Parsifal K. Afronzo Jr., perched on the edge of a slate leather ottoman, was apparently oblivious to this clutter or to the entourage scattered in his orbit. They sucked from bottles of raspberry vodka frozen in blocks of ice while unwrapping and almost immediately tiring of the electronic swag that had been piled there in tribute by the event’s sponsors. Messaging their friends in the other rooms of the club to determine if they were missing anything good, they honed their nonchalance, as aspiring paparazzi caught them in the background of their Cager cell shots.
Trailing Beenie, Park took note of a crew-cut duo of alert young women wearing skintight head-to-toe ensembles of various nonreflective black tactical materials. A style that extended to the assault rifles slung on their backs and the pistols strapped to their thighs. That they had been costumed for roles as cannon fodder in a B-grade action picture didn’t seem to interfere with their expertise. Spotting Park and Beenie approaching the VIP ropes on a direct line, one of them moved to intercept while the other shifted subtly to put herself in a position to offer cover fire or throw her body in front of her client.
The bodyguard who had stepped to the rope directed them toward a line of shoe gazers lining a nearby wall.
“Please take a spot at the back of the line. If Cager does any signing this evening, it will done on the line only.”
Beenie raised a hand.
“Cager.”
The bodyguard placed a hand on the butt of her sidearm.
“Please do not address Cager, sir.”
“Cage, it’s Beenie.”
“Please move away from the rope, sir.”
Beenie lifted himself on tiptoe, trying to see over her shoulder.
“Dude, it’s Beenie; just wanted to discuss what we talked about that last time.”
The bodyguard came down a step and jutted her face into Beenie’s.
“Hey, asshole, you don’t understand polite English? I said leave Cager the fuck alone and fuck off to the back of the line. Better, just fuck off out of the club before I Taser your ass and drag you out to the street.”
“It’s all right, Imelda.”
She drew back.
“Sir?”
Cager’s fingers paused, and he pointed.
“It’s all right. Just go stand by Magda and keep looking hot and dangerous.”
She flared perfect nostrils.
“Sir?”
He tapped a message to elsewhere.
“Pose. You come over here, it throws the tableau out of balance. The bouncers can take care of this kind of thing. Unless it’s something serious, I want you and Magda to maintain the composition up here. If we have a situation like when we were in Tijuana and those guys tried to kidnap me, you can break their knees and Magda can shoot them in the hands like you did there. Otherwise, I really want to uphold the integrity of the image.”
Imelda gave half a nod.
“Yes, sir.”
“And please call me ‘boss’ from now on.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Thank you.”
She moved back to her position, her partner countering, giving themselves maximum coverage of the perimeter.
Cager’s typing had subsided into a single action, repeatedly stabbing one key.
“Beenie.”
“Hey, Cager.”
“Beenie, have you got my Aspiration Codex?”
Beenie looked at Park, gave him an I-told-you roll of the eyes, and shook his head.
“No, man, I don’t.”
Cager jabbed the single button violently three times, then held it down.
“Then why are you here bothering me? Why did I just keep Imelda from Tasering you? I want to break into the Apex Foundation, and I can’t begin without the codex.”
“Yeah, I know, man. And I thought I’d have one by now, but I got held up because a deal I was trying to make is still in escrow. As soon as it clears, as soon as I hear from Hydo that that deal is sealed, I’ll be able to make a move and get your Codex.”
“Fuck!”
Cager raised his arm and threw the phone at the floor. The screen went instantly dead, tiny numbered and lettered keys flew, and a ripple of silence circulated through his hangers-on.
“Loganred. I’ve been bidding on that Hammer of Ultimate Wrath for a week. That lurker pulls a speed bid and wins the auction in the last possible nanosecond. What is the point of bidding if you use software to place your bids for you? I can’t even understand a mentality like that. Loganred. Does that feel like victory to him?”
On the banquette, a boy wearing a black frock coat over red jeans tucked into black motorcycle boots flipped up the smoked clip-on lenses from over his rectangular glasses.
“You don’t need a Wrath Hammer, Cage. I got mine.”
Cager picked up the wreckage of his phone and used a clipped thumbnail to pry open the SIM card door on the back.
“Yes, Adrian, I know. The whole point of getting my own hammer is so I don’t need you and your hammer in the war party anymore.”
He slid a chit of gilded blue plastic from the slot.
“That’s why I’m so upset. Because now I have to be subjected to your derivative steampunk style for another night.”
He turned his head toward the boy, the comb coming from its pocket, gliding across his head in sharp strokes.
“Do you know that everyone is laughing at you, Adrian? That clockwork lapel pin and that ascot, they are pretentious. Just, why can’t you wear jeans and a T-shirt? You’re not cool. It’s okay not to be cool. Just stop trying so hard. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
Adrian flicked the dark lenses back into place over his eyes, but not before tears were clearly seen there.
“Fine, you don’t need my hammer. Fine, man.”
He stood up.
“Just go into the Tesseract Fold without me and see what happens.”
Cager shrugged.
“Take it personally if you want. That’s not how it was meant. I’m just trying to help.”
He pointed at a little shaft of knobbed plastic that Adrian was holding.
“You can keep that night-vision scope you’ve been fondling. And you can stay.”
Adrian fiddled with a dial on the side of the scope.
“Thanks, Cager. I didn’t mean to be a dick or anything.”
Cager shook his head.
“Sit down, Adrian. Even if you wanted to act like a dick, you couldn’t. You’re nice. For what that’s worth. And I don’t have my own hammer yet. So I need you in the picture until then.”
Adrian dipped his head.
“Okay, man, you’ll see. You’re gonna need me in the Tesseract.”
Cager had turned away, reaching inside a creased and cracked leather shoulder bag that rested between his feet.
“Hydo doesn’t have a Codex, Beenie. If he did, I would have bought it from him. I always buy from Hydo first. He’s reliable. I buy from Hydo. Then I buy from other people. Then I come to you. As a last resort. And you don’t have my Codex.”
Beenie played with the Velcro straps on the back of his biking gloves.
“I know Hydo doesn’t have one. But he’s brokering a package deal on a bunch of artifacts I bundled for one of his customers. Once that comes through, I’ll have what I need to do the deal on the codex.”
Cager took a phone, identical to the Nokia he had just smashed, from the bag and studied it.
“When did you talk to Hydo?”
“Uh, yesterday?”
Beenie looked at Park.
“Is that when I saw you there?”
Cager’s eyes twitched from the phone to Park and back.
“You know Hydo?”
Park nodded.
“We do business.”
Cager thumbed opened the SIM door on his new phone and slid in the card from the old phone.
“Can you get a Codex for me?”
Beenie coughed.
“That’s not his deal. He does the other kind of business.”
/> The tiny card door snapped shut.
Cager brought out the comb, raked the part, wiped it on his thigh, and put it in his pocket.
“Shabu?”
Looking at Cager’s green eyes, Park had a moment when he was certain that he must be sleepless. It wasn’t simply that the pupils were pinned tight, it was the sense of a vision that was perceiving a different wavelength of light. The look he saw in Rose’s eyes when she began conversing with the past or with entire realities that had never existed. Then, just as quickly, Park realized his mistake. Cager wasn’t sleepless; he just wasn’t seeing the same world that most people saw. It was a look he recognized from childhood, from occasions when his family was required by the rules of protocol that governed his father’s career to interact with the inhumanly wealthy.
He nodded.
“Yes. Shabu.”
Cager’s eyes took on a new focus as Park and his profession were fitted into his area of experience.
“Do you have it with you?”
“Yes.”
Cager nodded.
“Imelda.”
The bodyguard came to slight attention.
“Yes, boss?”
“Do you have any news for me?”
She unnecessarily touched the knob of a Bluetooth earbud.
“No, boss.”
Cager looked Park down and back up.
“Okay.”
He rose, slinging the bag over his shoulder, lifting the section of velvet rope closest to him.
“Come on.”
Park ducked his head and stepped under the rope, Beenie following.
“Where?”
Cager waved his phone at the tournament room.
“Away from this.”
He turned from them and touched a rivet on a strip of rusted iron trimming the scarlet wainscoting, and a secret panel swung open.
Adrian and several of the other followers rose to take their places in Cager’s wake. He help up a hand.
“Guys, there won’t be any rock stars to meet or have sex with, and I’m not going to be giving anything away. You may as well stay here and watch the hack-n-slash.”
He pointed.
“You stay here too Beenie. I don’t need any more middlemen.”
Park shook his head.
“He’s not a middleman.”
“Then we don’t need him to do business.”
“I want him to come.”
Cager popped open the keyboard on his new phone and started flicking buttons.
“Why?”
Park, tired and hitting the wrong side of the speed, was reminded of his years at Deerfield, the ruthlessness with which class warfare had been in practice there. Not of the purple himself, he had been close enough in terms of background, family wealth, connections, and physical appearance, that he’d been free to circulate with any given clique. And he found after his freshman year that the place where he felt most at ease was at the bottom of the food chain, with the scholarship and legacy students. Once there he found ample opportunities over the next three years to use his gifts when facing down bullies who had marked his friends as easy targets.
It took Rose, laughing hysterically at the thought that he’d never put it together, to point out that there might be some connection between that experience and his love of police work.
Thrown back to the school yard, he lost some of the dealer’s natural subservience in the face of a rich client and slipped character.
“Because he’s my friend.”
Cager tilted his head to the side.
“He’s your friend?”
“Yes.”
Cager looked up from the phone.
“And what is that supposed to make me think about you?”
Park shook his head.
“I don’t care what you think about me.”
Cager smiled.
“Come on. You and your friend go first. That will give Imelda and Magda a better shot at you if you try to abuse my person.”
Park looked down the passageway revealed by the open panel.
“So if there’s no rock stars or freaky sex, why are we going?”
Cager used the comb again, pressed the tines to his chin, whitening the skin in stripes.
“To look at something beautiful.”
The passageway had the feel of a disused maintenance access. Their feet clanked over steel grates laid on rusting train rails. A thin sluice of viscous reddish-brown liquid ran underneath, light came from a row of caged industrial lamps hanging from exposed conduit, all but two of them broken, dim, or flickering; the concrete walls seemed to sweat bile.
Park touched a wall and found it bone-dry and warm, could feel the delicate stipple of artfully layered paints.
Cager nodded.
“I told the designer that I wanted a secret passageway and that it should feel like you were being taken someplace to be tortured.”
He pointed at a rust-mottled institutional door ahead, shifting light showing through a cracked panel of chicken-wire glass.
“This was going to be the insider’s insider celebrity VIP lounge. Secret door, secret passage, establishing an expectation of decadence. Inside it was all luxury, of course. CCTV feeds from the dance floor and bathrooms, private bar and DJ, a majordomo you could send to fetch anyone you saw on the screens and wanted to bring behind the green curtain to see how the wizards of the world live. Ultimately it was just the same silly show that makes the rich and famous feel special. Or less bored for a few minutes. And I wasn’t interested in catering to that crowd for very long.”
He stepped past Park and Beenie and put a hand on the door.
“Money makes people stupid. They don’t have to work as hard as people who don’t have money. That’s why the smart people who do have money mostly use it for one thing.”
Park thought about his father.
“They use it to make sure the people without it don’t get any more.”
Cager tilted his head.
“You’re not stupid. What’s your name?”
“Park.”
Cager adjusted the hang of his shoulder bag.
“You know what I think, Park?”
“No.”
“I think that pretty soon we’re going to find out which is more powerful, knowledge or money. I think the worse things get, the more distance there’s going to be between the smart poor people and the stupid rich people. And that the smart poor people are going to figure out how to live, and the stupid rich people are going to probably do something very dumb. Like pushing a bunch of red buttons and blowing everything up. That’s what I think.”
He combed his hair.
“What do you think?”
Park felt the chill of the frozen world, but the scenario being described was not one he could believe in. His baby did not allow such visions. There was no place for his baby in a world like the one this wealthy alien was describing, so how could it ever come to be?
He pointed at the door.
“I think we better make a deal before money stops having any value.”
Cager took a prison movie key from his bag.
“Not stupid. But you lack imagination. Or maybe just the will to use it.”
He put the key in the lock and gave it a grinding 360-degree turn.
“This may be wasted on you.”
He gave the door a push, and it swung open.
“But you’ll dream about it whether you want to or not.”
He stepped inside, combing again, a series of tiny adjustments to the lay of his hair, imperceptible.
Park and Beenie followed, stepping into the hidden round chamber that had once been the pleasure dome for Cager’s most exclusive clientele. Now, instead of coke-addled starlets and inbred eurotrash demiroyals, the room was populated by a hushed collection of aesthetes and aficionados, a highly select inner circle.
Almost exclusively male, perhaps one as old as forty, most of the others topping out at thirty, status, such as it was, outwar
dly displayed in the obscurity of the movies, bands, literary quotes, or bits of machine language code displayed on their T-shirts. Eyeglasses, of which there were many pairs, tending toward either retro-huge plastics or slight and unframed geometrics. Hair at similar extremes of long and unkempt or military-grade buzz. Jeans only, black preferred, khakis allowed if obviously ironic. Chuck Taylors, black, red, or white, high or low, the footwear of choice. None managing the austerity of Cager’s geek perfection. Their tablets, smart phones, net books, cloud links, heavily modded and customized. Hardware signaling not only to one another directly and over the club’s ubiquitous WiFi but also beaming otherwise unspoken detailed information about their owner’s beliefs and loyalties within this particular conclave.
As in the tournament room they had just left, attention was focused on a series of screens. Mounted on the wall and running 180 degrees of the room’s circumference, they were set at intervals that minimized light spill or peripheral distraction from screen to screen. Blow-up photographs of processor chips and detailed screen shots of 1980s golden era 8-bit video games hung from the ceiling and covered bare sections of wall, hiding the speakers while simultaneously baffling and focusing the surround sound on the middle of the room.
At that center were a cluster of five black and red Erro Aarnio Ball Chairs. Occupants engulfed by the globes, only their legs dangling or jutting free from the openings directed at the screens.
The screens themselves flashed and swooped, perspectives zooming and receding, plucking particulars from a series of popping and dropping menus, settling on a map, pulling close until it unfolded into a richly detailed scene of a central square in a city made entirely of iron. Forge, the City of Smiths. One of the entry points for Chasm Tide. A destination for parties looking either to arm themselves heavily or to have fabricated tools of special trade.
The five central screens showed varied characters’ points of view. Just off the shoulder, from behind the character’s eyes, well overhead, depending on player preference. The remaining screens displayed a collection of wider master shots of the action. The five avatars themselves: dark, light, human, non, scaled, armored, burly, lithe, bristling with blades, carrying only a staff, hooded and cloaked, fur-bikinied. The archetypes of the fantasy role-playing tradition. They materialized with a whoosh and a hum, resolving from an artful blurring of space, and stood there, inert amid the fuming wonders of Forge.