James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“We found his body.” It was hard to associate the mutated, agonized corpse we had found in the bunker with the dignified man I’d spoken to in the Museum only the day before. After he’d pitched in with his pet Agent, I hadn’t been his biggest fan… but I hadn’t wanted to kill him. “It was… difficult to recognize him, but there were cervine features that were unmistakable. Jenner was sure.”

Talya closed her eyes for a moment, her brow furrowing. When she opened her eyes, they were dark and glistening. “He was a good man, Rex. I learned so much about history from him, not just Native history. He told me all about ancient Korea, he told me about all of these places he lived… but you know why I decided to join Jenner and Mason instead of the Fires?”

I said nothing, and waited for her to continue.

“It was the film,” she said. “The film that you and Zane found. After the argument at work, I realized that John and Michael were just talking about the law and themselves and our position within society that whole time. They weren’t talking about the fact that you and the Tigers had found a film of an adult man raping a child. And I know why they weren’t talking about it. Because it was Josie in the film.”

“Josie? What do you mean?”

Her cheeks flushed red with anger. “Because she’s not a Weeder. She’s just a normal human kid.”

I recoiled inwardly. She was right. At the time, I hadn’t noticed, but now that she mentioned it…

“That’s all they care about. Bringing new blood into their gangs, building their little army,” Talya continued. Her eyes were hot now, the intense gray and gold of uranium ore. “That’s why John was so nice to me all this time. He wanted me, because I’m a young Weeder. He wants the shifter kids. Ayashe cares about all of them, but she’s so tied up in her job that she ends up not doing anything for anyone. Jenner is the only one who doesn’t see Josie as being worth less than the others, and will do what’s right no matter what.”

“You could be right,” I said, motioning her forward and starting to walk. “But for now, we should eat. And while we do that, you should tell me what you found on the computer.”

“I haven’t gotten into the filelist yet. I was able to restore the deleted files, but everything on that computer is password locked. I’m going to go and get a password cracker from work today when I’m safe to drive.” Talya pushed her hair out of her face, and sat heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. “I’ll call in sick. This is more important.”

“A cracker? What on earth is that?” I had vague images of her inserting Goldfish crackers into the computer as some sort of bribe.

“It’s a software program you use to break passwords. It basically keeps trying combinations at high speed until one of them works,” she replied. “At the office, some people… well, they lock themselves out of their terminals, or they change the password on a group document and don’t know how to change it back. I got Crack so that I could just solve the problem on-site instead of bothering my manager.”

“Oh. They have something like that for safes, too.” I poured us both coffee, and put together sandwiches. “An auto-dialer. You attach it to the door, and it turns the dial back and forth until the safe opens.”

“That sounds kind of old-fashioned,” she said. She still looked wan, but some of the color had returned to her face. “Kind of KGB-ish.”

We ate in companionable silence. It was relaxing to spend time with another Russian-speaking person, even though we were descended from opposite ends of Eastern Europe: me from Ukraine, her from the far Western hinterlands of the Aleutian Islands. Neither of us felt compelled to arbitrarily smile or do anything except share food, tea and coffee while we each ruminated on the events of the night, which suited me just fine.

Talya left after the meal, and went to check on Josie before leaving the club. I did the same, looking in on the little girl as she slept on, semi-comatose. There were signs of her having been awake. She was clean, for one thing, and there was a makeshift bedpan by the bed. The drip was disconnected. There was a Band-Aid over the bruise in her elbow.

I wanted to sleep, but pride and duty kept me from bed. Instead, me, my cat and my books and went to work out whatever it was that ‘Soldier 557’ was trying to say with their name.

Translating a number into text was far more difficult than turning a word or phrase into a number. The difficulty came about from two things: firstly, an entire phrase could be condensed into a string like ‘557’. The coded numbers could be added together and the resulting numbers used instead of a whole string of numerals. In addition to that, a two or three-word phrase, like ‘Glory to Satan’ could be distilled to, say, the number 939, but 939 had multiple possible translations. You could use it to say ‘Glory to Satan’, but 939 was also the number which could be disassembled to read ‘The Holy Spirit’. The translation relied on context.

After an hour or so of spirited decoding, I had a shortlist of words and phrases. The standout was a single word, which had prickled at my intuition from the moment I’d worked out and etched the letters into the page with a pencil. ‘Glory’. In a stroke of what seemed like some kind of intentional, precognitive cruel humor, the number also translated to ‘Russian mafia’. But ‘Soldier Glory’ didn’t make much sense.

I exhaled thinly, tapping my pencil against my bottom lip as my chest twinged and cramped. Concentrating on magical matters was not helped by the presence of the parasite. In any case, I didn’t think it was going to be much help in finding our murderer… not unless the ‘Russian Mafia’ translation was more than a case of my own amused bias. For one thing, we didn’t call it that, not unless we were talking to someone outside of the Organizatsiya – and when did that ever happen?

But as I packed up, the doubt lingered, as did the instinctive resonance of the name Glory. Not a word… a name. I had a hunch, and even with my magic cut off at the root, I trusted my intuition. Whoever was signing off, they were signing off as Glory. Unfortunately, that meant I was out of things to show Jenner when they returned. The name didn’t belong to anybody we knew.

At a loss, I went to tend to more mundane things. Dressing my wounds, then treating Binah’s burns. She’d had a couple days of antibiotics to take down her infections, so I spent a fruitful hour lancing, flushing and balming my familiar’s abscesses. She shivered in my lap, but she didn’t fight me, or even squirm. As I worked carefully, precisely, the jumble of details, names, incidences, deaths and clues turned around and around until, quite unconsciously, my brain fit the pieces together so smoothly and so perfectly that I stood up in alarm and sent Binah and my tray of surgical equipment to the floor.

Lev. Sergei. Jana. The TVS symbol… all of it came together in a flash. We didn’t call our Organization the Russian Mafia… but outsiders did.

Was it a sly joke? Or did they know that someone from the Bratva with esoteric knowledge and skill would eventually figure it out? As I stalked back and forth in the bedroom, fitfully rubbing my mouth and hair and wrist, months of conversation and clues aligned like the faces of a Rubik’s Cube.

The leaders of the Tigers returned in the evening, tired and disheveled. The pall over the three of them was obvious. They had only found traces of Mason’s passing as a tiger: scents and disturbed brush. There was precious little else. They went to bed with no time or energy to talk. Jenner was blaring punk music out of one of the smaller rooms, but when I passed close her door, I could hear the sound of her cursing and crying underneath the mask of sound. She wasn’t the sort of person to accept an offer of counseling, and I wasn’t the kind of person who could offer it. The only thing that would console her was the return of her old man.