James Baldwin - Stained Glass

Talya was back in the common room when I came out: same spot, different clothing. She was reading a book, waiting while the computer ground and ticked. I drew up to look over her shoulder, and was confronted by a maintenance screen which was scrolling through what appeared to be hundreds of words and numbers at rapid speed. “Good grief. What is that thing doing?”

“That’s the cracker.” She cleared her throat with a prim little ‘hem-hem’, and then jiggled the pointer around. “It’s been running for a couple of hours now, which means your doctor friend really knew how to make a secure password.”

“He wasn’t my friend. Will it work?” I stepped back from it, suitably intimidated.

She guffawed. “Of course it’ll work. It’s a program.”

I squinted at it, watching the lights flicker. “The first time I turned it on, it made a horrible honking sound. I thought it was about to explode.”

Talya covered her hand with her mouth for a moment, and then waved it as she struggled not to laugh.

“What?”

“That’s the floppy disk drive booting up,” she said, choking a little. “It’s meant to do that.”

I sniffed. “I nearly put nine rounds into it. Pure reflex.”

“You’ve never used a computer before?” She had swallowed down on her laughter, but her eyes were still overbright with mirth. Mirth at my expense.

“No,” I replied. “I have a vague notion that you type on it like a typewriter and point at things with the pointer, but that’s about all.”

“Pointer?” Her brow furrowed. “You mean the mouse?”

“I mean the pointer.” I gestured at it. “Though I could be persuaded that the inside of it is run by mice running on wheels, given the noise it makes.”

“No, that is the mouse.” She put a hand over it and jiggled it around on the pad, then picked it up and showed me the underside. There was a ball set in the middle of the casing. “See? It looks kind of like a mouse, with the wire as the tail.”

I scowled. “Mice generally have their balls further to the rear.”

Talya laughed, and the machine beeped loudly and suddenly. I jumped inside my skin, while she turned, suddenly sober and inquisitive. “Ooh, it’s a hit!”

I leaned in while she navigated back to the colored navigation screen and began to click through assorted screens until she had access to a collection of folder icons. Talya chewed her lip as she began to open them into lists of what I assumed were filed documents, expanding the taxonomy in and out at dizzying speed.

“Oh, here we are… wow, he had a modem and email and everything.” Talya used the clicker – the mouse – to scroll through a list of files. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

She clicked an icon, and then recoiled off the barstool with a scream, hands thrown up and over her eyes.

Peter Kaminski was laid out like a gutted lamb in a slaughterhouse, head thrown back so that his face was partly out of frame, his blond hair matted with blood. His coltish frame and the hardness of his jaw were easily recognizable. All of the transplantable organs had been removed and were set aside in Styrofoam coolers around the body. They were all tagged, ready for transit.

My nostrils shuddered as I took Talya’s place, gingerly using the mouse to close the file and open the next, and the next. Each one was uniquely horrific. There were only two more bodies – one of which showed the creation of Pig-Head in progress, one of which was vaguely identifiable as the limbs and torso of Goat-Head. My stomach lurched. The rest was pornography. Adult men and women, the missing children and others I didn’t recognize… and then men I did recognize by their tattoos. Ivanko. Kir. A huge man with rich brown skin and faded prison tattoos that I knew, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my gut, was my old friend Ovar. Then I was back to the photos of Peter Kaminski while he was still alive. In one picture, he was clearly drugged and being forced into compliance by a flabby masked man I knew without a doubt was Vanya. Some of these photographs dated from the beginning of the year, involving different children than the ones at Wolf Grove.

Words from the past returned in a wave of remember smell and sensation. Yuri’s grating, poisonous words. “I know what Sergei sees in you. Same thing he sees in all the rest of us poor motherfuckers. Machine parts. Tiny, fragile, cheap machine parts.”

Jana hadn’t been lying to me, and this was what I had never seen while I was stranded on my own conveyor belt in Sergei’s system. Now, I understood why he wanted to set up shop in Thailand. Now, I understood why the other men had always despised me for my chaste demeanor and regarded my chivalric relationship with Crina as second-rate. They were into what they thought of as ‘the good stuff’. They hadn’t asked me or told me because they’d known what my reaction would have been: two shots to the groin and one in the head for each of them.

All emotion drained from my body and mind in an instant, leaving me clear and hard and cold. The cynic in me searched for Pastor Christopher and Aaron, but they were both absent from these pictures. Lily and Dru, however, were present in quite a number of them. The photos of them were far back in the file-list. The dates went well back for several years, and some of the pictures were worse than graphic. I didn’t have to guess at the fates of some of the children who had been ‘homed’.

“Lily was a hyena shifter, wasn’t she?” My voice was stiff.

“Yes. She—” Talya peered at the image I had on the screen, and turned away with a choking sob. “Oh my god. Why… why didn’t any of them ever say anything to us? We would have helped if we’d known!”

How could I explain such a thing? Children were under the power of these adults. The structure of their laws and the degree of secrecy among shapeshifters, as I understood them, had Elders holding absolute authority over kids like these. Clarified behind a veil of practiced dissociation, I leaned and squinted at the photo of the hyena and the child she was mauling. Here and there, her body was stuck with what looked like spines of glass.

Puzzled, I moved the pointer-mouse to the magnifying glass icon, and clicked it. As I’d hoped, the picture zoomed in, but it decreased the quality and I couldn’t really make out the shards anymore. “How would Falkovich get these pictures onto the computer?”

“It’s… oh god… I’m sorry.” Talya gulped back tears, and came up beside me. Her hands were shaking as she navigated out of the folder and back through the hierarchy. “Th-These are p-pictures that this man was sent over Usenet and Telnet. It’s… like a newsletter where you can send letters to a computer over the phone.”

“So other people were sending him these pictures?” Vanya had computers, I knew that much.

“Or he was sending them to other people. They must have scanned them in and shared them. He has logs. I don’t know if I can bear to read them, Rex. I really don’t.”

“Call Ayashe and tell Jenner.” I stood up and back, mind already on the job. “Tell them I have to go pay someone a visit.”

“What? Where?” Talya dashed at her eyes and took a heavy seat.

“Red Hook,” I said. “An office warehouse at the waterfront. Don’t worry about me – I just have to go and have a talk to someone who might know more about this.”

“You really do know some bad people, don’t you?”

I was already halfway to the door. “Not for much longer.”

This time, I was not going to risk being unprepared. I bought eggs from the nearest bodega – a full dozen fertilized eggs – and on a leap of associative intuition, a carton of full-cream milk. Not including Falkovich’s house, the last time I’d been in a major firefight there’d been two Spooks and a demon so toxic that it made the scars on my arm ache to think of it. I could confirm now that DOGs were immune to bullets. Worse than that… they were nourished by them. And it had been hiding in a gun, seeping out like oil when Lev had pointed the weapon at me and fired.