Tim Akers - Heart of Veridon

I walked down past her place, around the corner, spent a minute in a bakery then went back. No one seemed to notice me as I walked by the door; no one looked familiar or suspicious. I went around to the back and palmed the dropstone Emily and I had used to arrange meetings. There was a key inside. I put the ‘stone back in its notch, went around front and let myself into the building. The same key opened her door. Once I was inside I locked up and then jammed a chair under the door.

The key in my hand was new metal and smelled of oil, as if it had been freshly pressed. It didn’t look familiar, but I had never seen Emily handle a lot of keys. The ’stone downstairs usually held a coded message, with times and places. I pocketed the key and looked around.

Emily was neat, almost mechanically precise in her tidiness. The apartment reflected that precision. The desk where she and I had sat the day before was clean and empty, the chairs set at an angle. Maybe even the angle I had left it at when I stood up. Valentine said that Emily missed a meeting with Cacher, and I remembered her mentioning that he was on his way over. That’s a tight window of opportunity. Would Valentine have leaned on me harder if he’d known how tight?

I opened each of the drawers in turn, emptied them completely and checked for hidden compartments before I moved on. It took about ten minutes, and at the end of it I didn’t know anything new. There was no Cog. There were no secret instructions from shadowy agencies about my meeting on the Heights, or anything to indicate that Emily was anything more than the whore and fixer I had known for five years now. I put everything away and looked around the rest of the apartment.

There wasn’t much to see. Her clothes were all neatly arranged in the bedroom dresser, her bed was made. The room smelled like her, like summerwisp blooming in spring. I didn’t spend a lot of time in the bedroom, and the kitchen nook was just a drawer of cutlery and a coolbox that was empty. There were no signs of struggle or forced entry, but the gun she kept in the closet by the front door was missing, as were the ledgers she had been working on when I left. Those had been for Cacher, I remembered, which meant he had been here. Probably let himself in, couldn’t find Emily so he took what he had come for and left. Did he take the Cog, too, or had Emily taken it with her? For that matter, where did she go, and why?

I sat on the divan that looked out over the street, laid the service revolver in my lap, and turned the situation over in my head. Lot of ways to come at this one.

The least likely, least worrying possibility was that Emily was just on some business. Not missing, just laying low while she attended to… whatever. Either one of her Haven Hill clients or some deal that required her personal attention. And maybe she took the Cog with her, intending to drop it with Valentine or whoever, as part of her errand. But if that’s what was happening, Valentine would be able to track her down. For that matter, it seemed awfully early for Valentine to be concerned about Emily’s whereabouts. People in this business disappeared, they went to ground fairly easily. Being able to stay out of trouble is what made fixers like Emily valuable.

And the gun? It was her home defense piece, a cruel foot and a half of metal, just the critical bits of a shotgun with the rest cut away. She had a traveling piece, always left the shotgun in the closet in case someone jumped her as she came into the apartment.

That left the more worrying option. Emily, surprised somehow in the apartment, caught off guard. Taken without mess or struggle. Taken, and the Cog with her. Not a lot of people could pull that on Em. Maybe there had been a fight, and the creep cleaned up before he left. I looked around the room; everything was obsessively aligned, clean, perfect. It would take time to get a room back into this state, and there wouldn’t have been a lot of that, between my departure and when Cacher had arrived. It didn’t make sense.

I was standing up when I heard them on the stairs. I snapped out of my revere and immediately understood why I hadn’t seen anyone stalking the house from the street. They were across the way, two Badges in gray overcoats peering calmly through a rented window. Fucking stupid and lazy; my head just wasn’t in this staying alive thing. Now that the move was on, their boys hammering up the foyer stairs, they had given up hiding behind the curtains and were leaning out into the street, sighting the long rifles that the Council rarely issued and that you never saw in the city limits. I rolled away from the window just as the glass splattered into bright shards and the far wall crumpled into plaster.

I took four squatting steps to the door before I remembered the feet on the stairs and threw myself back into Emily’s room. The front door began to flex under officer’s boots, flakes of plaster dusting down from the jambs like snow. I fired twice into the door and then winced as a shot from across the street splintered the bedroom window sill and sprayed the room with splintered glass. I leaned over and, bracing with both my feet, flipped the mattress over and against the window. Better that they fire blind. The pounding on the front door started again. I belly-crawled over to the fireplace and scooped up the iron poker. Another bullet came through the window, dust and feathers puffing out of the mattress, wood splintering from the bed frame. I wedged myself into a corner of the bedroom and started hacking at the plaster ceiling. Emily lived on the second floor of a two-story building. When I got to the plank slating I climbed on a chair and put my fist through, depending on the laced bone conduit of my Pilot’s interface to hold me together. There was a lot of blood, the skin flapping back from my knuckles, but I got through. I pulled myself up into the darkness as they cleared the front door.

The attic was dark, and it was hot. There was only a little light, coming in from the gable vents. I had plaster dust in my eyes and mouth, and my hands were bleeding all over my gun. The floor of the attic was just beam framework over slating, so I balanced carefully toward the vents. A spattering of fire came up through the floor, the Badgemen getting damn desperate. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t follow me up, all of them too precious to be the first one to stick his head up into the darkness.

I kicked the vent out and shimmied up onto the roof. It was all of two heartbeats before the goons across the street shot at me. Hard to miss with a rifle like that, but they did. I rolled down the opposite decline of the roof, hooked my leg over and crawled, slowly, too slowly, down the drainage pipe and into the street. People had cleared out, all the gunshots and kicked out architecture had scattered folks. The Badge came out of the building, just about the time I was putting my boots on the ground.

I didn’t bother aiming, just shot, cycled, shot, bullets nicking off the brick wall of Emily’s building. I was on my heels, backpedaling so fast that I was falling. The Badges dropped to the ground or ducked behind doors and barrels. I only counted four of them, but there were more inside.

I finally came down on my back, rolling around the corner of the building and coming up on my knees. I realized that my last couple shots had been dry, the cylinder empty. Kneeling, I dumped the hot shells into my lap and started to quick load, keeping one eye on the building front. The Badges started to peek out. I had a brief memory, kneeling like this in the empty room of the Tomb Estate, fumbling bullets into this gun as that thing came down the hall. I thought I could hear the dry rasp of wings on wallpaper, blinked and realized I was frozen, a bullet pinched in my fingers, the Badge slowly creeping across the street towards me.