James Corey - Nemesis Games

Butch and the four other heavily armed thugs with professional trigger discipline who’d escorted them from the elevator walked out, closing the door behind them. Erich waited until they’d gone before he spoke, but the tiny fist of his bad arm was opening and closing the way it did when he was nervous.

“Well. Amos. You’re looking more alive than I’d expected.”

“Not looking too dead yourself.”

“As I recall the way we left it, you weren’t ever coming back to my city. Open season, I called it.”

“Wait a second,” Peaches said. “He said if you came back here, he’d kill you?”

“Nah,” Amos said. “He broadly implied that one of his employees would kill me.”

Peaches hoisted an eyebrow. “Yeah, because that’s different.”

“If this is about the old man, I haven’t checked to see if he made it or not. Deal was he kept the house, and I did that. More than that, and I’ve got other problems.”

“And I got no trouble to cause,” Amos said. “I figured things had changed enough maybe the old rules weren’t a great fit for the new situation.”

Erich walked over to the wall screen, limping. A few seagulls circled, black against the colorless sky. From the last time he’d been there, Amos knew the buildings that should have provided a foreground. Most of them were still in place close in. Out toward the shoreline, things were shorter now.

“I was right here when it happened,” Erich said. “It wasn’t a wave like a wave, you know? Like a surfer wave? It was just the whole fucking ocean humping up and crawling onto shore. There’s whole neighborhoods I used to run just aren’t there now.”

“I didn’t see anything happen,” Amos said. “The newsfeeds and the mess after were bad enough.”

“Where were you?”

“Bethlehem,” Peaches said.

Erich turned back to them. There was no anger in his face, or fear, or even wariness. That was good. “So you’re headed south, then? How bad is it up there?”

“Not that Bethlehem,” Amos said. “The one in the Carolina admin district.”

“Where the Pit is,” Peaches said, raising her hand like a kid in a classroom. Then a second later, “Was.”

Erich blinked and leaned against his desk. “Where the third strike hit?”

“Close to there, yeah,” Amos said. “Lost that tequila you gave me with the hotel, so that sucked.”

“All right. How are you still alive?”

“Practice,” Amos said cheerfully. “Here’s the thing, though. I’ve got a job. Well, Peaches has a job, and I’m in. Could use some help.”

“What kind of job?” Erich asked. A sharpness and focus came into his voice, talking business. It was like watching someone wake up. Amos turned to Peaches and waved her on. She hugged stick-thin arms around her torso.

“Do you know Lake Winnipesaukee?”

Erich frowned and nodded at the same time. “The fake lake?”

“Reconstituted, yeah,” she said. “There’s an enclave on Rattlesnake Island. The whole place is walled. Independent security force. Maybe fifty estates.”

“I’m listening,” Erich said.

“They have a private launchpad built out onto the lake. The whole point of the place is that you can drop there suborbital or down from Luna or the Lagrange stations, and be walking distance from home. Everyone there has a hangar. Probably nothing with an Epstein, but something that could get us to Luna. Going through the road, you couldn’t get past the checkpoints, but there’s a way in from the water. The boathouse locks are compromised. Put in the right code, and they pop open even if the security chip’s not in range.”

“Which you know how?” Erich said.

“I used to summer there. It’s how we got in and out when we went slumming.”

Erich looked at Peaches like he wasn’t sure how she’d gotten in the room. His laugh was short and hard, but it wasn’t a no. Amos picked up the pitch. “Idea is we get in, grab a ship, and head for Luna.”

Erich sat down on the ball, his legs wide, and rolled a few centimeters back and forth, his eyes half-closed. “So what’s the score?”

“The score?” Peaches asked.

“What are we taking? Where does the money come in?”

“There isn’t any,” Peaches said.

“Then what do I get out of it?”

“You get out of here,” Amos said. “Place was kind of a shithole before someone dropped the Atlantic on it. It’s not getting better.”

Erich’s wasted, tiny left arm squeezed tight to his body. “Let me get this straight. You’ve got a score where I go seven, maybe eight hundred kilometers, sneak past some private mercenary death squad, boost a ship, and the payoff is that I get to leave everyone and everything I’ve got here? What’s next? Russian roulette where if I win, I get to keep the bullet?” His voice was high and tight. He bit the words as he spoke them. “This is my city. This is my place. I carved my life out of the fucking skin of Baltimore, and I spent a lot doing it. A lot. Now I’m supposed to put my tail between my legs and run away because some Belter fuckwit decided to prove he’s got a tiny little dick and his mama didn’t hug him enough when he was a kid? Fuck that! You hear me, Timmy? Fuck that!”

Amos looked at his hands and tried to think what to do next. His first impulse was to laugh at Erich’s maudlin bullshit, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t going to be a good idea. He tried to think what Naomi would have said, but before he came up with anything good, Peaches stepped toward Erich, her arms out to him like she was going to give him a hug.

“I know,” she said, her voice choked with some emotion Amos didn’t place.

“You know ? What the fuck do you know ?”

“What it’s like to lose everything. How hard it is, because you keep thinking it can’t really be gone. That there’s a way to get it back. Or maybe if you just act like you still have it, you won’t notice it’s gone.”

Erich’s face froze. His bad hand opened and closed so fast, it looked like he was trying to snap the tiny pink fingers. “I don’t know what you’re talking —”

“There was this woman I knew when I went in. She killed her children. Five of them, all dead. She knew it, but she talked about them all like they were still alive. Like when she got up tomorrow, they’d be there. I thought she was a lunatic, and I guess I let that show, because she stopped me one day at the cafeteria and said, ‘I know they’re dead. But I know I’m dead too. You’re the only bitch here thinks she’s still alive.’ And as soon as she said that, I knew exactly what she meant.”

To Amos’ astonishment, Erich started to weep and then blubber. He fell into Peaches’ open arms, wrapping his good arm around her and crying into her shoulder. She stroked his hair and murmured something to him that could have been I know, I know . Or maybe something else. So clearly something sweet and touching had just happened, even if he wasn’t clear what the fuck it was. Amos shifted from one foot to the other and waited. Erich’s wracking sobs grew more violent and then started to calm. It must have been fifteen minutes before the man pulled himself out of Peaches’ embrace, limped to his desk, and found some tissue to blow his nose.

“I grew up here,” he said, his voice shaking. “Everything I’ve ever done – every meal I ever ate, every toilet I ever pissed in, every girl I ever rolled around with? It’s all been inside the 695.” For a second, it looked like he was going to cry again. “I’ve seen things come and go. I’ve seen shit times turn into normal and turn back to shit, and keep telling myself this is like that. It’s just the churn. But it’s not, is it?”