Clean: A Mindspace Investigations Novel (10 page)

Before I could duck, she cocked back and punched me.

Pain exploded in my jaw. I staggered backward, clocking my rear against the hard steel streetlight. I literally saw stars.

“Stay out of my head!” she told me.

I held my jaw. Waited for the breath to come back. To the left, her footsteps walked away.

When the lights
of Swartz’s aircar came over the hill, I was sitting on the worn steps of the police station while a streetlight sputtered above me. My jawbone ached, my whole body ached, and I was begging the Higher Power for another junkie to come along so I could beat him up and steal his stash. I didn’t have time for anything more complicated, like a trip to the South DeKalb projects that would still sell me Satin. Assuming they still would; I’d shut down everyone in Decatur who would sell me anything, and dealers talked. Eventually, they talked.

Like the bastard he was, of course, Swartz showed up right on fucking time. I knew he’d tear the city apart if I wasn’t here, if I wasn’t sitting at the station. With the night shift all on the main floor facing the windows, cops looking on, all gloating as I sat on the steps. Swartz would have known if I wasn’t here right on time. And in ten minutes I wouldn’t have gotten five blocks. Swartz said God had a sense of humor, and I thought he was probably right.

Time to break out one of the emergency vials at the apartment. Call in sick tomorrow. Fall back down the rabbit hole.

Of course, Swartz chose that moment to settle the aircar near the curb and get out. He waved at the cop on
Reception, and I stood. My hands were shaking with need. I put my hands in my pockets so Swartz wouldn’t see.

But he wasn’t an easy man to fool. After one look at me, he said mildly, “There’s a Friday late-night meeting at the North Decatur Y I’ve always wanted to try. The leader brings lemon cake, the real kind. There might even be a few ginger cookies.” When I said nothing, he said, “You look like you could use a meeting, kid.”

I wasn’t a kid, but I wasn’t going to argue tonight, not when I might give something away. I’d go along with his plan, stay quiet. Knowing the vials were still there, waiting for me at my apartment. That empty gaping hole inside of me subsided a bit, knowing it would get its fix. Just a matter of time.

Swartz put his hand on my shoulder, forced me to look in his eyes. “We’re going to the meeting.” It wasn’t a request.

I picked up my bag from the worn police steps and got into the aircar. Quiet as a church mouse, I buckled my seat belt.

“Lemon cake?” I asked. Lying to Swartz was like sandpaper on my soul, but it was just a little lie, I told myself. More omission than anything.

After the Narcotics Anonymous meeting, the emptiness had settled into patience. Swartz took me back to my apartment, driving me across the city without complaint. The problem was, he wanted to visit the apartment.

“I’m tired tonight,” I said.

“You look twitchy,” he responded.

Just a matter of time, I told myself again, as we walked up the five front stairs to my building, avoiding the worst of the crumbling steps and the suspicious
green spots. Before the Tech Wars, this had been a proud boxy office building, but now it was smudged, cracked, and discolored. Like a very old woman, beauty still there despite the wrinkles.

I nodded to the bored lobby guard as we made our way to the only stairwell of the building. I found my door, letting us in and hitting the light. Behind me, Swartz was calm but worried. He wasn’t going to leave until he was sure I was okay. I appreciated the sentiment, but just now, I wanted him to leave. Go away. Let me deal with things on my own. Quiet as a church mouse, I told myself. It would just be a matter of time.

I locked the door, then grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the cabinet above the sink. “Want a cigarette?” My tiny apartment was a closet, barely big enough for my beat-up thirdhand couch and half-sized card table. He was in the small living space now, I was in the kitchen, but we were close enough to talk without raising our voices.

He sat on the couch. “I’m trying to quit.”

I looked at the small blue nicotine stick, decided the emptiness in me needed a small reward while it waited, and lit up, taking a long drag like it was salvation itself. I retrieved a worn pack of cards from the cabinet and settled in a chair across from Swartz, ready to wait him out. He took the cards from me and dealt a hand of solitaire for himself.

When his hands were busy, he asked, “You ready to talk yet?”

“Not really.” I slouched in the chair, my knees sprawled. When that didn’t feel right, I leaned forward, taking another drag of the cigarette before snuffing it out in the empty ashtray on the beat-up coffee table.

Swartz played solitaire quietly, his presence in the apartment normally calming, but today, an intrusion. I
didn’t have to say anything if I didn’t want to. The only reason I was willing to talk, normally. But he wouldn’t leave any time soon, not without me talking, and I needed him out.

Fine. I’d talk. “Cherabino hit me today,” I said. “I sort of deserved it—she’s told me again and again to stay out of her head, and I didn’t. But she hit me.” A betrayal. A stupid sucker punch.

Swartz turned a card over and made a neutral noise.

“It’s
Cherabino
.”

“So? She pulled the punch, didn’t she?”

“Pulled the punch? No way. It hurt like a son of a bitch.”

Swartz looked up. “You’re still standing, aren’t you? Next time she hits you, hit her back. Didn’t they teach you anything in that fancy Guild school of yours?”

I set my jaw. “Apparently not.”

His grizzled face creased with deeper lines. “What’s really bothering you? A little love tap isn’t going to put you in this kind of spiral.”

“What if it did?”

He looked at me.

I looked at him. I couldn’t tell him about the Link any more than I could tell him about the vials in my wall. But he wasn’t going to back down, so I had to tell him something. “Fine. It’s the Guild, okay?”

He put the deck down and leaned forward. “The Guild? You still obsessing over them?”

“I’m not obsessing. These are the people who kicked me out. Who put me on the streets. Bad people, Swartz—at least to those of us who don’t toe the line. So far as I know, I’m the only one they’ve ever let go, the only one with the temerity to work with the cops—and that without somebody looking over my shoulder.”

He nodded. “The watcher issue.”

“Just because they haven’t set one yet doesn’t mean they’re not going to. I need somebody dogging my steps like I need a set of blisters on a ten-mile walk. But I can’t not tell them. I can’t. Legally, they can lock me up any time—I have the numbers. Koshna’s clear. Guild stays out of politics, out of the police force, they get to do whatever the fuck they want to the poor idiots with Ability. That’s me, Swartz. It’s still me. No matter how much I hate them. No matter what they did to me before.”

Swartz shrugged. “You’re not too afraid of the people if you’re pushing the police to contact them.”

“It’s the right thing to do. It’s the only thing to do—I’m sure as hell not going to guard the Guild killer for weeks while the trial gets going. He’s powerful. He’s possibly more powerful than I am, and I don’t have the training to watch him around the clock without slipping somehow. So I’ve got to do it anyway. But I don’t want to turn over this particular rock. I don’t want to remind them. I don’t really want to face them. Face what happened.” I stubbed out the cigarette. I hadn’t meant to go on like this. Truth was a dangerous habit—I’d need to be careful I didn’t say much else.

“Is it really going to be that bad?” Swartz asked. “They treated you well enough when you worked for them.”

I was quiet for a long time, while Swartz picked up the deck and started playing again. He wasn’t going to rush me, not on this.

“Black eight on the nine of diamonds,” I pointed out.

We sat in silence for a while, until Swartz had to shuffle for a new hand. “Well?” he asked me, making eye contact.

“Yeah.” I looked at my hands and decided to lie. “Listen, Swartz, I’m tired. Can you pull this out of me a different day? I have an early interview tomorrow morning.”

He frowned at me a minute. “We’re doing the service project tomorrow.”

“Cherabino called at the last minute,” I lied. “I can’t make it.” I’d be sleeping in, enjoying the high.

Swartz gathered the cards up. “I’ll see you Sunday, then.”

I shut the door behind Swartz with a sense of relief and anticipation. I lit another cigarette and went back to the bedroom.

Suddenly I was exhausted, so tired my bones hurt. I sat down on the glorified cot that was all they would give me—real beds were still worth something in trade, apparently—and leaned back carefully against the lumpy wall. Was I really going to do this? Three years thrown away? I took a long breath of the smoke, and thought, Maybe. Maybe, just give it a minute. The smoke curled up to the low ceiling above me.

The room was maybe two inches longer than the solid cot beneath me, and maybe twice as wide. Mine was the largest floor plan this building had—central area with a separate bedroom and bathroom, both—and even this one was tiny.

Despite its size, this apartment was worth whatever the department paid for one, impossible feature. The building had been a haven for small technology companies before the Tech Wars, office in a box or some such. A developer had converted it badly when demand froze after the technology companies all went under. What mattered was the “badly” part. The walls were still full of original, inactive Tech.

The lumps behind me were carbon-based microcircuitry, layer upon layer of electric loops, stacked and quiescent. They’d wrenched out the triple central-processing relays in the remodeling—along with every other semisentient computer in the city, all destroyed more than fifty years ago—but the rest was still there, still waiting. I’d had an electrician reconnect the components and put in a couple of “gates.” Two weeks of hairsbreadth tuning with a ’scope, but it had been worth it.

I took one long, final breath from the cigarette, then snubbed it out in the ashtray on the floor next to the cot. I braced myself.

Then I reached out my leg and bumped the waist-high switch with my foot. Behind me, the wall hummed to life. The lightbulb above me flickered, but nothing else happened in the realm of the five senses. I was not fooled.

Wrenching pain wrapped around me in Mindspace, like a tidal wave hitting a wall of pines, pressure, pressure in a torrential rush…then…nothing. Literally nothing. I took a deep breath. Mindspace was gone. Or, more literally, I was gone—from Mindspace. My thoughts slowed down, quietly, like I’d had one too many glasses of alcohol on a calm day, and I took a deep breath.

I could think, finally, but the emptiness was still there. The promise I’d made to myself, to get away, to give in, to have one moment when it all made sense. I got up and ran my hand over the lumpy wall until I found the hidden switch. A circuited panel opened, and the two medicinal vials in the little recess in the wall stood out—two dots of pale color in a gray box. Three small needles.

The vials were old stuff, their bright blue color faded to a dull pastel; it had been six months or more since I’d
bought them. But the drug would still work. Not as strong, not as sharp, but it would still work. I could always buy more tomorrow, the good stuff. Leave work a little early, have plenty of time to get to South DeKalb or Fulton by bus, easy peasy.

I took a breath. Okay. I reached into the box, pulled out a needle and a vial, set them on the bed. Rolled back my sleeve, and with the confidence of long-ago practice, measured out a small dose. My tolerance would have gone down, I told myself, watching the blue liquid wander up the glass tube of the needle, climbing up the little marks. I didn’t want to overdo it on first go.

I heard a dull thumping from the living room, a knock on the door. I paused. The knocking came again. Whoever it was would have to go away, I thought.

“It’s Swartz,” I heard muffled through the door. “I’m coming in.” The metallic scraping of a key sounded in the lock.

Oh crap! Why did I give Swartz a key?

In a panic, I threw the measured needle under my pillow with shaking hands. Pushed the rest into the alcove….

A hand clamped down on my shoulder. Out of nowhere.

Why didn’t I…oh. I stared at the lumpy wall, at the fuzzy not-there feeling it was putting off. The machine was on, the illegal machine Dane had designed for me years ago. My stomach sank. I couldn’t feel a stampede of minds with the machine on. I’d had no warning Swartz was coming.

I turned, slowly, trying to block the alcove with my body.

He pushed me aside. Stood there, a look of dismay on his face. “I’m getting too old for this,” he said, and scooped the entire contents of the alcove in meaty
hands, needles and all. “This stuff’s poison, boy. I’ve said it a hundred times.”

He advanced to the bathroom with his hands full, refusing to stop, his body like a freight train. I grabbed at his sleeve, his shoulder, but he just kept going. He just kept going, unfeeling, uncaring.

I pleaded, “Don’t do this. It’s just for emergencies. Don’t do it!” I tried to dig in my heels, but he outmassed me and I was too panicked to think of any tricks.

He wrenched open the door of the tiny bathroom, threw the glass down hard into the metal sink. I heard the sound of all my hopes shattering, the glass falling to bits. I slammed my body forward, one last dash—and he blocked me.

He held me back with an arm, with a white-knuckled grip as all my plans seeped in blue droplets down the drain.

Then he turned on the water.

My heart dropped in my chest. It was gone, and Swartz knew. “You didn’t have to do that,” I muttered.

“You should have done it yourself.” He pushed past me, heavy footsteps going back to the bedroom, a death knell.

I slid down the wall to the hard floor, staring out into my bare apartment, the emptiness sweeping over me like white noise, all-consuming. Swartz would find the dose under my pillow; he always found them. I should get up, scream, start swinging, get cruel to keep that last shred of hope. I should.