“Never touch the stuff,” I said.
“Something else?”
“That’s all right.”
“We can make coffee,” Meladine said in a quiet voice. “I know you Earth natives often—”
“He said he’s fine,” Strawn said curtly.
Her wince was hardly noticeable, but that kind of thing always bothered me, and I started to regret responding to the man’s holo. Strawn glared at her until she rose meekly and walked out of the room. Then he turned to the wall nearest us, where there was a watercolor of a field of yellow tulips. The tulips stirred as if by a breeze.
“Activate screen,” he said.
The painting dissolved and in its place was an aerial view of a war-torn city, with crumbled buildings and gaping craters. A red light blinked in the middle of the area.
“Old Vanga Seven?” I said.
“Very good,” Strawn said.
I knew from my research that the Vangans had destroyed their own planet centuries earlier—overpopulation, pollution, the usual suspects. Unlike most planets with similar problems, however, the Vangans had been fortunate that one of their moons—Vanga Seven—had been ripe for terraforming, to use the Old Earth word. Unfortunately, another hundred years later the Unity Worlds war with the Dulnari had destroyed Vanga Seven as well. After the war, the moneyed people of the moon decided to construct floating cities like Trenton instead of rebuilding below. To me, it seemed a little like building on a battlefield without burying the bodies.
“Nobody lives down there anymore but the savages,” Strawn said, as if reading my thoughts. “People who can’t afford to get out. And that’s apparently where my daughter’s little toy has gone. The red blinking light is its last known location. Something must have shorted its homing beacon. Otherwise your job would be a lot easier.”
“How did it get down there?”
Strawn shrugged. “Maybe it boarded a sanitation vehicle. I don’t know. He’s a Paqil 5000. Very intelligent.”
“Why do you think he ran off?”
“Good question. I’ve heard that the Paqils are designed to respond to their owner’s attention. My daughter Alexa just turned four. She used to spend a lot of time with Bear. That’s what she calls him. Bear. Very simple, I know, but she named him when she was two.” He chuckled, again without any sign of the emotion that usually accompanied it. “Anyway, she’s been doing a lot of other things lately. Virtuoracing. Laser dancing. Not spending nearly as much time with him. It’s my guess that Bear sometimes runs away because he’s lonely.”
“He’s done this more than once?”
“Yes, but he’s never left Trenton before. Screen off.” The tulips returned, and he turned to face me. “That’s why I need you, Dexter. I’ve heard that you’re a man who doesn’t mind going to dangerous places. They say, well, they say you were once ...”
“In the Calfan Mafia?” I finished for him.
“Yes.”
“It’s an interesting rumor.”
“You’re saying it’s false?”
I smiled. “I’m saying that if it
was
true, it isn’t now. I work for myself.”
“Yes. Well. I’m curious how you made such a transition.”
“It’s natural to be curious.”
“Hmm. Well, a man in my line of work has learned to be guarded, too, which is part of the reason you’re here. I’m afraid that my face alone might incite a riot down in Old Vanga Seven, as some of the Unity Worlds policies I’m associated with have not exactly been ... popular.”
“Why not just buy another toy?”
“My daughter would know the difference, believe me. Will you do it? I will pay you ten times what I’ve already paid you.”
It was a lot of money, and I could have certainly used it. But I decided long ago to never again work for someone I despised. And I was already despising Jachin Strawn.
Before I could answer, though, a little girl with blond hair walked into the room. She had pale, freckled skin and big green eyes, and her yellow cotton dress swished when she walked. She was cute, not beautiful but cute, just as little girls who have never been bioshaped were supposed to look. She reminded me of Linna, my own daughter, who had been about the same age when she died.
“This is Alexa,” Strawn said.
My mouth felt dry. She held a piece of paper, which she handed to me. On it was a crude drawing of a brown teddy bear with blue eyes. At the bottom, in bold brown lettering, she had scrawled BEAR.
“I draws you a picture,” she said, “to helps you find him.”
***
It took me nearly three days of scouring the smog-blanketed cities of Old Vanga Seven, wandering among the crumbled buildings and the tent towns that rimmed the bomb craters, bribing my way past drugged-up gang members and what remained of the local mafia, until somebody said they’d seen the toy hiding in the basement of a burned out apartment building. That led me to an old toothless man living on the first floor who said, yeah, he’d seen the toy, but he’d sold it. After jogging his memory with a fair amount of pure vernilon—a drug that was like money down there—he gave me the shop’s location.
I told myself I wasn’t doing this because of the girl. Rule number one was never to let emotions dictate the jobs. It was always about the money. But try as I might, I couldn’t shake the look on that girl’s face when she showed me the picture of the bear.
The shop’s location was in a bazaar of sorts—not in one of the sun-bleached tents, but in one of the gray buildings surrounding the area. The upper windows all gaped black, but there were a few occupied stores in the bottom floors.
Throngs of emaciated people packed the street, some carrying straw baskets or herding dirty-faced children. Beggars crowded the aisles and pawed at me with bony fingers. The placed reeked of sewage and rot. Outside the shop I was looking for was a front display that amounted to nothing more than a white cloth on a folding table, filled with dozens of tiny pieces of electronics, all useless junk.
Inside it was so dark it took my eyes a moment to adjust, the place lit by only a few exposed bulbs. The humid air smelled of burnt metal. A pasty-faced man with long greasy red and gray hair was seated at a table in the rear, head bent down as he examined some small bit of electronics. He wore a black lens over one eye, something homemade—a camera lens fastened to a pair of goggles. He looked up. The black lens made his right eye appear enormous. He had enough gray in his hair that I guessed he was old enough to have lived through the war with the Dulnari.
“Don’t got no money,” he said.
“I’m not here to rob you,” I said. “I’m looking for something—a toy bear. Somebody told me you had one.”
He slipped the goggles onto his forehead. He regarded me silently, chewing on his bottom lip. His pale forehead glistened. His body odor—a mix of garlic and layered sweat—was so overpowering it made me wince.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, I, uh, did have it a week ago. But it’s gone. Sold it.”
I walked to the table. “You sure? Because I’d pay a good price for it.”
He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”
“So if I was to look around in your store for it, I wouldn’t find it?”
“Uh ...”
“Because if I found it, after you saying you didn’t have it, I wouldn’t be very happy.”
He swallowed so hard his fleshly neck jiggled. “Well ... I
might
have it. What does it look like?”
I described it for him.
“Oh, that one,” he said. “Yeah. I was thinking of a different bear. That one’s in the back. I was trying to fix it.”
“Fix it?”
“I didn’t break it. It was broken when the old guy sold it to me.”
He stood abruptly, his belly bumping the table, and scurried to a metal door at the back. I followed. The door led to a cluttered storeroom, a narrow aisle between metal shelves filled with wooden crates. It was dark except for the light coming from the main part of the store, but the man shuffled ahead, disappearing into darkness. I placed my hand over my gun, in its holster beneath my jacket, and followed.
A light attached to a metal arm clicked on, illuminating a workbench, crates piled high on all sides. The man hustled to the table and reached for something.
“Hold on a minute,” I said.
He froze. When I got closer, I saw the bear. Dirt coated its fluffy tan fur. Its paws and muzzle were the same color as its eyes—a deep, rich brown. It sat lifeless on the workbench, stubby arms and legs spread wide. A square area of its chest had been removed and placed next to it, exposing the circuitry within the bear. A blue wire led from the inside of the bear to a small handheld.
“What were you doing?” I asked.
“I told you. I was trying to fix—”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. You’ve got it hooked up to some kind of device. Why?”
He blinked a few times. I took a step toward him, and he retreated, holding up his hands.
“Wait!” he said. “I was just trying to play the memory banks, that’s all.”
“What?”
“I noticed somebody had gotten into it before. These Paqils, they come completely welded. No removable panels. But somebody had cut it open and then sealed it back up. I thought ... maybe ...”
I saw where he was going, and I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. “You thought maybe somebody was hiding something.”
“Yeah. I was just curious, that’s all.”
“Or you were looking for something to blackmail somebody with.”
The look in his eyes confirmed my theory, but he shook his head vigorously. “No, no, I wouldn’t do that. I just—”
“Did you get it to play?”
“No, no, I couldn’t—”
“Are you lying?”
“No! I’m telling the truth. I—”
My anger got the best of me. Thump, thump—just like that, I hit him with two swift punches to his face. Then it took everything I had to stop myself from hitting him again. It was always there, the anger, swelling inside of me, waiting for its chance. To break a bone. To hear a scream. To make sure my opponent didn’t just respect me, but
feared
me.
When I was with the Calfan mafia, it was my ruthlessness that made me such a useful part of their organization. But it wasn’t ruthlessness, not really. It was a lack of self-control. When the anger took over, it took over completely. And it was that same lack of self-control, when the son of one of the bosses wanted to try to prove himself by taking me on in a fistfight, that got me in so much trouble.
After the son ended up a vegetable, they killed my wife and daughter as punishment. I got my revenge, eventually liquefying everyone involved, including the bosses who gave the order, but it didn’t make losing the only two people that mattered to me hurt any less. The reason they were dead was because of my own weakness. I had to live with that.
The greasy-haired man went down hard, his nose a bloody mess. I loomed over him. He raised his arms in a protective shield.
“All right, all right!” he cried. “I got it to play. But I won’t tell anyone what I saw, I swear. Just take it. I don’t want anything. Just—just don’t hurt me!”
I squatted so we were at eye level. It was a moment before he realized I wasn’t going to hit him, then he lowered his arms.
“Play it for me,” I said.
***
In the dark storeroom, I watched what the bear saw play out on the handheld’s tiny screen. A lot of the footage was just the girl, the two of them playing together, or the bear watching her sleep, but my greasy-haired friend was able to fast forward to more disturbing images: Strawn screaming at his wife, his wife running away, Strawn catching her and beating her. It happened many times, all of it seen from the vantage point close to the floor.
During one of the fights, the bear looked to his right, and there, crouched on the other side of the doorway, was Strawn’s daughter. She had seen everything. I realized I had never seen Strawn hit her.
“He never put a finger on the girl,” the storekeeper said, his voice nasally because of the wad of tissues he held up to his nose. “Not in the stuff that’s on here, anyway.”
“How much has been erased?”
“No way to know. But there’s only a few months filled in the memory banks, and this bear’s a lot older than that.” He shook his head. “I used to work on these back in my old life. I’d heard of these Paqils doing this kind of stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, running away when they see something bad.” He hesitated. “You work for him?”
“I was just doing this one job.”
“Oh. You know, I can erase that stuff if he wants. For a price.”
I looked at him.
“Or for free,” he said. “I’d do it for free.”
“Just put it back together,” I said. Then, as he reached for the bear, I grabbed his arm. “Wait. I want you to do one more thing for me.”
***
After giving the storekeeper a little vernilon for his trouble, I boarded the pod I’d gotten from Strawn and headed for Trenton. It was nearly dark, but it wasn’t until the pod rose above the sooty cloud cover that I saw that though the sun was setting, it was much brighter above the smog than below. The planet Vanga, dominating the western sky above the smog, was no longer a gray oval smudge. Now it was a crimson oval smudge, like a big bloody thumbprint. I wondered what the Vangans would do if they ruined the moon they were living on just as they’d ruined their home planet. Build a moon for their moon? How many reminders of their mistakes did they need inhabiting the sky?