Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2)
Read Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) Online
Authors: Rosa Montero
ALSO BY ROSA MONTERO
Tears in Rain
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Rosa Montero
Translation copyright © 2016 Lilit Žekulin Thwaites
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as
El peso del corazón
by Seix Barral in Spain in 2015. Translated from Spanish by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503936461
ISBN-10: 1503936465
For the witches—Gaby, Isabel, Nativel, Reyes, Rosaló, and Virginia. We are seven, including me.
And for the witches’ assistants. They know who they are.
For Macu, the little goat who frisks about in the countryside, and for Álex and Nuria, benevolent genies.
For Carmen, the principal witch.
For the real Frank Nuyts, musical magician, magnificent composer, with whom I have done an opera.
And for the real Berrocal and the real Fred Town, sorcerers and muses.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Shakespeare
, Macbeth
1
H
umans are slow and heavy elephants; replicants are fast and desperate tigers,
thought Bruna Husky, consumed with impatience at having to wait in line. She recalled yet again the words of the ancient author whom her friend the archivist had once quoted to her: “The caged tiger paces back and forth incessantly so that the unique and incredibly brief moment of salvation won’t escape him.” Bruna knew it by heart because it had impressed her: she was that tiger trapped in the tiny prison of her life. Humans, thanks to their very long lives and interminable old age, pompously glorify the advantages of learning. They maintain that you can even learn something from bad experiences. But Bruna couldn’t waste time on such nonsense. Like all replicants, she lived for only ten years, of which three years, ten months, and twenty-one days remained, and she was absolutely certain there was a lot of knowledge not worth her knowing. She could, for example, have lived very happily knowing nothing about the filth of
the
Zero zones, but here she was, after undertaking a futile journey to misery.
“Good morning! You are leaving Zone Zero. As of this point only people with valid authorization, please. Thank you!”
Bruna had been hearing this message for some time, becoming progressively more distinct as the long line of travelers crossed the control point and she moved closer to the gate. The border seemed no big deal, not much more than a long transparent wall through which you could glimpse a few equally transparent corridors and rooms on the other side. But it was made of reinforced plexiglass, with very thick armor plating—maybe 2.6 centimeters, she thought: impenetrable, indestructible, and as hard as a diamond, although much uglier, because the plexiglass yellowed and dirtied with age. The ocher-colored patches resembled old urine stains and managed to make the barrier look exactly like what it really was: a squalid prison wall.
“Good morning! You are leaving Zone Zero. As of this point only people with valid authorization, please. Thank you!”
Bruna growled. She hated artificial voices, artificial courtesy, and above all the stupid little tone of enthusiasm that was so inadequate and so incongruous in these circumstances. The world around her seemed to be boiling. Along the skyline, columns of toxic smoke were rising from the industrial chimneys, merging with the gray, contaminated sky that threatened to collapse on top of her head. Located in a mountain pass, the border control took advantage of the narrow road and the impregnability of the huge rocks. Seen from up high, the valley Bruna was about to abandon was a scorched, dismal cauldron. An accursed land.
“Move up,” said the man standing behind her.
He was right: the line had advanced two paces, and she hadn’t realized. Two miserable steps and the guy was protesting. She made up the tiny distance with one stride and, thanks to the height she enjoyed as a combat rep, gave the human a mocking look. He didn’t seem to be intimidated by her athletic constitution or her feline eyes with their vertical pupils that identified her as a technohuman, or by the tattoo on the left side of her body—a fine black line that encircled her, running down from her forehead, through the middle of her left eyelid and cheek, over her breast and abdomen, down her left leg, along the sole of her foot to her heel, and then back up to her shoulder, completing the circle by traversing her shaved head. So much calmness in a human wasn’t normal. Usually they were afraid of her and loathed her. But this man had to be rich. Powerful. He must have been accustomed to inspiring fear in others. He was wearing the latest model carbon-purifying face mask, elegant and almost invisible—ultralight and ultraexpensive technology. What sort of business would bring a type like him to a Zone Zero, one of the most contaminated zones on the planet? The world’s drains.
It must be dirty deals,
thought Bruna, unenthusiastically chewing over her dreadful play on words.
“Good morning! You are leaving Zone Zero. As of this point only people with valid authorization, please. Thank you!”
Dumb machine. Air had been the property of the big energy companies for a long time, and they charged the inhabitants for it: the cleaner the air, the more expensive it was. Six months ago the Constitutional Tribunal had declared these businesses illegal and prohibited the ownership and sale of air. A big triumph for democracy that in reality was useless because the Green zones immediately imposed a residency tax that the poorest people couldn’t afford. That was why in the splendid, one-of-a-kind nation of the United States of the Earth, borders such as this one continued to exist. It was necessary to build them like this, from transparent plexiglass, to make the contradiction less noticeable. But then time assumed responsibility for creating those ocher-colored urine stains. Bruna took a deep breath of the heavy, mineral air. It smelled of sulfur, rust, an old damp rag. The rep had a clear mental image of the air coating her pink lungs with the very fine black dust that covered every surface in the Zero zones.
So much the worse for my health,
thought Bruna. Although, all things considered, what did it matter?
Three years, ten months, and twenty-one days,
she brooded. The cretin with the mask would live longer than her in all likelihood. And not because of his carbon filter. That was why clients of modest means searched out replicant detectives to go to the Zero zones. Miserable jobs paid miserably—barely two thousand gaias to fill your lungs with toxic metal while you were investigating the whereabouts of an idiot. Only a replicant with a very short life span, someone condemned to death like Bruna, would accept a job like this. She looked at the executive in his mask again and hated him. Really hated him. Then as happened so often, her long-standing fury turned into despondency, which was even worse. She always preferred anger to suffering.
She had almost reached the control. There was only one person in front of her. A young human. Her garish, tight clothes suggested a prostitute maybe. Her thin mobile computer was mounted on an ostentatious gold-plated bracelet studded with gems that were obviously fake. Perhaps she was going to work in the adjacent sector, a Zone One.
The girl put her wrist up against the Eye, and after the few seconds it took for the data to be checked, the gate opened. There was a small corridor on the other side leading to a decontamination chamber. Nothing too serious: aspiration of the toxic particles in the hair and clothing, and an antiviral and antibiotic steam spray. A superficial clean that lasted barely a minute. The luggage was checked and decontaminated on a conveyor belt nearby. It was this process that caused the long lines.
The girl was about to pass through the door when the uproar erupted, starting with sudden yelling, a collective animal bellow that made your blood freeze. The girl stopped and looked back; in fact everyone waiting in line looked behind them. At the mass of individuals racing madly toward the wall. There were a lot of them—three hundred, four hundred, maybe more. Men and women. They were carrying ladders, backpacks, bags, suitcases, children on their shoulders. They were screaming in desperation and anger but also to encourage one another. That’s how the people in the stories Bruna’s friend Yiannis used to tell her must have screamed when they assaulted the walls of medieval castles. The first members of the horde hit the transparent barrier like a wave breaking against a dyke. The wall spat them back, discharged them, because it was electrified. Bruna knew that for a fact, since they often spoke about it on the news; border attacks in Zone Zero happened regularly. The horde also knew that the plexiglass would make them dance, but even so they risked trying to cross it. Some of them wore insulating gloves and wrapped their bodies in strange rags to minimize the effect of the electric current, but they shook all the same, shook and screamed while those behind them climbed over their shoulders. The girl who looked like a prostitute swiftly regained her composure and ran through the gate. The wall sealed itself again behind her.
“Good morning! You are leaving Zone Zero. As of this point only people with valid authorization, please. Thank you!”
Like magic, three media drones appeared above their heads, their tiny motors making little farting noises. Bruna tuned in to the news on her mobile and, sure enough, the assault on the wall came up live. There was something almost epic, grandiose, even beautiful about the scene on the screen on her wrist, what with the smoke, the aerial shots, the clever close-ups, the multicolored background, and the gray-blue color that dominated everything. In real life, however, it was nothing more than a chaotic, howling flood of people stampeding over one another, a mountain of desperate, wounded characters. It was assumed that the electric current was there to deter rather than to kill, but some of them were lying motionless at the base of the wall. Even so, others were managing to jump on top, jerking from the shock but unstoppable.
“If you’re not going through, get out of the way!”
The man with the mask pushed Bruna aside, pressed his mobile up against the Eye, and passed through the gate. And as if he had anticipated or even ordered it, as soon as the gate closed behind him the
fieras
, the feared security officers of the Special Regional Intervention Forces, turned up. They were dressed in riot gear, which made them look somewhat like astronauts from the early days of space travel. The first thing they did was launch rockets at the drones. The little machines exploded, and their fiery fragments began to rain down on everyone. Then it was the line of travelers who howled and started their own avalanche, while those assailing the wall scattered, and the
fieras
indiscriminately fired their stun guns. A sudden monumental shove like the all-enveloping thrust of a tsunami lifted Bruna off the ground and swept her through the gate into the decontamination chamber. Suddenly, she found herself shut inside a small cubicle with nine or ten other people—an unbearable crowd for such a small space. From the shoulders down (luckily, she was the tallest in the group) every centimeter of every body was being painfully compressed by another body. Lungs fought for breath, and there was a chance that the weakest individuals would not be able to inhale enough air. Anguished panting began to be heard just as the
fieras
opened the chamber, and the group, stumbling and gasping, spilled out onto the other side of the wall.
“On your knees! On your knees with your hands behind your heads!”
Several of the travelers had already fallen facedown on the ground of their own accord when they exited the chamber, but the
fieras
were harassing them regardless, pushing them and hitting them with their guns. Bruna’s heart began to beat faster and her adrenaline fired up, an automatic response ramped up in combat reps by genetic engineers. Raising her arms, Bruna slowly started to kneel down, but it didn’t stop one of the guards from ramming the butt of his weapon into her kidney. Bruna turned around with the speed of lightning and, grabbing the butt of the gun, gave the
fiera
a shove that landed him on the ground. Everything instantly froze: the astonished man sprawled out on his back, the other guards aiming their weapons at her, Bruna still holding the butt of the gun in her hand. She felt the ice-cold, hyperlucid stillness of those significant moments of tension wash over her—another gift from the geneticists who had designed her. She was at such a level of alertness that seconds seemed to last minutes, so she allowed herself to assess the situation calmly: she was surrounded by six
fieras
; if they all fired at once, the force from their stun guns would definitely stop her heart and, despite her strength, she would die. But the guards were frightened. Sometimes there was an advantage to being feared.
“Keep calm. Keep calm,” she said in a firm but quiet voice, using universal English. “Nothing’s going to happen. My name is Bruna Husky. I live in Madrid, in the Hispanic region. I’m a private detective. I have a license and I’m registered. I’ve come to this zone on behalf of a client. I shouldn’t have pushed your team member, and I apologize. But you shouldn’t have hit me in the back. I was obeying your orders. I’m a combat rep, and I’m designed to respond automatically to assaults like this.”
Silence. Bruna glanced at their faces. They were barely distinguishable behind the protective covers attached to their helmets. But she could see their eyes behind the visors. Human eyes: nervous, unstable, emotional, hesitant. Bruna knelt down.
“I’m going to put the gun on the ground, and then you can check my details.”
Slowly and deliberately, Bruna put the weapon down and then placed her hands behind her head. The
fieras
approached. They swiped a Reader across her mobile and ran a check of what she’d told them. As the facts were confirmed, they started to relax. They became increasingly confident and cocky. The guard whose weapon she had taken stopped right in front of her.