He stood. Looked down at the tableau formed by the dead. Something about it. Almost posed. Almost staged. But also: the man’s neck, half hidden by the shirt collar. Was it … twisted? Who could tell with the gray cap. Impossibly long, smooth, gray neck. (Did that mean Heretic was old, this one young?) But also torqued.
Finch glanced up at the tired, sagging ceiling. About ten feet.
“They look like,” Finch said. “They look like they both fell.”
Could that be the sound the neighbors heard?
“The spore camera’s first shot is of them on the floor,” the Partial said.
Finch had forgotten him.
Turned, stared at the Partial. The Partial stared back. Taking Finch’s photo with each blink.
“I could…”
“What?” the Partial said. “You could what?”
I could tear out your eye with my bare hands. Not a thought he’d seen coming.
“You know what I think?” the Partial said.
Finch tamped down on his irritation. Tried to remember that, in a way, none of the Partials were more than six years old. Disaffected youths no matter what their age. All pale. Or made pale. Humans who’d gotten fungal infections and liked it, Truff help them. Got an adrenaline rush from heightened powers of sight. Enhanced by fungal drugs autogenerated inside the eye. Pumped into the brain. In a sense, their eye was always looking back at them.
I’ll never know what you think. Not in a million years.
“You volunteered for that,” Finch said. Pointed at the Partial’s eye. “That makes you crazy. So I don’t need to know what you think.”
The Partial snickered. “I’ve heard it all before. And you’ll never know what you’re missing … But here’s what I think, whether you want it or not. That man’s not really human. Not really. I should know, right? And something went wrong. And maybe they didn’t die here but were, I don’t know, moved.”
Finch gave the Partial a long glance. Turned to kneel again by the man’s body. The second half of what the Partial had said made less sense than the first.
“Just do your job.” I’ll do mine.
The Partial fell silent. Hurt? Seduced by something new to click?
Finch really didn’t care. Something had caught his attention. Two fingers of the man’s left hand. Curled tight into the palm. Grit or sand under the fingernails. Finch got to his knees, leaned forward, took the man’s hand in his. The warmth of it surprised him, the green spores already ghosting into the flesh. He pried the fingers back. Revealed a ragged piece of paper. A pulse-pounding moment of excitement.
Then he pulled it out. Released the fingers. Let the arm fall. Shielding the paper from the Partial with his body.
Normal paper, not fungal. Old and stained. Torn from a book? He unfolded it. Two words, written hurriedly, in black ink: Never Lost. And below that some gibberish that looked something like bellum omnium contra omnes. Self-contained, or once part of a longer message?
Definitely torn from a book. On the back a printed sentence fragment, “the future can hold when the past holds ambiguity such as this,” and a symbol. Somehow familiar to Finch. Although he didn’t know from where.
Stuck the paper in his boot before the Partial could blink that he’d found something. Got up. Pulled gloves from his jacket pocket and put them on. Opened the pouch at his belt.
Heretic had forgotten the preservatives, but would blame Finch if it wasn’t done. Corpses didn’t last long otherwise. Within forty-eight hours, you’d be breathing them, as the spores did their work.
Carefully, he sprinkled a blue powder across both corpses. Not spores this time, but tiny fruiting bodies. The powder smelled like smoke from the camps to the south. Or the camps smelled like the powder. Pointless to wear the gloves after the hundreds of fungal toxins and experiments that had been released into the air. The millions of floating spore-eyes. Yet still he did it.
Blue mingled with green. The green disappeared as he watched, colonized by the blue. The two bodies would not decay now. They would linger, suspended, until Finch returned to collect their memories.
“… and know you don’t want to eat the memories,” the Partial said to Finch’s back. Sounding triumphant.
Finch’s thoughts had been so far away he’d missed the first part.
“Is that all?” Wanted to laugh.
Did they talk this way together in the barracks near the camps where the gray caps housed them like weapons? Spewing out each day and night like black ants. Foraging on the flesh of the city. Observers and security both.
“You’re afraid of change,” the Partial said. “Of being changed. That’s why you hate me.”
Swiveled abruptly in his crouch, hand on his gun. Met the Partial’s corrupted gaze.
“Is that all?” Finch repeated. “I mean, are you done with your picture-taking?”
No skill when every blink was an image. No honor in a perpetual voyeurism. A kind of treason against your own kind. “It warps the privacy of your own life,” Wyte had said once, as if he knew. “Permanent occupation. I wouldn’t want to live that way.” Yet now Wyte did. And so did Finch. In a sense.
“I’m never done,” the Partial said. “And if you’ve got a past, you should be worried. They’ll work through all the records someday. Maybe they’ll find you.”
Funny thing is, Partial, Heretic already knows my past. Most of it. And he doesn’t give a fuck. That’s not who I’m worried about.
Wanted to say it but didn’t. Unsnapped the clasp on his holster. The fungal gun trembled there like a live thing. Wet. Dripping. Useless against a gray cap. Very useful against a Partial. Still human, no matter how much you pretend.
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“I see everything,” the Partial said. “Everything.”
“Yes,” Finch said, “but that’s unavoidable, isn’t it?”
The Partial stared at Finch. Seemed about to say something. Bit down on it, hard. Walked out into the hall. Slammed the door behind him.
Leaving Finch alone with the bodies.
* * *
Now Finch can see the frailty death has lent them. Now Finch can see the vulnerability. The way the light uses them in the same way it uses him. He walks to the window. Looks out across the damaged face of Ambergris.
Six years and I can’t recognize a goddamn thing from before.
Harsh blue sprawl of the bay, bled from the River Moth. Carved from nothing. The first thing the gray caps did when they Rose, flooding Ambergris and killing thousands. Now the city, riddled through with canals, is like a body that was once drowned. Parts bleached, parts bloated. Metal and stone for flesh. Places that stick out and places that barely touch the surface.
In the foreground of the bay stands the scaffolding for the two tall towers still being built by the gray caps. A rough pontoon bridge reaches out to them, an artificial island surrounding the base. The scaffolding rises twenty feet above the highest tower. Hard to know if they are almost complete or will take a hundred years more. Great masses of green fungus cling to the tops. It makes the towers look shaggy, almost as if they had fur, were flesh and blood. A smell like oil and sawdust and frying meat. At dusk each day the gray caps lead a workforce from the camps south of the city. All night, the sounds of hammering and construction. Emerald lights moving like slow stars. Screams of injury or punishment. To what purpose? No one knows. While along the lip of the bay, monstrous fungal cathedrals rise under cover of darkness, replacing the old, familiar architecture. Skyline like a jagged wound.