Imagined it?
Wouldn’t put it past Heretic to have him followed. Or maybe it was just some ragged kid hoping to mug a passerby. As he rose, Finch made sure to pull his jacket back. To show his gun. Such as it was.
* * *
239 Manzikert Avenue was a dark vertical slab of stone and wood with blackened filigree balcony railings crawling up the front. Trees left black leaves and rotting yellow berries on the steps. If the berries had been edible, the steps would’ve been clean.
Ornate double doors stripped of the metal that had once served as inlay. Steps guarded by a three-legged cat that hissed. Then hopped away. Beyond the doors, a hallway studded with lights so dim it would’ve been hard to read by them. Finch stepped inside. The feeling of being followed shut off. Like it’d been attached to a timer inside of him.
The floor squeaked. Freshly waxed. It hadn’t been waxed in the morning. Finch smiled. Old Hoegbotton trick. Cheap security. Bell the cat. He went squeaking to the stairwell. Already knew the elevator didn’t work.
The outside light couldn’t seem to push through the tiny windows set into the walls. The stairwell got darker the farther up he went. But, gradually, more evidence of people. A dog howling. The flushing of a shared toilet. A screaming child. A mother’s raised voice. The smell of something spicy being cooked for dinner. Filtered through the exhausted, stale funk of a place in which too many had lived in close quarters for too many years.
Finch knew not to start on the first couple of floors. No one liked to live that low if they had a choice. Ambergris Rules. Better to live next to a corpse than one floor above the gray caps’ underground realm. His father had taught him that.
Stopped at the fourth floor. Just to be safe. Fourth or sixth. Anyone on the fifth was long gone. Either after the corpses arrived and before the Partial came to talk to them. Or after the Partial came to talk.
Finch had a simple formula. A polite knock. Short questions, in a friendly tone. Didn’t like to go in like Blakely, guns blazing. Or like Gustat, using threats to coerce. They got information, sure. But not always the right information.
He worked the long line of closed doors to either side of the discolored, torn carpet. At the fifth door, a mother answered, holding her son. Maybe five or six, born around the time of the Rising. The mother looked worn. Pale and thin. Probably starving herself to feed the child. Probably thought that holding the kid would make Finch play nice. The kid’s open, eager face confounded Finch. Almost like seeing another species. Parents kept their children hidden. Went out to forage for them. Finch’s father had done the same for him. During the wars.
“What do you want?” she asked.
Finch decided he wanted nothing. Asked a couple of easy questions. Showed her the photo of the dead man. The woman didn’t recognize him.
Tried a couple more doors. A middle-aged man in a tank top and shorts answered holding a frying pan. For defense? For dinner? Either way, he didn’t know anything, hadn’t seen anything.
Neither did the old married couple who might’ve lived there for forty, fifty years. Might even have recalled when 239 Manzikert Avenue hadn’t been a dump. The man stood behind the woman, peering out with the kind of distant stare Finch associated with the camps. The wife had a blotch of purple on her forehead that might’ve been a birthmark or might’ve been fungus.
The next interview went better. A man of about sixty answered. Slight build. Large blue eyes, accentuated by the wrinkles in his forehead. A cultured voice. He wore a too-tight dinner jacket. The points of the collars on the white shirt beneath stabbed the flesh of his neck. His wrists showed from the dark ends of his cuffs. He looked like a child in a straitjacket.
As Finch questioned him, he slowly realized the man had dressed up for the interrogation. Had heard him at other doors down the hall. Soon, the man was asking him to come in for tea. Polite in a way that hadn’t been common in Ambergris for years. Finch guessed violinist or theater owner. Either that or he’d once been the doorman.
He didn’t know anything about the murders. (Finch couldn’t recall when he’d started calling them murders, but the word felt right.) Thought the man in the photograph looked familiar, but couldn’t place him. In the way people do when they’re trying to help.
Then the man asked if the people living there had been of use.
“People living there?” Finch echoed.
“Yes. There were people living there. A man. A woman.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I don’t know their names.”
Didn’t know anything else, either.
Who was lying to him then? Heretic? The Partial?
Remembered Heretic’s strange mood as he headed up to the fifth floor.
* * *
In the apartment, the bodies lay much as before. Except that each had sprouted a thick, emerald-green stalk topped by a nodule. The detectives called them memory bulbs. No one could pronounce what the gray caps called them. Sounded like a word between “loam” and “leer.” An aqua-colored nodule for the man. Bright orange for the gray cap. Which meant Finch had learned something new.
The bodies still looked peaceful. Even with the dull light streaming through the open window. The man looked better preserved than when Finch had seen him that morning. Sometimes death did that. For a time.
A figure stepped out of the back room. The Partial, grinning. “Shit.” Finch’s gun appeared in his hand. Heart pounding.
“I’d aim that somewhere else if I were you,” the Partial said. Fungal eye blinking and blinking. Recording.
Finch transferred his gun to his left hand. Shook his right. Green liquid hit the floor. Goddamn gun. Wiped his hand on the side of the couch.
“Did you follow me here?” Finch demanded.
One eyebrow arched. “Getting paranoid? Afraid you’ll be found out?”
Snarled, “Why do you keep saying that?”
The Partial smiled. Triumphant. “Everyone has something to hide.”
“Why didn’t you tell me two people lived here?” he asked the Partial. “A man and a woman. Did you question them? And where are they?”
A preternatural calm to the Partial as he countered with, “Tell me what was in the dead man’s hand.”
Finch stepped back. Took in the narrow face, all slab of tongue and uncanny black-green left eye. Right eye atrophied from the repurposing. Dull orange lichen lived there now. The tongue moved like Finch’s pet lizard’s tongue. Tasting the air. The amount of energy that went into the eye meant they had to suck on gray cap–provided mushroom juice seven or eight times a day. Looked like green pus. What was their name for themselves? A gray cap word. Sounded like grineeknsenz or something just as ugly. Rumor had it they’d made a pact with the gray caps. That soon they’d be made more like the gray caps, in return for their service.
“Nothing important,” Finch managed finally.
“Isn’t that for me to decide?”
“It’s for Heretic to decide. It’ll be in my report.”
“I hope it is.” The Partial’s gaze was cold and dark. “We notice more than the gray caps, Finch. And we’re more prepared to use what we find than they are.”
That surprised Finch. Was the Partial criticizing Heretic? Safer to ignore it.