“Sure. I don’t know how long it will take.”
“That’s fine…” Lingered, unsure how to ask for more. Then just said it: “Another favor. Memory bulbs tonight. Can you check on me? Call, or knock on the door if the phones are out? In an hour or two?” No idea when Sintra would get there. No point taking chances.
Now came the frown, as he knew it would. But she nodded. “I will. I will, Finch. Don’t worry.” Reached out to squeeze his arm. Then withdrew her hand quickly. As if she’d shown weakness.
He stared at her now. Smiled. Sometimes he felt a closeness with her he shared with no one else, not even Sintra. She’d never fought the Rising. She’d just read her books, preserved them. Protected them. Shared them. Eked out a living making crafts. At least, this was the story she’d told him. A small part of him still wondered why she’d been taken to the camps. Or why she’d been let go. “I was too sick to work,” she’d told him. But she’d never looked sick to him.
“The gray caps like to confuse randomness with purpose,” Wyte had said once. But Finch didn’t believe that. Just believed they kept the purpose buried deep.
“Thank you,” he said. The words came out a little ragged. “Long day. I’ll call when I take them. If the phones work.”
“I’ll come up and knock if I don’t hear,” she said. In return, he knew he’d have to help push back the encroaching river one more time. Each task had its own price with Rathven.
She shut the door, taking the light with her.
* * *
Finch’s apartment was near the end of the hall. Had to negotiate a hothouse wetness to get there. Tendrils and caps of red-and-green fungus sprouted from the walls. Gray caps only cared about keeping the streets clean. No help from his next-door neighbors, either. Almost like they thought it gave them camouflage.
No one around, except his cat, Feral, a big brute of a tabby, crying to be let in. Bumping up against his legs while Finch made shushing sounds. Feral was loud, always trying to trip Finch and bring him down to eye level.
Sometimes the little old man in the apartment opposite heard Finch and came out, but not tonight. A former accountant, the man liked to sit in a shaft of sunlight from the hall window. Smile and talk to himself and nod, and read from the same ragged book.
Two minutes to unlock and then relock. Only Sintra knew the sequence. Still not comfortable with that idea. Had thought about changing the key.
Flash of another dark room. A worn bed. White sheets dull in the shadow. Didn’t look like anyone had slept in it in months. Dusty floor. Two corpses.
Flipped a switch. Relief when the lights actually came on. Faded floral print wallpaper. Rootlike edges to the frayed beige carpet. Worn-out furniture.
Relief at being able to hang up the role of detective in the closet, along with his jacket. To let the tough exterior come off like a mask worn for a festival.
“Hold on for Truff’s sake,” Finch said to Feral as the cat ran to the kitchen through the living room.
Feral had wide round eyes. They gave his owlish face a perpetual look of surprise. Finch had rescued him as a kitten from a fungus that had wound tendrils around the animal while he slept. Still had purple patches on his flanks, sometimes growing, sometimes not.
No sign of Sidle, his windowsill lizard. Never really knew if it was the same lizard anyway. Felt compelled to pretend for some reason.
After feeding Feral, Finch put the two memory bulbs on the kitchen counter. Poured himself a glass of Trillian’s Premium Whiskey, aged eighteen years. An F&L brand trading off a famous name. Something no self-respecting H&S man would’ve drunk before the Rising. He had six bottles left in the closet. Next to the boxes of cigars. These had been his father’s habits, his legacy. Nothing better had replaced them. The smell of cigar smoke made him feel like his father was right there, beside him.
Cigars. Whiskey. Both working as a kind of peculiar clock or timer. When they ran out, would his life as Finch run out, too?
Heretic’s touch like wet, dead leaves sewn together and stuffed with meat.
Dinnertime, but he wasn’t hungry.
A long, shuddering sigh as he sat in the old leather chair next to the couch in the living room. Under the light of an old glass lamp shaped like an umbrella that he’d taken from the lobby. Watched the dusk dissolve into night.
On the far wall hung three of the hotel’s original tourist scenes of Albumuth Boulevard. A far better view than the one from the small balcony abutting the kitchen. All the balcony could show him was more of the night sky, a sliver of the two towers, and the alley below. A view saved for emergencies. A second view could be had from the bathroom by opening the small latched window and standing on the toilet. Finch could look down into the courtyard whenever he wanted. Between the two sight lines, he had as much forewarning as he could expect. If what came after him was human.
Not a bad place. At least he had a separate office next to the kitchen and extra bookcases, overflowing, on the wall closest to the door. He’d made them from planks torn up from the rotting eleventh floor.
Even before the Rising, Finch had enjoyed reading. So many nights at the old house in the valley he and his father had sat reading in silence, separate yet together. To block out the night. The wars. Now the gray caps’ camps lay so close that a crushed foundation under a heap of garbage was all that remained of the house. Nothing left but the books and other things he’d rescued.
Some books had been bought during cease-fires. Before the Rising destroyed the idea of bookstores. A few had come from his grandparents, who had returned to the Southern Isles when he was ten. Memories of them were like spent matches dull against a sudden darkness. He leafed through the books for signs of them sometimes. A folded letter. A note that never dropped to the floor.
But most of the books had been his father’s, rescued from the old home. About a dozen Finch knew from long repetition, part of his father’s home-schooling when it was too dangerous to go to class.
His father had started out as a brilliant engineer. In his youth, he had served in the Ambergris military in that brief, bright window when they’d taken on the Kalif’s empire. He was with the troops as they advanced into a desert strewn with oases and hunched trees with gnarled black branches. As they took the Kalif’s lands, and contemplated their own vision of conquest. As they were pushed back.
With Finch’s mother dead in childbirth, his father had raised him after the war. A strange life, seesawing between wealth and poverty. Father’s many impor- tant yet strange friends. His connections with Hoegbotton & Sons. And yet sometimes things had been bad enough Finch’s father had supported them doing odd jobs and trading books for food. Or burning books for fuel.
Back at the old house, there had been many photographs of his father. The broad-chested muscular form of the man, tight in that characteristic Ambergrisian uniform of olive green. Wedge of a hat tilted to the side as was the fashion. On a hill or in a city or atop a tank. Surrounded by fellow soldiers or alone. Always smiling. Eyes dark dots looking into the camera. Seeming aware of future fame, but not of how it would come. Nor of how far he would fall.
Finch had chosen “John” for his new identity because it was his father’s name. “Finch” was just a common bird, a creature no one would ever notice. He’d burned all photographs except one the night he’d changed his name. Displayed on the mantel, it showed his grandparents just arrived from the Southern Isles. At the docks with their suitcases beside them. Looking faded, remote, and confused. Grandpa had been a carpenter. Grandma a homemaker. There were no relatives on his mother’s side. His father was four years old in the photo. This image was all Finch was willing to risk.