“What questions, Bliss?” Wyte asked.
No response.
Finch showed Bliss the photograph of the dead man. “Do you know him?”
Bliss stiffened, glanced up at Finch. “Again, it would be nice to know why you’re here?”
“Look at the photo, Bliss.” Bliss looked.
“This man is dead.”
“Yes, but do you know him?” Finch asked again.
Bliss shook his head. “I’ve never seen him before.”
Lying? Or truly confused?
“What about these words?” Finch took out a piece of paper on which he’d written bellum omnium contra omnes.
Saw the surprise on Bliss’s face. Saw that surprise change to something vaguely catlike and unreadable. Knew whatever Bliss told him would be truth diseased with lie.
“Stark asked about something similar,” Bliss said, gaze distant. “But I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Wyte made an exasperated sound. “Let’s finish this at the station. Interrogate him there.” To Bliss: “If you cooperate, maybe it won’t come down to a bullet and a memory bulb.”
Most men would’ve gone a little pale. Bliss just sat there staring daggers at them. A defiant little man who had once run half the city.
Finch pushed. “Maybe you’re right, Wyte. I’d like to know what deal you made with Stark for your life. You don’t mind a trip to the station, do you, Bliss? You’ve got nothing to hide, right?”
Bliss erupted up off the couch like a man twice his size, flung the lamp at Wyte, knocking his gun away. Completed the motion by slamming Finch on the side of the head with surprising strength. Dazed, Finch fell over a low table, banging his knees. Bliss bolted for the kitchen while Wyte was still scrambling for his gun.
“Fuck! Finch, stop him!”
Finch got up off the floor, drew his gun, stumbled toward the kitchen. Wyte was two steps behind.
Beyond the kitchen: a flight of stairs leading down. Finch could hear running footsteps but couldn’t see Bliss. Had no choice but to charge down the stairs, only to be greeted by another hallway. Then a quick, tight corner. Wyte had caught up, and they barreled around like a couple of slapstick comedians, sliding into each other.
Caught a glimpse of Bliss’s white shirt through darkness.
“Bliss! I’ll shoot! Don’t think I won’t!” Could Bliss even hear him?
He lost Bliss in the shadows again, but got off a round or two. Hit nothing but wall. Cursing himself for not having checked the rest of the apartment. Collided with Wyte taking a second corner. Wyte was already breathing hard.
They collected themselves. Opened the door that greeted them. Another long corridor, with a door at the end.
“Fuck! How big is this place?”
They sidled up to the door. Finch got down low on his haunches, put his hand on the knob. Now he was breathing hard, but not because he was winded.
“Cover me high,” he said, glancing up at Wyte. Blood singing in his ears, fingers a little numb.
Wyte nodded, face impossibly long and thick from that angle, chin jutting, expression priest-solemn. Finch turned the knob and pushed the door open. Slowly rose, knees already aching.
“Goddamn it.”
An empty room ten feet square, the walls made of cinder blocks painted white. A single bulb for light. No windows. No other door.
They kept circling it with guns drawn, like Bliss would appear out of nowhere.
Never lost.
Except now he was.
4
Where had Bliss gone? The question haunted Finch as they left the apartment. Didn’t know if anyone had heard the shots. Or if Bliss still had people who might be watching. “Secret door?” Wyte had suggested, almost as if it didn’t bother him. But they’d found nothing. They’d have had to tear the place apart. Brick by brick. Didn’t have the tools or time for that.
They passed addicts with the familiar purple stains across their skin. Men in the ill-fitting uniforms of janitors for the camps. Somebody pissing in an alley. Faded posters on a long crumbling wall, showing pictures of members of the short-lived puppet government. Another blood-red mushroom looming over them big as a tree. Every week there seemed to be more of them. Next to it, a blossoming flower of a building atop the squashed remains of the local grocery store. Soft humming sounds came from an interior obscured by fleshy window flaps.
Where had Bliss gone—and how was he involved?
Finch replayed that moment over and over. Bliss running for the kitchen. Bliss in his memory bulb dream. Trying to reconcile those versions with the Bliss he remembered from before the Rising. The way Bliss’s gaze couldn’t settle on one thing. As if his mind worked faster now. A growing sense that this new Bliss hadn’t been stripped of prestige and security but had traded it for something else.
Wyte seemed agitated, and Finch thought he knew why. So he said, “It’s my fault. We should’ve taken him in from the beginning, like you suggested. I didn’t need to question him first. And I forgot to check out the rest of the apartment.”
Wyte’s neck had an orange stain on it. Fingernails that had turned black. A smell like a distant sewer drain. But he’d been worse.
“I hit him, and I spooked him,” Wyte said. “I’m as much to blame as you. Maybe more. But that’s not the point, Finchy.”
Here it comes.
Wyte stopped walking, faced him. Finch had his back to a crumbling wall veined through with fungus so blue it looked black. An overlay of scattered bullet holes. Across the street, a laughing pack of Partials shoved a couple of prisoners ahead of them. A middle-aged bearded man with a bandage across his forehead and angry rips in a shirt discolored pink. A woman who could have been the man’s wife, her long black hair being used as a leash by one of the Partials. Just a jaunt around the block before getting down to business.
“Look, Finch,” Wyte said. “I’m your partner. And you keep keeping things from me. I hadn’t even seen the photo of the dead man until you showed it to Bliss. And where’s the list Heretic gave you?”
Wyte will never adjust. It made Finch sick deep in his stomach.
Finch pulled Wyte back to the wall with him. The Partials had moved on ahead, oblivious to anything but their prisoners, but he didn’t want to take any chances. In a whisper: “Listen to me. I’m just trying to protect you.”
Wyte stared at him for so long that Finch had to look at the ancient dislodged stones of the sidewalk. A sudden hunger for a past when Wyte hadn’t been this way. A feeling so strong he felt water in his eyes.
Each word meant to wound, Wyte said: “I don’t need protecting, like I’ve told you. Back in the day, I protected you.” Then self-importantly, when Finch said nothing: “I’m going to work for the rebels soon. I know someone who knows someone.”
This shit again. Once every few weeks.
Something snapped in Finch. Felt it in his head like the sudden eruption of a migraine.
He shoved Wyte up against the wall. Didn’t care who was watching. Felt the air go out of the older man’s lungs. Those eyes scared by what they saw in Finch. Skin clammy. Some of Wyte’s shirt wasn’t really a shirt.
Finch said as calmly as he could: “You are not going to be a fucking spy for the rebels. You are not going to be a fucking spy for the rebels. Ever. Do you understand?”