With a show of repugnance and disdain, Stark removed first one shoe, then the other.
“Empty your pockets.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.” Realized he was shouting. Realized his hair was still clotted with Wyte’s blood.
Stark spat as he pulled out his pockets. He didn’t have much. Some money. A photograph of an old woman. A few keys.
“I don’t like to be weighed down,” Stark said.
Nothing there to tell Finch anything more about Stark.
Finch took a memory bulb out of his packet pocket. “Do you know who this is?”
A kind of savage, jaded amusement at seeing the bulb. Which faded. Quickly. Replaced by something Finch hadn’t seen in Stark before. Uncertainty.
“It’s from Wyte. Wyte’s memory bulb. Now why do you think I made it?”
“Fuck you,” Stark snarled. “Fuck you. Why don’t you eat it, Finch. Eat it and be damned.”
“You wanted information. You wanted me to help you. So I’m going to help you. You’re going to live inside of Wyte’s head for a while.”
“I won’t eat it,” Stark said. He’d gone pale. The eyes flickered from side to side. Looking for a way out.
“Why didn’t you kill Bliss, Stark? What did the two of you talk about?” Still curious.
“We talked about petunias, Finch,” Stark said. “We talked about art and literature and what the weather was going to be like. What the fuck do you think we talked about? We talked about why I shouldn’t kill him.”
“And how’d he convince you?”
“Said he’d get me information, money, influence. Gave me the address of that rebel outpost for starters. He was going to help me clean out the whole area. But I haven’t seen him since, the bastard.”
Regarded Stark for a moment. Looked him in the eye. Believed what he found there. Or believed if it wasn’t the truth he’d never get it out of Stark anyway.
“On your knees.”
“No.”
Finch pressed the gun up against Stark’s cheek. “Guests get to choose. You’re new here, so you’re a guest. Bulb or bullet? Bullet or bulb?”
Slowly, Stark sank to his knees. Tried again. “I can make you a rich man, Finch. I can even get you out of Ambergris. There are still a lot of choices here.”
“Do you think so? I don’t.”
“Do you know who I am, back in Stockton? Do you know what happens to you if you hurt me?” Stark’s lower lip was quivering.
“No, I don’t know. Because you won’t tell me who you are. Open your mouth.”
Stark’s stare in that moment contained a kind of limitless, unhinged hatred. A kind of poison that willed itself to close the distance. To enter Finch. He grabbed the bulb from Finch. Crunched down on it with a kind of arrogant defiance. Finch realized Stark thought he could survive it. That he was bigger than whatever might happen to him.
A minute for the bulb to take effect. Finch placed the gun’s muzzle against Stark’s face. “Any last words before you don’t remember who you are?”
Stark gave out a little crumpled laugh. A kind of regal contempt. “Not a one for you, Finchy. Except you’ll pay for this, one way or the other. I’m the crown prince incognito. I’m an enchanted frog. Somebody will come after you.”
The man’s hostility began to fade as the memory bulb took effect. Finch looked into his eyes. Found nothing there. Nothing worth saving. Just an outsider who’d decided he wanted to profit off of the city’s misery. A thug who thought he was tougher. Playing a game where his only strategy was to keep turning the screws. Finch didn’t care who he was anymore. Just wanted him gone. Wondered without interest what Bosun would do now.
Stark’s pupils had begun to dilate. Eyelids flickering like hummingbird wings. Said, as if from a faraway place, “No, I won’t. I don’t want to.” Fell back on his heels. Arms slack.
Finch came close. Held Stark’s head back. Took out another pouch. Poured preservation powder all over Stark’s tongue. Like sand. Held his mouth shut even as Stark struggled, lethargically. Made him swallow. Once. Twice.
Released him. Stood back. Both times Finch had seen Heretic force a bulb and the powder on a prisoner, they’d died within an hour.
Stark convulsed, smashed his head back against the wall. So hard he left blood and hair on the brick. His eyes rolled back. Fell over on his side. Began to thrash. Blood poured out of his nostrils. Began to talk in a low voice. Very fast. No distance between sentences.
Then Stark began to laugh. Quietly at first. Almost like a gasping whisper. But rising in volume, until he was shrieking. Rolling around on the ground guffawing his brains out. With blood still looping out from his nostrils. Arms tight around himself. Mouth in a half-moon of involuntary mirth. It didn’t really sound like laughter anymore. It sounded like screaming. Someone screaming as they were cut apart by knives.
A voice drowning as it spoke. Awash in strange tides.
What did Stark see? Was it Wyte? Wyte’s memories? Distorted further by the powder? Or something else entirely?
Finch stepped back, in a firing stance. But he could not fire. All the rage in him had left. The madness.
Finally, lowered the gun. Left Stark there. Writhing in the mud and water. Feet kicking. Fighting with himself. The laughter raw and rasping. Like something had gone wrong in his throat.
Stark would not come back from this. And before the end he’d be in a kind of hell, like the hell Wyte had experienced. Like the hell Finch was in now. Would Bosun come after him? Didn’t know. Didn’t care at the moment.
Ambergris Rules.
* * *
You could close your eyes forever and still never be anywhere but where you had always been. Finch saw his father’s capacity for violence only once. When he was twelve. A hot night. Made so by the rumbling excesses of heavy artillery off to the south. Brown smoke highlighting gouts of orange flame erupting around the silhouettes of buildings. The distant whumping sound of shells and tank retort. House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe engaged in a struggle none yet knew was pointless. The cease-fire hadn’t held.
They’d had to move from their house, gotten caught in a war zone. Finch was hunched down by the window of the third-story apartment they’d taken refuge in. Waiting for his father to return from hours of scavenging for food and other supplies.
The window, with its grimy gray frame, had become a kind of moving painting for Finch. As intense as any zoetrope. Below, Albumuth Boulevard, once one of the richest arteries of trade in the world, had become little more than a mass of rubble and ripped-apart bodies. A day before men and tanks had fought across that landscape, the light red-green at their backs. The moans and screams matched to the cruel intensity of colors. He would watch, unblinking. Sometimes catch glimpses of gray caps running along the periphery.
Behind him, the door burst open.
A sniper with the insignia of House Hoegbotton. Framed by the doorway. Only five years older than Finch. Face already ancient.
“Down on the floor,” the sniper ordered, walking into the living room. He had long, delicate fingers. Golden stubble on his cheeks. Smelled of sweat and gunpowder. “Get under that chair.”
Finch scuttled out of the sniper’s way across the floor. Under the chair as ordered. Watched as the sniper pulled the curtains across the window, opened the pane a crack, and shoved the long, steel muzzle of his automatic rifle through the crack. From Finch’s perspective on the floor, the sniper looked huge. The recoil of the rifle made a dull, satisfying sound. Discarded shells rolled across the floor toward Finch. Touched one. Brought his finger away burned.