City on a Hill, page 10
“Jacob?” Xandes asked, her eye brow cocked as she came alongside Sabrina. “You did not mention that he shared his name with you.”
“Must have slipped my mind,” Sabrina said, busying herself with her belt. “Can’t even be sure that’s really his name.” Her visor, hooked onto her hip, was vibrating. She grabbed it, but knew she could not answer it in the hall, as the chorus of pounding and pleading had begun anew.
“Shut it!” Xandes screamed, rapping on the windows with the stick. Her voice rose with every door she passed. “Shut it. Shut it. Shut it.”
Sabrina reached the end of the corridor and was grateful to have the door closed between her and Xandes, silencing the sound of the detention officer’s voice. She opened her visor. It was Sean. Relief coursed through her. She snapped it onto her forehead and noticed the hour. It was morning.
“I got a lead on our friend with the knife,” Sean said.
Sabrina wondered how he even knew about Jacob as she had not yet filed a report, but then she realized he meant Orehem.
“The one who tried to add some ventilation to your armpit?”
“The very. The deed for the shop was co-signed by an Anselem Jackson. I’ve got his address in my hand. I say we do some surveillance.”
“Are you back?” She asked, listening to the background noise of conversations, footsteps, and intercoms that sounded like the station office.
“Discharged yesterday.”
She leaned against the wall, the muscles in her back relaxing. She caught sight of her face in the screen of a blank detention monitor. She was grinning like a school girl. Sean described how he got an early discharge from the hospital. She half-listened. If he was calling her, she deduced that D’Ag’s order for her to be assigned to scrit duty had yet to filter down to Sean. Her uncle assumed that she would follow his orders without question. She had not slept all night. Sean was just beginning his shift and probably wondering why she was late.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Chapter 9
Anselem Jackson
Daldo stared at Sabrina from the mural on the wall of a house on the end of a row. He was wearing his green and white Roosen team jersey, his number 0 emblazoned on his chest and emanating light nearly as bright as the glow from behind his head. His facial features were stylized and idealized, his cheekbones sharper, his lips fuller, his eyes were irritatingly half-closed, as if he was drowsy. Off to the side in miniature were depictions of him in various moves: diving to catch a pitchball, tackling another player, tumbling in the air like an acrobat. If she squinted, the depictions of his lithe body and those of his opponents resembled birds hovering about his head.
“I should take that woman in for that … monstrosity,” Sabrina said when the owner of the house, a roundish woman in a gray dress, dragged a rusty cart of groceries to the stoop and began to fumble with her keys.
“You don’t even know if she painted it,” Sean said from the seat beside her. “Likely she had nothing to do with it. Just woke up one morning, and there it was, painted by hooligans.”
“You’d mind more if it was a Jenis club player up there,” she said.
“I would, but only because the lot of them are so ugly.”
They were in a worn-out CRP with cloudy windows, faded paneling and instruments with their buttons worn smooth. The seats had lost their stuffing long ago. Both of them were dressed in civilian clothes, Sean in a blue pullover and brown trousers, one of the new cuts available that year. Sabrina wore an orange blouse and green trousers over her patrol suit. Their clothes were loose in order to conceal their weapons.
Sean leaned over from the driver’s seat and took a closer look at the side of the house.
“No candles, stones, flags, or even a basin. It does not qualify as a point of worship. It’s technically just art.” He was baiting her. It was mid-afternoon. They had been trailing their mark, Anselem Jackson, all day, following him on a trip to the clothing store where he was a procurement manager and on a few visits to his distributors. Anselem had grabbed lunch from a vendor on the street before returning to his office, where he had been working at his desk since.
Despite the initial thrill of tracking a possible lead, not to mention the thought of going against her uncle’s wishes, Sabrina was drowsy. After a lunch of brick-oven bread slathered in olive spread and rosemary, she suspected she was not the only one. Sean’s head had nodded towards the steering wheel a few times. She cradled a cup of tea between her legs, but the relaxing warmth on her thighs was having the opposite effect than she intended. Banter was what they needed.
She considered Sean’s suggestion that the horribly proportioned and clearly illegal depiction of Daldo was art. She decided it was not. Art was what Lindsey created. This eyesore before her was just obscene.
“I bet if you checked the ground underneath you’d find candle droppings. The work is clearly deifying him.”
“After that goal he scored in the match against Trilander …”
“Not you, too.”
Sean smiled and readjusted himself. It took him some time to find a comfortable position in the old, worn-out seats. A spring had been digging into Sabrina’s thigh all morning.
“He’s just a guy, Cadet. In a couple years, his numbers will drop and there will be some other guy.”
She remembered one of her uncle’s comments about being in the center of a cheering multitude and how it could affect the psyche. Sean broke into her thoughts.
“Come on, some of my favorite memories are of playing on the pitch and watching games with my friends. There is no harm in having pitchball heroes.”
It was hard for Sabrina to argue the point. She loved to play. Keep the ball from opposing players, pass it to your own, or put it in the net. It was an artificial world, free of the complexities of real life, of relationships, of sexism, of injustice. It was the fairest field she knew besides the boxing ring. If all that mattered was physical ability, she could always excel.
“People get around the flag thing,” she said. “At a game the other day, I saw people waving red-and-blue dish towels when Trilander scored.”
“I imagine the old man will speak to the minister of dish towels, and those colors will be discontinued next year.”
“There is no minister of dish towels,” she said, although she would not put it past her uncle to speak to the minister of manufacturing and commerce to ensure that such colors were discontinued. “I’ve heard it said that sports are just ritualized violence, a release valve for our violent natures.”
Sean’s eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment as he stared straight ahead. In one hand he held his cooling tea, with the other he picked at the cracked steering wheel. “You know Sabrina, sometimes I wonder … all this the Head Ministry does, all this we do, to keep religion in check, to keep the sects from returning and wreaking havoc on our copasetic existence here. I wonder if it’s all misplaced. Is religion the source of all evil, or is it us?”
He turned to look at her, and she felt empty. She had not expected the conversation to go in this direction. After her long, unresponsive silence, he continued, “Even the sports, we talk about them so much down here in Fortinbras. Up in Lysander, it’s all about fashion.”
“That is where the clothing manufacturers are.”
“But why did the Founders place them there? It does sometimes seem like a big experiment. One city focused on sports, the other on fashion.”
As if on cue, a group of schoolchildren crossed the street in front of the CRP, then turned up the sidewalk. Half wore red shirts pulled over their uniforms, half blue shirts. One of D’Ag’s experimental schools. To Sabrina’s dismay, she could not help but notice how the children wearing the same colors clumped together.
“Maybe the experiments are needed,” she said.
Sean sipped his tea. “I don’t want to be a test rat. Science has been used for some pretty evil things, too.”
Sabrina drank from her own cup, chewed her lip, then offered a new subject. “I saw Officer Dentry this morning. His arm was in a cast. Do you know what happened?”
“Yeah,” Sean said with a chuckle. “Got too close to an L’ved.”
“Are you serious?”
He nodded, his eyes again scanning the street. “Came across a nest of occultists. Called in for reinforcements. An L’ved was nearby, swung in low. The occultists panicked. Tried fighting it.” He shook his head. “Stupid. The old wasps are not lethal … at least they are programmed not to be. They’ll shock and stun before they will kill.”
Not unlike our orders for the capture of scrits, Sabrina thought.
“But then how did Dentry get hurt?”
“The occultists crossed the line. I don’t know what happens or what does it, but once those things decide to take you out, you’re dead. They are supposed to be able to recognize an officer by the suit, but well, nothing is perfect. Dentry is lucky to be alive.”
Sabrina gripped her cup more tightly. She wondered if D’Ag was aware of the force the L’veds were using.
“Have you ever seen them kill?”
Sean shook his head. “No, but I saw the aftermath. I was a cadet. There was a den of occultists, and we called in the T-heads who called in an L’ved. I saw the room where the L’ved cornered those people.” His eyes glazed over again. “I don’t eat meat any more after that. Can’t stand the smell.”
“What makes them switch over to being lethal?”
He shook his head and pressed his lips into a thin line. “I don’t know. Whatever they feel like.”
“They are machines. They don’t feel. It must be a programming protocol.”
Sean shrugged and sipped his tea. “Think what you want. Those things, they don’t move like machines.”
“You think they are remotely controlled, by some T-man somewhere?”
“You mean from Third City?”
It was Sabrina’s turned to shrug. Third City was a belief among most people within the walls. Children made rhymes about it and referred to it as “Turd City.” It was where older siblings threatened to send younger siblings if they did not behave.
“Third City is a myth.”
“Then where do the T-men live?”
Her uncle had explained to her that the special investigators had to keep their identities secret, but that they lived among the folk of Lysander and Fortinbras, just like anyone else. There was no “Third City.” But she could not share that with Sean. When she had asked D’Ag if myths about imaginary cities among the populace disturbed him, he had laughed. “When they start talking about imaginary ‘kingdoms,’ I’ll be worried, but not Third City.”
“They probably have to keep their identities secret,” she said carefully. “They probably live right next door, and we don’t know it.”
“I’ll entertain that,” Sean said. “But then where do the L’veds stay?”
“I don’t know, D’Ag’s bed chamber.”
Sean laughed, almost spilling his tea. Sabrina smiled, but her mind was preoccupied with his question: where did they stay? She had never seen a nest of them within the Head Ministry, although she knew there were rooms where she was not allowed to go. For some reason, the image from her dream a few days before came to mind: the white marble walls, a single glass column, a silver sphere inside ….
“Where did they come from in the first place?” she asked.
“I always thought our dear leader created them. After all, they weren’t around when our parents were kids.”
Sabrina wondered, her hand touching her uniform sleeve. Pictures of Moshi’s laboratory came to mind. If not D’Ag . . . .
All this talk of her uncle was making her uncomfortable. She did not want to reveal too much to Sean, but at the same time, she was becoming aware of so many mysteries she had never questioned.
“I always wondered why they had the street names changed,” she found herself saying.
“Me, too!” Sean said. “When I was growing up in Lysander, we used to play a game where we would try to find old names on street corners, pavements, curbs, the sides of houses, anywhere that the censors had missed. We had a whole collection of old street signs, bits of broken letters, and charcoal rubbings we made of engraved letters that had not been sanded away.”
“That was so illegal,” Sabrina said breathlessly.
Sean shook his head at the memory, staring out through the windscreen. “I know. We’d all be rehabilitated for it now.” He sat up with a jerk, the flattened springs in the seat groaning. “Game on, Cadet.”
Anselem Jackson had stepped out of his office and onto the sidewalk. Sabrina set down her cup. Anselem walked off in the opposite direction. When she was certain he was not turning around, she opened the door of the CRP and followed.
Anselem was a tall man, a head above just about every other person he passed on the sidewalk. It made him easy to follow. As casually as possible, Sabrina, steered herself into the flow of foot traffic behind him. From what she had seen of his face, he was in need of a shave. His eyes rested in deep sockets below a gloomy, dark brow. His hair was tapered closely on the sides but was overlong in the back, resting on the collar of his jacket. The jacket itself was standard issue, but it was old, its cut having been declared “out of style” in Lysander at least five seasons ago. Sean had thought nothing of it, but Sabrina found a clothes merchant, wearing an out-of-style jacket suspicious.
Don’t presume. She reminded herself. Justice required a disinterested mind.
Anselem’s shoulders swayed, his head bowed. Like many tall men, he seemed uncomfortable with his height. He turned off the main boulevard and headed west towards the wharves. Street vendors rolled in and out of the quays, their carts full of fresh fish, while two noticeably old and out-of-shape officers scanned the fish for radiation. It was not one of the more prestigious duties for officers. Most often it was seen as punishment or last stop before retirement.
Lose Anselem, and it will be all I ever get to do.
She turned her face from the officers in case one recognized her. Anselem went north next. Sabrina took her bearings. They were moving towards the Blocks through a neighborhood that was a patchwork of reclaimed and non-reclaimed houses. New residences with shining fixtures and freshly painted shutters faced dusty buildings with boarded windows, their doors sealed with the crest of the Security Ministry, prohibiting entry. She had been on more than a few calls, arresting the occasional homeless man or curious adolescent in such shells of houses. Twice she had found scrits, one alive, one dead from dehydration. At first glance, there was nothing objectionable within the sealed houses she had been inside. They often looked eerily normal, just like any other house would while its residents were out: magazines had been left open on couches; antique communication devices rested in charging ports; a purse, a backpack hung beside a door. She had tripped over children’s brightly colored toys more than a few times.
But the insidious did lurk. In almost every home there were grotesque signs left from the sects that had dominated life: scrolls containing superstitions rolled tightly into cylinders and nailed to the walls as talismans, suns displayed on candle sticks, swords of all materials, wood, metal, polished stone—some so grotesque as to have a figurine of a corpse stretched across them. These things shared walls with family photographs, calendars, thermostat controls—the mundane things of daily life so permeated with poison that no one even noticed. Insanity had become so common that it no longer seemed unusual. The victims of the Cataclysm had tumbled towards the abyss in complete ignorance. It was no surprise to her that the catastrophe had caught so many of these people unaware, only that anyone survived at all.
The pace of traffic, vehicle and foot, slowed on this street. Residents visited on front stairs while children played on the sidewalks. Anselem stood out with his quick pace and his lowered head, as if he had some important destination to reach and a schedule to keep. Everyone else moved leisurely, greeting and gossiping with their neighbors. Sabrina slowed and made small talk with a few women sitting on stairs while their children played in the street. When she looked up, she noticed Anselem disappearing into a house. It was a condemned building, but the plastic seal molded to the door had been split down its center. It was too dangerous to follow him inside, so she continued down the block past three more houses. When she was certain she was hidden by the angle of the windows, she ducked into the next alleyway.
The alley was overgrown with weeds that left a yellow residue on her trousers. An empty can crunched beneath her foot. The end of the alley was blocked with scraps of warped and rotting wood fallen from the ruins of an old factory. An exposed nail snagged her coat and ripped it with a loud tear. From the windows above her head, she heard two children singing, a wall screen playing, and a mother calling for one of her children. A teenage boy answered back in uninterested tones.
At the very back of the alley, another noise caught her attention: a door, scraping the ground as it opened. She peered slowly around the corner to see the door opening, the seal of the ministry peeling off its face. Anselem emerged into the tiny space behind the houses. He descended a set of rickety metal stairs in her direction. She spun back around before he could see her, listening carefully: his footsteps, his own trousers brushed by the copious weeds, the sounds of planks of wood being set aside, the rasp of what sounded like a metal gate opening. Then nothing.
She waited a few more beats, her hand dropping to the blaster at her waist before she turned the corner.
Anselem was gone. She snapped her blaster out of her holster. The windows of the factory shell were high up, higher than the houses’ roofs. The wall was solid brick, unbroken by a door, but there was a stairwell leading down to a utility grate set below ground. The boards Anselem had positioned to the side were leaning up against the wall next to the stairs. The grate was large enough for him to have passed through.
