At the end of a long, winding path through dusty service corridors and a creaking elevator that jolted violently through its descent, Zed came to a stop before a set of silver double-doors at the lowest level of the MEC. The temperature had dropped noticeably, as though the metal was sucking up all the heat in a ten-foot-radius; Mal wondered if frost would bloom in the shape of her hands if she pressed her palms to the cold metal, how long the evidence of heat and moisture would linger before evaporating.
Zed had paused with her hand on the push-bar, steadily venting heat from the openings of her neck and shoulders in narrow channels of steam: after a moment of letting the adjustment settle, she pushed the door open into the storage facility. Mal followed close behind her, watching the frost form on the metal tendons and struts of Zed's neck, the beads of moisture on the neckline of her shirt crystallizing into ice; the sight had her feeling blue with cold, even under her blanket.
The layout of the facility was very much like the schematics she had once glimpsed of Niña’s cryogenic bay. The room had been designed for high-volume, temperature-controlled storage, floorspace divided into a grid of narrow walkways to accommodate the large pillars arranged throughout, every vertical inch lined with rows upon rows of square lockers. The little steel doors seemed to shimmer with cold, each one no larger than a manhole cover and clasped shut with a pin-locked handle, and equipped with a flat, detachable computer console displaying a glowing red strip. Mal shied away from the consoles as they passed, pulling her blanket tighter around herself, hoping to shield against the Database's watching eyes; Zed strode by with complete confidence, carving a steadfast path into the furthest corner of the facility. She stopped by a ground-level locker, third from the corner and among the last to be marked with red, and easily knocked aside the pin to pull the handle. The door swung heavily open like a vault, letting out a plume of freezing, white-flecked wind, and Mal felt that cold sink its spiny grip into her lungs as Zed pulled a body out of the frozen depths, laid out on a metal tray and steel rails.
It couldn't be Tai-Song: in all her life, Mal had never known Tai-Song to have such thick frost clinging to every inch of him, had never known his skin to look so drained of colour that he was almost transparent. He wouldn't be caught dead in these linen clothes, would never leave the house without his awful jacket to make people look twice and wonder what he had been thinking. The world was still spinning, surely things would at least pause for a moment if Tai-Song was dead.
Her mind reeled, stubbornly hunting for the last time they had spoken, bouncing off of the wrong answers — the second-hand stories, the notebooks, the sound of Zed's voice — like a stone skipping over water. The last time she had seen Tai-Song was the same as it ever was: nine years ago, in the darkened shadows of her bedroom doorway, he had stiffly tried to convince her that she wasn't to blame, had lied to her face in an effort to get her out of bed. When she did nothing but continue to stare at the ceiling, the façade was easily discarded as he snapped at her to stop feeling sorry for herself, to accept that it had happened and to move on — she hadn't responded to that either, except to get up from her bed and close the door in his face.
She grabbed the console hanging on the open door, navigating through the report and skimming over the miles of green text, but all she could parse were random numbers measured in grams and litres and percentiles, highlighted words like immediate storage treatment and no revival potential jumping out from the paragraphs of jargon, tagged as urgent and in need of approval from a higher-up. She swiped through the file with burning eyes, blinking hard to keep the tears from compromising her vision further, not sure of what she was looking for until she found it in a single sentence near the end: Disposal order — offload body into Upper Bay from Port Liberty, as soon as possible. Destroy all evidence of MEC residency.
She read it over again, trying to reconcile the absolute clarity of the instructions with the fact that they were buried in a paragraph that seemed more concerned with the ideal timeline for organ harvest, wedged between unrelated sentences like it was trying to hide in plain sight. Zed had been here, digging her fingers into the file's coding to move things around, keeping Tai-Song's body safely within reach and buying them just a little more time for rescue.
“He was supposed to be dumped ten days ago, right after it happened." The angle of the light cast an expression of bitter sorrow across Zed’s features as she relayed the facts in Cantonese, as she lightly touched the orange light shining through her blouse. "Render doesn’t pay much attention to these things, unless it’s about you — he thinks it's already done, and everyone else thinks he’s waiting for someone to pay the bond."
Ten days ago — Mal couldn't definitively say where in the city she had been at that point, what she had been doing instead of being here to prevent this from happening. Had she even arrived in the city yet, or had she still been detoured by the barricade on the river, a hundred kilometres north of the city and a week delayed?
“Thank you,” she finally replied, afraid to speak too loudly in case Zed could hear how hollow she felt inside. “It would have broken our hearts to find him in the water.”
Zed didn't answer, gesturing for the console and reaching under her shirt to retrieve a weathered connecting cable, originating somewhere south of the orange glow. The cable was fixed in a neat spiral as she fed the end into a port on the side of the console, one of the two making a funny little chime at the successful connection. From this angle, Mal could see the green text moving at top-speed to rearrange and alter itself, giving them a little more time — she privately thought that it was unnecessary, given the lack of attention that morgue staff had already demonstrated, but she supposed it was good for Zed to feel useful.
She glanced up at the camera overhead, and the temperature sensor right beside it — it was only a matter of time before one triggered the other and summoned an unwelcome audience. Even with the ticking clock, her eyes felt sluggish as they roamed over the frost and grime on Tai-Song's skin, finally landing on his right temple where the ice was interrupted with a muddy brown bandage. It felt like she was wading through mud as she peeled back the corner to reveal a four-pointed bullet hole — after a few hours in the bay, no one would take notice of such a small injury.
Her hand dropped limply back to her side. "How did it happen?"
"Like Gwenh said," Zed replied shortly, hanging the console back on the door and winding the cable back into place. "We were escaping. He was killed while trying to protect me. She and I were taken in, tortured, returned to the twelfth floor."
"He was trying to protect you?"
"He pushed me out of the way." She tapped the dome of her chest with two fingers. "Damage here is hard to fix. Better to avoid it altogether."
Mal's hands had drifted back to her stomach, fingers digging into the soft fat as her gut began to cramp. "I should have been there."
"You weren't."
"I could have stopped it. If I had gotten here on time, I could have come in and gotten him out before it happened — I could have talked him out of coming here in the first place." She snarled to herself and dug her fingers in until it hurt. "Why the fuck was he even in Newark?"
Zed had gone very still. "It was for me," she said quietly, touching her chest again, tracing the diamond glow under her blouse. "Drones don't speak — I couldn't speak. I asked him to fix it."
"And why'd he bring you along, huh? Lot of trouble, the way that you are—"
Zed scoffed, hand falling to her side. “The way I am? Piss off.”
"What, am I hurting your feelings?" Mal clicked her tongue dismissively, even as something in her gut curdled at her own behaviour. "We're Untouchables. We leave the liabilities at home."
“Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”
“I understand just fine—”
“No, you don’t! You were gone, how could you possibly understand?” Even angry, she was conserving her movements and keeping her voice low, mindful of the camera and temperature sensor and every other little thing that Mal was disregarding. “I was there, because you weren't: if you had been there, he wouldn't have needed to make me into your replacement." Her hands curled into fists, metal grinding and scratching against itself. "You have no idea what it's like to be someone’s poor imitation — you have no idea what it's like, to wake up after years of blinding, painful nothing, only to be told that you've already got someone else's shoes to fill.” She loosened her clenched hands and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. “He barely called me Sai Mui, or Zed — most of the time, I was Mal-2.”
Mal opened her mouth, and found that everything she could say seemed too little, too easy, too late: I'm sorry or I didn't know wouldn't make a dent in the things Zed had been enduring. She wanted to say them anyway, and found that her throat was blocked up with anger, burning through the eyes at how carelessly Tai-Song had treated this child.
Zed shook her head with a sigh. “It doesn't matter. If I had been faster or smarter in Newark, in the parkade, he would have been right to trust me to keep up, and he wouldn’t have gotten caught trying to save me. He’s dead because he thought I was you, and you don't get to pretend I'm not important.”
"I didn't—" She paused to compose herself, to peel the shaking anger from her voice. "When I say that he shouldn't have taken you to Newark, I mean that you're too young."
"I'm not a baby."
"So say all kids." She couldn't be older than Navy, and in fact seemed a couple years behind him: that wasn't outrageously young by the standards of the city, where a thirteen-year-old might already be wiring booby-traps on the front lines, but in Mal's mind Zed was a teenager of Kawehno:ke, someone to be sheltered for just a little longer. "You're just too young."
"Shut up."
The frost on Tai-Song's skin was beginning to fall away as his flesh reached room temperature, having spent too long out of the freezer. Mal's hands were wrapped around the freezing metal railings, had been for long enough that steel was beaded with condensation and her knuckles were white with tension. She hated him, in that moment, with more fervour than she had ever felt in her life: when she had gone into Newark, she had left her vulnerable dependent in a safe place, instead of dragging her into unnecessary danger. When she had leapt headfirst into enemy territory, she had done so with the security of knowing that Dominik could handle himself.
"Do you still want to save him?" she dully asked, figuring she already knew the answer: with the way he had treated her, Zed certainly didn't owe him the effort of bringing him home.
“Of course I do,” Zed snapped, as though the question was the stupidest thing she could conceive of. “I owe him that.”
"Do you?" Did Mal? "All he's done is think of himself, same as ever. I'm always cleaning up his mess and covering for him, and all I get in return is more shit to deal with while he fucks off to somewhere new. And now look!" She gestured sarcastically to the body. "He's found the perfect way to ruin everyone's day, all at once, forever."
"I'm not leaving him. He's my brother."
“He certainly didn’t think so!” It felt insane to even pretend, at this point. “You told me how he treated you — he called you Mal-2 instead of your own name!”
“It doesn't matter what he called me or how he meant it. He’s dead.” Her voice stayed stubbornly even, not rising to the bait. “I choose my people, no one else. I don’t care if it makes him turn in his grave or if it makes you sick to your stomach: he’s my brother, and I have a responsibility to bring him home, even if I'm not an undertaker.”
Mal looked down with shame-dark cheeks, feeling ridiculous for losing the argument, and for being on the wrong side of the argument to begin with. “How do we get out?”
She was prepared for the silent treatment, a cold shoulder lasting for at least forty-five seconds — a vital aspect of the Yeung playbook — but evidently Zed had been raised better. She nodded curtly to a door half-hidden behind the pallets of chemicals. “That door leads to a secondary loading bay that sees less traffic, but it’ll be more difficult to get out quickly. We’ll need a vehicle waiting.”
“Okay.” She should have paid more attention to how Render’s vehicle was operated when she had the chance — after tonight, there wasn't a chance in hell of him letting her out of the building again. “What are our options?”
“Nil. All vehicles are assigned by fingerprint scanning, and additional drivers have to be okayed by both the primary owner and the manufacturer. It would have to be a vehicle from outside of Midtown.”
Somehow, she didn’t think that Goose would be willing to risk their life or their car to come and retrieve Tai-Song’s body. “Well, why do we need a car? There’s two of us, we’re fast — I bet we could sneak him out and make it home on foot.”
“I’m not dignifying that with an answer.”
“Fine, your turn to pitch solutions.”
It was amazing how precisely Zed could broadcast her disappointment, without eyes to narrow or lips to purse. “Gwenh said that you're good at escape plans."
"Gwenh is blind to my shortcomings, on account of my sparkling personality. Tai-Song was always the guy for that kind of stuff."
"But Gwenh said—"
"I don't care what Gwenh said," she snapped, regretting her tone immediately as Zed flinched away and hunched her shoulders. She took a deep breath to steady herself, looking back to the wall of lockers; the next one down was also marked red, all the others after marked green, and she didn't have to check inside to know who was indefinitely interred within. She took another deep, sharp breath, and forced herself to ask: “Do you think she meant to do that?”
“She wasn't in control of herself.”
“But Isaiah is still dead.” She couldn’t budge her gaze from the locker holding his body. “And this probably isn’t the first time it's happened.”
“No, probably not.”
She took in another deep breath, hands tightening around the rail. “Do you think I should leave her behind?”
“I don’t want to,” Zed carefully stressed, after a stunned pause. “I like her the most, out of all of you. But it's not my call, and she may bring her problems home.”
“But if we get her out of here, she should get better, right?”
“After a period of recovery, withdrawal. You won’t be able to substitute the regimen to wean her off of the drugs. She may not survive getting completely cut off from the supply.”
"She will.” Mal's voice was rough with desperation. “She’ll make it — she has to, she's come too far to lose it all for that.”
“She attacks anyone who comes too close to you." Zed's voice was uncharacteristically low and gentle. "Are you prepared for the possibility that she might attack someone you love? Your friends? Your child?”
The suggestion that Gwenh might harm an infant was ridiculous, but the possibility of harming Goose or Etienne or any number of others wasn't. "I won’t let that happen," she swore, furiously shoving the questions down to be dealt with at a later date. “She needs to come home.”
“We agree, then." Zed looked down at Tai-Song, shoulders hunching regretfully. "But if it comes down to one or the other, I choose Tai-Song."
"Good, because I'm choosing Gwenh." It didn't sting so much to admit where her priorities lay, not when she trusted Zed to take care of their brother when she could not. "I'll do everything I can to get them both home — it's just going to take me some time."
"You have less than you think." She pointed at the sensor on the ceiling, now flashing intermittently as a temperature control kicked on. “Render will be here soon. We should go back to the bunks, and regroup there.”
Mal shook her head. Tai-Song had been sitting here for nearly two weeks already: the thought of delaying his preparations even one moment longer burned her undertaker’s heart. "I'm staying with him. You go back, and keep your head down until I come up with something."
“He’ll punish you."
“Not badly. Better that it falls just on me than the both of us, anyway.” She looked to the pallets stuffed into the corner; from a cursory glance, she could spot a flat of jugs containing isopropyl alcohol, and they had passed a hand-washing sink on the way to Tai-Song's locker. She could make it work. “I’ll figure out a way to get all of us out of here — just stay safe, until then.”
Zed lingered for a moment, looking conflicted: caught between wanting to take the chance to leave and avoid punishment, and feeling obligated to stay and bear the weight alongside her. The sensor began to flash faster.
"Go," she urged, resisting the impulse to reach over and help her along with a hand on the elbow, or the shoulder — it was taboo to carelessly touch the living while caring for the dead. Without physical encouragement, Zed eventually nodded curtly and left the way they came, closing the door quietly behind her.
Working by eye with only half the ingredients she was accustomed to, the solution she mixed to clean Tai-Song's skin was alcohol-heavy, stinging the open cuts on her hands as she bent to wipe away the blood and dirt from under his fingernails, the creases of his elbows, and the dips of his bony clavicles. She had to pause with every pass of the cloth, feeling intermittently dizzy with grief, and took a moment be so very thankful that his body was found here and not in the bay, like Render had planned — that she at least knew the truth. She did her best to banish Rowan's ghost from her mind as she passed the rag over his face, dissolving all the stubborn crystals of frost that clung to his eyebrows, his sparse whiskers, every strand of his buzzed hair.
It wasn't long before the door opened with a sharp noise that travelled mercilessly, signalling in no uncertain terms that Render had arrived. She breathed out forcefully and continued with her work, but with no amaryllis to soften Tai-Song's skin, no flag to tuck in his hands, no parcel of sweet-smelling herbs to seal into his mouth, there was nothing more she could do but linger nearby and keep him company. She kept one eye on the steel bucket placed in the empty space beside his head: its reflective surface kept her appraised of Render's movements as he came to stand behind her left shoulder, flanked by two armed guards. He looked much older than he normally did, his nightclothes making him look frail and thin, his eyes sunk deep into his face by the late hour and the sharpening effect of the fluorescent lights.
She tore her attention away from the reflection and focused on Tai-Song's hand, held gently between her own like a bird. With the right audience, it was hardly even a conscious decision to arrange his warmed hand over her navel, and now that the anger and shock had burned away she could feel the prickle of tears deep behind her eyes and in her nose, all the things she had tried to hold back for Zed's sake now trickling through a hole in the dam.
Render's breath caught at the sight, and he hesitantly stepped closer. She turned her face to hide the gathering tears, one hand wrapping around the slick, freezing rail for stability, clenching until her knuckles turned white.
"You lied to me."
"To protect you." He lightly touched her shoulder, clamping down when she flinched away. "Some stones should remain unturned, Mal."
“He's my—" She shook her head with a scoff, buying herself time to remember that she could not say brother, that she had to live in a reality where Tai-Song was the father of her make-believe child. "You would have done the same, if it was Constance.”
“Maybe,” he allowed, moving behind her to take the console off of the door, navigating easily to the information he needed: whatever Zed had done to obfuscate the disposal order, it wasn't enough to hide it from a dedicated eye. He sighed and placed the console back on the door, meandering behind her again and posting up at Tai-Song's head, surveying his body with detached disappointment — she wanted to throw herself over Tai-Song and protect him from Render's gaze, to hiss and spit until he got the message and retreated. "You understand why, don't you? His sister is Yeung Yuen-Fa: she is the mind and will powering the rebellion. If she were to learn that her brother was killed in my territory, it would be disastrous. She would not rest until every man, woman, and child in Midtown felt her wrath."
Mal bit down on her scoff. Yuen-Fa was hardly the only mind and will set to winning the war — no one person could claim to bear more than a fraction of that weight — and yet Midtown seemed convinced that she was a near-mythical figure, that killing her would cause the whole operation to grind to a halt. She had never considered this other, equally-stupid angle: that building up Yuen-Fa's image into the perfect enemy meant that Render's paranoia veered into delusion.
"It's for the best that the truth stays buried," Render was saying to her, and Mal struggled to tune back into the lecture. “Untouchables do not easily forgive our trespasses.”
“She doesn’t have to know.” Her knuckles began to creak. What right did he have to be so afraid of the people he kept firmly beneath his boot? What right did he have to call his atrocities mere ‘trespasses’ while painting her loved ones as cruel, vindictive monsters? “I’ll tell her that I found him in the bay, like you wanted. No one else has to know—”
“Enough, Mal.” His tone was sharp, and for the first time he looked completely unapologetic at making her flinch, eyes cool and uncompromising as he stared down at her. “I could incinerate his body down to ash right now, if I wished, but I choose not to. If you want to keep him nearby to visit and grieve, I will abide for your comfort — but there will be no more talk of leaving. You will remain in this building, where I can keep an eye on you.”
She bowed her head and told herself that it was no different from before, even when it was a lie — the person she had been before today could not have ever conceived of how much more complex things could become. She didn't trust herself to speak without cursing him to a well-past-due grave, and instead gave him a sharp nod. He sighed gustily and extended his elbow for her to take, an order disguised as chivalry; she pushed past the urge to hesitate, and viciously hoped that the taboo would manifest as a horrible illness that would subsume Render's lungs with black mould.
"The studio will be more comfortable for your continued stay, I think."