Six kilometres east of the second line with three more to go, all the while passing old, peeling billboards that once advertised things like Ellison-brand baby formula and bottled water, Mal’s thoughts finally returned to Little Caughnawaga.
She had few memories of before the fire, save that times were lean but friendly, that she was surrounded by people that shared her father’s Kahnawake roots, that everyone they met on the street knew her by name. She had been just shy of four when her family fled their creaky house on the edge of the neighbourhood, just tall enough to see the fires burning outside the window; she remembered peering over Baba’s shoulder as se carried her out of the house, Auntie Elodie following behind them, wondering why Dad had gone back inside. The streets were flooded with fiery light and the forms of their neighbours, silhouettes like black minnows in gloomy water as the fire forced them toward the coast. The air had burned her unprotected lungs as she huddled against Baba’s broad chest; se had wrapped ser arms tightly around her as the fire forced them into the shallows, urging her not to breathe too fast or too deeply as they moved steadily south.
It had taken an eternity to find a safe place, that night, and an eternity longer for Dad to rejoin them, carrying what little he had saved from their burning house: a key, a rolled up charcoal sketch, the camera, and a small box containing Mal's baby things. The fires burned and smouldered for an unnaturally long time before Midtown swooped in to claim the abandoned territory, the latest in a long string of such land-grabs, and there weren’t many left to protest against it. The theft proved the final straw for a community already decimated by Pinta’s deadly construction, and most planned to return north — Auntie Elodie included. Between the distance and the argument she and Mal's parents had gotten into right before she left, it would be almost twenty years before Mal saw her again.
She shook her head and focused on the task at hand as she arrived at the old base. The entrance was boarded up to contain the deadly mould infesting the first floor, the other entries only accessible by a rusty fire escape. She climbed the ladder and tumbled inelegantly through a second-floor window, holding her breath as she listened for rotting floorboards. She kept her snorkel firmly on her face as she made her way into the hall, taking in her condemned surroundings. Tai-Song’s baby and co-parent were almost certainly far away from here, but even so she couldn’t imagine what he had been thinking, risking tragedy every time he travelled between workplace and child — and wasn't that a frightening concept. The search may well be doomed if she was no longer able to read his mind as though it was her own.
She mapped out the floor-plan with her feet as she walked the length of the hallway. The elevators were on the left at the far end of the hall, the stairs on the right. In a side-room just before the stairs, a vending machine had been carefully tipped over with a series of pulleys, the coolant canisters cleanly stripped from the back — only Tai-Song would risk getting crushed for a score that no one else wanted. She peered inside and carefully reached into the cavity, stretching her fingers to catch the green plastic card that had fallen inside. Most of the old printing was rubbed away, the magnetic strip on the back rendered useless with a long, thick scratch down its length, but the room number, 317, had been rewritten in thick black ink.
She climbed down with a huff, heading for the third floor. The key didn't work, but the room’s electric lock was easy to jam open with a deft hand and a pocket-knife, and the door opened into a depressingly dim cave. In the gloom, she could see a hideous white-and-blue vintage jacket on the back of a chair, half-turned between the desk and the bed. The fibres of the carpet beneath her feet were rank and tangled from years of neglect and whatever else Tai-Song had been doing to it, and the heavy curtains sent rivers of dust cascading down as she threw them open. It looked as though Yuen-Fa had been right, however: there were no bottles of liquor or anything more adventurous to be found.
On the desk, she found a plastic toolbox, its label long-faded, the lid scratched to hell, the clasps breaking under the strain of being opened. Inside was the majority of a diagnostic scanner, much farther along than Goose’s work. She stuffed it into her satchel and sat down, pulling his jacket over her lap. He never went anywhere without it, had doubled-back on important missions because he had left it behind — this time, uncharacteristically, he had considered his errand too important to come back for it.
She rifled through the pockets, finding a tin of hand-rolled cigarettes and a single corkscrew bullet on a necklace chain. She left the tin: what little tobacco there was in Kawehno:ke was set aside for Ceremony, and after a year she had stopped craving cigarettes entirely. She held the bullet closer to her eyes to properly study it, scrutinizing the English and Chinese characters engraved into the barrel. It was a common good-luck charm, especially among front-liners: claim an unfired Midtown bullet, engrave it with your name, and carry it on your person at all times to ensure a novel death of old age. Dominik must have given it to him — Tai-Song had no interest in the war or its superstitions, preferring his malfeasance and mad science. She dropped the bullet back into its pocket: she had no use for it either, seeing as it hadn’t done Gwenh any good.
She stood up and stepped back, abandoning the lack of clues for the moment. Her fingers closed around her camera as she took in the accidental artistry of the scene, the garish jacket placed like a purposeful message, or a childish dare: come and find me, Munch — and don’t forget to bring my coat when you do. The built-in bulb flashed weakly as she took a picture, lending some light and contrast, and through the viewfinder her eyes were drawn to a tiny piece of yellow beneath the bed-skirt.
It was a stack of pocket-sized notebooks, filled with angry letters, a mix of Cantonese and English carved into the page, all helpfully titled: For Mal, For Goose, For Gaa Ze, For Doma, For Willow, For Every Stinking Vulture That Comes Near Me. She skipped past the ones written in Cantonese, since she wouldn't be able to read most of them, but also all the letters meant for her; she was certain that they would say the same things he had said to her after Gwenh was killed: it was your fault, why didn’t you act smarter, why didn’t you try harder? Instead, she settled on a letter to Goose, desperately curious as to what he was thinking, how things had gone so wrong.
Much of it was what Mal had been thinking when she first saw their war-drone, but even a step further: Tai-Song’s writing was manic, obsessively combing over every detail, trying to find the divine truth of how Goose could be so cavalier with the arbiter of Gwenh’s death. He was writing in circles, eager to fight Goose in single combat, eager to learn at their feet — that was why Tai-Song had followed in their footsteps, dragging the corpse of a drone all the way from Bayonne to Borough Park. I’m tired, Goose — how did you do it? When I’m not angry, I’m crying a river, and when I’m not crying a river I can’t feel anything at all.
She delicately wiped a tear from her cheek before it could break the seal on her mask, flipping past the recent pages and coming across one that had been torn out. With a pencil-rubbing, the contents were revealed on the next page: a long string of computer code that she identified as CPP, too complicated for a diagnostics scanner. At the bottom, she could only just make out a faintly written ‘細’. She rubbed her chin in thought, tapping the pencil against the paper; she thought that the character could mean ‘small,’ but her knowledge of written Cantonese was so sparse that she couldn't be sure. She looked again over the code, and back at the character, hoping to divine a connection between the two — but Tai-Song would never make things so easy for her.
Her handling caused a stray piece of paper to flutter out from where it had been loosely tucked into the back cover. It was distressed and smudged, clearly an important reminder, but still legible: 1 week tech shipment, PN bay 8 container 6, 3 day window. find something nice for D+W. She staggered to her feet with the note in hand, feeling every minute that she hadn’t slept as she gathered up the notebooks and tied the jacket around her waist. She would be expected to follow up on the lead, but as far as she was concerned Yuen-Fa could find someone else to do it. She had wasted enough of her time on Tai-Song.
***
Mal fell down the last three feet from the fire escape with a yelp, the rusted metal slipping out of her sweaty hands. Willow materialized beside her as she picked herself back up and hissed over her raked-up palms, rifle still slung over his shoulder.
“Find anything?”
“Sure, let me do all the work.” She handed over the notebooks, the note, and the jacket as she started her walk back to Bath Beach, trusting him to keep up. Her feet ached, but five kilometres would pass in less than an hour. “Do you know anything about what he was working on?”
He threw the jacket over his shoulders as he kept pace beside her. “I’ve never even been up there. Why, is it something bad?”
“I don’t know — I’m not so good with the tech stuff.” It was better for everyone if Willow was focused on the war, not on his boyfriend’s science experiment. She nodded to the note in his hand. “I know he was thinking of you two.”
He hummed, looking over the note with a soft expression. “That bin’s close to the south fence: I’ll get Dom to go with you, just in case, but you should be in and out.”
“That’s nice, for whoever’s going.”
“What?”
“I’m staying behind.” Those who trespassed into Port Newark rarely made it out — she had no doubt that Tai-Song was one of those lucky few, but she hadn’t been lucky in a long time. “You’re going to have to find someone else to do it.”
“There is no one else!” Even as he spoke, he looked aghast at his outburst, and he ducked his head to compose himself. “He’s burned a lot of bridges this year — I don’t even think Yuen-Fa would look for him, at this point. There’s no one else who can do it.”
She came to a halt; this conversation required her full, undivided attention. “Don’t guilt-trip me.”
“I never said anything about guilt. Maybe you should think about why you heard it.”
“You want Clover to grow up without a mother?”
He looked away, biting his cheek. “I wouldn’t ask you if it was that dangerous — I wouldn’t send in Dom, either.”
“Well, I can’t risk it.”
“You would have, for Gwenh.” He was quick to jump back, anticipating her swing. “She cost you everything, and still you stay loyal — why doesn’t he get that treatment?”
She stumbled with the force of her missed blow, righting herself with a snarl. “Because he didn’t do the same for me.”
“So you’re just going to write him off for something he did ten years ago?” He stepped into her path, shoulders tense with anger. “I suppose you haven’t changed a bit.”
“Nine. It was nine years ago.” Ten years ago, she would have gone into Port Newark without a second thought; nine years ago, he hadn’t bothered to return the favour. “He could have carried her.”
“Or he could have been killed, and we’d both be widows.” He stepped back again, perhaps sensing that he was close to crossing a line. “I’m asking you as a friend, Mal — please bring him home.”
“We’re not friends.” Even so, he was pushing the right buttons. She knew that Tai-Song was probably fine, that he was only missing because he didn’t want to be found, but it was undeniably strange of him to disappear on such a tight deadline as this. She knew that he wasn’t dead, of course she knew that, she would know it if he was dead, but her responsibilities didn’t begin or end at death. He could be lying in a ditch somewhere, in need of help, and no matter how angry she was, no matter how badly he had messed up, someone needed to find him before he got scooped up by a Midtowner.
It felt like swallowing nails as she finally gritted out, “I need a day to prepare. Tell Dominik to meet me at Jay’s, tomorrow night.”
“We don’t have that kind of time—”
“You’re going to have to make that kind of time. If you can’t wait, you can find someone else to do it.” She massaged her temples as she turned away, more exhausted than ever. “Tomorrow night, after I put Clover down. No earlier.”