Anniversary Day (5 page)

All that he cared about was that it staunched the blood flow.

He used the rest of the bandages on the rest of her wounds, and hoped he got everything in the dark and the dust.

Then he took a deep breath, pulled off the gloves, and tossed them into the pile that was the kitchen. He pushed a path to the door, knowing that taking a few minutes now might save him a lot of grief while he carried Palmette. The last thing he wanted to do was fall on her, or drop her on something sharp. That would only make matters worse.

He shoved debris away from the door, then he went back for Palmette.

She still hadn’t moved, but she didn’t look worse—so far as he could tell, anyway. He apologized to her as he scooped her in his arms. He had to be hurting her. He hoped she couldn’t feel it.

He would have draped her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, but he was afraid of making that stomach wound worse. He hoped this would work.

She was heavier than she appeared, and her clothes were sticky with blood. Her head tilted back, her arms trailed down the side, and her legs hung free. He staggered a bit, trying to get his balance—he was tired, which surprised him—and then managed to move forward along that path he had carved.

Sometimes her feet grazed the debris. Once he bumped her head against something and he apologized again.

But she didn’t move, and if it weren’t for her shallow breathing, he would have thought he had already failed, that she was already dead.

As he picked his way across the dirt, he found himself mentally apologizing for all the bad thoughts he had had about her ever since he heard he would have yet another new partner, all the bad expectations, all the horrible plans he had for dumping her as quickly as possible.

He hadn’t been fair to her, and it hadn’t been her fault. She had done the best she could following his instructions—better than any other new partner—and she had waited as long as she could before seeing if she could get involved in the investigation, following department protocols.

It wasn’t her fault that she got injured. It was his. He should have been watching out for her, instead of trying to keep her away.

He made it to the door. He juggled her form, bracing it against one side of him as he reached for the latch. He managed to pull it open, startling the emergency workers outside.

The officer on the ground was covered in bandages as well. It looked like they were operating on him on the spot.

“Can one of you guys help with this?” Nyquist asked.

He must have looked a fright, covered in dirt and dust and blood.

But one of the emergency workers stood and took Palmette from him.

“We have an ambulance,” the emergency worker said, “but right now the streets are blocked. The Dome sectioned, and we’re trapped here. There’s no hospital in this section.”

It took Nyquist a moment to understand what “the Dome sectioned” meant. It meant that the Dome’s protective walls came down, here at least, and maybe all over the city.

“There’s been a breach?” Nyquist asked. That was the only thing that he knew of which would cause a dome’s protective walls to come down.

Although he had heard, after that Moon Marathon disaster, that the city itself could order parts of the Dome partitioned off from other parts.

“We don’t know,” the worker said. “Our links are down. Nothing’s working. We assume so, though, given the smell.”

The burning chemical smell. Nyquist hadn’t gotten used to it, but he had started to ignore it.

“You sure that’s not happening in this section?” he asked.

“We’re not sure,” the worker said. “But it hasn’t gotten worse in the last hour, and that’s a positive at least.”

A positive. They were searching for positives. Which made Nyquist even more worried than he already was.

“Well,” he said, “Do what you can for her. I have a prisoner in the back that I have to get into some kind of custody.”

“A prisoner?” the other worker asked.

“The reason we all came here in the first place,” Nyquist said. “The woman inside that house murdered a man in the front room.”

He didn’t add that she might have murdered his partner as well.

“I think she’s better off in there,” the worker said.

Nyquist shook his head. “Too many possible weapons,” he said. “Besides, she’s our responsibility if the building collapses.”

The back of the squad could be modified into its own tiny jail cell. He was going to use that.

Provided she didn’t kill him first.

“Wish me luck,” Nyquist said, and went back inside.

Eight

Alvina was still unconscious when Nyquist got to her. She hadn’t moved at all, and he didn’t think anyone could be that motionless for that long if they were faking. To be safe though, he checked her hands. They held nothing, the wrists still tight in the cuffs.

He took a deep breath. He was lightheaded—probably from that smell—and his eyes still burned. No air was on in this place, so nothing got scrubbed. He wasn’t used to toxins in the air at all. The Dome usually protected everyone from things like that.

As he crouched, his clothes stuck to him. He was covered in all kinds of stuff, most likely Palmette’s blood.

He didn’t want to think about that. Instead he considered his options.

No one would blame him if he left Alvina and she died. She had killed the man in the next room. She had attacked Palmette. If Alvina didn’t make it out alive, not even a murmur would follow him.

But he could see her breathe. And as long as Alvina was alive, she was a danger. If someone else came back in here—rescue crew, other officers—and Alvina attacked that someone, injuring or even killing them, then Nyquist would get blamed.

His third option, which no one would blame him for, was simple:

He could kill her.

He watched her back rise and fall. She was crazy; she was dangerous; and keeping her in custody would be hard—especially right now, with everything falling apart around him.

The logical choice, the smart choice, was to slam her head until she stopped breathing. No one would look at the head injury. The coroner would think she died in the collapse of the house.

No one would think twice about it.

Except him.

He let out a small breath. This stupid woman’s death would haunt him for the rest of his life. He would think about her and think about the moment he decided to kill her and he would remember the action, he would remember how it felt to bring that weapon—whatever he chose—down on her head repeatedly.

And he would feel like a damn hypocrite, arresting others for killing. Or he would have to drop off the force because he couldn’t do his job, and then what would he become? A Tracker, finding Disappeareds for money? Some kind of private detective, beholden to the corporations? He already had only a fragment of a soul left. He really didn’t want to lose the last of it.

He swore, then checked her again, saw no weapons within grabbing distance. He couldn’t bind her feet, not without taking off his suit coat and using that, and he wasn’t about to. Even though the damn thing was sticking to him, it felt like armor. He knew that was irrational, but he deserved at least one private irrational moment on this totally irrational day.

He wasn’t going to pick Alvina up, not like he picked up Palmette. That left him too vulnerable. If Alvina woke up, she would start kicking and pounding him, and he wasn’t sure he was up to the onslaught.

So he grabbed her feet and pulled her away from the table. Then, when he could get around her, he dropped her feet, went to the side, and grabbed her bound hands.

He yanked them over her head, and pulled her in a circle, turning her around so that he could drag her to the door.

She didn’t wake up. Her head lolled. Blood dripped down the side of her skull into her eyes and alongside her mouth.

He’d really hurt her. He probably gave her a serious head injury, one that he was now compounding. But he didn’t care. He was getting her out of this house, where she would become someone else’s problem.

When he got to the door, he pulled it open with one hand. The emergency workers were still there. The second one had come back. He looked at Nyquist.

“You want me to take her?” the emergency worker asked.

Nyquist shook his head. “She can’t go in the ambulance.”

“She clearly needs to,” the worker said.

“She’s dangerous.”

“We’ll strap her down. We have one more bed left.”

“Save it for this guy,” Nyquist said, nodding at the officer.

The other worker stood, pulling off his gloves. “There’s no point.” He looked tired. There were tubes and multicolored AutoBandages all over the officer’s skin, but none of that seemed to make a difference. His features were lax, his eyes fixed.

Nyquist knew what that meant. He’d seen dead people too many times not to recognize another one.

“We’ll take her,” the first emergency worker said.

“She’ll try to kill you if she wakes up,” Nyquist said.

“Yeah, we got that,” the worker said.

“Keep her away from Palmette,” Nyquist said.

“We’ll put this one on the street,” the worker said. “If they ever find us here, we’ll send her on the second ambulance.”

“Thanks.”

The second emergency worker gently took Alvina’s hands from Nyquist. Then the worker eased her to the ground to examine her wounds before he moved her again.

Nyquist staggered away from them, and went to sit on the fake yard, with the crime scene lasers pointing at the sky. The Dome above him was black, not because it was Dome Night, but because of some substance coating the inside. Whatever that substance was, he had been breathing it.

He wiped his face, then wished he hadn’t because of the goo on his hands. He looked around. The Dome had sectioned, and clearly the problem wasn’t near here.

He wondered if he could walk out.

He wondered if he had enough energy for it.

Then his links whispered, and crackled, and suddenly the emergency channels were back online, filled with panicked talk and shouting and messages and warnings.

A bomb had exploded inside the Dome, damaging a section. A fire was sweeping through that section, but the emergency protocols had worked; the other sections were protected.

People should sit tight: if they needed help someone would reach them. If they were emergency personnel and they were all right, they needed to use their own personal codes to report the situation in their areas.

Dispatch would triage.

Nyquist listened to the noise in his head, never thinking he would be grateful for it. He didn’t send his personal code. He figured the ambulance workers would do that—and sure enough, just as he had that thought, he heard the codes for this section go through clearly, with mention of life-threatening injuries. Needed to get the ambulance through a protected section of the Dome to a hospital. One of the workers swore about the fact that there was no hospital in this section.

Nyquist listened even though he normally would have tuned out. Then he mustered the last of his strength, stood, and headed to the ambulance. If they let him, he would go with Palmette, make sure she got the right kind of care in this situation, before he cleaned up and went back into this mess.

He would also keep Alvina away from her.

He should go with the prisoner, he knew, but he wasn’t going to. They would strap her down. She was cuffed. The hospital would figure it out.

He reached the ambulance door. Palmette had some color in her face. The attendant had wiped off the blood.

Nyquist sat on the bumper, not talking to anyone, and listened to the sound of his city, coming back to life.

Anniversary Day

(Now)

Nine

Fifth political fundraiser of the week and it was only Wednesday. It was also Anniversary Day, a day Mayor Arek Soseki hated.

Of course, he couldn’t let anyone know he hated Anniversary Day. On Anniversary Day, everyone got together to celebrate the fact that the City of Armstrong had survived a bomb large enough to destroy a section of the Dome.

The Dome had worked properly—it immediately isolated the section, leaving that part of the Dome exposed to the vacuum that surrounded the Moon, while the rest of the Dome managed to survive.

Damaged, but it survived.

Soseki dwelt on the survival when he gave his Anniversary Day speeches. The strength of Armstrong, the quick response of the authorities, the resiliency of its people. He had given these speeches for three years now, and he could recite them in his sleep.

He practically was asleep. He stood in front of the podium in the backroom of O’Malley’s Diner. O’Malley’s wasn’t a diner and its owner was not named O’Malley. O’Malley’s Diner was one of the more upscale restaurants near the Port, and its location, rather than its food, had made it a place for politicians to hold quick-and-dirty fundraisers. Easy access, not to mention some rather hidden back routes from the Port itself, kept some of the fundraisers secret—or at least, some of the attendees.

Soseki had lost count of how many times he’d given a speech here. He almost felt like he should carve his initials into the real wood podium. The entire backroom was paneled in real wood of a type he wasn’t familiar with. Not that the mayor of Armstrong needed to be familiar with wood. Wood was one of those things the rich indulged in that Soseki didn’t understand.

He scanned the crowd. Two hundred super donors. Of the two hundred men and women in front of him, only about twenty represented their own interests. The rest belonged to some corporation or another, here for the express purpose of dumping funds into Armstrong’s city council elections through legal means.

Fortunately it was election season, because that made his Anniversary Day speech just a little more interesting—at least to him. He had to combine two canned speeches into one.