After a week, Maela found little in Elden’s call logs to their purpose. Mostly conversations with colleagues or neighbors, nothing stood out from the files before Ricky’s difficulties compelled the old man to action. Back on the hustle, his routine hadn’t changed; orders were placed and deliveries were made, even as the memory of a vile murder lingered on the fringes of Ricky’s thoughts, unsolved and forever a reminder of what he couldn’t change.

On an unusually cool morning, he woke to a persistent rap at his door. He wasn’t expecting Vinnie or even Maela Kendrick and a peek out from his door cam showed a stranger pacing in a tight circle. The man looked clean enough, Ricky decided, releasing the latch slowly.

“Can I help you?” Ricky asked.

“I’m trying to find Richard Mills?”

“That’s me.”

The man held out a smooth, glass-covered pad and Ricky placed his hand atop it to register his palm print and verify the identification. When it signaled the correct image, the man handed over a standard courier’s document case.

“I was sent by Oliver Allouez with instructions that it had to be given directly to you.”

With that, the man turned and headed briskly up the alley.

“Thanks,” Ricky mumbled, but the man didn’t hear. He turned for his kitchen and placed the carrier on a counter, looking at it for a moment as though its contents brought an unseen risk he was hesitant to take. A small message chip had been inserted into a windowed slot on the edge of the case and Ricky pulled it free before slipping it into his wrist comm. At once, a voice spoke from the recorded note;

“Hello, Mr. Mills. I am Oliver Allouez, agent and actuary for the estate of Elden Fellsbach. The enclosed document was found among the financial records in Mr. Fellsbach’s apartment and addressed specifically to you. It is access-protected, requiring handprint verification, which you have obviously provided. The case was unlocked in this process, and you are now free to open and retrieve the contents. Also, you will notice a sum of Novum credit tokens Mr. Fellsbach has asked me to transfer into your accounts. Simply instruct your banking facility to provide the details and I will proceed. If you have any questions, or require further information I may be able to provide, please do not hesitate to call my offices. Good day to you, sir.”

Ricky thumbed the twin latches and pulled up the lid, revealing several data sticks sitting securely in their cradles, but another had been fixed to the inside of the case’s lid and separate from the others. He pulled it free and inserted it carefully into his reader. When it blinked to life, the words made Ricky frown in confusion.

“Go find our old Sammy. Inside, another stick will show you the way. Follow it. No matter where it leads or how strange it may seem, follow until the task is complete. Ishmael will help, but this must be done and it must be done by you. When you are finished, they will be free. You will be free, too.”

Ricky felt the cold fingers of worry return. Had the old man gone off in his final days? What could possibly compel him to such lengths, only to deliver a strange riddle that held no clues? He looked closely at the data sticks, suddenly grinning with a nod as he recognized them from so long before.

“I’ll be damned,” he said out loud, pausing to code in Maela’s comm number.

“Richard?”

“A courier just dropped off a package; I think you need to see this.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure, but it’s from Elden; he must’ve made it before he was killed.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

When Maela arrived, Ricky thumbed one of the sticks into a reader.

“What have you got there?” she asked, looking over Ricky’s shoulder.

“Data sticks; the man handling Elden’s estate sent a courier just now.”

“What’s on them?”

“I don’t know. Mister Anthony, the man who showed me how to run the hustle, used to get them for Elden once in a while. It was years ago, and he spent a lot of money for them, too, but whatever it was, he didn’t want anyone up there knowing about it—especially the Regulators.”

Maela’s brow furrowed at the thought, but she nodded for Ricky to continue.

“Mister Anthony would get a call from Elden, and these sticks were what he wanted.”

Maela moved to inspect the label closer.

“Ex Libris?” she asked suddenly.

“Yeah. I don’t know what that meant, but…”

Maela blurted out a laugh, catching herself when Ricky stared in confusion.

“Books, Richard! It’s an ancient language called Latin they used a thousand years ago; it means ‘from the library.’”

“The ones they used to print on paper?” Ricky asked.

“They were everywhere back then,” Maela continued. “Jonny’s parents told him about stories they heard when they were very young—from great grandparents, I think. Anyway, they kept books in huge buildings before the Fall, right out in the open. People could go there and read anything they wanted and no one said a word.”

“I always thought that stuff was made-up,” said Ricky with a smile.

“It sounds like your friend bought transcriptions of old books copied over into these data sticks.”

“Goddamn it,” Ricky said as the terrible truth became clear; “if the Regulators ever caught him with those things…”

“Yes,” Maela nodded, “and that’s why Elden needed people like you and this other guy, Anthony, to find them. I’ve heard about underground operations where people bring and sell them and then other people speak the words into an ordinary text program so the Regulators won’t know. It’s risky, but they make a fortune doing it; these might be some of those narrated copies.”

Ricky looked at a stick where it lay in the palm of his hand.

“I guess there’s only one way to find out, right?”

The stick snapped into place and its text appeared on his monitor in seconds, but the words were alien and cryptic.

Oedipus and Antigone.

Ricky advanced the reader to the next file.

How Green Was My Valley.

He looked close and read another aloud.

“To Kill a Mockingbird?”

Maela leaned close, mesmerized by the words. She recognized some of them, but most could only hint at their true meaning. She continued the list at a near whisper.

“And Quiet Flows the Don; The Tale of Genji; Moby-Dick; Lord of the Flies; Atlas Shrugged; The Good Earth…”

“These are all old book names?” Ricky asked.

“They’re made-up stories from long before the Fall,” Maela replied.

“You recognize them?

“A few,” Maela replied, “but Jonny’s mom and dad would probably know them all. When we were first dating, he worried I would tell the Regulators, but after he figured out I don’t like those assholes any more than he does, we talked about books and he told me what they said inside. Well, some of them, anyway.”

Ricky smiled again, speaking also in hushed tones as if reverent to the meaning he knew each title held for Elden.

“All this time, I imagined they were some secret code fragments, or processes he wanted to develop and sell. Mister Anthony insisted it was wasted money, but I didn’t believe it; Elden didn’t waste money. He was reading these old stories!”

“Dangerous,” Maela said at last. “This shit would’ve gotten him indicted in ten seconds; the Regulators don’t tolerate crimes like this.”

“Crimes?” said Ricky suddenly. “They’re that bad?”

“Jonny said his parents never talked about them with strangers, and he was always sent to his room when they discussed them with his aunt and uncle. It scared him, worrying somebody would break in and take his mom and dad to the cylinders.”

They looked at more titles while the list scrolled through, but after a while, Maela wanted answers.

“This isn’t getting us any closer. We don’t have anything to go on except that strange note; let’s start with that and see where it leads.”

Again, they read the odd sentences, but still nothing made sense.

“Run a search,” Maela said at last. “Try ‘Ishmael’ first and see if it finds something.”

Ricky inserted the first stick and set the program to look for Elden’s words, waiting only seconds before it finished scanning the vast collection, holding at the beginning of the Moby-Dick text. There, the reference appeared, but the bizarre narrative that followed brought only more confusion. Maela tapped in the rest of the note and again, the scan did its work, stopping to highlight a single passage and she read it aloud:

“‘It was a shocking bad wound,’ began the whale surgeon; ‘and, taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy…’”

Maela looked at Ricky.

“Does that mean anything to you?”

“No,” he replied, his face screwed up into a mask of confusion.

“Well,” she continued, “your friend seemed to think you’d recognize it, and he wouldn’t have left all this shit for you to read unless he wanted you to find something.”

She looked at the words again, as though re-reading them would somehow force them to a revelation. A moment later, Ricky smiled and rose quickly, nodding his head with the surety of one who understood after all.

“Elden, you son of a bitch!” he declared with a laugh.

“What?” Maela asked.

“Read the next part.” He grinned.

She narrowed her eyes at the following paragraph, mumbling the passage quickly.

“‘Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,’ interrupted the one-armed captain, addressing Ahab; ‘go on, boy.’”

Maela sat back with a nod.

“Okay, so now we know ‘Sammy’ is short for Samuel Enderby; does that get us any closer?”

Ricky called up a land traffic status page, thumbing through a menu of street names until he found it.

“Enderby Court, see?”

“Yes, I see, but it doesn’t tell me anything, Richard! Where the hell are you going with this?”

Ricky’s toned softened as he began his description. At last, he understood and the hidden discovery that eluded Maela made for him a sudden and wonderful sensation of hope and enthusiasm. Indeed, the old man knew how to hide his secret in a way only Ricky would understand and a simple street name in a map display would soon take them through the next step of a growing mystery.

“When I was just starting the hustle on my own, not long after Mister Anthony moved away, I relied on Elden’s contacts among the Uppers to do a lot of my business; they wanted things I could find, and all of them had plenty of money to pay for it. The problem was a place to put the stuff I scrounged that was safe and out of the way. I was still living with my mom back then, so I couldn’t hide them at home. Elden let me use a storage locker he owned.”

“Good for you, Richard, but…”

“Let me finish! The locker was inside one of the little transit sub-stations down near the southern wire, about half-way along a dead-end street called Enderby Court.

“Okay,” Maela said with a satisfied smile of her own, “your friend hid his tracks well, but not enough that you wouldn’t be able to figure it out; clever of him.”

“I haven’t used that locker in a long time, but even then, the place seemed pretty tame. Across the field from the sub-station, some of the Agros come in from the Broadlands to trade and sell their stuff away from the Central Market. A lot of it was illegal, but now the gangs are gone, all that’s left are the new retirement blocks.”

Maela nodded, finally able to see the reason for Ricky’s obvious joy and relief. At last, she thought, they were making progress.

“All right, we have our goal; let’s move.”

Ricky nodded and followed Maela up the alley toward Rademacher. As the machine cleared the glass towers in the middle of Morrissey Square, Ricky looked at her for a moment, guessing correctly his opportunity to look past the badge and find the person within.

“What’s the story with you and Jonathan?”

She returned a sad laugh.

“It’s long and complicated.”

“We have time,” Ricky insisted gently.

She smiled at him for a second, impressed by his nerve, but quietly grateful he’d taken enough interest to ask.

“We found each other through mutual friends and got locked-in for all the wrong reasons,” she began. “Jonny is a very good man, don’t get me wrong, but…”

“But?”

“No two people were less suited to each other.”

“Sometimes, opposites attract,” Ricky said. “That’s not unusual, is it?”

“That’s just it; we’re not really opposites.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m not really the shy type. He isn’t very reserved, either, so there’s been moments when the neighbors had to call the cops on a cop; imagine how that looked.”

“He seemed fairly mild to me,” Ricky offered.

“That’s because he hasn’t had enough time to judge you and decide from his safe little world whatever you’re doing is probably a crime against all decency…”

“I see,” he replied with a smile.

She caught herself after a moment and said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone off the edge like that.”

“It’s okay, Maela; I’m the only one here.”

“Jonny really is a good person, but there are necessary parts of my job that don’t allow for the best behavior, you know? He never understood that and it drove a wedge between us long ago.”

“What does he think detective work should be?”

“He watches the vids and believes that’s the way it really is on the street. We save lost children and make the world better without getting dirty doing it. Lots of people up above think that because they’ve never had to deal with the animals who live down here, and…”

At once, she felt her face run red with embarrassment and regret.

“I didn’t mean it that way, Richard, sorry.”

“I didn’t take it that way,” he said.

“After a million fights and slammed doors, we agreed to go our separate ways and that was it. I see him now and then, but it’s not like it was. We’re friends again, but only just.”

She pretended to watch the car’s speed and altitude readout, wishing suddenly their conversation could take a different direction. Ricky said nothing, but Maela’s view of life where the Flatwalkers struggled daily was not so jaded as it might have seemed to others. He thought at once of Bartel and Junkyard—of Boris, too. They certainly qualified as those Maela detested and no one knew it better than Ricky.

The car’s navigation system found and recognized a parking pad at the sub-station on Enderby Court. When it settled onto the smooth surface, they moved quickly across the rain-washed pavement. Inside, the air smelled of ammonia and disinfectant from the cleaners’ work an hour before. Polished stone floors clacked underfoot and sent echoes to match those of others making their way home from pod trains in the brightly lit gallery. Before them, broad steps with dull, aluminum handrails kept riders in precise columns as they walked upward to the platforms. Ricky aimed left to a wall where the lockers waited, each in different shades of green, blue and purple, placed to form a cheerful pattern that reminded Maela strangely of her neighbor’s bathroom floor. At number 114, Ricky paused to remember a time when he first threw himself fully into the shadowy world of the hustle so long ago.

“I don’t suppose you have the combination?” Maela asked.

“If Elden put something here a few months ago, then the old code must still work,” Ricky answered.

“But you know it, right?”

“Yes; he set it to my birth date so I would never forget.”

Ricky knelt as Maela turned in a slow, deliberate circle to ensure no others loitered nearby, ever cautious and always moved by a suspicious nature she learned to trust.

In seconds, the hard, plastic door swung open, revealing only a small, metal box. Ricky tumbled it slowly in his hand, pausing for a moment to regard an object made long before he was born. It was old and tarnished by the passage of decades, but sturdy and solid to the touch. Countless hands no doubt filled it with curios and the tiny bits of obscure, private lives, he thought silently, lived by strangers from the past he would never meet. Maela looked over his shoulder as he pried open the warped lid and placed it carefully on the floor. Inside, a small computer drive sat in a foam rubber cradle and attached to it, a retinal scanner like the ones bankers use. Ricky knew it must’ve cost Elden a steep price.

“Let’s go, Richard, we can look at this stuff at home,” Maela said, now pushed by a nagging sense of uneasiness, alone and exposed with the key to a mystery and a murder. He replaced the lid and tucked the box under an arm, turning for the exit as Maela looked left and right, prepared to use her authority and position should anyone interfere. In minutes, they were airborne and moving across the southern fringes of the Industrial Zone where it curved from the west, speeding toward the Square and the unseen privacy of his flat where a riddle waited to be solved.