At three AM, Zoey trudged up to her bedroom, looking to lay flat for the first time in twenty-four hours. They had worked straight through, and her brain felt like a hunk of rawhide a dog had been chewing on.
She collapsed onto the bed in the guest room, kind of wanting to get back in that huge bathtub but not having the energy to get up and run the water. She kicked off her jeans, curled up under the comforter, and waited for Stench Machine to settle in next to her face. Then she grabbed her phone off the nightstand and dialed her mother, not altogether surprised that she immediately answered. Nobody was sleeping tonight.
“Zoey! My god. This is so crazy, right?” Her mother was stretching out the last syllable of every sentence (riiiight?), something she did when she was high. “I’ve never been nailed into a box before.”
“Mom, where are you?”
“I am … let’s see. I am in a cabin, in, uh, some kind of resort, I think. I have three armed guards outside—or four, they all look alike—and they won’t let me out. Budd goes and gets the food at mealtime but he won’t tell me what’s going on and…”
She drew out the word “aaaaaaand” until she just gave up on the sentence. Zoey assumed she had a vape in her hand. Budd had been dispatched eight hours earlier to oversee the logistics of getting Molech’s construction crew out of the state, and then to shepherd Melinda Ashe to a safehouse in which she would, to put it frankly, sit and wait to see if any of the good guys survived. In the background, Zoey heard Budd ask what she wanted on her pizza. Zoey’s mother answered “Gummy Bears” and giggled.
Zoey said, “Well, I’m glad you’re all right. This whole thing just keeps getting crazier. The people who live here seem pretty used to it though.”
“Honey, why didn’t you just get out of there?”
(theeeeere)
“The bad guys can afford plane tickets, too, Mom, that’s why you’re out in the middle of nowhere. We have to see this through, this isn’t like getting away from one of your old exes, there’s no place I can go that these people can’t follow.”
“Are you talking about Jezza? Did you hear about him?”
“What? No, why would you bring him up?”
“Well, you know he was the one you had the problems with, when you burned your shoulder on the oven?”
“Yes, Mom. I had not forgotten that.”
“He committed suicide, in his jail cell. They found him this morning. Isn’t that craaaaazy?” Zoey started to answer, but couldn’t process what it meant. “It’s like everything goes nuts all at once.”
“Mom, I think this is all going to be over in the next day or so. If something goes wrong, not that it will, but if it does, Budd will take you to an airport, whatever one you want, and put you on a flight. You pick which one. You’ll keep using that account they gave you, it’s supposedly untraceable and has, well, infinite money in it.”
“Whaaaaat? Where am I supposed to gooooo?”
“Wherever you want?”
“And where will you be?”
“Come on, you know what I’m saying here, Mom.”
“I’m not spending the rest of my life running, Z. I’ve got friends, I’ve got Marnie and her kids heeeere…”
“If you don’t, they’ll find you. These guys aren’t the type to forget.”
“What guys?”
“Just promise me you’ll go. Promise me.” And then, Zoey was crying.
Her mother let out a breath, presumably through a cloud of steam, and said, “Everything’s going to be fine, things always work out in the end for us.”
There was a knock at Zoey’s door.
“I have to go, Mom.”
“All right, honey.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. And don’t forget to—”
“No, Mom. If, uh, if this is the last time we ever talk, I want that to be the last thing we say to each other. I want to leave it at that. So I guess we need to say it again. You’ve always been my best friend and the best, well, the best mom you were capable of being under the circumstances. And I love you.”
“I love you, too, honey.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye. And don’t forget to take those cranberry pills or else you’ll get another urinary tract infection.”
“Goddamnit, Mom—”
She was talking to a dead phone.
A voice behind the heavy guest room door said, “Can I come in?” It sounded like Will.
“Sure. I mean I’m crying and I’m not wearing pants but who cares at this point.”
A pause.
“Can you put some pants on, please?”
“I will not. I’m under the covers, get over it.”
Will entered, apprehensively. “It’s all set, if everything goes south, a Pinkerton has instructions to get your cat to a safe location.”
“Do you think he’ll actually do it?”
“He didn’t take the assignment seriously until he saw what it paid. And he won’t get the other half of his check until he brings proof of cat life to the attorney, so I don’t see why not.”
Zoey said, “It’s a good thing I’m so exhausted, or else the fact that I probably won’t be alive at New Year’s would be seriously weirding me out right now.”
“You can’t focus on death, or failure. Otherwise you’re surrendering greatness to all the people too dumb to contemplate it.”
“There was a moment when we were all working and Andre said that thing about hot dogs and we all laughed and all at once I remembered Armando, and I felt guilty. He hasn’t even had a funeral yet, and already we’re working and laughing and carrying on like he was never here. His family, his friends, he’s gone from their lives forever. That’s so strange, and so awful, the way the world just breezes right on by without you.”
“And now you’re thinking about how the world will go on without you, right?”
“I guess so.”
“This is why people get obsessed with the apocalypse. They want the world to die with them. We’re all selfish, we hate the thought of everyone just … moving on.”
“Well, I would want my mom to. Even if it meant she totally forgot me, I don’t want her to be miserable.”
“And Armando wouldn’t want you to be. He’d want you to get the son of a bitch he was trying to get. He’d want you to finish the job.”
“I can never tell if you’re really talking to me or just trying to sell me on something. It’s always like you just see me as one of the levers you can pull to get what you want. It kind of makes me hate talking to you.”
“Unlike you, who is always honest and never has an ulterior motive. That story, about how you were home and lonely at prom? Telling it in front of Armando, who made it his job to rescue women for a living? ‘Oh, I’m such a disgusting troll, no one could ever love me.’ Planting that seed in his brain?”
“All right, all right. I’m Arthur Livingston’s daughter, is that what you’re about to say again?”
Will just shrugged.
Zoey rolled over and stared at the ceiling. “There was a guy, an old scumbag boyfriend of my mom’s who gave me the scar on my shoulder. I just got off the phone with my mom and she said he committed suicide. In his jail cell.”
“So? Good riddance.”
“Here’s the thing—I had told Armando the story, when they were doing my outfit. Could he have picked up the phone and ordered something like that done?”
“No. Armando didn’t have those kind of connections. That wasn’t the business he was in.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
“I wouldn’t think about it anymore. See, there’s a guy who deserves to be forgotten.”
“You were in the room when I told that story, weren’t you?”
“You should try to get some rest. You’ll need to be sharp to pull this off tomorrow.”
“And where Armando couldn’t pick up the phone and get somebody strangled in a jail cell and then have it faked to look like a hanging, you could.”
“As I said, as far as I can see, it’s just another rotbrain doing the world a favor by taking himself out. Nothing more.”
“And you promise me that’s what it was. If you tell me now you didn’t have him killed, I’ll believe you.”
“I think,” said Will, pausing to choose his words, “that he made the decision to die. And he made that decision the moment he decided to touch Arthur Livingston’s daughter.”
Zoey covered her eyes with the blanket—something she used to do as a little kid. “Oh my god. Why? Why would you do that?”
“If Arthur had heard about that incident back when it happened, Jezza Lewis would not have woken up to see another sunrise. Just collecting on an overdue bill, as far as I see it.”
“You people live on a different planet. I keep having to remind myself of that. Lives just mean nothing to you.”
Will let silence hang in the room for a minute, then crossed his arms and let out a breath.
“My wife. She … she was killed. Three years ago. Organized gang of thieves, robbed a high-end jewelry store on Lattice Drive. Private security chased them. My wife was just a passerby, walking across an intersection, pure coincidence. The pursuit blew through and one of the vehicles smashed right into her. Don’t even know if it was one of the good guys or bad guys and I’ve never tried to find out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“This city … it’s like that. The people are just background, props in somebody else’s adventure. And that’s all my wife was, to them. A thud and a dent in their fender, a forgotten moment in somebody else’s thrilling car chase. That’s the way it is here and it’s always getting worse. And that can’t be allowed to continue.”
“So that’s why you’re so big on taking down Molech?”
“It’s bigger than that. You know what Tabula Rasa means, right? The words?”
“Clean slate? Isn’t that it?”
“I’m not going to bore you with the history, but Arthur and the other investors who snapped up all this land—they’d kind of gotten run out of Las Vegas due to … some unscrupulous practices. So the idea was they’d just start their own Vegas, the way it used to be, back when it was Sin City and not just Disneyland for the elderly. Utah had this crazy Libertarian governor at the time—anyway, the point is ‘clean slate’ to them just meant ‘no rules.’ But Korea changed Arthur. Tabula Rasa, that phrase started to mean something different to him. He wanted it to be a clean slate, for everybody. A city that actually works. Jobs, clean air, no bureaucrats…”
“It sounds like the kind of idea a little kid would have.”
“Arthur was … naïve, in his own way. And he was too late—even in those early days, organized crime had moved in, getting in on the ground floor. They had set up shop before the first McDonald’s, the gangs and the black markets and human traffickers.”
“The Arthur Livingstons, in other words.”
“Exactly. So I think all of this, the whole project with Raiden and this stupid dream about super powers, he thought what so many guys like him had thought—that with enough money and technology you could smooth out the flaws in society like ironing the wrinkles out of a shirt. Stamp out the crime like a comic book superhero and turn this place into a utopia. But you know it doesn’t work that way.”
“No. Because the bad guys are just as motivated to keep things like they are.”
“Probably more so. But maybe I’m naïve, too, because I can’t shake the idea that the whole world is watching us. When they broke ground out here, they called it the city of the future, like Tabula Rasa really is a preview of what the world is going to look like, and everybody’s just waiting to see which way it goes.”
“That’s a lot of pressure.”
“It’s the burden we took on. That you took on.”
“When I inherited all the money?”
“When you were born. Get some sleep.”