CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

On my way to Shutter Gardens, wearing the Expo-Screen, I took a shortcut through the walkway where Maclean had been killed. The spot where her body had been found looked utterly unremarkable. Just a patch of indifferent pavement next to a dumpster and a man in chef’s attire, sitting at the back of his restaurant smoking a cigarette.

I passed through the front doors of Shutter Gardens easily. There was no admission fee, which made my job easier. And it would also make it easy for criminals to meet here off the radar. Shutter gardens was vast, full of long tunnels and isolated, sheltered spaces. I’d watched Shutter from a distance for a few days, and I’d noticed that he sometimes visited the gardens in the early evening, around when it closed—right around the current time.

Tropical leaves waved across my path as I entered, a fan of green, holographic vegetation. My legs passed right through the leaves. The rest of the world was erased as the digital foliage closed in behind me and concealed the exit. A cactus flickered on my left, and behind it, a trellis of flowers scaled the wall.

Dark paths stretched out deep into the gardens. Leaves shifted in a false wind, but they made no sounds. I took the path farthest to the left and began to wander, wondering where I was going, what I was looking for. Maclean must have found something here before she died. Something worth killing for. I drifted through the dense forest, scanning the deepest corners and recesses.

A mother and a child walked by me as I turned into a mountain pasture. Cone-shaped conifers rimmed the edges of an oval clearing, waving with thread-like stalks of grass. There was a pond with a flat, motionless surface. A dragonfly skimmed the holographic water. As I wandered deeper into the gardens, leaves shaking soundlessly overhead, a thought began to take shape. I would find it here. I would find the missing piece of data that would set things to right. The data that would bring order to this chaos, that would make the patterns in the Optica make sense again. It would put an end to the nonsense. I would save Yury.

I was sure of it.

After a long stretch of wandering I came to a path that had been boarded off. CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, read the hanging sign. In the surrounding area, I saw no surveillance cameras like there had been in the previous sections of the gardens. There were no footsteps, and there was no one around.

I slipped through a gap between the boards and the wall. A long, winding tunnel led to a coral reef, an enclosed pocket hidden deep in the gardens. The air was alive with fish shoaling overhead and seahorses that swam through me. As I rounded a bend in the reef, I heard no sounds and saw no humans, but somehow I sensed the presence of a person, another living, breathing body waiting behind this bend.

I stuck close to the wall of rocks beside me and entered a clearing that opened onto a fake underwater expanse. A shark-shaped shadow circled in the distance. False sunlight filtered down from the ocean’s apparent surface, vaulting far over our heads. And there—some distance away, a person sat on a bench, half concealed by a shoal of bannerfish.

I moved forward slowly, and the figure grew larger. But their back was turned to me. I couldn’t see the face, but it looked like a woman, a hint of long hair showing between the swarms of fish. On the ground beside her lay a crate full of bottles with the label: FOCUS ENERGY DRINK. I took a few more steps.

With a flash of movement, the shoal of fish dispersed, startled. With a metallic click, I was at gunpoint. The woman had spun around and she was pointing a pistol at me. It was a familiar black Russell.

For a minute I said nothing, terror crackling like radio static in my head.

Finally I said, “Jenny, it’s me. I’m wearing an Expo-Screen.” I hoped that she would recognize my voice. I didn’t want to say my name in case we were under surveillance.

Her skin paled. Behind her head, a jellyfish inched towards the sunlight, weaving through hanging ropes of kelp. Her eyes, wide and tinted green by the underwater sunlight, looked like those of a stranger. They couldn’t be the same eyes I’d seen that night in the dirt and darkness of the vault.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she said in a shaking voice. She didn’t lower the Russell.

“Jesus, I’m working on a case. What’s going on? Would you put that gun away?”

Her skin paled further. “What case?”

“I can’t talk about it here.”

“Fucking talk. This is a surveillance-free zone.”

“How do you know that? What are you doing here?”

A sudden realization seemed to strike her, and she fidgeted anxiously, her gun still pointed at me. “Someone’s gonna be here soon. You’ve got to leave. Now.”

I couldn’t bring myself to move, frozen in place.

“Go to your apartment,” she said. “Stay there and don’t fucking leave. Don’t talk to anyone.”

The coral reef, then the rest of the gardens, then the street bled into a blur as I moved without thought, overwhelmed with fear from an unknown source. A car screeched its horn. Music thudded from a truck streaking by and shoulders jostled me as I shoved through crowded sidewalks. The night looked strange and confusing. The letters of neon signs stuck out oddly in the dark and seemed illegible, threatening me with their nonsense. I didn’t understand what I’d just found at the gardens, but whatever it was, it was a destructive force, something that would make me come undone. I’d found the clue I was looking for, but it didn’t help me understand things. I’d found the data, but when the pieces all fit, what they showed me made no sense.