Lares’ room was about three hundred feet below the surface, which meant it had been there about five years.
Dark, down in the tunnels, and always cool, no matter how hot it is outside, something about the physics. Kern counts the turns, scrambles down decrepit ladders by phone light—there are no markers, as the people who live here know the way and want their privacy. He refuses to think of the time he found a body here by touch. It’s important not to make a mistake, as Lares has a thing for booby traps, the more complex, the better. The street sounds are distant. It’s a kind of peace.
The lightless narrow corridors all look the same, but when he thinks he’s at the right place he says, “It’s me, man. Open up,” into the dark. Waits. Lares’ disembodied, staticky voice: “Come on down. I unlocked the door.”
How many times has he come here with whatever wallet, watch or phone Lares had assigned him to fetch. Sometimes it was second-story work, but more often it was just a mugging, which he always found exhilarating, which was troubling, because it seemed more like a bully’s feeling than his. There was a time when he came by to ask Lares about his more difficult reading—the books on Zen, especially, often made no sense—for Lares had read everything, and liked to hold forth; they’ve never been friends, exactly, but Lares seemed to accept him, as he did almost no one else, perhaps seeing in Kern’s single-mindedness a mirror of his own. Lately, though, Lares has been getting more remote, as though slipping ever farther out of humanity’s orbit, and Kern reminds himself not to presume.
Five turns later he’s in Lares’ room, dark but for the light of all the monitors. From a corner comes the tapping of keys; eyes adjusting, he sees Lares there, engrossed in his laptop, at work on his game, like always, his eyes reflecting the code scrolling by.
The monitors are salvage, as is the bare, stained mattress, gleaming blue in the dull glow, but the laptop, Lares told him, was designed by an AI, and cost a fortune; the keyboard, which looks like the flattened vertebra of some gigantic Pleistocene mammal, lets you code for days without hurting your wrists. The air is stale; he tries not to show that he’s breathing through his mouth.
On the screens are empty caverns, unsettled water glittering in torchlight, an abandoned forge with scattered tools, and, there, motion, and it’s what has to be a vampire with his eyes like slits of fire, his deeply stained lips and his air of tragic, labored dignity; the vampire steps out of the shadows, scans his crypt wearily, goes to a window to stare out at the sky.
Lares tears his eyes from the monitors to stare at Kern, envoy from a world that doesn’t interest him. About twenty-five, Lares, already balding, getting fat, in need of a shave. What Kern can see of the floor is covered with drifts of sour clothes, burrito wrappers, random computer hardware. There’d been this little punk-rock girl named Gabriela who said she couldn’t afford boundaries who Lares used to pay to clean up and to blow him once in a while, but she’d disappeared years ago, and now Lares seems to have gone beyond the need for cleanliness or women. In the screens’ faint glow, in which the squalor is barely visible, there is a calm, almost a romance, as though time were in abeyance in the dark room, while in the game, behind the screens, it passes.
The vampire stretches hugely, and there’s something inhuman in the dimensions of his shoulders. Boredom, irritation, suppressed rage pass over his features, and then he’s stalking down a corridor, the camera following as he flexes and clenches his cruelly taloned hands. “I like the way he moves,” Kern says. “It’s better than last time. Like he’s looking for someone to hurt. It’s as good as a movie.”
“Funny you should say that,” says Lares, with something like tenderness, his voice rusty with disuse, watching his creation’s rage blooming. “I’ve been working on him for years, but body kinematics are hard. But Sony developed an emotional-movement library and, given their really incredible level of investment in it, their security was unimpressive.”
“Tell him you lost the phone,” the ghost whispers in his ear.
“So the last job was a problem,” Kern says, and gives him an edited version of the truth.
“Are you sure the phone’s gone?” Lares asks, weirdly pale in the screen light.
“Absolutely,” Kern says. “I chucked it by the Folsom checkpoint. It’s gone for good. No telling who found it.”
Lares slumps deeper into his chair. Kern says, “So what was it, anyway? Why all the fuss?”
“Something special,” Lares says, far away. “I needed it for the game. But it doesn’t matter.”
“Who did we steal it from?”
“Depends on your point of view. Some graffiti kid, proximally, but he got it from other thieves who are friends of his—they didn’t know what they had, but they thought he’d like the images. I knew about it because of these contractors who were going to steal it first. Dumb-asses,” he says tonelessly. “If they were really such bad news they’d know more about encryption.”
“Contractors?”
“Ex-cartel. Migrating north along with everything else. Bringing their special skill set to the unique challenges of today’s global business environment. Basically, they’re campesino shooters trying to build a brand on their violent surrealism.”
“The passport,” says the ghost.
“I need to get out of town. Can you get me a passport?”
“How soon?”
“Now.”
“Expensive.”
Kern takes a sheaf of bills from his pocket, holds it to the light to show denomination.
* * *
“Paraguayan,” Lares says, showing him the document, a little blue book with a golden seal, still warm from the printer he’d exhumed from under the laundry. “Still technically a country. Kind of a historical survival. They don’t use digital records, so there’s no good way to check it out. It’ll get you on a plane, but don’t try to bring any contraband, not with this passport.”
“Contraband means drugs,” the ghost says. “Weapons, anything illegal.”
Lares’ laptop starts pinging. He looks at it. “Movement sensors. It’s probably just someone lost. Or a drunk. Drunks. A lot of drunks. No, most are too small. Oh shit.”
A little bug drone skitters in through the door, stops, seems to be looking at them. It goes click, click, click, which is its sonar, like a bat.
Kern rises, trying to think of a plan, but a courteous voice says, “Please stay where you are,” in Juarez-inflected Spanish.
A stranger comes in. He looks like anyone. Like a construction worker trying to dress respectably, like maybe later he’s going off to church. An air of competence about him. He holds a gun, not the hand cannons the gangsters favor but a little silver one.
“You have some of our property,” he says gravely.
The room is cramped and the man is six feet away but it might as well be miles and though it’s better to die fighting Kern can’t bring himself to make a move. Strange to have lost everything in the space of a moment. He slumps, tries to look defeated, awaits a chance.
“It’s lost,” says Lares, putting his keyboard aside, giving the man his full attention. His concentration is intense, his eyes bright. “So there’s nothing for you here.”
“Are you certain?” asks the man.
Lares nods gravely. “Sit down,” he says to Kern. “Don’t make our guest nervous,” and his earnestness is such that Kern sweeps what’s probably underwear off a stack of cardboard boxes and sits.
“You don’t have to sit up so straight,” Lares says to him. “You’re not in church.”
“You both have to come with me,” the man says.
“But you’re going to kill us if we do, aren’t you?” asks Lares, somehow like a schoolboy. “And if we don’t you’ll kill us anyway.”
The man regards him.
“I just want to know,” says Lares, as though clarifying this point is of the utmost importance. “I need to know where we stand.”
The man’s gun is trained on Lares’ heart. He’s almost smiling. Kern regrets sitting—the bullet would be better—a flash and it’s done. The ghost says nothing.
“I have to cuff you,” says the man.
“Of course,” says Lares, offering his wrists gamely, but he looks grey, seems to be sweating, is struggling to keep his voice steady. “An excellent idea. You know, there’s something I’ve always meant to say at a time like this.” He giggles hoarsely.
The man ignores him, fishing plastic cuffs out of his pocket.
“Look at me,” says Lares.
The man does.
Like an actor enunciating, Lares says, “And then without warning we came to the end.”
There’s a deep throbbing hum from the wall behind Kern and his hair stands on end and it’s suddenly very hot, so hot he’s sweating, and he smells smoke and burned meat, and there’s a glugging sound that makes him remember a two-gallon jug of water, its cap off, knocked over in the desert, the water blackening the sand.
“Watch what you’re kneeling in,” says Lares because Kern is kneeling by the man who has laid himself out on the floor, and a pool of blood, black in the half-light, is spreading, and it’s already too late for his shoes. At first he thinks the man is cut, then sees he’s in two pieces, bisected cleanly just under his collarbones, the flesh at the partition burned ruby, the ruby still spreading. “I thought it would cauterize instantly,” Lares is saying, “and be clean, but there are the arteries. Of course there are the arteries. They’re just tubes. There’s nothing there to cauterize.”
“Talk to him,” says the ghost.
“What?”
“It takes twenty seconds for the brain to finish up.”
Kern puts his hand on the man’s cheek. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s okay. You’re going to die, but it’s okay. Everything’s over now.”
The man’s eyes seem to track him. Slight twitching of the lips. Then his eyes fix on nothing, and his pupils get wide, wider, are windows onto night.
The ghost says, “I’ll have his death with me forever.”
“I didn’t think it would really work,” Lares babbles. “I mean, it works in the movies but in real life anything this complicated fails catastrophically in the moment of truth, but it did work, and now he’s dead and we’re going to live. They were decommissioning a car factory in Yokohama and I found the auction for the laser they used to cut the engine blocks. Customs labeled it ‘industrial robotics, miscellaneous.’” Kern looks up, sees a slit burned into the far wall, still smoking, the concrete glowing, dark space behind it—there’s a much wider burn line at shoulder level opposite—involuntarily, he hunkers down.
“Voice-activated,” Lares says. “A key phrase. I thought it was clever. I’ve wanted to say it for years. Sometimes I had to shout it into my pillow. And when his gun is in my face it finally occurs to me that it might not recognize my voice under stress.”
Kern realizes he still has the passport in his hand. Lares is looking at him oddly. “Are you wearing an earpiece?” he asks.
“I found it,” Kern says.
Lares stares at him, shrugs, grabs a bag.
“What about your stuff?” Kern asks.
“Fuck it!” Lares says cheerfully, shoving his laptop into the bag, grabbing his wallet and phone, heading for the door. “It’s time to leave. There are a lot of places to hide, and I can work on the game from anywhere. You coming?”
Kern rises, feeling something is still owed the dead man, unsure what.
One of the screens flickers, now shows a sword submerged in a shallow pool, the blade pitted and rusting, and he remembers asking Lares how you play the game, how he’d said it wasn’t something you play, it was more like it was art, a “closed semantic universe,” which he’d never really understood, but as far as he could tell it meant that it was made of intertwining stories, accumulating endlessly, like dust in an old room, and the sword would have its place in the order of things. At the time Kern had thought it pointless, though he’d respected Lares’ clarity of vision, but now he sees the appeal of a world small enough to understand.
Lares stops in the doorway, says, “They’ll be watching the main exit. Do you know the tunnels well enough to find another way out?”
“Yeah.”
“Then do it. The next one is coming in I’m guessing two minutes.”