“Who are they?” I asked. A light came on over the man, illuminating him, so I could see him clearly. I recognized him; I’d seen him on TV a couple times, on the news.
“This one will need your help,” she said, pointing. “When he calls, go to him.”
He was a tall, handsome man with very blue eyes and short black hair. When I saw him on the news, I remembered he was wearing a suit. He carried a badge, the kind you kept in a leather wallet. He was somebody important, some kind of investigator or something. He wasn’t wearing his suit now, though; he was wearing a white sleeveless undershirt. In the middle of his forehead, pressed in black ink, was the number 4.
“Where did the scar come from?” I asked. There was a big white scar that started up beneath his jawline and got thicker as it moved down his neck, then behind the undershirt. There was more scar tissue across his right shoulder. The woman didn’t answer.
“Your chance of successfully navigating this relationship is fifty percent,” she said instead.
“What relationship?” I asked, but she was on to the next one. The light came on over the woman, letting me see her clearly.
“This one will help you,” she said, pointing. “When you call, she will go to you.”
She was about six inches shorter than the man, and thinner, but even more muscular. She looked like she was all muscle and bone, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and a mean face. Her lips were painted black and peeled back in a wide frown, and her nose had been broken at some point. Her hair was cropped almost to stubble, and her prominent chin jutted forward. I had never seen her before in my life.
Her left hand was a pale gray that went up to the middle of her forearm, and black veins stood out under the skin. The number 2 was stamped on her forehead.
“Your chance of successfully navigating this relationship is ninety percent.”
“What about the middle spot?” I asked.
“That is where I stand,” she said.
“So we’re going to meet?”
“We will meet three times before this is all over.”
“And what are my chances of success with you?”
“Respectively, in percentages,” she said, “thirty, one hundred, and zero.”
“Those aren’t good odds.”
“Only the first one will occur at this time.”
She reached over and snapped the switch back down, cutting the lights. She looked down at her hand, still holding the wounded heart, and looked a little sad.
“Is it yours?” I asked. She ignored me.
The woman stepped back away from me, disappearing into the shadows, and then everything faded away. The green room dissolved around me, leaving nothing but blackness.
I opened my eyes. I was awake, or at least I thought I was. It seemed like I spent a lot of time wondering whether I was dreaming or not. I picked my head up off the couch and blinked until things stopped spinning, and strained to see out the window. It was still dark outside.
I felt a tickle on my neck and brushed at it. Something brown with feelers flicked onto the floor and scurried off. I turned my head and looked at the coffee table; the remote controls were spread out all over the place, along with some pens, a spiral notebook, an oil-stained paper plate, and a shot glass that was full to the brim. I sat up and looked at the TV, which was showing some cartoon with the sound down. I drank the shot, then grabbed the bottle of ouzo from the floor and refilled the glass as I burped up a pocket of air that tasted like cabbage, licorice, and soy sauce.
I poured more of the ouzo into the shot glass, which had kind of become a moving target, and spilled a little onto the floor. I wiped it up with the toe of my sock. I drank the shot and stared at the TV.
A green icon danced in the upper right-hand corner of the screen; the data miner was bouncing around, letting me know it had finished gathering information. I couldn’t remember what I had been looking for.
Fumbling for the remote, I turned the sound back on and brought up the data miner. All the categories had hits. The timer showed the miner had been collecting information for almost two hours…. I must have dozed off for a while there. There were multiple hits on a bunch of topics: movie stars, TV stars, musicians…. One jumped out at me.
WACHALOWSKI.
The dancing icon bounced next to the name. It had eleven hits.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked.
I brought up his listings and had a look; they were all news channels, all short segments. I cycled through the stills. Three of them were the same shot of him standing in what looked like a dark building lobby, facing the person taking the footage.
It was the man from the green room, the one with the scar. He was with the FBI, it looked like. The scar I’d seen in my dream was there, going from beneath his jaw to down under his shirt collar.
I clicked the remote to play the first segment. Agent Wachalowski took out his badge and showed it to the person filming.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Colin Patrick,” a young man’s voice, maybe dubbed in, said from offscreen, “freelance news. I received a tip that you uncovered a human-trafficking ring, right here in this office building. Can you tell me anything about what you found?”
“Sorry, I can’t,” Wachalowski said. The camera cut away to show the elevator door, where the numbers on the display indicated a car descending.
“I hear you’ve got some revivors upstairs,” Colin said.
“Be careful,” Wachalowski said, and the camera cut quickly a couple times as he pushed by, “the SWAT guys are on their way down.”
The camera cut back to the newsroom, where two anchors were sitting.
“While there were no witnesses to the actual removal of the revivors,” the woman anchor said, “a source at the FBI confirmed that a total of twenty-one revivors were recovered at the Goicoechea Building, which was, to all appearances, a hub for trafficking in bodies from outside the country, for distribution to the underground labor and sex trades.”
I shuddered.
“Sources also report that at least one of the smuggler’s clients was not apprehended,” the male anchor said, “and that, based on the records recovered, there may be twenty or more revivors still unaccounted for inside the city.”
The rest of the clip looked like the anchors going back and forth, so I flipped to the next one. Someone had managed to get some footage as the FBI came out of the building. One of them held a woman’s arm as she walked, naked except for a blanket, through the snow. Her skin was grayish, and her white eyes looked like they were staring right at the camera. It was a revivor.
“This is just one more example of the sick, twisted, and ultimately debasing effect this whole endeavor is having on our people, our country, and our world,” a man was saying. “Offering second- tier citizenship benefits to anyone volunteering for Posthumous Service is this administration’s most appalling—”
“So serve,” the woman countered. “Serve your country, is that so much to ask? Serve the obligatory two years and get first-tier benefits. Is that such a crime? Serve your country, and it will serve you.”
“They don’t even want that. They’d rather have a never-ending stream of cannon fodder they can buy on the cheap for second-tier benefits. The whole thing is—”
“Then don’t serve,” the woman snapped. “If you can’t handle either form of service, then don’t serve. No one is forced into it.”
“No, they can settle for life below the poverty line. Less than one percent of third tiers ever make it to even lower-middle class. That’s the life you can expect for—”
I flipped through the rest of the clips and found they were all just variations on the first footage I saw. There weren’t any other revivor pictures, and there weren’t any good pictures of Wachalowski.
I did a freeze-frame on the shot of him from the hotel lobby, and zoomed in on his face. He looked kind of mad,
