A diaphanous bathrobe is draped over a deck chair. A simple breakfast is set up at a glass-topped table: a board with cheese and fruit, bread and a knife to cut it. A carafe of tea or coffee.
The bright form of Laura Petras breaks through the surface of light and she sees us, standing like pillars at the water’s edge. Her head bobs at the waterline, her hair invisible under a tight swim cap, and she looks at us in puzzlement, but not in fear.
“Mr. and Ms. Speculator. May I ask what you are doing on my property?”
She flips up her goggles so they form a pair of eyes, inverse and bulging, on her forehead. She squints at us. The look of bafflement and confusion on her face is as carefully forged as the fake captures.
“I think you know,” I say.
“I do not.”
It is disconcerting to see a person dissemble so fluidly, so effortlessly. A shiver of bad feeling rushes up my body. I keep my legs steady on the white pavement.
“Would you get out of the water please, ma’am?”
“I will not. I will do so if you tell me what you’re doing here.”
“No. First you get the fuck out of the water, lady.” That’s Paige. Her gun is pointed directly at the suspect.
“I’m sorry,” says Petras. “I’ve forgotten your name.”
Paige does not move her gun. “Get out.”
“Ms. Paige?” I say, ready with my usual note of caution, but Petras is pulling herself out of the water. Slowly the Expert rises from the pool, flicking her eyes from one of us to the other. I hear the dog barking again, somewhere inside the house, greeting the day.
Petras is in a plain one-piece bathing suit, her hair gathered tightly under the cap. She stands calmly, unafraid, dripping onto the white pool stone.
“If you want to discuss the Crane matter in more detail I am happy to do so, but in my office, at the appropriate time. And certainly not,” she says, to Aysa, “at gunpoint.”
The first full splash of sunlight reaches the house, glinting off the second-story windows, making them momentarily into a wall of fractured shadows.
“We’re not here about Crane,” I tell her.
“What?”
“We’re here because your whole house is off the Record. We’re here because you are in violation of subverting the cornerstone of the Golden State.”
“What?”
Her whole face haes changed. Her whole body. She is caught and she knows it. I step forward, drop into the vox officio. “You are accused, Ms. Petras, of involvement with the Golden State conspiracy. You are accused of taking your home off the Record. You are accused of high crimes against the Objectively So.”
With each iteration of the word “accused” her eyes widen further, and all the steel goes out of her stance. Suddenly she is like a fish hauled from the water, trembling, terrified. I have never seen anyone dissemble so immediately, so naturally.
“Ma’am—” I begin, but Aysa has had enough.
“Hey,” she says. “Hands in the air. Hands in the fucking air!”
“Listen to me,” says Petras, looking at me and then at Aysa, back and forth, trembling now. “Listen, I swear to you—”
Aysa shouts, “No more talking!”
The ground trembles again, a mild follow-up seismic motion, just enough to make me momentarily unsteady. The surface of the pool ripples and trembles.
“I have done nothing.”
“Shut up,” says Paige, and glancing at her I see on her face what I am feeling in my heart, the force of what Petras’s stream of untruths are doing to the air, bending and tearing at it, pulling at its seams like fabric.
“It’s not”—her eyes widen with feigned alarm—“it’s not so. What you are saying, it is simply not so.”
“It is so, ma’am. You were a conspirator in the plot initiated eleven years ago by Armond Kessler. You managed to escape justice, and now you have started again, replacing real captures with fakes, on your own property.”
“This is madness.”
There are captures in the high palms, captures above the sliding doors connecting the poolside to the kitchen. But they’re dummies, all of them. Connected to nothing, leaving no archive, forging no permanent reality. Charlie told me how astonishing it was to realize how easily a capture can be faked, and these are even better than the ones he encountered in Glendale. Their eyes blink like the real eyes of captures. They swivel to follow motion and catch sound. Masterful forgeries, perfect simulacra of the real thing.
“And what comes next, Ms. Petras?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I’ve done nothing.”
Monster, I think. Monster monster monster. I am imagining fake captures planted all over the Hills and the Valley, downtown and Mid-city, by the beaches and on the pier and in the parks. I am imagining the Record being undermined, one capture at a time, the truth going dark, the eyes of the Record blinking closed, one by one. I did it, I think. I stopped her. A powerful feeling floods through me, magic in my arms and legs. In time, just in time, we have saved the State.
“I promise you I have done nothing,” says Petras. “I have executed the duties of my office. I have always been loyal to the State.”
The more she speaks, the more I feel it, the pull and rush of lies, the bending at the edges of the world all around me. My lungs fill up with it, the grit and dust of it, and my eyes are watering from it. The air is bending at all its edges, collapsing around me, cascading down the walls.
“She is lying,” says Aysa, and I know she’s right, I know Petras is lying because the atmosphere is distending, warping, and I am catching it everywhere, I am feeling the sparks and stars of it, Petras saying “Not so” and Aysa saying “Another lie,” and I know it’s true, and I have my weapon out and
