The Tindalos Asset

and Isaiah is hardly even the palest poor phantom beside this titan that has slept away untold eons, shrouded by the endless, impenetrable night here at the bottom of the deepest part of the sea. A million years ago or more, the siren whispered and set you wandering the lightless hallways of a sprawling, sunken necropolis so that you came suddenly upon the Sleeper in His abyssal vault, and even through the living blackness you saw Him. And beholding Him, you fell to your hands and knees and scuttled away to this corner that is no corner, wishing yourself only a pair of ragged, inconsequential claws, smaller even than a mote of dust, so that there would not be even the slimmest chance that the Sleeper—in His own dreams—would ever notice you. A mountain walked, the siren whispers, and you never have needed to scream so badly as you do now. But you won’t scream. You know that you won’t. You won’t make any sound at all. The siren whispers—or you think to yourself—No woman or man has ever been even half so damned as would be the one who wakes Him. Even Judas Iscariot would seem, by comparison, a saint. Hitler would seem a choirboy. So in the darkness you wait, and the thing in your belly snickers, and great white worms and fish with blind and bulging eyes, creatures that have never seen sunlight, slip about you and wrap you in their icy folds.

And then—and now—

—it may be the Sleeper was nothing more substantial than a fever dream, because here you sit in a chair at the center of a red maze painted upon a wooden floor. The siren is waiting somewhere at your back, and there’s a tall looking glass in a rotting wooden frame, standing only a few feet in front of you, holding your reflection captive. And everything here hangs suspended within a shimmering liquid sphere. Like mercury, you think, or oil, or water drawn up from the bottom of the sea. It’s perfectly smooth, that sphere, so now you know why the hound hasn’t come. It can’t come because there are no admitting angles for it to slip through, not here within the siren’s hollow sphere. You take a deep breath, because your chest aches, as if you haven’t breathed in ages, and the air reeks of dead fish and sulfurous hydrothermal fissures, of encrusting salt rimes and blood. In your belly, the siren’s child wriggles, wanting to be born, and you can feel its mother searching through your thoughts, thumbing memories like sodden pages. You look down at your muddy feet, at the webbing that has grown between your toes, at the scatter of iridescent photophores glowing blue-green beneath your skin, and you ask the siren what she thinks she’ll find, what it is she’s seeking. You tell her you’re not trying to hide anything, not anymore. You make promises and swear that all your consciousness and unconsciousness is an open and willing book. “I’m not keeping anything back from you,” you whisper desperately and hear yourself sobbing, and you hate that sound, as you have always hated the sound of crying. The siren roughly brushes fragile recollections, and they burst in your mind like bubbles rising from deep, deep places. Days and nights come and gone—

“She got mixed up with an Austrian group, Black Sun. They use heroin to fund . . . fuck, I don’t know what all. Expeditions to find the Aryan descendants of Atlantis. Also, I think you broke my jaw. I’m going to have to explain this to my handler, you know.”

“Rough sex explains a lot, Elle. Especially at some crappy, Johann-come-lately Thule sex party . . .”

“Can I at least get up off the floor now?”

“I’m not keeping you on the fucking floor. Get up if you want to. Just tell me, how much shit is Dieter bringing you tonight?”

“Listen, if you’re going to take those briefcases, you can’t leave me conscious. It has to look like I didn’t just give them up.”

“In my opinion, I’d have to leave you dead. Anyway, we’ve got dope contacts, if I wanted the dope.”

—and the siren, she smirks, and the thing inside your belly snickers, and you realize that the red maze shifts and rearranges itself every time you look away. There’s no path out, unless she says so. Picking at the convolutions of your frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex, the siren’s claws are as good as razor blades. This isn’t necessary, you tell her. “I fucking swear to you, I’m not holding anything back.” But the siren, she laughs her typhoon laugh and tugs hard at the supramarginal gyrus of your left parietal lobe. We’ll be finished soon enough, she says, and when I have what I need, little killer, then we’ll play dress up and you can be the pretty princess and I can be the hagfish with a poison apple, luring you away to nap inside your glass whale-fall coffin. She leans in and laps the tears from your face, and another mnemonic bubble bursts—

. . . The car races through the stormy night, the Signalman hunched behind the wheel. Ellison Nicodemo skims over the clutter of redacted documents until she finds the mug shot of a woman she has to kill tonight.

“Her name’s Kristall Weber,” says the Signalman, “a former double agent for the BND and GRU with ties to X. Not a very nice woman, when all is said and done. True to form, she decided to double-cross us. Which is what I get for trusting the Greek. Anyway, I can’t tell you exactly what all she had her grubby fingers in—mostly because our friend hasn’t told me—but what I do know is that we’ve got a very fucking small window available to tidy everything up before she defects to Julia Set and makes it out of the States. Best guess, she’s headed for a helicopter extraction. We had eyes on her until about twenty