Soul Patrol: Badge of the Forgotten

Even Trade

 

Elias didn't decide to hit him.

His body decided. One second he was standing at the reception desk, and the next he was halfway across the marble with his fist cocked, and Boone's arm was locked around his chest like an iron bar.

"Easy, kid," Boone hissed in his ear. "Easy. That's exactly what the smug bastard wants."

"What did you do to her?" Elias's voice cracked off the cathedral walls. "You son of a bitch, what did you do?"

"I have already told you." Pell's voice was calm as a pond. "Ms. Weaver has her name, her tea, and her pleasant afterlife. Every term of our agreement has been honored. You should be grateful, Mr. Thorne. Most people leave this building with far less."

"You erased me out of her fucking head!"

"A small administrative f*e, Mr. Thorne. The Bureau does love its paperwork."

Dolores watched all this with the polite worry of a woman watching two strangers argue at a bus stop. Then she stepped forward and touched Elias's sleeve.

"Excuse me, dear. Are you quite all right? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"He's dead, ma'am," said Boone. "We all are. Long story."

"Oh! Well, that explains the pallor."

Elias's throat closed. It was her voice. Her cardigan. Her handbag. And behind her eyes there was nothing but kindness for a stranger.

Boone squeezed his shoulder once, hard. It said everything Boone couldn't say out loud.

Elias swallowed it. He could fall apart later. Right now he had a plan, and a fake marble that felt very hot in his hand.

"Fine," he said. "Here's your fucking marble."

Pell took it between two gloved fingers, delicate as a jeweler. From his breast pocket he drew a small brass device, all gears and tiny lenses, and held the glass up to it. The gears whirred. A needle wobbled, thought it over, and swung to green.

Ding.

Elias stopped breathing. He was doing that a lot lately.

Pell's smile didn't move. But something behind it did. For half a second, less, the Auditor went perfectly still, staring at the light inside the glass. The smoky saloon. The black aces. His eyes flicked to Boone.

Boone was picking his teeth with a toothpick and looking bored.

Then it was gone, and Pell slid the marble into his jacket. "Splendid," he murmured. "Truly. Deputy, forgive a moment of sentiment. It is a rare thing to see a memory so well loved."

"Uh, thanks?" said Boone. "I think?"

Elias filed it away. Something had just happened, and he had no idea what.

"One further matter." Pell drew a gray envelope from his coat, sealed with gold wax. "Since you have become an officer of the Patrol, Mr. Thorne, I am regrettably unable to stamp you on the spot. The law is the law. So we shall do this properly."

He pressed it into Elias's hand.

NOTICE OF TRIBUNAL. IN RE: THORNE, ELIAS. HEARING IN TEN DAYS.

"I look forward to it," said Pell. "Do bring a lawyer. Or failing that, a good accountant."

"Go fuck yourself," Elias said.

"I never respond to that," Pell said pleasantly. "I find it rarely improves the conversation."

Somewhere across the lobby, a bell began to ring.

Then another. Then a hundred. Every alarm in the building went off at once, sirens, chimes, a cathedral of brass shrieking. Filing drawers slammed shut in unison. Every clerk turned a smudged face toward the records corridor.

And out of it, sprinting flat out, with a torn sheet of paper in his fist and a huge crooked grin, came Dale Kowalski.

"Cap!" he bellowed. "Cap! I got the shit! Run! Run! Run!"

"Oh, you fucking idiot," Boone breathed, with something like love.

Pell's smile finally slipped. "Stop them," he said. Not loud. He never got loud.

Every clerk in the lobby moved at once.

They came like a tide, silent, stamps rising. Elias grabbed Dolores's hand. Boone grabbed Elias's collar. And Vega stepped in front of all of them with her cigarette in her teeth and her badge blazing white.

"Hold your breath," she said, and slapped the badge against the marble.

A window flashed in front of her. Elias caught only a glimpse. Then her cigarette smoke exploded outward, and it didn't drift. It hardened, spreading across the floor into a black wall, and the front line of clerks slammed into it like bricks.

For half a second, Vega looked older. Whatever she'd just burned, she didn't say.

"Move!" she barked. "Move your asses, all of you!"

Dale skidded up, wheezing. "A thank you would be nice, Cap."

"I'll thank you when we're fucking alive!"

Elias looked at the bronze doors. Two hundred steps beyond them. Thirty clerks on the wrong side of a smoke wall that wouldn't last. He made a decision that was going to cost him something.

"Burn."

BURN SCRAP? Power: Shadowstep (12 seconds) Cost: One small memory Confirm?

"Yes!"

BURNED: The smell of rain on hot pavement.

Memory Reserve: 83%

The shadow of the pillar beside them peeled off the floor. Elias dragged everyone into it at once, Dolores, Boone, Dale, and Vega, and the world folded sideways.

"Oh," said Dolores, somewhere in the dark. "This is the bingo again."

"It's worse than bingo, ma'am!" Elias yelled.

"I rather like it!"

They spat out at the top of the steps, and Elias didn't wait to slow down. He hit the first stair at a dead run and kept going, two hundred steps of white stone, with his partner cursing behind him and Dale wheezing and the smoke wall cracking somewhere above like a dropped plate.

They hit the bottom. Halfway spread out in front of them, gold and crowded and blissfully normal.

"There!" Vega pointed. On the corner stood an old red telephone box. "Everybody in!"

"That's a phone booth, Cap!" Dale yelled.

"It's a fucking Patrol line! Get in it, Dale!"

They crammed themselves in: five people and a handbag in a box built for one. Boone's elbow was in Elias's ribs. Dale's mullet was in his mouth. "Cap," Dale wheezed, "is that your elbow or your gun?"

"Both, Dale."

Vega shoved the receiver against her ear and spat two words into it.

"Precinct Nine. Code black."

The floor of the box dropped.

They landed on marble in a pile of arms and legs. The great clock still ran backward. Half the precinct had jumped up from their desks. The Viking was holding a crossword in one fist and an axe in the other.

"We're good!" Dale wheezed, flat on his back. "We're good, we're good, we're good."

"Nobody move," said Vega. She patted her jacket, then pulled out a small glass sphere: the real marble, still glowing, rain streaking down its windshield. "Safe." She let out a long breath and put it away. "Thank Christ."

Elias sat up slowly. The precinct smelled like old coffee and paper and something else, something he was sure he'd always liked. He breathed in, trying to name it.

Nothing.

Dolores tugged at her cardigan and looked around at the desks and the giant clock. "Well," she said brightly. "I don't think I've ever been anywhere like this."

Boone helped her to a chair. Elias watched her go, and his fist tightened around the gray envelope.

"Cap," Dale said, still on his back. He held up the torn sheet of paper like a trophy. "I found it. I found the erasure logs."

Boone clapped him on the shoulder. "You beautiful dumb bastard. You actually did it."

Vega took it. Her eyes ran down the page, and her face went very, very still.

Elias climbed to his feet and read over her shoulder.

It was a list. Neat type, a hundred and forty names in tidy rows, under one word at the top. PENDING. Elias knew a lot of them already. The centurion. The constable. The Viking. Dale.

Every name was a Patrol officer.

The first name on the list was his own. THORNE, ELIAS.

The second was hers. VEGA, M.

"That's every cop in Halfway," Dale said, sitting up, his grin gone. "That's every one of us."

Vega didn't answer. She was looking at the margin.

Beside her name, in pencil, in a shaky hand that didn't match the neat type, someone had written two words.

SHE KNOWS.

Vega folded the paper once, twice, and slid it into her jacket. When she looked up, her face was a wall, and her eyes went straight to Elias.

"Not here," she said quietly. "Not in front of the others."