Soul Patrol: Badge of the Forgotten

Loose Ends

 

Elias didn't think. Thinking would have taken too long.

He crossed three rows of pews in one lunge, and the Veil around him tore away like wet paper. He got a hand on the clerk's wrist a half second before the stamp would have touched his mother's shoulder, and wrenched it sideways with everything he had.

The clerk turned that smudged, featureless face toward him, unbothered, and drove an elbow into Elias's ribs hard enough to crack something.

"Oof, fuck!" Elias staggered, wheezing, but didn't let go of the wrist.

"Interference," the clerk said, in a voice like a dial tone. Not angry. Not anything. Just a fact being logged. "Interference will be noted."

"Note this, you smug bastard."

"Elias, don't you fucking dare," Boone barked from somewhere behind him, already moving.

BURN SCRAP? Power: Spectral Punch Cost: One small memory Confirm?

"Yes!"

BURNED: The name of his favorite band.

Memory Reserve: 75%

His fist connected with a crack of pale light, throwing off sparks like a struck match, and the clerk folded backward over a pew and hit the chapel floor in a heap of gray suit. The stamp skittered away under a row of seats, its bruised light flickering out.

For one horrible second, the whole chapel went silent. A few mourners near the door turned, confused, at the sound of a scuffle nobody else seemed to have caused.

Diana blinked, looking around like she'd heard something she couldn't place. "Did anyone else hear that?"

"Hear what, Mom?" Mara asked.

"Nothing. Nothing, sweetheart. I'm imagining things."

Boone reached him a second too late to stop it and yanked Elias back by the collar instead, hauling him toward the side aisle, out of sight behind a pillar, just as the clerk sat up, groaning, his face smoothing itself back into place like wet clay.

"You need to breathe," Boone hissed, dragging him further back into the shadow of the pillar. "Slow down, kid, before you get yourself seen. Or worse."

"He was gonna stamp my mother, Boone. In the middle of my own fucking funeral. What was I supposed to do, take notes?"

"I know. I know. But you're bleeding out of your nose again, and that Veil's not gonna hold if you keep tearing holes in it."

Elias wiped his face with his sleeve, hands shaking. He looked back toward the front row.

Mara had gone very still.

She was staring straight at the pillar where they stood, at nothing, at empty air, her blank gray face somehow managing to look confused and searching all at once.

"I know you're here," she said, quiet, almost to herself. Then louder, to the room, to the ceiling, to whatever she thought might be listening. "I know you're here, Eli. I don't know how I know. But I do."

Elias's chest cracked open all over again.

He wanted to answer so badly it felt physical, a scream trapped behind his teeth. He took one step forward before Boone's hand clamped down on his shoulder like a vise.

"Don't," Boone said, low and rough. "She can't see you. She can't hear you. All you'll do is scare her worse."

"I have to say something."

"You can't. You say one word, and she spends the rest of her fucking life thinking she's losing her goddamn mind. Is that what you want for her?"

Elias said nothing. It was the cruelest kind of true.

Somewhere near the doors, the landlord was still dabbing at his eyes, oblivious to all of it, and Elias found himself absurdly grateful that at least one person in the room was crying for the right reason.

Diana touched her daughter's arm gently. "Mara, honey. Let's go home."

Mara nodded, slow, still scanning the empty air near the pillar. She reached up and unwound the pale blue scarf from her neck, the one Elias suddenly, achingly remembered giving her two Christmases ago, and without seeming to fully understand why she was doing it, she draped it over the back of the front pew.

"For you," she whispered, to nobody. "In case you're cold, wherever you are. That's stupid. I know that's stupid." She laughed, wet and small, at herself. "You'd tell me it's stupid too."

She let her mother lead her out.

Elias stood frozen behind the pillar until they were gone, until the last of the mourners had filed out, until the chapel was empty except for a groggy clerk climbing to his feet by the pews and the faint smell of lilies going stale in the heat.

"Boone," he said eventually. "I need a minute."

"Take two."

He didn't take either. Instead he crossed the aisle, picked up the scarf, and held it. It smelled like her laundry detergent. He folded it and tucked it inside his coat, close to his chest, like it might do some good there.

Across the chapel, the clerk had recovered his composure and was retrieving a fallen clipboard from beneath the pew. Elias watched him straighten his gray suit, adjust his stamp, and flip back to a page he'd apparently lost his place on.

Something on the page caught the light. Elias felt it before he understood why, a cold prickle up the back of his neck, the same feeling he used to get right before a client called to say the numbers didn't add up.

"Boone. Look."

They crept closer, quiet as they could manage. The clerk hadn't noticed them yet, muttering irritably to himself as he re-scanned his clipboard. At the top of the page, in crisp official type, were the words:

FORM 88: LIVING RELATIVES, PENDING PROCESSING. SUBJECT: THORNE, ELIAS J. (ERASED) DEPENDENTS FLAGGED: THORNE, MARA E., THORNE, DIANA R. STATUS: AUTHORIZED FOR CLEANUP.

Elias read it three times, hoping the words might rearrange themselves into something less monstrous. They didn't.

"Authorized cleanup," he repeated. His voice had gone flat and cold. "They authorized wiping my mother and my sister. Like it's paperwork. Like they're a fucking spreadsheet error."

"Christ." Elias pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes. "That's exactly what it is to them," Boone said grimly. He said it like a man reciting something he'd heard a hundred times and never once liked. "Form 88. Anybody with a close enough tie to an erased soul gets flagged too. In case they start asking questions nobody wants answered."

"Has this happened before? To other families?"

Boone's jaw tightened. "Ask me something I want to answer, kid."

"That's not a no."

"No," Boone admitted, quiet and tired in a way Elias had never heard from him. "It ain't. And I never asked enough questions about the ones I heard about. Figured it wasn't my business."

"It's everybody's business."

"Yeah," Boone said. "I know that now."

Elias forced himself to keep reading. At the bottom of the page was a stamped authorization line, small, official, easy to miss.

AUTHORIZED BY: OFFICE OF PRIOR CERTAINTY.

"Office of Prior Certainty." Elias said it twice, like saying it again might make it mean something. "What the hell is that? It's not on any org chart Vega showed me. It's not in the rulebook Dale copied."

Boone stared at the words like they'd bitten him.

"I've been dead a hundred and thirty-nine years," he said quietly. "I've never heard of it either."

Boone let out a long breath through his nose. "Kid. We gotta move before Vega sends a search party."

"One more second."

"You said that at the pillar too."

"I mean it this time."

The clerk finally noticed them.

His head snapped up, smudged face swiveling toward the pillar, and for one long, terrible moment, he looked directly at Elias, Veil or no Veil, as if he could see straight through whatever was left of it.

"You," the clerk said, in that flat dial-tone voice. "You were not supposed to survive contact."

Then, calmly, without any hurry at all, he reached for a second stamp clipped to his belt, one Elias hadn't noticed before, small and plain and far too heavy-looking for its size. Its ink glowed a color he'd never seen on any stamp yet. Not the bruise-purple of the field clerks. Not the fresh-bruise glow of Pell's own.

Something darker. Something that seemed to eat the chapel light around it rather than give off any of its own.

Black.

Boone's hand found the grip of his revolver.

"Kid," he said, very quietly. "Whatever that fucking thing is, we are not sticking around to find out what it does."