Soul Patrol: Badge of the Forgotten

Precinct Nine

 

They came out of the dark like a cork out of a bottle.

One second Elias was falling. The next he was airborne, and then he hit something wide and flat and papery, and a thousand sheets of paper exploded into the air.

"Ow," he told the ceiling. "Fuck. Ow. Fucking ow."

Boone landed beside him on both boots, dusted off his duster, and straightened his hat. Show-off.

Elias lay on his back on what turned out to be a desk. Above him, an enormous iron-framed glass roof let in gold light, and beyond it hung a sky the color of a peach going bad. A clock the size of a wagon wheel dangled from the rafters. Its hands were spinning backward.

The air smelled like rain on hot pavement and old library books, a smell he couldn't place and somehow already liked.

He sat up slowly.

The room was an old train station, or it had been once. Marble floor. Brass railings. Arched windows taller than houses. But instead of ticket counters, there were desks, hundreds of them, in crooked rows, and every desk had somebody sitting at it.

Every single one of them was staring at him.

He was pretty sure his lab coat had blood on it. He was pretty sure his hair was standing straight up. He was very sure a Viking was judging him.

He saw a Roman centurion in full armor, sipping from a foam coffee cup. A Victorian constable with a mustache like a pair of eagle wings. A Viking with a braided beard, doing a crossword. A guy in a leather jacket and a mullet, holding a donut halfway to his mouth.

"Boone," said the mullet. "You brought a live one."

"Found him in a drawer."

"Course you fucking did."

"Where the fuck are we?" Elias asked.

"Precinct Nine," said Boone. "Welcome home, kid. Try not to bleed on the goddamn paperwork."

Elias noticed something else then. Every officer wore a badge pinned to their chest, and every badge shimmered a different color. The centurion's glowed a dull red. The Viking's flickered blue. Each one looked alive, like a tiny heartbeat trapped in metal.

A door slammed at the far end of the hall, and the entire room sat up straighter.

The woman who came through it was small, maybe five feet tall, in a navy jacket sharp enough to cut bread. Silver hair, cropped short. A cigarette burned between her fingers, and as Elias watched, he realized it never got any shorter.

"Boone," she said, in a voice like gravel in a coffee can. "Why the fuck is there a living man on my desk?"

Elias scrambled off it. "Sorry, ma'am. I didn't pick the desk."

"Captain Marisol Vega," she said, not looking at him. "Died in 1974. I'm not a ma'am. Boone, talk."

Boone talked, fast. The morgue, the ledger, the Forgotten that spoke, Auditor Pell showing up with a stamp.

Vega's eyes narrowed. "Pell arrived within four minutes?"

"About that."

"That's fast." She took a slow drag. "That's real fucking fast."

"Somebody tipped him off," Boone said.

"Or he was already waiting," said Vega, and nobody liked that answer.

She turned to Elias and grabbed his wrist. Her grip was strong as a vise. She flipped his palm up. A faint gray mark lay across the skin, like the ghost of a bruise.

"Stamped," she said. "What did it take?"

Elias's throat went tight. He'd been holding it together for ten minutes, mostly out of shock, and now it all came rushing up.

"My sister's face," he said. His voice cracked in half. "I know her name. I know her laugh. I remember her snorting when she tries not to crack up. But I can't see her. There's just a, a fucking hole."

Nobody in the hall said a word.

The Viking put down his crossword. The centurion stared at his coffee. Even the mullet guy set his donut on the desk. Elias got the feeling that every person in this room knew exactly what it felt like to have something cut out of them.

"Only one memory," Vega said quietly. "You got fucking lucky. The last man Pell stamped lost a whole decade." She let go of his wrist. "I'm sorry, son."

"Can I get it back?"

"Maybe." She glanced at Boone. "If we catch who's behind this."

"Behind what?"

"We'll get there." She jerked her chin at a glass-walled office. "Inside. All of you. Everybody else, back to work, the dead don't file their own fucking reports."

Elias started toward the office. Something skidded across the marble and bumped against his foot. A sneaker.

"Lost and found," said the mullet guy, not looking up from his donut. "Right foot, I'm guessing. Size ten?"

"Nine and a half."

"Close enough. Don't die in it."

"Too late for that," Elias said, and pulled it on. It fit fine.

The office smelled like old coffee and older secrets. Vega sat behind a desk buried in folders. Elias took the chair in front of it. Boone leaned on the wall, arms crossed.

"Here's your situation, Thorne," Vega said. "The Bureau just tried to stamp you out of existence. Next time, that smug bastard Pell won't come with three clerks. He'll come with thirty."

"Great."

"There is one thing the Bureau can't do." She tapped the desk. "It can't stamp an officer of the Patrol without a tribunal hearing. Paperwork, precedent, three signatures, a whole circus. It takes weeks."

Elias understood before she finished. "You want me to be a cop."

"I want you on payroll. You're a discrepancy. Only place a discrepancy is safe is inside the system."

"I'm a dead accountant," he said. "Was. Whatever. I don't shoot people. I've never been in a fight in my entire fucking life."

"You threw a tray at a clerk, you crazy son of a bitch," said Boone.

"That was a reflex!"

"It was a good reflex."

Vega ignored them both. She opened a drawer and set a small object on the desk. A blank brass badge. It looked ordinary, rough and unfinished, the shape of a star with nothing stamped on it.

"Every Patrol badge is forged from the memories of the officer who carries it," she said. "That's what makes it work. That's what makes it yours."

Elias stared at the badge. "The forge takes memories."

"A few."

"How many is a few?"

"Whatever the badge needs." She said it plainly, without flinching, and that scared him more than if she'd lied. "Small ones, usually. A meal. A song. The face of a stranger on a bus. But the forge decides, not us."

"Can I say no?"

"You can. Then Pell stamps you again, and next time he doesn't stop at a face."

Boone pushed off the wall. "Cap, he's got a right to know what he's signing."

"He knows." Vega's eyes stayed on Elias. "The badge does more than protect you. It burns memories for power. Speed, strength, the kind of tricks that keep you alive. Every burn costs you something you'll never get back. That's the job. That's the price."

"That's the shittiest job offer I've ever heard."

"Benefits are shit too," said Boone. "But the coffee's free."

Elias almost laughed. It surprised him. He rubbed his palm where the gray mark sat, and thought of a blank space where his sister's face had been. He thought of the calls he couldn't answer.

If he was going to lose things either way, he wanted to lose them fighting.

"Okay," he said. "Say I do it. What happens to the Forgotten? The one who said my name?"

Vega and Boone traded a look. It was a long one.

"That's why I said we'd get there," she said.

She pulled a manila folder from the pile and slid it across the desk. The tab read THORNE, E. Inside was a single sheet of gray paper, stamped in red ink with one word across the top. ERASURE ORDER.

The signature line had been blacked out with a thick bar of ink. Only the seal at the bottom was clear, gold and unmistakable, the crest of the Bureau of Final Records.

"Boone told me about the ledger. I had the original pulled while you were busy with the shoe." Her voice went flat. "Your name wasn't fading by fucking accident. Someone issued this."

Elias read it twice. His hands went cold.

"It has a date on it," he said.

"Yes."

"That's three weeks ago."

"Yes."

"But I died last night."

"Yes, Thorne. I know." Vega's cigarette stopped burning for one strange second, and the smoke hung frozen in the air. "Someone signed your erasure three weeks before you died."

The room seemed to tilt.

"Which means," Boone said softly, "that bridge wasn't a fucking accident."