Soul Patrol: Badge of the Forgotten

Thirty

 

Thirty gray suits stood between them and the street.

Elias counted anyway. Twenty-nine, and Pell made thirty. Every single one held a stamp, and every stamp glowed the color of a bruise.

"Here are the terms," Pell said, in the voice of a man reading a dinner menu. "Mr. Thorne hands over the marble. Mr. Thorne and Deputy Boone submit to processing. In exchange, Ms. Weaver keeps her name, her tea, and her pleasant afterlife."

"And if we say no, you smug prick?" Boone drawled.

"Then I stamp all three of you, and we finish the paperwork over lunch."

Twenty-nine clerks stepped forward in perfect unison, stamps rising. It was the most unsettling thing Elias had ever seen, and that included a morgue.

Behind them was a brick wall with a steel door marked STAFF ONLY. Beside them was a dumpster. Above them, a laundromat sign buzzed pink in the gold light.

Boone leaned close, lips barely moving. "Kid. How much reserve you got?"

Elias glanced at his badge. A gold window bloomed.

Memory Reserve: 91%

"Ninety-one."

"That's enough. Barely." Boone thumbed back his hammer. "That steel door is the back of the Spin Cycle. Third dryer from the left is a Patrol line. Straight to Precinct Nine. All you gotta do is get us there."

"That's ten fucking feet and there's thirty of them!"

"Then don't go the ten feet the boring way."

Elias looked at the pink glow of the sign, and the long dark shadow it threw across the alley floor.

Oh, he thought. Oh, fuck me. That's a terrible idea.

"Dolores," he whispered. "Grab my hand. Don't let go."

"Dear, I've been holding onto things since 1958." She squeezed his fingers. "This is the most exciting thing to happen to me since bingo."

"Shadow's big enough for three," Boone muttered, "if nobody gets fucking cute."

"Now!" Boone roared, and fired.

The white bullet took a clerk in the throat. He folded into paper. Elias grabbed Dolores with one hand and Boone's duster with the other, and thought the word he'd never wanted to think again.

Burn.

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

"Yes!"

BURNED: The name of his neighbor's cat.

The shadow swallowed them.

It felt like falling sideways through cold water. The alley smeared into gray, and the clerks became tall smudges, and every sound came out slow and deep. Elias ran, dragging two people behind him, through a world that was only shadow and pink light. His lungs burned with air that wasn't really there.

"Left, kid!" Boone yelled. "Your other fucking left!"

"I only have one left!"

"Then use it better!"

Ten feet. Nine. Eight.

A clerk stepped into the shadow with them.

He didn't run. He just appeared in front of Elias, stamp raised, smiling with a mouth that looked painted on.

"Burn!" Elias yelled. "Burn, burn, burn, fuck!"

BURNED: How to whistle.

The twelve seconds reset. Elias swerved, and the stamp missed his ear by an inch.

Another clerk. Another. Every step, something new blocked their path.

BURNED: His locker combination from high school.

BURNED: The taste of orange soda.

BURNED: A knock-knock joke he'd loved when he was seven.

Small things. Every one of them tiny. He didn't even notice them leaving, which was the worst part. It was like watching pennies slide out of his pocket and not being able to feel the weight change.

BURNED: The color of his first car.

Memory Reserve: 84%

The steel door loomed up ahead, huge and gray.

"Almost there!" Boone shouted. "Keep going, kid!"

A stamp swung out of nowhere, aimed straight at Elias's back.

Boone threw himself in front of it.

The rubber slapped onto his shoulder with a wet, cold sound. Ink flashed. Boone grunted, and for half a second his whole body flickered, like a bulb about to burn out.

"Boone, you fucking idiot!"

"Keep. Fucking. Going."

Boone's outline stuttered again, blurring at the edges like a photograph left in the sun. Elias did not look at it. He couldn't. If he looked, he'd stop.

Elias hit the steel door with his shoulder, and the shadow spat them out into a room of humming machines. Rows of dryers, blinking their little lights like a landing fleet. Fluorescent bulbs. The smell of lavender detergent, absurdly ordinary.

"Third from the left!" Boone gasped, clutching his shoulder.

Elias yanked the door open. Inside the dryer there was no laundry. Just a spinning tunnel of white light.

"Dolores, in!"

"Oh, heavens, I'll ruin my cardigan..."

"In!"

He shoved her toward it. She grabbed the rim with one hand, but the golden chain still wrapped around her, the binding that held her name in place, ran straight back out the door.

And a clerk had his fist around the other end.

"No! Fuck!" Elias lunged.

The chain snapped.

It didn't break with a crack. It shattered, in a spray of golden light, and the old woman was yanked backward through the door by six gray hands.

"Dolores!"

"Go, dear!" she cried. Her voice was already fading. "Go on! I've still got my kettle!"

Elias tried to run back. Boone caught him around the waist with an arm like an iron bar.

"Let go, you son of a bitch!"

"Not a fucking chance, kid," Boone grunted, and hurled them both into the dryer.

The light swallowed them whole.

The last thing Elias heard was a calm voice, far behind, cutting through the roar.

"Bring the marble to the Bureau by dawn, Mr. Thorne, when the gold sky goes gray. Or Ms. Weaver forgets her own name."

They hit the marble floor of Precinct Nine in a heap.

Elias lay there, staring at the backward clock, hearing his own breath sawing in and out. His nose was bleeding again. His fist was clenched so tight around the marble it had gone numb.

"Boone," he croaked. "You okay?"

The old cowboy sat up slowly, pressing his shoulder. A ring of gray ink had soaked through his duster. His face was pale, even for a dead man.

"Yeah," Boone said. "Yeah. Fine."

"He stamped you."

"Kid, I've had worse than that from a fucking paper cut."

"What'd it take?"

Boone opened his mouth. Closed it. He looked so lost that something inside Elias's chest curled up small.

"My middle name," Boone said. "I had a middle name. My mama gave it to me. I said it every day of my life." His voice cracked. "I can't remember what it was."

Vega was already crossing the hall, cigarette burning. Behind her, half the precinct had stood up from their desks.

Vega's hand settled on his good shoulder. "Forty years I've known you, Cyrus," she said softly. "I never once knew it either."

Boone laughed, a cracked, wet sound, and wiped his eyes with the back of his glove.

"Talk," she said. "Now. What the fuck happened?"

Boone talked. The alley, the marble, the thirty clerks, the Patrol badge on a stranger. It took less than a minute, and by the end, half the precinct had gone dead silent.

"And Dolores Weaver?" Vega asked.

"They took her," said Elias.

Vega glanced at his badge and read the window over his shoulder. Her mouth thinned.

"Six goddamn Scraps in one run?"

"They were only little things," Elias said. "A cat's name. A joke. How to whistle."

"Little things are what people are made of, Thorne." Her voice was not unkind. "You just spent a bit of your personality."

Elias reached for the cat's name and found only a space where it used to be, like a room where somebody had moved all the furniture while he slept.

He swallowed. Then he uncurled his fingers. The marble sat in his palm, glowing softly, rain streaking across its little windshield. The only clue to his own death.

The only thing that could save Dolores Weaver.

"Pell wants a trade," he said. "This, for her. By dawn."

"That's a fucking trap," said Vega.

"I know."

"Thorne. If you hand that over, we lose the one lead we have."

"I know."

"So you know we can't."

He looked at the marble. He looked at the old cowboy who'd just lost the gift his mother gave him. He thought of pancakes he couldn't remember, and a little girl with no face, and a woman with a kettle on.

Boone set a hand on Elias's shoulder. "Whatever you decide, partner, I'm with you. Even if it's fucking dumb."

"It's gonna be really fucking dumb."

"Yeah. I figured."

Elias closed his fist around the marble and looked at the two people who believed in him.

"Then how much of myself," he said, "am I allowed to spend to get her out?"