Soul Patrol: Badge of the Forgotten

Wake

 

Two days passed inside Precinct Nine like two years.

Vega kept the lockdown tight. Dale ran surveillance on the Bureau's public notices. Boone whistled entirely too much for a man who used to hate whistling. Hattie sharpened tools she never used and stared at her locked cabinet like it owed her rent. Dolores had taken over the break room entirely and was teaching Bjorn to knit, which was the single strangest thing Elias had seen in a week full of strange things.

On the third morning, a slip of paper landed on Elias's desk. Dale had clipped it from the public obituaries, the ones the Bureau let bleed through into Halfway so the freshly dead could see their own send-off.

ELIAS J. THORNE. SERVICE THURSDAY, 10 A.M. RIVERSIDE CHAPEL.

"No," said Vega, the second she saw his face. "Absolutely fucking not."

"It's my funeral."

"It's a trap with a fucking guest book, Thorne."

"Cap." Boone's voice was quiet. "Let him go. I'll go with him."

Vega glared at both of them for a long moment. Then she stubbed out her cigarette, hard, and it did not relight. That still hadn't happened again since the Forge, and none of them had mentioned it out loud.

"Veil only," she said. "Nobody sees you. Nobody hears you. You get in, you say your goodbyes, and you get the hell out. Understood?"

"Understood," Elias lied.

"I heard that," Vega said.

"Heard what?"

"You lying. Don't make me regret this, you little shit."

Boone taught him the Veil at the Forge that morning while Hattie hovered nearby, muttering about wasted fire time. It was a Scrap, cheap and simple, a thin bend of light around the shoulders that made a man look like nothing worth noticing.

"Burn," Elias said.

BURN SCRAP? Power: Veil Cost: One small memory Confirm?

"Yes."

BURNED: His apartment door number.

Memory Reserve: 76%

The world did not look any different to him. That was the unsettling part. He only knew it had worked when Hattie walked straight past him without a glance.

Riverside Chapel had white pews and a hundred flowers that smelled too sweet, and organ music that somebody had picked because it was somebody's favorite, though Elias couldn't for the life of him remember whose. He stood at the back of it in a coat that made him invisible, watching his own life get folded up and put away.

There weren't many people. That got him more than he expected. He'd always assumed, in some vague way, that a life added up to more than this. Nine rows of empty pews and a casket that was, he was fairly certain, closed for a very good reason. A handful of coworkers from the firm, awkward in black suits. A neighbor. His landlord, of all people, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief that had definitely never been used for crying before. Elias would have laughed, if laughing hadn't felt like it might break something in his chest.

And in the front row, alone, sat two women.

The younger one had brown hair pulled back in a hurry, like she hadn't had the energy to do it properly. She was gripping a folded program so hard her knuckles had gone white. That had to be Mara. He knew the posture. He knew the stubborn set of her shoulders, even from behind.

He couldn't see her face. There was nothing where it should be. Just a smooth gray blank, and a woman's voice coming out of it that he recognized instantly and couldn't place anywhere.

Beside her sat an older woman with silver starting in dark hair, sitting very straight, the way you sit when sitting straight is the only thing holding you together.

"Boone," Elias whispered. "That's my mother."

"I figured," Boone said gently.

Diana Thorne. Her name arrived in his head whole and unburned, thank God, thank whatever passed for God down here. Her face was right there. Every line of it. The small crease between her eyebrows. The way she pressed her lips together when she was trying not to cry in public. He'd never burned a memory of her, and here she was, whole and real and utterly wrecked with grief, ten feet away.

He'd never wanted a hole in his chest to hurt this specifically before.

"You okay?" Boone murmured.

"No," Elias said. "Not even a little bit."

The minister said things ministers say, gentle and useless. Elias barely heard a word of it. He was watching his mother's hands twist a tissue into shreds, watching Mara's blank face turn toward the casket, again and again, like she was waiting for it to open and let him out.

Then Mara stood up to speak.

"My brother," she started, and her voice cracked immediately, and Elias hated how much it sounded like her, and how badly he wanted to walk up there and tell her to stop, that he was right here, that he was fine, mostly, sort of. She stopped, breathed, started again. "My brother was the most annoying person I've ever loved in my entire life."

A wet, surprised laugh rippled through the small crowd.

"He called me on my birthday and sang off key on purpose, because he knew it drove me insane. He ate the good ice cream and left the empty carton in the freezer like a coward. He worked too much, and he never called back fast enough, and last night, I called him eleven times, and he didn't answer, and I keep thinking if I call the twelfth time, he'll pick up."

Elias's chest caved in.

"I don't know why he was on that bridge," Mara said, and her blank face turned, unerring, straight toward the back of the chapel, straight at him, as if some part of her still knew exactly where to look. "I don't know why any of this happened. But I know my brother, and I know he would have hated every single second of us standing here being sad about him. So somebody laugh. Please. For him."

Nobody laughed. A few people cried harder instead.

Elias was crying behind a Veil nobody could see, silent, furious, useless.

"I love you," Mara said to the casket, to the room, to the blank space where her memory of his face should have been able to picture him and couldn't. "Wherever you are. I love you, you idiot."

She sat back down. Diana put an arm around her, and for a moment the two of them leaned into each other, holding each other up, and Elias had never in his life felt so completely, uselessly dead.

"I hate this," he whispered. "I hate every fucking second of this."

"I know, kid."

"Kid," Boone murmured. "We should go. This is eating you alive."

"One more minute."

"Elias."

"One more fucking minute, Boone. Please."

Boone let out a slow breath and said nothing more. That was when Elias noticed the man three rows back.

He was wearing a black suit like everyone else, ordinary, forgettable, except that his face was the wrong kind of smooth. Not grieving smooth. Smudged smooth. And his hand was resting inside his jacket, where a rubber stamp would fit perfectly.

"Boone," Elias breathed. "Clerk. Three rows back. Left side."

Boone's whole body went still and dangerous. "I see him."

"What's he doing here?"

"Cleanup," Boone said grimly, remembering the phrase from the Form 88 they'd seen at the alley. "Anyone attached to the erased."

"That's not a fucking policy," Elias said. "That's a hit list, and my family is on it."

The organ started up again, mournful and slow. The clerk rose from the pew as the service ended and the small crowd began filing out, shuffling toward the doors in twos and threes, none of them noticing him at all. He moved smoothly, unremarkably, drifting toward the front row where Diana was helping Mara to her feet.

"Fuck," Elias said, already moving. "Fuck, fuck, fuck. Boone, he's going for my family in the middle of my own goddamn funeral."

"I see it, kid. Go."

He was reaching into his jacket.

"He's going for them," Elias said. "Boone, he's going for my mother and my sister."

The stamp came free of the clerk's jacket, glowing the color of a fresh bruise, and his hand rose, casual as anything, toward Diana Thorne's unsuspecting shoulder.

Elias tore through his own Veil without a second thought.