Chapter 5: Required Course

He finished the swing.

He’d gone for the head, and he’d gone for it because the man had come through the door at the end of the corridor with his eyes half shut against the fixture over it. Whatever was wrong with the color of him, a corridor light hurt, and Ash had read it off him the way he read a stripped wire. One look and you know where not to put your hand.

The man had four strides of corridor and spent two of them. His wrist came up into the arc of the swing, and the arm behind the wrist went with the weight instead of against it. Not stopping the canister: steering it, past his own ear and out of Ash’s hands.

The extinguisher hit the wall and rolled and stopped against the baseboard, with a dent in the red shell of it the size of a thumb.

Ash looked at the dent for about as long as it took to know it didn’t add up to anything he could use. Then he went in low and shoulder-first and put the man down.

They landed hard. Ash came up onto his chest with his knees planted on either side and set the point of the fruit knife against the artery under the man’s jaw.

“Don’t move.”

The man lay on his back on the cold linoleum with both hands up over his head, palms open, and didn’t move. He wasn’t breathing hard.

Then he laughed, short, mostly air.

“Not even on the payroll yet,” he said, “and you’re already on top of me.”

Half a beat later it came again, in Ash’s left ear. Same sentence, same voice, flat and close, arriving the way sound arrives off a channel. The voice that had walked him down the corridor to this room.

Ash kept his weight where it was and the knife where it was, and let it sit. There would be a time to ask about the earpiece. This wasn’t it.

Whatever had been in the man’s face while he was up on the pipe, head back and mouth open and taking his time about it, was gone. There wasn’t a scrap of it left.

He pushed himself up on one hand and sat. Ash came with him, because the knife was where it was, and sitting up put them face to face with less than a foot between them.

Up close, the color of him was a white Ash couldn’t source. Nothing about him sat on a shelf Ash had.

He’d seen this face before.

He couldn’t have said where. He went looking for it and came back with no room, no year, no name, and nothing he could check the feeling against.

The corner of the man’s mouth came up.

“I’m on your side.”

Ash didn’t answer. He took his left hand off the knife and put two fingers against the man’s cheek.

Warm. Skin, and under the skin a jaw, and under the jaw the flat ordinary heat of a person. Whatever the color was, the lights weren’t doing it, and he wasn’t cold.

The man reached into his coat with two fingers and came out with a card and held it up until Ash took it.

Same mark as the chest plate: a white line in a black square. Under it, small print.

UNDERLINE
EMERGENCY ORDER SECTION
SOL WHITLOCK, SECTION CHIEF

Ash knew the mark. It rode on the trucks that sat across both ends of a street with the road shut down, and it rode on the quiet afterward, on equipment nobody wrote about and on nothing anybody said. He turned the card over. The back was blank.

“Three days ago you sent us an application,” the man said. “I’m the one who was supposed to interview you.”

A tightness went through Ash’s temple, and then the envelope was there: thin paper, a mark in the corner, his own name typed across the front. An interview. He remembered putting it down somewhere.

“I think I’ve forgotten some things,” he said.

He got off the man’s chest. It was awkward and he did it anyway, and he stayed on his feet, close enough to use the knife again.

Whitlock stayed sitting with one knee up and watched him from the floor. Then he raised a hand and laid the back of his glove against Ash’s cheek, over the bandage, and left it there. Thin deerskin. Rough enough to catch on the gauze.

“Yesterday was the day,” he said. “I stayed until it got dark. You never came.”

Ash had nothing to put in that space. When the door at the end of the corridor came open, the thing he’d been expecting was police. Not a name off a card, and not a man who had waited for him until dark.

He could name most of what was in his own head. He had no idea how any of it had gotten in there, and none of it was this man.

“And searching a body,” the man said. “That’s a required course.”

He caught Ash’s wrist through the sleeve, turned his hand over, and pressed the palm flat against him, high on the chest, then moved it down. Slow. Under the coat and under the shirt there was muscle, and under the muscle a heartbeat, and over the top of all of it his eyes were on Ash the whole way down.

“You find the little things this way,” he said. “The pieces a man keeps where you can’t see them.”

Ash’s hand made the trip down. He wasn’t the one driving it. Somewhere around the fourth rib he noticed that he had stopped breathing through his mouth, and he turned his face at the wall.

Two fingers went into the collar of the shirt and came back out with a flat piece of steel, and the man snapped it away without looking. It rang off the linoleum two meters down the corridor and slid.

“Ah.” He sounded pleased about something. “And if you get distracted doing that, you’re dead.”

The left hand went down to the sheath on the outside of his thigh. Draw, turn, counter: the flat of the blade came to rest against Ash’s throat, Ash’s chin came up with it, and the man was behind him. All of it inside a second.

“If I wanted you dead,” he said over Ash’s shoulder, “you’d never have gotten a look at my face. Stop thinking about it, kid.”

Ash stood with his chin up and the blade where it was, and did the thing he did with a machine. He took the measurement. One second, out of a standstill, and the man’s breathing hadn’t changed for any of it.

The building shoved. Once, hard, from somewhere under the floor, and the far end of the corridor rattled.

Ash turned his head.

Two horns had come through the nurses’ station door and out the other side of it: the points stood proud of the steel on this side, and the paint around them had come off in flakes.

He had picked that door because it was steel. He had stood behind it and done the math.

The animal on the floor was still on the floor. Its sides were still moving. The pipe through it was still doing its job.

He had half a thought about that and didn’t get to finish it, because he took a step back and his shoulders met a chest.

An arm came down across the back of his neck, forearm and not a choke, and the man leaned his head past Ash’s ear to look down the corridor.

“You know what that is?”

“An anomaly.” He said it with a question mark on it and left the question mark there. It wasn’t a question he could leave blank.

“So you kept the useful parts.” The forearm stayed. “It’s a domestic goat that got out of its pen and had radiation done to it until it stopped being a goat. The core doesn’t break, so it doesn’t die.”

He put a long dagger in Ash’s hand. The glove dragged across Ash’s palm as he let go of it.

Steel, and heavy the way a kitchen knife isn’t. Ash turned it once. The balance sat where it should, and there was a dark stain worked into the seam where the blade met the guard, and it hadn’t come out in the wash.

“Learn the business,” the man said. “This is the business. We clean them up.” He set the toe of one boot against the animal on the floor and rolled it an inch, testing the pipe. “Take the core out of that one. Don’t crack it. Some machines run on cores. There are people walking around with pieces missing who can use one. The market’s there, and the market pays.”

“Mister Whitlock.” It came out polite, the way a form comes out. “I’d still like to think about other work.”

“Sure you can.” He laughed, low, in the back of the throat, and started on the buttons of his coat. “All you have to do is walk out of the building alive. This is an interview, kid. It’s not a drill.”

He took the coat off the way you take one off at the end of a day, one shoulder and then the other, no ceremony, and put it around Ash and did the collar with both hands. Under it he had on a wine-red shirt and nothing else, and the corridor air had to be cold on his arms. His arms didn’t care.

Ash pulled the coat shut and held it shut. The lining was still warm off somebody else. What came up out of it was laundry detergent, ordinary, with nothing under it. A flat hard thing sat in one of the pockets, about the size of a pencil case, and knocked against his hip when he moved.

Then the nurses’ station door came out of the wall. Frame, brick and all, and the dust came up the corridor in a low wave, and what walked out of the gap was on two legs.

Fur burned down to the hide. The fire in that room had been his. The smell reached him before the thing finished its second step: burnt wool, and wet hide under it. Across the chest, in white barn paint, block letters, half blistered away and the rest still readable.

WREN HILL FARM — PEN 5 — GOOD MILK FROM GOOD GOATS

“Do what I tell you.” The man leaned in and tapped the earpiece in Ash’s left ear with one finger. “Keep this in. I’m going to draw it off.”

“Don’t go.”

His hand was out before he had decided anything. It landed on the man’s side, low, over the left hip, and it didn’t land on a rib or a muscle or anything that belonged inside a body. Under the shirt there was a pad of something packed and taped flat.

The man stopped.

He turned his head. Whatever came up onto his face then wasn’t the laugh, and it wasn’t the teaching voice. Ash had no word for it. He waited. Two seconds, three. He was waiting to find out what Ash was going to say.

Ash took his hand back and looked at it.

Not a smudge. His whole palm, wet and red, the print of it going brown at the edges. It had come through the shirt and the pad under it, and the iron smell of it was coming up off his own skin.

He looked up. By then the man was well down the corridor and not slowing, and he went over the animal on the floor without a look down at it. The corridor air took the loose shirt and pulled it flat against his back.

He hit the wall twice with the flat of his hand as he went. Two hard hits, a rhythm. In the gap where the frame had been, the burned thing turned its head.

Blood was in the air the length of the corridor. So was the noise.

It came down the corridor and past Ash at arm’s length. He had his back on the wall and both hands flat on it, and the horn that went by swung close enough to move the air over his face, and the thing never turned its head. It was looking at the man, and the man was ahead of it, going away down the corridor.

Then it was quiet.

Down at the end, the doorway had lost its frame and its door and part of the wall around them, and smoke was coming out of it and hanging in the corridor. The animal on the floor was still pinned and still breathing, with its own blood pooled dark around the pipe.

Ash stayed where he was with his left hand out in front of him, palm up. The wet on it went dull and tacky while he watched, and he stayed there until it had.