Bound God

The top floor of the tower ran on indicator lights. Red, green, red, a slow tide of them moving down the rack wall, and by four in the afternoon they had blurred every eye on the floor. "I'm dead," somebody said, to nobody in particular. "That's it. I'm dead." Then the yawning started. One person, then the two desks behind her, then the room, the way a cough goes through a school. "Finish the pull before you sleep." The voice came from the far end of the floor, unraised, and every chair in the office locked up at once. Then a man stood. Nobody ever learned whose idea that was or whose legs those were — he was simply on his feet with the chair skidding out behind him and his chest already inflated, saying at full volume that it would be done tonight, sir, consider it handled, everything would be handled. The books came in from six directions. Thick ones, hardbacks, vendor manuals nobody had opened since the install. When the throwing stopped there was a grave in the middle of the office, and somewhere underneath it, a man. Sebastian Wade looked over the damage once, without expression, and turned back to his screen. The data was still moving. The desk with the three dark monitors was still empty. Officially it was a network technology company. Troy Systems. One owner, no receptionist, no walk-in traffic. No traffic of any kind, which in a building like that was either completely ordinary or exactly the thing you did not ask about, and the crew had voted, silently and years ago, not to ask. Nobody here traded names. You got a handle and you answered to the handle, and if you ever learned anything else about the person at the next desk it was because somebody had screwed up. The owner was the Warden. The crew called themselves the work-release crew, a joke that got funnier the longer you worked there. Some of them had badges. A couple had half a badge. Across the room, behind a glass partition, sat a second group, women mostly, with their own handles and their own work, and in two years nobody on either side of the glass had ever asked the other side what it did. At 4:03, Adrian Banks — Coin, to everyone in the building — came through the lobby turnstile with a magazine over his head. The handle had been a first-week joke about his surname and the shape of his bank account, and the crew had picked it up before he could argue. The July heat had gone through his shirt two blocks off the bus. His phone was hot in his palm, not from use, just the weather and the battery and the general condition of his life, and he'd had it out the whole ride down. The magazine was a security quarterly two years old, never finished, currently serving as an umbrella. "Sorry, boss. I'm late." Wade didn't look up. He was in the middle of a data split and didn't have time for him, so Coin stood where he was and dripped quietly until the cold off the ceiling vents got his hair dry again. At 4:15, Wade raised his head. "Pay's not docked. You're on tonight." Flat, the way he said everything. Coin understood it immediately. At Troy, being forgiven was worse than being fined. There was nothing to say about it. He was late. Wade was the law. "Yeah," he said. "Okay." He found his desk. Three machines, all dark, three keyboards canted where he'd left them. He wiped his face with the wet wipes he kept in the drawer, killed half a bottle of water in one go, and rejoined the human race. The chair hit him in the hip before he heard it coming. "Coinfather." Kojak caught the desk edge one-handed and let the wheels bring him in the rest of the way. The handle was off an old TV cop, and he had never once let anybody forget it. "You're usually a clock. What happened, you trip?" "You dust that one for prints, detective?" "That's a serious question." "It's a serious answer." Coin hit the power on the first monitor. "I work three jobs. Everything's tight. Tight is the only setting I have." Kojak whistled low. "Three. That's a lot of bosses." "You'd think the math would work out better." "Listen." Kojak leaned in, and his voice went almost sincere, which on him was a warning sign. "As a friend. You keep this up, you're going to work yourself into an early grave." "Quit, and it isn't early." Coin pulled the keyboard toward him. "I'll take tired." Kojak opened his mouth to answer, and Coin's eyes caught up with the rest of him: no shirt, and a pair of board shorts printed in a pattern loud enough to hurt. "Does the Warden know you dress like that?" "It's a hundred degrees out there, man. Nobody can think. This keeps me cool." "Sure it does." Kojak laughed, big and open, and then glanced across the room at the last desk at the far end. The laugh stopped on its own. He shivered — a full one, shoulders and all, right there in the air conditioning with the sweat still drying on him — and didn't seem to notice he'd done it. Coin noticed. He didn't say anything about it. He filed it. "Go on," he said. "Your tasks are piling up, aren't they?" The word tasks did the rest. Kojak came upright in the chair, back flat, hands on the keys, the whole performance of him gone in half a second. Coin turned to his screens and let himself think it, briefly, without meaning it: there were worse lives than this one. Then his phone lit up. He'd left it face-up on the desk. He picked it up without hurrying, because there was no reason to hurry — it was a task return, he'd had a task running since midnight — and swiped it open. Acquired. Intercept confirmed. He dragged the packet open with one thumb. It was small. Smaller than anything had any right to be after sixteen hours of watching. One image, one line. The image was a world map, flat, drawn on a latitude-longitude grid, every country outlined and shaded in a different depth of green. Some of them dark as pine, some of them pale as new leaves. Under it, one line of text: US-984XN, PRI — and after the PRI the rest of it was blacked out, a solid bar of black sitting in the middle of the sentence like somebody had put a thumb on it. Coin blinked at it. He tilted the screen, as if the angle might help. It didn't. One picture, one line, and a shape where the rest of the sentence was supposed to be. What the hell. He'd gone up against AK at midnight and spent the night and most of the day sitting quiet on the outer nodes, with a net wide enough to catch a country, waiting for something big to wander in, and this was what came back. He'd been hunting something big and caught a minnow. Or he'd caught bait. That was the other possibility, and honestly the more likely one. Strange, unreadable, exactly the kind of thing you seeded for whoever was dumb enough to be watching. You don't hand a man a map unless the map is the trick. He closed it. He didn't save it. He didn't send it anywhere. He put the phone down and went back to work. Sixteen hours of watching, one small thing to show for it. He'd had worse nights. He'd also had much better ones. Troy was named for the horse. He'd learned that in his first week, along with the rest of it — that the company was a shell, that the shell was the point, and that the work on the other side of the shell came with a nondisclosure agreement, a background investigation, and a man from a very well-known agency sitting across a table, asking in a friendly way whether he had ever used anything he wasn't supposed to use. He'd signed. He'd been cleared. He'd been twenty-three. Yesterday the crew had gone in through the back door of a foreign telecom and come out the other side with everything they wanted, and the back door was still open tonight, so the pull ran on, and nobody had slept. His own day came in five parts. Mornings he was a graduate student, more or less. Early afternoons he sat across from a kid whose parents paid him in cash and looked at him like he was doing them both a favor and a disservice. After four he belonged to Troy — four hours, more or less, depending on what the day wanted. Nights he poured drinks. After that was his own time, and about his own time he said nothing to anyone, which had turned out to be the easiest secret he'd ever kept. On paper he cleared a little over four thousand a month, and some months the gray work made it better than that. On paper, a twenty-five-year-old grad student in a one-bedroom should have been fine. He was not fine. Every month he counted money, every month he complained, and every month he ate somebody else's dinner. He also had a line. He'd drawn it himself two years ago, roughly where collecting information stopped being an interesting job and started being something else. The work had been drifting over it for a while now. Nobody at Troy had ever asked him to move the line. Nobody had to. The floor emptied gradually, and then all at once. Bags packed, monitors killed, a small cluster at the elevator that existed only to keep anyone from being the last one out. Even Kojak, slowest man alive, eventually got a t-shirt over his head, aligned shirt and shorts with visible effort, and drifted off humming something tuneless and half a beat behind. Then it was two people. Coin yawned hugely, checked the clock, and started to stand. Seven o'clock. Overtime still had to eat. "Break room," Wade said. "There's food." Coin stopped halfway out of the chair. In two years, Wade had never once said the word food to him. Or room. In that order or any other. The break room was down the hall, tiled and bright and cold enough to be used as an argument against summer. A guy from building security had the corner table staked out with his radio and his dinner, eating with the deep contentment of a man whose job was not getting worse. He raised a hand at both of them as they came in. There were two containers on the counter, still warm. Coin opened one. It was better than Troy's food had any right to be, which was its own kind of information. "So what's tonight?" he said, sitting down across from Wade. "Really. Why just the two of us?" Wade picked up his fork. "The others are working too." Which answered nothing, in a way that made clear it wasn't going to. Privately, Coin had never been afraid of Sebastian Wade. It was one of the strange facts of the job. The ones who flinched around him flinched on instinct, and Coin had stood across from him a hundred times, alone, late, and felt nothing but the ordinary friction of two people who wanted different things. He'd never been sure whether that was nerve or a defect of some kind, and he'd stopped trying to be sure. "There's something I wanted to run by you," he said. Wade didn't look up, but he was listening. Coin could tell. It was the kind of stillness you get when something with teeth decides not to move. "I'm going to be stretched thin." He'd rehearsed it in the shower that morning; he used it almost word for word. "There's the thesis — my adviser's been patient about the deadline and I've used that up. There's the other job, the afternoons. And there's some personal stuff I've got going on." He paused. "I might be late more often. Not like today. More than today." Wade chewed. "I wanted to give you a heads up," Coin said. "So. I wanted to see what you thought." There it was, out on the table. It wasn't a resignation, he'd been careful about that. It was a resignation wearing a jacket and asking for permission, and they both knew it. Wade looked at him then. Not long. It was a look Coin had gotten before. It made him aware of his hands. "You know what I do," Wade said. "I've got an idea." "You've got half an idea. That's why you can say that out loud." Wade went back to his food. "When you leave here, think it through. Take your time. Think it all the way through." Not no. Not yes. Something worse. Coin let it sit. Because here was the thing. Troy paid. Troy paid better than anything else in his week — better than the school, better than the kid, better than the bar — and it paid like that because it took something for it. He'd known that when he signed. What he hadn't known was how fast a thing could stop being exciting and turn into a lease. And the work had moved. It had crossed his line and kept going. The contract he'd signed two years ago had a scope in it, the scope had a ceiling, and above the ceiling was a different grade of clearance and a different grade of background check — the kind where they don't ask your friends, they ask your friends twice. He'd been looked at once already. Being looked at again, harder, was not something you walked away from clean. Money could be made again. A life, once it was gone, was gone. He was twenty-five and broke and tired, and he did not intend to find out which side of his line the next task fell on. "Okay," he said. "I'll think it through." "Good." They ate. It was, weirdly, one of the better meals he'd had all week, and he spent most of it watching the security guy across the room get to the bottom of his container. After a while Coin decided the conversation was over and stood to carry his trash out, because it was going to be a long night and he wanted to start it with a clean desk. "Tonight," Wade said, "I'll handle it myself." Coin turned around. Wade hadn't moved. Fork down now, eyes on the table. "You mean—" "Go home. Or wherever you go." A pause. "Get some sleep." Coin looked at the clock on the wall. He'd been on the books since 4:03. He went back to the floor for his bag. The desk rows were down to the emergency lights, the racks still ticking red and green down the far wall, and the whole floor was empty except for the last desk at the end of it. Wade sat there with his fingers laced together on the desk, looking at the screen. Not typing. Not scrolling. Coin had no idea what was on it and wasn't going to ask. "Night," he said. Wade didn't answer. Coin got his bag off the back of his chair and took the elevator down. It was 7:40. The bar had him at eight.