Wyte grunted. Reflexively writing up reports on nothing in particular. Lost husbands. Unidentifiable corpses. Vandalism. Finch had cases, too, but nothing that couldn't wait.
"Hate these things," he said, again to Wyte. Again, to indifference.
Heard Blakely muttering to Gustat: ". . . they're saying that we're addicted to a special mushroom that grows out of our brains." Gustat chuckled but it wasn't funny. Rumors could get a detective killed by some desperate citizen. Any excuse that didn't slip through the fingers.
Finch rummaged in a drawer. Found a worn handkerchief. It predated the war. He'd gotten it from an expensive clothing store further up the boulevard. Didn't know why he kept it. Luck? Grimacing, he picked up the gun with the handkerchief. Shoved the thing into a space under his desk. Next to the box with the ceremonial sword his father had given him. Brought back from the Kalif's empire twenty years before. Wrapped in cloth. Finch could always get to it in a pinch. Made him feel perversely safer knowing it was there. In its gleaming scabbard.
"I'd rather get shot than use that gun," Finch said, too loud. Not sure if he meant it.
Gustat and Blakely, joined at the hip, looked up, glared. Both had a flushed look. Like they'd been drinking.
"Shut up, Finch," Blakely said.
"Yeah, shut up," Gustat echoed. Fiercely.
This caused Dapple to bring a case file so close to his eyes it hid his face. Dapple was the worst of them. He'd been an artist once. Landscape painter. Watercolors. Popular with the tourists. No market for that now. No landscapes to speak of that you could spend hours painting without taking a bullet for your troubles. Sure to become a druggie, or a creature of the gray caps in his cringing way. At least Gustat and Blakely, even though they annoyed Finch, still had their wits about them.
Almost as if to cover for Finch, Wyte asked, "So, Finchy, just how bad was it?" "Finchy" sounded closer to his real last name, so Wyte often called him that. To avoid slipping up.
Finch turned toward Wyte. Hadn't wanted to. No telling what he looked like.
Wyte: a tall man, late forties, with a handsome face, powerful shoulders and chest. Tattered olive suit. Eyes gray. A spark of green colonizing the brown of each pupil. Right temple: a purple birthmark that hadn't been there yesterday. Smelled of cigarette smoke to cover the stench of mushrooms. Even though cigs were hard to come by. Once, he could have entered a crowded bar and all the women would have found a way to stare at him.
"A double," Finch said. "In an abandoned apartment. One gray cap. One male human." Then told Wyte the rest.
"Dancing lessons gone terribly wrong," Wyte said. His grin only manifested on the left side of his mouth.
Skinner, next to Wyte, hazarded a snicker. But Skinner snickered at everything. Finch didn't find it funny. He was still seeing the bodies. Skinner expressed too much zeal pursuing cases that involved the rebels. Why hadn't Skinner become a Partial?
"This is nothing good, Wyte." Good equaled will go away quickly. This could linger.
Wyte, as if realizing his mistake: "Do you want me to take the memory bulbs?"
"No thanks."
Who knew what a memory bulb would do to Wyte in his state? Finch didn't want to find out. The late Richard Dorn had sat at his desk for nine months after the gray caps had forced him to eat a memory bulb despite his wasting disease. Dead. Turning into a tower of emerald mold. The desk sat in a corner now, abandoned, a smudge on the seat of the chair.
Worse for suspects kept in the holding cell. Bring in a thief, do the paperwork, then the gray caps decided. Attempted murder? Might be disappeared by morning. Or sent to the camps. Or let off with a fine. The guy Blakely had brought in the other day was still there. Slumped in a corner. Clearly thought his life was over.
Never bring anyone in unless you have to. Unless you're certain.
"Are we in trouble on this one?" Wyte asked. Black patch on his neck, slowly moving. Nails a faint green. A whiff of something toxic.
Not the same kind of trouble.
Finch shrugged. "Who knows?" A routine call could turn into disaster. A disaster could go away overnight.
Wyte leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. Red stains on the shirt's underarms.
Finch had known Wyte for more than twenty years. They'd fought in the wars together. Known the same people before the Rising. Played darts at the pub. Had drinks. Sudden gut-punching vision: of his girlfriend back then, a slender brunette who'd worked as a nurse. Laughing at some joke Wyte had made one night, the days of Comedian Wyte now long past except for the occasional flare-up that just made it worse.
Some cosmic mistake or cruelty, to work cases together when Finch had once worked for Wyte as a courier for Hoegbotton. Each a reminder to the other of better times. Since then, Wyte's wife Emily had left him. He'd taken up in a crappy apartment just north of the station. Never saw his two daughters. They'd been smuggled out to relatives in Stockton before the Rising. Finch couldn't work out how old they might be now.
Someday Wyte will be a silhouette on the horizon. Someone familiar made distant.
And Wyte sensed it.
"You can help with the fieldwork going forward, Wyte," Finch said. If you don't become the fieldwork.
"No problem. Be happy to."
"I'll put my notes in order," Finch said, "and after I use the memory bulbs, we'll start in on it. Tomorrow."
Wyte wasn't listening anymore. Gaze far away. Disengaged. Apocalyptic thoughts? Or maybe he was just registering the inside of the building. They all conducted an unspoken war against the station. It tried to make them forget its strangeness. They tried not to forget.
Finch turned back to his desk and started sorting through the mess. Hadn't organized it in a week. Hadn't had the energy.
Mirror. Pills to protect against infection. Spore mask for purified breathing. Writing pad. Pencils. Telephone. Broken telephone. Folders on open crimes. Folders on closed crimes. Paper clips across the bottom of drawers. A list he'd made of complaints from people who had called him, thinking he could help. Usually he couldn't.
Maybe once, early on, he had convinced himself he could do some good, sometimes even imagined he was a mole, getting close so he could strike a blow. Imagined he was in it to defend Ambergris from the enemies that surrounded it. Imagined he was protecting ordinary citizens.
But the truth was he'd been tired, had stopped caring. Broken down from too much fighting, too many things connected to his past. And when that spark, that impulse, had returned, it was too late: he was trapped.
"I'm not a detective."