Skin Deep (Legion 2)

“To crash the company,” I said, walking back to Zen, passing a flummoxed Audrey. “So I could afford to buy it. Yol was supposed to do that part, but only got halfway done. I had to have Wilson do the rest, calling the various Exeltec investors and buying them out.” I proffered my hand to Zen. She gave me my phone.

“So . . .” Dion said.

“So I now own a sixty percent stake in the company,” I said, checking the text from Wilson. “And have voted myself president. That makes me Zen’s boss.”

“Sir,” she said. She was doing a good job of regaining her composure, but I could see a wildness in the way her hands still trembled, the way she stood with her expression too stiff.

“Wait,” Dion said. “You just defeated an assassin with a hostile takeover?”

“I use the cards dealt to me. Probably wasn’t particularly hostile, though—I suspect that everyone involved was all too eager to jump ship.”

“You realize, of course,” Zen said smoothly, “that I was never actually going to shoot you. I was just supposed to make you worried so you’d share information.”

“Of course.” That would be the official line, to protect her and Exeltec from attempted murder charges. My buyout agreement would include provisions to prevent me from taking action against them.

I pocketed my phone, took my gun back from Zen, and nodded to Audrey. “Let’s go collect that body.”

21

We found Mrs. Maheras in the garden still. She knelt there, planting, nurturing, tending.

I walked up, and from the way she glanced at me, I suspected she realized that her secret was out. Still, I knelt down beside her, then handed over a carton of half-grown flowers when she motioned toward them.

Sirens sounded in the distance.

“Was that necessary?” she asked, not looking up.

“Sorry,” I said. “But yes.” I’d sent a text to Yol, knowing the feds would get it first. Behind me, Audrey, Tobias, Ivy, and a downcast J.C. stepped up to us. They cast shadows, to my eyes, in the fading light, and blocked my view of Dion standing just behind. We’d found them all walking along the road, miles from Zen’s holding place, trying to reach me.

I was tired. Man, was I tired. Sometimes, in the heat of it all, you can forget. But when the tension ends, it comes crashing down.

“I should have seen it,” Ivy said again, arms folded. “I should have. Most Orthodox branches are pointedly against cremation. They see it as desecration of the body, which is to await resurrection.”

We had been so focused on the information in Panos’s cells that we didn’t stop to think there might be other reasons entirely that someone would want to take the corpse. Reasons so powerful that it would convince an otherwise law-abiding woman and her priest to pull a heist.

In a way, I was very impressed. “You were a cleaning lady when you were younger,” I said. “I should have asked Dion more about your life, your job. He mentioned hard labor, a life spent supporting him and his brother. I didn’t ask what you’d done.”

She continued planting flowers upon her son’s grave, hidden in the garden.

“You imitated the cleaning lady who worked at the morgue,” I said. “You paid her off, I assume, and went in her place—after having the priest place tape on the door. It really was him, not an impostor. Together, you went to extremes to protect your son’s corpse from cremation.”

“What gave me away?” Mrs. Maheras asked as the sirens drew closer.

“You followed the real cleaning lady’s patterns exactly,” I said. “Too exactly. You cleaned the bathroom, then signed your name on the sheet hanging on the door, to prove it had been done.”

“I practiced Lilia’s signature exactly!” Mrs. Maheras said, looking at me for the first time.

“Yes,” I said, holding up one of the slips of paper with scriptures on them that she put in her son’s pockets. “But you wrote the cleaning time on that sheet as well, and you didn’t practice imitating Lilia’s numbers.”

“You have a very distinctive zero,” Audrey explained, looking supremely smug. Cryptography hadn’t cracked this case after all. It had just required some good, old-fashioned handwriting analysis.

Mrs. Maheras sighed, then placed her spade into the dirt and bowed her head, offering a silent prayer. I bowed my head as well, as did Ivy and J.C. Tobias refrained.

“So you’ll take him again,” Mrs. Maheras whispered, once she had finished. She looked at the ground before her, now planted with flowers and tomatoes.

“Yes,” I said, climbing to my feet and dusting off my knees. “But at the very least, you’re unlikely to be in too much trouble for what you did. The government doesn’t recognize a body as property, so what you did wasn’t actually theft.”

“A cold comfort,” she muttered. “They’ll still take him, and they’ll burn him.”

“True,” I said idly. “Of course, who knows what secrets your son had hidden in his body? He’d been splicing secret information into his very DNA, and he might have hidden all kinds of things in there. The right implication at the right time might prod the government into a very, very long search.”

She looked up at me.

“Scientists disagree on how many cells there are in the human body,” I explained. “Somewhere in the trillions, easily. Perhaps many more than that. Could take decades upon decades to search them all, something I doubt the government will want to do. However, if they think there might be something important, they could likely set the body into storage just in case they need to do a thorough search at some point.

“It wouldn’t be a proper burial, as you want—but it also wouldn’t be cremation. I believe the church does make provisions for people donating organs to help others? Perhaps it’s best to just consider it in that light.”

Mrs. Maheras seemed thoughtful. I left her then, and Dion stepped forward to comfort her. My suggestions did seem to have made a difference, which baffled me. I’d have rather seen a family member cremated than spend forever being frozen. However, as I reached the building and looked back, I found that Mrs. Maheras seemed to have perked up visibly.

“You were right,” I told Ivy.

“Have I ever not been right?”

“I don’t know about that,” J.C. said. “But you do make some really bad relationship choices sometimes.”

We all looked at him, and he blushed immediately.

“I was talking about her dumping me,” he protested. “Not picking me in the first place!”

I smiled, leading the way into the kitchen. I was just glad to have them back. I walked down the little hallway lined with pictures, toward the front door. I’d want to meet the feds when they arrived.

Then I stopped. “There’s a bare patch on the wall. It looks so odd. Every surface, desk, and wall in this place is covered with kitsch. Except here.” I pointed at the pictures of the family, then two pictures of saints. Two spots, empty save for little nails. Ivy had said that Mrs. Maheras had probably taken down the picture of Panos’s patron saint in preparation for his funeral.

“Ivy,” I said, “would you say it’s safe to assume that Panos knew if he died, this picture would be removed and placed with his corpse?”

We looked at each other. Then I reached up and pulled on the nail. It resisted in an odd fashion. I yanked harder, and the nail came out—but had a knob and string tied around the back end.

Behind the wall, something clicked.

I looked at the aspects, suddenly worried, until the wall’s nearby light switch—plate behind it and all—rotated forward like a hidden cup holder in a car’s dashboard. The portion that had been hidden inside the wall had LED lights blinking on the sides.

“Well I’ll be damned,” J.C. said. “The kid was right.”

“Language,” Ivy mumbled, looking closely at the contraption.

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“What happened to the future curses?” Audrey said. “I kind of liked those.”

“I realized something,” J.C. said. “I can’t be an Interdimensional Time Ranger. Because if I am, that means all of you are too. And that’s just a little too silly for me to accept.”

I reached into the holder that had come out and extracted a thumb drive. Written on it, with a label maker, were a few words.

“1 Kings 19:11–12,” I read.

“And He said,” Ivy quoted in a quiet voice, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”

I looked at my aspects as a fist pounded on the door. Then I pocketed the thumb drive and pushed the holder back into the wall before going to meet with the feds.

Epilogue

Four days later, I stood alone in the White Room. Tobias had covered over the hole in the ceiling, as he’d promised. The place was refreshingly blank.

Was this what I would be, without my aspects? Blank? I’d certainly felt that way while being held by Zen. I’d barely been able to do anything to save myself. No plans, no escaping. Just some stalling. Ivy had sometimes wondered if I was growing good enough on my own that I eventually wouldn’t need her or the others any longer.

From what had happened to me when I’d lost them, I figured that day—if it ever came—was a long, long way off.

The door cracked open. Audrey slipped in, wearing a blue one-piece swimsuit. She trotted up to me and delivered a sheet of paper. “Have to go catch a pool party. But I did finish solving this. Wasn’t too hard, once we had the key.”

On the thumb drive, we’d found two things. The first was the anticipated key to unlocking the data on Panos’s body. The body had been seized by the government, and I’d convinced them to put it on ice for the foreseeable future. After all, there might be very, very important data on it, and someday the key might turn up.