*
“Paraguayan,” Lares says, showing him the document, a little blue book with a golden seal, still warm from the printer he’d exhumed from under the laundry. “Still technically a country. Kind of a historical survival. They don’t use digital records, so there’s no good way to check it out. It’ll get you on a plane, but don’t try to bring any contraband, not with this passport.”
“Contraband means drugs,” the ghost says. “Weapons, anything illegal.”
Lares’ laptop starts pinging. He looks at it. “Movement sensors. It’s probably just someone lost. Or a drunk. Drunks. A lot of drunks. No, most are too small. Oh shit.”
A little bug drone skitters in through the door, stops, seems to be looking at them. It goes click, click, click, which is its sonar, like a bat.
Kern rises, trying to think of a plan, but a courteous voice says, “Please stay where you are,” in Juarez-inflected Spanish.
A stranger comes in. He looks like anyone. Like a construction worker trying to dress respectably, like maybe later he’s going off to church. An air of competence about him. He holds a gun, not the hand cannons the gangsters favor but a little silver one.
“You have some of our property,” he says gravely.
The room is cramped and the man is six feet away but it might as well be miles and though it’s better to die fighting Kern can’t bring himself to make a move. Strange to have lost everything in the space of a moment. He slumps, tries to look defeated, awaits a chance.
“It’s lost,” says Lares, putting his keyboard aside, giving the man his full attention. His concentration is intense, his eyes bright. “So there’s nothing for you here.”
“Are you certain?” asks the man.
Lares nods gravely. “Sit down,” he says to Kern. “Don’t make our guest nervous,” and his earnestness is such that Kern sweeps what’s probably underwear off a stack of cardboard boxes and sits.
“You don’t have to sit up so straight,” Lares says to him. “You’re not in church.”
“You both have to come with me,” the man says.
“But you’re going to kill us if we do, aren’t you?” asks Lares, somehow like a schoolboy. “And if we don’t you’ll kill us anyway.”
The man regards him.
“I just want to know,” says Lares, as though clarifying this point is of the utmost importance. “I need to know where we stand.”
The man’s gun is trained on Lares’ heart. He’s almost smiling. Kern regrets sitting—the bullet would be better—a flash and it’s done. The ghost says nothing.
“I have to cuff you,” says the man.
“Of course,” says Lares, offering his wrists gamely, but he looks grey, seems to be sweating, is struggling to keep his voice steady. “An excellent idea. You know, there’s something I’ve always meant to say at a time like this.” He giggles hoarsely.
The man ignores him, fishing plastic cuffs out of his pocket.
“Look at me,” says Lares.
The man does.
Like an actor enunciating, Lares says, “And then without warning we came to the end.”
There’s a deep throbbing hum from the wall behind Kern and his hair stands on end and it’s suddenly very hot, so hot he’s sweating, and he smells smoke and burned meat, and there’s a glugging sound that makes him remember a two-gallon jug of water, its cap off, knocked over in the desert, the water blackening the sand.
“Watch what you’re kneeling in,” says Lares because Kern is kneeling by the man who has laid himself out on the floor, and a pool of blood, black in the half-light, is spreading, and it’s already too late for his shoes. At first he thinks the man is cut, then sees he’s in two pieces, bisected cleanly just under his collarbones, the flesh at the partition burned ruby, the ruby still spreading. “I thought it would cauterize instantly,” Lares is saying, “and be clean, but there are the arteries. Of course there are the arteries. They’re just tubes. There’s nothing there to cauterize.”
“Talk to him,” says the ghost.
“What?”
“It takes twenty seconds for the brain to finish up.”
Kern puts his hand on the man’s cheek. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s okay. You’re going to die, but it’s okay. Everything’s over now.”
The man’s eyes seem to track him. Slight twitching of the lips. Then his eyes fix on nothing, and his pupils get wide, wider, are windows onto night.
The ghost says, “I’ll have his death with me forever.”
“I didn’t think it would really work,” Lares babbles. “I mean, it works in the movies but in real life anything this complicated fails catastrophically in the moment of truth, but it did work, and now he’s dead and we’re going to live. They were decommissioning a car factory in Yokohama and I found the auction for the laser they used to cut the engine blocks. Customs labeled it ‘industrial robotics, miscellaneous.’” Kern looks up, sees a slit burned into the far wall, still smoking, the concrete glowing, dark space behind it—there’s a much wider burn line at shoulder level opposite—involuntarily, he hunkers down.
“Voice-activated,” Lares says. “A key phrase. I thought it was clever. I’ve wanted to say it for years. Sometimes I had to shout it into my pillow. And when his gun is in my face it finally occurs to me that it might not recognize my voice under stress.”
Kern realizes he still has the passport in his hand. Lares is looking at him oddly. “Are you wearing an earpiece?” he asks.
“I found it,” Kern says.
Lares stares at him, shrugs, grabs a bag.
“What about your stuff?” Kern asks.
“Fuck it!” Lares says cheerfully, shoving his laptop into the bag, grabbing his wallet and phone, heading for the door. “It’s time to leave. There are a lot of places to hide, and I can work on the game from anywhere. You coming?”
Kern rises, feeling something is still owed the dead man, unsure what.
One of the screens flickers, now shows a sword submerged in a shallow pool, the blade pitted and rusting, and he remembers asking Lares how you play the game, how he’d said it wasn’t something you play, it was more like it was art, a “closed semantic universe,” which he’d never really understood, but as far as he could tell it meant that it was made of intertwining stories, accumulating endlessly, like dust in an old room, and the sword would have its place in the order of things. At the time Kern had thought it pointless, though he’d respected Lares’ clarity of vision, but now he sees the appeal of a world small enough to understand.
Lares stops in the doorway, says, “They’ll be watching the main exit. Do you know the tunnels well enough to find another way out?”
“Yeah.”
“Then do it. The next one is coming in I’m guessing two minutes.”
24