"Well, then, come on and help me find the Maze! That's the way down to Nine, and Nine's where the good music's supposed to be, the 'unknown' lifts. And Joey himself…"
Shade gave him an odd look, almost nervous. "Oh, I don't mind hanging around up here," she said. "Besides, they say that once you leave Eight for Nine, you can't come back."
That surprised him. "Who says?"
"Other people up here." Shade glanced around her, although those "other people" were not much in evidence right now. "All the time, in the Upper Circles, you see people from as far down as Eight wandering around. Slumming… helping the newbies, or torturing them with news of the lifts you can get down lower."
Nick nodded. He'd seen enough of this as he worked his way down. One and Two were pafticularly bad in this regard-a lot of the people from the circles between Three and Six seemed to enjoy coming up there and making the new Banies nuts. "But have you noticed," she said, "that you never see anyone from Nine?"
Nick nodded. This might have been why rumors about Nine were very few and far between. It left another question, of course: If nobody from there comes back to tell us what's happening, then how are there any rumors at all? But rumors didn't need reality to get started. That was one of the things this level was about, as he had been discovering.
"You hear anything else about how to get down there?" Nick said to Shade.
She shook her head. "Nothing that's done me any good," she said. "But I wish you luck."
"Yeah," Nick said, "thanks. Look, I'll see you on the way out, maybe?"
"Maybe you will."
She turned away.
"Hey, Shade-"
She glanced back at him.
"Thanks for helping, the other day."
"I didn't help," she said. "Not really." That faint air of sorrow seemed to come down on her again.
Shade headed for the doors, which swung back to let her out into the darkness. Nick watched her go, thinking, Poor kid, I wonder what her problem is? But then, if he asked her, he had the awful feeling he'd find out… and right now, he had enough problems of his own. Besides, tonight was about enjoyment… because he wasn't going to be able to afford much more of it.
Nick turned and made for the door at the back, the entry to the Stairwell of Doom, to pick a stair and see where it took him.
In the doorway a dark shape watched him for a few moments, then shrugged and turned away.
Chapter 6
That evening Charlie was sitting once more in his workspace, with piles of files around him, in the blackest mood he'd been in for days. Part of it was because this session had been delayed. His sandwich with his father, last night, had segued into one of the more ferocious games of cutthroat "timed chess" they'd ever had, and his father had won-an unusual outcome. Charlie had chalked it up to the fact that he was slightly distracted by his evening out with Mark. Now, though, he was in the midst of analyzing the information that Mark had helped him bring back… and that was accounting for the rest of his dark mood.
Charlie sat leaning back on the bottom-most bench in his workspace, looking into the Pit. It was full of virtual information and exhibits again, so much so that he'd had to move the worktable out of the middle of it. Now the floor of the Pit was occupied by six different sets of information, floating in the air… and what bothered Charlie the most was the similarities between four of them.
They had all been strangulations, of course. That was bad enough. But in four of those suicides-the "double" suicide of just a few days ago, and the New York and Fort Collins ones-the toxicology reports had turned up something that would have immediately struck the authorities as suspicious, Charlie thought… if they had bothered comparing notes. But they hadn't.
He got up, strolled over to the New York suicide. This had been Renee Milford. Charlie had been through her autopsy, but he had no heart for looking at those pictures of her. He had found one that he preferred in one of the local New York virtual environments dedicated to news and current events-a family "virtshot" of Renee sitting at the beach in a one-piece bathing suit, with the tall brick water tower of Jones Beach State Park away behind her in the distance. She was blond, and pretty, and eighteen. Her smile was sunny, she had a slight sunburn on the tops of her shoulders, she was laughing at the camera, and she looked as if she didn't have a worry in the world. The picture had been taken in 2023, the year before she died.
Charlie looked down at the image of Renee sitting there, her hair a little tousled by the wind, blown sand glittering in the air. Next to her, hanging in the air like some kind of malevolent, multicolored, multilegged bug, was the image of the molecule the city toxicologist's analysis had found in her blood. It was scorbutal cohydrobromate.
The hydrobromates were not in the pharmacopeia, either the government's informal "N. P." or the official "U. S. P." list. They had no legitimate medical use. They were what an earlier generation had referred to as a "designer drug," a chemical built to get people high… and sometimes intended to perform other functions as well. In the case of the hydrobromates, the high was usually enough. But scorbutal hydrobromate, when it started to be produced in the 2010s, soon acquired a tarnished reputa- tion, even for a recreational drug. It was a mind-dulling, inhibition-loosening drug, and was used by crooks who wanted their victims to be less than clear about what was happening to them. One form of it, delivered as an aerosol spray, had briefly been used on night trains in Europe in a real-life scenario of the old urban myth about people being "gassed" unconscious so they could be robbed in their sleeping compartments. The gangs who did this had been caught and put away, but not before the drug's reputation spread, and more of it started to be made all over the place, in Europe and then in North America. "Scobro" was popular, for it was cheap and relatively easy to make-it could be thrown together out of various readily available household chemicals and a well-known remedy for upset stomachs-and best of all, from the criminals' point of view, it tended to metabolize quickly. It was very short-acting. Having left the brain muddled and dozy, its molecule then came apart into its component bromides in the bloodstream itself, often before the liver even had a chance to start detoxifying it.
Charlie scowled at the molecular model hovering gently in the air by the image of Renee Milford, who appeared to have strangled herself in her parents' garage. The toxicologist in Queens-who knew what she had been thinking of, while she was working on this case, or what she might have suspected? But she had run a much more thorough and expensive blood series on Renee than had strictly been required… and the scorbutal had turned up in it. Luck, Charlie thought, or just good timing. The drug deconstructed itself even more quickly in the rapidly acidifying bloodstream of someone who was dying or dead than it did in the blood of a live person, and in a matter of minutes there might have been none of it left at all.
He sighed and moved on to the next set of "exhibits," the one for Malcolm Dwyer, who had been one of the two kids to die here in the D. C. area a few days ago. Malcolm had had a big dose of the drug, so much that even after the delay in finding his and Jeannine Metz's bodies, there had still been significant amounts of it in his bloodstream-enough, at least, to identify it by the bromide and bromate fractions pooled in the parts of his body already beginning to experience rigor. The coroner in Arlington had found it and recognized it immediately for what it was.
The problem was that, by itself, finding sco-bro in someone's bloodstream didn't mean that much. Yes, the drug was illegal, like almost all the other designer drugs. But lots of people took it anyway. And in a case like this, the nature of the crime scene would itself tend to minimize the role of any drug. After all, no drug could make you commit suicide… could it?