Simone’s apartment had been huge once, with high ceilings and decorative wooden beams that gave it a slightly rustic feel. She had turned the front part into her offices—an old-fashioned front door with Simone Pierce Investigations carefully lettered across the frosted-glass window. Inside was a waiting room, with chairs and a desk for a receptionist (if she could ever afford one) and behind that a table and sofa. From there, through another, more tightly locked, door was a hallway leading to her office, the kitchen, and a bathroom. Her bedroom was past her office and had its own bathroom. No one was waiting for her, so she locked the front door for the night, shut the light, and went into her office.
Simone lived in the office, and it showed. What money she made was spent here. She had a relatively up-to-date touchdesk, the kind that looked like a long curve of black glass that curled up into a wave on one side, ending in a flat screen. She placed her palm on the desk to turn it on, the black glass becoming a series of images. She shrugged off her coat and hat, put them on the coatrack by the door, and sat down at the desk. She slid the small inbox symbol up to the flat screen and tapped it once so it expanded. She had six new messages, but nothing pressing. If she were like Caroline, she’d have an expensive wristpiece connected to her phone and her home office through a high-security cloud, and she could check all her messages from one place, but when she was out, she was usually working, and preferred as few distractions as possible. Her phone and office were cloud-connected, so she could always have messages that came through her touchdesk dictated to her by her phone. She just didn’t want a screen on her wrist. It affected her aim.
She lifted her left leg to take her gun out of its ankle holster and put it on the desk. The images under the gun twitched, realizing something was covering them, and reorganized themselves to another part of the desktop where they could be seen clearly.
Simone turned her earpiece back on while walking to the kitchen. It was only nine thirty. She called Ms. St. Michel’s personal line.
“Hello?” Ms. St. Michel answered. She had an accent Simone couldn’t place—some sort of European, maybe Scandinavian.
“Ms. St. Michel? It’s Simone Pierce.”
“Ah, yes, Ms. Pierce.” She hesitated on the other end of the line. Simone switched on the light in the kitchen and turned on the coffeepot. “Do you have something to tell me?” Ms. St. Michel’s voice wavered ever so slightly. If Simone hadn’t known better, she might have thought it was part of her accent.
“Can I ask you first when your husband came home tonight?”
“Perhaps seven thirty, maybe a little later. Why do you ask?”
“Just checking a hunch. Ms. St. Michel—”
“If you are going to be the one to tell me my husband is cheating on me, you may as well call me Linnea. Being called Ms. St. Michel and then being told Mr. St. Michel is unfaithful makes it all seem like we’re just actors in a play. This is my life.”
“Linnea, then,” Simone said, licking the bitterness off her lips. She hated it when clients got personal. “I took some photos tonight of your husband with another woman, but I don’t think it’s an affair. I would appreciate it if you would look at some photos of the woman in question and tell me if you recognize her. May I send them to you?”
“No. Henry is home, and I don’t want him to walk in on me and find me staring at photos of him that should not exist. I will come to you. Tell him I need some air.”
Simone looked out the window. The only light now was coming from the city’s buildings and algae generators, but she could make out some heavy clouds on the horizon.
“Linnea, it’s going to storm soon. Maybe we should wait until tomorrow?”
“I could never sleep. I will come over now. That is okay, yes?”
“Yes… I just don’t want you to drown on your way.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Linnea said, her voice a sigh. “I will be there soon.”
“Sure thing.”
Linnea hung up, and Simone shook her head as she poured herself a cup of coffee, took it with her to the waiting room. She unlocked the door again, and turned the light back on.
Simone went back to her desk to read her messages, sometimes glancing out the window at the approaching storm. Lightning flashed in the distance, and she could hear the wind on the windows. Walking around New York, even without the high waves and strong winds of a storm, was dangerous enough. The city was permanently slippery and poorly maintained, and try as they might, shoe companies couldn’t make your soles completely slip-proof. Rip currents had taken up residence around all the buildings, a complex map of tides and undertow; struggling against them would drown you, but relaxing and letting them carry you would end with you miles out to sea, far from the city, if your head wasn’t bashed into some debris on the way.
But during a storm, being outside went from merely deadly to suicidal. One wave could throw you against the side of a building and you’d fall off whatever narrow bridge you were on and into the water, unconscious. The next day, the recycling boats would find your body while dragging the water, and deliver it to the recycling center, where they’d look for your IRID or some other identification. If you were lucky, and your IRID hadn’t floated off your body (or been taken along with your wallet by a particularly ambitious recycling boat worker), then notifications to your family would be made. But if you had no identification like most drowned people, and your fingertips, lips, and eyelids were too damaged from water and hungry fish to get a fingerprint or a facial scan, they took your photo, pinned it on their bulletin board, and posted it online. Your body would be kept at the recycling center, and if no one claimed you in two weeks, whatever nutrients could be harvested from your corpse were sucked out and the rest of you burned, the ashes poured back into the ocean. Simone tried to check the website regularly, just to make sure no one she knew was on it. On average, there were between a dozen and twenty new faces every week.
Simone’s messages weren’t anything interesting aside from an amusing bit of gossip from Danny about one of New York’s elite coming in for a psychic reading to ask if his mistress was cheating on him. About half an hour and two cups of coffee later, there was a gentle rap at the door, and Simone walked out to the waiting room to open it. Linnea stood in the hall.
She was an attractive woman, somewhere in her fifties, the kind who aged gracefully, though whether that was natural or not, Simone couldn’t tell. Her being well dressed wasn’t a surprise, but still the richness of her clothes took Simone aback. She wore a fur-collared, brown-bronze trench coat that went down to her ankles, and under that a perfectly tailored golden sheath of a dress that ended just below her knees. That meant she’d had a ride over; dresses—anything that tangled your legs if you slipped—were idiotic in the city. That’s why women were never fined for wearing pants, even though it was technically a federal offense.
Linnea took off her coat and handed it to Simone but left on her hat, a small bronze oval perched on her chocolate hair, from which hung a long veil, down to her shoulders. And it was all made of DrySkin. Even the veil, Simone was willing to bet, had thin layers of the stuff over the holes in the netting. It felt like nothing, stretched like spiderwebs, and breathed like air, but when water hit the fabric, it broke into a thousand droplets, never penetrating—just hanging there like diamonds until they dripped off or evaporated. It was the same stuff they used to waterproof electronics these days. Expensive. Even Caroline didn’t have a complete wardrobe of it. Simone only had one coat made with the stuff. She went back to her office and carefully hung Linnea’s coat.