With Max driving smooth as a dream, it was easy to drift into semi-consciousness, floating backward across the stream of time to the haunted days of my youth. The memories were newfound, released from amnesiac captivity in the months since retiring. Back then, I was one of the countless abandoned children, scratching for survival in the unforgiving streets of Chicago, feral as a wildcat, driven purely by my immediate needs. Deacon found me in that state, pulled me into the HSSC's Youth Program, where I found instant companionship with an equally damaged girl named Natalie. And from that moment onward, everything changed. Not for the better, but on the darkest path a person could travel. Decades of undercover work, betrayals, assassinations, and torture, expertly manipulated and dominated by Natalie at all turns. And in the end, I sobbed in front of a brilliant fugitive, begging for him to take the pain away. Take the memories away.
Which was precisely what he did.
"We have arrived, Mr. Trubble."
I exited the wheeler and walked across the busted sidewalk into the Gardens, passing through a rusted iron gate marked Kensington Way. My shoes clomped on the cobbled path, creating ghostly echoes across the fog-enshrouded swath of overgrown weeds, vines, and tangled brush. Pitted statues of once-important people materialized like ghosts; faces cracked, limbs crumbling. The sunlight barely made an impact through the misty rain and cloud cover, casting illumination like a bad dream.
I paused, half-turning. "You can come on out, Poddar."
He stepped from behind a weeping willow tree, pistol in hand, aimed at me. His dark eyes smoldered with anger I'd never seen before. "How did you know?"
"Can't wear aftershave if you're gonna be tailing folks. Now, why don't you lose the gun and tell me what this is all about?"
He stepped closer, looking at me as if I was a stranger. "Is it true, Mick?"
"That's a pretty vague question."
He jabbed the gun in my direction. "Is it true? Are you HSSC?"
"You already know I was. And you should know that I'm not anymore. What's changed?"
His eyes darted around, searching the fog. "You tell me. I've been doing some investigating — about this place, this so-called Haven. I've always known something was off about it. It's all a façade, a city of lies. I've been gathering evidence, trying to get a handle on what's really going on. And you know what I found out?"
"That you don't know what the hell you're doing?"
He glared. "No. That everything always leads to you."
My mouth tightened. "All right, Poddar. I'm sick of the gun. You wanna talk, let's talk. I'm not the enemy here."
He stepped closer; pistol still aimed at my face. "You sure about that, Mick? Because I don't think you have a clue who the enemy is."
My hand darted out, sweeping his gun aside. My next move was to disarm him, but that didn't work out the way I envisioned. Rotating in the direction of the motion, Poddar pivoted, kicked my legs out, and somehow pinned me to the ground with one arm wrenched behind my back. It wasn't exactly my most triumphant moment. To add insult to injury, I fell into one helluva coughing fit, hacking and choking like a lung was gonna come up.
Poddar twisted harder. "Think I'm gonna fall for that old trick? Think again."
Finally getting my cough under control, I craned my neck to give him a heated stare, the only weapon I had at the moment. "What the hell, Poddar? You're getting my rags all dirty. This ain't you, man. Take a breath and think for a minute. You think I'm some kind of criminal mastermind? Do you have any idea how crazy you sound right now?"
"Not you," he hissed. "It's your partner that's pulling all the strings. Admit it!"
"My partner?" My teeth gritted from the pain of having my arm nearly pulled from the socket. "Ben the Bear? He's just a gopher — does work for me. You're higher than a zeppelin if you think he's running things."
"Not him. Your other partner. The hidden one. Hunter Valentino."
"Hunter? He's the exact opposite of my partner. I told him I'd kill him the last time we were face-to-face. Gimme a break here, Poddar. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, remember?"
He eased up on the arm, taking his body weight off it. I showed my gratitude by deciding not to shoot him in the face. Turning over, I sat up, flexed my sore shoulder, and tried to brush mud and dead leaves from my flogger.
"Great. Just great, Poddar — look at what you did. If I didn't consider you a friend, I'd put you in the ground for principle's sake. Why didn't you just pay me a visit if you had questions? We could have been sitting in the Gaiden drinking bourbon right now instead of wrestling in the mud like little kids."
"I wasn't in the mud," he pointed out. "And I didn't come to see you because I don't know if I can trust you anymore." He took another paranoid look around. "Ever since I've narrowed things down to Hunter, he's been trying to kill me."
I coughed into my crimson-stained hankie. "I'm sure he was. That's what psychotic synoids do if they perceive a threat: eliminate it."
He offered me a hand, helping me to my feet. "What's with the cough?"
"Something new I'm trying out. Apparently, multiple sessions of accelerated healing enzymes don't do the organs any favors."
He gave me a look of cautious empathy. "How much damage?"
"Not enough to kill me. Not quickly, anyway. The doc said I wouldn't live through another session of healing accelerants. Never should have trusted Hunter when he kept getting me to drink the stuff. The cure was worse than the problem."
"The problem was dying, last time I checked. If you didn't have the nanomachines in your system, you'd have died when your girlfriend filled you with lead."
"Ex-girlfriend. Doesn’t matter, though — it's Hunter's fault. Can't trust a synoid, especially an independent assassin model with malfunctioning protocols."
Why do you keep calling him a synoid, Mick?"
"Why wouldn't I? That's what he is, Poddar."
"That's not what I heard at all."
"Izzat right? Well, why doncha enlighten me, seeing how you're such a slick investigator and all."
He gave me a cross glance before answering. "I haven't found too many eyewitnesses. The way I hear it, that's because he kills everyone who sees his face. But I've run down a few people that claim to have seen him."
I lit a gasper and exhaled smoke into the drizzle. "Yeah?"
"Yes. Even then, they can't say much. Only glimpses. His face stays shadowed or masked with a scarf covering it. But they all say his eyes are the scary part. Cold and piercing, pure ice."
"Sounds like you got nothing, Poddar. Cold eyes? That's half the population of New Haven."
"But you've seen him."
"So have you, Poddar."
Confusion flickered across his face. "What? When?"
"The whole fiasco with Selene's leg. We went to his house, remember?"
"Never saw him. You claimed you talked to him, but you were all out of sorts. I thought you were on drugs, honestly."
"C'mon, Poddar. I might smoke and drink more than the average sap, but I don't fool with psychedelics. It was the aftereffects of the super healing juice Hunter stashed in some absinthe. Never mind that — you definitely saw him in Beck's mansion, right before the New Man showed up."
Poddar's incredulous stare would have been hilarious under normal circumstances. "What the hell are you talking about? Hunter wasn't there, Mick. It was just you, me, and Ms. Kilby with Beck."
I frowned. "What game are you playing, Poddar? He was right there. Don't tell me you forgot about how he slapped Beck around to get answers. That shocked all of us, remember?"