Chapter Text
It was messy work, killing gods. Shaw expected a certain amount of collateral damage. The night before she went after the one called the Machine, she checked her stocks of silver needles, black thread, salt, and kerosene. All satisfactory. She loaded the ritual ingredients into her duffel bag above an ever-useful layer of plastic tarp, zip ties, and duct tape. If the reports were accurate, the new god had at least two avatars. No doubt they would put up a fight.
By the time Shaw finished oiling and packing her semi-auto, it was past nine p.m., and her growling stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since lunch. She didn’t bother to check the mini-fridge. It held only a few bottles of beer, a cup of bitter coffee, and the congealing remains of weakly spiced curry from the day before. She had been cooped up in that shitty motel room for days, warded up to the eyeballs, waiting for the last god’s impression to fade.
It hadn’t been a tough extermination, another wealth god that starved as its company’s funds were scattered and drained, but its shadow lingered. The first night Shaw had dreamed of money: piles of it, cold and endless, stamped with strange silhouettes. Next came the nightmares: blindness, being buried alive, nothing too original. Control gave strict instructions to lay low until Wednesday morning. The technical kids in Research had calculated it exactly. By Wednesday at six a.m., the traces of her last engagement would fade to undetectable levels. But Shaw had been in the game long enough to judge the risks herself. And she couldn’t take another minute of sitting in that room, listening to radio news.
Just to be careful, she refreshed her body’s wards. Traced the tip of a needle over the old scars, the touch so light they barely bled. “No power finds me,” she muttered. “No power calls me. No power binds me. No power breaks me.”
They used to teach children that chant, in the bad old days following Independence. Not anymore. Now people thought they were safe.
Shaw knew better, but that wouldn’t keep her from getting some decent food. She slid her weapons under the bed, left a do-not-disturb sign on the door, and headed out.
It was a warm night for April, the air heavy with the promise of rain. Shaw walked a few blocks east, passing bars plastered with hissing neon and grimy Italian joints that tourists probably considered authentic. She stopped at a Vietnamese place and ordered a pork bánh mì. The kid behind the counter nodded, barely looking at her. Sometimes Shaw wondered if people’s reactions to her were entirely natural. All that time and energy exerted to make her invisible to gods—it might bleed over. Not that she minded.
She leaned against the wall and waited for her sandwich. At a nearby table, a couple pitchers of beer had loosened some businessmen’s tongues. They spoke loudly about what they termed the immigrant situation. “I’ve got this neighbor,” one said. “Straight from Chicago. The guy’s always going on about how shit was better back there. They had TV! They had churches! I’m like, this isn’t fucking Chicago, is it? This is the FSA, and if you don’t like it …”
Shaw tuned their voices out. For lack of anything more interesting to do, she examined the few other customers there. A youngish couple ate their sandwiches in tired silence. A slender woman in a leather jacket slurped up a bowl of pho. Either an artist or an engineer, Shaw decided. She had the look of someone who had decided to take pride in isolation.
Five minutes passed, and the kid handed over her bánh mì. Shaw took a bite. Crisp pickled radish, fresh cilantro, hot pepper: it was exactly what she needed on a night like this. She dropped a generous tip and left the restaurant, sandwich in hand. She didn’t want to waste any more time hearing the businessmen spew.
Almost ten o’clock, and the rhythms of the city kept changing. Traffic grew quieter. Lone pedestrians turned nervous, casting glances at shadows, or bold, hidden by the dark. Halfway back to the motel, Shaw was caught in a crowd of people emerging from a play. They milled around, slow and uncertain, as they readjusted to outside world. Shaw stuffed the last bite of bánh mì into her mouth and glanced at the marquee. Hitchcock’s Rear Window. A classic. Her lips twitched upward. She had a good idea what she’d find nearby.
Her eyes locked on a man with a messenger bag and an ill-fitting suit. He was dealing, all right. She sidled up to him, smiling and wide-eyed, and he even didn’t bother to hide the VHS tape in his hand. “Aren’t those things dangerous?” she asked.
“Nah, sweetheart.” He smirked. “If they could bring Grace Kelly to life, every sad sack around would have her on his arm.”
He had a point, though not a particularly original one. Everybody knew that the prohibition of film made more sense on the large scale than the small. Ape brains couldn’t help but believe in what they saw and heard. Get thousands of people watching the same movie or fixated on a simultaneous TV broadcast, and maybe they’d spawn a minor god. But someone playing a contraband tape in his apartment? Unlikely to end in a miracle.
Shaw wouldn’t usually waste her time on the video trade, but small-time crooks were easy to manipulate. She pulled a badge from her jeans pocket. It belonged to one of her covers, a cop called Nadia Syed. “You want to rephrase that?”
“Shit.” The man’s eyes flicked to the side. Debating his chances of escape, Shaw guessed. He made the smart choice and stayed put. “Look, I’m a loyal Free American. I got rent to pay. I just sell what the tourists buy.”
“Course you do. Can I see some ID?” With a grimace, the man handed over his residence license. Shaw glanced at it. “Anthony Lucas,” she read aloud. “I’ll be checking up on you, Tony. You better find a new line of business, and fast.”
“You’re not arresting me, then.” A calculating look came over his face. “So what do you want?”
“Information.” Shaw pitched her voice lower. Leaned closer, as if she were scared of eavesdroppers. That always helped to sell the act. “You heard anything about the Machine?”
“What machine?”
“Don’t play stupid. New god on the block. A dangerous one.”
Tony took a step back. “I’m no theist.”
“But you sell to them. Here.” She scrawled the number to one of her phones on a scrap of paper. “You think long and hard about the path you’re on. Then you call me.”
He grabbed the paper and half-jogged away, bag rising and falling against his thigh. No doubt he’d find a new place to sell his goods and pray to no one that the cops leave him alone. Shaw didn’t expect to hear from him. Fear was as good as love to most manifestations, and she had just given the Machine a new believer. If the mission went to shit in the following days, she’d have another path to follow to the god.
Control didn’t always approve of her contingency plans, but they got results. Back when Cole was still around, they had bounced ideas like that off each other all the time, worked out the risks versus the rewards. Now that he was gone, all she had was a rotating string of technical kids in her ear, agents who never left their chairs. Exactly what she’d asked for.
Shaw kept walking. A block west, a payphone rang as she passed by, but she paid it no attention. Predestination and coincidence could be easily confused. The hotel was in sight when she heard footsteps drawing close.
“Um, excuse me,” a voice behind her said.
As Shaw turned, her hand rose automatically to the gun tucked at her hip. A few yards away stood a teenager with an unfortunate nose piercing and a startled look in her eyes. “Yeah?”
“It’s, uh.” The girl held out her phone. “This lady says she wants to talk to you?”
“What?”
“I don’t know. She said ‘the short, angry woman making a ponytail look good.’”
Someone had made her. This was bad. But even if the girl were some god’s disciple, a phone didn’t pose much of a threat. Not to her, at least. Shaw took it, checked for explosive devices, and raised it to her ear. “Who the fuck is this?” She kept her eyes on the girl as she talked, daring her to make a move.
A faint chuckle came over the line. “I’m looking forward to meeting you, Sameen. But I’m just calling now to tell you one thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Golden leaf. Middle drawer. Twenty-three thirty-five eighteen.”
“What are you—” The line went dead. Shaw glared at the phone. Complications. There always had to be complications. She stuffed the phone in her pocket and ignored the way nose ring girl’s eyes widened. “Look,” Shaw told her. “I’m tired. You’re, what, sixteen? Go home. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t play with religion.”
“That’s—that’s my phone.”
“Not anymore.” She waited a few seconds. The girl dropped her gaze, stepped back, let her survival instinct take the reins.
Back at the hotel, Shaw drew a chalk circle over the thin, rust-colored carpet. She placed a pinch of salt at its northernmost point, ash at its southernmost, and drops of her own blood to the east and west. In the center she dropped the girl’s phone. “Containment,” she said. “Quarantine.” A wall rose in her mind, heavy and impregnable, concrete bristling with spikes and turrets. That settled, she called Wilson.
He wasn’t happy. No surprise there. He wanted nose ring girl detained, probably vivisected.
“The kid’s nothing,” Shaw said. “A pawn. You know that. It’s the caller that matters. And I can get to her.”
“You’ll do nothing until we say so. Stay put. You want a fucking pizza, we’ll send you one with extra toppings.”
“Sounds good. No pineapple.”
She didn’t recite the caller’s little code. Golden leaf. Middle drawer. Twenty-three thirty-five eighteen. Odd phrases like that could be used as viruses, bending minds to divine will. Lucky for Shaw, she wasn’t the worshiping type. Pathological impiety, they called it. One of her more useful symptoms. Whatever it was in humanity that called out to something greater, that built gods out of empty space, she didn’t have it.
What she did have was a stalker and a mission to carry out. She fell asleep with a pistol on the bedside table.