Dead Waters

11

Jane looked over at me across the wrought-iron elevator cage we rode up to my apartment. She gave me a weak smile, which warmed my heart even though she looked as much like a drowned rat as I did. The old-world elevator rose up through my building, clattering its way up past floor after floor, the low hum of its motor a soothing sound after a night of chaos.

Jane moaned, followed by a piteous trail of laughter. “You know you’re in trouble when just riding in an elevator hurts,” she said.

I would have nodded in agreement, but I couldn’t lift my head forward from where it rested against the side of the elevator. Tonight’s pursuit had been a brutal one, but only when it was over did our bodies truly start to feel the toll of our exertion. The only good thing to happen since hobbling our way out of the alley near the professor’s high-rise was that the rain and broken hydrants had taken care of dousing the flames of the van Jane had exploded with her technomancy. Other than that, our bodies had slowly given in to the aches and pains that followed our fruitless chase.

When the elevator hit my floor, I rolled back the black iron accordion gate and the two of us hobbled our way to my apartment door at the end of the hall. I fished out my keys and managed to get my door open despite my feeble state. I didn’t even bother to flick on the lights and instead took in the welcoming silence of my home. The quiet majesty of my living room was dark, but the wall of windows along the left side of it let in enough light to show off my old-world gentleman’s club motif—rich leather sofas and an entire wall of shelves that housed various antique finds of mine. I pulled off my waterlogged coat and hung it by the door before going any farther.

I helped Jane squirm out of her coat and hung it next to mine. “You really ought to have a chute installed that drops straight down to the incinerator.”

“I don’t think that would be such a great idea,” I said, crossing over to my sofa. “I’d be half tempted to throw myself down there, if only to dry off.”

I started off down the main hall that led back to the other rooms of the apartment. “I’m going to change.”

“I’m going to shower,” Jane said. She kicked off her shoes and squelched down the hallway behind me in her wet socks on her way to the bathroom. “If you could just pull something out for me to wear, that would be great.”

“Sure,” I said.

I continued down the hall to my bedroom and changed into something less soaking wet. One Ramones T-shirt and a fresh pair of jeans later, I hit my couch out in the living room, opening up my satchel and pulling out the now-soaked books that Jane had picked for me from Redfield’s place. The distraction of trying to read them with my powers if only to identify students from his lectures was a welcome one after the night we had been through, and I was thrilled to see that exhaustion seemed to be keeping any untoward flare-ups at bay. NYU lecture halls filled my mind’s eye as I pushed into the visions of the professor educating his students on the history of film. While engaging, it hardly was anything I imagined someone killing him over. Eventually the drone of his voice and the subject matter became too much and I decided to switch up books.

When I pulled out of the vision, it was to a different sound entirely. Jane was screaming from the other room.

“Jane . . . ?” I said, my voice and body both weak from the hit my blood sugar took with the vision. I grabbed a pack of Life Savers from a tray of them on one of my end tables and opened it, popping them in my mouth and swallowing them whole.

“Simon!” Jane called out from the bathroom.

I rose from the couch and ran on unsteady legs down my hallway toward the back of the apartment. I threw open the bathroom door, startling her. Her hair was hanging down, wet, and Jane was wrapped in a white towel. Her eyes were so bugged out I thought they might pop.

“What is it?” I asked. I looked around the bathroom for any sign of trouble.

“I just got all the ick off me from tonight,” she said, “and when I was drying off, I found this.”

Jane pulled aside her hair and spun around, facing her back to the bathroom mirror. She lowered the towel so it exposed just below her shoulder blades. Set between them was what looked like a tattoo of a dark green swirl of symbols with words circling them in a language I didn’t know. The outer edge of the swirl was a ring that was composed of what looked like writhing snakes that were, in fact, writhing.

“What the hell is that?” Jane asked, her voice on the verge of slipping into full-blown hysteria. I had to calm her, and quick.

I walked over to her and put my hand over the mark. It was below the skin, but the snakes were definitely moving within the pattern itself. I pressed my hand down harder, trying to feel for them, but it was like trying to touch a projection on a movie screen.

“Odd,” I said, feeling the rise and fall of her chest as she panicked. I traced it with a gentle touch. “Does it hurt at all?”

“No,” she said. “Does that really matter? It’s on me. Isn’t that enough?”

“Calm down until we have something to panic about, okay?” I asked. Jane nodded. “Good. Now, do you feel any different?”

“You mean other than freaked-out?” Jane asked, sharp.

“Yes,” I said. “Other than that.”

“Nope. Just freaked-out.”

I looked her in the eye and gave her a smile. “So I take it you didn’t get this from a wild night out with the girls, then?”

“What?” she said, missing my attempt at humor and snapping at me instead. “No, Simon! Get it off of me!”

“Hold on,” I said. I grabbed the edge of the towel, lifted it, and rubbed at the spot. After a minute of vigorous scrubbing, I pulled the towel away.

“Well?” Jane asked.

“No use,” I said. “It’s still there.” I looked at the towel. It was still clean. “Whatever it is, it’s not like an ink stamp. None of it came off.”

“Oh, hell,” she said. “This is it. That bitch marked me, didn’t she? I knew something felt off. I got in the damn shower and I just stood there for, like, an hour letting the water run over me, but look at my skin and hands. They didn’t even prune. I’m telling you, she did something to me. I’m going to go to bed and when you wake up, you’ll be lying next to a giant water snake or a puddle or something—”

“Calm down,” I repeated, saying it for my benefit as well as hers.

“That’s easy for you to say,” she said. “You’re not marked. That woman didn’t dive through you!”

“We don’t know anything yet, so don’t panic,” I said. “When you went through D.E.A. orientation, didn’t they teach you that panic is for the norms?”

“What orientation?” she asked. “The day I started, they sent me to HR and they barely handed me my welcome kit before Director Wesker pulled me out of there and dragged me off to Tome, Sweet Tome to start cataloging the Black Stacks. I think the only real orientation I ever received was being instructed not to cry while working for Thaddeus Wesker.”

“A valuable lesson, mind you,” I pointed out.

Jane craned her head to look around into the mirror at herself. “That doesn’t really help me now, Simon.”

I grabbed Jane and eased her out into the hall so she couldn’t look at the tattoo anymore. “I know,” I said, guiding her down the hall toward the bedroom, “but we don’t really have an emergency room for something like this, you know? I don’t think anyone from the graveyard shift is up on this type of thing, but I think I know who might be able to tell us something in the morning.”

“You do?” Jane said, looking hopeful for the first time tonight.

“Yup,” I said, leading her over to her side of the bed. “Allorah Daniels.”

Jane’s face was a mask of skepticism. “Won’t she be busy Enchancelloring?”

“We’re all working hard to cover each other’s asses these days,” I said. “I’m sure she won’t mind taking a break from old men and paperwork to get in some lab time. Science was her first love, after all. But first, you need to rest tonight. If there’s no pain or symptoms from it, we’ll defer to her expertise in the morning first thing. I promise.”

Jane lay back against her pillow and slid underneath the sheets, leaving her towel lying in a pile on the floor right next to the bed. “I don’t see how I’m supposed to get any sleep,” she said, worry returning to her face.

I tucked her in, and then went over to the night table on my side of the bed.

“I have just the thing for that,” I said, fishing a small vial out from a jumble of miscellaneous junk in the drawer. I held it up. Down one side were the letters RVW.

“What is that?” she asked.

I held it out to her and dropped it in her hand. “Wow,” I said. “They really did rush you through your orientation. You have this in that welcome kit you still carry around as a purse. It’s a sleeping potion of sorts.”

“RVW,” she said, reading the side of it before twisting off its top. “Rip Van Winkle. Not very clever.”

“I’m pretty sure the Enchancellors came up with the name,” I said. “Leave it to the bureaucrats to lack any artistic finesse.”

She raised it to her lips.

“Careful,” I said. “Just a drop should do it. Otherwise, who knows when you might wake up.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, taking a tiny swallow from it. “If I slept for twenty years, I’m sure that this thing on my back would have killed me by then.”

“Comforting,” I said, and crawled into bed on my side.

“I thought so,” Jane said, already yawning. Her eyes slipped shut.

“Sweet dreams, my love,” I said, putting my hand on her forehead. I ran my fingers through her still-damp hair.

“Only if you visit. . .” she said with a sleepy smile and was out like a light. I took the vial from her hand and stared at her for a few moments, wondering about the mark. How was I going to get to sleep thinking about it?

What the hell, I thought, and took a hit of the stuff myself. I only hoped the woman in green wouldn’t visit me in my dreams. With my luck, I’d be naked without my bat, and I really didn’t want to look that up in any of the dream interpretation books.