Finch by Jeff VanderMeer Read online

  The gray caps, the files revealed, had spent at least as much time trying to track her down as preparing for the Rising. But they could not locate her. They flooded tunnels. Sent spore armies rushing down remote streets. Blocked off passageways. Still, they couldn't find her. Which made Finch, even conflicted, admire her, reading the files. Understanding the cost of being constantly on the move. Constantly in flux.

  Sometimes that cost came through over the radio. A mad howling. As if the city were a creature gone insane. Capturing the sounds of warfare. Of demolition. Of fighting with the gray caps or the Partials.

  But for the last several months Finch knows there have been no radio broadcasts from the Lady in Blue. From Alessandra Lewden. Little or no organized rebel activity anywhere in the city. Meanwhile, the towers continue to rise in the bay. People grow more and more used to their situation. Becoming cynical about the Lady in Blue. Distrust reborn between former Hoegbottons and former Frankwrithes. Even Wyte's noticed it.

  The fact is she hasn't saved Wyte, him, or anyone from six years of living under gray cap rule.

  Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

  5

  ome is an apartment in a twelve-story rundown hotel. He'd moved there six years ago, three months after the Rising, two years after his father's death. In its day, during the worst of the fighting between House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe, it had become famous as a kind of sanctuary. Far enough away from the battles to be neutral. Near enough to the merchant quarter to be profitable. Everybody trying to make money on the war.

  But those days are gone. Outside the hotel, a statue of a dead composer stands guard beyond the crumbling steps that lead to the gaping front door. Powder-burned, nose shot off, one raised arm just a stone stump. A raving madman lives near the statue. Finch has no idea how he survives the gray caps' patrols at night.

  Inside, the lobby is dank and dim and molding. An old crooked photograph on the wall captures a few signs of the hotel's lost luxury in a scene from some long-ago party. A strain of pale green lichen has infiltrated the faded burgundy of the carpet. Gives the floor a spongy feel and sheds a disconcerting, ghostly glow that leads Finch through the entrance after dark.

  Elsewhere, bulbs burn fierce or dull, like mismatched cousins. Always, a ghastly yellow haze. A curling faded wallpaper that sometimes isn't. Smells that change by the hour, dictated by the currents in the basement. Walls knocked out. Old furniture piled high. A courtyard through the middle of the hotel. The basement is awash in water, an intrusion from the River Moth.

  Finch knows many of the people in the building by name. A kind of survival strategy. Strangers mean danger. Like a leftover slogan from the old days when Hoegbotton gangs purified their neighborhoods of the “F&L scourge,” and F&L gangs returned the favor. He doesn't know how safe his presence makes those around him, but he does his best. Tries to notice what's going on. Likes to believe he is doing what his father would've done.

  The crumbling sign on the roof still reads “ otel Mur t.” Crows nest in it.

  Sometimes Finch hides behind the sign.

  Peers out across the skyline, toward the bay, from its shelter.

  His apartment was on the seventh floor, but Finch ignored the dirty marble stairs and the stubborn elevator. Followed the wormy carpet into a darkened courtyard instead. A snarl of bushes and long grass along the path. At the center, a ragged vegetable garden of tomatoes, carrots, squash. Didn't know who tended to it. He turned left, pushed open the first door, took familiar steps down into the dark two at a time.

  Bottom of the stairs. Finch turned right, faced a door at the end of a stub of hallway.

  Rebecca Rathven lived there. He could hear the sounds of water, the slap of fish surfacing, coming through the air ducts. Mixed, sometimes, with Rathven's cackling laugh as she read something funny in her books. On a quiet night, the odd sounds traveled as far up as Finch's floor. Finch liked the sounds. And he liked Rathven. Found her useful. Found her interesting. Sometimes in a sinister way.

  Who takes a flooded basement as an apartment in a hotel full of empty rooms?

  Finch knocked. Heard footsteps. A pause. An appraisal through the peephole.

  She was used to visitors, but still cautious. People came to Rathven for information from the past. They came to her if they'd lost the thread. They came to her to talk. Why? Finch, like most people, had books, but Rathven had a library.

  That library changed with every visit. Rathven kept shifting the stacks against the inroads of the river. People who owed her favors helped her create barricades of wooden beams and homemade sandbags. He'd told her to move, to go higher. But the effort, all of those books ... she said she would, but she hadn't yet. Might never.

  The door opened wide enough for Finch to smell soggy pulp. Trying to save the unsalvageable. A wavery yellow light crept into the hall. Rathven's long face appeared, tilted up at him. Startling white skin, almost translucent. Looked at times like something broken. Then like something strong. Dark hair shot through with lighter strands. Thick black eyebrows, hazel eyes, high cheekbones, thin lips curled in a smile. Blue dress and brown sandals. Finch could never tell her age. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. Had never found a way to ask.

  “Finch.” The word invested with some secret amusement. “Come in?”

  Smiled, shook his head. “But I do have something for you. A list. A long list.”

  “A list of what? Laundry list? Shopping list? Enemies? Friends?”

  Finch laughed. “You should've been a detective.”

  “I am a detective,” she said. The ritual refrain.

  “List of names,” he said. “People who lived in an apartment where two murders took place. And you'll love this: it's more than a century of names.”

  Not quite a frown, but a kind of quiver to the lips. A caution entering the eyes. She'd guessed the source. Not hard, really.

  Rathven had been in the work camps for three years. Had the brands on the bottoms of her feet, the red-gold marking of fungus she could hide but never forget. There was a pulsing sensation sometimes, she'd told him. A restlessness. He'd never asked what else had happened to her there. Didn't really want to know.

  She helped him because he'd gotten her brother Blaine, who went by the name “the Photographer,” out of the camps and into the hotel. Dozens of old cameras in the Photographer's fifth-floor apartment. The man used the cameras to take thousands of photographs of water. Funded that obsession by running a black market for goods. Finch bought or traded with him like everyone else. Using gray cap vouchers, food pods, or salvaged items.

  If the Photographer ever cut him off, or Rathven ever stopped helping him, Finch knew it would feel like a punch to the kidneys. Friendship or need?

  He leaned over, pulled the list from his satchel. Felt tired suddenly, like he'd stolen something from her but realized it too late. “Could you read it? Tell me if any names are familiar. Maybe from your books.” Would pay her in information and fungal antidotes, like usual.

  Rathven took the paper gingerly. Prodded the spongy edges with one finger. “Only if you tell me why.”

  “Recent murders.”

  The color went out of her face.

  “Got a piece of paper?” he asked.

  She nodded, reached behind her. Handed him an old envelope. Return address from somewhere in the Southern Isles. Might as well be some imaginary place now.

  Drew the symbol. Handed the paper back to her. “Do you know what this is?”

  A disdainful glance. “It's a gray cap symbol, of course. Very poorly drawn.”

  “Can you check it out? I've seen it before. But I don't know what it means.”

  “Sure. I don't know how long it will take.”

  “That's fine . . .” Lingered, unsure how to ask for more. Then just said it: “Another favor. Memory bulbs tonight. Can you check on me? Call, or knock on the door if the phones are out? In an hour or two?” No idea when Sintra would get there. No point taking chances.r />
  Now came the frown, as he knew it would. But she nodded. “I will. I will, Finch. Don't worry.” Reached out to squeeze his arm. Then withdrew her hand quickly. As if she'd shown weakness.

  He stared at her now. Smiled. Sometimes he felt a closeness with her he shared with no one else, not even Sintra. She'd never fought the Rising. She'd just read her books, preserved them. Protected them. Shared them. Eked out a living making crafts. At least, this was the story she'd told him. A small part of him still wondered why she'd been taken to the camps. Or why she'd been let go. “I was too sick to work,” she'd told him. But she'd never looked sick to him.

  “The gray caps like to confuse randomness with purpose,” Wyte had said once. But Finch didn't believe that. Just believed they kept the purpose buried deep.

  “Thank you,” he said. The words came out a little ragged. “Long day. I'll call when I take them. If the phones work.”

  “I'll come up and knock if I don't hear,” she said. In return, he knew he'd have to help push back the encroaching river one more time. Each task had its own price with Rathven.

  She shut the door, taking the light with her.

  Finch's apartment was near the end of the hall. Had to negotiate a hothouse wetness to get there. Tendrils and caps of red-and-green fungus sprouted from the walls. Gray caps only cared about keeping the streets clean. No help from his next-door neighbors, either. Almost like they thought it gave them camouflage.

  No one around, except his cat Feral, a big brute of a tabby, crying to be let in. Bumping up against his legs while Finch made shushing sounds. Feral was loud, always trying to trip Finch and bring him down to eye level.

  Sometimes the little old man in the apartment opposite heard Finch and came out, but not tonight. A former accountant, the man liked to sit in a shaft of sunlight from the hall window. Smile and talk to himself and nod, and read from the same ragged book.

  Two minutes to unlock and then relock. Only Sintra knew the sequence. Still not comfortable with that idea. Had thought about changing the key.

  Flash of another dark room. A worn bed. White sheets dull in the shadow. Didn't look like anyone had slept in it in months. Dusty floor. Two corpses.

  Flipped a switch. Relief when the lights actually came on. Faded floral print wallpaper. Root-like edges to the frayed beige carpet. Worn-out furniture.

  Relief at being able to hang up the role of detective in the closet, along with his jacket. To let the tough exterior come off like a mask worn for a festival.

  “Hold on for Truff's sake,” Finch said to Feral as the cat ran to the kitchen through the living room.

  Feral had wide round eyes. They gave his owlish face a perpetual look of surprise. Finch had rescued him as a kitten from a fungus that had wound tendrils around the animal while he slept. Still had purple patches on his flanks, sometimes growing, sometimes not.

  No sign of Sidle, his windowsill lizard. Never really knew if it was the same lizard anyway. Felt compelled to pretend for some reason.

  After feeding Feral, Finch put the two memory bulbs on the kitchen counter. Poured himself a glass of Trillian's Premium Whisky, aged eighteen years. An F&L brand trading off a famous name. Something no self-respecting H&S man would've drunk before the Rising. He had six bottles left in the closet. Next to the boxes of cigars. These had been his father's habits, his legacy. Nothing better had replaced them. The smell of cigar smoke made him feel like his father was right there, beside him.

  Cigars. Whisky. Both working as a kind of peculiar clock or timer. When they ran out, would his life as Finch run out, too?

  Heretic's touch like wet, dead leaves sewn together and stuffed with meat.

  Dinnertime, but he wasn't hungry.

  A long, shuddering sigh as he sat in the old leather chair next to the couch in the living room. Under the light of an old glass lamp shaped like an umbrella that he'd taken from the lobby. Watched the dusk dissolve into night.

  On the far wall hung three of the hotel's original tourist scenes of Albumuth Boulevard. A far better view than the one from the small balcony abutting the kitchen. All the balcony could show him was more of the night sky, a sliver of the two towers, and the alley below. A view saved for emergencies. A second view could be had from the bathroom by opening the small latched window and standing on the toilet. Finch could look down into the courtyard whenever he wanted. Between the two sight lines, he had as much forewarning as he could expect. If what came after him was human.

  Not a bad place. At least he had a separate office next to the kitchen and extra bookcases, overflowing, on the wall closest to the door. He'd made them from planks torn up from the rotting eleventh floor.

  Even before the Rising, Finch had enjoyed reading. So many nights at the old house in the valley he and his father had sat reading in silence, separate yet together. To block out the night. The wars. Now the gray caps' camps lay so close that a crushed foundation under a heap of garbage was all that remained of the house. Nothing left but the books and other things he'd rescued.

  Some books had been bought during cease-fires. Before the Rising destroyed the idea of bookstores. A few had come from his grandparents, who had returned to the Southern Isles when he was ten. Memories of them were like spent matches dull against a sudden darkness. He leafed through the books for signs of them sometimes. A folded letter. A note that never dropped to the floor.

  But most of the books had been his father's, rescued from the old home. About a dozen Finch knew from long repetition, part of his father's home-schooling when it was too dangerous to go to class.

  His father had started out as a brilliant engineer. In his youth, he had served in the Ambergris military in that brief, bright window when they'd taken on the Kalif's empire. He was with the troops as they advanced into a desert strewn with oases and hunched trees with gnarled black branches. As they took the Kalif's lands, and contemplated their own vision of conquest. As they were pushed back.

  With Finch's mother dead in childbirth, his father had raised him after the war. A strange life, seesawing between wealth and poverty. Father's many important yet strange friends. His connections with Hoegbotton & Sons. And yet sometimes things had been bad enough Finch's father had supported them doing odd jobs and trading books for food. Or burning books for fuel.

  Back at the old house, there had been many photographs of his father. The broad-chested muscular form of the man, tight in that characteristic Ambergrisian uniform of olive green. Wedge of a hat tilted to the side as was the fashion. On a hill or in a city or atop a tank. Surrounded by fellow soldiers or alone. Always smiling. Eyes dark dots looking into the camera. Seeming aware of future fame, but not of how it would come. Nor of how far he would fall.

  Finch had chosen “John” for his new identity because it was his father's name. “Finch” was just a common bird, a creature no one would ever notice. He'd burned all photographs except one the night he'd changed his name. Displayed on the mantel, it showed his grandparents just arrived from the Southern Isles. At the docks with their suitcases beside them. Looking faded, remote, and confused. Grandpa had been a carpenter. Grandma a homemaker. There were no relatives on his mother's side. His father was four years old in the photo. This image was all Finch was willing to risk.

  Once, Sintra had asked about the people in the photo. He'd said he didn't know them. That he'd found the photo on the street and liked it. True, to a point. Hadn't known the four-year-old. Never really knew his grandparents. Just another nonmemory from a lost life, and most days he didn't regret that.

  On the back of the photograph, his father had scrawled a few lines: “Sometimes a man will see in his own image a desert, and it is the need to make that desert bloom which drives him again and again to action, as hopelessness compels us to our end. Sometimes, too, a man will flee in the enemy's direction, eager to weather any punishment-physical or mental-that proves he is still alive. Or, he does so from a pride that lies to him, tells him he can change what seems unchangeable.�
�� From a book? His own thoughts? Finch would never know.

  Feral jumped up on his lap. Began to purr as Finch petted him.

  The rough-smooth taste of the whisky scratched and soothed his throat. He sank further into his chair. Maybe Sintra would come by tonight.

  Never lost.

  “Yes, I know, fat boy,” Finch murmured. Could sit there all night. Forget what he had to do and pull out a book that he'd read three or four times already. Pretend he lived in a better world.

  Turned on the small radio on the table next to him. Feral stopped purring for a second. Only one station across the dial: the gray caps' station. Gone any cacophony of voices and music. Usually just a single signal, filled with cryptic clicks and whistles. Punctuated by propaganda delivered in flat tones by human readers. “. . . A spy is caught and killed just outside the Zone ... Sector 509 has been scheduled for renovation. Anyone living there should relocate immediately.”

  But, tonight, nothing. That made thirty-seven days of static. What did it mean? Was it just another slackening of attention? Or something more serious? Finch had noticed a pattern. The new dislodged the old. A puppet government in place for six months dissolved when the gray caps turned to building the camps. Electricity no longer reliable since they'd started in on the two towers. These failings brought a twisted optimism. Maybe they can't do everything at once. Or maybe there was a purpose to all of it that he just couldn't see.

  He pushed a complaining Feral off his lap. Walked back into the kitchen.

  The memory bulbs lay on the counter. Vaguely round. Pitted and whorled. Smelling of both salt and offal. Already rotting?

  Finch looked down at the cat, which had followed him expecting a treat. Wondered what would happen if he fed a bulb to Feral.

  “You want to eat one of these and I'll eat the other?” he asked Feral.

  The cat walked back into the living room. Finch laughed. “Smart choice.” Picked up the phone receiver, dialed Rathven's number. A crackling interference. At least it's working.