2

On the colder nights, whether there was rain or snow or hail falling outside, my father would prop his leg up on a cushion and pad his left leg with hot water bottles. It happen nearly as often when we were younger, but by the time I left for college it had become a common sight. He didn’t say a word about how much his leg bothered him, it just wasn’t his way. But it was the only evidence I really had of his military service; even his medals were mostly kept locked up in his safe. Neither did I have the courage to really ask him about his war stories; whatever Ryan or Mom knew, they refused to talk about it.

I’ve often wondered what he thought about me taking up marksmanship. Ryan and our mother had always made their feelings clear, even if it was just through silence. Yet my father was the one who’d bought me my Smith and Wesson for my eighteenth birthday, on the summer before I’d gone up to study at Doldrum. It was for some competition or another. Really, I don’t remember anything about it now.

I do remember thinking, even as I stepped into the subway station with my brother, that I really should give him and Mom another call. You know how it is with these things. You put it off till tomorrow, then tomorrow turns into next week, and next week turns into Christmas, and then you’re staring across a gap you have no idea how to bridge anymore.

I’ll do it tonight, I told myself. Better late than never.

Ryan’s glorified little Lexus ripoff of a vehicle was still under repairs, so we’d had to take the subway for this trip. I yawned. It was already past twelve and the sun was setting into a bright, drowsy sort of afternoon, perfect for a siesta. Even the businessmen heading back to Greenpark after their lunch looked half-asleep, and I’m pretty sure you could rip those guys open and find silicon chips and circuits.

The train rolled in with an ear-splitting screech. Everyone lying back on the bench jumped at the sound, and started frantically stuffing themselves through the entrance.

My brother slipped through and pulled us in right at the last second. The doors closed with a ting and we were off. Ryan slipped a file out of his backpack and handed it to me. The same one I’d seen him reading earlier about the Eye of Eternal Freedom.

I didn’t want to take it. Frankly, I didn’t want to talk to him at all. Sure, he’d pointed out something that would probably save my life in the long run. He was probably right in thinking I was in no way prepared to go full-on Trickshot Neville on a sea of cultists. But it still rankled that he’d found a way to undermine the one thing I could do better than he could.

Shit, what was I thinking? I’d done a flawless job of undermining myself without him to do it for me. I sighed and grabbed the binder.

I can’t say it was an easy read, especially when having to tune out a group of Cub Scouts trying to sell cookies to everyone in the subway car. Not to mention there was also a loud match of Republic of Rue being played with what looked like the contents of a nearby dumpster. I buried my head into the pages and tried to focus.

Turns out Cillian Pupil was the real name they’d slapped on this guy’s birth certificate. His parents had been a pair of hippies trying to restart a new commune in the midst of nature with copious amounts of LSD and absolutely zero resources. Little dude nearly died of pneumonia when he was three years old. Was first brought into a police station at age eight, when his parents decided he would be the perfect drug mule.

I leaned back against the wall of the subway car and looked up. Ryan was studying the Rue players with interest. “Seriously, is there any major criminal out there who hasn’t had a screwed-up childhood?”

“Hmm?” He glanced back at me. “I’d say the people behind the Pink Sampan murders. And Leopold and Loeb, possibly.” He gave a thin-lipped, humorless smile. “I mean, it really depends on how far you’re willing to take the definition of a ‘screwed-up childhood’.”

There was a brief commotion in the subway car as one of the players grabbed a box of thin mints from the Scouts and started using them as supplementary pieces in their expanded game board. Ryan’s head snapped back to check it out, and I went back to the file.

After a brief stint in the military (in the same battalion my Dad had been in, coincidentally) Pupil left for a spiritual pilgrimage through Bhutan and Mongolia. Although according to a few accounts, it was actually in Kashmir that he finally decided the only guru he needed was himself. For reasons I still can’t understand, he set up his new tonic for the masses in the middle of the Australian Outback. Among his first converts were a group of programmers from a nearby university, and then –

Ryan tapped my shoulder. “Come on. We’re getting out here.”

“What?” I looked around me, a little miffed about getting disturbed right at the moment things were getting interesting. “Wait, this isn’t anywhere near Crocus.”

“Yeah, I wanted to make a little stop along the way.” I followed him out from amongst a crowd of business suits, who all petered out the second we stepped out of the Greenpark subway station.

Greenpark is the dreariest and most depressing borough in the City, filled with gunmetal grey office buildings and not much else. I heard somewhere it got the name by some politician who’d dreamed of renovating the whole area but instead settled for dotting all the roofs with shiny solar panels.

Hell, even the street life around here was soul sucking. What kind of food vendor sells dried prunes? I kicked up a stray soda can, caught it, and tossed it into a nearby bin. “So, what, are we heading for the nearest safe house of the Eye or something? This place isn’t exactly a residential area.”

“You’d be surprised.” Ryan said, checking his phone. “Huh, looks like Iqbal’s already taken up their request.”

“What, this quickly? It’s been like two hours.”

He stuffed his phone into his pocket. “Like I said, this one was personal business for him.” He pushed open a pair of doors and walked inside one of the office buildings. It was a pretty standard looking lobby, the receptionist with a frizzy ponytail typing out something on her phone as my brother stepped up to the counter. “Hey, uh, can you tell me how I can access the nineteenth floor from here?”

She tensed, looking up at him with wide and very dark eyes. “I’m – are you sure you don’t mean the eighteenth floor, sir? That’s where we have our marketing department.” She started picking at her nail polish. “It’s an easy mistake to make.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s the nineteenth.”

“No one’s gone in there for weeks.” She wrinkled her nose, her anxious expression briefly giving way to disgust. “I mean, we used to have homeless guys and other weirdos come in here each day just to go up there. But as far as know, those floors have been closed down.”

“Floors?” I asked. Ryan looked a little surprised as well, but he did a better job at masking it. He leaned forward. “Look, you don’t need to worry about it. We’re just doing a bit of an inspection.” He tapped a clipboard he pulled out of who-knows-where. “We’ll be in and out in under thirty minutes.”

It took us way longer than I liked to go up those nineteen floors, because the elevator kept getting stopped by office workers with their arms full of chai Americanos (ew!) and sandwiches. It made me feel wistful, in a weird sort of way. My only experience with real work was odd repair jobs and six hour restaurant shifts. I’d never had a job that went from nine to five, and that situation didn’t look like it was going to change anytime soon. It must be nice to have a routine and a salary you could depend on, instead of well, this.

I would say the grass is always greener on the other side, but the only grass you’re likely to find around here is the perpetually dyed plastic stuff. I leaned against the wall and watched the number on the dial click upwards. The nineteenth wasn’t the highest one, I noticed. Not even close.

“Any of you guys ever visit floor nineteen?” I asked the office workers. Ryan flashed me a cautioning look, but the stupid elevator was so crowded anyway I might as well see if I could get something useful out of this situation.

A few of the other occupants sighed and studied their phones more intently. Most of the rest just flashed me looks that were in equal parts confused and exasperated. But one of them rubbed his stubbly chin in deep thought. “I was dared to do it at an office party once. By Ronnie. You guys remember Ronnie, right?” He glanced around the elevator, and there were a few shrugs. “Don’t remember what I was dared to do there, exactly. Just that it looked crazy in there. Like, real shit.” Then this man, who was about a foot taller than I was and nearly twice as wide, shivered.

A woman frowned. “That’s where those cultist freaks set up their office, wasn’t it? What do you kids have to do with it?” She glared at us, as if worried we’d start handing out pamphlets any second now.

“A lot.” Ryan sighed, “and more and more with every minute.” The elevator doors opened at Floor Nineteen.

——————————————————————————————————

Here’s a riddle for ya: you’re a cult called the Eye of Eternal Freedom, the same one that forbids eyes of any kind in its imagery. What the hell are you going to use as your symbol?

What Cillian Pupil chose was eye sockets. Something shaped like an eye, colored entirely in black. Ah, well. I suppose it’s easy to spray on for graffiti purposes.

My brother flicked on the light switch, and the whole hallway was lit up.

If you squinted, you could still make out the office trappings from the window blinds and air conditioners. But the walls, floor and ceiling were all painted in psychedelic patterns, almost shifting on their own when I looked at them too long. Bright, rainforest colors, which made the black eye sockets in the center of each pattern look all the more menacing.

I sniffed the air. “Place still smells of weed. Are you sure it’s still empty?” My hand went to the gun at my belt. I watched Ryan frown as I did it, but his gaze quickly went back to the hallway.

“No.” He admitted at last. “The Eye itself cleared out of here a while ago, but the main reason why we’re here is because if who’s ever been assigned to kill Ms. Vior wanted to set up a temporary base around here somewhere, these floors would be the perfect spot.”

His torch illuminated a flight of stairs. “They must’ve gotten these specially installed.” My brother said with a frown. “It wouldn’t match with the rest of the building’s layout.”

I opened one of the shutters, trying to let a bit of sunlight into the place, but the sun only lit up motes of dust floating around in the air. “Again with the floors. How? Why?”

My brother went up to a couch that had seen better days, smack dab in the middle of the hallway, and picked up another few pamphlets. “Two floors, nineteen and twenty. They weren’t even rented out by the standard process, if I remember right. The owner of the building just allowed the Eye to set up here.” He checked under the table, brushing his hand over it to see if there was anything taped to the underside. “And it’s far from an inexplicable choice of location. It’s near the center of the City. Pretty much everyone can get a subway here. And while on paper it’s in the middle of a bustling office building, in practice we’re incredibly high up, and there’s only the elevators and the emergency stairs as entrances. There’s no way to just causally pop in and out of here.” He interlaced his fingers. “Makes it even easier to isolate people.”

He stood up and glanced at the stairs. “All right, how do you want to play this?”

“Floor twenty does look enticing.” I admit. “But somehow, I don’t like the idea of backtracking. Let’s finish things down here first.”

That’s what the work ends up being, most of the time. Ryan can be good, sometimes scary good, at pretending he’s always executing a plan from beginning to end. He says it’s a routine for impressing the clients. But his primary method of operation is just to poke at the dark corners of a case until something interesting floats up to the surface.

Still, he’s remarkably thorough with his poking around. We went through communal areas, stripped-down kitchens that still had their fair share of cockroaches and sleeping spots that had been stuffed with as many bunk beds as possible. He searched through each spot as closely as he could, not batting an eye at the murals and the piles of pamphlets.

“They left behind a lot of stuff.” I said. “I mean, look at this electric kettle. It’s probably in better shape than the one at your place.”

“I really shouldn’t have to remind you, but leave that exactly where you found it.” He tossed over a pair of gloves. “And wear these if you’re going to keep shifting stuff around.”

The gloves were the pale purple nitriles they use in hospitals, the ones that always feel just a size or two too small. “My point stands. Why did the cult leave this cushy little headquarters? I mean, this office space alone must be worth a fortune. And if they’ve been gone for a while, why hasn’t this place been renovated already?”

Ryan frowned. “I have theories.” He said, which was his way of saying he wasn’t sure. My brother opened the last door in the hallway and winced. “What?” I asked. What could it be? A dead body? Several dead bodies? More cockroaches?

Nope.

This mural covered the entire room, even the floor and ceiling. The shifting red and green patterns were relegated to the background, offering pride of place to a man with dark sockets where his eyes should’ve been. It’d been a while since I’d seen Cillian Pupil on the news, but the multicolored halo around his head made his status unmistakable.

The halo was kind of like a rainbow, though with an entirely different sequence of colors. I recognized it from the shrine my mother had set up in my parent’s attic, from the books my mother read mantras from every Sunday. I don’t know why seeing it infuriated me so much – I mean, the man wasn’t exactly subtle about any of his other inspirations – but it touched something deep down that urged me to burn the image off the plaster.

Then my eyes went off the mural and towards the room.

Pupil’s hand in the mural was stretched out, palm open, as he pointed towards a playpen filled with toys. Most were cheap plastic you could buy out of gumball machines, but some looked handcrafted. Crude, maybe, but well-loved.

I thought about the Vior family. Two siblings who’d spent their whole lives separated because of this cult. Had Maryssa played with these toys? Surely this place couldn’t be that old.

I thrust my hands into my pockets, clenching and unclenching them over and over again. “If you want to believe Doomsday is coming in another ten years, that’s your right.” I muttered. “But what kind of worthless piece of shit drags their kids into this stuff?”

This was followed by a few moments of silence, as we checked out a utility closet that had been stripped bare. “How much of the file did you actually read?” Ryan asked, sweeping the beam of his flashlight through the dusty shelves.

I coughed. “Not much. I skimmed the whole thing, naturally, but I only got halfway through Pupil’s life story before you dragged me off the subway.”

“So probably enough to answer my question, then. What kind of people do you think Pupil appealed to most?”

“The usual types, right? Hippies, addicts, basement dwellers, prostitutes - ”

“Runaways.” Ryan cut in, stepping back and shutting the closet door. “The homeless. People who were thrown out of shelters, or by their own families. People with jobs they hated and problems with their health and mind that everyone else was unwilling or unable to help them with. You want to know why these people would take their kids here? Because this is where they felt safe. This is the only place they felt they had a community.”

I thought about the members I’d seen outside our Alcoholics United meetings. If you want to look for lonely people, I guess there’d be few places better. “What’s your point?” I asked, turning to look at him. It must’ve been the lighting, but he looked like a pale shadow of our mother at that moment, his eyes so dark a grey they were almost black. “What you, want me to feel bad about these people? Or are you just wasting time we could be spending outside the crazy cult office?”

“I’m reminding you that no matter how tempting it may be to see Pupil a crazy eccentric attracting other crazy people, that’s not who he is. He’s a man with a gift of finding people at their lowest and using that to bend them to his will. Chances are we’re going to meet people who understand how to twist that stereotype to their advantage.” He sighed, realizing he’d led himself into another lecture, and shook his head. “So, yeah. I’d say all this is relevant.”

We walked out to the central staircase. I peered up through the darkness, lifting up the light on my phone to illuminate the gap.

“Anyway,” My brother said, still sounding exasperated, “it looks floor twenty is what actually holds the Inner Circle’s office.”

There was a door on top of the stairs. I squinted, trying to make out the words printed on it. “Hmm?”

“The Inner Circle. Leaders like Pupil usually need a group like that, someone the general rabble can look towards. Enforcers, administrators… influential patrons like Mr. Ruhk, the man who owns this building. But Pupil gave his Inner Circle a special name…”

“Iris.” I said.

“Yeah, it’s pretty obvious isn’t it, especially with the whole eye theme. Still, there’s something to be said for the classics.”

“No, I mean that’s what’s printed on the door.” I started climbing the stairs. “Come on. How much are you willing to bet they’ve actually locked this one?” Actually, he hadn’t been willing to bet at all. He slipped out what looked to me like a set of needles and picked the lock in under two minutes.

“This whole City is filled with shoddy locks.” He said, shoving open the door. “I’ve been thinking about writing a letter to the Aston and Vanderbilt Company.”

“We both know you won’t.” I said, slipping in after him. “Why make our job any harder than it already is?”

I fumbled around and flipped a switch. Floor twenty had the same cold white and grey décor we’d glimpsed in the rest of the building. Was it weird that I sort of missed the murals now? Ryan’s gaze immediately sharpened. “Do you smell that?” He asked.

It took me a few seconds to figure out what he meant. The scent was faint, and mixed in with the dust and almost papery smell of the rest of the office. “Bleach?” I said. “I mean, that’s not too weird.”

“This place hasn’t been cleaned in a while. For it to stay that long…” He sniffed the air, and started picking the lock of one of the other doors.

I glanced around the room. “I dunno, Ryan. I don’t think you’re going to be finding any incriminating documents around here. This place has been stripped clean.”

“Get ready to turn off the lights.” He said, opening the door to yet another white-tiled boring office room. This one had been stripped of all its furniture, though. The smell of bleach was a touch more noticeable here.

My brother pulled out a canister from his backpack, labelled LUMINOL. He shook the can, carefully spraying it across the room, then looked at me and nodded.

I flicked the switch once more, and the room was plunged into darkness. At first, it was pierced only by a few stray sunrays through the shutters. Then blue patterns started lighting up the room, blooming on the floor in puddles and showing up in splatters on the wall.

“So.” I swallowed nervously. “What exactly is this stuff supposed to show?”

“It reacts to most compounds with iron and copper.” My brother said, his voice sounding almost reluctant. “Animal dung, cigar smoke, and the like.”

“Right, animal dung.” That had to be it, right? There had to have been some pets kept around here. But if so, it was pretty weird only this room had been cleaned this way. The shapes of those glowing blue patterns, swiftly fading now, weren’t much more comforting. “Or it could be something else with iron. Like blood.”

“Very astute, Dy.” My brother turned on the lights, and I covered my eyes. “I’m not sure how much help calling the police here would be, especially with how old the traces here are already are.” He chewed his lip. “Not to mention that – ah.”

I opened my eyes to see Ryan already kneeling at a corner, prying one of the tiles off with a knife. I knelt beside him to get a closer look, and suddenly the bleach smelt overwhelming. Was I imagining something rotten beneath it now?

My heart was thumping like a jackhammer by the time Ryan ripped out the tile. But it was just files. I blinked. “You know, I don’t want to sound unimpressed with your efforts, but that wasn’t well hidden at all. Hell, why even hide it in the first place?”

“Like I said before,” My brother said, tapping his temple and then flipping through the files. “At this point I have only theories.”

The file I picked out looked pretty normal at first, with a bunch of newspaper clippings that mentioned the Eye. Angry complaints of how they were the corrupting the local youth, protest marches, that sort of thing. Even a few printouts from some blogs. Which meant that when the clippings started to shift in topic I noticed immediately.

They happened in every country the Eye had sunk its claws into. One accident. Two suicides. A few overdoses. But even more had clearly been designed to send a message of some sort. One person had been hanged over his front porch in the middle of the night. The clipping that caught my eye was somewhere in the middle of the pack, yellowed around the edges and with fading text.

The described a Mrs. Violetta Brown, who had been shot outside a soup kitchen in Perth. It was noted that she’d been an avid member of the Eye, but had chosen to stay at a local boarding house within the week before her death due to what members of the Eye described as “trivial differences”, and was survived by her children and the members of her community.

I studied the photograph provided with the clipping. It was a close-up of a woman, clearly cropped from another photograph where she’d been walking on door-to-door speeches. I’d never met her before, but the family resemblance shone clear as day. “Ryan.” I said, tapping his shoulder. “Look, this has to be the clients’ Mom, right? She looks just like them.”

My brother grabbed it out of my hand and glanced over it. “Yep, has to be. I knew Pupil has a tendency to change the names of his followers, especially his Iris members. Justifies it with more of his ‘inner light” bullcrap, but the idea is to make them even harder to track down.”

“You don’t think it occurred to the Viors that this is need-to-know information?”

My brother pulled another piece of paper out of the file and handed it to me. “It’s the not the only detail they left out, unfortunately.”

It was another list, and it took me a few moments to see what Ryan was talking about, mainly because the last name had been changed.

It wasn’t that large a list. Cillian Pupil must’ve been reluctant to let too many people into his inner circle. But the name Maryssa Brown was plastered there as a proud member of the Iris, with a smiling photograph of our client. They had made sure to take one with her eyes closed.