The Phoenix Crisis (23 page)

Not going to give up!
If Shen died here today, it would be the will of
the universe and not for lack of trying on Rain’s part to save him,
she reminded herself. She would fight for his life to the bitterest
end.

“
Prep me 30 cc’s of
Zythatrol,” she said. A syringe was filled and handed to her. She
injected it into Shen. Knowing that this agent, while
dangerous—especially in this amount—was their best chance of either
swiftly reversing the falling blood pressure, or at least stopping
it from getting worse.

“
EQR ready,” said James from
her side. They attached the equipment to Shen and Rain made sure
everything was done right. It was a bold treatment, especially when
complicated by a high dose of Zythatrol, but Rain could think of no
other way to stop her patient from total circulatory failure. She
hoped the oxygen starvation to the vital organs wasn’t already of a
fatal magnitude.

“
Now
,” she said.

Chapter 15

There it was. In all its middle-class
glory.

Calvin stood at the entrance to a large
residential building. Like many of the other nicer buildings in
this section of West Central District, it had a small garden in
front. It was well-maintained, with lush green grass that was kept
short, along with a handful of pruned trees. The dark green was
offset by pockets of white, yellow, and red, as perfectly
rectangular flower patches grew in patterns so organized Calvin
thought the plants had spent time in the marine corps and were
standing in lines awaiting inspection.

He walked through the gate and along the
short path that led to the entrance. Then, after taking a deep
breath, he went inside. The doorman saluted when he saw him, even
though Calvin had left the better part of his personal escort
outside. Undoubtedly the doorman watched the news and recognized
the face of the newly appointed Executor of the Empire. It was a
strange thing to have people notice him everywhere he went, to have
become a household name in a matter of a day. He didn’t like it,
not truly, but it did have certain advantages.

“
I need access to level
nineteen,” he said. “And I need the key to room nineteen
eleven.”

“
Of course,” said the
doorman. He handed Calvin the room key and then unlocked the
elevator. No doubt being so cooperative because he didn’t want to
be seen as obstructing an investigation.

Nikolai followed Calvin into the elevator.
He stuck close to Calvin at Kalila’s instance. She’d somehow
realized that Calvin would be uncomfortable with an escort of
bodyguards following him around everywhere, so she’d specifically
instructed Nikolai to remain vigilantly at Calvin’s side at all
times. Apparently he was one of her most trustworthy, and
deadliest, people. Calvin had not objected—there was something
about Kalila’s smile that simply made him want to agree with just
about anything.

“
So this is home?” asked
Nikolai as the elevator sped toward the higher floors.

“
This
was
home,” said Calvin. “Once upon a
time.”

His mother had moved them
here once it was clear Samil, Calvin’s father, was not coming back.
Calvin had resented the move, believing that if they left their old
home Samil would never find them. That they only needed to keep
waiting and be patient, that he’d resurface. And when he did he’d
have a good explanation for his absence
.
You’ll see
—Calvin recalled telling his
mother. But he’d been young and naïve, and his mother had been wise
not to listen. Samil had never returned to Capital World. Or, if he
had, he’d never made an effort to let Calvin or Olivia
know.

“
It is… nice,” said Nikolai.
Probably just to make conversation. Nikolai didn’t have the
greatest people skills, but Calvin was already starting to get used
to having him around. The lean, yet thickly-muscled warrior with
his shaven head and fierce, sun-damaged skin wasn’t the subtlest of
shadows, but so far no one had given Calvin any kind of trouble
while Nikolai was around.

“
We lived here, but it
wasn’t anything special,” said Calvin. The elevator came to a stop
and opened on the nineteenth floor. Calvin stepped out into the
hallway, followed closely by Nikolai.

The sights of the nineteenth floor were
eerily the same as he remembered them. The old woman who kept the
floor clean was there, fiddling with a cart of supplies—except now
she looked positively ancient. The reddish-brown carpets and faded
off-white walls were all the same, and so were the metal doors
coated in cheap pseudo-wood paneling. Even the tacky art hanging on
the walls was the same, as was the fake plant at the end of the
hallway next to the window. That green thing—whatever it was—had
been sticking out of that pot since before Calvin had moved in here
as a child. And it had probably been there since before he was
born. Probably since the building was erected a hundred years ago.
Capital World with its limited space and high population was unlike
other worlds in that it repurposed its structures more often than
replacing them. As such, many of the buildings—particularly
residential towers and commercial enterprises—were actually quite
historic.

“
This way,” said
Calvin.

They went to room nineteen eleven and he
rang the chime. When no response came—as expected—he knocked on the
door. No answer.

“
Well we gave her a chance,”
said Calvin, still hoping, albeit desperately, to open the door and
see his mother there, wearing her scrubby clothes and half-finished
with another of her deep cleans of the apartment, which she was
prone to do when stressed or preoccupied. He inserted the keycard
and the door unlocked. He pushed it open.

No one was there to greet him. The front
room was open and minimally decorated. There was a new amateur
piece of art sitting on a painting easel that his mother had
undoubtedly been working on. He walked up to and touched it, hoping
some of the paint was still wet. It wasn’t. And the picture wasn’t
finished enough to know what it was supposed to be.

“
Mother,” he called loudly
as he stepped past the small kitchen and down the hall. He knocked
on each of the three bedroom doors before opening them. “Are you
here?”

The first room was completely empty. It had
been Calvin’s room and, now that he was grown and gone, there was
nothing in it. No child’s sized bed, no box of his things all
packed away, none of the scribbles he’d markered on the wall
because he’d thought they were funny. It was as if he’d never lived
here at all.

The second room had been converted into a
kind of office-gym combination. There was a rowing machine set up,
as well as an exercise mat, and on the other side was a desk with a
computer terminal. Calvin turned it on, hoping to find some kind of
clue, perhaps his mother had used this terminal to arrange her
travel plans, but the computer was dusty and had clearly not been
touched in months. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
Calvin knew his mother rarely touched a computer unless she
absolutely had to.

The third room, the master bedroom, looked
neat and tidy. The bed was made and there was no sign that someone
had left the place hastily. No indication that anyone had rummaged
through the drawers and dressers, no sign that the closet had been
hastily raided in a mad packing frenzy. Everything was orderly and
in place. And nothing seemed to be missing.

He checked the bathroom, the closets, and
the storage alcove. Once he’d combed every square inch of the
apartment, he returned to the front room in dismay.

“
No luck, eh?” asked
Nikolai. He’d helped himself to a sandwich he’d made from materials
left in the refrigerator. Rather than getting on his case about
tampering with potential evidence, Calvin went to the refrigerator
and inspected the meat. It didn’t smell foul. True it remained in
its original airtight container, but that was some indication of
how recently it’d been placed here. The bread too showed no signs
of mold or decay. The lettuce on the other hand did. So he guessed
that his mother had last purchased groceries and left them here no
more than ten days ago. Or, if she hadn’t, someone else
had.

“
So now what do we do?”
asked Nikolai once he’d polished off his sandwich and wiped the
mustard off the corner of his lip.

“
Radio down, tell them to
send the forensics team up. Dust for prints and search everything
over multiple times—they know the drill,” said Calvin. He didn’t
like being back here, he’d never had fond feelings for this
apartment, but now that his mother was missing it made him feel
especially uncomfortable being here.

“
And what about you and me?”
asked Nikolai.

“
We’re going to ask the
neighbors some questions.”

“
All right then,” said
Nikolai. He radioed Calvin’s instructions and then followed Calvin
out of the apartment. Calvin locked the door behind him—he didn’t
want anyone else to disturb apartment nineteen eleven until his
investigation team had a chance to go over it.

While he waited for them, he began calling
on the neighbors and asking them questions. He didn’t forcibly
round them up for interrogation, but he and Nikolai made it clear
that non-cooperation was not an option. Using his authority as the
Executor of the Empire, he compelled even the shiest of the
resident of the nineteenth floor to answer a few questions for him.
But, in the end, he needn’t have bothered.

Ultimately they all said variations of the
same thing. They’d last seen Olivia Cross weeks ago, some claimed
not to have seen her for months—though most of these claims were by
people who were not very outgoing and, by the look of things, left
their apartments under only the rarest of circumstances. No one
said they’d seen anyone calling on Olivia, nor did any of them
notice anything suspicious or hear any noises. The likeliest thing,
based on the lack of evidence of a struggle, was that Olivia had
left of her own free will. The question was, however, why would
she? And why wouldn’t she tell anyone? Calvin wondered if that
meant she had been abducted while she was out and about, leaving no
evidence of her capture behind at her apartment.

By the time he was through interrogating the
residents of the nineteenth floor, and had managed to talk to every
one of them—which had meant waiting around for some of them who
were away to return home—his forensics team had a preliminary
report for him.

No sign of anyone inside the apartment,
other than Olivia and now Calvin and Nikolai, and there was no
indication that there had been anything unusual—such as an
altercation—that’d gone down. No scratch marks, no slammed doors or
forced locks, nothing suspicious whatsoever.

Calvin nodded. He gave them instructions to
complete the investigation but he realized this was a dead end. He
would never give up on finding his mother, just like he would never
give up on finding Rafael, but he knew that throwing all of his
resources and attention at this wasn’t going to buy him anything.
Whoever had taken her—if she had indeed been taken—had gone to
great lengths to ensure that there was no trail left behind. That
meant, as much as he hated to admit it, he had to focus on his
other priorities and await either a ransom note—if that was the
abductors’ intentions, assuming they were going to use Olivia as
leverage on him—or else wait for new leads to be found by his
investigation team. In the meantime he had to do his duty and focus
most of his efforts on the Phoenix Ring and finding Rafael.
Hopefully his mother would resurface along the way, and that she’d
be unharmed. He wished for nothing more than this whole thing to
prove to be a false alarm.

***

He raised an arm to screen his face from the
raging fire as he walked down the street adjacent to the burning
building.

“
Oh god!” croaked an old man
who stood in the street, staring aghast as his flat—and those of
hundreds of others—was consumed by the inferno. “Why?” he said,
staring up at the sky.

He was one of the many in the crowd who’d
escaped when the alarms went off. Now people from adjacent
buildings were pouring into the street, joining the mob, curious
and terrified. A few ran around in a panic, shouting, or struggling
to find a way to combat the flames—to no avail—but most were too
stunned to do much of anything but chatter nervously amongst
themselves and stare up stupidly at the dying building. Little did
they know that thousands of such incidents were going on across the
planet’s surface right now. And not one of them an accident.

“
You?” the old man pointed a
crooked finger at Ryker as he approached. “You did this!” the old
man turned to get support from the mass of people around him. “I
saw him come out of the building—he started that fire! I’m sure of
it!”

Ryker did nothing to
contradict the rumor. On the contrary, he welcomed it. Even though
it wasn’t
technically
true—Micah had started the fire. Not Ryker.

“
You did this?” a large man
shouted. He was looking at Ryker. They all were.

“
For crimes against the
Crown and the Empire,” said Ryker. “I hereby sentence this building
to burn in the Name of the King.” He stopped when he was a few
meters away from the crowd and took them in—they were an innocent
enough looking lot, probably loyalists who’d avoided getting
involved in the rebellion sweeping the planet, just like he’d
hoped.