False Hearts Read online

  “What happened to you? What did you see?” I ask. I feel like he has to tell his side before I can tell mine.

  I think Nazarin understands this. He finally downs his drink and then goes to the tiny kitchen for more. Begins to pour a drink, thinks better of it, and brings the entire bottle to the chair with him. I approve of that plan.

  “Mia doesn’t like men much, does she?” he starts.

  “No, she doesn’t.” More SynthGin splashes into my cup. I think of Mana-ma. “There’s plenty of women she hates too.”

  “When I came in, I was in a prison cell,” he says.

  I can’t help but wonder if it looked anything like the cell my sister is in right now.

  “There was no light. I thought maybe the drug hadn’t worked and it’d killed me.” He smiles ruefully at this, as if it’s funny. “I didn’t realize it was Verve, though I did think something was off. I haven’t taken much of either Zeal or Verve.”

  Interesting, I think, considering how many people have it as part of their daily lives.

  “Anyway, I realized where I was pretty fast,” he says, swigging again. “Found a way out, but then I saw those demon things. They were surrounding the building, like a barricade. Twisted little fuckers.”

  “Yeah. A lot of them had faces of the people I grew up with.”

  He shudders. “I fought my way through them but it wasn’t pretty. Then the drug hit me pretty hard, and I saw all the people I wouldn’t mind dead. That took a while as well.” He drains the drink.

  “Wait, so you affected the Vervescape too?”

  He stops at that. “I guess I did.”

  “You’re a lucid dreamer, then, or you could become one.” I set down my glass with a clunk. “If you can lucid dream, you don’t need me.” Can I quit? Can I stop this before it’s really begun? The hope is painful.

  “I’m untrained, and I can’t do what you can. I couldn’t get rid of these ones. It seemed like they almost killed me. I ended up having to kill them all. Cut them to pieces.”

  I swallow.

  “Most of the people I saw deserved it. A few have been put in jail and then quietly locked up in stasis. Doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes wish I could have had the honor of actually killing them myself.”

  “Everyone has a darker side,” I whisper, echoing his earlier words.

  “That they do. Still, the shared dream should have worked better, even if it was Verve. I should have appeared right with you. I should have guessed that she’d be so strong. She was raised in the Hearth too.”

  “When she was there, the Meditation stuff wasn’t as common,” I say, almost distantly.

  “Really?” Nazarin leans forward, interested. “When did it really start?”

  I stare off, remembering. “Maybe a year or two before Mia left, so like … fifteen years ago now? Mana-ma became obsessed with the idea that we could all become one, and when we did, that’s when God would speak to her even more clearly. So we trained. Before that, it was more Meditation to clear the mind, not to try and impact anything. But maybe that still gave Mia a foundation to start being able to control the Vervescape.”

  “And did it work, this Meditation?”

  “It did. By the end, we could take a pill and connect into one large shared dream world populated by every member of the Hearth.”

  Nazarin’s mouth falls open, almost comically. “What was the drug?”

  “I don’t know. Mana-ma kept her secrets. Maybe it was God, after all.” My voice drips with sarcasm.

  Nazarin’s forehead furrows as he turns over this new piece of information. I’m sure he’ll follow it up with the SFPD, but I have a question of my own.

  “What would have happened, if Mia had killed me in the dream?” I ask him.

  “If she was lucid and knew you weren’t a part of the dream? She could have found a way to kill you there that would have been … permanent.”

  “I could have died?” I want to throw my glass at him. “I didn’t sign up for death.”

  His eyes spark at that. “This whole thing started with a death. With your sister killing a Ratel hitman.”

  “Accused of killing.”

  He makes a noise deep in his throat. “You still so very sure she didn’t do it?”

  I say nothing. I’m not sure why I still defend her, when her chances of innocence seem to dwindle the more we follow the clues. If she did kill him, though, I have to cling to the fact that murder and self-defense are two very different things.

  “You knew this would be dangerous going in. You knew full well death could always be a possibility, and don’t pretend you didn’t. You’re going into the underworld of San Francisco, Taema, you can’t have expected not to get your hands dirty.”

  I glare at him, and he glares right back.

  “Here’s how it’ll go,” I say. “When we do something, you tell me what kind of danger we’re facing. Don’t just let me barrel into it headfirst without knowing what the hell I’m up against. OK?”

  He’s the first to look away to take another swig. “Deal. If it’s any comfort, I didn’t think today would be dangerous. It wouldn’t have been if it was Zeal and not Verve, because Zeal is so much more static when you’re in someone else’s dream.”

  “What a lovely surprise for us.”

  “It means we have a problem, though.”

  “Don’t we already have lots of problems?” The SynthGin has made me irritating, but I can’t seem to stop the sarcasm.

  “If the Ratel have spiked the Zeal with Verve, they’re going to try and eavesdrop on the dreams.”

  Oh God. “And if they have a lucid dreamer see Mia’s dreams, then our whole cover is blown.”

  “Exactly.”

  “We’re screwed then.”

  “Not necessarily. One: the other Zeal lounge they spiked, the one I was security for? It didn’t work. They couldn’t get the levels right; no one could mine even a millisecond of a dream. Second: they might not be recording the dreams, but trying to find lucid dreamers based on physiological reactions. That might mean that Mia comes to their attention, but they’ll likely discount her because of her ill health.”

  I can’t banish the mental image of Mia sobbing. “She’s afraid of someone. She told them about Tila. She could be in contact with the Ratel already.”

  “Maybe, but if so and if she wanted to sell out your sister, she likely would have already. Third: even if they do manage to record, there will be a backlog of so many dreams. It’ll take them time to sift through it all, because they still don’t have that many lucid dreamers. That’s why Tila was able to rise through the ranks so quickly. So, if the dreams have been recorded, then when you work your first shift at the Verve lounge as Tila, you’ll have to erase that one without detection. That won’t be easy.”

  “Nothing is easy.” I rub my face. I’m so tired.

  “What happened in the dream?” he asks.

  He’s been wanting to know this since we arrived, but he waited (wisely) until I was drunk enough to talk about it without screaming. Though I’m not drunk enough that I don’t realize that’s what he’s aiming for.

  I don’t answer right away, but stare out of the window. This second safe house is near the Panhandle, on Fell Street. It looks right onto the thin strip of park connected to the Golden Gate Dome. I can just barely see the tips of Grace Cathedral from between two orchard high-rises. It’s quite a pretty view—those pure white towers flanked by fruit trees within glass buildings thirty stories high.

  I get to my feet and wobble.

  Nazarin leans back in his chair. “You’re drunk.”

  “Very deductive, detective.”

  “Come on. Tell me what happened to you in there.”

  I stagger to the little bathroom. “I’ll tell you in a second.”

  I pee and then lean over the tiny sink. I press my palms against my eyes, breathing raggedly. It’s late and I feel like shit. I’ve drunk at least a quarter of the bottle of the fake gin. I’m de
finitely drunk.

  When I come back, Nazarin has a huge glass of water and I gulp it down. I’ve delayed as long as I can. Time to return to the nightmare world, at least for a little while.

  So I tell him everything. I don’t leave anything out, and I’ve got a pretty good memory. I tell him about the mandrake demons, false Mana-ma and Tila, Mia’s scalpel. “The drug seemed to pull her in deeper. My sister was there and she started ranting. I guess Mia made that happen? Maybe it’s a hint, but mainly she just sounded batshit crazy.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Something about finding the link and then: ‘He is the red one, the fair one, the handsome one. From Earth and now he goes back to the Earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Changing faces like kaleidoscopes.’”

  “Sounds like the garbled scripture that Tila spouted in Zenith, according to Sal.”

  “That’s what’s weird. If Mia was going to give me a hint, shouldn’t she have referenced Mana-ma’s Good Book? That’s what we all have memorized. Mana-ma would show us other holy writ, all sorts of it too: the Torah, the Qur’an, the Book of Mormon, gnostic texts, the works—but out-of-context bits that suited her. Usually she ranted about how they were the warped echoes of the true voice of God, which only she heard. Naturally.”

  That familiar guilt twists deep in my stomach. For a long time, I’d believed that Mana-ma did hear the true voice of God. That she was the vessel able to bring us salvation. And I’d been so stubborn, so willingly blind, for so long. After Tila and I had left the Hearth, after the last holds of Mana-ma were finally gone from me, we went through a phase of reading all the holy books we could get our hands on. Buddhist texts, ancient Egyptian things (I admit to reading the Book of the Heavenly Cow mainly because it had such a great title), Ellen White’s Seventh-Day Adventist texts. A lot of stuff from other cults, especially ones formed after Mana’s Hearth. The Contours of God. The Green Cabal, which thought that people who saw aliens were actually seeing fairies, and lived in the woods with toadstools for a few decades.

  Everything and anything, wondering if maybe we’d find the truth in one of them.

  We didn’t, but I remember sitting side by side in our little San Francisco apartment in the Inner Sunset, our legs touching and our cheeks pressed against each other as we read, like when we had been connected. I still feel I think best when I’m sitting like that with Tila, feeling the steady beating of her heart in time with mine, and the gentle sound of her breathing. Maybe that’s why I’ve felt so lost: I can’t think properly when she’s gone. All the good memories with her hurt.

  The silence has gone on too long. I can tell he’s been watching me as I stare blankly into space.

  “So. Let’s start looking at what Mia might have meant. It sounds like religious rhetoric, so I’m thinking the Bible,” Nazarin says. He blinks and his ocular implant activates the wallscreen, bringing up a version of the King James Bible.

  Nazarin taps his thumb against his lips. “Vuk’s dead. It could be about him. So I guess that explains the ashes to ashes part. ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’”

  “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky … we know that Mia’s a junkie!” I sing. The SynthGin has made me silly.

  At Nazarin’s confused look, I giggle even more. “Never mind. Old song by a man called David Bowie. Sorry.” It was from post-1969, so I first listened to it after coming to San Francisco, during my and my sister’s self-taught education in music. I clear my throat, try to calm myself. “I have no idea what she meant by ‘the red one, the fair one, the handsome one.’”

  He searches for quotes relating to red. The following appears on the wall:

  Isaiah 1:18: Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

  Exodus 28:15: You shall make a breast piece of judgment, in skilled work. In the style of the ephod you shall make it—of gold, blue and purple and scarlet yarns, and fine twined linen shall you make it.

  “Mean anything to you?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “Nope.”

  He searches for “the fair one” and the snippet from the Song of Solomon appears:

  My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

  I still shake my head. Tila is beloved to me, of course, but the quote doesn’t jump out to me in any significant way. Does she want me to come away with her?

  He frowns. “I’m sure we’ll find out something. There’ll be a kink in this trail somewhere.”

  He tries a general search, not in the Bible, of “the red one, the fair one, the handsome one.”

  “Got it,” Nazarin whispers.

  The triliteral Semitic root ADM: red, handsome, fair. And a word from it, “adamah,” meaning “ground” or “earth.”

  “Adam.” The word rasps from my throat. My head spins and I lean back on the chair, closing my eyes, hiding my face in my hands.

  “The first man? Does that mean anything to you?”

  Of course it does. And it has nothing to do with the original Adam from Genesis, the rise of Eve’s original sin or the fall of man. It has everything to do with a nice boy with a genuine smile, laughing through the pain as he tried to catch green grapes in his mouth, his left arm a stump on the pillow, his infected foot propped up on the bed. A lifetime ago. A world away across the bay.

  “It does. We knew a boy named Adam. But I don’t know how the hell he’d have anything to do with this.”

  “Maybe Mia wanted us to speak to him. Where is he?”

  Not opening my eyes, I say, “He’s dead. Died ten years ago, in Mana’s Hearth. Maybe she meant another Adam. Or she was babbling nonsense hopped up on Zeal or Verve. Fuck, I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t think about this any more.” I take my hands away and reach for the bottle of SynthGin. It only has enough for half a glass.

  “Any more?”

  He brings out the bottle of SynthTequila. Holds it out to me like an offering.

  “That’ll do.”

  * * *

  Our empty SynthTequila glasses sit on the table by the window, glowing silver in the moonlight. Nazarin and I are on the bed. The detective is splayed against the wall, his arms crossed behind his head. His eyes are half-lidded, his lips parted. I’m lying on my side, my head resting on my arm. He makes a pretty picture. In this soft light, he does not look so fierce. I can’t see his scars.

  Nazarin stretches, his shirt lifting just enough to show the muscled planes of his stomach.

  “Do you want another drink?” he asks, his voice quiet.

  “No,” I say. I sit up, move a little closer. We pause, six inches apart, sizing each other up. We both know what the other wants. What we don’t know is if we should cross that line.

  The old Taema wouldn’t have. The old me would have decided it was too improper, unprofessional. The new me, though? The one who has given up everything, who just nearly killed my foster mother in a dream world? She’s a different creature entirely.

  Nazarin opens his mouth to say something.

  I close the distance between us.

  His mouth is warm. His lips part further, his tongue darting against mine, soft and tasting of tequila. His stubble scratches my chin. I pull him against me, and his body is the opposite of his mouth—hard, angular, strong. I roll on top of him, and his lips move from my lips to my neck. I close my eyes, a small smile curling my lips.

  I sit up and Nazarin pulls my shirt off of me. His fingers trace their way down my scar before reaching behind me, unclasping my bra. I slide it down my arms, tossing it to the floor before helping him out of his clothes.

  We are not slow. We are not gentle. We are not tender. We each take what we want, what we need, yet we do give the other what they desire. It’s been almost a year since I broke up with David. It’s a long time to be alone. I concentrate entirely on Nazarin and the sensations he gives me, determin
ed to quiet my racing mind.

  Afterward, I lie on top of him, my breasts pressed against his muscled chest. From this close, I can see all his scars, crisscrossed against each other. I trace my fingertips along them as he drifts off to sleep, wondering what story lies behind each one.

  His heartbeat is in time with mine.

  FOURTEEN

  TAEMA

  I wake up curled up against Nazarin’s side.

  In the harsh light of day, sleeping with my undercover partner doesn’t seem like the brightest idea I ever had, even if I am delightfully sore and sated. I ease myself away from him, running my tongue over my dry lips. Synth alcohols don’t give you a hangover, but your body still understands on some deep level that you’ve messed with it. I lean on my knees.

  I dreamed of Adam. My first crush. How he used to visit us and stay for dinner. He’d flip through the books in our room, and I’d watch his fingers turn the pages. I’d often wondered if he liked either me or my sister, or both of us. He was so tall, and strong from helping plow the fields for grain. I could picture his face so clearly in my mind, as if I’d just seen him the day before.

  Nazarin shifts, curling on his side, turned toward me, his face burrowed into his arm so I can only see the tips of his eyebrows and his buzzed hair. He looks cute, something I still find remarkable in such a large, intimidating man. Images of the previous night flash in my mind, and though they are pleasant memories, I’m nervous about how he’ll react when he wakes up. I watch him for a minute, willing my body to feel better, even if nothing exactly hurts. Nazarin’s breathing hitches, his brows furrowing. I wonder what his dreams are.

  I move to leave the bed and Nazarin stiffens, his arm snaking out to grab my wrist. I cry out in surprise. We freeze. Nazarin meets my eyes, the sleep clearing from them as he remembers what we did. His gaze darts down to my naked torso. He lets go of my wrist and I rub it.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Light sleeper.”

  It’s more than that. He’s someone used to sleeping with one eye open and a gun under his pillow.