33
The next morning Adam One came to see how Toby’s Vigil had gone. “Did you get an answer?” he asked her.
“I saw an animal,” said Toby.
Adam One was delighted. “What a successful outcome! Which animal? What did it say to you?” But before Toby could answer, he looked over her shoulder. “We have a messenger,” he said.
In her hazy post-Vigil state, Toby thought he meant some kind of mushroom angel or plant spirit, but it was only Zeb, breathing hard from his climb up the fire escape. He was still wearing his pleeblander disguise: black fleather vest, grimy jeans, battered solarbike boots. He looked hungover.
“Were you up all night?” said Toby.
“You too, looks like,” said Zeb. “I’ll get shit for it back at the nest — Lucerne hates it when I work at night.” He didn’t seem too concerned about that. “You want to call a general meeting,” he said to Adam One, “or hear the bad news first yourself?”
“Bad news first,” said Adam One. “We may have to edit it for wider consumption.” He nodded towards Toby. “She doesn’t panic.”
“Right,” said Zeb. “Here’s the story.”
His sources of information were unofficial, he said: in pursuit of the truth, he’d been forced to sacrifice himself by spending an evening watching the girls gyrate at Scales and Tails, where the CorpSeCorps guys hung out when off-duty. He didn’t like to get too close to the CorpSeMen, he said — he had a history of sorts, he might be recognized despite the alterations he’d had done to himself. But he knew a few of the girls, so he’d mined them for rumours.
“You paid them?” said Adam One.
“Nothing’s free,” said Zeb. “But I didn’t pay too much.”
Burt had indeed been running a gro-op in the Buenavista, he said. It was the usual method — unoccupied apartments, windows blacked out, electricity hijacked. Full-spectrum gro-lights, automatic sprinkler systems, all top of the line. But it wasn’t just ordinary skunkweed, not even West Coast superweed: it was a stratospheric splice, with some peyote genes and psilocybins, and even a little ayahuasca — the good part, though they hadn’t completely eliminated the part that made you puke your guts out. A lot of people who’d tried this would kill to do it again, and there wasn’t much being made yet, so it was going for a very high price on the market.
It was a CorpSeCorps operation, naturally. The HelthWyzer labs had developed the splice, the CorpSeCorpsMen were the wholesalers. They ran it the way they ran everything illegal, through the pleebmobs. They’d thought it was a joke to get one of the Adams to front it, and to plant the gro-op in a building the Gardeners controlled. They’d been paying Burt well enough, but then he’d tried to cheat by selling on his own. He’d been getting away with it too, said Zeb, until the CorpSeCorps got an anonymous tip. Traced to a cellphone tossed into a dumpster. No DNA on it. Woman’s voice, though. Very pissed-off woman.
That would be Veena, thought Toby. I wonder where she got the phone? Word had it that she’d taken Bernice to the West Coast, with the money the CorpSeCorps had paid her.
“Where is he now?” said Adam One. “Adam Thirteen? Former Adam Thirteen. Is he still alive?”
“Can’t tell you,” said Zeb. “No word on it.”
“Let us pray,” said Adam One. “He’ll talk about us.”
“If he was in that deep with them, he already has,” said Zeb.
“Did he know about Pilar’s tissue samples?” said Adam One. “And our contact in HelthWyzer? Our young courier with the honey jar?”
“No,” said Zeb. “That was just you and me and Pilar. We never discussed it in Council.”
“Let’s hope he’ll have an accident with a gutting knife,” said Zeb. “You didn’t hear any of this,” he said to Toby.
“Fear not!” said Adam One. “Toby’s truly one of us now. She’s going to be an Eve.”
“I didn’t get an answer!” Toby protested. An animal yawn was not very definitive, as visions went.
Adam One smiled benignly. “You’ll make the right decision,” he said.
Toby spent the rest of the afternoon mixing up a scent combo that would be irresistible to rats, and could be laid down as a trail from the Fender-Bender Body Shop to the Buenavista Condos. The goal was to remove the rats from the former and rehouse them in the latter, without loss of life: the Gardeners didn’t want to displace a fellow Species without offering them accommodation of equal value.
She used meat scraps from the stash Pilar kept for maggots, some honey, some peanut butter — she’d sent Amanda to buy that at a supermarkette. Some rancid cheese; beer dregs for the liquid element. When it was ready, she sent for Shackleton and Crozier and gave them their instructions.
“That is really putrid,” said Shackleton, sniffing with admiration.
“Think you can stand it?” said Toby. “Because if you can’t …”
“We’ll do it,” said Crozier, straightening his shoulders.
“Can I come too?” said little Oates, who’d followed them.
“No thumbsuckers,” said Crozier.
“Be careful,” said Toby. “We don’t want to find you spraygunned in a vacant lot. Minus your kidneys.”
“I know what I’m doing,” said Shackleton proudly. “Zeb’s gonna help us. We’re wearing pleeb stuff — see?” He opened his Gardener shirt: underneath it was a black T-shirt that read, DEATH: A GREAT WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT! Underneath the slogan was a skull and crossbones, in silver.
“Those Corps guys are so dumb,” said Crozier, grinning. He had a T-shirt too: STRIPPERS LOVE MY POLE. “We’ll walk right past them!”
“Not a thumbsucker,” said Oates, kicking Crozier in the shin. Crozier batted him on the side of the head.
“We’re under their radar,” said Shackleton. “They won’t even see us.” “Pig-eater!” said Oates.
“Oates, that is enough language out of you,” said Toby. “You can come and help me feed the worms. Off you go,” she said to the other two. “Here’s the bottle. Don’t spill it inside FenderBender, and especially not on wood, or some unlucky people will have to live with it for a long time.” She added, to Shackleton, “We’re depending on you.” It was good to let boys that age believe they were doing the jobs of men, so long as they didn’t get carried away.
“Ciao, bedwetter,” said Crozier.
“You totally stink,” said Oates.