Limbus, Inc., Book III Read online

  His head snapped up, eyes narrowing in the reflexive annoyance of someone who has been interrupted while doing something terribly important. “Can I help you?”

  “Um,” I said. Suddenly confronted with a living person who didn’t work for my father’s company, who I was expected to actually converse with, my throat went dry and my mind went blank. I stood there for several agonizing seconds, trying to make my mouth move.

  “Miss, if you don’t have business here, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to—”

  “Recruiter!” Getting the word out was like uncorking my voice: the rest of the words came tumbling after it, eager to be heard. “I have an appointment with one of the Limbus recruiters. I, uh, I don’t know her name.” How could I be so stupid? I should have asked for her name, even if I didn’t ask for anything else. The world runs on names.

  The guard’s expression softened. In a much gentler voice, he asked, “Do you know your name? That will let me verify your appointment.”

  “Beatrice Walden.”

  “All right, Miss Walden. You just hold tight.” He pushed his magazine aside, pulling a keyboard tray out from beneath the desk, and tapped a brief phrase on the keys. “Here you are. Eleven o’clock. You’re right on time.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I can buzz you up, if you can answer one question.”

  I went still. Keeping my voice as light as I could, I asked, “What’s that?”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” He met my eyes. His were warm and brown and surprisingly kind, given how brusque he’d been at first. “You don’t have to go up there. You can always find another way.”

  I bit my lip. He was only saying what I’d already said to myself. The fact that he already worked for these people and was telling me this was a little terrifying, but compared to what I was facing if I didn’t do this, a little terror was no big deal.

  “There isn’t another way,” I said. “Not for me.”

  “If you say so.” He dropped a plastic key fob on the counter between us. “Floor eleven. There’s only one door, and this will get you through. Best of luck, Miss Walden.”

  “Thank you,” I said, polite and bewildered. The key fob was heavier than it looked, like it was plastic stretched over some other, denser core. I wrapped my fingers tightly around it and walked toward the elevator, my skin itching and prickling under the synthetic fibers of my turtleneck. I forced myself to keep breathing. It was harder than it should have been. Not as hard as it was to push the “call” button, or to step through the elevator doors when they slid silently open. Not nearly as hard as it was to press “11” on the control panel.

  The doors closed. The elevator began to move. I closed my eyes and tried not to hyperventilate.

  There was a soft ding as the elevator slid to a stop on the eleventh floor. I opened my eyes and looked out on a white, featureless room. There was a door on the far wall; the lock panel next to it was the only bit of color in the whole place, bright red, almost like a warning. I walked toward it. The whole scene was so surreal that for a moment I wondered whether I’d fallen asleep on the bus and was dreaming this.

  There was a beep when I ran my key fob across the red panel. The door swung open. I stepped through.

  The office on the other side was much more conventional. Huge, and palatial, but conventional. The floor was covered in a thick shag carpet, and massive picture windows made up two of the walls, providing a jaw-dropping view of the city. There were a few low bookshelves around the edges of the room, each topped by a spectacular orchid. The only other furniture was the desk, which was so large that it felt like it should have come with a different, grander name. Probably something French. Everything sounded classier when it was in French.

  There was a woman sitting behind the desk. She looked like her name should be in French, too. She had smooth, light brown skin and sleek black hair, and when she turned away from her computer to look at me, her eyes were a shade almost exactly between the two, deep brown and piercing.

  She stood.

  “Miss Walden, I presume?” she asked, not making any move to step toward me. Instead, she gestured to the wall beside me. “There’s a folding chair in the closet, if you please. You’ll want to sit down for our conversation, and you’ll forgive me for not providing you with something fancier.”

  If she’d been one of my father’s researchers, who made millions off my unique properties, I would have been offended. Under the circumstances, what she was asking seemed perfectly reasonable. I was a visitor at worst; a future employee at best. Future employees couldn’t be allowed to go around destroying expensive furniture just because they felt like it. It simply wasn’t done.

  The closet wasn’t locked. The only thing inside it was a folding metal chair of the sort I’d been sitting on for most of my life. I pulled it out and carried it with me as I walked across the sound-muffling carpet to that behemoth of a desk. The woman watched without comment until I unfolded the chair and sank down onto it. Then she sat back down in her own chair, folding her hands in front of herself on the desk, and smiled at me. It was a deep sea smile, a shark’s smile, filled with teeth and secure in its victory.

  I didn’t recoil. If I had any victories that day, that was the big one.

  “I understand that you’re uncomfortable being here, and I can sympathize,” said the woman. “You’ve been isolated for quite some time, and it will take you a while to become comfortable again. Your initial assignments will reflect this. We want you to feel at ease in the field, and are willing to invest in your comfort. My name is Emily Ng. You may call me ‘Ms. Ng,’ or ‘ma’am.’ Anything else will be taken as an insult, and will be handled appropriately. Please indicate that you understand.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She smiled her shark’s smile again. “Excellent. Now, Miss Walden, what makes you think Limbus would be a good fit for your skills?”

  I gaped at her. “You…you recruited me,” I finally managed. “I don’t even know what Limbus does. I’m here because you asked me to be. I need the money. I still don’t understand what you’re going to want me to do.”

  “An excellent answer. A surprising number of recruits will try to bluff at this stage, which simply wastes everyone’s time. You are here, Miss Walden, because you possess a unique set of skills—unhoned, yes, but potentially very valuable. We’re not in the business of allowing valuable things to go unclaimed long enough for someone else to pick them up. Limbus is willing to help you hone those skills, and reward you handsomely for using them to our benefit, providing you’re willing to make a serious effort to be a true corporate asset.”

  “Skills?” I shook my head. “I don’t have any skills.”

  “No?”

  “Killing everything you touch isn’t a skill, Ms. Ng. It’s a punishment for my father’s hubris.”

  She smiled again. It wasn’t getting any less unnerving. “Did you ever wonder why he named you ‘Beatrice’? A lovely name, but a bit old-fashioned, all things considered.”

  “He named me after Rappaccini’s daughter, from the Nathaniel Hawthorne story,” I said. “I can’t tell you whether it’s because he liked the story or because he was a pretentious asshole. I’m voting for a combination of the two.”

  Her eyebrows climbed toward her hairline. “Swearing, Miss Walden? During a job interview?”

  “This isn’t a job interview,” I said. “Either it’s a recruitment, or it’s a waste of my time. I still don’t know what you want from me.”

  “Oh, is that your only concern? It’s very simple, Miss Walden.” Her eyebrows returned to their original position on her face, while her smile didn’t waver. “We want you to kill people for us.”

  I sat, silently, and stared at her.

  *

  I will probably never know what convinced my mother to go along with my father’s grandiose plans for me. That’s a good thing: if I knew why she’d agreed to it, I might be forced to love her a
little more, and then I’d actually regret what I did, accidental as it was. Regardless, her signature is on all the paperwork pertaining to the genetic modifications he began making while I was still in her womb. It’s actually a pretty fascinating read, assuming you have a strong stomach and no sense of ethics. There’s a project description dated three days before my estimated conception. There’s a consent form, signed by both of them, dated two days later. And then comes the string of lab reports and technical jargon, describing, one gene at a time, what the great Dr. Walden had decided to do to his first and only child.

  Not all the paperwork originated in his lab. Starting with the second trimester, there are news reports, injunctions, and legal paperwork mixed in with the reports and consent forms. My gestation ran right ahead of the law, which raced to make babies like me illegal. But the law is slow and science is swift, and bodily autonomy is still the order of the day: no matter how little they liked the idea of my existence, they lacked the power to compel my mother to have an abortion. Maybe they wondered, too, what was going to happen when I popped out, Dr. Walden’s monster baby, a horrifying hybrid of science and nature. If they couldn’t stop me, they could at least document me.

  Except that my parents had money, and money meant lawyers, and so far as I had been aware, the world outside the lab had never even learned my name. I had grown up in sterile rooms and overgrown gardens, moving between beds of specially treated soil and the clinical chill of the lab.

  My father, may he burn in Hell forever, claimed to be a conservationist, horrified by the loss of genetic diversity in the rainforests as we cut down more and more trees to make space for factories and cattle. I had been his grand solution. A child, modified to secrete toxins normally found only in flowers, sensitive enough to mimic any species, if exposed to it long enough. Before one of my sessions, I would be fed piles of vegetation, oleander blossoms and henbane berries and woody bark stripped from unnamed orchids. Or they’d let me have lettuce and water and sunlight, and I would sweat novel toxins, poisons that the world had never seen before.

  While they were both alive, I had been expected to visit the lab once a month. They would prepare me, making my food and telling me about the plants I was going to mimic this time, the wonderful medicines they’d be able to make from what I produced. There had been a time, when I was very young, when I had been so eager to please them—to earn their affection, which I should have known I was never going to get—that I had actually looked forward to my visits to the lab. I had watched my natural pink and yellow secretions turn green, or purple, or once even a bright, electric blue, and I had been proud of what I could do that no one else could. I had thought I mattered.

  Until my mother got sick. Looking back, it was probably something manageable, a bad case of food poisoning or the flu. She’d gone to bed Thursday night, and come Friday morning, she hadn’t felt up to leaving her room. I had been seven years old by that point, judged old enough to pour my own juice and make my own salad. Too young to understand consequences.

  Around noon, I had made her a sandwich. Cheese and ham on wheat bread, just like I’d seen her make a hundred times. I had carried it up to her room. She had been asleep when I left it next to her bed and went downstairs to my cartoons, feeling so accomplished and grown up, like I’d finally shown that I was a big girl who could be trusted to do whatever my parents needed me to do.

  I hadn’t been old enough to understand why my parents spent so much time wiping down every surface I touched, or why I had my own dishes. I hadn’t been old enough to understand a lot of things.

  My mother had woken; seen the sandwich; assumed that my father had left it for her, when she was feeling better. Maybe she’d even been pleased. That kind of small, caring gesture wasn’t like him.

  She had died of anaphylactic shock before he got home. Her throat had closed before she had a chance to scream.

  My father had been more careful with me after that. Not more distant—that wouldn’t really have been possible—but more careful. When he finally died, some twenty years later, it had been in the lab, of a heart attack that had nothing to do with me. I was the most poisonous thing in the world, and yet I had only managed to kill one of my parents. It was a little embarrassing, really.

  No matter what I did, I was never living up to my potential.

  *

  There had only really been two questions after Ms. Ng’s admission that Limbus wanted me to kill people: how many people, and why me? There had to be more traditional assassins in the world, people who actually knew how to commit murder, rather than doing it accidentally.

  Ms. Ng smiled, leaning forward at her desk, and said, “There is a tradition in India of the Visha Kanya, the poisonous girls. They were raised much as Hawthorne’s fictional daughter, fed on poison until their bodies became vessels of destruction. Supposedly, one Vish Kanya became so deadly that even looking at her could kill. Their lives were short, since the poison they fed upon was of outside origin. Even the longest-lived among them only saw three days of her twenty-fifth year before her heart gave out. You, on the other hand, are in perfect health. Your doctors believe your lifespan will be as long or longer than a non-modified human’s. Many of the compounds you’ve been encouraged to mimic have medicinal properties. You’re one big anti-carcinogen. Your blood runs green with chlorophyll. You’re a scientific miracle, my dear, and that makes you both valuable and untraceable. You can mimic poisons so subtle, so rare, that your targets will have no defense. You can sleep in a bed of peanut flowers for a week before you meet a man with allergies, and let your touch send him into anaphylactic shock. So you see, it’s not that we can’t find other people capable of killing. It’s that we can’t find anyone capable of killing exactly like you.”

  I went still, clenching and unclenching my hands against my knees. My gloves were getting squishy. My palms had been sweating almost since the start of this interview, and I knew that if I looked down, the previously cloudy plastic would be patterned in abstract swirls of pink and yellow.

  “I’ve never killed anyone on purpose,” I said finally.

  “We’re aware,” said Ms. Ng. “Training will be provided—and your first paycheck can be drawn for the full value of your current debts. Peace is an interesting thing, Miss Walden. There are those who will try to tell you that it comes only from within, but in my experience, money can certainly buy a great deal of the time you’ll need to find it.”

  “What if I can’t perform? What if when I try to kill someone, I can’t do it?”

  “Then your contract with us will be terminated. Any moneys which have been paid into your account will, of course, remain yours; the hundred and fifty thousand is your base pay, a retainer, if you will, and is not contingent on any successful outings.” She leaned back, reaching behind herself to grab a sheaf of paper, which she dropped in front of me with a smile. “It’s all there. All you need to do is sign, place the contract in the attached envelope, and drop it in the mail. Your first check will be deposited in your bank account by midnight that same day. Your training will begin the day following.”

  Asking her how they could do things that quickly seemed unwise, and so I didn’t. I reached for the contract with one shaking pink and yellow hand, thinking about the house where I’d grown up, thinking about the labs where I’d bled away my childhood, one needle at a time.

  “I can sign now,” I said.

  She smiled.

  *

  There was a Limbus, Inc. company car waiting for me downstairs, a sleek, steel construct with a driver behind the wheel and clear plastic sheeting covering my seat. There wasn’t much chance of me sweating through my clothes, but that plastic sheeting still made it easier for me to relax, allowing myself to trust that these people had…

  Well, they didn’t have my best interests at heart. They wanted to use me as a weapon. Given that my father’s company had always been trying to use me as a panacea, it should have been an easy choice. But being a panacea did
n’t necessarily make me a good thing. I was more of a way to sidestep all those restrictions on harvesting endangered plants, a way to stick it to the companies that couldn’t synthesize the same chemicals through the cheap and easy mechanism of “sweat them out the pores of a young girl who, legally, you own.” I had made them millions in the years since I was born, and how did they repay me? By trying to expel me from my childhood home.

  Maybe being a killer wouldn’t be all that bad. There was certainly no way that it could be worse.

  The driver pulled up to my house in a third of the time it would have taken if I’d been on the bus. I moved to get out. He cleared his throat. I froze.

  “Miss Walden, if you would wait for a moment,” he said. Opening his door, he got out of the car and walked around to open mine. I blinked at him. He smiled, the expression only slightly obscured by the mirrored glasses that he wore. Somewhere between his seat and my door, he had acquired a hard-shelled plastic suitcase. He offered it to me. I noticed that he was wearing gloves, and relaxed a little more. Wearing protection around me isn’t offensive: it’s just plain common sense, the sort of thing a person does when they enjoy breathing and would like to keep doing it.

  “Ms. Ng believes that you will find these to your liking,” he said, as I took the suitcase. He didn’t help me out of the car. That was good. Touching me, even with gloves on, was not something to be done lightly. “I’ll be here to pick you up tomorrow morning at eight. Please be prepared. Limbus places high value on punctuality.”

  “Okay,” I said, swallowing the urge to laugh. Limbus is going to pay me to kill people, but they place a high value on punctuality. Don’t be late to your killing-people training, Miss Walden! Don’t forget that you’re supposed to be an employee now!