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CHAPTER 5

It took a day for her to set everything up, but Lily came through for me. She was able to get ahold of her ex, a fellow named Clarence who went by the moniker Dante, and convince him to meet with us. As expected, Arcanum was being very cautious about the whole thing. We were to meet on their turf and we’d be swept for cameras or listening devices.

It was a dark and rainy night on the South Side of Delta City. Traffic is usually lighter at night but this town never really goes to sleep. Lily sat in the passenger’s seat next to me, quietly, like she was lost in her own thoughts. She was wearing makeup, dark eyeliner and purple lipstick. Maybe it was just so she would blend where we were going; her ex wanted us to meet him at a nightclub in the southeast sector of the city, a joint that, according to Lily, Arcanum owned and operated through a cutout. Maybe she just wanted to look good so that this Clarence cat was reminded of what he wasn’t getting anymore. Women are funny like that sometimes.

I was dressed the same way I always was, and Lily said I’d stick out like a sore thumb, especially with the tie. She was probably right about that, but I wasn’t interested in playing dress-up to try and convince a bunch of kids that I was hip. Normally I try to be the gray man, not draw attention to myself. That helps a lot this line of work. In this case, though, it didn’t really matter. They knew who I was and were expecting me.

“You okay?” I asked, breaking the silence.

“What?” Lily turned from staring out the window and seemed surprised by the question. She could get lost in her own head sometimes, especially when we were working on a case. “Oh. Yeah. I was just thinking about Cassandra Carmichael’s notes, Arcanum, all that. Mentally juggling a lot of things right now.”

“I know the feeling. Did you find anything else in her files? I know it’s the weekend and I don’t expect you to work on your days off. I just know you. I’m guessing you kept looking through it.”

“I did,” Lily admitted with a smile, “but I didn’t get too deep into it. There’s a ton of material there. Years and years of repots, requisitions, financial analysis, spreadsheets, personnel management, things like that. A lot of it is interesting, but isn’t related to this Seraph or Site 471. I think she just downloaded as much data as she could and didn’t have time to sort through it.”

“Seems reasonable. She looked like she was in in a hurry in that video.”

“A lot of her notes are disorganized and haphazard. She was paranoid and wasn’t getting much sleep. I did find some documentation confirming that terraforming plant site by Mount Gilead is Site 471. There was also a long stop-work put in place up there before a bunch of personnel were cycled out, later replaced by different people, but nothing about why.”

“That would seem to corroborate some of what Cassandra Carmichael said in that video.”

“Most of the documents describing the dig site are redacted, and I don’t think Cassandra was able to find get the unredacted versions. I haven’t found anything that specifically mentions this Seraph or finding alien technology yet, and because of all the redactions, simple keyword searches aren’t helpful. I have to read the whole thing line by line and try to figure things out from the context. It’s a slow process. Right now I think our best leads are still Arcanum and the stepfather.”

“I agree, but I appreciate your hard work. That’s a lot of information to start with.” I was quiet for a moment. “Say, if you don’t mind me asking, just how involved were you with Arcanum?”

“Somewhat involved, I guess? I was a member but I never got in too deep. I did some coding and analysis work for them, but I was never really an insider. That takes a long time. You’ve got to prove you can be trusted.”

“Just like the GLF,” I said, “I’m getting tired of all this cloak-and-dagger business.”

“It wasn’t as bad as that. They didn’t try and make me do anything wrong. I was just hesitant to get too involved. Last time I did stuff like that, it blew up in my face and I got arrested.” She paused, then looked up at me. “I was worried that if I got busted again, I’d be looking at real prison time, given my record.”

I gave the sort of half shrug you do when you’ve got both hands on the steering wheel. “That was a perfectly reasonable concern for you to have, kid. The sorts of people Arcanum likes to take on have a lot of influence. One of the downsides of growing up is that you realize how much trouble your youthful idealism can get you into. It’s the same sort of lesson our client learned the hard way.”

“I know. It was hard to let it go, though. I admire what they do. There’s still a part of me that would like to be part of something like that.”

I grinned. “Admittedly our work isn’t usually glamorous.”

Lily smiled. “I like my job, Boss, don’t get me wrong. It’s just . . . I don’t know. Dante was so passionate about it. I think he felt a little betrayed when I didn’t want to go all in for Arcanum. I hadn’t been trying to mislead him about it or anything, I just wasn’t comfortable with it.”

“Sometimes people hear what they want to hear. It sounds to me like this young man wanted you to join Arcanum so badly that he couldn’t tell you weren’t as enthusiastic about it as he was. I assume this is why it didn’t work out between you two?”

“Yeah, mostly. We had a pretty big fight about it. I told him we were done.”

“That was probably for the best. The question is, is he still holding a grudge? Will he help us?”

“I think so. Dante was never, like, petty.”

“Well, I guess we’ll find out.”

She was quiet for a minute, then looked up at me again. “You know, you’re pretty good at giving relationship advice.”

“My ex-wife would argue with you on that.” I chuckled. “Hell, that woman loved to argue. Let’s just say I’ve done so much dumb shit in my time that I know what not to do.” That got a smile out of her. I made it a point not to pry into Lily’s personal life. Besides that she’s an adult—she doesn’t need me acting like I can run her life better than she can.

All that said . . . she has a good head on her shoulders, but she’s still so young. Twenty-one local years old, which is about twenty-four in Terran years. I remember being that age and what a fool I was. If I can help her avoid some of the mistakes I made, well . . . all the better.

“Tell me about this guy,” I said. “Clarence, Dante, whatever his name is. What’s he like?”

“Do us both a favor and call him Dante. He doesn’t like it when people he doesn’t know use his real name. It’s kind of a thing with the net-diver community and Arcanum in particular.”

“Did you have a nickname like that when you ran with those people?”

“Yeah—Lilith, or L-1-L-1-7-H. I know, not super creative when my real name is Lilian, but I came up with it when I was a kid. Twelve-year-old me thought it sounded really mysterious. I didn’t even know about the figure from Jewish folklore until I was older.”

She knew more about Jewish folklore than I did. “How’d you meet Dante?”

“Same way I met all my other friends—on the Net. I knew him even before I got busted. I never met him in person until my trial.”

“Is that right? He showed up there?”

“He did. Put on a tie and everything to support me in court. My parents took a liking to him, thought it was sweet that he showed up.”

“Your parents weren’t the only ones who took a liking to him.”

“Well . . . let’s just say he’s not like a lot of the other diver boys I met.”

“How were those other boys?”

“You know the type: pasty, awkward, shy. Not great people skills. A lot of them live off of junk food and energy drinks, spend all day jacked into virtual reality.”

“So the stereotype of the unhealthy, weird net-diver has some truth to it?”

She grinned. “More truth than a lot of us would like to admit. Not Dante, though. His parents immigrated from Earth, from the African Union. He works out a lot and wasn’t a VR junkie. He didn’t, you know, act weird because I’m a girl, and he was so polite to my parents.”

“Everything a girl could want, hey?”

“He was my first love, my first . . . uh . . .” Lily trailed off. I looked over at her and she was blushing a little. “We were just kids.”

“You think he’ll help us? I brought some cash in case we need to incentivize someone.”

“The money won’t help, not with Arcanum. They’ll either help us or they won’t. If Cassandra Carmichael was working with them, that means she earned their trust. They always look out for their own.”

“I hope you’re right.”

She looked over at me, cocking her head slightly to the side. “You’re not thrilled about talking to the stepfather, are you?”

“I’m not. Cassandra went to him, turned up missing, but he told Dagny everything is fine. It’s suspicious. Whatever is going on, he knows something about it. I don’t want to tip our hand any earlier than necessary. He already knows Dagny was asking after her sister, but he doesn’t know about us yet.”

“Yeah,” Lily agreed. “I would be hesitant to go to anyone at Ascension unless we know they can be trusted.” She looked at the navigation screen. “Hey, we’re almost there.”

The nightclub was called The Vault and it was not my kind of place. It was, however, the sort of joint I would have hung out at when I was Lily’s age: the loud industrial-synth music, expensive shots, a cloud of cigarette smoke hanging in the air despite the best efforts of the ventilation system, and, most importantly, lots and lots of women.

Just inside the front doors was a sort of foyer, the place where you checked in and paid the cover charge. The muffled thump of heavy bass resonated through the walls and floor. A couple of bouncers, big guys in tactical armor vests, stood at the back of the room and surveyed the crowd. Behind a panel of armored glass stood an earnest young woman in a skintight halter top. Half her head was shaved the way young people do these days. I let Lily do the talking, only handing over my ID when asked.

“We’ve been invited,” Lily explained to the other girl. “Dante is waiting for us.”

The hostess looked down at a screen for a moment. “There you are. Great! I’ll need you to hand over any weapons that you might be carrying. No guns, knives, or other weapons are allowed in the club. You will be checked before going in. You can also check your coats and hat.”

Lily took off her jacket and placed it in a big metal drawer before turning to look at me. “Boss?”

“Rules are rules, right?” I took off my jacket and folded it up. Setting my hat on top of it, I placed it in the drawer. The two goons at the back of the room shuffled a little bit when they saw the gun under my right arm, but they didn’t say anything. I undid the fasteners that attach the shoulder rig to my belt and took the whole harness off. I looked at the girl behind the glass. “You want me to clear it, too, or should I just leave it in the holster?”

“As long as it’s in a holster it’s fine.” I laid the holster rig on top of my jacket, next to my hat. “Great!” she said.

“Not so fast, kid.” Reaching into one pocket, I pulled out the little 9mm snub automatic I carry as a backup, still enclosed in its holster. “You’ll want that, too, I expect.” From another pocket I drew my auto-opening knife and put that on the pile, too. After that came my multitool, which has a knife blade on it, a flashlight, and spare ammunition for both guns. “I want a receipt for all this,” I said to the girl behind the glass.

“Holy shit, Boss,” Lily said, putting a hand over her face. Hell, I didn’t even wear my body armor that night.

After handing over all my hardware, the two mooks gave me a rough and thorough pat down. Then they swept both Lily and me with electromagnetic scanners designed to detect concealed weapons, tiny cameras, microphones, or other electronic devices. “You treat all your customers like this?” I asked.

“Only the ones who show up loaded for bear, buddy,” the one sweeping me said. “You got any cybernetic implants, artificial organs, things like that?”

“Not me, friend. One hundred percent meat except for a metal plate in my head. Little souvenir from the war.”

“Oh. Uh . . . thank you for your service, sir,” the bouncer said awkwardly.

“Don’t mention it.”

He looked over at his partner, who had just finished checking Lily. “He’s clean.”

“You can both go,” the other goon said.

“Thank you,” Lily said, apologetically. “Come on, Easy. I know where we’re going.” Past the entranceway was a set of stairs that went down. Being in the basement seemed on the nose for a club called The Vault. “This building used to be a bank,” she said, leading the way. “They got the property for cheap at auction.”

“So the club takes up the basement,” I said. “What about the rest of it? This is a big building.”

“They rent it out to generate revenue. There’s a big server farm on one floor, and I think a cybernetics clinic on another. It’s all on the up and up.”

At the bottom of the stairs was an open landing with another set of doors. Lily pushed them open and we were in the club. The music had been turned down and it seemed like most of the customers were getting ready to leave. A pair of women probably the same age as Lily eyed me up and down as they walked past. I eyed them right back—one, with pink hair, was wearing a tight mesh dress. The other was dressed like a schoolgirl from an old porno. They smiled at me as we passed each other.

Lily looked up at me with a grin on her face. “You dirty old man.”

“What? I can’t help it if women find confidence attractive. Besides, look at the other men in here. A lot of them are wearing as much makeup as the women.”

“It’s called glam,” Lily explained. “It’s in this year. To be honest, I don’t see the appeal, either. If I wanted to make out with a chick I’d make out with a chick, you know?”

I chuckled at that. “So this is where you like to hang out, hey?” Another woman walked past, this one with bright green hair and a pair of enormous knockers barely contained by a corset. “This ain’t really my scene, but it’s growing on me.”

“Easy, you’re probably the oldest guy in the place right now.”

I laughed again. “Hell, you’re probably right. Don’t worry, kid, you won’t catch me here after work. The eye candy is nice but it’s too loud. Anyways I’m not interested in being a vehicle for a girl half my age to work through her daddy issues. I have all the drama in my life that I need just now.”

“I don’t really come here anymore. Too many people I’d prefer not to bump into.”

One wall of the club was lined with semicircular booths, padded benches partially encircling a round table. In one of them four young people, three guys and one girl, were slumped into their seats, heads rolled back like they were passed out. They all wore headsets that covered their eyes and ears. A bulky virtual reality console sat on the table in front of them. Wires led from the console to the back of each kid’s head, plugged into their neural interfaces. I shook my head. “Why would you bother to come here and pay the cover charge if you’re just going to jack into VR? Can’t they do that at home?”

“It’s a fad,” Lily said, making a disapproving face. “Virtual hookups. People call them coomers. They come here, meet strangers, jack into a VR program together, and simulate having sex.”

“I’m pretty sure people have been doing that since they invented VR, kid.”

“I know, but it’s the in thing this year. Sometimes people will hookup with multiple virtual sex partners a night. They’ll do things that they wouldn’t do in real life. Since you meet your partners in person, you know they’re really who they say they are.” She looked up at me. “That’s important to most people.”

I shrugged. “At least you can’t catch chlamydia that way. I guess I would just prefer to not do it in front of a room full of strangers.”

Lily looked up at me again. “You’ve never tried VR, have you?”

“Of course I have. It just makes me a little motion sick, is all.”

“No, I mean real VR, with a neural implant.”

“Right, right. No. Didn’t feel comfortable plugging a computer directly into my brain.”

“It can be addictive, very addictive. That’s the problem. It doesn’t perfectly simulate your body’s senses, at least not with a commercial-grade cerebral interface. The more you use VR, the more your brain adapts to it, and the less real it feels. It becomes harder and harder to ignore the sensations from your physical body despite the direct stimulation from the implant. You start to notice the flaws in the simulation more and more, especially if you’re using a portable console like that, which has low fidelity. They end up in this ugly cycle of addiction, needing the dopamine hit from VR but finding it harder and harder to get.”

I stopped and looked down at my young partner. I’d never seen her use a VR interface. As far as I knew, she didn’t even have the neural implant, yet she seemed a little unsettled. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You didn’t, Easy. This . . . this is a big part of the reason I stopped coming here, of why I left this whole world. There are people who try to spend their entire lives online, plugged into the system for every waking hour. Some even try sleeping while plugged into VR.”

“Isn’t that supposed to cause nightmares?”

“You do it enough it’ll cause more than nightmares. You can get hallucinations, psychotic breaks, even brain damage.”

“Sounds like you’re speaking from experience,” I said, delicately.

Lily was quiet for a second. “I . . . let’s just say I had problems with VR dependency, and I saw what it did to people I care about. I swore off it, got my implant taken out. I don’t even like being around it now. It . . . it brings back to when I was in a dark place. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize for being honest, kid. It takes real strength to admit you have a problem, even more to actually overcome it.” I nodded to the far wall. “Those are the VIP rooms, I think.”

“They are,” she said, happy with the change of subject. “We’re meeting him in number three.”

“Right. What do you say we go get this meeting over with then get the hell out of here?”

“Sounds good, boss. And, you know, thank you.”

I patted her on the shoulder. “Anytime.”

“Hey, when we get in there, let me do the talking at first, okay?”

“You got it. Lead the way.”

Lily slid the double doors open. The VIP room was small and square. There was a low table in the middle and padded couches along the walls. The walls were covered with mirrors. The room was lit by red lights. Dante was sitting on the couch facing the door. Like Lily, and like a lot of the kids in this club, he was decked out in all black. His eyes were hidden, in the dim red light, behind a pair of smart glasses. His hair, curly and black, was cropped short on top and shaved on the sides of his head. A small goatee stuck out from his chin. He had gauges in both his earlobes, too.

He had his arm around a young woman with tanned skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. She wore a short skirt and a tight top, and was snuggled up next to him real cozy-like. Her legs were crossed and her arms were folded across her chest. She gave Lily one hell of a glare as we stepped into the little room. I guessed she was Dante’s new squeeze from the way she was mean-mugging Lily.

Lily, to her credit, didn’t let the girl’s evil eye phase her. “Dante. Thank you for meeting with us.”

Dante looked at his girl. “Baby, give us a few minutes. OPSEC.” The girl huffed but didn’t say anything. She stood up and stalked out of the room, leaving a cold draft in her wake. She closed the sliding doors behind her and the noise of the club was muffled to where we could have a proper conversation. The three of us were alone.

“I, uh, I hope I’m not causing a problem,” Lily said, tepidly. She’d been right, this was really awkward for her.

The young man stood up. “No problem. Selena understands operational security.” He reached across the table and, looking Lily in the eye, offered her a hand. “It’s good to see you again.” He was a smooth operator. He then held his hand out to me. “I’m Dante.”

I shook his hand firmly. “Easy Novak, private investigator. I appreciate your willingness to meet with us.”

“Sit, please,” he said, taking a seat himself. “I apologize for the security measures, but we have to be careful, especially when investigators come sniffing around.” He looked me in the eye. “No offense.”

“None taken,” I said.

He looked at Lily. “Haven’t heard from you in a long time, Lilith. A couple years, I think. You don’t stay in touch with hardly anyone from the old days. You don’t come to the club anymore. You ghosted all of us. Then, out of nowhere, you contact me and say you’re a detective now and you need my help. You say you have a problem that involves Arcanum. What is going on?”

“It’s about Cassandra Carmichael,” Lily said. “She disappeared. We were hired to find her.”

Dante played it cool. “What does this have to do with Arcanum?” Was it an act or did he really not know? How compartmentalized were these people?

“She was working with you,” I said, firmly, “and she’s been missing for two months now.”

“Is that right?” Dante asked, raising an eyebrow. “Who hired you?”

“Concerned parties,” I said, tersely.

Lily put a hand on my arm. “Easy.”

I didn’t let up. I leaned in so I was a little closer to Dante. “I didn’t come all the way down here and get groped up by a couple of goons just to sit here and listen to you play coy. I know you know something whether you want to admit it or not. I’m not asking you to divulge everything about Arcanum. Honestly, I don’t give a damn about Arcanum—I got no beef with you people. I’m here to do a job. Cassandra Carmichael is missing and she could be in real danger. Hell, she could be dead already. Either way, I was hired to find her and that’s what I intend to do. Will you help us or not?”

It’s a gamble using direct pressure like that. It works well on some people, but others will double down and push back even harder. From what Lily told me, though, Dante was basically a good kid, not the type to callously use someone. I figured my best bet here was to appeal to his sense of honor while letting him know how serious the situation was.

The young man took off his glasses and exhaled, heavily. “I was afraid of this. Yeah, she was working with us, and we know she’s missing. We had someone check her place to see if they could find out what might have happened.”

I looked at Lily, briefly. Dante had just confirmed that Cassandra Carmichael actually was working with Arcanum. I didn’t know yet if it would help us find her or not, but it at least confirmed that she hadn’t made the whole thing up. “That explains how her apartment got turned over,” I said. “I take it you were responsible for getting the security cameras disabled, too? How’d you manage that without the building super noticing?”

He raised an eyebrow again. It was a tell, something he seemed to do whenever I said something he wasn’t expecting. “Sorry, that’s kind of a trade secret. We were doing the same thing you are, trying to find any clues as to what happened to her.”

“Was it your man who got into the wall safe?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Dante, please,” Lily said.

He sighed. “Okay, listen. I wasn’t involved with this at all. I only found out about it after you contacted me. I had to take it up the chain to find out who Cassandra Carmichael was and why we were helping her. Our operative was able to get her safe open but there wasn’t anything in there about what she was investigating.”

“What did you find?” I asked.

“Personal documents and belongings, like you’d expect. Her passport and birth certificate, some cash, jewelry, things like that.”

“So you just took it?” I asked. “Burgled her apartment? Does Arcanum care at all about the people who try to help it, or was she just a means to an end?”

He broke eye contact when I said that, looked down at the table. It must have got to him. I know how to push a guy’s buttons when I have to. “You must understand, we have to be careful. It took us a long time to even realize anything was wrong. It was only a week ago that we had her apartment searched. I guess they took the stuff in the safe to scan it, make sure there wasn’t a data stick or anything hidden in it. We still have all of it, even the cash. We’re not thieves. We were going to give it back if she turned up.”

“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere,” I said. “She told us that she was going to approach Arcanum to help. What sort of help did you offer her? Did she give you any information?”

“If you’re familiar with our work then you know what kind of help we offer, Mr. Novak,” Dante said. “My question is, how much do you know? You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need our help. If you want us to disclose anything, you have to be willing to do the same.”

“Dante,” Lily said, her voice pleading.

I held up a hand. “No, he’s got a point. We were hired by her family.”

“I see. From what I understand, Cassandra contacted us over encrypted chat. There was a long process of vetting before we got involved. We were able to connect her with other insiders who were willing to talk to us. She wouldn’t tell us exactly what she was investigating, just that it was big.”

“We did find quite a bit of information from Ascension,” I admitted. “I’m guessing your insiders are where she got some of it from.”

That piqued his interest. “What did you find?”

“Financial documents, logistics stuff, requisitions, things like that. Some of it related to what she was investigating, some of it not.”

“We would be interested in taking a look at what she gave you.”

“Why’s that? It all came from your source, didn’t it?”

“Some of it, but you have to understand, she also was a source. She was a high-level logistics coordinator. She had access to a lot of things. Our organization is interested in seeing what she was able to dig up.”

“We might be able to come to an arrangement,” I suggested.

“Maybe. I need to know I can trust you. I need to know that you’re not working for Ascension.”

That pissed Lily off. “Are you serious? You think I would work for them?”

“No offense, but like I said, you ghosted all of us. I don’t know what you’ve been up to since then.”

I raised a hand to intervene before Lily shot her mouth off. She was normally slow to anger but she did have a temper. “Seems like we have ourselves a predicament, here. I want something from you, you want something from me, but neither of us knows if we can trust the other guy.”

“I feel like you’re going to make a proposal,” Dante said.

“I feel like I am, too. Let’s start with a show of good faith. I will give you some of the files on Ascension that Cassandra Carmichael left behind. There are things that don’t pertain to my current case, but you might find it interesting all the same. In return, you give me everything that was in the safe in her apartment.”

“That . . . sounds reasonable. I’ll have to talk to some people to get the okay, but I think they’ll go along with it. Then what?”

I held my hands up agreeably. “Then, if we’re both satisfied with what the other has provided, we move on to the next thing.”

“I don’t know where she is,” Dante said. “I’m sorry. I wish I did.”

“We understand that,” Lily said. “We’re just trying to retrace her steps.”

Dante pulled out his handheld and began tapping at the screen. “Hang on a second,” he said, not looking up at us. A few moments ticked by without anyone saying anything. He just kept watching his screen. Finally, he said, “I got the okay for this. Where do you want to do the exchange? Do you want to come back here?”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not,” I said with a grin. “Lily has informed me that I’m too old to hang out here, and the music’s a little loud for my taste. Any reason you can’t just swing by my office?”

That caught the kid off guard, like the thought of just coming over had never occurred to him. “Uh . . . I can do that, I guess, if you want. When?”

“We’ll be in the office on Monday at zero-eight-hundred. See you there?”

“I’ll be there,” Dante agreed. We shook on it.


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Framed