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  for my father

  IN THE FIRST PLACE

  Everything is heavy here: his weapon, the metal and synthetic particles in the air, the way the light falls through them. But the two women in his crosshairs—sisters, he thinks—are just leaves. Papery, circling, drifting. They can’t find their way out from the place where they’ve fallen. As much pity as he can feel for them, he has already felt. Now he is nothing but the trigger. This change in him has taken several moments.

  And now he moves, and because he’s the trigger, when he moves, usually someone gets hurt. Dies.

  Usually. But it’s hard to know. Since he’s been over here he’s trained in five or six of the new weapons classifications, like the other fire squads in his battalion. None of them really understand how the triggers work, or what’s being fired exactly, or even, in some cases, what is really happening after the trigger is pulled. He thinks he’s done some terrible things. He thinks he probably does them every day. But again, because it’s hard to be sure, all he’s left with is this idea that people—all of them everywhere but especially here, where everything is heavy and dried-out and hot—are like these leaves, these already-dead things that he’s just blowing around, triggering into flame.

  Now a disaster is pursuing the women, the sisters, bending the air around them, pluming in every direction. He can see the two of them better now, lit up, no longer holding hands, running hard for the H2.0 storage capsules that stretch across the rail tracks, a five-mile metal caravan of engineered water. The caravan was behind a temporary fence a few days ago, but that got breached and now it’s out in the open, the world’s worst-kept secret, guarded by Charlie company, all guys from the New Cities like him. Like him, a lot of them haven’t slept. Like him, a lot of them have been here a few years longer than they thought they’d be.

  The two women are cloaked head to knee, like ghosts, wearing the homespun, mummy-wrap-like foot coverings that most people wear here, because they can be bound high up the leg and are good in the dust. Through his scope, he can see that one woman is smaller than the other, maybe a teenager. The smaller one looks over her shoulder, and he can see a flash of fire reflected in the lens of whatever she’s wearing to protect her eyes. Then she runs harder, reaching for the taller woman, whose longer strides are pulling her ahead.

  Each of the H2.0 storage capsules is the length of four train cars, longer by half than the old shipping containers that were in use when the Wars started, back when his father was fighting. They are a dull platinum color, reflecting no light, absorbing no heat. They look like a colony of well-fed worms laid end to end, moisture trapped inside their shells. These worms never dry out in the sun. He has pressed his gloved hand to the sides of these capsules, many times. There’s a faint pulsing inside, like the water is a little bit alive, like it has just a worm’s heartbeat. The capsules are cool, the only coolness for hundreds of miles: engineered water is always 10 degrees Celsius, 50 degrees Fahrenheit, unless you have to boil it using the heating element it’s sold with. In the last three weeks there have been seventeen attempts on the H2.0 caravans, a new one almost every night. Even though the people attacking them need this water to live. There’s no other water left in this place. Nothing about it makes sense to him anymore, and he doesn’t care.

  Behind the woman and the girl, plumes of fire are racing, unfurling toward the tracks. The fires are programmed to self-extinguish if they come into contact with the storage capsules. The H2.0 is too precious to incinerate. It’s too precious to exist at all, probably.

  The women, who could be water scavengers, or who could be raiders targeting the caravan, seem to know this.

  He knows that at this distance they could make it all the way to the train cars to detonate one of the homegrown devices that proliferate over here. Or they could get past the H2.0 caravan back to the perimeter, blow up another section of the fence. Or just fire on someone on patrol, an ordinary night’s work. And then, however they got in, they might get away. They might actually make it.

  He’s not supposed to let that happen.

  Not quite thinking but not quite not thinking, either, he reaches for the egg-like pod in his belt, flicks the safety, and lets it fly, which it gratifyingly does, like a football lasered downfield by a rocket launcher.

  Now he’s moving again, humping in his heavy dustbowl gear for the base tower. His suit and his weapon together add something like sixty pounds to his weight and he’s already so tired that he’s living with a constant ache in his gut, ferocious and unrelenting. His post is about a half klick from the tower and part of him is already saying, You will never make it. Never. Just sit down. Sit down for a second; you know that’s all you want to do. All he can hear inside his helmet, amplified by the communicator, is his own ragged breath—he’s Vadering, as the men call it, filling the helmets of everybody else on the hookup with the sound of his own panting. He sucks in a charred breath and swallows it as he runs and has time to think Why is everybody else on the hook so quiet? before the boom he’s launched knocks the earth out from under him and he falls.

  The next thing he is aware of is a ringing in his ears. And the taste of blood in his mouth. And a gorgeous smell, unlike anything he’s ever experienced in his life. The air is heavy but not with plastic particles and metallic dust—with moisture. One of the capsules must have blown up. Or something’s gone wrong. He rolls onto his back and tries to care. That taste, my God. Something sweet and floral on his lips. He wants to lie here and taste it forever. The scent, so lovely.

  Then the taste of blood in his mouth overtakes the taste of the H2.0 and he forces himself to his knees to spit into the dust. Then to his feet. His whole body aches, just like when you’ve got a fever, when you’re so sick your hair hurts, your leg hair hurts. He’s never been on the ground when a boom went off before, and he supposes this is just one of the shitty side effects he’ll have to deal with now. His ears are still ringing—he can imagine his head whanging the inside walls of his helmet like the clapper in a bell.

  As he stands, and as the blood rushes to his head, the ringing in his ears turns to static—terrible, excruciating. He rips off his helmet and holds his hands to his ears and tries to calm his breathing. His nose is bleeding, but he won’t know it until later. He won’t know anything about what’s just happened to him, what he’s just unbuckled in himself, until later.

  Even through the static, he can hear the screaming. He moves in the direction of the sound.

  She’s screaming for help, but not from him. Tough shit, lady. I’m all the help you get today. She’s using the language they use over here. It sometimes sounds like his language, enough that he can pick out words if he tries, but he knows it’s also code, or meant to be code. A lot of the words sound the same but they mean something different. His head is still spinning as he approaches her. He can’t tell whether she’s the tall one or the small one because she’s on her knees. She has something in her lap. It’s the other woman, curled up, shaking. A dark pool surrounds them where the metallic dust has turned to black glass, like an oil slick. He walks carefully, so as not to slip.

  “Ma’am. You’re not supposed to be here. You know we’re supposed to fire on intruders. You’re lucky I’m trained in the nonlethal—” h
e begins.

  She shouts something at him. Her face is concealed by her hood and goggles, their scratched lenses glowing in the light from the dying flames around them in the dust.

  “Ma’am, I don’t—”

  She shouts it again, again. Her gloved hands move to tear the goggles and the hood violently from her face, so that he can see her, so that she can say this to him, and as she moves, the other woman rolls off her lap into the black glass dust and he can see that she’s no longer shaking.

  Later he won’t remember much about her face, what she looked like. He will remember this: She is bleeding from her eyes and ears and nose and mouth, and as he watches, blood begins to run from her scalp over her forehead in dark waves.

  It’s clear enough what she’s saying.

  You did this. You did this.

  F. QUINN

  RISE 8, UNIT 7 LAKE

  NEW CHICAGO 0606060101

  NEW STATES

  PFC C. P. QUINN 2276766

  MCC 167 1ST MAW

  FPO NEW CHICAGO 0604030901

  November 18, 11:13 a.m.

  CQ,

  I know you’re working on it, but try to get home as soon as you can. Don’t dick around. Don’t wait. When you get to the other side, call me. And right before and after you call me, you better run. Seriously.

  Also I have good news. I’m getting married. Pretty soon. The marriage application was approved as soon as I got to seven months. I’ll tell you more when we talk. When you call me. From the base. Immediately. After running to a connected portal.

  Maybe I’ll find Gard by then. We’ll see. I’m on the case. Don’t worry. Just get here.

  Fred

  Nov 27 12:33 PM

  Hi. My name is Carter Quinn

  You knew my sister, Gardner?

  You may know this but she’s been

  missing for a while.

  Can I talk with you about when you last saw her?

  Nov 28 10:42 AM

  Hi. It’s Carter again.

  I’m sorry but I’m just following up

  I’m trying to find my sister

  Can we possibly meet

  to talk about when you last saw her?

  Nov 30 3:17 PM

  I’m sorry to bother you

  Gard is still missing

  No one in our family has heard

  from her since October

  She mentioned you a lot

  in her messages to me

  Can we meet?

  Dec 1 10:22 PM

  Hi. It’s Carter Quinn.

  Gardner really did mention you a lot

  Please

  I have to keep trying.

  ONE

  My sister Gardner, a former Nurse Completionist, is missing, gone completely. She’s been gone for at least two and a half months, and right now that’s about all I know.

  She didn’t disappear all of a sudden. It was more like she evaporated, over the course of a year, while I was at the Wars. I got messages from her over there, and then the messages got slower and weirder, and then I didn’t hear from her again. A few months ago my oldest sister, Fred—don’t call her Fredericka—wrote me that Gard had gotten into some trouble, but she was going to handle it. I got only a few messages from my pop the whole time I was over there, and our mother has been gone since we were kids, and Gard, who was working two jobs, was often too busy or tired to write, so Fred has been my best source of news from home. Finally, even Fred’s messages stopped making sense.

  My third tour just ended, so I came home, to look for my sister. I’ve been gone for two years and five months, back three weeks.

  Fred and I seem to be the only people looking for her, and before I even got back, Fred dumped the responsibility squarely in my lap, in a message that I’ve probably read and reread fifty times:

  Nov 18 3:47 PM

  Find her. You need to keep looking,

  no matter what.

  We’ve DEF got to find her

  in time for this damn wedding.

  And this baby.

  I can’t do this without her.

  And I’m afraid

  of what might’ve happened to her.

  You be afraid too.

  It hasn’t been easy. I don’t have many leads. Gard’s a grown woman, not wanted for anything, and Security has already closed her file. Our father won’t even talk about Gard, much less help me speculate about what might have happened to her, or where she might have gone. The one thing I have managed to figure out, and it didn’t take long, was that Gard dropped—or lost—all her friends from nursing school, a while back. Probably when she started doing Completion work for low-income women, outside the Standard of Care. That’s not a prestigious line of work, or so I’ve gathered. I wouldn’t really know. My point is I don’t have many sources of information, other than reading and rereading my sisters’ messages to me, and doing some basic sniffing around of my own. My point is I do not know very much. Of course, I’m used to that, I’m a Marine. That’s meant to be a joke. Sort of.

  I’m less comfortable with being an ignoramus than I used to be, though.

  So that’s why I’m here, at New Grant Park on a Wednesday afternoon, like it’s not a complete shit show, with the twelve-foot perimeter fence and the Security checkpoints. No one in their right mind comes here anymore, but all the same, it’s always crowded. I remember when I was a kid there were these evil-looking blue lights that they used to run across the surfaces of the old fountains, nasty little water mirages, but they don’t do that anymore. They also don’t paint the ground cover green anymore because no one’s bothering to pretend that chewed-up, garbage-strewn, rubberized stuff is grass. I’ve seen the pictures. I know how it used to look. I don’t care. It’s still a park. Even fake leaves make shade.

  There’ll be bugs and ears and screens and transmitters in every third bush and bird butt. But it’ll be crowded, and there’ll be noise, plus the constant helicopter traffic overhead, and the plan is to talk quietly and walk loudly. I’m wearing dress shoes, new for Fred’s wedding—not a style I would have picked. But thick, expensive, imported, and crazy-ass-loud on pavement, which for my purposes today is a plus. Fred’s wedding is this coming weekend, just a couple of days off, and the shoes seem like a pretty good indicator of what’s about to go down in our family. We are all—me and Fred and even Pop—going to be A. J. Squared Away, even if our feet are killing us. Fred’s done good, I guess. I haven’t met the guy.

  I move directly toward the park gate, and I don’t look around. In front of me as I’m waiting to scan in are a couple of women carrying their lunches in sacks, standing close together, not talking much, not checking their wearables, and there’s some quick-spreading unease behind them in the entrance line when Security actually blocks both of the women at the gate.

  “What’s the problem, Officer?”

  “You’re ineligible.”

  One of the women repeats it, sort of blankly. “Ineligible.”

  “Ineligible for park access. You’re not making Care Standard. You owe”—Security checks it with a flick of the eye—“a lot. And this one.” He nods toward the woman’s lunch companion. “You’re both, what, halfway through the Completion period? And you already owe this much? No, I’m sorry.” It’s clear he’s not sorry. “Why don’t you go home and take care of your children? That’s where you really should be, isn’t it?”

  I have to wait while the points are deducted and both women are turned away with their wearables singing; one woman tearful, both of them looking furious and humiliated. Mothers. It’s hard to watch, harder not to stare.

  I keep my eyes down, on my new shoes.

  Then it’s my turn to move through the checkpoint, and I can’t help but look up as the Security guard scans my wearable—once, then twice. I don’t have any reason to be nervous about being bounced. I’m a veteran; they’ll keep their hands off me. But since coming home I’ve been given more than a few opportunities to understand, in case I didn’t already
know, just how deep the average person’s dislike of veterans like me runs.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thank you for your service,” the other Security guy pipes up, and as usual I have no idea how to respond to that.

  Inside the park I move in the direction of the Buckingham, following the general drift of the lunchers and the lonelies. It’s a hot day, and shade under the stressed-looking fake trees is thin. The smell is baked rubber. The noise in here is almost overwhelming—there’s piped-in Christmas music, plus the chirping of the not-birds in the not-trees, and below that the usual environmental soundtrack of fountain waters chuckling and soft breezes shushing, broadcast just low enough for people like me to hear, people who are paying too much attention to everything. Most people aren’t even trying to talk over it all. And of course the helicopter traffic overhead, constant, chopping the air into rags.

  At the fork of the path that bends toward the gravel circle around the Buckingham, I stop and lean against a lamppost and rub my ankle. Partly because the shoes really are starting to bother me.

  I hear crunching footsteps approaching, light and purposeful on the gravel walk, but I keep my head low for an extra beat or two, just to make sure.

  “You,” she says.

  That’s my cue to straighten up and look. She’s pretty. I think most women are pretty, actually—after two and a half years in the service my standards are not what you’d call high. But this one, this Natalie B., she’s really pretty. Nice hair: an off-center halo of dark curls. Nice skin: makes me think of bittersweet engineered coffee, shining in a cup. Her eyes are big and dark, with long lashes. It surprises me a bit to see that she has a fairly large, detailed tattoo on her left forearm. I try not to look like I’m looking too closely at it, or at any part of Natalie B. in particular. Her mouth is set in a funny expression. Exasperation. I recognize it from having two sisters.

  “Thanks for meeting me.”