Technomancer (Unspeakable Things: Book One)

open a crack here and there. There was just enough light to see our surroundings. The sunbeams glowed with golden motes of floating dust. Clearly, she didn’t want anyone seeing us inside. I realized then that she didn’t have any more right to be in here than I did.
    I wandered around behind the bar until I found a door marked OFFICE in tiny gold letters. I tried the handle. This one was locked too. I produced the jingling set of keys again and rattled them one after another in the lock.
    Suddenly, Holly was right there, very close behind me. I could feel her body heat and her breath on my shoulder. I glanced back, mildly amused.
    “You really want that check, don’t you?”
    “Hard to pay the rent without it.”
    Our eyes met, and I could see right away she had some bad habits. She had more to pay for than rent. I turned back to the lock and worked it harder. The key seemed stuck.
    “Let me try,” she said.
    “I think I’ve got it,” I said, but another thirty seconds of jiggling proved I didn’t. I hit the door with the heel of my hand. It felt quite solid.
    “Try the sunglasses,” she said in a quiet voice, almost a whisper.
    I stared at her. “What?”
    “Put them on. Tony always did when he came back here.”
    I snorted, but thought
what the hell
and put them on. I jiggled the knob one more time. The door popped open at long last.
    I took off the glasses and frowned at them. There was no way they could have helped me open the door. All they did, as far as I could see, was make the gloomy bar two shades darker. I looked at her.
    “Are you trying to tell me that these sunglasses…?”
    Holly shook her head. “I’m not trying to tell you anything, Mr. Draith.”
    She pushed past me into the office before I could ask her how she knew my name. She had never asked me what it was. I noticed her attitude had changed. She seemed much more confident in my presence now. Perhaps she’d measured me and marked me down as harmless.
    I followed her into the office. The interior was acrid with stale cigar smoke. A full ashtray sat on the desktop, brimming with ashes and thick cigar stubs. The ashtray was smooth, thick glass shaped like a clamshell. The glass had a faintly green color to it, and I figured it was a refugee from the last century, when ashtrays decorated everyone’s coffee table.
    We both took a look around. I found papers, receipts, bills. No checks or cash. Nothing of any real interest.
    “The safe is down here,” Holly said, kicking away a dirty scrap of carpet with a rubber backing.
    A round metal door with a recessed combination dial was planted in the floor. The floor felt very flat even if you stepped on the dial.
    Holly sucked in her lips, and looked at me. She made a brief, hurry-up gesture in my direction.
    “What?” I asked. “I don’t know the combination.”
    She rolled her eyes and put out her hand.
    “What?” I asked again, feeling as if everyone at the party was in on some secrets—but no one had bothered to tell me anything.
    “The sunglasses,” she said, still holding out her hand.
    I stared at her, then at the safe. I knelt beside the safe, and she knelt beside me. I reached down and gave the handle a twist. It didn’t budge. I let my hand fall away. I took the sunglasses out of my pocket, but I didn’t put them on.
    “Are you telling me that if I put these things on, I’ll know the combination?” I asked.
    Holly shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. All I know is—it will open.”
    I rubbed my chin for a moment. I took out the sunglasses and eyed them with alarm. What was I playing with? Could these plastic shades do something…strange? I recalled the way Meng’s hood ornament had tossed me out the back door of her sanatorium.
    For a moment, as I stared at them, I found the sunglasses threatening. A cold ripple ran through my nervous system. I knew it was silly. The lock on the office door had been a fluke. This woman was as crazy as the rest of them. But back at the sanatorium that pistol
had
vanished from my hand—and I
had
been transported and dropped onto a set of cement stairs.
    Sometimes, when a man’s world shifts under his feet, it causes paranoia. I had experienced these odd events stoically, if suspiciously. I’d played along up until now, assuming some logical explanation would eventually present itself. Perhaps I’d been experiencing side effects from days on heavy drugs. But now it was different, because I was being asked to