Technomancer (Unspeakable Things: Book One)

they were cut away and destroyed. We kept some of Tony’s things, however. They were in better shape and there was one item we were looking for.”
    We?
I thought. Yet another reference to an out-of-sight cabal of allies. I was determined to remember that
we
and find out who they were. I wondered about this person she called Tony. The way she mentioned him, it seemed she assumed I knew who she was talking about.
    “What happened to Tony?” I asked.
    “Killed,” Meng said without a hint of concern. “In the same accident that brought you to us.”
    “Did you know him?”
    “Of course I did. Everyone knew Tony. You were his friend, Draith. Pull it together, man. You must remember something.”
    I narrowed my eyes toward her. She didn’t have much of a bedside manner. She was telling me my friend was dead,but without a note of compassion. If I could have remembered the man, I was sure I’d have been upset.
    Miranda showed up, apparently having been summoned by the button in Dr. Meng’s desk. The good doctor ordered her to get Tony’s things. Miranda quickly returned with a plastic bag. There wasn’t much inside. Mostly, it consisted of a black overcoat with a few lumps in the pockets. I shrugged it on.
    “That’s all?” Dr. Meng asked the nurse. “Disappointing.”
    “He wasn’t wearing this at the time of the event, milady,” Miranda said. “The coat was in the backseat. Everything he had on at the moment of death has been…lost.”
    Milady?
I couldn’t hide my wide eyes when I heard that. It sounded to me like their relationship went deeper than the professional norm.
    I cleared my throat. “It will cover these green scrubs, at least,” I said. I took this opportunity to slip the photograph I’d found under my pillow out of my scrubs and into a pocket.
    I decided I would play along with these two. I wanted a clean break from this place. If I could get out of here without further weirdness, I’d be happy.
    “What do you want me to do, exactly?” I asked.
    “I want you to go out there and do what you do best. I know there are strange things happening in the Community, and I know you’ve been trying to investigate them. Keep doing it. Keep pestering and sniffing about like a stray dog at a butcher’s shop. If you find anything interesting, come tell me about it. Find out what happened to Tony. I liked him—even if he was a petty thief.”
    All this talk of my being a mongrel and a loser who consorted with more of the same finally annoyed me. I waved the pistol around. “I don’t understand your attitude. I’ve got the gun.”
    “You do?” she asked.
    I felt a tingling in my hand. My eyes snapped to my fingers, which were still curled around a ghostly trigger. There was no pistol visible in my hand, however. There was nothing there at all. The freaky thing was I still felt the weight of it, for a fraction of a second. But then that was gone too, and I was left clutching air. The gun had vanished.
    “How did you do that?” I asked, feeling my first real thread of fear. Up until that moment, I’d taken all her hints as a big mind game, perhaps meant to talk me into giving myself up. She was, after all, a brain doctor.
    “Like this,” she said, and she smiled at me more broadly.
    I eyed her teeth, and they grew in my sight until they were big and white like the infamous grin of the Cheshire Cat. At the same time, the rest of the room that surrounded us faded. For a split second, it was just me and that grin in our own private universe. The rest of reality was a gray-white nothing, like an old TV tuned to static air.
    I tried to shout, but there was no sound. I felt my throat quiver, but that was all. The next sensation I had was that of falling briefly, followed by a hard landing on unforgiving, rippled concrete—a set of stairs that came up and hit me in the ass. I tumbled forward with a series of mild pain explosions. Fortunately, I only had about three of those hard steps to roll down. At the bottom, I picked myself up and felt for newly broken bones. There were only bruises.
    I had fallen into an emergency stairwell. It was a big, echoing place, where everything was gray-painted steel tubing and stained cement. Above me a sole fluorescent tube in a wire cage illuminated the scene with harsh, blue-white light.
    A single dark object sat upon the steps. It was the .32 automatic Dr. Meng had caused to vanish from my handbefore she had made me vanish after it. I snatched it up and