Kathe Koja
He sits hunched in prisoner’s white baggies at the scuffed steel table, in this visitation room that smells like plastic and tension and twenty years’ worth of bad news. The gray-suited lawyer takes a chair and makes a smile calibrated somewhere between business pal and professional fixer, how many guys like this has he seen through the years? total control on the surface, but inside one big grubby gumbo of needs, behavioral studies have been written about guys like this, studies that he studied, always looking for a way to use all that repression and hunger and fear.
And “Your situation,” the lawyer says, “it’s not pleasant, Mr. Siegler, I know. But things are moving in the right direction.”
“Which direction is that?”
“Your transfer to a reentry facility. A low-security institution, most likely Landau, with a much less regimented environment. No more uniforms, daily recreation, weekly visitors—”
Visitors? like who, Marko’s enforcers? or Nadja? Good thing he never booked Lee to plan that wedding . . . He knows what the deal is, knew it when Sunset’s funding dropped like shit down a chute and the site abruptly stopped updating, knew even before they came for him at the gym: this is all Marko’s fall, but he has to take it, the last thing Marko said to him in person was You’re a partner, Jonas, better stay a partner. And Marko’s money sent this lawyer, not a top-tier or even second-tier firm, but competent enough to broker a no-fuss deal without too much suffering, other than his own guilty plea to investment fraud; no one will ever invest in his projects again. No one. Ever—
“—even some online access—”
“Online? Full access?”
“There are a few restrictions—mostly interpersonal contact, you understand, porn sites—but you can spend,” checking a note, ”three hours per day online. So if you’ll thumbsign here, Mr. Siegler—”
—and his thumb immediate to that tablet, because what he needs more than porn or recreation or even freedom is to know, to find out what really happened to the Factory—a tear-out? a teardown?—and to Ari. That sale had been his hail mary, meant to be dual use, pay off Marko and the increasingly bloodthirsty Goran, and put the place safely into Ari’s hands. But Ari moved on, Ari like a pinball, those brass balls mercilessly racking up the score, give him anything and he’ll make something out of it, that Skidmore guy with his jaw hanging open, did the Hechman woman look the same way when Ari kicked her to the curb? Did he?
“And once more here—”
Because his actual punishment—not this bullshit charge, or the days lost lying on the stale bunk, standing in the endless lines, not even the ruin of his career—that punishment is his constant scouring yearning, thinking, thinking: If only he had not been so fucking angry, so goaded by Lee and, say it, so self-deluded, if only he had made Ari a real partner when he had the chance! What they could have done together, what they could be doing now! Ari Appleseed, Ari Archimedes, I know the Factory better than you do—
“—should have you transferred soon. So it’s good news for you today, Mr. Siegler—”
—but he does not respond to the lawyer, only stares unseeing at the tabletop: because it is actually true, Ari does know better, Ari is the Factory. And that means the Factory is still alive and well, because Ari is out there leveraging everything he knows, everything he was taught, everything he would never have learned without—
“Mr. Siegler?”
“Right,” and he smiles then, his first real mile in months. “Right, good news.”
