Free That Nietzsche Thing by Christopher Blankley Page A

said. He
turned away and tapped at the back of his ear. He was making
another call.
    I took the hint and slipped out of the back
door.
    The streets were still quiet. I was on foot.
There’d be no buses or taxis out tonight. The rioting downtown had
shut the city down. I might have been able to flag an emergency
vehicle and ride along back to Occupied Seattle, but I wasn’t
heading in that direction. After the gunfight, after the creepy
Rosicrucian shrine, I wanted to get to Vivian Montavez’s apartment.
I wanted to close the door and hide away from the world, and I knew
no better place to do it.
    Let the riot rage on and the Crime Scene
Investigators do their best. I’d had enough of the City of Seattle
for one day.
    I only wanted to get back home.

 
     
     
     
     

Chapter 13
     
    The key was still in the rubber plant. The
cold coffee was still on the stove. Everything was as I’d left it.
Except for the flashing of emergency lights from the center of the
city, the evening beyond the windows of Vivian’s apartment looked
peaceful. I struggled out of my bomber and dropped my body heavily
onto the futon. I turned on the TV only to be bombarded by news of
the continuing riot. I turned off the TV and wondered if there was
any food in Vivian’s fridge.
    There was. Bread and hummus and cold cuts. I
made a sandwich and dug an errant beer out of the crisper.
Returning to the living room, I sat back down on the couch and
listened to the silence. It would be chaos, down in the streets of
Seattle, but up here on the hill, all was quiet. I took my Rhino
off my belt, and with a shaking hand put it on the coffee table
before me. I dug into my sandwich.
    Three C’s...It was so insane that there
couldn’t be any truth to it. But such a crazy, paranoid, conspiracy
theory brought so many elements of the Montavez case into focus.
And it was the only half-sensible explanation for everything that
was going on downtown.
    The old woman in the bookstore had mention
there’d been a schism in the Rosicrucian’s ranks, into an
iconoclastic faction and an orthodox wing who’d stayed loyal to the
teachings of A.E. Dark. Then they’d all vanished, according to
O’Day, consumed by the Geneing epidemic.
    An epidemic somehow connected to Dark, though
as of yet, I had no idea exactly how.
    Q, Q...it all came down to Q. Constantine had
said the Vivian was in Seattle looking for Q. Both the book and the
man. But finding the book, or rather decrypting the book that was
hiding in plain sight, was finding the man. The text of Q must
contain some clue to the identity of the man, Q. But what could a
book, written ninety years ago, tell about a man living today?
Unless he was very, very old. Ancient in fact.
    No, that was dead end.
    But the three C’s...that was no coincidence.
I didn’t believe in coincidences. Not anymore. A catchy turn of
phrase. Competence, Community, Comparison. Corpus...what was the
rest of it? I’d already forgotten. I should have written it
down.
    Corpus means body, I knew enough Latin to
know that. So, it wasn’t a direct translation. But the repetition
of three C’s and Constantine’s reaction to the basement of the
flop. And him insisting on keeping the book.
    It all fed into my crazy theory.
    Okay, the Genies in that house, the one’s
who’d left the e-reader in Montavez’s apartment then torched
O’Day’s lab to get it back, were certainly the Rosicrucian’s O’Day
spoke of. The ones who’d take the Geneing very early in the
epidemic. They must be the orthodox wing. They’d taken Vivian’s
original copy of Q and literally worshiped it. On the off-chance
that O’Day was attempting to decode the novel, they’d burned his
computers. Any attempt to actually read Dark’s Last Novel was sacrilege to them.
    But what if they were only half the story?
Only one faction had become Genie’s en-masse. What if the
iconoclastic wing had remained sane? What if the iconoclastic wing
had gone legit...
    Vivian Montavez