Tyrannia by Alan Deniro Page A

minute for someone to pick up, but it wasn’t the agent. The room on the other side was dark, and he could barely see the shapes: a lamp, a head, a gun. Then the head moved closer to the camera.
    “Yes, hi?” the woman said. She was young, thin, had a bandaged face. Was chewing something. Kind of evil-looking, Amar thought. She dipped out of view again until she was just a shadow.
    “Where’s . . . where’s the resident of this property?” he said.
    “Who are you?” she said.
    “I’m a business associate of the woman who lives here. I need to speak to her.”
    “Oh,” she said. “Um . . .” She scratched her hair with both hands. “That’s . . . that’s really not going to be possible. She’s been taken to the Lord.”
    Marigold wasn’t sure what to do with the man on the other side. The agent’s apartment was given to her as part of the punishment. They kept adding conditions onto the agent’s punishment; Marigold wasn’t sure how she felt about that. First the lancing—Marigold was squeamish about it, but fine, it had to be done. People wanted it done. Then the agent was told she was free to go but then Marigold’s superior put his mask back on and said, wait, Marigold needs some place to stay to recover, to convalesce, and Marigold wasn’t going to make a big deal of it, but the rest of the couriers thought it was only proper. Marigold never really had a place of her own, just a couch in the couriers’ warehouse, on Staten Cape. The concierge—who was quite cooperative during the entire justice operation in the Kinko’s, all things considered—was beginning to balk at this, Marigold could tell. After all, the building was under his charge, and the couriers—even though they had the official backing of Lord Manhattan, with all the opportunities in the boroughs opened up to them—were beginning to press their luck a little, Marigold thought. But they insisted, and Marigold did need to sleep off all the excitement and the dull pain that was everywhere on her face, so she relented, and arrangements to move to the fifth floor were made. The concierge bit his tongue and gave the security card to Marigold. He also said to let her know if she “needed anything” but she knew what he meant to say was: “I’ll have my eyes on you.”
    But where was the agent to go? That wasn’t really thought through by the couriers. The agent was sitting in a corner, staring at the hot glue drip and mix in the funnel of the binding apparatus, and the dragon moths buzzing around the ceiling bulbs, as if it all was happening to someone else. In a way, it was; she didn’t seem the type, after what she had been through, to stir up trouble anymore. She wouldn’t have been a recurrent threat, Marigold knew that. But the others didn’t see it this way.
    “She just can’t be wandering Queens,” one of the couriers said, as if concerned.
    “No, no . . .” Marigold’s assistant supervisor said. “She’ll be safest in the Lord’s custody, wouldn’t she? For her own protection. Marigold, don’t worry. She’s going to be all right.”
    Her assistant supervisor might have noticed a look of concern on Marigold’s face as she watched the agent trying to stand up, say something. The agent couldn’t get her footing though.
    “I think she’s going into shock,” Marigold said, forcing herself to look at her assistant supervisor, who plucked her from the street, literally, when she was ten, in a neutral-car derby on the old Brooklyn Slags. Marigold was ten, and steered the Acura chassis down the 500 foot incline. The car came in third, even though it crashed into the breakwalls. In the wreckage, her future assistant supervisor had snatched her out and splinted her broken leg. She wasn’t really hurt; he didn’t know that her brother was the brake operator in the compressed trunk and had died on impact. Marigold had never told him that. She didn’t remember much about that day. But the need to protect him from