Tyrannia by Alan Deniro Read Free Book Online Page A

bodies. And besides, they were under contract with Lord Manhattan, and he wanted no part with him. He sheathed his sword.
    “Stupid,” one of the couriers said as he held the agent down next to the paper cutter.
    “You can hold her hand if you want,” another courier said to the concierge. The agent turned her head toward him, and her feet nearly slipped on the wet straw. She could see that he was contemplating leaving her there and she started screaming and crying.
    “What’s got into you?” a courier said. “Hold still.”
    The concierge then took her hand, and she clenched it, dug her nails into him, to the point of almost striking blood. After that, she closed her eyes and she could only hear their voices, and wondered what Roger would think of her.
    “Heat it up.”
    “We can’t heat it up. Nothing to do that here . . . none of these machines will do that.”
    “The bindery? There’s a glue-heater on the top—”
    “Fuck that. We don’t have any pamphlets to bind. I’m not going to pay-n-pedal simply to cauterize an awl.”
    “Fine. Fine. I don’t know if Marigold would really want to cause this one too much harm though.”
    “She’s not the best judge of that now, is she? She was stupid enough to get wounded.”
    Then they started arguing in Telugu.
    Thirty seconds later the awl went through the agent’s cheek, through the cloverleaf lesion, to the other side, scraping against her molars. Then she passed out and the concierge let go of her hand.
    Amar didn’t know any of this. He was at the beach when he received the compressed files. His family was in the water, along with hundreds of other fathers’ families. Roger’s novel tried to download to Amar’s wristwatch, but the memory constrictions were too tight. He had worked with the agent before in the past, regarding Roger’s increasingly erratic hand at writing. The agent always thought of Roger’s hands shaking when he typed or dictated his novels, but Amar never got that sense. He only saw the information at hand.
    He squinted at the file name report on his watch—the sun was bright—looking for clues. The scanners captured words in their filing nomenclature, before downloading the scans in full at Amar’s home: BARBARIAN 20-35.ppgr, DEVIL-ROCK.ppgr, LUCY-IS-AT-A-BAR 450?-.ppgr. More unusual gems: Knives . . . a kiss . . . more devils . . . a hill with a cathedral . . .
    “Early draft,” the agent had punched into the scanner, with fingers she could barely control, her face bandaged like a mummy’s. “Please.”
    Amar’s youngest son Prius came running up the beach toward him, from the Bay, waving his arms like wings.
    “Watch out for the glass!” Amar shouted, covering his watch with his other hand so that his son wouldn’t splash any saltwater on its face, large as a saucer.
    “I saw an eel,” his son said, as he got closer, panting heavily. “But I escaped it.”
    “I don’t think there are any eels in these waters,” Amar said, looking out at the Bay. “And the lifeguards would kill them on sight.”
    “Oh but there are!” his son said, plopping down on the edge of the towel and pushing his feet into the gravelly sand. Amar winced and turned his body so the watch wouldn’t face his son.
    “If you say so,” he mumbled, giving a smile. Looking at his watch again at a slant, with the file names cascading on the screen, he wondered whether there was a glitch in the transfer. Nothing of the Eighth Client’s files had ever looked like this before. The enjoyable voices on the beach kept murmuring over him. Surely there were others like him here?
    “You’re not working, are you?” his wife said, putting a hand on his shoulder from behind. He flinched.
    “You surprised me,” he said, looking down.
    “You are working. Amar . . . you need to take that stupid thing off.” She stood over him, blocking the sun, crossing her arms. He met his wife at the Technical Freelance Armory, a few years after Mexico Moon, which in