Zero History

“Did you want to?” he asked as she unlocked the door.
“Want to what?”
“Work for Hubertus. I didn’t. Didn’t plan to, I mean. It was his idea.”
“Now that you mention it,” she said, over her shoulder, “it was his idea.”
Milgrim stepped through after her, into a tidy white space perhaps fifteen feet on a side.
The walls were recently painted brick, the concrete floor a glossier white, nearly as clean.
A small square table and four chairs, matte steel tubing and bent, unpainted plywood,
expensively simple. An enormous light glowed softly, something on a clinical-looking
metallic pedestal, a sort of white parabolic umbrella, angled up. It looked to Milgrim like
a very small art gallery between shows. “What’s this?” he asked, looking from one blank
wall to another.
“One of his Vegas cubes,” she said. “Haven’t you seen one before?” She went to the
light and did something, dialing the illumination up.
“No.”
“He doesn’t understand gambling,” she said, “the ordinary kind, but he loves Las Vegas
casinos. The sort of thought that goes into them. How they enforce a temporal isolation.
No clocks, no windows, artificial light. He likes to think in environments like that. Like
this. No interruptions. And he likes them to be secret.”
“He likes secrets,” Milgrim agreed, putting his bag on the table.
A boy with an almost-shaven head came in, a tall white foam cup in either grimy hand,
and placed them on the table. “Thanks,” said Fiona. He left without a word. Fiona picked
up one of the cups, sipped through the hole in the white plastic lid. “Builder’s tea,” she
said.
Milgrim tried his. Shuddered. Sweet, stewed.
“I’m not his daughter,” Fiona said.
Milgrim blinked. “Whose?”
“Bigend’s. In spite of rumors to the contrary. Not the case.” She sipped her tea.
“I wouldn’t have thought that.”
“My mother was his girlfriend. That’s where the story started. I was already around, so
it actually doesn’t make any sense. Though I did wind up here, working for him.” She
gave Milgrim a look he couldn’t read. “Just to get that straight.”
Milgrim sucked down some tea, mainly to cover his inability to think of anything to
say. It was very hot. “Did he train you,” he asked, “to ride motorcycles?”
“No,” she said, “I was already a courier. That’s where I know Benny from. I could
walk out on Bigend today, have a job in an hour. It’s like that, being a courier. If you
want the day off, you quit. But it was driving my mother crazy. Worried about the
danger.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Average career’s all of two years. So she talked to Bigend. Wanted him to take me on
at Blue Ant. Do something there. Instead, he decided to have his own courier.”