Chapter 16
Back in the kitchen, I quickly gathered together the things I was going to bring to Shelley. "Wizzit," I called out, "you'd better send me out there fast before somebody else comes along and tells me that Shelley can wait."
"I'd advise you to hold off for a couple of minutes," Wizzit replied. "She is just being brought back from interrogation. Let's give her some time to get settled in her cell, use the bathroom, things like that."
So I waited for a while, passing the time by picturing Nicolai telling Mike to lay off Padma and me. I was just trying to decide whether Mike's face would be turning red or purple when I heard Wizzit say, "Uh oh!"
"What is it, Wizzit? What's wrong?"
"Trevor, I'm calling Bill down to the kitchen to go out there with you. Shelley is lying facedown on the floor of her cell. She has not moved to either of the neutral corners, per our standard procedure. She is not moving at all, in fact."
I could hear Bill's footsteps in the hallway as he ran to the kitchen. "She's not dead, is she?" I asked as he burst through the door.
"Negative. I can hear her breathing and her heartbeat. I believe she is merely unconscious."
"Can we teleport out now?" Bill asked anxiously.
"Give it another few minutes," Wizzit said. "Her guards have not yet left the vicinity, and in addition, she is lying in an unusual position. Let me get some additional footage of her. I can digitally remove you from the security camera's image if necessary, but if you're going to be moving her, I'll want some extra shots I can feed in."
"Can you at least show us what's going on in her cell?" he demanded.
Wizzit didn't reply, but the vid screen on the wall flared to life. This wasn't the image from the fairly low-resolution surveillance cam; what we were seeing was generated by the microsensor package that Nicolai and I had installed shortly after Shelley was incarcerated there. The large amount of input data it provided allowed Wizzit to show her to us from pretty much any angle he wanted and from whatever distance he chose.
Bill made an angry sound as we zoomed in on Shelley's face. I could understand why. She had obviously been struck repeatedly -- with a fist, if the bruises we were seeing were any indication. Her nose had been bloodied, and the one eye that we could see had swollen shut.
"Are you storing this footage?" Bill asked, his voice tight with fury.
"Already stored and ready for public release, whenever we decide to play this particular card," Wizzit replied. "I am also currently downloading their own video footage of the interrogation that led to this, cross-referencing with available staff photos to identify as many actors in the footage as possible. I am reviewing the video as it comes in . . . hmm . . . it appears as though an unidentified man took great exception to the last list of names that Shelley provided. He shouts 'Do you think this is funny?' at her . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . four times . . . and then, to use the most precise term available to me, he went all apeshit on her, hitting and kicking her repeatedly in the face and torso."
I frowned. "That last list was . . ."
"Names and addresses of acrobats and clowns currently employed by the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Baily Circus."
I nodded. I remembered now, and at the time, it actually had seemed pretty funny. Not so much now.
"Can you determine who it was that attacked her, Wizzit?" Bill asked.
"Based on the deference the others are showing him," Wizzit replied, "I would guess that the unidentified man is our friend, Mr. Emile Zwicky, the agent in charge of Shelley's case. And . . . yes! I have confirmation. Several other interrogators pulled him away from her; one of them shouted, 'For God's sake, Emile, she's out cold! Let her alone!'"
"And how injured is she?"
"Scanning . . . she does not appear to have suffered any life-threatening injuries. Extensive bruising, split lip, bloody nose – not broken, though -- two loose teeth, possible mild concussion, possible fracture of the cheekbone. No fracturing of the skull, however, and only a remote possibility of brain damage."
"That's good, at least," I said, relieved.
"When can I go out to see her?" Bill demanded.
"You can go out now," Wizzit said, "although I would recommend turning on camouflage mode. They have apparently summoned a physician to see to her. He will be there in approximately two minutes. Of course, you must not draw attention to yourself while anyone else is in the room."
"Send me out there now."
I felt the tingling at the base of my skull; evidently Wizzit decided to send me out as well. I barely had time to activate my force shield and turn on camouflage mode before everything went hazy. When my vision cleared, Bill, in camouflage mode himself, was already at Shelley's side. I couldn't see him, obviously, but I could hear him speaking softly to her and I could see the way he swept back Shelley's dark blonde hair from her face.
Shelley uttered a groan and half-opened her eyes. She grimaced groggily, revealing bloodstained teeth. He spoke to her for a short time, then Wizzit said, Prime-to-Prime, "Time to back away, Black. They will be entering within ten seconds."
Bill whispered something further to Shelley, then drew her hair back over her face as it had been. "Over here, Black," I murmured, guiding him to me. "In the corner to your right."
He stepped back and took hold of my outstretched hand. (See, it's not just boys holding hands with girls when we're in camouflage mode. Per our standard procedure, boys hold hands with boys as well, so we can keep track of each other.)
Seconds later, the door to the cell opened. The doctor who entered (at least, I assumed he was a doctor) wore captain's bars on his shirt collar. He knelt beside her, speaking quietly. His hands moved over her -- poking, prodding, testing. As we watched him work on her, I said, Prime-to-Prime, "Hey, Black, can I ask you something? In confidence?"
"Sure," he said absently, as if he had heard me but didn't want to take his eyes off of Shelley.
"How well did you know Robin South?"
"Robin?" I felt him shrug. "Reasonably well. We recruited her and Toby at about the same time, when I became Prime Red after Rama died and Cathy resigned. She had been with us a little over two years, I think, by the time I . . . retired."
I winced at the hesitation in his voice. His retirement from the Primes had not been voluntary, I knew; Wizzit had fired him. Supposedly that had all been smoothed over by the time Wizzit invited him to rejoin us on an interim basis as Prime Black, but I didn't know whether it was still a sore point with him and I had no wish to re-open old wounds. "Let me pose a hypothetical question," I said. "If Robin had come to you and told you that one of the other Primes had been . . . well, sexually abusing her, what would you have done?"
"Did she tell you that?"
"Yeah, the night before she died."
Bill sighed deeply. "Robin . . . had some character flaws. Don't get me wrong, she was good at her job -- she was a good fighter, she generally worked well with the team, and she spoke enough Mandarin to be our translator whenever we were in China -- but . . . well, I know she latched onto Mike for a while, and after he broke it off with her, she came to him one day and told some wild story about how I had forced myself on her the night before. I don't know what she was trying to do, maybe win his sympathy or something."
I felt my heart sink. "Yeah, the story she told me was something like that. What did Mike do?"
"He found me in the gym and tried to punch my lights out." He chuckled softly. "Luckily for both of us, Shelley was there. She explained to Mike that I had been with her in her room when the assault allegedly took place."
I looked over at Shelley, who was still lying on the floor. At the doctor's request, she was curling up her legs, then stretching them out again. "You and she go back a long ways, don't you?" I said.
"We were Primes together for ten or twelve years, so yeah. We didn't start dating until after I
became Prime Red, though. I lost track of her after I left the Primes, but then we re-connected about a year ago."
"I'm glad you did." I squeezed his hand. "You're good for her. You make her happy."
"Thanks."
Shelley was sitting up now; the doctor was checking her face, head, and teeth. Then he shone a pencil flashlight in first one eye, then the other. Eventually he seemed to come to pretty much the same conclusions that Wizzit had. He sent someone out for a wheelchair so they could take Shelley to their infirmary for some x-rays.
He seemed angry, and so did a number of the guards who had followed him into the cell. That surprised me, although maybe it shouldn't have. I guess I had been assuming all along that Shelley's jailers were just a bunch of sadistic buffoons. The ones seeing to her now, though, seemed genuinely concerned about her and mighty ticked off at Zwicky.
Attack Doll 4: Primes Emeriti Page 16