by M. A. Foster
Rael looked into the reflection, and he saw there a softer, younger face, with a small, delicate chin, a wide, blurred mouth, a sharper and larger nose, deep chocolate eyes whose whites were still swollen and red. It was the face of a stranger, and yet it was also a face he knew well enough to draw, although he was not especially skilled at drawing. The face belonged to Damistofia Azart. The next attack came then, but he could sink down to the cold floor slowly, and this time he slept a little, or fainted; he was not sure. She could not say.
Achilio Yaderny, Team Leader of Marula Squad Forty-Two, Bureau of Remandation, looked about the small and shabby room with a nagging sense of irritation and incompletion. Certainly this was the place where the murderer had to be; Rael. They had traced him to this building, and through the terrified night-man to this very room. There could be no mistake. And yet there was no Rael. Instead, there was a girl with no papers who was extremely ill, with God only knew what sort of disease. Give her credit: she had half cleaned the place up, but you could tell it had been rough.
And her story, what they could make of it, during the occasional lucid moments she had, would be impossible to check. She met him, and agreed to meet him here: he let her in and then left. She had been sick then, coming down with it, whatever it was. He hadn’t come back. He’d taken her clothes, too. Small chance he’d use them as a disguise, because according to the description they had, this Rael was tall and gaunt, whereas this girl was small; and as wasted as she was, she looked even smaller. All probable, no doubt, and so there would be a report back to the prefecture, and there would be no end to it—a royal pain in the arse, up all day and all night, too, trying to figure out where the bastard got to.
Yaderny glanced at his men with a weary gesture, raising his eyebrows and glancing at the ceiling, and removed his communicator, inserting the earplug, and pressing the Headquarters Call button.
“Yaderny here.”
“Yes, we are there. No suspect. We have a girl whom he picked up on the way, but she was sick when she met him here, and he left and took her clothes and papers.”
“Yes, she still has something, although she says the worst of it has already been. No, she doesn’t appear to know anything about him, or where he might have gone.”
Yaderny rolled his eyes and made sputtering motions without sound before replying. “Yes, of course. Definitely. We will bring her in, but she should be put in the palliatory for observation until it can be determined if she’s contagious or not—we don’t want the whole city down with diarrhea—Marula’s not that high above sea level.”
“No. No trace whatsoever. He didn’t leave anything here. No one saw him leave… but that doesn’t mean much in itself. We will check the rest of the building, it’s not large, but I’m sure we won’t find him. This taking the room was a decoy operation, as obviously was the girl as well.”
“Yes. Send a medical team to move her, she’s not in walking condition.”
There was a moment during which Yaderny listened intently to the communicator, and then, shaking his head, he replied, “Yes. we could, but as I said, I don’t know what she has, and I don’t know if we can move her without losing her. She’s not much good to us, but she’s no good at all dead.”
“Fine, then. I’ll wait. I’ll personally watch her, and send the rest out in the building. We’ll be in shortly. Out.”
Yaderny kept his distance from the girl and looked at her. She was asleep now, or unconscious, at any rate. Sick as she was. he didn’t think she looked like much. Pale, and very thin, with a metallic sheen to her skin that spoke of recurring high fever. Poor kid, someone who was looking for a little fun, and met up with a cold-blooded maniac who killed with a pin, and then vanished, leaving her. She was in a tight spot, no doubt about it. No papers, no clothes, sick, probably a stranger—yes, she said she wasn’t from Marula. Came here to die. Well, probably not die. She was breathing evenly enough. He turned to his men and told them what more they would have to do while he waited for the medical team to come for the girl, and they nodded, not complaining, because their patience was endless, and they were thorough, and they observed. And they filed out of the room quietly.
Yaderny went to the window and looked out onto the street, where one of his outside men was waiting. That one looked up and saw Yaderny, and made a small sign, signaling that everything was quiet on the street, that no one had come or gone. Good. At least they could depend on that for a fact. After a time, Yaderny’s men came back, silent and glum, shaking their heads. Yaderny did not rage and rant at them; it would do no good. No—they had looked, and they had found nothing. No trace. That meant that somehow Rael had slipped out of the building sometime between the time he had come here and the time when they had traced him to this place. That wasn’t much, and it meant that he’d still be in the city, unless he could make contact with someone who could smuggle him out. Not likely, but still possible. But Yaderny was a long-time squad leader, he had instincts, and this one told him strongly that Rael had not left Marula. Indeed, he was sure that Rael was somewhere nearby, hiding, after leaving them the dummy trail to run to and cover up the real scent with their own tracks. Yes, he was certain: Rael was close by, probably within hearing of a speech-projector.
Yaderny shivered with anticipation at what the captain would say—that it was all a lot of superstitious nonsense, that they had missed the assassin and that was that. But Yaderny would argue, and eventually he’d agree to send a team back to this neighborhood. But by then, dammit, it would be too late. That was what the bastard was waiting for. Now! They had him pinned down somewhere, somewhere close, damn close! So close he couldn’t move until they left. And they’d told him to come back to headquarters! Yaderny took the communicator out again and put the earplug in once again, noticing as he did that the medical team was arriving to pick up the girl. Good. He keyed the Headquarters relay.
“Yes. Yaderny here. We didn’t turn him up in the building, but I’m certain he’s not left the neighborhood. We covered it too well.”
“Yes, it’s my instinct again, but I could tell you how many times that’s been right, or nearly…
“You say stay and do house-to-house? Thank you, sir. I will do it Please seal this area off… You already have? Good. I’ll need some more troops, have them report to me directly, I’ll turn the locator on so you can trace me. Good, and thank you again. Yaderny out.”
By this time the medical team was at the door carrying a stretcher. Yaderny turned to them, pocketing his communicator. “This girl we believe to be associated with an assassin, and so she is under remandation.” Yaderny produced an ID card which the medics acknowledged by nodding agreement. He continued, “She has no papers, also. She claims to bear the name Damistofia Azart. She has had some sort of attack, of what we don’t know. She’ll need quarantine, and isolation, and guard.”
One of the medics said, “Your people, or the Palliatory staff?”
Yaderny thought a moment, and replied, “Yours, until we have something else on her. Right now, she is a low-grade suspect. Keep her confined. I think that whatever she had, the worst of it seems to have passed, but I’m no medical, I don’t know what she has. Fever, vomiting, diarrhea…” He made a gesture as of picking something loose out of his pocket and handing it to them, as if for their choice. “With those symptoms, it could be anything: Mercani’s Ague, Bosel Fever, Chorylopsis, Battarang, Vyrygnenia, Nasmork, Tifa… I assume you can find out there.”
They nodded, and the one who had spoken before said, “Hope it’s not Tifa; but doesn’t look like it. We’ll keep her locked up good, never worry.” And they went to the bed and took Damistofia from it, wrapping her up in the sheet she was already covered with, laying her on the stretcher carefully, almost tenderly. And they took her out without further ceremony. As they were taking her out, it seemed that she awakened for a moment and looked at Yaderny briefly, but it was an unfathomable expression, one Yaderny himself could assign no meaning to.
Afte
r that, he told his men what they were going to do, and they left the shabby little room in the rooming house and rejoined the men they had left outside, on the street. Soon they were met by the first of the new troops, and Yaderny threw them into the search immediately, with the elan and verve of one who knew that they would pick up the trail again, very soon. There was great excitement as they began, spreading out. Yaderny threw himself into the chase wholeheartedly, not content to let the underlings do all the work while he stood back and supervised.
In fact, he didn’t slow down until they had gotten a couple of blocks away. They had just cleared a small commercial building, with unused warehousing facilities on the upper floors, and they had come out in the street to take a short break. Yaderny sat down on a curbstone, just pausing for a moment to think where to hit next, and then his instinct suddenly rose within him again, quite out of nowhere, for no special reason, but he knew. He knew that somehow Rael, the assassin, had escaped them, that their search would turn up nothing. It came to him with the utter certainty he had always known and employed when he could, with a general pattern of success. That was why he was a Squad Leader, not just one of the foot soldiers. But he knew it. Rael was gone. He sat still for a moment, thinking. They would continue, of course; foolish to recall the teams now that they were already working. But he already knew the outcome: their quarry had moved, and was now outside the area they had under control.
One of the team members, long accustomed to the moods and intuitions of the boss, noticed a change in Yaderny’s general demeanor, and stepped close, to speak to him. “Something wrong?”
Yaderny said, “Yes. I think we’ve missed him. The trail’s cold now.”
“We haven’t covered much, and that area back there is still sealed. He can’t have gotten out of it.”
“Yes. You’re right… but I don’t think it was like that, that he was there and we missed him, and when we left, he moved. No, nothing so simple. No. We moved a certain way, and our move made it clear for him. And you know what?”
“What’s that, boss?”
“I think it’s for good.”
“But you felt sure back there; you thought…”
“I was sure. He was close. Damn close. Or somewhere we could have seen if we had only looked. But not now. No. Rael, whoever he was, is gone, and we’ll not find any more trail.”
The squad member reflected, “All’s not lost: we have the girl, Azart.”
Yaderny replied, without heat, “What do we have in her? Not much, I’ll bet; oh, I’ll have her checked, but not hard. You see, we already know she wasn’t on the Beamer with Rael, or at least as far as we can determine. No, we’ll hear her story, and they’ll probably give her some correction for losing her papers, but she doesn’t know anything: she was part of the decoy setup he arranged. We would spend enough time with her, just enough a delay, for him to get in position, and then when we moved, then he’d move. I’m sure that’s the way of it. Too bad. I’d like to get a handle on this one—there are a lot of problems with this case.”
“Yes, so goes the rumor. And as far as the girl having no papers; that’s not all that uncommon, either. There’s quite a few of them wandering around, you know… I’ll bet she didn’t figure on running into this, or us.”
Yaderny added, “Or getting sick, either. Now under guard, in isolation, and under quarantine. Poor kid! But that’s the way it works out: you never know what’s going to crawl out from under a rock and bite your arse, do you?”
The squadman chuckled. “No, no.”
Yaderny said, “Let’s get on with it, for the sake of form; take your men and work that shop across the street. Take your time. We aren’t going to catch him, or see any trace of him.”
“You don’t think we’ll pick him up from another job, later on?”
“No. He’s gone, that’s all. Just vanished. I don’t know how, but he did.”
“What about the other guy, the one who Rael cooled on the Beamer? The higher-ups going to work on that?”
Yaderny said, “I hear they are working on that with a will. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them turn on that more than this; that’s the sort of talk I’ve heard.”
“Yes, me as well. But now we’ll go do it.” And picking up his partner, the squadman walked across the street to search the place there. But Yaderny knew it was all over. Too late. And what bothered him was that he had been so certain they were close to him, once. Close.
For Damistofia, Time, once a string of crystalline beads, now mutated into an undifferentiated grayness, which displayed random and subtle variations that communicated no meaning to her whatsoever. She was taken somewhere, across Marula, so she thought, but it all looked the same to her. There was a place that was quieter, removed from the street noise, and there, things were done to her, which she did not resist; they were not especially gentle things, but she sensed there was no deliberate intent to cause pain, and the rough treatment seemed to help, after its own fashion. She slept. She was fed and washed and examined under the guidance of what passed for medical arts in Marula, in Lisagor.
There was a doctor who came and examined her, and talked with her some, and who eventually told her that her case had them baffled, that she had apparently contracted some factor which had caused her to, as he put it, “purge herself completely.” And that, save from some drowsiness and temporary confusions, she was completely healthy, and would need only time to recover. That she was vague about her past they wrote off to amnesia, and after a few desultory attempts to penetrate it, they pave up, and recommended that upon discharge from the Marula Main Palttatory she be assigned to retraining and given some simple task to do, along with a suitable probationary period.
The police came and talked with her a few times, but as Yaderny’s assistant had remarked, when everything was considered, the loss of papers wasn’t the most serious event in the world of law enforcement, in fact, they did have much more pressing problems than an unidentifiable girl who had had a momentary association with a mysterious assassin. What these problems were, they did not say, and Damistofia did not ask, although a part of herself she kept under mid control thought she knew. For a time, Yaderny seemed to show an interest in her, but more and more he delegated his work to assistants, progressively lower in the police chain of command, and at last, she was talking with either disinterested flunkies or confused students, neither of which profited by the experience. They pursued things as far as their priorities permitted them to, and then they quietly gave up on her and instructed the Identification Bureau to issue her new papers in the name she claimed to be her own, in the full form favored by the Bureau, Damistofia Leonelle Azart I Zharko, Resident, Marulupol, Sertse Solntsa, Lisagor.
They moved her from the largely empty violent ward to a more relaxed part of the Palliatory, still somewhat isolated, where she had a small cubicle of her own, and where she spent the days attending retraining, eating and sleeping, and exercising; they had insisted on the last, because of the condition she had been in.
Her appearance, at first curiously mutable, soon stabilized; after that she began to gain weight and take on an appearance of more health and normalcy: a slender young woman somewhere in her late twenties or perhaps early thirties, slight and graceful, with pale skin and dark hair and eyes. The face was oval, with large, slightly protuberant eyes, which lent her an intensity she did not, on acquaintance, seem to have.
Internally, she practiced on herself a self-willed amnesia almost as thorough as the one they thought she had: this was necessary to make a clean transition from Rael to Damistofia, because she soon discovered that thinking as Rael, which she tended to do without being aware of it, brought her into conflict with the realities of the body she inhabited: there were too many discrepancies. The weight and mass of Damistofia’s slight body was distributed differently from that of the lanky but powerful Rael. Thinking as Rael, she wanted to swing her shoulders more, and walking was a problem because of the feel of the placement
of the thighs and hips. Men walked spraddle-legged, compared to women, because their hip joints were closer together and they needed to leave space for the genitals. Women walked with their feet together, and did not need to counterbalance the heavy legs with motions of the upper body. This was something normal people learned unconsciously, or instinctively, but Damistofia had to practice it constantly until it became routine.
Another problem, which showed less but bothered her more, was sex, or more precisely, sense-of-sex. Rael had learned, whatever he had been before, to enjoy women, and sex. This sense of desire, part of the psyche, made the transition with Damistofia, but the realization of it was a constant difficulty. It was difficult for her to grasp, especially in the location of the impulse. She experimented a bit, to get the feel of it, touching herself, trying to imagine… It was like, and unlike. Desire was as strong, when she encouraged it, but curiously diffused, unspecific, unlocalized; more, it didn’t drive her to assertive motion, even though she could recall that clearly enough; rather, it made her lethargic, with an odd undertone of tension that would often culminate in a headache. And she tried to reach back further, to Jedily, whoever she had been, but there was simply nothing there. Whatever they had done to the original subject at the Mask Factory, their work had been complete: Rael could not remember Jedily, and now Jedily was even farther away. Damistofia knew, fatalistically, that whatever sexual orientation she settled on, she would have to do it on her own.