A couple of hours after Themia was captured, I felt the moon rise. I couldn’t see it in our windowless cell block, but that didn’t matter; I felt the possibilities of change through every part of my body.
A Raid and a Rescue
Part 2 of 3
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I must have looked startled when I suddenly realized I was Edward Kettlestone as well as u-Rimikhal Surrethia, and a flood of memories from Edward Kettlestone’s life distracted me from what I was doing — walking my rounds with Mierra. I tried to cover for it as she looked curiously at me: “Did you hear that?”
The sound continued, a faint screaming coming from somewhere to our left. She shook her head. “You can’t let it get to you, or you won’t last long here. Come on.”
“I don’t just mean the screams — didn’t you hear the gunshots?”
“No... But we shouldn’t leave our posts. Whoever it is can call reinforcements from the floating guards, and if it’s so urgent they need us to drop everything and come, they’ll ring the alarm.”
We continued on our rounds and I took stock of my new memories. As Edward, I’d been thinking of all this as a game — not just my ostensible life as Surrethia, which only went back a few months, but my whole life as me, the real person under all the male or female human masks, with no name that humans could utter. But my own memories were centuries-deep and too vivid for me to discount them. Neither Edward nor his friend Gerald had invented all those memories; they had been in too much haste to get started to put as much thought into character backstories as usual. Edward and Bill had decided that Surrethia’s human cover ID would be as Biansurru’s sister, but I remembered so much more that they hadn’t thought of: how I’d been friends with Biansurru for twenty years in my previous human ID, as a woman named Urreshi; how I was exposed as a lunar and barely escaped the police, fleeing to Biansurru and Surrethia’s home for refuge; and how, when Surrethia died of typhus a few weeks later, I took over her identity, working with Biansurru to bury her secretly in the dead of night. I remembered other human faces and identities I’d worn in the past decades and centuries — and the animal forms, too — and the people, human and lunar, I’d known.
And I remembered how Biansurru had gotten me this job, a couple of months after I took over his sister’s identity, and how quickly I had gotten used to the screaming. As Edward, I thought it was probably Irrush screaming after getting shot by one of the guards, and maybe Themia or Khonu were screaming from non-fatal wounds as well, but as Surrethia I knew it could just as easily be one of the prisoners over on the men’s side being tortured, or screaming at the memory of recent torture. It wouldn’t do to show undue curiosity about it.
Mierra and I continued our rounds, inspecting all the cells on our block. The prisoners were all locked in, by ones and twos, and they’d had their evening meal; some of them were trying to sleep, others were talking quietly with their cellmate or the prisoners across the hall, one was singing in an aboriginal language I knew well (I’d been a member of that tribe for more than a century), but which as Surrethia I couldn’t admit to knowing. None were making trouble, anyway, and we returned to our guard post to rest for a few minutes before starting the next round. Mierra rolled a cigarette and lit it, but didn’t offer to share; Surrethia used to smoke, but I “quit” when I took over her life. I took the magazine I’d been reading out of the desk and found my place, but I couldn’t concentrate on the article, still flooded with disparate memories.
Within an hour or so, Themia would probably be hauled in to the women’s side of the prison; she might be interrogated right away, or they might throw her in a cell to stew for a few hours first. Meanwhile Khonu would be imprisoned and questioned in the men’s side, and quite possibly Liero too — I remembered pretending to be Liero, but I couldn’t remember being him, not like I remembered being Edward. With any luck, Themia would be on my cell block, and I’d have a chance to get at her before she was questioned... what if she was on another block, though? I’d need to plan for that too.
As Edward, I’d been curious about what it would be like to be a woman, to have breasts and wide hips and a vagina. As myself, though, this shape was nothing new — I’d worn it almost every hour of the day and night since I took over Surrethia’s identity, and I’d worn so many other female shapes that the novelty, if there had ever been any, had long since worn off. I remembered the old days when I could safely shapeshift every time the moon was up, when the humans didn’t have a good way to detect us except by trying to kill us and seeing if the usual methods for killing humans didn’t work. But since they invented X-rays, microscopes and blood tests, we’d had to learn to form human skeletons inside ourselves, and stable fluid sacs that would look like human internal organs, and to produce a fluid just under our skins that looked like human blood under the best microscopes the humans had. Changing shape wasn’t something we could afford to do casually, not if it involved breaking up and reforming our skeletons, which might not pass on an X-ray until they’d stabilized in the new shape. Guards at the prison were randomly X-rayed about once a week and subject to blood tests once a month, while private citizens might be randomly X-rayed any time they visited a government office to pay their taxes or apply for a permit. (The government of Omruthia required a lot of permits.)
Our break was about over and we were about to walk another round when someone rang the bell at the heavy steel door leading from our cell block to the central atrium of the women’s side. It was the sequence of rings, two short and one longer, which meant guards escorting a new prisoner. I went to the door, looked through the periscope at the people on the other side, and gave Mierra the clear sign; she lowered her pistol and I unlocked and opened the door.
Two male guards escorted in a female prisoner. She’d had bruises all over her face, arms and chest, and some teeth had been knocked out; her shirt was gone and her bra was loose on one side, but she wore the trousers of a female guard’s uniform. As Surrethia, I’d never met Themia, but I remembered Kim’s description of her from her character sheet, and I was sure this must be her. She was a couple of inches shorter than me, with straight black hair and the kind of nose that indicated she had an aboriginal grandmother somewhere in her ancestry. But not recently; you couldn’t get a job as a guard unless you were at least seven-eighths Omru, or plausibly impersonate one if you didn’t at least look like it.
“Caught this one sneaking in, oddly enough,” said the guard who was holding the chain attached to Themia’s manacles. “Her and two men, all in uniform, with fake ID. Commandant says she’s to be in solitary for a while, and you’ve got a free cell —”
“No, we don’t,” Mierra interrupted. “We just put a new prisoner in solitary during the day shift; the records must not have been updated.”
“Oh...”
“We can move a couple of other prisoners around, double up some that have their own cell, and block this one’s cell off with portable partitions if we need to,” I suggested.
“I’m pretty sure they’ve got an empty solitary cell in Block S,” Mierra returned, giving me a dirty look.
“All right, no need to trouble you ladies further. Good evening.” And they were gone.
“Why’d you say we could double up some others and make room for that one?” Mierra asked.
I shrugged. “I didn’t remember they had a free cell in Block S. And I wanted to look cooperative; this is the best-paying job I’ve ever had, and I don’t want to lose it.”
“If you’re trying to make nice with Puenkho, don’t bother; he’s bad news. Tharrashi over on Block T dated him for a while and she said...”
I tuned out Mierra’s rambling about Puenkho, the guard who’d been holding Themia’s leading-chain. If Themia was in solitary on another cell block, I’d have trouble getting at her. Probably they’d leave her there for some hours, then pull her out and interrogate her; hopefully they’d interrogate her several times before they sent her over to the technomancers to do as they liked with her brain. I thought over various possibilities, none very promising, as we made another round of the block and took another break.
A couple of hours after Themia was captured, I felt the moon rise. I couldn’t see it in our windowless cell block, but that didn’t matter; I felt the possibilities of change through every part of my body. But I was long used to the discipline of maintaining a consistent shape throughout the day and night — those of us who hadn’t learned that had either fled over the mountains to Ekynia, or died. I resisted the impulse to change, kept doing my job, and kept brainstorming.
Moonrise made it possible to get to Themia, but it still wouldn’t be easy. Every method I could think of either had a high risk of failure, or would take several days to prepare, or both. If I didn’t care about blowing my cover ID, I could probably get to Themia tonight, silence her — freeing Kim from this world she undoubtedly thought of as a “dystopia” — and maybe even get out of the prison alive, though in need of a new ID.
But if I were exposed as a lunar, Biansurru would be suspected of being one himself, or of knowingly collaborating with me. Once they started investigating him and interrogating him, they’d find out about his own connections with the resistance, and he couldn’t stand torture the way a lunar could. So I’d have to come up with something else.
It was about dawn when our day-shift replacements relieved us. I lingered for a few moments in the atrium, saying good morning to the other night-shift guards as they left and the day-shift guards as they arrived; then I picked my target and went over to Ziebi, one of the guards on Block S who was pretty near my height and weight.
“Any plans for the morning?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Go home and crash for now. I’ve got a date on my next off day, though; this guy I met at Shuenia’s nameday party.”
“Good luck. Say, you’ve got something stuck to your sleeve, here —”
I brushed her left sleeve and touched her hand and wrist for a moment. That moment was enough to taste her skin and learn how to take her shape, if I needed to — and if I had the chance.
A few minutes later I met Biansurru by his car in the parking lot.
“Anything interesting happen?” he asked, opening the door for me.
“Some guys brought in a new prisoner, but we didn’t have a solitary cell free,” I said, getting in. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
I assumed the car might be bugged, and didn’t volunteer anything about Edward and Bill. Biansurru started to say something once we were underway, but I cut him off.
“I’m kind of tired; let’s deal with that later.” I brushed my left hand against my left earlobe and yawned, a signal the resistance used to warn of listening ears. When we got to Biansurru’s row house and went inside, I walked through every room with my sleeves rolled up and my shirt partly unbuttoned, tasting the air with every patch of exposed skin.
“Nobody’s been here since we left last night. So no bugs. We can talk.”
Biansurru let out a sudden breath as he sat down on the sofa. “Edward? Is that you?”
“Kind of,” I said, sitting down next to him. “I remember being Edward and I remember being Surrethia, and Urreshi and Tushorro before that... what about you?”
“I remember being Bill and Biansurru both. Mostly Bill, I think, but I’m not sure... this is so confusing. Did you find out anything about Kim?”
“Themia’s in solitary on Block S,” I said. “I’ve thought of ways to get at her, but the best case is I’d probably lose my job at the prison and probably my cover ID as Surrethia. At worst I’d get killed without killing her first. And if I’m exposed, you’d be exposed too — I think we need to coordinate, and both of us go after Khonu and Themia at the same time tomorrow night.”
He shook his head. “Liero got captured, but Khonu got away. Liero’s in the fishbowl cell in Block M.”
Some cell blocks had a cell whose walls were of technomantically reinforced glass. Prisoners were usually put in it naked, exposed to the view of the guards and other prisoners.
“We ought to silence him, too, if we can do it without blowing our cover.”
“What? But — he won’t pop back into the other world when he dies. And I can’t see how to get at him when he’s in the fishbowl, even if it were on my cell block.”
“Well, he probably doesn’t know enough to be dangerous anyway.”
“I think we should go look for Khonu now. If we can’t find him, we’ll try again tonight before work — we need to tell him what happened when I got killed as Irrush, and about that film actor — what was his name?”
“It doesn’t matter. You want to eat something before we go back out?”
“I guess we’d better.”
Forty minutes or so later, we drove over to the safe-house that Khonu, Themia, Irrush and Liero had been using. If Themia or Liero had already been interrogated, the secret police might already know about the place. But Themia at least had been left in solitary, and probably was only being interrogated about now. Biansurru drove slowly past the house, a rickety old place in the middle of the aboriginal ghetto with peeling paint and broken porch steps. There were no cars in the driveway or parked in front, and no lights in the windows, but there was smoke coming from the chimney.
I’d been darkening my skin and adjusting my face on the way over, and shifting some mass from my breasts to my hips and belly, leaving my overall build the same so I wouldn’t have to break and reform any bones. A couple of blocks past the house, Biansurru let me out and I walked back to it, cutting through a couple of back yards and approaching the back door. If the secret police were already watching the house, they wouldn’t recognize me.
I gave the code-knock at the back door: three raps, pause, one, pause, and two. Nobody answered. I pressed against the back window, not only my ear (which was mainly for show, though its cupped shape did mean it picked up sound a little better than the rest of my skin surface) but the whole right side of my face and both hands. No voices, no footsteps; just a faint hum that was probably a refrigerator.
After listening a minute, I picked the lock and entered. It was as I’d more or less expected: the stash of money was gone, with Khonu’s jump bag. Any papers that might have been incriminating were gone, either taken along by Khonu or burning up in the wood stove. If I hadn’t been a lunar, I’d have checked to make sure they’d burned thoroughly and didn’t need a little kerosene or something to help them along, but I gave the stove a wide berth and got out of there as soon as I was sure Khonu was nowhere around.
I cut through a different couple of back yards to get to the next street over, walked back to where Biansurru had parked and got in. “He’s gone,” I said. “Drive.”
“We can look for him at the Cross-Eyed Okapi tonight before work,” he suggested.
“Yeah, he won’t leave town. He’ll be planning to rescue Themia, if I know him. We’ve got to find him before he tries something stupid, let him know we’ve got it covered.”
“Do we?”
“I’ve got a plan, but I need a little more information. And I’ll need your help, and Khonu’s if we can find him in time.”
By the time we returned to Biansurru’s house, I’d returned my face and figure to normal. We went inside and sat down on the sofa. Biansurru’s shoulders sagged suddenly and he started trembling.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said. “I — I’ve got to do it. We can’t leave Kim in there — they’re probably already torturing her by now...”
“Shh,” I said, putting my arms around him. “Get some rest. Themia’s been trained to resist torture; she can’t hold out forever, but she’ll hold out long enough that we can rescue her before they give up on her and decide to extract her brain.”
He’d stiffened for a moment when I hugged him, but then relaxed. “Um, Edward?”
“Call me Surrethia, please.”
“How much do you remember about, um... about Biansurru and Surrethia? Or the person you are, I mean, both before and after you became Surrethia?”
“Before Surrethia I was Urreshi. We used to sleep together, back before Surrethia died and I took over her identity. Then you didn’t want to anymore, and you told me to sleep in Surrethia’s bed... I said I didn’t mind, and I still mean it.” Lunars got pleasure from contact with each other, or with humans, but with humans it didn’t matter much what kind of contact; this hug was as good as the sex used to be when I didn’t look like his sister. I didn’t have a particularly high concentration of nerves in my vagina or breasts, no more than in my arms and hands. “I’m happy to be your sister.”
“Oh God, Edward, I didn’t intend that. You know it wasn’t on my character sheet and I swear I wasn’t thinking it either... I just suggested you could be my sister because I knew as a lunar you’d need a cover ID, and it would be convenient if we shared a house in case the mission lasted several days but I didn’t want us to be lovers... I didn’t even think about you having replaced my original sister when she died, much less about — what happened with Urreshi —”
“Biansurru, you didn’t do anything wrong. Neither did Bill, I’m sure. I know that Edward didn’t invent every detail of my three centuries of memories. And I don’t know how, but I’m sure they’re real — what we had when I was Urreshi was real, and what we have now that I’m your sister is a little different, but just as real. Bill and Edward didn’t create us, any more than Gerald could have created this whole world.”
“But where else did we come from?”
“Probably the same place the other world came from. Have you thought about how we’re speaking Omreshi? Gerald showed me his dictionary once, you know, a few weeks ago when the campaign had just started. It’s only about a hundred and fifty words, and a few rules for making compounds and phrases — not even enough grammar to write complex sentences. And I can speak four aboriginal languages too, which Gerald never created a word of.”
He was silent for a few moments; I stroked his hair soothingly, and it had some effect. “Maybe you’re right. Gerald must have discovered this world, somehow... and you and I discovered our other selves here when we tried to create new characters...?”
I wondered. Did that mean that Liero, who I had no real memories of, was also a part of me? And what about the twenty or more other characters Edward had played in various games over the years?
“Enough philosophizing,” I said. “Go get some sleep, and by the time you get up, maybe I’ll have figured out if my plan will work.”
I went into Surrethia’s room, which I hadn’t changed much since she died, and sat down with the city directory and a map book. I didn’t need as much sleep as a human, and as long as the moon was up I was too wired to get to sleep easily. I looked up Ziebi’s surname in the directory and figured out where the people with that name lived. I could rule out all but two of them based on what I’d heard from Ziebi and her friends over the last few months; I knew she lived fairly close to the prison, and that she lived in an apartment, not a house. I adjusted my vocal cords to a low alto, narrowed my tongue a bit, and dialed one of the numbers.
“Who speaks?” a gruff man’s voice said.
“Doserra speaks. Is Ziebi there?”
“You’ve dialed wrong.”
I called the other number, heard Ziebi say “Who speaks?”, and apologized for dialing wrongly. I made sure to put my tongue and vocal cords back to normal before the moon set, and got to sleep not long after.
When I woke that afternoon, I got up and made breakfast for me and Biansurru, to have it ready when he got up.
“So,” he said, sipping his coffee and blinking. “You said something about a plan?”
I told him.
“That should work. You know Ziebi well enough to impersonate her?”
“Not with her close friends. With other guards at the prison, yeah, I think so.”
“So you can get into Block S, and... and give Kim a way out. And —” He glanced at the clock. “With any luck we’ll have made contact with Sandor first.”
I didn’t like the way he kept talking about them by the names of the people who’d pretended to be them, but I wasn’t sure what to say about it. I said only, “We’ll do what we can. What about this...”
We discussed our plans during breakfast, and refined them further on the way to the Cross-Eyed Okapi. It was a bar catering mainly to people of mixed aboriginal-Omru ancestry, where Khonu and Themia’s resistance organization used to meet up and exchange messages. Nobody in the organization knew everybody else, so an unfamiliar person asking after Khonu and giving the right passcodes wouldn’t look suspicious.
Biansurru drove past it and parked a little way down the street. He got out first, and I followed him at a distance. He entered the bar; I paused to admire the displays of cheap jewelry and hats in a couple of storefront windows, and passed with concealed distaste by a propaganda poster — “Is Your Neighbor a Lunar? Know the Warning Signs!” I gave Biansurru time to case the place thoroughly, and when he came out, I paused by another window and saw him, out of the corner of my eye (lunars have better peripheral vision than humans), take off his hat and mop his brow — a signal we’d agreed on to say that the place looked safe enough but Khonu wasn’t there. I continued down the street to the bar and went inside, while Biansurru turned the corner to circle the block back to his car.
“What’ll you have?” the bartender asked. He was a small wiry man with aboriginal-pattern facial hair, heavy on the chin and sparse on the cheeks. I had a beard like that one time.
I described the rather improbable drink I supposedly wanted, a code telling him I was part of his organization and needed him to pass on a message. He made an elaborate show of mixing up a root beer with spices — secret agents can’t drink on duty, or anyway they shouldn’t. Not that alcohol would affect me like a human, anyway.
“You know a guy named Giasho who comes in here sometimes?” The name Giasho didn’t matter, just that it was a man’s name.
“Yeah, I haven’t seen him in a while though.” That told me he was ready for my addressee’s actual name.
“If you see him, tell him Khonia was asking about him.” The fact that I’d mentioned a random man’s name meant he needed to turn “Khonia” into its masculine equivalent, Khonu.
“I’ll try to remember. — That’ll be two kroner.”
I slipped him two one-kroner notes, with the message I’d written out earlier sandwiched between them. He deftly put the bills in the cash drawer while slipping the note into a hidden compartment underneath them. I poured a libation into the funnel of the shrine by the radio, bowed, then sat down and drank enough of my root beer to be plausible.
A few minutes later I was with Biansurru, on the way to work. I told him what I’d learned, which was basically nothing.
“But I’m pretty sure Khonu will be in there sometime in the next few days; he’ll need his contacts in the organization to organize another raid to free Themia, and he’ll get the note then.”
The note said, in English: “Bill and Edward are taking care of Kim. We’ll look for you here every evening at five, if we aren’t being followed.” (It took a lot of concentration to think and write in English, but we could do it.)
“I hope he’s all right,” Biansurru said. “As bad as this is for us, it’s got to be worse for him...”
Not as bad as for Themia, I thought, but didn’t say.
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Comments
As said many, many times,
As said many, many times, prisons are built to keep people in, not keep people out. So once you have a form of access, you can pretty much move around inside with ease. I do hope they are able to get to Kim before she is fully interrogated by the removal of her brain. Ooooh, that would leave a mark.
Not quite that easy...
As a former correctional officer (prison guard), i can tell you that, that's not the case. it's very hard to get out of *and* into a prison. It used to take my entire 45 minute lunch break just to step out to smoke a cig (back before i quit smoking) and that was *with* uniform, valid ID, and personal familiarity with the people i had to check with to gain access. The smoking area was only maybe 50 yards away from my work area.