“Some kids have disappeared too,” Gerald said. “The news didn’t say, but I’ll bet a first-edition Monster Manual that they were playing ‘pretend.’ Same as we were, only without dice.”
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I stared in dismay at the screen, glancing back and forth from the regression test results to the clock display. 5:10 pm, and I wasn’t getting out of here anytime soon. I took out my phone and texted Gerald:
Sorry dude. Got to work late. Run Liero as an NPC tonight, and I’ll join you guys later if I can get out of here by eight.
He texted back:
Bummer, you’ll miss the big prison raid. I’ll try not to get Liero killed. :)
I put the phone away, studied the test results, then went back to the code to figure out where it was going wrong. My boss wanted the fix for this defect checked in before I left tonight. So it was that I wasn’t there when it happened, and wasn’t listening to news or watching Twitter or anything when it all started.
The first I knew of it was when I arrived at Gerald and Karen’s house, a few minutes after eight. I’d checked in my fix and walked out the door at 7:37, and I’d texted Gerald to let him know I was on my way. On the way over, I was listening to a three day old podcast on my MP3 player, not to the radio. My phone chirped a few minutes later, probably Gerald texting me back, but I didn’t want to look at it while I was driving, and their house wasn’t far from my office.
So I didn’t find out until I walked up and knocked on the door. Karen opened it, looking drawn and pale.
“Are you okay?” I asked, glancing around. The guys weren’t sitting around the dining room table as usual this time of night; the game session should have still been going.
“You haven’t heard anything?” she asked.
“No...?” I started to pull out my phone to look at the last couple of texts and tweets, but instead I just asked her: “What’s going on?”
“Come on in.” She led me to the den, where Gerald was watching TV; a car commercial was on.
“Where is everybody?”
Gerald gave a hollow laugh. “My guess? The Kantheria Center for Correction and Amendment.”
“Yeah, but —” That was the official name of the prison we’d been going to raid and rescue prisoners from, leaders of the resistance movement our characters were members of. Most people called it the Ant-Lion Pit. (It sounded better in the language Gerald had made up for his game setting; serrezikh sounds cooler than “ant-lion,” anyway.)
“They got past the first checkpoint okay,” he said, “and the second, and they’d killed or knocked out the guards and clerks in the records office so they could look up where the prisoners they wanted were being held. But then they all vanished. Go take a look at the dining room, we haven’t touched anything...”
I walked into the dining room, disbelieving. It had to be a bad joke; I wondered where they were hiding and whether they really expected to take me in. I looked around the dining room table, the chairs pulled out just as far as you’d expect if someone were sitting in them, dice and character sheets at each place, a box of pizza and half-eaten slices on several paper plates...
...and three empty suits of clothes, lying slumped in the chairs and on the floor under the table. There on Bill’s seat was the Maxwell’s equations “Let there be light” T-shirt he wore more often than most, lying crumpled on a pair of khaki slacks, and crumpled grey socks trailing out of his sneakers... and there in Kim’s chair, I could see a corner of a maxi-pad where her camisole had fallen off the seat and left the inside of her panties and capri pants exposed. Sandor worked in an office with a hard-ass dress code, and usually came here straight from work like me, so I wasn’t surprised (after seeing Kim and Bill’s clothes) to find the button-up shirt with the loosened tie crumpled in his usual chair, a napkin tucked into the shirt collar to protect it from pizza sauce.
“So they’ve vanished into Omruthia,” I said sarcastically, half playing along. “And you had absolutely nothing to do with it?” Gerald had followed me into the dining room. But he looked too distraught to be playing a joke, and I started to feel really worried.
“No,” he said, “And it’s not just them. It’s —”
Just then Karen called out from the den, “The news is back on.”
I followed Gerald to the den. Karen was sitting on the edge of the sofa, leaning toward the TV, where a reporter was apparently in the lobby of a fancy hotel or — no, it was a theater. Some Broadway theater in New York, from the caption at the bottom of the screen.
“— and they all just disappeared,” a young lady was saying into the microphone, “right in the middle of the song. You could see their empty clothes hanging there for just a moment and then they fell down, and people were screaming, but you could barely hear it until the music stopped... Then somebody dropped the curtain and a minute later the band started playing something else, and the manager came out and said ‘keep calm’, but I’ve seen Wicked three times and I know that’s not supposed to happen.”
The scene changed to a news studio, with a couple of anchors at a desk and the reporter from the theater lobby on the screen beside them. They were talking about how most of the actors had vanished from theater stages at 7:34 pm all over, wherever there were plays being performed.
“And movie and TV actors, too; a few minutes ago they were interviewing a cameraman from the set of Days of Our Lives,” Karen said.
“Bill and Kim and Sandor aren’t the only roleplayers this happened to either,” Gerald said. “I just got confirmation. I posted about it to a couple of gaming forums, and just before you got here, I saw some replies — other GMs talking about the same thing happening to their players.”
“Damn,” I said quietly. “That could have been me.”
“There but for the hardassness of your boss,” Gerald said.
“And the children,” Karen said, her voice breaking off in a sob.
“What?”
“Some kids have disappeared too,” Gerald said. “The news didn’t say, but I’ll bet a first-edition Monster Manual that they were playing ‘pretend.’ Same as we were, only without dice.”
“Or those method actors,” I said, light dawning. “All pretending to be somebody else, somewhere else...”
I was interrupted by a scream from the dining room. We all jumped up and ran, hearing a crash and clatter before we got there.
Bill looked up at us, a terrified look on his face and no clothes on his body. He was lying on the floor next to his toppled chair, half atop his own clothes.
“Where were you?” Gerald asked.
“What did you do to us?” Bill shouted, scrambling and backing away, apparently unconcerned for his nudity.
“Chill,” I said, stepping between them. “It wasn’t his fault. Get some clothes on and tell us what happened.”
After Bill had gotten dressed, and Karen had gotten him some coffee, we turned off the sound and turned on closed-captioning on the TV and sat down to listen to Bill’s story.
“I’d just started looking through the N filing cabinet — I mean I’d told you Irrush was going to look through it — when suddenly I was there. We all were, standing around the records office, looking in filing cabinets or standing guard. Themia and Khonu and I all suddenly stopped what we were doing and looked around, and I think Khonu gave a yelp before Liero put a hand over his mouth. I asked Themia ‘Is that you, Kim?’ and she said yes, and when Liero let go of Khonu he said he was Sandor... but Liero didn’t know what the hell we were talking about; he wasn’t Edward, I guess cause you weren’t there playing with us.”
“You were running him as an NPC?” I asked Gerald.
“Yeah, they couldn’t do the raid without his technomancy. — Go on, Bill.”
“So Themia, I mean Kim, she said we shouldn’t talk about it until we were alone, away from Liero. Till then we just needed to get the job done and get out.
“Khonu thought we should abort the mission. ‘It’s not a game anymore, and we don’t know what happens if we get killed here,’ he was saying, and Liero was saying in a loud whisper: ‘Is that all this is to you, just a game? What kind of idiots have I gotten myself mixed up with?’
“Sorry,” I said automatically. That was the kind of thing Liero would say, and it was partly my fault for making him that kind of character even if I hadn’t been playing him at the time.
Bill shook his head and went on. “So we argued about it for a minute and Liero said if we wanted out, we should stay where we were for five minutes, give him time to get away, and then sneak out as best we could. He was going to rescue at least one prisoner tonight, and he didn’t trust us to have his back after we’d gone crazy like that. So I said he should go ahead, and we’d wait.
“We let him go, and then a few minutes later the three of us started trying to get out the way we’d come. We didn’t get far before it all went wrong. We ran into the commandant of the prison, who wanted to know why he didn’t recognize any of us, and wanted to see our IDs. We told him we were new hires, and showed him our IDs. They’d held up fine at the front gate, but something made him suspicious and he ordered us to come with him to the personnel office.
“So we started to play along, and we made a break for it the moment he and the guards with him seemed to relax. I don’t know exactly what happened after that, it’s all kind of hazy — I got shot, I’m pretty sure, and I was bleeding a lot but I was still trying to walk, and somebody was screaming and I think I was one of them. And then I was back here.”
We looked at each other somberly. “So,” I said, “you went there. And a bunch of other gamers and actors — and little kids playing pretend, God help us — went wherever they went... and then you came back when you got killed there?”
“Apparently so,” Gerald said.
Karen looked back at the TV. “Bill’s not the only one.” She turned the sound back on.
A reporter was interviewing an actor I vaguely recognized, who was wearing a bathrobe. “I was there, I was him — I could remember being me but I remembered being Ace Riley too, I knew I was in Dr. Artifex’s laboratory and I had to find the formula and get out before he figured out the fire in the greenhouse was just a distraction. And being both me and Ace Riley was enough to throw me off my game, I guess, because I dithered over whether to keep looking for the formula — Ace Riley cared about it but I didn’t — or just to get the hell out of there. I finally decided to clear out, but I wasn’t fast enough. Dr. Artifex came back and we both drew and fired — I shot him but he got me, too, with some weird gun that didn’t seem to do anything at first. I thought I was okay until the flesh started to slough off my bones when I was nearly out of there.
“It hurt like a million devils for a minute or so, but then I was back on sound stage three, alive but naked.”
Gerald muted the sound when the talking heads in the studio started analyzing the actor’s story. We could figure it out as well as they could or better.
“So,” I said, “has anybody else tried to start roleplaying or acting since this thing happened? Any plays that were supposed to start at eight, for instance?”
“I don’t know,” Gerald said.
Karen added: “I think the TV said they were canceling performances of all plays until further notice, and stopping filming on whatever other scenes they had scheduled for today.” (It was only only about five-forty on the west coast, I realized.) “And they said it was just fictional films and TV shows; they’d checked with the crews of several reality shows and documentaries and everyone was fine.”
“Well,” I said, “if Sandor and Kim get killed like Bill here, they’ll be okay. It will hurt for a little while but they’ll be safe back here. But if they get captured?”
“They’ve got hollow teeth, I think,” Gerald said. “I have to check their character sheets to be sure.”
“I know Liero’s got a poison tooth, but those guys have ways of stopping you from breaking a tooth when you’re captured. They aren’t here, which means they haven’t died — and if they got captured and were able to use the hollow teeth, they’d probably use it.”
“If they knew they’d come back here, they would,” Bill said. “I had no idea what would happen.”
Karen added: “They might find it’s easier to plan to kill yourself if you get captured than to actually do it. They weren’t really hardened secret agents, just playing them in a game.”
“I don’t know,” Bill said. “It’s like that actor said, I could remember being Irrush too. I didn’t exactly have the time or leisure to introspect about how much I was Irrush and how much I was Bill, but I think under some circumstances I’d have reacted like Irrush.”
“It could vary from one person to another,” I said, “depending on the actor or player’s attitude to their character. We don’t have enough data yet. But if Sandor and Kim got captured, and weren’t able to use their poison teeth... we need to consider the possibility that they’ll never get out of Omruthia without help.”
“The brain boxes,” Gerald said. “Oh, God. What was I thinking?”
We — our characters, I mean, — had heard rumors in earlier game sessions about how the technomancers at the Ant-Lion Pit were extracting the brains of condemned prisoners and putting them into machines — printing presses, elevators, radio transmitters — as controllers. Some people said they were stringing multiple brains together to make a big thinking machine. If that happened to Kim or Sandor, they’d be stuck there for years, decades, until something went wrong with the life support keeping their brain alive.
For that matter, if they managed to escape from the prison and keep their heads down, avoiding the notice of the secret police, they might still be stuck living out the rest of their characters' natural lives in Gerald’s dystopian world. They wouldn’t know that dying would bring them back home safely.
“We’ve got to go in after them,” I said.
“How?” Karen asked.
“Me and Bill roll up a couple of new characters and Gerald starts a new session with us.”
“Do you think that will work?” Gerald asked.
“I have no idea. But we’ve got to try. You can give us inside information, show us all your maps and notes on the prison, and the secret police and anything else we might need to know. And I figure our new characters can be prison guards who are secretly members of the resistance — we’d be ideally placed to rescue them, or to put them out of their misery if the technomancers have already started vivisecting them.”
Bill reluctantly agreed. “I’m terrified of facing those guys again, even if I know I’ll just come back here if they kill me. But I can’t just leave Kim there.”
“All right, if you’re willing I’ll help. Let me go get my notes.”
By unspoken consent, we left Kim and Sandor’s chairs and clothing alone. Bill and I sat at the far end of the dining table and spread out Gerald’s notes and maps; both of us read every word, and I tried to memorize as much as I could of it, especially the maps. Karen kept watching the news, and the gaming forums where people were talking about the vanished gamers; now and then she’d relay important information to us.
“Listen!” she said, about fifteen minutes after we’d started studying the maps. “Some guy just posted this to RPGnet: ‘Me and several friends were gaming tonight, and we’d taken a break to let everybody go pee and get snacks and stuff around six-thirty.’ (I think he’s on Central Time.) ‘My character had just gotten killed, and it was going to be a little while before the GM got a chance to introduce the other players to my new character; I was still tweaking the new character I’d had in reserve, sitting it out, when they got started again. And they’d just gotten started when everybody vanished, including Hal, the GM. That was six forty-five or so, at least ten minutes after everybody else is reporting people vanishing. I freaked out, and I turned on the news once I calmed down a little bit, but it wasn’t until a few minutes ago that I checked here to see if it affected other gamers. I think it might have gotten Hal because he was really getting into character as this NPC who was our party’s guide...’ Okay, there’s more, but that’s the important part.”
“So we know it wasn’t just a one-time thing,” Bill said.
“But it might not last indefinitely, so let’s get our characters ready and go in while we can,” I added.
It was nine-thirty when we finished studying Gerald’s notes and creating our character sheets, and handed them to Gerald for his approval. He tweaked all the stats upward a few points — “I’ll bend the rules for you guys, I want you to have every advantage. But Edward, are you sure about this?”
“Sure about what?” Bill asked.
“If Kim and Sandor both got captured, they’ll be in separate wings of the prison,” I said. “We need both a male and female guard, so we can get at both of them.”
Bill looked like he was going to make a bawdy joke, but then he said: “No, I should do it. Let’s swap. I need to rescue Kim, you can look for Sandor.”
“Bill,” I said, “tell me this. If the only way to get Kim out of that prison is to kill her, can you do that? Especially if there’s no time to explain, and you can’t tell her she’s going to pop right back here?”
He looked taken aback. “Oh... yeah, we might have to do that. I was thinking we’d get them out the prison first, but...”
“Let me do it,” I said. “We can explain later for sure, we hope we can explain ahead of time... but I don’t want you to do anything you might regret, something that might hurt your relationship with Kim. Or worse, that you might hesitate... and then get both of you captured and your brains sucked out.”
He chewed it over for a few seconds. “All right. You’re sure you aren’t doing this because you want to find out what it’s like to be a woman?”
I shrugged, trying to act casual. That was part of my motivation, but I wouldn’t let on. “I don’t think I’ll really get much chance to find out — I hope we’ll be in and out pretty quick, without a lot of time to, um, test out the new equipment. Kill Kim and Sandor and then ourselves, or if we can, tell them what’s going on and give them weapons to off themselves with. But somebody has to be female to infiltrate the women’s side of the prison.”
“Why a lunar, though?” Gerald asked.
“Shapeshifting could be useful,” I said. “If I get caught trying to rescue Kim, it could help me get away. And it ensures that I won’t end up as a brain in a tank — the worst they can do to me is kill me, so I’ll end up back here.”
Lunars were Gerald’s answer to werewolves, invented for his game setting. They could shapeshift as long as the moon was above the horizon, day or night; when the moon set, they were stuck in whatever form they happened to be in until it rose again. The government of Omruthia hated lunars and was waging a genocidal campaign to root them out and kill them all — to kill us all, I should say, as I was starting to get into character. And lunars didn’t have a distinct brain; they thought as well as moved, breathed and digested with every cell of their body.
“And if we wind up staying there longer than we expect,” Bill noted, “it means you won’t be stuck as a girl if you don’t like it. You can shapeshift into a guy form.”
“Maybe, although I probably won’t do that unless my first cover ID is compromised. You about ready?”
“I might want to make my character a lunar too...”
“It might not be a good idea,” I said. “You said you were disoriented when you first became Irrush — it’ll probably be worse for me, being a different sex and species. Maybe crippling. I don’t want that to happen to both of us at once. And lunars have those vulnerabilities as well as powers — a human-lunar pair would be more versatile than two lunars.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
We went over each other’s character sheets, and hashed out a few more details about how our characters knew each other. Then Gerald took a deep breath and started.
“It’s just before sunset when you arrive for your night shift jobs at the Kantheria Center for Correction and Amendment. Your contacts in the resistance have warned you that agents of one of the other resistance organizations may be trying a foolhardy prison raid —”
“Hey!” Bill said. I shushed him.
“— and if so, you should try to cover for them with a little bit of well-timed incompetence, but don’t risk blowing your cover to save them. If they get captured, try to silence them before they can be made to talk. They’re unlikely to know anything about the more effective resistance organizations, but better safe than sorry. You each report to your posts and everything goes normally until about eight... Roll versus perception.”
Bill and I both made our rolls. “You hear what might be gunshots from the direction of the records office, followed by a faint scream.”
“I’m going to check it out,” Bill said.
“I’ll —” I began, but I got no farther.
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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.
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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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I was nervous all night during my shift, but I tried not to let it show. Mierra probably thought the screaming from the interrogation rooms was getting to me, and it was; I was thinking it might be Themia.
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I was nervous all night during my shift, but I tried not to let it show. Mierra probably thought the screaming from the interrogation rooms was getting to me, and it was; I was thinking it might be Themia. And we had orders to keep one of the prisoners in cell fourteen awake all night, so she’d be ripe for interrogation on the day shift; we had to take turns going in and shouting at her, and shaking her by the shoulders when that wasn’t enough, every hour or so. Her cellmate kept waking up too, and cursing us more vigorously than the poor woman we were supposed to be keeping awake.
I’d had to do that several times since I started this job, although I hadn’t had to actually torture anybody; but with the sudden infusion of Edward’s memories and personality, I was starting to rethink this whole business of going undercover as a prison guard for months or even years. The only real good I’d done in all this time was to carry messages to and from prisoners on my cell block, and keep the organization informed about who was imprisoned and what their condition was. Supposedly we were going to do a really big prison break, much more professional and likely to succeed than the amateurish job Khonu, Themia, Irrush and Liero had tried, once we got enough people in place; but I had no idea who else was involved, except Biansurru, or how many more people we needed to get hired and promoted before we could break the prison wide open, kill the torturers and technomancers and free the political prisoners. And how much damage was this job going to do to me spiritually before then?
Toward the end of my shift I excreted some fluid from my nostrils, sniffled a lot, adjusted my vocal cords to hoarseness, and told Mierra I thought I was coming down with something. “If it doesn’t get better I might call in sick tonight,” I said.
I kept my eye on Ziebi as we left at the end of our shift, following her at a little distance through the checkpoints to the parking lot. She got on the number eleven bus along with several other guards and interrogators; I noted it and then hurried to meet Biansurru at the car.
“Drive as fast as you can without drawing attention,” I said. “She’s taking the bus home; this is perfect. We can get there ahead of her and wait.”
By the time we reached her apartment building, I’d changed into a copy of her. I told the concierge that I’d lost my key; she let me in to the apartment and told me she’d have a replacement key by the time I left for work that evening, but I’d owe twenty kroner extra on next month’s rent. I apologized and thanked her profusely; when she was gone, I waved to Biansurru from the window and he came on up.
Ziebi arrived home just five minutes later. She barely had time to register astonishment at seeing me when Biansurru grabbed her from behind and chloroformed her. We had her bound and gagged a few minutes later.
“Go on home now,” I said, “and try to get some sleep. I’ll see you at the bar tonight, right?”
“Good luck,” he said, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Don’t forget to call in sick for me,” I said, realizing I couldn’t do it now that I had Ziebi’s voice.
“I won’t.”
I gave him a hug, and he left.
After moonset I took a nap. When I got up, I helped Ziebi use the toilet, and tied her up more securely again afterward.
“I could leave your pants down around your ankles,” I said while I was drying off after my shower, “so you can go whenever you need to while I’m out being you. Would you like that?” She nodded, then shivered and shook her head.
“I’ll get you a blanket,” I said, and brought her a couple from her bedroom. I covered her bare legs and left her sitting on the floor next to the shower. I also left the shower head dripping so she could dampen her gag and then suck the moisture from it.
I caught the number six bus to the stop nearest the Cross-Eyed Okapi, and walked down the block to the bar. I smelled Biansurru and a few moments later saw him sitting at a table near the back with a shorter man with a full beard. I joined them at the table.
The other man looked nervous as I approached, but Biansurru said in English, “Don’t worry, that’s Edward. I told you not to be too surprised when you saw him.” He sounded strange when he spoke in English, and with the Edward part of my mind I realized he had an Omreshi accent.
“Your new character is a woman?” I figured Khonu was mostly Sandor, if he was talking about me as if I were just a character.
“We needed someone in the women’s side of the Pit to get to Kim,” I said, forcing myself to use her player-name. If English felt strange in my ears, it felt even stranger in my mouth; as Surrethia, I’d never spoken it before. “I think I’m going to have a chance to get to her tonight. Has, um, Bill already told you about how he got back to Gerald’s house...?”
“Yeah. I guess once we’ve got Kim out, we’ll all have to die here to get back home...”
They brainstormed about the most painless methods of suicide and murder they could think of, and I kept my mouth shut. There wasn’t any painless way for a lunar to die.
I caught the number fifteen bus from the stop around the corner from the bar (thanks to Ziebi and her extensive collection of bus schedules), and got to work twenty minutes early. They pulled me aside for a random X-ray at the second checkpoint, and I managed not to show my relief when they developed the picture and said I could go. I’d worried that Surrethia’s skeleton might not quite look right in Ziebi’s body, but they didn’t seem to notice. They considerately shielded my fake gonads with a lead apron, which meant I didn’t have to tighten the connection between my spine and pelvis — I’d loosened it up a little to let me match Ziebi’s height, knowing that most X-rays wouldn’t show that part of the skeleton.
When I walked in to Block S, I gave a big yawn.
“Rough day?” Rukharria asked me. She was Ziebi’s fellow guard on the night shift.
“Didn’t get enough sleep. And not for a fun reason, either; I’d almost gotten to sleep when the neighbor’s cat started yowling...”
I feigned bleariness, to discourage unnecessary conversation that might blow my cover. We had orders to keep two prisoners awake all night; I glanced at the order sheet and said, “I’ll take the one in eighteen.”
“Sure,” she said, looking pleased. Eighteen was a solitary cell; if it wasn’t Themia’s cell, then going back and forth to eighteen every hour should give me a chance to slip into Themia’s cell and deal with her at some point.
No, I found out an hour later, the prisoner in eighteen wasn’t Themia. There were four solitary cells on the back hall of Block S, all out of sight and earshot of the open cells that were filled with two or three prisoners each. I didn’t want to check each of them one by one; too much chance of Rukharria finding out. So on my next break after walking the rounds, I looked in the file drawer that held the information on various prisoners.
The prisoners in sixteen and twenty weren’t Themia; even if she’d given the interrogators a fake name, and managed to stick to it, the incarceration dates were wrong. The file for the prisoner in cell seventeen was missing. I knew what that meant. The screams I’d been hearing intermittently from the interrogation room down the hall were Themia’s. And I might have kidnapped Ziebi and risked revealing my identity as a lunar for nothing, if they kept her there all night.
But a little before midnight the interrogators emerged from the room leading a listless, hollow-eyed Themia.
“We’re done with this one for now,” said the higher-ranking one, a redhead whom most human men would have thought beautiful. “But don’t let her get more than a few hours' sleep. Wake her up a couple of hours before morning shift and keep her up.”
“Aww, not another one!” Rukharria complained.
“I’ll take care of her,” I said, “it’ll be convenient, she’s right next to my other one.”
“You’re a peach,” she said. “I’ll cover for you next time.”
I took the keys for the solitary cells and led the interrogators and Themia back to cell seventeen. We locked her in, and just before the door closed I saw her give me a look that would have made Edward writhe in agony; Surrethia didn’t feel too good about it either.
The interrogators had me unlock the prisoner in cell twenty, and interrogated her until the end of the shift.
I kept going into cell eighteen every hour or so, but since she was in solitary, and nobody could see what I was doing in there, or hear me shouting at her — or not shouting — I let her get some sleep. It wasn’t much, not enough to satisfy Edward’s conscience, but it was all I could do until the organization had its people in place for a prison break.
A couple of hours after moonrise, I left cell eighteen, after watching the old woman sleep for a few moments, and unlocked cell seventeen. I slipped in quietly and closed the door behind me.
Themia was sound asleep on her cot, one hand drawn up toward her face, drooling a little. I thought for a moment about killing her in her sleep — I could crush her throat with lunar strength, I could reshape my hands to make an airtight cover on her nose and mouth. But I needed to get out of here without being suspected of killing her, and she deserved an explanation. I shook her shoulder gently until she blinked.
“All right,” she said, sitting up, “I’m awake now. You can go.” Then she glanced at me suspiciously. “Why were you so gentle this time? Last night you yelled at me and slapped me every time I dozed off...”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said. It was an English idiom, and it sounded faintly ridiculous in Omreshi; she looked at me curiously and then her eyes got wide.
“I’m Edward,” I said in English.
“Eduarr?” she asked, and then, trying harder to match the English sound: “Edward? How...?”
I replied in Omreshi — no sense twisting my tongue when there was no chance of eavesdroppers, as there might have been in the bar. “After Irrush got killed, Bill reappeared in Gerald’s living room...” I explained how we’d come in to help them and tell them how they could get home, and how Khonu had escaped the night of the raid and stayed free since. She nodded.
“I’d hoped he’d get away. I might have gotten away too, if...” she choked. “I know now that he’s okay, and I wouldn’t have wanted him to go through even an hour of what I’ve suffered, but... I’ve still been feeling guilty about shooting Bill.”
“What?”
“The guards had shot him in the back,” she said. “He could hardly walk and probably wouldn’t live many hours; there was no way we could take him with us... and I couldn’t leave him there for them to suck out his brain and do God knows what with it. I shot him in the head, but I hesitated too long, and I got caught not long afterward.”
I was silent for a moment. “You don’t necessarily need to tell him. He was in so much agony and confusion from the first shot, he didn’t know you were the one that gave the coup de grace. I won’t tell, anyway.”
“Thanks... So, I guess you’re here to get me out?”
“Back to Gerald’s house,” I said. “I can’t get you out of the prison otherwise.”
“Oh... Well, it can’t hurt any worse than what they’ve been doing to me here.”
“Less, I hope.” I took the powder in its wax-paper package from my pocket. “This isn’t the fastest poison, but I can’t afford to kill you outright. The day shift might find your body before I get clear of the prison. It’ll probably kill you before they have a chance to interrogate you much more, though... With any luck they’ll think it’s a heart attack from the stress of questioning and they won’t even do an autopsy.”
“Why does that matter?” she asked.
“It probably doesn’t. I just need to get away from here before you die so I can tell Khonu and Biansurru I got you out.”
“All right...” She reached for the poison but I held up a hand.
“We don’t know for sure that suicide will get you out of here. Everybody we know of got back to Earth by being murdered.” She flinched at the word “murdered” and I regretted my word choice. “Killed by an outside agency, anyway. So I’m going to feed you this.”
“Okay.” I dissolved the powder in the big mug of water the day shift guards had left her, and held it up to her lips, forcing her to drink. She didn’t spill much, and there was enough poison to kill three people.
“So that’s it,” she said, after spluttering for a few moments. “I’m dying?”
“Going home,” I said.
“Kim’s going home,” she said, “but Themia is going to a strange place that sounds kind of scary.”
“Scarier than here?”
“It’s just a matter of time before the government of America is as bad as the one here. And they’ve got much better surveillance technology than Omruthia does; when they really start using it unashamedly, they’ll be scarier than these people. Maybe all those little kids and actors disappearing is going to be an excuse for another big power grab, like after 9/11.”
“Maybe we can do something about that,” I said. “I’d better go.”
“Tell Bill I’ll expect to see him back at Gerald’s house as soon as he gets off work.”
“It might take us another couple of hours to wrap things up here, but hopefully not too long. Goodbye.”
She was asleep again when I returned an hour later; I let her sleep. I woke her gently a few minutes before the end of my shift.
“I’m about to leave,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“Awful,” she said. “Dizzy and lightheaded, and... I can’t feel my toes.”
“Shouldn’t be too much longer, then. Try not to conk out before the day shift gets here, okay?”
“All right, smartass. When you get home I expect you to dish about what it was like being a woman for... however long I’ve been in here...” She closed her eyes, swayed back and forth for a moment, and fell back on her cot. I let myself out.
I let out a sigh of relief when I plunked down in an empty seat on the number eleven bus. The day shift guard hadn’t raised a ruckus when she checked on Themia, and Ziebi obviously hadn’t escaped from her bonds and called the police or the prison yet. A few minutes more and I would be safe. I rode past Ziebi’s apartment building, noting a reassuring lack of police cars in front, and continued to the end of the line, the central intercity bus station. I went inside the station to the ladies' room; once in a stall, after I’d done my business, I changed from Ziebi back into Surrethia. Ziebi’s clothes no longer quite fit me; I considered taking off her bra, adding muscles to my breasts to make them self-supporting, and disappearing my nipples, but it could be dangerous to get caught like that at moonset. I wound up loosening the straps, but leaving the bra in place, and loosening the girdle. Fortunately the prison guard uniform was loosely tailored, and my feet were about her size, so I didn’t need any other adjustments.
Once I was all put back together, I caught the number nine bus to Biansurru’s house. I unlocked it with my key and let myself in.
Biansurru was waiting in the sitting room with Khonu; we’d given Khonu a key to the house so he could hide there until we got off work.
“Who’s that?” Khonu asked, looking a little nervous.
“It’s me, Eduarr,” I said. “Didn’t Biansurru tell you I’m a lunar?”
He looked from one to the other of us. “He kind of forgot to mention that detail.”
“Well, the face I was wearing when we met yesterday evening was a disguise I was using to infiltrate the cell block where Themia’s being held.”
“Did you see her?” Biansurru asked breathlessly.
“I saw her, and I gave her the stuff. She’s probably back in Gerald’s house by now, or if not now, then within another hour or two at most.”
“Hmm... She’ll probably be alone. Gerald and Karen would be on their way to work by this time.”
“If time flows at the same rate... It was roughly an hour for us between you disappearing and coming back; was that about how long it was for you?”
“About that; I don’t know.”
“Anyway, let’s give Kim some time to get dressed before we show up,” I said. “It will give us more time to talk about what we’re going to do.”
“Maybe we should draw straws,” Khonu said. “Short straw kills the other two and then themselves?”
“I’m not sure killing ourselves will work,” I said, and I explained what I’d said to Themia, and how I’d forced her to drink the poison.
“I hope that works,” Biansurru said. “I mean, I hope whatever being is doing this to us considers that a killing instead of, I don’t know, an assisted suicide.”
“We don’t know that suicide won’t work,” I said. “Probably it would. But let’s play it safe. And let’s not assume too much. Themia didn’t have much choice — if I didn’t give her that poison, they’d keep torturing her and eventually pop her brain into an oil drill or something. But we do. Do we all want to go back?”
“Why wouldn’t we?” Khonu said. “This place is worse than my parents' most harrowing stories about growing up in Hungary under communism. I want out of here.”
“All right. Biansurru?” I tried to act casual, but I felt a deep dread. I knew what he’d say — it had been clear to me over the last few days that he thought of himself more as Bill than as Biansurru; and as Bill, he cared a lot more for his girlfriend, recovering from the shock of her death and getting dressed in an empty house, than for me, his adoptive sister.
“I’m going back. Part of me wants to stay and bring down this evil system, like we’ve been trying to do for so long... but realistically, it’s not going to happen in our lifetimes, and if I stay here and participate in the big prison break, I’ll probably wind up in an interrogation room and then in a brain-box.”
I nodded sadly. “If you’re both going, then... I guess I’ll go too.”
“You don’t want to, though?” Khonu asked.
“Not really. I guess it’s different for you two... you’ve got just a few decades of memories from either life, and you might feel more like Sandor one minute and more like Khonu the next. But I’ve got centuries of memories as Surrethia, overwhelming the mere three decades as Edward.”
“I’d kind of gathered that,” Biansurru — Bill — said. “I just didn’t want to admit it. But if you’d rather stay here, despite the fact that being a lunar is a capital crime and you have to hide who you are... well, we’d understand. We’ll explain to Kim and Gerald and Karen, and anybody else you want us to pass messages to.”
“No, I’ll come back with you. Not at the same time, I mean, but a little later. I can kill you two here in the house easily enough — we’ve got chloroform left over, and I can make it painless. But then I’ll need somebody to kill me. That’s not hard for a lunar, I just need to blow my cover somewhere nice and public, and presto! instant lynch mob.”
Biansurru and Khonu looked appalled. “I wish there was another way,” Biansurru said, “but I can’t think of any.”
“Well, there’s suicide by cop. Just depends on when and where I blow my cover. But yeah, I pretty much have to let them burn me alive to get out of here.”
“I see why you’re not in a hurry to leave,” Khonu said.
I shrugged. “I’ll be along after a while, probably a few hours after you get back. You guys ready?”
Biansurru took a deep breath. “I guess so.”
I hugged him long and hard, and he didn’t resist; he squeezed me back this time. Over his shoulder I saw Khonu looking away from us, embarrassed.
I fetched the chloroform, and told Khonu and Biansurru to sit in the bathtub before I knocked them out.
“What?” Khonu asked, bewildered. “Why?”
“So the blood will go down the drain, and the landlord’s charwoman won’t have so much work to do to make the place habitable for the next renter.”
“Oh... That is surprisingly considerate, under the circumstances.”
They barely managed to squeeze into the tub — Biansurru was a big man, and the tub wasn’t a comfortable fit for him, even alone. I chloroformed them, and waited a minute to be sure they were well under. Then I hauled Biansurru out of the tub — I had other plans for him, and they didn’t involve getting his corpse all bloody — and slit Khonu’s throat.
“He’s going home,” I muttered to myself. “Right now he’s flopping around nude on Gerald’s living room floor. Hopefully he’ll manage to get dressed before Kim walks in — she’s probably in the kitchen or den or somewhere...”
I took Biansurru into the living room and laid him on the sofa. Then I returned to the bathroom, took off my clothes, and cut off most of Khonu’s bloody clothes to make the next step easier. I only had a few more hours till moonset; enough time, but not a lot extra. I ran the shower for a few moments to wash the worst of the blood down the drain; then I turned it off and carefully stopped up the tub. Next, I let my human form liquefy — I’d been gradually breaking up and dissolving my skeleton ever since the bus station restroom, in preparation for this — and flowed into the tub, engulfing Khonu’s body.
It took me half an hour to digest him. Then I started fissioning.
I finished with just half an hour to spare until moonset. As soon as I’d formed a pair of eyes, I looked at my sister, who was still looking a little amorphous around the edges; her toes weren’t differentiated from her feet yet, her breasts didn’t have nipples, and she didn’t have much of a nose or ears yet. I wasn’t much farther along.
When we’d gotten ourselves looking more human, we gave each other a long look.
“We can’t both be Surrethia,” we said simultaneously.
After a pause, we said “Heads I stay;” — this time she was a fraction of a second ahead of me. I nodded, and we went into the bedroom where she picked up a coin from the bureau. I watched as she tossed it high; it fell on the bedspread... heads up.
“Heads you stay,” I agreed, and shapeshifted back into Ziebi with barely five minutes until moonset. With the deadline so close, I had to hurry it, and even though I didn’t have a skeleton, it still hurt.
Then we got dressed — I put on Ziebi’s borrowed clothes — and I helped her carry Biansurru to the car. Then I said goodbye, and went to catch a bus. Surrethia would drive Biansurru out to the lake to drown, giving him another dose of chloroform on the way to keep him under. She would walk to the nearest bus stop, and report him missing a day or two later; when his abandoned car was found near the lake, it would be dragged for his body, and he’d be ruled a suicide, or possibly a murder by one of the resistance movements that hated Erru Serrezikhal and everyone involved with it. She could go on with her life, keep working at the prison and help with the breakout whenever the organization got all its pieces into place. Even though I was about to go to a country with better technology and a much less oppressive government, I envied her. How much of myself could I retain when I became Edward? Was there even room in his human brain for my three hundred years of memories?
I nodded a greeting to a couple of Ziebi’s neighbors as I got in the lift to go up to her apartment. I let myself in and went to the bathroom to check on her.
She was asleep, but her pulse and breathing were good. I left her alone and laid down to take a nap.
I was awakened, I’m not sure how much later, by the sound of the police kicking in the door. Aha. They must have figured out I poisoned Themia. I sat up and waited for a moment; then, to make it look good, I scrambled for the window and fumbled with the latches. They caught up with me before I got it open, and ordered me to halt; I turned around.
“What’s wrong, officers?” I asked. Just then there came a muffled moaning from the bathroom. I laughed. (This was kind of fun in a perverse way, knowing nothing I could do would make this worse, and that it would be over soon in any case.)
One of the officers called out: “There’s another one in here! Looks just like her, but she’s bound and gagged.”
“I think we’ve got ourselves a lunar,” the officer in charge said with relish.
They dragged me out the door and down the stairs, giving me a few whacks on the head with their batons and pistol-butts for good measure. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as changing from Surrethia to Ziebi in a mere five minutes; my brains weren’t in my head, but all over my body. Once they had me out in the courtyard, one of them took out a matchbook and struck a match.
“Stand back, guys,” he warned, and touched it to my fingers. When my hand went up like a torch, the others yelled, and one said:
“That’s a lunar, all right!”
Now this hurt worse than any hurried transformation. But I had just presence of mind enough to grapple the officer who’d held the match to me; I might not be able to take him with me (the fire had already spread from my arm to my torso, and now my head; I was blinded), but I could give him some bad burns... I lost feeling in the arm that had started burning first, and with the other arm that had just started burning I felt my grip on the officer loosen. He pulled away from me, and for I’m not sure how long — seconds, minutes — I felt nothing but pain.
Then I was falling, and I hit something soft with a whump. When I stopped screaming, realizing that I didn’t hurt anymore, I picked myself up and looked around.
I was lying, nude, on a bare mattress that was spread out next to Gerald and Karen’s dining room table, where the chairs had been when Bill and I left.
“Um, guys? Where are my clothes?”
Sandor called out from the den, “They’re hanging on the back of one of the chairs.” I looked around, and there they were.
A minute later Bill called, “Are you decent yet?”
“I’ve got my pants on, anyway.” He, Kim and Sandor emerged from the den and looked at me.
“The prodigal returns,” Kim said. “Thank you for getting me out of that damned place.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, pulling on my shirt.
“And me,” Sandor said. “I don’t see how I could have rescued her on my own. I wouldn’t have known how to get back here; even if I could get her out of prison we’d have been stuck in Gerald’s stupid dystopia for the rest of our lives...”
“What are friends for?”
But I knew what friends weren’t for. I’d be closer with Bill — and Sandor and Kim — after this than before. But I’d never have the kind of relationship with him I’d had with Biansurru for the last twenty years, first as his friend, then as his lover, then as his sister. By the time I got used to being Edward again, I probably wouldn’t even want it.
Back home (I was still thinking of Omruthia that way), Surrethia would be grieving over him. Probably less than we’d grieved over the loss of our other human friends in centuries past, since she’d know he wasn’t really dead, just gone to an arguably better place — but she’d still grieve.
And I’d be grieving over the loss of my life as Surrethia, and over my lost relationship with Biansurru. It hadn’t been the same since that sudden infusion of Bill and Edward’s memories, anyway. But Edward’s friends and relatives wouldn’t be grieving over him, as so many were over the people who’d vanished three days ago and hadn’t come back.
“Hey, Edward...?” Bill said to me later, when Kim had gone to the restroom and Sandor was in the kitchen making another pot of coffee.
“Yes?”
“It would be weird to keep thinking of you as my sister, you know. But if you want to be my brother...”
I didn’t say anything; I just hugged him. Brothers can do that.
The End
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format.