... Continues the Book of Hephaestion:
At six in the morning, Zone and Rock answered Siris Interlandi's summons on the intercom. Siris had set up her workroom on the lower level. The soldiers' quarters were upstairs in rooms that got more sunshine, were less damp.
She told them to get John Manegold out of the cast iron tub. Rock tightened his corded arms around Manegold's knees. Zone pressed Manegold's head and shoulders into his belly so he could lock his fists across the chest of the corpse under the armpits.
The corpse was soaking wet and warm. The warmth, however, was only on the surface. What one expects from a slab of meat left too long in the freezer, then thrown into a pot of water for many hours.
Meat on the bone, they knew, reacted sickeningly to a quick thaw.
Yesterday, when they lowered the body into the tub, they were glad they had specified the tub's dimensions and the Bhavaja contact had come through. Last night, no part of Manegold had been yielding. If the tub had been standard, Manegold would not have gone in. Without comment they had put him in and watched Siris sink Manegold beneath the water, apply weight.
Now Manegold was coming out soggy and sloppy and white all over, as though the laws of biology did not matter. They carried him to the workroom. Before their arrival, Siris had prepared one of the two lower floor bedrooms. The lamps were in place over a worktable. The soldiers put Manegold under the lamps.
Zone and Rock stood back, and Siris examined the body. Confirmed there were no scars. She probed the flesh. And she felt his neck.
Her mouth fell open. No fracture. Oh, how they must have panicked.
Siris imagined that it was administrative, the initial delay in transferring the body of John Manegold to its appointment in the capital. Something held them up. Maybe the medical technician, duly alarmed, had interfered.
It would have taken several days for the spine to knit. Maybe four days, or five.
They got the body away from any witnesses, stuck it in a freezer not because they knew the extreme cold would stop the process but because they wanted a secure chamber. Freezers locked from the outside.
Siris recalled the first time she supervised a walk by Hephaestion.
She had read that the demian tremona re-grew its limbs and closed its wounds in shocking ways.
What she read was nothing compared to Hephaestion's ability to resurrect. After years of research, the Kinder Project had no understanding of it. Hephaestion's blood prolonged life when pumped into healthy humans. Pumped into the sick and injured, the blood's healing properties were well documented. But a dying subject died and stayed dead. Nothing they had so far explained the phenomena.
"We lack the technology to unlock this puzzle," Mozun said, early on. "We, the world. How does it occur? What created the species? An ancient alien visitation? Is our friend a hybrid? A genetic mutation? Why can't we identify what it is that creates affarites? When we unlock the puzzle, we will control it."
So the Kinder administrators believed.
Siris adjusted the lamps over Manegold, then raised the blankets and checked the setting for the heat pad. Rock and Zone stared without expression. They could accept that a man frozen solid would get up in five days and speak to them.
Footsteps on the old hardwood boards in the hallway. Dance entered Siris' line of vision.
"What is wrong with Angel?"
Siris glanced over her shoulder, not at Dance, whose voice was small, uncertain and incongruous with the tough, compact soldier she was.
Siris confirmed that Hephaestion slept in a corner of the workroom, on the floor. He lay on his back under a sheet, his face turned into the wall.
Siris said, "He's just sleeping."
Dance protested. "He doesn't sleep, he doesn't eat, he doesn't shit."
Siris leaned over Manegold one last time. He looked no older, no younger than Hephaestion. There were over two hundred subjects through history investigated by Kinder as affarites. Subjects one all the way up to Hephaestion never looked any older than this. They were perfectly proportioned, generally beautiful, and charismatic in some splendid or wicked way.
"He eats as he pleases," Siris said to Dance. "But he does not taste food the way we do. Food has a side effect that you are aware of. And since he does not need to eat, normally he doesn't. He produces waste when he is weakened, or when he eats. As for sleep, he needs about thirteen hours every ten days."
Dance stared at her sleeping angel. Siris was being open, was glad to speak. Felt that her altered status at Kinder freed her to say and do a lot of things.
"Why is he on the floor?" Zone asked.
Siris smiled to herself. "Because he trusts us."
A good thing to say. The soldiers liked her for it.
"And because it's more comfortable for him than a bed. You can't imagine the places he has slept."
Rock chuckled, imagining a few places.
"A clean carpet is paradise," Siris said.
Rock and Zone walked away, satisfied.
Dance lowered her voice. "Can he hear us?"
"No, absolutely not. His power is very selfish." Siris turned from Manegold to stare at Hephaestion. "I don't mean him, I mean the power inside him. I try to think of the power and Hephaestion as separate beings, because when Hephaestion's body needs something or gets hurt, the power ceases to obey Hephaestion's conscious mind and serves his body. When he needs to sleep, he has to sleep whether he wants to sleep or not. When he is injured, he loses the link to his power that he knows, consciously, he's going to need in order to get out of the shit he is in or to help others, because his power turns immediately to heal him. His power is like a little tyrant."
Dance frowned. "So if I needed to wake him up . . ."
"We can't. It's just the way it is. The only way to keep this from happening is to give him a powerful sedative every night and hope he sleeps two or three hours. Otherwise, all we can do when he has to sleep is watch out for him."
About four hours later, Hephaestion showed signs of moving toward wakefulness.
Siris closed the door to the workroom so the others, upstairs, would not hear his nightmare.
She sat near Manegold, certain that she should not interfere with Hephaestion's dreams, yet wanting very much to ease his torment. Then he woke. She knew because he was silent, he was still.
He got up and walked without speaking into the bathroom. She heard the toilet, she heard the shower.
He came out naked and wet.
She used to watch him when he was unclothed on the monitor. It was different now, but why should that change his habit? He did not understand nakedness as she did, anyway.
He dressed himself in the clothes of the businessman he was pretending to be. They were all in white shirts, slacks, and leather shoes, just in case.
He approached Manegold. "When will his heart start?"
"Tomorrow," Siris sighed. "Tonight, if we're lucky. Has Manegold decided? Is he here?"
"No, he isn't here. I don't know where he is and I can't find him unless I walk. If it gets to be a long time, I'll walk."
"That's dangerous, here."
He was close to her, looking past the lamps at the unconscious form on the worktable, nodding at her. "I know. For expediency, you'll have to ignore your principles."
She inhaled softly, not alarmed but shaken. The fastest way to make Hephaestion go and come back was asphyxiation. His power restored him inside twenty hours. Siris disapproved of asphyxiation. Without essential environmental controls, the method required violence.
"I can give you something first," she said, softly. "You don't have to be awake."
"Fine," he said, as though they were discussing the weather. "He could come back. He might." Then, suddenly, he reached past the lamps to squeeze Manegold's hand. "You are only a seedling, a child."
She looked up, surprised.
He registered her surprise and settled into the chair beside her. "You don't know what it's like the first time. Maybe I should tell you, because you are expecting him to behave as I do when I wake."
She got up, reached over the worktable, and checked her instruments. "You do not always wake in a well state. But you are at one end of the course and this young man is at another."
"No, it's the same thing in here." He touched his head. When he moved she was aware of his body, his breath. He smelled of the overly sweet soap and shampoo their Bhavaja contact left. His body never had a natural odor. "Our curse is we cannot pass the gate. Anyone who has died will tell you death is not a thing but a transition. It happens whether you will it or not, rage against it or accept it, believe in it or don't. Dying is another matter."
"Not the destination, but the journey."
He bowed his head and said nothing.
Siris folded her hands in her lap, worried. "I'm not getting it, am I?"
"No, you're right. You have always at some level understood that. You are very attentive when I walk. Your team, in particular, was always courteous, respectful, and careful of my comfort. Under other supervisors, the teams have been otherwise. I always thought you knew."
"Knew what?"
"That I am afraid to die."
She reached for him, her eyes wide. "The way we do it, medically it is impossible for you to suffer."
"It is the moment it starts, when I am not sure if I will feel it. Your people have mastered the process, do not be concerned. I don't feel it. My problem is I cannot stop the fear, and I cannot escape from it. And I want to pass the gate, and be new and innocent and unaware."
"Want to? I wouldn't lay your gift aside, if I had it." She exhaled, for emphasis.
"Aremon Cuilean was bound to a wheel. His enemies beat him until all the bones in his body were broken. But he was not dead. They put up the wheel in the sky, where they wanted his corpse to rot. They drove a sword into his heart. He died then. What god says it's right to awaken and remember that?"
Siris' fingers had brushed his wrist, then drawn away. Looking aside, she massaged her brow.
He said, "I remember looking at the flames climbing over the roof of my father's house. The people who hurt the stable master and one of his lads held my twin and me. I was waiting for my father to come back and take my sister and me to safety but he never came.
"To me it seemed that he ran through the fire with my mother and left us. The rebel slaves took us to their camp. It was a war camp. Sometimes we would hear the battles, and sometimes we heard nothing. But every so often, the women who fed us would make us walk among the dead on an expanse and pick up things. Knives, armlets, cloaks, helmets. Whatever we could carry. I was five when the smell of a battlefield became ordinary. When I ceased to cry out while a woman who gave me figs bent over a wounded soldier and slit his throat.
"Then there was a battle we did not win. Men came to put the children of the baggage camp into wagons. We were silent, unable to understand. Even when I was sold, I did not know it. I knew nothing until they took Tisiphone from me.
"I tried to run, to be free. They liked me there but the overseers were getting impatient. When one of the overseers asked about my parents, I told him they ran away into a fire and left me. He told me that parents don't run through fire just to leave their children, and my parents were dead.
"I believed him, but it did not help. They sold me at private auction. I read things for my new family, and wrote what I was told to write. When I got bigger, it became more difficult to sleep. I was allowed to sit at night in the library and copy old books. Everyone was pleased with my writing. They made up names for me and the children of the family played with me and were not allowed to trick or beat me. Sometimes, I allowed myself to call the master of the household 'lord' instead of 'master' because sometimes I called my father 'lord.' But as I grew older, I began to see the perfect lines of my prison. The things I could not do, like refuse to translate a passage of a book. I could not bathe in the pool, dine in the hall, greet a well born guest at the gate, walk unchallenged across the city, drink at a city fountain, or say no I will not perform this mission."
Siris stood up.
"The first man I killed was to be the last man I killed, as far as I knew when I took his life. I did not run or hide my guilt. I waited for them. They came with fists and boots and rope, and they put on their show of a hearing so their knotted little hearts could have something to rage against. We were the same, for I raged too. But I knew when and where and how, for me, it was going to end. I chose my time. And in the night before I was to die, I lay in my blood in a place without light and listened to the soldiers call the hours of the watch. Every hour was a nail into my body. I heard the soft voices of lovers passing, and a woman saying something to a man that resembled nothing a woman had ever said to me, and I hated him because he got to hear it. I hated the soldiers on the wall, who knew where they belonged, and I hated the children of the man I had killed, because they had known their father and his shelter. My power, then, was the vision and mind-calling. I could talk to the storms but I could not defeat them. I only slept a little and I could go a long time without food. I was sixteen. Then, at dawn, they came for me. I felt the fear so sharp and so strong that I wanted to cry, but I could not remember how to cry. Out on the road by the fort wall, they put a rope around my neck. My hands had been bound behind my back for two days. I had no more feeling in them. I looked up at the sky, surprised to see that it was still there. Then they pulled on the rope and my feet left the ground and I kicked and thrashed until the sight left my eyes. I have never killed a man that way. You know I have not."
"You have not."
"And I have never raped a man or a woman, or a child. I have never killed a child with my own hands. Everything else, if it can be thought of, I have done."
"I know this, Hephaestion." Siris was close enough to brush his leg with hers but she stayed still. He did not need to tell her this. "You must hold on," she said in a whisper. "You are not a god. Your judgment can be impaired, as can anyone's. If you insist on facing what is before us with an open wound in your heart, at least understand the consequence of your choice."
He shifted in his chair, looking at the worktable and Manegold. "I am very tired."
"Not here or now," she said back. "Please recognize the danger of straying from the mission while you are in this state. You are at an edge, you have just found out you are not alone."
He got up. There was a window in the bathroom that was visible from the bedroom-workroom when the door was ajar. He walked to it, leaned his shoulder against the frame.
Without looking, she knew that his eyes were closed.
She checked Manegold. She brushed his forehead with her fingertips, pushing back the hair from his brow.
"Kinder does not own you," she called to Hephaestion. "While the project can become the headquarters of your enemy, just as it has all these years been your sanctuary, still you must realize that you remain of your own will."
She felt, rather than saw his eyes slowly open.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked. In the past, he asked by rote. This was different, because he already knew.
"Complete the mission. This young man has an opportunity to live. Whatever he feels now he feels because he is traumatized. I realize Kinder security is capable of containing him right now, because he is young, and it may be more of a prison for him than it has been for you, but if you can endure existence another three or five years, you can mentor him."
He threw his back to the window. "I will ask for a price."
"I have always been fair," she reminded.
"You will find a way to remain so. It will be between us, and I will do as you ask, but I will want recompense."
"Recompense how? In what way?" As if she did not know.
"I shall want to be free."
"Free, Hephaestion? Free of Kinder?"
"Not merely Kinder. I want to be released, and I want you to release me."
Of course this meant that Charles was right. Charles, Peter Weihing, and Kinder in general. Hephaestion first influenced, then manipulated her. Or manipulated her in order to influence her. In the face of awareness she felt a wave of helplessness. What Hephaestion wanted. Did he even understand that she was an outsider to Kinder now? Of course if she achieved, how should she put it, the bargain, the penalty for doing so was her life. That he would-- might --ask altered everything. That he intended to seal her to this action deepened her understanding of him in a profound way.
She sighed. "I am beyond the means, I am sorry." But she was not sorry and he knew it.
His voice hardened. "I will count on you. It is not necessary that you work for Kinder."
She roused herself and breathed deeply. This was a discipline taught by Kinder. Expectation, control through preemptive action. When pushed she was not above an old habit or two. The Stoic Mind was certainly an old habit. But-- where was the fear? She was surprised to find there was no fear. She was not, it seemed, afraid of 237. Perhaps she counted on him to know his enemy. She was not his enemy.
Slowly, she moved to a table for a pitcher of ice water. "Once done, it cannot be undone."
"Escaping Kinder or submitting to you?"
"Both. I would be especially thorough, Hephaestion."
"I would expect you to be."
"Where would I meet you?"
"In Nashipur," he said, from the window. "I was born near there. The city still cremates its unclaimed dead."
"You must promise that when you break out of the Kinder compound you do it without killing anyone. You must promise to leave Manegold behind."
He gestured to the closed door that led into the main room. "What I do, I do. But I will be alone. I would not kill for my freedom, not anymore. You know this. I only kill for the freedom of others. And you are right, we shall never be enemies. We will hold to that. I will hold to that."
At six in the morning, Zone and Rock answered Siris Interlandi's summons on the intercom. Siris had set up her workroom on the lower level. The soldiers' quarters were upstairs in rooms that got more sunshine, were less damp.
She told them to get John Manegold out of the cast iron tub. Rock tightened his corded arms around Manegold's knees. Zone pressed Manegold's head and shoulders into his belly so he could lock his fists across the chest of the corpse under the armpits.
The corpse was soaking wet and warm. The warmth, however, was only on the surface. What one expects from a slab of meat left too long in the freezer, then thrown into a pot of water for many hours.
Meat on the bone, they knew, reacted sickeningly to a quick thaw.
Yesterday, when they lowered the body into the tub, they were glad they had specified the tub's dimensions and the Bhavaja contact had come through. Last night, no part of Manegold had been yielding. If the tub had been standard, Manegold would not have gone in. Without comment they had put him in and watched Siris sink Manegold beneath the water, apply weight.
Now Manegold was coming out soggy and sloppy and white all over, as though the laws of biology did not matter. They carried him to the workroom. Before their arrival, Siris had prepared one of the two lower floor bedrooms. The lamps were in place over a worktable. The soldiers put Manegold under the lamps.
Zone and Rock stood back, and Siris examined the body. Confirmed there were no scars. She probed the flesh. And she felt his neck.
Her mouth fell open. No fracture. Oh, how they must have panicked.
Siris imagined that it was administrative, the initial delay in transferring the body of John Manegold to its appointment in the capital. Something held them up. Maybe the medical technician, duly alarmed, had interfered.
It would have taken several days for the spine to knit. Maybe four days, or five.
They got the body away from any witnesses, stuck it in a freezer not because they knew the extreme cold would stop the process but because they wanted a secure chamber. Freezers locked from the outside.
Siris recalled the first time she supervised a walk by Hephaestion.
She had read that the demian tremona re-grew its limbs and closed its wounds in shocking ways.
What she read was nothing compared to Hephaestion's ability to resurrect. After years of research, the Kinder Project had no understanding of it. Hephaestion's blood prolonged life when pumped into healthy humans. Pumped into the sick and injured, the blood's healing properties were well documented. But a dying subject died and stayed dead. Nothing they had so far explained the phenomena.
"We lack the technology to unlock this puzzle," Mozun said, early on. "We, the world. How does it occur? What created the species? An ancient alien visitation? Is our friend a hybrid? A genetic mutation? Why can't we identify what it is that creates affarites? When we unlock the puzzle, we will control it."
So the Kinder administrators believed.
Siris adjusted the lamps over Manegold, then raised the blankets and checked the setting for the heat pad. Rock and Zone stared without expression. They could accept that a man frozen solid would get up in five days and speak to them.
Footsteps on the old hardwood boards in the hallway. Dance entered Siris' line of vision.
"What is wrong with Angel?"
Siris glanced over her shoulder, not at Dance, whose voice was small, uncertain and incongruous with the tough, compact soldier she was.
Siris confirmed that Hephaestion slept in a corner of the workroom, on the floor. He lay on his back under a sheet, his face turned into the wall.
Siris said, "He's just sleeping."
Dance protested. "He doesn't sleep, he doesn't eat, he doesn't shit."
Siris leaned over Manegold one last time. He looked no older, no younger than Hephaestion. There were over two hundred subjects through history investigated by Kinder as affarites. Subjects one all the way up to Hephaestion never looked any older than this. They were perfectly proportioned, generally beautiful, and charismatic in some splendid or wicked way.
"He eats as he pleases," Siris said to Dance. "But he does not taste food the way we do. Food has a side effect that you are aware of. And since he does not need to eat, normally he doesn't. He produces waste when he is weakened, or when he eats. As for sleep, he needs about thirteen hours every ten days."
Dance stared at her sleeping angel. Siris was being open, was glad to speak. Felt that her altered status at Kinder freed her to say and do a lot of things.
"Why is he on the floor?" Zone asked.
Siris smiled to herself. "Because he trusts us."
A good thing to say. The soldiers liked her for it.
"And because it's more comfortable for him than a bed. You can't imagine the places he has slept."
Rock chuckled, imagining a few places.
"A clean carpet is paradise," Siris said.
Rock and Zone walked away, satisfied.
Dance lowered her voice. "Can he hear us?"
"No, absolutely not. His power is very selfish." Siris turned from Manegold to stare at Hephaestion. "I don't mean him, I mean the power inside him. I try to think of the power and Hephaestion as separate beings, because when Hephaestion's body needs something or gets hurt, the power ceases to obey Hephaestion's conscious mind and serves his body. When he needs to sleep, he has to sleep whether he wants to sleep or not. When he is injured, he loses the link to his power that he knows, consciously, he's going to need in order to get out of the shit he is in or to help others, because his power turns immediately to heal him. His power is like a little tyrant."
Dance frowned. "So if I needed to wake him up . . ."
"We can't. It's just the way it is. The only way to keep this from happening is to give him a powerful sedative every night and hope he sleeps two or three hours. Otherwise, all we can do when he has to sleep is watch out for him."
About four hours later, Hephaestion showed signs of moving toward wakefulness.
Siris closed the door to the workroom so the others, upstairs, would not hear his nightmare.
She sat near Manegold, certain that she should not interfere with Hephaestion's dreams, yet wanting very much to ease his torment. Then he woke. She knew because he was silent, he was still.
He got up and walked without speaking into the bathroom. She heard the toilet, she heard the shower.
He came out naked and wet.
She used to watch him when he was unclothed on the monitor. It was different now, but why should that change his habit? He did not understand nakedness as she did, anyway.
He dressed himself in the clothes of the businessman he was pretending to be. They were all in white shirts, slacks, and leather shoes, just in case.
He approached Manegold. "When will his heart start?"
"Tomorrow," Siris sighed. "Tonight, if we're lucky. Has Manegold decided? Is he here?"
"No, he isn't here. I don't know where he is and I can't find him unless I walk. If it gets to be a long time, I'll walk."
"That's dangerous, here."
He was close to her, looking past the lamps at the unconscious form on the worktable, nodding at her. "I know. For expediency, you'll have to ignore your principles."
She inhaled softly, not alarmed but shaken. The fastest way to make Hephaestion go and come back was asphyxiation. His power restored him inside twenty hours. Siris disapproved of asphyxiation. Without essential environmental controls, the method required violence.
"I can give you something first," she said, softly. "You don't have to be awake."
"Fine," he said, as though they were discussing the weather. "He could come back. He might." Then, suddenly, he reached past the lamps to squeeze Manegold's hand. "You are only a seedling, a child."
She looked up, surprised.
He registered her surprise and settled into the chair beside her. "You don't know what it's like the first time. Maybe I should tell you, because you are expecting him to behave as I do when I wake."
She got up, reached over the worktable, and checked her instruments. "You do not always wake in a well state. But you are at one end of the course and this young man is at another."
"No, it's the same thing in here." He touched his head. When he moved she was aware of his body, his breath. He smelled of the overly sweet soap and shampoo their Bhavaja contact left. His body never had a natural odor. "Our curse is we cannot pass the gate. Anyone who has died will tell you death is not a thing but a transition. It happens whether you will it or not, rage against it or accept it, believe in it or don't. Dying is another matter."
"Not the destination, but the journey."
He bowed his head and said nothing.
Siris folded her hands in her lap, worried. "I'm not getting it, am I?"
"No, you're right. You have always at some level understood that. You are very attentive when I walk. Your team, in particular, was always courteous, respectful, and careful of my comfort. Under other supervisors, the teams have been otherwise. I always thought you knew."
"Knew what?"
"That I am afraid to die."
She reached for him, her eyes wide. "The way we do it, medically it is impossible for you to suffer."
"It is the moment it starts, when I am not sure if I will feel it. Your people have mastered the process, do not be concerned. I don't feel it. My problem is I cannot stop the fear, and I cannot escape from it. And I want to pass the gate, and be new and innocent and unaware."
"Want to? I wouldn't lay your gift aside, if I had it." She exhaled, for emphasis.
"Aremon Cuilean was bound to a wheel. His enemies beat him until all the bones in his body were broken. But he was not dead. They put up the wheel in the sky, where they wanted his corpse to rot. They drove a sword into his heart. He died then. What god says it's right to awaken and remember that?"
Siris' fingers had brushed his wrist, then drawn away. Looking aside, she massaged her brow.
He said, "I remember looking at the flames climbing over the roof of my father's house. The people who hurt the stable master and one of his lads held my twin and me. I was waiting for my father to come back and take my sister and me to safety but he never came.
"To me it seemed that he ran through the fire with my mother and left us. The rebel slaves took us to their camp. It was a war camp. Sometimes we would hear the battles, and sometimes we heard nothing. But every so often, the women who fed us would make us walk among the dead on an expanse and pick up things. Knives, armlets, cloaks, helmets. Whatever we could carry. I was five when the smell of a battlefield became ordinary. When I ceased to cry out while a woman who gave me figs bent over a wounded soldier and slit his throat.
"Then there was a battle we did not win. Men came to put the children of the baggage camp into wagons. We were silent, unable to understand. Even when I was sold, I did not know it. I knew nothing until they took Tisiphone from me.
"I tried to run, to be free. They liked me there but the overseers were getting impatient. When one of the overseers asked about my parents, I told him they ran away into a fire and left me. He told me that parents don't run through fire just to leave their children, and my parents were dead.
"I believed him, but it did not help. They sold me at private auction. I read things for my new family, and wrote what I was told to write. When I got bigger, it became more difficult to sleep. I was allowed to sit at night in the library and copy old books. Everyone was pleased with my writing. They made up names for me and the children of the family played with me and were not allowed to trick or beat me. Sometimes, I allowed myself to call the master of the household 'lord' instead of 'master' because sometimes I called my father 'lord.' But as I grew older, I began to see the perfect lines of my prison. The things I could not do, like refuse to translate a passage of a book. I could not bathe in the pool, dine in the hall, greet a well born guest at the gate, walk unchallenged across the city, drink at a city fountain, or say no I will not perform this mission."
Siris stood up.
"The first man I killed was to be the last man I killed, as far as I knew when I took his life. I did not run or hide my guilt. I waited for them. They came with fists and boots and rope, and they put on their show of a hearing so their knotted little hearts could have something to rage against. We were the same, for I raged too. But I knew when and where and how, for me, it was going to end. I chose my time. And in the night before I was to die, I lay in my blood in a place without light and listened to the soldiers call the hours of the watch. Every hour was a nail into my body. I heard the soft voices of lovers passing, and a woman saying something to a man that resembled nothing a woman had ever said to me, and I hated him because he got to hear it. I hated the soldiers on the wall, who knew where they belonged, and I hated the children of the man I had killed, because they had known their father and his shelter. My power, then, was the vision and mind-calling. I could talk to the storms but I could not defeat them. I only slept a little and I could go a long time without food. I was sixteen. Then, at dawn, they came for me. I felt the fear so sharp and so strong that I wanted to cry, but I could not remember how to cry. Out on the road by the fort wall, they put a rope around my neck. My hands had been bound behind my back for two days. I had no more feeling in them. I looked up at the sky, surprised to see that it was still there. Then they pulled on the rope and my feet left the ground and I kicked and thrashed until the sight left my eyes. I have never killed a man that way. You know I have not."
"You have not."
"And I have never raped a man or a woman, or a child. I have never killed a child with my own hands. Everything else, if it can be thought of, I have done."
"I know this, Hephaestion." Siris was close enough to brush his leg with hers but she stayed still. He did not need to tell her this. "You must hold on," she said in a whisper. "You are not a god. Your judgment can be impaired, as can anyone's. If you insist on facing what is before us with an open wound in your heart, at least understand the consequence of your choice."
He shifted in his chair, looking at the worktable and Manegold. "I am very tired."
"Not here or now," she said back. "Please recognize the danger of straying from the mission while you are in this state. You are at an edge, you have just found out you are not alone."
He got up. There was a window in the bathroom that was visible from the bedroom-workroom when the door was ajar. He walked to it, leaned his shoulder against the frame.
Without looking, she knew that his eyes were closed.
She checked Manegold. She brushed his forehead with her fingertips, pushing back the hair from his brow.
"Kinder does not own you," she called to Hephaestion. "While the project can become the headquarters of your enemy, just as it has all these years been your sanctuary, still you must realize that you remain of your own will."
She felt, rather than saw his eyes slowly open.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked. In the past, he asked by rote. This was different, because he already knew.
"Complete the mission. This young man has an opportunity to live. Whatever he feels now he feels because he is traumatized. I realize Kinder security is capable of containing him right now, because he is young, and it may be more of a prison for him than it has been for you, but if you can endure existence another three or five years, you can mentor him."
He threw his back to the window. "I will ask for a price."
"I have always been fair," she reminded.
"You will find a way to remain so. It will be between us, and I will do as you ask, but I will want recompense."
"Recompense how? In what way?" As if she did not know.
"I shall want to be free."
"Free, Hephaestion? Free of Kinder?"
"Not merely Kinder. I want to be released, and I want you to release me."
Of course this meant that Charles was right. Charles, Peter Weihing, and Kinder in general. Hephaestion first influenced, then manipulated her. Or manipulated her in order to influence her. In the face of awareness she felt a wave of helplessness. What Hephaestion wanted. Did he even understand that she was an outsider to Kinder now? Of course if she achieved, how should she put it, the bargain, the penalty for doing so was her life. That he would-- might --ask altered everything. That he intended to seal her to this action deepened her understanding of him in a profound way.
She sighed. "I am beyond the means, I am sorry." But she was not sorry and he knew it.
His voice hardened. "I will count on you. It is not necessary that you work for Kinder."
She roused herself and breathed deeply. This was a discipline taught by Kinder. Expectation, control through preemptive action. When pushed she was not above an old habit or two. The Stoic Mind was certainly an old habit. But-- where was the fear? She was surprised to find there was no fear. She was not, it seemed, afraid of 237. Perhaps she counted on him to know his enemy. She was not his enemy.
Slowly, she moved to a table for a pitcher of ice water. "Once done, it cannot be undone."
"Escaping Kinder or submitting to you?"
"Both. I would be especially thorough, Hephaestion."
"I would expect you to be."
"Where would I meet you?"
"In Nashipur," he said, from the window. "I was born near there. The city still cremates its unclaimed dead."
"You must promise that when you break out of the Kinder compound you do it without killing anyone. You must promise to leave Manegold behind."
He gestured to the closed door that led into the main room. "What I do, I do. But I will be alone. I would not kill for my freedom, not anymore. You know this. I only kill for the freedom of others. And you are right, we shall never be enemies. We will hold to that. I will hold to that."
-- Next Chapter
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