That had been a day ago, at least. Probably more. She had spent the time since isolated and immobilized, growing parched and ravenous by infinitesimal degrees.
The field was off now, though. Her motor nerves were back online. The only things holding her down were the nylon straps cinched painfully around wrists and ankles, waist and throat.
"There's been a mistake," she said quickly. "I'm not Alice, I'm Taka. Lenie and Ken's friend."
She wriggled against the restraints. Achilles smiled faintly.
"You're really not a very good biologist, Alice," he remarked, not unkindly. "I'm sorry, but it's true. You've had all kinds of clues, but you never quite put them together the right way." He sat on some unseen chair or stool next to the gurney. "If I hadn't stepped in you'd still be spreading Seppuku far and wide, killing your patients even faster than usual. No real scientist would make such basic mistakes."
"But I'm not—"
He put a finger to his lips, shushing her. He propped his elbows against the hard neoprene surface of the stretcher next to her head, rested chin in hands and looked down at her.
"Of course," he continued softly, "no real scientist would kill her own family, either."
So it wasn't a mistake. He knew exactly who she was.
She knew him, too. At least, she knew his type. He was soft. He was pathetic. Every day she faced down people who'd break his neck without breaking stride. On his own, without the props, he was nothing.
Except right.
She closed her eyes. Keep control. He's trying to scare you. Don't let him. Deny him the satisfaction.
It's a power game like all the others. If you aren't intimidated, you take some back.
She opened her eyes and looked calmly into his. "So what's the plan?"
"The plan." Achilles pursed his lips. "The plan is rehabilitation. I'm going to give you another chance. Think of it as a kind of remedial education." He stood. Something in his hand reflected the overhead lights, something small and shiny like a nail clipper. "We're talking a kind of carrot and stick scenario. I have this hobby that a lot of people would describe as, well, unpleasant. You'll find out how unpleasant, depending on how quick a study you turn out to be."
Taka swallowed. She didn't speak until she thought she could keep her voice leveclass="underline" "What's the carrot, then?"
Not quite.
"That was the carrot. My carrot, anyway. Your carrot is, you pass your orals and I let you go. Alive and everything." Achilles frowned, as if lost in thought. "Here's an easy one to start with. How does Seppuku reproduce? Sexually or asexually?"
Taka stared at him. "You're kidding."
He watched her a moment. Then, almost sadly, he shook his head.
"You went to the seminars, I see. They told you all our secrets. We prey on fear. Once we see you're not afraid, we'll pick on someone else. Maybe even let you go."
"You said—" she stopped, tried to control the tremor in her voice. "You said you'd let me go…"
He hadn't laid a hand on her and already she was begging.
"If you do well," Achilles reminded her gently. "But yes. I'll let you go. In fact, as a gesture of good faith, I'll let part of you go right now."
He reached out. The shiny thing in his hand pressed against her breast like a tiny icicle. Something snicked.
Pain bloomed across her chest, razor-sharp, like the cracks in glass before it shatters. Taka screamed, writhing in useless millimeter increments against the straps.
The bloody gobbet of a nipple dropped against her cheek.
Darkness swirled around the edges of vision. At some impossible distant remove, way south of the pain at the center of the universe, a monster fingered its way between her labia.
"Two more where that came from," he remarked.
Decirculate
Clarke had learned a fair bit at Ouellette's side. She was no doctor, but she still had the rudimentary medical training she'd received as a rifter and the MI did most of the diagnostic and prescriptive work anyway. Miri's exorcism had cost them a few thousand patient records, half a year's downloaded updates, and all the vehicle's uplink capabilities—but whatever remained still knew enough to scan a body and prescribe basic treatments. Clarke wasn't up to dealing with much more sophistication than that anyway; even lobotomized, Miri was hardly the rate-limiting step.
People trickled through town, seeking Ouellette's ministrations but settling for Clarke's. She did what the machinery told her, played doctor as best she could. At night she'd sneak offshore and bypass Phocoena entirely, sleeping breathless and exposed on the bright, shallow bottom. Each morning she came ashore, stripped her diveskin down to the tunic and pulled Ouellette's borrowed clothing overtop. The strange dead fibers rubbed loosely against her limbs as she moved, an ill-fitting travesty full of folds and stitches. Removing the 'skin always felt a little like being flayed alive; this, this substitute might as well have been shed from the flanks of some great poorly-proportioned lizard. It wasn't too bad, though. It was getting easier.
It was pretty much the only thing that was getting easier.
The worst part wasn't her own medical ignorance, or the endless, rising count of those she couldn't save. It wasn't even the outbursts of violence that people sometimes directed at her when faced with their own death sentence, or with that of a loved one. She was almost grateful for the shouts and the fists, thrown too rarely to constitute any kind of real cost. She'd experienced far worse in her time, and Miri's weapons blister was always there when things got out of hand.
Much, much worse than the violence of those she didn't save was the gratitude of those she nearly could. The smiles on the faces of those for whom she'd bought a little time, too dulled by disease and malnutrition to ever question the economics of trading a quick death for a lingering one. The pathetic delight of some father who'd seen his daughter cured of encephalitis, not knowing or caring that Seppuku or the Witch or some rogue flamethrower would take her next month or next year, not thinking of the rapes and broken bones and chronic starvation that would stalk her in the days between. Hope seemed nowhere more abundant than in the faces of the hopeless; and it was all she could do to meet their eyes, and smile, and accept their thanks. And not tell them who it was that had brought all this down upon the world in the first place.
Her experiment with naked eyes was long since over. If the locals didn't like her affect, they could damn well go somewhere else.
She wanted desperately to talk to Taka. Most of the time she resisted the impulse, remembering: Ouellette's friendship had evaporated the instant she'd learned the truth. Clarke didn't blame her. It couldn't be easy, discovering you'd befriended a monster.
One night, lonely enough to gamble, she tried anyway. She used a channel that Desjardins had assigned for reporting any late-breaking Seppuku incidents; it got her to an automated dispatcher and thence to an actual human being who—despite his obvious disapproval over personal use of dedicated channels—patched her through to someone claiming to speak for a biological countermeasures lab out of Boston. He had never heard of Taka Ouellette. When Clarke asked if there might be other facilities she could check with, the man replied that there must be—but the goddamned Entropy Patrol never told them anything, and he wouldn't know where to point her.
She made do by indulging in false hopes. Lubin would catch his prey. Desjardins would honor the deal they had made. They would track down the threat to Atlantis, and disarm it. And Taka Ouellette, or others like her, would solve the mystery of Seppuku and stop it in its tracks.