"Where am I?" His throat hurt and it was hard to talk. Long Joseph looked at the hanging curtains on either side of his bed, then back at the dark-skinned young man in the funny uniform. There was a strong smell of new plastic and alcohol. "What place is this?"
"Field hospital." The man had a university voice like Del Ray, but there was still a trace of the townships in it. "Back of a military ambulance, to be exact. Now lie down while I check your stitches."
"What happened?" He tried to sit up, but the young man only pushed him back down. "Where is Jeremiah?" He felt a sting up his arm as the bandage was pulled back, but nothing more than that. He looked down curiously at the long lines of translucent knots over pale, red-edged flesh. "What in hell happen to my arm?"
"A dog bit you," the young man said. "You nearly got your head chewed off, too. Try not to bend your neck."
"I have to get up." Joseph tried to sit up. He was remembering things now—lots of things. "Where are my friends? Where is Jeremiah? Del Ray?"
The young man pushed him back again. "Do that again and I call for the guards. You are under arrest, but you're not going anywhere, even to prison, until I decide you're ready."
"Arrest?" Joseph shook his head, which—he suddenly realized—hurt like sin. It felt like he had been drinking for days, then stopped. It is never the drinking that is the problem, he thought, it is the stopping. "Why arrest? Where are. . . ." A sudden cold ran through him. "Where is Renie? Oh my God, where is my daughter?"
The young man frowned at him. "Daughter? Are you saying there was someone else in there with the three of you and those other men?" He stood and leaned out of the curtain to say something to someone. Joseph took the opportunity to try to get up again, but discovered his legs were shackled to the rolling stretcher.
"I told you to lie down," the young man said. "If your daughter's in there, they'll find her."
"No, they won't. She in a big tank. And her friend, too. He is one of the Small People, you know that? Do you know the Small People?"
The man looked at him doubtfully. "In a . . . tank."
Joseph shook his head. It was hard to explain and it hurt him to talk. His neck felt like it had been squeezed in a vise. Another thought struck him. "Why am I arrested? Where you people come from?"
The doctor, if that was what he was, looked at Joseph even more doubtfully. "You have been caught trespassing on a military base. There are some people who are going to want to talk to you about that—and about the armed men who were chasing you." He showed Joseph a small, tight smile. "Since I don't think any of those gentlemen are going to be talking."
"What about my friends?"
"They're alive. The young man—Chiume, is that his name? He lost some fingers to a dog bite. And the older man had a bullet wound in his leg. You all have other injuries as well, but nothing life-threatening."
"I want to talk to them."
"Until the captain says you can, you don't talk to anyone. Well, perhaps an attorney." The young doctor shook his head. "What were you playing at?"
"We were not playing," Joseph said sullenly. He wanted to sleep again, but could not—not yet. "You tell them my daughter and her friend are still down in that basement, in those tanks full of electric jelly. You tell them to be very careful when they take her out. And tell them not to look—she have no clothes on."
The doctor's expression said quite clearly that he thought Joseph was out of his mind, but he went and told someone anyway.
She woke up to see Stan Chan sitting at the other end of a long tunnel. She thought it was a tunnel, but she also thought it might just be that the room was dark and he was sitting under a small light.
She wasn't quite sure where she was. She made a noise and Stan saw her, jumped up, and came over. He was harder to see when he was standing next to her than when he was far away. She asked him for water because her throat was dry and it was hard to talk, but for some reason he only shook his head.
"You should have taken me with you, Calliope," he said quietly. "I called back, but you were already gone."
It was more than hard to talk, it hurt like hell. There was some kind of pipe in the corner of her mouth which kept her from closing her jaw. "Didn't . . . want . . . spoil . . . your . . . weekend," she told him as best she could.
He didn't make a joke in return, which struck her as odd. As she slid back into sleep she suddenly realized he had called her by her first name. That frightened her. That meant there was a very good chance she wasn't going to make it.
"You look okay, Skouros. Not too tan and a little thin, but you had enough of both to burn."
"Yeah. Those are beautiful flowers. Thanks."
"I've been here every day. You think I'm still bringing you flowers? Those are from your waitress friend."
"Elisabetta?"
"How many waitresses you know well enough to send you flowers and a Sherlock Holmes teddy bear?" He shook his head. "Teddy bears. I'm not sure about that one, Skouros."
"I guess I'm going to live, eh?"
He raised an eyebrow.
"Because you're calling me by my last name again," She fumbled some ice into her mouth, wincing at the pain of moving her arm. The stitching on her back went layers deep—sometimes she thought she could feel it all the way to her breastbone—and she felt fragile as spun sugar. She wondered if she'd ever feel normal again. "You've been stonewalling me, Stan. Tell me what happened. He got away, didn't he?"
He looked surprised. "Johnny Dread? No, he didn't. We've got him and we've got his files. He's the Real Killer, Calliope. Why do you think I've been sitting here every day? Just because I'm your partner and I love you?"
"It wasn't because you love me?"
"Well, maybe. But every tabnet reporter in New South Wales is trying to get in here. No, every reporter in Oz. Somebody even snuck a camera-drone in under the cover of your fruit cup. You were sleeping, so you didn't hear me chasing the damn thing around until I could swat it with a magazine."
"I heard it." She could not hold down the growing sense of joy—stitches, punctured lung, breathing tube be damned! "We got him?"
"Bang to rights. You know how the Real Killer kept blanking the surveillance cameras? Well, he didn't—not exactly. Somehow he rerouted the images to his own system. Damn smart. We still don't know how he did it. And he saved all of them—his own little Hall of Fame." Stan shook his head. "Sick bastard played games with the images, too—added music to them, even edited in his mother's old booking photo at the end of one of the murders. Guess which one."
"Which murder? Merapanui."
"In one."
"But we've got him, right? And we've got good evidence." When she laughed it felt like someone was twisting a sharp stick into her back muscles but she didn't care. "That's wonderful, Stan."
"Yeah." There was something in his face she didn't like. "If he ever comes out of it, he's clocked, docked, and locked."
"Comes . . . out of it? What are you talking about?"
Stan rested his chin on his steepled fingers. "He's catatonic. Doesn't move, doesn't talk. Kind of an open-eyed coma. The unit that responded to your emergency call found him that way."