Nemecene: The Epoch of Redress (37 page)

"You need me. And I need you." That's a sick co-dependency.

"And Keet?"

"We are all one."

"And Stitch?"

She's shaking her head. "He is trouble. Like your father."

He's nothing like my father. I can't trust her. Stitch is a witness, and if he's no good to her then… No, I won't allow it! "You can't force me to join you."

I always have choice. I am not helping her destroy life. If there is a nebulous field like the Pramam says, then I'm not going there.

"You will. It is not your choice to make."

That's where you're wrong. "We'll see about that." I'll turn her in and Father will vouch for us. He's important in the Ministry. They will listen. He'll forgive us for leaving without telling him. I know he will.

"He can no longer protect you."

Ohhhm gee! He knew. He knew about her. He was protecting us? That means she's been planning this for years. We sealed our own fate by running away. I can't bear the thought that I was in some way responsible for Mashrin's death. Don't take on the guilt. It will only serve her and her cleansing mission. Ignorance is not a sin, but now that I can see her malice, standing by and turning a blind eye is. Stitch has stopped shaking. His hair is moving again.

"Cover your ears, Stitch." This kick should reach the surface. Get off me. Run. Kick the other wall. Just keep hitting. The echo in here is deafening. She's on me. Yell then. "Nathruyu is here. She has hostages. Beside the generator. Nathruyu is here. The…" She's choking me.

Juicy! Cough. Gasp. Cough. She's down. Stitch is up.

"Ta, Stitch. Let's clip out." Masks on.

"The vent is on the right." Shadows. Four of them, running fast towards us. I yank Stitch's arm. "I hear them. Left then. We'll find another way. Hold out in here."

We're hiding in a nook, waiting. Some voices. It's them! Thank the little baby prophet! Never thought I would ever be ecstatic about being around those creepy ones again. I signal Stitch to keep hush and perk. Perfect. The ducts act as amplifiers.

"She is not here." No! That's impossible!

"You. Take the box. You. Disable the biowall. You. Secure the exit. I will find her."

That was Sothese. Some banging, clanging, ripping. They're tearing the area apart. This is our chance. The noise will be our cover. Talk hush.

"Show me the slipmap. Where are we?" I nudge Stitch.

"Here. South west of Almedina Square. And a hatch. One minute away, if we clip. Ready, chum?"

"Yeah. Let's clip out!"

We're running low on time. If the map is wrong then... We'll make it. My eyes are burning. They're chasing us. Stitch hears them too. He grabs my hand and…almost there. I can see a glow from the side and a ladder. Turn around. Who are these shadows? They just stopped. All I see is the whites of their eyes. It's too dark. Stitch? A struggle in the nook. No! They're looking past me. No more noise. Whoa! Let go!

"Counsellor?"

Day 74: Early Morning

Y
esterday marked the end of an exhausting detour in our personal journey.

It was Unified Day. Although Eli and I do not actually practice, it has become a tradition over the years, mostly because Father insisted we pay respect to the Pramam and celebrate his birth date, so Eli and I gathered at dawn to exchange a few gifts. We had invited Stitch to join us, but, predictably, he denounced the celebration as a conspiracy to legitimize the Pramam's ascent to power and his personal judgments as divine authority. He added that if there were a single physical manifestation in this world which could be classed non-sentient, then the Pramam was it. I cannot say that I disagree with his position, especially concerning his underlying callousness veiled as righteous compassion. In hindsight, I am surprised, yet grateful, that we never attended any meditations, considering how closely linked Father was with the Inner Council. With his insider perspective, maybe he experienced the cruelty first hand and simply kept up appearances for the neighbors by claiming we had a private sajadum in our home. Regardless, it was the only time of year that he acknowledged you, and because of that, for a few brief moments, we were together as a family.

In the end, Stitch did eventually drop by Eli's room, a half hour late and bearing a different kind of present, an imprint of the Pramam's speech scheduled for broadcast at midi. He had been tipped by one of his chumbuds that there was to be a significant announcement regarding the twisted child collector, as she had been dubbed since her highly publicized clamp about a month ago, and what Stitch discovered revealed her intrinsic motive, and reminded us of how close we had come to unwittingly earning a private cell in the Ministburg lockdown.

A thorough diagnosis was finally complete, and Dr. Tenille, the expert assigned to the painstaking task of daily interviewing Nathruyu, had presented his case to the Inner Council last evening. Having spent seven straight days with her myself, trying to decipher her ambiguous and misleading statements, the fact that he was able to pull together a cohesive interpretation of her madness is commendable. Then again, he has made his career out of gaining the trust of exceptionally difficult patients, like you, who coincidentally suffered from an affliction almost exactly like hers. The voices, the hallucinations, the memory lapses, and the nightmares were all similarly entrenched, and even the tendency towards seemingly random violent behavior. However, in her case, the aggressive traits she exhibited were founded on a more intense level of paranoid schizophrenia.

She was obsessed with the notion that the mutilations were simply regrettable casualties in a war against the ills of society promoted and sustained by the current dynasty, referring to the Unification lead by the self-proclaimed prophet. She likened the current government to an incestuous band of puppets acquiescing in unison to the whims of a tyrant, as if all fed into a single string. Except for the method she chose to draw attention to her cause, these are hardly the words of a madwoman. I can think of an entire underground society which shares that view, albeit they have chosen to express themselves in a more civilized manner, through private lobbying and political espionage. The Gadlins understand that the masses need stability more than anything else, and though they do not agree with many laws and traditions ratified by the governing officials, they believe in peace above all else, and consequently they work creatively within the existing system to prepare a successor for the Pramam's inevitable replacement.

The report continued, claiming that the most effective method she had devised for rallying the people against the autocratic warden of the prison they were oblivious to living in was to create fear for their children, to make them begin to doubt that the Pramam was capable of protecting them, and, as a result, to foster disbelief in his claims of prophetic powers, in essence shattering the spiritual bond that stops our fragile society from falling victim to human greed and creating a void for her to fill with her deluded grandness. She had already selected the unsuspecting scapegoat for her scheme and had orchestrated a few chance encounters which would place the accused at the scene of the crimes, even to the point of enlisting accomplices with competence in the art of covert operations and record falsifications. As soon as the ensuing uprising gained enough momentum, she would arise, victorious, with a true prophecy of the murderer's identity to become their savior and newly elected leader.

Despite the fact that there was no mention of names, we knew who the unfortunate fools were. A warm gush of blood shot up to my brain, causing my skin to flush, and instantly spread to Eli and Stitch huddled beside me. Could we have been that stupid? We were so blinded by our egotistical needs to avenge our own pasts, Stitch with his cousin, Eli with her guilt-driven nightmares, and me with proving Father wrong about you at all costs, that we were easy targets for an unscrupulous manipulator. It was the enemy within that defeated our better judgment and convinced us that it was acceptable to play along with a killer's fantasy for personal gain. Fortunately for us, her tactics failed and her last move became her undoing, as she vainly assumed that I had succumbed to her irresistible charms and at the same time vastly underestimated Stitch's ingenuity and loyalty. There were no conflicted emotions on my part, so I alerted the Pramam's advisor and his hounds.

The official message, on the other hand, does not give credit to the anonymous tip, rather it states that the SIF investigation has been a resounding success. The lone conspirator considered herself anointed by a higher source, who had given her the mandate to remove the biochip implants of children to save them from the Unified monstrosity, knowing full well that it would doom their bodies, and that a local sage from her home town had banished her from training when he noticed her narcissistic tendencies, dutifully informing the Ministry of her objective to advocate anarchy.

I am not sure as to just how much of this transmission actually ended up in the final draft, since a new mission presented itself as a result of the transfer plans. Because of the direct threat to the Unification, Sothese has been stationed in Eadonberg since the capture, making sure Nathruyu does not endeavor to escape solitary confinement from a customized cell prepared in her honor in the GHU transition wing. As such, we had resigned ourselves to accepting the disjointed pieces she had fed us about your history until we read the second section of the communiqué.

This morning, as I sit here in quiet reflection with you in my heart as always, Nathruyu is moving to the Ministburg penal island, awaiting trial, which means that if we still wanted the answers she promised us during our Snack Shack meeting, we needed to act during his Holy address. Not having disappointed us yet, Stitch had already taken the initiative and made arrangements to sneak me through security, and that day, I was to learn from her fine example and outcharm the charmer.

Under cover of fog, I entered the building with the usual thrower and rubber combination and headed to the underwater level where I came upon the first serious challenge, the second being the actual encounter with the beautiful stranger. The level was in complete obscurity except for a thin ray of natural light I could barely discern, emanating from a hole in the ceiling. The walls deadened the sound of my footsteps as I counted the paces to the unit where she supposedly was held, trusting that there would be a door or some other suitable barrier separating us. As I advanced, I had the distinct sensation that someone was monitoring my progress and would reach out to grab me at any instant. Stitch had recently fashioned a biochip decoder like Eli's, which worked wonderfully for camping on GMU frequencies, but I had to rely on the thrower's display for lighting, which did little more than announce my presence to whoever was lurking in the shadows. And that is when I found myself on the floor, nursing my bruised behind, as I smashed against an invisible barrier.

The angel who had captivated me with that first smile on the hovertrain platform was barely recognizable through the field I had just bounced off. She was crouched in the center of the room, her frostbitten lips shivering in a beam of light, a meek sombre figure whimpering in agonizing pain. Something inside me yearned to believe that this semblance of a person muttering unintelligible verses was not the one I was looking for, but the feeling that overwhelmed me when our eyes met convinced me otherwise. I cannot fathom what torture she has endured at the hands of her nemesis, nor what willpower she has drawn on in order to survive, yet one thing is clear. The benevolent Pramam was anything but, and this woman was being denied the basic human rights guaranteed her in our professedly enlightened legal system. Ironically, the very hypocrisy she was ordained to expose had her trapped without a voice to do so.

As I observed her dungeon more attentively, I could see the walls glisten faintly, covered with a substance that had all the characteristics of ice. The moisture in the air had condensed against the walls, turning the area enclosed by them into a large freezer and maintaining its hostage in a quasi-hypothermic state. A heavy weight on my chest began to crush my rib cage, starving my lungs of oxygen when I realized that the dark layer covering her from head to toe, was not the silk I was so accustomed to admiring on her, but her naked flesh. Had they burned her? They had stripped her of her clothing and her dignity and left her straining to wrap her body as tightly as she could with her arms, to keep its plummeting temperature from reducing her into a corpse. She was using her long black hair as a cloak to preserve whatever modesty she realistically could. To my horror, the creature I had confronted in the arcade had not been a fabrication of the night.

The invisible door between us sheltered me from the inhumane conditions they were subjecting her to, but I still sensed her presence in my core, not as it relates to pity, but more akin to the sensation I had first experienced with her: joy, kindness, and a deep connection beyond the physical. The entire situation felt incredibly wrong. I was convinced that no matter how obtuse her communication style was, underneath it all lay a fundamental truth that I had yet to uncover. I imagined that perhaps, at last, with the two of us locked in silent acceptance, my eyes floating in the void beyond the gateway to her liberation, we could dispense with the game and open a fresh and honest dialog, if only to appease the conscience I am certain she possesses.

She confessed to me then that he was punishing her, that he had the power to release her but had chosen to inflict incommensurate suffering upon her. Such was his judgment and effectively timed ultimate reproach. There were no tears for her to cry, just the caustic pain of an abandoned child, alone, trembling, and confused while she heaved, desperately searching for a way to expel her grief.

As I listened, absorbed in her agony, the sweet scent of myrrh evoked your memory. Or was it the image of her contorted pose that was rousing your scent? Her features may have been different, but the silhouette was strangely familiar. Bent into a ball in the corner of your cell, I recall you warning us to hide Eli's voices from everyone, especially Father, and never to trust, which as children served us well. Now, circumstances have altered our beliefs. There is a sordid past which, for reasons incomprehensible to a young intellect, you shielded us from, and which our sinister stalker alleges to have intimate knowledge of. The question that continued to haunt me, faced with the fear of eternal ignorance as the opportunity for closure was quickly fading, was: does Nathruyu know or does she not know what really happened to you.