16- Xerondar

Forty-seven minutes past midnight, the twelfth of September. Seven pounds, two ounces. Ten fingers, ten toes, and a healthy sounding cry. The most beautiful sound in the universe, at least to Xerondar’s ears. She was born with a thick head of wispy dark hair and delicate pink skin. The doctor had been surprised to find four teeth already in her mouth, and she began to open her intelligent-looking blue-gray eyes just twenty-one hours after her birth. She was perfect.

Modern hospitals have a special room where they keep the newborn babies. This one had a large window where friends and relatives could look in and see them. Xerondar stood outside that window almost constantly. He watched over her as she slept and cried and had her diaper changed. Every few hours they took her to see her "mother", the carrier, and that was when he would eat, walk around, talk to the staff.

Her birth was healthy and uncomplicated, so she would be leaving the hospital in a few days, when the carrier was fully recovered. Then he would not be seeing very much of her, not for some time. All he could do for now was to treasure these few short days when he could stare for hours at her tiny face.

The carrier’s husband was also frequently found at this window, which made Xerondar feel slightly uncomfortable. He watched the man as he grinned proudly at her, as if she belonged to him. This was the man that Nira would think of as her father for the next several years. Xerondar always felt a little jealous of the fathers for some reason. This plump, balding man would hold her in his arms, kiss her baby face, make her laugh, teach her to walk and talk and tie her shoes. He would earn her love and trust before Xerondar could even be permitted to introduce himself to her.

But he had loved her first. Long before this man had even been born, Xerondar had been there to love her, to care for her and shelter her, to protect her and teach her and serve her. And he would continue to serve her, even after this man’s life had faded from all memory.

He turned back to where she lay sleeping. They called her Caroline. A nice enough name, as many of her childhood names had been. Xerondar longed for the day when he could remind her of her true name. He whispered it to her through the glass. "Dellanira."

After several hours, a nurse touched him on the shoulder. Visiting hours were over for the day. Sighing, he glanced at her one more time, then made his way to the elevator. He had a room at a hotel just a block away from the hospital, so that he could be there constantly whenever visitors were permitted. It wasn’t until he stepped outside that he realized how hungry he was. He had only eaten small snacks during the brief periods when Nira was taken out of the viewing room, anxious not to waste any time when they might bring her back at any moment. He placed a hand on his empty stomach and glanced around. There was a Tex-Mex restaurant between here and the hotel that was open 24-hours. Xerondar had gone there the night before and had the best puffy tacos he had ever tasted. Or maybe they had just tasted that way to him. Everything in this world seemed a thousand times better, now that she was born, now that he had finally been able to see her face after all this time.

He entered the restaurant and was seated at a small table. A pretty young waitress appeared with a basket of warm tortilla chips and a bowl of fresh salsa. "Are you expecting friends, or is it just going to be you tonight?" she asked.

"No, I’m alone," he replied. He thought about that as she took away the extra place setting on the table and left to fetch him a Dr. Pepper. It would be nice if he had someone to share this with, someone who understood all of this, whom he could talk about it with. He wondered what it was like for the others, those who had maintained connections with each other.

He remembered the years that he and Nira had spent with Aterat and Tsu Lai, before Nira had decided to break away from them. No, even back then there hadn’t been much friendship between them. Tsu Lai had been nice enough, and Xerondar had gotten along with him fairly well. But Tsu Lai wasn’t a very social person. He was always so quiet, with that far-off look in his eyes, as if he were contemplating the universe or something, which made for a lot of rather awkward, one-sided conversations. And Aterat . . . well, she had always hated Xerondar, and only tolerated him because he was necessary for Nira.

He’d heard that most of Shepetheleh’s followers were a pretty tight-knit group. Some of them even lived together. When they had first set out on their own, Nira had briefly considered going to him, but she had decided against it, choosing instead to be independent and neutral. Xerondar respected her decision, and even agreed with it. But he did sometimes wish that there were more independents like them, others that he could perhaps keep in contact with. He’d like to be able to call one of them now, and share his excitement over Nira’s birth.

Of course, he and Nira weren’t the only pair that was on their own– there were a few others that had also decided to choose independence and neutrality over the constant fighting. There was Finbar, but his situation was just too depressing. It just wouldn’t feel right for Xerondar to talk to him about how happy he was, when that man’s own life held such little joy. Nadina was another independent, but no way in hell would he ever want anything to do with M’boku and his sick games, and to get involved with Nadina would be to get involved with M’boku. Then there was Alexei, but Xerondar really didn’t know him very well, and from what he’d seen of him, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

And so here he was, sitting in a restaurant alone, eating his puffy taco in silence, and keeping his excitement to himself. In just a few short years, he wouldn’t be alone anymore. He would have Nira with him. After all this time, they would finally be together again. He could hardly wait.

15- Jack

Jack sat in the hotel lobby, sipping at the bitter coffee in his travel cup and rubbing at the aching muscles in the back of his neck. He had been bent over his computer all night, trying to put everything together in his head. Nothing made sense.

The local cantonal police were investigating an attempted murder at the hospital they had visited, and since it had involved the two witnesses they had recently questioned, Jack and the four specialists he was working with had been informed of the details. The attacker, a tall Asian male with long black hair, had sneaked into Hespah Stille’s room with what witnesses described as a short sword. Somehow Ms. Stille had been forewarned of this attack, and had previously hidden herself in a different room. Then, as if this whole situation were not bizarre enough, Ms. Stille’s personal lawyer, Karl Waiblingen, appeared on the scene and confronted the man with a handgun. According to witnesses, Mr. Waiblingen managed to shoot the attacker multiple times, and yet the man was somehow still able to get all the way downstairs and into a waiting car. Mr. Waiblingen himself suffered several lacerations, including a life-threatening stab wound in his abdomen, but was immediately treated by the doctors and nurses on staff at the hospital, and was expected to make a full recovery.

The most puzzling part of this whole story was that Ms. Stille and Mr. Waiblingen both refused to assist the police with their investigation into this matter, and neither of them wished to take any legal action against the man. Even though it was obvious that they both knew the man who had attacked them, and had even known beforehand that he was coming, they refused to provide any information about him.

The Swiss were currently checking into the validity of Ms. Stille’s and Mr. Waiblingen’s passports and identifying documents. After the discovery of Nadina Jones’s false identity, and based on a few comments made by Stille and Waiblingen during Jack’s interview, there was reason to suspect that their documentation might be false as well. Personally, Jack was willing to bet on it.

These people had a secret. Jack knew they must be involved in something big, and now it was clear they would go to any lengths to cover it up. Some kind of international organized crime group, or . . .

Jack jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder, sloshing lukewarm coffee onto his sleeve. He looked up and found one of his colleagues standing over him. It was that Eastern European fellow, Kostya something-or-other. The one who gave him the audio-recorder at the hospital.

"I’m sorry to have scared you."

"No, it’s alright, I was . . . lost in my thoughts. Did you need something?"

Frowning, Kostya sat in the chair across from him and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "I want to talk to you about this investigation."

Jack looked at him. This was the first time any of them had sought him out to discuss the case. "Okay. . ."

"Why are you here with us?"

Jack felt his face grow hot. He knew the others had no respect for him as a detective– he’d sensed it from the start. But none of them had come right out and admitted it to his face. "I– I shouldn’t have to defend my right to be on this investigation! I– "

Kostya held up a hand. "Please, Inspector. Please do not misunderstand. I’m sure you have many qualifications and experiences. But you did ask to join this team, am I right? You made a special request to come here. Why did you do that?"

"Well, I . . . I feel very strongly about this case. I’ve been connected to it from the start. I want to see it through. You weren’t there . . . I saw the bodies. The mother and her boyfriend. Photographs can’t– you can distance yourself, just looking at pictures, but . . . And this boy, he’s only three years old. I can’t explain . . . It– It’s my case. I just feel like I have to be a part of this investigation, I . . ."

"So then follow the case from home. Everything we find, we are sharing with your people back in London. You would be able to do the same thing that you are doing here, you could do this from home. So what is the point of being here? Why did you want to come with us?"

Jack narrowed his eyes at him. "What are you saying, exactly?"

"I’m saying that there are two investigations on this case right now. Ours, and yours. We go over all of our information together, we talk about it, we share everything and work as a team to track this killer. All except you. You sit in the corner. You make your own copies of everything and you keep your thoughts to yourself. Right now, we have all been upstairs discussing the implications of the attack at that clinic and its importance in relation to our case, and you are sitting down here in the lobby, as you said, lost in your thoughts. Why are you on this team if you refuse to work with us?"

Jack stared at the man. "Me? I refuse? I– You have all made it quite clear that I am not welcome among you. This entire time that we’ve been in Switzerland, no one has ever asked me for my opinion. Not once. In fact, no one has said more than two words to me this entire time, aside from you."

Kostya shook his head, then gave Jack a condescending, pitying smile. "Inspector, have you ever seen any of us ask for anyone’s opinion? I tell you, Durand, Landin, Claes . . . none of them have ever asked me for my opinion. No one says, ‘What do you think, Demko?’ No. We all just offer our thoughts to the group, because that is why we are here. And you. Have you ever asked any of us for our thoughts? Do you come to me and ask what I think? Do you hold my hand and ask me to join you in your lonely little corner to help you in your investigation? Is that what you expect from us?"

Kostya stood up and stretched his back, then looked back down at Jack. "It’s almost noon. None of us have slept yet, and we are all getting hungry. In about an hour, we will probably order some food and discuss all of our theories while we eat. If I were you, I would come upstairs and help us decide what food to order."

Jack watched Kostya walk back to the lift. He felt somewhat like a foolish child who had just been scolded. It was humiliating, and yet a part of him– the part that wasn’t busy agonizing about how embarrassing it was– that part of him was happy. It was as if he were a little boy who had finally been invited into the club. Even though Kostya had made it clear that he had been acting like a complete ass all this time, he was determined to prove to everyone just why he was here.

When he entered the room, any thoughts of food had been pushed aside. His four colleagues were all crowded around a single computer screen. For a moment, he considered pulling up whatever it was on his own computer, but he decided against it. Pretending it was perfectly natural, Jack squeezed in with the others to see what they were looking at.

The local police had finally managed to obtain photographs of Ms. Hespah Stille prior to her operations. She had been a patient at that clinic three times before in the past two years. Apparently she was having some rather drastic changes done, and the police had requested documentation so that they could run a search on her old face to check for prior criminal involvement. The clinic had handed over records from each surgery, along with "before" and "after" photographs and detailed descriptions and diagrams of what had been done, and notes on her recovery.

The whole team gawked at each set of pictures, starting with the "before" photo from her most recent operation. As they looked over the work that had been done, a few people wondered aloud why she had to go to such lengths to change her appearance. What could she be hiding? She’d had implants under the top of her scalp to change the shape of her head. Implants on her chin and cheekbones to make them fuller and rounder. The bones in her forehead had been filed down and sculpted, her nose had been completely transformed, her jaw had been reshaped, her lips, her teeth . . . nearly everything had been altered.

Then they opened the last set of photographs. The original "before" pictures.

"Oh, my god," Jack heard himself mutter.

The woman in the photo was unlike any he had ever seen before, outside of textbooks. Long, matted, crayon-red dreadlocks framed a pale, wild-looking face. A low hairline sat just above a pair of jutting eyebrows. Her brilliant green eyes were set deep into the shadows of her huge brow, and beneath them she had almost no cheekbones at all. Her nose was big– wide and bulbous but somehow shorter than it should be, causing her mouth look like it hung too low beneath it. Her lips were huge and wide, and her teeth stuck out oddly– in fact, from the side-profile and x-rays it was clear that her entire mouth jutted forward from the rest of her face. And then her chin was just a weak little slope that seemed to just melt back into her neck.

Durand pointed to the x-ray, tracing the top of the skull with her finger. "Her head is so flat on top," she observed.

"She’s like a Neanderthal," Kostya agreed. " The Missing Link."

The Belgian officer cleared his throat. "I’ve seen all I need to see. We should not mention these pictures if we speak to Ms. Stille again."

The other fellow– Jack was fairly certain his last name was Landin, but he wasn’t sure where the man was from or what his rank was– nodded his head and was the first to turn away from the computer. "Well, now we know why she wanted to change her face, and we know that it has nothing to do with our investigation." He sat at the table in the center of the room and pulled out his phone. "I am ordering something to eat. Who else is hungry?"

Jack glanced at Kostya, then turned to Landin. "I’m famished," he said with a smile, "What are we ordering?"

14- Tsu Lai

"A warrior shows no pain on his face, nor does he cry out when he is wounded, for he knows pain well, and greets it with calm serenity, as he would an old friend."

The ancient memory of those words flitted through Tsu Lai’s mind as he screamed through clenched teeth.

It was true, he did know pain very well. All kinds of pain, and in varying degrees. They had been long acquainted. But despite everything, he was still human, at least by his own definition. And for all his efforts, he simply could not greet the bullet lodged in his hip with calm serenity. Nor could he look upon Jean’s twisting, groping tweezers as an old friend.

He had passed out once, but Jean had woken him up, insisting that he remain conscious because of his head wound. And so, deprived of the bliss of sleep, he concentrated on the sound of his own screaming. It distracted him from the pain of his injuries, which in turn distracted him from worse thoughts.

He had failed.

Aterat had given him one task: to kill Shepetheleh’s anchor. And he had failed. He had come all this way. But when he’d entered the room, Hespah was already gone. He had searched only a few of the other rooms, and then the pretty blond man had found him. Most likely he was the guardian of one of Shepetheleh’s retainers, but Tsu Lai didn’t know him.

The first bullet had grazed his ear, the second had just barely missed, the third had found his left shoulder. In return, Tsu Lai had sliced open the man’s right arm and part of his chest, disabling his dominant hand and forcing him to drop his gun. Then in one quick movement, he had closed the remaining distance between them to shove his blade through the man’s abdomen. The pretty man had collapsed, and Tsu Lai had turned to continue his search for Hespah.

But he had apparently underestimated his opponent. Even as he lay bleeding on the floor, the blond man had somehow managed to grasp his weapon in his shaky left hand and squeeze off two more shots before losing consciousness. The first had missed by a wide margin, but the second had landed in his hip.

Tsu Lai stopped his screaming for a moment, struggling to catch his breath as Jean held up the offending bullet in his bloody tweezers. "Got it," he announced, dropping it onto a napkin and setting down the tweezers.

The last wound had hobbled him, and that was when Tsu Lai had known for certain that his mission was a failure. He was wounded and bleeding, and considerably slowed by that fact. Any further fighting was too great a risk. All he could do was escape with his own life.

"A warrior does not fear death. He happily sacrifices himself to protect those he serves."

Those words no longer applied to him. That particular part of his warrior’s creed had long since been replaced by a very different rule.

"Never allow yourself to die." 

Hespah had said that to him, so long ago that he almost wondered how it was that he remembered it so clearly. He had been young and naive then, holding a baby girl who made him feel things that he’d never have believed possible. Back then he had soaked up every word of advice that Hespah and Shepetheleh had offered him, so desperate not to be overwhelmed by this incredible new world that he had just entered. "You must stay alive at any cost," she had told him, "Even if you have to choose between saving her life and saving your own, you must always save yourself."

That had seemed a strange way to serve someone, putting one’s own life before theirs. It had been Shepetheleh who had explained it to him. "Her life is bonded to yours," he had said. "You are the anchor that keeps her safely tethered to this world. If she dies, she will simply be reborn, and you will find her and serve her in her next life as you do in this one. But if you die, she can never return, and the fate she would suffer is worse than anything you can imagine."

That had been countless lifetimes ago, long before this endless fighting had begun. It was depressing to think of those early times, when today he had attempted to destroy them both. It was not my choice, he wanted to tell them. But he knew that was only half true. He knew very well that even if Aterat had given him the option to refuse, he would still have done the same. It was what she wanted.

Tsu Lai hissed loudly as Jean poured antiseptic over the burning hole in his flesh and dabbed away the excess blood with a wad of gauze.

"Try to breathe normally," Jean insisted for the third time. "I can’t allow you to faint again."

He nodded, which set everything spinning again, making him nauseous. But he regained control of himself once more and began concentrating on his breathing.

In his retreat, he had been limping heavily from the bullet in his hip. That, combined with the light-headedness from his significant blood-loss, had caused him to lose his footing in the stairwell. He had tumbled down an entire flight of stairs and had hit his head twice in the fall. By the time he had reached the ground floor, his body was so badly beaten that it was a miracle he had not been apprehended by the handful of security officers that had scrambled after him on his way out.

Luckily, Tsu Lai had thought to prepare for such an exit. Jean had been waiting for him in the back of the car, just in case. Now, if only there were a way to prepare himself before speaking with Aterat about all of this.

He had failed, and she would not be pleased.

13- Hespah

Scratching on or under the bandages was forbidden, but Hespah had discovered that if she scratched at the skin around the very edges, it actually helped to relieve the incessant itching quite a bit. It also helped that she was no longer wrapped up like King Tut. Gradually the nurses had been making the dressings smaller as she healed, and now they only covered the incisions. The ones along her jaw, around her nose, above her eyes, beside her ears, and along the edge of her hairline were the only bandages remaining. The one on her head irritated her the most, because in addition to the itching of scabs and fresh scars, her hair was growing back where they’d had to shave it. She wanted to rip the damned thing off and just claw the entire area raw. But she didn’t.

At least it no longer hurt as much. The nurses were all amazed at how quickly she was healing. Most of the swelling had gone down, and the flesh around the implants had almost completely healed. The areas where they’d had to file and sculpt her actual bones were the slowest to recover, and she was still on pain medication for those, but they’d lowered the dosage, so she was able to think more clearly now.

As she healed, she watched her transformation in the hand-mirror on her bedside table. As the bandages were removed, and the bruises faded and the swelling went down, a new face began to emerge. It was one she didn’t recognize, but she knew she would eventually get used to seeing it every day. Or even if she never got used to it, the new face wasn’t bad. Even now, when she still sort of looked like she’d been bitch-slapped by an express train, she was much prettier than she’d been before. What will Shepetheleh think, when he returns to find me like this? She hoped he would understand; she hadn’t done it for vanity. It was a necessary change. She just couldn’t go around looking like that anymore. And with the advancements in cosmetic surgery over the past few years, she knew it was safe enough.

Hespah sighed and set the mirror back down on the little table. The thought of his reaction made her nervous, and she didn’t want to dwell on it. She picked up the book in her lap and found the place where she’d left off. Karl had been kind enough to bring her a box of her recent favorites, and she’d been reading and rereading them for the past week, since the nurses had decreased her painkillers and she was now able to concentrate on something for more than three seconds. She read almost constantly here– what else was there to do?

She was just getting to one of her favorite parts when her cell phone went off, ringing and vibrating noisily on the table beside her bed. It was Jacob. "What do you want?" she grumbled.

"Hespah, it’s Jacob. Listen, Tsu Lai is in Switzerland. We think he might be coming for you. Karl is on his way."

"What?" Hespah sat up straight. "Where is he now?"

"I don’t know. Fanzou sent Karl an e-mail."

"Shit. I’ve got to get out of this fucking room." She hung up and tossed her phone down onto the table, then flung her book across the room, threw off her blankets and leapt out of bed.

She paused, and placed a hand on the chair by her bed to steady herself as a wave of dizziness overcame her. She wasn’t exactly in peak condition, and getting up so suddenly had thrown off her equilibrium.  She blinked and looked around the room. Her usual bare-handed fighting style wouldn’t be much use right now. She needed a weapon. She fumbled through the small tub of bandages and supplies that the nurses kept on her bedside table and found a small pair of sharp scissors. It would have to do.

Hespah put a robe on over her pajamas and dropped her cell phone into one of the pockets. Luckily the nurses had removed her I.V. a few days ago so she didn’t have that to bother with. She slipped quietly out of her room and crept down the hall, careful to avoid any of the staff.

She took the back stairway to the next floor down and sneaked into the first vacant room she found. She crouched on the floor between the bed and the window and closed her eyes for a moment while she took slow breaths and waited for her heart rate to calm down. Just this little bit of excitement had her head pounding. The doctors hadn’t been exaggerating when they told her she wasn’t ready to be out of bed yet. How the hell was she supposed to defend herself in this condition? As humiliating as it was, Hespah knew she was right in choosing to hide from this fight. She took her phone out and dialed Karl’s cell.

"This is Karl."

"Jacob just called me. Where are you?"

"I’m on my way but Tsu Lai is probably already there. The receptionist said he left, but I don’t think he gave up. You need to get out of that room, if you can."

"I’m in an empty room on the third floor."

"Good. Stay hidden. I’m almost there."

The phone went silent, and Hespah put it back into her pocket. She pulled out her scissors and waited, crouching in the corner, watching the door, and the window, and listening for any sign of activity in the hall. He would look for her in her own room first, and when he didn’t find her there, he would start searching the other rooms.

Her head hurt. It was almost time for her medicine, and the excitement was only making it worse. Where the hell was Karl? She pried the scissors apart so that she had two sharp little knives, one in each hand.

After what felt like hours, she heard voices in the hall, and people on the stairs. Something was happening on the floor above her. Hespah tightened her fists around the broken pair of scissors and leaned forward, onto the balls of her feet, letting one knee rest on the floor for balance. She tucked her hips forward and hunched her shoulders, curling her spine like a cat preparing to pounce.

More shouting in the hall. More feet pounding on the stairs.

And then thunder. Three loud cracks of gunshot from somewhere above. Someone screamed outside the door. Then two more shots, farther apart than the first three.

Hespah instinctively looked up at the ceiling, but there was nothing there to see. She realized she was holding her breath and let it out all at once. There was more shouting, and running. A door slammed, and she heard a loud crashing noise on the stairs. But no more gunshots. After several minutes, things began to quiet down, and Hespah finally relaxed.

When the nurses found her three hours later, she was asleep, slumped against the wall with the broken pair of scissors still clutched tightly in her hands.