“And could there be any particular significance to the name that you chose for the operation, Magistrate?” a man’s voice, clear and sympathetic, was speaking close to his ear.
Kane opened his eyes and looked around carefully. He was stretched out on a leather couch in a small office, the walls of which were painted a reassuring, rich butterscotch. He turned, looking at the man who sat in a chair beside his head, peering over his regulation glasses at Kane, a notepad resting on his crossed legs.
“I’m sorry?” Kane asked, confused.
Beside him, the man thumbed back two sheets of his notepad, and Kane saw the tiny scrawl that covered each page. “Cerberus, you called it, the hound of Hades,” the psychiatrist said, tapping the top of his pen against the notebook. “Do you think that has any particular significance?”
Magistrate Kane shook his head. “I don’t really remember,” he said. “What were we talking about?”
The psychiatrist offered a sympathetic smile. “Are you still perhaps confused after the gas attack? Magistrate Salvo told me that you were lucky to get out alive.”
Kane closed his eyes, letting the words wash over him as he tried to remember. It had been a regular PPP—Pedestrian Pit Patrol—down in the Tartarus Pits, which sat at the very bottom of Cobaltville, surrounding the Administrative Monolith. He and his partner, Grant, had been accompanying some newbie, couldn’t remember the name, checking ID chips and generally making their presence known, when someone had launched a burning bottle of something flammable—a molly—in their direction. It had been a long time since the Pit dwellers had openly attacked Magistrates like that, and the newbie had asked why they had targeted them today.
“We’re Mags,” Kane had said, the regulation helmet sitting low over his face, masking his features and adding to his stern appearance. “That’s reason enough.”
There had been explosions and blasterfire, and a smoking canister had almost exploded in his face. After that it was all lost; he couldn’t remember anything.
“How’s the newbie?” Kane asked, recalling the rookie’s name at last. “McKinnon?”
The psychiatrist looked at him, his expression the well-rehearsed mask of sympathy that every psychiatrist on Cappa Level had been trained to employ in such situations. “I’m afraid Magistrate McKinnon died,” he said, holding Kane’s gaze.
As he lay back on the couch, Kane’s eyes wandered around the room once more. Despite the relative safety of the surroundings, his point-man sense was alert. He felt as if he was being watched, and not just by the psychiatrist who sat patiently beside him. There, in the far corner of the ceiling, a little black blister, no bigger than his hand, contained a surveillance camera. You were never truly alone in Cobaltville, he remembered.
“What about my partner?” he asked, still looking at the surveillance blister. “What about Grant?”
“He was still in surgery when you came in here,” the shrink said. “Would you like me to go check?”
Something was wrong, Kane knew. Some instinct deep inside him felt unsettled. Maybe the gas attack had affected him, just as the psychiatrist had said. And what was this Cerberus that the man had been speaking about? The name seemed familiar and, even as he thought of it, an image flashed in his mind: a woman’s face, her porcelain skin beautiful and clear, her hair a flowing tumble of red curls, her glowing eyes like twin emeralds reflecting flame.
“That’s okay,” Kane said, pushing himself up from the couch and smoothing back his dark hair, gathering his thoughts.
Beside him, the shrink checked his wrist chron. “We still have almost twenty minutes before the session is over, Magistrate Kane,” he announced as Kane stood.
Kane looked at him, standing in the dark T-shirt and combat pants of an off-duty Mag, the muscles of his tanned arms flexing as feeling returned to them. He felt as though he had been sleeping and was only now awakening. “I think I’m going to skip out of this one,” he explained. “You’ve been a great help. I’m better now.”
The psychiatrist looked about to complain, but Kane stared through him before placing the dark-lensed glasses over his eyes, becoming an emotionless Magistrate once more. The whole culture of the Magistrate system was built upon intimidation; everything they did, the way they dressed, the way that they carried themselves—even when off duty—was designed to instill fear in the people around them. They were the last bastions of order in a world that had tipped close to utter chaos, and their authority was absolute, their judgment incontestable.
The psychiatrist stood up, and Kane could see the little beads of sweat forming on his brow as he peered into Kane’s dark lenses. “Well, I wouldn’t wish to waste any of your precious time, Magistrate,” he said in a shaky voice, visibly cowering before the larger man.
“No,” Kane agreed, shucking into his regulation black, ankle-length, Kevlar-weave overcoat, the familiar red shield of office attached to the lapel, “I’m sure you wouldn’t. Good day to you, psychiatrist.”
“G-good day to you,” the shrink said, rushing in front of Kane to open the door to the office and let him out.
Kane walked along one of the corridors of Cappa Level. Above him, the grand structure of the Administrative Monolith towered high into the sky, brushing the clouds that languished across the Colorado plains. Off to the west, the sun was sinking, a rich orange ball as late afternoon turned to evening.
He thought back to the discussion he had been having with the shrink minutes before. “Cerberus, the hound of Hades,” he muttered. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Before he had time to consider it further, Magistrate Kane found himself standing outside his apartment in the Residential Enclaves, and the aching in his limbs and gnawing at his stomach told him that he needed to get home, prepare some food and get a proper night’s rest. He would check on Grant tomorrow; right now he was dead on his feet.
A SUDDEN JOLT OF PAIN and Grant was awake.
He tried to open his eyes, but they wouldn’t open. He felt so lethargic and yet strangely he was utterly awake.
And the pain. The crazy pain.
It was so intense, so absolute, that it threatened to overwhelm him, consume him. He clenched his fists, holding on to his tenuous grip on wakefulness. Did his fists really clench? He couldn’t tell, couldn’t be sure. No matter now, what really counted was the pain. All that counted was the pain.
He calmed his mind, remembering the techniques they had taught him years before in Magistrate training. A Magistrate is never ruffled, never swayed by emotion.
The pain was in his right leg. High in the leg. A line of pain across the top of the leg, close to his groin.
And the left? The left leg? What did that feel? Was he trapped under something? He felt as though he may have blacked out and had lost his immediate short-term memories. Even in not remembering how this came about, he still recognized the symptom, the feeling of bewilderment.
The pain continued, a blazing sensation that felt so strong across the top of his right leg.
Pain equaled danger, which meant that Grant needed to be awake, needed to find out what the pain was, what was going on. To escape perhaps? To save himself? Perhaps even to save others.
He struggled once more to turn his head and open his eyes. I’m awake, he told himself, but I can’t wake up.
It seemed impossible, but suddenly the pain became worse, went beyond absolute into a whole new level of agony that Grant had never even imagined existed. He felt the muscles of his mouth strain, stretching open, trying to scream, yet no sound would emerge.
And suddenly his eyes were open, assaulted by lights so bright that it stung to look. His vision blurred immediately, salty tears streaming across his eyes, rolling down his cheeks. He struggled, blinking the tears away where he couldn’t move his hands to reach them, and he saw properly for the first time where he was.
Safe.
That was Grant’s first thought when he realized where he lay. He was on his back, bright lights around him, people bustling about in the familiar, starched uniforms of the Cobaltville medical hub. Behind the lights it was hard to see. Everything was lost in comparative darkness, but he could smell the disinfectant, the antibacterial wash. He counted six—no, seven—people in the room with him, reduced to silhouettes by the overhead rig of fierce lights. As Grant watched, he began to discern their features, his eyes getting used to the bright halogen lighting. They were looking at him intensely, with concern and furrowed brows and much muttered, hasty discussion that he couldn’t seem to make out. They were looking at him intensely, but not at his face. They were staring at his legs.
Grant tried to look down the length of his body, to see what had transfixed them, but he found that he couldn’t move, couldn’t make his body react.
The pain in his right leg burned and ached, but he could not see why, could not see what was going on.
Suddenly, one of the doctors, a middle-aged man with a shaved head and vibrant blue eyes, wearing a cotton mask over the bottom half of his features, leaped back from where he stood at the foot of the gurney, and Grant watched as a fountain of blood flew up and splashed over the doctor and the other people there.
The bald surgeon bit out a curse, and Grant saw something glinting in his hand, a whirring blade of some kind, attached to a wire that led to a socket in a portable machine.
Please, Grant thought, please let me know what is going on. And, once again, the salty tears blurred his vision until all he knew were the frantic voices and the sounds of the machines beeping steadily in the far distance.
“Doctor?” It was a woman’s voice, softly spoken yet urgent. “Doctor, look. I think he’s awake. The Magistrate is awake.”
“In the name of the baron,” said a man’s voice, fearful but with anger bubbling beneath the surface, “where the hell is that anesthesiologist? He shouldn’t be awake for this. Put him out, Elaine.”
Tears swam across his vision, and Grant saw the blur of a woman dressed in white rushing closer to his face, the sound of her heels clattering on the hard tiled floor. She was reaching toward him, her hand a pinkish, blurred rectangle that smelled of antibacterial wash.
Suddenly something hard was pushed against Grant’s face, wrapping itself around his mouth and nose, coiling and shaping itself as though it were alive. And the woman, the nurse, was pushing her hand against his forehead, holding him in place as though he could move.
“Upping feed level to 3.8,” she said.
The sensation of pain in his leg was abating and, for just a second, the thick tears seemed to clear. Grant saw the nurse close to him, leaning over the gurney, her white uniform starched with perfectly creased lines down its edges. The uniform was unflattering, but Grant could see that she was a curvaceous woman, the tunic straining against the swell of her breasts. Above that, russet hair, her head turned away as she spoke to the chief surgeon, counting down in her clear voice, her frank concern clear in her tone.
She turned back then, looking at Grant, her hand still pushing at his forehead to hold him down. His eyes seemed to see only her smile for a moment, white and dazzling beneath the lights, with large, straight teeth; a photogenic smile. The canine teeth at the edges of her burned-umber lips were just visible as she spoke, her tone a soothing purr but the words lost.
Grant’s vision swam and he looked at the nurse’s face, trying to make sense of it. Two dark, watery eyes looking back at him, set deep in her face. Her beautiful, flawless teeth showing in her sweeping jaw, following the curvature of the long muzzle that poked toward him, the pink-and-black nose twitching slightly amid the rusty brown fur.
Grant realized then that the nurse was some kind of animal, a dog. A German shepherd or maybe a timber wolf.
And as he looked up, gazed across the room, the surgeons and the other nurses and personnel in the room all appeared the same. Dogs. He was being operated on by dogs.
BRIGID BAPTISTE’S EYES opened and she looked at the computer screen before her through the small, square-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. The glasses were a symbol of office, marking her as a Cobaltville archivist, but were also a medical necessity. Years of computer work had left her slightly shortsighted. Her eyelids felt heavy, and the information on the glowing screen seemed unfamiliar. Her vivid emerald eyes scanned the glowing screen for a few seconds—it showed an archival report on an island in the Pacific that had been used for bomb testing back in the 1900s.
Strange, she thought, glancing surreptitiously around her, seeing the familiar forms of her colleagues as they worked at their own terminals, running through and amending the documents from the old days, the days before skydark. Everything seemed normal, and yet there was something that Brigid felt in the back of her mind, and the feeling had begun when she looked at the document on her screen.
I blinked, she thought, going through her preceding actions, and when I looked at the screen again it was like seeing it for the first time.
Perhaps there was something in the document? Perhaps she had seen something, or noticed something, or perhaps something had changed even as she was looking at it, almost subliminal and yet different.
“Refresh,” Brigid ordered into her mike pickup. A wipe panned down her terminal screen at the instruction, refreshing the information as though she was loading the file from scratch.
Nothing. No differences. Brigid’s eidetic memory would alert her instantly if something had changed.
“Go back,” she instructed into the pickup.
The screen blinked and refreshed as it went back to the previous document, exactly the same as the item that she had been looking at.
“Go back,” she said again, her voice soft, eyes flicking around the room for a moment to check that she wasn’t drawing any attention.
Before her, the screen blinked and refreshed once more, taking her back to a previous document. It appeared to be a schematic of an underground military facility—a redoubt—and Brigid’s brain automatically decoded the cryptic coordinates as she read them from the top right corner of her screen. The Tennessee River Valley, she realized, close to the barony of Beausoleil.
She had seen this before, she told herself, reassured. She had to have looked at the Pacific island stuff and just not taken it in. Mind wandering or maybe just tired. Yes, Brigid realized even as the word came to mind. Tired—that was it.
She sat there for a moment, looking at the schematic on the screen. “Revert,” she instructed, and the computer returned to her most recent file, the military report on the Pacific bomb tests. She looked at the report for a moment and a smile crossed her lips. There was a satellite picture of the island under discussion, and from this angle it looked sort of like an animal. Four legs, a body, a head with open mouth. No, not a head. Two heads. She giggled as she thought of the words “two heads are better than one.”
Must be tired, she realized. I’m seeing things. She removed her spectacles and glanced around the library room, but no one seemed to have noticed her giggle. Her section leader was across the far side of the room, leaning over Meredith Burrt’s desk, running through a file with the short, blond-haired woman.
Placing her glasses on the desk before her, Brigid raised her hand and waited for the section leader to come over and relieve her of her post. She needed to rest; maybe she was even coming down with something. She couldn’t recall the last time that she had felt so tired.
KANE OPENED the door to his apartment. It was unlocked, a carryover from the Program of Unification, when the Council of Front Royal had decreed that privacy bred conspiracy and, hence, deviant thinking.
He pushed his way into his compact two-room apartment, taking in its familiar walls and familiar smells. The whole place seemed faceless, with barely any sign of individuality or anything that could really be considered decoration. A single shelf against one wall of the main room included three books, one of them his precious, hidebound copy of The Law. Like all Mags, Kane could access all rules, amendments and subsections of the Cobaltville penal code merely by engaging the computer system, but there was something reassuring about having a genuine physical copy of the codes to refer to in his quiet moments. Three tall windows shed light onto the shelf and the wall to which it was attached, and Kane glanced through the panes for a moment, taking in the familiar lights glittering on the Administrative Monolith, which loomed over the ville.
Exhausted, he slumped down on the sagging cushions of his old couch, pondering what to eat. It was strange, he thought, to feel so tired after waking from a dream.