“I took the data held by the mat-trans,” Decimal River told Cloud Singer as she humbly stared at his laptop screen, “and added a transgenic alternator to their DNA sequences.”
Cloud Singer looked at him blankly.
“Essentially, I made them obey us,” Decimal River expanded. “Doubles of the Cerberus warriors that follow our commands.”
“What are they doing now?” Cloud Singer asked.
Decimal River enlarged a window on his glowing screen, upon which data flows raced by. “The three of them are active,” he assured her, “pursuing their primary objective.”
GRANT SAT ON THE GROUND with his arm around Shizuka, watching the sun set behind Trapper Peak. The beautiful warrior woman looked up at him, admiring the firm set of his jaw, the intensity that burned in his eyes. “It has been nice,” she said quietly, “just spending a day like this, with no dangers.”
Grant looked down at her and smiled. “No dangers,” he repeated. “Long may it last.”
Her arms wrapped around him, Shizuka pushed herself closer to Grant’s warm body.
IN THE SHADOWS of the machine room, amid the thrumming and whirring of the various units, Kane was using a heavy wrench to loosen bolts on the main air-conditioning processor. The two bucketlike canisters of phosgene were resting on the floor, close to his feet, and both of them were still sealed tightly. He groaned as he tried to loosen another of the tremendous bolts that held the front panel onto the blocky unit. The bolt wouldn’t move, no matter how hard he strained—it may well have been stuck in the same position for two hundred years, he knew, and it wasn’t going to budge for all the sweat he expended.
“Damn it,” Kane grunted, tossing the wrench aside with a loud clank. He took a step back and stared angrily at the processing unit, hands on hips. “Well,” he decided, “there’s more than one way to crack a nut.”
Kane took up the wrench once more and ran his free hand across the front panel of the processor. It was thick with a black, powdery dust, though whether this was an accumulation of weeks or months or years he couldn’t tell. Beneath the dust, the cold metal of the unit thrummed against his touch. Kane pushed against it, driving the heel of his hand into the panel and feeling it give just a little. It wouldn’t buckle to his touch, but it was thin enough that he might bust through it with a few good swipes of the heavy wrench.
Kane took a half step back, holding the wrench in a two-handed grip and raising it behind his shoulder, like a baseball player in the batter’s box. With a loud cry, Kane swung the metal wrench into the front panel of the boxy unit. The wrench hit with the loud clash of metal on metal before rebounding back along its arc, dragging Kane with it.
He looked and saw a jagged, silvery scar had appeared in the black dust where the wrench had hit. The metal panel had dented just a little, a tiny, silver kiss against its flat surface.
Pulling the wrench over his shoulder once more, Kane swung another heavy blow to the machine.
He worked like this for more than fifteen minutes until the panel finally came loose, a large rent across its surface, one corner torn from its housings. By the time he had created the hole, Kane was wet with sweat, his hair damp, his shirt clinging to his back.
“There we go.” He smiled, placing the wrench atop the huge unit and pulling at the rent with his hands, enlarging the separation. After separating the sharp edges of the broken panel, Kane eyed the bucketlike canisters on the floor beside him. He wanted to open both canisters of phosgene while they were inside the unit, both to ensure that they did the maximum damage and also to hide the evidence of his sabotage from a casual viewing. He yanked at the panel but it wouldn’t bend far enough, and he realized he needed a lever to properly open it. Picking up the wrench once more, Kane got to work, bashing and levering the torn panel to widen the gap he had created.
As he worked, cursing and hammering, Kane was unaware that a man called Ben Michaels had entered the vast processing room and was watching him, his brows raised in a mixture of surprise and confusion. Michaels, like so many of the staff at Cerberus, was a Manitius Moon Base exile. In his late forties with tanned skin and a balding pate, Michaels was an engineer and he had adopted the role of maintenance man for the redoubt along with a number of other people best suited to the task.
“Hey, hey!” he called as he saw Kane take another swing at the front panel of the main processor with the wrench. “I don’t think you should be doing that.”
Kane looked up at the man, his eyes narrowed. “What’s it to you?” he snarled.
“Wait,” Michaels said, “I know you. Kane, isn’t it?”
Kane just glared at him, an unspoken challenge in his erect stance.
After a moment, Michaels continued, his tone wary now as he spoke to the larger man. “I don’t know what’s going on, Kane, but this wasn’t okayed by me, and that’s no way to handle a wrench, friend,” he explained. “I don’t want to rain on your parade or whatever, but whatever your orders were, no one told me you’d be doing this. That is to say, I mean, whatever it is you’re doing.”
Kane continued to glare at the engineer from the darkness, feeling the heavy weight of the wrench in his hand. “I’m sure we can straighten it out,” he said, and all emotion drained from his voice. “Here, let me show you my orders.”
Kane swung then, cracking Michaels across the side of the head with the heavy wrench. The engineer fell, crashing into the tall processing unit, yelping in pain. Kane pulled the wrench back and swung again, smashing with full fury at the man’s head once more.
Blood was smeared across Michaels’s face. His nose had caved in and his left eye was turning red as he staggered to keep his balance, his breath coming in ragged gasps. With one hand resting against the processor, Michaels leaned forward and spat. A great gob of blood, saliva and two shattered teeth landed at Kane’s feet. “What the devil are you doing?” he muttered, the words coming out strained through his swelling lips.
“Showing you how to handle a fucking wrench,” Kane told him, lunging forward and swinging the tool again.
Michaels’s screams of pain were masked amid the churning sounds of the air-conditioning units as they processed fresh air for the Cerberus personnel.
“DAMN IT!”
In the Cerberus operations center, Skylar Hitch flung down her miniature screwdriver in annoyance. Donald Bry looked up at her from his monitoring post beside Lakesh on the other side of the room.
“Something wrong, Skylar?” Bry asked.
Hitch looked at him, her frustration turning to embarrassment as she realized that everyone in the room had turned to watch her when she had let out that cry of annoyance. “Just…I can’t get this stupid capacitor to…Argh!” The normally timid computer tech looked as though she was going to punch the desk in front of her, where the circuit boards that she was working on resided.
Next to Donald Bry, Lakesh checked his desktop chron and spoke to Skylar in a soothing tone. “It’s almost 9:00 p.m.,” he began, “and I rather suspect you were working at this problem before I came in this morning, Skylar. Why don’t you go to your quarters and get some sleep.”
Skylar looked about to argue until Lakesh added reasonably, “Our old, worn-out computers will still be there in the morning.”
“Thank you, Dr. Singh,” Skylar acquiesced after a moment’s thought. She ran a hand through her hair, pushing at her dark bangs where strands had escaped the ponytail she wore, before standing up. She reached for the screwdriver and placed it carefully beside the motherboard at a perfect ninety-degree angle to the edge of the desk. “I’m sorry,” she said apologetically as she passed Lakesh’s desk on her way to the main door.
“Think nothing of it,” Lakesh told her, his smile warm and sincere. “See you tomorrow, Skylar.”
When the tech had left, Lakesh turned back to the report that he had been assessing with Donald Bry before pausing, a thoughtful, faraway look in his eye.
“Shall we get back to this report, Doctor?” Bry asked after a moment.
Lakesh glanced at him and smiled. “You know, it is getting late for all of us,” he decided in a loud voice. “Why don’t we conclude this tomorrow, when fresher heads will prevail, I’m sure.” With that, he dismissed the bulk of the monitoring team, leaving only a two-man crew to watch things. With no one out in the field, the Cerberus operations center could function with a skeleton staff quite easily; most of the monitoring systems functioned automatically and rarely needed input from a human being.
The remaining crew were Brewster Philboyd, who stayed at the communications desk to monitor any incoming calls, and Trent, the sallow-faced operator whose primary responsibility this day was for the mat-trans, but who would double as general systems checker and button pusher until the next shift came on at 1:00 a.m.
Brigid Baptiste remained behind, too, despite Lakesh’s suggestion that she call it a day. “You were out in the field this morning, and you’re still working on your reports,” he chastised her.
“It’s a field report,” she explained, peering up from her desk over the rectangular frames of her eyeglasses. “I like to get these finalized while all the information is still fresh in my mind.”
Lakesh snorted with laughter. Brigid’s notorious eidetic memory made her statement a fallacy, he knew, but he didn’t bother to argue. Some things you just wanted to get out of the way rather than putting them off for another day. He had known Brigid a long time, since way back when he had been her section supervisor in the Historical Division at Cobaltville, and he had always admired her dedication to a given task, her utter attention to detail. “Make sure you get a proper night’s sleep, though, Brigid,” he instructed her as he made his way through the operations room door.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Brigid assured him, “when I’m finished here I’ll sleep like a baby.”
IN THE HIDDEN CAVE in the outback, Cloud Singer turned to Broken Ghost, a frown creasing her brow. “So, they’re clones?” she asked.
Broken Ghost smiled indulgently. “Not really,” she said patiently. “Their technology, the mat-trans, works by generating and replicating digital files, downloading and uploading the matter that makes up human beings, their belongings, their essence. Like a computer, it’s essentially the transfer of a file containing information, nothing more than that.”
Decimal River broke into the conversation then, proud of his handiwork. “The files are held by the mat-trans units, but they are instantly wiped when the person rematerializes from quantum space. If they weren’t, there would be the risk of two, three or—” he shrugged “—a hundred of the same person running about. It’s a basic failsafe. I broke the failsafe, adding a strip of code to the transferring files. A virus worm that makes the reborn Kane, Grant and Baptiste pursue our needs over their own.”
“Is that possible?” Cloud Singer asked, astonished.
“There are limitations,” Decimal River admitted. “Their memories are flawed, so they will paint in the details of their pasts as required, like characters in a story.”
“With more time,” Broken Ghost added, “without the pressure of the Death Cry wave front, we would have made them perfect.”
Cloud Singer nodded, finally understanding the full scope of Broken Ghost’s audacious plan. “You promised me the head of Cerberus,” she said. “That was our agreement.”
“His greatest warriors are imprisoned beyond reach,” the assassin assured her, “and Cerberus itself will fall next. Then I will move in and kill Lakesh, completing our contract.”
Cloud Singer bowed her head in acknowledgment, cursing her own impatience.
KANE HAD WRAPPED Michaels’s body in a black trash bag he had found among a stash of materials in a corner of the vast machine room. He had placed Michaels’s body on the floor of the room, wedged beneath a series of wide pipes that distributed the air flow around the whole redoubt. Then he had gone back to working at the front panel of the huge processing unit, pulling at it, using the blood-spattered wrench as a lever to pull the rent wide.
Once Kane had the front section fully open, he crouched beside it and took a cloth from his pocket, tying it over his nose and mouth. Then he placed the first canister of phosgene inside the main junction of the processing unit, where three large pipes met, and pulled at the seals until the canister opened and began leaking its deadly, near odorless, colorless payload into the air. Pulling at the seals of the second, he placed it across from the first, wedging it where two wide pipes met, cooled by rushing water before they fed the Cerberus base with fresh air.
Once he was finished, Kane put hand and shoulder to the misshapen front panel and shoved until it bent back in an approximation of its former setting. The repair wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, but in the darkness of the room it would suffice. It only needed to remain undetected for twelve hours; by then the lethal toxins would be in every air shaft, feeding the Cerberus personnel with the deadly phosgene gas.
Kane stood back, admiring his handiwork, and beneath the kerchief he had placed over his mouth he smiled, a broad and terrifying grin.
Kane tossed the bloodstained wrench beneath the piping before he made his way to the service door and departed the air-processing room.
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT, and the lighting in the Cerberus operations room had been dimmed, giving the large area a cozy feel. Brigid Baptiste sat at her desk running through the details of her report on the screen. At one of the desks beside her, Brewster Philboyd looked about ready to drop off to sleep, his large frame slumped in his chair at the communications desk.
Brigid leaned across to him, speaking quietly. “Brewster?” she said tentatively. “Why don’t you go catch some sleep. You look beat.”
Brewster removed his spectacles and rubbed at his eyes before he turned to look at her. “I’d love to,” he admitted, “but my shift’s over in an hour. Not long now.”
Brigid shrugged. “I can monitor communications if you like,” she told him. “I’m only doing a final run-through on my report here. I don’t mind pulling double duty.”
Philboyd smiled, glancing around the large room. It was only himself, Brigid and Trent left now, since the mass exodus over three hours before. “Well,” he said, “I don’t really want to leave you alone.”
Brigid pointed to Trent. The sallow-featured man was scratching at his neck and looked thoroughly bored. “Trent will keep me company,” she assured him. “Go. We’ll be fine.”
Brewster thanked her and made his way to the door, offering a weary “good night” to Trent as he exited.
Trent looked up, stifling a yawn. “I’m dropping off myself,” he told Brigid as he stood up and stretched his limbs. He paced across the room to the small coffee percolator that sat behind Lakesh’s desk. “You want some java?” he asked Brigid as he picked up the pot.
She nodded. “That would be great,” she told him as she watched him peer at the pot. It contained just a tiny dribble of the rich, brown liquid and nothing more. “Think we’ll need more coffee, though.”
Trent laughed. “Heh, yeah. Y’know, I’ll just go up to the canteen and grab us a couple of cups,” he decided. “This pot’s not been cleaned in a week, I swear to you.”
Brigid offered an innocent expression. “I thought that all added to the flavor.”
“Sure, Ms. Baptiste,” Trent told her, nodding very seriously. “Someone who didn’t like washing up told you that, I reckon.”
Brigid shooed him away, assuring him she could handle the ops room for ten minutes on her own. As soon as Trent had left, Brigid stood up from her desk and walked swiftly across to Trent’s terminal. She sat down, brought up a live data stream regarding the mat-trans system and began working through her task. She estimated that Trent would return in twelve minutes. She would be finished in four.
SKYLAR HITCH STOOD before the mirror of her tiny bathroom, looking for spots on her skin as she cleaned her teeth. It had been a long day, and dark circles were definitely appearing under her eyes. She had begun work on the computers in the ops room at just after 6:00 a.m. and she had still been working at the motherboards at 9:00 p.m. when Lakesh had dismissed her.
She leaned forward over the compact sink, spitting toothpaste foam into the basin as she ran water from the faucet. As she did so, something occurred to her. It wasn’t a big revelation, just a little idea of how to repair the aging computers without going through the laborious process of cleaning and resoldering the components on the motherboards. Swishing her mouth out with water, Skylar grabbed her dressing gown and rushed out of her quarters, her furry-faced bunny slippers slapping against the tiles as she headed back to the main operations room.
When she reached the Cerberus ops room, Skylar found the lighting had been dimmed, and she was surprised to find only one other person working there. Brigid Baptiste sat at the main mat-trans terminal, punching in code at an incredible speed.
As ever, Brigid looked fantastic, her tall, agile body wrapped in one of the tight-fitting jumpsuits of the Cerberus operation, her red-gold hair radiant, cascading over her shoulders in a luxurious wave. By contrast, Skylar was five foot nothing, wearing an old dressing gown over the long T-shirt she habitually wore to bed, and the slippers that were shaped to look like cartoon bunny rabbits on her feet.
“Hi, Miss Baptiste,” Skylar said self-consciously as she scrambled across the room to the three desks that contained bits and pieces from the deconstructed computer units she had been working with that day.
Brigid looked up at her, a fierce look in her narrowed eyes. “Hello” was all she said before getting back to her work at the keyboard.
Skylar sat down at one of the three desks and looked at one of the circuit boards. It showed a dark line where smoke had damaged it, and Skylar sighed as she tilted it to the light. She couldn’t quite see what strength the capacitor ran to, and she leaned across and flicked on the desk lamp. Brigid glared at her as the light came on.
“Sorry,” Skylar said quietly, as though she had been caught making noise in a library. “I just had this idea…. Won’t disturb you.”
Brigid went back to her work at the mat-trans-linked computer, ignoring Skylar as the IT expert went back to her own work.
Skylar realized that she needed something to pry the capacitor loose, and she reached across the desk for the little screwdriver that she had left beside the ancient circuit diagrams that she had printed out earlier that day. As she stretched across the desk, she happened to glance at Brigid’s terminal screen and, without really thinking, asked what she was up to.
Brigid’s head remained focused on the screen for a moment, but her typing fingers stopped their furious movement. “What am I up to?” she asked darkly. Slowly, Brigid’s head turned, and then she was facing Skylar, a dark, angry look on her features. “Do you recall what happened to the curious cat, Skylar?”
“Um, excuse me?” Skylar asked, wondering what on earth Brigid was so mad about.
Brigid stood up and stalked across the room, her hands forming into fists as she walked the five paces to bring her before Skylar’s desk.
“I’m sorry, Miss Baptiste,” Skylar said, “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I can come back later, it’s fine.” Skylar stood up then, looking across to the large door that led into the room.
Brigid took a step to the left, blocking Skylar’s path. “I never liked you,” she said ominously.
Skylar couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Where had that come from? “I’m…I’m sorry?” she stuttered. “I’ll go. I’m going. Sorry.”
The IT expert took a single step, but Brigid’s right arm shot out, her fist punching at the smaller woman’s face. Skylar maneuvered out of its path just in time, and Brigid’s fist smacked against her collarbone instead, forcing her to stumble backward.
“Please,” Skylar began, “I don’t…”
Brigid didn’t let her finish the sentence. Her booted foot kicked high, thumping Skylar hard in the chest, knocking her backward once more until she slammed into the side of the desk. “The curious cat was killed, Skylar,” she said.
“What’s gotten into you?” Skylar wailed fearfully, struggling to keep her balance as she was forced against the desks.
“I never liked you,” Brigid said again, leaping forward, her hands closing around Skylar’s throat. “Nosy and arrogant because you know how to operate computers. That’s not a talent, Skylar, that’s barely even an ability.”
“P-please,” Skylar croaked as Brigid’s grip tightened around her neck, “Miss Baptiste. I think something is very wrong with you…. Please try to—” She could tell that Brigid wasn’t listening, and she struggled vainly to loosen the grip of the taller woman. There was a dark, determined look in Brigid’s narrowed eyes, a horrible joy in the set of her smiling jaw. Skylar thought that she knew what it was—bloodlust.
Skylar’s throat was aching now and it was getting harder to breathe. She couldn’t shake the other woman’s grip. Brigid was a trained fighter, powerful, her body a tool, a weapon. And Skylar Hitch? Skylar Hitch was just an IT consultant; all she ever did was sit at a desk working on a computer problem. She had never even visited the Cerberus gymnasium. Her hand scrambled across the desk, grabbing for something she was sure had to be there.
The screwdriver.
Her hand brushed against it and Skylar saw it in her mind’s eye. Her fingers clutched at it, grabbing the handle of the little four-inch tool. Her vision seemed darker now, but with the dim lighting it was hard to really be sure. Brigid pushed down, hands clamped around Skylar’s tiny throat, pushing inward, ever inward, wringing her neck.
Suddenly, Skylar’s arm swung, jabbing the screwdriver’s blade into Brigid’s side, just below the taller woman’s rib cage. Brigid howled in pain, and her grip loosened on Skylar’s throat. Skylar pushed her away and stood there, leaning against the table, retching and coughing.
Although she did not look up, Skylar heard Brigid wrench the blade from her body and toss it aside. The plastic handle of the screwdriver tinkled as it hit the tiles of the floor.
“You fucking bitch,” Brigid growled behind her, and Skylar turned to see the red-haired woman stomp up to her and reach for her face with outstretched hands. There was a tear in Brigid’s jumpsuit along the left-hand seam, and a small circle of red was forming on the white material there. Brigid’s hands played across Skylar’s head for a moment, securing their position before she began twisting. Skylar Hitch felt the enormous, screaming pain as something in her neck gave, and then she blacked out.
SKYLAR’S TINY BODY fell to the floor in a heap as Brigid let go and stepped away. The IT expert’s neck was broken, and Brigid knew she was either dead or dying. It was a move that Kane had shown her once, years before, one that Brigid had committed to memory, like everything else she saw.
She leaned down and dragged the smaller woman’s limp body across the room by her hair. Opening the arma glass door to the mat-trans, Brigid tossed Skylar’s body inside. She closed the door behind her and walked back to the terminal that she had been working at. After a half dozen keystrokes, the emitter array began to whine and mist began to fill the mat-trans unit before the body of Skylar Hitch was digitized and spirited away.
Brigid glanced at her wrist chron. Seven minutes. Trent would be back in five more and it wouldn’t do for him to see her working at the mat-trans terminal.
STANDING IN A SILK dressing gown so short that it left her legs almost entirely bare, Shizuka watched from the doorway as Grant admired himself in the bathroom mirror. He had removed his shirt and shoes, and he stood there in his pants, examining his face as though wondering whether he needed to shave.
Silently, Shizuka watched him, intrigued by the strange ritual he was going through before coming to bed. Suddenly, Grant turned and looked at her, a smile on his lips. “Ha, caught me,” he said, the trace of embarrassment in his tone.
“Doing what?” Shizuka asked in her soft, musical voice.
“Looking at old scars,” Grant admitted. “Thinking about things that happened. Just remembering, really.”
Shizuka stared at him for a few seconds before turning and walking across the little bedroom that formed the main part of Grant’s private quarters. “Don’t take too long,” she told him, “or I’ll be called back to New Edo.”
Undoing the silk ties on her short dressing gown, Shizuka sat on the bed. She removed the dressing gown as she watched through the open door while Grant stood at the basin. It was a little unsettling the way he seemed to be watching himself so intensely, examining his eyes, his teeth, as though he didn’t quite recognize who he was supposed to be. But a moment later, the feeling left Shizuka as Grant switched off the bathroom light and paced across the room to join her in bed. He removed his pants and underwear, tossing them to the floor and joining Shizuka under the covers.
Shizuka felt desire rise in her as she smelled his skin so close, felt his lips push against hers. She kissed him back, pulling him closer, her hands running down the curved muscles of his familiar, scarred body. Grant was strong, and Shizuka felt that strength as he pushed at her, his body over hers, his kisses so passionate that they drove her back against the pillow. His mouth pushed into hers, his body pressed against hers, and Shizuka wanted him so much in that instant.
And then he bit her, his teeth catching her lip in his passion, and it jerked her back to reality, out of the forming fires of her passion, and she yelped. “Careful, lover,” she admonished, pulling her face away from his.
Grant ignored her, his face looming closer in the semidarkness of the room, kissing her once more with heat and passion. And violence—above all else, violence.
Shizuka pushed him away. “Slow down. You hurt me,” she said quietly.
Yet still he ignored her, pushing against her naked body, positioning her beneath him so that he could enter her, have her. As Grant thrust against her, Shizuka rolled, flipping his weight off her.
“I said slow down,” she said, louder this time, a slight edge to her voice now.
Grant lifted his torso above her, his smile showing bright in the dimly lit room. And then he said one single word, and it both scared and repulsed Shizuka as she lay in the bed before her trusted lover: “No.”
He was upon her again, holding her wrists, forcing her down against the mattress as she squirmed beneath him. “Let me go,” she demanded. “Let go of me. This is not funny, Grant-san.”
Grant yanked her wrists above her head, and Shizuka stretched her body taut, gasping in pain. Grant brought her wrists together, holding them down with a single, large hand, leaving his other hand free to probe her body, working its way down her torso as she squirmed.
Shizuka didn’t want him. She didn’t even want to be in the same room as him now. Grant had never done this before, never been violent with her. He was a strong man, used to war, driven by rage sometimes, but with her he had always been gentle.
Suddenly Shizuka knew. As Grant forced his body against hers, pawing at her breasts, smiling sadistically as he listened to and ignored her pleas, Shizuka suddenly knew. It wasn’t Grant.
Whatever it looked like, whomever it appeared to be, this man—this monster—wasn’t Grant.
She shifted her weight, sinking into the mattress before kicking out with her legs like a beached fish. It was difficult to get any leverage while Grant held her like this, but she kicked hard enough to dislodge him, make him rear back.
Grant still held her wrists tight against the mattress, and Shizuka rolled, kicking backward before kneeing him hard in his side, pulling her leg back to kick again and again. Grant—or whoever he really was—howled in rage, and his grip on her faltered.
Finding her hands free, Shizuka moved with lightning swiftness, scampering up the length of the bed toward the wall behind it, her legs kicking out as she scrambled away from the huge ex-Mag. The monster with Grant’s face reached out, grabbing her by her ankle and yanking her down onto the mattress and back toward him. She let him pull her, going limp as he hoisted her toward him, lunging at her with his body. Then her free leg snap-kicked into his face, the ball of her foot catching him in the side of his nose so that a spray of blood shot across the room and spattered the wall.
The Grant thing roared in pain, letting go of Shizuka’s ankle as his hands went to his bloodied nose. A few spots of blood dripped from it, and Grant tossed his head to shake them away, taking his eyes from her for a moment.
Shizuka was off the bed then, diving to the floor. She landed beside Grant’s pants where they lay in a heap there. Something in Shizuka’s mind set off an alarm then. Grant was once a Magistrate; he was extremely disciplined. She had never known him to discard his clothes in such a casual, messy manner, never in all the time they had been together. And then she recalled the coat hanging in his wardrobe, slightly wonky on its hanger. The devil was in the details, she realized.
Grant placed one foot on the floor, hard, and he leaned down to grab Shizuka by her flowing hair. At the same moment, Shizuka was reaching underneath the bed without looking, feeling the scabbard that she had placed beneath it for safekeeping while they had enjoyed the surrounding countryside of the Bitterroot Mountains.
Shizuka yelped as Grant pulled her up to her knees by her hair, and his hand drew back, preparing to slap her, a savage grin on his face. “Don’t tell me this isn’t fun,” he said, laughing at her.
Shizuka pulled the katana—still in its scabbard—from under the bed and jammed it against her lover’s ribs. The blunt edge of the scabbard wasn’t enough to do any real damage, but the shock made Grant tip from the bed, letting go of Shizuka’s hair, a few strands tearing away in his hands as he dropped backward. It was all the time she needed.
Her left hand clutched the uppermost part of the scabbard, pulling it down and toward her as her right held firmly to the sword’s grip. Twenty-five inches of tempered steel appeared from the scabbard, glinting as the blade caught the dim bedside lights of the room, singing a quiet, pure note as its length emerged.
“Whoever you are,” Shizuka warned him, “you have just made one very big mistake.”
The thing that looked and moved like Grant stared at her from the bed, and a cruel smile crossed his face once more. “You’ve got me all wrong, Shizuka, my love,” he cooed, “my dearest heart.”
“Fuck you,” Shizuka screamed, swinging the blade at Grant.
The Grant thing moved fast, powering himself from the bed and out of reach of Shizuka’s swinging blade. She jumped forward, balancing atop the bed in a fighting stance, the blade poised over her head as she watched her cruel target scamper across the small room until he reached the wall.
“What did you do with him?” Shizuka demanded. “What did you do with Grant-san?”
“You crazy slut,” Grant snapped back. “I didn’t do anything with him. Come now, put the sword down. You’re fucking delusional.”
Shizuka’s eyes fixed on Grant’s, on this thing that pretended to be Grant, and she shook her head ever so slightly. “No, I’m not,” she assured him. “Slow on the uptake, maybe, that I’ll accept. But you’re not Grant. You’re nothing like him.”
The huge ex-Mag smiled confidently, deciding to change tack. “Not what you thought this afternoon,” he said, goading her. “You were all over me like a bitch in heat back there in the woods. Surely you haven’t forgotten—”
“Shut up,” Shizuka snarled.
“I certainly haven’t forgotten,” he continued. “I can’t wait to tell Kane all about it….”
“Shut up,” Shizuka said again, more insistent this time. But she realized something even as this vile creature spoke—Kane was in on this, too. The pair of them were different, no longer themselves. And it stood to reason that Brigid Baptiste was one of “them,” too, whatever they were. The three of them traveled together, a single unit, and what affected one of them had likely affected them all.
“Come on, girl,” Grant cooed, his arms stretched wide, “let’s get back to bed. Kiss and make up. What do you say?”
Shizuka’s eyes tracked across Grant’s naked form, the familiar muscles, the scars and moles. “Never!” she told him, leaping from the bed and across the room, her katana thrusting forward in a lethal strike.
The blade hummed as it rushed through the air, and Grant attempted to spin below it in a swift, frantic movement. Something clipped the side of his head and he felt hot liquid pump down the side of his face. He looked up and saw, lying stuck to the gray wall of the little room, his left ear, a splatter of blood shining all around it.
“You crazy bitch,” Grant cursed, driving himself toward Shizuka with his left arm outstretched, ready to grab her thin, swanlike neck.
Hating the close quarters of the small room, Shizuka swung the blade again and its razor-sharp edge smacked into and through the wrist of Grant’s outstretched arm, spraying blood across the room in a pumping geyser.
Grant skipped backward, looking at his twisted hand in incredulity. The hand was intact but it hung at an odd angle now, a whole chunk of his wrist severed down to the bone, leaking blood over the floor. “I’ll make you eat that knife before I’m done with you,” he assured Shizuka as she shifted to a two-handed grip on the blade.
Shizuka wasn’t listening. Her feet pounded against the floor and she ran at Grant, two, three, four paces across the tiny room, the katana poised before her. As Grant tried to dodge he found himself right up against another wall, nowhere left to run. And then the blade drove through him, tip first, cutting a path through the center of his rib cage, just below the breastbone. The blade tilted upward, piercing Grant’s body at a thirty-degree angle, cutting through muscle and organ as Shizuka drove a path through her “lover’s” body. There was a violent thump, and the blade ceased moving—it had hit the back wall behind Grant.
Grant’s eyes were wide open, the whites showing all around the pupils as he stared at Shizuka; his body gradually slid down her blade under its own weight. “Shizuka, my darling,” he breathed. “How could you?” Then his knees buckled, and Shizuka extracted the blade as the thing that looked like Grant sank to the floor, surrounded by a pool of its own blood.
She stood there, her breathing heavy, her heart racing, looking at the familiar body that lay before her. “What on earth have I stumbled onto?” she asked in a low, frightened whisper.
Whatever it was she would have to tell Lakesh, and he in turn would need to alert the whole Cerberus crew as to just what was going on. Killers with the faces of friends in their midst. And more. A killer with the face of her trusted lover, and he had almost fooled her, had fooled her entirely for a time. It almost didn’t bear thinking about.
Shizuka grabbed her silk dressing gown from where it lay across the cushions of a chair, put it on and left the quarters, the bloody sword still clutched in her hand. She had to find Lakesh right away.