“I’m sorry,” Brigid was babbling as the black-garbed Magistrate pushed the muzzle of his Sin Eater painfully into her midriff. “I just tried to take care of her. She’s my niece. Please…”
Magistrate Kane’s expression, his eyes hidden behind the dark lenses of his glasses, didn’t change, but there was a note of confusion in his furious voice. “What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I should have registered, I know,” Brigid continued, her words rushing out, “but I was so scared, so scared I would lose her, that the Mags would come and take her away. I’m good for her. I’m a good mother to her. Please don’t. Please don’t take her.”
“Lady,” Kane growled, “I do not have one clue about what you are talking about.” His head seemed muzzy, his thoughts unclear, almost as though they were being blocked by an exterior power. Hadn’t he known whom she was talking about just moments before?
“Abigail,” Brigid said. “You came for Abigail.”
“Who the heck is Abigail?” Kane asked, easing the pressure of the Sin Eater from the archivist’s belly.
“My niece,” Brigid told him, the tension clear in her muscles as she stood pushed against the wall with the intimidating Magistrate right before her.
Kane turned then, peering at the doorway to the little apartment and seeing the girl pulling at the bandage on her arm, tearing the scabs away with her nails. “The girl,” he muttered, as if to himself. Then he turned to Brigid and spoke firmly, holding the Sin Eater where she could see it. “You stay right there, Baptiste. Don’t even blink unless I tell you otherwise. Understand?”
Brigid nodded, defeat clear in her stance now.
As Kane walked across the small lounge and into the little corridor that led to the doorway where the child stood, he heard Brigid sobbing, “Please don’t hurt her.” He ignored her. He wasn’t here to hurt a child, but he could see the blood on the girl’s arm, the pained satisfaction in her grimace as she tore at the itchy scab.
Kane crouched on his haunches, bringing his hidden eyes to roughly the same level as the girl’s. “Abigail? I need you to come inside now,” he said, his voice sincere.
The girl looked at him, her jaw set defiantly. “Are you going to shoot me?”
Kane returned the Sin Eater back into its wrist housing and shook his head. “No, I’m not going to shoot you,” he assured the blond-haired girl.
Abigail picked at the scab, her nails turning red with dried blood. “Are you going to shoot Auntie Brigid?” she asked.
Kane held his hand out to the girl. “Come inside,” he told her.
Abi looked up, seeing her aunt standing against the wall of the apartment. Brigid was trembling and there were tears rolling down her rosy cheeks, but when she caught Abi’s eye she nodded firmly. Abigail walked forward and took the Magistrate’s gloved hand. Kane stood up and closed the door behind the girl, leading her back into the apartment and placing her on the couch. She sat there, swinging her legs and watching him warily, her hand still fidgeting with the scab on her arm.
“How did you do that?” Kane asked the girl, pointing to her scabbed arm.
“Lauren pushed me off the stage at school,” Abigail told him. “It was deliberately on purpose. Are you going to shoot her, Magistrate?”
Kane smiled just slightly at the girl’s hopeful request. “I’m not going to shoot anyone,” he assured her. “I’m just going to talk to your aunt for a while, okay?”
Abi nodded very seriously, as only children did.
“You have some gauze?” Kane asked Brigid. “Something we can use to stanch the blood?”
Brigid looked at him, fear in her eyes. “Please don’t take her from me, Magistrate Kane,” she said, her thoughts racing, confused and muddled. “Please, I implore you.”
Kane stood before the woman, looking her up and down and feeling increasingly as if he had made a big mistake. She was babbling, afraid of him, of what he would do, and her fear threatened to overwhelm her. He needed to break down that barrier if he was to figure out what was really going on, why he knew her and how she connected to the tattooed woman who had attacked him. Kane looked from Brigid to her niece, seeing their fear so palpable, and then he did a very unusual thing for a Mag.
He raised his hand to his face and he removed his dark shades, folded the arms and placed them in the inside pocket of his jacket. He looked at Brigid with his steely blue-gray eyes. “I’m not here for your niece,” he assured her.
Brigid looked at him, flinching for a moment from his penetrating gaze. “I…I know I shouldn’t have hidden…”
“I’m not here for her, Baptiste,” Kane said. “I’m not here to take her away and I’m not here to hurt her. Now, why don’t you go sit down while I look in your bathroom cabinet?”
Brigid looked perplexed. “My bathroom…?”
“Sit,” Kane instructed, gesturing to the couch.
Brigid let out a long breath that she didn’t realize she had been holding, and then she walked across the little room and sat with Abigail. As Kane disappeared into the bathroom, Brigid examined the wound on her niece’s arm, telling her that she shouldn’t scratch it.
“Is the Magistrate man going to shoot us, Auntie?” Abi asked, her voice a whisper.
“He says he won’t, munchkin,” Brigid assured her, though she wasn’t nearly half as certain as she tried to sound.
The Magistrate returned with a package of gauze pads, a bottle of disinfectant and a roll of tape. He handed them to the redhead and stood over her as she cleaned the girl’s wound and dressed it once more.
“So, why are you here, Magistrate Kane?” Brigid asked as she blotted disinfectant around the wound.
“I saw you in the market,” Kane began. “Did you see me? I saw you and I felt something, like déjà vu.”
Brigid looked up at him and smiled, her face still wet with tears. “Are you…You’re not trying to come on to me, are you?”
“Shit, no,” Kane answered, looking a little embarrassed. “It’s…it’s hard to explain, but I think that maybe you and I know each other. In another life, somehow.”
“Abi, stop squirming,” Brigid said, and she didn’t bother to look up as she carefully dressed Abigail’s wound. “With the best of respect, Magistrate, that does sound a lot like a come-on.”
Kane ignored her, knowing that the only way to really explain what he meant was to give her all the facts. If she was the enemy, he would know, wouldn’t he? “I was attacked,” he told her, “by a girl, but something strange happened. I was attacked in the street by a girl who wasn’t there.”
“I recall a poem about a man who wasn’t there again today, and the narrator wishing he’d go away,” Brigid stated.
“What’s that?” Kane asked.
“It’s a sort of nonsense poem.”
Kane nodded and sighed. “So this girl attacked me, maybe eighteen years old, and she was like nothing you’ve ever seen. Her body was covered in tats, weird stuff like circuitry, and her clothes—they were so strange.”
“This is very interesting, Magistrate,” Brigid said, “but I’m not really seeing how it connects to me.”
“We fought, me and this strange-looking girl, and then she disappeared,” Kane said. “I was standing there and she just went, like she’d never even existed. And if she doesn’t exist,” Kane said thoughtfully, “then neither do you, Brigid Baptiste.”
“What makes you say that?” Brigid asked, scoffing.
“Because I got the same vibe off her as I did off you when I first saw you in the Market Square,” Kane told her.
“So I don’t exist,” Brigid said. “That’s just great. Thanks for dropping by and scaring my niece and wrecking my apartment, Magistrate.”
“Stop calling me that,” Kane said quietly. “Stop calling me Magistrate. It’s Kane.”
“Well, Kane,” Brigid told him, “I’m not really following any of this. I think perhaps I should call your superiors.”
Kane scratched his head, felt the pressure of his conflicting emotions, his strange, nonsensical thoughts. “The thing of it is,” he said, “what if she did exist? What if she exists and you exist and I exist, but we’re it? What if everything else here is…a trick?”
“What?”
“I have this idea,” Kane told her, “that maybe we’re all Magistrates stuck in some big prison. At first I thought that maybe you were the jailer, but I’m pretty certain that’s not the case. I think you’re a prisoner, too, and that’s why I know you.”
“You don’t know me,” Brigid said, “and I think you need medical attention. You’re deranged. I thought you were going to…to take Abi from me.”
Kane looked at the beautiful woman, her pretty little niece, and he cursed himself. He had come in here and terrified them and made things worse for everyone and he had proved nothing, solved nothing. He drew the dark glasses from his pocket, placing them over his eyes once more as he turned to leave. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t say anything about your niece in this one-person apartment, okay?”
“Thank you,” Brigid said, “Kane.”
As Kane reached the door the old question came back to him. He turned and looked at Brigid Baptiste as she watched him. “Baptiste, what is Cerberus?”
The color drained from Brigid’s already pale face and her jaw dropped. “What?” she asked. It was the island. The island in the report, the island that looked like a three-headed dog. And the dog. The lazy dog. The lazy dog that the quick brown fox never jumped over. But why wouldn’t he jump over a lazy dog? It made no sense. It was like the man who wasn’t there, and he wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish…
“Close the door,” Brigid said in a hushed voice, feeling nausea rising in her gut. “Close the door and come inside.”
Kane did so, pushing the door shut. “What is it?”
“Kane,” Brigid began, standing up from the couch, feeling suddenly woozy, “I’m going to show you something that would get me arrested and locked away for a long time. But if you’re right, I think it holds the answers.”
“I’d already have you on the illegal child, if I wanted.” Kane smiled sympathetically. “I think we’re past all that now.”
Brigid told Abi to sit quietly as she led Kane to her bedroom. Kane looked around him, seeing the jumbled clothes and the chair that had been shoved against one wall. Brigid reached for the wardrobe doors and opened them. Inside, Kane saw the old DDC computer on the little shelf-cum-desk, its screen still glowing where Brigid had been working on it before he had arrived.
“That,” Kane stated, “is the kind of violation I can’t turn a blind eye to. It would mean my badge.”
Brigid ignored him. She was in deep already; there was no turning back now. “Read the screen, Kane,” she said.
Kane leaned over her shoulder, looking at the glowing words through his dark lenses: “The quick brown fox never jumps over the lazy dog.”
“Is this another of your nonsense poems, Baptiste?” he asked.
“It’s a mnemonic,” she told him. “An old-fashioned way to test the keyboard of a typewriter. The phrase uses every letter of the alphabet.”
Kane read the screen again, then looked at Brigid. “Nice, but what am I looking at?”
Brigid was calculating it in her head then, but she already knew the answer. “Why does the quick brown fox never jump?” she asked. “Why ‘never’? It’s pointless.”
“It’s just a phrase,” Kane said. “All the letters, right?”
Brigid shook her head. “You don’t need never,” she assured him. The n’s in brown, the e in the, and so on. The word is redundant.”
Kane looked at it, realizing that she was right. The v and r were already present in over. “Your point being?” he prompted.
“I think you’re right, Kane,” Brigid said thoughtfully. “I knew it all along, and that phrase proves it.”
NURSE ELAINE WAS PLUMPING the pillows behind Grant’s head, leaning over him, all curves and swells beneath her starched white uniform.
“Do you know,” Grant said, “you must be just about the most perfect woman I ever saw.”
Elaine blushed, shaking her head in denial as she eased him back down onto the bed.
“No, I mean it,” Grant assured her. “I mean, if you asked every man on this ward to describe his dream girl, I’m pretty sure they’d all say it’s you.”
“Grant, please,” Elaine whispered, moving closer to him, “you’re embarrassing me.” She bent at the waist, leaning close to his face. “Someone will hear,” she said, that mischievous twinkling in her eye.
Grant closed his eyes in a long blink, and behind the lids he saw the thing he had seen in the theater, the beast that she had been overwhelmed by. He opened his eyes and she was still there, hot breath brushing against his face.
“What is Cerberus?” Grant asked, his eyes never leaving hers.
“‘THE QUICK…BROWN…fox…’” Kane read the phrase aloud, shaking his head. “I don’t get it, Baptiste, what does this mean? Who is the fox?”
Brigid smiled indulgently as she explained. “There is no fox and there is no dog. It’s just a phrase used by typists in the Beforetime to ensure that the keyboard worked. You see?”
Kane glared at her. “I see nothing.”
“You don’t understand how my mind works,” Brigid began.
Kane cut her off. “Don’t start believing that that makes you special,” he advised her. “I don’t understand how any woman’s mind works.”
Brigid laughed and shook her head. “I have this incredible memory,” she said. “I mean, I can remember details that other people never even noticed. I can recall everything. It’s called an eidetic memory.”
Kane looked at her blankly. “Okay, and so this proves…?” he prompted.
“Let’s say that we’ve been tricked somehow, fooled into believing that we belong here, in Cobaltville,” Brigid proposed. “We’d remember coming here, right?”
Kane nodded. “Unless someone did something to our heads,” he said, beginning to follow her line of reasoning.
“Exactly,” Brigid cried. “And, you see, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you are trying your damn luck if you think you can fool someone with a photographic memory.”
Kane laughed. “Go on.”
“They changed our brains,” she said, “our very way of thinking. Fooled us into believing what we see, what we feel. But I knew. From the very start, I knew. I just didn’t realize.”
“And the quick brown fox…?” Kane asked.
“He jumps over the lazy dog, always has, always will,” Brigid explained. “Those bastards thought they could fool me, but my subconscious knew all along.”
“I still don’t get it,” Kane admitted after a few seconds.
“Every letter of the alphabet is contained in the sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,’” Brigid told him. “By inserting the word never, my subconscious was telling me not to trust the alphabet, words, the very device through which we comprehend the world. To not trust what I saw, what I felt. Everything we are told here is a lie.”
Kane nodded slowly. “But if that’s the case, if you’re so smart, why did you need me to bust in here and point it out to you?”
He wasn’t mocking her, Brigid knew; it was an entirely reasonable question in the circumstances. “They distracted me,” she realized. “They put something in my way that I couldn’t see past, like a wall or a blind or…” Suddenly, Brigid stood up and stepped away from the computer nook.
“What is it?” Kane asked as she pushed past him, exiting the bedroom as though sleepwalking, oblivious to his questions. “What’s wrong?”
Brigid ignored him as she walked into the apartment’s lounge and looked at the little girl sitting on the couch, gazing into the three-dimensional diorama of the fume. “Abigail,” she said, her voice trembling, “come here, please. Come give your aunt a hug.”
Abigail looked confused as she got up from the couch, placing the fume to one side and walking across to Brigid. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked.
Brigid shook her head and pulled Abi close, holding her tight. “Oh no, munchkin,” she said, “you didn’t do anything wrong.”
Kane watched the scene from the bedroom doorway, feeling confused and irritated. “Baptiste,” he called. “Do you think you can explain this a bit more clearly?”
Brigid let go of her niece and held her out before her, looking at her familiar features, those emerald eyes that matched her own. “Go play with the fume, Abi,” she said quietly. “I have to work in my room for a little while. Okay?”
Abi turned and leaped onto the couch, picking up the fume and immersing herself into its virtual world.
Brigid turned and walked back to the bedroom, pushing the door closed once Kane had joined her. “It’s Abigail,” she told Kane. “She’s my emotional center—she holds me here in this world. But I don’t think that she’s real, Kane. I think she’s just a cruel trick to stop me from seeing what’s going on all around me. All around us.”
“That little girl?” Kane asked. “She seems so innocent…”
“She is,” Brigid said. “She has my eyes—did you notice that?”
Kane nodded. “I thought maybe she was your daughter when I first saw you.”
“That wouldn’t have been enough,” Brigid said. “My sister died in a crash and so I took care of her only daughter. She’s like my daughter with added guilt layered in. I look at her and I feel so guilty, Kane, that I never spoke to Bronwyn for years and years.”
“Your sister?” Kane asked.
“Ye—” Brigid began and stopped herself. “Probably no, probably just another, carefully constructed lie. I believe you now, Kane, but do you have any idea what you’ve stumbled on?”