This defunct branch of Hertz car rental is the property of the embassy, and is connected to it via a short foot tunnel. While the diplomatic status of the former is ambiguous and hinges on whether one could argue it to be “part” of the embassy, the latter is most definitely safe ground.
We felt it wise to have a secluded entrance, says Madison, for more discreet comings and goings.
Why leave all the Hertz signs up?
The what signs?
These, says Lydia as they pass one on their way to the foot tunnel.
Oh, the ambassador liked them. Thought they added a nice authentic feel to the place.
Fair enough.
The tunnel takes them into the embassy basement and past the kitchens: a warm dusty smell drifts from a nearby door. Now they’re on Logi soil and Fitz’s head cannot be taken from them. Lydia feels relieved, for Fitz more than herself—she knows she’ll be in very deep shit when she steps out of the embassy, but at least no one will be able to do horrible stuff to him anymore.
Lydia wonders if she could claim asylum on Logia or something. It’d be lonely, she’d be limited in how much time she could talk to people each day, and she’d more or less lose contact with everyone on Earth, including her family. And anyway the Logi probably wouldn’t let her go there. There’s no reason they should see her as their problem.
They ascend the stairs into the high-ceilinged lobby. Whereas Fitz liked the residence to have a broadly Earthlike aesthetic—for him, that was part of the point of living here—the embassy is a dizzying culture clash, with insanely deep-pile carpets that mimic the spongy floors of homes on Logia, and walls decorated with strangely colorless paper—not even really white or gray, if you stare at them they seem to have no depth, like you’re looking into mist. Apparently the Logi see them very differently. Fitz told her once he saw skies filled with birds.
A staff member rushes over urgently to speak to Madison. He seems aghast by what’s happened and for the first time Lydia senses they may not be hailed as heroes after all. She’d assumed Madison was carrying out orders, with clearance to resolve the situation by any means necessary. But perhaps she’s gone off-piste too.
Madison turns to Lydia. The ambassador wants to see us.
Us? Not just you?
Us.
Whenever Fitz came to the embassy he didn’t need Lydia, so she either didn’t come with him at all or waited in the reception room just off the lobby. Her only previous meeting with the ambassador wasn’t even at the embassy, but at the Met Gala earlier this year. When they were introduced he seemed unaware Fitz had a new translator, and asked what happened to the old one: then he and Fitz had a conversation Lydia was not privy to, and the ambassador moved on to another group without speaking to her again. She’s sure he won’t remember her.
The ambassador’s name is Temple. He’s quite short (by Logi standards, which means he’s a little taller than Lydia), and Lydia assumes he’s quite old, though she always finds it hard to tell: maybe he just moves and speaks slowly. He wears a thick robe that looks like a dressing gown and a shapeless hat that resembles a shower cap. Lydia will have to be careful these observations don’t leak out at any point. She offended an important trade negotiator back in London during a work experience placement in a very similar way: he had no scalp spikes and preferred to converse with his eyes closed, and Lydia couldn’t help thinking about how his head looked like a dirty tooth.
Take a seat, please, says Temple without looking up from the copious paperwork on his desk. When you see the desks of high-ranking officials on media, they’re always really neat and have, like, one document on them and a lamp, and the document is probably just for show anyway. Lydia notices that to one side of Temple’s desk there’s a wheeled office chair, a copyright-free printed thing like the ones in schools and public buildings everywhere, which is incongruous in the tasteful surroundings: Probably Temple doesn’t know humans would see it as basic and inelegant, and even if he does he probably doesn’t care. However, it is clearly there for human use and Lydia pulls it into position, then sits.
Madison takes one of the other chairs, which has a slightly convex back, and places the box on her lap.
Is that the head? Temple asks, allowing Lydia to hear. She’s rarely experienced three-way conversations like this: if she’s not required to translate, she doesn’t need to know, so she’s not looped in.
It is, says Madison. She starts to open the box—
Please, not here, says Temple. I don’t need to see it.
Of course, says Madison, folding it back down.
The police are livid, Temple says.
We didn’t expect them not to be, says Madison. Lydia wonders if she is included in this “we.”
They’re literally outside right now, demanding we give them that box and hand her—Temple points at Lydia—into their custody.
What have you told them?
I told them I had to speak to you first. But it’s going to take a great deal of work to smooth this over, you know.
It is, but they’re the ones who need to do it. What happened to Fitzwilliam is an outrage and they allowed it to happen.
I agree, but—
You think we were wrong to take it back? You want us to return it?
Not wrong as such, but there were more amicable ways of doing this. This has created quite a situation.
Yes, says Lydia, we noticed that when we were driving over here.
A ripple of amusement emanates from Madison, which she swiftly suppresses. Temple turns his attention to Lydia. The monitors are arriving tomorrow. This is not an ideal situation for them to find us in.
No, I see that.
I’m not clear what we’re supposed to do with you now.
If I may, Madison interjects, Lydia deserves our gratitude. She’s been the target of a sophisticated effort to manipulate her against us, and not only has she resisted it, she’s uncovered possible direct police involvement in it.
Temple leans back in his chair. Do I understand you correctly? You’re suggesting the NYPD conspired to manipulate this translator against us?
Not necessarily all of them, Lydia interjects. But someone there must be involved in this, I’m sure of it.
Tell him what you told me, Madison says. The whole thing.
Lydia looks to Temple. He gives a gesture Lydia recognizes as “open mind”—a steady unclenching of a fist accompanied by a studied, calm silence that awaits a response. She tries to keep her account as concise as possible, partly because the longer it goes on the less sober she’ll be, partly because the more detail she puts in, the madder she sounds.
This is very serious, says Temple, if true.
You don’t need to tell me it’s serious, I’ve been living it.
I went with her to the places where she was deceived, says Madison. Her reactions were absolutely in earnest, I can vouch for them. And then there’s this. She points to the box.
Temple shudders and looks away. The one thing missing from your story is who. All you have is an unspecified number of unidentified employees of the NYPD.
Yes, says Lydia, I’m very aware of that.
I think there’s something we can try, says Madison.
This surprises Lydia. Is there?
Madison taps the top of the box.
Temple has given his permission to go ahead with Madison’s proposal, provided they find a different room to do it in and don’t tell him the details. Lydia can’t really argue with either of these points. So a meeting room has been requisitioned and the box has been placed on the tall circular table in the center of it. Lydia clambers onto a chair and kneels on it so she can get a better view of what’s going on.
Madison opens the box and starts to lift the contents out. Lydia braces herself.
The shock of seeing Fitz’s head in the tank is dulled on a second viewing, but Lydia now realizes how many of the details she blanked out upon seeing it earlier. She paid little attention to the clumsy way his neck has been sealed, for instance—it looks like molded plastic and glue. She sees the slackness of his unmasked face through the distorting prism of the fluid. And she can see the cauterized blood under the helmet, where his head has been sliced into and patched with electronics. She wonders why that was necessary: perhaps to stimulate the brain into activity.
Madison busies herself with checking over the components that hang on the side of the tank, seemingly detached and unaffected. But then she suddenly says, Excuse me, turns away and hurriedly leaves the room, and Lydia senses the wave of upset and revulsion, and realizes she was just trying to act detached and unaffected.
Lydia is left alone in the room with Fitz’s head.
“You poor bastard,” she says. She’s never spoken aloud to him before. Even the best translators sometimes succumb to their instincts and speak aloud to Logi—she did it a few times when training for the job—but she never did it to Fitz. “Did you ever notice that? Depends what the last one you had was like, I suppose. You always said how brilliant she was. I hope I wasn’t too crap by comparison, anyway.”
Madison comes back into the room, composed once more, saying, Sorry about that.
It’s OK, Lydia says.
I don’t think there’s much chance of me managing to operate this. Can you try?
I’m no expert with this stuff.
But you’ve used things like this before, whereas I haven’t.
Lydia’s about to protest that, actually, she hasn’t used things like this, but realizes Madison’s definition of “things like this” is “any digital technology.” Madison rotates the tank—which means Lydia can no longer see Fitz’s face, but has a better view of the spots where his head has been opened up, so swings and roundabouts really—and pushes it across the table towards her.
The interface on the screen is not very user-friendly—it’s not based on off-the-shelf software and was plainly never designed for anyone other than its operator to use. It has its own power source and can connect to any pair of glasses, which supply it with a mic and phones. Like any such interface, it keeps a log of all connections and Lydia manages to locate it—but she’s unsurprised to find it’s been wiped, either by its operator or by someone at the NYPD. She searches through it, trying to find any clues anywhere in its records—but it’s a very basic device and there aren’t many places to look.
Do you think you might find something, you know … Madison points directly at Fitz’s head. In there?
Lydia glances at the head. You mean try to make contact with him? Would that work?
I’ve no idea. No one’s ever attempted this kind of ghoulish technology before. But if someone’s been speaking through him, perhaps they left some traces?
It seems possible, at least. But why do I have to do it? Lydia asks. You can talk to him better than I can.
Why do you say that?
Because I’m not one of you, am I?
But you spoke to him more than anyone. He was terribly antisocial, and you saw him every day. You know him much better than anyone else.
Lydia’s not sure she really knew him at all, yet she thinks Madison might be right. She works out how to turn on the power to the head and the tank glows very slightly—it seems power flows directly through the liquid, taking the place of the energy the body would usually supply. She feels it the moment she throws the switch—it’s not Fitz as he used to be, it’s a weak yet recognizable version of him, like a recording of a recording of a recording, growing a little fainter and more corrupted each time. It really is like his ghost has stepped into the room, unable to communicate but letting her know: I’m still here.
Lydia’s mind connects to what’s left of his with no effort, and she queasily becomes aware that he is in some sense alive. Previously she’d thought the machine merely plugged into the language centers of his brain and bypassed everything else, but the rest of the brain is in fact awake, just heavily suppressed so it can’t take any action. He knew what was happening to him and could do nothing about it.
She’s getting nothing coherent from the contact. Just this horrible uneasy feeling. It’s like talking to someone who’s asleep and having a nightmare, whimpering the occasional half sentence in reply. If she keeps listening, it’s possible something useful might surface—but it might not. There must be a way to adjust the settings and release him from this suppression so he can tell them who was responsible, but how? Her hand hovers over the interface, trying to make sense of it—probably the user was never intended to do anything other than plug in and talk through it, but it must be possible to tweak the settings. She finds a series of toggle switches and experiments with turning them off and on—
Lydia notices she’s lying on her back on the floor of the meeting room and she wonders why. Her head hurts a lot and there’s a wetness on her top lip which turns out to be blood leaking from her nose.
She opens her eyes and sees Madison standing over her. She blinks and tries to speak to Madison—but her head throbs like someone’s injecting scalding hot coffee into it. She winces, waits for it to pass.
When she opens her eyes she can see Madison gesticulating. Lydia can tell the Logi is talking but can’t hear her. She just shakes her head at Madison and shrugs.
Madison seems to understand there’s a communication problem, and she helps Lydia up. At this point Lydia becomes aware she has also vomited down the front of her shirt, and dully wonders where the hell she’s going to get a clean one from: all her clothes are at the residence. The details of her dire situation come back to her as Madison helps her into a chair (which is too high, as usual). Madison points at her, turning her hand in a circle, which Lydia recalls means stay here, and then leaves the meeting room.
Lydia tries to collect herself as she comes to terms with the possibility that she may have destroyed whatever it is that enables her to speak Logisi. If so, she’s finished. This was her life, her one useful thing, and she’s broken it, and her one chance was maybe to go to Logia and it was probably a stupid idea but now it’s definitely not going to work, not now that she’s broken her brain—
Madison returns, accompanied by a man with a warm manner, unruly graying hair and a dark suit with a bright green shirt underneath, who looks to be in early middle age. He introduces himself as Ivan, and explains he’s the senior translator here at the embassy. Lydia’s never met a working translator as old as this before: usually they burn out, go into teaching, change careers (e.g., become drug dealers) or just retire. “Maddie here tells me you’ve had a shock, is that right?”
Despite everything, Lydia laughs when she hears Madison referred to as Maddie. She thought she was the only one who used nicknames.
Ivan looks more concerned, asks Lydia if she’s OK.
“I’m not great, to be honest with you, Ivan.”
Ivan nods, glances at Madison, then turns back to Lydia. “She wants to know if you found anything out?” From his tone it’s clear Madison hasn’t explained to him what they were doing, and it’s only now that Lydia thinks: Did I find anything out? After she tinkered with the settings there was a howl in her mind. Just pure unfiltered pain, worst thing she’s ever felt in her entire life, and then she passed out. She explains this to Ivan, who relates it to Madison.
“So you’re saying there was nothing?” Ivan says on Madison’s behalf.
But no, there was: amid the pain, something else. Lydia recalls how she could usually tell who Fitz was talking about without him using their name, because there was an emotional flavor to how he spoke: it tasted of his precise opinion of that person. And through the pain she could hear Fitz speak of the person responsible for his torment, and Lydia knows exactly who it was. He was trying to tell her before, at the residence, when she thought she was talking to his ghost—but she couldn’t hear him. Suddenly she could, and it all came out in a torrent.
While Ivan explains this to Madison, Lydia realizes there’s something she has to do, right now. She stumbles down from the chair and over to the tank, and she cuts off the power. Then she takes the helmet off Fitz’s head, tears the wires out and smashes it against the table until it breaks.