Countdown: 2 Days, 23.5 Hours, 4 deaths
The stench of poison clings to her.
Late last night, she used a corner of Joe's kitchen to brew more of the foul concoction Colin had taught her to make the morning of her first contracted kill. The coating on the needle of her hairstick had thinned, and she could not risk being without it.
She'd made sure to keep a close eye on the heat, this time. Colin had tried to mask his pride at the end result, but she could see it in his eyes, anyway. She'd felt more like an apprentice in that moment than she had in years.
Kaol had not returned to the bar.
She had slept in a cold bed, alone with her nightmares for the first time in days.
She'd dreamed of blood. Coating her hands, crusting under her nails, slipping down her forearms. She'd dreamed of walls of faces- green eyes set into visages with smooth flesh where mouths should be. They had watched, reveled, as she reached into Marcus' skull, and ripped out his eyeball with her bare hands, severing the tendons of the stalk with her fingernails. In the dream, the eyeball had transfigured itself into the slippery egg of Warmus' testicle, and she had squeezed it between her palms until it softly crushed, oozing through the gaps in her fingers as though hard-boiled.
She had woken not with screams, but with a wetness between her thighs.
Her mug had contained more rum than coffee this morning.
She sees someone sniff, then choose a seat a few rows away from her when they step onto the Bullet.
The bell chimes, announcing her stop, and she steps off the bullet and onto the platform in P Hept. She pats at her hair as she descends the stairs and onto the coral-paved street, is reassured by the crude wooden hairstick nestled within the knot of disconcertingly dark braids.
A chill runs up the back of her spine, her hair stands up on end at the nape of her neck. The sudden, unexpected sensation makes her stumble and nearly lose her footing. She glances around her, quickly, searching for an imposing figure, for eyes as black as chips of obsidian. She half-expects to find him lurking in some shadow, his shark-toothed smile glinting unnaturally white.
Her scan of the area reveals only commuters and the ordinary, day-to-day movements of average people. Despite the persistent feeling of eyes on her, there are no hints of The Artist's presence.
She doesn't look for another hallucination of Marcus; those have been appearing far too frequently for her sanity.
She wonders if The Artist will find her here, if he will take her entrance into the Belvados household as his answer rather than a death. If she will even survive long enough to use the poison she'd spent the night brewing.
As she walks, she passes a man standing on a street-corner, a group of the citizenry huddled around him, listening eagerly as he speaks.
"We will not let them get away with this. We will make ourselves heard. No justice, no peace!" she hears him exclaim. The slogan of the terrorist organization is repeated by those around him, not with jubilance but with a grim determination.
Aurelia shudders.
She sees the street number she is looking for on a nicely kept, whitewashed building: 1312, and quickens her steps a little. She steps within a door painted Physician's White emblazoned with two winding snakes, and is met by surprisingly cool air- the kind that only comes with very, very thick walls, this time of year.
She steps up to the front desk and gives her assumed name to the receptionist yawning at her post. The woman hands her a stack of papers- more papers Aurelia has to sign without reading to keep up the pretense.
"Do you need help with that, Sugar?" the woman asks, and Aurelia nods. She sits with the stranger and invents a medical history. Once the receptionist has finished jotting down all of her information, she hands Aurelia a pen. Aurelia signs Sera Baliem's name on the dotted line, unsure of what exactly it is she's signing for.
"The doctor will meet you in the exam room," the receptionist says, leading Aurelia to the back of the office.
The walls are as thick as ever, the air still blessedly cool. The receptionist hands her slim file over to a nurse wearing Physician's White. Aurelia strips her dress and underwear off when the nurse instructs her to, and dons the standard paper medical gown she is perfunctorily handed.
The nurse offers her a tight, polite smile, and vanishes, closing the door to the room behind her as she goes.
It clicks.
Aurelia frowns, hops off of the exam bed, the paper gown she wears crackling and rustling as she does. She crosses to the door, and finds that it is locked from the outside.
There are no windows here, no way out save for the door. Why would the nurse lock her in?
Aurelia paces the room, holding the gown together at the small of her back as she feels the air brush against the bare skin there. Beside the examination bed, there is a metal tray laden with instruments she hadn't paid much attention to when she arrived. They flash silver in the light- hooks and blades. A full syringe sits beside them, ready and waiting to be used.
Aurelia reaches out, picks up the syringe, twirls it between her fingers. She presses the needle against her fingertip, and then barely- just barely- depresses the syringe. If it is an ordinary shot she will feel nothing except perhaps a slight burn; if they mean to kill her with poison, the amount will be just enough to feel a fraction of its effects.
She flexes her fingers, shakes her hand, but nothing happens.
She shrugs a little, sets the syringe down, thinking that she has, indeed, cracked beneath the strain of the week.
Maybe this office simply locks the doors because they don't want patients to wander around the building?
She moves further around the room, opens a few of the cabinets, finds them filled with standard physician's supplies: gauze, tape, cotton balls, bandages, glass thermometers, jars of pre-ground herbs to be used in capsules and poultices.
There is a glass sink in the counter below the cabinets, a bottle of soap and rubbing alcohol sitting on its edge.
Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to indicate any sinister reason for being locked in.
Frowning, Aurelia turns back to the exam table, hops back up. The paper of her gown bunches and crinkles as she does.
Something catches her eye, and she glances downwards, and finds that the exam bed has foldable arms, which are currently locked in the down position. Odd. She leans over the bed, runs her fingers down along the arm, feels the grainy texture of leather, the smooth slide of steel, beneath her fingertips.
Leather cuffs with metal buckles. Heart in her throat, Aurelia reaches down, finds that there is a leather belt folded under the feet of the examination bed as well.
Restraints.
Why, by the tides, would a doctor need restraints in an examining room? In all the checkups she's attended over the years, she's never seen the like.
The thickness of the walls no longer provides a respite from the heat. Rather, it is restrictive, smothering, oppressive. If something happens, no one will be able to hear her scream.
She reaches back, runs her fingers over the hairstick to reassure herself. It has the opposite effect. She cannot feel the grain of the wood beneath her right index finger. She brings her hand back in front of her eyes, studies it. She squeezes it into a fist, but only four of her fingers cooperate. The index finger does not move. It remains, half-curled and motionless.
She wonders what was in that syringe.
The door clicks, and Aurelia watches as the handle turns.
Her reaction to the doctor is visceral.
The sight of Dr. Orelius Castus is a painful punch to the gut, and for half a second she is somewhere, some-when, else. The room is suddenly cast in indigo and cerulean, the exam bed is covered in opulent silks and plush pillows.
Instinctively, she scrambles backwards on the table and crouches like a feral, cornered animal, her heart pounding in her throat, her hair-stick uncapped and clutched in a white-knuckled hand.
She blinks and the illusion of her room on Indigo Isle is gone, but Dr. Orelius Castus remains.
The file bearing Sera Baliem's name hangs from his hand, his eyes wide as saucers as he stares at her, his mouth agape.
"Aurelia?" he croaks, fumbling to open the door that he just closed and locked behind him mere seconds before. His movements are clumsy and uncoordinated.
Aurelia can't breathe, can't speak, can barely hear beyond the rushing of blood through her ears. It is like a torrent of rain pounding against the shutters during a hurricane, or the roar of the sea in a typhoon. Her heart beats so quickly that it hurts.
Of all the doctors in Glascost for the Belvadosi to ally themselves with, why this one?
Why did it have to be the one who had pulled her from the brink of death, who had stitched her broken body back together from both within and without?
Who had masked Marcus' crimes with words like 'compromised immune system' and 'influenza?'
The fleshy, pale-skinned son of a senator is trying and failing to fit the key into the lock, his pallid cheeks shaking. He is scared, Aurelia realizes. The smell of it wafts off of him, filling the room with something almost ammonic.
And no wonder he feels fear- Aurelia has murdered two people he was close to in short succession- first his employer's son, with a hair stick very similar to the one she grips now, and then his brother, with a serrated knife and a gushing jugular.
His fear awakens something in her, something that causes her coiled, tensed muscles to snap and release like a rubber band.
It calls something cold and metallic into her hand from the tray table as though by magic, sends her soaring across the room like a seagull over the waves.
There is warmth beneath her, struggling, flailing limbs flopping like a fish against the docks. There is a wet, sucking sound, a gasping of air, a gurgling, muffled voice pleading with words that don't sound like they belong to a human tongue.
Something feral and dangerous and otherworldly hisses and growls and curses; blackness crowds at the edges of the world, narrows everything down to a pinpoint bathed in shades of scarlet.
It could be moments, minutes, or hours before the blackness recedes. Until the only sound left in the room is that of Aurelia's own ragged breathing. The world comes back in bits and pieces, snatches of reality.
The first thing to return to her is sensation, awareness of her own body- her thighs shake, her arms feel weak and heavy, her right hand is cramped, her chest aches, and her breath comes in short spurts, as though she has just finished swimming a race through rough currents.
There is something warm and slippery and wet coating her hands, making her fingers and palms slide slickly against whatever she touches.
Smell comes before sight- the stench of fear has been replaced by something heady- rust and salt and ammonia and copper. When her vision finally stops swimming in shades of garnet and gray, she finds Orelius beneath her on the floor, his chest and neck a mass of oozing wounds.
It isn't as much of a surprise as it should be.
The scalpel drops from her hand, clatters to the floor, glinting red and silver in the light.
For a moment, there is euphoria- complete and utter satisfaction, bliss. The heady sensation of power surges through her veins. She licks her lips, and smiles when she tastes copper from the splatter there. Something tugs pleasantly low in her belly at the flavor of it.
He'd hurt her. He'd hurt her, helped the man who tortured her, and now he's dead. He's dead, and she killed him.
Just like that, the pleasure recedes.
Aurelia feels her heart swim upwards, leaving her chest and lodging somewhere below her larynx; she can feel it pounding in her throat. Ice slips through her veins, replacing the intoxicating warmth that had just pulsed through them moments before.
He's dead. He's dead and she's killed him and she's just lost her tie to the Belvados family and this wasn't a contract, it was murder and she's definitely going to drown for this if she's caught, whether she completes the rest of the contracts or becomes a ghost...
Her throat is closing, it is getting harder and harder to breathe. Her voice catches on every breath she sucks in through her constricted throat, making her wheeze so loudly that the nurse must be able to hear it from behind the too-thick walls and still-locked door.
She bends in half, plants her bloodied palms on her knees, and closes her eyes as she tries to focus on calming her breathing.
If she slips off the edge of the abyss, the mercs will find her and arrest her, and Kaol will probably be tied to a stake and choke on the tide right alongside her.
She has to keep herself together. She will think about the ramifications of this death -murder- later, tonight or tomorrow. For now, she needs to get out, to escape, before a nurse comes searching and calls the mercs.
She pushes herself to a standing position, feeling her head spin as she does so. The swooping sensation in her gut makes her taste acid, but she swallows it back. Mechanically, she removes her paper gown and tosses it in the trash.
When a search of the cabinets fails to reveal a towel or a rag, she runs some gauze under the tap and sponges the blood off of herself.
Murderer, she thinks, as she pours some rubbing alcohol onto a clean piece of gauze. She sets about wiping off every surface that she touched- the cabinet handles, the lid of the garbage can, the exam table, the scalpel. Fingerprinting is not standard procedure in a contracted kill, but it will be used here once the body is found.
She slips on her plain, slightly scratchy clothes with hands that she manages to keep mostly steady; when she re-arranges her braids back into a simple knot, her fingers only tremble a little as she secures her hairstick through them.
Aurelia takes a deep breath, steels herself, and glances back to the bloody corpse on the floor. Orelius' hand is still clutched around the key he was fumbling with when she killed him.
She swallows, and then crouches down beside the body, reaching out for his hand. It is still warm to the touch, soft and pliable, so Aurelia is easily able to uncurl his fingers from around the key.
The medical chart he had carried into the room lays on the floor beside him, the papers scattered across the floor. These are evidence as well, she knows. So she gathers the papers bearing her assumed name together before tucking them into her bag.
She avoids looking at the corpse as she steps over it to unlock the door. She wraps her skirt around her palm as she turns the handle and slips back out into the hallway. The nurse is nowhere to be seen, but Aurelia sees the receptionist sitting at the front desk, chatting with a tall male patient who must have entered after she was admitted to the exam room.
She presses herself against the wall, cursing under her breath. The man begins to cough, and Aurelia hears concern in the receptionist's voice when she asks if the man is alright.
He asks for water between hacking coughs, and the receptionist leaves her post to comply.
Aurelia closes her eyes in relief at her unbelievable luck, and walks as quickly as she can towards the exit. She ducks her head and puts her hand up over her mouth and nose as though to avoid contagion as she hurries past the ill patient.
The sun is blinding after being inside the comparatively darker doctor's office, and it takes Aurelia a few precious seconds to blink and orient herself. Her heart is in her throat as she hurries away, expecting to hear the shouts of the patrol at any moment.
Every sense is on hyper-alert, her mouth is dry as Rivergate cotton, but no footsteps thud after her.
The man is still at the street-corner, still espousing the merits of the terrorist organization to an ever-growing crowd. Thankfully, if the mercs do arrive, he will draw attention away from her presence.
She makes it to the bullet station without incident, her heart thudding in her throat, the muscles across her neck and shoulders taut with tension. She finds her seat, and sits on the edge, her muscles coiled, ready to bolt and flee at any moment. The doors hiss closed without incident and the train lurches forwards, the floorboards vibrating with the gentle buzz of the engine.
It takes two stops before Aurelia feels like she can breathe again.
As the adrenaline begins to ebb, reason returns. The ramifications of what she has just done begin to set in.
Marci knows her face, as do the servant girls from the kitchens. A new disguise won't change that. And she has just murdered one of the most powerful tools the Belvados family controls.
She can never step foot on the Belvados estate again.
She only has two more days left to fulfill the challenge set by the Board.
The realization makes her wheeze, makes her breaths come short and the air grow thin.
Four deaths. Two days.
Even if she is not implicated in the physician's death, her original task is impossible.
If she does not kill Councilmember Pelas Larch, she is going to drown.