For a moment, there was silence. It seemed to Raphe, that the subtle hum from the vents had stopped, as if the building was holding its breath. He thought, where was the click-click of heels against the tile outside? Had the wind outside stopped blowing? The light from outside had turned from the golden honey of late afternoon to an velvet shade of dusk. Where had the day disappeared to? It was a moonless evening and they were both sitting in the half-dark motionless as he watied for another word, another sentence.
There was a knock at a door and Raphe jerked upright in his chair. The lights in the room turned on automatically, casting hard lines into the room where before there was only softness. All at once the sounds came back, the wind outside howled and the building was alive with sounds. The ventilation resumed its incessant hum and then there was another knock at the door, "Doctor?"
"Yes, yes. Come in."
"It was so quiet in hear and the lights were off..."
"Oh, yes. I think I must have fallen asleep and the lights had gone off," Raphe said quickly, trying to dispel any thoughts of impropriety, "You know how long these sessions can get." He added, "Thanks for checking up on me."
"My pleasure," the nurse replied. "Shall I call the orderlies to help Jane back to her room?" Raphe paused for a moment looking at his charge. It seemed that she was out of story today.
"Yes. Thank you. That would be fine." The door closed quietly as the nurse walked away. Raphe glanced down at his notepad which was empty. It was no matter, really, he thought as he stood up and stopped the video recorder standing next to him. He could review the tapes if needed, but it seemed he rarely needed to. He remembered with startling vividness all the details of Jane's fiction. The orderlies came in and helped Jane out of the room. She walked away without acknowledging his presence and went back to her room without incident. Raphe packed the video into his briefcase and shook off the lingering raiments of a waking dream.
Outside, the wind blew in thick gusts, the fallen leaves chattering excitedly across the street. He looked at his watch. Oh my! he thought. It was nearly 8:00 already. He pulled the cell phone from his pocket and noticed a pair of unanswered messages. He dialed and braced himself against the elements and the impending flurry of angry words.
"She falls like a wounded raven, a black silhouette dropping from the night into the dimly lit street. Normally, she would use her cloak to slow her descent, but falling backward, it wraps quickly around her -- gravity already has too much of a hold. She tucks her head in hopes of avoiding the worst just as she hits the upper branches of a defoliated tree. It's skeleton branches sound like breaking bones to her. A larger, lower branch is resilient, bends but does not break and twists her around dumping her violently, face-first on to the ground."
"Her gun flys from her hand as her body is suddenly stripped of breath. Dazed, she gropes for the familiar handle, but her eyes can not focus. She knows if she stops for too long they'll have her. She crawls toward the tree and warping her arms around it, lifts herself up. She looks for a moment for her weapon, but time is not a friend this night. She stumbles down the street and as she rounds the corner she hears shouting from the rooftops above."
"Her head pounds ferociously as she navigates the winding streets, jogging unevenly and cradling her bruised right arm. She dares not head back toward the station where she came in, nor to any station nearby. She dreams her way out of the Old City, a weary and wounded ghost, tracing long unused paths of her childhood: a back alley here, which hides a familiar passageway; a long forgotten courtyard there, the decaying leaves there pile high with the years. There's a station she knows, not far from here. The sounds of pursuit are distant now. A few more minutes and she sees the familiar maw in the ground, stairs that lead down to safety and a train that will take her home."
"She waits in a small space between two burnt out shells of building waiting, expecting someone to bar her way. Nothing comes and she moves quickly from the shadows and descends the stairs into darkness. A train comes to take her back across to the island, and without further incident she makes way back home. The train pulls into the familiar station and she staggers out and back up to the street. She walks the short block and a half to her building. Up the stairs, in her flat, she sheds layer after layer, walking straight toward her bed. Colthing litters to floor until she comes finally, naked to her bed. She falls on the bed, and drifts into an exhausted sleep. On the floor, in her vest, a phone with a few unanswered, urgent messages awaits the morning."
"Scythe knows that the men below her will be trying to find a way on to the roofs. Perhaps there are already men on other rooftops, closing in on her. She makes for the other end of the building, her heart pounding now. She wonders who was after her and where they had made her -- was it Murciel who had made the phone call? was it chance that someone saw her leaving the club? There is little time to think of such things now. As she reaches the edge of the building she looks over the edge."
"There is a small back alleyway between this building and the next. Briefly she considers it, then vaults over the parapet clearing the narrow gap and coming cleanly down on to the roof of the building on the other side. Too small, she thinks, too easy to get trapped down there as she continues her sprint across to the parallel, hopefully empty street. Halfway across this building she catches a glint of moonlight in her periphery, which drives her to the ground. She hears a high-powered round ricochet off a vent next to her."
"Sniper! Someone must have known she was coming, she thinks, the murder must have wanted her to follow him after all. She darts toward the shooter, zigzagging as she does, trying to cut of the angle of his shot. He fires twice more at his swift target, before she disappears below the building where he perches."
"He is confused, not knowing where she's disappeared to. He looks toward the building where she came from, there more men where just reaching the top of the building. She's damn fast, he thinks, just as her foot catches underneath his chin, flinging him neatly up and on to his back. She catches the rifle and lands a heavy knee across his chest."
"Who sent you? He groans, struggling vainly. She knocks him unconscious with the butt of the gun. It was a rhetorical question anyway, she thinks, as she quickly rifles through his armored vest. She finds a wallet, which she stows away quickly. Amateur, she mutters, and sets off in her original direction slinging the rifle over her shoulder."
"Reaching the edge of the building she peers over and sees half a dozen men roaming the street in pairs scanning the rooftops with high intensity lights mounted on their guns. She hesitates a moment, she's spared one man's life already this night. Unfortunately she would not be able to be so merciful now. She steadies the rifle against the edge of the roof and takes aim at the pair closest to her."
"The gun discharges twice, killing both instantly, before the survivors are able to find cover. Uncertain of where the shots came from, one man foolishly tries to use a light pole for cover, One quick bark from Scythe's rifle and then his body slumps to the ground like a rag doll. Another dives behind a bench and spends the last seconds of his life, wonder why he took this job. The last two men crouch behind a wheel-less vehicle with shattered windows and try to pinpoint the location of their assailant."
"Scythe ducks behind the parapet and looks down at the building where she came from. There at the far side of the roof, the first of a dozen men jumps the alleyway and lands in a low crouch, his sidearm drawn. There are too many to avoid becoming bogged down in a long siege that she knows she would lose. She takes the rifle, hurls it down at the remaining two men and takes off sprinting along the street side edge of the roof. She vaults over the edge with one hand and catches it again with the other as she falls, twisting her body toward the two men who have come out from hiding to look curiously at the rifle that was thrown at them. She pulls her sidearm as she falls and fires twice. Two men die wondering how this thing lying shattered on the street has killed them."
"Scythe walks out onto the streets of the Old City in early hours of the day, alone. Unlike the perpetually crowded Cathedral District, the streets of the Gotic Quarter are desolate at night. Barred and broken windows in impoverished buildings grin malevolently at her. The street is lined by flickering street lamps that arch wearily over rutted cobblestones. As she makes way back toward the station, even these few, fickle spots of light grow scarce, until finally, along one long, curving block, there is only the moon to guide her. The darkness closes around her."
"She is suddenly aware of the oppressive silence. Around her, buildings of varying heights form a long irregular canyon. She slows and then stops, hearing a faint, but strengthening sound of footsteps slowly building down the street from her. She retreats a few steps, and then pauses abruptly, hearing more footsteps, these even more urgent, coming toward her from that direction. She looks at the broken facades of the buildings that now trap her in. She makes out, in the moonlight, a small gap between two of them, not nearly big enough to hide in, but perhaps enough to give her something to climb."
"Quickly, she darts toward her possible escape route. She thrusts her hands into the narrow crevice. Just wide enough, she thinks. She begins to scale the wall and after a few moments the street below her is filled with growing number of widely waving lights. She curses herself quietly for not being more cautious leaving the club. One errant light finds her just as she is reaching up to grab the edge of the roof. A brief flurry of shouting is followed by the crackle of gunfire."
"She pulls herself over the edge as bullets lodge themselves into the side of the building and knock small flecks of stone off the edge where she hung from moments ago. She rolls onto her feet, and quickly pulls the phone from her vest. She looks at the screen. Damn. It is, as she suspects, jammed."
"Our Lady Peace bleeds a crimson neon with bold slashes of sodium light that gaped like lacerations. Odalisques, both voluptuous and waif-like, spin seductively around raised chrome poles. A deep, constant bass beats frenetically as Scythe moves across the floor passing costumers riding high on Velocity, who lay strewn like ragged dolls on the worn velvet chaises, and girls perceived not sufficiently alluring, carry onyx trays filled with all forms of sin. Almost no one notices, one more patron, cloaked in shadow, careful of who sees her face."
"Shine and crush, Scythe says as she slides up to the bar. Murciel, the bartender, a mammoth slab of a man, casts a quick glance her direction as he crushes an over-ripe gourd into a glass with his meaty fist and pours a clear syrup over the juice. He slides the glass her direction. She looks up and asks, Anyone here I should know about? He pauses for a moment, considering. One of the Efreeti brothers was here; he left hours ago though. She spares a thought for Jacob's brother, now languishing some oubliette, as she picks up her drink. No one else? The bartender shakes his head as he polishes a glass."
"She slides the matchbook from her pocket and tosses it to him. I'm looking for someone. Murciel holds the book to his nose and sniffs. There are traces of her scent, which he ignores, and hints of sulfur and cloves. Underneath that, nearly imperceptible, were notes of something so foul. He winces and tosses the matchbook back, "No one who's been here smells that bad." Scythe looks at him intently for a moment and then sighs heavily. The trail ends here here tonight, she thought. Still, someone wanted her to follow, she was almost sure of it. She pulls a card from her vest and flicks it to Murciel. Let me know if anyone like that comes in. She places her glass back down and leaves the now empty bar."
"Murciel watches her as she disappears out the front door, her scent lingering in the air. The customers who had quietly left the bar while they were talking slowly wander back. He slides the card through a reader and a fair sum of money registers on the monitor, along with a phone number. It would probably be only good once; she'd never risk giving him her real number. Just as well, no one would be trying to get it from him. He thought of that odor on the matchbook, a smell of rotting plants, infused with tar and brimstone, as he picks up her still full glass. What a waste, he thinks, and drains the glass."
It was absurd of course. Raphe, a fourth year resident at the New York State Psychiatric Institution, had a promising future ahead of him. He was practically engaged to his girlfriend, a lovely Japanese girl he had met while they were together at Columbia University. She would graduate from the medical school in the spring and they would in all likelihood move to wherever she matched and he might start a small practice. Her parents found him well-educated, frugal, and practical. His parents found her charming, well-behaved, and sensible. Often while staring idly out the window, he would think of their lives together and how nice it would all be. In short, he was terrified.
Raphe reminisced. As a child and through his teens, he had always been the adventurous sort. He recalled day-long hikes through the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, driving up to Yosemite for week to camp with his father, and backpacking through the Appalachians the summer before starting college. He had wanted then to learn all about the East Coast before starting school at Columbia. It wasn't too long after, that he found that Manhattan was a world away truly a world away from all he had known.
Four years at the University and four more years at the medical school had effectively doused his wayward spirit. Though he usually felt very little desire to leave the island, lately he had been having these occasional moments of nostalgia. And it had become increasingly frequent as he continued his sessions with Jane. There was something about her voice, the subtle mimicry of her movements, the incredibly detailed stories that she told, that made him look longingly out windows and wonder about the choices he had made.
A shift in her voice drew him out of his reverie.
Chapter 2
The young resident looked at his patient. She was quite lovely, even with her dark brown hair cropped boyishly short. Her bangs fell across her face and softened those unblinking eyes that seemed to be forever gazing at the gauzy sunlight coming through the windows. She was quite tame in this state, her lips moving slightly as she lay nearly catatonic.
They called her Jane, because she didn't know her own or wouldn't say. He disliked this, because it made her so generic, so ordinary. He had been studying at the Institute for three years now and she was by far the most interesting patient he had had. She spent most of her time in a trance-like state, and was willful or violent only occasionally -- he looked down annoyingly at the chart: prone to violent outbursts.
He had been there only once when it happened. It had been little over a month since the police had handed her over to the Institute's custody, which was unusual since handling missing persons cases was not a normal part of a psychiatric hospital's routine, but a lack of patients for students to study, and her atypical symptoms made for a compelling argument. And so, it was under a dappled October sky, the brisk autumn air coaxing color out of the mostly green elms, that he had taken Jane outside for the first time since entering the Institution. For a moment it seemed like nothing had changed, but then she seemed to catch a whiff of something in the air, or perhaps it was some slight sound, and her eyes alit with the same vibrant intelligence that she displayed in her stories.
She was remarkably strong. It had taken 4 orderlies to restrain her and bring her back in, that is after they had managed to catch up with her. Since that time he hadn't seen anything quite so exciting from her, but still he came and he listened, took careful notes, and on occasion tried to get some sort of conversation out of her. And though this never proved fruitful, she still mostly spun her tales when he was around. It was because of this that he imagined that she liked him.
"A light fall of rain begins as she stores away her phone. From this rooftop she can see the harbor, less busy than she has ever known it, now that trade with the Gaian States has ceased. It has only a month now, since the docks in the Warehouse District were full and vessels waiting for service could be seen congesting the waterway from the Quay Wall to the Gotic Quarter of the Old City. Trade is an indication of peace and prosperity and the sight of empty wharves fill Scythe with a dread she has not known. In her 26 years of life she has only heard of wars in history books. It is almost impossible to contemplate that after 150 years of peace that such a thing could even exist. And so she holds out hope that some sort of treaty can be reached. But these are events very much beyond her yen. She shakes the ominous portent from her thoughts as she focuses on the task ahead. She needs to get onto Transriver train to cross over to the Old City. And with that she descends back into the slums of Nova Cestro."
"There is a line not far away from where she is and she goes there straight knowing that, improbable as it was, anyone who might have followed her this far would not be misled by any disappearing act she might try to pull. Even still she waits beside the awning of a corner shop, just outside the station, until she hears a train approaching. She moves quickly down the stairs into the flickering lights of the station. With a practiced slight of hand she pulls a transit card from a pocket and slides it through the reader as the passes through the stile. Just as quickly she slides the card back in her pocket and slips on to the train. There were few people in the train at that hour of night passing back across the river to the Old City. A security guard, just off his shift eyes her warily. She pays him no heed as she moves toward the rear of the train passing through a couple of coaches and stopping between two. She feels more in her element in the darkness, away from the fluorescent lights. She smells the old musky odor of murky waters leaking into the subterranean tunnel and feels the rush of air as the train hurtles in the early morning hour towards her destination."
"She walks like this for more than an hour in a vain attempt to cleanse her thoughts of a melange of bloody tableaux, through neighborhoods infested with the lowest kinds of scum: flesh traders, death merchants, and dream slavers. She moves for the most part unnoticed, yet she is different enough from the lost souls that normally come down to this part of town to feed their addictions that she attracts some small attention. Those that know enough to recognize her however, shrink away to the darkest corners they can find. She is no stranger here, this gendarme. She is known to them as Scythe."
"Scythe pays little heed to these minor miscreants this night. She fingers the discarded remains of the matchbook in her pocket, feeling the name of the club: Our Lady Peace. A few short hours ago, she had burst into that room sidearm drawn, only to find that she was again too late and that yet another victim had been claimed, she nearly missed the faint but still fresh scent of cloves burning in the air. The smell of cloves gave her pause, the smell of sulfur lead her to the matchbook, which had been carefully or carelessly – she wasn't sure which – discarded among the dying embers of the fireplace that had been extinguished with the life of it's owner."
"It is a place that she knows, located in a niche of Nova Cestro that most pretended didn't exist and where even she, with the respect that experience and rank granted her, could not move with such impunity. There are those there who would kill her without a second thought to the consequences they would have to bear, for family and lovers she had sent away to the Gulag or for those that had perhaps died at her hands. She slips into a low lying, abandoned tenement whose would be residents shrink away from her passing, pretending not to be noticed. At the rooftop, she pulls her phone from her coat. Did you find anything? No, I didn't expect much more than that. Do you have a name? Yes, see what you can dig up. I'm stopping by a place I know, I'll be back soon. She pauses for a moment here and the voice on the other line repeats the request. Yes, I will be careful."
"She stands over the victim's body. The blood, still warm, oozes with the scent of the crime, a maleficent odor as oddly familiar as the nightmares of her childhood and, though it had been only two months since she first tasted it, as deeply engrained. The body that lays at her feet has been mutilated in ritualistic fashion, cuts that seem callously random spoke volumes to her. And though it would have been difficult to tell for the untrained eye that the corpse was once a small boy, each cut was precise and every twisting of bone deliberate, the casual placement of entrails, a grotesque conversation. She does not linger long and she knows that the forensics teams will find nothing more than this and they will see no deeper than a mutilated corpse."
"Stepping outside of the flat out onto a balcony flung carelessly several stories above an inky dark alley way, she looks out over the city with its steepled skyline and past the harbor which cuts it in two, at a faint crescent of moon, cresting over the highlands in the distance. She pulls a phone from her vest and a cigarette from her coat and lights the end as she makes the call. Yes, another one. No, no survivors. Yes, send the team. She ends the call quickly, wanting very much to put this far from her mind and put this place far from her body, but she is always here, at the moment of death -- this time, minutes, perhaps only seconds too late. She takes a long drag and blows her frustrations into the sky, the smoke obscuring the stars, if for only a moment. Then she catapults off the edge, landing with catlike grace and stealth in the alleyway below to search for a killer which would undoubtedly taunt her for another month yet."
"The alley opens to a small street of unloved edifices, which she moves quickly down, a shade skipping from lamplight to lamplight. The pavement is wet from the season's first rain, a last autumn squall which broke the heat that had been lingering over Nova Cestro. Somewhere in the looming distance a broken bell tower coughs twice and then is still, embarrassed to have broken the silence with such cacophony. She turns a corner and then another and then another until the route she's taking gives no hint of her bearing. It is an old habit of hers, to confuse would be followers, though this time it is her own stubborn memory she longs to elude."