Thresholder, ch 167, Compromised

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Inside Perry’s hotel room, two women were failing the Bechdel test.

“The front desk didn’t report him leaving,” said one of the two women. Her name was Dolores, no last name given when her partner referred to her. “So where’d he go?”

“Front desk could be lazy, inattentive … covering for him,” said the other woman. She was Middler, which was probably a last name, but the only name that had been mentioned.

“It’s a surprisingly empty room, for a man who’s been staying here several days,” said Dolores. There were sounds of things being moved around. “No clothes, no toiletries, not a satchel, like he cleared out before we got here.”

“Except that the front desk did see him come in,” replied Middler. “Confirmed.”

“Confirmed,” Dolores repeated.

Perry was on the outside of the building, pressing himself up against it with the sword. His fingers were touching the glass of the window, the better to get audio from inside. He hadn’t thought to leave a listening device in there, though maybe it was better that he hadn’t, because it would give them something to find. Besides, it would only have worked properly while he was in the city with Marchand to listen.

“So what’s the next step?” asked Middler. “Wait?”

“I’m not doing a stakeout, not when there’s no body, not when we don’t even know if their guy is dead,” said Dolores. “If the K-men want that, they can go hang. And you saw this guy fight, I’m hoping we don’t have to fight him.”

“We’re just here for information,” Middler affirmed. “I don’t want to sit around sleeping in shifts hoping this asshole shows up.”

“We’re sure they didn’t know each other?” asked Dolores.

“You saw the lead up to the fight, not a chance,” said Middler. “No one could make out quite what they were saying, but they seemed surprised by each other.”

Dolores groaned. “Alright, next step is to find out where the ever-loving fuck this guy came from. And that’s work for tomorrow. Someone has to have seen him. He might have come in off a train. He’ll be hard to mistake.”

Perry swore. Would someone from the train remember him? It certainly seemed possible. The Inspectors who’d been on the train they’d stopped would be able to match his face, though he didn’t actually know how often they came back into Charlonion — they’d had horses.

“Odds that he shows up again?” asked Middler.

“Extremely high,” said Dolores. “He came to a hotel, checked in for a full week, and we know the Yuuk he’s with was working in the long term, trying to recruit, or at least forment some kind of rebellion. They’re not just going to disappear.”

“So where do you suppose the body is?” asked Middler.

“Somewhere in the Flux,” said Dolores. “Impossible to know where that chase took them, but the K-man would have reported in. And there’s no way that our suspect would have lugged the body off across the city. Which leaves the K-men to go combing through the Flux inside the city.”

“How far are we chasing this one?” asked Middler.

“High priority,” said Dolores. “But not so high that we’re pestering the public.”

“They’re worried that it’s going to get out,” said Middler. “Some maniac running through the street, strong enough to kill a K-man, faster, maybe, stronger, maybe … that wouldn’t be good.”

Dolores sighed. “Well, we’re not getting anywhere tonight.”

“Shame to waste a hotel room,” said Middler.

“Lock the door,” said Dolores.

There was a sound of a bolt clicking into place, and then clothes being removed, and Perry removed his fingertips from the window before he could hear any more. He rose up into the air and looked down on the city, then dropped toward the collegium, finding himself a narrow alleyway that seemed to lead nowhere. He wanted a good place to hide, somewhere he could emerge from.

Once that was accomplished, he went into the shelf space, closing it behind himself and taking off his helmet.

Anaksi was asleep on the couch. She’d figured out how to turn the lights low.

Perry took his armor off, trying not to make any noise, and set the power armor up next to the bank of batteries, so they could leech off the fusion reactor and get recharged, not that there was all that much power draw. He slipped the earpiece in and laid down in one of the bunk beds. There was room for four people, in a pinch, though they were nothing to write home about in terms of comfort.

“How fucked are we?” asked Perry. He kept his voice low 

“It depends upon our goals, sir,” said Marchand. “If you wished to continue on as an apprentice of sorts to Doctrix Grayspear, I can’t say that I expect that to hold for more than a few days, though they can’t possibly be thinking of going to the collegium.”

“So I go there, hope for the best,” said Perry with a sigh.

“However, if our goal is to await the inevitable return of the Trigger Queen, then I do not think that anything has changed,” said Marchand. “The largest change in material conditions is that there’s some danger in going out in public, but this isn’t a necessary part of what we’re attempting to do.”

“That’s the optimist’s read on things,” said Perry.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

“So we live like rats, hiding in the shelf space,” said Perry. “And I go pretend that nothing is wrong with Grayspear, or … I do the interrogation thing right off the bat, maybe break into her home with the armor on and my voice disguised so she doesn’t know that it’s me.” He sighed. “Alright, fine, noted.”

“I’m only telling you things that you already know, sir,” said Marchand.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Well, I’m going to get some sleep, wake me up in the morning, I guess.”

“Very good, sir,” said Marchand.

But instead of sleeping, Perry used his new power.

The funny thing about it was that Marchand already conferred something like it, at least for the purposes of remembering things that Marchand was there for. So long as it wasn’t from a damaged section of memory, or something that had been deleted to save space, Marchand could play anything back in full detail, and when he had enough compute, he could do whole reconstructions of a scene, making it something that Perry could walk around in and examine.

So on his own, the power offered Perry only the opportunity to walk in those memories that Marchand didn’t have and couldn’t reconstruct.

Perry called forward a memory of Richter, the first time they’d gone “diving” in the power armor, a short jaunt into a seaweed forest. It had felt otherworldly and dangerous, pushing aside kelp and watching the fish swim past them like they had somewhere to be. Perry had been more timorous then, more worried about the power armor and its integrity, about what would happen if it failed and they were below the water with dwindling oxygen supplies. He’d been worried about the oxygen supply itself, whether he might end up with the bends, whether Richter knew what she was doing.

But he’d heard her joy as she pointed out the wildlife, and the eagerness in her voice over the radio waves that were doing this complicated technological process to transmit the sound ten feet from suit to suit. It had helped him to relax, to trust her.

He watched himself. He could see the scene two ways, with just a slight change of perspective, watching himself in the armor trudging along, or standing in place of himself, a point of view from right behind Richter as she moved about, though still with his body laid vertically in the bed, the vision shifted so as to pretend he was standing upright.

He watched himself come up from the water later on, and tried to be objective about the power, to gain something from this exercise rather than just feeling sad for times gone by.

Was this his memory? It seemed too rich and detailed for that. Some of it was made up, he thought, filled in from what he knew, like the specific way that the seaweed tangled around his leg, or the fall of water from around Richter’s helmet as she rose from the ocean, or the way that her hair looked when she removed her helmet. He had no idea how she was wearing it that day, but in the vision, it was up in a tight, utilitarian bun that let the helmet stay as close to her skull as possible.

She smiled at him, and he smiled back, both inside the vision and as himself.

“Someday,” he said.

He dismissed the memory — the reconstruction of a memory, or whatever it was — and went further into the past. He saw Earth again for the first time in years, his Earth, not the Earth that Marchand came from. He went on a hike through a forest, sat in a classroom, listened to his friends talk about inane political topics. It felt specific and clear, but also more than what he actually remembered, and he tried to follow the argument, to see if there were seams, but he was tired, and simply let it wash over him. The argument was about Japan, and their right to self-defense, and whether this was an example of American imperialism. He heard his own voice, and fell asleep to himself being right about everything.

When he woke up, it was to Anaksi’s hand on his shoulder.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, fine, just sleeping,” said Perry. He was laying in the bed with the sheet over him, and wearing nothing beneath it. “March, time?”

“It should be around seven in the morning, sir,” said Marchand. “I gave Anaksi the go ahead to wake you, as I was about to do the same in another fifteen minutes.”

“He told me what’s happening,” said Anaksi. She glanced at the suit of armor. “How we’re stuck here.”

“Technically speaking, it’s just a risk to go outside,” said Perry.

“No, I meant — that I’m stuck here until you wake up,” said Anaksi.

“Ah,” said Perry. “Yeah. Sorry. You’re feeling better?”

Anaksi nodded.

“Then we’re going to find somewhere to set up, somewhere high, and I’m going to go to the collegium like nothing has happened,” said Perry. “Depending on how that goes, I might interrogate Grayspear tonight, in her home, wearing the armor so she doesn’t know who I am.”

“You would break in?” asked Anaksi.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “I mean, we were talking about killing her earlier. We need to know what she knows. We need to know whether her assistant really was Queenie. Speaking of, are you up for showing me things?”

Anaksi nodded. She held out a hand, which you absolutely did not need to do in order to activate the power, and Perry was suddenly beside her in what must have been her tribe’s village. It was larger than he thought, maybe because of the large lodge. People were milling about, all of them dressed in various pieces of animal hides. Baskets were being woven from fibers and meats were being smoked over a fire. There was very little metal about, save for some tools, and a clutch of identical rifles stacked up against the side of the lodge.

The old woman looked nothing like Queenie, save for the long red scarf she was wearing. She had dark, weathered skin, and had to be in her sixties, a rough sixties. She didn’t have the chipped tooth either, when she spoke.

The conversation went exactly how Anaksi had said it did, and a part of Perry felt guilty relief at that: this was one of the benefits of the power, that you couldn’t lie with it.

“There’s a train coming, carrying the harmonizer for Grabler’s Gulch,” she said. “It’s due in a week, and will only be lightly guarded. It promises ruin for your people. They want to determine the shape of this land. But if you stop them, the small sphere of power it carries can be turned to another use.”

“What use?” asked the man standing next to Anaksi. It was her husband, the man that Perry had killed on the train, though he was unadorned here, in more sensible clothes, the same hides that everyone else was wearing, no mark of his station. “How would it help us?”

The old woman cackled, and there was something of Queenie in it. “There is a particular fool in the city, a woman whose work we can use. Doctrix Grayspear.” This woman’s grasp on the language was poor, with a heavy accent. “The harmonizer can be a weapon, the kind that could take down the entire Commission and usher in the fall of Charlonion.”

“And why do you want that?” asked Anaksi’s husband.

“Does it matter to you?” asked the woman.

“If you want to ally with us, yes,” said Anaksi’s husband. “If you want to gut Charlonion and spills its entrails on the dusty ground, we need to know that it’s for the right reasons.”

“This is no trick,” the old woman replied.

Perry caught it then, a twitch of the scarf that didn’t match the wind. He wondered where that detail came from, whether it was part of Anaksi’s memory, or whether it was pulled from reality.

“Rewind,” said Perry.

“What?” asked Anaksi. She was looking at him, and he looked down at himself. The vision brought them through with clothes, but apparently the blanket wasn’t close enough to count, so he was just laying there looking at this conversation totally naked.

“Er, sorry,” said Perry. He sat up in the bed, carefully feeling the edges of it because he couldn’t see. It was a chance to test the power, to see the edges of it. It was vision, hearing, and for some reason scent, but not touch. “Rewind means to go back, do it again.” He didn’t want to point out the scarf, in case that changed the outcome — they would test that later.

Anaksi showed the conversation again, and the scarf did the same twitching, moving against the wind.

“Did you see that?” asked Perry.

“What?” asked Anaksi.

“The scarf,” said Perry.

Anaksi replayed the vision a third time, and watched closely. “It’s magic.”

“Same as the one Queenie had,” said Perry. “There are lots of possibilities. Mind controlling scarf, the scarf being the thing that allows her to change appearance … I don’t know. Powers can get very weird sometimes.”

“Show me what she looked like from your perspective,” said Anaksi.

“That’s all there was to this?” asked Perry. “Just this conversation?”

“No, there was more,” said Anaksi. “My husband wanted to know that he wasn’t going into a trap, but he never felt that it was credible that the harmonizer would lead to some weapon. I’ve said before, we were going to ransom it.”

“Then here,” said Perry. He showed her Queenie as she’d been when he was talking to her at the saloon. The only thing they had in common was the scarf, which was very distinctive. “March, can you see this?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

“Wait, really?” asked Perry.

“Yes, sir,” Marchand repeated.

“I mean, how?” asked Perry.

“We are interlinked, sir,” said Marchand. “I can see either this vision, or base reality, at my whim.”

“Well what the fuck,” said Perry. “Whose viewpoint are you seeing it from, mine?”

“I cannot say, sir,” said Marchand. “It appears to me as though seen from another camera, but without either of you within it. I believe this might just be a convenience, rather than reality.”

Anaksi was looking at Queenie, pointedly not paying attention to Perry. The blanket was covering his lap, he could feel it, but from her perspective he was just sitting there naked. She didn’t seem to be all that uncomfortable with him, and he decided not to be uncomfortable either — he was in the best shape of his life and perfectly groomed, so why not? If she needed him in pants, she could ask.

“She doesn’t look like anything special,” said Anaksi. “Show me the train?”

“You should have seen her there,” said Perry.

“Your perspective,” said Anaksi.

Perry pushed the vision forward and showed her what was relevant, mostly Queenie standing on the train with her scarf billowing out behind her, whipping around of its own accord. There were a few moments with the posse too, but not too many.

“Now the battle at Grabler’s Gulch,” said Anaksi. Her voice was flat.

Perry hesitated.

The problem was, he’d killed a few people. He’d undeniably killed a few people during very relevant portions of the night when Queenie was there leading the charge into the basement of city hall.

Perry had an advantage though, which was that he was a veteran of television and film. He knew about deceptive editing and quick cuts, and he had at least a little faith that he could learn how to do this with a newfound power on the fly.

So he showed the lead up, as Queenie and her men approached, kicking up dust. He showed the moments when Queenie had fired from extremely far away, displaying her unparalleled accuracy. When that was done, before he jumped into the fray and killed people she’d known, he switched over to the bank vault. It was hard to only get Queenie there, and he failed to hide a body, but he showed himself getting shot, and hoped that he looked enough like a victim, then played out bits and pieces of the chase, hoping that adding in more ‘cuts’ would make it seem as though he was just trying to get to the good bits.

He wasn’t lying to her, he was just omitting certain things that would make him look bad in her eyes. He had killed people she cared about, and worse, they had apparently been altered to no longer be themselves, which made them innocents, at least in some sense of the word.

She didn’t call him on it, if she noticed.

“All that’s left is to have her come to Doctrix Grayspear, or for us to interrogate Grayspear,” said Perry.

Anaksi nodded once. “Can you show me the other worlds, before you go?”

“All of them?” asked Perry.

“I don’t know,” said Anaksi. “Just … some of what the Inspectors saw.”

Perry stood up, casting the blanket to the side, and fumbled his way around a room he couldn’t see in order to get on some underwear and pants. This was by way of practicing blindness. At the same time, he was putting up images from the worlds he’d been to, of Seraphinus and Teaguewater, as much of the grand vistas as he had access to — which because he could fly was a great many of them. This was to practice multitasking, and to give her eyes something to look at that wasn’t his naked body.

“It’s beautiful,” said Anaksi as she watched the rising sun over San Francisco Bay.

“Yeah, I’m fond of that one,” said Perry as he buttoned up. “Here, one more.”

He showed her the Natrix as it lumbered along, the giant machine as seen from the ground, with people waving from the upper balconies.

“And the Commission doesn’t know?” asked Anaksi as Perry let the vision fade.

“No,” said Perry. “Or if they know, they haven’t informed anyone we’ve eavesdropped on.”

Shoreboth seemed to know, but he was, possibly, not quite of this world, and certainly beyond the Commission’s power. In a single conversation, Perry had probably learned more from the entity than the Inspectors had in their entire time of being tethered to the creature.

“You’re not telling me everything,” said Anaksi.

“No, I’m not, because there’s a lot to tell,” said Perry. “Too much, really. Even trying to catch you up on everything relevant would take … days? Weeks? There are technologies I know of that the Commission would kill for, there are histories of worlds, there are players in the game.”

“I want to know,” said Anaksi. “I deserve to know. You’ve said you’re sympathetic, you’ve said that you’re on the side of the Yuuksen, you’ve said —”

“Stay in here, with Marchand,” said Perry. “Put on the helmet, ask questions, have him give you digests.” He turned to the armor. “Marchand, give her full read-only access.”

“Surely not full, sir?”

“You heard me,” said Perry. “Let her see anything she wants to.”

“Sir, there are numerous intimate moments that I have captured on camera,” said Marchand.

“Alright, fine, read-only access to everything that you agree she should have access to,” said Perry. “Does that work?”

“If you close the shelf around us, I will be diminished, sir,” said Marchand. “I would not be in my right mind to make such a determination.”

“Flag files for restriction now then,” said Perry. “Anything where I’m having sex with someone, seeing someone naked, taking with someone about their emotional issues, anything that’s tagged with relationship stuff … I don’t know.”

“Sir, a number of critical moments have taken place while you were in a state of undress,” said Marchand.

Perry rolled his eyes. “Alright, I don’t care if she sees me naked, she’s already seen me naked.”

“Very good, sir,” said Marchand. “That allows access to a significantly greater portion of the archives.”

“Har har,” said Perry. He looked over at Anaksi. “He’s joking.”

“I am not, sir,” said Marchand. “And sir, did you intend to inform her of the, er,” he paused for a moment, then slipped into French. “The werewolf pathway?”

“No, let’s keep that one under wraps,” Perry replied back.

“How many secrets do you have?” asked Anaksi.

“Lots,” said Perry. “And you’ll be getting a significant number of them, I swear, by the time I come back from being with the Doctrix, your head will be buzzing. Okay?”

“I — okay,” said Anaksi.

“Great,” said Perry. He found the rest of his clothes and finished getting dressed. “I’ll check in when I can, but I’m constrained while I’m in her office. Tonight we’ll post up somewhere, so we can listen in on her conversations and make sure we don’t miss Queenie’s return.”

~~~~

It was strange to go back to the workshop as a wanted man. Granted, they had a whole city to look through, and even if they were circulating the image of his face — which he didn’t think they were — he doubted that he would get caught out. And if he did? He’d fight or run, and he hadn’t seen anything that said they’d be able to stop him.

It was a day for test subjects. Three had been scheduled by Grayspear to come at specific intervals.

The first of them was a man whose wife and child had died two weeks before. Grayspear had approached him and told him that she could cure his grief, and he had assented to the experimental “procedure”.

Perry sat to the side while she explained everything to him. He felt like he should stop it, but he stood to the side. It was something he thought he needed to see, and the man, at least, seemed to have given informed consent. Perry would have said more than Grayspear did, would have explained that the machine meant never loving anyone again, never being able to start another life to rival the first, but Perry didn’t actually think that would sway the man any.

In the end, the man was placed in a chair with his head just over the machine that Grayspear had been spending so much time on. It required power, and the three of them switched off, though the amount of drain seemed to be a pittance.

“Now we wait,” said Grayspear.

They didn’t talk much. Grayspear had no beside manner, and seemed to resent bringing this man into her workshop.

“How long are we expecting this to take, doctrix?” asked Perry after an hour had passed.

“I had hoped I had done enough to make it faster,” said the doctrix. She frowned at the man who was waiting in the chair. He had cried briefly, for no obvious reason. Perry didn’t think was a part of it. “Our next appointment is two hours from now.”

“We’ll know when it happens?” asked Perry.

“Oh yes,” nodded Grayspear. “It will be unmistakable.”

It didn’t happen until two hours later, after their next appointment had shown up and was left waiting in the hallway. The man sat up with a yelp, clutched his head for a moment, then released it in confusion, as though he’d had a migraine that had lasted only a fraction of a second and then faded away to nothing.

“Oh,” he said. He stood up from the chair, smoothed down his clothes, then looked at Grayspear and Perry. “Thank … you.”

“Why did you say that?” asked Grayspear.

The man shook his head. “It’s polite, when someone does something for you.”

“You value politeness?” asked Grayspear.

“I — I — my wife and child, it’s — I still remember them, but —” he closed his mouth. “Huh.”

He seemed more puzzled than anything.

“Do you value politeness?” asked Grayspear.

“I — what does that mean?” asked the man. “I think people should be polite to each other, yes.”

“Why?” asked Grayspear.

“Because it’s expected,” said the man. He still had that puzzled look. “It greases the wheels, doesn’t it? Gets you what you want. And if you let politeness go, then … it’s a matter of respect, that’s all.”

“And is respect something you value?” asked Grayspear.

“What are these questions?” asked the man. He tried to take a step back and bumped into the chair. “What have you done to me?”

“We have cured you of your grief,” said Grayspear. “What do you feel about murder, do you think it’s something you would like to do?”

“I — no, of course not!” he said. “What is happening?”

“We’ll talk in the coming days, when you’ve had a chance to readjust,” said Grayspear. “Now out, we have the next one.”

She shooed him out of the room, and the second man came in right after the first. Perry watched mutely from the side.

He honestly didn’t know whether it was better to live with the pain of loss or not. Did you ever really come back from the sudden death of a wife? Of a child? He wasn’t sure that you did. Maybe, eventually, and it was the ‘eventually’ that worried him, as though the man had accepted a permanent cure for a temporary condition. Though he didn’t know if it was permanent.

The next man was more well-to-do, which seemed to give Grayspear pause.

“You were recommended to me,” she said.

“My father thought it would help me,” he replied.

“Not many people know about this,” said Grayspear.

“Erm,” said the man. He was really more of a boy, late teens, if an adult by the standards of this place. “My father is part of the Commission. So he might have heard it from someone there.”

“Many people are part of the Commission,” said Grayspear. “And what is it that your father does?”

“He’s Commissioner Wellis,” said the boy. He wasn’t looking at them, instead preferring to stare at his feet.

“I’d be executed if something went wrong,” said Grayspear with a hiss. “Get out of here.”

“He won’t be pleased,” said the boy. “Is that … I was supposed to come here and have you carve the weakness from me.” He looked up at Grayspear. “You can do that, can’t you?”

“Not yet,” said Grayspear. “And when we can, we’ll do it to you, after several tries to make sure it works properly. But we can’t do it now, the thing we do is to remove attachments, to make a person less beholden to their bonds.”

“To … my father?” asked the boy.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” said Grayspear. “Do you love your father?”

“I do,” said the boy. He was tentative about it, maybe because of his feelings, or maybe because he was eyeing the chair. “But I’m a disappointment to him. And this would … make it so that I wouldn’t be?”

“It would make it so you understand that your father is just a man,” said Grayspear. “It would shake loose the weight of expectations upon you, if that’s your problem. You would feel it clear that other people are just people. But it would not make you a better person, not unless that better person is buried under the weights upon you.” She was staring at him. Her weight was on one of her feet, like she was moments away from turning him out.

“I want it done then,” said the boy. “To see who I am.”

“It’s irreversible,” said Perry. It was the first time he’d spoken. “You wouldn’t be able to love anymore. If you had a wife, it would be transactional, not a union of two people who care for each other.”

Grayspear gave him a frown.

“I would never be allowed to marry for love,” said the boy. He took a breath. “Do it.”

“Sit in the chair,” said Grayspear with a sigh. “Lay back, placing your head as close to the machine as possible. This might take some time.”

Half an hour in, Grayspear pulled Perry into the corridor while the machine ran under the power of the man who was laying in it.

“What was that?” she asked.

“I thought he should be informed of the consequences,” said Perry. “Better for you if there’s a problem down the road, so you can offload responsibility onto him, claim that he made his own choice with the knowledge of what it would entail.”

“No,” said Grayspear. “You don’t believe in this device, do you?”

“I think it works,” said Perry. “Or at least, does something to these people. But I’m less sanguine about the benefits, and more cautious about the risks.”

“Bah,” said Grayspear, rolling her eyes. “We must know the truth, and this is the only way to get it. The device must be used to understand how it works, what it fundamentally does.”

“If this is for science —” he stopped himself, then couldn’t help it. “Where are the standardized survey questions for these men before they begin? Why isn’t this being done blind, or double blind? Why aren’t we measuring them physically? I don’t know how the first trial of this went, but if this is for science then we need to be gathering more data than we are.”

Grayspear stared at him. “What is a double blind?”

“Neither the subject nor the experimenter knows what the experiment is,” said Perry. “You’d have an assistant in the dark about what the machine does, and they would handle all the procedures and questions and things. But I don’t think you could do that ethically here, because you need the consent of the patients, or subjects, or whatever we’re calling them.”

“It seems a foolish way to do things,” said Grayspear. She folded her arms across her chest. “A slow and arduous way. One that would get in the way of truth-seeking. I can accept many things, but being called a poor scientist is not one of them. Do you wish to continue as my assistant, or not?”

“I do, I will,” said Perry.

“Then stay quiet,” replied Grayspear. She went back into the room in a huff, and Perry followed after her.

He did wonder what it would be like to experience the machine. Whatever it was doing, Queenie could do it faster, and without as much effort. She’d had an entire group of people converted in about a day, much faster than Grayspear could do it. And what had she promised them? If they felt no bonds, only raw transactional self-interest, how had she compelled them to fight for their lives? They wouldn’t have been motivated by the destruction of the Commission, it would have had to be something else. He hadn’t talked to Anaksi about it, not that she would know.

The change happened earlier, for no particular reason that Perry could see, taking only two hours. It was the same as before, with the boy sitting up from the chair, less pain on his face, only a wince and then some brief confusion.

“Oh,” he said.

“Tell me what you’re feeling,” said Doctrix Grayspear.

“You were right, he’s just a man,” said the boy. “Wow. He holds the purse strings, but —” he stopped. “Do I not care about money?”

“Only you can answer that,” said Grayspear. “Did you care about it before?”

This is the sort of thing you ascertain before the procedure, thought Perry, though he knew that wasn’t his true objection.

“I did, I think,” said the boy. “And now … I don’t?”

“Hrm,” said Grayspear. “You should care about money. You need money.”

“No,” said the boy. “I need a place to stay, and food to eat, clothes on my back, but the money is just … paper, coins, numbers. It’s nothing.” He stood up and smiled. “Thank you.”

He rushed from the room, not showing any politeness or further gratitude. Maybe he had stopped caring about them in the slightest.

“You didn’t tell him not to go killing anyone,” said Perry. Marchand’s dry humor was rubbing off on him.

“Bah,” said Grayspear. She tapped her foot. “But it is troubling.”

“How so?” asked Perry. “If someone can have an attachment to money, we’d expect that we’re removing that too, right?”

“Money is how the Commission was meant to control these people,” said Grayspear. She looked at the machine. “Law has power because people respect it, and we erase that respect from them. But they’ll obey the law anyway, because there are consequences if they don’t, imprisonment and fines and executions. It works.”

“No,” said Perry. “Too easy to commit a crime and get away with it. You need that respect. You need that culture.” Markat believed that, anyway.

“Maybe,” said Grayspear. “We’re on a new frontier.”

“And you’re worried that he suddenly stopped believing in the power of money,” said Perry. “That this particular lever stopped working on him, because without this idea that he needs to be rich, he’s content to live some bohemian lifestyle, which the Commission doesn’t want.” The word ‘bohemian’ was replaced by translation with a word that was unfamiliar to Perry, maybe derived from a placename.

“I’m worried that the Commission won’t give me what I want,” said Grayspear. “That they’ll see me as a threat, rather than a scientist. The accident was bad enough.”

The accident was three murders, but Perry kept his mouth shut about it.

Their third was a no-show, which didn’t become obvious until after almost half an hour had passed.

“We’re done for the day then,” said Doctrix Grayspear with a clap of her hands. “Unless you wanted to have a go?”

Perry watched her face. She was grinning. “No,” he finally said. “Did you?”

“I don’t know who I would be, if I came out the other end,” Grayspear replied. “I don’t know that I would still care about this grand project, or what I would do to fill my time.”

“We changed people today,” said Perry. “And not, maybe, for the better.”

“But we know more than we knew the day before,” said Grayspear. “And in a few days time, we’ll have them back, and they’ll have adjusted to their new lives. They’ll know themselves better, and be able to tell us what they think. It’s important, don’t you agree?”

“I suppose,” said Perry, though he didn’t actually agree at all. He would rather the device be buried in a deep grave. “I’ll take my leave then. What’s on the agenda for tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow, we do interviews, more with the first round of test subjects,” said Grayspear. “If I want to get the full use of you, I’ll have you be the one asking questions, to see if there’s an angle that I’ve missed, something that helps us develop the picture of what’s actually happening when their brain snaps.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis.

“Very good, doctrix,” said Perry with a slight bow.

He left her tower and made his way to a dead-end alleyway, the kind that was at risk of being swallowed by a building the next time someone did renovations. He had checked in throughout the day, whenever he’d made the excuse of needing to use the bathroom.

“What’s going on?” asked Anaksi. “Are you finished?” She pulled the helmet from her head, where it had been each other time Perry had come in.

“Done for the day, yes,” said Perry.

“And?” she asked.

“Still no sign of Queenie. Tonight’s the night we get some answers,” said Perry.