Beneath the hood, he had no face.
There were eyes. A slit for a mouth. Something that might have been a nose, once. But he’d been burned. Horrifically. Tufts of hair threaded away from the back of his gleaming purple skull. The skin under his eyes was bubbled and melted. He howled and covered his face with his suited arms, but the illusion wavered. Now she could see more than just the edges of it. This was why he lived this way, she realized. A simple filter hid her true face from most eyes, but this man, whoever he was, couldn’t bear even that attenuated amount of scrutiny.
“Please don’t kill me,” he whimpered. “You found me. That’s enough.”
“Didn’t you try to kill me?” Hwa asked.
“No.” He spoke from behind his hands. His ruined face peeked out from behind glimmering fingers. “It all went so wrong. So wrong.”
“Why? Because the wrong person wound up hurt?”
He shook his head. It was a motion of his whole body. His neck, she realized, was so thick with scar tissue that it would no longer move. “They said no one would be there.”
Hwa frowned. “During the lockdown?”
“During the shift. They said it was a dead shift. Maintenance day. So fewer people would be there. They just wanted the apparatus destroyed. But they got the schedule wrong.”
Something very hard and very cold began to form in the pit of Hwa’s stomach. Her voice came out quiet. “What?”
“They said it would be fine. He said it would be fine. He said I’ll find you something you want, and give it to you. But it all went so wrong.”
Hwa’s vision swam. “How long have you been like this?”
“Three years.” He sounded exhausted. “I change my mind. Kill me. Kill me now. I’m so tired. Maybe you know what it’s like. You have some sense of it. I can tell. I can see it on your face. Your real face.”
Hwa wiped blood from her eyes. Most of it was blood, anyway. She had thought of this moment so many times. What she would do. How she would do it. Fast or slow. Painful or painless. Here was the face on every heavy bag, the spirit inside every training dummy. She had not expected it to be this wounded, already. This much like her own.
“You killed my brother.”
He brought his hands away. “I killed all of them. Or I helped. I’m the only one left alive. The rest of us didn’t make it. I got all the money. There was a lot of money. They wanted this city. Badly.”
She needed to know more. And desperately hoped he wouldn’t tell her.
“But you know that.” He was wheezing, now. “You’re on the payroll, too. Just like this whole town.”
11
Emergent
When she entered Daniel Síofra’s apartment, the freezer was the first place she went. She had the passcode from one of their running meetings. A Saturday. He was late that day thanks to a group call, and he said she should just take the train and meet him upstairs. How long ago was that? A week? Two weeks? Three? Was it normal, the way they’d fallen into step with each other? No. He’d pushed boundaries from the start. She should have put a stop to it. But it was good, having a friend like him. Someone for whom she could be new, someone who didn’t know her—that poor sick girl with the terrible mother. Someone who didn’t pity her like she knew Eileen and Mistress Séverine and even Kripke did. And now she knew why he’d become her friend. Why he’d followed her so very closely. She thought she might be sick.
It didn’t matter. Not anymore. She folded the ice up in a towel and took a seat facing the door and waited. At the hospital, Dr. Mantis had said she would need ice. She knew all that already, but the anti-concussion machines were worth the lecture.
It was very late when Síofra arrived. He came through the door carrying a bottle of chilled vodka. The frost on it retreated from his flesh where his fingers curled around the neck of the bottle. She saw as much when he set it down on the coffee table. He’d bought it quite recently, then. On his way home. Some remote part of her noticed these things and filed them away someplace where they couldn’t hurt her.
“Hwa,” he said, smiling. He came closer. She had only the fire on, and kept it low. Lights hurt. “Hwa?”
Then his face changed, and he was on his knees in front of her. “What happened?” His hands came up to her face and she flinched and he pulled them away. He kept his hands in her line of sight. “Who did this? Hwa? Oh, my God. Tell me who did this.”
To her disgust, a single tear rolled down from her good eye. Síofra’s hands struggled on the arms of the sectional, fingers twisting the fibres of the blanket that shrouded her. He wanted to hold her. She wanted to let him. It would be so easy. She could lie and say there was just another fight, Andrea maybe, or maybe someone at the school, and he would bundle her up in martinis and pity and tell her he’d never let anyone hurt her, not ever again.