“Certainly. C-Come in.”
Mulaghesh brushes rain off her sleeves and steps over the threshold. The front room is dark, messy, and was obviously never intended to receive visitors, as every surface is concealed by tottering towers of books and cups of tea. It’s terribly cold inside, a common symptom of a lonely house, in Mulaghesh’s experience. But most curiously, Rada’s walls are covered in taxidermied animals: sparrows, thrashing fish, the heads of deer and hogs and certain mountain cats. It’s as if all the fauna of the hillsides crept down her walls and suddenly found themselves frozen.
Mulaghesh says, “Uh. Do you hunt?”
“No. W-Why? Oh, yes, the a-animals. No. Th-Those I do m-myself.”
“You…stuff them yourself?”
“Oh, y-yes. It’s a hobby of m-mine. There’s a lot of hunters here, and they t-tend to d-d-discard much of animals. I f-find a way to use them. I pr-practice in these r-rooms, through here,” she says, leading Mulaghesh through a door. On the other side is a much more normal space—a white, plain, medical office one would normally expect to see when looking for a doctor. “N-no one, um, ever actually c-c-comes to the other d-door.”
“Oh. I’m, uh, sorry.” She coughs. “I didn’t realize.”
“No, it’s qu-quite all right.”
Rada’s taxidermy skills are still on display here, though in a more restrained capacity: the snarling head of a boar and a duck in midflight hang on the walls just beside the entry door. Rada asks Mulaghesh to wait while she changes into something more functional. “The body is qu-kwuhhite, uh, m-messy you see.”
“I see.” Mulaghesh takes off her rain-slick greatcoat and hangs it in the corner.
Rada withdraws while Mulaghesh sits and thinks. She’s more dismayed than she expected: she’d thought for some time that Choudhry was dead, and then after that she thought she was somehow involved in the murders. But to hear she was desecrated so abominably is something Mulaghesh never expected.
Rada returns, now dressed in dark tan clothing with a rubber apron. “She’s in the b-back room. If you’re r-ready.”
“I am.”
Rada nods and leads her through the door. On the other side is a small room that looks fit for surgical or perhaps funerary purposes, and in the center is a large stone slab with drainage holes in it. On the slab are…
Things. That’s all her brain can process them as: items. Objects. Fragments of something. Not a person, certainly not a human being, because she simply can’t conceive of such a thing. To see a fellow person cut down to such crude elements is dehumanizing beyond words.
She tries to get ahold of herself. She focuses, and looks.
On the table are two torso halves. Dark-skinned, breasts withered and sagging. The hint of thick pubic hair at the crotch. A woman vivisected carefully and cleanly, her arms and legs pruned away. Only her left thigh remains, but this segment too has been dismembered, placed close to the hip as if to try to give these ravaged pieces of a human the semblance of a whole. It only highlights the monstrousness of all of this.
“It’s the s-same as you saw,” says Rada. “Yes?”
“Yeah,” says Mulaghesh quietly. “Close. But they left the heads and limbs behind the other times.”
“We’re not wuh-wrong that it’s a S-Saypuri woman, th-though?”
Mulaghesh shakes her head. “No. Even though she’s bloodless now, the skin’s the right tone. They found her on the cliffs?”
“Y-Yes. Where the m-missing M-Ministry officer used t-t-to walk, or so I’m t-told.”
She looks at Rada, breathing hard. “And you can do an autopsy?”
“P-partially, yes. Th-the b-body isn’t f-fresh, so to suh-speak, but…I can t-try. What do you hope t-to find?”
“Anything. Something. I want to find something to use to pin these bastards down.”
Rada nods meekly. “Then we’ll begin.”
Mulaghesh takes a seat on the far wall and pulls up a second chair to prop her feet up. She slouches in the chair, hands resting on her stomach, and watches, much as someone would a spectator sport, as Rada Smolisk carefully and thoughtfully dissects the once-human husk lying on her table. It is not, as Mulaghesh feared, an inhuman, monstrous violation; rather, Rada makes remarks throughout her examination more suggestive of a boat trip through a pleasant and familiar countryside.
“Remarkably clean cuts,” she says quietly. “Almost surgical. Yet even surgical cuts, on this large of a scale, would leave…how shall I put this…sawing marks. It takes work, getting through so much tissue. And yet there’s none here. It’s as if she’s been put through a mill saw.” She rummages about for some ghastly instrument to aid her.
She doesn’t stutter while she works, Mulaghesh notes. It’s as if such close interaction with the corpse transforms her into a completely different person, someone much more confident and focused than she is in waking life.
Mulaghesh herself can hardly focus at all. Through the hours of the autopsy—and it takes far longer than she expected—the echoes of her vision keep screaming in her head. Now that she’s faced with yet another corpse—again, mutilated as a Voortyashtani sentinel would do—she feels as if the entire world is about to fall apart, and they shall all go plummeting into the inky dark sea, past columns of glimmering moonlight, to a strange white island on the other side of reality….
Are they coming through? Are the sentinels poking through bit by bit, to attack anyone they can find? And how is this even possible, if Voortya’s dead?
“I very rarely have an audience for this,” Rada says absently. Her brow is wet with sweat. It must be hard work, Mulaghesh realizes, parsing through all the bone and muscle walls.
Mulaghesh rubs her eyes, trying to focus. “Does an audience make it any better?”
“Perhaps. It’s something I feel better having a witness for, this sort of thing. It’s remarkable, isn’t it?”
“What? The corpse?”
“No. Well, yes, in a way. It’s this…this opportunity to examine what we are, the many disparate and curious elements that make up our beings.” There is a snap of breaking bone. “So many systems, so many pieces…More complicated than the most complicated of clocks. I wonder, sometimes: are we truly one thing, one being, or many, many different things, simply dreaming they are one?”
“I guess that’s a good point,” says Mulaghesh, feeling surprised, impressed, and somewhat discomfited. She wonders if Rada always pontificates during such procedures, either to her trapped patients or to the empty walls.
“What do you think, looking at her?” asks Rada.
“That she could have been one of mine.”
“Interesting. If I might ask—how does it make you feel?”
“How I feel? Like I want to find out who did this.”
“You feel a responsibility to her, then? More than you would any other person?”
“Of course I do.”