I nod, and he presses the button and the hologram pops up like a macabre children’s picture book.
It’s Mia, alone. She’s not connected to the machine, but she’s just come off it. The medical information scrolls to the right of her, listing all the physical ways the Zeal and Verve have messed her up. Malnutrition. Kidney disease. Skin abscesses near injection sites. Tooth decay. Jaundice. It’s reflected in the hologram—Mia is thin and unhealthy, just as she was the last time I saw her, strapped to the Chair, wires emerging from her arms as she dreamed her nightmares in the Zealot lounge of Mirage. But in this her eyes are open, moving from side to side as she staggers back to the hovel where she lives.
Lived.
I swallow, unable to look away. A dark, shadowy figure comes up behind her. A man, most likely, judging from his height. His face is covered in a dark fabric mask. He grabs Mia around the neck and pulls her to him, whispers something in her ear.
I pause it. “How do they know he whispered to her?” Mia’s face is also a lot more detailed and expressive than the re-creation of Tila murdering Vuk had been, and everything is shown from the same angle. I can answer my own question.
“It was caught on camera,” Nazarin says.
“Do you think it was the Ratel?”
“I honestly don’t know. I hope not. And this isn’t their usual MO. If they order a hit, they want you to know it.” His jaw works, and he must be thinking of his partner. He presses play again.
Mia’s eyes widen at whatever the masked man whispers. “Which lost soul are you?” she asks, loud enough to be heard by the camera.
He doesn’t respond except to grab her face in his hands.
“I wanted to try and be good again. I suppose it was always too late.” She closes her eyes. “I forgive you.”
He breaks her neck. She falls to the ground. The man is gone. Mia is also gone, even if her body remains.
The image goes dark and I turn away. A round, heavy weight of dread and grief sits in my stomach. I cross my arms over my torso and hunch forward.
“I don’t want to push you, after just seeing that,” Nazarin says, leaning on the counter next to me. He’s close, but not too close. Perfectly trained. “I think there’s something in here that can help us. What do you think she meant, when she mentioned ‘lost souls’ just now, and when Tila mentioned changing faces in Mia’s dream?”
I lean closer, lowering my voice to a whisper in his ear. I feel him shiver. “Are you sure the government didn’t do this?” I ask. “Catch her lucid dreaming because of us, and snuff her before the Ratel found her?” The government being behind this would be marginally better than the Ratel, though still terrifying, but the real question simmers behind those words: is it our fault?
He shakes his head. “No. I have access to those records. Whoever this was, it wasn’t one of us.”
Unless they were off the books and they don’t want him to know. That’s always a possibility.
I furrow my brow. Changing faces. Vuk’s autopsy said he’d had lots of plastic surgery. Even changed the shape of his ears. Had she known him, somehow?
Changing faces like kaleidoscopes.
A horrible theory blossoms in my head. “Fucking hell.”
“What?”
“Turn on the wallscreen.”
The blank wall home screen appears in front of us.
“Bring up the list of Vuk’s suspected surgeries.”
He does, and I stare at them. Sure enough …
“Bring up his face.”
A photograph of him appears. I look closely, but at first it still seems impossible. The face is totally different.
“Give me the tablet.”
He passes it to me and I take the little stylus from the side and start to sketch. I’m a passable artist at best, but I focus on the shape of the eyes, the nose, the wide mouth. I draw him almost smiling, as if we’ve just thrown a grape at him and missed. I project the drawing of Adam onto the wallscreen, right next to the picture of Vuk. Maybe, just maybe. The jawline is the same. The eyes are the same color—that warm hazel I remember. I close my eyes and imagine that face I’d just seen in the dream. I open my eyes and look at Vuk. Yes. Yes.
“The missing link,” I say.
Nazarin catches on right away, which I appreciate. I can’t quite articulate my thoughts anyway.
“It’d be difficult, but with enough surgery, Vuk could be this boy, Adam.”
I shake my head. I’ve made the connection, but it still doesn’t seem possible. He’d had his left arm reconstructed. Underneath the synthetic skin, it had been as metal as my mechanical heart. “The boy I know was a fetal amputee. His arm ended at the elbow. But Adam died.”
“Did you ever see the body?”
“N … no.” There were no funerals in the Hearth.
What did they do with the bodies?