by M F Sullivan
“Anyway, who we really are is living consciousness. Light on the inside and out. What do our bodies matter? I wanted to be a girl since I was little! I was a regular hoodlum, getting into my mother’s gowns and makeup. So many beautiful kimono, smeared with white paste…it makes me want to die to think about them. Sigh”—she said the word “sigh” out loud, and the martyr laughed, earning a nick on the ear that instantly healed—“I could have inherited those someday. Theoretically.”
“Was she mad?”
“About the dresses? You should have seen my ass!”
“No, about—”
“Oh, no way. Are you kidding? She was always disappointed that I was born a boy! I was almost eight when I admitted to her that I was a girl, and it was like, we were at the doctor two days later.” She told the story laughing, but Dominia couldn’t help sadness for the small child forced to endure eight years of life in tortured secrecy. At least young Morgan had been granted a sweet sliver of Eden before life unveiled its unjust face and delivered her to her fate among the Holy Family. “Part of the reason I look so good now is because we were able to make small adjustments while I was young. You can at least feel these!” No boundaries, the woman: she snatched up Dominia’s hands and settled them on the warm breasts beneath her shirt. For her part, the General tried to maintain the objective and studious look of someone, say, at an art gallery, or perhaps a doctor looking for lumps. She even threw in a bit of, “Oh, mm-hmm? Ah, I see,” which cracked Miki up.
“You’re so shy! This is hilarious. I always heard you martyrs were super-depraved S and M freaks. Anyway, yeah, these are real, see? The doctors couldn’t do anything at first, of course, because I was small, so Mom overhauled my wardrobe, started treating me like a human being, and taught me how to be a proper woman. Then, when I hit puberty, the hormonal therapies started. It was a long road, but I was cured by the time I was in my early twenties. No better way to take it all for a ride than to leave work as a geisha and apply my talents elsewhere! Hah, she was way more pissed off about that! But, see?” She caught Dominia’s chin. “It doesn’t matter who we were before. None of who I was would have mattered if I hadn’t told you. None of what you’ve done matters now that you have this chance to free yourself through change.”
“Thank you,” said the martyr as Miki clipped and arranged one last lock that was allowed by the stylist to hang upon the General’s pale forehead.
“Any time, cutie. Come to me first, next time you need a haircut.” Kahlil appeared in the doorway and drew her attention. “There are a few chunks I wasn’t able to save…what’s up?”
“You guys are going to want to take a look at this.”
Always fatal words. Sensing the weight of what she was about to observe, Dominia followed Miki, Basil, and their maligned host to the proverbial command center. There, a paused video buffered. She recognized it before he said anything at all, because she had seen it, quite literally, with her own eye.
“You wanted it, you got it. This stream was obtained by a friend of mine in Jerusalem, a guy who has access to some serious martyr information. They’ve had this stream’s link for the past couple of days.”
That fucking DIOX-I. The fucking Hierophant. There it was, her conversation with her Father on the rooftop of Kabul, recorded in perfect silence. Everything she had done, everything she had seen: watched not just by her Father, but by the Hunters, and every human government in the world. She would have gouged it out right there if she wasn’t sure it would try to cram itself back in.
Calmly, she asked, “The stream was leaked by whom?”
“A confidential source.”
Still reeling from before, she almost speculated aloud, “the Hierophant,” but refrained as he went on. “If they don’t already know you’re here with me, they will when they’ve caught up. And that’s assuming they aren’t getting live reports from its GPS, anyway.”
Oh, yeah. This thing was coming out of her skull. In retrospect, of course it tracked her location: it had a map feature, didn’t it? What was the world coming to!
“Do you happen to have an eye patch lying around?”
Kahlil offered the kind of expression that made even Dominia feel stupid. “Do I look like a pirate?”
“A little,” said Miki, earning an irritated look she exchanged for a grin. “With the beard, and all. A software pirate, at least.”
Muttering something in Arabic that got him slapped in the head, Kahlil minimized the video stream with a tap of his touch screen. “Look, Miki…I’ve got a lot of equipment here to interfere with recording devices and unauthorized uploads while people are in my house, but this…you can’t stay here. I’m sorry. I broke the encryption, but I can’t help you beyond that. The Lazarene ceremony is in the basement of a music store, at”—he paused, looked at Dominia in irritation, and covered his mouth to prevent lip-reading efforts while he shared the address.
“This is bullshit,” said the prostitute; their host rose from his seat to defend himself.
“What do you want me to do, Miki? I’m stupid. I’m stupid to have taken your money. With the Caliphate—and probably the government—aware that you’re here, I’m as good as dead.”
“This is a risk you knew when you agreed to put us up,” Miki began, but Dominia shook her head.
“He’s right. He’s done enough for us. There’s no reason another human has to die because I’m here.”
“They’ll be dying because the Hierophant came,” said Miki.
“And he came because I did.” She thought of the lifelong suffering of the patient Lamb, who never wished for anything but to be with his brother. How she struggled against the urge to admit defeat against suffering; how she grappled with inevitability! The calm, rational General forced herself to say, “We can go elsewhere.”
“Thank you.” The man’s voice relaxed with a heave of gratitude. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t be this inhospitable. But—”
“We understand. At least, I do. Thank you for keeping us this long. I hope”—she frowned and decided not to carry on with that particular line of thought, opting instead to say—“I hope we’ll meet again, in better circumstances.”
Then, with a glance down the hall, the sighing General added, “At least we don’t have a lot of luggage.”
They did, however, have a dog. A dog who was found in the bedroom with his head upon his paws, ears pinning back and forth upon his tuxedoed head like fuzzy satellite dishes. A dog who, when called, “Basil, we have to go,” decided he was now as stupid as all other dogs in the world. He got up in place, dashed in fast circles, then settled back down with a pre-nap huff.
Somehow, this action gave Dominia the idea that she’d done something wrong.
“Come on.” Miki pushed the mongrel with her toe while the dog peeped up at her from one eye. “We’ll get you some bacon or—oh, wrong town. Do dogs like falafel?”
“Lamb,” the martyr profaned, stooping to the level of the dog. “I’m missing something, aren’t I? There’s something…something I’m not doing. Or maybe…”
“Are you seriously talking to the dog?”
“Thinking out loud to it,” she tried, which was blatantly false, because the border collie deigned to lift his head and wag his tail in some kind of indicator. She was, in fact, talking to the dog. Miki’s tongue expressed her displeasure with a click against the roof of her mouth.
“Primitive man—I mean, before the primary Western calendar flipped from CE to AL—used to just, like, murder each other for fun. You know that, right? Not only gladiators in Roman times, I mean, but serial killers—and this one dude talked to his dog. Or his neighbor’s dog. I don’t remember.”
“And Caligula promoted his horse. Why do you know this?”
“It’s a requirement for Red Market women to learn the savage nature of mankind because now the savage, murder-for-fun types are you. I just mean to say, when I see you talking to a dog, my palms start to sweat.”
“That’s a kind
of profiling I don’t appreciate.” Dominia struggled to keep a straight face and failed when she turned her attention back to Basil. He stared intently at the gun concealed in her waistband: that emergency-only device that seemed ever more chain than tool. “But maybe you’re right. I mean, it looks like he’s staring at my gun right now.”
“Hey,” said Miki, “it kind of does.”
At the time, what Dominia did next seemed to be a small mistake: as an experiment, she removed the gun and held it out to see if it was the dog’s focal point. His gaze remained plastered to the weapon. The General was about to comment on the strangeness of it, amused that in all her years of working with military dogs she had never seen an animal interested in guns; Miki appeared on the verge of a similar conclusion; but none of that happened, because Kahlil opened the door without knocking, saying as he entered, “Look, guys, I feel bad about turning you out, and—”
No dog had moved faster; no martyr, slower. It was the sheer surprise of having the dog move in a way so sudden and directed. Not for her hand or her arm or her body or even Kahlil, but for the gun. The next five seconds abstracted: sheer surprise, the scramble of movement, black-and-white blur, the clatter of metal, and the urgent no-no-no of thought followed by the inevitable crack of the gun. All this chaos released into a new kind of order, which took the form of the scream of their unfortunate host and his string of Arabic profanity. While the man clutched his hip and cried, “What the fuck, what did you shoot me for,” Dominia exchanged with Miki a startled look. Both women turned this incredulity down upon the dog; Basil, for his part, wagged his tail, laid the big, sweet doggie eyes on extra thick, and stepped away from the weapon.
Feeling somehow apart from this tableau as much as she felt a part of it, Dominia considered that this was what her Father must have felt all the time: vague amusement. That, or the palpable sense of being the butt of some intangible joke. She cracked a smile that let show the gaps the Hierophant had made in her teeth.
“Well…we do know one medical professional in Kabul.”
XIV
Communication Skills
In many ways, Tobias Akachi seemed too good to be true. Dominia first thought this was because she had not known many humans in anything other than a bureaucratic sense, as when they came into her San Valentino office to appeal to her for grants, favors, stays of execution, etc. Humans, therefore, seemed increasingly to be an otherwise defenseless group in need of a compassionate hand—though she had always felt that way, even while slaying them. The bloody course of her final war arose from a deep admixture of love and hate, in which love found but recent consideration. Somehow, love was more painful for the General. Was that a symptom of evil? Humans, after all, seemed to express love with ease. Not having seen them in their own environment since her aborted childhood, she had not recognized how their kindness, their prevailing belief in the basic decency of conscious individuals, drove some to help even martyrs. And martyrs, well…perhaps it was wrong to call her kind inherently selfish, but what else could be said of a cannibal race? Her Father had, since before their human births, drilled the message of martyr superiority: How could humanity but believe it? How could martyrs but act with those beliefs lodged in their hearts? If, in the martyr world, Dominia had called a friend for help at a strange hour, would she have received any friendship? Any help? Martyrs were to be hospitable to other martyrs, of course. But they were also taught it was understandable to refuse the phone call of an absurd hour, and acceptable to find a solution other than inviting a general, a prostitute, a wounded man, and a dog over for unlicensed emergency surgery. Dr. Akachi had a different approach, about which he discoursed while tending the thrashing patient.
“One should leap at the opportunity to help one’s fellow man.” The dentist used one great hand to hold Kahlil while the other manipulated a pair of silver tweezers in a way topical anesthetic and slow-acting opiates wouldn’t help. “And, with love in the heart! If you do not have love in your heart, you’d might as well do nothing at all.”
“I don’t know.” Miki pinned Kahlil’s shoulders to the silver surface of the dentist’s chic dining room table, sometimes grimacing through her friend’s struggles. “A lot of great charities were founded from a sense of obligation. Lots of old people have been helped. My country has a whole system of elder care—and why? Because old people are so good at guilt!”
“Obligation breeds mutual resentment. I help because I am happy to! Because I was put on God’s Earth to help my fellow man. To help you, Kahlil, get this nasty fellow out of you!”
With a glance for the martyr, then the dog, who observed from the living room couch, Miki said, “This is a great argument for ID-locking all guns.”
“This is an antique,” protested Dominia, who lifted the hem of her shirt to show the handle. Kahlil hissed.
“Put it away! Didn’t you learn your lesson? That stupid dog— Ow!”
While lifting into the light a bloodied bullet that made Miki wince, Tobias laughed. “Relax. You won’t die! Maybe limp a bit. Some long-term aches. You’ll get a good idea of when it’s going to rain!”
“You should be grateful.” Dominia adjusted with a snap the band of her drugstore eye patch, procured at a clerkless convenience store to blind the DIOX-I to their conversations. “That dog saved your life by forcing you to leave your house. You think your Caliphate would have been understanding?”
“Oh, Allah.” Kahlil tried to sit up until Miki shoved him back. “Do you need to mention my—affiliations?”
“I do not care. Much.” The winking dentist brandished a hooked suture needle intended for stitches in gums. “After all, I have a martyr who can testify to my impartiality! That is high praise, I think.”
“You should have destroyed her brain while she was in your office,” said Kahlil, who swore as Miki slammed him down into the table. “Shit— Well? Can you blame me?”
“Yeah, asshole, I can blame you. It’s your own fault you got shot, the way you barged in.” Sniffing, Miki looked over at the dog. “Poor boy was startled. Weren’t you, boy? Who’s a good boy?”
“He shot me!”
“He doesn’t know that!”
Dominia wasn’t so sure, but there was no point in arguing. Better to play along, to smirk and say, “Holding a grudge against a dog is kind of petty, Kahlil.”
“So maybe I hold one against you.”
As Dominia pointed to her own chest in a who, me? way, Tobias rinsed the closed wound with distilled water and daubed on some hiss-provoking antibiotic cream. “Good as new!”
“Great. Can I go home, now?”
Dominia’s hand on his chest rendered his effort to sit up humorously futile.
“Actually,” she said, “since we have you here, maybe you could do us a favor. I’ve been thinking…two can play this hacker game, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not the only one who’s been blinded by the Family.”
Miki took her meaning right away. “Yeah—yeah, that’s a great idea! That idiot, René…he’s probably making the mistake of appealing to the Hunters as we speak! About to lose his life, too.”
“Then what are you hoping to gain?” Kahlil’s voice reached a high pitch of annoyance. “He’ll be dead soon! All of us— I’m going to be dead soon! You have to let me get back to my apartment.”
Eye narrowing, Dominia demanded, “What’s so urgent?”
“You heard me before. In spite of my security efforts, your stream is going to lead the Hunters—even the government—straight to my house.”
“Then you should make yourself scarce,” said Miki, but he didn’t agree.
“They’ll think I’m colluding with you. If I was in my apartment, I’d have a chance to explain myself and protect my possessions. Now they’re going to rifle through everything, and they’re going to find Miki’s information, and that will be that. Either the government realizes I’m part of the Hunters, or the Hunters realize I’ve been runni
ng around with a woman of ill repute.”
“Looks like you’re going to have to find a new business,” suggested the aforementioned working girl, who looked amused as anybody might in the given circumstances. “I’m sure we could use someone like you for our own tech stuff. Ever thought about joining the Red Market?”
“And join a bunch of heathen prostitutes?”
“Whom you solicit,” Miki emphasized, much to the visible chagrin of Kahlil. Clear on the source of his offense, she waved a hand. “Oh, nobody here cares. Hell, you introduced Tobias to me.”
“To fix your teeth.”
“And, of course, I did.” Akachi remained shameless and jolly as he’d be for any other subject. “She is a very fine woman! Perhaps an exception among the usual Red Market sort. The Bible says, my brother, that the sin in prostitution is upon the shoulders of the customer—not upon the prostitute, as such.”
“And the Prophet said that the finances made through prostitution are as haram as that made from soothsaying. And the sale of dogs. No fucking wonder! All this is happening to me because I’ve been a bad Muslim.”
Rolling her eyes, Miki said, “I love how men are all happy to stick their dicks into a whore, and then judge their character as soon as their boners are gone…be as stupid about this as you want, Kahlil, but you’re going to end up dead if you stay in this city. Look”—she made sure Dominia’s eye remained covered—“we’re going to Cairo after we meet up with Lazarus. It’s safe there. At least, the Red Market isn’t going to kill you in cold blood because you hosted us. They might even reward you for it. And if it’s religion you’re worried about, nobody cares! You won’t be forced to worship, or even meet the Lady. But I’m telling you, Kahlil…you stay here, you’re dead.”
“Fuck,” said Kahlil; then, in a higher and more tearful pitch: “Fuck! Miki, why would you do this to me? You’ve ruined my life!”
