Gredel took the injector from Caro's limp fingers. She reached out and brushed the hair from Caro's face.
“Want some more?” she asked. “Want some more, sister Caro?”
Caro gave a little indistinct murmur. Her lips curled up in a smile. When Gredel fired another dose into her carotid the smile broadened, and she shrugged herself into the sofa pillows like a happy puppy.
Gredel turned from her and reached for Caro's portable computer console. She called up Caro's banking files, and prepared a form closing Caro's bank account and transferring its contents to the account Gredel had set up. Then she prepared another message to Caro's trust account on Spannan's ring, instructing any further payments to be sent to the new account as well.
“Caro,” Gredel said. “Caro, I need your thumbprint here, all right?”
She stroked Caro awake, and managed to get her to lean over the console long enough to press her thumb, twice, to the reader. Then Gredel handed the injector to Caro and watched her give herself another dose.
Now I'm really a criminal, she thought. She had left a trail of data that pointed straight to herself.
But even so, she could not bring herself to completely commit to this course of action. She left herself a way out. Caro has to want it, she thought. I won't give her any more if she says no.
Caro sighed, settled herself more deeply into the pillows. “Would you like some more?” Gredel asked.
“Mmm,” Caro said, and smiled.
Gredel took the injector from her hand and gave her another dose.
After a while, she exhausted the first vial and started on the second. With each dose, she shook Caro a little and asked if she wanted more. Caro would sigh, or laugh, or murmur, but never said no. Gredel triggered dose after dose.
After the second vial was exhausted, the snoring started, Caro's breath heaving itself past the palate, the lungs pumping hard, sometimes with a kind of wrench. Gredel remembered the sound from when Caro had given herself too much endorphin, and the memory caused her to leap from the sofa and walk very fast around the apartment, rubbing her arms to fight her sudden chill.
The snoring went on. Gredel very much needed something to do, so she went into the kitchen and made coffee. And then the snoring stopped.
Ice shuddered along Gredel's nerves. She went to the kitchen door and stared out into the front room, at the tumbled golden hair that hung off the end of the couch. It's over, she thought.
And then Caro's head rolled, and Gredel's heart froze as she saw Caro's hand come up and comb the hair with her fingers. There was a gurgling snort, and the snoring resumed.
Gredel stood in the door as cold terror pulsed through her veins. But she told herself, No, it can't be long now.
And then, suddenly, she couldn't stand still any longer, and she walked swiftly around the apartment, straightening and tidying. The new clothes went into the closet, the shoes on their racks, the empty bottle in the trash. Wherever she went, the snores pursued her. Sometimes they stopped for a few paralyzing seconds, but then resumed.
Abruptly, Gredel couldn't bear being in the apartment, and she put on a pair of shoes and went to the freight elevator and took it to the basement, where she went in search of one of the motorized carts they used to move luggage and furniture. There were a great many objects in the basement, things that had been discarded or forgotten about, and Gredel found some strong dedger-fiber rope and an old compressor, a piece of solid bronzework heavy enough to anchor a fair-sized boat.
Gredel put these in the cart and pushed it to the elevator. As she approached Sula's doors, she could hear Caro's snores through the enameled steel. Gredel's fingers trembled as she pressed codes into the lock.
Caro was still on the couch, her breath still fighting its way past her throat. Gredel cast an urgent glance at the clock. There weren't many hours of darkness left, and darkness was required for what happened next.
Gredel sat at Caro's feet and hugged a pillow to her chest and watched her breathe. Caro's skin was pale and looked clammy. “Please,” Gredel begged under her breath. “Please die now. Please.” But Caro wouldn't die. Her breaths grated on and on, until Gredel began to hate them with a bitter resentment. This was so typical, she thought. Caro couldn't even die without getting it all wrong.
Gredel looked at the wall clock, and it stared back at her like the barrel of a gun. Come dawn, she thought, the gun goes off. Or she could sit in the apartment all day with a corpse, and that was a thought she couldn't face.
Again Caro's breath hung suspended, and Gredel felt her own breath cease for the long moment of suspense. Then Caro dragged in another long rattling gasp, and Gredel felt her heart sink. She knew that her tools had betrayed her. She would have to finish this herself.
All anger was gone by now, all hatred, all emotion except a sick weariness, a desire to get it over. The pillow was already held to her chest, a warm comfort in the room filled only with Caro's racking, tormented snores.
She cast one last look at Caro, thought Please die at her one more time, but Caro didn't respond any more than she had ever responded to any of Gredel's other wishes.
Gredel suddenly lunged across the sofa, her body moving without any conscious command, the movement seeming to come from pure instinct. She pressed the pillow over Caro's face and put her weight on it.
Please die, she thought.
Caro hardly fought at all. Her body twisted on the couch, and both her hands came up, but the hands didn't fight, they just fell across Gredel's back in a kind of halfhearted embrace.
Gredel would have felt better if Caro had fought. It would have given her hatred something to fasten onto.
Instead, she felt, through the closeness of their bodies, the urgent kick-kick-kick of Caro's diaphragm as it tried to draw in air, the kick repeated over and over again. Fast, then slow, then fast. Caro's feet shivered. Gredel could feel Caro's hands trembling as they lay on her back. Tears spilled from Gredel's eyes.
The kicking stopped. The trembling stopped.
Gredel leaned on the pillow a while longer just to make sure. The pillow was wet with tears. When she finally took the pillow away, the pale, cold thing beneath seemed to bear no resemblance to Caro at all.
Caro was weight now, not a person. That made what followed a lot easier.
Handling a limp body was much more difficult than Gredel had ever imagined. By the time she got it onto the cart, she was panting for breath and her eyes stung with sweat. She covered Caro with a bed sheet, and she added some empty suitcases to the cart as well. She took the cart to the freight elevator, then left by the loading dock at the back of the building.
“I am Caroline, Lady Sula,” she rehearsed her story. “I'm moving to a new place because my lover beat me.” She would have the identification to prove her claim, and what remained of the bruises, and the suitcases plain to see alongside the covered objects that weren't so plain.
Gredel didn't need to use her story. The streets were deserted as she walked downslope alongside the humming cart, down to the Iola River.
The roads ran high above the river on either side, with ramps that descended to the darkened riverside quay below. Gredel rode the cart down the ramp to the river's edge. This was the good part of Maranic Town and there were no houseboats here, no beggars, no homeless, and-at this hour-no fishermen. The only encounters Gredel feared were lovers sheltering under the bridges, but by now it was so late that even the lovers had gone home.
It was as hard getting Caro off the cart as it had been getting her on it, but once she went into the river, tied to the compressor, the dark waters closed over her with barely a ripple. In a video drama Caro would have floated a while, poignantly, saying goodbye to the world, but there was none of that here, just the silent dark submersion and ripples that died swiftly in the current.
Caro had never been one for protracted goodbyes.
Gredel walked alongside the cart back to the Volta. A few cars slowed to look at her, but moved on.
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In the apartment, she tried to sleep, but Caro's scent filled the bed, and sleep was impossible there. Caro had died on the sofa and Gredel didn't want to go near it. She caught a few hours’ fitful rest on a chair, and then the woman called Caroline Sula rose and began her day.
The first thing she did was send in the confirmation of her appointment to the Chang Ho Academy.
The first day she packed two suitcases and took them to Maranic Port and the ground-effect ferry that took her across the Krassow Sea to Vidalia. From there, she took the express train up the Hayakh Escarpment to the Quaylah Plateau, where high altitude moderated the subtropical heat of the Equatorial Continent. The planet's antimatter ring arced almost directly overhead.
Paysec was a winter resort, and the snowfall wouldn't begin here until the monsoon shifted to the northeast, so she found good rates for a small apartment in Lus'trel, and took it for two months. She bought some clothes, not the extravagant garments she would have found in Maranic Town's arcades, but practical country clothes, and boots for walking. She found a tailor and he began to assemble the extensive wardrobe she would need for the academy.
She didn't want Lady Sula's disappearance from Maranic Town to cause any official disturbance, so she sent a message to Caro's official guardian, Jacob Biswas, telling him that she found Maranic too distracting and had come to Lus'trel in order to concentrate on academic preparation for the Academy. She told him she was giving up the Maranic apartment, and that he could collect anything she'd left there.
Because she didn't trust her impersonation of Caro with someone who knew her well, she didn't use video, she typed the message and sent it print only.
Biswas called back almost immediately, but she didn't take his call or any of the other calls that followed. She replied with print messages to the effect that she was sorry she'd been out when he called, but she was spending a lot of time in the library cramming.
That wasn't far from the truth. Requirements for the service academies were posted on the computer net, and most of the courses were available in video files, and she knew she was deeply deficient in almost every subject. She worked hard.
She only answered one call, when she happened to be home, was able to listen to the answerware, and realized that the caller was Sergei. She answered and called him every filthy name she could think of, and, once her initial anger was a little spent, she began to choose words more carefully, flaying him alive with one choice phrase after another. By the end, he was weeping, loud gulping honks that grated over the speakers.
Serve him right, she thought.
Lamey had her worried more than Sergei or Jacob Biswas. Every day she half-expected Lamey to bust down the door and demand that she produce Earthgirl. He never turned up.
On her final day on Spannan, Biswas insisted on meeting her, with other members of his family, at the skyhook. She cut her hair severely short, wore Cheng Ho undress uniform, and virtually plated her face with cosmetics. If she looked to Biswas like a different girl, no wonder.
He was kind and warm and asked no questions. He told her she looked very grown up, and he was proud of her. She thanked him for his kindness and for looking after her. She hugged him and the daughters he'd brought with him.
His wife, Sergei's sister, had the sense to stay away.
Later, as the skyhook carried her to Spannan's ring and its steady acceleration pressed her into her seat, she realized it was Caro's Earthday, the real one.
The anniversary that Caro would never see.
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Margaux (dread empire's fall) Page 6
