The Forever Drug (31 page)
Either way, she was gone. I didn't see her anywhere in the room.
I lay my chin back on the floor and allowed exhaustion to claim me.
The doctor stared down at me, his face covered with a surgical mask and his hair covered by a paper cap. In one hand he held a syringe filled with a pale greenish liquid. His other hand rested lightly on my shoulder.
"Welcome back, Romulus," he said. "You've been out for a long time. What's the last thing you remember?"
I looked around the room. I was in a medical clinic with bare white walls and a curtain pulled around the bed. I could smell a faint whiff of something herbal—probably the drug in the syringe—as well as the odors of various disinfectants and the starch in the sheets on my bed. I was in human form, lying on a hospital bed under covers that were held a few centimeters over my bare skin by aluminum bars, shaped like a tent frame. Restraints held my wrists and ankles, and a strap was across my chest. The restraints were self-adjusting; even if I'd shifted to wolf form I wouldn't have been able to slip them.
My wrists and ankles were chafed, as if I'd been straining at the straps. The one on my right wrist looked as if it had been chewed. The inside of my right arm had a series of tiny red puncture marks.
The doctor saw me looking at the restraints.
"Sorry about that, Romulus," he said. "Even though you were in a coma, you were scratching at your burns. We had to restrain you so you wouldn't tear the synthskin off."
Burns? So that was what hurt so bad. The left side of my face felt funny, rubbery, as if plastic wrap had been stretched across the skin. It ached and itched at the same time. A number of other spots on my chest, side and thigh must have also been burned. I could feel sharp twinges every time I tried to move, could feel the pull of the artificial skin that had been used to patch my burns. The edges itched something fierce, like gigantic mosquito bites.
"I... don't remember being burned," I said. "What happened to me? Where am I?"
The doctor leaned closer. His eyes were gold above the mask. He wore a baggy white hospital uniform and smelled of expensive cologne. "What
is
the last thing you remember, Romulus?"
"I..." The memory was hazy, like a halfremembered dream. "I was in an underground parking garage. There was an elf girl, and ... and a glowing ball of light. No wait. It was a paranormal animal of some sort. It looked like an octopus, with tentacles. It was killing the elf..
"What day was that?" the doctor asked. "Do you remember?"
I had to think about that one. I'd been on my way to the police station, to see if Sergeant Raymond had any assignments for me, and had taken a jander through the North End. The streets had been crawling with UCAS sailors ...
"It was the day the
Leviathan
docked," I answered. "July 25."
"What time of day was it?"
"I don't know. It was just getting dark. Early evening, maybe?"
The doctor smiled. "That's good, Romulus. Very good. The ball of light burned you. It hit you with some sort of magical attack that put you into a coma. That's why you wound up in the clinic." He laid the syringe on a stainless steel table beside the bed. "You seem to be on the mend, now. I think we can discharge you."
"Uh ..." I hated to ask the question, but I had to know. "Who's paying for this?"
The paper mask shifted slightly; the elf must have been smiling. "Lone Star," he said. "You were injured in the line of duty. The corporation is picking up the tab."
He lifted a paper cup from the table where he'd placed the syringe. As he held it to my lips I smelled a bitter odor. "It's a mild painkiller," he told me. "It will help you to relax while I change the dressings on your burns. Then you can leave the clinic. I'll have one of the nurses call you a cab."
He tipped the cup, and a sharp-tasting liquid wet my lips. The hand that held the cup was right under my nose; the doctor's scent seemed vaguely familiar—an elf's scent. I looked up into his gold-irised eyes as I swallowed the sedative, wondering if I'd awakened from my coma once before, if that was where I'd seen him bef—
The sedative must have knocked me out. The next thing I knew, I was lying face-down on a sidewalk that smelled of city grime and hundreds of different
scents—all of the people who had walked on it that
day. I lifted myself to my hands and knees and looked myself over. I was dressed in clothes I didn't recognize: a baggy, generic track suit. I was pretty shaky and had no idea how I'd gotten here from the clinic. Had I tried to walk and then passed out? My vision kept blurring in and out. Only by squinting hard could I make out the street names of the intersection next to me: Barrington and Rector, down by the docks. My tongue felt thick and I wasn't able to concentrate. Were these the after-effects of the tentacled creature's attack?
A thought came to me: Dass would know. She was probably the best paranormal taxonomist the Division of Paranormal Investigation had. She'd be able to tell me what that tentacled creature was and what it had done to me. I lay back down on the sidewalk, resting my uninjured cheek against the cool cement.
I'm not sure how long it was afterward that a squad car pulled up next to me. The two officers hassled me at first, but once I convinced them that I was an irregular asset, working with Lone Star, they agreed to give me a lift back to the station. The ride helped to clear my head. The heat wave we'd been having seemed to have broken; the city's air was cool and clean. I hung my head out the window, letting the night air whip through my hair.
By the time I reached Dass's office I was feeling closer to normal again. Not one hundred percent— but better. Dass was on the phone to someone— probably another mage detective, judging by the thaumaturgical shop talk—but she motioned me to sit down and abruptly cut her conversation short. When she turned to me, her scent held faint overtones of relief—and worry.
"Rom!" she said. "Where the frig have you
been
all week? The smuggling ring is busting wide open—we found the European connection. The Coast Guard responded to a distress call from a container ship that was caught in the hurricane, and when the rescue teams went in to pick up survivors from the sinking ship, they found it crawling with a dozen blackberry cats. The cats were being smuggled to the UCAS in a container, and escaped when it shifted and burst open during the storm. They forced the Coast Guard officers to take them to shore, made them run the patrol vessel aground, and for the past two days we've been getting cat sightings up and down the coast. Raymond wanted you to track them, and nearly turned purple when your landlady said she didn't know where you were."
I cringed. When you're an irregular asset, you're on call all the time. I'd never failed to respond to a call before—even ones that involve cats, which I loathe. A multiple containment like the one Dass described would have been worth big nuyen to me. Not only had I missed an opportunity to earn some serious cred, I'd also blown a chance to impress my superiors, and now I could tell I was in deep drek.
"But the sergeant must have known I was in the clinic," I said. "He'd have been the one who authorized the expense."
"Clinic?" Dass looked me over more closely, peering at the artificial skin that covered the bare spot in my beard where I'd been burned. "A medical clinic? Is that why you look so banged up? Where were you this past week—off chasing down leads in your Jane Doe case? Did she turn out to be linked with the smugglers, after all?"
"My what?" This was getting more confusing by the minute. I had no idea what Dass was talking about. "Who's Jane Doe? And who are these smugglers you keep mentioning?"
I smelled nervous sweat breaking out under Dass's arms. She was looking at me strangely. Her eyes lingered briefly on the inside of my right arm, on the needle puncture marks, and she frowned. Then she got up and shut the door to her office.
"What's the last thing you remember, Rom?" Her eyes held a worried look.
"Funny," I said. "That's the same question the doctor asked me."
I told Dass about the glowing ball of light in the parking garage. Partway through the story, she stopped me. "That's the last thing you remember? That was two and a half
weeks
ago, Rom. You've got an eighteen-day gap in your memory."
"I know," I said. "I was in a coma. At the clinic, after the ball of light burned me—"
"The corpselight didn't burn you," Dass said in a grim voice. "And you weren't in a coma for eighteen days. Nine days ago, you participated in a raid on a boat carrying endangered paranormals. I was there with you. Two days after that, you were here at the station, asking if my interviews with the smugglers had turned up any more information on your Jane Doe.
"That was the last time I saw you: on August 4. And now you turn up with your memories wiped— just like Jane Doe."
I wet my lips. This wasn't sounding good.
Dass pointed at my arm. "It looks as though someone used
laes
on you. Massive doses. Did you get a good look at this 'doctor'?"
"Uh ... I'd recognize his cologne," I said. "And his scent: he was an elf. But he was wearing a surgical mask and cap. All I could see were his eyes."
"Where was the clinic?"
"I don't know. One minute I was inside, and the next I was kissing pavement."
"Frig," Dass said. "That doesn't give us anything to go on."
I had a queasy feeling in my gut. It felt as if somebody had tipped the world on a crazy angle when I wasn't looking. I gripped the sides of the chair I was sitting on.
"Dass," I said slowly. "You'd better tell me what's going on. How many memories did they wipe? What am I missing?"
Twenty minutes later, I still wasn't feeling very enlightened. All Dass could tell me was that eighteen days ago I'd gone out on a routine containment of a blackberry cat—and come back with a woman who didn't know who she was or where she was from. We'd run some retinal scans on her, and these linked with those of Margaret Hersey, a woman who'd just been released from prison after serving a three-month sentence in the Citadel for unlicensed use of a manipulation spell. But the Hersey match was bogus, a fabrication. I'd apparently dug up what I thought was the real name of Jane Doe: Mareth'riel Salvail, an elf who was a Tír Taimgire national. But there'd been no scans with that data. And according to Lone Star's databases, Salvail had died in a plane crash in 2057. Even so, I'd insisted that she was still alive, that
Salvail
was Jane Doe. I'd jandered off to find her...
Only to turn up with a big hole in my memory a week later.
I'd been violated. Mind-raped. I must have stumbled across some serious drek. I was probably lucky not to have wound up dead.
"There's something else, Rom," Dass said. "Earlier today, the Harbor Patrol found a floater who matched the general description of your Jane Doe: elven metatype, apparent age mid-thirties to mid-forties, dark hair and eyes, medium build. Looks like she jumped from the old bridge, judging by her injuries."
I sat up. "Her ears... were they ..."
Dass looked at me expectantly. "What?"
I'd gone blank. Whatever question I'd been about to ask was gone. "I don't know."
Dass shrugged, then continued: "The floater's DNA scans didn't match any in the Lone Star databases— even Hersey's. The body had been in the water too long for retinal scans to be done—which was the only way we'd have been able to link her with any certainty to your Jane Doe. She had no dental work— perfect teeth, if you can believe it—and no identifying scars or marks. But Ident
did
find one thing. They passed it over to DPI to see if our detection spells could pull up any information on it."
Dass reached into her drawer and pulled out a clear plastic evidence bag. From it she pulled a silver locket on a chain. I reached out and touched it—then jerked my fingers back as the metal burned blisters on my fingertips.
"
Kusikitika
—sorry," Dass said. "That was stupid of me. Let me do it."
I sucked on my fingers while Dass opened the locket. What had I been thinking? I'd reached out to touch the locket as if it were the most natural thing in the world, all the while knowing that it was
silver
. That blackout had left me really frigged up. I wasn't thinking straight any more.
Dass-slipped the silver locket back into its evidence bag so I could hold it. She stared at me expectantly while I looked at it. "Do you recognize it?" she asked. "It looks like the one your Jane Doe was wearing, but I didn't get a good enough look at hers, that night she was here at the station."
I peered down through the clear plastic at a tintype—how did I know that word?—of a woman in a long dark dress. Her eyes looked hauntingly familiar. They were black in the monochrome image, but somehow I imagined them to be a dark brown, with tiny flecks of gold. I looked at the locket using my astral vision. It was tinged with a trace of sadness and loss ...
I handed the locket back to Dass. "Sorry," I said. "Never seen it before."
"Do you want to try to ID the body?" Dass asked.
I shook my head. "No point. I can't remember what this Jane Doe you're talking about looked like. I wouldn't recognize her if she walked up to me on the street, let alone after she'd been in the water for several days. And there's no way for me to get my memories of her back, especially if they were wiped by
laes
. The damage that drug does is forever."