He was releasing a stream of urine when he heard the heavy hall door swing open. He hurried to finish and tie up his pants. He thought he not been obvious about his haste, but as he turned, Gyde stepped up to the receptacle beside him, smiling.
“You make me laugh, Pol. Shy as a girl, as if you weren’t raised with a few hundred men.”
Gyde released his own uncircumcised, slightly hooked penis with exaggerated boldness—or was it pride? A sardonic smile dimpled his aging face.
“I’ll be outside,” Pol said.
Back at the Department of Monitors, Pol sat at his desk eyeballing the photographs in front of him. Black paint on a white marble walclass="underline" THERE ARE ALIENS AMONG US.
Gyde stood up at his desk. “Lunch?”
“I’ll be down in a minute.”
Gyde’s departure opened the floodgates. The massive old room, with its towering cracked ceilings and clanging radiators, held the desks of six other Silver-class detectives. Their occupants followed Gyde to the dining hall as instinctively as they had once followed him into battle.
Pol was relieved to be alone. He opened the case file from the adjunct. The terrorist had left two other messages in graffiti prior to last night’s defacement.
THEY ARE HERE. THEY ARE US, said the most recent message.
And the first: WHAT ISN’T THE STATE TELLING US?
That one was stupid. What was the state telling them? But the other message struck that mental funny bone just as the alien message had. THEY ARE HERE. THEY ARE US. Pol felt the darkness in his mind quiver responsively, as though disturbed by a neurological aftershock. He did not know what it meant, only that it meant something.
When he reached the dining hall and sat down, Gyde put a finger to his lips to hush his greeting. He motioned his head toward the next table, where a group of Bronze monitors, their rust-colored uniforms tight and foreboding, were having a conversation. An Iron female came to determine his choice of the two menu options today. Pol gave her a quick response, hardly knowing what he’d ordered. He was listening to the Bronzies.
“Where was this?” one of them asked, voice low.
“Saradena. I was stationed there until last week.”
“How do you know the corpse was a Silver? You said the head and hands were missing.”
“You wouldn’t know a Silver when you saw one? He had an old sparring scar on his left thigh, his skin was white, prominent blue veins at his privates, like a statue, and his physique was perfect, a classic warrior. By the blood, he was a Silver.”
Pol felt a rush of fear-based adrenaline, but no one was watching him; no one was looking at him at all. Gyde’s head was tilted, his eyes half-lidded, listening to the dialogue.
“I’d know a Silver,” another Bronze agreed, “even with more than that missing! But who would do such a thing? In one of our own cities? Not even in battle!”
“Maybe he did something wrong,” a quiet voice said. Pol hazarded a glance. The speaker was a tall Bronze he’d seen before—hulking, mean-looking. His voice was dull with import.
The table went silent. “Doing something wrong” could easily be fatal. It was, in fact, not a very smart thing to even talk about it. The Bronze from Saradena looked around apprehensively. He saw Gyde and Pol watching him and paled. He began carving his steak.
“Not decapitated,” Gyde said calmly but loudly. “Not by the state.”
Gyde turned back in his chair and lifted the bare ridge above his eyes at Pol, as if to say, Look how I’m playing these children.
“That’s right,” someone at the next table ventured, emboldened now. “If he’d done something wrong he would have disappeared, not been found carved up like that. It must have been a private citizen who did it—a murderer, a lunatic.”
Pol slammed his hand down on the table with a painful bang. “Be silent!”
The Bronzies at the next table fell into a mute attentiveness to their food and, after a show of eating, rapidly dispersed back to their cubbyholes.
Pol’s plate came. Gyde leaned forward thoughtfully, chin on his hand. He was studying Pol with that damned inscrutable expression. His eyes were a soft sea green at the moment, but if you looked closer you could see the steel in them, the glint of a spear, even when he was relaxed.
Pol had the urge to say something, to justify what he’d just done, something like “they shouldn’t talk that way about the state” or “I don’t like that kind of talk while I’m eating.” But wisely, he said nothing.
“You ever heard about that case?” Gyde asked slowly. “A decapitated Silver? You were in Saradena, weren’t you? Before you were assigned here?”
“Briefly. On leave. And no, I never heard of it.” The knife was heavy as Pol picked it up to cut his meat.
“You’d get a lot of merits solving a case like that.”
Pol shifted his eyes to his partner in a cold, lazy stare. He brought the dripping meat to his mouth. “It’s in Saradena.”
“I know. Don’t they have the luck of the gods.”
“Should be some decent merits on our new case.”
“Yes,” Gyde said, brightening. “He’s been elevated to a full-blown state terrorist, our man. I want to solve this one quickly. Let’s put a few days on it starting now, drop everything else. After lunch we’ll sit down and make a list of all the angles.”
After lunch. There was still a long afternoon stretching ahead. Pol felt as though his mind were cracking in two. He really ought to sit through it, but he honestly didn’t think he could, and there was that darkening cheek to administer to.
“I thought I’d do some research after lunch. For an hour or two. We should make sure we have all the facts before we lay down a strategy.”
Gyde’s weathered, hairless forehead pursed into lines like those the tide leaves in sand. “Research?”
“At the Archives.”
The lines deepened. Pol felt Gyde’s eyes bearing into him, but his partner didn’t comment.
Pol managed to catch one of the Silver buses, its thick leather and cranked-up heat a welcome respite from the cold. It dropped him off at the gymnasium on the Silver grounds, the pool and spa visible and empty through the large glass panes. Inside, only a few recuperating wounded, their bare flesh pink from steam, were using the facilities. Outside, a unit of young Silvers, perhaps ten or eleven years old, was practicing hand-to-hand wrestling. Their Iron caretakers waited patiently to one side while Silver instructors gave the lesson. The children wore the woolen one-piece garments that fit them like a second skin. Similar garments were worn under the uniforms of Silvers in battle. Pol had one under his own black detective’s uniform. It was one of the many small details that distinguished a Silver from the other classes. Even warmth was a privilege of rank. Not that anyone was ever truly warm in Centalia.
The wrestling lesson was a small knot of activity on the endless gray parade grounds of the Silver compound. The dormitories were on either side, massive and silent in the dim afternoon light. There were few Silvers in residence this month. A big offensive push was going on over at the border with Mesatona, and most of the soldiers were in the field. Only the children and the older ones, like Gyde, reassigned to state jobs, still haunted the grounds. The old Silvers moved up the steps and across the frosty soil like shadows when it got this quiet, their eyes on distant blood-soaked battles they could no longer join.
And then there was Pol.
It began to hail in great icy lumps. He quickened his pace. He had two rooms on the third floor of building fourteen. The rooms were tall and elegant, the furnishings spartan, and there was no lock on the door. He had found a way around that. He went into his bathroom, taking along a small chair, and propped it against the handle. Alone at last.
His craggy face was bleak in the light that came in from the small window. He turned on the overhead. It made him look bloodless. He leaned forward, hands on the sink, staring into the mirror.