He’d been sweating, and he must have touched himself unconsciously. The blue at his temples was smeared.
He turned on the tap, waited for it to run hot. He took a few of the dark paper sheaves stored by the commode and wiped his temples. The light blue makeup, almost the same shade as his eyes, came off, staining black against the rough paper. He wiped again, wetting the paper, making sure he got it all. Then he flushed the paper down the commode. He splashed water on his face and poured it over his short blond hair (there was just a trace of black at the roots; he’d have to dye it again tomorrow night). He stuck his head fully under the spigot, wishing he could disappear in the flow.
Pol 137 was the name of the dead Silver in Saradena whose head and hands were never found.
He soaked a cloth with hot water and wrapped it around his entire face, holding it tight. He sat down on the commode and leaned back, waiting for the heat to soften his skin. With all this shaving, he was getting noticeably raw.
Silvers did not have facial hair or eyebrows.
There are aliens among us.
If only he could remember.
The darkness of the impostor of Pol 137 was more than skin deep, ran deeper than the hair on his face that he shaved or the hair on his head that he dyed. There was a black chasm in his mind, a schism that was torment to try to breach. He probed at that place now, the way a tongue probes at a painful tooth, only because he must, because he was in danger. That place was like a hole in reality. He could, with effort, take himself to the far side of that hole, that schism. And what he glimpsed there had a logic that he wouldn’t expect madness to have. And yet the logic of “back there”—that far side of the chasm—was not consistent with the logic of “here,” this side. And so it broke down; it all broke down. His memories fractured and fell apart. If he tried too hard and for too long he tottered on the brink of falling permanently into that hole and never coming out.
It was much more functional to not go there. And functional was what mattered. He had to have his wits about him at all times. But still, he knew that schism for what it was: a wound. He’d had a head injury in battle; that was the superficial cause. He had once believed that was all there was to it. Now he wasn’t so sure.
The first thing he remembered with certainty was wandering around in the gray blasted plains of a battlefield in utter confusion and terror. That was how Marcus had found him—greedy, slobbery Marcus. The merchant had been driving across the war zone during a ceasefire, his truck full of black-market goods.
Marcus had scooped him up, clamped him with servant’s bracelets, and given him an identity: Iron class, Kalim N2. Marcus had thought him a shell-shocked enemy soldier, a free-and-clear profit on the hoof. The greedy bastard had hoped to turn him around quickly—sell him off before he could get back his memory, rebel, make trouble. But first Marcus had to patch him up—or, rather, have his servants patch him up, sew up his wounds, teach him the rudiments of the language, get him over the deep wracking chills and vomiting, the look of utter panic in his eyes.
He remembered Marcus’s drab, Bronze class 2 household. Its very meanness, its coarseness, had been a comfort at first. It had offered a routine that calmed the whirlwind in his brain, as if having someone tell him what to do at every moment took the burden off himself. Gradually, the schism in his mind had separated and solidified, and the current reality began to gel. There was a weight on him that felt oppressive, made him weary all the time, but every day he felt his feet settle more and more naturally on the floor, as though he were touching down, like an angel.
But he had reached the point of functionality and then passed it. After a while, the menial labor began to grate. Being given orders lost its comfort factor. He sensed, then knew, that he was not born a servant. He saw the uniforms in the street, the beautiful men and women flashing like military diamonds, the posters everywhere of the triumphant, handsome, perfect Silvers—muscular, haughty, glorious, the pride of the state. The more he looked at them, the more he knew what he was, what he must have once been. He’d been a Silver in some foreign state; he’d had wealth, privilege, power over others. Especially that. Especially power. Somehow he’d been wounded in battle and captured by his enemy, but he was still a warrior.
He’d been sure of that in Saradena. Did he still believe it?
The cloth was cooling. He went back to the mirror and unwrapped his face. He examined his skull minutely for the hundredth time, fingertips tripping over the surface to feel the scars. There were the smaller scars hidden in his hairline where he himself had done a little surgery, nipping and tucking his skin back so that his eyes would have that subtle slant of the Centalian Silvers. And at the back of his skull was the scar from his battle injury, so small and insignificant—a crooked line no longer than a single joint of his finger. Underneath it was a bony knot. He probed, as if his fingers could unlock its secrets. He understood how the injury might have torn, shredded, his memories. But what he didn’t understand was how it could have caused what he did remember to be so completely mad.
Those memories had to be madness; they couldn’t be real. He had spent the past few weeks confirming that at the Archives. But there was one thing he did trust about those memories: he had been on a mission, a very urgent mission. And whatever else he did, however he survived, ate, worked, dreamed, while his brain healed, it was critical that he remember just what that mission was.
The impassive young Silvers at the entrance to the Archives, straight as arrows, sculpted like effigies, did not betray any recognition of him on their faces, though he’d seen this particular one, the one who held his identity card, on many occasions.
“Pol 137.” The Silver wrote meticulously in his book. He looked up, meeting Pol’s eyes for the first time. “Working on another case, Detective?”
“Yes. For the Department of Communications.”
Pol took his ID back and went on past.
Stupid. Why had he said that? That Silver had no need to know. He had been flustered at the question. Keep your mouth shut. Shut! He had only gotten this far on a damaged brain by saying as little as possible and by never, never, asking questions.
There was another checkpoint, the main archivist. Pol had to leave his things here. The archivist copied the documents Pol needed onto a special green paper and wrote down the number of sheets he had been given. When he left, these would be returned for disposal. No papers went in; no papers went out.
Inside the Archives, Pol went to a bank of small lockers and took a key from his pocket. Notes could not be taken from this place, so they were stored here. Even so, Pol knew that anytime the state decided to look at his notes, they would, so he kept them cryptic. He took his archive notebook and his green pages to the massive old tables in the center of the room. From his seat he was visible to the archivists, visible to the armed guards who stood along the balcony. There could be no secrets here, where all secrets were kept.
There wasn’t much in his notes. His search for the language he remembered had yielded nothing. He had found six different languages in the Archives, two obsolete, the other four still in use in foreign states, but none of them matched the language he’d had in his head when he was picked up. So he still did not even know what state he had come from. He’d been inserting his own private keywords into searches for his cases whenever he could. He hadn’t found any references to “United States of America,” “United States Army,” or any of the other words that rose to the surface of his brain like flotsam from a sunken ship.