Ellis crawled to Pax. “Are you stabbed? Are you okay?”
Pax reverted to a series of hitching breaths, unable to speak. Pax’s head shook. Ellis wasn’t certain which question was being answered, then realized it was probably both. The gun was still in his hand. Another look at Three-fingers confirmed the threat was gone, but it took three tries for Ellis to put the pistol back into the holster. Once there, he remembered the safety was still off. Glancing at the wall, at the tracks of blood-tears, he pulled it out and gently engaged the safety before putting it away again.
“That’s a gun, isn’t it?” Pax asked, staring at his hip.
“A pistol—yes.”
Pax didn’t say anything else, just stared as if the metal at Ellis’s hip was alive.
“You aren’t hurt?” Ellis asked again.
Pax’s cheeks were slick, hands shaking. “I almost died.”
Pax looked over at the body and the spray of blood. There were splatters even on the ceiling. They dripped, leaving little dots on the white coffee table and the stone pyramid. The once perfect room of Zen-like serenity traded for the violent confusion of a Jackson Pollock painting.
With a gasp, Pax seized Ellis, hugging him tight. Fingers clutched him around his waist like talons, as Pax sobbed into his chest. Ellis reached out with his own arms, returning the squeeze, and the two shook together.
Ellis wasn’t one for shows of emotion. He wasn’t raised that way. They were good old-fashioned Protestants. By the age of nine, hugging his mother had already become awkward, and if they’d had fist-bumps back then, the two would have been early adopters. He hadn’t shown much more affection toward his own wife, even early on, and later…It always felt more like work, when it should have come naturally.
But Ellis had never killed anyone before.
He told himself that if it hadn’t been Pax, he would have hugged the couch. He just wanted to hang on to something. Pax was bawling into his shirt. He could feel the wetness and knew he wasn’t too far away from a good cry himself. Hanging on helped. Feeling that he was taking care of Pax made it better. He just wasn’t sure who was really helping whom.
Pax stopped crying and pulled away, still shaking a bit. “Sorry, I think I soaked your shirt.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t pass out from the smell,” he offered, trying to sound tough and not sure why.
Getting up, Pax retreated from the room, and Ellis followed. They slipped around the corner into the corridor, which was just as empty of color as the living room. Pax stopped, flopped to the floor, and backed up against the wall.
“We need to call someone?” Ellis asked.
“In a minute,” Pax said, struggling to speak clearly, blurting words out in a rush. “No hurry at this point…I’m still trying to…remember how to breathe right. I really am sorry…I suppose that wasn’t very professional of me. Homicide copsin your day didn’t run away from blood and cry like that, did they?”
“I don’t know.” Ellis sat beside Pax. “Maybe some did.”
Pax’s expression was dominated by a force of will illustrated by a gritted jaw. “ Youdidn’t.”
Ellis offered a forced smile. “I watched a lot of westerns as a boy. John Wayne never cried.”
Pax nodded as if understanding, but Ellis doubted it.
It took several minutes, but eventually Pax said, “I wonder who it was. That’s the trouble with the master sequence pattern.”
Out in the garden, the light was starting to fade. Ellis wondered if the falselight was synchronized with the light on the surface. Maybe they wereon the surface; he really didn’t know where they had ported to, and he had already determined he couldn’t tell the difference between real and falselight.
“So we found the killer,” Ellis said. “What do we do now? What’s the procedure?”
Ellis found himself in a hurry to leave. He wasn’t showing it, but he felt sick. Not like he had the day before—a different kind. He could smell the blood, or thought so, and the odor of gunpowder lingered large in the small home. He’d just killed someone. The idea—the recognition of his actions—had flashed across his mind several times like a random strobe light, but all the sitting had started settling it into his consciousness, coalescing into a real thought. He’d prevented Pax from being murdered, which was a good thing, but at the same time, Three-fingers looked just like Pax. The whole scene was surreal enough to be drug induced.
His hands were shaking. Were they shaking when I pulled the trigger?He didn’t think so. He couldn’t even remember the exact moment of the gunshot, couldn’t recall what he had aimed at or if he’d aimed at all. Adrenaline—that’s why he was shaking. Maybe that was why he wanted to leave. Fight or flight was kicking in, and he wanted to be gone, away from the blood, the body, and the reminder of what he’d done.
“I don’t really know.” Pax wiped the tears away. “You understand we’re breaking new ground here. There’s no procedure.” Standing up, Pax adjusted the frock coat and vest, then paused. “Vox?”
No answer.
Pax walked down the hall, opened a door, and went inside.
Ellis stood up and was about to follow Pax when he heard a shuffle, then a click.
“Vox?” Pax called returning to Ellis in the hall.
The baseboard lighting flickered on once more, brighter now to compensate for the fading falselight.
“Vox?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, what is your name?”
“Abernathy. I—Oh my! What happened?”
“You were switched off, then I was attacked. Ellis Rogers saved my life by…by killing Geo-24’s murderer.”
“Either of you injured?”
“No.” Pax’s head shook, and again Ellis wondered at the visual capability of voxes or if that was just habitual body language. “Abernathy, why were you required to ask questions when Geo-24 returned?”
“I was not informed.”
“Did Geo-24 ask you to send that message to me—to me personally, or just to any arbitrator?”
“To you specifically.”
“You and Geo-24 weren’t friends?” Ellis asked Pax.
“Of course not.” Pax looked stunned. “Despite your impression of me, I’m not fortunate enough to socialize with geomancers. Abernathy, do you know where Geo-24 went?”
“My records show Geo-24 went to the grass on the North American Plate.”
“Had Geo-24 been doing anything odd recently?”
“Define odd.”
“Different, unusual, inconsistent with normal activities?”
“Geo-24 suspended working on the garden, but that, of course, is not doing, rather than doing something odd. There was also the research on Pol-789.”
“Research?”
“Geo-24 was scanning datagrams on Pol-789, which I define as unusual, because Geo-24’s pursuits were always rocks and never people. Well, almost never. Geo-24 once conducted a similar investigation on you.”
“Me? When?”
“About a year ago.”
Pax paused, thinking.
“Who’s Pol?” Ellis asked.
“Pol-789 is the present chief of the Grand Council.”
“How important is that?” he asked, looking at Pax. Ellis wasn’t certain how voxes worked, but they must be able to “see” somehow and able to read body language to some degree, because Abernathy was silent.
“In your day Pol would be like a prime minister or president,” Pax explained. “Only government is nothing like what you’re familiar with. It really only consists of fifty-two people.”