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’mreallya 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. Before each dose, she shook Caro 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 the time 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.
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 walked swiftly over 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, then resumed.
Abruptly, Gredel couldn’t bear being in the apartment. She put on a pair of shoes, went to the freight elevator and took it to the basement, where she looked for 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.
She 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 sotypical, she thought. Caro couldn’t evendie 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 her 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 responded to any of Gredel’s other unexpressed wishes.
Gredel suddenly lunged across the sofa, her body moving without 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. 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 as if in a halfhearted embrace.
Gredel would have felt better if Caro had fought. It would have given her hatred something to fasten on to.
Instead, through the closeness of their bodies, she felt 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 awhile longer just to make sure. The pillow was wet with tears. When she finally took the pillow away, it revealed a pale, cold thing that bore 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 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 said aloud, rehearsing 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 she feared were lovers sheltering under the bridges, but by now it was so late that even the lovers had gone to bed.
It was as hard getting Caro off the cart as getting her on it. But when she finally 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 good-bye 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 good-byes.
Gredel walked alongside the cart back to the Volta. A few cars slowed to look at her, but moved on.
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 Cheng Ho Academy.
She packed two suitcases, took them to Maranic Port and the hovercraft ferry that would take 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.