EIGHTY-THREE: Chinese Water Treatment

             Jason made sense.  Jason would follow her. They all knew Jason was obsessed with her mother.

            She re-suited and re-shimmered as Hopeful and walked out the door. She didn’t dare port again. Not with Miasmen so close. Not if one of those Miasmen was Simon. She walked back into the lounge and was careful to wake the stool.

            “Excuse me, that run-in with the clothes replicator must’ve fried my brain. What area is Jason Simmons in, I’m drawing a blank?”

            “I’m surprised Hopeful, he’s your favorite client. He’s on the purple hall in room A4. It’s a single room.”

            “That would explain the purple pajamas.”

            “Pajamas?” the stool asked puzzled. “You seem frazzled would you like me to have a Chinese Water Treatment scheduled for you.”

            “No, that won’t be necessary.”

            “Very well,” said the stool almost sounding disappointed.

            “Can you remind me, again, what day was I scheduled to return from my long break, if I hadn’t been called in?”

            “11 days, 9 hours and 15 minutes.”

            “Schedule at CWT for me in 11 days, 15 hours and 45 minutes.”

            “That would be about your lunch break.”

            “All the better.”

            Arous smiled to herself and walked down the hall. As she did she turned to wink at the Spartan Guard that she had winked at before but his face was frozen with a mix of fear in his eyes. She thought it was odd but didn’t let it ruffle her. She turned the corner and as she was just out of ear shot she tipped the water bottle in her jacket porting herself to the purple wing through another leaky sink.  The door on the room she faced was Jason Simmons. The hall was empty and she could just hear heavy breathing inside the door. She pushed it open and walked in.

            She got him up and awake without screaming. He was a little slow on the uptake but evidently Hopeful had a rapport with Jason.

            “Lady Grey wants to see you, yes, but you have to be quiet, just let me put this jacket on you.”

            “No!”

            “Shhh. It’s the only way. I can’t have you walking around un-restrained. Look I won’t tighten it.”

            “What if something happens,” asked Jason as he looked at her with his dilated pupils.

            “If something happens, I’ll leave it loose enough for you to get out,” said Arous.  “We’ve got to hurry. She wants to speak to you before . . . before it’s too late.”

            “Oh, okay.”

            “You know where she is, right? You’ve been found sleeping outside her room before, right?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Why don’t I let you lead the way?”

            “Okay.”

            He took her a winding way through the maze of tunnels from purple to pink to turquoise to grey. From around the corner she could see where the Spartan Guard stood. She pulled him back around the corner.

            “Jason.”

            “Yeah.”

            “I need you to do something first.”

            “I thought you said she wanted to see me.”

            “She does. But you see those two guards outside the door?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Well, if we’re going to get into her room we need to get them out from in front of her door. So, I need you to be a distraction. What you have to do is run down the hall and scream your fool head off.  And just as they take off after you I want you to run back this way. Understand?”

            “What happens if . . . ?”

            “If ‘if’ happens then just take off that jacket and start throwing punches, understand?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Ready?”

            “Yeah,” said Jason with excited eyes.

            “Go.”

            Jason started running down the hall screaming. Just as Arous thought, they left their post and started chasing him. They’d seen him before, they knew his game but they wouldn’t expect that his jacket would come off. Arous ported just to in front of her door and walked in.

            “Who are you?”

            Captain of the Spartan Guard, Captain Simon Hodges-Baire was there. Even though she knew it was possible it still threw her and for a split second she was offend by his tone as he questioned her.

            “Novice Hopeful, you have no business in here. This is off-limits to you.”

            She regained her footing enough to notice shimmering grey shapes in the room in front of what looked like a cage of fog. The shimmering shapes were cocooned Miasmen, she had seen right through them and once her brain identified them she could see their shapes though they remained faceless.

            “Resident Hopeful!”

            “I’m sorry, I must have walked into the wrong room.”

            Past the fog she could see nothing, no figure hovering inside. She only had a few seconds.  Arous felt her shimmer begin to break down.

            Simon’s voice was a thin rasp of vibrating words.  “Where are the guards?”

            Simon pushed past her and into the hall. As he opened the door a flash of red light invaded the room.  For a split second the light fully outlined the shapes of the Miasmen and showed their faces. One looked familiar but she was more as the red light permeated the cage and illumined a frail silver figure hunched in the cage.

            “Mom?”

EIGHTY-TWO: Disturbance

            “Misamen!?!”

She yanked her hand back. They were close. A disturbance in the Miasma that close, they’d take notice; she was too close, they would realize it was someone they didn’t know. 

            “Did they see me? Why am I talking to myself? Is this what Hopeful does? It’s annoying.”

            The room next door was silent. She turned to look at the bed behind her. It was empty. She heard the door jiggle. She opened the box at the foot of the bed. She took the dot out of the last slot and cupped it to her ear.

            “Taken for Water Therapy at 11:15. Will return at 1:45. Vitals are normal.”

            “Before the changing of the Guard. That’s convenient.”

            Arous stripped the suit and stuffed it under the mattress, jumped in bed and hoped for dirty sheets.

            “There’s no one in this room other than Intern Hopeful-”

            “You mean the patient-”

            “I just saw Hopeful walk in here.”

            “Nevermind,” said the Spartan Guard. “It must have been a disturbance on another plane.”

            “But Hopeful just-”

            “If you paid more attention to what door she walked into instead of her wink and smile maybe you’d known where she was.”

            They left the room and Arous’ mind scrambled. How did they know? The Spartan Guard? How did they know she tried to port?

            “Unless the Spartan Guard are Miasmen . . . that would mean Simon . . . ”

            She was talking to herself again. She stopped herself short and could feel her chest pounding.  It sounded like a large drum played just under the bed and vibrated her chest. If the Spartan Guard were Miasmen, that meant Simon was a Miasman, that might mean . . .

            But, it couldn’t be that all of them were. She was panicking, she had to follow the logic to calm herself down.

            “It can’t be that every Spartan Guard is a Miasman, they can’t all  be. They couldn’t hide, they need to be able to hide to pass off as myth. Think, think, what is the link, what makes them special. Special. Special.  She remembered the Grey Guard she saw at the Temple, she thought about what MiJin said about the eyes of the Grey Guard that escorted her on the hyoc. Outside this door there are only Spartan Guard. Unless there is a Miasman in the room with my mother . . . ”

             That didn’t make her feel much better but she had calmed down.

            Worse, she realized that whatever advantage of surprise she had may already be gone.  But, if Simon knew, why didn’t he come in himself.  If what Jude said was true, he would stop her. If what Jude said was true and Simon wasn’t her friend, then on Ricci’s orders, he may just be waiting to take her out.  If Ricci was the Miasman, Simon would have to follow those orders.

            But, Arous couldn’t go back now. She had to get in that room and see for herself if her mother was there, alive, well. She had to know even if it killed her. The only way to get in that room is to cause a real disturbance. There was a perfect candidate for creating a disturbance and he was already here.

            Jason.

EIGHTY-ONE: Hopeful

            Arous stood in the courtyard of the HaleSpa looking up at the full moon.

            “Where did Ricci place her? Where?”

            There was only one room that overlooked the courtyard with barred French doors.

            “That must be it.”

            She turned to the fountain pooling a little water into her hand. She took her water bottle and filled it.

            “That should get me around.”

            Instead of porting to the hall where she suspected her mother’s room was. She ported to the closet near the stairwell which turned out to be a good idea; it had a sink and she just came right out the leaky faucet. There was a lounge just across the hall from the closet; the lounge was a suite which she could walk in one side and out the other.  The other side opened right across from her mother’s room.

            There were Spartan Guard posted outside the room. She walked from the closet to the lounge and looked up and down at the rows of lockers. A hoveh-stool slept in the corner. Arous shifted into what she could remember of Novice Hopeful as she grabbed a jacket out of her locker. There was a hair on the lapel of Novice Hopeful’s jacket, follicle intact. Arous smiled and cleared her throat.

            The stool bobbed to life at the sound.
            “Novice Hopeful, I just undressed you and you weren’t wearing that.”

            “I know I had an accident with the clothes replicator in my hoveh. Can you get me another care suit?  I just got called in.”

            “Very well. I’m so sorry your weekend off has ended this way.”

            “All in a day’s work.”

            The stool bobbed up, up, up to the top row and over a half dozen columns and finally came down with a care suit.

            “Funny, that looks a little tight on you.”

            “That clothes replicator must have done more damage than I thought,” said Arous, a little shaky in Intern Hopeful’s voice. “Oh, and there’s something sticky on the floor just outside the room across the hall.  Mop it up will you?”

            “My pleasure to serve.”

            Arous’ skin wavered and readjusted based on the image she’d read in the stool’s memory as it scanned her. 

            “Thank you for brushing your hair with your jacket on, Novice Hopeful. Lucky for me. Even a retina or DNA scan won’t stop me – I’m that good as Skin-dancing.”

            She walked down the hall and past the Spartan Guard with a smile and a wink. She walked into the adjacent room and shut the door. She put her hand to the wall to feel the vibrations. Something was going on. She wet her palm from the water in her water bottle and put her hand to the wall.

            “Misamen!?!”