One Heartbeat

The Dream Garden. Ironic, I suppose, to choose the place where I had my first brush with Aneti back when she was Sehutannyi, but I had practical reasons for coming here. Quite simply, it takes experience to drug someone’s drink, which I do not have. The holograms and plays of light could mask almost anything as long as one doesn’t move outside of the personal illusion.

I also took advantage of the instinctual feedback, choosing something dangerous: a glittering carnivorous bird. It appeared around me in stages as the hologram loaded. The feedback sensors prickled my forehead. It made me feel as though my heart had turned to iron. Without it, I may not have had the courage to betray her.

The form of a sea man wove around her, making her skin transparent and ghostly. Her body moved up and down, caught on a tide, and her skin felt cold like death in the arctic ocean. Our server was a nahitakhë. Her accent and light skin betrayed her as a foreigner when she queried us about drinks. She prepared the berry-dark wine with an expert hand, and as she worked the show burst into being. Colored lights danced all around us and phantoms swirled up from the ground at our feet, coalescing into a dream-like story about someone circumnavigating the solar system. I pressed one lh. into the nahitakhë’s thin, bony hand because I felt sorry about her condition. She stopped speaking to us.

I leaned in to kiss Aneti as the craft flew past the gas giant in an out-of-control spin, caught in alien gravity. My hand tilted over her drink when her eyes closed, the vial masked by pebbly feathers and my hand. My heartbeat increased; adrenaline rushed through my veins. Norepinephrine coursed through my endocrine system and I felt what must have been the first stage of a panic attack—yet the bird’s feedback kept that in check. The edges of my vision blurred to black.

Aneti reached beneath the mild illusion shielding to coil her fingers around my hepteri vest. The vial slipped, plunging more 4-hydroxybutanoic acid into the fluke than was perhaps advisable. As I capped it, she reached for her drink.

Thirty minutes later, Aneti tilted her head down towards the table and said, “I … I’m not feeling well. I think I’m going to be sick.” She pressed her hands against her forehead, and a watery illusion oozed down her changed face.

I grabbed her arm and helped her up. “I’ll take you home.”

As we stood, her hand brushed against my thigh. I went still for a moment. With her like this, it didn’t seem right to kiss her or think of her prone and helpless on my bed as I kissed her unreceptive body. The thoughts made me feel unclean. I kissed her forehead and put my arm around her waist to help her up.

The condition only worsened as we went to her apartment. Had I not memorized her address, she would have made us turn down the wrong street. She screamed at phantom insects crawling at her on the ground and claimed that they were inside of her because she could feel them tearing into her vitals. She called me a ghost and tried to hit me when we reached the front door; I calmed her down by kissing her as I punched in the key code for the apartment. Hopefully, she won’t remember any of this.

She scanned us into her apartment. When she went into the bedroom, I filled a glass of tap water and dissolved a sleeping pill in it. Her eyelids already fluttered when I found her in the bedroom, but I couldn’t risk her waking up. I just couldn’t. She didn’t even realize that it tasted strange, not even when it pulled her under. She fell asleep rambling about something from the Shushei Enaharipui that justified killing someone.

I waited fifteen torturous minutes before I started combing the apartment for documents, carefully replacing everything I moved. Two hours later, I almost wanted to give up; every time Aneti tossed and turned on the bed, I thought she would awaken to find me searching through drawers for keys or papers in once-locked compartments. She didn’t awaken, and the search progressed slowly. I found two or three Daybreak documents behind her dresser. Covered in dust, she must have forgotten she had them, but they proved that she had been involved with Daybreak for at least two years.

The assassination documents—those that she hadn’t fed to birds, at least—lay buried in a small folder beneath her detail paints, the last place I would have looked because the box was not even closed. I took photos of every page without reading them, anxious to finish. The folder contained 41 distinct documents, with many smaller messages tucked in for safekeeping.

They only referred to the assassination’s target once. It was enough to make me fall to the floor, enough for the damned norepinephrine excess to trigger another panic attack, but this time I had nothing to save me from it. It rolled over me in waves: the walls closed in around me and my body felt like it had been crushed beneath the table. My body soaked with sweat and my vision blurred; for a few moments, I think I even went blind.

See … it’s one thing to stop an assassination of someone in the regional government, as Equilibrium Nexus did.

It’s another thing entirely to prevent someone from assassinating the Deimo.