See Part One for disclaimers and author's notes.
Chapter Four
-- Bad Dreams --
El looked her old friend over curiously. They hadn't seen each other in -- a very long time. Lia looked frazzled, but El wasn't going to tell her that.
"You look frazzled." In the brain and out the mouth. Drat.
Lia laughed. "So do you."
"Okay. So, I still retrieve strays." El walked over to study the view from the floor to ceiling windows. It wasn't a great view, just lots of tall buildings and gray sky.
"Got room for another one?" Lia gave herself the mental version of one of those looks. Talk about in the brain and out the mouth.
El turned to face her, a very familiar look on her face. No. Lia wasn't in trouble. Not yet. "What are you up to?" The words sounded a touch suspicious, but then, they knew each other.
Lia searched for a really good way to explain. There wasn't one. What she had was crazy. Insane. The words had been soundless, yet they echoed in her head. El knew that look when Lia finally met her gaze. Trouble. Something had touched Lia. It didn't happen often. El came over and sat on the next stool.
"Tell me."
It spilled out. The project. The subjects. The man in room 4. The John Doe that no one seemed to know anything about, yet was being held as not even the insane are usually held. "Well, I guess if he was Hannibal Lector, you might keep him like that. Only Lector wasn't insane. Not technically. He understood exactly what he was doing and why and that it was considered wrong by most of society. He just didn't care."
El looked puzzled for a moment, then caught the reference. "Lector is a fictional character."
Lia looked up at her. "Yeah." She was a little puzzled. Then she remembered, El had a tendency toward the concrete. Rock. Boulder. The gritty real life stuff. Examples from fiction, however appropriate, tended to slide past her. "El. I don't know of a real person, a real criminal, sane or not, who would be held the way this guy is being held."
El frowned at her. It was that "Well, why didn't you say so in the first place" look she knew so well. Then she smiled. "All right. So, what do you want to do?"
"Get him out."
El nodded.
Taja, who was barely following the conversation at this point, thought it was time to insert a comment. "You're rescuing an insane person?"
Lia looked around as though she had forgotten Taja's presence, which she had. "He's not insane -- I don't think."
"Oh. Well, that's good. So, why is he locked up if he's not?"
"Because -- because -- because he's not human." The words tumbled out slowly accompanied by a look that said she wished she hadn't gone there, but now that she had, she knew she was right. Epiphany. "He's not human, El." She looked around at the woman for reassurance. "He's not human?"
El though about it for a few long moments. "All right. He's not human. What is he?"
Lia made a helpless gesture. "I don't know. What has eyes like the heart of a star?" She met El's gaze and shrugged her shoulders. "It's the best I can do. It's like -- gazing into a thermonuclear reaction -- great special effect by scary when it's real."
El accepted that. "So. How do we get in?"
"I work there."
"I'm a cop."
"I'm -- an ex-thief?," Taja offered helpfully, drawing their full attention. She saw a look in El's eyes that questioned the "ex". "Okay. I fell back on what I know this morning. I don't know where we are. We needed money to get Siro -- well, okay, it turned out we didn't need money to get Siro looked at, but I thought we did. And clothes." She gestured to indicate the outfit she was wearing.
El smacked her forehead lightly with one hand. "Clothes. Damn. Sorry. Let's get you something cleaner."
"A bath would be nice, too," Taja agreed and followed El into another part of the apartment. Her jaw tried to drop at the bedroom she walked into. It was -- wow. Her brain was having a hard time cataloguing what she saw.
There was a bed on a dais in the exact center of the room. There were hangings that started out at the center of the ceiling and then bellied out to form a soft pyramidal sort of look, falling to the floor from about halfway out to the walls. The room was about 30x30 which gave it an aura of grandeur. Where the outer room had windows floor to ceiling, there were no windows in this room.
Along one wall there was a jungle of potted tropical and semi-tropical plants. El motioned for Taja to join her. Beyond the wall of plants was a Jacuzzi/tub deep enough to stand up in and be covered in warm water. There were seats along the edge also. The wall to the right was covered in paintings. All were shrouded in opaque muslin. The wall to the left was covered in weapons, also from different centuries. Two walk in wardrobes took up most of the remaining wall. The door to the room was exactly centered between them, and on the wall itself.
El handed Taja a couple of thick, soft towels and nodded toward the tub. She checked the water. It was warm. She pulled off her clothes and stepped into the tub. Ahhhhh. El rummaged through her clothes to find something that would fit and seem relatively natural to her guest. She left the leather parts and took the tunic and pants to clean. City grime was a terror to get out of clothing, as she well knew.
Lia appeared at the door. "El."
"Yes?"
"Your gentleman friend is waking up."
El joined her friend and went to check on Siro.
Siro came to consciousness as though from a great distance. There was a light in his dreams that tugged at him. He wanted to investigate the light, yet there was a voice that called to him, keeping him in the darkness of his dreams. He followed the voice, voices, low pitched female voices. He opened his eyes. His dark brows pulled down in a frown Taja would have found all too familiar. The woman he saw was not Taja. Her face was full of hard planes barely softened by the overlying skin. It was a good face, strong and beautiful in its way, but not Taja. He tried to sit up.
El placed a hand on his chest. "How about some help?" Gently, she eased him into a sitting position so he could swing his feet down to the floor. His ribs protested a little, but not nearly as much as he had expected.
"Thank you. Taja?"
"Taking a bath."
He nodded, then grinned. Trust the pleasure-loving girl to find something good about their situation. "She's all right?"
"Better than you are."
She got a wry smile over that one. "Water?"
While El got him a drink, Siro sized up the two women. Well, they were both striking, the smaller one easier on the eyes with her fly-away soft brown curls and bright blue eyes. Although the eyes were disconcerting in their directness when she looked at him. They were oddly dressed to his eyes. But he vaguely recalled a lot of very oddly dressed people, so he decided not to let it bother him. He drew a deep breath. The ribs ached, but were tolerable. He became aware of an urgent need.
El noticed the slight frown. She offered him a hand to get off the bed/couch and led him into the alternate bath accommodations. She demonstrated the flush and left him to deal with the call of nature. Lia was grinning at her when she turned away from the closed door. El lifted one eyebrow in inquiry.
"Hey. Good looking. Hurt. Take care of him. Get friendly? No?"
El made an exasperated sound.
Siro discovered running water and made use of it to take the dirt and sweat off his face. He wondered where his shirt had gotten to. He stared into his own eyes for a long silent moment. He knew Taja was all right. He had survived, he didn't understand how, but he had. Where was Kung Lao? And Rayden? Where was Rayden? There was an echo of a call in his mind as he wondered about the thunder god's fate. He straightened and looked around. He closed his eyes. There. A touch of -- what?
He came out of the bathroom with a determined look on his face. "Taja?"
El pointed. He nodded and went through into the bedroom. He could hear splashing. He walked through the jungle and stopped suddenly, recalling another time when he'd surprised her in the bath. She hadn't exactly taken it well. He stepped back through the greenery, cleared his throat and called her name.
Silence. Taja turned toward the opening and breathed a sigh of relief that he wasn't standing right there. "You're awake!"
"Yes. Kung Lao --"
"He -- wasn't -- with us."
"I know. I-- Rayden is here. Somewhere."
He heard water splashing as she climbed out of the tub and started drying off. "Here? Where?" Taja came through the plants wrapped in a length of fluffy material, drying her hair and looking at him curiously. "How do you know?"
"I --" Oh, great. Now he was going to get mystical on her. That was Kung Lao's way, not his. He closed his eyes. There it was. He opened them and met Taja's wide-eyed gaze. "I -- can feel him?"
Taja felt for Siro. She could see the bewildered look in his eyes. "Ok. So -- how do we find him?"
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Across town, Micah felt odd, very odd. He was light headed, he was seeing -- he staggered to his feet, took a step and fell to the floor unconscious. Terry and Siobahn stared at him for a moment before moving to his side. He was breathing. His pulse was steady, but weak. His pupils were dilated. Terry and Siobahn looked at each other in confusion. Neither had a clue what was happening.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Siro put a hand to his head and the other out to steady himself. Suddenly he felt like he was in two places at once. Taja, towel only partially secured, moved to help him.
"Sit down. What's wrong?"
Siro had closed his eyes and shook his head to clear it, as he might after a hard blow. The world stopped being quite so wavery. "I don't know. I felt --like I was -- here and somewhere else. I know where he is."
"Where?"
Siro picked up a pencil and wrote several odd words on a piece of paper. El picked it up. She handed it to Lia whose eyes widened in surprise. She looked up into Siro's eyes. She had known that there was something connecting her visit with the man in the hospital, but not this. "Oh, no. This is where I work." She looked around at El. "Why do I have a very bad feeling about this?" she asked in a very small voice.
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