Элизабет Бир - The Best of Elizabeth Bear

People like the nameless him who drugged me—people like me—require a certain anonymity, either in ourselves or in our victims.

The floor is cold against my rear end. My gloves are gone. My wrists scrape against the soles of my shoes as I work the rope past them. They’re only a little damp, and the water isn’t frozen or any colder than the floor. I’ve been down here awhile, then—still assuming I am down. Cellars usually have windows, but guys like me—guys like I used to be—spend a lot of time planning in advance. Rehearsing. Spinning their webs and digging their holes like trapdoor spiders.

I’m shivering, and my body wants to cramp around the chill. I keep pulling. One more wiggle and tug, and I have my arms in front of me. I sit up and stretch, hoping my kidnapper has made just one more mistake. It’s so dark I can’t see my fluorescent yellow-and-green running jacket, but proprioception lets me find my wrist with my nose. And there, clipped into its little pocket, is the microflash sleeve light that comes with the jacket.

He got the mask—or maybe the mask just came off with the bag. And he got my phone, which has my tracker in it, and a GPS. He didn’t make the mistake I would have chosen for him to make.

I push the button on the sleeve light with my nose. It comes on shockingly bright, and I stretch my fingers around to shield it as best I can. Flesh glows red between the bones.

Yep. It’s a basement.

Eight yearsafter my first time, the new, improved me showed the IBI the site of the grave he’d dug for the girl in the mermaid-colored dress. I’d never forgotten it—not the gracious tree that bent over the little boulder he’d skidded on top of her to keep the animals out, not the tangle of vines he’d dragged over that, giving himself a hell of a case of poison ivy in the process.

This time, I was the one who vomited.

How does one even begin to own having done something like that? How do I?

Ah, there’sthe fear. Or not fear, exactly, because the optogenetic and chemical controls on my endocrine system keep my arousal pretty low. It’s anxiety. But anxiety’s an old friend.

It’s something to think about while I work on the ropes and tape with my teeth. The sleeve light shines up my nose while I gnaw, revealing veins through the cartilage and flesh. I’m cautious, nipping and tearing rather than pulling. I can’t afford to break my teeth: they’re the best weapon and the best tool I have. So I’m meticulous and careful, despite the nauseous thumping of my heart and the voice in my head that says, Hurry, hurry, he’s coming.

He’s not coming—at least, I haven’t heard him coming. Ripping the bonds apart seems to take forever. I wish I had wolf teeth, teeth for slicing and cutting. Teeth that could scissor through this stuff as if it were a cheese sandwich. I imagine my other self’s delight in my discomfort, my worry. I wonder if he’ll enjoy it when my captor returns, even though he’s trapped in this body with me.

Does he really exist, my other self? Neurologically speaking, we all have a lot of people in our heads all the time, and we can’t hear most of them. Maybe they really did change him, unmake him. Transform him into me. Or maybe he’s back there somewhere, gagged and chained up, but watching.

Whichever it is, I know what he would think of this. He killed thirteen people. He’d like to kill me, too.

I’m shivering.

The jacket’s gone cold, and it—and I—am soaked. The wool still insulates while wet, but not enough. The jacket and my compression tights don’t do a damned thing.

I wonder if my captor realized this. Maybe this is his game.

Considering all the possibilities, freezing to death is actually not so bad.

Maybe he just doesn’t realize the danger? Not everybody knows about cold.

The last wrap of tape parts, sticking to my chapped lower lip and pulling a few scraps of skin loose when I tug it free. I’m leaving my DNA all over this basement. I spit in a corner, too, just for good measure. Leave traces: even when you’re sure you’re going to die. Especially then. Do anything you can to leave clues.

It was my skin under a fingernail that finally got me.

The periodwhen he was undergoing the physical and mental adaptations that turned him into me gave me a certain… not sympathy, because they did the body before they did the rightminding, and sympathy’s an emotion he never felt before I was thirty-three years old… but it gave him and therefore me a certain perspective he hadn’t had before.

It itched like hell. Like puberty.

There’s an old movie, one he caught in the guu this one time. Some people from the future go back in time and visit a hospital. One of them is a doctor. He saves a woman who’s waiting for dialysis or a transplant by giving her a pill that makes her grow a kidney.

That’s pretty much how I got my ovaries, though it involved stem cells and needles in addition to pills.

I was still him , because they hadn’t repaired the damage to my brain yet. They had to keep him under control while the physical adaptations were happening. He was on chemical house arrest. Induced anxiety disorder. Induced agoraphobia.

It doesn’t sound so bad until you realize that the neurological shackles are strong enough that even stepping outside your front door can put you on the ground. There are supposed to be safeguards in place. But everybody’s heard the stories of criminals on chemarrest who burned to death because they couldn’t make themselves walk out of a burning building.

He thought he could beat the rightminding, beat the chemarrest. Beat everything.

Damn, I was arrogant.

My formerself had more grounds for his arrogance than this guy. This is pathetic, I think . And then I have to snort laughter, because it’s not my former self who’s got me tied up in this basement.

I could just let this happen. It’d be fair. Ironic. Justice .

And my dying here would mean more women follow me into this basement. One by one by one.

I unbind my ankles more quickly than I did the wrists. Then I stand and start pacing, do jumping jacks, jog in place while I shine my light around. The activity eases the shivering. Now it’s just a tremble, not a teeth-rattling shudder. My muscles are stiff; my bones ache. There’s a cramp in my left calf.

There’s a door locked with a deadbolt. The windows have been bricked over with new bricks that don’t match the foundation. They’re my best option—if I could find something to strike with, something to pry with, I might break the mortar and pull them free.

I’ve got my hands. My teeth. My tiny light, which I turn off now so as not to warn my captor.

And a core temperature that I’m barely managing to keep out of the danger zone.

When Iwalked into my court-mandated therapist’s office for the last time—before my relocation—I looked at her creamy complexion, the way the light caught on her eyes behind the glasses. I remembered what he’d thought.