Here is another installment in the Stories of Elektra series. Like Time Islands, this is a longer story so I’m publishing it in three parts on three successive days. Makeover World is a standalone but is related by setting, character and theme to the others in this series. Here is Makeover World – Part 2. Be sure to read Part 1 first.
2.
Heads turned toward them, people stared. They heard something even though Nick and Maari were off in a quiet corner. Nick panicked. There could be an agent in the place, there could be listening sensors. In desperation, he laughed out loud, then worried that he’d overdone it. Did it sound forced?
“You always exaggerate!” he continued, as if talking to an old friend he never took seriously. He laughed a little more. But as quietly as he could, he whispered: “No! Stop right there.” But she went on, at least keeping her voice down so that he could barely hear. Sensors would pick up anything actually voiced.
“I didn’t just kill him. I cut him with a razor and watched him bleed to death. …”
“Enough!” he whispered harshly at her. “You can’t tell me that kind of thing.”
“I had studied the body’s arteries and sliced into the ones in his thighs and arms. …”
“Don’t you get it?” He grabbed her arm, but she quickly pulled it back. “I can’t protect sources here. They constantly grill me on suspect activity I might hear about.”
“So what? I’m telling you about things that happened on Kalos, and years ago, in the Varain Colony. The place was under attack. I just got out with the rest of the civilians before it all went up in flames. Nobody cared about crimes and law at that point.”
He relaxed a little. The Varain Colony had been nuked. There had been nothing left but blasted ruins. “Still, you’re involving me in a crime – doesn’t matter when or where it took place.”
“Not really,” she said. “Let’s just say this is my way, my colorful, exaggerated way of saying I did things that wound up killing something in me.”
“OK, that’s better. Your twisted imagination made you out to be a monster.”
“Sure, a monster. But one that couldn’t live with being a monster.”
“What happened after this ‘exaggerated’ event?”
“At first, not much. After all, there was fighting in the streets. I was lucky to evade the bot killers they sent down the main avenues. I wrapped white rags around my arms and huddled with a big group of civilians under a Congress flag. The troops let us through their lines and trucked us to a refugee camp. I had nothing to do with the Varain crazies – and that’s all they cared about – so they let me through. But there was nothing for me, no family, no work, nothing to keep me on Kalos. I had to get my body clean of drugs and the other poisons I’d been fed so I shipped out to the Sun station at the edge of the Kalos system. They were famous for cleansing people of all manner of toxins, but you had to take on their version of God and salvation. I was grateful for getting cleaned up but what they called spiritual discipline I just couldn’t take. So as soon as I could, I started station hopping on freighters until I finally hit the Key. I figured I’d come that far, right to the edge of this system, so I might as well go all the way to Elektra, try another planet instead of another station on yet another icy airless rock. Those places were OK for a time since there are fewer ways to go wrong, but everywhere you look is artificial and closed in. I wanted to see a sky again, feel the light of a sun, like rinsing away all the stale air and human stink and the feeling of eyes on you everywhere.”
“It sounds like you were haunted.”
“Yes! Haunted. And haunted is worse than being hunted. I’d have almost preferred having an actual pursuer. Instead I had my good old brain with me all the time. How do you run when you’re already caught?”
“So you got here. What got you to Lomax Mountain?”
“This is the makeover world, right? You’re the one who was publicizing all the personal transformations. Your profiles were famous. You made it sound like everyone was here to become something new.”
“I profiled a few people, but I’m not the one who started that trend.”
“No, of course not. But you said something in one those q-casts about a guy who said he felt like coming here had given him a new soul. That stayed with me. It made me realize what had happened.”
“And what was that?”
“You don’t believe in spiritual things, so you won’t like what I call it. But there’s an essential part of me that left. I call it my soul. My soul had run away. When I sat there and watched all that blood come out of that bastard, it just up and left. Didn’t even slam the door, just vanished. No sound, no nothing.”
“And here you thought you could get it back?”
“I felt different here. It’s hard to say what it was. I must have looked strange when you met me. For a long time, I didn’t know what to do. After all, where do you go, what do you do if you’re looking to get your soul back? One thing was happening on the outside – my body felt kind of warped. But on the inside it was different. I was opening up to things, though I wasn’t really clear about what was happening. After I came back and I found your profile on me, I couldn’t see myself in the woman you described, at least physically. Because I looked to you so small, in a way, so turned in on myself, I guess. But you saw me tonight and knew I had changed so much you could hardly recognize me. That’s because I could live the way I felt inside, instead of feeling always so weighted down. Back then it was like I was wearing a heavy yoke across my shoulders. But at the same time, I was empty. My body must have been twisted or pushed in on itself. I don’t know, I just never felt right, never felt I could stand up and face myself. Maybe that was it, what you saw. But that’s gone now. I feel like I’ve picked up my life like a piece of scrap metal that turns out to be a treasure. I can breathe and look people in the eyes again.”
“But what convinced you that you could be changed by going up on that mountain?”
“There are others who have been there and gone through something similar. I ran into one of them. Or really, she ran into me. … But look, that’s got nothing to do with what I still need. It’s why I wanted to see you.” She paused and reached out to hold Nick’s forearms. He almost flinched when she did that, suddenly thinking of her cutting open that nameless man she had killed.
“I don’t know what happened to me on that mountain. Of course, I know how I feel, how I’ve changed, but the rest of it. That’s gone. All I can remember is that night and a few flashes, like dreams I can’t fully recall. It’s like I was asleep for a long time and woke up as a new person.”
“A new person who got her soul back?”
“No,” she said sharply. “Maybe not that, not yet. I’m different, but there’s something strange still. I can’t describe it, what’s still missing.”
“But maybe all that’s still missing is the poison you left behind. It sounds like you were ruining yourself. You don’t want to be that person again, do you?”
“No, but that’s not it. I can’t understand it – just that whatever this new me is, it still doesn’t really feel like me. That’s the only way I can put it.”
He didn’t want to push her anymore on that. “You’ve been gone, what, a couple of years. You can’t remember any of that?”
“Just a few flashes, nothing coherent.”
“Did somebody put you in a hibernation unit?”
“No. I mean I don’t know. I have no idea what might have happened to me.”
“What about those flashes? What do you see in those?”
“Nothing is clear. A few strange sounds, shadows mostly. Nothing I can make sense of. Believe me, I want to know, I really do.”
“I believe you, but somebody must have done something to you. At a minimum, someone had to take care of you in all that time. Someone made sure you stayed alive. And someone got rid of your memory of that period. That kind of thing is doable. People even pay to have it done.”
“I … I just don’t know what happened. That part is horrible. I want, I need to know. But I’ve never felt so alive and so … ready. To be me.”
“How long have you been back?”
“Not long, about 10 days now. I was suddenly aware, awake like never before, every little thing looked alive, like I was seeing it for the first time. And I was back in the last house I had lived in, as if I had never left. Except everything looked new all of a sudden, and I found I had money in my account. I’d been broke, living on anything I could cadge or steal. Suddenly I had plenty of money and my own place to live in.”
“There’s nothing spiritual about money and clothes and flats.”
“Of course not. Somebody is helping me with all that. But I don’t know who.”
“No idea? Come on. Didn’t anyone take an interest in you before you left?”
“Can’t you get it straight? No memory means no memory. You’re the first person I’ve talked to about this.”
“OK – but maybe we can do this: I want you to walk me through everything that happened the night you left, just that night. You seem to remember that part. Something more might come back to you.”
“No, I’ve racked my brain for the last ten days. I won’t remember anything else if we sit here and talk about it. You and I have to go back to where it happened. I haven’t seen that place since that night. If anything could open those memories, it would be up there in the hills.”
He wasn’t comfortable rushing off that night, so they agreed to meet at his place the next night and take his flyer northeast of the city to Lomax Mountain, one of the largest features of the Spider Hills. That was where she had vanished.
Continue on to the conclusion of Makeover World – Part 3.
Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash
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