The Redactor, Chapter 05

I woke with a fever at 2:33 in the morning.

  But it wasn’t a fever. I’d snarled myself up in the bedclothes and sweated through a nightmare.

  But this nightmare didn’t linger like normal. Its power dispersed in an instant, was squeezed to the edges of my mind by one thought: the other notes.

  Heiro’s folder held five sets of notes. One had been enacted. A failure, but not for want of trying.

  I hurried down the stairs to the ground floor of my apartment in the dark. I missed a step and felt a moment of terror when my torso lurched forward and tipped me off balance, before I clutched the balustrade and fought myself upright.

  In my study, I found the pull-cord of the reading lamp by feel, and raked the folder to me. I opened it and hunted for the next set of notes in the sequence.

  I found it and ran a finger down the margin of the topmost page. I stopped at Means. The next word was Poison.

  Poison?

  My mind flared with the memory of goading Hiero to nail the details—that’s where the devil lay.

  So, I’ll research, he’d said, and smirked at me from behind his fringe. The devil gets around...

  I scanned the page for the details, while telling myself this was all hypothesis. Loose conjecture that I could drop any time, no harm done. The door to my study could burst open, and the candid camera enter, and I’d laugh it all off.

  For scene, Hiero had written—a bedroom a hundred feet above a sprawling, glittering mass of humanity.

  Great time to get poetic.

  Then tagged on the end, almost as an afterthought—Hong Kong.

  For Time, he’d written, A Celebration.

  My eyes flickered before I reached Victim. I had to fight some compulsion to look away, slip the paper beneath the others.

  It said: female, Asian.

  That narrowed it down to—what?—1 billion? If I was to infer this female Asian had normal breasts, maybe that cut it down another—

  I gave that calculation away.

  A bedroom in a Hong Kong high-rise and a celebrating woman.

  It sounded like the setting line of a screenplay.

  No, it’s a prophecy, damn it. Wake up.

  But the oracle has drunk too much of the mystic wine, part of me protested. What the hell could I do with Hong Kong, female, party? Antarctica, penguin, standing around, was hardly worse.

  And what kind of a celebration did you have in your bedroom?

  The memory of Hiero’s eyes struck me again. Their glint forced me to calm. I rehearsed a few facts. I was an intelligent man. I’d been told just that today by a policeman. Wonderful.

  I recalled what I knew of Hiero, to recollect how the world looked to a student. I tried on his shoes, walked around in them a while. They didn’t take me any place I wanted to go, but everywhere I went, I bumped into other students.

  Rhianne was a student. An exchange student, like Hiero

  What were the chances?

  Who cares. It was an easy hypothesis to test and, if no good, discard.

  From the back of my bureau I dragged my laptop, opened it, and waited while it booted. My fingers hung over the keypad, ready to enter my password, but it went straight through to the desktop. I was too intent on my test to notice the anomaly.

  I opened a web browser and hit the bookmark for the university staff portal. Soon I was peppering the student database with queries.

  Students from Hong Kong? Many.

  Exchange students from Hong Kong? A handful.

  Studying humanities? Two.

  And—thought the intelligent professor—exchange students from Hong Kong with a birthday in the next week or so? One.

  I clicked on that student’s profile. I never should have. I forgot that profiles included a colour photo.

  Li Min gazed out at me, eyes crinkled by her smile. Hair bobbed, and wearing the kind of checkered blouse that either meant she was a square, or conducting some subtle subversion. She was an arts student, so probably the latter.

  Her smile looked genuine, in any case.

  Would she still be smiling on her birthday—tomorrow?

  Crap.

  I spun on my chair, and hauled myself back up the stairs to my bedroom. It felt empty during the day. Cavernous at night. Through a chink in the curtains I glimpsed channel markers winking red and green out over the Swan River. The breeze streaming through the open window smelt of frangipani.

  I undressed, then redressed in track pants and t-shirt. I descended to the ground floor, and keyed the alarm to arm. The last thing I did before I bounded off across the lawn was to press the button on my Medline watch that told it I was going for a jog, and that it was okay to be in the Orange Zone for a while. Told it I was happy to walk at the precipice of death for a few minutes tonight in order to push away that unknown future time when my heart would throw me over the precipice without my say-so.

  I should have stretched, would pay for it tomorrow. But I needed the rush of air around me, the thump of my feet on the tarmac. The smell of sprinkler-wet grass. I needed to think.