I apologize once again for tardiness. But the length. Again, these are quite a bit more difficult, but more fun to do on my part. And if it isn't obvious by the imperious tone I gave him, I do not like my narrator character and think his views are quite rancid. It feels kind of irresponsible to have bad narrator characters like this, but hey, I thought about what kind of person this guy would be, and I inevitably came to the conclusion that he would be, well, this.
And if it isn't obvious by the title and the story therein, this is a continuation of https://www.buzzsprout.com/811181/episodes/8874713 , "Jerrimal," narrated by the titular guy who isn't a demon. Just a jerk.
I apologize once again for tardiness. But the length. Again, these are quite a bit more difficult, but more fun to do on my part. And if it isn't obvious by the imperious tone I gave him, I do not like my narrator character and think his views are quite rancid. It feels kind of irresponsible to have bad narrator characters like this, but hey, I thought about what kind of person this guy would be, and I inevitably came to the conclusion that he would be, well, this.
And if it isn't obvious by the title and the story therein, this is a continuation of https://www.buzzsprout.com/811181/episodes/8874713 , "Jerrimal," narrated by the titular guy who isn't a demon. Just a jerk.
The office was cold. All across the building air conditioners sang their decadent song. None of the employees had seemed even a little bit bothered by the temperature, but then they were all a bit on the overweight side. Beneficiaries of a war they had forgotten, of the actions of a man they simply accepted as dead. And myself, of course. It was not my place to bolster my pride, certainly, but I could not forget the decades of labor to make this place safe. My labor, and even now I felt strange in the presence of its results.
But I wouldn’t be here long, hopefully. My appointment was in the system, and whilst the local government was often sluggish with, well, everything, even they could not ignore the importance of an appointment. I would be back in the struggling air of the outdoors soon enough, to feel the slick of mud beneath my boots. I hated that they forced me to keep those same said boots on, even whilst we were indoors. The secretary had said somebody would come to clean it up. Another decadent job. Professional cleaner. But it was fine, it was fine. I would be back home soon enough.
My questions were soon going to be answered, but then I felt it odd that I was going to be the one asking the questions. If the law had been even a tiny bit competent, surely they would be asking these questions to me, and not the other way around. But it seemed as though nobody cared, not for myself, not for Alborz, or indeed the hunter corps as a whole. But such is how it had always been. We got our rations, they got their peace. They had no idea how much we bled for them, and that was the way they liked it, the cowards they were.
The receptionist lazily called out my name. There was a drawl to her voice as though she didn’t even consider the time she wasted in talking, like each and every second wasn’t precious. It just made me hate my situation more.
The first office on the left. I was familiar with it, if only in the fact that I’d scoped out the place before submitting my ticket. It never hurt to be prepared, to know all of the corners that the beast that mimicked me could be hiding around.
“Hello sir, come on in! Take a seat!”
The man was a large one, not in height or musculature, but in volume. He was obviously trying to compensate for his vast girth with his choice of vertical striped shirts and booming voice to get his clients to think him taller than he actually was. His skin on his hands was smooth, while his face was marked with the lines of smoking. A vice to deal with stress? No. He was around fifty, and the dark circles under his eyes were too light for one his age to not have dealt with stress jovially. I took the seat he pointed to with his outstretched arm. It was shorter than his own, a classic psychological power play. But it was quite comfortable. Artificial leather of the best sort.
“Your first name? How do you pronounce that?”
“Jeri. You now, like Jerry with the two r’s and the y. Mom just got ‘creative’ with the naming.”
“And last name? Imal? That right?”
“Yes sir.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jeri Imal. I’m Sylvester Grierson. So you’re the clone murderer, am I right?”
Everything about this man was too jovial for me, from his casual mentioning of my case to the posture he held himself in. But I had to make do.
“Yes, sir, at least allegedly.”
The overweight man laughed. “Hah! Of course ‘allegedly’! You can’t seriously think you’re in legal trouble, can you?”
“Well, sir, I do not expect to be. But it would be unwise of me to not investigate this matter. After all, it seems that someone has taken up my identity.”
“Hah! Sure, boy, sure. Some hyper advanced alien species has dropped down on our little planet to mass produce automatons that bear your resemblance. Alborz was mad, senile maybe. He was getting up there in years, wasn’t he?”
The more the man spoke, the more I despised him. But I had to keep the anger from slipping into my voice.
“Sir, the testimony I heard was an exact replica of Alborz’s voice, and now he is dead, or disappeared.”
“Sorry son, what’s more likely? The avatar of death came down to earth to reap a poor man’s soul, or a shell shocked veteran killed himself with one of his thousand weapons? Come on. There’s no gods, no spirits, and barely even aliens. We at the ministry think logically, and logically, his account matches up with nothing we’ve found. You’re good.”
Rage boiled up in my gut, so hot I couldn’t help but lean forward in my chair. “Sir. I don’t believe you understand. I knew Alborz. I knew his personality, his actions, every thing about him. It makes utterly no sense that he would kill himself.”
“And what was the last time you saw him?”
“Pardon?”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Besides his casket as at the funeral? Almost twenty years.”
The fat bureaucrat slapped his hand down on the table. It would have been a much more impressive gesture if there had been more muscle attached to his ligaments. “HAH! Twenty years. I can barely remember a lot of the people I was friends with twenty years ago! People change, boy. The man went through a lot, which, when I ran over your record, I saw that you weren’t with him the whole time. Don’t be crazy. We’ve run over everything multiple times. The grounds, the neighborhood, the murder weapon. Our little hero got a bit murmurry in his last days. Wrote all kinds of crazy journals, like the stuff they talk about in the Silent Skies. It’s his DNA, his gun, his house. Suicide. Maybe he just submitted that testimony to make you look bad? Or, like those social lunatics do, tell a story? Seems to be their biggest goal in life, and what could be a bigger story than framing your ancient friend for your murder? Nonsense.” A bit of mirth faded from his eyes as he leaned in in turn. “Listen. We’ve no charges against you, no evidence, no nothing. Do yourself a favor and go back to life. Stop worrying.”
“So you have nothing else for me besides the public record?”
“No. Unless…?”
“The files are owned by Seranym, I presume?”
“In tandem with the local government, of course.”
“Level orange access?”
“Oh. You’ve already been through the archives, haven’t you?”
“Indeed, sir. Any way you could provide me with said access?”
Again, that look of mirth returned to his lazy eyes. “I mean, sure, but you’d be wasting your money.”
“It that easy? To bribe you?” By God. I would curse this man’s name from here to the sea, even if he helped me.
“Hah! It’s not a bribe if it’s legal, isn’t it? Yeah, of course I can get you level orange access. But, like I said, you’re wasting your money. You really care, feel like someone’s out to get you, frame you, whatever, just leave the planet. It’s a free country, isn’t it? You leave to, erm, Centauri or wherever, we wouldn’t even bother extraditing you if more information came to the case. Which it’s not. Open and shut.”
“How much?”
“You know, you might try socializing. With other people. It’s more fun, I’ve got to tell you. Lot better than moping around thinking that every person in existence is in a predator/prey relationship with you.”
“Excuse me?”
“What? I mean, kid, you’ve got to wipe that scowl off your face and actually talk to someone, not hate them. It’s a better life.”
“And I could get fat, too.”
His smile grew malicious. “Off your paranoid credits. Two thousand for three days. That’s what you get, and even now I don’t recommend it. Even when it’s me getting the money, getting more fat.”
“Two thousand? Surely the administrative fees are but a fraction of…”
“Kid. We’ve got standards to uphold here. You lower prices a little when there’s incentive to do so, people in the know, or are actually pursuing something worthwhile. You aren’t, you’re being paranoid. So we keep to the standard.”
“You are a hound, preying off the dead.”
“That’s actually the opposite of my job. It’s kind of to make sure less people become dead, least in suspicious ways. From your craziness, Mr. Jeri, I really only see YOU preying off this poor dead guy, fueling your mad fantasies. Let it go. Let the two thousand credits sit in your bank account or investments, whatever. Just forget about it.”
“Fine. Two thousand credits. What is the payment method, and how will the status be applied to my card?”
“Oh, I’ve already got your info in the database. It’s a few clicks, a call to the archives with my credentials, and then you’ll get the update prompt tomorrow at six in the morning. Archives open at seven, just so you don’t get too excited. So you’re good with wasting your money?”
“I agree to spending my credits to get the clearance, yes.”
“That wasn’t my question. You good with wasting your money?”
“Do you sincerely wish to humiliate me?”
“Yes. Humiliate you in front of me and only me. Because you’re crazy. I see it in your eyes, your speech, your ridiculous idea that Alborz was telling the truth. Honestly, Mr. Imal, I saw a lot of that in Alborz.”
My eyes flared. “You knew him?”
The fat man shrugged lackadaisically with his over-sized shoulders. “The hunters work with law enforcement all the time, even now. Alborz was a regular sight at the office back then, and, heck, just before he died he’d show up once a week to take coffee with his old friends. But, no. I never really talked to him. Just listened. And he sounded a bit like you.”
“And what under the stars could you possibly mean by that?”
“He was obsessed, keenly so, in rather explosive ways. He’d also drag himself to a halt in the middle of conversation, dart his eyes around the room when there was zero chance in hell anything would get to him but flakes of dust, a fly, maybe a pleasant conversation. The entire time you’ve been here, your eyes have been doing the same thing. I guess it works out in the field, right? But it just makes you seem odd, here. The only attack you’ll ever get in here is me criticizing you of your odd behavior, least so long as you actually are innocent.”
“So long as I actually am innocent?”
“Your persistence in this matter is the only thing that makes me suspicious. A good man takes his small victories with him, he doesn’t sit around, panicking about defeat. Alborz was starting to understand that in his later years. Almost made him fun to listen to, when he wasn’t going on about the grail roach for the fifteenth time.”
“So you really think he killed himself?”
“Think? We know. He mentions timestamps in his reports, doesn’t he? Video bugging out? We ran diagnostics on all of his cameras. Nothing out of the ordinary, until May 15th. That’s when he put the gun to his head. I won’t show you it, of course, because it’s behind the clearance you’re yet to receive, but… it’s all plain as day. The man clearly had demons running around his head that nobody really knew about. That’s just how minds work, especially minds that have braved death a thousand different times. Surely you understand.”
“I do not. All of us love living more than anyone else, least we do after a few weeks in the thicket.”
“And Alborz was in the city for two decades. Think about it. The puzzle pieces fit together for you being innocent. When you get to the archives, you should understand. Anyways, I’ve got another meeting I must attend. Yes, late and all, but that’s only because I was humoring you, so don’t go all judgy. It was… erm, a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Imal. Hope you get back to your thicket soon.”
“Really? That it? You’re just going to leave?”
“I don’t really have more to say. You’ll get your clearance, like you asked. There’s just…”
“What a waste of time.”
“Indeed, sir. Especially for me. Just count your blessings for a moment. There are no charges against you and there never will be if you continue abiding the law. Just… be happy for a second, okay? I really have to go. This meeting, well, it’s at least sort of important.”
“Sort of?”
“Well, see, we’re going to be organizing the marshal’s ball, right? That matters to more people, I think.”
“How DARE you?!”
“No charges. Open and shut case. You want to argue with me about the sky being blue?”
“Fine. Whatever. Go.”
“Well, I can’t just leave my office with you sitting here, fuming.”
“Alright. Fine. I’ll go.”
I left the office feeling my veins pound against each other in fury. I’d gotten the clearance, at least, despite the man’s protestations, so the morning wasn’t a complete loss. I hoped to never see that tub of lard again. And, thank God, I probably wouldn’t.
I began the walk to the transit station with my eyes doing that same thing the magistrate admonished me for. In truth, they’d probably been doing that for thirty years at this point. I never really noticed it. It was simply a natural response to the sheer danger of the thicket. Nothing more, and nothing to be judged. I hated the city. The only thing that was nice about it was the transit, which the municipal government still had the wisdom to keep free for myself and others of the corps.
But what was I doing? Going back to camp? To forget that he was dead? The man who’d taught me to shoot Demazires just above their left eye? I was nothing before him. Nothing. Just some scoundrel without money and ambition. He’d been the only reason I’d found anything besides the cold concrete of the colony, and here I was, resigning myself to the merciless iniquity of his disappearance, the utter apathy of colonial officials. It made no sense.
No. I would be back in the morning. That was true. I would dive as deep into those records as my new clearance would allow me. And I’d find something. Anything. It couldn’t just be that he was… gone.
“People die, sometimes for no reason. In fact, that’s the reason most people die.” Came an all too familiar voice. It was my own, kind of. But I wasn’t speaking.
A man. Sitting on the transit bench. No one in their right mind ever sat on that bench. But that was… that was an utterly irrelevant detail. I stopped my eyes, locking them down on the monster.
It looked like I was staring straight into a mirror. The eyes had that same keen sharpness, darting everywhere about the form of its prey. The hair was tousled in the exact same pattern it usually fell into from a night sleeping on the forest floor. The posture, the clothes, everything was the same. Except for the socks. Mine were clean. Ish. Cleanish. But the doppelganger’s were dirty to the point of uselessness.
“Glad you noticed it.” The fiend curled its lips into an adrenaline fueled smile, like the sort I knew rose on face when I was watching a scope.
“Noticed what, demon?”
“Why, the socks, of course. They are a relic of my old purpose. Alborz expected you to have dirty socks because you never understood that it’s easier to clean floors and feet than laundry, so I mimicked that belief. You’ve grown soft with time, haven’t you?”
“Soft?”
“Yes, soft. I know that hand is cradling a Mel. The old, strong you would’ve already pulled the trigger.”
“I need answers, fiend. It is no weakness to be inquisitive to the nature of your prey.”
“Oh, I’ll answer questions, of course, that’s always the best part, isn’t it?”
“The best part of what?”
“Oh, certainly not the hunt. Or perhaps it’s another sort of hunt, but then we’d be stretching our metaphors, wouldn’t we?”
“If your tactic is just to try and confuse me, you ought to know that it’s not working.”
The thing rolled its eyes. It felt really strange seeing a copy of my eyes do that when I practically never did it myself, but I did not let a single bit of that confusion fall into my expression. Stone faced. Emotionless. I always had to be ready to kill.
“Oh, Jeri Imal. You found me out of belief in your imagined friend’s account. Why then would you think you could kill me?”
“Imagined friend?”
Again that unnatural rolling of eyes. “Yes, that’s the part you take interest in. Imagined, because you forget like many of your brethren do that relationships are not static. Just like everything in the universe, they change, dissolve, and are reforged in the fires of time. You put a sword in a chest, you never oil it, it gets rusty. In your imagination it might be sitting there still shiny, but it’s really orange. Schrodinger’s metaphor. Except with cats. But the cat always dies, because I’m there.”
“You make no sense, beast.”
“Oh, please. Call me by my name. Jerrimal, pleased to meet you.”
“No.”
“Oh, so many words. You want explanations, don’t you? Well, this is hardly a place for explanations. It would be nice to stop and get a bite to eat, wouldn’t it?”
“Not with you. You answer here, or you get a bullet to your chest.”
“And you lose your one chance to get weird words crammed inside your head. Please. Stop acting stupid. You’re better than that.”
“Better? That’s a weird way to put it. You’re a threat. To me, to everyone, to the entire colony. It would be more stupid for me to let you roam around, murdering to your heart’s content!”
“Sure. I guess. But you forget that you can’t kill me. If you have a madman that you can’t kill, is it better to try and kill them, spit in the face of infinity, or to, erm, maybe listen to them? Perhaps your words can do better than the magistrate’s, find evidence and motivation that a forensic scientist never could. Or do you think so little of yourself?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Of course. So interrogate me. Obviously, the best place to interrogate anyone is somewhere they’re comfortable, to trick them into thinking that you’re a friend. And here I am, offering you to question me at a cafe. We’re already well on the way to being friends, no?”
“Of course not. How could I be a friend with Alborz’s murderer?”
“Oh, it’s easy to be friends with murderers. Tasha?”
“What about her?”
“Friends and more, no? Comments about the dirty socks?”
“No.”
“Oh, too soon? Well, we’re friends, too.”
“Then stop looking like me.”
“Oh, of course. How could I have forgotten? Just give me a second to change.” The demon’s skin shifted itself around in patterns that were impossible to focus on. Whatever the reason, I felt drawn to the eyes. They barely changed. They stayed in the same spot, with the same cruel humor swimming in them. It was just that they were now blue.
And, true to form, the demon was a completely different man, one I didn’t recognize.
“Better?”
“No.”
“Oh, come. Of course this is better. Just admit it to yourself.”
“I will not admit anything when it’s false.”
“Sure. But lunch? I’m thinking Felicia’s.”
“Felicia’s? That’s a bit…”
“Already being choosy. What a friend you are. You want answers, join me there. It’s close, food’s better than your sallow tongue would ever recognize, and it’s cheap. Your cup of tea. Except for the grease, of course.”
“Fine. Felicia’s.”
The walk over to the cafe was incredibly short. Perhaps three minutes, for I gave my legs no quarter. The demon followed in stead, humming an annoying tune to himself. I couldn’t recognize it, but it grazed against my brain in all the wrong ways.
I was immediately overwhelmed by the smells. Oil. Grease. Fat. A million ways to dull the mind and slow the reflexes. Such were the primary reasons I avoided these places like the plague. It would be utterly shameful if someone else in the corps saw me in shuck a degenerate establishment. But such was the demon’s request, and if I wanted to get more info out of him… dead men do not speak. Demons either, probably.
The squish of cushy, false leather, modeled after an ideal time which could never have been ideal, for it lead directly to the first fall. Decadence. And someone to serve, to. She was nothing to see. Overweight, like most of the colonial who weren’t involved with Seranym’s mining ventures. I knew my order. It was the only thing I could tolerate from places like this.
“A spanish omelet, please. And coffee.”
“Just coffee for me,” the demon crooned.
I glared at him. “Then cancel my order, waitress.”
“Alright then. I’ll also have the El Presidente Special.” He turned his tongue to me. “One way or the other, we’re sitting and eating. And it’ll be better for you if you get some real food into that shriveled belly of yours.”
I grunted. “Okay. I guess I’ll still have that Spanish omelet.”
The waitress dashed off in annoyance, our orders in tow. The whole situation perplexed me. Who was this, really? I couldn’t tell if I ever voiced the question out loud, but the demon answered.
“It’s very simple. Sometimes things become less. Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes the becoming less is good. That’s what I do, and will always do.”
“So you believe yourself to be a representative of entropy?”
“Whoa, edge man over here with the sharp words! I don’t believe myself to be a representative of entropy, Jerry, because that concept is too small, secluded to just this patch of possibility. Eternal energy diffusion, bah! As insignificant as the fulfillment of this contract.”
“So what are you then?”
“Just, erm, think big. And then bigger.”
“You think you’re God?”
“Closeish. But no. Not God. We’ve no relation, thankfully. That crystal freak wouldn’t even know I exist. Well, I mean, zey sort of do, but just this shard of negative possibility… look, you’re not smart enough to understand, I’m sorry.”
“You’re pushing your luck with these insults.”
“Yet I got you into a cafe, when the last time you ate in public was five years ago. I’m not pushing anything.”
“Oh, you don’t know me.”
“I know you better than any person on this planet, really. Because five years was correct, you see? It was Thomas’ place, and you only really ate there on a whim. Your eyes were darting about the whole time. Because of course somebody’s out there to kill you, isn’t there? Except that’s a large point of civilization, isn’t it? In the wild, doing your work, there really was a creature out there trying to gore you with its tusks. Here? You killed them all. And how can the dead kill you? So, in short, I know you. Better than you know yourself. But that’s not important.”
“So perhaps you do know a little about me. Then you know my questions.”
“Of course.”
“And you’re not going to answer them?”
“I’ll answer them when they’re asked. See, it’s just more fun that way.”
I scowled. The fury I had for this creature was getting my heart overactive, to the point where I could feel it pounding in my ears. But I had to keep calm. Always. That was the first lesson any hunter learned. Quiet the heart.
“Why take on my form? If you presume yourself to be so powerful, why bother with a physical attack at all? Why all this mystery? This mystique? I don’t understand.”
“Look, very frequently I have to work off of convenience, right? When infinities grind together, sometimes the math works out and the ratio is finite. Then you’ve gotta make decisions, as much as you can make decisions in a shard of possibility utterly foreign to your entity. So you start getting logical or whatever. What is the easiest, most efficient path I can take to getting this guy dead with there being as few ripples of repercussion as possible? So I show up to him as you, and get him to put a bullet in his brain.”
“Wait. That last sentence?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
The waitress finally showed up with the food. It was far greasier than I would usually stomach, and there was something drastically important going on, so I didn’t acknowledge her with more than a nod. But the demon took to his steak like a ravenous dog, cutting off the only bit of this cursed conversation that I cared about. I gave him fifteen seconds, scowling at him as disrespected me. Thirty seconds. I slammed my palm down on the table.
“Demon! Finish your sentence!”
He growled at me in between bits of steak. “What sentence? Everything I’ve said thus far has clearly been phonetically constrained. Why, if you looked at the bit above, where you think I didn’t finish my thoughts, you can clearly see that ‘oh,’ and ‘yeah,’ are completely self contained injunctions.”
“What on God’s good earth are you talking about?”
“Doesn’t matter, of course. But Alborz, right? Yeah, Alborz. That guy. Technically, he killed himself.”
“How?”
“You think you’re smart, right? Put the pieces together. Localized cause and effect. Me. Alborz. His recounting of events, the police report, the evidence. You know everything you’ve seen has been correct, right?”
“You must be lying.”
“Think about it. Give me time to finish my meal.”
I glared even harder at the beast as he ripped further into the plate. Alborz could not have killed himself. It made no sense. That wasn’t something he would have done, even if something was hunting him. Obviously I was being fed a false story by a malicious stain on existence that was simply trying to be an even greater pest than he already was.
“Really? Still thinking on it?” The demon smiled while a tiny droplet of grease ran down his cheek.
“I…”
“Yeah. Alright. So I’ll piece it together for you. Whole story. Forty two years ago, okay? Alborz is a rising star. He’s getting everything he wanted. Money. Fame. Women. The usual stuff you folks are all about. But he’s starting to feel the luxuries of his life are all hollow, right, like you. So he spends more and more time out in the field, building his name, telling himself that he’s not in it for the adrenaline, but for the rational stuff. Money and all, whatever. So he goes about making this place less, slaughtering the biodiversity. Very lovely thing for him to do, as it helps Seranym’s profitability and thus speeds up the human clock, making me have to wait less time. So I’m interested in him, right? You show up, same sort of priorities that he had, ‘cept of course you wanted revenge for your dead brother. Whatever. You two get close, Alborz is spending nearly all of his working hours razing the planet’s ecology to the ground, but he’s having a lot of near death experiences. I grow nervous that my tool might explode before he’s supposed to, so I show up as you in places where you aren’t, keep the guy alive. He outlives his usefulness, so I come to make somebody whose life I artificially prolonged shortened, made less. Just ‘cause it was bugging me, that I’d left that loose end or whatever. Show up in the same guise, he freaks out, tries to kill me, like you’re still thinking of doing. But that literally means nothing, it’s like trying to give the air a Christmas present, so I just keep showing up, having fun while the guy thinks he’s blowing my brains out. He gets crazy, hopeless, all those delicious feelings. I show up one more time and he’s emotionally drained, won’t even shoot me on sight. So I talk him into giving up, making his death honorable or something by having his skilled hand be the one that pulled the trigger. And so he did. Funniest part was, of course, that I would never have killed him. I never kill my focus, not directly.”
“Focus?”
“Yeah, of course that’s the word you ask a question about. So Alborz was tricked into killing himself by me. That’s the full story. You want to go to the police with that? Think it’ll make a difference? Like the obese magistrate himself said, there’s no more evidence. You’re good to go.”
“But you…”
“Doesn’t matter, Jeri. Nice meeting you, anyway. Hope you enjoy the meal. Honestly…” the beast backed out of his seat, a wicked grin emblazoned on his face, “honestly, I’ve gotta go. There’s a couple of guys in an apartment complex four hundred years ago that I have to go bother.”
He turned to walk out the cafe door. That was the moment. I jumped to my feet, the gun I was steadily clutching in my pinkie finger spiraling straight into my grip. An old technique, taught to me by someone who had never deserved to die. In a second it was aimed straight at the beast’s back, calibrated just so it would shatter his spine in the precise way that the bone fragments would impale his lungs. Yes, an old tactic. And a brilliant one.
Click.
Nothing.
The demon turned around with his smile sharper than ever. “Look. I get you’re enthused and everything, but that wasn’t you forgetting to load the chamber or whatever. I did that for your own good. No need to actually have something to be sent to jail about.”
I screamed and hollered at the demon to come back. He obstinately refused, walking straight out of the diner. I rushed after him, the eyes of everyone fixed on my outburst. The doors shrieked against the force of my impact. I looked around outside, and… nothing. Not one single trace. His shoes left a little bit of mud in the cafe, and on the doorstop, but just at the point he had disappeared from my vision his trail halted. Even his scent… there was nothing. He was there, then gone, and nothing else.
I retreated to my booth and ate my omelet with many of the clientele whispering about my apparent madness. It didn’t matter. None of it did. This was no beast that I could track, nor would I want to track it even if I could. The demon was right. I wasn’t responsible for Alborz’s death, and nobody thought I was. There was nothing to fix, nothing to change… I felt worthless. Then again, that feeling had been gnawing at me for a good while. It wasn’t the money. It wasn’t even the honor, really. It was just having a job to do that made sense. And everything was making less and less sense by the day.
I figured that to calm my nerves I’d need to shoot five thousand or so Remzis. Always less. The demon was right. Always less.