As far as Elena could tell, the Turks were incapable of catching a break.
Oh, maybe back before she'd joined and the whole world had fallen apart, and also before the Turks had their funding gutted for SOLDIER, back in the days of the old Turks, back when Vincent Valentine was a Turk and not . . . whatever it was that Vincent Valentine was now—maybe back then, the Turks didn't get their feet kicked out from under them every five minutes.
But now, well.
Good news: Tseng hadn't been killed in the Temple after all.
Bad news: Tseng and Rufus were in the Shinra Building when Diamond Weapon blew its top off.
Good news: Tseng and Rufus were apparently unkillable and had survived that, too.
Bad news: Just months after he'd recovered from his injuries in the fall of Shinra Tower, Rufus grew gray-black weals on his shoulder. Which he didn't tell anyone about for half a year.
And might not have told them about it for even longer if the issue hadn't forced itself.
It was in the middle of a meeting, one of the long depressing meetings where Rufus and Tseng discussed a lot of things that boiled down to the fact that the public hated the very name Shinra, plus the stock market had collapsed and dragged a big chunk of their assets with it, plus three-quarters of everything Shinra had owned or controlled had fallen in, was on fire, or was covered in mako dust or glowing goo. Although, of course, neither Tseng or Rufus put it that way. And Tseng had statistics and charts that showed exactly how fucked they all were.
It was a strategy meeting, which meant that she was supposed to be coming up with ideas, only the only idea she could think of at the moment was 'let's all call it quits, move to Costa del Sol, and drink margaritas until they throw us out of the bar for indecent behavior.'
She happened to look up and meet Reno's eyes, and had the discomfiting feeling that she was probably thinking the same thing he was. Rude, on the other hand, was quietly paying attention.
Great, on top of everything else she'd grown up to be a Turk in the Reno model.
Reno scribbled something on a note and shoved it at her. She twisted it around with her fingertip so she could read it. 'How does it feel to be completely screwed?'
She met his eyes again and shrugged, and smiled crooked in commiseration.
He grinned and took the paper back and wrote something else on it, then spun it to her. She read, 'Oh, that's right, you only wish you were getting screwed.' When she glared at him, he shot a meaningful glance at Tseng and then back at her.
"Did you have an idea, Reno?" Tseng asked drily.
And just as if he actually had, Reno didn't sputter or hesitate. He spun his pen in his fingers and said, "We can funnel the resources we do have through the Saucer. That'll help disguise that it's coming from us, when we need to hide it."
She was going to have to learn that trick. If she was going to be a Reno-model Turk, she could at least be a good one.
"That's true," Rufus said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked tired, which was odd because he always looked cool and composed, scarily so. But now his skin looked grey and fragile. "We do have relatively ample liquid assets in the—" and then he began to cough, bringing a hand up to cover his mouth. At first there was nothing unusual in the cough, just a tickle-in-the-back-of-my-throat kind of noise. Then it went on a bit longer and sounded wetter, and Elena thought, He's is getting a cold, that's why he looks tired.
And then Rufus hacked, doubled over, hacked again, shuddered, and pulled his hand away from his mouth. Instead of blood, a brackish black ooze gleamed green under the office lights. And Rufus was still shaking, now not with coughs but with a long shudder that flung his body back.
Tseng moved fast, so fast Elena thought he must have suspected this, although judging by the look on his face Rufus hadn't told him. Within seconds he had Rufus flat on his back on the table, head turned so that any more ooze wouldn't choke him. "Rude," he said.
Rude pinned Rufus, which was good because the shudders looked to be intensifying into a seizure.
Tseng held his hand out to Elena without looking at her or saying a word, and despite the horror of the moment Elena felt a flash of pride that she knew what he wanted and that he knew she would know. She jerked her wrist to free one of her knives from the arm-sheath, and slapped its hilt into Tseng's hand. He sliced the layers of Rufus' clothing straight down.
Black welts marked Rufus' chest, an archipelago of disease on his fair skin. The same liquid he'd coughed up bubbled in droplets out of the welts, ran together into swamps.
"Stigma," Reno said, and shucked off his jacket. He jumped up on the table, knelt next to Rufus, and used it to mop at the black stuff. Elena took off her own jacket and handed it to him when his soaked through.
Everyone knew that it was better if Geostigma victims didn't marinate in the gunk.
Eventually, Rufus stilled. Rude held him down a moment longer, then let go. Elena glanced at Tseng and saw his face fixed in an expression of great control, although control of what she couldn't read. Then Rufus' eyes opened, watery, blinking a few times before they focused.
"You idiot, sir," Tseng said softly. It was the first time Elena had ever heard him speak that way to the President. "Why didn't you tell us?"
"I was trying to decide how I wanted to deal with it," Rufus said. He shoved himself shakily up on one arm, and with the other wiped a smudge of liquid from his face. It left a long, ugly smear on his clean white greatcoat.
The silence stretched until it felt ready to snap. Finally, Tseng said, "And have you decided?"
"I think so," Rufus said.
It'd been six months since he found the first welt, but since Rufus wore insane layers of clothing he'd kept it from them. Six months. That put him as one of the very earliest victims, according to Elena's research. Hell, they'd all made comments about the Stigma, not knowing that Rufus was sitting there right next to them with stigmata hidden under his layers.
There was no cure, of course, but there were treatments that could forestall the inevitable. Anti-mutagenic injections in case it was mako poisoning, immunosuppressants in case it was an immune disorder, experimental chemical doses that might be able to bind with . . . whatever . . . it was that came out during an attack and flush it away harmlessly.
But the general feeling among the Turks was that they were going to have to find a cure themselves.
"Reno and Rude," Tseng said. "I want you in Cosmo Canyon."
"Crazy hippie canyon?" Reno said, flipping his pen again and raising an eyebrow almost to the level of his goggles.
"Crazy hippies or not, they have a lot of information about the Planet. Elena and I will break back into the old Shinra building and look for information there."
Reno's skeptical look turned to a grin. "Have fun with the roaches, El."
"Phew," Elena said, kicking a burnt piece of . . . something out of the way. "It's a mess in here."
"I imagine most buildings would be a mess if they were hit by Diamond Weapon. Cover me." Tseng kicked open the door to what had previously been an employee break room. The room was empty: it was pretty easy to tell because the floor had fallen out of it and dropped at least three stories to the rubble below. "I'm more worried about finding squatters."
"Who'd squat in this hellhole?" Elena kicked over a mutated roach and then crushed it. Waste of ammunition to take them out any other way, even if it did mean she'd have to give her boots up for lost after this mission.
"A crazy person," Tseng said. "Unfortunately, Midgar is oversupplied with crazy people. Always has been. This floor's clear, but the elevators won't go any higher."
"I guess we'll have to take the stairs. Door's down this way." Fortunately, Elena knew the Shinra building stairwells very well. Probably they were full of mutant bugs, though. "We should start an export business."
"Export business?"
"Of crazy people. It's not like Midgar's got an oversupply of anything else right now. Besides mako dust and mutant roaches."
"Don't forget the rats. But who would import crazy people?"
"Cosmo Canyon," Elena replied, providing cover as Tseng broke through the stairwell door.
"Ah, excellent point," he said, once they'd dispatched three rats and a . . . something. Best not to look too closely. "The library's on floor sixty-two."
"It's a good thing I've been keeping up my aerobics."
Fifty-six floors, ten rats, one mako-addled squatter, and countless bugs later, they jimmied open the lock on the sixty-second floor. Which was blissfully empty.
"I guess nobody wanted to break into the library badly enough to pick the lock," Elena said.
"Maybe." Tseng sounded cautious, but then, when didn't he? "Do you want to take the History section, or the Medical section?"
"History." Elena put her flashlight between her teeth so she could keep her gun in one hand and go through the endless books and papers with the other.
In total, it took twelve hours and three energy bars before she turned anything up. Had she not had training, it would have taken longer, but the Department of Administrative Research actually did have some reason for being called that.
"Tseng!" she called. "Tseng! I found it!"
Tseng appeared around a bookshelf. He had dust in his hair. He still looked gorgeous. Goddamn unfair world. "What?"
"Listen to this," she said. "It's a translated excerpt found in the Forgotten Capital." She began to read. "In the first days after the Calamity came upon us, we did not recognize her for what she was, nor did we know that she would destroy us if we did not contain her. We welcomed her with joy, seeing in her reflected our own hearts and minds. But she was only a reflection, not a true soul. Embrace a mirror and it will cut you.
"In the first of the signs that came unto us, we saw that those of us who had first embraced her suffered the Affliction. But we did not see it for what it was, and we did not understand."
"That sounds like the Stigma, all right," Tseng said. "What else does it say?"
"Nothing here. But there's an endnote . . . ." She flipped further in the monograph, and then read, "Further research into the details of this mysterious Affliction can be found in Memetophormic Genetics and the Clone Phenomenon: A Preliminary Study, by Hojo, pg 34-39.
But luck being what it was (in other words, a total bitch), the monograph was nowhere to be found in the library. Or on the laboratory level. Or in Hojo's private quarters.
"He must have taken it with him when he retired to Costa del Sol," Tseng finally said, with an air of weariness.
He didn't even try to stop Elena when she decided to kick a filing cabinet to death in her frustration.