Lenne was only slightly awake. She was a crumpled heap hanging over the crisscrossing metal bars that supported the stage. Her legs—one broken—hung roughly straight down. The material of her right sleeve had caught on a bar some distance up so that her arm was twisted and suspended above the woman's body. Gravity had smashed her face into cold metal, and she could feel hot blood pooling inside her left cheek.
Suddenly she was conscious. Blood! The shards of glass had fallen down with her, slicing up her exposed skin and clothes before continuing to fall the twenty meters to the stone floor at the base of the arena. Oh, God, the sticky blood was everywhere! Lenne began to breathe heavily with fear. Who would find her lying there, who would see that her blood was not red as it was supposed to be?
Things were still dark. Her brain honed in on the sounds from above. There were shouts, and they were growing louder—closer.
"There's a hole in the stage—please, sir, you can't go any farther!" yelled a nervous, high-pitched voice Lenne thought might be one of her bodyguards.
"Outta my way! Lenne's there!" It was the deep, commanding voice of Shuyin.
Lenne bit her already bruised lip and tried not to cry. Of course there were tears collecting in her eyes from the pain, but she refused to let any fall out of fear.
Still, the fright was overwhelming. Her heart was wild within her chest, pushing blood faster and faster through her body to gush out of her wounds.
This was it, wasn't it?
A light would come on and Shuyin would be standing over her. He would look down and see that the blood weeping from her body was not the right color. Would he think she wasn't even human?
Maybe she wasn't human, not anymore…
"Let me go!"
"Sir, no—"
"Lenne!"
Her arm pulled the woman upward and gravity tried to drag her down. The metal bars that had crushed her bones and bruised her skin now constituted the only barrier between herself and the shattered glass on the arena floor so many meters below. The pooling tears overflowed, and, mercifully, the pain finally drove Lenne into a state of unconsciousness.
She awoke on a clean white bed covered with a single, clean white sheet. Even before she opened her eyes, Lenne knew exactly where she was; her nose alerted her to the familiar smells of the laboratory where she had spent so many hours, her mouth recognized the peculiar taste of the air.
The room was empty for only a moment. It was then that Lenne struggled to raise her head off the pillow and the bank of controls on the far wall began to flash light blue in response. Her father entered, clipboard in hand, eyes lifeless as usual.
"Daddy," she said, and her hand immediately went to her left cheek. She felt no scar, nor any residual pain. She inspected her body quickly and saw only faint scars where the deepest cuts had been. Even her broken leg bore only a thin cast about it.
Her father walked over. He took one square hand and pushed dark hair from his face, as was habit. Those gray eyes that met his daughter's—they actually showed relief. Later, Lenne would reason that he was happy only in the survival of a precious test subject, but, at that moment, her heart was warmed by what appeared to be fatherly concern.
"What happened?"
He stopped looking at her. He rolled a stool from the control panels to her bed, sat on it and began to take her vitals. The handheld computer in his hand gathered the data and beeped as it created charts and graphs.
He was a short man, and when he stood this fact was emphasized. His voice, which he actually started to use, had a tendency to go up and down when he was excited about something. Presently, however, he spoke monotonously, as was almost always the case with Lenne's mother. "WWRM attacked your concert."
Lenne was sitting up before two seconds had a chance to tick by on the sterile clock of the far wall. Her legs swung over and her feet moved downward in an attempt to touch the gray tile floor, but her father waved a discouraging hand. Lenne obeyed, choosing to employ her vocal chords instead. "WWRM? Why?"
WWRM was an acronym for World Wide Resistance Movement, and that's exactly what it was: an international terrorist organization that struck at all governments it viewed as unjust. It stood firmly on one side of the planet's war. Of course, there were about a half dozen distinguishable sides.
"Don't ask me. Apparently they wanted to bring Japan into the war, and now they've succeeded."
"So it's beginning…"
"You're a smart girl," announced a new voice. It was the commanding tone of Lenne's mother, who had just entered the room. She was a tall woman, towering nearly a foot and a half over her ex-husband. Her brown hair was cropped short around her ears, and her face itself, hidden behind a constantly disgruntled expression, was a matured version of her beautiful daughter's.
"Why would they attack my concert? They don't know about me, do they?"
"I don't see how they could have known. Unless…" Lenne's mother came at her almost as a lioness pounces upon her startled prey. Glaring down her nose at the young woman, the scientist demanded, "You didn't tell anyone, did you?"
"Of course not! I never told anyone!"
"Not even that no-good boyfriend of yours?"
"He's not no-good! How dare you say that!"
The woman drew back slightly, apparently surprised by her daughter's explosion. "It was never a good idea to let her continue performing," she said, turning to Lenne's father. "Some rabid fan could have stalked her."
Anger surged inside of Lenne. She sat there shaking, staring at the lap of the pale blue hospital gown. She folded and unfolded her hands, shaping them into overlapping fists. They had never understood why she insisted on keeping her career. They didn't understand that military research was only one method of helping people. They never saw that working to save people's lives wasn't enough, that making people happy was just as important.
"Maybe they bombed the concert because of what it stood for."
Lenne looked up to see her father confronting her mother. Well, it wasn't exactly a confrontation, but for him not to automatically agree—especially on a matter concerning Lenne—was rare and, therefore, serious.
"It's a possibility," Lenne's mother finally conceded. "And at least Michael got in there right away."
Michael was Lenne's manager, although he first and foremost was answerable to her parents.
"What color is my blood these days?" Lenne wondered dully, annoyed at their tendency to exclude her conversations of which she was the subject.
"Purple," replied her mother sharply. It sounded like a joke, but Lenne knew better.
"So…did anyone see?"
"Michael got a private ambulance jet in there right away. At least he's worth the money he makes us pay him."
"What about Shuyin? Is he okay?"
"From what I hear, he caused a nuisance. He got so mad they wouldn't let him on the ambulance that he—"
Lenne leaned forward. "That he what? Mother, tell me."
Her mother moved back another few steps before turning around to face the control panel. She began to enter some information at warp speed, her fingers flying across the buttons. "That he killed the co-pilot."
Lenne was put under sedation for the rest of the day. Eventually, when the medicine wore off, she was allowed simply to sleep.
Hours later she awoke in the dark. She investigated a little with curious hands and found that her medical treatment had continued while she was out. The cast was gone and she could no longer feel scars on her legs or arms.
She twisted one of these healed arms around her back and discovered even more bumps there than before, and that they added to the complexity of the strange pattern. The injections had also continued, apparently, and they left more of the scars that did not heal. It was as if the scars themselves served some sort of purpose.
When Lenne thought about the pattern, she thought about inspecting it in Shuyin's bathroom mirror. This, in turn, made her think of Shuyin and what her mother had told her.
"…he killed the co-pilot."
Lenne used both hands to trap the rising screams inside her mouth. Outside the closed door was undoubtedly a guard, and she had no wish for a stranger to come in and see her in so much pain.
So, instead of screaming, Lenne pulled her knees to her chest and wept quietly into the sheet covering them. She couldn't get imagined images of Shuyin out of her head. She knew how angry he could get when he felt people he cared about were threatened, and she distinctly remembered the anger in his voice when she was caught under the stage.
In a soft and trembling voice, she made one of the most terrifying realizations of her life.
"He killed someone…because of me…"
Lenne's parents let her go home the following week, although she was supposed to stay in the apartment at all times. She was not unaccustomed to house arrest, and, for the first time in a long while, she was glad for an excuse to hide in the safety of her bedroom.
On her desk she had found her buzzing handheld, which she promptly turned off. A dozen new messages were waiting for her, and she knew they were all from Shuyin. If she opened just one, he would know, and he would become even more desperate to see her.
Desperate, that's what he was. A desperate man, acting irrationally without any consideration for others. He resented her bodyguards, he always had—in fact, she knew he resented the whole business. He said he didn't like to think about all the men out there watching her videos and objectifying her.
"You're just another hot body to them!" At first he would yell, but then he said more gently, "I know you're beautiful where it counts."
Lenne blinked at her reflection in the mirror. A ghostly Shuyin emerged from her imagination to stand behind her. He proclaimed she was beautiful, placed his hand over her heart before sliding it up her neck and letting it rest against her cheek.
She smiled to think of how completely he loved her.
But then Shuyin turned, scowling at an imaginary opponent. He had a blade in his hand. He charged, killing the other ghost almost instantly, all the while a smile on his lips.
Lenne gasped in horror. She pulled away from her phantom lover to the sanctuary of her bed, where she found asylum only beneath her thick comforter. "Lights off!" she ordered, and the Environmental Control System, the ECS, immediately obeyed her command.
The images wouldn't fade back into her memory. They stayed in her consciousness, they taunted Lenne as she futilely kept her eyes squeezed shut. Her mind refused to be blinded.
What had happened to Shuyin now? She suddenly found herself preoccupied with the matter. Was he in jail, facing a stiff sentence? Would he be swiftly executed for his crime?
Lenne leapt from her bed. She was sweating and shivering at the same time. She hugged herself and stumbled about her darkened bedroom. Shuyin…dead? She would never see him again? Never again hear his voice? Kiss his lips? Hold him?
"No!" She meant for the scream only to sound within the confines of her own troubled self, but it echoed within the room instead, flung out by dried lips. The word came out again and again, and she muffled her screams with trembling hands.
He killed a man, one part of her said.
I know…but it was for me, don't you see that? If it hadn't been for me…
"Lenne?"
There was a voice outside the door, followed by knocking.
Lenne, now a crumpled heap on the floor, clawed at the wall until she was standing. "What is it, Aunt?"
"I heard something…are you all right?"
"Yes, sorry… I had a nightmare."
"Do you need to talk about it?"
"No, no thank you."
"Good night, then."
"Wait—" Lenne pushed down on the button located next to her door and the thing slid open, revealing her aunt standing there, a tall figure cut from a dim rectangle of light from down the hall.
The woman was Lenne's mother's sister, and, while she was almost as tall as the scientist, her features were a little rounder. She also had longer, lighter hair than her sole sibling, and it came down to her shoulders in one soft, rounded wave. At one time the woman had been a model, known worldwide by only her first name, Aki, but she had suddenly quit ten years ago for unknown reasons.
"What is it, Lenne?"
"Mother and Father told you about Shuyin, didn't they?"
Aki shifted her weight, looking slightly uncomfortable. "What about him?"
"The…the co-pilot…"
Aki frowned.
"I just wondered…" Lenne bit her lip. She was afraid of the answer to her pressing question. "What did they do to Shuyin?"
"He got off as far as I know. In the confusion, people blamed the pilot's death on the terrorist attack and that was that. Your parents really have some leverage, honey," she added, her expression strange.
"What?" Part of it made sense; how could Shuyin have sent her those messages from jail? But nothing else came neatly together in her mind. Had Shuyin gotten away with murder? And why would her parents have done anything to help him, given what they usually had to say concerning his and Lenne's relationship?
"Lenne…"
She looked up into her aunt's face. But the woman only smiled sadly and shook her head.
"Aunt?"
"Your uncle wanted me to make dessert. Let's go have some, okay?"
"Okay."
As they walked together down the hall, aunt ahead and niece a few steps behind, Lenne attempted to straighten out her hair with her fingers and to rub sorrow from her eyes with her fist. She could be teary-eyed in front of her aunt, perhaps, but her uncle was another matter.
Lenne was nearly silent as they ate. She had decided what to do about Shuyin.