Chapter 25 – Isolated Pawn
Samsara's world shook. For a brief moment, whether out of grief for her friend or anger at Nimzovich or frustration at not knowing what to do, Samsara saw the world flicker like a candle, the walls or her laboratory buzzing out of shape and out of phase with the reality she knew. In place of the empty room, she saw an image, a numinous image, of a large, powerful man standing in front of a small, apparently helpless girl, bearing down on her with an enormous sword, directly over the spot of blood on the floor. As the weapon found its mark, Samsara watched, horrified, as the girl turned her head to face her. Samsara stared into the shocked eyes of the swordsman's victim, and Jinling's face stared back.
Then the whole scene faded, and all that remained was the laboratory, empty, and colder than the wall's thermometer made it out to be.
A small piece of Samsara's heart died that moment.
Completely stricken with feelings she had never needed before, she fell over onto her side, bumping her head against the hard floor, inadvertently switching her headset radio on, and the sounds of "Orest ist tot!" from Strauss's Elektra spilled into the room, making Samsara feel even more hollow.
Numbness overtaking anger, Samsara sat and thought no thoughts, felt no feelings, and said no words. Absentmindedly, she struck her hammer against the floor a few more times, each halfheartedly, half hoping she could work up the motivation to act, or at least to think, to do anything to lessen the pain, to make things better, to make things right again. But there was nothing to do but pound on the floor with a hammer. Were Nimzovich there, she could pound on him with her hammer.
This thought dragged the smallest bit of feeling back to her. It was an uncomfortable feeling, an anger that drew upon reserves of violence she considered too primal and uncivilized to touch, but it persisted, manifesting in her knocking on the floor. With a thud, thud, thud, she hit over and over, lightly at first, and just barely rhythmically, but the more she hit, the clearer the image, however contrived, of Nimzovich she had in her mind, and the harder she struck at it. The blows of her hammer grew more and more mechanical as she went, each strike feeding back into her anger, and her anger feeding the falling of the hammer, intensity spiraling upwards, tempo increasing, until a red mist covered her eyes and she nearly lost control.
Louder and louder, harder and harder, Samsara struck the floor again and again. Pausing only to remove her glasses and wipe the mist from her eyes with her hands, she found that everything became even redder the harder she rubbed, so she dropped all pretense of self-control and flung her hammer madly at the ground. Unable to see it to pick it up, she began hitting with closed fists instead of her hammer, again and again and again, until she could no longer feel anything with either hand. Her feet and her body grew numb, and then her heart, and then she felt dizzy, and she collapsed again, bloody red stains lining her face and staining her knuckles, palms, and the floor below her.
The red world faded to black, and Samsara fell asleep.
XXX
Samsara looked up from where she stood and saw a wooden sign hanging down from a metal gate. The sign was old and half rotted away, but the gate appeared fresh and shiny, as if it had been polished recently. Carved into the sign were letters she could barely read, spelling out some sort of koan that made no sense to her: "Truth becomes fiction where the fiction's true, and real becomes not-real where the unreal's real." After the second time she read through the sign's quizzical words, it fell to the ground with a splash and disappeared beneath the earth. She did not wonder either why it fell or why it disappeared.
Lacking anything else to do, Samsara walked through the gate that once held the sign, taking care to float above the water into which the sign had fallen, or to walk around it. By the time she had crossed, she could not remember how she did it, so she looked back to find some clue. When she looked back, the gate had disappeared, and in its place was a lush green garden filled with orchids and tulips and ornamented with statues carved out of jade and lined with gold.
Samsara shook her head and turned forward again, for the first time noticing that in front of her was a deep ravine carved out of red rock, with a fast-flowing river jetting by underneath. Without even realizing she was doing so, she found herself walking forward, toward the ravine. She tried to shout and warn herself that there was no bridge, but she had no voice. When she reached the edge, she closed her eyes and took a step, and her foot hit upon a solid, if creaky, wooden slate, part of a bridge that was not there before she closed her eyes.
Relieved, Samsara made her way to the center of the bridge, where she came upon a fairy, floating half a dozen feet above her and looking sternly down on her with a face that she recognized as her mother's. The fairy said nothing but shook her head and shrugged her shoulders; she then flew to the far end of the bridge and becked for Samsara to follow her.
She followed, but when she was three quarters of the way across, one of her feet hit a hole where one of the wooden slates was missing, and she tumbled down, at the last second catching hold of the side with her hand. With a grunt she pulled herself up until her shoulders were above the level of the bridge, but then the bridge became slippery, and she nearly fell again. Below her, she saw the river turn to fire, bubbles of which leaped up from the depths and threatened to scorch her feet.
From the solid ground at the end of the bridge, the fairy pointed and growled at her, impatient for her to make her way across. Samsara tried to shout that she needed help getting back up, but again her voice was gone, so she was forced to ignore the fairy and concentrate on trying to pull herself up.
She looked down at the river of fire again, and when she looked up, the fairy was gone. In the fairy's place were the wavy outlines of three ghosts, in the shapes of young girls, walking side by side across the bridge until they reached Samsara. As they walked, they hummed a tune Samsara vaguely recognized as being from the ballet Giselle. Unable to call out to the ghosts, and unable to move her arms to signal that she needed help, Samsara struggled to make the most helpless face she could in hopes of gaining their sympathy.
One of the ghost girls, the one in the middle, pointed at her face and laughed, long and hard. The other two looked over at the one in the middle and then at Samsara and then at the ghost in the middle, and then they too joined in the laughter. Samsara suddenly felt the urge to laugh along with them, and when she did, she found that her voice had returned, only it was someone else's voice—Jinling's! Together, the three ghost girls and Jinling's voice laughed and cackled and carried on for as long a time as can be counted in a dream, and as they all laughed, the ghost girl in the middle began to spin around and around in a circle until her body was a blur. She laughed as she spun, and she laughed as she slowed to a stop, facing away from Samsara.
Suddenly Samsara's voice disappeared again, and with it went her breath, as if all the air in the world had been sucked out instantaneously. Samsara felt her face turn blue and then purple and then orange and then green as she tried to clutch her throat with her third arm while her first two held fast to the bridge. When she realized she did not have a third arm, she couched one more time, and whatever had kept her from breathing fell out of her throat and onto the wood slate in front of her. At first it was just a small trinket, and she could not tell what it was, but soon it became apparent that it was her hammer.
The ghost girls laughed again, both the ones facing her and the one facing away. As they laughed, the all began to sound like Jinling, and when the middle ghost turned around to face her, it looked like Jinling. Samsara nearly choked again.
The laugher continued from the ghost girls until the one in the middle, the one with Jinling's face and now voice, picked up Samsara's hammer and thrust it downward into the wooden slate with a monstrous thud, thud, thud. The other two ghosts girls seemed to find this amusing, so they laughed louder and the Jinling ghost hit harder and harder with the hammer, slowly splintering the block of wood, slowly shaking the flimsy bridge, slowly willing Samsara to fall to her doom down below in the river of fire.
Thud, thud, thud, went the hammer, and thud, thud, thud went Samsara's heart.
XXX
Thud, thud, thud came the sound at the front door to the lab as Samsara awoke from her slumber, blood racing and head spinning and hands and feet tingly and numb. Thinking as quickly as she could, she lashed out with her arm to hit the snooze button on her alarm clock and win herself nine more minutes of sleep, but she could not find any alarm clock or even any bed. Groggily opening her eyes and lilting her head from side to side as she regained her bearings, Samsara remembered where she was and why she was there, on the floor, in such a sad state.
The knocking at the door continued, louder and louder, more and more frantic. Samsara had not yet decided she would open the door, but before she even had that as an option, she had to get to her feet and get in some position to open doors or run or hide or whatever final option she might settle on. For now, though, she found just getting to her feet to be difficult enough. She tried supporting herself with her hands the way she normally rose from the floor, but both hands were bruised and bloody enough that they buckled under when she put even the smallest load on them; she saw for the first time just how much of her blood littered the floor while she examined her hands, and the cautious voice in her head told her to be careful lest she had a broken bone or two.
Weary of lying on the floor and listening to some unknown person or group of people attempting to knock down her door, she twisted and turned until she was able to swing her weight onto her knees, and from there she pulled herself up into a squatting position and then to her feet. She started off for the door, but then she scolded herself for being rash and bent down to try to pick up her hammer first. While her fingers still hardly worked, she managed to trap it between her two palms and pulled it up under her right arm, where she held it fast until she managed to open her satchel wide enough to drop it in. From there, she looked around the room once more.
She saw nothing encouraging. The front door, though solid, continued to shake under an increasingly violent storm of knocking. The lab had an emergency exit, but she did not know if it would be best to run that way or to find out who was out in front. It could have been Nimzovich, of course, but on the other hand, it could have been the police investigating Jinling's disappearance.
How would the police know about her, though? Samsara let out a breath that was somewhere between a huff and a sigh, and she walked up to the door and stopped in front of it. Aware that she was vulnerable and not in a particularly good state for running away from anyone, she though again about taking the back exit and letting whoever was in front worry about the front door. However, she also thought about how bad the situation would be if the front door were to be broken somehow, and how she valued the security her laboratory provided her.
What security, though, if Jinling could be here, and still...?
A dagger of pain shot up through Samsara's chest. She clearly was not ready to think about that yet. For the moment, all she could focus on was the door. All she could afford to focus on was the door.
Thud, thud, thud, reminded the door.
She turned the options available to her over in her mind, again and again. Maybe the police were at the door, and they would help her out. Maybe Nimzovich was behind the door, and he would kill her. Maybe it was Jinling...
But it couldn't be Jinling, could it? And if it was Nimzovich, maybe he wouldn't be the one to kill her. Maybe...
Ignoring the pain in her hands, ignoring the pins and needles that pierced her whole arms as she willed her muscles to obey her, Samsara tore the hammer out of her satchel and, without further thought, ran to the door, pulled it open, and lifted her hammer above her head. She tried to shout something threatening, but all that came out was a shrill cry that might have come off as terror or confusion or anything in between to a listener. All she could see in her mind was the image of an evil man standing over her friend's body, her hammer smashing the man's head and causing him to crumple to the ground next to Jinling. As the door opened, Samsara let the hammer fall.
This proved to be a bad idea.
Before it was even halfway over her head, the bolt from a police-grade electric stun pistol ripped into her torso and deadened her joints. Her arms fell to her sides, her hammer landed harmlessly on the floor, and her knees gave out. Without further struggle, she fell to the floor, unarmed and helpless before what turned out to be a crowd of large men in silver uniforms and shielded helmets.
"Suspect is down," said the man in front into a small radio. "We are inside, and we have our suspect. I repeat, we have our suspect. Backup not needed."
A "roger" and some other jargon filtered through the static on the man's radio, but Samsara could not interpret any of it.
Some of the other large men crowded around. One of them, wearing a slightly darker uniform with a red badge pinned to his chest, took the liberty of grabbing Samsara by the collar and pulling her more or less to her feet. His badge reached her eye level when he had her at full height, though Samsara was too woozy to say what shapes or letters or numbers might have been on the badge. She could barely even hear his voice as he shouted some orders to his subordinates and the slapped restraints onto her wrists.
"You are under arrest for the murder of Miss Jinling Lan," he said to her, and that was all she could catch before she blacked out again.