Chapter 11

Author's Notes: If you're still following this story, I recommend going back and reading the previous chapter, since a few plot points have changed. My thanks as always to the fabulous Wrecking Kru (leave your sanity, MauMauKa, and Krugerstop) for their ongoing support and friendship. There's also an Easter egg here for those of you who saw Neill Blomkamp's Chappie this past week. Enjoy!

It occurred to Lorelei how seldom she saw her mother anymore. There were reasons for this,, supposedly, and whenever she asked about them, Aunt Jessica would give the usual non-answer. Lorelei had her own ideas, and if the plastic bag of pills she'd found stuffed into the back of Helene's dresser drawer were any indication, that was probably the root of it. Her aunt never had anything nice to say about drug users, whom she called "parasites" and "junkies." Lorelei had listened in on enough Defense Council meetings to know a lot of other people on the torus obediently echoed these sentiments publicly, even if many of them were addicted themselves.

Even if Helene Delacourt was a parasite or a junkie, she was still Lorelei's mother. And Lorelei, in her own way, loved her. Their complicated estrangement was just another part of her life she wasn't supposed to talk about. Aunt Jessica had trained Lorelei so well in that department. If you can't say something nice, she recalled from some old Earth cartoon, don't say anything at all.

But how am I supposed to say something nice, Lorelei wondered as her mother fluttered about the room like a nervous bird, if I don't even know what's going on? She'd learned to accept it, and didn't ask too many questions. Besides, she'd never found a bag of pills like that again.

Party preparation was one of the few times she was allowed to get out from under her aunt's steely gaze and see her mother anymore. Helene had always had an eye for fashion and the latest trends; she was a bird of paradise next to her pragmatic elder sister, and always spent plenty of time and money to impress the citizenry of Elysium.

Lorelei looked miserably into the gilt-framed mirror before her. She'd have to spend the next hour or so being combed, perfumed, styled, and otherwise primped, all in the name of fashion. It was as if she were the tiny, delicate dog her mother had never bought. Just a toy. An accessory. Still, she tolerated it for two reasons. It was less painful than sitting through school or one of Aunt Jessica's "leadership" lectures…and if it meant finally meeting the infamous Agent Drake face to face, it was more than worth an hour or two of discomfort.

"Look at you, petit," Helene cooed as she pinched Lorelei's cheek playfully. She was everything Lorelei was not: tall, dark-haired, effortlessly elegant even in her dressing gown and slippers. In that most superficial of ways, Lorelei envied her. "You are going to look just like a little princess when Gerard and Lili finish with you."

"I guess," Lorelei said with a noncommittal shrug. She didn't bother to tell her mother that she had hated pink for years now, or that the frothy dress they'd picked for her looked like some demented cupcake come to life. A pink nightmare. Helene had probably spent more time picking it out than Aunt Jessica spent in defense briefings. Besides, if Lorelei's plan worked, it didn't matter anyway. The dress would wind up stuffed in the incinerator, and she'd be free to roam and, hopefully, meet Drake. "Did it have to be pink?" she protested weakly.

Helene looked as if she'd been slapped. "You look awful in green or blue; you know that," she explained, probably neither knowing nor caring that those were her daughter's favorite colors. "Besides, you want to match my dress, don't you?"

Of all the things Lorelei had worried about that day, this had barely registered on the radar. "Yes," she agreed with a smile that was somewhat too enthusiastic, hoping it would placate her mother. "It's not that color pink, though, is it?"

"Oh, goodness, no," Helene said with a giggle. "I'm far too old for that shade. You'll look so adorable, though, won't she, Gerard?"

"Oui, Mademoiselle Delacourt," agreed her valet, a slim, handsome, mustachioed man of indeterminate age. Lorelei had always wondered why her mother employed human servants as well as droids. Maybe she just got lonely since Lorelei had moved out. Or maybe Gerard and the nearly silent Lili were saving up for a place on the torus, just like Lorelei's teacher. Indentured servants, Lorelei remembered from a history lesson, that's what they were called. There were more a few of them on Elysium: café servers, dancers, lab techs, some the sons and daughters of lesser families, all of them working toward an impossible dream. Like the people on Earth, Lorelei sometimes wondered about the mundane details of their lives. Still, Aunt Jessica had told her over the years never to dwell too much on those of lower station, and so Lorelei tried not to.

Gerard, though, possessed a palpable warmth, and he was hard for Lorelei to ignore, much less dislike. "So, young mademoiselle, shall we make you look beautiful to catch that special gentleman's eye tonight?" he said in his suave Parisian dialect, testing Lorelei's golden hair with one hand as Helene watched approvingly.

Lorelei couldn't help but laugh. "I'm ten, Gerard. I don't have a boyfriend," she said.

"Ah, but you may by the end of tonight, no?"

As he and Lili began to brush and style her hair into gravity-defying curls and loops, Lorelei smiled to herself. She was trying to catch someone's eye, and only she knew whose. It was her private secret, like the tiny piece of coral she'd been keeping in the toe of her right shoe for luck, the one she'd stolen from the house she'd been drawn to like iron filings to a magnet for all these years now. I still don't even know whose it is. Maybe it's just a model.

Normally Lorelei hated these "beauty regimens," being naturally tender-headed, but Gerard and Lili were so skilled that she barely noticed. She kept thinking about that huge, empty house as they brushed, curled and piled her golden tresses. It was too bad all their work was for nothing, as she'd just be pulling it out by hand later on.

I wonder what he'll wear? And how will I recognize him?

Her mind drifted again. Somewhere, Gerard and Helene were carrying on in French…were they talking to her? She could almost fall asleep in this chair. Then she remembered what would happen if she did.

I'll be here waiting for you, girl.

It was as if the boogeyman were right there next to her, whispering as seductively into one ear as that rasp of his would allow. But he wasn't there…he couldn't be…unless Dr. Perrine were right and she really had started to hallucinate. Lorelei must have flinched just then, because Gerard pulled back immediately, a look of alarm on his handsome face.

"Something wrong, mademoiselle?" he asked her. "Did I hurt you?"

"No, Gerard. You didn't." At that moment she wanted to bolt from the chair, from the room, from her life. The panic rat gnawed at the lining of her stomach, threatening to free itself again. This couldn't happen here…not in front of Helene. Lorelei inhaled deeply, counted to ten, the way Mr. Smith had shown her. Fear can control us, or we can control it. With each ascending number, she screwed her eyes more tightly shut, willing her tormentor to leave. When she'd finished, Lorelei opened her eyes…and saw only the alarmed faces of Gerard and Lili, as well as her mother.

No one spoke for a moment. Then, as if nothing at all had happened, Lorelei put on her best false smile. "Sorry. My mind wanders when I'm just sitting here," she said, knowing how stupid that sounded.

Gerard, clearly not fooled, said nothing, but looked to Helene for direction. "She's always being silly. She's my little geniale." Helene laughed. "Aren't you, petit?"

"Uh-huh." Lorelei tried not to wince as Lili resumed her hairdressing, more forcibly this time. "That's me."

She exhaled a mental sigh of relief. That had been close.

In the mirror, a different girl's reflection stared back at Lorelei. She was beautiful, her silky blonde hair piled into a fashionable updo, her face expertly coated with just the right amount of makeup for a girl of ten. If she didn't know better, she might have been looking at an old photograph of Aunt Jessica from an album. It would take a lot longer than she thought to transform back into herself.

"You're sure you're all right, mademoiselle?" Gerard muttered into her left ear. "You looked like you just saw a ghost."

In a way, she had…but she didn't bother telling him that.

Kruger had been in this line of work nearly two hundred years, and there were few things he hadn't seen, experienced, touched, or otherwise encountered. This was one of those rarest of times, and even he had to raise an eyebrow at the results of the Prosopos face-changer as he stared into his full-length bedroom mirror.

His own reflection - craggy, weathered, with the distinctive cheek and temple implants of a senior field agent – had been replaced with that of another man entirely. Kruger had already seen the dossier for the man he was impersonating, Stocks, and his agency photos. It still hadn't prepared him for how fucking young this guy was. Not a single grey hair, laugh line, crow's foot, or any other trace of advanced age stared back from the reflective surface. Kruger knew the med-bay technology had vastly improved since he first started getting re-gens over a century ago, but how exactly was the CCB recruiting these new guys now? From cradles? Stocks, despite his quarter-century of experience under his belt, was just a kid.

Or maybe, I'm the one who's getting too fucking old for this job. Not many of us Gen 1s left anymore.

When he'd gotten over the initial shock of seeing his holographically generated disguise for the evening, Kruger had to admit that Tselios had done a good job picking out a similar face from the crowd of CCB's many agents. Stocks, though not as angular as Kruger, did have a beard and a reasonably hawkish nose. He wouldn't have to do a double take every time he passed a mirror tonight. He'd done enough ops over the years in disguise or from under his stealth cloak, but given a choice, he'd always preferred that the target see his true face, with its fathomless black eyes and rough features. It made them more fearful, and a scared target was an easier one to break. Or destroy entirely.

The smile that appeared on the impostor's face was almost as wolfish as Kruger's normal predatory grin. He'd been thinking of the girl just then. She'd be his target tonight, and if he was successful, he'd take her on a little excursion back to his place for some bonding time. How exciting would that be?

If that bitch of an aunt had the slightest idea, she'd have the girl surrounded by a phalanx of security droids all night. There would be security to slip past, of course – a given at these types of events – but the threat was perceived to be strictly external. Kruger, in his perfectly tailored navy suit and tie, looked as if he belonged at the Elysian social event of the year. No one, not Delacourt or the girl or anyone else would ever see him coming.

Just like he wanted.

All day, in addition to making himself over into "Stocks," Kruger had been turning over several questions in his mind. He had never been the kind of man who liked riddles, much less those without any answers. If asked, in the guise of this previously MIA agent, where he'd been all these months and why he was attending a swank party instead of an Earthbound debriefing, he'd simply make up some kak about files getting mixed up. It happened all the time, especially for the older agents. Some things had never changed from his earliest days with the CCB, and endless bureaucracy was one of those. Chances were he wouldn't be asked anything, much less interrogated, at a party like this, but he knew the importance of covering one's tracks. There was the issue of fingerprints, but Tselios had assured him that was covered by this clever little app…any time Kruger used a biometric scanner or lock, it would be Stocks' profile, and not his own, which appeared in the system. Having never used a Prosopos himself in the line of duty, Kruger assumed all of this was correct. If some Earth hacker came up with it, and not the Bureau, that's a pretty fucking sure bet. They spend their whole fucking lives looking for loopholes down there.

A quick glance to his expensive wristwatch – another thing Kruger owned plenty of, but only rarely wore – told him it was time to go. As he looked in the mirror for a final check, that unfamiliar face smirked back at him with an expression only slightly less lupine than usual. He'd have plenty of time later tonight…he never slept much…and when he did return, he wouldn't be alone. It would be rude not to let his guest appreciate him for who he really was.

~~s~~

"Stop fidgeting, petit. You'll ruin your hair and your dress," Helene said for at least the third time during their brief aircar ride to the venue. She peered critically over her holo-reader.

Lorelei didn't see how either would be possible. She felt, and looked, like a girl stuffed into a particularly frothy pale pink cupcake, but that wasn't what was bothering her. Every nerve ending in her body felt supercharged, humming with electricity. And why wouldn't they be? She'd been waiting for this meeting for years now, ready to see that mysterious man behind the curtain for who he really was at last. As for the dress, she didn't care one way or another. It would wind up stuffed up into an incinerator bin before long. The hard part had been smuggling the duffle bag containing her change of clothes on board.

Thankfully, Mr. Smith wasn't with her tonight. He'd have known right away that something was up, just like he always did. When Lorelei had asked him where he was going, he'd only favored her with a serene smile and the vaguest of answers.

"Business, Miss Delacourt. Always business." He'd left it at that, neither indicating to her what sort of business it was or whether she'd even see him tonight.

It occurred to Lorelei that he must have things to do outside spending time with her; she'd just never stopped to consider what those might be, and out of her admiration for him, had never gone digging for his files in the Elysian servers. Like everyone else she knew, including herself, Mr. Smith seemed to exist to do her aunt's bidding.

She squirmed again, and not from the unfamiliar feeling of the dress' shimmering fabric against her sensitive skin.

Helene was too immersed in one of her holo-chats with another partygoer to notice. Lorelei looked at her mother askance, every inch of her coiffed, tailored and perfect in a low-cut fuchsia silk gown, and wondered for at least the millionth time in her young life how the two of them could possibly be related. Everyone always said Lorelei favored her aunt, not her mother. Their hair color was the same, but so what? There were so many blondes on the torus that Lorelei felt like a dandelion in the presence of roses sometimes. At the moment, she didn't favor either of them. Both of them were too wrapped up in their own busy lives to notice, or care about, Lorelei's own problems. In so many ways her aunt and her mother were so different, but that selfishness, that complete indifference to a young girl in their lives, bound them together. Had they never been her age? Lorelei knew they were old, but everyone had been a child once, right?

If only Mr. Smith were here. He'd understand.

Inside their Ducati aircar, it was just her, Helene, an uncharacteristically silent Gerard, and a younger CCB agent, Hightower, who had all the personality and warmth of a dead salmon. Uncomfortable as it was, Lorelei tried not to squirm even more thinking about what awaited her as they began their descent. Just getting into the venue would be a gauntlet: paparazzi photographers, strangers to greet, poses to strike in this stupid dress and elaborate hairstyle that were better suited to a living doll than a flesh-and-blood girl. Then there would be the mingling. Pretending to like people she'd never met, all for the sake of…

Who? Not Lorelei herself. For others, for her mother and aunt, just like always. She wasn't a daughter or a niece; she was an accessory. As she looked sideways at her mother, primping at the last moment as the aircar settled onto its landing pad, Lorelei wondered if Helene should have just skipped motherhood altogether and bought a pedigreed toy dog.

"Ready for your big debut?" Helene stood, not wobbling at all on her stilettos, and beamed at Lorelei.

Lorelei would rather have been anywhere right then, even back in the sims facing down the hooded menace, but it would be pointless to say so. She just nodded. "I guess," she mumbled.

While Hightower stood and Gerard opened the door, Helene leaned in closer and cupped Lorelei's chin under her hand. "It's a party, petit. Not a funeral. I know you don't like attending these sorts of things, but, won't you at least try and enjoy yourself? For me?"

She couldn't remember the last time her mother had even tried to connect like this, let alone taken into account Lorelei's own feelings. For a moment she was speechless. Then, she found the words…and remembered the duffle bag hidden underneath the aircar seat. "All right," Lorelei said, "but you owe me."

"Of course." Helene turned, ready to face her adoring audience. She'd been born for this life. "Now, petit," she said from between her teeth, "please remember to smile."

Lorelei grinned, thinking of how different she'd look in a short amount of time, and how surprised Mr. Drake would be to finally see her. She followed her mother out onto the red carpet and its parted sea of onlookers.

I can do this.

~~s~~

In another part of the event hall, far removed from the glitter and pomp of the red carpet entrance, deep within its maze of corridors where few humans ever ventured, a solitary figure moved as stealthily as a shadow detached from its host body. Kruger was at home in these confines; always had been. The few droids he'd passed barely acknowledged his presence. Evan Stocks was a perfectly acceptable party guest; C.M. Kruger had been blacklisted for this particular soiree. Even the physical disguise itself wasn't all bad. Stocks' lean, angular face and beard were a good enough match so that, whenever Kruger passed by a reflective surface in the service corridors, he didn't do that telltale double take. The dark suit, one of many he owned that had been custom-tailored for him but which he rarely wore, allowed just as much movement as any set of fatigues did. That, and it perfectly concealed the small arsenal of weapons he wore underneath. The marvels of modern engineering.

He'd enjoy hunting his quarry tonight, truly. In all his previous encounters with her since her return to Elysium, she'd been a passive prey, a mere sleeping beauty in need of a dark prince's touch. That had long since begun to bore him. Like with any of his favorite drugs, Kruger needed to up the ante, to push the envelope just that much farther until it slid into some Stygian abyss, a place only he ever dared venture.

Tonight, though, he'd have a little company for a change. A little golden light down there in the depths with him. Hunting her, a wolf among these flocks of well-dressed sheep, was going to be so, so much fun.

At the first checkpoint leading into the hall, Kruger met with only a passing glance from the Praetorian droid at the barrier. His ID, which the droid read from "Stocks'" bio-scan, checked out fine. "Cleared, Agent 22 Theta Green," droned the machine. So far, so good. As advanced as Elysium was, there were never enough people to do the massive amounts of data entry the CCB required to keep current on every last one of its workers. Things fell through the cracks and lay mislabeled in forgotten files until someone picked them up again. Someone like him, who knew an opportunity when it presented itself on a silver platter like this one had.

He passed another droid with the same result. It was all he could do to keep from grinning with the sheer anticipation of what lay ahead.

Up the ramp, Kruger could see into the massive ballroom at last, decorated in autumnal finery so elaborate as to suggest a fantastic mirage: diamond-encrusted chandeliers, sparking candelabras on every table, a gilded forest of real aspens and birches. The Elysian guests of honor hadn't arrived just yet; they'd want to arrive in their own inimitable styles. Scores of service droids and human catering staff moved busily about, making last-minute touches to the decor and moving a dozen enormous ice sculptures into place. Stupid things, like swans and leaping deer. Why anyone would want to waste good water like that, Kruger would never know.

There were a few agents milling around as well. Some Kruger knew, others were strangers, but none of them gave him a second look. He belonged here, just as they did. Perfect. Before, at his place, he'd memorized Stocks' dossier, learned who his friends and enemies were, every known detail of the guy's personal life, and discovered they had more than a few Old Country acquaintances in common. Some of them, Kruger hadn't seen in years. Naidoo, Marais, even the legendary pair of Jones and Du Toit, two of the only agents who were nearly as feared as himself. If he were lucky, maybe he'd have time to catch up with them…as Stocks, of course…in between stalking his golden prize.

He looked at his watch again. Just past eight; getting closer. Until then, Kruger had plenty of time to really explore the surroundings, and fantasize about what he'd do with his little prize once she was his again.

I can do this. And I'm just here waiting for you, sweetheart.

To Be Continued