Lazarus Rising

1.12 Moonstones

Back at her apartment Cheyenne found the familiar, disconsolate dimness that had skulked there for the last three days. She was used to operating at night, prowling in the blackness that suckled every building of the city. It felt as if the nocturnal gloom seeped from the endless plumes of dirty smoke that the City's twisted old chimneys breathed into the air. The unearthly hours were demanded by her employers, seeking out criminals and subversives in the run down clubs and bars of New Europa's backstreets. It always left her feeling strangely remote from the harsh reality of daylight work.

Despite having run the heat in her aero at full blast she was still cold. Trying to supress the sporadic shivers still convulsing through her body she pulled off her jacket, threw it on the floor and struggled into a thick top that rose high around her neck and fell down over her hands leaving her looking like a child playing in her parent's wardrobe.

Rolling up one sleeve she topped up a tumbler with a hefty dose of spirit, slugged the whole glass down with the last of Haydens Poppers and was rewarded by the kick of liquid fire in her stomach.

Slowly overtaken by a sluggish weariness in her limbs she slumped on the couch, wrapped her arms around her shoulders and considered what had happened at the Collective.

Was her experience a hallucination? Perhaps there was something in Haydens Poppers, a bad batch maybe. She'd not failed to recognise the woman's face as it had gazed down on her, it was her own. Somehow she felt she'd inhabited the body of the dying Riser and shared his visions, felt his emotions as he lay terrified in the snow. Was it Charisa's face that had somehow thrust itself into her fevered dream, her mirror features threading their way into the eddying mist of her consciousness as she lay paralysed on the floor?

A worrying thought occurred to her. Ever since her collapse she'd been unable to shake the feeling of cold and dizziness. She scrabbled in a drawer and pulled out a Wellness bracket and clamped it on her wrist. Wincing as the sharp needles bit into her wrist she sat pensively looking at the readout until a single message C...L...E...A...R scrolled across the display. With a long sigh of relief, she took it off and tossed it on the desk.

Feeling something out of place in her pocket Cheyenne tugged out the evidence bag containing the moonstones from her pocket. She'd forgotten them. Carefully extracting the spherical stones from the packet she laid them, one by one on the table until they formed a small arc of white diamonds on the polished surface, like an ancient stone circle in miniature.

Many years ago Sterling Stenz had given the neckless as a present to her aunt. Her aunt was enthralled with the delicately cut jewels and had worn them continually ever since. Such was her admiration for the President. Cheyenne could not remember a time when she'd seen her without them. Looking at them on the desk, they reminded her of the good times Ventner had spoken of. The ramblingly mansion at Six Hills with its evergreen, manicured gardens and the long summers away at Willow-Woods on the far side of the lake playing on the little sailing boat, dodging summer rain storms and searching the long, curving foreshore littered with fossilised stones to take home and line up on the window ledge in her bedroom. Her aunt was happy then. So was she.

Her eyelids fluttered as she hovered on the edge of sleep. In her detached dreams, filtered through the dropping curtain of her unconsciousness, lines of hanging Risers flashed past her. The falling snow clouded her view. The distorted figure of the man in a churchyard loomed toward her as she tried to run from him, her legs struggling to get purchase in the thick snow. Behind her she could hear him getting closer and closer, his cold breath on her shoulders, red eyes, searing into the skin on her neck. Wildly, she fought to move faster but found herself sinking up to her chest in the deep binding snow. She could feel his fingers crawling round her neck, closing in on her throat.