Death Opera

fortissimo

A snort and the rustling of bedsheets through the door to Bao's right, draws her attention to a razor's edge. Knowing that the man in the bed did not steal this instrument pains her slightly, but knowing he must know of her search for Kalina and has ignored it, overshadows any mercy his ignorance might provide.

Between her color matching suit and the lack of lighting, Bao looks like no more than a wisp of smoke, she observes in the mirror hung over the bed. A lone man, lying on his side, fills the center of the bed. His light hair matted and damp, one leg on top of the covers, his plain boxers bunched up close to his hip. Shirtless, Bao sees he has little body hair, and no noticeable tattoos. The alarm clock on the bedside table casts his skin a sickly green pale. There is a light left on in the bathroom, but the door is closed. Bao pauses, but hears nothing.

Bao lays the edge of her sword against the exposed skin of his neck, barely even touching the flesh. She draws the sword up high, and in a motion like a lightening strike, completes the stroke, cutting clean through, past his neck and through the left arm he had extended under his pillow. The man emits no more than a light gurgle, and never even opens his eyes, as his lifeblood quickly begins to darken the sheets and bed. Removing a glove and using her exposed finger tip, Bao uses the thin sheen of the man's blood on her sword to draw a coda on the mirror over his bed. She intentionally leaves her finger and thumb print at the center of the bloody coda.

Confident that her work will be correctly attributed to her own hands, Bao wipes the darkening blood off of the scalpel-sharp blade against the bed sheets, and sheathes the weapon. She will clean it and oil it carefully later, but for now she must move quickly. The stations have monitoring systems to automatically call for aid when a citizen's vitals change negatively, and the late violin player's vitals certainly have changed for the worse.