The Demon and the City - By Liz Williams Page 0,28

Jhai opened her hand and the flat, white culprit lay on her palm.

"What, those? They're our headache tablets!"

Jhai looked at her narrowly.

"Light begins to dawn, Robin. This isn't a headache pill. This is something you take to give yourself the non-fatal, no-long-term symptoms of the more romantic set of illnesses. Like TB, and like anorexia, and Shenan fever, and AIDS."

"What!" Robin said again.

"They're called Geneva pills, after the old conventions over chemical warfare. People take them because it's fashionable in certain more decadent circles of society to look beautifully wasted. So you get the symptoms, for a short time, but you don't actually have the disease. There's no need for a cure, because you're not really ill. You just feel and look like death, at whim, which is a prerogative of the very rich. When you get tired of it, you stop taking them."

"But I was coughing blood and everything!"

"Yeah, they're an effective little number. Minor hemorrhage. I begin to perceive that this was not a matter of choice, Robin, which I should have guessed because they're also very expensive. But then, Deveth Sardai is an heiress, isn't she, wherever she's got to?"

A heavily ironic use of the present tense, Robin thought. The skin along her spine crawled. "Deveth didn't give them to me. I got them from her mother. When I went to see her, I wasn't feeling too goo—"

"Deveth's mother has that effect on a lot of people."

"—and so I raided her bathroom cabinet. They were in a Paugeng bottle. I thought they were para-codeine."

"She probably didn't want the old man to know," Jhai mused. She fixed Robin with a gimlet eye. "Anyway, you're all right now. For the time being."

Desperately, Robin explained to Jhai that the experiment's hands had been bound, that she had not aided his escape. Her employer proved noncommittal. Eventually Robin nerved herself to ask Jhai if she would be fired.

"I'm sure we'll work something out, Robin," Jhai said ambivalently, and then her wrist phone hummed, mercifully distracting her attention away from Robin. Jhai read the text message scrolling on the tiny screen, and Robin saw her face tighten with displeasure.

"God, it's going to be one of those days," she muttered. She gave Robin a cold glance. "I've got to go. We'll discuss this later." She left. The nurse came in soon after and gave Robin a sedative; before she had time to think, she was asleep once more.

Later, awake, Robin considered facts and tried to stifle panic. She would lose her job. They had Deveth's dead body concealed in the morgue room (and something far away within her wailed at that thought) and she was sure she had been caught on the monitor. The experiment had gone missing; a dangerous, angry demon at large in the city who had legitimate grounds for hunting her down. She was going to get out of here now.

She dressed with haste, fumbling into her clothes, and stood waiting until she heard the nurse go into the adjoining room. There were two technicians in the elevator, neither of whom she knew. Both of them ignored her. Unobtrusively, Robin made a long detour through the palms in the atrium and as soon as she was clear of the entrance bolted into the warren streets of Ghenret. She had no clear idea where to go. She could not go home, nor to her mother's, and there was nowhere else. She wandered through the dusty back streets, feeling eyes on her spine, eyes everywhere as far as the downtown stop. By noon Robin had crossed Ghenret and the canal district, and was into Shaopeng, merging with the lunchtime crowds and losing herself in the malls and markets near the station. She stayed there all afternoon, pretending to shop and lingering in teahouses. She had gone to the bank, and drawn out as much cash as she could from the autoteller, but she did not like to use her card in case Paugeng had put a trace on it. Robin, in times of stress, operated according to an instinctive sense of survival, which so far had not failed her. She told herself this now: Remember when you stayed in that bar all night until the man at the opposite table, the one who'd tried to pick you up, had left with another woman? His date had later been found floating in the Taitai canal. Remember when you decided not to take the ferry, or walk down that dark alley, or talk to