34

Outside the window, the gardener’s trowel chopped, chopped, chopped. Each blow pounded like thunder through Eduard’s splitting skull, as if he had the mother of all hangovers.

He tossed and turned on the bed, feeling every one of his aching muscles. Even the afternoon sunlight hurt his eyes, piercing his pupils like tiny spears. Mordecai Ob had returned at midday demanding to switch back to his own form, and now Eduard felt so bad he had no choice but to take a nap to sleep off whatever Ob had done to his body.

Tanu worked in the flowerbed under his window. Just weeding. He might as well have been using a jackhammer.

Groaning, Eduard stared at the ceiling for several minutes before he could finally stand up, fighting the wave of nausea. His ears rang, and beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. No, it couldn’t just be a hangover. He must be sick, afflicted with some kind of drawn-out flu. The illness seemed to have been coming on for weeks now.

He had already run a viral and bacteriological scan on himself to see if he was getting sick, but he had found no infections of any kind. And this didn’t have the same feel as the severe illnesses he had endured earlier in his career. Of course, nothing approached that level of misery.

Lately, Ob often seemed annoyed or dismissive when he saw Eduard. He had to tread lightly. He didn’t want to lose his job, not for himself and not for Daragon’s sake. His friend had done this for him, put his own reputation on the line with his boss. Eduard bit back his complaints. He could imagine plenty of worse things.

He remembered the days of selling his body, enduring all kinds of agony just for a few credits. By comparison with Madame Ruxton, this wasn’t so bad. He would get through it, too. He just wanted to know what the problem was; then he could put it out of his mind. No problem.

Eduard staggered over to the window and shifted the polarized curtain film. Below, Tanu worked shirtless in a petunia bed. The gardener bent over, sweat trickling like oil down his bronzed back. He dug up old flowers, making room for the new flats of hyper-phlox stacked on the lawn near the walkway.

Sensing Eduard’s scrutiny, Tanu looked up, blinking in the afternoon sunshine. Eduard stared through the window, seeing his ghost reflection and noting the surprise on the gardener’s face, as well. His own eyes were sunken and shadowed with pain, his cheeks gaunt. He tried to find a glimmer of humor. “Hey, I didn’t know working with flowers could be so loud.”

Tanu looked at him, then hung his head. He set down the trowel and gathered an armful of uprooted petunias, looking like a large child embracing a Christmas tree.

Eduard leaned out the window, but the smell of the fresh air and dirt made him queasy. As if fleeing, the Samoan gardener trudged away toward a mulch-processing enclosure.

“Hey, Tanu!” The desperate sound in Eduard’s voice must have struck a chord, because the gardener slowly turned. “What happened to Ob’s other physical trainers? Why did they quit this job?”

The Samoan shook his head. The rustling petunias quivered in his arms.

“At least tell me who the last one was. What was his name?”

“Sandor, his name was Sandor Perun. But he never took the time to talk to me like you do.” Intent on his gardening, Tanu refused to give further details.

At least now Eduard had a name to track down, a place to start. Maybe he could talk to this Sandor Perun. He took several potent painkillers left over from Teresa’s recovery, stood under a gushing hot shower, and finally felt refreshed enough to tackle his questions at a COM terminal while the Chief was away at BTL Headquarters.

On the interactive filmscreen he searched through a jungle of data, trying to track down Mordecai Ob’s previous body-caretakers. Any information about BTL business was naturally restricted, but the workings of a private estate should be subject to the same COM-accessibility requirements as any other piece of public information.

Sandor Perun. Eduard found a subset of data behind several pseudonyms and translucent filenames, but he could find no record of Perun’s current status, where he lived. Next, backtracking through the man’s name, he bumped into the relevant fields of employment at Ob’s estate, searching for hiring histories.

He uncovered previous employment listings—his own file, first, and then Sandor Perun, a thin man with a bushy dark mustache. But there had also been two others: Janine Kuritz, and before her, Benjamin Padwa.

At that point, their files grew thin. Eduard’s brow furrowed with suspicion and concern. When he tried to uncover details about the former employees, he found no further record. No information at all. COM had no listings of what they had done after leaving service here.

Trying numerous tactics, Eduard hacked away, approaching the names from the rear, using any peripheral connection . . . with little success. Even their medical records had been entirely cleansed.

He supposed a person could live on the fringes of society, avoid using the computer/organic matrix—just like the immortal Phantoms he had once wanted to emulate—though that seemed highly unlikely. Where were they?

Didn’t it make more sense that the head of the Bureau of Tracing and Locations could also make people disappear?

He didn’t know how long it would be until Ob returned home. Uneasy, his fingers stabbing at the keys like knives, Eduard erased his search.

Suddenly everything about this too-good-to-be-true job, everything about this estate, seemed like a trap. He dared not trust anyone but himself until he found some answers. Not even Daragon.