Chapter 02: Knife’s EdgeThe next morning, Katherine woke up early. Over time her nightmares of the past had faded; never forgotten, but they only rarely disturbed her sleep. The encounter with Mr Saunders had brought those terrible, vivid dreams back in full force, and her sleep had been haunted by incoherent visions of violence, a bloated body, gaping wounds and blood—so much blood, and the sensation of drowning. She woke up gasping for air.

  She washed and dressed, reviewing her agenda for the day. Leaving her spartan accommodations at the Clinic, she met the technician in the studio set aside for her by Jonathon. Accepting a coffee and croissant, Katherine settled into her seat at the computer and accessed her documents. The video files from the diner were waiting, per her request.

  The footage was clear enough. She forwarded through the tedium of the early day, only slowing once a pretty woman in a tight, professional-looking skirt appeared on the scene. The woman crossed over to the bathroom and emerged soon after in a breezy peach sundress. She sat, ordered food, waited. There was a commotion. The girl flinched, protested, avoided eye contact.

  On the screen and seen from the camera’s raised angle, the man named Mal stormed towards the girl. She cringed away from him, her simpering protests only angering the man further. He was ex-military turned mercenary, a hardened survivor of combat and atrocities overseas. When his hand shed out it hit with precision, taking her across the cheek, snapping her head back.

  “Fucking cunt.” The man’s voice sounded tinny and distant as he pinned her to the wall, hands reaching and grabbing, burying his face in her hair and breathing in her scent.

  The girl struggled, twisted, shouted “No!” and shoved the man away with surprising and desperate strength.

  “Stop.”

  The image froze with the man in mid-stumble, arms pinwheeling and foot caught on the leg of an overturned chair.

  “Can we zoom in, Ari?”

  “Yes, but the quality will fluctuate.” The technician was short and wiry, head half shaved, the rest a coloured and coifed wave, reactive chromatic dye crawling through a rainbow’s spectrum as her head twitched between screen and client in the room’s dim light. Intricately detailed tattoos snaked across neck and brow.

  Ari sounded apologetic. “The composite you’re looking at should hold up even in extreme close-up, but the original footage quality isn’t great,” she said. “Only three of the six cameras in the restaurant were working, and the capture quality was low. Well below legal requirements,” she added with a sniff. “The software can boost the image and clean up the noise, and we can extrapote some of the missing data, but you’ll lose fidelity the closer you get.”

  Katherine nodded. “Fine,” she said, swiped back across the screen, rewound seconds to just before the man’s assault and with a few taps and touches closed in on the face of the girl. The image pixeted, processed, cleared; and she examined the face of Cindy Belmy under duress.

  Eyes brilliantly green and freshly made up: done with great care, expertise even, in colours that accentuated the girl’s startling and startled beauty. Up close, each eyesh was delineated in mascara, exaggerating eyes wide with fear under pale, tidy eyebrows, carefully drawn in and threaded into thin arcs. Very good, very fashionable: Katherine nodded her approval and then pulled the image back, brought into focus the highlighted cheekbones and painted lips rounded in an ‘o’ of horror. It was a face captured in an instant of genuine fear. Katherine knew the face, knew it well, had been there for its conception just as she’d been there for the end of its previous life.

  She advanced the footage at a deliberate pace, transfixed by the girl’s expression as the man approached, raged, and assaulted her. Intimately familiar with the range of human emotions, with their expression and concealment, Katherine understood the extremes of anger and loss and fear. She’d felt them too deeply herself and recognized their expression in others. And what she saw on the screen before her appeared genuine; impossibly so, it seemed to her, knowing as she did what followed.

  With each incremental advance, the slice of frozen time revealed nothing more than a young woman in genuine panic, confronted by an eruption of all-too common male violence. Katherine looked for the narrowing, the tightening of expression that belied the girl’s helplessness. It wasn’t there. If she hadn’t known better, she would have accepted the footage at face value.

  But she did know better. She knew that beneath the makeup and fear, the long hair and slender arms, the dainty dress and vulnerability, there y a man, and this man concealed a shocking capacity for violence.

  It irritated her profoundly to think back to her first encounter with Mr David Saunders and accept that he had fooled her completely. The smugness, the cockiness with which he’d approached her office had blinded her through annoyance.

  “I hear you’re the one to talk to,” he said that day, all but sauntering up to her desk. “About Jeremiah Steele.”

  She’d looked up from some paperwork, already in a bad mood. He’d been a stunningly good-looking man, slim but strong, perpetually mocking eyes under short-cropped hair, golden undertones to his skin hinting at some mixed ancestry. Fshing an affable grin and absurd confidence, he approached her desk. Mr Saunders’ chin had been dirty with stubble and his clothes looked slept-in, but the disheveled look only added a certain raffish charm. Katherine had disliked him instantly, intensely. Much to her irritation and only ter could she admit her instant and intense dislike was rooted in an instant and intense attraction to the man.

  Katherine resented him both then and now for the way he made her feel.

  Back on the screen, the man named Mal recovered, grabbed the girl by the hair, hauled her back. She cried out in pain—then, surely? Katherine rotated through the scene, the details blurring then sharpening as the AI extrapoted and rendered missing data, filling in the gaps in the image. Even now, face distended with pain, she saw only Cindy, nothing but a young woman being brutally yanked by her hair back to her assaulter and the authenticity of the scene was fascinating—because she knew the man was yanking on the tail of a viper—yet equally disturbing. The pain and violence she witnessed was genuine, and she felt an impossible desire to intervene, to rescue this seemingly helpless girl.

  The man smmed the girl up against the wall. Her face went white, the breath knocked out of her. Now? No—not yet—not even as the man grabbed her, roughly mauling her breasts. She cried out, her voice a terrified mix of fear and disbelief, and the desperate and high-pitched keen of her distress rang true. He covered her mouth, thrust up against her, and Katherine watched fascinated as the man she knew existed beneath the surface submitted to the assault.

  Mal grabbed Cindy and shoved her away and her head collided with the edge of the restaurant countertop. The girl sank to the ground, dazed. Blood flowed freely from her forehead. The man stalked over, hauled her to her feet, threw her back down and now she was on her knees and he towered over her, he reached for his belt buckle, and….

  There it was.

  Like the fsh of a knife’s edge in moonlight, or the bursting of the chrysalis: it was now Saunders on his knees. David not Cindy in the torn dress, face framed in blood, kneeling and looking fiercely upwards, long hair like gilded shutters drawn aside to reveal incandescent, furious joy, a slice of sharp sunlight cutting through parted curtain flooding a darkened room. In every line of the young girl’s—no, not a girl, definitely not a girl but a man’s—frame, the transformation was clear: an anticipatory tenseness, a curl to the lip, the lustful narrowing of eyes.

  And the man, the other man, the ex-soldier Mal, had no idea what awaited him as he reached down.

  At that point it wasn’t a fight, really, more a deliberate, surgical dissection performed with cold pleasure. Rather than the brute force demonstrated in the fight against Agent Fosters, David now moved with precision, with a fleet and sinuous grace as he leverage both surprise and his lighter, smaller frame to his advantage. There was a savage meticulousness as he evaded his victim’s grip and hooked Mal’s knee, twisted and brought the man to the ground, and tore into his target with ruthless efficiency.

  Agent K was intimately familiar with every aspect of Mr. Sander’s recorded life. Per standard procedure, after that first meeting Katherine had initiated the usual dig into the man’s past. A superficial pass revealed nothing unusual: a fairly ordinary life and a boring man. He was a successful corporate employee, exploiting male privilege and innate charisma to rapidly rise through the ranks, though both charm and privilege were supported by genuine ability. Even then, however, certain details hadn’t rung quite true. Ruefully, Katherine had to admit she’d ignored her early doubts, blinded by the possibility of having something on Jeremiah Steele.

  She’d still been careful, of course—Saunders could’ve been a pnt, a distraction, even a trap to call her out—though those early misgivings fell away after the man took two bullets to the chest after his day in court.

  No, it was after that, after the drive and the fight and the conversation on the phone with Steele, after the man she’d put under her protection had very nearly bled to death on the Clinic floor, that she began to dig deeper.

  She’d pulled every shred of data she could snag with the widest nets avaible to her, calling in favours and contacts both private and State: birth certificate, school reports, employment records; his every achievement and sanction, success and failure. Medical records, extensive vaccination data, and vast fields of biometric data culled from an adult lifetime of digital existence. Location stamps, favoured travel routes, shopping trends and every use of currency, every purchase, every snack and meal, gym membership, passport records, taxes. Every drink—so many drinks!—from every pub and bar and restaurant and club and dirty little hole in the wall he’d ever visited.

  Then she’d unleashed the data sifters, the best semi-autonomous algorithms avaible to her and got them crawling through the mountains of data that delineated a life. They sniffed out the patterns and the abnormalities that y outside those patterns; the times and pces where other data fields overpped—the recurring habits and people, pces, anything of statistical significance that could expin how an ordinary man with an ordinary past could sink so easily, so thoroughly, into a role so antithetical to his very identity.

  Or more to the point: how could someone so ordinary, so boring and without experience of violence or war, survive both the attack of a trained assassin and the sexual assault of a decorated, damaged veteran? The answer, she hoped, should arrive ter in the week as the AI completed its search through the data.

  Meanwhile, in controlled slow motion, the man who presented as a pretty young woman pulled back from her victim. With a dainty touch, he dabbed at the errant drops now spattered across his face. The blood smeared like grotesque blusher across his cheeks, and he smiled with wild joy. The man, Mal groaned and twisted on the floor in pain. David stood over him and stared for a moment, bemused, where an acrylic nail had ripped away. Then, with something akin to a shrug and with almost casual disdain, the girl picked up a folding chair, colpsed it ft and held it high, ready to sm the edge down into Mal’s face.

  Apparently noticing something, he hesitated. Tossing the chair to one side, he knelt next to the wounded man. He spoke, words too quiet for the cameras’ microphones, long hair obscuring the movement of his lips. David stood and walked away from the broken man.

  Katherine sat back, let the footage py itself out, and watched as the man in the torn dress stood and stalked towards the colpsed waitress. He walked unsteadily in his wedge heels.

  There was a brief conversation, after which the young woman seemed to reassert herself. She left the café and returned to the car under the scorching gre of the sun, trotting across the tarmac with an almost ebullient confidence. Cameras switched automatically to provide unbroken coverage, picking up first on the external footage as she strode swiftly across the pavement, then switching to the camera in the car.

  She watched the girl in the car for some time, lips pursed in thought. Cindy sat there unmoving as the vehicle hummed to life, left the station and returned to the main road. She was smiling as she looked out the window. At one point, she examined her hand, the torn knuckles and nail. She made a zy effort at wiping away a spot of blood on her dress. Eventually, her eyes drifted shut, and she slept.

  Katherine allowed the recording to py and quietly watched the resting face of the pretty man. A flutter of darkness at the edge of her vision: exhaustion, but also fragments of a nightmare, ragged shreds of memory. This she thrust aside, and smiled, the slightest curving of razor-thin lips. For the first time she allowed herself to believe, rather than simply hope, that her pn could work.

  Leaning forward, Katherine tapped a few keys and shut down the footage from the diner. She switched to a live feed from the Clinic’s security system. Camera after camera, she followed her ward as he made his way from the residential quarter through garden paths and public corridors to the Iaso building. She noted the femininity of his apparel and the appraising gnces of passing patients and nodded with silent approval.

  Soon, he stood outside the designated therapy room. A subtle hum from his armlet indicated he should enter. There was a moment’s hesitation. He smoothed down his long hair with a nervous gesture and took a moment to check his appearance in a convenient mirror. Katherine watched him take a deep breath and cross the threshold.

  Author's Notes

  When I picked up Constant after its 15-year (or so) hiatus, I made steady progress until--this chapter. I don't know why, but I just ran out of steam and stopped writing again. This was originally the start of what I considered an interlude, and I had Katherine reviewing the footage from the cafe, wrote some stuff about digital snooping and--just kind of gave up. I walked away from the keyboard for a break, and didn't return for six months.

  Eventually, I picked it up again. Whatever blocked me was gone. It took some heavy editing, but I salvaged Katherine's scene, wrote the one that came before it, moved a bunch of stuff around and--just started writing again. This was May 2023, and I've been writing steadily every since. To this day I have no idea why I just gave up again, but at least it didn't st a decade like before. In this, I need to thank those patrons who stood by the long dey, and encouraged me to continue.

  If you like my work and would like to support it, check out: patreon.com/fakeminsk.

  Or just leave a comments or some feedback, believe me, it's appreciated!