Evensong

She hadn’t looked at Anwar’s earlier files, when he was Rashad Khan, for some time. She did now. Most of them she already knew well, but she found something she’d almost forgotten, tucked away in a subfile: The Story of Arnold the Wart. It was Anwar’s (then Rashad’s) entry for a short story competition at his school, written at the age of twelve.

Hubert had a large wart on his head. It was growing larger every day. Hubert grew attached to it, in every sense of the word, and after living with it for a while he decided to give it a name. He called it Arnold.

Hubert and Arnold went through life comfortably together, but Arnold grew bigger and bigger. Eventually he got so big that Hubert became a wart on Arnold, and Arnold’s friends kept saying to him “Arnold, why don’t you cut off that ugly wart?” So he did.

Rashad’s teachers told him that the Arnold story was cold and careless and brutal. It needed more work, particularly on Arnold’s and Hubert’s relationship to each other and their social interaction with their peer groups. Rashad went away and thought about it, then came back with a new ending.

...Arnold’s friends kept saying to him “Arnold, why don’t you cut off that ugly wart?” So he did, and they both died.

Not only did the story not win the competition, but it led—after a series of worried meetings with educational psychologists—to the school principal asking for a conference with Rashad’s parents. The outcome was inconclusive.

The principal referred to Rashad’s well-known skill with immersion holgrams. Indeed, Rashad had many impressive qualities, but (his parents sensed the “but” coming) the holograms often showed a kind of quiet disrespect for authority figures. They also showed a compulsive curiosity about how things worked and what was hidden inside them—the tension between containers and contents, surface and substance. None of these were in themselves bad things, but they gave him a quality of apartness. A quality further emphasised by the Arnold story. There wasn’t just a quietly cruel humour hiding in there, there was a private dread of relationships and commitment: the idea that getting close to another person could kill you.

She pondered Anwar’s exact, word-for-word report on his interrogation of Richard Carne, and remembered Annihilate. I used that word myself, in the villa. Asika was annihilated, and so was Levin. Both of them, long gone.

And she remembered what she’d been about to ask him before she’d cut the connection: would he really have done those things to Carne? She knew what he’d told Olivia when she asked the same thing—he’d included a verbatim report on that conversation, too—and knew that if she, Arden, was to ask him, he’d simply have referred her to that answer. She’d have to settle for that. But she remembered his outburst just now, and thought, What is this mission doing to him?

Dissolution. Corrosion. Collapse.

Anwar snapped his wristcom shut. The empty projected rectangle faded from the wall. Something was going to happen, here, live and in public, in two weeks. Whatever they would send,it wouldn’t be some Meat slab. It wouldn’t be just another out matched opponent. It would be whatever killed Levin and Asika. Only about thirty people in the world knew what he was, and eighteen of them were others like him. Sixteen now. How can they make things that kill Consultants? Who are they? How can Rafiq not know about them? Am I out of my league? Is Rafiq out of his?

For the first time he actually feared for his own life, never mind hers. No, he did mind hers. Olivia was offensive, but this was his mission. Very offensive, but this was still his mission. Monumentally offensive, so that he could almost imagine killing her himself, but he wouldn’t let them kill her, whoever they were. Because of what she stood for. Bigots multiplied everywhere and made the world ugly. Only a few people stood for things which made it less ugly: Rafiq, certainly, and maybe her, at least publicly, no matter how offensive she was privately.

So this was still his mission. The one he was made for. But his lifelong comfort zone was gradually, detail by detail, collapsing.