Hyena Eyes

"Really, Cayten, you're wrong," he said, in a barely audible whisper. "It's just sport; we wouldn't have hurt them. When we catch them, we give them money and let them go. Who does it hurt? It's nothing, compared to the other things they're willing to do for money, things they do all the time."

She covered her face, and concentrated on controlling her breathing. The skein idled in her backbrain, but she was barely aware of its influence. When she thought she could speak with some semblance of calm, she looked at him. "Will you take me home?"

He looked at the corridor into which the pack had run, then shrugged.

"Yes, of course, Cayten."

They were almost out of the tween corridors, when she smelled fresh death. Even though her skein was only idling, she still felt drawn to investigate the off-corridor maintenance shaft from which the smell came. She started toward the shaft, impelled by her skein, and then thought, What's wrong with me?

"No," Genoaro said, just as she decided not to look. His voice changed her mind.

"No?" She studied his face. He was almost a stranger, but not quite. Something under that sheath of twitching muscle still showed the presence of Genoaro Maryal, but he was looking for a place to hide.

She ducked through the oval pressure hatchway, into the shaft. In the dim red glow of the safety light lay a small, ravaged corpse, eviscerated and partially dismembered. Thin ribs thrust whitely from what was left of the torso, and the floor was slick with blood and other fluids.

When she backed out, gagging, Genoaro was gone.

GENOARO DIDN'T come home. Cayten roamed her studio silently, doing no work, feeling a revulsion for herself, and for Genoaro, so powerful that it seemed to produce an odd species of numbness. She could feel an agony trying to be born, but it was as if her mind were refusing to process the thing she had learned about Genoaro, as if it were fighting the onset of some storm that would forever alter the shoreline between her and Genoaro.

She found herself, perversely, thinking of the many tender things that Genoaro had done for her in the sixteen years she had known him.

So much evidence contradicted the new knowledge she had gained of him in the tween corridors. She paused beside the glass-fronted case in which she kept those things she had made that were too precious to sell. On the bottom shelf was a small begging bowl she had made when she was still learning her craft, before her skills had brought her the critical and financial success she now enjoyed. The bowl was built on an armature of clone-grown walrus ivory, a net of warm, pale yellow, polished to a glassy smoothness. Genoaro, at the time still an unknown himself, still working in relative poverty, had given her the planet-born gems from which she had cut the major parts of the design. Viewed from the top, the bowl displayed a man and woman carved from lambent blue-white moonstone, languorously entwined on a shimmering coverlet of black opal.

The two of them.... The piece had marked the beginning of her rise to prominence. He had bought her the gemstone slabs, a gift he could not afford, as an expression of his faith in her talent.

She opened the case and took out the bowl. The ivory warmed her fingers, but the opal sucked away the heat. She traced the moonstone figures with her fingertip, concentrating on the silky texture.

Her hands suddenly shook with an impulse to smash the bowl against the wall. Instead, she returned it to the case, very carefully, so carefully.

She went to Thendard that night.

She told him everything, all the terrible details.

When she was done, he shook his great head, slowly, his jowls quivering. "Cayten, Cayten. I hardly know what to say. I suppose I didn't know Genoara as well as I once thought I did."

She looked at her hands, which twisted together in her lap like two creatures with a separate life. "Nor did I. But I still love him, Thendard, though I hate myself for it."

"There's no shame in loving the dead, Cayten. But you have to live for the living."

She looked up, her eyes full of hot tears. "But he's not dead. He's not. There must be something I can do."

Thendard rose from his powerchair and paced heavily back and forth. "I don't think so. What? Cayten, please, it'll be easiest if you think of him as dead. They don't come home from the Dark."

"You don't know he's gone to the Dark?"

"No.... But it's what I prefer to believe. If he hasn't gone into the Dark, then he's a purposeful monster, like the others who hunt the tween corridors for helpless victims. I prefer to think that he can't help himself. I loved him, too, Cayten. He was a good man, a good friend, full of humanity. Some beasters gain in humanity, on the Level. Some lose, and there's no way to tell in advance which way it will go."

"Why do you do it, then?" She watched him with narrowed eyes, holding in a sudden rush of anger. Thendard had proved stronger than Genoaro; she could not contain her resentment.