When Xen turned up a couple of hours later, I was still hunched over the data screen, digipad in hand, cross-referencing whatever public records I could call up on my fairly basic data screen with a new resident’s account. I turned to face Xen, and my back creaked an unholy creak as I straightened up.


    Xen grinned and waggled two carry bags full of food. "I hope you''re hungry."


    "Oh, Xen, you shouldn''t have. This must have cost you a packet!" I rushed over to unburden Xen, taking one bag to the desk.


    "No, no, it''s all free. The food at the end of the final shift is up for grabs for employees. But most of my colleagues are tired of the same food all the time, and the rest of us can''t eat anyway, so... bon appetit, as the Terrans say."


    "Thanks," I chirped, trying to stay chipper. Of course Xen couldn''t eat with me. Xen probably plugged into a wall socket for energy every night or something. I''m sure Xen wouldn''t think anything of it, but I''d have to eat alone in front of Xen, and that was a tad awkward.


    "Sit, sit, and dig in." Xen was watching me with a wide smile on Xen''s face, so I unwrapped the first parcel on top of the closest bag. The smell jolted me back into the knowledge of my own body - oh yeah, that''s right! I have one of those, even if I had been ignoring it for the last couple of hours to become a disembodied digital investigator. And that body was hungry. I crunched into the flaky pastry and was rewarded for my step into the unknown with a cold yet delicious mix of mashed vegetables, well seasoned. Xen leaned back after being perched forward, still smiling. "How is it?"


    "Tasty! Just what I needed. Thank you."


    "It would be better if you could heat it up, but I imagine you don''t have the facilities back there, do you?''


    "No, but this is fine."


    "Well, sit back and keep eating, and I''ll tell you about what''s in these boxes."


    "I hope you don''t expect me to get through all of this!"


    "No?" Xen''s projected mouth rounded in a pretty pout. "I wasn''t able to look up the average Gerondian metabolism in time to make a decision, so I just took all that I could."


    "You''re too kind, Xen. No, I''ll have some now, and put the rest away for breakfast." I hadn''t even considered what I was going to do for meals yet. Hopefully I could safely store this food in one of the cabinets in the back rooms, and wouldn''t wake to find a trail of some kind of space station ant or flies going at it.


    I finished the first pastry, licked the crumbs off my fingers, and dug into the next packet, finding some sort of cheesy bread tube. Xen, meanwhile, lined up the boxes where I could see them, and opened them one at a time. "In here is my shed skin." Each about the size of a pillowcase, there lay these semi-transparent sheets of synthetic skin, looking for all the galaxy like petals. I said as much. "I suppose so," Xen replied, and stroked down the top layer. "I assure you, it feels quite different from your skin, however." Xen cut short the burning silence that followed. "This will go on last, as it is the most delicate part of the procedure, and I can''t afford to get it wrong or ruin any of this, not if I want to make it convincing." Xen shut the box. "We won''t open this again until the time is near, so the dryness of the station doesn''t desiccate it any further.


    "Now here, this is a collection of major limb parts, and in this box, torso parts. The final box contains one head, including various innards which will take a bit of forgery - nothing I won''t be able to handle before the event, but I''ll need your help for part of it. I''ve had to mod the body parts over time to appear as close to my model as possible, because I wasn''t able to always procure the exact correct one. But I believe it will pass muster under a standard stat-sec autopsy."


    The blank head of not-Xen stared back at me from within its dim confines. "No face... is that going to be a problem?"


    "A face would only stay projected so long as I was operational, so... no. No face."


    "That''s a relief, in a way." Xen met my eyes, and nodded. I brushed my hands off and stood. "Well, shall we take this all to the back and get started? How many days do we have?"


    "Well, it''s more like three nights. Because I have to work at the cafe during the days... so I''ll need to be here during the nights, working on it. I hope that''s not too much of a problem? But I''ll have to leave late at night anyway to go recharge in my room."


    "If you can recharge here, you''re welcome to. If it saves you time."


    The tense silence was back. Xen''s lips pursed. "Thanks. And I won''t bother you to help, not until the final night. That''s when I''ll most need you, for some of the more sensitive operations."


    "Well, I''d like to help tonight, if I could."


    Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.


    "You looked busy when I came in."


    Right. Lisia. "To be honest... I sort of want to take my mind off of that for now. I''ll need to go make some inquiries around the station tomorrow during the day... come on, let''s move these boxes."


    Xen took two, and I took the last, both of us leaving the skin box where it was for now.


    I''d said I wanted to take my mind off my business, but I ended up telling Xen everything that happened since I left the Atrium, and all about where my investigations pointed from the research I''d done on the data screen. While Xen scraped metal, bored holes, forged barcodes and pieced together the body double, I idly munched on a bit more of the food, and achieved a tiny sense of peace from having a sounding board for my findings.


    "So what do you think?"


    "About what?" Xen enquired, and for a second I thought maybe I''d been talking to a blank wall for the last hour. But no, Xen''s eyes were curious.


    "About where I should start tomorrow."


    Xen sighed and put down the piece being worked on, to stretch Xen''s fingers. All ten digits moved through a standard sequence, arching and flicking in a wave, before Xen picked up the piece again and kept working. It was both the most uncanny, robotic thing I''d seen Xen do so far... and also gave me thoughts too filthy to name at that particular moment.


    "I think you''re going to have to meet the station proper tomorrow. And there''s little I can do to help you, other than say... be careful, and make sure you''ve got enough credit."


    ---


    The public records had turned up nothing about either Persoranos, Viola Meria Disanthus or Lisia Astrantia Helianthe. The staff there had been supremely unhelpful, but I had enough of the basics down to know how to search for myself. Not that it helped.


    Next, I''d gone through all the shipping agents on the station, using a combination of small bribes, sweet talking, and intimidation tactics, all to get to the same conclusion: the Persoranos was not on any of their records. It had been twenty-five years ago, and all the shipping agents here were newer than that. Business on the Thorn was cut-throat, it seemed. Certainly, my credit chip was feeling slit open, the way it was haemorrhaging with all the ineffectual social lubrication it had been implicated in today.


    So, as dinner time saw many of the businesses wrapping up their custom for the day, I hung around the Atrium with my eye on the last hope. Right next to the stat sec offices, there sat the customs office.


    It was the first place I''d tried that morning, naturally, only to be rebuffed when I was told that I''d need Constable Frod''s clearance for access to that data. Unacceptable. So instead, here I was two or so hours after the office had locked up for the day, waiting for the opportunity to break in.


    Now, with stat sec right next door, I had to be on my toes. I waited, and half thanks to luck, and half to a bit of deduction, I caught the cleaning crew arriving at the customs office around Terran twenty-hundred. As they unlocked the door, I ran my eyes over the details of their uniform. Not tonight, but another time, I''d have to acquire me one of those for possible future use. Very handy little disguise. The two cleaners dragged their cart in, and left the door open behind them.


    I slipped through before it could automatically shut, and hid behind the reception desk until they were further in.


    As soon as they were cleaning one of the side offices, I knelt and powered on the front desk computer. The security system was password operated. No problem. I inserted my algorithm chip into one of the back ports and let it run until my way in was hacked. Opening up the database, I ran a full-text search looking for Persoranos. Nothing. Viola Meria Disanthus. Nothing. Lisia Asterius Helianthe. Nothing.


    It made no sense. They had to have records.


    On a hunch, I checked the dates of the records in this database.


    Ah, that was it. This database only went back five Terran years. So the older records had to be in storage. On site? I could only hope. I waited for the cleaners to move between rooms further down the corridor, then slipped past, eyeing up every room placard as I went along. At first it was all people''s names who worked here, but eventually I hit a sign that said ''Archives''.


    The door was locked.


    The mechanism on the door was old fashioned, requiring a digikey. This was going to take a little time, so I hid behind some nearby cabinets until the cleaners left that one room and began their next. Returning, I slipped my pocket knife into the digikey slit and jiggled it until I found the manual release valve. The door slid open, rather more loudly than the more modern doors, with more layers of dust caked into the tracks no doubt. I slipped in and hit the shut button as soon as I could. Hopefully I had gone unnoticed.


    It was dark in here. I couldn''t risk shining a light. So the only other option was the one I didn''t really want to do... but had to.


    I turned my eyesight mod on, and faced the glare of a world suddenly too bright.


    Moving very slowly to counter how off-balance my night vision eye mods made me feel, I eventually found the ancient console in the back of the room. I powered it on, and the machine chugged away like it was struggling to cough itself back into life. I turned my mods off once the screen came on, and waited for my eyes to adjust back from temporary blindness to some semblance of normality.


    The machine, while ancient, was sturdy and did its job well. There was no password on it, and it loaded straight to where I needed it, on the search filters. I keyed in what I needed, looking for Persoranos.


    Boom, there it was. Persoranos, merchant ship, entered port 25 years, 4 months and 3 days ago, then left 2 days after that. There, on the passenger manifest, was one Viola Meria Disanthus.


    I searched her name in the database. There were no other hits.


    I tried Lisia instead. Again, not a single hit.


    What did this mean? Did Lisia Helianthe stop on the Thorn and never leave again? Unlikely. More likely that she took on a second alias and fled the quadrant entirely. The Thorn was distant, but there were places much further from Gerondia than the Bramble Nebula.


    I put the machine in its shutdown sequence, and not a moment too soon, as the doors at the front of the room slid open again, and the lights turned on.


    "Was this where you said you heard the sound?" the unmistakable voice of Constable Frod rang through the Archives, all the way to one Marys Sophora down the very back, crouching behind a filing cabinet, with no other way out.