Infiltration - part 2 (Patreon)

The summons came at the second prayer. A novitiate is invited to study with the leader before his evening bath, and you go, and you go alone, and you don't bring questions you haven't been told it's permitted to ask. I've been waiting six weeks for the summons. I've been ready for it for three.

The robe hides most of it. Most. The chest is the newest part, the breasts small still, smaller than they will be by the end of the week if the rate holds, and the robe is loose enough across the front that the shape under it reads as a thin man if nobody looks twice. The hips are the older problem. The hips have been there for a few weeks. I've learned to walk so the swing becomes a limp, a thing I do on purpose, a thing the other novitiates have stopped asking about. The beard is the new worry. The beard is thinning. The skin under it is coming through softer. It has been holding, just, but the leader will see me at a distance of three feet and the leader has the eyes of a man who has spent his whole life watching for what people are hiding.

The knife is in the sleeve.

The bath house is empty except for him. He's in the water already, one arm along the lip of the pool, the other resting on his thigh under the surface. He watches me come in. He doesn't say anything at first. He lets me cross the tile to the edge of the pool and stand there in the robe and the silence goes on a beat longer than a man like him would let it go on if everything were ordinary.

"Take it off," he says.

I say I'd like to sit with him first. To listen. The novitiates were told the first lesson is listening.

He looks at me. The look is the look of someone reading a page he has read before.

"Take the robe off."

The robe will come off and the body underneath it will not be the body of any man who has ever walked into this bath house and the leader is two feet from me with his arm along the lip of the pool and the knife is taped to my forearm under the cloth and the choice has been made by the time I understand I am making it.

I take a step back.

He moves before I do. Faster than I'd planned for. The water doesn't slow him the way water slows most men, he comes up the steps in one motion and the wet of him hits the front of my robe and his hands are on the cloth before I can get the knife free of the tape, and he yanks the robe down off my shoulders in a single hard pull and the robe is on the tile behind me and I'm standing in the bath house with him with no robe on and the knife still half-stuck under the tape on my arm.

He sees what I am.

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. The face he makes is the face of a man who has just understood something that he should've understood three weeks ago, and his hand comes up to grab my throat.

I get the knife free.

He's strong. Stronger than the file said. His hand on my throat is the grip of a man who has held men down before, and the body I'm fighting from is not the body that did the training. The shoulder doesn't have the muscle. I bring the knife up and he catches my forearm with his other hand and the two of us stand there on the wet tile in a clinch I can't win on strength.

I have the training. That's the only thing I have. I have technique that he doesn't have because he's not a soldier. He doesn't know what to do when I let my wrist go soft. He thinks he's broken my grip and he turns to put me down on the tile and the turn opens his side and I bring the knife around in a short hooking motion the way I learned in a basement in Sofia twenty years ago and the blade goes in under his ribs on the right.

It doesn't go in the way I want. The angle is shallow. The body is wrong, the body doesn't have the weight behind it, and the knife goes in two inches when it should go in four and I have to pull it and put it in again. The second time is better. The second time finds something. He makes a sound that isn't a word and his hand on my throat loosens and his other hand goes to the place under his ribs and the blood comes through his fingers warm against the back of my hand.

We stand there.

He looks at me. Looks at what I am. His mouth moves like he's going to say something and then doesn't. He goes down on one knee first, and then the other knee, and then sideways. He doesn't make it into the water. He goes down on the tile next to the pool and the blood spreads slowly on the wet stone, finding the grout lines, running into the water in thin pink threads.

I stand over him with the knife in my hand and my hand shaking and the new body still rearranging itself around the fact that I'm alive and he isn't, the pulse of it loud in my ears, the breath coming hard and high in my chest in a way I don't know yet how to control.

The robe is on the tile behind me. I pick it up. The cloth is wet from his coming out of the water and I put it on anyway and the wet of it soaks through the front of me immediately and I tie it as tight as the cloth will go.

The guards on the door are on a rotation. The next prayer bell is maybe twenty minutes. Less. There's a service corridor behind the bath house that the cleaning women use and I've walked it twice and I know where it comes out and I know which gate is unguarded at this hour and I know the route from the gate to the road.

The face the handler is expecting has been gone since the beard started coming in patchy. I haven't told him. There was no way to tell him that would have ended in anything other than a cleaner at the safehouse.

I look at the man on the tile. I look at the door to the corridor and run.