The room was in the basement of the private hospital, and it had been chosen for the same reason the general's office had been chosen: nothing said in it would leave it.
The general sat in a steel chair in the middle of the floor with his wrists strapped to the arms and his ankles strapped to the legs. His ruined hand had been cleaned and dressed and the two stumps had been closed with stitches, and he had not looked at the bandage once. His good hand rested on the arm of the chair with the fingers slightly curled, as if it were waiting for something to be placed in it.
Kin stood against the wall by the door. Selah stood on the other side. Odile sat at a small table with a folder open in front of her and a pen in her hand that she had not yet used.
The general looked at each of them in turn, then settled his eyes on Odile.
"You are the one who arranged the papers," he said.
"Yes."
"The clerk. The leave request. The message to Osei." He nodded slowly. "You are good."
"I am thorough."
"Thorough is not the same thing."
"No," Odile said. "It is not."
Kin pushed off the wall and walked to the chair. He stood in front of the general and looked down at him, and the general looked back up with an expression that was not fear and not defiance and not quite anything Kin could name.
"Where is Diallo."
"I do not know."
"You know."
"I know where he was yesterday. I know where he was an hour before you took me. I do not know where he is now, because I have been sitting in this chair." The general tilted his head. "You have taken the one man in the country who could tell you, and you have taken him out of the room where the information arrives. That was a mistake. It is the only mistake you have made tonight."
Kin did not answer.
"Ask me something else," the general said. "Ask me something I can answer."
"Where will he be tomorrow."
"He will be at the stadium. He is always at the stadium. The speech is the whole point of him." The general's mouth moved into something that was almost a smile. "That is not what you wanted. You wanted the residence. The room. The route. The corridor. The time. I do not have those things. I have not had them for eleven hours."
"You are lying."
"I am not lying. I am answering carefully." The general shifted in the chair. "You will not get the residence out of me. You will not get the route out of me. You will not get the room out of me. I will give you the stadium, because the stadium is public and it costs me nothing, and everything else you ask for I will give you in pieces that sound like answers and are not, and you will sit here until morning and learn nothing, and then you will have to decide whether to kill me or let me go."
Kin looked at him for a long moment.
Then he stepped back and looked at Odile.
She had not moved. She had not written anything. She was watching the general with an attention that Kin had seen before, in a different context, in a different country, in a man who had spent his life reading other men for a living.
"Keep going," she said. "Ask him the same question again."
"Why."
"Because he answers it differently every time, and I want to hear the differences."
Kin asked the question again.
The general answered it again, and the answer was the same in content and different in shape, and Odile watched his face while he gave it the way a woman watches a clock she suspects is losing time.
***
They went on for two hours.
Kin asked. The general answered. Odile watched. She watched the way he held his jaw when he was telling the truth and the way he let it go slack when he was not. She watched the pause before he said the word stadium, and the pause before he said the word residence, and the difference between the two. She watched him when Kin mentioned the warlord by name and when Kin mentioned the warlord by title, and she noted that the second one made him blink. She watched the fingers of his good hand, which curled and uncurled in a slow rhythm that sped up when he was constructing a lie. She watched his breathing.
At the end of the two hours she closed her folder and stood up.
"Enough," she said.
Kin turned to look at her.
"Take a break," she said. "Ten minutes. I need to check something."
***
She was gone for forty.
When she came back she was carrying a garment bag over one shoulder, and she set it on the table and unzipped it, and inside was a suit. Not the kind of suit Kin wore. This one was folded flat and grey, and it had no collar and no cuffs, and when she lifted it out and held it up it did not look like clothing so much as a second skin that had been cut to the shape of a man.
"What is that," Kin said.
"Something I have been working on for a year and did not expect to use tonight." She laid it out on the table and smoothed it with her palm. "It takes the shape of a person. Not a mask. The whole body. Height, weight, posture, the line of the shoulders, the pitch of the voice. It has been calibrated to one man."
The general looked at the suit.
Then he looked at Odile.
Then he understood what he was looking at, and something came into his face that Kin had not seen there before, not when the fingers came off, not when the pager was shot, not when he was taken out of the window and thrown through a storm drain.
"You will not," he said.
"I will."
"You cannot. The voice. The mannerisms. The way he stands. You have watched me for one night. One night is not enough."
"I have watched you for three years," Odile said. "You were in the file before you were in the chair. Every speech. Every photograph. Every recording. Every time you walked past a camera on a public street. I have been building the model since before you knew my name."
The general pulled against the straps. The chair scraped an inch across the floor and stopped.
"You will fail," he said. "You will fail at the gate. You will fail in the corridor. You will fail because the men who guard him have known me for twenty years and they will know within one sentence that something is wrong, and when they know, they will shoot, and he will not go to the stadium because they will move him the moment they hear."
"Perhaps," Odile said. "But you just told me that the residence is where he sleeps. You told me that by insisting so hard that the residence was the one thing you would not give up."
The general went still.
"Everything you protected," Odile said, "was the key. You gave it to me by protecting it."
***
The door opened and Nia walked in.
She walked.
Kin heard the footsteps first, and they were even, and that was wrong, because the last time he had seen her she had been dragging a broken leg and a shoulder that would not lift. He turned, and there she was, and she came across the room at her normal pace with her normal looseness, and if Kin had not known, he would not have known.
Her shoulder was whole. Her leg was whole. The medical crew had done their work, and the work was better than anything Kin had ever seen outside the System.
"How," he said.
"I heal fast," Nia said. "Two days is a long time when you sleep through most of it."
The general looked at her. He looked at her the way a man looks at a piece of a puzzle that has just been handed to him.
"She is the wrong size," he said.
"She is the closest size we have," Odile said. "You are a small man, general. Kin is too tall. Selah is too tall. I am too old. Nia is the one."
Nia looked at the suit on the table and then at the general, and a grin spread across her face that Kin had not seen on her before, the grin of someone who had spent a week on a cot and was ready to be useful.
"I am going to be you," she said. "For a day. I have never been a general before."
The general surged against the straps. The chair tipped onto two legs and came back down with a crack, and the guards on the door moved, and Kin put a hand out to stop them.
"You will not," the general said. His voice had changed. The calm was gone from it. "You will not wear my face. You will not walk into that building wearing my face. You will not speak with my voice to men who have bled for me. I will not allow it."
"You are strapped to a chair," Odile said.
"I will not allow it."
The general's good hand moved.
Kin saw it happen. The general's fingers closed on the table beside the chair, the small table where a nurse had left a tray of instruments, and the tray had been cleared but the table had a drawer, and the drawer was open a finger's width, and inside the drawer was the gun.
Kin's gun. His own gun, his .50, which someone had set down on the tray when they moved him into the room and had not taken back out.
The general had it in his hand before anyone moved. He brought it up under his own chin and pulled the hammer back with his thumb.
"Then I will not be used," he said.
Kin moved.
He did not have time to disarm. He did not have time to reach the wrist or the elbow or the shoulder. He put his hand over the muzzle and turned the barrel away from the general's head and toward the floor, and the general, who had decided, and whose finger had already closed, pulled the trigger anyway.
The shot went off in the small room like the end of the world.
The .50 round went into Kin's palm and through his hand and out the back and into the concrete floor and through the concrete floor and into whatever was under it. The bones of his hand came apart in a way that Kin felt more than heard, a crunch like a walnut under a boot, and the gun came out of the general's grip and clattered across the floor, and Kin did not scream. He grunted, once, and looked down at his hand, and his hand was very wrong, and blood was coming out of two holes in it, and the fingers were not where the fingers should be.
Then he looked at the general.
The general was staring at him with an expression of pure, cold rage, the rage of a man who had been denied the one thing he had left.
Kin hit him with the back of his good hand. Not the fist. The back, flat, the way you would hit a man who needed to be awake and was not, and the general's head snapped to the side and his eyes rolled up and he went limp in the chair.
Kin stood over him for a moment.
"You will die," he said, very quietly, to the unconscious man. "After this is finished. Not before."
He looked at his hand.
The healing had already started. The System worked its way through the ruined flesh, pulling bone back into bone and knitting tendon to tendon, and it was slow, because it was slow, because the hand was complicated, and because the body was tired. Blood still dripped from his fingers onto the floor. The pain was there, and it was enormous, and Kin had stopped feeling enormous pain a long time ago.
Odile was at his side with a cloth.
"Sit down," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You are not fine. Sit down."
Kin sat down.
Nia looked at the general and then at Kin and then at the suit on the table, and the grin was gone from her face.
"Still going?" she said.
"Yes," Kin said. "Still going."