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Bailer’s face was pale. Eunomia looked up, toast hanging from her mouth. His skin almost looked like hers. Bailer looked across at her sharply, his eyes looked down. The television was still on.
“Eunomia, go into the kitchen.” He said. His voice was shaky. Something was wrong. Eunomia went back into the kitchen and sat down at the table.
“What’s wrong Mia?” Amelia asked. Harry was sitting on the other side of the table eating his cereal. He shot Eunomia dirty looks, and then pulled a face. Amelia didn’t notice.
“He’s…” she searched for the right word, “concerned. Worried. Scared.”
Amelia’s forehead creased. She looked round at Harry, and then went out into the living room. Eunomia could hear them talking quietly, deliberately keeping their voices down. It didn’t matter much though. Eunomia had heard the report on the television. She knew Stern was missing.

It had been four days since Eunomia had come to the Bailer household. Amelia had made a fuss of her. She had bought her new clothes. When Amelia had come home with a plastic bag, smiling, and had handed her a dress fresh from the shops, labels still attached she had been reminded of Child. Holding that dress in her hands Eunomia had wanted to cry, or throw it away, but she couldn’t. She didn’t thank Amelia. She didn’t say anything. She probably took it for surprise; found it cute. Harry didn’t like her. He’d started crying when he saw her. That was upsetting for Eunomia. Afterwards she’d looked in a mirror. She couldn’t think what had made the child react like that. The professors and the other staff at the facility never said anything. Amelia told her not to worry about it. That was when Eunomia had looked at her hand, and had looked at Amelia’s. She had seen the difference. She had sat in the spare room, on the bed, for hours. She’d tried to read at first, but the pictures made her feel wrong. She looked at Rapunzel, Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard’s Wife and then she looked in the mirror. She threw the book across the floor. It landed face down, its pages creased against the rug. She felt bad about it, reminded that it had been a gift. She had picked it up, tried to erase the creases and put it carefully under the bed. She tried to go to the castle. She was sat in an armchair, looking out over her garden. The sun was setting and all was peaceful. The window was open and she could smell the perfumes rising from the garden, the gurgle of the water. But then there came the screaming. Her blood ran cold and her hands gripped the armrests. She lifted her feet up off the floor. The sound was underneath her, rumbling in the stones. Angry, she stamped on the floor. This was her place. How dare he pollute it. She rose from the chair, covering her ears with her hands. Still the noise wouldn’t stop. It was like it was oozing from the walls, from the hole he’d left in the wall. She started screaming to cover it up. The sound of her own voice shocked her, and then she was back on the bed in the spare room. No one came, so maybe she didn’t really scream. She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling.

Bailer shut the door, not moving from behind the wooden frame until his wife walked in.
“How was it?” She asked, glancing out the living room window as the car pulled away.
“Fine. Fine. They asked if I wanted protection.” Bailer said, smirking humourlessly. “With two of my colleagues gone within a week of each other they’re not ruling anything out…Hell.” He collapsed onto the sofa with a sigh. “I’ve checked in with work. They’re shutting the place down until the police work out what’s going on. I keep thinking…keep wondering about everything. Like the cameras. We looped the footage, but what if they notice that? We doctored the sign in sheet too. If they look too close they’re bound to see that. I had to lie through my teeth. The reason I brought Eunomia back here, despite protocol, was because I was worried Stern was going to hurt her.” He laughed drily.
“Pull yourself together.” Amelia said calmly.
Bailer winced, sinking further down against the sofa. “Sorry, Lee. I know. I need to keep my head.” He stared ahead, out at the kitchen window. “We should move.” He said after a while. “Like the police said…if they’re after my colleagues they’re probably after me too. I hope that old b*****d’s roasting his arse in hell, getting me involved in this crap, getting all of us involved.” His head was in his hands. Amelia put her hands on his back, rubbing gently.
“We’ll be fine. We’ve just got to stay quiet. I’ll talk to my sister. She had a house in the Swanage settlement, remember? We could stay with her.”
Her husband looked at her. “Yeah. We could do that.”
She kissed him on the mouth, and they let the matter drop.

“Why do I look like this?”
Bailer didn’t want to have this conversation. “Like what Mia?”
She pressed her fingers to her face, to the red marks and lesions that never healed. “Harry does not have this. Why do I have this?” She was beginning to infuse more emotion into her speech. It sounded whiny.
Bailer frowned. “You’re actually very lucky. Most artificials end up with uncontrollable growths that have to be routinely trimmed back, or even more horrible hues. I once saw a guy who was almost purple and his eyes were so swollen he could barely see, and his creator got a prize for advancing the field. Stern made you to the best of his ability. What’s the matter? You never worried about this sort of thing before.”
Eunomia was quiet, wondering how to convey her discontent, her anxiety. She felt a distance with Bailer, like a rope bridge with the middle cut out. Child would have known what she was feeling. Child would have fixed it.
“Can I go outside?” She asked.
“Into the garden?”
“No. Outside outside.”
Bailer frowned and shook his head. “No. Not a good idea.”
“Why?”
Bailer sighed, muscles tense, fingers gouging about above his eye socket. “Eunomia, right now things are rather…unstable. There are people, the same people who killed Child, who might be out there looking for us because of what you did to Sheckle. Normal people, human people, don’t make people disappear into thin air particularly not important people who are involved in the sort of secret service s**t Sheckle was. Ok?”
Eunomia didn’t flinch. She held her arm up, bent at the elbow, fingers curled.
“The thing he was holding, that hurt Child, he pointed it at me. His finger pulled down, like this,” she demonstrated. “It’s in my castle. It left a mark, like this,” she put her thumb and index finger together in an ‘o’ shape. “It almost hit here,” she pointed to her chest, over his heart. Her breathing had quickened. The corners of her eyes glistened. “I can hear him scratching at the walls.”
“Eunomia that’s enough.”
“I heard him. You heard him.”
Bailer almost hit her. He stopped himself, his hand rising above her. Her eyes were looking at him. He couldn’t tell if it was a plea or a dare, or something else. As if he were being pulled away on a string he stepped back from her and collided with the fridge door.
“I’m sorry, Mia. I’m sorry.”
“Accepted.”

On a bridge some miles away, a woman was watching bubbles rising through the water.
“Concrete shoes? Isn’t that rather archaic…?” A gruff voice murmured behind her ear.
“I was feeling nostalgic. I used to love those old movies, course the victim was usually alive…” She shot a meaningful look at the man.
The man shrugged. “We got enough out of him.”
“We got what? A garbled story about how the guy just disappeared…somehow accomplished by his freaky little creature. Do you believe that? Really?”
The man shrugged again. “What do you think’s more likely? The professor overpowered him…killed him, hid the body?”
The woman rolled her eyes, watching as the last pockets of air burst free. She stepped away from the barrier. “Well, maybe not the old guy all on his own. What about the other one? The younger guy. I think we should be checking up on that one. From what I heard he’s the one who’s got the old professor’s creature. I suppose we at least need to investigate his story, until they find Sheckle anyway.” She stretched out her arms, reaching up towards the moon. “Well, I call dibs on the radio this time. You want to call in and tell the boss Stern’s taken care of.”
The man nodded, and drew out a phone. While he made the call the woman settled herself into the passenger seat and started fiddling with the radio, twisting screams of static from the machine. She found a station she liked and pulled out a notebook from the glove box and turned to the last page. Blood smudged the bottom part of the page, where she hadn’t cleaned her hands properly.
“Charles Bailer,” She recited to herself. She checked the address and fished a map out of the glove box. By the time her partner returned to the car she had the address and they were ready to go.

Continued in Part 12 --->

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