Body Surfing

through the narrow opening, the glass shattering and glancing off her skin, tight and hard as armor. The ground rushed up, and part of her, the part that was still Ileana, braced for impact. But the other part—the part that was in control—tucked and rolled smoothly over the grass, used the momentum of her jump to propel her directly into a run. By the time the soldiers made it to the window the only signs of her were the two bedposts and the frayed cords that had tied her to them.
     
    She stole clothes from a line outside the smoking ruins of a house. Black tights, black shirt, a strip of dark cloth to bind her pale hair like a Bosniak woman. She dressed in a field about a half mile from her house. The field had burned and the ash was still hot, but Ileana’s bare feet didn’t feel it. She used the ash to darken her hands and face until her exterior was as indistinguishable from the night as the thing inside her.
    Bursts of small-arms fire shattered the stillness, tracer roundsarced in the distance; here and there flashes of Serb mortars landed along the edge of town. When a rocket grenade landed a mere fifty yards away, she didn’t flinch. Her attention was focused inward, on the wounds she’d incurred at the hands of the soldiers. She set the small lacerations on her face to healing, the rope abrasions on wrists and ankles, the tears in her vagina and anus. She would have liked to clean the revolting remnants of a squad of Serbian soldiers out of her body, but the demon didn’t let her do that. When he’d finished recalibrating her system, he made her sit in a squat, only her eyes and ears and nostrils flickering as she gathered data from the night around her. All the while a hunger was growing in her, half lust, half hatred. A desire for the purest form of violence: revenge. Only when the demon felt her actively fighting him—not to be released, but to be allowed to kill—did he let her go.
    Hell hath no fury like a woman. Scorned, spurned, burned or bandied about by a pack of Serbian wolves like a hapless lamb. Well, the demon thought, she is the wolf now. The real hunter, no matter what the Legion called its agents.
    The demon smiled at his own wit, but the expression didn’t reach Ileana’s mouth. It remained set in a predatory snarl as, wraithlike, she slipped into the smoking city.

7
    M ohinder was unable to find the boy’s watch, but he rustled up a pair of scrubs and led him out to his father. After he was gone, Sue began writing up her notes. On the surface it looked like a pretty routine psychotic break—tragic, but routine. But the woman in her, the empathic being who’d survived twelve years of rigorous training whose sole goal was to take emotions and intuition out of the process of caring for someone, just didn’t buy it. Q. didn’t seem sick to her. He seemed like someone who’d forgotten how to talk to a part of himself. A part he refused to name, lest that name turn out to be his own.
    Perhaps that was why she’d thought of J.D. Thomas. A die-hard Jungian, her former teacher had dedicated his life to the study of shadow and anima, the twin selves that dwell behind the screen of the persona. The terms were somewhat analogous to Freud’s notion of id, superego, and ego, but Jung conceived of them less as mental forces than quasi-distinct personalities. The anima contained the female portion of a man’s personality (women had their own animus), while the shadow, as the name implied, carried the darker urges, the baser ones: for sex, violence, dominance. In extreme cases, one of the two posterior entities could overcome the persona in a manner that resembled MPD, sometimes going so far as to take a nickname to distinguish itself from the primary personality.
    J.D., however, had seen the question in more complicated terms. Building on one of Jung’s most famous—and most controversial—theories, that of the collective unconscious, he argued that there were hundreds of fully fledged personalities in each of us, as well as flecks of thousands more. These personalities weren’t subconscious projections: they were in fact our ancestors, their experiences and emotions chromosomally transmitted at the moment of conception. How else is it, J.D. had argued, that all human beings are born with the same feelings? Happiness, sadness, anger, lust? How do we know that crying is a signal of distress, laughter a sign of delight? Few people challenged these basic assumptions, but most