It is a strange thing; disturbing, really. How quickly the mind can shear itself from the most horrific immediacy, how stubbornly it can fixate on stray memories or random imagination — on anything else, anything at all, just as one may fix a mask, no matter how unfitting and regardless of what grotesquery it showed, if only not to face oneself, if only this mask was less unsettling than what lay beneath.
There was no end to grotesquely masked things in this guild, nor to raw unsettling truths. There was no end and no escape. Even the faraway memories offered no way out. They began as a distraction but they could only run wild for so long before running into the walls of the pressure-mute silence that was their confinement. Eventually, they brought Yu back full circle, back to the silent drowning of his own senses, and also back to the disquieting memory of what he had seen in the common room. Back to what he had learned about the human.
Amidst all this, his fractured mind had fixated, briefly, on a single piece of paper. The krynn had taken it away, but Yu had seen enough. It was an official document. A contract of purchase and ownership, dated 641. It had listed, in structured formality:
the token purchase price, as dictated by the Reparation Agreements;
details regarding the identity of Kel-Khadar, borman;
and below, the standardised description of the human female distinguished as A-84R15.
Born 631.
Hair: red. Eyes: light green and blue.
Height: 1.21 metres. Weight: 26.5 kilograms.
Status: sterilised, with no signs of physical maturity.
Dentition: several teeth missing, see attached table. Second set in growth.
Deformities: none.
Injuries: right ear absent, cut fresh, no infection; superficial scar down right side of neck and shoulder blade.
Condition: otherwise sold as seen.
And at the bottom: Conceived and born in Settlement 08 through female A-84K14.
Sealed with the Barnstream sigil.
Signed by Tria.
Yu had read all of it, and he had known, instantly.
It was fake.
A forgery.
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