Departing from the foyer and down a single corridor, I found the room I was looking for. Within this room, a zebra lay peacefully in his cot, hooves crossed across his chest. He was positioned atop the covers, dressed warmly in a thick red bathrobe. After I’d knocked, no more than a simple “come in” had sufficed to let me enter.
From the time I had entered, up until the time I finished familiarizing myself with his and his room’s appearance, Zorn did not once open his eyes. It was hard to get a read on a face like that. Perhaps that was the point.
“Hello, Zorn. I’m Pesco Margherita, detective issuing from Canterlot PD. My partner Bluebird and I are here on emergency authorization by order of the Royal Guard. They are due to arrive in several days, but they would like us to investigate the matter of the changeling before then. I understand you are ill, but I would like to ask you some questions.”
“Greetings.” His voice was gravelly and baritone, deeper than even my own as a full-grown adult. “Yes, that will be all right.”
This introduction seemed to provide little to no new information to Zorn that would have him open his eyes, or perturb in the slightest his austere tranquility. Perhaps in his mind, this development was only predictable.
Zorn’s room, to me, was like the coat pattern unique to his kind—a curious and impressive collage of contrasting elements. On his shelves, ancient tomes on alchemy with faded spines coexisted alongside modern, machine-printed science textbooks. On his end table, an old-fashioned mortar and pestle held pulverized traces of medicinal herbs, while on his workbench, one found an expansive collection of glass chemistry equipment. On his desk, his personal scientific logbooks lay open, readily sharing their voluminous contents (albeit written in his native language), quite unlike their taciturn owner.
These were stripes of lifestyle that made it impossible to tell foreground from background. I couldn’t decide between two distinct impressions: that of a youth torn between two cultures, or of one who felt allegiance to neither.
“Very well,” I said. “I have some general questions to begin with, if you would like to help me to understand the story here.”
I took the silence as an indication to proceed:
“How long have you six known each other?”
“Three years, plus or minus. The length of our time at Canterlot Country Day.”
“And have you noticed anything off about anyone’s behavior or personalities, recently?”
“No.”
“Can you personally think of any reason a changeling would replace one of you? Is there anything recent that you know of going on with any of your families, for example?”
“No, and no.”
“Do you know of anything in Blanche’s room, or anywhere in this house, that would be singularly valuable for a changeling to either steal or destroy?”
“No.”
“Do you have any observations on others’ behavior this morning, particularly between the hours of nine and ten thirty?”
“No.”
“Do you have any alibi for yourself, for that time period?”
“No.”
“I can appreciate the brevity, Zorn, but please elaborate.”
“I have no witnesses to corroborate my story,” he said, maximally to-the-point. “But, I have been in my room all day, resting. I am not feeling well.”
Through random inquiry, Zorn was not turning out to be terribly useful. And so, I proceeded to the one question I had for him in particular, and I leaned into it. “Might I ask, even if it’s probably nothing important: Why were you not present in the main hall with the rest of your friends?”
“Because I am not feeling well,” he repeated.
“That’s too bad. How long have you been sick? What are your symptoms?”
“Onset of mild fever, malaise, rhinitis about 48 hours ago,” he listed in clinical fashion. “Being prone to sinus infections in the past, I have taken a steroidal decongestant as a precaution. But I do not expect this to be any more than a head cold.”
I pondered his condition. Mild illness struck often, of course, and Zorn’s illness was a coincidence at this point in the case—and coincidences were either the best or the worst places to focus, when solving a crime. I recalled Bon’s proposed strategy, that of starving a changeling of love; could these symptoms be part of a withdrawal?
Or were there even any symptoms at all? None were patently noticeable, in this zebra in repose. Malaise was invisible; a fever useless, if I didn’t know a healthy temperature for his kind; and lack of congestion would tell me nothing, if his story was that he’d taken a decongestant.
“That’s good to hear,” I said. “At least it’s not the sort of illness that has you all but incapacitated, huh?”
Zorn finally opened his eyes, albeit briefly, to examine my expression. “Indeed.”
“I guess we all need our rest when we’re sick. Even with just a cold.”
The implication was unavoidable. “I didn’t expect there would be any information I needed to hear immediately at the meeting. None that the detective couldn’t tell me himself, once he started interrogating us individually.”
“Yeah, that’s a fair assumption. And proven right: Nothing about the case came up that you kids don’t already know.” After a pause, I pressed, “But still, don’t you think your close friends will—sorry, you do consider these five others to be close friends, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Right. Do you not think your friends will worry about you, on your own like this? I’m no friendship expert, but I don’t think they really congregated because they had any particular information to receive. I think they just wanted some reassurance, from us as the authorities, but mainly from each other. That’s all.”
Zorn fidgeted his hooves on his chest. A subtle, but unmistakable, sign of discomfort. Yet, he continued his trend of not responding until I asked or implied a direct question. I began to pace gently around the room, passively eying his chemistry experiments, before bringing the question to the fore:
“Don’t you want reassurance? Don’t you want to reassure your friends?”
I looked back at Zorn. His eyes were open, head upright, looking down at his chest. His fidgeting intensified into hoofwringing. And yet, intuitively I felt him less rather than more suspicious for this response. I asked myself why, and I rationalized: This is a genuine expression. The truly callous liars I’d had to deal with in the past, invariably their reaction to emotional contradictions was confusion, not distress.
Zorn remained quiet, and I wanted to probe further. But I stopped in place—I saw it, and my attention was immediately distracted.
“Tell me about your recent experiments, Zorn.”
Without looking back, I could hear his body turn to look over at me and what I had found. A creak from his mattress, and then hoofsteps behind me. In a moment, he was standing by my side, confirming my discovery: Six petri dishes, lined up side by side. One of them was demarcated with extra space, as though it were a control. Each of the six cultured a similar-looking biological growth (indeed, they appeared to be the only ongoing experiment of a biological appearance), with one exception—five of the petri dishes, including the control dish, were stained a pacifying blue, while one of the experimental dishes instead glowed bright crimson. Each was labeled with a single letter of the Zebrish alphabet.
His reaction had all but confirmed everything I could’ve suspected about their significance. I liked it when my suspects were so kind.
“You have an eye for noticing things, Pesco, and a mind for putting two and two together,” he said, low and monotone. “There is not a doubt in my mind that you and your partner will, in due time, unravel the truth behind our past and present circumstances.”
“Is that to say, Zorn, that you have no intention of explaining which of your five friends this red petri dish corresponds to?”
“No, I do not.”
A tense standoff, as Zorn’s previous insecure, emotional wavering was replaced with a resolute commitment to his latest words.
“But I would be correct in assuming, nevertheless, that this experiment pertains to some sort of investigation of your own concerning the changeling? Well before Blanche found her own evidence?”
“Yes, you would be. On both counts.”
“And you are aware, Zorn, that electing to withhold such crucial information from an officer of the law, under direct request, in a state of emergency, skirts dangerously close to obstruction of justice, if not aiding and abetting?”
“I am now. It makes no difference to my decision,” Zorn asserted. “I would hope in turn that as an officer of the law, Pesco, you are aware that the notions of prudence, morality, and the law correlate but do not coincide.”
For fear of diminishing returns (and a dubious legal basis), that was as far as I was willing to lean on Zorn… for now. “Fair enough. I can sympathize. I’ll admit the distinction is sometimes lost on my colleagues, and maybe just now I got ahead of myself,” I pivoted. “But I can promise, Bluebird and I only have you and your friends’ best interests at heart. Is there any explanation you can comfortably give me, regarding your decision?”
“Partially, perhaps. If you do not understand or agree with my perspective on things as I explain them, however, we may simply be at an impasse.”
He turned around, left my side before the petri dishes, and lay back down in his cot.
“You asked me about the way in which I interact with my friends, or fail to. You should not compare my behavior to theirs, for I am nothing like them. I am painfully aware of this fact. I can thank them for their continued friendship with me, even if I scarcely understand the value they place in mine.
“I do not know how many zebras you’ve encountered in your time, Pesco—in pony society they are few and far between, and they tend not to seek each other out to start families. Almost every zebra you will encounter is, like me, a foreign-born immigrant. The country we hail from, the lands we are accustomed to, they are a place of shadowy jungles teeming with predators, and of desolate, infertile plains. We do what we can to survive. For some, that means abuse and exploitation. For most of the rest, it means turning a blind eye. It is all we can do to look after our own household.
“Abuse. Though it has never visited me personally, I have always thoroughly despised it. Despised the sad creatures into which it transforms victim and perpetrator alike. And yet, I have understood that abuse is always a longer and more complicated story than it so appears. In this respect pony society, as well, is imperfect—one spark, one rumor of wrongdoing, and a herd mentality will call to action, solving the problem at hoof but creating ten more in its wake. And so while I could not stand to live in my homeland any longer, now in Equestria I cannot break out of my paralyzingly analytical ways, as a passive observer, as a scientist. Even among my closest friends.”
The philosophizing was running long on me. It was honest inner turmoil, but it was not clarifying things. I didn’t understand in the slightest how it pertained to the changeling situation. I prodded his vagueries with one of my own: “But surely, a scientist understands the importance of the objective truth, of speaking it out loud. Even more than a detective, perhaps.”
I received another in turn. “And what is the truth, even in science? It is not so clear-cut.” By this time, Zorn’s eyes were closed again. “No one experiment can establish fact. Much less one conducted by a high schooler, in his bedroom, according to tortuously improvised methods. And even if it could, objective facts are abused by subjective biases—and I would hate to infect another with my own possibly ignorant judgment.”
Surely, the judgment he feared would prove ignorant was not his, but my own. He simply doesn’t trust me. Or perhaps, my professional paranoia informed me, this was all a ruse, a deflection… In either case, I had no more cards to play. “I understand. That will be all, for now.”
I made a motion to leave, when Zorn sat up one last time. “I understand that I am not your favorite equine-of-interest right now. Allow me to offer you a token of my trust.”
Oh?
He paced over to a cabinet beside his experiment table, and produced in hoof a glass syringe. Equipped with a hefty brass plunger and a large-gauge needle, it would not have looked out of place in an antique shop, were it not for the viscous green serum with which it was loaded.
“This is a magic-suppressant agent. I have concocted it in the past to subdue and study small fauna of magical endowment. As of late, I thought it wise to synthesize a dose in much higher strength.”
He passed the syringe over, entrusting its contents to my discretion. The instructions were clear: If the need arose, I could instantly disable a belligerent changeling’s transformation. The subtext was even clearer: Our changeling was belligerent.
“Pesco, it is as I said: I do not doubt you and your partner will rapidly discover the truth for yourselves, with or without my cooperation. But, I am not lying when I tell you that I do not know the full story: I do not know how it must end.”