Broken Pixels (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 4) (26 page)

“Didn’t you kids hear the announcement earlier? No one is allowed outside the atrium unless you are entering or exiting the front entrance. No exceptions,” the cop said.

“Sorry, officer. We must have arrived after the announcement was made. We were just curious and wanted to look around,” Cam said.

He eyed Cam suspiciously. “You picked a strange time to leave the atrium. The demonstrations are just about to begin.” He tapped his ear where some kind of electronic device was nestled and said, “We just got the signal that the Aphotis is on her way from the control room to begin.”

Mara gasped, shocked that Abby would introduce herself to these people using that name. The reaction caused the cop’s gaze to slide her way. Mara blushed but didn’t say anything. He stared at her for a few seconds, then looked at Sam who stood next to her against the wall. The cop’s face went white, and his entire body tensed. He raised the gun a few inches and pointed it at Sam’s chest.

Mara glanced over. A single drop of blood ran down Sam’s chin from the corner of his mouth.
He must have bitten his lip when he crashed into the cop
. He seemed unaware of the injury as he forced a smile at the cop, who called over his shoulder to his partner, “McGuire, come over here and look at this!”

As the second cop approached, Mara froze Time.

“Why’d you do that?” Sam asked, when he realized the uniformed men weren’t moving anymore. “I thought you wanted to reserve your mojo, or whatever you call it.”

Mara took her thumb and wiped it across the corner of Sam’s mouth. She held up the thumb and said, “You’re bleeding. At least you were. It looks like it stopped.”

Sam rubbed his mouth and looked at his own fingers. “Ah, so they were about to nab me for not being a robot. Oops—sorry, Cam. I meant, a person of synthetic composition.”

“Don’t worry about it. Frankly your T-shirt is more offensive,” Cam said.

Sam looked at the cartoon of fighting robots and chuckled. “Sorry, man. It’s not like I planned on coming here.”

Jabbing her bloodstained thumb at them, Mara said, “Enough banter.” Grimacing at it, she paused and looked around for a way to clean her thumb. After finding no alternative, she stuck it in her back jeans pocket and wiped it off.

Stepping over the frozen policeman in front of her and pointing past the second one paused on his way toward them, she said, “I’m assuming that’s the stairs leading to the second floor.”

Cam nodded.

“Good. You and I will go in the stairwell and wait for Sam.” Turning to her brother, she said, “I’ll unfreeze them, and you prompt them to forget they ever saw us. Can you do that?”

“No problem.”

Cam followed Mara to the door but stopped suddenly as she opened it. “I thought you said it’s temporary when Sam prompts someone. That it wears off. Won’t they just remember the incident later?”

Sam waved a dismissive hand. “They don’t know us. They won’t remember if we are not around to remind them. Even if we ran into them on the street in a few days, they’d probably just get a little déjà vu and not be able to figure it out.”

Mara waved Cam through and said to her brother, “They’re all yours.” She walked into the stairwell and closed the door.

The police officers began to move again. McGuire walked over to stand next to his partner, who still had the gun pointed at Sam’s chest. It took them a second to realize their other two detainees had disappeared. When they did, they spun around to scan the empty hall. Both cops now had their guns drawn, and they turned to face Sam. The one Sam had bumped into reached up to the device in his ear. Fearing the cop was about to report Mara and Cam as fugitives or something, Sam wanted to get his attention. So he raised his finger and pointed it at them like he held a gun of his own.

The two cops tensed and glared at him. He had their attention.

“I want you to put your guns back in their holsters please,” Sam prompted, lowering his pointed finger as well. “Now, you two officers will take a walk to the end of the hall here. You heard a sound and decided to investigate it. When you don’t find the source of the sound, you’ll come guard the door just like before, but you will have no memory of meeting me or my friends. Do you understand?”

Though their eyes looked blank and uncomprehending, their heads bobbed up and down.

“Excellent. When I close the door to the stairs, you’ll hear the sound.”

Sam stepped past the cops and entered the stairwell where Mara sat on the steps while Cam leaned against the metal handrailing. As Sam approached the stairs, Mara slid over to one side, instead of standing to proceed up the stairs, which was not what Sam expected.

“It’s probably not a good idea just to hang out on the steps,” Sam said. “Despite what the cops said, there might be people moving around in the building.”

Mara glanced up at the door behind him and the low sound of metal wrenching came from the doorknob. “No one’s coming through that door, and we’ll hear if someone comes from upstairs long before they get here.”

“I hope those cops aren’t back from their little walk or they would have heard that,” he said, while taking a seat next to her. “What’s on your mind? You’re missing Ping, aren’t you?”

“I do wish he was here, but that’s not it.”

“Cough it up. We’ve got to get up to the third floor and find out what Abby the Aphotis is up to,” he said.

“Yeah, the Aphotis. Abby’s been telling people in this realm that she’s the Aphotis. That worries me. It scares me,” Mara said.

“What specifically about that bothers you?” Cam asked. “What’s the significance of that name?”

Mara pushed her hair from her face and tucked the strand behind an ear, then looked at Cam. “We really haven’t had time to discuss a lot of this with you, and, to be honest, part of me wanted to think Abby is in this realm simply because we are, but I’m starting to think something larger is happening. You see, Abby’s body and her consciousness were merged with the soul of a man from another realm—a man who believes it’s his destiny to define the nature of reality by engaging in some kind of metaphysical battle with me. Are you following any of this?”

Looking both tired and sad, Cam said, “To be honest, no. But a few weeks ago I had no idea that such a thing as realms existed. And I do understand that my own realm, my own way of life, is being threatened in a very fundamental way. I know that she has to be stopped, and I suspect you are the only one who can stop her. That’s as much as I understand. Do I get the metaphysics of it? No. But I don’t think I need to.”

“I guess what I’m trying to get you to understand is that this may turn out to be a real battle, with real casualties. This whole freeze-and-forget thing, like we just did with the cops, probably won’t cut it if we meet up with Abby and her followers, if that’s who they are.”

“There have already been a lot of casualties—the people in the park, the ones we just saw by the loading dock. There are probably hundreds, or even more, that we haven’t seen yet. But those people haven’t really lost their lives. They’ve just lost their bodies and possibly a few memories. Once this is over, most of them will get a second chance to complete a normal lifespan. They’ll get new bodies.”

“Assuming they still have a realm left to live in,” Sam interjected.

Cam’s eyes widened, and he looked to Mara, probably for some kind of denial.

“It might be a little soon to get that apocalyptic. Let’s see if we can find out what she’s up to in that auxiliary office on the third floor.” Mara stood and headed up the stairs. After taking a couple steps, she paused and looked at the door. An audible metallic twang came from the doorknob. Sam gave her a look of exasperation and hissed at her. “I told you the guards are still there!”

“Sorry. I decided we might need a way out, in case we run into someone coming down the stairs,” she said.

The doorknob began to turn.

Sam pushed Cam up the stairs. “Go!” he whispered.

The guard Sam had bumped into cracked open the door and stuck his head through. After looking around and not seeing anyone, he pulled it closed.

Just after they had passed the door leading into the second floor, footsteps from one of the landings above made Mara stop and turn back down the stairs. Without saying anything, she pointed over the railing to the flight of stairs below them. Sam and Cam turned and walked back down. Stepping gingerly, so as not to alert whoever was above, Mara followed. When they arrived at the second floor, she noted that the door faced in the opposite direction from the door on the first floor. She nodded, and Cam opened it.

Mara was shocked at what she saw.

Unlike the unremarkable rooms and halls of the first floor, the second was wide open and filled with massive translucent cubes twenty feet tall and filled with some kind of swirling iridescent fluid. From the base of each cube, a clear pipe extended below the transparent floor and ran toward the center of the building—toward the atrium. As she stepped from the stairwell, she could feel a thrum in the air, an energy that waxed and waned. Something pulsed in the air. She could feel it on her skin.

After Cam had closed the door, Sam turned around and said, “Man, this looks like some kind of warp engine on
Star Trek
.”

“What are those cubes?” Mara asked Cam.

“According to the documents I retrieved earlier, most of the transceiver node’s processing infrastructure is located on this floor. The cubes enhance, store and route both energy and signals. The sphere up in the dome receives raw power and signals which are shunted to these cubes for processing. They actually output more energy and stronger signals than the raw material they receive from the sphere. Then they shunt it to the sphere for transmission.”

“The energy and signals are stored in a liquid?”

“I think technically it’s a plasma—sort of a dense, highly charged gas—but it does look like a liquid when it’s trapped in a container,” Cam said, staring at the pipes running below their feet.

Behind them, they heard voices through the door. Cam waved them off to the corner of the column that contained the stairwell. The walls around that shaft were the only solid features on the entire floor; everything else was translucent or transparent, illuminated by energetic plasma. After a few moments, the sounds of footfalls and conversation faded away, seemingly into the ground. Whoever it was didn’t stop at the second floor.

Cam reached for the doorknob, but Mara grabbed his arm. “Let’s give them a minute to get out of the way.” Tilting her head toward the closest cube several yards away, she asked, “Is it okay if I take a closer look?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think it would do any harm.”

Sam rolled his eyes and said, “If she had more time, she’d probably disassemble one of them to see how it worked.”

Mara approached the cube and placed her hand against its side. For some reason, she expected it to be warm, thought she would feel a vibration. She felt nothing. Whorls of light passed over her as the plasma shifted and churned inside the giant glass box. Mara found the motion relaxing, almost hypnotic, like watching ocean waves. Soon the light enveloped her and she felt a sense of familiarity and the thrill of a new adventure. For some reason she looked around, expecting to see facets, sheets of light like those she had perceived with her mother’s crystals. But this light flowed. It oozed around her, wrapped her in warmth and sound—the sound of voices.

See the light.

Shine the light.

Be the light.

The last line held an urgency. It was repeated over and over, growing louder. In the background other voices chanted, “Believe, believe. To be the light, you must believe.” Even more voices, more desperate sounding, almost screaming, chanted, “I want to believe, to be the light!” The cacophony surrounded Mara, smothered her. Thousands of voices and more clamored to be heard. “I want to believe.”

Something grabbed Mara’s shoulder, and she was yanked from the light. One voice drowned out the multitudes, “Mara! What the hell are you doing?” It was Sam.

Shaking her head, she blinked a couple times, and her eyes focused on her hand, still pressed against the translucent wall of the cube. The iridescent plasma continued to glow, except for an amorphous blackened circle immediately around her hand, which now radiated with a light of its own. She snapped her hand away from the cube.

“I could hear voices,” Mara said, without giving it much thought.

“Undoubtedly a side effect of conducting a mind meld with a power cube,” Sam said. “What were you doing? Getting a handful of plasma?”

Rubbing her hand, which now glowed less brilliantly, she said, “I wasn’t trying to do anything. When I touched the cube, I think I could tap into some of the signals that are in the plasma, some of the voices of the people stored there.”

Sam snorted. “I thought the Sig-net was down. How could there be voices in there?”

Cam approached and said, “There are probably millions of signals in the cube that weren’t sent before the transceiver node went down.” Turning to Mara, he asked, “Are you okay? That looked a little disconcerting.”

Mara wagged her hand in the air. “I’ll be all right.”

“What were the voices saying?” Sam asked.

“More chanting.
See the light. Be the light
. But even more than that was this exhortation to believe that they
could
be the light, and others were desperate to believe. It almost sounded like one of those revival tent meetings Detective Bohannon said his preacher father used to have.”

“So there is a religious angle to all this,” Sam said.

“I don’t know. The last piece of advice Ping gave me before he went into the receptacle was to consider the metaphysical aspects of all this. Abby’s telling these people she’s the Aphotis, not the Second Coming. That sounds more metaphysical than religious.”

“Getting someone to take on a new belief definitely sounds religious to me,” Sam said.

“Belief is also a significant component of how people perceive reality,” Mara said. “Remember the lessons Ping gave us at the warehouse? Belief, knowledge and awareness are tools you use to shape reality.”