Jade Sky (28 page)

"Impossible."

Matt brushed aside her skepticism and turned back to the book. At some point Janet returned, and Dawkins briefed her on what they'd learned so far. Matt read a sentence, re-read it, then read it again. He pushed the book over to Dawkins. "Does this say what I think it says?"

Dawkins bent down. "In the ninth age, the jade slaves will give themselves in pleasure to the Servant, and as her multitude of voices enslave and consume them, the ladder will descend into the dark pit." Matt grunted in agreement, and Dawkins continued, silently. At last he sat back.

"Holy shit. The whispers. We're not going crazy. She's possessing us." He looked up at Janet. "She's going to kill every aug, every Jade user on the planet. We're the possessed men whose souls she'll use to free her fathers from the pit."

"When?" Blossom asked. Matt wondered if she'd started to believe.

They read further, then Matt said, "The first just before the sun 'inverts as the wise men see,' and then it looks like one a season until the last, their leader, is freed. 'When Semjaza returns from his exile, the rule of man will turn to unending slavery for the glory of the Watchers under the jade sky.' The Bible says there were two hundred egregoroi who followed Semjaza, so if we know what that last line means
—
"

Janet cut him off. "The sun's magnetic field reverses every eleven years, but we've only had the technology to detect it for a couple of decades. Would that fit the bill?"

"I think it would," Dawkins said. "Hard to be sure, though."

Matt raised an eyebrow. "So if that's right, we've got, what, twenty or thirty years before Semjaza and the apocalypse, give or take?"

"No," Blossom said. "Only a couple years before we go crazy."

"We've got to think long-term," Dawkins said.

Blossom slammed her hand down on the table. "We don't have long-term. We have years. Months. That's it."

Janet plucked the gum from her mouth. "I've got another fifty, give or take. Barring any accidents." She popped the gum back into her mouth and gnawed it back down.

Matt ignored Janet to agree with Blossom. "I'd rather not become a casualty. Still," he put his hand atop Blossom’s, "this is bigger than us. Even if we don't live through
—
"

She yanked her hand away and stormed to the window, where she stared out at a tractor trundling toward the turkey farm down the road.

"Just hold on," Dawkins muttered. He closed his eyes and his face went slack.

Matt turned back to the book while Dawkins twitched and jittered, Janet rubbing his temples. The whispers tittered as he read of their true nature, the infusion of the last surviving Nephilim into his spirit. They laughed as he read of the golden ladder, his soul but a rung for the egregoroi to climb to escape their divine punishment. He shook it off and slammed the book shut, then waited for Dawkins.

Minutes went by, then Dawkins stopped jerking, his breathing calmed, and he opened his eyes. He hugged his sister, then turned to Matt. "You're not going to like this."

Matt held up his hands. "Hit me." Blossom appeared at his side, frowning.

"Well," Dawkins said, "our best chance of success is to recruit more people to our cause, undermine ICAP's true masters wherever we can, and build a resistance movement that survives us. I can't see what I can't live, so I don't know if it will work, but everything premature I see leads to disaster."

"Unacceptable," Blossom said. "I won't go mad if I can stop it. I won't."

"You don't have a choice
—
"

She cut Dawkins off. "There is always
—
"

"WE CAN'T WIN." Dawkins sat back, took a deep breath, and continued. "Yes, you can choose to do something else, but if you do, you're going to die and solve nothing. We go in ourselves, Gerstner destroys us, and we're looking at an apocalypse. A real, honest end of the world apocalypse."

"You say this madness, it possesses us, like a demon?"

Matt answered for him. "Yeah. That's what the book says."

Blossom turned her gaze on him, eyes ablaze. "So when we go mad, it's not just our body that dies. We die forever or go to hell or whatever?"

Matt shrugged. "It looks that way."

"Then we have nothing to lose. Damned either way, yes?"

"But everyone else
—
" he tried.

"I don't care about everyone else," she snarled, then fell to the floor Indian-style, her arms wrapped around her head. "We need to do this," she mumbled. "I won't let my daughter fall to madness."

"Look," Matt said. "I don't know what she has to do with this, but
—
"

Blossom disappeared.

He blinked and looked at Dawkins. "Where did she go?"

He shrugged. "I didn't look into this."

A door slammed above them. Matt's heart went cold, and he bolted for the stairs. He met Blossom halfway up, her defiant eyes full of tears. "You give me no option."

He tried to grab her wrist, but she twisted away. He tried again and she hit him, an open-palm strike to the sternum that knocked him backward. He fell, arms pinwheeling as his feet left the stairs. His head rang as it hit the floor at the bottom of the landing, but his hand struck out to grab her ankle as she flashed by.

She fell to the floor and kicked at him, but he dragged himself over her and wrapped her in his arms. Her struggles weakened to human level, and then to that of a scared kitten. She sobbed against his chest, and from the floor he looked up at Dawkins and Janet, unsure of what to do.

"Please check on my wife," he said.

Janet padded past them as Blossom's tears soaked his shirt. A few minutes later she came down stairs and set an autoinjector on the floor. He read the number on the cartridge and recognized second-generation regenerates. His arms tensed as he squeezed Blossom tighter than a comforting hug.

"What did you do?"

Her tear-filled eyes held only anger. "We go now. No waiting."

He crushed her arms to her side and squeezed the breath out of her. "What. Did. You. Do?"

She slammed her forehead into his face. Stars exploded in his head as his nose broke, and she used the advantage to slip from his grip. Dawkins dove for her, but not before Janet cried out and slapped her neck.

The three of them went down in a heap next to Matt. While Janet scrambled out of the way, they pinned Blossom to the floor. She screamed and cried and thrashed, but her speed couldn't compete with their strength. After a while
—
minutes or hours, Matt had no idea through the stream of anguished wailing
—
she calmed, sniffled a few moments, and lay still.

"Can we let you up?" Dawkins asked.

She gave a curt nod. "I'm done."

They let go, and as they got to their feet Matt asked her again, "What did you do?"

She raised her chin, as defiant a gesture as he'd ever seen out of her. "Now you're like me. Desperate. Two months ago, my daughter, the doctor says she has glioblastoma multiforme
—
brain cancer. Inoperable, very fast. Three months to live, maybe less. I smuggled out regenerates to save her, but now she's going to go mad unless we stop this." She turned to Dawkins. "These aren’t angels or devils. Still, you say they can be stopped, so we're going to stop them. Or your sister"
—
she turned to Matt
—
"and your wife and child, will pay the same price as my daughter."

Black rage consumed Matt. He stood, and Dawkins forced him back down with a hand on his shoulder. "No, Matt. Vengeance here solves nothing." He looked at Janet, his face a blank mask, then back to Matt. "We have to try."

*   *   *

Monica lay on the couch, weak but less peaked, and nursed a cup of tea. She smiled a sad smile when she saw him and winced as she stood, but Matt hugged her anyway. "You shouldn't be up." Going by his own experience, she'd feel both giddy and miserable for a day, then never feel ill again.

She squeezed and didn't let up. "I feel a bit better. When I woke up you weren't here."

He held her and didn't apologize; he couldn't be sorry for what had to be done. She swayed on her feet, and giggled, and used his embrace to keep on her feet. He let her down, hand behind her head and the small of her back, and kissed her eyelids to close them. He waited with her until her breathing settled to the deep flow of sleep, then turned his attention to his companions. Janet sat on the loveseat, legs crossed, and Dawkins sat on the couch across from her, a pair of long knives in his lap.

Dawkins tightened his grip on the knives. "Once we're done with Gerstner, you figure out what you have to do, and I'll figure out what I have to do. Meantime, Sakura's an asset, and we use her." He looked everywhere but at Janet, and Matt forced himself to quash the twinge of sympathy in his heart. Whatever else he might be
—
brother, crusader
—
Dawkins held his place in history as the most prolific drug dealer in history, with all the murder and treachery that entailed.

"Okay, let's talk to her."

They entered the kitchen and sat on either side of Blossom, who fiddled with her fingernails and didn't look up. Dawkins had left the knives in the other room; Matt presumed he didn't trust himself yet.

"All right," Matt said, "we do this." He looked from Blossom to Dawkins. "So where are they keeping her?"

"Where do you think?" Dawkins asked. Matt's hopes slid as he continued. "Frahm's house."

Matt grunted. "There goes Plan A." Blossom raised an eyebrow, so he added, "Air-fuel bomb."

"Why is this not an option?" she asked.

"Frahm lives in a residential neighborhood. He may be willing to slaughter innocents, but I'm not."

Dawkins shrugged. "This is war. Everyone dies if we lose, so why not do it the most efficient way?"

Matt snarled. "You don't get to dictate the terms of my help. I'm in this because I have to be, because you forced me to be, because she forced me to be." He thrust his chin at Blossom. "But I'm not about to cause another Lake Kivu." The international community had labeled it a natural disaster and gave no credence to Congolese claims of international terrorism. He still couldn't be sure whether Dawkins or ICAP had detonated the island, and he no longer cared. They were all monsters in their own way, and he refused to join the callous slaughter.

"Okay," Dawkins said. "Then what's the plan?"

Matt frowned. "We need more information. Can Janet access the blueprints?"

With a glare at Blossom, Dawkins replied, his words clipped. "Janet isn't able to do anything right now. It'll be days before she's recovered from the augmentation." Matt remembered his regenerates treatment and the odd combination of euphoria, extreme nausea, and headaches that had accompanied it. The side effects hit people differently, and augmentation had laid Janet out with debilitating migraines. "Regardless, Frahm's house isn't ICAP property. There'd be no reason for them to have that information."

"Someone had to have built it. There has to be records."

"Incomplete. They don't show anything below the basement."

"How do you know she's there?"

Dawkins squirmed a little. "Because we're going to go inside, so I can see it."

"Do we come out?" Blossom asked, sneering.

He ran a hand through his hair. "I don't know. My ability to see stops at the door." He looked at Janet, queasy on the floor. "I don't think I survive. I don't know if you do."

"How did you end up so precognitive?" Matt asked.

He shrugged again. "You want some irony with that question? Brian Frahm. He hand-selected eight of us to beta test the first precognition augmentation. We were like test pilots during the Cold War, willing to risk our lives for that next great tactical edge. I'm the only person who didn't bonk out within four days. And then it showed me what ICAP really was."

"So Gerstner allows you to see how to defeat Gerstner?" The question made Matt’s head hurt.

Dawkins shrugged. "Don't ask me how it works. I don't know that there are rules to magic."

Blossom clucked her tongue and changed the subject. "What resources do we have?"

Dawkins smiled in a manner that promised murder if he could deliver it. "Anything you want, Sakura: AKs, helicopters, boats, explosives. In a couple days I could assemble a small army of mercenaries, including some really augged-out monsters a hair's breadth from bonking out, but anything I do, Frahm will catch wind of it. He knows I'm out, he knows I'm going to try something, and it would be a mistake to assume he doesn't have moles in my organization."

"Do we need an army?" Matt asked.

"I don't think so. Satellite recon shows that Frahm's house doesn't get a lot of traffic. Sometimes he gets late-night boats with their lights off that never reach the house, so there has to be at least one outside entrance
—
"

"Wait." Matt raised a hand. "Frahm doesn't live on the river."