Rogue (3 page)

“Hot enough for ya?” he asked, then belched.

She finally looked up at him. “If I offer to pay you, will you go away? I can afford it.”

“Come on, you oughta know me better than that,” said Nick, finishing his bottle in another epic swig. “How much?”

Brooke scowled at him, reached for her water bottle, and looked back at her book. Nick watched carefully as she unscrewed the top, then paused as she finished reading something.

Like he'd seen his friends do, he closed his eyes and tried to send a thought suggestion to her:
Drink.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, perfect, why?” asked Nick, reopening his eyes.

“Your face was all screwed up, like a baby trying to poop.”

Brooke took a long sip of water while slowly shaking her head.

Awesome. The mind thing totally worked. Or maybe she's just thirsty.

“I was just trying to think,” said Nick.

“I forgot—for you, that's cardio.”

He glanced at his watch.

Seven minutes. That's how long it's supposed to take before it affects the nervous system.

“I'm gonna hit the shower,” he said.

“Thanks ever so much for the update,” said Brooke, turning away, her face buried back in her book as she took another sip.

Once he was behind his locked bathroom door, Nick answered Ajay's page with one of his own.

Done.

WILL'S RULES FOR LIVING #2:

YOU CAN'T LIVE YOUR LIFE TWO DAYS AT A TIME.

“Dr. Abelson, this is the young man I've been telling you about,” said Franklin, smiling, raising his voice well above a conversational level. “My grandson, Will.”

The man's right eye was opaque with milky cataracts. The other had a cold reptilian blankness to it. Wisps of hair clung to his head like cotton candy. The flesh of his face sagged like it was trying to slide off his skull, and the runoff collected in a wrinkled puddle below his chin.

Abelson extended his right hand, mottled and covered with scabs, the fingers bent and twisted like broken twigs. Will reached out and took it. Dry and scaly to the touch, it felt more like a claw.

Will quickly calculated:

This is my grandfather's mentor. My grandfather's at least ninety-five. So somehow Dr. Joseph Abelson—a man who was a contemporary and colleague of Adolf Hitler's—can't be a day less than a hundred and fifteen…and maybe even a whole lot older than that.

As Abelson stared at him, a long, dry rasp escaped the man's throat, an attempt at speech that didn't sound like words.

“He says you look like your father,” said Franklin with a little chuckle.

And you look like a mummy,
thought Will.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, sir,” said Will, raising his voice to match his grandfather's level and drawing his hand back.

“As I believe you know, none of the first class of Paladins perished on that ‘plane crash' we arranged in '38,” said Franklin, then patted Abelson on the arm. “And neither did our teacher. He came back to supervise the program, in the hospital the Knights built for us down below, which you've also seen.”

Will couldn't take his eyes off Abelson, who continued to gaze at him with that one unsettling red-rimmed eye. No sense of what he was thinking or feeling registered; that eye looked dead, and his slack face seemed incapable of forming any expression at all.

You're not the only one who can mask his feelings,
thought Will as he turned back to his grandfather.

“You weren't even on the plane,” said Will.

“No, my father had seen to that—after the interference of his meddlesome friend Henry Wallace. He packed me off to Europe for a few months, and so I missed being part of the program.”

“Lucky for you,” said Will.

The memory of those pathetic, malformed creatures writhing around, wasting away in the copper tanks down below came to mind.
For the last seventy-five years.

Will closed his eyes and shuddered.

“Yes, well, we all knew the risks,” said Franklin, untroubled. “Those boys all volunteered with open hearts, and not one of them has said they ever regretted it.”

Not according to Happy Nepsted,
thought Will.

“And although my father had prevented me from participating initially, when I returned to school, the Knights still found a crucial role for me. Can you guess what it was?”

“You were the control group,” said Will.

“Precisely, Will. Every worthwhile scientific inquiry requires a baseline to chart any changes in the study group against, and that assignment fell to me.”

“But wasn't your father watching you like a hawk, afraid you'd fall back in with them?”

Abelson gave out a small, wheezy gasp and Will realized it might have been a laugh. That's how Franklin seemed to interpret it, and he smiled in response.

“Not during the war years,” said Franklin. “Father was far too preoccupied, like the rest of the country. Fighting Fascism, Nazis. Making America ‘safe.' Not to mention Father really did believe he'd already expunged the Knights from the Center for good.”

“I'm guessing you didn't give him any reason to think otherwise.”

“Exactly. I played the perfect choirboy. The next challenge we faced was of our own making. By the time the war was over, as a number of unfortunate issues with the health of our first group began to surface, we'd realized the protocols for the Paladin program would require extensive…fine-tuning.”

Abelson raised a finger and his tongue rolled around as he issued a few more unintelligible rattles and hisses in Franklin's direction.

Franklin leaned down to listen. “That's right, Dr. Joe,” he said, then, interpreting again for Will, “Back to the drawing board
indeed.
”

Franklin moved to an opaque curtain covering a space on the wall the size of a medium window.

“But this time we'd found a whole new level of inspiration. You see, by then we'd established stronger and more reliable contact with our…new friends from down below, on the other side of the divide.”

“But how?” asked Will as he walked over to join his grandfather. “They were all dead by then, weren't they, or banished there—”

“Dead, certainly not, but banished?” Franklin chortled again. “That's only what those preposterous do-gooders who put them there have convinced themselves to believe.” He looked at Will sharply. “And you do know who I'm referring to, don't you?”

Will knew he was on dangerous ground here; he tried to maintain a delicate balance of skepticism and light contempt in his response. “I heard they call themselves the Hierarchy. Are those the ones you mean?”

“Exactly so.”

“I didn't know they were real.”

“Oh, they're real, all right, sorry to say, and full of more self-righteous arrogance and delusional grandeur than you could possibly imagine.”

“Who are they?”

“Like our friends, older beings. Far older, from some other realm beyond our imagining, or perhaps, as they claim—I'll reserve my skepticism—advanced souls who've evolved beyond the indignities of physical life on Earth into a more exalted existence. And I suppose it is possible that at one time, in distant ages past, they did serve a useful function for this Earth. Who's to say? Maybe for a period of time they faithfully fulfilled that purpose.

“But once our friends developed into something like their equals, I believe the Hierarchy's pride got the better of them. Instead of celebrating them as peers, they perceived the Others as rivals, and from that moment on, these fools forfeited any claim on their former role as “benign protectors.” After that, they engaged in a genocidal crusade to thwart a magnificent race of beings that was guilty of nothing more than realizing its destiny. Which culminated in the Hierarchy's tragic decision to ‘banish' the brightest light this world had yet produced.”

Franklin's voice trembled with barely suppressed anger and his hands were shaking as he waved them around emphatically. Will had never seen him so wound up.

“Now you and I, we're expected to learn from our mistakes, correct? Well, the norms of human behavior don't apply to our ‘lords and masters.' That was only the beginning of their missteps, Will. During our own human history, these fools have made countless blunders interfering with the affairs of men, thwarting our progress, holding us back from reaching our highest potential.

“But the worst mistake the Hierarchy ever made was their first one, and how badly they underestimated the Others they tried to so callously destroy. And soon we will finally make them pay for it.”

Will's blood ran cold, but he kept his voice neutral. “I'm not sure I understand. Do you mean your friends aren't actually trapped in—what do they call that place again?”

“The Never-Was? Oh, yes. They were trapped in there all right. Banished. Never to be seen again.”

“So how did they make contact with you?”

“In dreams, of course,” said Franklin, as if this was the most obvious answer in the world. “To begin with. Both Dr. Abelson and I experienced this, a slow filtering of ideas into our minds. But it took us a while—thick-skulled hominids that we are—to realize these remarkable creatures were reaching out to us through a language of symbols and images, not words—and that eventually led us to what they wanted us to find.”

“What was that?” asked Will.

“A more direct way of communicating,” said Franklin, grasping a pull string attached to the curtain. “Through the device they'd left behind so long ago specifically for that purpose. They'd designed it as a kind of beacon, like the black boxes in today's commercial airplanes. One that emanated a faint signal that could only be perceived by individuals attuned to its peculiar frequency—the one that Ian Cornish had first sensed when he arrived and searched for down here in vain all those years. The one that Lemuel and Dr. Joe and I finally found.”

Franklin pulled the curtain, revealing a window looking into a small adjoining room, about the size of a closet. On an elevated platform sat the object.

It was the ancient brass astrolabe Will had once happened across in the basement of the castle. A larger version of the one Franklin had given him when he'd first revealed his identity—the one sitting on the desk in his bedroom—but an exact replica, as near as he could tell.

“Put those glasses of yours on,” said Franklin, placing a kindly hand on Will's shoulder. “And then have another look at it.”

Jumping out of the shower, Nick dressed quickly, then grabbed the bag he'd packed with all the items on his checklist. He listened at his door, glancing at his watch. Counting down the seconds to seven minutes. He cracked open the door and peeked out.

Brooke was no longer at the table. Nick's heart skipped a beat; he looked around and didn't see her anywhere. The water bottle still stood on the table, half empty; that meant she'd drunk more than enough to do the job.

Nick cautiously crept through the living room and peeked into the kitchen. She wasn't in there either. Then he noticed the door to Brooke's room hung open a crack.

Nick moved silently across the room. As he was about to nudge the door open, he heard a whisper of movement behind him. Brooke lurched out of the shadows behind the fireplace, extending an outstretched hand at him. Her face twisted in fury and spite, almost unrecognizable.

Don't let her touch you.
That's all they'd told him. That was all he needed to hear.

Nick vaulted into a backward somersault, landing on his feet on top of the sofa, then springing off again to the far side, putting the sofa between them.

“Wha' did you do?” she screeched at him, her voice slurring.

“What?!”

Brooke staggered toward him, her motor skills visibly impaired, fighting desperately to stay upright, yelling even louder.

“Wha' the hell did you do to me?”

She tripped and fell over the footstool in front of the sofa, then scrambled after him, pulling herself up onto the cushions.

“I didn't do anything to you,” said Nick.

“Don't lie to me!”

Everywhere Brooke touched, every
thing
she touched, wilted and shrank, leeched of color, light, and whatever life or energy it once possessed—blanched, discolored, drained. As she yanked herself up to her feet again, rabid with fury, struggling to find her balance, Nick shuffled back behind the dining room table.

“I don't know what the heck you're talking about,” said Nick.

“Yesh you do!”

She lurched toward him again, grabbing on to the top of a dining room chair to keep from falling. As her fingernails dug into the veneer, a coarse vapor issued from under her hand, and the slat of wood collapsed inward, sending her tumbling toward the table. She landed with both hands on its surface, her fingernails dug in, and then she slipped backward toward the ground, leaving scorched, skidding nail marks and handprints behind.

Nick couldn't see her for a moment. As a precaution, he took two running steps and parkoured around the wall behind him, flipping and landing in the center of the room.

He looked back but didn't see her under the table where he'd just seen her go down. That strange black vapor rose from a variety of places, and the table and chairs looked as if a piano had fallen on them. Nick picked up the small shovel from the fireplace tool set.