The Reviver (41 page)

She smiled. ‘Now,
that
was all for Tess. I hope it’s not something you regret, because I don’t.’

He looked at her, then down to the floor, suddenly aware of Annabel watching him. ‘You’ll be trying to work out who you all are?
What
you all are?’

‘Yes. We don’t know how long that’ll take.’

He couldn’t shake the sense of dread. Even though he now had an explanation for what he’d seen in the Decker revival. All in his mind, as he’d always been told, as he’d
tried
to believe. Hallucinations from tainted medication. But he hadn’t been able to believe it then, and he didn’t believe it now.

‘Tess, there’s something else out there. I’ve seen it.’

She shook her head. ‘Please, Jonah. We’ve done this twelve times before. Don’t you think we would know? If there’d been evil trying to come through, wouldn’t it have happened by now?’

Jonah looked her in the eye, knowing he wouldn’t be able to convince her to call this off. He had a sudden sense of vertigo, then, realizing how much she had invested in this. If she wasn’t deluded, she had allowed herself to be bonded with something unknown. If the ultimate purpose truly was to summon evil, what did that mean for her?

‘But what do you think
now,
Tess? What
are
these things? You don’t seem different to me.’

‘It’s within me, Jonah. Dormant most of the time, but not always. I feel it, trying to remember. Sometimes memories come, overwhelming and strange. Soon I’ll start to understand. When I had my first encounter, there was a warmth, a
hope,
a feeling of such protection and honour and trust … When I left my parents’ home for the last time, Jonah, I stole two things from them. I took some money and a charm bracelet that had been my grandmother’s. My mom didn’t wear it, but I remembered it on my grandmother’s wrist, thinking it was so beautiful. I even had a favourite charm, one I thought was better than all the others.’ She raised her left wrist and showed him the bracelet and the charm she had meant. A small, simple angel. ‘After my encounter, this was the image I was drawn to.’

‘Angels,’ said Jonah, trying to hide his scepticism but not quite managing to do so.

Tess picked up on his tone. She lowered her wrist, her other hand covering it. ‘It’s simplistic, but it’s how I felt.’

‘And the being within you is the same one I spoke to in the Underwood revival.’

Tess looked at him warily, then at Andreas.

‘No,’ said Andreas. ‘Tess was the first to survive but not the first to try. The first of us, our pioneer, died. A weak heart, it seemed, missed by all our testing; he died during the final resuscitation. The next day, we tried to speak to the being he had bonded with. It had gone. It had died with him, tragic proof that true Unity had been achieved. Once free of their tomb, they’re as mortal as we are. Now there are eleven of us blessed with Unity, here to witness the last.’

Annabel spoke to Tess: ‘You’ve had this thing in your head for sixteen months, and you’re still only able to guess at what it really wants?’

Tess looked shame-faced. She bowed her head. ‘I’m trying,’ she said. She glanced at Andreas again. Jonah saw a hint of impatience in his eyes, and a look of failure in hers. ‘It’s difficult to describe. We’re one being now. Memories return, confused and impossible. The being within me is the strongest of them, but it still only comes through in dreams that are hard to understand. It’s started to become more clear. I think they came to save us. There was a great shadow over all things, but they found the way to defeat it. They can teach us.’

Jonah took a deep breath and realized that she was desperate for them to believe her, to validate the choice she had made.

Andreas stood from the seat he’d been in. ‘Now, we have preparations to make. I apologize again for your incarceration, but we had no option. We’ll try and make your stay as comfortable as we can.’

‘When do you let us go?’ said Jonah.

‘You’ll be held until the Unity group has left the country. The revival will proceed at 3 p.m. If all goes well, we’ll be holding a celebration here tonight and leaving the day after tomorrow. You’ll be released within twenty-four hours of our departure. I’m sorry it can’t be sooner. What role you play after that will be up to you. You can tell whoever you like what went on here. Whether they believe you or not, we’ll be far from harm. I suggest you take the opportunity to catch up on the sleep you missed last night. This afternoon, if any of you want to witness the Elder’s revival firsthand, please do.’ He looked at them in turn.

‘Count me in,’ Annabel said, wry scepticism in her voice that won another cold look from Andreas.

‘I’ll give it a miss,’ said Never.

Jonah kept silent. Yes, if he wanted to know for sure he would have to see it with his own eyes. Perhaps there
was
a chance that the doctored medication explained it all, that the hope Tess had felt was more than wishful thinking. That what he had seen in Alice Decker wasn’t real.

But Eldridge hadn’t been in any doubt that it was. Real, evil …

And patient.

And if this was the last Unity revival, it also made it the last opportunity to show itself.

*   *   *

Soon after Andreas and Tess left, a guard opened the door. ‘You, come with me,’ he said to Never. ‘Time to shower.’

It was the one who’d Tasered him. ‘Not unless there’s a lock on the door. I don’t trust you.’

The guard wouldn’t be baited. ‘You want to sit in your piss all day, fine by me.’

Jonah and Annabel sat in uneasy silence for the quarter hour until Never returned, his hair wet. He was wearing what looked like surgical scrub pants, carrying a stack of towels.

‘They let me take these as makeshift pillows,’ he explained. ‘They said they’d sort out something better by tonight. I’m guessing we’ll be in this room for a while.’

He handed out the towels and killed the room light. With the light spilling in from the window in the door it was far from dark, but at least it wasn’t quite so harsh. They each lay on the floor, the stress and exhaustion creeping up on them all.

‘Jonah, what’s your instinct?’ asked Never. ‘You really believe this?’

‘Maybe they’re crazy, but I think they’re being open with us and have no intent to hurt anyone. Except themselves. I know what I felt in the Decker revival, and I haven’t felt that here. I don’t know what to believe now.’

‘And what about your, uh,
friend
?’ said Annabel.

‘Yeah,’ said Never. ‘How’re you coping with that?’

‘More to the point,’ said Annabel, ‘how much do you trust her?’

Jonah thought about it. He didn’t know how to feel about Tess. Since he’d first met her, she’d been confident, and always looking out for number one. Now, suddenly, she seemed vulnerable. Did that make her more trustworthy or less? ‘All I know is, I have to find out what comes through in that revival. The only way is to watch it happen.’

Annabel nodded. ‘So we watch it. Not that we have much else to do. We watch it and hope there are no surprises. But I’ve been thinking. They say they don’t plan on hurting us, but crazy people can get very desperate very quickly. I think we need a backup plan. We need options.’

‘What kind of options?’ said Jonah.

‘How easy do you think it’d be to get us out of here, Never?’ she asked, and Never turned his head and grinned at her.

‘Escape? Yeah. Right.’ Then he saw the look in her eye. His grin dropped. ‘You’re serious.’

‘You’re the technical expert, right? You must have some idea how the security could work in a place like this. So give it some thought.’

‘You’re confusing me with the A-Team. But I’ll try.’ He sat up, his eyes drifting around the room, ceiling to floor. He stood and walked to the corner farthest from the door and folded his arms. A few minutes later he lay back down and closed his eyes.

‘Giving up so fast?’ Annabel asked.

‘The plan’s taking shape, but I’ll sleep on it. Like I told Andreas, you can count me out of watching when they bring back number thirteen. Tess thinks angels, Andreas thinks aliens. I’ll stay here and suss out our escape route, just in case
Eldridge
is right and we find ourselves dining with the Antichrist.’

‘So what’s your plan, Houdini?’ asked Jonah.

‘First,’ said Never, ‘we have to get out of this locked room. Problem one.’

‘And then?’

‘We’re in an office section of a lab facility. The security in a place like this is designed to keep people
out,
not keep them
in.
It’s a normal building, a little more secure, yes, but in the end it has to obey fire regulations.’

‘Meaning?’ Jonah didn’t think he was going to like the next bit.

‘If there’s a fire, the fire exits open.’

‘So we start a
fire?
’

‘Christ, no. We might even be able to unlock the doors just by hitting a fire alarm, but
smoke
’s the thing. If we make enough smoke, I’m sure the whole system will kick in before anyone comes to check it out. Whenever it’s quietest, three or four in the morning, we sneak out of the room, set off the alarm, run out the nearest exit, and away we go.’

‘And how do we get out of the room?’ Jonah asked.

‘Partitioned office,’ said Never, pointing up. ‘Air conditioning means a ceiling cavity. We just go over the wall.’ He indicated the wall the desks had been pushed against. ‘When they took me to have a shower, I paid attention. If I’m right, on the other side of this partition is an empty office. Hopefully it isn’t locked, but at worst we’d have to go on a little further to reach the corridor. More exposed, but we could do it.’

‘And then we make smoke
how
?’

‘Yeah. Working on that. There are rough edges, but these things take time and my brain needs to shut down for a few hours. I’ll think some more while you two watch Andreas later.’ He looked hard at Jonah. ‘But promise me. If it
is
Satan this time, scream loud. I’d like a head start.’

32

Jonah woke suddenly in the semi-darkness of the office, disorientated and scared. He had been dreaming of Lyssa Underwood, the woman sitting up on the gurney and screaming about the burning city as her face became the bloody mess of Alice Decker’s.

The clock on the wall showed eleven. Just over four hours of sleep on harsh carpet tiles, and he was feeling it. He stood, wincing as his muscles rearranged themselves. He walked over to the door, looking out through the small window. A guard sat opposite, reading a magazine. Jonah knocked until he had the guard’s attention.

By the time he got back from the toilet, Annabel and Never were up.

A request for food and water brought them sandwiches, snacks and soda an hour later.

‘And you’ll be wanting these back,’ the guard said, throwing a plastic bag at Never.

He looked inside. His clothes, cleaned. ‘I hope they used non-bio,’ he said. ‘I’m very sensitive.’ He threw a particularly disrespectful grin at the guard, but the guard just grunted and left, locking the office door behind him.

*   *   *

The three prisoners sat mostly in silence as the building around them became increasingly busy. Annabel and Jonah had not felt hungry, eating only because they knew it was sensible, while Never more than made up for them, wolfing down almost everything in range.

Jonah shot him a look. ‘Have you ever lost your appetite? Even once?’

‘I eat when I’m nervous,’ Never said. ‘And I’m
very
nervous.’

Jonah could see it in his eyes, and he knew his own eyes must look the same.

They were given camp beds and sleeping bags for the night to come, assembling them and avoiding talking about the approaching revival.

When Jonah and Annabel were escorted from their office prison, Never’s refusal was received with a shrug from the guard taking them.

‘So I heard,’ said the guard, handing him a bucket. ‘You’ll need that. There’ll be nobody around to take you to piss.’

‘I’ll manage,’ said Never. ‘I’d rather get some more sleep. Your employers are lunatics, you know?’

Just for an instant, Jonah thought there was a twitch of a smile on the guard’s face. He wondered how much the guards knew. How much they believed. Whether they did or not, they would be well paid.

Once the door was locked, Never moved the camp beds to make sure they were only just visible through the window in the door. He padded out one sleeping bag with the towels they’d kept, enough to fool a quick glance. He turned the lights out, sat out of sight, then waited fifteen minutes before removing a ceiling panel.

*   *   *

Jonah and Annabel were taken to a long, thin observation area that overlooked a large chamber. Two rows of seats faced massive windows. Most of the seats were occupied, the room noisy with excited chatter. Jonah scanned the faces and wondered which of these people had gone through the Unity process – which ones had their secret souls, waiting to be discovered, waiting to reveal their nature. There were twenty seven people in all; four were obviously security, stern faces on imposing bodies. Tess was not there, but the ten others who had survived the Unity process could all be sitting in front of him now, yet none really knowing what it was they had agreed to take on.

A guard went ahead and indicated a seat for him to take, on the front row near the door. Another guard sat to his right, Annabel in the next seat along.

His nightmare from that morning had left him on edge, wanting more than ever to believe Tess’s attribution of his experience with Alice Decker to the tampered medication. It would make things so much simpler if Tess was right about everything. Michael Andreas would have his Unity, and Jonah and his friends would go free back to a world that had nothing to fear.

It was a seductive hope. Because if Tess was wrong, what did that mean for her?

He looked down into the chamber. Several assistants went with purpose from place to place; all of the dozen people down there were dressed in green scrubs and surgical masks. He assumed Gideon was there too, but Will Barlow was the only one he recognized. Jonah knew those eyes.