The Seven Markets (23 page)

“How?” she said, opening a private channel with Bo which Rossi couldn’t hear.

“Perhaps we should all sit down,” Bo said. Ellie assumed it was a private message from Bo to her until Rossi extricated himself from her—with some reluctance, she was pleased to note. His hands remained on her shoulders.

Ellie summoned chairs for them all. Couches. Big, comfortable couches they could each stretch out on. To these she added coffee tables and—why not?—steaming mugs of coffee. Once she’d started there was no sense in stopping. By the time they sat down, her nothing was replaced by the drawing room of the house she and Rossi had once shared. The fireplace crackled and snapped and the picture windows opened out onto a snow-covered landscape she still saw in her dreams.

One of her dogs, Brutus, padded over, leapt up onto her couch, and curled up at Ellie’s feet. When she scratched behind his ear, his leg twitched with delight. Her other dog, Rufus, sprawled out with his belly exposed to the fire.

“How nice,” Bo said. “Where are we?”

“Maine. Near the coast. This was our home.” She dug into Brutus’s neck. “These were my dogs. I can’t imagine why I never thought to do this before. I always loved this place. Even when I was . . . well, even then. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“I lived here?” Rossi said.

Ellie examined him. He was young, so young. It was Rossi as she’d known him nearly from the beginning. Not the boy who’d accompanied her at the Prince’s order, nor the man he grew into. This was Rossi in the full flush of his youth. Twenty, maybe twenty-five years old, by the looks of him, with his dark hair cut close, not as he’d worn it but as was the current style. His face was tanned, and his eyes, though confused, cut through her just as they always did.

“We lived here,” she said. “We were—you looked after me. For a long time you were the closest thing I had to family.”

He smiled; it lit up his whole face. Her memories of Rossi—the Rossi she’d known—were of an old man lying back in his favorite chair, an open newspaper spread across his lap as he dozed. One of her great fears was that her recollections of him were colored by the spell the Prince had set upon her. She was pleased to feel genuine affection for the man sitting across from her. Wherever he’d come from, he was unmistakably Rossi.

“Please, Bo, tell me how you did this. Where is he from?”

“He’s something of a side effect, actually. What you might call an ‘unplanned consequence.’”

“He’s not from the bean, is he?”

“He is.”

“That’s impossible. Clones don’t have consciousness.”

Bo shook her head. She looked pleased with herself. “I told you, Ellie, it’s not a clone. Okay, the gloop is made up of cloned cells, but the Rossi we’re growing, that’s right out of the hair and tissue samples you supplied to us.” She was referring to the captured hair and fingernails within the jeroboam, the enchanted phial he’d left for her with Mister Beesix. Ellie couldn’t remember how long ago she’d entrusted it to Bo’s care.

“You can’t get a consciousness out of a few scraps of ancient hair, no matter how well they’re preserved.”

“I agree, normally. But I think I told you before that you and Mister Rossi are proving rather different as subjects. The normal rules don’t seem to apply to the two of you.”

“So it’s him? He seems confused. I’m sorry, Rossi. Clay. But it’s true.”

“It is. Doctor Beauregard, you can explain it better than I can. Please?”

Bo sat forward in her chair. Ellie felt a lecture coming on.

“No,” she said. “Bo, give it to me in fifty words or less. It’s been a hell of a day.”

“There’s not much to it, not really. Remember all those tubes we had going in and out of the bean’s incubator?”

Ellie nodded, yes she remembered.

“One of those was a hardline, similar to yours. We use them for cloning to upload data to the new body. Think of a building: it’s like laying the foundation before putting the frame up. With Mister Rossi here, the opposite happened. The server started filling up with data. Data we couldn’t understand. It was even weirder when we tried to analyze the upload. It was raw data. No, it was more than raw data. It was absolute nonsense. An unending sequence of numbers and letters pouring out every nanosecond. We had to double the storage in the first day. By the second day we had to double it twice more. Finally, this morning, the stream slowed to a trickle. And when the trickle dried up, what we had was our friend here.”

“Me,” Rossi said.

Ellie squeezed his hand. “His memories?”

“Nope. On that front he’s a blank slate. Still, there’s something of your Rossi in him. I’d never publish this—not even if my contract allowed it—but for lack of a better word, it was the spark of his life.”

“Come on.”

Bo raised her hand in mock salute. “Scout’s honor.”

“Do you even know what that means?”

Bo admitted she did not. “But I’m telling you the truth. I can’t quantify it better than that. Somehow, some tiny remnant of your Rossi survived in those hair and nail trimmings. We had to stumble on to it, but I credit him as much as my team for the bean doing so well. Ellie, he’s helping it grow.”

Ellie was able to access Bo’s systems without expanding to fill the nothing, and without, she was confident, Bo knowing what she was doing. She pushed through firewalls and security measures, brute-forcing her way through the passwords as if they were made of air. Rossi’s file was right on top of the data stacks. It took her less than a second to pore through it all.

“You’re serious,” she said. “Bo, when did you get religion?”

“I could be excused for it, don’t you think? The things I see here with you. But no, Ellie, I’m not talking about some man-in-the-sky madness. We can transfer consciousness from one body to the next—not yours, regrettably, but it works for the rest of the population. And is it really so crazy, when you get down to it? I told you his DNA has that same shine on it yours does. Almost like it’s too good, too perfect. Maybe the lingering spark of life is a side effect; too small to detect but waiting to turn on with a nudge of encouragement.”

Ellie thought of Rossi’s ring, which she’d worn for a time to mask her true nature. If he’d been wearing it the day he’d cut his hair and nails for the jeroboam, might some of the glamour have clung to those discarded bits of him? She’d always thought of glamours as parlor tricks, little more than camouflage. Walking around with four arms and blue skin? Put on a glamour and you’re ready for a night out on the town with no one the wiser. What if there was more to it than that?

“It’s his glamour,” Ellie said.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s like—oh hell, it’s magic, Bo, pure and simple. Rossi had a ring he used to wear. It made him look younger than he really was. I wore it, for a time, and it was more than just a costume. When I wore it, I
felt
younger, too.”

“And he was wearing it when he died?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I found it after he—it’s not important, though. He was wearing it when he filled the jeroboam, so whatever was on him went into it.”

“But you don’t have a glamour, do you?”

Ellie looked around. She was sitting on her favorite couch with a dog that had been dead more than two hundred years, sitting next to a friend who’d been dead even longer. With a thought, she could turn this place into the bottom of the sea, outer space, or anything else she liked. Earlier she’d wished herself taller without batting a virtual eyelash. She had a glamour, that was certain, but that wasn’t what Bo was asking.

“No. I did, a while back, but I stopped using it. But Bo, just because I’m not fooling people into thinking I’m thirty again, that doesn’t mean there isn’t magic crawling all over me.”

Bo came to it almost at once. For Ellie’s part, she was surprised they hadn’t stumbled onto it a few decades back.

“Your necklace.”

“Bingo. It’s from
him,
and we know it’s packing heat, even split down the middle. You can’t imagine how powerful it was when it was whole. If Rossi’s glamour is mucking things up, you can bet that shattered supernova hanging around my neck is in on the game too.”

She expected Bo to be dejected; surely this meant her experiment with the Rossi-bean was doomed to failure. The doctor surprised her, though, by laughing aloud. There was a maniacal edge to it Ellie didn’t like. She could imagine towering Tesla coils crackling with energy and a hunchbacked henchman hauling jars with brains sloshing around in them.

“Bo, what is it?”

“It’s been staring us in the face the whole time—we were just too stupid to see it. Ellie, the shine in your DNA, the shine in his,
that’s
the glamour doing its work. We’ve been trying to work around it for so long, it never occurred to us to just let it do its thing.”

Ellie felt excitement rising up within her. Bo was going to tell her they could fix her, fix her body. Use the pink gloop and this new understanding to grow her a body from the inside out. It would hurt, sure, but the pain wouldn’t last forever. And when Hart and his men returned, they’d have the Prince hog-tied and willing to do anything for his freedom. She wasn’t going to ask for much; just her liberty. If she had to ask more than once . . . well, after four hundred years, who could blame her if her darling husband came away with a bruise or two? She’d been willing to settle for the freedom of the grave but now, if Bo could do even half of what she said . . .

A screen blinked on, blocking the fireplace. Rufus sprung up, nothing but a sub-routine pretending to be a dog, but it still tugged on Ellie’s heartstrings. The face which filled the screen belonged to one Louis Bloch. He was her head of engineering, and in command while Hart was out in the field.

“Ms. MacReady, ma’am, we’ve got a signal coming in. It’s them.”

Ellie wiped away the drawing room with a sweep of her hand. Screens appeared all around, filling the nothing. She was disappointed to find the vast majority of them blank. No signal over the sub-net. A bad sign if ever she’d seen one.

But a handful of the screens were live. She separated them from the blanks, clustering them together in one place. Five in total. She recognized the names appearing on each one’s UI, but only in a purely academic, informational way. She knew of them, but she did not
know
them. An oversight, to be sure, but not one she cared to examine right now.

Each live feed showed roughly the same thing: a bouncing view which she recognized as a man running. The five soldiers had emerged from the Market, but they hadn’t missed a step. She feared they might run all the way through the city and straight to the ocean if she couldn’t get them to stop.

“Doctor Beauregard, what’s going on?”

“Hush a moment, Clayton,” Bo said, taking the man’s hand. Ellie would have swatted her away if she hadn’t been so busy. Business for another time, she decided, skimming from feed to feed, piecing together what had happened.

“Here,” she said. “Rossi, I’m sorry but bear with me here. Bo, can he take it if I focus in on a single feed?”

“I think so. Why?”

“Because,” Ellie said, selecting one of the soldiers and casting herself, Bo, and Rossi, together, into the soldier’s mind.

Private Anslo Ramirez entered the market on hesitant feet. His palms were sweaty and he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes focused on one thing for more than a second. Telemetry told Ellie, watching the feed, that Ramirez was terrified, his vitals spiking across the board. The fact that he continued advancing was a testimony to the private’s fortitude.

The Market was as beautiful as she remembered it. The sights and sounds were the same but somehow minimized. Blame it on long absence, or on software inadequately interpreting the soldier’s signal. She wanted to explain to Bo and Rossi that this wasn’t the Market, the real Market, they were seeing. The muted colors, the dulled sounds, they were all distant shadows of the true Market.

“Ellie, it’s . . .” Sharing the soldier’s feed was different from being alone inside his head. She was aware of Bo and Rossi, like waking up in a strange place and knowing you’re not alone.

“Where is this?” Rossi said, his voice filled with wonder.

“It’s the Market. This is where we met. In another life.”

“It’s beautiful. The air, it smells like . . . I don’t have the words. Bo, what am I looking for?”

“Baking,” she said. “Pies and muffins and steaming hot rolls. And flowers and running water and cinnamon and honeysuckle and sweet beer and a thousand other things. You’ve been to the Market, Ellie, yes?”

“A few times now.”

“How did you ever bring yourself to leave?”

Ramirez stopped. Their view shifted as he backed away from a storefront where a man with sandy hair and a huge soup-strainer mustache was pulling a tray of morning buns from the oven. As the soldier continued distancing himself, the man squirted dollops of icing over the top of each bun, whistling while he worked.

Hart’s voice filled the world. “Everyone back. Barnes, just like we discussed.”

A lone soldier broke from the pack. He approached the baker, pausing to sniff the man’s wares. Ellie, Bo, and Rossi couldn’t hear what he said, but after a brief conversation, the baker removed three pastries from a rack behind the counter, dropped them into a small sack, and passed them over to Barnes.

Barnes nodded.

“Everyone be ready,” Hart said, the voice of God in their ears.

Barnes drew his sidearm, an oily pistol with a long, straight barrel. The baker regarded it with curiosity, almost as if he didn’t believe it was real. He smiled and said something Ellie guessed was, “Anything more for you today, sir?”

Barnes shot the man three times in rapid succession, twice in the chest and once in the head. It took several seconds for the baker to realize he was mortally wounded. Confusion passed over his face in a wave as he slumped down, the strength gone from his legs forever.

Bo shouted something, but Ellie muted her. What happened next would decide everything for her. Everything.

Barnes stood with his weapon lowered but still unholstered. He looked left, then right, then left again. He pivoted in place to check his rear. He stepped back, away from the baker’s stall. He left his sack of pastries behind and walked, taking his time, back to where Hart and the rest of his squad waited.