The Tower (34 page)

A flash of light. A flash of darkness. The clattering of silverware and the smell of honey and pancakes.

“Cat, stop playing with your food.”

“We’re gonna be late for the bus!”

I was sinking deep below the surface of a vast ocean. I saw a battered girl in a dirty hospital gown sitting alone on a bed. What was her name?

“What’s your name, boy?” asked the man with gray hair.

And Terry said, “He’s not to be harmed.”

An explosion. A shadow in a pipe.

Ralph. “Are you going to kill me, lad?!”

Everything was echoing through the giant pipe, and somebody was there. Somebody without a face.

“Who are you?” I called out. “Who are you really?”

A colorless field of tall weeds quickly grew into a forest of tangled tree branches. The darkness deepened.

A crisp voice said, “They went in here, sir.”

I tried to run, but I was stuck in thick, black mud. The mud was everywhere. It was alive, wrapping itself around my ankles and pulling me down.

“Don’t worry,” said Dr. Kellogg, “they do trust you.”

No! You’re dead. You’re dead like everyone else down there!

“Control, Adrian,” said Cindy.

The gray-haired man’s voice echoed again, laughing, “...or there’ll be some assembly required when you get him back.”

I heard someone shout, “He’s too young!”

And then Terry was walking away from me. She was walking into a trap.

“Terry! No!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

She turned to me, but her eyes were empty. “It’s just a bad dream, Adrian.”

Another flash of light. I slipped deeper into the mud.

“Go on, little destroyer!” shouted Ralph.

Terry smiled. “There’s always a choice.”

“Addy, will it hurt us when we die?”

As the mud poured into my mouth, a soft voice called from above, “Adrian?”

I opened my eyes. For nearly a minute, I could barely make out the difference between light and shadow. Very slowly, my eyes began to adjust, and when they finally came into focus, I saw Cindy leaning over me and looking down at my face.

My head was throbbing. The whole room seemed to be swaying violently from side to side, like the cabin of a tiny boat on a stormy sea.

“Adrian?” Cindy said again.

I tried to open my mouth, but it seemed to be glued shut. I realized that I had been clenching my right fist, and when I tried to open my mouth, my fist had opened instead. I slowly cleared my mind and visualized where my mouth was. To my surprise, I discovered that it was on my face, under my nose and above my chin.

“Where am I?” I croaked.

“Home,” Cindy answered quietly. “Technically, you’re in the healers’ office on the eighteenth floor. But you’re home.”

Once I had a general idea of where my head was in relation to the rest of my body, I tried to lift it a bit, but found that it still hurt too much. Next I tried to bring my hand up to my head, but couldn’t do that either. At first, I thought I was moving the wrong part of my body again, but then, looking down at myself, I realized that my wrists and ankles were tightly strapped to the bed.

“What’s going on?” I asked weakly. “Why am I tied down?”

“We were afraid you would hurt yourself,” said Cindy, undoing the leather cuffs around my wrists. “How are you feeling?”

“Everything’s spinning.”

“That’s because Terry knocked you out while the puppeteer was still inside you,” explained Cindy. “It will take some time to reorient yourself.”

Who was Terry? It took a moment for the name to register, and then all the memories came flooding back.

“What happened?” I said, struggling to sit up. “Where’s Alia? Where is she?!”

Cindy forced me back down onto the bed, saying, “Calm down, Adrian. Alia is fine. She has hardly left your side these last two days, but she’s eating lunch now with Terry upstairs. Mark and Mr. Baker are okay too. We all made it out.”

“Alia is alive?”

Cindy smiled. “Alive and well.”

I let my head fall back onto the pillow. “I thought I killed her.”

“I wasn’t so sure myself until she woke,” said Cindy. “Don’t worry. I explained to her what happened. She’s not mad at you, and I’m sure she still wants to share your room.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. The boat was still swaying, but the sea was slightly calmer.

“What happened out there, Cindy?” I asked. “How did they get so close?”

“I’m so sorry, Adrian,” Cindy said miserably. “You were right. You were right and I was wrong.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The mission. We were almost killed. It was an ambush – by the Angels. They set us up. They had a hidden team of Seraphim twice our number.”

“But how?”

“Mr. Baker thinks one of his team may be a spy. Three of them were members of my personal guard, and they all survived. They are being questioned about this mission and on account of what happened back in August on our camping trip.”

“What happened to the rest of the Knights?”

Cindy sighed softly. “Many are dead, Adrian. The Angels weren’t trying to capture them. They were after me, so they came at us full force, and the Knights barely managed to hold them off while we escaped. Many of them... Most of them are dead, Adrian.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in. I closed my eyes again and tried to picture their faces. I could see a few of them. I wondered who they were.

“Adrian?” said Cindy.

I looked up at Cindy and whispered, “I’m okay. How long was I out?”

“Two days. Well, three if you count the ride home. You were semi-conscious for a while. Do you remember?”

“No, and I still feel horrible.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Cindy. “You were having a 48-hour nightmare. That’s why we had to tie you down. Derrick was afraid that if we pacified your dreams, you might not recover completely from the puppeteer’s control. He wanted you to work through it naturally.”

“Was I talking in my sleep?” I asked, starting to remember bits of my dream.

Cindy nodded. “Talking, yelling, cursing from time to time. It was amazing Alia ever managed to sleep in this room last night, but she insisted.”

“Did I mention anything about some kind of assembly?”

Cindy raised an eyebrow. “An assembly? You mean like a meeting?”

“Or maybe assembling something.”

“I don’t know,” said Cindy. “I wasn’t really listening. It kind of felt like eavesdropping. Besides, you were, for the most part, incoherent. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I just thought it was important for a moment.”

It wasn’t important. The nightmare was already fading away. What was important was that we were alive. Cindy and Alia and Terry and Mark. We were all still alive. Thanks to Terry.

A portly, middle-aged man wearing a long white coat and a horrendously obvious toupee entered the room and said, “Ah! He’s up, I see.”

Cindy looked like she was about to introduce him, but he strode up to my bed and started to speak rapidly in an oddly squeaky voice. “Welcome back to the land of the living and peacefully coherent,” he said. “I am the resident healer on duty this week, Dr. Pales, and I am also a dentist by trade and you need to be brushing your teeth more.”

Cindy laughed, saying, “One thing at a time, Doctor.”

“You are absolutely right, Ms. Gifford,” replied Dr. Pales, and then peered into my eyes, asking, “Can you feel at least three of your limbs?”

“I can feel all of them, Doctor,” I said.

“Excellent! All seven, then, yes?”

I laughed a little, and Dr. Pales said, “Do you feel strong enough to get up and eat at the table or shall we treat you like a baby for a few more hours?”

The room was still rocking somewhat, so I answered, “Baby sounds good right about now.”

“I will bring you a tray but you will have to feed yourself.”

“Fair enough.”

What I really wanted to do was go back to sleep, but lunch didn’t seem like a bad second option. Dr. Pales was gone only a moment.

“A freshly reheated instant meal that tastes as bad as it looks on the cartons I just threw away!” announced Dr. Pales as he set the tray on my bed. It was some kind of pasta and steamed vegetables. I tried to pull myself up into a sitting position, but found that my ankles were still strapped to the bed.

Undoing the leg binds for me, Cindy asked, “Do you want me to call Terry and Alia down now?”

I hesitated. Though I obviously hadn’t been in control of my actions when I injured Alia and Terry, even so, I felt that I owed them both a very serious apology. I just didn’t know how I was going to say it.

Correctly reading my expression, Cindy said, “A simple sorry will suffice for your sister. As for Terry, well, it’s up to you. I’m sure she got a kick out of saving the day.”

Cindy telephoned our penthouse. Less than three minutes later, Alia and Terry came bursting in.

“He lives!” cried Terry as Alia jumped onto my bed, upsetting my tray and sending most of Dr. Pales’s reheated junk food onto the floor.

I did apologize to them both, but Terry just laughed, and Alia, judging by the way she was hugging me, probably wasn’t even listening. After half an hour of chatting with them, I decided to try getting up. Walking was a bit awkward at first. I couldn’t be sure which foot to put forward. When I nearly fell over, I tried to stick out my arms to steady myself but stuck out my tongue instead. Fortunately, no one saw that.

Once Dr. Pales deemed me “fit to travel to the moon and halfway back,” as he put it, we thanked him and left his office.

In the elevator, Alia lifted up her shirt to show me what she laughingly called her “Addy mark.” The ugly round scar on my sister’s lower left side resembled the bullet scars on my stomach and back, only much larger, and I couldn’t find it nearly as humorous as she did. Alia claimed that she didn’t remember any pain. I still would have preferred that she be at least a little cross with me after what I had done to her, but that was Alia for you.

When we entered the penthouse, it finally occurred to me that it was a weekend, the evidence being that Terry was not at school, and from there I correctly deduced that it was the 15th of March. I hadn’t even lived in New Haven for one whole year yet, but what a year it had been!

Terry suggested that she and I play a game of nine-ball to help me reacquaint myself with my body. I felt the introductions were pretty much complete by now, but I happily agreed. Pool was no different from other things Terry and I did together in that she was guaranteed to win, but at least we were playing a game that didn’t risk human lives.

“Terry, there’s, uh... something I want to say,” I began hesitantly as I helped set up the table.

“I heard your unnecessary apology the first time, Adrian,” replied Terry.

“It’s not that. I wanted to say thank you.”

She looked up at me. “Thank you?”

I smiled and said, “Thank you for not killing me, Terry.”

Terry snorted. “So I’m not the bloodthirsty monster you thought I was?”

“I don’t know, Terry,” I said slowly. “Sometimes I wonder about you. I think I know you, but then you do something totally unexpected and I think I’m way off.”

Terry gave me a curious look and said, “It’s hard to know who anyone truly is, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” I answered quietly.

Terry lined up her cue stick for the break shot as she said, “I’m not above taking life, Adrian, but that doesn’t mean I’d enjoy it any more than you. Maybe if you stopped trying to see the world in black and white, you’d understand that.”

I shrugged. “I like black and white, Terry. It helps me sleep – comparatively – better at night.”

I missed my shot and Terry took over, sinking two balls before she missed.