Those That Wake 02: What We Become (16 page)

Looking down into Talby’s face, Castillo was admirably holding tightly to the creature inside him. By sheer luck Talby’s flailing foot caught the outside of Castillo’s knee, where a piece of shrapnel had lodged many years ago. It was no bother to him for the most part, but hit it hard enough at just the right angle and a jag of pain crackled up Castillo’s body and lit the beast.

Castillo teetered, caught his balance, and yanked Talby from his seat by the neck. He threw him to the ground with the force of a pile driver. Talby squirmed there, a tiny animal trapped. Castillo lifted his foot up, the beast already supplying an image of what Talby’s face would look like after Castillo had finished.

“What’s that?” Castillo asked, his vision suddenly clearing of red, his foot still held in the air over Talby. One of the cellscreens on the wall showed a map of the city, and on it a dot lit up, chirping a familiar tone that had reached past the beast and pulled Castillo’s attention back out. He set his foot down, the leg still aching from the shot to the old wound, and looked around the room at the other faces.

“What’s that?” he asked again, quietly.

“Uh,” one of the security guards piped up, “that’s the feed from Ms. Kliest’s office, some project she’s been working on.”

Castillo walked over, examined it more carefully, then nodded slowly. He pulled a cell from his pocket, keyed it.

“Roarke,” he said to the voicemail screen. “Where the hell are you? I’m coming up. Mal just came back online.”

He stepped over Talby and walked out of the briefing room. Talby might not have gotten quite what was coming to him, but Castillo had been able to pick up on what really mattered, and now they had Mal again.

That was the benefit of being able to control the beast inside.

LAURA WOKE UP, FACES SKITTERING
out of her waking mind and back into the dark of her suspect memory.

This was the third motel room she’d awakened in in as many days, the whole lot of them blurring together with their stiff, starched sheets and their almost-clean carpets, their ancient HDs, and the sad views of their own parking lots. From town to town they’d gone, once stopping to check out a vast, echoing, and abandoned warehouse that, a year ago, had one day been filled to the prefab walls with cutting-edge uplink equipment and the next day utterly empty; another day stopping to speak with a highway patrolman who, two and a half years ago, stopped a speeding car only to find that neither the driver nor the car had any record in any data bank the officer had access to. What did the officer remember about this two and a half years on? Exactly, to the word, what had been written in his report. It was all she could do to drag Aaron away from that one, raging and spitting, before they had both been hauled into county lockup.

They extended their search, moving from location to location, Aaron becoming more and more sullen with each stop that yielded nothing; his face darkening, his responses getting shorter and harsher.

She pulled herself up in the bed this morning, wanting to scour it all from her head with a hot shower. She stripped off the T-shirt she had slept in and stepped under the water, as hot as she could stand it.

She stood under the burning water until she could look at the day ahead of her without a haze clogging her vision. She stepped out into the steaming bathroom and started drying her black, black hair, staring in the fogged mirror. Her blue eyes were bright enough that they were practically the only thing she could make out in the humid reflection.

Naked, with the towel wrapped around her head, she stood trapped in reverie. She was waiting for a revelation, driving from one spot to the next, waiting to recognize something, for a memory to burst free from the murk in her brain and shudder her body with its power, and until then all she could do was hold her smile and keep pushing Aaron. Nothing here? On to the next. And the next. And the next. And who was there for her? Who kept pushing her?

With a small surge of anger, she spun to the door and whipped it open, prepared to storm out and snatch up her underwear with hard-edged fortitude. But when the door opened, a figure was coming quickly to its feet and stumbling back, and Laura screeched and then, again much to her surprise, instead of leaping back and throwing the door closed, she jumped forward with her fists balled up and her knees bent.

“I didn’t—” Aaron said. “I wasn’t—” For an instant, the little boy inside him was apparent on his face, a child caught in the hot spotlight of guilt. But he quickly recovered himself, flattening his features and standing up with rigid dignity.

Laura pulled the towel from her hair and swathed herself in it, glaring in astonishment.

“You were looking at me from under the door,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I was trying to determine who you were.”

“Are you kidding me? This is
my
room. Who the hell else would I be?”

“I knocked and no one answered, so, given the situation we’re in, I let myself in. When I heard noise in the bathroom, it seemed prudent to make sure it wasn’t an intruder before I announced myself.”

Laura studied the boy with the acne and the nervous fingers.

“You,” she said, “are completely full of shit. How did you even get in here?” She pictured him, staring down with a contemptuous smile at the cellock holding her door closed. “Forget it. Get out.”

“Laura, it’s very important that you believe me. I think trust is of paramount—”

“Shut it. Get out. See if you can figure out a way to see through the wall while I get dressed, why don’t you?” She put a firm hand on his shoulder and steered him out and shut the door in his scowling face.

They drove from the motel in silence, but for Aaron’s calling directions out in monosyllables.
At least,
she thought,
the embarrassment shut him up.
There was no grumbling, no complaining, no masked pleas for assurance.
Is the next one going to be it? Are we going to find something soon?

“I want to make it clear,” he broke into the hypnotic hum of the road around them, “that I was not spying on you in the shower. You must admit it’s not unlikely that if we’re on the right track, someone might be following us.”

“You know,” she said, not taking her eyes from the road, “you are digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole. The mature thing to do at this point would just be to admit what you did and take it like a man.”

That was low, and she knew it, giving him trouble on the basis of his age, which he worked so hard to camouflage. Sure enough, his face reddened, and he started sputtering a diatribe about being on his own for long enough to know exactly what the hell the “mature” thing to do was and if there were anything to admit, he would have done it.

The green and white of a passing sign snatched her attention.
POPE SPRINGS
—2
MILES
.

“Pope Springs,” she said quietly.

“What?” Aaron was brought up short, still in the middle of his ridiculous, teetering defense. “Yes. That’s our next stop. A few miles on the other side of it, actually.”

“What happened there?”

He paused, collecting the information.

“A house on top of a hill burned down there a little more than a year ago. An anonymous buyer had spent a great deal of money appointing it with all sorts of electronics, but then never moved in. According to the data I have, the place was empty at the time it burned down, though it was reported by the local fire department that when they arrived, a number of people were already on hand, milling about, watching the place burn.”

Laura made no comment.

“Why are you asking?” Aaron prodded. “Do you remember something about this?”

Did she? Not really. Actually, it seemed like less to go on than Aaron’s usual, with just the anonymous owner filling it with tech gear to flag it. In truth, all she had really done was notice the sign.

“No,” she said. “Just wondering.”

“Are you sure, Laura? Because—”

“Aaron. It’s nothing.”

They came into Pope Springs and found it to be nearly indistinguishable from the other dwindling little towns they’d passed through over the last few days. The lonely cell and wireless store seemed to be the only functioning business on the desolate main street, which had a different name than the main street in the last town and the one before that, but the paint on the forlorn houses was peeling in the same way; the rust on the cars, the absence of visible inhabitants, all the same, another little town that was giving up on itself. Laura brought them through it and up the hill on the other side.

“Here,” Aaron directed. She pulled off the side of the road, and they got out.

The empty spot still resonated with the absence of a house that so clearly belonged there. The grassy plain formed a nearly perfect circle, with a patch of light forest growing along a gently sloping hill back down toward town. Set back toward the far end of the lot was a slight rise, the solid foundation of what was once a house, but now, over it, a flat bed of hard gray stones were packed down to bury the ruins of what had once stood. The field, to Laura’s eyes, was haunted by the house, which was no longer there, a view yearning for completion.

“Well,” Aaron said, coming up beside her at the edge of the grass, “do you recognize it?”

She took the space in with eyes desperate for something to nourish her memory.

“No.”

No point lying about it just to keep Aaron’s spirits up. She did have the feeling about the house, but that was just her sense of the place, not her memory of it. There was something else, though, something stirring in her belly.

“Is there a record of ownership?” she asked, just to head off his seething response.

“The electronic trail is like a dark alleyway leading back on itself. It’s owned by a limited liability corporation that is a subsidiary of a real estate development fund owned by another LLC, which is, in turn, owned by the first LLC.” Aaron shook his head in simultaneous frustration and admiration. “That’s one of the reasons I had it flagged in the first place. For all the good it does us,” he ended bitterly, turning back to the car, so he could slam the door hard and stew about this waste of time for the rest of the day.

But Laura kept looking at the empty space, at nothing. The feeling she woke up with, of having lost something crucial to her, of something she needed deeply having gone from the world, was swelling in her as she looked at this lot. She didn’t recognize this place in the normal way, but it connected to something in her. Maybe that was the best she was going to get.

“Wait,” she said. “I’ve got a feeling about this place.”

“A feeling?” Aaron had stopped himself behind her. “What does that mean?”

“If only there was some way to get beneath the rocks, maybe we could find something in the ruins.”

“It’s possible to get beneath the rocks, Laura, but I’m not going to waste time and resources on a drawn-out operation just because some overwrought girl woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”

“This spot is making me feel something that none of the others did. Maybe that’s the best we’re going to do, Mike. So instead of thinking up new ways to—”

“Okay.” Aaron was nodding his head slowly and looking at her carefully, like she had misapplied makeup into a gross smear across her face. “I’ll get it started.”

“What? Why did you change your mind so quickly?”

“You just called me ‘Mike.’”

“What? Who’s Mike?”

“I don’t know, and I’m betting you don’t know, either.”

“I don’t,” Laura said shakily.

“So, something is happening in your brain. The brain doesn’t store memories in one place. There are different kinds of memory, and you don’t have a visual one of this place for some reason, but you may have an emotional one. That will have to do for now.”

He walked out toward the bed of stones, subvocalizing on his cellpatch with God only knew who, leaving Laura alone.

“Mike,” she said softly, trying it out on her tongue. “Mike.”

In less than thirty minutes, a red pickup pulled up behind Laura’s car. A door with the words
SLATE CONTRACTING
stenciled in fading white letters opened, and a man stepped out. Thick with undefined muscle through his torso and limbs and a crew cut of ash-gray hair, he stood and took in the two figures waiting for him. Unsure of whom to address, the boy who was clearly far too young or the girl who was clearly far too much of a girl, he held his spot until Aaron addressed him.

“Mr. Slate,” he said, offering his hand, which disappeared, after an uncertain moment, into Slate’s rough paw. “I’m Aaron Argaven. We spoke on the cell.”

“That was you. Okay. What are we looking at?”

“As I said, I want those rocks cleared.”

“Yeah,” Slate said. “I put those down myself. You know there’s nothing under there but charred wood. House burned down ’bout a year and a half ago.”

“One year, four months, actually. I want it cleared. By tomorrow.”

“By
tomorrow?
” Slate’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. “That’s not going to be possible. I’d have to call in both my crews to do something like this in twenty-four hours, and we’d have to work around the clock, which we don’t do. Plus, I’ve got people on another job right now. We wouldn’t even be able to start until next week. Then there’s the matter of permits from the town.”

“What’s your standard fee?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to look it over. I could write you up an estimate by tomorrow.”

“Go look it over, Mr. Slate. Decide on a fee, then multiply it by ten, and have the job done by tomorrow.”

Slate looked up at Laura for some measure of sanity, which she couldn’t supply. Aaron’s manner was somewhat short but completely professional. If it hadn’t been coming from a fourteen-year-old, there was no doubt Slate would be jumping for joy.

“You think maybe I should speak to your father or someone?” Slate suggested casually.

“Is money only good if it comes from somebody’s parent?”

“Nooo.” Slate drew the syllable out. “But that’s a steep offer you’re making, and I, ah, haven’t seen any money.”