Those That Wake 02: What We Become (28 page)

Her time in this service was spent, by virtue of the very few employees who traveled in her circle, in the company of the man who had come to collect her in the restaurant that day. Orin Roarke was possessed of a dispassionate air that she had come to rely on both practically and, to her profound astonishment, emotionally.

Thus, the irony was not lost on her, as she looked into the face of the man she loved and spoke frankly.

“I’m afraid of him.”

“That’s how he works,” Roarke replied from the other side of her desk, his face that comforting mask of stoicism. Beneath the steel-gray crew cut, the face was bruised and puffy, and the soldier—as she had come to think of him—had a cast and sling on his right arm.

“It’s different.” For no reason she could quite define, she was nearly whispering.

“The difference would be hard to deny,” Roarke allowed. “He’s walking. Hell, he’s practically hopping. He’s like a teenager in an old man disguise now.”

“I don’t even mean the physical differences. It’s the way he looks at things now, at us. We’re not even like tools anymore.” She knew she was speaking in the unfamiliar terms of instinct and emotion, a world Roarke had no truck with. “Set aside his health. Have you noticed any changes?”

Roarke looked at her just that one telltale moment too long. It had been the ultimate undoing of many she had faced.

“What?” she pleaded in a harsh whisper. “Tell me.”

“The boy, Mal,” Roarke’s voice had lost its clipped military tone. “He was nearly dead, his body was falling apart. And then . . . it just wasn’t. He beat me down. I knocked one of his teeth out a few days ago, and he had it back. The things that are happening here; they’re not . . .
human
things.”

She could scarcely believe it when the next words came out of her mouth, in a lower voice even than before, a voice vibrating with urgency and terror.

“We could leave now,” she said. “Get out and never look back.”

“You will come to me now.” It was the Old Man’s vibrant hiss of a voice, though he was nowhere apparent. Kliest heard it, like a snake trapped in your eardrum, and when she looked at Roarke, it was clear that he had heard it, too.

Roarke looked at her, his soldier’s face holding strong, but his eyes breaking open for just a moment, asking her which way to step.

She looked back, words caught in her throat. The Old Man was everywhere now, in every hallway, in every room, in their
heads
. This business they had started—God is dead, who will replace him?—she had carried out the details as she always had, without question. Only now was it dawning on her that the consequences might fall just as heavily on her as the rest of the world.

She stood up, smoothed her jacket and skirt, and led Roarke out of her office, down the short hall, and to the double doors she had stood at with a sense of wicked anticipation so many times over the last few years.

She stepped in, and where, for her, it had been like entering the treasure-packed cavern of a dying monarch, it was now like stepping into the lair of a beast.

The Old Man stood perfectly still in the center of the room, facing away from them, hands clasped behind his back. The dim red light deepened the crevices in his flesh, exaggerating the skeletal sharpness of his fingers. Even standing there, though, his pernicious vitality pulsated like a heart.

To the side, the figure of Castillo stood sentry, enveloped in shadow. His chest rose and fell, laboring with heavy breaths, his gleaming eyes whipping from figure to figure. He was a bull trapped in a pen.

“I am whole now,” the Old Man said with his back to her. She couldn’t see his thin, cracking lips move, but the voice, quiet and vibrant, reverberated inside her skull. “And, whole, I am ready to begin my ascension.” He turned and his eyes flickered, and he seemed to notice Roarke for the first time. “First things first.”

The Old Man stepped forward, and Roarke immediately sidestepped, interposing his body between Arielle and the approaching monster.

The Old Man didn’t break stride. He moved forward with what in a much younger man would have to be called a spring in his step. The Old Man stopped before Roarke. Directly in front of her, Roarke’s body twitched, a gentle flutter as a body might experience fading off to sleep. But for the fact that coursing adrenaline was hyperfocusing all her senses, she wouldn’t have even noticed it.

“When you see them, when you can reach out and actually touch them, minds are so delicately balanced, so precarious. It’s such a simple matter to submerge the man”—he nodded at Castillo’s hulking, animal form—”and untether the beast. Or to push even farther, until the mind is gone altogether. This is empty now”—the Old Man gestured at Roarke. “Come, see.” He extended a hand, and she stepped forward, compelled by dread, until she could see Roarke’s face.

But it was not Roarke’s face anymore, not really a face at all. While its structure of bone and flesh remained the same, its animation, its life, was gone. Whatever could be said to actually
be
Roarke was gone from it, as clear as the difference between a mannequin and a real human being.

She stifled a shriek, choked it down with all the dispassion she had accumulated over the course of her life. That much she could still do.

“Consolidation is a gratifying pursuit.” He regarded her with a measure of excitement. “You will mobilize the MCT. Things will be very different soon.”

She pressed her fingernails into her palms so hard that she felt the hot trickle of blood. She could not bring her eyes up to look at him.

“Don’t fret, Arielle. Your work has not gone unappreciated. There is a reward for you.”

“This body still functions.” It was Roarke speaking, his lips moving, but it was the Old Man’s voice coming out of him. “If the last of your duties are performed to your consistently high standard, I will let you have Roarke’s body. It can be with you, talk to you. Touch you.”

She saw it in her head, perhaps because he put it there: Roarke, reaching out, caressing her cheek, her neck with his strong hands. But the nerves, the feeling, led into a festering, monstrous brain, and beyond the face, the Old Man looked out from Roarke’s eyes.

She could hold back her shriek no longer.

FOR AN IMPOSSIBLY LONG STRETCH
, the depth of realization in Laura’s eyes held the room in a motionless, soundless amber of indecision. The world spun around them, flying off on its own way as the room remained frozen, trapped.

“Laura,” Mal finally said, two syllables laced with such anguish that they brought a knife of ice slicing through Rose’s heart.

Laura, for her part, remembered. Everything the Librarian had told her, everything since Mike’s sacrifice, since they had run out of the crumbling edifice that had been Man in Suit, Remak’s reappearance as a bizarre, ghostly observer. She remembered the future she had made, sweated and cried and bled to build with Mal. She remembered it all not as a giant tidal wave held back by a dam that had suddenly crashed in, but merely as a sleeper remembers the world when she awakens, a simple reemergence. She wasn’t thinking about it, and then she was. It was as though Mal had simply been in another room and she had been concentrating on something else, and then Mal walked back in and, oh, there was Mal.

She remembered everything up to the point where Mal had laid a gentle kiss on her lips as she closed her eyes and they went to sleep and she woke up in her parents’ home, with scrambled eggs and tofu bacon cooking and an application in to Vassar after taking a year off between high school and college.

Some malicious surgeon had grafted a mockery of a life onto her real one and given her a lobotomy to accommodate it. The anger swelled in her once again, even as the thumping of her heart pushed the realization into her brain: Here was her
real
life. Here was Mal.

Mal.

Her lips twitched, unable to quite hold back the smile that the solemn moment wanted to forbid. Her feet strained forward, her arms fought to come into an embrace. But it wasn’t just Mal. It was Mal with a girl at his shoulder. Aaron, of course, finally defused it.

“Mal, right? Aaron Argaven. I understand you and your girlfriend here screwed things up badly, and now Laura and I need to fix it.”

Mal’s dark eyes lit on him, confused, then returned to Laura.

“The Old Man,” she said. “We think he’s after Remak, to learn how he manipulates minds.”

Mal simply looked back at her, his expression still, but she knew him well enough to see the wild currents passing behind his eyes.

“How do you know about that?” the girl next to Mal asked in a small voice. She was a small girl, and it was her bearing as much as her stature that made her small: voice, gangling limbs, shoulders and torso bent in such a way to suggest a fetal curve.

“I’m Laura,” Laura said to her. “What’s your name?”

“Rose,” she said in a quarter-voice from behind her hair. “I’m Rose.”

“Rose, we learned all of that from the Librarian. The Librarian is—”

Rose was nodding.

“I know who the Librarian is,” she said. Was this what had happened? Laura had demanded her own memory be erased because Mal had found someone else and the pain was too much to bear?

“That man Remak,” Rose said. “He sent Mal into the Old Man’s tower, to find out what he was trying to do.”

“And?” Aaron was used to the instant gratification of his dataflow. He pressed for information the only way he knew how: impatiently.

“He’s going to make a big move starting here, in the city. The MCT is a part of it,” Mal said. “He wants control. That’s all he’s ever been about, and now he wants more of it.
All
of it.”

“Through Remak,” Laura said. “Through his access to the neuropleth.”

“Neuropleth.” Aaron turned it over in his mouth. “‘Many minds’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Remak’s body was converted into neurological impulses,” Laura said as if reading from an advanced biology textbook without missing a beat; or as if she were quoting Remak from memory. “The neuropleth was where he interfaced with other people’s nervous systems.”

“You remember,” Mal said.

“I remember. Now I remember,” Laura said, and she saw Rose flinch as she did.

“Our time running from the Old Man. What Remak became, what the neuropleth is. How Remak helped us. And didn’t help us.”

“Remak saved Mal,” Rose said, struggling to look Laura in the eyes. “But he’s gone. Really gone. For good.”

How did she feel about that? Considering that it was Remak who had obliterated her memory and created the false life that she had finally escaped, she felt only the dullest ember of grief for him.

“I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.” Laura was surprised to hear herself say it.

“He saved Mal,” Rose said, her voice finding the slightest edge of commitment.

“He stole my memories,” Laura said, turning on her sharply.

“But he gave you your life back.” Rose was clutching at Mal’s hand with angry propriety.

“We
are
our memories,” Laura said, anger crackling in her voice.

“So Remak is gone,” Aaron commented archly, derailing the argument. “And so is this ability he had to control minds. So the Old Man can’t get it, and we’re safe. Relatively speaking.”

The room was silent in tension. Rose and Mal did not seem prepared to offer comfort regarding the state of their safety.

“The Old Man has it already, doesn’t he?” Aaron said, the world, as usual, conforming to his lowest expectations.

“Yes,” Mal confirmed.

“So what does—”

“Wait.” Laura cut him off. “How did he get it?”

“The same way he gets everything,” Mal said. “He took it.”

“Yes,” Laura said, staring at Rose, her instinct—or perhaps just her sense of resentment—kicking in. “But took it from whom? Wasn’t Remak gone?”

“Yes,” Mal said. “But in his interactions with Rose and me, he left a . . . I don’t know, a doorway to it in our heads.”

“So the Old Man took it from you?”

Mal’s eyes were resolutely not shifting toward Rose.

“No,” he said, finally.

“Then why do you keep answering?”

“Laura.” Aaron had sidled closer to her. “What difference does it—”

“Why do you keep answering, Mal?” Laura pressed.
Why are you protecting her?

“Rose told me,” Mal said.

So, with the evidence clearly supporting her now, Laura turned full on to Rose.

“You gave it to him,” Laura said. “Is that what happened?”

“I . . . I didn’t
give
it to him.” Rose looked as though she were about to buckle. Her hands were clenched, her arms trembling to hug her own body. “He
took
it.”

“How does someone take a doorway out of your head?”

Rose’s eyes flickered manically beneath the strands of hair, from Laura, to Mal, to the floor, back and forth, back and forth.

“How?”

“You weren’t there,” Rose said hotly. She had clearly meant to shout it at Laura, but it came out as a hiss. “Remak died to save Mal, and I let that diseased thing go into my head and rip out what he wanted to save Mal.” She was angry but didn’t know how to make it come out of her, like an actress so overcome with stage fright, she couldn’t own the part. “We did what we had to, to save Mal. Where were you, Laura? Where were you?”

Laura’s offense instantly dwindled. Her eyes went straight to Mal.
Where was I, Mal? Not where you needed me. Goddamn Remak. God
damn
him.

“So what does it mean, exactly?” Aaron cut into the tension with characteristic obliviousness. “The Old Man can do what Remak could?”

“The Old Man’s mind is . . . I don’t know . . . bigger than Remak’s was, more powerful,” Mal said. “He can control people without inhabiting them the way Remak could. And he can draw strength from the minds in the neuropleth into his own body. He’s only had access to it for about half an hour, but he can already do that. He hasn’t mastered it yet. I think the world would look very different now if he had.”

“Screwed things up is right,” Aaron said. “Looks like we got here just in time. Laura, we’re going to need to—”