Those That Wake 02: What We Become (31 page)

The towers seemed to swallow up her field of vision, rendering even the gleaming carapace of the dome all but invisible to her. She could see Mal’s entire body straining toward the central tower, in the shadow of which he had nearly died. He looked as if he wanted to lift his fists and duke it out with the very structure itself.

She could almost feel the Old Man here: the air seemed thick with the sense of something prodding, probing, an itch just beneath her senses, bugs crawling beneath her skin.

Why was she not terrified? She was walking to her doom with the full intention of never returning. Did she not believe she was really going to die? Or was it, in fact, that she had somehow always been headed for this, for sacrifice? In the most mundane of miracles, her parents had made a strong child, and the child had made a strong woman, a woman who would become what she needed to in order to fight.

Mal’s strength was that he would never bend, never change. But hers was that she could.

And this, this bastion of humanity, this beneficent doomsday machine, was what she needed to be now. What everyone needed her to be.

The tower sheared up, higher and higher as they approached it, Laura leading the way.

A HEAVY AND UNWELCOME QUIET
had fallen in the apartment, too. Rose sat, hunkered on her bed, her knees hugged to her chest, her brow knit in a deep concentration that had no room for Aaron.

Aaron had tried to chat at her in a futile effort to gain a response. He preferred a hum around him, a crackle of motion and sound.

He was responsible for expediting Laura’s entrance to the tower, which required slicing their system and placing false orders, which themselves required code signatures, which required him to slice even deeper down. This was busy work to him, a mindless chore of running probable algorithms based on their code styles until he found one that allowed him to slip through. He had been told he was a genius at this sort of work. His father had once even brought him in for a shareholder demonstration, a sort of PR event about the limitless potential of Argaven leadership. But the truth was that Aaron’s genius was far beyond this stuff; it lacked challenge. It was the mental equivalent of twiddling his thumbs, and it did not eat nearly enough of his concentration to shut out the burden of solitude around him.

So he went to look out the window, to see some motion, some life. As it turned out, with the bars placed inside the window, he could not get his face close enough to the surface to have a look down there. He could see only across to another shining, featureless façade. It struck him only then how like a prison this place was, and he wondered what the people trapped living in these boxes did with the knowledge that they were being treated as cattle. Or, worse yet, did they not even know? Did they simply
feel
it, and were their lives, in some way, unconsciously guided by this feeling?

He patched into the MCT’s visual security net, looking through the eyes of various security cameras for the life and motion he craved. The streets, though, were weirdly empty, with only scurrying shadows at the edges of view and giant, rumbling MCT vehicles lumbering slowly along the avenues. Even the wondrous flow of information—the ones and zeroes of binary code that created the music of Aaron’s world—was plodding in an unprecedented funk, slowed in some kind of sympathetic fugue with the human world.

He was not getting what he wanted, and he was struck with a pang of realization: that all of this equipment was suddenly, epically unsatisfactory to his needs. Because what he wanted, what he really needed, was Laura. Just to tell him to shut it or to scold him for being so monomaniacal or to put her hand on his arm. But none of that was ever going to happen again, because she would soon be quite dead and would leave Aaron with a hole that was even emptier than the one she had filled to begin with.

Goddamn her.

He spun on Rose as though he were going to take out his frustration on her frail and yielding emotions. But the moment he locked her in his sights, when the words were welling up, there was a hurried pounding on the door.

Rose lurched off the bed, clutched at the door, and yanked it open—assuming, no doubt, that it was Mal.

Instead, waiting on the other side was a tall, slim woman so perfectly honed in the line and balance of her sharp features and the tailoring of her sharp suit that she seemed to have been machined into existence, molded and refined from a flawless alloy. Her blond hair was in a tight bun, and the perfect silver dot of her cellpatch gleamed even under the dull light offered in this dreary place. Her eyes were hidden behind cellenses, and her face was so smooth and unlined that it was impossible to tell what age she could be, or even what decade of her life she was in. Her poise, framed in the doorway, was well controlled, giving nothing away.

Rose, whose poise was quite the opposite, took a stumbling step back at the alien figure in her midst.

“I need to speak to Mal Jericho right now,” the woman said in a voice that chimed like crystal ice.

“He’s not here,” Aaron answered when Rose remained silent. “Who are you, exactly?” As he asked, he sent a proximity code and found that her cellpatch security was tighter than the security of both the Lazarus Towers and the MCT.

Cracks began to form in her poise.

“I
need
to speak to Mal Jericho. Do you— Wait. Are you . . .” She held her question in a moment longer, clearly not believing. “Are you Aaron Argaven? How are you . . . What are you doing here?”

Knowing that she knew of him and the way she reacted to his presence there revealed certain things about her: the line of work she was in, her level in the hierarchy respective to Aaron’s lineage. This knowledge pumped confidence into Aaron’s voice.

“Look, don’t dither in the hallway,” he said. “Come in and explain yourself, and then we’ll see about answering your question.”

Her head jerked about with shock that she was even still in the hallway, and she stepped into the apartment, distaste for the uncouthness of her journey nipping at her heels.

“Your name?” he asked, shutting the door behind her.

“It doesn’t— My name is Arielle Kliest.” Her voice was becoming shriller and her delicate, sculpturesque fingers with their gleaming jewel-like nails were fluttering in agitation. “I work for the Old Man. I’ve been his right hand for years. But he’s gone over the— No. He’s just gone. It’s not even him anymore. Or it’s more him than it ever was. He’s going to tear us down. He’s going to tear everything down. Mal Jericho is the only one who can stop him.”

“How’s that exactly?” Aaron maintained his own poise, not because he was immune to the effect of her words, but because after a lifetime of privilege, he knew how you acted in front of a menial.

“The Old Man has fused with a—a—a thing. Mal is the only person who knows what it is, I think, or knows how to get it out of him.”

“And what gives you—”

“Listen,” she said, and were she not pressing down on it with all her control, her voice would have been a shriek instead of a hiss. “There’s no time. Someone’s been sent after me. You need to tell me where Mal is right now.”

With impossible punctuality, as if by merely giving it the shape of words made it true, the doom that had followed Arielle Kliest from the Lazarus Towers bore down upon them.

The door did not bother with a knock this time but was instead flung open with such force that one of the hinges audibly cracked. The shape of a man shattered the precarious safe haven of the room. His form was low and wide, like a bull. His face, though, was not altogether a man’s. It was missing something inexpressible, something no civilized face should have. Shadows seemed to gather unnaturally at the eyes.

To her credit, Arielle Kliest regained her poise and stared her fate in its inhuman face.

THERE WAS NO MOTION AROUND
the base of the central tower. A stray car chugged out dirty smoke from its exhaust, abandoned in the street. Laura plunged ahead, pressing toward the main gate of the central tower, Mal pushing after her, before an MCT squad turned a corner and saw them.

A small group stood before the sprawling courtyard that was the main entrance to the central tower, two men in black and gray jumpsuits and a man in a charcoal suit.

Their lenses followed her approach like automatons, like cameras that never stopped tracking you.

They came to the gated entryway of the courtyard, and the man in the suit stepped forward. He was of indeterminate age, his hair was styled in a generic wave, his eyes were hidden by cellenses, and his face was a thing of placid neutrality.

“Ms. Westlake, Mr. Jericho?” the man said. “This way, if you please.” He tripped the cellock, and the gate swung open. He motioned into the courtyard and fell in beside Laura as she entered, Mal following behind. The uniformed men, both carrying weapons in holsters at their belts, flanked them.

The man in the suit guided them silently through the courtyard’s characterless benches and concrete urns of plastic plants and past the fountain with a stone bird appearing to rise, as if resurrected, from the running water.

They entered the climate-controlled expanse of lobby, whose vast tiled reaches echoed with their footsteps. Guards were stationed at doorways and elevators, but none of them moved, and only a few suited men walked from one passage to the next, their eyes stale and their faces musty with apathy, despite the Armageddon about to fall on all of them.

The man took them through passages that wound behind offices and finally came to a stop at an elevator, the doors waiting open for them. He motioned them in, but Laura stood, staring at its mirrored insides.

“Orders came down just half an hour ago to take you two up to the very top,” he encouraged, offering a plastic smile by way of further invitation.

Thank you, Aaron,
she thought, not in fact all that grateful at the moment.

She entered, and Mal and the suited man stepped in behind her, though the guards did not. The man slid a card into a slot on the button panel, and the top light glowed softly. The door closed, and they moved upward.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” the man said quietly, his voice hesitant if not his expression. “What’s up there, exactly?”

“Sorry?” Laura said, shaken from her own thoughts.

“On top,” the man said. “Who’s up there?”

“I’m sorry,” Laura said. “You don’t know who you work for?”

The man tilted his head in mild surprise at this.

“Certainly I do. I work for the Lazarus Corporation.”

“Yes, but that’s not a person; that’s a corporation. You don’t know who owns it, who’s in charge of it?”

The man shook his head, a child confronted with an indecipherable geometric proof.

“I don’t actually work for a person,” he said, in a tone that suggested he was the one making sense. “I work for Lazarus. The corporation is its own entity, you understand. I was just wondering who signed the bills and such.”

Laura nodded. She understood perfectly. He was nothing more or less than his function, just a man in a suit.

“Just a greedy old man,” she said, “with a swelled head.”

The door slid open.

“Just around to the stairway and up two flights,” the man said. When she hesitated, watching him, he added, “I’m not allowed to go any farther.”

She took a final look at him and tugged the Mets cap on her head snug, a totem of her past. The she and Mal walked out onto the white landing, the door closed, and they were alone.

“He’s just above us,” Mal said. “This is how I got in before.”

“Do you think he knows that we’re here?”

“Maybe. If he could get into my head, he would have already. It’s like with the Idea before, there are some brains that aren’t open to him. That’s why he’s killing all those people, isn’t it? But even if he knew we were coming, I don’t think he would care.”

She looked across the white landing, toward the stairs, but before she took a step, Mal reclaimed the lead. He led them up two white sets of stairs and found a white door waiting, slightly ajar. There was a slot for a card, a camera above. Obviously, you would normally need clearance to come through, though Aaron apparently had hacked all the way to the very top of the monster’s lair.

They went into a hallway done in deep browns, from the rich wood of the walls to the plush carpet beneath. Intermittently along the wall was a spotlighted painting or a niche containing an ancient stone bust of an ominous, cracking marble head gazing down at them balefully.

There was no doubt at all which direction they needed to go. The world throbbed with a heavy, powerful heartbeat, though whether it was moving through the hallway or just through her own head, Laura couldn’t say.

At the end of the hall, there was a set of double doors. She felt the heat from beyond, the choking heaviness of something that reeked with age.

“He’s in there,” Mal said needlessly. Expectation hung in the air between them, something waiting to be said, a last opportunity.

“Let’s do this, then,” Laura told him tersely.

“We have to make”—Mal paused unconsciously —“physical contact.”

Laura held out her hand. He looked at it somberly for just an instant, then reached out and took it.

She looked straight into his eyes, unwilling to be intimidated by the weight of what he had done to her, unwilling to give him that power. The eyes looked back at her, in the midst of that young-old face, filled with longing.

Suddenly, she felt that longing, too; she was in those eyes, looking out at herself from the other side. She was in that brain and
in
that longing.

Through his eyes, she did not see the same Laura she saw every day in the mirror. She saw herself through the prism of Mal’s longing. One facet glowed with his awe of her: her ability to feel so openly and earnestly, her connection to the world and the people around her, her willingness to give herself to them. Another facet shone with her fragility, which bred in Mal the fierce, indestructible need to protect her, to make sure her open and earnest heart was never,
never
tarnished or tainted or bruised, because, to him, it was the only good, true thing in the entire world. Another facet flickered with the fiery red of her anger and the deep gray of his crushing sense of guilt over what he had done and his flailing lack of understanding over why it had not been the right thing to do. A final facet reflected her as an opportunity, a last chance for happiness. It was not Mal’s own happiness, she realized, but any happiness. To him, she was the hope that real happiness of any sort could exist in the world.