Joy, fear, rage, redemption, desperation, all boiling at a feverish pitch.
There was no room for her to feel anything else, especially this close to the disruptive effect of the wall. Looking into his eyes was like looking into a kind of fire; a fire that surely hurt him just as much as it hurt her, if not more, because somehow he kept that fire inside his head.
He was watching her now, waiting and judging her silence, seeing her in the flesh for the first time, and who knew what he would try to do next? She'd watched him for so long; his ascent and descent, had even played a hand in parts of it, but none of that had prepared her for this moment, looking into his eyes and wondering if she was going to survive.
"Not home," she answered, feeling like minutes must have passed when it had probably been a few seconds at most. "But to a safe place."
He laughed again, eyes wild with what could be joy? Rage? "Safe? This place isn't safe for anyone." He looked past her, around at the body heaps, back to her eyes. "So this is the shadow SEAL. And you are Rachel Heron, of the Logchain. You're the one who betrayed James While. I've just come from his hollowed out body."
"So have I," she answered.
He laughed again, seeming genuinely happy. "You were there, then. At the super-Array."
She just nodded.
"You sucked him up. You pulled him down."
She kept her face impassive at that, though inside she was startled. Was he talking about the Lazarus protocol? There'd been nothing in James While's files about that. Neither him nor his partner Joran Helkegarde had ever figured it out, despite having all the data they'd needed for over a decade. Their minds somehow never made the final, impossible jump.
Had Amo's?
"James While is dead," she said. "I saw to that."
His eyes danced with amusement. "And is that because you loved him? Or because you didn't?"
That jolted her. How could he know anything about her relationship with James? She stifled a shudder. This man was not what she'd expected. He felt like a force of nature before her, capable of erupting at any moment, starting an inkling of fear worming its way down her spine. Maybe all her long years of preparation, the scalpel-like training Olan's powerful mind had forced her through, had not prepared her for this hurricane trapped in a human being.
"He's gone," was all she said.
Amo smiled. "And is that where I'm headed?" He shot his gaze up and made a strange sucking sound, followed by a high keening whine as he traced an invisible missile falling to earth, climaxing with a loud clap. "Up into the soup, back down to the ground?"
She studied him. Olan Harrison had sent her here, and she'd come. For twelve years Olan had given her orders, and she'd done them. She hadn't questioned them, and she didn't dare question them now, but maybe…
Amo opened cracks in her thinking that she hadn't known were there. He opened doors to a different kind of world; one where Lazarus was nothing special, and certainly nothing to build a new civilization on top of.
"You're here," she said abruptly, breaking that flow of thought. "You are welcome, if you consent to leaving your followers behind." She gestured to his army of the fallen. Every one of them was staring at her. "I will gladly escort you inside, where all your questions will be answered. We have much to teach each other, I'm sure."
He licked his lips. He scratched his chest.
"Will you crack open my ribs? Drill holes in my head?"
"That won't be necessary."
"Pull off my skin, then? James While had no skin left at all. I don't want to be given any special treatment."
She let her expression grow stern. He was mocking her again. While he was powerful and wild, he was also unruly. There was no discipline in his thinking or his speech, and Rachel Heron was disciplined if she was anything. "He did that to himself."
Amo nodded along. His eyes seemed to bounce, the pupils unfixed, his gaze seeming to take in things she couldn't see. He pointed at the two people flanking her.
"These others with you, why don't they show their faces?"
"You'll see them once you're inside."
"I see you. I know your record, Rachel. I want to know about these others. Are they like you, or are they more of my people, people who had comas, people who were immune?" His eyes narrowed. "Did you steal them from the world before the apocalypse descended? Did you drag them down off the hydrogen line?"
That was another angle she hadn't expected him to take, more confusion piling up in her head. "Come inside. Everything you want to know is there."
He grinned, but the sense of threat she felt only grew. "Do you take me for a fool, Rachel Heron?"
"No," she answered sternly. Now she felt afraid, and angry too. Had Olan Harrison known what he was sending her out to face? She felt like a bomb disarmer trying to tease apart the red and the blue wires, fingers trembling…
But fear too was an emotion, and she'd learned well how to manage it. Manipulation of the line required steely control to avoid the kind of madness Amo was now suffering from. She'd seen others who'd started down his path, channeling the line's raw power without limitation, but none so far advanced and still alive, bar Olan Harrison himself...
"I don't think you're a fool," she said. "The restrictions I've suggested are for our safety. We don't know you. We don't know what you stand for, or what you've come here for. Let us make you welcome."
Again his smile came, though the anger remained, seemingly sewn in to the joy, so no one moment with him was completely one or the other. His emotions were a blend that she couldn't understand.
"Welcome," he repeated, the mockery now dried out and bitter, turning to contempt. "In this world, after what you've done? Don't waste my time. Get your master, Rachel."
She didn't understand him for a moment, distracted while his intense gaze bored through her. Did he mean Olan? It had to be, but he shouldn't even know that Olan Harrison was alive. Yet who else could he be talking about?
"I've offered you everything I can," she said. "You are a guest here. Come in peacefully or don't come in at all."
"Everything I do, I do peacefully," he said, not breaking eye contact or missing a beat. "I whip my own people peacefully. I crack open heads in front of my own children, peacefully. I murder thousands with peace foremost in my heart, and I don't need to prove anything more to you. Now get him. Tell that wrinkled old rib-cracking bitch to come down here and face me himself, before I pull your goddamn walls down and burn you all alive."
Heron watched him. She was stunned. Pull what walls down? He couldn't possibly see the stealth shield. Could he?
"I'll wait," he said, and turned to fold in amongst his army of the fallen. It left Rachel Heron with a troubling blend of emotions fusing in her own chest; anger at Olan for sending her, fear of this mad and powerful man from the wilds, along with a strange, unbalancing unease in her middle that might have been regret.
But regret for what?
BREZNO
Anna approached the bodies jerkily, like a stop-motion figure made out of clay. She passed a woman dressed in frayed jeans and a yellow sweater with the color bleached out of it, lying on the gravel and shivering. Her skin was trapped halfway toward gray, and the light flickered on and off in her eyes, like all the others with her.
This was Amo's work.
She stumbled on a man's foot and barely caught herself. She felt bleary and drunk; the weight of so many jumps settling over her like a slow-motion avalanche, numbing her thinking. One thousand jumps was too many. Even now the weight of it deepened like a bruise.
She looked back at Peters, and the world spun. He was sprawled awkwardly on the gravel, twitching at random intervals, unconscious. The jumps had hurt him more than her. She'd known that, but she'd kept jumping.
Why?
The smell hit her.
It came on like a storm front, punching through the post-jump heaviness, and she doubled over and gagged on ropey spit. The stench of decay was suddenly overpowering, as if a swi
tch had been flipped. Looking up again, she took in new details; a tight scrum of bodies here had been mauled by wild animals. There ribs broke through a torn corduroy jacket, stained a moldering black. Dark stains surrounded another cluster where Amo's tire tracks ran, their blood and other fluids seeped into the gravel.
The sound of buzzing flies became a raucous drone. Now she saw thick clouds of them hovering like a pestilence. In Istanbul they'd burned the dead bodies before they festered. Nobody had done that here.
"I'm going in," Anna called to Peters. She remembered that much; some sense of mission. The world slopped side to side as she spun back, making her seasick. Of course Peters didn't respond. Maybe she could help him. Maybe inside…
She zigzagged ahead, taking steps that were too long, too short, like she'd forgotten how to walk. When she reached the bunker mouth she almost collapsed. The destructive power of this thing she was toying with was immense. The line. It was treacherous, and jumping through it was a risk that weighed heavier on her by the moment. But there was no time to recover now, only time to advance.
She lurched into the dark mouth of Brezno bunker. She went down stairs, rode in an elevator, walked down corridors glimpsed as if from afar. Where was she going?
The bunker's air conditioning and fans were still grumbling somewhere deep and distant. The air was clinical, with barely a hint of the burnt-out electrical stink Amo had caused when he'd sabotaged the shield. There were no corpses here either, no rot; only people caught in that half-phased place between life and becoming the ocean, carpeting the floor.
She walked amongst their shivering bodies as carefully as her stumbling feet could manage, remembering a time long-past, when she'd first worked her way along the landing in her father's house.
"Excuse me," she murmured as she went, until she found herself kneeling in a large, brightly lit hall, filled with plants and floored with soil. A farm bay? Snippets of nonsense rhyme flitted through her head, pieces of Alice on her adventures in Wonderland.
"I am not crazy," came the voice of the Cheshire Cat, "my world is just different from yours."
Now she was peering intently at a patch of dirt, within which a stark footprint was indented, crushing a tiny yellow flower. Was that her footprint? She couldn't remember. The flower's miniscule embryonic roots emerged from the upturned dirt like sad little fingers, beginning to harden in the dry air.
She found herself crying.
She wasn't supposed to be in the farm bay, was she? There'd been an idea for her coming here, but she couldn't grasp it anymore. There'd been a sense that maybe she could…
She was up and bouncing down corridors before the thought was complete. She had to take action now, even if she didn't know what it was. Her limbs felt like projections extending both far ahead and behind, like hundred-league boots spreading into the future and the past at the same time.
It made her nauseous, like her mind was splitting apart.
She blinked, and found herself in the blackened control room, beside the access port to the ruined shield. Yes, this. The shield was long-gone after Amo blew it up, but there was an echo of it on the hydrogen line still. Perhaps, this? With her eyes closed she let her mind flow into the line, instinctively pouring herself around the shield's echo like a mold of clay around the hard contours of a key.
Like this?
She'd been around shields before. Each one of them had been a low-resolution buzz, from the day she and Amo walked into Maine to the taste of the dead shields all the way up to Istanbul, though that low resolution now burst with a new depth.
The data was all there, like a T4 virus wriggling beneath the electron microscope, suddenly revealed. Perhaps the jumps had finally removed the scales from her eyes, and now she truly saw.
Yes.
Back outside in the hot sun she stood in the midst of the swarming flies and phasing gray bodies. Her lepers milled far away, as if they knew something terrible was going to happen. They were right. There had to be sacrifices; Amo had never shirked from that and she couldn't, either.
She summoned one of the lepers and it fizzed into existence beside her, lowering its head like a servant. Perhaps once it had been a man. She laid her hands on its crackling black skull and listened to the chaos fuming inside. Its thoughts were a dark looking glass of the line, unpredictable and out of control.
It was time for a little order.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, and pushed her mind inside it. The leper jerked and tried to flash away, but she held it still and drove deeper. It tried to scream, and the looking glass of its thoughts warped. From inside its mind she saw reflections of herself as if in a fun house mirror; here she was sixteen, standing in a madwoman's yacht with her finger in a rifle barrel, waiting for the blast that would blow off her hand. Here she was a little girl snuggled close to her father's chest as they made their long trek across the United States. Here she stood with Ravi bleeding in her arms in the cornfield, unable to keep him safe.
Memories became thread. Thought became fabric to stitch the parts together. She unfurled the mold of the dead shield's key like a spinnaker sail, and twisted the leper's mind to fit. Parts broke and re-aligned. Parts bloated and shrank as she squeezed. Somewhere in the midst her own belly blew up like a balloon, and –
"You see?" said Ravi, leaning over her as her stomach swelled, "if you drink when it says drink, this is what you get."
Something snapped like a bowsprit cable under too much pressure, and she reeled away from the leper as the thing in her belly cracked like an egg, spilling warm and smothering yolk across her body. The heat of it was everywhere, weighing her down like a tidal wave of the line, and beneath it she began to drown. She strained up toward the surface, barely crested the waves just long enough to see the first of the Brezno survivors stirring awake.
Their eyes were not white. Their skin was not gray. They looked around in surprise as a brand new shield rippled out from the transformed leper in their midst.
Then she sank back into the dark.
GAP
Anna woke with the sense of emptiness.
The weight was mostly gone from her head, but the tingle of that strange warmth spreading over her body was still there. She reached down to touch her belly, and felt the absence. Everything had just changed. Was this somehow Joran Helkegarde's plan?
She opened her eyes and looked up at low fronds of pine trees. There was blue sky above, and the sound of human bustle nearby. She rolled onto her elbow, and saw the Brezno bunker, with people tumbling in and out of its open mouth like frenzied ants. Each was carrying their personal burden of many-colored backpacks, large chunks of blocky equipment, gas canisters and wooden ration crates, gallon water jugs and bundles of bedding. Children ran along with them, some crying, most deadly intent. Everyone had pale faces, and thinned cheeks, and the same haunted look in their eyes.
Anna blinked. It didn't seem real, like waking from a dream to find the dream still continuing; people alive and living, even if they were in the midst of another exodus. These people hadn't been above ground for half a generation, and now here they were. Some of these children had never seen the true light of day.
It was too much at once to register, and she caught herself simply counting the numbers. There was no time to be happy for these survivors, not with the threat of sudden bombardment hanging over all of their heads. The shadow SEAL had already destroyed Istanbul. As soon as they saw the shield, more bombs would fall.
Her eyes searched the scene for Peters. He'd fallen there, sprawled at the edge, but he wasn't there now. Her leper was, stood in the scattered midst of bodies like a silent guardian. Its skin seemed to be a deeper black than before, a bottomless ebony that sucked her gaze in, while around it bloomed a curious fuzz in the air that felt like static made solid…
She broke off the contact and scanned the crowd. People were stopping in their tracks as they fled, entranced by the leper, while others moved amongst them and physically turned their heads awa
y, guiding them on. Even to her it was hypnotic, exuding an effect that swelled on the line and became this new shield, banishing the T4's infectious trigger.
The shadow SEAL would see that.
She pushed herself to her feet and hurried toward the bunker mouth, her stride growing even. Her remaining ten lepers were clustered to the side, hemmed in by vehicles. Caged like that they seemed rather forlorn, like tigers with their teeth and claws pulled, no longer fritzing and jumping at random.
"Hey," Anna said, grabbing a passing figure, a tall man in a blue smock. "What's happening?"
He looked at her like she was crazy. "Exodus protocol three," he said. "Where have you been?"
He tried to pull away and she tugged back, forcing him to face her again.
"Where's Peters? Have you seen Peters?"
"Get off me," he snapped, and yanked free. This time Anna let him go. The panic in his head was at fever pitch, swelling out onto the line. She could feel how close he'd come to striking her; not out of any real anger, more out of fear.
She reached out to the others and felt the buffeting tide of terror washing through them. They'd just woken up and been tossed into this. That's all they knew for certain. Exodus protocol three.
She let the flow of them carry her, past the thinned-out delta of the dead and around the curve of the mountain, to a second rank of doors in the rock where vehicles were rumbling out even now; trucks, passenger vans, RVs.
People were loading their gear and climbing on board. There were stacks of goods to be carried on, and also heaps of possessions left behind, and in the middle of it was Peters, waving on each vehicle. Coordinator of the evacuation. Anna smiled. He didn't look mad anymore, rather he seemed in total control. Logistics had always been his forte.
Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light Page 5
