"You don't often see these," Lucas said, leading the small procession carrying Jake's body. Sulman was there, and Jonathon, and Helen, and Macy too. Anna hadn't spoken to them much, but knew from their downcast eyes that she scared them. She always had, perhaps, but more so now.
"Farsan used to talk to me about Islam," Lucas went on, drifting largely, touching the stone grave markers. They weren't stone slabs, but small, carved columns, unadorned by names or any decoration other than small, intricate floral patterns. "The beauty of it, the peace of it. He laughed when I asked about Sunday school. Jake would have liked him."
Nobody said anything about Jake not being a Muslim. Sulman was, and the burial here had been his idea. "There is one hydrogen line," he'd said. "One God. I would be proud to count Jake amongst my brothers."
Sulman directed them now. They found a quiet corner and dug the grave in turns. Jake's body lay in repose on the gurney, so still and perfect in the hot sun. Lucas dug the most. Anna watched. If Ravi were there, he would be talking to the others with a kind of natural grace, understanding how to bridge the divide between them in a way that Anna could not do. He had taught her how to laugh. Jake too. Without them in her life, she was a serious, quiet person, not easily disposed to chatting, laughing, enjoying the company of others.
She'd never thought of it before.
They laid Jake in the ground and took it in turns to pour soil over him. Sulman said words and sang a beautiful song in Arabic. Lucas took his turn, reciting a few well-worn prayers. Once it might have been Witzgenstein leading such a ceremony, but of course Witzgenstein was dead.
Anna hadn't told the others that. She didn't tell them about Amo, or what he was doing at Olan Harrison's shield. She didn't tell them about Lara, only days away from the Huangshan range. She didn't tell them about the army of angels Olan Harrison had sent, because they couldn't help with that.
They had their own battles to fight. The angels fell to her.
Lucas stood at her side as various people from Istanbul bunker filed past, offering their condolences. Most of them barely seemed to know where they were, or what they were doing. There'd been so much loss, so much suffering, and they were in the fog of shock still. What did one more death mean? Still, they dropped handfuls of baked red soil into the grave, until the hole became a mound. Macy found a half-carved stone in a corner and laid it atop the pile.
Jake was gone.
The convoy rumbled on.
"He was the best of us," Lucas said, standing at his lab desk, hands on his papers and notes, but seeing nothing.
Anna stood across from him now. She could see at a glance how his research had advanced. Charts on the walls depicted the efforts the bunkers had already made on his behalf. In the last three days seven of the rumbling bunker convoys had made contact, after she'd stood their shields up. They had allowed themselves to be directed by Lucas in their research; now all of them were finally in harmony, aiming for a cure.
Only hours remained.
"The baby's really gone, isn't it?" she asked him.
He looked up. For a moment he wasn't really there, lost in ruminations of his own loss. Then his face drooped, and his eyes focused on her.
"Yes." For a moment he seemed to not know what to say. "I'm sorry, Anna. We ran scans while you were unconscious. I can't see any sign of it."
There was the sympathy again. She smiled back.
"It's all right. I felt it go in the middle of a jump, spreading into me. It changed me. I'm different, now. A part of Ravi's in me, along with the type ones. We're still a family, in a way."
She smiled.
Lucas tried to smile too. Perhaps the thought horrified him. She could see him trying to spare some sympathy for her. "That's a good way to think of it."
"It's the truth. It's what I need from you, now. How many researchers can you command?"
Lucas looked at her blankly for a moment, making the mental adjustment. Then he looked over at Sulman; also sat quietly at his desk, staring at an electron microscope image of a T4 contorting under chemical alteration.
Sulman looked back. "Maybe ten," he said.
"Ten thousand," Lucas said. "Seven bunkers are on the road." He rifled through his notes. "All of them highly skilled. We have chemical engineers, bio-physicists, neuro-programmers, experts in all manner of fields." He looked up, his eyes watery. "What do you need?"
"The cure's in my DNA," she said. "The baby put it there. Now I need you to get it out."
The frail look in Lucas' eyes shivered; stroked by breezes of excitement and guilt. The cure was everything he'd worked toward for years, but if they'd had the cure just a little earlier, Jake might have been saved. So many people might have been saved.
But they hadn't had it then. Anna looked into his eyes and willed him to be strong. This was the man who'd injected himself with a dozen rounds of experimental solutions beneath the totalitarian regime of Salle Coram, where his very existence as a gay man was a crime, where he'd writhed in pain alone on a dirty mattress in the hidden bowels of Maine bunker, all in the hope of a cure. He could do it again now.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe I'm not the right person. I didn't find it when-"
"It's different now," Anna said firmly, cutting him off, "and it can only be you. There isn't time for anyone else. In a few hours I'll be gone. At the very least, the secret in my cells will be changed. I need you to take it now, and crack the code. From there you'll take it to the people. Spread the cure, Lucas. It's what you're meant to do."
Now tired tears welled in his eyes. He didn't question her. He could see her fate was far out of his hands, and perhaps he saw that his own was, too. It showed him that he wasn't weak, wasn't ready to lie down and die. It wasn't only for Farsan that he'd made the cure. It wasn't only for Jake that he'd worked so hard ever since. There were bigger things at play.
The tears retreated. He blinked, and now he was ready again. He'd find the strength because he had to. "How long do we have?"
Anna reached into the line. She felt for the angels, jumping still. Less than a day had passed since she first felt them, in the ocean off American Samoa. They would land in hours, and after that....
"Less than a day. Maybe twelve hours. Then it'll be too late."
He frowned. "Twelve hours?"
She smiled. The pieces were coming into place. She embraced her fate.
"There's going to be big changes. There'll be such work to do. But for now, make me a cure, Lucas. Do it for Jake."
His eyes hardened. He nodded. "For Jake."
17. BOATS
She let the convoy leave without her.
Nobody waved. Everyone had their role, now. After taking their samples, Lucas and Sulman didn't even see her flash away, out onto the road behind them.
It was a suburb; a road layered with sand and spidered with cracks where tough tufts of weed rose through the dirty concrete like lines of beige magma. The low buildings here were shabby, disheveled, abandoned for so long and wearing their coats of dust like old hobos, layer upon layer. She walked over to a bookshop and touched her finger to the glass, drawing a simple message in the grime of years.
Anna & Ravi 4eva
Pressing her face to the glass, she looked through the grit to an interior that had gone untouched for fourteen years. Bookshelves stood in higgledy, leaning ranks, like drunks propping each other up on the way home. The wall behind the cash desk was plastered with pictures of people; famous authors, perhaps, scrawled with Arabic signatures. She didn't recognize any of them. This was just another world she'd never known.
A frozen floater lay on the floor by the door.
Anna squatted on the hot sidewalk, peering in at its wasted peanut face, the white eyes forever locked in an open position. This too was a person. She couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, young or old. For fourteen years this soul had beaten at this door, looking for escape, and nobody had come to help.
"I'm here now," Anna whispered.
O
f course she knew it was a lie, just another in a long procession she'd told to reach this point. Destruction was her specialty, not creation, and so too would this be a kind of destruction. Once upon a time she'd had the luxury of freeing the ocean and guiding them to the coast, but she'd long since grown out of that. Every person was a tool to her now, a weapon to be used.
She jumped and landed only inches away, across the glass and inside the dry heat of the bookshop, stippled with gritty shadows cast through the window, washed in the smell of slowly baking books. She laid her hand on the floater's head and listened to the glacial processes ticking away inside.
A grandmother.
She'd been waiting for her granddaughter to come pick up a new storybook, something fresh out of Ankara. All the memories were there still, though gummed together in a soggy ball. Anna knew that if she asked, this frail trace of the woman would resist. She wouldn't want to be a warrior. She wouldn't want to die for a cause she didn't understand.
So Anna didn't ask.
She filled the woman's mind with memories of her granddaughter. She was in danger. She needed to be protected. Then she flicked a new switch inside, and the woman's pale eyes sputtered to light. Her body shifted. She rose to her feet.
"I'm sorry," Anna said, then wrenched the line.
If the woman could have screamed, she would have. The transformation was sudden, irreversible and violent, as the T4 wrought destructive patterns throughout her like a key turning in a lock. Taut gray skin turned black, white strips peeled away like hanging bandages, and a staticky fog fumed out as her telomeres became radioactive sand clocks ticking down to some inevitable eruption.
A leper. She flickered and fritzed like an electric spark, her mind bobbing on the raw vibration of the line.
Anna surveyed the work. It was good. It was only the beginning.
She reached out and felt for all the dull, flat pebbles of quieted floaters around her. There were hundreds of them, thousands, spread throughout Istanbul. Every office, every bedroom, every basement apartment held them. In churches and mosques alike they lay, in spaces that had served as their prisons ever since the first call went out on the line. They hadn't been able to respond then, hadn't been able to throw their bodies on the piles of the demons far to the east, hadn't been able to fulfill their purpose and had instead languished in solitary captivity.
Now they would rise.
Anna jumped to them in a blur; through dark bedrooms, echoey halls, silent conference centers carpeted with the dead, in prisons, schools, shopping malls, bars and restaurants. To each she gave a touch like she was handing down a holy blessing, and brought them back, and used their memories against them, and added them to her army.
Hundreds soon jumped at her back. Thousands.
Once in New York she'd freed the ocean locked in Yankee Stadium, and led them away to their fate. This was the same. It was worse. It was necessary.
Hours ticked by, marked by the steady stitch of angels falling toward her, metronomic meteors arcing across the sky.
One last jump, and she stood beside the Blue Mosque on the Golden Horn, in front of the pools where she and Ravi had last been together, before the world changed. The water had mostly evaporated away, but their two boats still remained, on their sides where they'd left them. Their hulls nestled close together; her racer catamaran and Ravi's souped-up Powerboat. He'd lost the race and pulled her into the water. They'd kissed, and it had just been another kiss, on just another day, except none of that was really true.
It had been the last kiss. There would never come another, not like that. Beyond that moment lay only hurt and sadness. At the end of the line Ravi lay bleeding in a cornfield. Now his DNA hummed within her, and that was the closest they'd get to having a child together.
She looked at the boats. Her army of lepers shivered and flashed behind her.
"Goodbye," she said, for the last time, not just to Ravi but to a dream of a life she wouldn't now lead. Then she turned to her army and gave them her orders. The angels were almost there.
She jumped to meet them.
INTERLUDE 6
The voices spoke louder than ever.
It had been many years since they'd ruled him. In those early days after the Lazarus pull, torn from moment to moment like a soul splintered through a twisting kaleidoscope, it had been chaos. Clinging to any one moment of reality; to words, to visions, to facts or a clear concept of time, had been impossible.
Olan Harrison had glided through the world in a new body that hadn't felt like his own. Little Olan had spoken in his ear. He was guided by the artificial intelligence of his own self, and in time that guidance had come to drown out the rest of the voices.
But they were never truly gone. He rarely slept, because they spoke loudest in his dreams. At night he felt the severed ends of himself reaching up like banshees, calling for their constituent parts lost upon the line.
Standing now in his suite at the top of the Redoubt, moments after Rachel Heron had left with her battalion of angels, he shuddered at the fresh profusion of voices in his mind, proliferating after his battle with the Last Mayor
They were not his own.
He'd never known who they belonged to. Many of them were in a constant state of agony. Many were perpetually lost, panicked, afraid, alone. He'd been one with them for the longest time, barely kept afloat by the fractured spine of Little Olan, cobbled together from impressions like a badly stacked communications network.
He'd come to think of the line like a satellite array, with the voices as stray signals broadcasting foreign messages into his mind. Little Olan had seen it and offered prescriptions. Through long, meditative training he had coaxed the pieces of the real Olan Harrison to the center, bringing if not peace, then a kind of stability. The things done to him while he'd floated on the line for a year were nightmares, so he did everything he could to sever them from himself. For a time after returning to the Redoubt, that meant cutting pieces of himself away, those that were too tightly intertwined with the voices to separate, but that in turn had led to clarity.
He was still Olan Harrison, but sleeker, like a shark. There was little room for emotion. He rarely laughed, rarely enjoyed himself except in the exercise of power. Severing the revolution at the root had given him the most overwhelming rush of well-being. To reduce others to helplessness made his own suffering infinitely more bearable.
It became a habit, and a crutch.
Punishment worked, and across the years his powers only grew. The voices whispered secrets and he listened, allowing them their time in the light in return. They taught him how to control others, how to jump across vast distances, how to project force out of nothing, and they taught him the one truth that mattered above all others.
He couldn't leave the Redoubt.
He'd tried it once, a jump outside the shield, and he'd almost died. Away from his people in the Redoubt, his mind had cracked back into pieces. Without their salving presence around him, reflecting back the core Olan Harrison he'd chosen to be, he was flung back into a tumultuous cauldron of voices.
He'd raved. He'd cut gouges into his thigh with his fingernails. Rachel Heron found him banging his head against the shoulder of a type one in the body hills, and jumped with him back to the Redoubt.
For the failing of seeing him so weak, he'd determined to one day Lazarus her too, so she would know how it felt. Yet since then he'd only grown more dependent on her. Using her mind as a substitute for his own made his days pass by simply. Her voice was consistent. She, alone, seemed to be a real person, and sending her up and bringing her back down would ruin that.
The rest of them were ants doing just as he said, with no will of their own. He used them like a man drank water. Only Rachel Heron saw him, knew him, and that helped. Tomorrow, he told himself with every passing day. One more day, and she'll be gone.
Standing at the glass, he ran his fingers over the scabbed wound in his throat. If anything, the pain helped to center him. H
e'd passed through phases where he'd punctuated his meditation with self-flagellation. He'd brought the ants in to administer punishments to him. The skin of his new, perfect body was graced with a thousand marks of torture, from burns, breaks, and lash marks to excisions of skin, tiny implanted needles that pricked with every movement, extreme body modification and mutilation.
It all helped.
There were no other drives. Whatever he'd cut out of himself had left only this; power and pain.
Finally snaring James While had been a panacea. To look into that man's eyes and see the same agony ticking away inside him, the same fragmentation, had given him strength. To know that James While was finally locked away without a voice, without any means to escape his captivity, had given him a kind of joy.
And losing him? He'd feigned ignorance for Rachel Heron, but there was nothing he didn't see. He'd felt James While slip away under her touch, and accepted it. Her mission now was an essential one. And there were always costs.
It came down to what was right. He'd been many things in his time; a billionaire businessman, an innovative philanthropist, but in truth he'd always tried to do what was right. He'd wanted to help humankind, to be good.
Perhaps he was still good. There were always costs. It had taken the colonization, enslavement, and ultimate destruction of millions of native peoples around the world to build the modern world he'd come to straddle. Eggs were always broken. The omelet was worth it.
Now he moved about his lush space calmly, fetching a fresh shirt, fresh slacks. Before a full-length mirror he looked at his body. Every scar, every distending of his flesh, every mark rooted him in this time and place. He traced his fingers over them and shivered.
This was the new Olan Harrison. The voices were nothing.
He pushed them down.
Last Mayor (Book 9): The Light Page 14
