Dynara drains the rest of her wine and mulls over my words. With a shrug, she replies, “Correct.”
“And the people on the street outside the club, the ones the dragon attacked—they were fake, too?”
“Yep.”
“Which can only mean that you knew Brennian was going to create that dream at Valkyrie ahead of time. Else you wouldn’t have been able to produce all those constructs the second the dream breached into reality.”
“Uh-huh.”
I bang my fists on the table, and Dynara’s empty wine glass overturns, rolls off the edge, and lands with a soft thump on the carpet, a thin crack near its lip. “And the only way you could have known that dream was going to happen before it did is if you were following Brennian’s every move. From the get-go.” A hard breath clogs up my throat, and I have to hack it out before the final accusation spills from my lips like mercury, smooth and poisonous. “You knew it was him. The whole damn time. You knew right after he killed Victor Manson. You figured out the entire story, didn’t you? Regina Williams and all.”
“Yes.” She bends over and retrieves the fallen wine glass, sets it directly between us on the table. The cracked lip faces me.
“So the entire time, you were, what, dragging me around through some fucked-up mind game? Why the hell would you lie to me like that, make me think there was an unknown murderer terrorizing my city, put my life at risk again and again? What the hell did all that get you?”
A violent flick of a manicured finger, and the wine glass falls toward me, shatters on the tabletop, glass stained red. Dynara leans back into her plush chair and says, in a tone more appropriate for a day at the beach, “Proof that you weren’t in on it.”
“I…huh?” And in the span of three-point-four seconds, a brand new puzzle box dumps itself into my brain, and all the pieces come together, interlock, to form a picture I can’t believe I didn’t think to seek out before now. “You thought I was working with Brennian. You thought I was part of this conspiracy. Me?”
“You act like it’s a stretch.” She turns her face toward the window wall to my left, just as a news copter zooms overtop a nearby banking tower. “When, in fact, it made perfect sense. Think about it from my perspective, Adem. Six weeks ago, I catch a murder perpetrated by an IBI director, whom I know for a fact was not an echo maker the last time I saw him. Meaning that he somehow acquired powers underneath my nose—and, as I quickly discovered, from my own stash of Somnexolene. So, one, I had a man with great political sway and Level Six clearance imbued with the power to make dreams come to life, and who obviously intended to use that power to wreak havoc. And, two, I had a mole somewhere in my confidence that had stolen the most important thing I have ever held in my possession.
“Naturally, I was a bit on edge. Especially since I couldn’t just bring Brennian down. If I captured him, he’d never talk, not a man who’d been through that much interrogation defense training. And if I killed him, it’d shut the door to the answers permanently. So I had to play the Manson case in a way that revealed the mole inside EDPA and whoever else it was Brennian was working with. Because no way in hell did he learn that much about echo-making on his own.” Her hand slips into her jacket pocket and removes a pack of raspberry-flavored cigarettes. Her favorite. She opens the pack and takes a slim stick out, tucking it between her lips.
“And what better place to start rooting out Brennian’s allies than his social circle?” From her other pocket emerges a lighter, and she lights the cigarette in one hard click. “And who do I find in Brennian’s social circle but…?”
“Me?” My gut twists into a tight knot, but this time, it has nothing to do with my boss’s vicious blow. “You found me.”
“Yes. You. Adem Adamend. A most curious person. A genius in every regard, and yet, by his own choice, stuck at a bottom rung in the IBI instead of off in academia, making great scientific discoveries, or in some cushy corporate development job, raking in the cash.” She sucks in a thick drag and breathes out violet smoke. “You were, from the beginning, a suspect, Adem. Because you were the only person publicly related to Brennian who didn’t seem quite right—everyone else I looked into appeared mundane. Normal jobs. Normal histories. Normal abilities. And then there was Adem Adamend, sticking out like a sore thumb, wallowing in the mud with those far beneath him. And why? I asked myself. Why would he be there if it didn’t have something to do with Brennian?”
Two fingers pluck the cigarette from her lips and tap the ash into the remains of the wine glass. “So I looked into your past, and that was even more damning. Turned out Adem Adamend was an echo maker, clear as day, and killed his mother with a level three when he was only six. A level three that EDPA did not catch. A level three that EDPA did not even see.”
“What do you mean?” Dizziness assaults my head, and I have to grip the sides of my chair to keep myself from tumbling to the floor. “The Nexus sees all dreams, regardless of whether EDPA gets there in time to infiltrate them.”
“Exactly. But we didn’t see yours. I checked the Nexus logs for the date your mother died. Ours and New York’s and even Charleston’s, down in the Carolina region. I checked every Nexus log on the goddamn East Coast, just to make sure there wasn’t some glitch in our system that night.
“And there wasn’t. Your echo was invisible. All of your echoes are invisible. A fact we discovered after we started monitoring your powers for your training regimen.”
The nausea reaches a peak, and I have to press my hand to my mouth to stop myself from projectile vomiting the acid frothing in my stomach. “Why?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.” She grabs the cigarette with her lips and rolls it to the corner of her mouth. “But I suspect whatever factor makes your echoes undetectable is also what makes you capable of crossing when sedated and accidentally overlapping breaches. There’s something different about your powers, either in development or origin. And when I first realized that, I was sure you were working with Brennian.
“One hundred percent sure—that you and he and the mole and some conspiratorial system of criminals were out there, preparing to start a war of dreams. So I set up our little murder mystery game, placed myself in your path, lured you in to my web. All in an attempt to wheedle the truth out of you without setting off your allies’ alarms.”
Another violet cloud. “But I didn’t find what I was looking for in you. Not even a scrap of it. You were as ignorant to Brennian’s workings as the cashier at Larry’s Shop and Save. You weren’t a conspiratorial mastermind. You weren’t even some low-level thug. You knew nothing about echoes. Didn’t know you had powers.”
“But Brennian did. He knew I did.” My teeth sink into the sensitive skin around a knuckle, and I glance at my reflection in the window wall glass, a pale, gangly redheaded thing made even whiter by the swirling snow outside. “But Brennian was a new maker, so how could he have possibly known I was a maker unless…someone else told him. The man he was working with. Finn, perhaps. But the point is that…”
Dynara takes the cigarette from her mouth again and crushes it against the expensive antique tabletop, scorching the wood hot black. “Point is that someone out there knew you had echo powers before you did, before I did.”
A silence falls across the office, dampened only by the vicious winds beyond its walls.
I struggle to find my voice, all my thoughts in disarray. But then I catch it, a morose tone. “Answer me honestly: Is there some vast conspiracy out there, in this world right now, that led, however indirectly, to my mother’s death?”
Dynara doesn’t need to say a word to answer, but she does anyway. “Yes. Because if your powers were normal, we would have seen your level three, and we would have saved your mother before that monster in your closet tore her apart.”
The god of war and queen of lies scoots her chair back from the table and rises, fingertips stained by the ash of her cigarette. “Look, I don’t say this often, so listen up: I apologize for lying to you like
I did. But I had to be sure that you weren’t involved in whatever type of conspiracy this is shaping up to be. I’ve spent the last six weeks combing through every detail of your life, trying to find anything that hints at a connection between you and the forces Brennian was in cahoots with. Luckily, for your sake, I found nothing. As such, in time, I would have spilled the truth about Valkyrie to you, if you hadn’t figured it out on your own.”
A witty comeback fizzles out on my tongue, so I nod, slow and shaking.
In an incredible show of sympathy, Dynara rounds the table and awkwardly pats my shoulder. “Whatever you’re unwittingly wrapped up in, Adem, I will figure it out. Although I admit it won’t be entirely for you. What happened with Brennian, what happened with Lang, and now, with this Finn person still on the loose, Somnexolene and the instructions on how to use it in his repertoire—this is shaping up to be a real war, played in the shadows, until it breaches the light of day with the kind of death toll we can’t obfuscate.”
Her comforting hand grips my shoulder, hard enough to force my gaze up toward her hardened face. “On one level Adem, the practical level, I don’t care what you are or where you came from. I only care whether or not you are on my side. On a personal level, though, on your level, I do care what happened to you when you were six, what happened to your mother. I care—”
“You mean you care about finding out who created me, this fucked up thing that doesn't follow any rules. Because my ability to break your system makes you nervous. It makes you—”
She smacks me, and when my rubberized neck recovers enough to turn my head her way, her frown morphs into a murderous sneer. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I say what I mean. And don’t for a second pretend you don’t care about the origins of your powers. You care about that just as much as you care about your mother’s death. It’s a hideous itch in your brain already, isn’t it? The need to know the truth of it all, about Brennian and Lang and Finn and the impossibility of you. Because you want to know everything all the time—”
“I—”
“Don’t fucking try to deny it. It’s a poor shade on you, Adem, that lying shade of green.” Three steps backward she retreats and offers me her hand. “Conniving bitch that I might be, I am not your enemy. I have all the same questions and want all the same answers. And if you, smart boy that you are, and I, at the top of this tech tower, can just put our minds together for a fraction of a second every now and then, maybe we can actually find those answers.
“In short, stop throwing bitch fits and get with the program. There’s a potentially world-ending conspiracy in the works. It’s already killed your mother, a foolish lawyer, some students with too much ambition, my agents, IBI agents, and who knows how many other innocents. It also almost killed your best friend a few days ago.
“So how about this? Now that I know you aren’t a threat to our side, I won’t lie to you where the conspiracy concerns you. And in return, you get back on the streets and help me figure this mess out—instead of throwing tantrums in my office.”
I want to contradict this woman who wears more masks than I can count, whose emotions have been weathered to nubs of feeling by a life so violent my brain can hardly grasp the amount of blood spilled at her feet. I want to tell Dynara that I care more about my mother’s death than anything else in the world, that everything comes second to atoning for that Christmas morning, when I walked into my living room to find my mom in pieces. I want to tell the god of war that she and I are not alike, that we share nothing except a similar level of intelligence. I want to tell this immortal woman, frozen in time forevermore, that when I am dust in the ground, warmly remembered by friends I don’t yet have, she’ll be stuck here on this Earth, throwing punches, shooting guns, and staring out at the world beneath her, wondering when it will topple her tower. For good.
I want to tell Dynara she’s wrong about everything. About me. About the dream conspiracy. About herself.
But I can’t tell Dynara she’s wrong about anything.
Because she’s right.
So I shake her hand in an unspoken truce and let her help me to the door, where Murrough is still waiting, Ocom in hand, reading through a magazine. I step out of her office and let slip across the threshold a veil of false amiability, friendship and camaraderie cobbled together from the broken field of dreams beneath us. I walk, leaning on Murrough, away from the god of war, the queen of lies, the master of deception, and when she quips, “Say hi to Sir Clings-a-lot for me, will you?”
I reply, “He’s not that clingy.”
And she says, “Are we talking about the same guy?”
And I smile. “Shut up.”
And the elevator doors close before me, and the box descends as fast as it rose, and the unbearably dark kingdom of Dynara Chamberlain flies far, far away from me (for the time being).
A minute later, the elevator breaks past the illusory sky of the lobby and stops at the ground floor. Murrough, who’s been watching me in the corner of his eye since we stepped in, grunts to indicate he has something to say before I rush out of the box in a half-panicked frenzy. So, when the doors roll open, I stand immobile, trembling, back against the wall, and mutter, “Yes?”
Murrough shifts his stance in that uncomfortable way people do when they have something awkward to say. Or awkward to say at this time. “Nara told me the other day that you need some additional combat training?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, if you can get to work an hour earlier for the next few weeks, I can whip you into shape no problem. I was an army guy, way back when. I trained plenty of skinny recruits like you. I know all the tricks. I can definitely have you ready in time for the certification exams.”
“Oh, I…” I stare blankly out into the busy lobby for a moment, but a crowd of chattering scientists heading our way snaps me out of my stupor. “Okay. That’d be…great.” I check off the list of bulging muscles Murrough could use to crush me. “Just don’t break my nose? Please?”
Murrough grins and suppresses a chuckle. “I’ll try, kid.”
I exit the elevator. “Me, too.”
Chapter Twenty
Arlington is buried in half a foot of snow, all the headstones bleached white and wordless. For a quarter of an hour, I sit by myself on the icy cement seat of a low bench near the place where Whitford Brennian’s empty casket lies. Snowflakes stick to skin and hair, catch on my eyelashes, and I blink them away in time with slow, deep puffs of air. A strong, persistent wind lashes at my exposed face, chaps my lips, but my body felt numb the moment I stepped off the train six blocks away, so if the edge of frostbite is gnawing at my cheeks, I won’t know it until long after I leave. As an extra “precaution,” though, (after a seizure-like shiver contorts my limbs) I button my coat all the way and pop the collar up to my chilled ears.
Once, I check my Ocom, reading through all the official press updates about the Beltway disaster and the floodway collapse. Between Chamberlain Corporation’s charitable donations of money and manpower, the local first response emergency teams, and a little bit of muscle from the military base up near Baltimore, most of the debris has been cleared away, and all of the casualties have been accurately recorded. In total, twenty-eight people died under the dark umbrella of the Lang case. Seven were civilians. The rest were federal agents.
Boots crunch the snow behind me, and my shoulders stiffen for an instant, one hand falling to a bare thigh where my holster usually rests. But then I recognize the weight of the steps and relax. The wind masked his approach, but he’s no assassin sneaking up on me. I close the browser window on my tablet and stuff it into my coat pocket as Briggs rounds the edge of the bench, swipes the new layer of snow off the top, and sits himself next to me.
We don’t speak for some time.
Both of us stare at the white mound thirty feet away that bears the name of a man we both made the mistake of trusting. A life in service. A death in honor. The worst words a person could use to describe Whitford Brennia
n in the end. And yet, were those words absent, replaced with the truth, the real face of the man who so casually extinguished any life he deemed inconvenient—the effect on the world would be disastrous.
Federal inquiries. Boycotts. A media circus. Potentially even a riot or two. The general public would throw a fiery fit at the idea that a man in so high a position had a soul as black as starless night.
So his epitaph is a lie.
A lie to keep the peace.
A lie to keep the people comfortable.
In some ways, a lie to make us, the involved, feel more at ease. As if the truth of the case, the death and destruction, wasn’t really all that bad.
I wonder briefly if Lang and Anderson and Castile will have similar lies written on their headstones—and then I chastise myself with a hiss under my breath. Because there’s nothing to wonder. Their families will pay whatever it takes to have the most beautiful lies carved into their stones; the alternative is admitting that something, somewhere went wrong in their lives, in their upbringings. And what parent would ever risk the admission they screwed up parenting so badly that their child became a killer?
Not a single one.
So Lang and Anderson and Castile, DuPont and Stiegel, too…they’ll get their own versions of Service and Honor, their own false epitaphs about their lives stamped in stone forevermore.
Because that’s how human beings keep their “sanity” intact.
They pretend they have it, through and through, no matter the contradictions.
And—
“You know, Adamend,” says Briggs over the whipping winds, “as much as I like sitting here with you on this lovely holiday morning, I do have obligations to attend to today. So if you have something to discuss with me, as you claimed in your text, I’d appreciate it if you got the ball rolling.”
I cast a glance at Briggs’ face. Scarf-wrapped and topped with a thick, warm-looking hat, the only expression I can read emanates from his narrowed, near-black eyes. They seem to say, I know what you want to ask, but it’s not something I can answer. The only person who has a right to tell you the truth is the person it belongs to. Ric. So drop the subject for now, please, Adamend. Perhaps, in the future, Ric will tell you the truth himself.
Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2) Page 29
