by Wen Spencer
Shaw ignored him, putting the blade up against the base of the broken pinkie.
"Wait." Atticus caught Shaw's arm. "Parity kept a boat on the Charles River. Ice took it out this morning. That's what I was doing in Cambridge. And Ascii was taking Ukiah to Salem, before I got him out of the trunk."
Shaw grunted and released Daggit. The big man cradled his broken hand, glaring at the Pack. "If you're lying to us, Daggit, we will hunt you down and cut out your liver and feed it to you."
As Stein dragged Daggit away, Atticus's mind was filled with images of the Pack waging war with the cult, leaving a trail of stolen boats and dead humans floating in their wake. "I'll set up a raid with Zheng. We'll get Ukiah back. Just give me twelve hours."
"No," Shaw growled.
"What about the Ontongard? Why do you think they were in Cambridge? They were down at the marina. They're hunting the cult. If you go after the cult, you'll be caught between them."
"All the more reason for us to go, not you and Zheng."
"You can keep the Ontongard busy. That's what you were made for, right? To fight the Ontongard."
Shaw snarled as an answer.
"There's the problem of finding Hex's Gets," Grant said. "We know where the cult is."
"If the cult really have been killing and burning these Gets," Atticus said, "then a profile of the victims from the cult's burn sites probably will give last known addresses and such. All you have to do is get close, right? Then you can feel them? My team's already working on the information."
Consensus moved through the Pack, with hard knots of resistance coming from the Dog Warriors, who knew Ukiah best.
"Fine, twelve hours," Shaw said. "Make it noon tomorrow."
***
"Well?" Ru greeted him when he pulled the Jaguar in beside the Explorer.
Atticus could feel the Pack following behind him, waiting for the information he'd promised. What the hell was he thinking? "We have to pull rabbits out of our ass to save my brother." He explained the situation as quickly as he could. "They think Ukiah is too moral to cooperate with the cult."
"Possibly. He's actually quite sweet."
Atticus frowned at Ru. "Based on what? We barely got to talk to him."
"I ran into him this morning. Things got so crazy, I forgot to mention it." Ru hesitated, looking troubled. "But there's something wrong with him."
"Which is he? Sweet or screwed in the head?"
"I gave him a street test. He failed so bad."
"Street test" was what Ru called his method of seeing how street-smart a kid was. A lot of kids who crossed their paths were already hardened criminals. Others, though, were good kids about to be swallowed down; those were the ones they tried to steer toward havens, getting them off the street before they could be eaten.
"So he's naive," Atticus grumbled.
"I've never seen a kid over the age of ten let me go this far. He's a complete babe in the woods. He let me do the fucking penlight in the eyes, Atty."
Atticus found himself thinking of the sturdy naked toddler he'd protected in the forest as a wolf. He tried to ignore it. Ukiah probably only looked younger because of the odd way they aged. "If he's like me, then he's perfect. He could be just pretending to get on your good side."
"Are you sure? Think about when he first woke up in the bathroom. That wasn't an act. It was like he's feral."
Yes, that was true. Even the Pack with their wolf taint didn't seem half as wild.
I left him in the woods— how long did it take for someone to find him?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Temple of New Reason Commune
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Ukiah woke with something warm and furry gently touching his cheek. He opened his eyes to find a yellow tabby kitten sitting beside him, patting at his face. Its eyes seemed oversize for its large head, and all its fur was puffed out in a wild, disorganized manner. It was a tiny scarecrow version of a cat.
"You're a lot nicer than what I'd expected to wake up to." Ukiah heaved himself up to a sitting position, which made the room spin.
Said room was ten foot square and made of cinder-block walls, a steel door, and no windows. Except for the bare foam pad he sat on, a plastic twin food-and-water dish for the kitten, and a yet unused litter box, the room was empty. Light came from single bare bulb. The air was stale, as if circulation was limited. "Yeah, this is more what I expected."
The kitten clambered over his bare knees, needle-sharp claws coming out sporadically as it needed more traction. Ukiah petted it absently, generating a steady rough-engine purr, as he searched for Pack presence.
" Rennie? Bear? Hellena?" he silently called, and then, truly desperate, " Atticus?"
But there was no one there to reach. He was utterly alone in this desolate corner of the world.
Things could be worse, he reminded himself. He was at least alive and not a prisoner of the Ontongard—only a cult of homicidal lunatics.
"In circumstances like this," he told the kitten, "you have to keep things in perspective."
The cult had stripped him out of his soaked clothes and dressed him only in a pair of dark flannel boxers. If his situation weren't so dire, he'd mourn the loss of his black tracking shirt and favorite blue jeans. Maybe the cultists were just washing his clothes. His body reported massive bruising and demanded food. Closing his eyes and shutting out the kitten's furry warmth, he could sense the pounding of the surf in ceaseless rhythm and the heaviness of air that he'd come to associate with Massachusetts. How far from the coast did you have to get to escape those effects?
The kitten, which had been licking his thumb, decided to chew on it instead with tiny sharp teeth.
"Ow, ow, ow, stop that!" Ukiah jerked back his hand and checked to see if he was bleeding. Even a small amount of his blood could transform the kitten to a hybrid of himself. "And we don't need that on top of everything, now, do we?"
Outside, footsteps came quietly up to the door. The walker was wearing something soft-soled, like tennis shoes. Ukiah breathed deep, expecting to catch the person's scent, but the stale air reminded him that the room was close to airtight; there wouldn't be advance warning by that means.
Thus he was mildly off balance when a slot at eye level on the door slid open, revealing Ice's steady gaze.
Did Ice know that Ukiah had been fighting with Core when he'd been killed? Did he blame Ukiah for his lover's death? Did he hate Ukiah?
"They say eyes are the windows of the soul," Ice whispered after several minutes of silent study, echoing Ru's comment. Knowingly? Unknowingly? Ice's eyes were the color of the winter sky, a blue paled nearly to white. If Ukiah was seeing Ice's soul, it was a cold and emotionless thing. "I'd been so busy looking at the lost fount, the spoiled plans, the fleeing time, and Core's desire that I missed you completely. If I had just looked,I'd have seen that you were not human, and avoided all this."
What was "this"? Ukiah was afraid to ask.
"The question is," Ice continued, "what exactly are you?"
Ice seemed to want an answer.
"I'm hungry," Ukiah said. "And I need to pee."
"We left you a litter box, water, and food."
"That?" Ukiah pointed to the kitten's food to clarify that they were referring to the same thing. Yes, Ice meant the cat food. "I'm not eating that."
"What, it's not good enough for you?"
"If I eat it, what would the kitten eat?"
"Schrцdinger Five? He's food too."
It took a moment for Ukiah to realize he meant the kitten. "I'm not eating him!"
"Perhaps if you get hungry enough, you will."
The view slot slid closed.
***
Ukiah used the litter box, and was surprised at how well it absorbed the smell of urine. Afterward, he distracted his empty stomach by playing with Schrцdinger. What was the point, he wondered, of kidnapping him if the cult only planned to starve him to death?
He'd been awake for approximate
ly four hours when someone came furtively up to the door. Ukiah felt half-blind, unable to guess who was on the other side. The slot slid open, letting in a male's scent. The eyes looking in were dark brown; they glanced first to the kitten in Ukiah's lap and then rose to meet his gaze.
"Are you still hungry?" the man whispered.
"I'm starving," Ukiah said truthfully.
"Shhhhh." The man turned his head, showing that his hair was dark brown, straight, and cropped tight around his ears, making them seem too large for his head. The cultist looked down the hall for a minute, apparently trying to judge whether their conversation was being overheard. "I have something you can eat," he whispered once he was convinced that it was safe. He poked a candy bar in through the narrow slot and jiggled it.
The smell of chocolate pulled Ukiah across the room to snatch the candy bar quickly before the cultist could change his mind.
"Thank you," Ukiah mumbled out of habit around the warm, rich hit of complex carbohydrates. It was a stupid thing to say, he realized, considering the situation.
"I'm Mouse," the cultist whispered.
"Why are you giving this to me?"
"I wanted to ask you a question."
"What?" Ukiah asked, leery of answering any of their questions. He'd die before he gave up Kittanning or allowed the cult near his moms.
"Is Joachim Wolf correct in his theory of holon principles?"
Ukiah paused in chewing, confounded. "Hmmm?"
"Well, he points out that people living in a two-dimensional world would perceive a sphere passing through their plane of existence as a circle that grows larger and shrinks. And that if a number of cylinders were scattered onto their dimensions, they couldn't perceive that those lying on their sides—appearing as rods—were the same objects as those standing upright—thus seeming to be circles."
"Yeah," Ukiah said, meaning he understood.
"So if a four-dimensional creature intersected its hand into their plane," Mouse illustrated with his fingertips and the slot, "the two-dimensional inhabitants would see the fingers as separate beings and not as a unified whole."
Ukiah stuck to an "uh-huh."
"So it's reasonable to correlate that humans are in essence all members of an ьber-being that we can't perceive, yet is immanently in us. Just as flocks of birds fly together because of the ьber-being of birds, and schools of fish swim together because of the ьber-being of fish, so do humans follow lines of thinking when there is no apparent means of communication. The same idea occurs to individuals who aren't exposed to the same materials or line of thought—as if there's an ether-space that we share."
Mouse said this with the fire of someone who considered himself correct, but then squelched the fire with, "Right?"
"I suppose that's how it would seem," Ukiah said carefully.
"Well, it would explain why the Fallen all seem to be one creature. They are, in essence, evil intersecting our plane of existence—one creature, appearing as many—yet, when you look closely, you can recognize each piece as part of the same whole."
Since Mouse was right and wrong, Ukiah decided to stick with saying he was completely right. "Yeah."
"Wow," Mouse whispered. "Can you touch me?"
From his scent, Ukiah recognized him now as one of the cultists on the boat. Surely they'd come in contact several times, but apparently Mouse wanted something much more focused.
Why was it that as individuals the cultists seemed, by and large, good people, yet as a whole the cult was ruthless and deadly? Was there something to this ьber-being theory, where the cultists had been massed together into something more dangerous than any one alone would have been? Ukiah extended his fingers into the slot and touched Mouse's hand resting on the sill beyond.
"Thank you," Mouse breathed. He eased the slot closed with obvious reluctance and scurried away.
***
Mouse proved to be the first in a series of odd conversations. A pale-eyed woman by the name of Ether came whispering questions about string theory, offering up a sausage wrapped in a pancake. Luckily ancient memories from the Pack held information of how the universe worked from civilizations that had greater knowledge than Earth.
The third cultist was a green-eyed man called Link, who wanted to know if his father, a soldier, was in heaven. The light dawned on Ukiah: The cultists, suddenly finding themselves in possession of an angel, wanted to tap his holy knowledge.
"Yes" seemed the best answer to give Link.
"Even though the commandment is: 'Thou shalt not kill'?"
"A father gives his children rules, so they can know 'good' from 'bad,' but he also forgives them when they do wrong, because he knows that it's part of growing up. What child can be perfect?"
Link gave him a pack of gum as a treat. Ukiah rationed himself to one, crinkling up the silver wrapper to make a cat toy for Schrцdinger.
***
Ukiah recognized Ice's stride when he returned. He got to his feet, wondering what would happen now.
Ice opened the door this time and gazed at Ukiah with an odd, uncertain look. While Ice didn't point it at Ukiah, he carried a stun baton. The kitten, Schrцdinger Five, darted about their feet, blissfully unaware.
"We only suspected that you were an angel, but you know, you don't really look . . . holy." Ice swept his gaze down over Ukiah, and shrugged. "Perhaps the Mormons are right."
"How do you know . . ." It felt wrong to claim he was angelic, so Ukiah let the question trail off.
"Demons are usually easy to spot," Ice explained. "They all hold their bodies the same. It's like one person wearing different skins. They shuffle around like automatons." Ice slowly circled Ukiah. "But you . . . you've got that wild-animal grace, so we didn't spot you. And then there's the matter of the Blissfire—you could pour a bag over a demon and it might as well be water. You reacted."
"No, it doesn't work on them," Ukiah observed truthfully.
"And when you capture a demon, it's like a rabid dog. There's no reasoning with a demon, and certainly you can't intimidate it."
And the cult had done both with him.
"So when we caught you and took you to Eden Court, we thought you were just a human, guarding over the nephilim." Ice shook his head. "We'd only dug into your past deep enough to find your name and address. Something made me double-check our information, and there it was, like handwriting on the wall—in June you'd been shot dead."
"You didn't sound sure that I was an angel before."
"The cat was the last test."
"Schrцdinger?" Ukiah glanced down at the small tuft of fur currently chewing on Ice's shoelaces.
"You put a living animal in with a demon, and it's dead in minutes." Ice picked up the kitten and examined it. "Demons can't stand to have life near them." Ice handed Ukiah the kitten. "Usually they'll eat the cat."
Schrцdinger Five, as in, numbers one through four had already been killed.
"Come," Ice said. "We'll find you something to eat."
Ice led Ukiah down a hallway lined with steel doors. Ukiah eyed them, wondering what else the cult had hidden behind them. The Ae? If nothing good came of this mess, then at least he had a much better chance of finding and destroying the Ae before the cult could use them.
"Where are we?" Ukiah asked.
"This is our ultimate haven," Ice said. "We call it Sanctuary."
They went up a flight of stairs and through another steel door into a large and surprisingly elegant kitchen. Natural stones formed the exterior walls. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over roiling surf, revealing that the building sat on a bluff next to the Atlantic. A dozen cultists were gathered in the kitchen, working on a meal. Ukiah recognized Mouse and Link from talking to them. Some of the cultists he recognized from Eden Court, their names gleaned from conversations there: Meta, Ray, Cursor, Qwerty, and Boolean. The other five Ukiah didn't know.
Ether entered the room carrying a bright yellow bottle of laundry detergent and a stack of folded clothing. "Link,
you said you needed a buoy for the new lobster pot? I emptied the last of this out into a quart jar and"—she saw Ukiah and went shy—"rinsed it well."
"Thank you." Link took the empty bottle. "Cool, neon yellow. That will be easy to see."
"Here." Ether held out the clothing to Ukiah, blushing.
"Thank you," Ukiah said out of habit, and found that while the clothes were his, they no longer felt right; the seawater and harsh detergent had washed away everything familiar.
"You can . . ." Ether started to say something but then, glancing to Ice, fell silent.
She had been about to offer him privacy, Ukiah guessed, but Ice had stopped her. Angel or not, Ice still wasn't about to trust him. Putting the kitten down, Ukiah dressed, aware that the cultists watched him, some with awe, others with guarded suspicion. He had the package of gum tucked into his waistband. As he took the pack out, Ice stopped him long enough to see what he had in his hand. The cult leader gave Link a hard look, but let Ukiah pocket the gum.
Like Atticus's beach house, Sanctuary was an open, sprawling home. From where Ukiah stood, he could see into a living room with a vaulted, rough-timbered ceiling and a dining room that could seat twelve people without squeezing. Like the kitchen, the windows of both rooms looked out over the ocean.
He was zipping up his pants when the realization hit him. "We're on an island!"
"Yes." Ice watched him with the cold blue eyes.
Ukiah went out the kitchen door to a flagstone patio. The stone house had been built on the highest point of the low-slung island, probably sometime in the eighteen-hundreds. Ukiah could see that from the north to the south points, the island was a mile long and a quarter of that distance from east to west. Grass and low shrubs made up most of the vegetation—less than a dozen pine trees dotted the island. The only creature moving seemed to be a solitary seagull riding a stiff wind overhead; its cry echoed his inward cry of dismay.
A thin veil of fog hazed the sky, obscuring the horizons. To the west he could make out tiny barren islands and then an immense nothingness of water and fog. To the east the land curved around a small bay with a dock and a garage-sized boathouse. Two boats sat tied to the docks; one was the one that the cult had used to kidnap him. Four cultists, heavily armed, guarded the boats.
