Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 3)

by Marcus Sakey

  The question mark would be to say instead, “There are hundreds of thousands of sizable bodies orbiting the sun. Which ones are exceptional? What makes them so? Are there similarities? What do they reveal?”

  But how do you teach a child to grasp that complexity?

  You teach them to grasp the style of thinking. There are no answers, only questions that shape your understanding, and which in turn reveal more questions.

  Sounds more like mysticism than science. How do you draw the line?

  That’s where the critical thinking comes in.

  I can see how that applies to the categorization of solar objects. But what about more abstract questions?

  It works there too. Take love, for example. Artists would tell you that love is a mysterious force. Priests claim it’s a manifestation of the divine.

  Biochemists, on the other hand, will tell you that love is a feedback loop of dopamine, testosterone, phenylethylamine, norepinephrine, and feel-my-pee-pee. The difference is, we can show our work.

  So you’re not a romantic, then?

  We’re who we are as a species because of evolution. And at the essence, evolution is the steady production of increasingly efficient killing machines.

  Isn’t it more accurate to say “surviving machines”?

  The two go hand in hand. But the killing is the prime mover; without that, the surviving doesn’t come into play.

  Kind of a cold way to look at the world, isn’t it?

  No, it’s actually an optimistic one. There’s a quote I love from the anthropologist Robert Ardrey: “We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.”

  You used that as the epigraph to your new book, God Is an Abnorm. But I noticed you left out the last line, “We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” Why?

  That’s where Ardrey’s poetic license gets the better of his science, which is a perilous mistake. We aren’t “known among the stars” at all. The sun isn’t pondering human nature, the galaxy isn’t sitting in judgment. The universe doesn’t care about us. We’ve evolved into what we are because humanity’s current model survived and previous iterations didn’t. Simple as that.

  Why is a little artistic enthusiasm a perilous mistake?

  Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.

  CHAPTER 16

  Soren dreamed.

  He strolled a foreign city, ancient cobblestones beneath his feet. Weathered buildings of white stone, tall doors painted deep green, curtains flickering through open second-story windows, old men watching the world go by. Rome? He’d never been to Rome. A direct flight would have taken eight or nine hours of “normal” time, close to a hundred hours in his perception, but the hours weren’t the problem. Time was the sea he swam, and alone he could spend that in meditation, in pursuit of nothingness.

  It was the time trapped in a cramped space with other people.

  The agony of watching them move as though paralyzed, each expression warping and deforming, their worm lips twisting into tortured syllables, drops of spit arcing lazily from their disgusting mouths. Fat bodies and patchy skulls. The simple, horrible energy of their being, just being, and so loud about it, so garish and cheap. Even asleep their snores filled the world, their farts scented it. The only grace existed where they were not.

  That was how he knew this was a dream. On rare occasions his curse was lifted in dreams. He wouldn’t have to endure the slow descending footfall of every step, wouldn’t wait in the prison behind his eyes while the world caught up to him. He could walk amidst human beings and not hate them.

  The cruelest dreams were the lucid ones, where he had control. He could pause outside a restaurant and savor the rich scents of basil and garlic wafting through the open doors. Could scratch an itch on the back of his neck and feel his fingernails. Could note the small chapel ahead and admire the way its every line was in proportion, every stone tested by weather and time. As Soren approached the chapel, he heard sounds coming from within. Automatically, he winced. Sounds were unpleasant. Voices, sighs, laughter, all drew out to grate like metal against teeth.

  Only.

  These sounds.

  He’d never heard anything like them.

  A layered swelling, a soar of textures and moods. They had a rhythm that built like love, like when he moved inside Samantha and each slow stroke was an ecstasy to lose himself in, each tingle of sensation a world in its own right. The rhythm seemed almost to have a theme, as though someone had found a way to represent the brightening of dawn after a night so cold and long it seemed it might never end. The lower tones were the inky darkness, the loss and fear, but against them higher notes were insistent, swelling, moving together in a way that made his chest hurt.

  He stepped in the door of the chapel, marveling at the way the sound echoed off ancient stone. The interior was lit by thick white tapers with flames that danced, fast, so fast, it was jarring but somehow liberating, and the smell was rich and safe, wax and fire and incense. At the front of the room, a choir sang.

  People? People made these sounds?

  He moved down the aisle, found a dark pew, and sat. As the choir moved their lips, noises came out like he’d never heard before. A calculated tangle of voices, pure and sweet and strong. It took him, shook him, lifted him. His hands twitched in his lap, and his chest heaved. He was crying.

  This would be the cruelest dream of all, he could tell, but for now he was in it, and if he must pay the price, he would at least relish this, soak in it, let the sound wash over him like a warm sea, this purity, this essence, this holy . . .

  Music.

  This was music, he realized. The way others heard it. To him, it had never been anything but endless, horrible grinding, tones that rang through his bones. People liked it, he knew that, but he was not of people.

  Too soon the voices began to wind down. When the music drifted to an end, it felt like the vanishing of a physical force propping him up. Then he heard something else. Beside him. Another noise he had never known. A voice as it sounded to the speaker.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?”

  Soren knew the dream was about to end, then. He wanted nothing more than to stay a little longer, a little longer, forever. But it was the way of dreams that he turned anyway. On the pew beside him sat Nick Cooper. A man he had killed, and who had returned from the dead to trick him and break his bones and send him to a purgatory of white and counting.

  “Music,” the monster said. “I thought that might be the best way to show you. You’ve never heard it before, have you?”

  The dream would end soon. Soren turned away, faced the choir again. Perhaps they would sing again.

  “You have a T-naught of 11.2. If I say ‘one Mississippi,’ it takes me about a second. But you’ve never heard that before, have you? You’ve heard, ‘Ooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnne Mmmmmmmmmiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssssssssssssssssssss . . .’” Cooper broke off. “You’ve never known life. Not really.”

  The back of Soren’s neck itched again, and he scratched it. Most dreams he merely experienced, but ones this clear were usually under some level of conscious control. He decided to banish Nick Cooper from the chapel, and to focus all his attention on the music until the dream grew threadbare.

  “Let me guess,” Cooper said. “You think this is a dream.”

  Despite himself, Soren spun.

  “It’s like the parable about a man who dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke, he couldn’t be sure that
he wasn’t a butterfly dreaming he was a man. And other exercises in dorm room philosophy.” Cooper’s smile did not reach his eyes. “Well, let me end the mystery. You’re not dreaming.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s lovely, isn’t it? The chance to walk and talk and think without having to watch the rest of the world drag along. Imagine how things might have turned out if you hadn’t been born the way you were. You could have had a life. Friends, relationships. You could listen to music or stroll on the beach or have a conversation. All the things everyone else takes for granted. All the things you’ve always been denied.”

  “What is this?”

  “You know,” Cooper said, “you don’t have to stick to the whole three-words-at-a-time thing. Stretch your wings. Try a whole sentence.”

  Soren stared at him. Waited.

  Cooper sighed. “It’s the possibility of a real life.”

  “Real?” He glanced around, at the chapel, the choir, the Roman street through the open doors.

  “You of all people should know that ‘real’ is a flexible term. The rest of the world experiences one thing, and you experience another. Which is real? Ours? Yours? Neither?” Cooper shrugged. “Perception is just a matter of electrical signals in the brain. Philosophers and poets and priests say there’s more, and maybe they’re right. But that doesn’t change the fact that consciousness is a matter of current. There is no objective truth, only the subjective experience our minds perceive. After all, when you thought this was a dream, didn’t you want to stay in it?”

  More than anything, and for the rest of my life. But he just repeated, “What is this?”

  “It’s a simulation. Designed by the best and brightest in the Holdfast. Really puts the new in newtech, huh? It’s basically a cutting-edge game, powered by predictive networks that stay one step ahead. I’m not a bioengineer, but the way it was explained to me, it directly stimulates the parts of your brain that process sensory information. The occipital, temporal, frontal, and parietal lobes, neurons in the brain stem, who knows what else. Point is, it’s as real as anything else in your head. And because it’s generated, here we can nullify your perception of time.”

  “How?”

  “We sedated you while you slept, and Erik’s surgical team implanted a small interface device.”

  “Why?”

  “I think what you mean is ‘thank you.’” Cooper flashed another cold smile. “For a guy whose idea of entertainment is counting holes in the wall, whose dearest hope is that I’ll kill him, this is basically Christmas.”

  He understood then. “An offer.”

  Cooper nodded. “And this is just version one-point-oh. With time, Epstein can create a permanent interface, a sort of mental translator that would allow you to experience the world the way the rest of us do.”

  Scratching at the back of his neck, he said, “What price?”

  “Information.”

  “About John.”

  “Yes.”

  Soren paused.

  When he had been a child, overwhelmed by every second, unable even to explain to the people around him what was wrong, there had been a voice in his head that promised one day he would be cured. Someone would find a way to nullify this hell he carried behind his eyes. Someday he would be able to experience the world as others did. Simple joy in simple things.

  It was the only reason he’d stayed alive. And though he eventually stopped believing the voice, it had left a deep enough mark that surviving had become a habit, one he had never broken, despite daily consideration of it.

  Now it turned out he’d been right. There was a cure for him.

  The choir began to sing again. Tremulous whispers that bounced and echoed around the chapel. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever known, as lovely as the times with Samantha, but instead of a fading memory, it was here, real enough, and right in front of him.

  All your life you have tried to be a leaf and let the current carry you away.

  What if instead you became an eagle and soared on the breeze?

  “I know you think he’s your friend, but Smith used you. He sent you out to kill for him, and when you failed, he abandoned you. He felt no more love for you than a chess player feels toward a powerful piece, knowing full well that he’ll sacrifice it to win.”

  A memory came to him then. John, saying to him, “You’retherook. Overlookedonthebackrow.” Speaking in their old way, running the words together to make it easier for Soren. It had been in the apartment in Tesla, the one filled with books, the one where John had reunited him with Samantha.

  The itch struck again.

  Soren looked at the graceful chapel lit by candles, rich with the scent of wax and furniture polish, ringing with song, the beauty of which he had never known. Then he reached behind his neck with both hands.

  Cooper cocked his head. “What are you doing?”

  Soren ignored him. His neck felt normal, but he knew there was more to it, and he focused, applied all of his effort. Like trying to wake from a dream, that moment when both worlds seem real, when the boundary between them is pliable, and as he thought that, his hands touched something cold and hard. Looking Cooper straight in the eyes, he wrapped his fingers around it and tugged.

  The world froze, twitched, shifted like a video call with poor reception, and vanished.

  The chapel, the candles, the choir, gone.

  All but Cooper, sitting opposite him in the bright cell of white tiles pierced by holes, 415,872 of them. The man stared at him with an expression of mingled confusion and horror.

  Slowly—so, so slowly—Soren slid his right hand out from behind his head and looked at the cable that had been jacked into his neck. The voice inside him raged and screamed, told him to put it back, that it wasn’t too late, that this was what he had always dreamed of.

  He opened his fingers and let it fall. “No.”

  But it sounded like, “Nnnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooooo . . .”

  CHAPTER 17

  The ground was cold and hard as cast iron taken from the freezer. Luke Hammond felt the chill leaching into his chest, the stones digging into his legs, the dull ache in his muscles. Then he packed the discomfort away. A trick he’d learned at nineteen, as a long-range recon scout in Laos. Catalog the conditions, but don’t feel them. Focus on the mission.

  The night vision function of the binoculars had been destroyed along with all the other electronics when they’d been hit with the electromagnetic pulse. But the clear Wyoming sky glowed with starlight, and he could see the outpost easily. A cluster of trailers and prefab units surrounding an inflatable structure a hundred yards across and bumpy with rooms and hallways. The hum of generators rose and fell with the wind. A handful of cars and four large buses formed a makeshift parking lot. The outpost had no sign, no fence, no permanent structures of any kind. The whole facility looked like it had been thrown together a week ago—which it had.

  There was only one guard, stamping his feet as he lit a cigarette. No serious soldier would have made that mistake on watch, but no one here expected an attack. That was part of the point, and why Luke and his team had traveled almost fifty miles perpendicular to the path of the New Sons to reach this place. In this otherwise unoccupied wasteland, “security” was mostly to protect from coyotes.

  He lowered the binoculars and glanced sideways. Eleven men, all prone, all silent, looked back. They were dressed as he was, in layers of black clothing and woven hats. The most visible parts of them were their eyes and their weapons.

  Miller had argued for more men, but Luke wanted to keep the squad small. Epstein might be out of bombs, but there were no doubt eyes in the sky tracking every motion of the army. “We’ll look like deserters. You know there will be plenty of them. It’s one thing to chant slogans and another to suffer drone fire. Epstein can’t track every group.”

  “No,” General Miller had said. “But this is critical to our success. Will a dozen men be able to control the situation?”

&
nbsp; “Yes,” Luke had replied. “Our targets are used to following orders.”

  His team wasn’t the kind of elite unit he was used to, but people who drove across the country to join a militia tended to be of a breed, and he’d selected men with significant combat experience. The nature of it varied dramatically: Gorecki was an ex-marine who worked as a bodyguard for hip-hop superstars, Decker was the master-at-arms for a San Diego motorcycle club, Reynolds had commanded a police rapid response team in Tennessee.

  “I’ll take the guard outside,” Luke whispered. “There are probably a couple more awake in the dorms. Reynolds, that’s your team. Do it quietly. Gorecki, take your three and secure the perimeter. Staff will be in the trailers; Decker and I will go door to door. Understood?”

  His unit leaders gave him the thumbs-up. Luke started to rise, then paused. “Remember to check your targets. Nobody hurts a kid.” He waited to see nods from all eleven men, took one last look through the binos—the guard was still leaning against the hood of a car, his back to them—and handed them to Gorecki.

  Luke stayed low, duckwalking toward the parking lot. It felt good to be moving after half an hour on cold ground. The on-mission clarity bloomed, that heightened awareness and sharpened focus. How many times had he done something like this? Dozens? Scores? He’d lost count of the nations he’d fought in. There had been times in his life when he felt that he was only alive when he was operating.

  At least, he’d felt that way until he had sons.

  The noise of the generators would cover any sound he might make, but he stepped lightly anyway. When he reached the nearest bus, he dropped to his belly, peered under the vehicle. All he could see of the guard were the back of his legs. Luke considered circling, decided to take the less expected route, and army-crawled beneath the bus. More of the guard was revealed with each careful movement. Judging by the number of butts at his feet, he’d been here awhile. The graveyard shift was boring, and it was easy for the mind to wander.

  Luke rose, a ghost in shadows. He left his sidearm in its holster and slid a length of cord from his pocket, wrapping it around each gloved palm four times. One step, two, three, and then he was behind the man, close enough to smell the acrid tobacco reek and hear the raspy sound of his breath. Luke waited for him to take a last drag on the cigarette and exhale. Then he crossed his arms to make a loop, snapped it over the guard’s head and jerked back and out with both arms at the same moment he kicked out his knee.