“More? You mean the fugue state.”
“If that’s what you want to call it,” he says with a small smile.
I frown. “Then why didn’t Augustus simply kill me? I mean, after he paraded me around and showed I was a false prophet.”
“Did he?” Leopold’s eyebrows quirk up, unevenly. “The things I miss out on when dissociated into fragments. Unfortunate.” Then he peers at me. “I assume your talk earlier of tapping into Orion was a metaphor.”
I glance around, but we’re mostly surrounded by sentries now, and the other humans have pulled ahead. “A very limited metaphor.”
He nods, jerkily, but there’s a smile pulling at his face. “Does Lenora know?”
“Yes.”
“She will not hold out long against Augustus. It’s imperative we bring her back. You may not believe it, but Lenora has truly been your best advocate all along, in every meaningful way.”
“I know.” And I do—although, from that brief contact with her mind or soul or whatever that is in the fugue state, it was clear that her faith was in the potential she hoped I would someday fulfill, not the person I am right now. “I guess I can’t fault her for wanting me to evolve into what she designed me to be.”
Marcus has stopped the group at a blue door up ahead, waiting for us and glaring at Leopold.
He touches my elbow to keep me from moving up through the crowd. “Find Lenora. She may be lost, but she can still be found.”
“I’ll try, but I may not get that far.”
He nods, again in a jittery fashion. “For what it’s worth, I think she deserves a better fate.”
“Everyone deserves better than that.” I glance at Leopold’s dragging leg and hope that’s something that can be fixed—but I’m afraid the damage isn’t to his bodyform, but to his cognition. And that Lenora will be scrambled in the same way, or worse, before I can reach her.
I push ahead through the group and join Marcus at the still-closed door.
Together, we enter a room made entirely of glass.
Marcus waves away the three ascenders already in the lab.
Or maybe it’s the dozen sentries that have just invaded the room that shoo them out the door. I’m sure Marcus is communicating something via transmission as well. Tristan, Grayson, and Caleb clear the doorway as they leave; Kamali is only a few steps behind me as I trail Marcus. Leopold lumbers his way into the room.
The lab has the distinct odor of something living. Everything is typical ascender clean with spotless steel floors and gently glowing white walls, and the place fairly bristles with shiny lab equipment on the blue glass tables. Large cubes are embedded in the walls of one side of the room. At first, I think they’re storage, but then something moves behind the blue opaque glass. These shadows of living things, in the ascenders’ genetic lab, hit far too close to home, climbing a sour taste up the back of my throat.
Experiments.
That’s all I am to any of them, Lenora included. Another monkey in a cage. Only now the monkey is a tool they can use in their endless struggles to tip the power balance in their favor.
Marcus urges me toward an alcove at the back that’s nothing but empty space and a floating steel tray about three feet long. It’s too small for a human, but something gets put on that tray for examination. Or dissection.
My feet drag on the perfectly smooth floor, and my stomach is in full rebellion.
Marcus activates something in the alcove, and the tray drops into the floor, melting into the surface like the furniture in his apartment. In its place springs up a reclined chair like the one in Augustus’s torture chamber. A holographic control panel comes to life next to it. Marcus moves with ascender speed in manipulating the controls. A hum precedes the appearance of a blue mesh around the chair. Leopold looks on with interest, but Kamali gives the chair a disgusted look. The others have held back, still by the door.
“You know, I really don’t like holo chairs.” I stand next to it, staring. “And if you’re planning on probing my memories, you should know that Augustus tried and failed. It doesn’t work on me.” Which is close enough to the truth, and hopefully purges any ambition Marcus has in that regard.
“Of course not,” he says, still working the controls. “I’m reconfiguring it to record our work here.”
“That’s reassuring.”
A scuffle of noise behind me, near the door, draws my attention. The sentries are herding Grayson, Caleb, and Tristan back into the hallway. They’ve disarmed Grayson and Caleb of their weapons, and the two of them are sending each other looks like they’re ready to take on the sentries with their augments alone. Kamali is darting looks of alarm between me and Tristan. Leopold has a scowl on his twitchy face.
I whip back to Marcus. “What’s going on?”
He’s still fussing with the controls. “You don’t need the distraction.”
I stalk around the chair and thrust a hand into the holo display, forcing him to stop whatever he’s doing. “I don’t need you putting humans in a cage, either.” I keep my voice low, but the threat is clearly there. “Might make it hard to concentrate.”
Marcus gives me an indulgent look like I’m a child. “If I wanted to harm them, I certainly wouldn’t do it here. I simply—”
I cut him off with a scowl. “They stay with me.”
“Very well.” He grimaces, but he must have transmitted something because the sentries reverse course and usher everyone back into the room.
I’m not excited about having an audience, but that can’t be helped. Besides, I would rather have the augments nearby, in case things get ugly. Not that our ragged crew—two augments, a half-broken ascender, Tristan, Kamali, and me—would stand a chance with all the ascenders and sentries inside the complex. I doubt we could make it to the ship, much less escape the building. But I might be able to win their release by staying behind.
Grayson gives me a nod, while he and Caleb take up positions on either side of the alcove. They have no weapons, but they’re looking out for me anyway. I give them both a tight but grateful smile.
“Whenever you’re ready, Eli,” Marcus says, impatiently gesturing to the chair.
“I prefer the floor.”
He scowls as I take a seat on the cool ascender-tech flooring next to the chair, folding my legs and facing my miniature audience of Tristan, Kamali, and Leopold. Tristan’s arms are crossed, but he’s not actively glaring at me anymore. Leopold’s left hand still twitches in an irregular pattern. Kamali watches Marcus fuss at the holo controls—I’m probably outside the range of his device now, and he’s recalibrating it or something.
He finishes, looks up, and gives her a nod.
Kamali steps forward and kneels on one knee in front of me. Her eyes are deep liquid brown, and the ascenders’ softly-glowing walls make them sparkle with a thousand stars, just like in my vision. As much as I hate that she’s here—I don’t, not really. Just being able to lose myself in her eyes for a moment calms me in a way nothing else ever does.
She breaks the trance with a small smile. “Turn around.”
I’m not sure what she means until she makes a little twirling motion with her hand. I scoot around so I’m facing the blank back wall of the alcove, away from everyone.
“Bring me out if I’m in too long,” I say, even though I might be able to do it myself now.
“That’s why I’m here.” Her hands find my shoulders, and her hair brushes against my neck as she leans forward to speak quietly in my ear. “Forget the rest of them. They don’t exist anymore.”
I smile—the rest of them stopped existing for me as soon as she knelt in front of me and gave me that long look with her soft brown eyes.
Her fingers begin to knead my shoulder muscles, and my eyes drift closed.
“You’re in a safe place, free from worries or distractions. There’s only the feel of my hands and the sound of my voice.”
All true.
The tight-coiled tension of the past several
days leeches from my body, pulled out by her touch and her words.
My mind empties.
For a moment, I am truly relieved of the burden of it all—
—then the world shifts.
I’m in the master’s workshop. He is busy with some piece, painting on a canvas made of light. The ancient rock walls and rough-hewn workbenches glisten with pinpoints of reflected brilliance from his work.
You have returned, he says, not looking at me, still focused on his work.
For a moment, I forget why I’m here. Curiosity draws me forward, my fugue form drifting closer so I can see his art.
When I do, I almost look away—it’s a portrait of torment and suffering, a thousand bodies writhing in agony. The style is ancient, classical. It’s all the more horrifying for the grotesque beauty of the people’s faces. Their torture transforms them into demons. The figures move on the canvas in an endless repeat. The painting is alive with pain.
Why are you showing me this? I can’t help being mesmerized by the excruciating details. A boy whose face is melting. An old man who breaks into a thousand pieces. A girl with creamy brown skin and voluminous hair who is consumed, over and over, by the same torrential flame.
I have to look away.
There is always suffering, the master says, and his words are mallets on gongs, full of sound and piercing sadness.
Is there no escape? I scan the wrinkles of his face. He’s the master. He knows this realm. He should have the answer. Then I remember why I’m here: to stop this. How do I stop the suffering?
You are the bridge, he says, the words heavy. But they’re meaningless.
And not the help I need.
No, how do I stop this? I sweep my hand toward the painting, but the motion wipes it away, the canvas of light now brushed clean. I turn back to the master. I need to find Augustus.
My words zoom the workshop away, and the master with it. The scope of my vision expands a hundredfold, then a thousand. For a fraction of an instant, my field of view is vast—the entirety of the planet is within my grasp, held like a shining blue drop in the black ocean of space. Then I’m pulled back down, my vision telescoping with such speed that it feels like falling, even though I have no sense of motion, not the physical kind anyway.
The odd-shaped towers of New Portland look even stranger from above, but just as I think I’m going to plunge into one of them, my fugue form veers toward the Oregon mountains. A brilliant-white building flashes into view, and I fall through its walls, tumbling inside. When I jar to a stop, I’ve landed in a room that teems with ascenders. They buzz around the expansive room at ascender speed, attending to technology no human would have access to. The room seems made of glass, like Marcus’s research facility, only I know it’s the fugue state—the walls are simply less substantial than the pulsing life within them.
Augustus stands in the center, feet planted wide, hands on hips, his back to me. He’s gazing at… something. I can’t see what, but the air shimmers around it. I drift closer, giving him a wide berth. I need to know what he’s planning but getting it straight from his fugue form is dangerous business—as likely to send me into the void as to get me the information I need. I’m saving that as a last resort.
The thing Augustus is staring at makes no sense to me. On the one hand, it’s a box—simple, clear box with some kind of pink lump inside. On the other hand, it looks like a horrifying experiment-in-progress: the lump is the size of a hairless rabbit, only without legs or face or ears, just a pink, fleshy thing floating in red liquid. It sways gently even though there’s no obvious source for the motion. The dozen or so tubes attached to the box must be circulating the transparent red fluid and creating a gentle wave. The tubes run in all directions, connecting like umbilicals to the complex of machinery at the periphery of the room.
As I look closer, I see blue wisps that snake along the surface of the pink thing—like the dynamic coloration of ascender skin, except the blues wisps alternate between skittering above the surface and sinking below to whatever lies inside. In the fugue state, the walls and machines are ephemeral, the ascenders and the hairless thing are more substantial, but the blue wisps are electric. They shine with their own concentrated light.
Whatever they are, this much is clear: the pink lump is alive. And it’s very much the center of Augustus’s attention.
He raises his hand, as if in benediction over the box. With that motion, a holo matrix springs from the edges and enmeshes the thing in its blue web. The snaking wisps jump and spark, leaving a glittering trail behind. I edge closer. The lines don’t seem bound by the box—the shimmer in the air is, in fact, the residue of a thousand tiny, glistening trails.
I have no idea what this is all about. Maybe I should just pull out of the fugue and report back—
Augustus transmits to someone, a blue mist line that darts to the edge of the room. I tear my gaze from the box. An ascender is hauling a human toward us. The man is haggard, dark circles under his eyes, but that’s not what makes the room seem to dim with a crowding darkness…
He’s one of the Cleansed.
I recognize his slack face as he staggers forward, glassy-eyed—he’s the one who served me bread and wine and stood by, inert, as I escaped from Nathaniel’s purification chamber. The man’s head is shaved, but haphazardly, with small red nicks that splatter across the skin of his skull. I’m frozen, horrified, but when he’s forced to kneel in front of Augustus, head bowed, the certainty that he’s from the cult locks in—at the back of his neck is an angry red scar where the implant was inserted. Worse: a small silver trail glitters along his skin, shimmering up through the air and leading to the pink thing in the box.
My hands actually go up in front of me. I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to know what Augustus is doing here. He gives some order—the transmission flits across the air to the ascender holding the man. Before I can reach into their conversation, a blue snake flashes out of the back of the man’s head. It zips through the air then writhes along the surface of the pink thing in the box… and sinks below. Absorbed by it.
The man slumps to the floor.
The urge to flee wells up inside me, a force so powerful, I stumble backward. This is an abomination—I know it, deep inside, without even grasping all that’s happening. Darkness crowds the edges of my vision—it’s the void swirling in. I fight against it because I’m not done here. As horrific as this is—and I’m not even sure what this is—I have to find out more so I can stop this thing, this horrible thing that Augustus is doing.
I stagger toward to the box. I clench my fist then unfurl it and slowly reach out. My own hand glows brighter than anything else in the room, and as my fingertips pass through the box, the blue wisps on the hairless pink thing seem to frenzy, jumping into action at the nearness of my touch.
My hand sinks below the surface.
A hot wind sweeps across my neck. Screams deafen my ears. I know what it is without naming it, but then all doubt is erased when I’m wrenched to the vision of the parched plain. The barren landscape bakes beneath my feet. The blue wisps howl around me. I’m surrounded by fire and lightning, all striking and crackling through the brown mist that envelopes me...
I’m inside the storm of death.
A bolt of blue screams toward me and blasts through my fugue form—I’m thrown out, hurled away, and suddenly there’s nothing but the void all around. I’m adrift in nothingness. But the raw terror clings to me like a static charge that hasn’t been released. A potential waiting to zap whatever I come into contact with…
I have to get back.
I have to warn them.
I focus on Kamali’s hands and voice. I long for them, reach for them… I hear her voice in the distance. The sound hurtles closer like it’s carried on a hyper rail train through the fog…
A giant gasp of air sucks into my body like I’ve just remembered how to breathe.
I open my eyes.
Kamali is kneeling in front of
me, but then she leans back, surprise lighting her face. “Did you… are you already back?” She frowns.
I don’t tell her I heard her voice again because she looks unsettled as it is. And I’m starting to think she’s my guiding star even without trying. I give her a shaky nod instead. The after-effects course through my body, cramping and shaking it, but the physical effects aren’t what’s really giving me the shudders.
It’s what I saw in Augustus’s lab.
Kamali looks away. “He’s back,” she says to someone else.
And I don't have good news.
“You saw a pink blob in a box.”
Tristan’s skepticism bounces around the room, but it doesn’t land—Marcus looks horrified, Kamali’s frown deepens the more I talk, Leopold’s twitches are getting worse, and I flat-out don’t care what Tristan thinks. Grayson is stoic, still keeping his station at the edge of the alcove, but even Caleb looks a little freaked. His mechanical hand is rubbing his agitation away in a rhythmic curling and uncurling of his fist.
I ignore all of them and focus on Marcus. “He’s using the cult people to feed it somehow. And when I dipped inside… well, this is definitely the thing that Augustus is planning. And the danger that’s coming. I don’t know how a pink blob in a box is a danger, but it is.”
“Maybe Augustus plans to feed a lot more people to it,” Kamali offers. There’s a slight sheen on her beautifully carved cheeks, and I know exactly what she’s feeling—ready to throw up whatever meager breakfast she’s had. “Is that what you’re seeing?”
“What he’s seeing is the second Singularity.” Leopold’s voice has a squeak that doesn’t belong in it, but his voice is deadly serious under it.
“What?” I say, not sure I heard him properly.
He’s speaking aloud for my sake, but I can tell Leopold and Marcus are having an intense transmitted discussion by the level of twitchiness in Leopold’s body and the dark emotions writhing across Marcus’s face. Marcus is also back at the holographic controls of the chair, deep in the matrix, sorting through data so fast I can’t even register what he’s doing.
The Duality Bridge (Singularity #2) (Singularity Series) Page 27
