We all looked at him, and he blushed immediately.
“I was talking about her dumping me,” he protested. “Not picking me in the first place!”
I smiled, leading the way into the kitchen. I was just glad to have them back. I walked down the little hallway lined with pictures, toward the front door. I’d want to meet the feds when they arrived.
Then I stopped. “There’s a bare patch on the wall. It looks so odd. Every surface, desk, and wall in this place is covered with kitsch. Except here.” I pointed at the four pictures of the family, then the two pictures of saints. Two spots empty save for little nails. Ivy had said that Mrs. Maheras had probably taken down the picture of Panos’s patron saint in preparation for his funeral.
“Ivy,” I said, “would you say it’s safe to assume that Panos knew if he died, this picture would be removed and placed with his corpse?”
We looked at each other. Then I reached up and pulled on the nail below Panos’s picture. It resisted in an odd fashion. I yanked harder, and the nail came out—but had a knob and string tied around the back end.
Behind the wall, something clicked.
I looked at the aspects, suddenly worried, until the wall’s nearby light switch—plate behind it and all—rotated forward like a hidden cupholder in a car’s dashboard. The portion that had been hidden inside the wall had LED lights blinking on the sides.
“Well I’ll be damned,” J.C. said. “The kid was right.”
“Language,” Ivy mumbled, looking closely at the contraption.
“What happened to the future curses?” Audrey said. “I kind of liked those.”
“I realized something,” J.C. said. “I can’t be an Interdimensional Time Ranger. Because if I am, that means all of you are too. And that’s just a little too silly for me to accept.”
I reached into the holder that had come out and extracted a thumb drive. Written on it, with a label maker, were a few words.
“1 Kings 19:11–12,” I read.
“And He said,” Ivy quoted in a quiet voice, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”
I looked at my aspects as a fist pounded on the door. Then I pocketed the thumb drive and pushed the holder back into the wall before going to meet with the feds.
EPILOGUE
Four days later, I stood alone in the White Room. Tobias had covered over the hole in the ceiling, as he’d promised. The place was refreshingly blank.
Was this what I would be, without my aspects? Blank? I’d certainly felt that way while being held by Zen. I’d barely been able to do anything to save myself. No plans, no escaping. Just some stalling. Ivy had sometimes wondered if I was growing good enough on my own that I eventually wouldn’t need her or the others any longer.
From what had happened to me when I’d lost them, I figured that day—if it ever came—was a long, long way off.
The door cracked open. Audrey slipped in, wearing a blue one-piece swimsuit. She trotted up to me and delivered a sheet of paper. “Have to go catch a pool party. But I did finish solving this. Wasn’t too hard, once we had the key.”
On the thumb drive, we’d found two things. The first was the anticipated key to unlocking the data on Panos’s body. The body had been seized by the government, and I’d convinced them to put it on ice for the foreseeable future. After all, there might be very, very important data on it, and someday the key might turn up.
Yol had offered me an exorbitant amount to track down the key. I’d refused, though I had forced him to buy Exeltec from me for another exorbitant sum, so I came away from this in a good enough position.
The CDC failed to find evidence that Panos had released any kind of pathogen, and eventually determined that the note on Panos’s computer had been an idle threat, meant to send I3 into a panic. Earlier that morning, Dion had sent me a thank-you note from him and his mother for stopping the government from burning the body. I hadn’t yet told them I’d stolen this thumb drive.
It contained the key, and a … second file. A small text document, also encrypted. We’d stared at it for a time before realizing that the key had been printed on the outside of the thumb drive itself. Chapter nineteen of First Kings. Any string of letters or numbers, or mixture of the two, can be the passphrase for a private-key cryptogram—though using a known text, like Bible verses, wasn’t a particularly secure option.
Audrey went out, but left the door cracked open. I could see Tobias outside, leaning against the wall, arms folded, wearing his characteristic loose business suit, no tie.
I raised the sheet of paper, reading the simple note Panos had left.
I guess I’m dead.
I shouldn’t be surprised, but I didn’t think they’d ever actually go through with it. My own friends, you know?
He’d gotten that wrong. So far as I or anyone else could determine, his fall really had been an accident.
Did you know every person is a walking jungle of bacteria? We’re each a little biome, all to ourselves. I’ve made an alteration. It’s called Staphylococcus epidermidis. A strain of bacteria we all carry. It’s harmless, for the most part.
My changes aren’t big. Just an addition. Several megs of data, spliced into the DNA. I3 was watching me, but I learned to do my work, even when supervised. They watched what I posted though, so I decided to use their tools against them. I put the information into the bacteria of my own skin and shook hands with them all. I’ll bet you can find strains of my altered bacteria all across the world by now.
It won’t do anything harmful. But if you’ve found this, you have the key to decoding what I’ve hidden. You make the call, Dion. I leave it in your hands. Release the key on this thumb drive, and everyone will know what I’ve studied. They’ll have the answers to what I3 is doing, and everyone will be on an even playing field.
I studied the paper for a time, then quietly folded it and slipped it into my back pocket. I walked to the door.
“Are you going to do it?” Tobias asked as I passed him. “Let it out?”
I pulled out the flash drive and held it up. “Didn’t Dion talk about starting a new company with his brother? Curing disease? Doing good each day?”
“Something like that,” Tobias said.
I tossed the drive up into the air, then caught it. “We’ll set this aside, to be mailed to him on the day he graduates. Maybe that dream of his isn’t as dead as he thinks. At the very least, we should honor his brother’s wishes.” I hesitated. “But we’ll want to see if we can get the data ourselves first and check out how dangerous it might be.”
As my aspects had guessed, my contacts among the feds said the cancer scare had been a fake on Yol’s part, an attempt to make my task urgent. But we had no idea what Panos had really been working on. Somehow, he’d hidden that even from the people at I3.
“Technically,” Tobias said, “that information is owned by Yol.”
“Technically,” I said, pocketing the flash drive again, “it’s owned by me as well, since I’m part owner of the company. We’ll just call this my part.”
I passed him, heading to the stairs. “The funny thing is,” I said, hand on the banister, “we spent this entire time searching for a corpse—but the information wasn’t just there, it was on every person we met.”
“There’s no way we could have known,” Tobias said.
“Of course there was,” I said. “Panos warned us. That day we studied I3—it was proclaimed right there, on one of the slogans he’d printed and hung on his wall.”
Tobias looked at me, quizzical.
“Information,” I said, wiggling my fingers—and the bacteria that held Panos’s data, “for every body.”
I
smiled, and left Tobias chuckling as I went searching for something to eat.
LIES OF THE BEHOLDER
A STEPHEN LEEDS STORY
ONE
“So…” J.C. said, hands on hips as he regarded the building. “Anyone else worried that this doctor’s office is in a slum?”
“It’s not a slum,” Ivy said, extending her hand to help me from the back of the limo.
“Sure,” J.C. said. “And those aren’t crack dealers on the corner over there.”
“J.C., those kids are like six.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Starting early, are they? Nefarious little entrepreneurs.”
Ivy rolled her eyes, but Tobias—an African American man who was growing a little unsteady on his feet, now that he was getting on in years—just laughed a hearty, full-throated laugh. He climbed out of the limo with my help, then slapped J.C. on the back. They’d been joking the whole way here.
J.C. grinned, showing he was at least a little aware of his buffoonery.
I eyed the building. Though it was your typical, generic suburban office structure, it was across the street from a pawnshop and next door to an auto mechanic. Not a slum, but hardly prime real estate either. So maybe J.C. had a point.
I rapped on the front passenger window of the limo, which rolled down, revealing a young woman with short blonde hair. Wilson’s grandniece was shadowing him again. Right. I wished he’d left her behind today; I tend to be a little more … erratic when visiting with reporters.
I looked past her toward the tall, distinguished man in the driver’s seat. “Why don’t you wait here, Wilson,” I said, “instead of going to the service station? In case we’ve got the wrong location or something.”
“Very well, Master Leeds,” Wilson said.
His grandniece nodded eagerly. As comfortable as Wilson looked in his traditional buttling gear, she seemed awkward wrapped in a coachman’s coat and cap. Like she was playing dress-up. Had she been listening as I talked to my hallucinations in the back seat? I was used to Wilson, but it felt wrong to expose myself to someone from the outside. I mean, I was used to people seeing my … eccentricities when I was in public. But this felt different. An intrusion.
I turned and walked with my aspects into the office building, which had a familiar, sterile quality. Not quite like a hospital, but scrubbed often enough to give it the off-white scent of one. The first door to the right was number sixteen, where we were supposed to meet the interviewer.
J.C. glanced in through the side window. “No reception area,” he said. “Just one large room. Feels like the sort of place where someone grabs you the moment you walk in. You black out, and then … BAM … three kidneys.”
“Three?” Ivy asked.
“Sure,” J.C. replied. “They need unwitting mules for their illegal organ trade.”
“And exactly how unwitting are you going to be when you wake up with an incision in your abdomen? Wouldn’t you immediately run to the doctor?”
His eyes narrowed. “Well, the doctor’s obviously in on it, Ivy.”
I looked to Tobias, who was still smiling. He nodded toward a painting on the hallway wall. “That’s by Albert Bierstadt,” he said. “Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The original hangs in the Smithsonian, as one of the most famous works of the Hudson River School.” His calming tone was a relaxing contrast to J.C.’s jovial—but still deep-seated—paranoia. “I’ve always loved how the clouds part to illuminate the dark wilderness: a representation of the Creation through the lens of the American frontier. Our eyes are inexorably drawn toward that central light, as if we are being accepted into heaven.”
“Or,” Ivy observed, “perhaps the clouds are closing, and the landscape is dimming as God withdraws and leaves men in darkness.”
Startled, I glanced sharply at Ivy. She was usually the religious one, sticking up for all things Christian and holy. She shrugged and looked away.
I knocked, and the door opened to reveal a tall, mature Asian woman with a square face and prominent smile lines. “Ah! Mr. Leeds. Excellent.” She gestured for us to enter, and J.C.—of course—went first.
He ducked under her arm, deftly avoiding touching a real person, then looked around, hand on his weapon. Finally he nodded for the rest of us to enter.
The interviewer had set out a group of chairs for us, and she stood by the door a conspicuously long time for all of us to enter. She’d done her homework. Though she waited too long—she couldn’t see the aspects—her effort did help with the illusion, for which I was grateful.
Ivy and Tobias settled themselves while J.C. continued to inspect the room. Large windows to our right looked out on the curb, where Wilson stood beside my limo. The far left wall of the room was dominated by a large saltwater fish tank. The rest of the décor was in a “writing den” theme, with hardwood bookcases and deep green carpeting.
I stepped up to the window and nodded toward Wilson, who waved back.
“Three today, then?” the interviewer asked.
I turned around, frowning.
“I followed your eyes,” she said, pointing to the chairs where Ivy and Tobias sat, then to where J.C. had been standing—though he’d moved to search the bookshelves for secret passages.
“Only three,” I said.
“Ivy, Tobias, J.C.?”
“You have done your homework.”
“I like to be prepared,” the woman said, settling down in her own seat. “I’m Jenny, by the way, in case Liza didn’t say.”
This woman was Jenny Zhang, reporter and bestselling writer. She specialized in salacious pop-biographies that rode the lines between information, entertainment, and voyeurism. She had won awards, but really, she was just another hack who had fought her way out of the clickbait trenches and earned a measure of respectability.
I wished I’d never promised Liza the favor of doing an interview with one of her friends, but I was stuck. Hopefully Jenny wouldn’t keep me too long, and her eventual book wouldn’t be too painful.
She nodded toward the seats, but I remained beside the window. “Suit yourself,” she said, getting out a notepad. She pointed at my aspects. “J.C., Tobias, Ivy. Id, ego, superego.”
“Oh, great,” Ivy said. “One of those. Tell her we’ve been over this. It doesn’t fit.”
“We’re not fans,” I said to Jenny, “of that psychological profile.”
“Ivy’s the one complaining?” Jenny asked. “She’s a repository of your understanding of human nature—you’ve externalized in her your people skills and your understanding of relationships. She’s reportedly very cynical. What does that say about you, I wonder?”
I shifted uncomfortably.
“Hey,” J.C. said. “That’s not bad.”
“But you’ve also created a personification of peace and relaxation.” Jenny pointed her pencil toward one of the seats. She had them reversed, but obviously she meant Tobias this time. “You say he’s a historian, but how often does his knowledge of history prove relevant?”
“Frequently,” I said.
“That’s not what I hear,” Jenny said. “You claim to have limited ‘slots’ in a given team of aspects. Imagining too many at once is difficult, so you bring only a few with you at a time. Yet you always take these three. J.C.—your sense of paranoia and self-preservation—is a logical inclusion. As is Ivy, who can help you cope with the social norms of the outside world. But why Tobias?”
“She knows too much,” Ivy said. “Something’s wrong with this interview.”
“Do we really need to panic?” Tobias said. “So she’s read the previous profiles people have done of Stephen. Surely, we should expect that. Wouldn’t we be more suspicious if she hadn’t come in with some theories about our nature?”
I idled by the window, but finally J.C. nodded and sat down. He was satisfied. I stepped away from the window, but didn’t sit. Instead, I walked up to the fish tank. It was extravagant, with variegated corals and beautiful lighting. So much work to create what amo
unted to a prison.
Jenny was writing on her notepad. What did she find so fascinating? I’d barely said anything.
I watched the fish pick at the coral, eating at their own confines. “Don’t you have any other questions for me?” I finally asked Jenny. “Everyone else wants to know how I distinguish reality from hallucination. Or they want to know what it feels like to assimilate knowledge—then manifest it as an aspect.”
“What happened to Ignacio?” Jenny asked.
I spun on her. Tobias raised a hand to his lips, gasping softly.
“You mentioned Ignacio in past interviews,” Jenny said, watching me with poised pencil. “One of your favorite aspects. A chemist? And yet, in your recent case with the motor-oil-eating bacteria, you didn’t involve him at all. Curious.”
Ignacio. He, like Justin, was … was no longer one of my aspects.
Tobias cleared his throat. “Did you see she has an Algernon Blackwood book on the shelf? Original Arkham House edition, which is my favorite. The feel of the paper—the scent … it is the scent of lore itself.”
“You’ve frozen up,” Jenny noted. “Can you lose aspects, Mr. Leeds?”
“Original Arkham House editions are … are rare … though that depends on who you want to read. I once had a copy of Bradbury’s Dark Carnival from them, though the cover…”
“What happened?” Jenny asked. “Did they simply move out?”
“The cover … did not … age … well.…”
“Ivy,” I whispered.
“Right, right,” she said, standing up. “Okay, so she’s acting like this is an innocent question, but I don’t buy it. She knew this would touch a nerve. Look how tightly she holds that pencil, hanging on your words.”
“I’m sorry,” Tobias said, dabbing at his brow with a handkerchief. “I am not helpful right now, am I?”
“She’s goading us,” J.C. said, standing up. He rested his hand on Ivy’s shoulder. “What do we do?”
“She wants to push us off balance,” Ivy decided. “Steve, you need to reassert control of the conversation.”
“But how much does she know?” Tobias asked. “Did she really guess what happened to Ignacio? You don’t speak of these things often.” He cocked his head. “Stan says … Stan says she must be working for them.”
Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds Page 19
