Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds

by Brandon Sanderson

  Kalyani turned the phone to video mode and showed what Turquoise was drawing. Ngozi coached him to make tweaks, with some input from Ivy, and he did a remarkable job. My brain could memorize complex details quickly. We just needed a way to get the information out.

  “Cool,” Turquoise said when we were done. “Kind of looks like a potato who is pretending to be a man, and is worried someone will call his bluff.”

  “You’re a weird dude, Turquoise,” I said.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “Hey, Chin?” I asked. “You listening?”

  “Here,” my computer expert said, leaning down and waving into the camera.

  “Can you run that sketch through some kind of facial recognition software?” I asked.

  “No, but I can tell you who he is anyway.”

  “What? Really?”

  “Sure,” Chin said. “I read an article on him recently—that’s Kyle Walters, a local entrepreneur. He’s made a few waves in local tech circles.”

  I frowned, Googling the name. “Kyle Walters. President of Walters and Ostman Detention Enterprises.”

  “… Detention Enterprises?” Ngozi asked. “Like, prisons?”

  “For-profit prisons,” Chin said, reading. “He made news by purchasing a game company. It was a moderately big deal in some circles.”

  I nodded slowly. Whatever Chin knew came from me. I must have read about Kyle during one of my many information binges, where I tried to absorb as many news stories and articles as possible, for future reference.

  “Video games and prisons?” Ivy said. “That’s an odd pairing.”

  “Yeah.” I scrolled up on the article. “President of the company. Why did he bother coming to meet me himself?”

  “Meeting you is quite the experience,” Chin said. “He’s said to be a hands-on type. Guess he just wanted to see you for himself.”

  I frowned, studying the article.

  “What?” Ivy asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just … I think I used to know something about that structure he’s standing in front of.” I glanced at the caption below the picture. “‘Eiffel Tower’? Looks like some kind of art installation.”

  “Yeah. A big one.” Ivy shook her head. “Strange.”

  “That’s ‘art’?” J.C. said. “Looks like someone forgot to finish the thing.”

  I sat there, waiting for Tobias to explain it to us, then felt again like I’d been punched. He was gone. I took a deep breath and did some further searching into our Kyle Walters fellow. I found some clips of him talking at tech conferences, giving speeches full of buzzwords.

  But he owned prisons. What was he doing at these conferences? They weren’t even security conferences. Applied Virtual Reality Summit, I read. Huh.

  “He’s based locally?” I asked. “Where?”

  “Here,” Ivy said, showing me her phone, with an address listed. “He owns an entire building in a suburban office park.” It appearing on her phone meant I had that address tucked in the back of my brain somewhere, from when I’d memorized local business lists. So I hadn’t lost everything with Tobias.

  “You seem to be coping remarkably well,” Jenny said, “now that the initial shock has worn off. Can you explain how your aspects are helping you to recover?”

  Startled, I looked up. There she was, sitting across from me in the limo. J.C., with wonderful presence of mind, pulled his gun and leveled it right at her head.

  “Is that necessary?” she asked.

  “We just had an aspect go crazy and kill one of my best friends,” J.C. said. “I will blow the back of your head across that seat if I think it will save anyone else.”

  “You’re not following the rules,” I said to her. “Appearing and vanishing? That’s dangerous. Nightmares don’t follow the rules.”

  She pursed her lips, and for the first time seemed to get that idea. She nodded, and J.C. looked at me.

  “You can put it away,” I said to him. “She’s obviously not a nightmare. Not yet.”

  He obeyed, holstering it with deliberation as he leaned back in his seat, still watching her. We made fun of J.C., but I’ll admit he can be casually intimidating when he really wants to be. Ivy settled in next to him, legs crossed, staring daggers at Jenny. Ngozi had missed the entire exchange, because she was suddenly fixated on how dirty the inside of the cupholder was.

  “It seems to me,” Jenny said, “that you all are very quick to point a gun—but very slow to ask the difficult questions.”

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “Such as why is this happening?” Jenny asked. “Why are you losing aspects? What is causing your hallucinations to behave in this way?”

  “My brain is overworked. Too many aspects, too much going on with them. Either that or I’m emotionally incapable of handling change in my life.”

  “False dichotomy,” Jenny said. “It could be a third option.”

  “Such as?”

  “You tell me. I’m just here to listen.”

  “You realize,” I said to her, “that I already have a psychologist aspect.” I nodded toward Ivy. “She gives me lip, but she’s good at her job, so I don’t need another.”

  “I’m not a psychologist,” Jenny said. “I’m a biographer.” She wrote some things in her notepad, as if to prove the point.

  I looked out the window, watching streetlights pass on the side of the road. We’d pulled off the freeway, and were heading down a dim neighborhood street. The patches between the lights were dark—almost like nothing existed, except where those streetlights created the world.

  I pushed the intercom button. “Barb, GPS an office building called Walters and Ostman Detention Enterprises. Should be on 206th. Take us there.”

  “Roger, boss,” she said.

  “Tell me, Mr. Leeds,” Jenny said. “Do you want to be cured?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Say you’d lose us all,” Jenny said. “No more aspects. No more knowledge. No more being special. But if you could be normal, would you take that trade?”

  When I didn’t answer immediately, Ivy shot me a betrayed look. But what could I say? To be well.

  To be normal.

  I did everything I could to remain sane, to shove my psychoses off onto the aspects. I was the most boring of the lot, by design. That way I could pretend. But did that mean … mean that I’d welcome losing the aspects?

  Could I really live without them?

  “I miss Tobias already,” J.C. said softly. “He’d have broken this silence. Said something to make me smile.”

  “Tell me about him,” Jenny said. “I barely got to meet him.”

  It felt like she was trying to worm her way in, dig information from my brain.

  “He was wonderful,” Ivy said. “Calm with everyone. Interested in everyone.”

  “He loved a mystery,” Ngozi added. “He loved questions. He was the part of us that kept wanting to learn.”

  “I swear,” I noted, “half the aspects exist because he was interested enough to get me digging into some strange topic.”

  “He hated charging people for our work,” J.C. said. “Always wanted to give everyone a pro bono deal. Terrible businessman. Good man though.”

  “He was crazy in his own wonderful way,” Ivy said. “Remember how people would get when they found out that one of your hallucinations had his own hallucination?”

  I smiled. Maybe … maybe I could imagine Stan, Tobias’s astronaut friend. I didn’t usually have that much control.

  The others continued to reminisce, telling stories about Tobias. Jenny sat back, writing it all down. And it did feel better to talk about it. To remember. Maybe for once she’d actually helped.

  Eventually we pulled up to a small business building—maybe four stories high. I didn’t know if Sandra was inside, but hopefully they’d at least have information on where she was being held.

  I just had to break in and steal it.

  NINE

  “Same car,” N
gozi said, peering through the binoculars out the window of our limo. “Big silver SUV that was parked on the street near the hot dog cart. I can barely make out the license plate by the streetlights.” She hesitated. “Anyone heard of a ‘Lexus’ make of cars?”

  The aspects shook their heads. How many more aspects could I lose before I was just … gone? A drooling vegetable?

  J.C. waved for the binoculars, and Ngozi wiped them down with a disinfecting wipe, then passed them over. He looked over the building. “No way to guess at their security level. Here’s what we do: We go back to the house and I gather a team of specialized aspects. Chin, Lua, Marci.

  “We work some contacts, grab the architectural plans—and, if we’re lucky, find out who installed this building’s security. We might be able to find out who owned the building before this Kyle guy bought it, and—if they can be bribed—get an even better idea of what we’re dealing with. We come back in two days’ time, at three in the morning, when…”

  I opened the door and stepped out into the night.

  “… or not,” J.C. said, with a loud sigh.

  I knocked on the driver’s window, which Barb rolled down. “Go park the car someplace out of sight,” I said, then started out toward the office building.

  J.C., Ivy, Ngozi, and Jenny followed me. We crossed the dark lawn in a low run. Most parts of the building were floodlit, but on the east side the floodlight was flickering, mostly dark. So I approached from that side.

  Jenny hung back the farthest, looking awkward as she tried to hide behind a tree. At least she was playing by the rules now. Ivy had done this sort of thing before, and crept beside J.C. and me with her shoes—not the most practical for an infiltration—held in her hand. I was worried most about Ngozi, but she was smiling as she settled in beside me near some shrubs.

  “It’s been a while,” she whispered as we crouched down in the darkened shadow of the shrubbery. “I feel … I feel good. Like I can do this. Huh. Oh! Don’t brush those leaves! Do you know what kinds of chemicals they spray on these things to keep them looking this green?”

  J.C. scanned the side of the building. “You insist on doing this now?”

  “If Sandra is in there, I want to know. We can’t wait two days while they might move her.”

  He shared a look with Ivy, who shrugged, then nodded.

  He breathed out. “You people are all crazy.”

  “Hey!” Ivy said. “I’m the psychologist here. I get to define who is crazy, and only four of us are.”

  J.C. counted the five of us. Then, hesitantly, pointed at himself.

  “J.C.,” she said flatly, “you’re as crazy as they come. How many gun magazine subscriptions do you have?”

  “… All of them,” he admitted.

  “In how many languages?”

  “… All of them.”

  “And how many of those languages other than English do you read?”

  “… None of them.” He peered through the bushes with his binoculars. “But I can read the pictures. Those aren’t in Canadian or whatever, eh.”

  “Who’s the sane one, then?” I asked Ivy. “Me?”

  “Heavens no. It’s Ngozi. Have you seen the chemicals they spray on these plants? You should really listen to her.”

  Ngozi nodded in agreement, but J.C. just chuckled. And I … I smiled a little. It was hard to feel any levity after what had happened, but I realized I still needed it.

  Thank you, Ivy. “So how do we get in?” I asked.

  “Air ducts?” Ngozi asked.

  J.C. rolled his eyes. “Have you ever actually seen an air duct that a person could climb through? Like, one that was both big enough and wouldn’t collapse from the weight of a person inside?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ve seen lots. On TV.”

  “Yeah, well, how about next time we’re doing crime scene analysis, I yell ‘enhance’ like a billion times.”

  “Point taken.”

  “Fortunately,” J.C. said, holding up the binoculars again, “this place doesn’t look too secure. I don’t see any external cameras—they could easily be hidden, mind you—and no lights in the windows indicates that if they’re patrolling on foot, they’re doing so rarely. Of course, these modern joints don’t need patrols—everything is wired to go crazy the moment you breathe on the wrong door.

  “Best way in is to do what Audrey always says—look for the human error, rather than trying to break the machines.” He pointed, and I spotted a window on the first floor that had been propped open with a book, perhaps for fresh air.

  “We go all at once,” J.C. said. “If they’re watching the area via camera, stringing it out is worse. This way, at least there’s a chance the security guard will be looking away at the moment we run. Ready?”

  We each nodded.

  J.C. thumbed over his shoulder toward Jenny, who observed from farther back—perhaps not trusting herself to get close. “And her?”

  “Ignore her,” I said. “She … won’t show up on their screens. She, um, has a stealth system.”

  “Not the writer chick,” J.C. said, rolling his eyes. He pointed again. “Her.”

  I looked again. Barb was scuttling across the grass. She arrived, out of breath, and crouched next to me. “All right!” she said. “Sneaking in? I can dig that. What do you want me to do?”

  “Go back to the car.”

  “But—”

  “Go back to the car, drive off, and go to your uncle’s birthday party. That’s happening tonight, right? Grab some cake, Barb.”

  “You’ll need—”

  “I’ll get a cab. Go.”

  Her face fell, then she nodded and slunk off. If she exposed me to the security guards in there … I shook my head, glancing back at the team—and was met with uniform looks of disapproval.

  “What?” I said. “We don’t need real people.”

  “There are things she could do that we can’t,” Ngozi said.

  “I’m never one to turn away someone with a can-do attitude,” J.C. said.

  Ivy just squeezed my arm. “What if that’s the problem, Steve? What if you can’t just live with us? What if turning inward is what’s causing all of this?”

  “What? You’re that offended because I turned my chauffeur away?” They were all crazy.

  Besides. Maybe I didn’t want someone watching as I went through … whatever was happening to me. Can’t a man suffer a breakdown in private?

  “Let’s go,” I said—then didn’t give them a chance to object as I ran for the building. The others followed, even Jenny. I reached the side of the building, puffing, then approached the open window. It was the type that slid up and down, and through the glass I saw what looked like a service closet. There were buckets on the floor, and it smelled faintly of cleaning fluids. Perhaps they’d been airing it out.

  I pulled up the window, then slipped through. I managed to do it without making any noise or knocking over the buckets on the ground, though I bumped my head on a shelf in the dark room as I stood up. I saw stars, and my vision flashed, but I managed to keep myself from shouting out.

  I held open the window for the others, and J.C. gave me a thumbs-up as he climbed in. He probably hadn’t seen me knock my head, but I figured I was doing better than I might once have. Our training sessions were proving good for something.

  Ivy did knock over one of the buckets, but fortunately, the resulting clatter wouldn’t be audible to anyone but me—though she shot me a chagrined look after doing it. J.C. helped Ngozi in, then Jenny came last.

  I replaced the book, rested the window on it, then moved to the door. I took a deep breath and cracked it open. If they had the doors alarmed, this would reveal me.

  The light beyond the door was much brighter than I expected. I blinked against the garish, sterile glare. The hallway seemed empty, though J.C. pointed upward to a little knob on the ceiling, a hemisphere of reflective black glass. Security camera.

  I pulled back into the room and closed the d
oor with a click. After thinking a moment, I dialed Kalyani on the phone. “Grab Chin,” I said softly.

  A moment later, he was on the line. “Yeah, boss?”

  “We’re infiltrating the Detention Enterprises place,” I said. “We’ve breached the perimeter, but the hallways have some surveillance cameras.”

  Chin chuckled softly. “You’re surprised that a group that runs prison facilities has a basic level of security?”

  “He’s been reckless lately,” J.C. said. “More so than usual.”

  “All right. Well, have a look at your phone, boss. You see an app called SAPE? That’s your signal analysis booster. Give it a try, and set the thing to transmit data to my laptop.”

  “Done,” I said, flicking a few buttons, watching data appear on my screen.

  “Hm…” Chin said. “Visible guest wi-fi … hidden internal signals not broadcasting identities … Okay, cool. They’re using AJ141 wireless cameras.”

  “That’s good?”

  “Kind of,” Chin said. “So those little camera nodes broadcast signals back to a central watch station, right? And the night watchperson there cycles through the cameras.”

  “Can you hack it?”

  “Nope,” Chin said. “Not a chance. We’d need to plug into the thing directly, which—if you hadn’t guessed—would kind of involve going into its field of view. However, watch the signal on your phone. See that little blip?”

  “Yeah. What is it?”

  “That’s a ping for data, which is causing the camera to reset briefly and start transmitting. Awkward. They probably configured new cameras to work with their older security setup. It means that while you can’t hack the system…”

  “We can see when one of the cameras is transmitting,” I said, smiling. “Nice work, Chin.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t get caught, all right? We’ve had enough bad news today.”

  “Speaking of that…” Kalyani said from near Chin, her voice timid. “Mr. Steve?”

  “What?” I said, feeling cold.

  “Lua is gone.”

  “I thought you said you had everyone!”

  “We thought we had, but he ran out to grab something from his little survivor hut out back. And he didn’t come back! We sent four people out together looking for him, but he’s gone.”