Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2)

by Bartholomew Lander

  “Annika,” she said, drawing the woman’s attention. “I don’t know if this is a big deal or not, but there’s something I need to tell you about Kyle.”

  With the damning letter in her hand, Annika stormed down the stairs, past where Mark was helping Kara pack, and into the kitchen. “Kyle, you son of a bitch!” He jumped in fright where he still sat at the table. He opened his mouth to question her, but she gave him no chance to speak. “I was right to be suspicious of you, you goddamned snake!” Annika held up the half-crumpled note so he could see the official stamp on it. “Wanna explain to me what the fuck this is?”

  His eyes darted to the note and then back to her face. “What?”

  “Arachnologist,” she spat. “Should’ve known that was an omen. Even asked myself if it was a damned coincidence. If only I’d been more cynical, I’d have caught on.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Should’ve kept your employment to yourself, Kyle, if that is your real name.” She crushed the letter into a ball in her hand and threw it across the table at him. “Now the only question is, what to do with you.”

  Kyle stood up, shoulders shaking and face burning red. “I’ve had just about enough of this. If you’re going to treat me like a criminal then I demand an explanation for—”

  Annika drew her revolver and leveled the barrel at his head. He started, gave a girlish shriek, and fumbled backward into the kitchen counter. “You’re in no position to demand anything, traitor!” She clicked the hammer back. “Now give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

  “What’s going on?” came Mark’s voice over the sound of footsteps. A moment later, the whole family minus Ralph had crowded into the doorway, gawking at the spectacle.

  “Seems Kyle’s been holding out on us,” Annika said. “I wondered if it was a coincidence that he was an arachnologist. Well, I doubt it’s a coincidence that he was contacted by NIDUS under the guise of West Valley Research.”

  Kara gasped. “What?”

  “Thank Spinzie for the heads-up. For all we know he’s already filled with brain spiders. Anything to say in your defense, Kyle, or should we let the bullet do the talking?”

  He stood there, cowering. “Th-that job was . . . the people after you are . . . ?”

  “Quit stammering and tell me something interesting.” She took a step forward and eased the barrel of her Ruger closer to him.

  “I didn’t take that damned job,” he said. “I turned them down because of May.” Anger peeled back his lips even as his eyes were glued shut by fear. “Because I couldn’t stand the thought of being around her.”

  “Interesting. Except not. You don’t really think I’d believe that you turned down that kinda salary in favor of teaching biology at a community college, do you?”

  “Believe what you want,” he said with a growing indignation. “If I was part of some conspiracy against these kids, why wouldn’t I have betrayed you already?”

  “I imagine Marky’s death threats had something to do with that. You’ve probably just been waiting for us to leave so you can sell them down the river.”

  He shook his head, whole body trembling. “I would never do that. I would never . . . ”

  “Never say never, Kyle. Now, wanna give me a better alibi than I didn’t take the job. Don’t insult my intelligence.”

  “You crazy bitch, that letter is twenty goddamn years old! You think it’s got anything to do with me now?”

  “It must,” Annika said, “or else you wouldn’t still have it now, would you?”

  “No,” May said from the doorway. “You’re wrong. I believe him.”

  Annika held her aim steady and gave the woman a long look out the corner of her eye. “In spite of evidence to the contrary, you’d really trust him?”

  May gave a forlorn nod. “I don’t know anything about that job, or about all these people who are after my kids. But if it would have brought him to Grantwood, then I do know that Kyle’s exactly the type of person to turn it down. He’s always been something of a masochist. And . . . after what happened with him and Ralph and I . . . I believe him.”

  Annika turned her attention back to the man cowering by the counter. She took a deep breath as she mulled her options over. After the longest four seconds in history, she gave the slightest nod possible. “Whatever anger you have toward this woman, Kyle, you should lay it to rest. Her testimony’s the only reason I’m going to let you live.” She lowered the hammer and slipped the Ruger back into her holster. “But don’t think that means you’re off the hook. You obviously want us out of here, and you could probably use a cool three mil. Even if you’re not with NIDUS, I don’t trust you for a second not to rat them out to the police for your own ends.”

  Kyle’s expression turned helpless. He stuttered for a moment, and then a desperate anger billowed out in defiance of his previous dance with death. “I would never, ever do that to May.” He was looking straight at the woman when he said it.

  “Hate her enough to stay the hell away from her at the cost of all else, but not enough to sell her out, huh? I’d love to trust you, Kyle, but I’ve learned the hard way that trust breeds calluses.” She crossed her arms and found the blond-haired girl in the doorway. “Kara. Be and dear and tie him up for me.”

  “What!?” Kyle took a sudden step from the counter. In a rage, he swept his arm across its surface. A plate of eggs shattered against the floor. “You’re out of your goddamn mind! I wouldn’t betray May! No matter what happens, I wouldn’t do that. But you—you all fucking come into my house. You tell me I can’t go to work. You make death threats against me because you’re afraid of my interest in these kids. You deny me the right to research what by all accounts could be the scientific discovery of the fucking millennium. And then you come in here, put a gun to my head! Do you understand what you’ve cost me by being here? You cost me my peace of mind, you cost me my certainty, and you’d have cost me my job if classes were in session. I can’t even sleep in my own bed! And now you want to tie me up, all because you still don’t trust me? After all the shit you’ve put me through, if I was going to sell you out why would I wait until now?”

  Annika grabbed a piece of toast off the nearest plate on the table and shoved it into her mouth. “The reward money.”

  “Fuck the reward money, I would never—”

  “No sale. Tie him up, Kara.”

  After Kyle had been bound in webs, Annika left him in the kitchen. She had to finish getting the family’s affairs in order, and that meant filling the blank holes in their false histories and making a final decision on where they’d be going. Arthr, feeling at a loss, tried to help his parents with the packing. Mark began to look through the Repton Scriptures once more, though he did not expect to learn anything useful at this point. Spinneretta, feeling guilty over her role in Kyle’s binding and near death, began to gather her things in a numb daze. After getting everything together, she could think of nothing else to do than give the UNIX machine a last attempt, if only for educational purposes.

  And so the final day at Kyle’s house passed.

  Chapter 32

  Departure

  I can’t imagine anyone making a system like that without a plan to make it worth it.

  There came that thought again, straight out of Ralph’s nightmares. His eyes shot open. He was once again in a foreign bed. Though the clock on the nightstand said it was only six or so in the evening, the heavy curtains pulled over the window enshrouded the room in an unending midnight. There was no light at all in the bedroom, save for the dimly lit amber eyes of the man seated at the foot of the bed. In the comfort of the artificial night, he felt his heart begin to race as his nearly forgotten conviction returned to him.

  A plan to make it worth it. He could only remember bits and pieces, but he knew he had to go somewhere to rebuild his peace of mind. There was someplace he had to be, something he had to see with his own eyes, to confirm his role in the masquer
ade. But every time his mind approached the answer, it was whisked away in a rush of volatile thoughts. It was thus with a lethargic disdain for the fuzzy walls of his reality that he climbed out of bed and made his way down the hall, uncertain where he was going.

  Without imminent disaster or other catastrophic interference, death in absentia laws gave the missing seven years before being declared dead. Their timing was lucky, Annika thought. Had they been over that threshold, getting Ralph and May set up in their new identities would have been a bit more complicated. Having her parents’ legally dead designation overturned would attract far more attention than they wanted, after all.

  Standing over the papers spread across the small table in the middle bedroom, Annika worked and made phone calls into the early evening. She’d drafted a rough version of events to explain the family’s absence for six years, although she suspected Cathy was going to need to doctor some records to make everything air-tight. She balked at the thought of what it was going to cost, but between her and Mark someone would be able to foot the bill.

  As she went over the story for the third time, making bullet points down a blank page in a messy hand, an unfamiliar voice from behind startled her from her work.

  “What’s this?”

  She jumped and turned about, but to her relief found that it was Ralph. She realized at that moment that she had never actually heard him speak since he arrived. He must’ve been recovering, because at first glance he seemed cognizant. “These are your new identities,” she said, gesturing to the documents. “We’re going to get you away from here. Don’t worry.”

  Ralph studied the papers from where he stood. “How do you even pronounce this name?”

  “It’s a bit like hall-strum. Go down the hall and strum the guitar. Come up with your own mnemonic for all I care.”

  “Ahh.” A pause. He narrowed his eyes at one of the documents. “Carter? Wait, why aren’t we married?”

  “Well, I thought I’d let you guys reaffirm your love for one another. A fitting baptism for getting the hell out of the cult’s clutches. Besides, you don’t get to be too picky with hand-me-downs.”

  He was quiet for a few moments. “Where are we going?”

  “Minnesota,” she said. “A town called Lake Cormorant. Nice and out of the way, not too far from Duluth.”

  “And what about the kids?”

  “They’ll get their paperwork, but it might take a few weeks to get everything set up. Until then, it’s just you and May who’ll be official. You’ll need to be careful. No enrolling in school until everything’s in order.” She gestured at a scrap of paper to the side of her mess of documents. “That reminds me, I’ve gotta get them to pick out their new names.”

  He smiled at her and breathed out a relaxed sigh. “Thank you for doing this for us, Kyle.”

  Annika froze. “Uhh. Yeah. No problem.”

  “After all that happened between us, I’m just . . . I’m really lucky to have a friend like you.”

  She ground her forehead into her knuckles. “Go to bed, Ralph. You’re not quite all there yet.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Alright. Think I could get used to that hall-strum name, though. Has a good taste.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Good taste,” he said again, wandering toward the door. “Hall-strum.”

  Annika sighed, focusing again on the remaining paperwork. The clock was still ticking. She had only a few remaining hours to get everything in order.

  If there was going to be one good thing about getting a new identity, Spinneretta thought, it was that she’d never again have to see this stupid piece of UNIX trash. She’d finally be able to use a real computer again. Somehow, the manual to the operating system made everything more confusing, despite her relative progress from the last time she’d worked on it. Perhaps she just wasn’t in the mindset for it. Wasn’t really how I wanted to spend the last few hours here, but . . .

  A knock came, and she turned around, expecting it to be Mark. Instead, she saw her father standing at the door.

  “Knock-knock,” he said.

  “Oh, you’re up. Are you feeling okay now?”

  He stared at her, and after a moment he nodded. “I’m great. What are you doing awake so late?”

  She blinked at him. “It’s only like six.”

  “Oh.”

  She looked away, feeling nervous about how together he really was. “Well, I hope you’re about ready to go.”

  He walked over to her and squinted at the computer screen through his glasses. “What’s this?”

  “Stupid computer,” she said. “Can’t get it to do anything. All I can do is look at the file structure and imagine how cool it would be to use the internet.”

  “What won’t it do?”

  “Anything. Just been messing around with it, trying to figure it out. Been reading through this book, but I can’t even get the examples to work anymore. Like, there are these dumb things called environment variables, right? But they don’t even work. You might get a kick out of—”

  “UNIX variables are per-session,” Ralph said. “They aren’t inherited by child processes.”

  “Uh?”

  “If you want child processes to inherit the variable, then you need to set it for export. And if you don’t want it to get reset when you exit the session, you need to set it in your profile. Here.” He reached over her shoulders and invoked a spell of the computer deities. His fingers, as if typing in tongues, navigated to the home directory of arachne and threw open a configuration file she hadn’t even known existed. He appended a single line to the very end of the file, declaring a new variable for export. “There,” he said. “Every time you log in, the value of var will be set to hello world, and that’ll be globally available to everything. Just like a C constant. See how that works?”

  She nodded, stunned. “I didn’t think you knew how to use a fossil like this.”

  He gave a proud smile. “UNIX. It’s been a damn long time. I haven’t seen a UNIX machine since . . . ” He paused. His eyelids twitched, and his mouth fell open a hair-breadth. “I remember.”

  “Dad?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I think I understand now.”

  “Understand what, exactly? Are you alright?”

  He shook his head. “I’m great.” He turned around and began to amble toward the door. “I’m great.”

  “Hey, thanks for the help,” Spinneretta called after him.

  “No problem.”

  “Are you just about ready to go?”

  A long pause as he hovered at the threshold of the dim study. “Yeah,” he said at last. “I think I am.”

  Ralph closed the door to the study behind him.

  I can’t imagine anyone making a system like that without a plan to make it worth it.

  That was it. He was it. It all made sense now. He had never fretted over the way Grantwood had accepted his children without any serious reservations. He had never even noticed their own obscurity, nor the utter lack of scientific interest in the miraculous hybrids. In defiance of reason, he had allowed himself to be swallowed by sorrow and self-loathing. But now, it was all too clear. The doubt and suspicion surrounding his own work for the Corporation returned. The more he considered the implications of that suspicion, the more toxic those thoughts became.

  It could not have been a coincidence. He had to know for certain whether this was all his fault or not. He could no longer suffer his children to live with a father who unwittingly stacked the odds against them. The restless fervor in his heart grew brighter, burning away the fog of madness that devoured his sight. He could see clearly now, but he had little time to enjoy it. He had a job to do. Even if he could never know the truth, he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t seek it. And so he made up his mind.

  He went hunting for a piece of paper. May’s voice echoed from somewhere downstairs, and the sound of it nearly brought him to tears. She deserved better. She deserved better than the pathetic man tha
t he was, and so did his children. In a daze, he found a sheet of paper in the cupboard. With a half-broken pen, he scrawled a few words of farewell and left the note where it fell upon the floor.

  He had to return to where it all started. He had to go back. He was going to find that truth. And so he went downstairs, down the path toward his own end, humming the lyrics to a song he’d never heard before:

  Yellow King and Helixweaver

  The Chosen and the believer

  When they fight, within mists white

  How many dead stars will ignite?

  One, two, three, four, five . . .

  “Ready to go, kids?” Annika called as she entered the foyer from the hall.

  The bags slung over Spinneretta’s shoulders were heavy, cutting. Kara and Arthr stood on either side of her, holding their own bags at the ready. It must’ve taken a great effort, Spinneretta thought, for the woman to ignore the pall of despair and keep right on smiling.

  Annika nodded to each of them in turn. “Alrighty then, that just leaves a couple loose ends.” She headed for the kitchen, and Spinneretta found her feet gliding after her, if only to make sure she didn’t put a bullet in Kyle’s head after all this.

  “Well, this is it,” Annika said to the man bound by spider silk to the chair. “I guess I’d feel pretty bad about all this if I didn’t at least pay for the alcohol May and I stole from you.”

  “Who cares about the alcohol?” he spat back as he strained against his bindings. “The alcohol is the least of the things you’ve fucked up!”