by James Axler
“Just like so many others have. I’ll bet that if we add it up here and now, you could name dozens of people who gave their lives so that you and your little team of do-gooders could continue running around playing your silly ‘save the world’ game.”
“It’s not like that,” Brigid insisted, but her head was already racing, calling to mind the faces of others who had been hurt and killed over the past few years: Skylar Hitch, Henny Johnson, Clem Bryant and others in the Cerberus ranks, and numerous more beyond the walls of the redoubt who had appeared in Brigid’s life for just a few days or simply a few hours. Her life, along with that of her field teammates, Grant and Kane, had taken so many casualties, people whose names she had barely had time to learn, some for whom she had never even done that.
“Do the math, Brigid,” Morganstern insisted. “How many lives does it make? How many lives equal just one Brigid Baptiste? I don’t think the equation is balanced, do you?”
“Please,” Brigid pleaded. “I don’t know...”
“Wouldn’t you say it’s time to make sure both sides of the equation balance?” Morganstern pressed, looming over Brigid’s shoulder, so near that she could almost touch him. “The operator requires that the equation be balanced. We’ll do it together.”
“Operator,” Brigid whispered, shaking her head.
Hell-o operator, give me number nine.
She tried to ignore the figure looming at the edge of her vision, tried to dismiss his accusing words. But he was right, wasn’t he? She had left him there, had made the choice whether he lived or died. And she had chosen death, chosen to leave Daryl Morganstern to bleed out on the floor of the laboratory in the heart of the Cerberus redoubt as their enemies swarmed on him. She had killed him, hadn’t she?
* * *
IN THE HANGARLIKE ROOM, Grant felt the cold water against his face as the Magistrates held his head under. The Magistrates pushed hard against his back, forcing him down into the basin, where the dark waters swirled. The faucet still blurted out more icy water across the back of his shaved head. Grant felt that water trail across his nape like icy fingers running down his spine, felt the freezing water in the basin press against his face like a punch.
Almost immediately, his face began to feel numb, the frigid water like a wall pushing against his skin. His eyes felt hard, two steel balls against the pressure of the water. He could feel the edges of his skull where the eyes threatened to pop free of their sockets.
Before his open eyes, the water was dark, almost black. Patterns brushed across his retinas, shapes forming and unforming, dark shadows conjured from the imagination.
It took two Magistrates to hold him there, bent over almost double to dunk his head in the grim water. Grant was a big man, and even tied as he was, he struggled, fighting against the Mags who held him in place. But it was no use, he could not get any leverage, not while they had him like this. He would just have to tough it out, endure this dunking until the sadistic baron called time on the punishment.
Grant had almost drowned once before, back when he had been caught up in a tidal wave in the fishing settlement of Hope. He had survived that and he would survive this. It was just a matter of holding his breath, that was all.
The water pressed against him like a living thing clawing at his face. For a moment, something seemed to whisper to Grant from the water, reaching out from the dark pool that pressed against his eyes. He watched, eyes drawn to the darkness. Despite knowing that the water was only a few inches in depth, it appeared bottomless to Grant’s eyes—a dark, cold, bottomless pit of terrors.
He expelled the breath at last, feeling the stream of bubbles blurt from his nostrils, running across his face beneath the water like living things. In a moment they were gone, popping close to his ears, but their sounds were muffled by a sort of numbness that was overcoming his sense of hearing. The bursting bubbles sounded distant, scratchy, like an old recording from a wax cylinder.
He stared into the water, hearing the whispers plucking at his ears, seeing the dark faces that waited beneath the water’s surface. His chest felt hot, a balloon expanding inside its cavity, pressing against his ribs.
The shadow things swirled about the water, like crows taking flight. He needed to breathe, heaven help him, he needed to breathe.
Underwater, Grant’s mouth opened, the jaw slackening. His eyes were losing focus, the black shapes blipping in and out of his vision. He could taste the water; it tasted of dirt. He felt it wash against his teeth, his tongue, felt it lapping against his throat. He began to cough, sputtering out into the water, and then it was in his throat, sucked down, the cold so powerful it felt as if it were burning him.
There were things in the darkness of the water. Dark things. He saw them, dancing there, swimming closer.
“Enough!” Baron Trevelyan’s voice boomed through the sound of splashing water as Grant was pulled from the basin. The word ran around Grant’s head like an echo chamber.
Grant sucked at the air, coughing as it mixed with the water in his throat, a stream of water pouring from his mouth like so much drool.
Grant was manhandled, his head streaming wet, his goatee and eyebrows pouring with water. He blinked it back from his eyelashes. The room seemed bright now and for a moment his eyes struggled to focus. He felt himself slung against the hard back of the chair, his hands still bound, stabbing pains in his wrists and forearms where they had been held so tightly. He slammed into the chair, lolling there as water poured from his face, his head feeling terribly heavy.
Trevelyan was standing before him, a dark silhouette in the brightness of the room. Grant remembered Baron Cobalt and his brethren as mystical creatures far above human considerations of beauty.
“—speak now?” Trevelyan was saying, the sentence not quite making sense to Grant. Water sloshed in his ears, bubbling and popping against his eardrums, a feeling as much as a sound.
Two deathly Magistrates flanking him, Trevelyan looked at Grant, fixing him with his dark, inky eyes. Grant looked at the Mags, his vision swimming, seeing the way their faces were tarnished, their skin ruptured.
The baron spoke again, sneering, “Tell me where your friends are. How many.”
“Go t’ hell,” Grant muttered, water washing between his teeth and down his chin.
“Stubborn, aren’t you?” Trevelyan trilled in his weasel voice. “So be it. Put him under again. Make it longer this time. Let’s see what Grant is made of.”
With that, Grant was yanked up from his seat and dragged over to the basin again, thrust against it so that the cold enamel thudded against his chest. He tried to fight as two Magistrates shoved him headfirst into the swirling water again, the faucet gushing above him. He did not even know what he was fighting about; it was just instinct to never trust a baron. Just instinct, like breathing.
* * *
AS THE SYLPHLIKE FIGURE OF Helena Vaughn took another step down the stairwell toward him, Kane squeezed the trigger on his Sin Eater, unleashing a stuttered burst of 9 mm lead up the stairs. The shots sounded loud in the enclosed space of the stairwell, and bullets rattled as they spanged off the concrete walls and steps beside and behind the naked girl. She seemed unaware of them, letting them drill into and through her unclothed body.
Kane gritted his teeth as his discharge passed through the girl’s pale, ethereal flesh.
“You aren’t real,” he spit. “You can’t be.”
Helena Vaughn just stood there, shaking amid the barrage of bullets that pummelled her body, the dark shadows of the stairwell obscuring her sad expression, turning it into something much more haunting than Kane remembered.
Kane eased his index finger from the blaster’s trigger, bringing his weapon’s violent monologue to an end. The girl still stood there before him, the skin taut across her naked torso, clinging to her ribs in a mottled, pale sheet. She loo
ked up at Kane through the curtain of her bangs, the blond tresses tangled and in disarray. Kane watched as her mouth opened and she let loose a soft sigh before drawing a tiny, stutter of breath as if in pain.
“I never heard you speak,” Kane realized, still training his weapon on the teen.
The girl stood there in darkness, watching him, her expression accusing.
“You never had a voice to me,” Kane told her. “That’s why I can’t hear you now. I was your voice. As a Magistrate, I had to be your voice seeking the justice you demanded. The justice your murder demanded.”
The girl was still watching him, her thin body like a skeleton in the darkness of the wet stairwell. Kane could hear her breathing.
“I don’t know what you are,” Kane told her, “but you’re not real. Something is happening here, something I don’t properly comprehend. But whatever it is you think I’ve done, I can assure you it wasn’t me.”
Kane stood, breathing hard, eyes fixed on the shade in the darkness. His gun felt suddenly heavy in his grip. “Magistrate psych warned us that sometimes the job, the pressures, might get to us,” he recalled, almost reciting the speech he had been given on graduation. “They warned us not to let it, to keep our distance, to remember what our job was. I brought your killer to justice, and just because that didn’t save you doesn’t mean I did wrong.”
The girl—Helena Vaughn—continued to watch Kane from the darkness, bullet holes visible in the wall behind her. Kane marched up the stairs past the girl, striding defiantly to the next flight without looking back. She watched him go, watched as he ascended toward the ninth floor and Brigid Baptiste. He knew she was watching, could sense her eyes on his back, hear her labored breathing. With an enormous effort of will, he ignored her.
* * *
“WE CAN BE TOGETHER in the infinite embrace,” Morganstern told Brigid as she sat alone in the storeroom. “Finish this. Complete the equation. Kill yourself.” He spoke from just behind her now, his voice a solicitous whisper, tickling against her ear.
Slowly, reluctantly, Brigid reached for the shotgun she had rested on the narrow desk beside the television monitor. Picking it up, she turned it over in her hands and brought the barrel up so that it rested beneath her chin. “I’m so sorry, Daryl,” she sobbed. “I never meant for you to die.”
“Make things right,” Morganstern urged. “Kill yourself.”
The gun felt cold against the underside of Brigid’s jaw, the metal of the muzzle like ice on the soft spot beneath her chin. Brigid reached down, pushing her thumb blindly behind the trigger guard as tears rolled down her cheeks, jamming the digit against the trigger, preparing to squeeze it. She had left Daryl to die in one of the labs of the Cerberus redoubt, where he had always been at home. It had been as good as signing his execution papers. She could have stayed, fought for him, sought the medical attention that he needed. But she had not. He was right, she had been too busy looking out for herself to worry about this man who lay wounded at the hands of the base’s infiltrators.
“Kill yourself,” Morganstern repeated as Brigid grasped at the trigger.
She closed her eyes, forcing the hot tears from them in a cascade of salt water, willing the pain of the guilt to end. In the distance, someone was calling her name, as if they knew what she had done to Daryl, how she had killed him.
Brigid felt the cool metal of the gun brushing the underside of her chin, secured it to be sure she would blow her own brains out through the top of her skull. Then Brigid’s thumb stroked against the trigger.
Suddenly a loud crash seemed to fill the tiny storeroom.
Chapter 20
“Baptiste—don’t!”
It was Kane, standing by the open doorway of the storeroom. He had shoved the door open, some instinct guiding him to Brigid when he had failed to find her in the main open-plan area.
What he saw when he shoved open the door with a crash was Brigid Baptiste hunched in a swivel chair in the cramped little storeroom, her shotgun rammed under her jaw as she prepared to blow her brains out. She was alone, and tears glistened on her cheeks as the light spilled in from the main office.
“Baptiste,” Kane repeated, more softly this time. “Move the gun away. You can do this.”
“K-Kane?” she asked. It was like waking from a dream. She could not quite tell what was real and what was still the dream. “What happ— Where?”
“The gun,” Kane urged. “Let it go. Move your hand very carefully and let the blaster go. Okay?”
Brigid saw Kane through the shimmering glaze of her own tears, felt relief and joy surge through her. “Kane, what am I doing here?”
“The gun,” Kane repeated for the third time. “Let it go.”
Confused, Brigid looked down at her hands, saw the shotgun poised between her own jaw and the floor. Swiftly, reacting as if she had touched something dirty, she moved her hands away, tilting her head back and allowing the gun to fall from her grip. Kane was there instantly, plucking up the weapon and breaking it open so that it wouldn’t—couldn’t—go off. Then he was at her side, one arm reaching around her shoulder. She felt his warmth against her, and it was a relief in the coldness of the room, the cold that had been plucking at her mind like a harp string.
“You’re okay now, Baptiste,” Kane reassured, “you’re okay.”
“What happened?” Brigid asked. “Daryl said...” She stopped, feeling confused and silly.
Kane stepped back, stood by the door checking the office beyond for any signs of movement. The skeleton remained in its chair. He did not want them to be surprised by any of those rogue Magistrates.
“Something’s screwy about this place,” Kane told her, still watching the office. “Don’t ask me what it is, but it preys on the mind. You said it was Daryl you saw, right?”
“Daryl Morganstern, yes,” Brigid confirmed, removing her glasses and swiping at the tears. “He told me to...to kill myself. It all seemed to make sense at the time. But now I think about it...”
“It taps into our unresolved feelings of guilt,” Kane told her. “Don’t ask me how, but it manifests them as visions, hallucinations, maybe. I saw someone, too, a girl I knew.”
“Anyone I...?” Brigid began to ask.
Kane shook his head. “No. Old business, something I thought was long dead. Seeing Pellerito today must have churned it all up again, that’s all.”
Kane stopped talking, and he made it clear by his silence that he was not going to explain any further. Brigid took that moment to check the storeroom, scanning the shadows, looking for Daryl Morganstern, that dead man who had called to her from beyond the grave. Besides the videotapes, the room was empty, and yet his presence lingered, the scent in her nostrils, as if he were standing there just out of sight.
“He wanted me to kill myself,” Brigid said solemnly.
Swivelling his head, Kane looked at her, penetrating her with his steel-gray stare. “No, he didn’t,” Kane told her. “I knew Daryl Morganstern. Not well, I’ll grant you, but I knew him. He didn’t want anyone dead.”
“But I...” Brigid began, the feelings churning inside her breast. “He said that I’d killed him because I left him to die.”
“That true?” Kane asked.
Brigid looked at him helplessly, her mouth open, unable to answer. “I should have done something maybe...” she admitted cagily.
“And then what, more people would have died?” Kane challenged. “You go back over the past and it’s all different and you have all the time in the world to do everything right. But that’s just in your head. You were there and you would have made the best decision you could based on the information available. I know you, and I know that’s what you did. Because it’s what you always do.”
Brigid nodded her head with a heavy reluctance. “I’m that predictable, am I?” she teased
.
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” Kane said. “Now, come on, let’s get out of here. I have something downstairs I want to show you.”
Wiping away the last of her tears, Brigid raised herself from her seat and joined Kane at the doorway, taking back the shotgun that he held out for her.
“Careful with that this time, all right?” Kane advised with mock seriousness as he watched her snap its breech closed.
Brigid nodded solemnly. Guilt had haunted the reporter, Bryan Baubier, she remembered from the video recordings. Guilt about his mother. Guilt that seemed to plague the ville, destroying people by turning their own darkness against them.
“He said we were sorrow spaces,” Brigid said as she plucked up a hunk of radio equipment and strode with Kane toward the fire door leading to the stairs.
“Who did?” Kane asked, perplexed.
Brigid told him about the recordings and the history of Quocruft.
* * *
THEY HAD DUNKED GRANT under the water five times in total, each time holding his head for a longer period until he blacked out. He awoke in a cell, his hands still tied, delirium touching at the edges of his mind. There had been something in the water, a dark something that looked at him with accusing eyes that shone like moonlight on a lake.
He was lying on his side upon a simple cot, just a plain board bolted to the wall, with a coarse blanket draped over him. The blanket smelled of human sweat. Grant shrugged, struggling to get the blanket off as he woke properly from his daze. It was not easy with his hands still bound behind him.
“Gently now,” a voice instructed, well-spoken, the words sharp as cut glass.
“Who...?” Grant muttered, searching the room with eyes that did not want to remain open.
The room was drab, ill-lit with peeling paint on the walls. There was a workbench with a wooden chair to one side of the room. The bench was piled with mechanical debris from a child’s construction kit along with a notebook and pencils. Across from this, a gray bucket sat in the corner, a soiled rag draped over it. A man was hurrying over to check on Grant, skin the same ebony as Grant’s own, his dark gray hair in wild disarray around his head and clothes frayed at the edges, a dirty bow tie cinching in his collar. He moved with a limp, his teeth showing as he sneered through the pain. As he did so, Grant saw that something attached the man to the ceiling, a long, flexible hose that connected directly into the back of his skull. The hose looked dirty with oil and grease, but the man seemed to pay it no mind, as if it had been attached to him for a very long time.
