Those That Wake 02: What We Become

by Jesse Karp

  “For a while.”

  “What’s going on, Laura?” Claire Westlake’s voice had acquired a vein of panicky concern. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m not all right, as a matter of fact, and it’s because of school and because of Josh and because I’m not—” She wrestled the thought, her mind forcing a word out of her mouth she couldn’t predict. “Me.”

  “Laura”—her mother reined her voice back in, playing the steadying angle now—“everything is going to be okay, honey, I promise you. I’d be happy to come to you, take you to dinner. Or why don’t you take a week off and come see us. Your father would love that.”

  “I am taking a week off, Mom. I’m going to take a whole bunch of them off.”

  “You’re being flippant now, Laura, and that’s just not fair. This is a huge bombshell to drop. Help me understand it.”

  “I can’t help you. I don’t understand it myself.”

  “Then you need to stay until you do. Running away isn’t the answer.”

  “School is running away. Leaving school is me not running away anymore.”

  “You’re going to have to explain better than that, Laura.”

  Laura’s elbows went down on the table, and she leaned forward, confronting the screen.

  “I’m not a child,” she said through a hard jaw.

  “You are a child, Laura. You’re on the verge, you’re almost an adult, but we still owe you more taking care of, more being looked after.”

  Laura’s head slumped down between her shoulders, and she felt her eyes burning hot.

  “Mommy,” she said, letting the tears out—she had never been any good at holding them back. “Mommy.” She brought her face back up and let her mother see her pleading face. “There’s something wrong with me. There has been since I got here. You must have fought it so hard in your own head. You must have prayed it wasn’t so. But this isn’t me. I went off course somewhere, and you know I did.”

  Her mother was looking back, biting one edge of her lip. She was crying, too.

  “You can’t help me,” Laura said. “No one can help until I know what’s wrong. Leaving school is the first thing that’s felt right since . . . since I can even remember.”

  “Just as you want to pull away, Laura, I want to hold you closer.” Her mother managed a weak smile. “Where are you going to go?”

  “I’m going to drive for a while, just around New York.”

  “You’re going to drive around by yourself?”

  “No,” she said. She could give her mother this; at least she could give her this. “A friend is coming with me; Traci.”

  “Laura,” her mother’s fingers were flexing, instinctively wanting to reach out and touch her daughter’s face through a screen that wouldn’t permit it. “Come home.”

  “Soon, Mom. I promise.” She wiped her tears with a forearm, made a brave go at a smile. “I promise.”

  Claire studied her daughter—the image of her daughter, Laura reminded herself—through the screen. Her jaw was trembling.

  “Being a mother is like having your heart outside your body, Laura. Can you understand that?”

  The sense of loss she had been feeling welled up in Laura, and she nodded, unable to speak.

  “You call me, Laura. Every night.”

  “I will, Mom. I’m not going to drop off the edge of the earth. I’m just taking a drive.”

  “Okay. You find Laura and bring her back to us.”

  They looked at each other while an ad for Kleenex scrolled below.

  “Laura. I was wrong. You’re not a child.”

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you.”

  Laura managed to hold herself together until the screen went dark, but then tears came like a tidal flow, racking her body so badly that she had to grab on to the edge of the desk until her knuckles were white. She gasped in, unable to catch her breath, fluid streaming from her eyes and nose, her torso spasming as if in an epileptic fit.

  She was dimly aware of the door starting to open. Aaron appeared, caught totally unprepared, and instantly closed himself out once again.

  She put her hands over her face to plug the dam, and tears crept through her fingers, dropping onto the desk before the unfolded cell, the totem of technology before which they all prayed now.

  She took in gulps of air, let them out slowly.

  Not quite finished yet, she managed to stand up and refold the cell. As she weighed it in her hand, the tears tapered away and her ragged breathing filled the room. She took the object by its edge and winged it under the bed again, once more consigning it to darkness.

  She used the balls of her hands to scrub away the last of the tears, then marched out of her room to find her future.

  PART II

  The Beast

  ROARKE ADOPTED HIS ACCUSTOMED SOLDIER’S bearing before the door of Arielle Kliest and knocked.

  “Come,” Kliest said from within, and he pushed through and shut the door silently behind him, taking a spot directly before her desk, looking down at her cool, sharp features. “And so?”

  “Nothing, ma’am,” he stated as tersely as he would have brought news of resounding success. Judgment was the purview of those in charge. He merely reported facts. “The locator signal was coming from a man named Gerald Fisher. He’s been subjected to a standard interrogation array. There’s no indication that he knows Mal.”

  “If Mr. Fisher’s geolocator was functioning as a cloak, now that we’ve taken it out of the equation, why hasn’t Mal’s come back online?”

  “Tech has no explanation, ma’am. As you recall, it went offline briefly after we put it in the first time. Some kind of a manufacturing flaw?”

  “Not likely,” Kliest said, her voice softer than Roarke would have expected at the news. “And the girl’s apartment?”

  “Rose Santoro’s apartment is still empty.”

  “And,” she ventured carefully, “no sign of Mal himself?”

  “No, ma’am. The space Mal disappeared in . . .” For the first time, a crack appeared in the granite of Roarke’s face, an aperture to the moist, shaking spaces of the inexplicable. “There’s nothing there. It was a short ramp leading up to a tobacco store. Eight feet long, three feet up at its highest point, barely enough space to fit him. There was no exit from it that was not visible to us at the time. I simply don’t have an explanation. I’m sorry, Ms. Kliest.”

  She nodded, her eyes unfocused before her.

  “I’ll have a security team sent down to pick over it carefully,” she said absently, perhaps not even to him.

  “Yes, ma’am. If I may, I’m not sure I’d fully trust a security team at this point. To say that they dropped the ball on this one would be putting it mildly. Mr. Castillo reports that one of them actually pulled a gun on him to assist in Mal’s escape.”

  “Yes,” she said, bringing her formidable attention back on to him. “We have that on camera. He climbed down the building,” she said in the same breath, and it took Roarke an instant to register that she was no longer talking about the guard but instead about Mal. “He climbed down the building. Injured, no less.”

  “I could fill in details, ma’am, but that’s about the size of it. I will say, Ms. Kliest, that if Mr. Castillo and I were permitted to carry firearms—”

  “Guns are never permitted in the Old Man’s vicinity, as you well know,” she said, tossing the issue aside. “Does it impress you”—her eyes sharpened, studying his reaction with interest—“that Mal managed to escape in such a physically depleted state?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “No? I’d have thought you would admire such a high degree of commitment.”

  “To be quite frank, ma’am, it made me sick. He’s a child, and he nearly murdered himself to get clear of us.”

  She nodded, offering no indication of her own feelings on the subject. Instead, her expression flattened, and she rose from her seat.

  “I’m going to need you to join me fo
r the report. He may have some questions.”

  “Questions for me, ma’am?” Roarke attempted to pack his sense of unease behind the dispassion of his countenance.

  “Does he frighten you, Mr. Roarke?” It was not a taunt. There was a vein of sympathy in the question, and something more, even; a show of warmth.

  “It’s irregular, ma’am.” He almost let it stand, but her eyes seemed to be inviting him. “I don’t fully understand what he . . . is.”

  She gathered in Roarke’s rigorously self-imposed dispassion.

  “Do you know what separates us from the animals, Mr. Roarke?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am?”

  “The crucial step we took up the evolutionary ladder that the lower life forms did not,” she said. “What was it?”

  “Tool use, ma’am.”

  “Exactly so.” She seemed genuinely delighted with him. “Tool use, the ability to manipulate the environment to our own advantage. He”—her head inclined ever so slightly toward the room at the end of the hall—“understands this at a level you and I never could. Everything is a tool to him. Every institution we’ve created, every body that governs us, every emotion we feel, every belief we have. To him, they are a lever by which he can shift the balance of the world. He’s human, Mr. Roarke, like us, but more evolved; far, far smarter. He has always understood more deeply than others how to use tools.”

  “How?”

  She shook her head.

  “He tells me what to do,” she said, “and I do it. I know he is interested in Mal, because Mal can help him ascertain the whereabouts of a man named Jon Remak. Remak has access to something the Old Man wants access to, as well. A new and powerful tool, I’m sure. What is the tool?” She shook her head with finality. “He doesn’t share, ever. Would you share your tools with an animal? No, you’d expect something quite different from your inferiors.” She studied him, ascertaining whether he gathered the implications. “I will tell you this, though.”

  She took another step toward him, and her hand fell onto his. He had often thought of her as an automaton, able to summon or dismiss emotion as the efficient execution of her duties required. But her eyes found his and offered something, an invitation to something deeper. Her hand was warm and soft, and he found, to his surprise, that he liked it there.

  “Fear is one of his most useful tools,” she said, her breath tinged with mint. “Make sure there’s none of it in you when you’re speaking to him, because he will use it. It’s like offering him a doorway into your head.”

  Roarke gathered the fear and forced it, squealing, into an invincible steel box, which he slid into the recesses of his consciousness. Twenty years of military service and five years of work with that monster Castillo had trained him for at least that much.

  He gave her a single, sincerely dispassionate nod. Her hand lingered just an instant longer, then she stiffened, turned, and led him out of her office and down toward the end of the hall.

  A beast lived inside Lee Castillo. Sometimes he imagined it as a great, snorting bull bucking at the stem of his brain. Years in the marines had taught him the advantages of staying collected, patient. That same time had also taught him the value of being able to unleash the very worst he was capable of on instant command. The thing had always been in him, but the marines had taught him to direct it. If the beast was in charge, after all, Castillo would never have been able to so calmly approach the Lazarus Services Security office on the thirty-fifth floor. He would never have been able to hold a smile on his face while he asked the man at the desk where security guard Brett Talby was stationed at the moment.

  “He’s in briefing, Mr. Castillo,” the man said. “That’s down the hall, first door on the right.”

  Castillo did, however, let the beast spring out—just a flash of its horns, a blur of heaving body—to kick open the door of the briefing room. Desks and a podium were set around the room. Cellscreens were set up along the walls. Five startled faces shot up toward Castillo as he entered and picked out the particular face he was looking for.

  The beast held staunchly at bay—for the moment—he stood over Brett Talby and put one thick slab of hand down on the man’s uniformed shoulder.

  “You recognize me, right, Brett?” Castillo asked.

  “Of course, Mr. Castillo,” Talby replied, his eyes nervously darting to the others in the room, who were all riveted to the scene but had made no move to Talby’s defense.

  “Of course,” Castillo said. “I’m wondering, Brett, how it is that if you recognize me, you felt like it was a good idea to pull a gun on me.”

  A murmur of confusion rose from the bystanders. Talby’s thick, serious face was overcome with bewilderment.

  “I don’t understand, Mr. Castillo,” he said. “I never—”

  “Yeah,” Castillo said. “A gun. You helped that kid to the elevator and held me back by pointing a gun at me. We’ve got it all on security cams.”

  “Security cams?” Talby was starting to realize he had cause to panic. “That’s not—”

  His words were cut off by Castillo’s hands, which had suddenly snapped around Talby’s throat. The room stirred, and Castillo looked up, giving them a glimpse of the beast. The room held its position, everyone but Talby, whose hands grasped and clawed at Castillo’s wrists and whose feet kicked and pushed frantically.

  Looking down into Talby’s face, Castillo was admirably holding tightly to the creature inside him. By sheer luck Talby’s flailing foot caught the outside of Castillo’s knee, where a piece of shrapnel had lodged many years ago. It was no bother to him for the most part, but hit it hard enough at just the right angle and a jag of pain crackled up Castillo’s body and lit the beast.

  Castillo teetered, caught his balance, and yanked Talby from his seat by the neck. He threw him to the ground with the force of a pile driver. Talby squirmed there, a tiny animal trapped. Castillo lifted his foot up, the beast already supplying an image of what Talby’s face would look like after Castillo had finished.

  “What’s that?” Castillo asked, his vision suddenly clearing of red, his foot still held in the air over Talby. One of the cellscreens on the wall showed a map of the city, and on it a dot lit up, chirping a familiar tone that had reached past the beast and pulled Castillo’s attention back out. He set his foot down, the leg still aching from the shot to the old wound, and looked around the room at the other faces.

  “What’s that?” he asked again, quietly.

  “Uh,” one of the security guards piped up, “that’s the feed from Ms. Kliest’s office, some project she’s been working on.”

  Castillo walked over, examined it more carefully, then nodded slowly. He pulled a cell from his pocket, keyed it.

  “Roarke,” he said to the voicemail screen. “Where the hell are you? I’m coming up. Mal just came back online.”

  He stepped over Talby and walked out of the briefing room. Talby might not have gotten quite what was coming to him, but Castillo had been able to pick up on what really mattered, and now they had Mal again.

  That was the benefit of being able to control the beast inside.

  The Stones

  LAURA WOKE UP, FACES SKITTERING out of her waking mind and back into the dark of her suspect memory.

  This was the third motel room she’d awakened in in as many days, the whole lot of them blurring together with their stiff, starched sheets and their almost-clean carpets, their ancient HDs, and the sad views of their own parking lots. From town to town they’d gone, once stopping to check out a vast, echoing, and abandoned warehouse that, a year ago, had one day been filled to the prefab walls with cutting-edge uplink equipment and the next day utterly empty; another day stopping to speak with a highway patrolman who, two and a half years ago, stopped a speeding car only to find that neither the driver nor the car had any record in any data bank the officer had access to. What did the officer remember about this two and a half years on? Exactly, to the word, what had been written in his report. It was
all she could do to drag Aaron away from that one, raging and spitting, before they had both been hauled into county lockup.

  They extended their search, moving from location to location, Aaron becoming more and more sullen with each stop that yielded nothing; his face darkening, his responses getting shorter and harsher.

  She pulled herself up in the bed this morning, wanting to scour it all from her head with a hot shower. She stripped off the T-shirt she had slept in and stepped under the water, as hot as she could stand it.

  She stood under the burning water until she could look at the day ahead of her without a haze clogging her vision. She stepped out into the steaming bathroom and started drying her black, black hair, staring in the fogged mirror. Her blue eyes were bright enough that they were practically the only thing she could make out in the humid reflection.

  Naked, with the towel wrapped around her head, she stood trapped in reverie. She was waiting for a revelation, driving from one spot to the next, waiting to recognize something, for a memory to burst free from the murk in her brain and shudder her body with its power, and until then all she could do was hold her smile and keep pushing Aaron. Nothing here? On to the next. And the next. And the next. And who was there for her? Who kept pushing her?

  With a small surge of anger, she spun to the door and whipped it open, prepared to storm out and snatch up her underwear with hard-edged fortitude. But when the door opened, a figure was coming quickly to its feet and stumbling back, and Laura screeched and then, again much to her surprise, instead of leaping back and throwing the door closed, she jumped forward with her fists balled up and her knees bent.

  “I didn’t—” Aaron said. “I wasn’t—” For an instant, the little boy inside him was apparent on his face, a child caught in the hot spotlight of guilt. But he quickly recovered himself, flattening his features and standing up with rigid dignity.