“Thirty years is a long time to pursue a fruitless dream,” Kaye continued implacably. “We feel that three billion annually could be better spent elsewhere.”
She knew nothing. His voice was ice as he replied, “Three billion is nothing compared to—”
“We’ve won.”
Rikkin blinked, unsure as to what she was saying. “I beg your pardon?”
“People no longer care about their civil liberties,” she continued. “They care about their standard of life. The modern world has outgrown notions like ‘freedom.’ They are content to follow.”
Rikkin’s voice was a purr, but rich with warning. “I wonder how many of our forefathers made the same mistake? Sitting complacently on their thrones, while a single voice of protest brought them down.”
The chairwoman blinked. She was unaccustomed to being contradicted. Rikkin went on.
“The threat remains while free will exists. For centuries we’ve tried, with religion, with politics, and now consumerism, to eliminate dissent.”
His thin lips curved in a cold smile as he said, almost lightly, “Isn’t it time we gave science a try? My daughter is closer than we’ve ever been.”
“How is your beautiful daughter?” Kaye asked.
As if she cared, he thought. My daughter is more than beautiful. She’s brilliant. And we are not making pleasant conversation over a cup of tea.
“She has traced the protectors of the Apple,” he replied, and took satisfaction in watching Kaye’s eyes widen. There was no pretense of false courtesy in her reply this time. He had made her hungry.
“Where?”
“Andalusia,” Rikkin replied, adding pointedly, “1491.” He permitted himself to savor the moment.
“The descendants?”
He had her now. “All the bloodlines have died out,” Rikkin replied, then added with a satisfaction he could not quite hide, “… bar one. We’ve traced his back five hundred years, to the Assassin Brotherhood.”
Rikkin’s mouth twitched in a suppressed smile of triumph.
***
Sofia gazed at the pages she had regarded a thousand times before: images from an ancient tome, which depicted the usage of the Apple. It shone brightly, seeming to hover in a circle of enraptured, primitive people, wearing little other than feathers, woven grass clothing, and expressions of utter joy as they held hands.
The facing page was slightly more analytic. The long-ago artist had tried to break down the construction of the Apple, but despite his diligence that had survived centuries, the blueprint raised more questions than it answered.
But now, it had a fresh relevance. It was, as Sofia had told her father, within their grasp.
A sudden movement caught her eye and she turned to look at a clear screen. Cal had bolted upright, shaking and startled, from his bed.
He’d been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours, and Sofia was relieved to see him wake up on his own. After her father’s admonition last night to “push him,” she was afraid she might have to put more medications in his system in order to awaken him.
He looked around, as if expecting someone to be in the room with him, and she placed down her pen. He had her full attention now.
Cal swung his legs over the side of the cot and rubbed the back of his neck. His fingers found the marks left by the epidural that had been plunged into his spinal cord yesterday. He probed them gently, pulling his hand back and regarding it as if surprised to not find it bloody.
Then he spotted the three guards, separated from him by thick, unbreakable glass, observing him. Cal gave them a long stare, then promptly ignored them, got to his feet tentatively, and walked to the door.
It was locked, of course, and after a few tries he turned his attention to exploring the small room, devoid of everything except the spartan cot, an armless, narrow padded bench, and the small table beside it, which did double duty as a light.
Sofia was not at all surprised when, almost immediately, Cal homed in on the small camera. From her perspective, he was looking right at her.
This is a man intimately familiar with prisons, Sofia thought, but his familiarity with his situation did not appear to breed resignation to it.
A sudden wave of anger at her father washed over her. I wonder how bad this will be….
Cal stared searchingly into the lens, wondering who was on the other side of it. Another guard? The angel of promises and pain herself? It didn’t matter. He returned his attention to the guards, not at all intimidated. He had stared down their like before, more times than he could count.
There was a flicker in the glass; a reflection. Had another guard entered the room? No, not a guard, they did not move with such feline grace. He turned and his eyes widened.
The figure’s face was hidden by a hood. The head lifted—and Cal gazed into a face that was both intimately familiar and unspeakably alien: his own.
A killer’s blue eyes gazed at Cal, then narrowed. He stepped forward, slowly, then quickening his pace as he snapped his arms down, releasing the twin blades, and sprang.
The blade was pressed to his throat. Aguilar drew it back and the cold-hot, thrillingly painful slice opened Cal’s throat. He doubled over, coughing up blood, his hand to his gashed—
—whole…?—
—throat.
Nothing. No blood. It wasn’t real. Just his mind, playing tricks.
Sweat dewed Cal’s body as he lowered his arms, trembling.
There was a soft beep, and the door opened. For a moment Cal thought he was still hallucinating. His mother had been fond of old movies from the 1930s and ‘40s, and the figure who now entered looked like she might have stepped out of one of those films.
Sofia Rikkin wore a crisp white cotton blouse, pants with knife-sharp pleats, and black shoes. The style was almost masculine, but no one would mistake her for anyone other than an effortlessly attractive woman.
Or an angel.
“The hallucinations are part of what we call the Bleeding Effect,” she said as she entered, closing the door behind her. “Images of aggression, the violent memories that you relived yesterday, layer themselves over your present-day field of vision.”
“Just from what I experienced yesterday?” he asked.
She regarded him levelly. “They’re memories of aggression. Some were from yesterday. Not all.”
Cal turned away from her as she spoke, leaning against the glass. The guards stared expressionlessly back at him, but he didn’t really see them. Myriad emotions were roiling inside him at Sofia’s words. He wasn’t sure he could properly name any of them, but they were strong, and unpleasant, and one of them might have been shame.
She stepped beside him, her eyes searching his face. “If you’ll allow me,” she said, softly, “I can teach you how to control them.”
An emotion surged to the forefront at the words: Rage.
Cal’s lip curled in a snarl and his hand shot out. It closed around the soft, vulnerable flesh of her throat. He could have crushed her trachea. Part of him wanted to. But he didn’t.
He simply held her prisoner, as she held him prisoner.
“Stand down,” Sofia called immediately, and Cal wondered if Abstergo security was smart enough to realize she wasn’t being harmed if she could inhale enough to shout. “I have this.”
Her voice was as calm as ever, though the pulse fluttering against his hand, like a small, trapped bird, belied that calmness. Cal knew he was in control now, and he took advantage of it.
He pressed Sofia against the glass wall, watching the guards in his peripheral vision, but much more interested in her reaction. She was a cool customer, that was—
—Aguilar grabbed him, dragged the blade across his throat—
Cal froze, squeezing his eyes shut in agony, but the pain was a headache, nothing more. Nothing near as painful and as horrifying and disorienting as the obscenely vivid hallucinations he had been undergoing.
He had not released Sofia. The pain battered him,
like a tsunami pounding relentlessly against a defenseless shoreline. Through sheer will, Cal opened his eyes and took a steadying breath.
“What was it? In the machine?”
“It’s genetic memory,” she replied, carefully and calmly. “By using the Animus, we can relive the lives of those who made us who we are.”
“What I saw in there… it felt real.”
She held his gaze and answered, carefully, “It was… in a way.”
White-hot fury surged through him. Cal slammed his free hand against the glass. It made a shivering, unhappy sound that echoed in the empty room.
“Don’t lie to me,” he snarled. “I feel… different now.” Surely, now, Sofia would crack. Would show fear.
Instead, her eyes remained calm. Unbelievably, even her pulse had slowed slightly. She almost smiled, as if she knew something he didn’t.
“Why the aggression?” she asked.
“I’m an aggressive person.”
“Perhaps the better question would be, whose aggression.”
He did not want to play her games. Not now. Not when the feeling of a knife slicing his throat was still so vivid.
“What kind of prison is this?” he demanded.
“It’s not a prison, Cal. What happens in the Animus is complicated. You’ll learn more if you cooperate.” Her voice was reasonable, almost conversational.
Then: “Let me go.”
It wasn’t a plea, nor was it an order. It was presented as a reasonable option, implying that he, Callum Lynch, was a reasonable being.
Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t.
They stood for a long moment, the tension between them rising, their faces almost as close as those of lovers. Cal wanted to show her he was in charge. He could snap her neck, right here, right now, and that would shut up her smug rationality, wouldn’t it, shut it up forever.
But part of him didn’t want to do that. She was smug because she was fully aware that she had just tempted him with the one thing he craved more than violence: some kind of understanding of what had happened to him. What had been done to him.
His mouth was a thin, angry line, his breath coming quick and short from his nostrils. Then his gaze fell to his hand, and, gently, almost like he was releasing that small, trapped bird, he opened his fingers.
He expected her hand to go to her throat. He expected her to move immediately out of arm’s reach. She did neither of those things.
Instead, Sofia Rikkin smiled.
“Come with me,” she invited.
CHAPTER 9
Cal hadn’t darkened the door of a museum in three decades, and he had never even graduated from middle school. But the rooms through which Sofia now led him evoked both… times about a thousand.
Men and women dressed in white—Sofia’s researchers, he assumed—moved about with the kind of hushed, focused air he remembered from rare visits to a library as a child. There was plenty of light, but Cal could tell it was a special kind of light, and even as it illuminated it gave the room a secluded, almost cloistered feel, accentuated by the carved stone archways through which they passed.
Weapons were in evidence here, but only as antiquities to be carefully catalogued and analyzed. There were shards of pottery, inkwells and quills, pieces of statuary. In one area, what was clearly a painstaking restoration of an old painting was going on. Ancient tomes were sheltered in display cases, and pages upon pages of manuscripts were mounted on clear walls of plastic or glass.
As Cal drew closer, however, he saw that most of the pieces of paper weren’t manuscripts, as he had first thought, but transcripts of a much more contemporary nature.
And some of them were chillingly familiar.
Cal’s pulse quickened as he stared into a photograph of himself.
The boy in the picture was the age he had been when he had fled a bloodied tenement. His blue eyes traveled along what seemed to be a bizarre and disturbing scrapbook of his life writ large: old Polaroids from when he was a little boy, their once-natural hues now faded oranges and yellows. Other pictures of a more guarded young adult from his ill-fated foster home years. A staggering array of his various mugshots.
Newspaper clippings trumpeted his life in blaring, catchy headlines: “Fears Growing for Callum Lynch: Help Us Find Missing Boy.” “Gang Raids Local Offices.” “One Dead After Night Club Fight.” “‘Lynch Will Die’: Jury Finds Pimp Killer Guilty.”
There were small glass vials with color-coded tops in acrylic containers. The charcoal sketches he had obsessively drawn during his most recent incarceration were here, too. There was a fake passport, his fingerprints—and his name, etched into the glass—and finally what appeared to be a family genealogy that seemed to go back centuries.
A genealogy that he knew nothing about.
Cal felt his gut grow cold. He felt… violated. Exposed. “What is this?” he snapped. “What are you, my stalker?”
“I know everything about you, Cal,” Sofia replied. Her voice and manner was unsettlingly unruffled. “Your medical data, your psychological profile, the mutations in your MAOA gene, your serotonin levels. I know about the foster homes, the juvenile halls. The harm you did to others—and,” she added, gently, “to yourself. You’re living proof of the link between heredity and crime.”
Cal was stunned and sickened, yet captivated. He moved down his family line, and the “scrapbook” was now no longer filled with news clippings and photographs, but yellowed old daguerreotypes and spider-scrawl letters.
Teeth.
Wrinkled drawings of hooded figures and gauntlets with blades strapped to them.
“How did you find me?”
“We found Aguilar,” she said. The word—
—the name—
—was at once meaningless and full of portent. “When you were arrested,” Sofia continued, “your DNA matched his.”
“Who is Aguilar?” Cal asked, although he realized he knew.
“Your ancestor.”
Sofia turned and walked casually to another collection of images, her hands in her trouser pockets, her body language displaying no more distress than if they were walking together in a park on a summer’s day. She nodded at an old sketch on yellowed parchment.
Cal’s hands clenched as he resisted being catapulted back into the hallucinations. He breathed steadily through his nose as he took it all in. White quills of bird feathers—raptors, Cal knew, without knowing how—were sewn into the front of the coat. Cloth was wrapped several times around the waist, and bound on top of it was what looked like a leather belt, which upon closer examination was a whip. Daggers hung at both sides, and hidden blades were housed beneath the tooled gauntlets on the arms.
The face was mostly hidden in shadows, but it was a face that Cal knew all too well.
For a wild second, Cal thought this was some sort of gaslighting attempt; that the people here were playing some sort of elaborate trick. But to what end?
Cal hadn’t played a video game since he was a kid. But he was damn sure that if anyone really had the ability to make him feel as he had felt in the grip of the giant arm, they’d either keep it a closely guarded secret or be making a massive profit on it.
“Aguilar’s family were Assassins,” Sofia continued. “They were burned at the stake by the Templars Torquemada and the black knight you saw—Ojeda. Aguilar de Nerha took up the Assassins’ cause.”
Torquemada. It was funny, what stuck in one’s head; in elementary school Cal had studied the Spanish Inquisition, and somehow he remembered the name.
He continued looking at the bizarre display of his bloodline’s history. Now, the papers were sketches and art exclusively, or pages in Latin from some long-lost tome.
His gaze traveled downward, to a monitor on the desk below the colorful prints. Here, the only colors were a black background and white lines—but the images so created were beyond his comprehension; hundreds of intricate lines forming the shapes of part of a machine.
One thing he did reco
gnize, vividly; the arm, with its grasping two-fingered claw.
“What is it? This machine.”
“We call it the Animus.”
“I know about the Animus. I thought it was a chair.”
“Not anymore. How do you know about it?”
“Never played the games, but I shoplifted enough of them for quick cash.”
She looked faintly amused. “Really? Then you know it allows us to observe, and you to relive, the life of your ancestors through the projection of your genetic memories.”
Rolling his eyes slightly, Cal went to another display. “Do you get out much?” he quipped.
“More than you.”
Her tone was light, almost friendly. Banter. How strange, to be engaged in it with Sofia Rikkin—his angel, his jailor.
She continued in that vein. “Do you ever wonder how a bird knows when to migrate south in winter?”
“It’s all I think about.”
A hint of a real smile graced her lips, vanishing almost at once. Her voice, though, held a trace of amusement. “It’s genetic memory. As you recover those memories, you inherit something of their lives. If you allow me to guide you through this, there is no telling what you might learn or see.”
Cal felt himself close off as he recalled Aguilar’s presence in his room. “I’ve seen enough. And I don’t like the idea of you stealing my memories to make a game.”
All trace of lightness fled from Sofia now too, and she looked at him intensely.
“I’m not stealing. I’m utilizing. The memories are not yours. They belong to your ancestors. And believe me, this is not a game.”
Cal turned a corner and sobered further as he looked at another wall, one that had nothing to do with him. It was plastered with colored sheets of paper, each with carefully typed notes on them. Attached to the papers were small, wallet-sized photos of a few of the other… people he had met here. Mug shots, he thought.
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