Cal recalled Moussa’s bizarre comment before he had left Cal alone in the common room: All the rest… most of them are on their way to… infinity.
Cal looked at Rikkin, but the other man’s face was unreadable. He looked again at the occupants, and then, carefully, moving slowly, he stepped inside. Those who shuffled through the room moved to avoid him, but otherwise it was as if he wasn’t even there.
This was, without question, the most horrifying thing he had yet seen in this place. Violence, as Sofia would be quick to point out, was something he understood. It was urgent, immediate. It was alive.
This…
“What have you done to them?”
“They call it ‘splitting’,” Rikkin explained. Cal wanted to look away from the empty shells, but didn’t seem to be able to tear his gaze from them. “It’s what happens if you don’t enter a regression of your own volition.”
You desynchronized. It caused a neurological split, but we got you through it.
This time.
The words had been chilling enough when Sofia had spoken them earlier. Now, Cal’s bowels clenched as he understood the fate that he had eluded.
This time.
With seeming casualness, Rikkin removed something from his pocket and regarded it thoughtfully. Cal struggled not to react, but sweat broke out beneath his arms and his palms as he regarded the metallic contraption.
“Do you recognize this?” Rikkin asked rhetorically. “It’s an Assassin’s blade.”
Oh, yes. He recognized it.
In the cool, soothing blue light that appeared to be ubiquitous throughout the rehabilitation center, the blade appeared sterile. The almost mystical aura it had radiated in Cal’s memories—both those that were his own from that awful day and those that belonged to Aguilar de Nerha, who had a completely different relationship with the weapon—was utterly dispelled here. There was no intricately crafted gauntlet concealing it, and the inner workings of its spring-driven mechanism, which appeared almost childishly simple, were laid bare for anyone to see.
Cal remembered how easily, quickly, cleanly he had been able to activate or retract the storied weapon of the Assassins. How it had felt, to plunge it into a bare throat and experience the patter of hot blood spouting from the carotid artery on his hand as he pulled it back.
How it had looked on an ordinary late afternoon three decades past, with blood running off its tip to drip onto linoleum.
Rikkin pressed something on the device. The sharp shing of the blade’s activation, and the startling speed with which the lethal metal sprang forward, snapped Cal back to the present.
“This is the actual one your father used to take your mother’s life,” Rikkin continued in a conversational tone. He was examining the blade—admiring its construction, weighing it in his hand, as if fascinated by the thing.
Absently, almost as an afterthought, he added, “He’s here, you know.”
Rikkin lifted his eyes from the weapon. They were cold as a snake’s. Cal understood immediately that Rikkin did not simply mean that his father was here, at the facility.
He meant that Joseph Lynch was in the Infinity Room.
So this is the deal, Cal thought. He said nothing, but looked out again at the room full of things that were once people. But this time, he was looking for one of them in particular.
His searching eyes suddenly stopped their quest. A muscle in his jaw tightened and he swallowed hard.
“A mother’s death, Cal,” Rikkin said quietly. For the first time since Cal had met him, the man sounded genuinely regretful. “It’s not something a boy should ever be made to see.”
Cal turned back to Rikkin. The older man stepped forward, extending the blade hilt-first to him. Cal stared at it. He could knock it to the ground and spring on Rikkin. He could step back—walk away.
Drip.
Drip.
Red on the linoleum.
A giant man, a hooded man, staring out the window.
Slowly, Cal extended his hand to take the blade. Deftly, Rikkin turned, moving the weapon out of Cal’s reach and placing it with great precision on a gleaming metal table with curved edges. He stepped back, and looked at Cal, a hint of a smile quirking his thin lips.
Then he turned and sauntered out of the room.
Cal continued to stare at the blade, barely registering Rikkin’s departure. His arm trembled, ever so slightly, as he reached out and gripped the base of the knife. He had expected it to be cold, but it was warm from Rikkin’s touch.
And it was warm and growing warmer as Callum Lynch turned around and began to slowly make his way through a sea of shuffling zombies.
CHAPTER 18
“This is wrong,” Sofia said the moment Rikkin walked into his office.
He was mildly annoyed to find her here, waiting for him, but unsurprised that she had caught him out. His daughter was indeed a clever girl, and she knew him well. Though perhaps not quite as well as she thought.
She was standing in front of the monitor, watching the mindless shells amble about the Infinity Room. Her arms were folded tightly over her chest in a hunched, anxious pose, and her large, expressive eyes were full of accusation.
Rikkin didn’t even break stride as he brushed past her, heading for the bar and pouring himself a snifter of Hennessy Paradis Imperial.
“You left me no choice,” he told his daughter. “He has to go in of his own free will. You said that. I had to negotiate.”
“You mean manipulate.”
Rikkin paused for just an instant. The words were accurate, but they stung, and that surprised him. Lifting the liquor to his nose, he inhaled the spicy, orange blossom and jasmine scent.
“I assured the Elders we would have the Apple for London,” he said, too irritated to enjoy the cognac as it properly deserved and instead taking a gulp, feeling the warmth trickle down his throat.
“That’s in two days!” She had turned to stare at him, her eyes even wider than he would have thought possible. Well, perhaps now she would understand his recent desire to push the murderous bastard.
“Sofia,” he said, “he doesn’t want to know his past, or his father. He wants to destroy them… both.”
Sofia looked like a startled doe, Rikkin thought. One hand was wrapped tightly around her midsection, the other clenched into a fist. She was trembling; something he had not seen her do in years.
He felt a long-dormant desire to comfort her stirring, but he couldn’t surrender to it. Sofia had to learn that cruelty was a tool, and a damned useful one at that, and that these Assassins she treated were not pets.
But her words made him realize that she wasn’t shaking with fear or hurt.
His daughter was furious.
“We’re not in the business of creating monsters,” Sofia said. She got the words out with an effort; an effort not to refrain from breaking down, but from physically lashing out at him.
He looked at her, kindly, but experiencing the barest hint of contempt for her compassion.
“We’ve neither created them nor destroyed them,” he explained, rationally. “We’ve merely abandoned them to their own inexorable fate.”
***
The orderlies saw Cal with the knife. They made no move to intervene. Rikkin had doubtless had a quiet word or two with them.
The man he approached was both larger and smaller than he remembered. Cal was almost of a height with Joseph Lynch, now. Such a thing had seemed impossible when he was a little boy of seven. Then, his father had loomed as a giant to him, in all aspects. In the intervening years, Joseph had put on bulk; not muscle, but soft, sad flesh that gathered around his midsection and tugged his now-beardless face downward toward his thick throat. The red-blonde hair Cal remembered adorning his father’s head was now mixed with gray.
Cal moved silently to stand beside his father. Joseph turned toward him. Defeat was etched in every line of his face and stooped body as he said, in an Irish brogue that had not lessened in the thirty years sinc
e Cal had heard it shouting at him to Run! Go, go now!, “You are your mother’s son.”
The words were not at all what Cal had been expecting, and it threw him.
“What does that mean?” he asked in a rough whisper.
“The blood that flows through you is not your own.” Almost the same words he had last said to Cal. Your blood is not your own, Cal.
While crimson drops splattered on the floor.
“It belongs to the Creed,” Joseph was saying. “Your mother knew that. She died, so the Creed may live.”
Cal moved in an instant from standing perfectly still to placing the blade against his father’s throat.
“Remind me how, exactly,” he ground out.
His right hand clutched the blade. His mother’s necklace was wrapped around the fingers of his left.
The room was empty, now. Sometime over the last few moments, the orderlies had ushered out all those who had suffered in the Animus.
Cal and his father were alone.
Soon, it would just be Cal.
Joseph did not look afraid. He looked… resigned to his fate, almost as if he welcomed it. As if he had been waiting for this moment, and was relieved that at last, after so much torment at the hands of the Templars and their cruel machine, it had come.
“What you saw, I did,” Joseph said quietly.
“You murdered her,” Cal rasped.
Still calm, still quiet, Joseph answered, “I took her life, rather than have it stolen by that machine.” His voice cracked slightly on the last word; the only sign he had yet given that any of this had affected him.
“A man grows with the greatness of his task. I ought to have killed you.” His eyes, milky blue behind cataracts, stared into his son’s. “I couldn’t.”
“Well, here.” Cal flipped the blade in his hand, offering it hilt-first to his father. “Do what you couldn’t do thirty years ago.”
Joseph shook his head. “It’s in your hands now, Cal. This is what they want.”
“It’s what I want.”
But Cal knew he lied. He no longer knew what he wanted. The man before him was not the loving father, nor the heartless murderer. He was a pawn in the hands of the Templars, who had broken him so badly that he was now in the Infinity Room.
Cal was frantic for Joseph to make a decision, any decision, so that he himself could react.
“Spill my blood,” Joseph said, the weight of the world in his words, “but do not go back into the Animus.”
“Why?”
Joseph’s eyes burned into Cal’s, as if they had, at last, slowly flickered to life. Joseph did not care about his death—or life. But what he said next, he obviously cared about with all that was left to him.
“The Templars want us all dead. The Apple. It contains the genetic code for free will. They will use it to destroy us.”
Cal stared, unable to process all that he was learning. Was this nothing but madness born of too many hours of resisting the Animus? Or was it true?
Could this really be what the graceful, calm, beautiful angel Sofia was after?
A tear trickled down Cal’s cheek. “I’m going to find it,” he stated. “And watch them destroy you… and your Creed.”
Strangely, something seemed to soften in Joseph at Cal’s words.
“You cannot kill the Creed,” he said, as if he were speaking to a child claiming to kill a mountain. “It’s in your blood.” And then he spoke the last words that Cal had ever expected to hear from him: words from a poem Cal had last heard uttered by a young, sympathetic priest. Words about picking apples.
Cal’s eyes filled with scalding tears and he blinked them back fiercely. A lump suddenly swelled in his throat, threatening to choke off his words. He forced them through. It seemed important, now, that he say them to this man.
A faint, but genuine, smile touched Joseph’s lips as his son recited the next line of the poem. “You do remember,” he said, obviously moved.
A long pause. “It’s all I have of her.”
“The Apple is everything. Your mother died to protect it.”
Cal’s gaze fell to his left hand, clutching the back of his father’s shirt; the necklace wrapped around his fingers.
“She had no choice,” Cal said, understanding at last and wanting his father to know it.
Sofia and Alan Rikkin had told Cal what would happen if he refused to enter the Animus of his own free will. He could see the evidence that they spoke the truth all around him, shuffling purposelessly or staring blankly into space. His father had been here for thirty years, and it was clear Joseph Lynch had refused to go into the Animus without a fight.
Yet somehow, though he was broken beyond repair, he’d still clung to his mind. His memories—his, not those of some long-dead ancestor. He’d clung to them like he was clinging to the blade of a knife, slicing himself more the harder he gripped.
Cal knew what the Animus could do to one’s mind. He had come close to breaking himself, and he had only been here a few days. His father’s strength was humbling.
Cal relaxed his grip on his father’s shirt, and lowered his hand.
Cal unwound the silver, small-linked chain, observing that it had left small red marks on fingers from where he had bound it so tightly. He placed it around his father’s bull-thick neck, fastening it with fingers that trembled and still held the blade with which one man had murdered the other’s mother.
Cal rested his hands lightly on his father’s shoulders for a moment, looking into his milky eyes.
“I do.”
Father and son, bound by blood and love for a woman whose smile had filled both their hearts, regarded each other for a moment. Then Cal turned away, placed the knife down on one of the beds, and walked calmly toward the door.
He knew what he had to do.
***
A guard met him at the door. Cal informed him where he wanted to go, and the guard nodded. Cal was lost in thoughts of the past, present, and future—some not his own—and tried to focus on what was about to happen.
The guard stepped into a small, circular room with several doors. Cal had been here before; it was a hub room. One of the doors led to his destination. But the instant the guard stepped inside, there was a flurry of movement and he dropped like a stone.
A thin sliver of metal or wood protruded from his neck.
Some inner instinct alerted Cal. Before he even realized what he was doing, his hands had shot up to his throat, his fingers slipping between his flesh and the thin wire that was being twisted tight around his neck.
Had he moved a fraction of a second later, he would have been dead by now.
As he and his unknown assailant struggled, Cal saw that the would-be killer wasn’t alone. He recognized Lin and several of the others from the common room, where they had stared appraisingly at him. Now they stood, watching their fellow Assassin struggling to kill Cal.
He caught a glimpse of white, and realized that the woman he had mistaken for an orderly was in fact one of the patients. They had planned this out carefully. And Cal realized it might yet work—the wire wasn’t slicing this neck, but it pulled his own hands tightly to his throat, forcing him to participate in his own strangulation, and he would pass out soon if he didn’t escape.
Cal slipped his right hand out from under the wire and elbowed his assailant hard. He struck the soft flesh of the abdomen and was rewarded with a sharp grunt.
He switched hands quickly, and caught the attacker in the face with his left elbow. The grip slackened enough for Cal to wheel around, seize Nathan, and barrel toward the sealed doors with him.
Nathan stubbornly kept his grip on the wire, tightening it even as Cal pressed his palm against Nathan’s cheek and forced him back. Once the boy’s arm was at full extension, Cal slammed down on the inner bend of the elbow.
The hold was broken, but Nathan refused to give up. He pummeled fiercely, squirming in an attempt to get out of Cal’s implacable grip, but Cal would not release him. He sli
pped a powerful arm around Nathan’s throat, choking him as the boy had tried to choke him.
The doors burst open, the guards having overridden the hijacked controls. The head of security, McGowen, rushed toward Cal with his baton raised and aimed at Nathan.
Cal kept one arm around Nathan’s throat, while the other one came up and grabbed the baton before it could strike the boy’s skull. He released Nathan once he halted the baton’s brutal motion, and locked eyes with McGowen.
More guards pelted inside the room, heading for the Assassins, even the ones who had simply stood there watching. Two of them wrestled Nathan into submission. As they hauled him off, still struggling, he shouted to Cal, “You’re going to kill the Creed!”
Cal watched him go. He reached up to his neck, grabbed the makeshift garrote, and dropped it to the ground. McGowen was still staring at him, with his heavy-lidded, seemingly unblinking eyes.
Catching his breath, Cal jerked his head in the direction of the door he had been approaching before the attack.
“Take me to the Animus,” he said.
CHAPTER 19
The guards had been alerted to Cal’s imminent arrival, and Sofia had her team standing by. Both she and her father had watched the tense confrontation between Cal and his own.
Sofia had been surprised at how pleased she had been to witness Cal turn away from what surely had to be the greatest temptation of his life: a single, swift act of violence that would have been exactly the revenge he had probably always wanted.
She dared to hope she had gotten through to Cal; that despite the pain and cruelty that had been shown to him, both outside these walls and within them, he had listened to her. Cal had seemed to want to be cured; the fact he had walked away from his father instead of taking the older man’s life was evidence that on some level, he truly could learn to set aside the violence that was not just part of his life’s experience, but his very genetic code.
And if he could learn, so could other Assassins. Once they had the Apple, the combination of genetic manipulation and properly directed therapy could render a world that was, truly, without violence. Her project, her faith, all she had done for most of her adult life—all would be vindicated.
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