In New York one coma-candidate was shaping up to have an immensely strong signal. Another just north of London was growing likewise. He ran through lists of names and placed check marks against the ones he wanted. He splayed them out across a global map, surveying the spread, and it was then that he saw the pattern.
He called Sovoy, and Sovoy came in. They only had five days of accurate, detailed data by that point, but the flashing lights and shifts were as clear as the evidence for neutrinos pulsing through deep pools of water. It was no surprise they hadn't been noticed before, with the stream of information already so unreliable. Now it was as clear as day.
"Here," said Sovoy, tapping the screen. "Here, another a day later. Then here. Project it backward to the start and we're talking about one hundred already. Maybe more."
Joran stared. It was there. It was going to complicate things for him. It was a second wave assault that had to be stopped. He called James While at once and sent the filtered data up in a rich stream.
"The shadow SEAL are taking coma-sufferers," he told While, having learned by then to give him only the top line summary. "Day by day, so we don't notice, spreading the distribution, but the pattern is there. They're taking them right out from under our noses."
James While's eyes lit up. Joran thought he'd never seen him so excited.
"Take your one hundred," While said, with a new purpose that had been absent from his voice for weeks. "And lock the rest down. They're not getting a single one more."
14. SUFFER
In the light of day Lara's left temple was hot and tender, her left eye still saw only white, and the pain in her arms pounded with every beat of her heart.
The President's bedchamber was hot and sultry, though the windows were open and the curtain drawn. Witzgenstein was gone, peeled away from a position circled around Lara's head some time before the dawn. The feeling on the line as she'd disengaged had tickled, like damp strings trailing along her scalp. She'd kissed Lara's forehead tenderly.
"You'll see," she said quietly. "No, don't wake up. I'm building something better."
She'd gone.
Now a man that Lara didn't know was standing before her. He wasn't from New LA, which meant he had to be one of Drake's people. He was older, in his fifties, with gray hair and sad eyes. He just stood there, looking down at her, like a robot frozen mid-program.
"Hello," Lara said, reaching out to him on the line. The sense of him was foggy and imprecise, part of a new world only beginning to come into focus, but she could feel Witzgenstein's influence upon him. He was a flat, lukewarm gray beneath the bridle of deep red. There was some sense of the reins stretching back through the air, but Lara couldn't focus clearly enough to distinguish where.
All of this was new.
She shuffled to her feet. The man didn't move.
"You're guarding me," she said, but he didn't respond. She took a step; the slight jolt sent an electric shock of pain up her thigh, up her spine and into her skull. She grunted and took another step toward the door.
Now the man moved, clearly barring her path.
Lara slowly turned around. The room was luxurious, if musty and marred by damp patches on the walls. Thirteen years of neglect. The bed was still perfectly turned down, a four-poster of dark walnut with cream blankets trimmed with royal blue. The walls were custard-colored with white paneling, ornamental plaster tracery scrolled across the ceiling, the curtains were a pale blue floral, the carpet a faint gray, and the windows looked out over the familiar South Lawn.
Like a hotel. Like a nice hotel.
She went to the bathroom, every step like an old woman's, and her guard followed. She moved over to the accompanying sitting room, where a large window arch, spoked like a wheel, gave an excellent view over people busily hacking into the lawn's overgrowth.
Priorities, of course. The White House had to look nice.
She sat down. Her guard came to stand over her, now holding a tray with some food on it; a few rounds of bread, some cheese, chicken slices, orange juice. Luxuries, most likely mined from one of the supply depots before Witzgenstein burned them down. With a cool, damp flannel pressed to her pulsing temple, Lara ate.
She looked out of the window, as if pining for Witzgenstein's return. She didn't look at her guard, didn't speak to him again, but on the line she turned her entire attention to unpicking the fog around him.
There was a great deal of work to be done. Her success of the night before had come in a moment of intense emotion, fueled by pain and rage, with her clumsy misdirections masked by the hate Frances and the others felt.
That wouldn't work for long, or for the things she needed to achieve.
She had to get better. Like a lawyer honing a sharp argument, whittling away all the unnecessary evidence, trimming off unnecessary words and building an airtight, argument-proof bullet of logic, she dug deep into the line.
It made her head ache worse. It was like staring at a fuzzy watercolor portrait, a vivid mixture of colors, temperatures, emotions, motions and scents overlaid atop the real world, jumbled together in a white-static barrage that most people would never think contained any meaning. How often did you look at anything through a microscope and really understand what you were seeing?
It dizzied her. Just in this room, just gathered round herself and the man and the spaces Witzgenstein had moved through, the information was so dense it made a kaleidoscope of sensation. It helped that he stood still, and she sat still, and neither of them spoke, but the fog remained baffling. At moments of frustration, as the fog stubbornly refused to part, that frustration bloomed off her like three-dimensional ripples, causing subtle distortions that made the line much harder to read.
At such times she managed her breathing, and counted panes in the window arch, and worked toward control. She'd done meditation before, in yoga classes after her later panic attacks, and they'd become a staple of her life in her barista days, keeping her functioning while she went into Sir Clowdesley every day. She knew about staying calm, perhaps better than anyone left alive.
Each time, calm returned faster, so the room became a placid fog again. Outside the room there was a whirlwind of activity, keeping the great ongoing painting of the line in constant motion, but in here, in her garret prison there was enough quiet to work by.
And work she did.
It was like learning a language. She sliced colors into a dozen varieties, then a hundred, seeing the shades and giving them names, remembering the color game Amo had played with her on their first date. 'Fawn', he'd said, holding her hand, 'Isabelline. They're both kinds of brown.'
So she subdivided the line; in color, in sound, in emotion, in taste, in smell, in every way she could parse it. Gradually the fog sharpened like an image resolving on a screen, pixel by pixel, turning into something she could recognize and understand.
By midday she saw enough to see the precise lines of the red bridle encircling her. Witzgenstein held it there, and it in turn led out to Witzgenstein. Any brute force moves across the line, any movement in the real world outside a certain parameter, and Janine would know. The bonds were strong, but even after a morning of focus Lara could see their low resolution. There were gaps, and weaknesses, through which she could slip out her thoughts and her influence. Through those gaps she reached back along the red tether to Witzgenstein.
Out there she was a hot red sun surrounded by a whirlwind of control and change. Near her were others, amongst them the blips for Cynthia, Alan, George, Frances, each in their own pain from the previous night's beating.
She reached wider afield, and found Crow. He was a purple spark in a fuzz of gray, held tightly in his own bridle of red. She tried to pick through it, to get a message down to him, but the bridle was too tight.
She found her children. They were separated from each other in tight, confined spaces; frustrated and sad, and the sadness that brought forced her back before she bulged through the bridle too much.
Through the long aft
ernoon she dug deeper, drilling into the line like she was a builder in one of Amo's Deepcraft worlds, avoiding the thick seams of Janine's control and erecting new concepts and signposts to help her find her way. Hour by hour she forced back the fog until the whole of the White House hung around her in clear, sparkling relief.
There were levers she could pull, enough to bring Witzgenstein down from within. Support she could co-opt, minds she could turn, with time. The evening flew by as she planned. Perhaps after one more night spent worming her way tighter into Witzgenstein's heart, through kisses and whatever else she had to do, the keyhole would be open and the key would be ready to slot in and turn.
She didn't get the chance.
Around midnight Witzgenstein came back, placed a cold hand round her throat, wrapped the bridle tight around her body, and accused her of being a witch.
* * *
Lara looked up into Witzgenstein's eyes, while the bridle crushed her body as surely as the demon's hand ever had.
"I saw the others," Witzgenstein said, her voice calm but a ball of fury rising behind it on the line. "You wouldn't believe what happened to them. Frances, Alan, George, Nancy, Cynthia."
Lara tried to speak, but Witzgenstein tightened the bridle, choking her flat. The lines of it were imprecise, but precision didn't matter when you had brute strength. With her left hand she squeezed Lara's throat, with her right she pressed down on her swollen left temple.
The white pain in her eye exploded.
"Bruises all over them," Janine went on, feigning calm, "as if they beat each other rather than you. I don't know how that might have happened." She paused and looked into Lara's terrified eyes. "Unless it was witchcraft."
Lara couldn't get a breath in. The panic bulged and there was nothing she could do to calm it. Janine kept pressing down on her temple while squeezing with the bridle, so hard that Lara could no longer even wriggle, could only lie prostate and gaze up at her cold blue eyes.
"You're not a witch, are you Lara?"
She tried to gasp 'No', but it came out hoarse and breathless. Silver dots flashed across her one good eye as the lack of oxygen started her toward unconsciousness. In some silent, calculating part of her mind she recognized the enormous power Witzgenstein held, even as she recognized again how crudely she used it. The gaps were still there; too slim to slip through right now, but with the right time, with the right practice, perhaps she could-
"No more," Witzgenstein said, giving her a firm shake; like her body was a baby's rattle. "I am a Christian soul, but my patience has bounds. I accept that it's possible they struck each other, but so many times, and with no memory? I inspected your injuries last night, Lara. They each have as many as you. How could that happen? Tell me!"
Lara felt her eyes bugging. Her face grew hot and purple.
"Answer me with your witchcraft," Janine hissed. "Do it now, or I end our little experiment right here."
She was angrier than Lara had ever seen. Magenta lines burned off her like New LA on fire, and all that anger poured into the bridle, burning Lara's skin where it touched. Up close it was both fascinating and terrifying, and it was going to kill her if she didn't act now.
So she acted on the line.
What she sent out was crude, a push against the bridle that didn't budge it, that accurately represented her own strength, but not her precision. Witzgenstein blinked, looked at Lara with new eyes, then at once pulled back.
The bridle retreated. She rocked back.
"What was that?"
Lara choked. She gasped. Her body trembled as sensation came back. For a moment shock overwhelmed her, as she grasped just how close to dying she'd come.
"That was something," Witzgenstein muttered, puzzling it through, confirming for Lara that she'd never consciously wielded the power. "You did something to me."
Her eyes flared, and before Lara could throw up some kind of protective screen, she lunged in again, pressing her body close against Lara's quivering skin and bringing the bridle with her. It was not as tight as before, more imprecise still, but a firm clasp like a strong hand looped around her neck. In Witzgenstein's eyes the anger was shifting.
"Show me," she hissed, "show me how you do it."
The bridle tightened, choking her again, so Lara acted.
Not with grace or finesse, because those things wouldn't help her now. She didn't have the skill to weave through the gaps, not so early in her exploration of the line, not pressed beneath a passion so strong. All she could do was throw what little power she had against her bonds, like throwing her body against a brick wall, but each time she threw herself Witzgenstein relented a little, even gave a little gasp as if of pleasure, before pressing in again.
"Is that?" she gasped, feeling each attack, pressing back. "You're doing that. How?"
It was a lesson for her. Lara didn't want to teach it, but each time she stopped Witzgenstein just pressed in closer, firming up the bridle in response, consciously taking control.
Lara saw her chance fading away, and threw everything she had at the bridle, diving for the gaps, lunging for a way through, but Witzgenstein learned incredibly fast, becoming nimble as well as strong. She lapped everything up and demanded more, taking Lara fast to the point of exhaustion.
At the peak, she stole a kiss. Lara couldn't breathe while Janine's lips covered hers. With one hand she worked at Lara's hair, while she cupped the other under her back. She groaned, and pushed her face into the crook of Lara's neck, and began to weep, and her body shuddered as if she was the one crushed in the bridle.
Then the pressure relented abruptly. Janine pulled herself away, and slumped backwards onto a chair, where she struggled with tears and a jerky kind of laughter, while Lara struggled to breathe.
Perhaps a minute passed.
Lara didn't understand, and that scared her. The bridle was still there, but laid lightly across her chest like a cautioning hand, more finely spun than before.
"It would be rape, wouldn't it?" Witzgenstein said, breaking the silence. "I know that. Even with whatever this thing is." She waved a hand in the air between them.
Lara's jaw opened, but she couldn't think of a thing to say.
"Forcing myself on you. That's your trap. Making me no better than Drake."
Lara lifted one hand, and Witzgenstein shifted the bridle to let her. She rubbed her throat, trying to ease the flow of breath. She touched her burning temple. She probed the line, and was swiftly guided back.
All her work, gone. She panicked. She clamped the panic down. There had to be a way.
"You were angry," she said, sounding exactly like Indira had after one of the arguments she'd had with Julio, making excuses for her oppressor. "I gave you good reason."
Witzgenstein looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time, then gave a short, sharp bark of laughter. "You do think I'm a fool. You think you can work circles around me, in this." Again the hand wave. "But I'm no fool, Lara. You think I didn't know about this power? Maybe not like you. But since New LA, when you touched Drake on the stage, I've felt it." She turned her hands before her, regarding them with awe. "Witchcraft. I have it too, I suppose. I've used it, and that makes me as bad as you I suppose. The things I've done."
"I can teach you more," Lara said, no longer confident which path to take. "If that's what you want. Wield it better."
Witzgenstein smiled. "Silver tongue. They say the devil comes in all guises. So you are sent to tempt me from the one true path, but oh, child, if you knew the things I've already done."
"It's nothing," Lara said, choking the words past a knot in her throat, not even knowing what she was excusing. "It's not too late."
Witzgenstein just sighed, and smiled. She seemed to be settling into herself, now, into a new role. The passion and rage from before went away, replaced by the chilly exterior she'd always presented to the world.
"You don't know about Drake, do you? About what he did."
Lara frowned. Drake? "He was guilty, a true
sinner. You're not the same as him."
Witzgenstein just smiled, on the surface only, and that disconcerted Lara. She wasn't reaching through any more. "Really? Already I've started up a eugenics program more rigorous than his. Your people, Lara, I'm afraid you'll be bred out, in time." She made a slightly sad face. "So the Lord dealt unto the Philistines and the Hittites and all those others, so that they would be ground under the great heel of history. Genocide of the blacks, the Hispanics, the Jews, the homosexuals." She shrugged. "Call me a small-scale Hitler, if you like, but I know it's the one true path to peace. Americans. We all have to look the same, be the same, believe the same. Only then can we survive."
Now Lara stared. This was new. Hitler, genocide. She'd always assumed that Witzgenstein's cruelties were genuinely unconscious. She said racist, sexist bigoted things because of inherent biases, beliefs she wasn't even really aware of, while she truly thought she was being fair.
This wasn't that.
"You're judging me," Witzgenstein said happily. "It's all right. Get angry if you like, Lara, because it will be the fate of your children too. They'll have few children themselves, and fewer with each generation. It is cruel, but Drake taught it to me, and its true."
"Drake was mad," she persisted, trying to pull sense out of this. "You're not. What God would want this? Jesus wouldn't want this."
Janine nodded sadly. "You're right. Jesus would cast me out, and that pains me, but Jesus was for a different time. Jesus was not a sinner himself, as I am. Jesus never lusted after another man."
Lara shook her head as if she could shake that off. "We haven't done anything."
Janine just smiled. "Sins of the mind, Lara. I would, in time, just like Drake. I know that about myself."
The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8) Page 20
