Being dependent on a drug to feel anything more than apathy is the cruelest addiction.
Life, death, and everything between were gelatinous gray blobs of whatever. The Quick lurked in the dark recesses of my mind, waiting for her opportunity to strike.
I traced the outline of the Quick stick in my back pocket with a shaky finger; a parting gift from Lou before we'd left the Lowers—"In case of an emergency," he'd said.
I was brainstorming ways of disappearing inside myself when the door to the Vault winked shut behind me.
Somehow we'd made it in. That the camotech Lou had given us was so effective shouldn't have been surprising—it did come from Phoenix Corporation after all—but it was.
Raines fingered the curling gray locks clinging to a forehead no longer hers. Her hand, a traffic jam of purple and blue veins, reminded me of fattened slugs writhing beneath sun-parched skin. The chocolate brown of her eyes had shifted to become a veil of gray cloud smudging an otherwise blue sky. She'd aged a handful of decades, with a lifetime of wrinkles to show for it.
She was a perfect replication of the woman I'd seen earlier that day at the Time Bank, Madame Leader Cavanaugh. The only person with the apparent fortitude to stand up to President Jennings in the board room.
"Thirteen minutes," Raines said without turning.
Microscopic camobots skittered across my jawbone and threaded the delicate tendons of the face I wore. The Quick fueled thoughts of discomfort until I wanted nothing more than to scratch at the skin until it peeled away, leaving great jagged chunks of flesh, slimy with blood, wedged beneath filthy fingernails.
The nanobots were intruders and I wanted them out.
The Quick fed the thought, moving it closer to the realm of delusion, where it would only be a hop-skip away from reality.
I shuddered, squelched those thoughts, and looked up to find Raines already across the foyer at the security booth.
A round man with zero angles perched upon a stool behind the desk like an overfed vulture. A tangle of brown hair cut in a crude bowl shape only added to his monkish features.
That anybody living in the Mid-Uppers would choose to be fat, with hordes of starving people living beneath their feet, was beyond comprehension.
"Ah, Madame Cavanaugh, how good to see you," he said, shuffling to the edge of his seat. His posture tightened, which helped his general appearance, but not by much. "My name's Barry Wosley. How may I have the privilege of serving the fine leader of District Four today?"
Raines saddled up to the counter, her age-worn face pulled tight at the mouth. "I'm here to inspect the contents of a private box," she said, placing the ring-shaped key I'd carried around my neck for the past nine years on the counter.
The key-ring had become a talisman of suffering over the years. A promise made and subsequently broken. A reminder of how I'd failed Diana.
Memory of the key-ring, and what it hid, had been stricken from my mind thanks to the Quick. The implant Devers gave me to unlock those encrypted memories had yet to work as advertised. Clues and tidbits fluttered past like shadows in the night—shadows moving against a half-moon backdrop.
A single thorn of recollection had embedded itself in the forefront of my mind following my death in Lou's office. I couldn't venture anything more than a guess as to what we would discover by coming to the Vault, but somewhere in that building was a door needing to be unlocked. A door with answers.
Barry Wosley swiped the ring from the counter, his hands becoming a hurried blur. His pudgy fingers manipulated the key with a practiced dexterity before threading it onto his pinky. A veil of blue light appeared in front of him. Barry studied the screen with eyes obscured behind thick folds of skin, commonly referred to as eyelids.
Beads of sweat formed an orderly line down my cheek. Time becomes an incalculable variable when you're in the grip of the Quick. I rubbed my index finger against my thumb in little circles, content with the idea of burning my prints off with the friction.
Wosley looked up with a smile plastered to his face as if painted there—a study in the grotesqueness of the human form where proportions are a discarded concern. I feigned a smile in return, hoping it wouldn't appear as wooden as it felt.
"Everything seems to be in order." Barry slid from the edge of his stool with a grunt. His head sank beneath the counter top by a couple inches. "If you'll follow me to the end of the counter, I'll let you through," he said, using an arm lost inside a sleeve two sizes too large to indicate a door on our right.
A game-show buzzer informing us we had guessed the wrong answer squealed as we stepped to the door. The harshness of it startled me. I flinched.
I felt a twinge of embarrassment when I located the source of the sound—the door's locking mechanism.
Raines took the door with a withered hand and yanked it open with a strength surprising for a woman of her supposed age.
She wasn't selling her role as the Madame Leader of District Four, but as her personal attendant I should have gotten the door, so neither of us was giving a particularly convincing performance.
Through the door the squat man stood beside two men with muscles bulging like tumors, their hands resting gently on the butt of the vortex pistols at their hips.
Time to see how good Lou's camotech truly was. A guard approached with a scanning unit in hand. I reached to empty my pockets.
"That won't be necessary, sir," he said.
Strictly speaking, Quick Sliver wasn't illegal, but vices are meant to stay in the dark. It would still show on the scan, but I felt better knowing it would remain in my pocket.
The tendon running from my jaw to my ear formed a solid lump. I forced my lips apart to release the tension stored there as the guard waved the scanner over my body.
Would they see through the mask and find the body hiding beneath? Could they find the million tiny pieces of my broken heart?
My fingers curled into a fist while I pushed back on the melodramatic thoughts forced onto me by the Quick. I focused my attention on the hollow thump of my heartbeat.
The guard with the scanner blinked twice; arctic ice barely broke the surface of gray pond scum coating his eyes. His pupils shrank, sucked into a black hole, before rebounding and coming into focus.
"You're clear," the guard behind me said.
I released the breath I'd been holding through my nostrils.
"Thank you," Raines said a moment after the guard had completed her scan.
Wosley spun heel-to-toe and led us into an adjacent room. At the far wall he fumbled with a lanyard around his neck and swiped it across an invisible sensor. The wall melted to reveal a door. We followed him through to the next room, to another blank wall, where he repeated the process. In this way we continued our march towards the center of the Vault, passing through a dozen rooms in the process.
"Here you are, Madame Leader," Barry said, standing in front of a wall, in a room identical to all the others we'd passed. "I'll wait here. Press the call button when you're finished and I'll return to claim custody of the box. Have you been inside the Vault's viewing chamber before?"
Raines shook her head. "No."
"I thought not. Few people have," he said with just the right amount of condescension to make me want to smack him. "On the far side of the room you'll find a docking port. Simply insert the box to upload its contents. The room can sync with your nanocomp if you'd prefer, otherwise voice commands will suffice. I'll be out here if you have any questions."
"Thank you," Raines said.
The door winked shut as I stepped inside. A soft green halo of light hovered above. In the center of the room a pole slid up from a hole in the floor, rising to waist height before stopping. Raines and I studied the cube sitting atop the platform, wary to approach, like a couple of mice acutely aware of the snake dropped in the cage with them.
"Ten minutes," Raines said.
Time was sprinting away. Apparently it wanted nothing to do with us. I couldn't blame it.
Raines held it to the sensor and the port slurped at the cube.
We waited for something to happen. A light to switch on. A voice to offer direction. Anything. But for our effort we received a steaming pile of nothing.
Poised on the cusp of a discovery that would put my world into focus, and the room sat like a dead fish, glass eyes a glaze of inactivity.
The cube was supposed to spill its secrets, give understanding to my life, and meaning to my death.
Instead, I received the silent mocking of a billion-dollar room.
"Five minutes," Raines said, her voice layered with frustration. "We're out of time."
My lungs burned and I realized I hadn't taken a breath since Raines inserted the cube into the wall, afraid I might upset the precarious balance of the room if so much as a whisper escaped my lips.
That hadn't worked so I opted for the alternative. I grabbed a mouthful of air and choked it down into my lungs, held it until it screamed, then released it in a long slow whoosh like a deflating balloon.
"We're taking it with us," I said, reaching to extract the box from its port.
"Oh yeah, you got a secret stowaway compartment on you I don't know about?"
My fists tightened into miniature wrecking balls; the blood gushing through my veins hit its boiling point.
"I don't know what to do, Raines," I shouted. "This was supposed to have the answers. I needed it to have answers."
Raines backpedaled. "I know. I get that, but we're not gonna make it out of here if we take it. They'll shoot us down before we make the front door. Is a bullet to the back of the head the kind of answer you're looking for?"
"Maybe," I said, not caring that I was acting like a petulant child. The Quick had rolled back the sheath protecting my nerves and was tap dancing across their stringy surface. I was fried. Caring was beyond me. "Besides, who's to say this room can even read that box? Maybe I hid it here precisely because it couldn't?"
Raines shook her head doubtfully.
I reached for the cube protruding from the wall and said, "We gotta try some—"
The words trying to leave my mouth were denied as my fingers grazed the cube. All that remained was pain.
Pure, straight-off-the-vine virgin pain that hadn't been diluted by time or travel. A star going supernova in my skull.
The world flickered in and out of existence between the torrents of tears blurring my vision. My legs buckled, dropping me to the ground.
"Tom?" Raines knelt beside me, crying.
Or was I crying?
I was in too much pain to unravel the mystery of who was crying, but somebody definitely was.
Nerve endings running the length of my scalp screamed. I responded to the call by tearing chunks of hair free with fingers clenched into claws. Hair follicles fought valiantly, holding fast to sensitive skin, before releasing their grasp and allowing themselves to be uprooted in bloody clumps.
I tried breathing through the delusion. Told myself it was the Quick. It would pass. That it was only in my mind.
But the blood on the floor and my brain turning into a pus-filled blister suggested I was being excessively hopeful.
Despite that, I felt something else. Something surfing the current of my agony. Something I couldn't place, but was there, nonetheless.
A pressure expanding within me. Filling me past the point of full. Thoughts overflowed, boiling, frothing, and leaking into my gut where they simmered, cooking me from the inside.
"Jesus, Tom." Raines put a hand on my shoulder. Her touch was a dull razor wriggling back and forth, burrowing beneath my skin. "Talk to me."
I tried to scream, but the sound couldn't escape my clenched jaw. Teeth ground together, filling my mouth with hard paint chips of shattered enamel flaking from tooth clacking against tooth.
I croaked. "Cack cocket."
I curled into the fetal position, thinking I might escape the pain if I tucked into a tight enough ball and disappeared within my own belly button. I told myself it would be alright. Self-delusion was all I had left.
"Here," Raines said, with the Quick in one hand.
I didn't feel the needle threading me like a piece of string. Everything turned black. Thoughts overridden. Pain became a message lost en route to the receiver.
Quiet. Perfect silence, save for the wet wheeze escaping my lips.
The Quick had me; the sweet release.
I pitied the living. The dead were my idols. This drug was my god.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Bad Kind Of Treasure
Transitioning from lucidity to being under the control of Quick Sliver is like being torn apart atom by atom, and scattered to the far reaches of the universe. While floating along the cosmic breeze, somebody's god reached into my skull, flipped a set of dials and switches, and cranked up the intensity of reality.
The world slowed and my senses smashed together. I tasted colors and smelled sounds. Doctors call that synesthesia, a neurological disorder causing the brain to misinterpret senses, but I don't think it's a disorder. I think it's the way we were meant to be, our senses an interchangeable jumble. How else are you to fully appreciate a sunrise until you can taste light?
I looked up at the green light burning overhead; it tasted sour.
"Sit up." Raines wasn't being gentle anymore. She shook me like a vending machine refusing to drop her candy. "We have to go. Can you move?"
I stared at her, wondering how she got so old. Memories were photographs with cigarette burns where faces should be.
The fog of Quick lifted slowly and I remembered.
There was panic, or the closest thing to panic one can feel under the influence of such a strong mood stabilizer.
I was still on my side, shivering against the cold floor. It felt good against my sweat- and tear-stained cheek. I wanted to stay there forever.
It was a good place to die.
I tasted the light again. Copper and bleach.
Convinced I'd never wash that taste from my mouth, I spit. Thick red globules speckled the floor inches from my face.
In the light they looked black.
Raines had me by the arm and yanked me to my feet. I realized I was standing only after she shoved me towards the door, and somehow my legs managed to carry me.
"Listen to me." Raines spun me around and cradled my head between her soft hands; her nose grazed mine. "If we don't get out of here right now, they are going to lock us up. We won't stop Malcolm. You'll die alone in a jail cell. Do you understand? You've got to pull yourself together."
I nodded, looking at the world from the wrong end of a magnifying glass.
Raines' head was gigantic, her eyes inhuman. They weren't her normal color. Tiny oases of blue pulling me forward.
I leaned in before the message could be vetoed, and I kissed her. Like kissing a star, a blaze flushed my system with heat.
Until she shoved me back and punched me in the mouth.
The tumblers fell into place. The lock to my mind swung open on a squeaky hinge. I blinked hard.
Raines balled her fists, ready for a second round. "Feel better?"
"Yeah," I said, rubbing my cheek, "actually I do."
Sometimes a swift kick to the computing unit is the only way to get the system running properly again.
I dabbed at my lips, leaving behind a child's finger painting worth of color and liquids on my sleeve.
When I looked up, Raines was gone. Light glinted off the shimmering cube in the corner. We stared at one another for a long moment.
The cube tried to kill me. I think.
I'd had Quick fits before, but that last seizure felt like something else. Something pulsed inside me, peckin
g against the cage of my mind.
The Quick causes paranoia, but sometimes that paranoia is justified.
My hand quivered inches from the cube, afraid it would sink its fangs into me and inject another dose of poison into my veins.
Raines popped her head into the room and said, "Let's go."
At the sound of her voice my shoulders jumped to my ears and my heart gave an extra three-beat staccato. No more time for fear. I snatched the box and exited that room of horrors.
In the next room, Raines gestured to a wall with something dangling from her fingers. My mind felt sunburned: hot, stretched, and dry. Thoughts weren't flowing with their normal ease, so it wasn't until Raines swiped the item in question along an invisible panel on the wall that I realized what she had.
Barry Wosley's lanyard.
I scanned the room until I found the tip of a brown shoe poking out from beneath a desk. Thoughts had to wade through the mud-encrusted waters of my mind, but I managed to put two and two together: Raines had knocked him out.
A door, leading to destinations yet unknown, appeared in the wall beside Raines.
She forged ahead with a confidence suggesting she knew where to go.
I dogged her with a confidence suggesting I had no better alternative.
Half a dozen rooms later we stumbled upon the server room. The air had an icy bite. Breath crystallized in front of me with every ragged exhale.
My head spun trying to grasp the vastness of the room. Walls stretched towards the ceiling hundreds of feet overhead. Clunking computer towers the size of small houses formed endless rows of raw storage capacity.
Raines jogged down the nearest aisle. It was still unclear whether or not she knew where she was headed, but it beat asking for directions, so like an obedient lap dog, I followed.
The machines buzzed with a dry hum, as if housing bee hives. The sound reached a crescendo as we neared the center of the room.
Raines said something, but her words were lost in the drone. She leaned in and yelled into my ear. The purr of her voice against my skin coalesced with the ambient vibrations rippling through the room, causing me to shiver violently.
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