The weapons spun, their shiny black sides scraping against loose rock. One rifle did a full rotation before coming to a stop with its barrel pointed at me.
My first thought was of Raines and Ash swooping in on their little black pony to save the damsel in distress. I was so happy I could swoon, but opted to remain seated.
A black cord plopped to the ground fifteen feet to the right. My ride.
I hobbled to the nearest soldier lying on the ground, ignoring the shards of bone jabbing the pulpy flesh around my ankle. The soldier committed to the act of surrendering and kept his attention fixed on the ground as I rummaged through his pockets to come up with another vial of stimheal. I held it up to the waning light and stared into the face of my savior.
I injected the nanobots. They merged with my blood instantly.
God wrung my brain like a wet sponge, releasing a rush of endorphins. Endorphins that told me everything would be okay. That things would work out.
I did my best impression of a cowboy exiting a saloon, sauntering to the black cord dangling from the Kestrel like the world was my oyster.
And hell, maybe it was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Past Doesn't Forget Us
The world was not my oyster. Not even close.
It's a spiteful lover, giving affection one moment and stabbing me in the throat the next.
I was experiencing one of those throat-stabbing moments.
It's rare, but on occasion, you see something so extraordinarily out of place that it requires a second, sometimes even a third look to process. My mind, on its fourth double take, did another loop de loop.
In the Kestrel two men, with nanite-infused muscles, sat on a couch struggling to support their combined bulk. They looked like two rattlesnakes worth of mean, but they weren't the reason my brain was performing advanced aerial maneuvers. No, credit for that belonged to the man sitting across from them.
Pale skin freckled a hairless skull. Thin eyebrows converged, malnourished worms above eyes that couldn't twinkle.
Malcolm Wolfe.
"Wow," Malcolm said, gesturing to a sliver of open seat between the two men I'd dubbed Nitro and Doug in my mind. "I admit, I'm impressed. You've really gone for it, seized the day and all that."
I squeezed between the two super-sized bodyguards while calculating the time it would take to cover the distance separating me from Malcolm. If I could move like Ash he'd be dead before he finished his next breath.
But I'm not that fast. Not by a large margin. More likely, one of the guards with pistons for arms, and hands upgraded with bio-steel skeletons, would crack my skull before my cheeks left the seat.
They didn't bother cuffing me, an insult I told myself I'd make them regret, but who was I kidding?
The only people I cause pangs of regret are loved ones.
Malcolm was safe on that account.
"So this is it, huh?" I said, releasing the tension in my spine and sinking deeper into the cushion of muscle on either side. "You got me. You win. Now what?"
The stimheal worked magic behind the curtain of my mind, tinkering and tweaking, until I floated like a rainbow. A weird analogy, but with more endorphins than blood surging through narrowed arteries, it made a certain kind of sense to me.
"You have something I want."
I burped out a laugh. "You're kidding, right?"
"Nope."
"What on earth could I have that you want?"
"Well, I had hoped for the cube, but I'll settle for your memories."
Everybody wanted my memories. Everybody but me, that is. The cube was a different story; a mystery rather than a tragedy.
"Good riddance. Hope they treat you as poorly as they have me."
"Oh, I'm certain they won't, because unlike you I see how it all comes together. I see the big picture."
"Does it show me kicking your ass?"
Malcolm smirked and said, "No. I'm afraid that's only in your head."
"Don't discount it. Seems the space between my ears is gaining value these days."
"That it is, but only for a little while longer." Malcolm pivoted in his chair and grabbed a briefcase from the floor beside him. "I'm curious, Tom, have they told you why you're here? Why you in particular?"
I shook my head.
"Thought not." Malcolm thumbed a button on the case and the latches popped like a champagne-bottle cork. He reached inside and pulled out a small cube similar to the one I'd taken from the Vault. "Do you know what this is?"
"A memory drive?"
"Close," he said, twirling the device between nimble, bird-boned fingers. "It's called a Mobius Cube. Adam created it, but I perfected it. Adam doesn't share credit, but we know the truth, eh?" Malcolm winked like a snake charming a rabbit from its hole.
Casual references to this Adam character kept coming up. Judging by the context it seemed safe to say he wasn't a low-level player in this game. Beyond that, I didn't have a clue.
"From where I'm sitting, it's just a shiny metal box." I smirked for good measure, an act more for my benefit than his.
"It is shiny, huh?" Malcolm held the cube to the light as if he'd never noticed it before. Billions of refracted rainbows danced across the inside of the Kestrel.
"So, what makes it so special?"
"What it holds."
"Which is?"
"Thoughts."
"Okay," I said, adopting a strategy of playing stupid, a role becoming increasingly familiar. "What kind of thoughts?"
"All of them." Malcolm inserted a pregnant pause. It stretched, came to term, and grew into full-blown silence.
I urged him to continue with my eyebrows, but he wasn't getting the message. After twenty seconds of staring at one another I caved and asked the question he'd been waiting to hear. "Huh?"
"This cube is capable of housing every thought you've ever had. It stores the digital footprint of your physical mind."
"Bullshit." The word flew from my mouth.
"Not bullshit."
"You can't make a copy of the brain."
I mean, I didn't think you could. At the very least, it sounded like something you shouldn't do.
"Nobody said anything about making copies; it merely transfers."
"You're losing me again." I observed Nitro to see if he had followed along better than me. The lumbering ox nodded as if he understood every damn word, which left me feeling like the only kid in class whose hand painting of a turkey comes out looking like a multi-colored rock. "Transferring from what to where?"
"From here," Malcolm held a finger to his temple, and then gently lifted the cube in his hand, "to here."
I chewed on the implications. Assuming Malcolm wasn't stringing me along for the sake of torturing a dying man—a big assumption given his proclivities—meant he'd discovered a way for his consciousness to live on without his body.
A fate worse than death, I thought.
I voiced that opinion.
"No, no, you misunderstand," Malcolm said. "A mind can't live in the Mobius Cube indefinitely. The brain has too many sensory adaptations. Close the mind in on itself and it goes crazy. There has to be a physical release."
"Then why transfer your mind to the cube in the first place?"
"It acts as a receiver for an incoming consciousness. That consciousness remains here until it can be uploaded to a new vessel."
"Another cube?" I said, but the words had already filled in the blank. "No. Another brain..."
The words plopped out of my mouth and spilled to the floor. A mess that couldn't be cleaned. Disorder that could never be restored.
Malcolm clapped his hands slowly. The sound of one man playing patty cake—a sad sound if ever there was one.
"You're a coward. All of this just to bypass the Life Tracker 'cause you're afraid to die?"
"I wasn't born to die."
"Humans weren't meant to live forever."
"Then I suppose it's good," Malcolm said, licking his lips, drawing t
he moment out for a climactic flourish, "that I'm not human."
"Okay," I said, mentally reviewing Malcolm's file and concluding the ingredient I'd been overlooking in trying to understand him was the tiny caveat that he was bat shit crazy. "Then...what are you?"
"The better question is, what are we?" he said with a wink.
A decade spent in a Stream dream had fractured Malcolm's mind beyond repair, I concluded. Masked reality in a delusional haze of its own creation.
"You lost part of yourself in Pause, didn't you? The non-crazy part."
"I lost the only part of me that mattered well before Pause, Tom. An ignorant thief stole her from me." Malcolm's eyes darkened, two smoldering scales plucked from a dragon's spine. "But you weren't ignorant at the time, were you?"
"Me? Now I'm to blame for your insanity?"
"That's not a recent development."
"To me it is."
"I suppose that's my fault. It was my virus, after all, that reduced the great hope of Castle to nothing more than a drooling human." Malcolm beamed at that last part.
I sifted through my memories for clarity, hoping the nanites Devers had given me would offer some insight. Hoping, however, had no effect, and the invisible barrier separating me from the answers locked inside my brain remained.
"You're on a spirit quest, aren't you?" Malcolm said. "I can see your gears churning through the muck, deciphering the gaps. You'll get there. Your memories are resurfacing even as we speak."
The energy to play games drained out through my feet and into the floorboards of the jet. I replayed Malcolm's words in my head and locked onto something I hadn't wanted to hear.
"Her?" I said, edging slowly into the darkness, afraid of what lurked there. "You said ‘an ignorant thief stole her from me’”
"Yes."
"Who?"
"You know."
"I don't." But I feared I did.
"Diana," Malcolm said, his hands turned to white-knuckled fists capable of crushing coal into diamonds.
I shook my head. "No."
"You're not the only one to ever love her. At this point, I wonder if you can even say you knew her."
Revelations in the past twenty-four hours had cast doubt on the answer to that question. That Malcolm was right was the barb that couldn't be extracted without tearing a chunk of my heart out alongside it. The question wriggled through my innards, the worm burrowing through, tearing me apart at the seams.
"Let me tell you about your precious Diana. She loved me first. Before you ever existed, it was me. Only me."
That couldn't be true. He was lying. Getting inside my head so I'd do the dirty work of torturing myself.
I told myself not to play his game, but the scab had to be picked. "Then why did you kill her?"
"I didn't kill her." Malcolm sank back into his chair; the bravado leached into the cushion along with his anger. In its absence it left something else. He rubbed his hairless cheek, eyes cast downward at a spot thousands of yards past the floorboards. "I tried to save her."
"That's not how I remember it."
"Your memory is not the most reliable source."
"Bullshit, I saw you."
"Did you?" he said, with genuine interest.
I'd watched that particular memory on repeat for the last decade. Knew every gasp escaping Diana's lips, the feel of her warm blood both slick and sticky against my skin. Malcolm standing in the corner, his face a lesson in grim satisfaction.
I hadn't seen him pull the trigger, but he'd been the only one there. It had to be him. His look said it all.
My mind scrambled through the memory, pausing at the moment I burst through the doors and first saw Malcolm standing on the rim of pooling blood leaking from Diana's body. He had something in his hand. Something shiny. A gun.
His face, drawn in. Tight. Contorted. Puckered around the edges.
It wasn't the look I expected. It wasn't victory. It was grief.
A look I'd seen staring back in the mirror countless times.
How had I missed that? Was it there before? Were the nanites repairing parts of my damaged memory, or had I chosen not to see?"
"If it wasn't you." My voice was a whisper against the cacophony of life. "Then who?"
Malcolm titled his head, his eyes full with what could almost be called sadness. “You.”
I shook my head, refusing to go along on that one. Even the most self-loathing part of my psyche refused to accept that blame. I let her down, sure. Failed to save her, undoubtedly.
But I did not kill her.
"I didn't put a bullet in her stomach and leave her to bleed out on the floor."
"True, but that is not what killed her."
A riptide of rage churned through me, dredging from below the surface all the hurt and pain I'd promised myself. The sludge slithered through veins and into muscles, poisoning everything in its path with a black-tinted hatred.
It swelled. Hit its peak. Crested and then crashed down on me until every heartbeat boomed like a cannon. The acrid puff of black powder igniting my lungs drifted up and out my nostrils, firing me from my chair like a discharged bullet.
Arms extended, fingers inches away from Malcolm's throat. My world became a tunnel with a single destination. The edges were finger smudged. Details lost. None of that mattered.
All that mattered was ripping the lies from Malcolm's mouth.
But I didn't bridge the gap. Something thick, heavy, and resembling a tree branch fell on the back of my skull. The tunnel closed. Everything went black.
And then white.
And then black and white.
My sense of taste swapped places with my hearing. From my position on the floor, I tasted blood in my ears and heard groans with my teeth.
"No," I said, a feeble objection to Malcolm's accusation.
"I'm sorry to say, but yes." Malcolm leaned forward, his mouth inches from mine. "I would have saved her if you hadn't stopped me, Tom."
Nitro grabbed the back of my neck, plucked me from the floorboards, and tossed me into the chair beside him.
Now that I sat right side up, my senses returned to their original locations. Something rattled in my mouth. I tongued the offending object and spit into my hand. A pearly white molar rose from a glob of red, an iceberg floating upon a sea of blood.
"I didn't kill her." I kept with the same line of defense, my head swirling too much for any change in tactics.
"Nor did I," Malcolm said. "And true to my word, I'll show you. I'll give you the answers you seek. Give you the truth. Remove the block holding your memories at bay."
"Why?"
"Because knowing will break your heart. It'll hurt you more than I ever could." With an exertion only barely visible in the tremble of his bottom lip, he managed to keep the rest of his face impassive. "But nothing comes free, and you have something I need. Perhaps we make a trade. You get what's in here, and I get what's in there."
Malcolm held the Mobius Cube in his right hand and gestured towards my head. The light played along the edge of the device, making it appear sharp. A blade he was prepared to bury in my chest.
He gave a discreet nod. Nitro and Doug swiveled, grabbing me impossibly strong hands. I kicked and squirmed, but it was ineffectual against the combined strength of the two men.
Pinned. Overwhelmed. A shout broiled up from the depths of my being. "What are you doing?" I said through gritted teeth.
Malcolm hovered in front of my immobilized head, the Mobius Cube in his hand a latent threat of violence.
"I'm taking from you what you took from the Vault."
"I don't have the cube."
"It's not the cube itself I'm after. I want what was on the cube."
"Too bad it was blank."
"No, it wasn't. It was full. Brimming with life. A life hiding here, now." Malcolm stabbed a thin finger in the space between my eyes, wiggling it back and forth like a grub burrowing into my skull. "I'm going to relieve you of that burden. Take back what y
ou stole from me. To do what you couldn't; I'm going to save Diana."
Diana?
That was the last thought I had before Malcolm touched the Mobius Cube to my forehead. My world shattered, dissolved, and scattered like sand tossed to the breeze.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Rememories
I drifted through the void. A disembodied wanderer. Destinations unknown.
No way signs. No markers. No context.
Blackness held me in its apathetic embrace. Both warm and cold. Discomfort on either side of the spectrum.
I closed my eyes to focus.
Flung out of my body, into a memory.
"Love, what's wrong?"
I stood in a field outside the city. The air was fresher, but not by much. Man's fingerprint smudged across nature's lens.
"Huh?" I said, rubbing my eyes with dirt-caked fingers. "How did we get here?"
"We drove, silly." Diana rolled onto tiptoes and kissed my nose. Shockwaves pulsed from the point where lips found skin.
I shuddered.
"I don't remember that."
She looked at me. Something shifted. It wasn't in her eyes. It was in her body.
It sagged.
Imploding into itself as if the weight of the world had compressed her into an ever-shrinking version of herself. She was suffering. A pain I'd been oblivious to.
"I don't remember much of anything," I continued, struggling through the labyrinth of my own mind. "What happened to me?"
"Nothing, you're perfect, sweetheart. Perfect." Diana put her hands on my hips. They were small, but strong. Her grip was firm.
She held me tight, trying to root me in that moment. Already I was drifting.
A cloud rolled past. Fog condensed over my mind's eye.
"Stay with me," she said, her voice a plea. She must see the cloud coming too.
I fought it, struggled against the tide, but I'm weak. The darkness inside me was too strong. It pulled me under, submerged me in its numbing embrace.
So tired.
Couldn't remember why I was fighting.
A tear rolled down Diana's cheek. I reached to wipe it away.
Diana on the edge of our bed. Toes skimming the floor. She kicked her feet back and forth; a child on a swing set.
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