A Covenant of Thieves

by Christian Velguth

  Booker nodded, taking a breath. “We’d better go join them, then.”

  * * *

  The twenty-four hours after the incident at Jabal Musa had passed Rick by as an impressionistic swath of sights and sounds. He couldn’t be sure when Booker and Estelle helped him, Kai, Torv, and Dr. Okai climb out of what remained of the chamber, or when the VTOL had arrived to pick them up, or for how long he had slept, wrapped in a space blanket, before waking to see the Radical Dynamics campus shining in the Egyptian sun like a city wrought in silver. This time, these events, seemed more like something he had read about than actually experienced. Being met by a team of scientists and ushered into a quarantine area deep below the surface structures of the campus should have been upsetting, but he had been unable to summon the energy required for some proper indignation. It had all just been…unimportant.

  This lasted right up until they started drawing blood and shoving him in claustrophobic scanners and inserting probes way too far into his cavities. By the time his second round of testing was finished, Rick had been feeling all too indignant, all too normal.

  The battery of examinations lasted for well over twelve hours. Sometimes Rick saw Estelle from the other end of a corridor or across a lab, but most of the time he didn’t see her at all. He knew, though, that she was being subjected to the same treatment, if not worse. Probably worse; after all, she had come back from the dead. He hadn’t.

  At least, he didn’t think so.

  Examination and testing had been peppered with questions, interrogations into his current psychological state, personality tests, memory exercises, but it wasn’t until all the poking and prodding was done that anyone actually asked for specifics. Sitting in a bland-but-comfortable-enough room, Rick had been met by a bland-but-comfortable-enough man with a tablet. After being given water and a meal of his choice (steak medium-rare, waffles, two dozen hard-boiled eggs, and three avocados), the interrogation had begun.

  What did the intelligence tell you?

  “Nothing useful. Mostly about how great it was, how ignorant we were, standing in the way of destiny, yadda-yadda.”

  Did it give you anything?

  “You mean like a gift? No. It wasn’t fucking Santa Clause.”

  Did you, at any time, ingest anything?

  “No. Might have swallowed a firefly. No, not a real one, these little golden -- look, I don’t know what they were, but there were a lot of them flying all over the place.”

  Do you recall any visions? Any transfer of knowledge?

  “I -- no.”

  Have you had any unusually vivid dreams since your experience?

  “No. I haven’t dreamed at all, actually.”

  Do you recognize yourself in the mirror?

  “… Yes.”

  Do you believe you are still Richard Álvarez?

  “Yeah.”

  The same Richard Álvarez who entered the chamber beneath Jabal Musa?

  “You asking me if I’ve grown as a person?”

  The interrogator merely shrugged, smiling politely. “Just answer in whatever way seems best.”

  Yes. Rick wanted to say, Yes. Of course he was the same. He remembered everything before stepping into that tunnel, entering that golden light. He remembered life in Houston, growing up with Kai, scrapping for survival among the gangs, escaping, travelling to the Third Coast -- he remembered all of it. He had lived it. They were his memories. It was a stupid question, really.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m…I’m me.”

  The interrogator smiled, nodded, and made a note on his tablet. “Alright, then. I think we’re done here.”

  “Seriously? That’s it?”

  “That’s it. For now. Obviously we’ll want to follow up over the next couple days, but --”

  “Hang on.” Rick held up a hand. “How long am I going to be here?”

  The interrogator’s smile became a tad sympathetic. “I really don’t know. But I think it’s safe to say you’ll be staying with us for a few days, at least. Don’t worry, our facilities are very well equipped. You’ll be quite comfortable. Think of it as a vacation.”

  “Right. Well.” Rick drummed the table with his fingers. “It’s been fun.”

  He left the interrogation room and found himself standing alone in a white corridor. So far his entire time at Radical Dynamics-Egypt had been spent in the company of scientists and security personnel, shuttling him from one antiseptic-smelling room to the next. Now he was completely alone. It spoke to a confidence in the security of the facility, and in his utter inability to go where he wasn’t wanted.

  There were unmarked doors in all directions, as well as parallel stripes of blue, red, and green on the floor. Rick had no idea what they meant. He tapped the wristband he’d been provided with, waking it and selecting the navigation app. Immediately he located himself on a map. Level B-3. There was a legend for the colored stripes, but the key was blacked out with a message telling him he didn’t have the clearance.

  “Shit,” Rick muttered. He turned and opened the door to the interrogation room, poking his head in. The room was empty, the interrogator having exited through a second, unseen door.

  He slammed the door shut and turned back to face the corridor. On his wristband he tapped a question mark icon.

  “Hello,” said a friendly voice. “How may I help you today?”

  “I’m hungry.” It was the first thing that came to mind, and he realized it was true. Despite having eaten his weight in eggs only a couple hours ago, Rick realized he was starving. “Where can I get some food?”

  “The cafeteria is located on Level A-1. Would you like me to direct you there?”

  “Go for it.”

  A compass appeared on his wristband and a line was traced on the map, showing him where to go. Rick began to follow it, sending a message to Kai as he walked.

  Level A-1 was actually the ground floor of the main campus building, with the cafeteria located roughly in the center. Tiers of artfully-arranged planters climbed the walls to a high skylight. Rick entered his order on his wristband and navigated through crowds of Radical Dynamics employees to find a table. There he sat, waiting, until he received a notification that his food was ready. When he returned to his table, Kai and Booker were waiting for him.

  Rick and Kai embraced briefly. “Good to see you in one piece,” Kai said.

  “Same.” Rick took a step back, examining Kai’s new hand. “How’s it working out?”

  Kai flipped him off. “Well enough.”

  They sat, Rick nodding to Booker before digging into his salad. He normally didn’t eat salad, but something about the leafy greens and crunchy carrots really appealed to him right now.

  “Where’s Estelle?” Booker asked.

  “Dunno.” Rick washed down a mouthful of salad with some lemonade. “Didn’t see her, really. They kept us separate most of the time.”

  “I thought you said you were both done?”

  “No, I said I was done.”

  Kai gave Booker an apologetic shrug. “I assumed they’d be together…”

  “Look, she’s probably fine. Probably still going through her own interrogation. Have to imagine they’ve got more questions for her than me, right?”

  Booker folded his arms, looking unconvinced. “So you didn’t see her at all?”

  “Barely. Like I said, we were doing our own thing.”

  “Well, how’d she look?”

  “Harried, like me.”

  “What sort of tests were they putting her through?”

  “I don’t know, Booker. Probably blood, fecal samples, cavity probes -- you know, all the same ones I had to endure.”

  Booker sighed huffily. “Well, can’t you send her a message?”

  “Tried. Either she won’t answer or she’s busy.”

  “Well try again.”

  “Hopkins -- listen.” Rick set down his fork, holding Booker’s gaze. “I get it. Ok? But…just give her some space. She’s been through a lot. More
than any of us could probably understand. I’m sure she wants some breathing room right now. Trust me, she isn’t going anywhere.”

  “You don’t know that,” Booker shot back, and there was a note of panic in his voice.

  “If they wanted to lock us up in some secret gulag, do you really think I’d be sitting here right now?”

  Booker frowned, looking uncertain. “No,” he said finally. “I guess not.”

  “Right. Much as I hate to admit it, Pharos has been pretty straight with us so far. So let’s just chill, yeah? Enjoy the downtime.”

  Booker nodded, and they fell into silence for a time. Kai was looking around at the crowded cafeteria, at the people gathered around their own tables, chatting animatedly between mouthfuls. It wasn’t too hard to guess what they were talking about -- the Sinai incident had happened virtually nextdoor. “I wonder how many of them know,” he said finally, voice low. “About Pharos and the Remnants. Do you think they even know about the secret labs beneath this place?”

  Rick shook his head, scanning the cafeteria. “I dunno. Some of them must.”

  “I doubt any of the people who work up here have even heard of Pharos,” Booker said. “At least, not as anything more than what Estelle thought it was.”

  It was strange to be sitting at that table, ostensibly the only three people in the room -- in the building, maybe -- who knew how much wider and weirder the universe really was. It made Rick feel like even more of an outsider.

  “It’s all over the news,” Booker continued. “Everyone knows about what happened at Sinai.”

  “But not what actually happened, right?”

  He shook his head. “How could they? Nasim is keeping it all hushed up. Even if someone guessed the truth by chance, who would believe them?”

  “Two days ago? I sure as hell wouldn’t have.”

  “What’d they ask you?” Kai was focusing on him, prosthesis flexing idly.

  Rick shrugged. “Everything they could about what happened. I didn’t have a lot of answers for them. It’s still…”

  He trailed off as, for a brief instant, the cafeteria went fuzzy and all sound faded away. He had an impression of endless space, of vast and complex structures, of something important that he was supposed to remember. It all passed in an instant, and he found himself talking, completing his thought as if nothing had happened.

  “…pretty blurry. Like trying to remember a dream I had a week ago.”

  Kai nodded. Both him and Booker were watching Rick, but neither appeared to have noticed any change. Rick shoveled more salad into his mouth to give himself something to do. He’d been having those weird flashbacks periodically since leaving Jabal Musa. In the beginning they had been even more powerful, even clearer, infecting his waking mind, flooding them with images and knowledge he could barely understand and didn’t recall at all after the fact. Over time they’d faded to become these split-second glimpses of…something. Something he’d seen, in the end, when he and Estelle had been -- in the place. The place he couldn’t think of a name for. Rick figured it was only a matter of time before the visions stopped coming altogether.

  He wasn’t sure why he’d lied to the interrogator. At the time it hadn’t felt like a lie at all; only in retrospect did he realize he hadn’t been honest. As if something had made the decision for him. As if he had hidden the truth from himself.

  Maybe it was because he didn’t want to look too closely. Didn’t want to examine his mind, his being, just in case he uncovered something that wasn’t right. Something new or something missing.

  Do you believe you are still Richard Álvarez?

  He had to.

  * * *

  There was a courtyard on Level B-2. Though it was two stories underground, Estelle wouldn’t have known it if she had simply awoken here. The light was full-spectrum to mimic the sun, the space lush with local flora, the air cool and fresh and fragrant with what she imagined was the mingled scent of river and desert that was unique to the Nile Valley. A stream ran through the courtyard, populated by frogs and small waterfowl. There were winding paths and benches, copses and clearings. It was the same self-contained green technology that Radical Dynamics employed in arcologies like Tour d’Eden in Paris.

  She supposed the space had been created for Pharos workers seeking a reprieve from the stark white corridors and cold laboratories without actually going up to the Radical Dynamics sections of the facility. When Estelle entered through the sliding glass doors, however, she sensed that she was totally alone. Distantly she was aware of the frogs squatting along the banks of the stream and the birds picking their way through the papyrus reeds, but there were no other people. She could feel their absence, as clearly as she could feel the animals’ presence.

  This sixth sense, she had been told, would likely persist for some time. How the scientists of Pharos knew that, Estelle wasn’t certain. Something in one of their endless tests must have shown it, or maybe it was simply an educated guess. Either way, she wasn’t in too much of a hurry to see this new ability leave her. It had been overwhelming at first, especially when she drew near the densely populated city of Cairo. But it also made the world feel textured, vibrant.

  She wandered aimlessly through the courtyard, following branches in the paths at random, losing herself in the illusion of nature-directed chaos. She wasn’t looking for anything; she merely wanted to be here, away from the tests and questions. It was a peaceful place, even if that peace was an illusion.

  I died.

  There was no escaping that fact, try as she might to ignore it. Which had been difficult, given it was all any of the scientists had wanted to talk about, had been the entire focus of their tests. To see what death had done to her and how resurrection had transformed her. They had been eager to quantify her experience, and had no doubt found plenty in her body to keep them busy for years to come, but Estelle was only beginning to come to terms with what had happened.

  I died.

  Death had been a constant presence in her life. From the moment she’d been able to understand her father’s condition she’d understood that it would claim him, and sooner than she’d like. This, naturally, had led to a premature understanding of her own mortality. She’d spent her pre-teen years going through a morbid phase of contemplation that wasn’t superficial enough to be classified as goth. It had been a very serious study of life and the fact that it always, always came to an end. She struggled with it, accepted it, and then struggled again, eventually reaching something that could be thought of as an uneasy equilibrium. None of that had prepared her for the actuality of it when her mother died, and then her father. Certainly it hadn’t prepared her for the day when she would be able to look back upon her own death.

  She had no memory of that time spent in the black. Whatever she had experienced or seen through the eyes of the intelligence that had resided in the Ark, it was now lost. It was as if the experience had never even happened. There wasn’t even a gap in her memory. The moment of her death -- an explosion, a sharp impact, a white light -- transitioned seamlessly to the moment she reawoke. Looking back, it was hard to say she actually had died, although the scientists said she had most certainly been braindead, for a few hours at least.

  What did it mean, then, if death was impermanent? If she had no memory of the event, if it had left no lasting mark on her, then could anyone say it really even happened? From her perspective, it was simply a story she repeated to herself, like a false memory of childhood rooted in hearing the same familiar tales ad nauseum.

  And yet she had died.

  So what did it mean?

  Ahead, the path rounded a bend and the vegetation opened up to reveal the trickling stream. A small wooden bridge crossed it, but rather than stepping onto it Estelle left the path, going to the muddy bank. Tiny plips and splashes marked the hasty retreat of frogs that had been soaking in the shallows. She saw their dark forms squirming away, legs kicking up a swirl of silt.

  Estelle kneeled, reaching
down to place a hand in the water. It was cool, and when she brought her hand to her nose there was no scent of chemicals. She splashed a few handfuls on her face, relishing the shock of the temperature. It woke her up, grounded her. She went down on hands and knees, fingers squishing in the mud near the water. She grabbed fistfulls of the stuff, charcoal-black and fragrant. It must have been brought in from the Nile. Closing her eyes, she could feel the faint glimmers of life that marked worms wriggling in the mud beneath her. She could almost see them as sparking pinpoints of golden light.

  She opened her eyes. In the surface of the stream Estelle caught her own reflection. She had been given a new pair of glasses to replace those broken by K’ebero. They matched her old ones exactly. Her dark hair was pulled back into a short ponytail. She turned her head slightly to one side. There on her temple, just above one bow of her glasses, was the scar: a coin-sized starburst of gold-tinted flesh. The bullet had vanished entirely from her cranium, leaving the starburst scar as the only trace of her wound. It would be with her for the rest of her life, or so the scientists said.

  Rinsing her hands in the stream, Estelle reached up and touched the scar. It wasn’t raised or knotted or rough, but as smooth as the rest of her skin. Less a scar than a birthmark.

  If death wasn’t the end, then what was it?

  Estelle stood and rejoined the path, crossing the small bridge, distantly aware of the frogs returning to their haunts now that she had left. She smiled, bringing up Rick’s message on her glasses as she walked and composing a reply.

  “I’ll be right there. Don’t eat without me!”

  Forty-Six

  Radical Dynamics-Egypt

  Cairo Governorate, Egypt

  Despite the circumstances, the next three days spent in Cairo weren’t too terrible an inconvenience. Though their wanderings were restricted to the Radical Dynamics campus, there was plenty to see on the sprawling grounds to keep them occupied. By some unspoken rule, they never went anywhere alone if they could help it. None of them seemed to want to spend time apart from one another. Between Rick and Estelle’s continued rounds of evaluation and Kai’s physical therapy sessions, the four of them spent their time at Lotus, the campus bar, mingling with Radical Dynamics employees, or playing volleyball in the rec center, or pigging out in the cafeteria (they’d been given an unlimited stipend, courtesy of Nasim Al-Faradi) or relaxing in the cultivated gardens, or simply sitting around their shared suite of rooms, watching television or playing video games.