"I'll see you soon, Ravi," she said, and jumped.
LARA
INTERLUDE 3
"He says he'll only speak to you," said Rachel Heron.
Olan Harrison stood at the window looking out over the dramatic, splintered sweep of the Huangshan Mountains, beneath an acid blue sky. All the pieces were falling into place, and his vision was coming to full fruition. For so long he'd waited for this moment; the Last Mayor, first and greatest of the naturally immune.
He couldn't see him from the mountaintop facility; none of the retrograde humans had reached within five miles of the Redoubt, though they had certainly tried. The type ones had come first and the type twos had followed to pile on top, but none of them had been able to penetrate his shield walls.
"How did he look?" Olan asked, but didn't turn. His gaze caused discomfort, and he largely held it in reserve with Rachel.
"Half-addled," she answered. "Drunk on something, though I didn't detect any drugs or alcohol in his system. Half rage, half euphoria, and dangerous. He's powerful, Olan."
Olan nodded slowly. Yes, that made sense. A man goes mad. A man comes back from madness with special gifts. There could be great euphoria in finally finding the true face of your enemy.
"And he said no."
Heron cleared her throat. "His exact words were, 'Tell that wrinkled old rib-cracking bitch to come down here and face me himself.'"
Olan allowed a small smile. You had to be forgiving with children.
"Has he felt our capacity?"
"No, sir," she said sharply. "At least, he couldn't have. We're fully dampened outside the shield, as you ordered."
"Couldn't have?"
"He shouldn't have been able to," Heron clarified. "He has no training, no focus at all. But he said something about walls. He threatened to tear them down." A pause. "He's not the man you think he is, Olan. He'd be better off dead."
Olan rested his fingertips on the glass and watched the smoky hint of condensation form around them. Better off dead? Two hundred and thirty-five people had been rescued before the curtain fell on the old world; that was the best Little Olan had managed, back when the AI had had executive control. Now together they had swelled their ranks in the Redoubt to nearly a thousand. Every one counted, and this one, the Last Mayor, counted far more than most.
He turned and looked Rachel Heron full in her sharp, inquisitive brown eyes. The sudden weight of his gaze startled her, and she backed up a step, catching her breath. He had that effect; an artifact of the cloned body they had built for him. His eyes shone with a bright inner white light, like the dead.
"Don't underestimate his value," he said. "Many others have, and look where they are now."
Heron regained her composure quickly, meeting his gaze. He knew that was uncomfortable; the brightness was painful to behold. "He's hopelessly splintered. He's a danger to himself as well as us, and he'll never have the integrity to match our advanced control. He's a walking time bomb, as good as dead already, and the same goes for all his dregs from America. We don't need any of them."
Olan took a step closer, making her flinch slightly. "Dead men are the most dangerous, Rachel. Don't you agree?"
Heron shuddered as if he'd walked over her grave, though her face swiftly smoothed back to impassive. She hadn't needed any training to learn that iron self-control.
"Sometimes," she allowed, "but we can't afford to be complacent."
As soon as she said it she registered the mistake. He allowed her punishment to be another slight smile. Behind it came the ever-present threat of the box, and a thousand severed threads. "And you think me complacent?"
She withered inside, but remained defiant, staring at him until it became too uncomfortable. This was their constant dance, and he enjoyed it. Everything had a purpose.
"Ask me," he said. "I know you are curious."
"I don't need to ask," Rachel said, keeping the sullenness from her voice. "He has power; he was the first. He can be a vehicle."
He nodded. That was enough for now. "Then ask the other question."
At that she looked up, surprised. Sometimes he could still surprise her; the ways he traced his thoughts across hers, gathering information. Quickly her jaw set.
"James While," she said, never one to waste time. "Is he conscious yet?"
Olan smiled wider. It had surprised him that While still mattered to her. Perhaps she'd loved this man, once, maybe even more than Olan had.
"You needn't worry about James," he said. "You'll see him when the time is right. Concern yourself with the elimination of his SEAL. In the meantime, keep the Last Mayor detained at the wall. I will go see him myself."
Her eyes widened. "Olan-" she began, but he waved a hand and she fell silent. There wasn't any intent behind the motion, any power more than the smile earlier, but she'd learned like all the rest what force he could summon on a whim. The very T4 cells in her body belonged to him, after all.
"Yes, sir," she said, teeth gritted. "Should he be allowed to understand the means of his confinement?"
Harrison Olan let his lips quirk upward. So few things provided genuine amusement these days. Mastering reality could make things dull.
"He may already understand more than you or I, Rachel. This man has peered into a different kind of abyss." A pause. "Let's see what he can do."
* * *
Rachel Heron rode the elevator down from Olan Harrison's floor, fuming with a frustration she couldn't quite name. Every interaction with him left her feeling that way these days, like there were secret motives driving him that she couldn't even glimpse, while her own ploys shone plainly beneath his bright gaze.
Perhaps that was true. Olan Harrison ruled his people with an unremitting, invasive fervor, and made no exception for her. They were all part of his vision, and his vision required constant control. The rules that encircled them were totalitarian and complete, with chances for meaningful free will decisions only meted out in the course of their duties.
She thumbed the button for the third floor again, hard. At least that much remained to her; her body, her emotions, her thoughts. She'd seen Olan strip many people of even those, so they walked round the complex and worked and enacted his will without really being present in any human way.
With the tiniest fragment of his power he 'boxed' people, reducing them to passengers in their own bodies and minds, deprived of sensation, of the ability to speak or be truly 'seen'. Heron had felt it only once, after she'd disappointed him in the moments after the Severing, and shuddered at the memory.
It had been the worst kind of solitary confinement. You saw everything, you heard everything, but you weren't really there. People saw your body and face, even interacted with you, while at the same time they could see that you were shackled and gagged on the line. It was an unbearable deprivation, to be so trapped within your own skin.
She shuddered, and the elevator stopped at Strategic Governance. Here she felt at least one layer of the frustration peel away. In this place she had a semblance of control, even if everything she did was tailored to Olan Harrison's overriding goals.
The office was a long, undulating space that hugged the flank of the mountain range, with floor-to-ceiling windows composing the outer wall. On the left were the many meeting, research and command bays, each a glass-walled pod nestled into the raw red mountain rock, fitted with tables, desks and screens of varying sizes; some set up for presentations, some arranged for line work and logistical crunching. The building's construction was a masterwork of engineering, laser-cut to match the Huangshan bedrock precisely, slotting in and adapting to the mountain's pattern like a key in a lock.
Normally the panoramic sweep of it impressed her, seeming to invite the whole of the ever-changing view inside, but not today. Instead she felt uneasy still, about Olan perhaps, or the strange sense of regret Amo had shaken loose.
Using her training, she forcefully put that uneasiness to one side. It wouldn't interrupt her plans. For over a deca
de she'd waited, doing Olan's bidding, biding her time. Now the end was drawing near, and she was ready to buttress her past decisions with a final push that would finally lead to something close to freedom.
"He's throwing his army around," said Arter Rain.
Rachel Heron blinked and focused on her lieutenant, Arter, standing in her pod. He was a Lazarus-capture set in a second-generation model, with the glowing eyes replaced. As her second-in-command he was primarily responsible for the stealth walls that shielded them from the SEAL, and had kept the retrograde Homo Sapiens at a five-mile remove back when they'd been a threat.
He had the standard face of a second gen, with a few simple gene splices drawn from his corpse to help distinguish him; slightly larger nose, green eyes. The fourth generation body models were much better; healthier and sleeker, but most of the Lazarus-captures preferred to stay with the model they were first descended into. It was a kind of status symbol.
Rachel Heron was one of the few remaining who hadn't opted for a Lazarus upgrade, preferring to keep her original body intact, weaknesses on the line be damned. Most were gen two or three; only Olan himself was generation one, with its artifact of glowing eyes.
"He's doing what?" Heron asked.
Arter pointed at the screen on the pod's wall. On it was a silent drone video feed, one of the models they'd been using to follow Amo since he'd left the Siberian super-Array behind.
"It looks like they're dancing," Arter said, slightly bemused.
The screen showed Amo and his army, shot from a high angle, with the bulk of them spreading behind him down the sprawl of the type two foothills. From above it was clearer what a rainbow of types his army was made of, with a good representation of threes, fours and fives steadily catching up. The slower ones were still rolling their way east from Mongolia, monitored by separate drones.
Mostly there were types one and two, and Amo had them all moving at once, while he stood atop a low body-crag and directed them like a conductor running an orchestra. Some of them shook their bodies and jumped. Others seemed to be doing some kind of coordinated waltz.
"He's been doing it for a while," Arter said. "I think he's playing? Maybe he really is just mad."
Heron watched a moment longer. She'd spoken to the man just an hour ago. Out there at the shield's furthest edge he'd held himself out like a kind of drunken, dangerous jester. In every word they'd exchanged there'd been a kind of judgmental satire; like him talking to her was a joke, and her listening was a joke, and their whole pretense of conversation was a grand and ridiculous joke, which perhaps only he knew the punch line to.
Absent that niggling sense of threat, this dancing army might have seemed only silly and crazy. With that sense added though, it felt dangerous. It was why she'd pressed for Olan to dismiss him from his plans. She knew only too well how dangerous a mad, half-dead man could be. Just look at how close James While and Joran Helkegarde had come to shutting them down in those hard, early years.
"He's testing the wall," she said blankly, marking out the lines in her head where the invisible shield ended. "Maybe not even consciously."
Arter frowned, and looked again at the screen. "I don't think that's possible. It's scaled down to a level he can't possibly register, with modulations that…"
He trailed off as Heron walked up to the screen and drew a bright, curving stripe down the screen, at the edge of where Amo's army frolicked. The monitor picked up the motion and added a yellow line to the feed, tracking her finger. "Resolve to the shield," she said, and the yellow morphed atop the existing boundary of their island in the line.
The match was close to exact.
"Ah," said Arter awkwardly. "Right. I haven't been out there much."
"It's not detectable," Heron said. "You're right about that. And it phases too fast to see. You couldn't have known where it ended."
Arter didn't say anything. It was just more evidence of the way Olan Harrison kept them imprisoned, and how well he'd shielded them from James While's numerous scans. If nobody could feel the wall or see it, then how could they possibly scheme to cross it in either direction?
"But he feels it," Arter said at last. "This is no coincidence."
Others in the pod were watching them now, their current work abandoned. Heron looked at them, and felt her own bonds to Olan tightening. The sense of frustration came back again, and she realized how much it had been exacerbated by speaking with Amo. His madness was like a word on the tip of her tongue, always eluding capture, bringing with it that curious sense of something she was supposed to have done, or be doing.
Olan Harrison kept them like slaves. That was true. But in the world of the blind, the one-eyed woman was queen, and Rachel had always expected that position for herself. Now though, with this mad man on their doorstep, things felt like they were changing.
That change brought a crushing sense of panic, at how truly trapped she was. Perhaps all her years of scheming amounted only to this. Amo was a mad man, and Olan was a mad man too, and here was she, trapped in the middle.
7. TRIAL
Lara voyaged west from Washington, with her people in tow.
It began as a lonely, silent journey, full of agony in both her body and soul. She felt the fire's searing kiss on her skin without end, slumped on the back sofa of Drake's silver Airstream, rumbling over cracked old roads. The scorched soles of her feet rested in antiseptic bandages on ice. A dozen more bandages covered assorted burns up her legs, on her shoulders, across her swelling belly. Antibiotics and painkillers coursed through her system, numbing her senses, but none of them salved the pain in her soul.
Her people had tried to burn her alive.
The memories were never far away. She couldn't escape the righteous expression on Witzgenstein's face as she consigned Lara to the flames. She couldn't forget the screams as Witzgenstein took her place on the fire.
She didn't sleep.
She exerted control.
Everything now was control, using Witzgenstein's bridle at all times, because none of them could be trusted. On the line she smothered the people from New LA and Drake's family alike, and steered them in a long convoy, their every breath and movement filtered through her, their every turn, their every thought regulated.
So they left Washington, DC behind. They spidered west along I-70 toward West Virginia, and she suffered. The rage didn't calm, nor the outrage. The shame didn't cool, nor the pain, so she vented it outward into her people.
They all burned. They all felt the joy and guilt of murdering Witzgenstein. They felt what it was to kneel naked in the mud, equally distraught and dominant. She gave them the memory of Crow's pain, and her own.
Then the trial began.
On the morning of the third day, as they crossed into Ohio toward Columbus, she began a rotation of people in and out of the Airstream, like courtiers come to kiss the ring. She sat them down before her and slit them open on the line, burning through the full contents of their minds in one sitting; their memories and emotions, intentions and drives, pains and joys, until their thoughts were worn down to tired nubs.
Then she moved on to the next. There were no secrets between any of them; not anymore.
Throughout the first long day came Cynthia, then George and Alan, a smattering of Drake's blank children, Drake's wives and husbands. All slit open before her, and not one of the interrogations used words. She didn't need them anymore, and neither did they. Her bridle was in all their mouths, stopping up their tongues. Her lash lay across all their backs.
So their judgment would come.
In Cynthia she saw everything, from the bashful hillbilly racism entwined around her heart to the welter of jealousies and rages she'd felt at Jake after he came out, at Drake for never taking her to his bed, at Witzgenstein for not raising her up higher. Throughout there was a heady mixture of impotent rage, cruel thoughts, confusion, shame and distaste.
She looked into Alan's soul. Masako's partner, Lin's father; he was an empty, insincer
e, insecure man. Even within his own memories he second-guessed himself, from his actions to the actions of others, whether they liked him or hated him or were laughing at him behind his back. Even his own son was a mystery to him, with his fey, half-Japanese eyes, and his muttered scraps of a language Alan had never mastered. Alan had felt belittled and shunted every day of his adult life, and followed Masako, then Witzgenstein, then Drake because following others was the only way he knew.
In a child of Drake she found acres of nothingness. Whole realms were empty, that should have been packed with ant-burning and girl-shoving and moments of bullying and being bullied, of parental love and friendship and excitement and fear, all treasured and sutured around with the scar tissue of childish interpretation. All that remained were gray spaces still bearing the glove-like imprint of Drake's puppet-master hand.
She wept after each child like him.
She opened up Lydia, and wept more as the past came spooling out like the rot finally unleashed from a gangrenous wound. A decade of degradation. A lifetime of being abused, of going against her sexual orientation, of fulfilling the survival dreams of a vindictive, empathetic, dominating master, becoming his baby-making machine and little more. She saw back to Lydia's first days in her semi-trailer cage, to the time she held Drake's life in her own hands, with a knife she could have stabbed into his heart, and felt that agonizing choice play out in her mind every day since.
There was so much pain and shame.
In some hearts the anger remained. In a woman named Alyssa there was little more than naked, brittle hatred, but then terrible things had been done to her, for so long. Sat upon the chair before Lara, her abuses poured out like vomit. Drake had used her for years: in long days of meaningless humiliation; in senseless, joyless orgies that lasted far beyond the outer edge of pleasure; in games of passive emotional blackmail that amused only him. Madness had come and gone from her several times, harnessed to a growing cruel streak that Drake fostered.
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