Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (20 page)

I sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs and managed to avoid saying,
But you think it’ll all be pointless.

“Come on, Morag,” he said. “It’s six hours there, six back, no big deal. Maybe you’ll only be gone a day or two. You’ll be back before Jimmy and Lorna even get here.”

The thought of leaving you was unbearable. It was even harder now that I sensed that Kit and Rosko, for all their compassion, had so little hope you’d recover.

And honestly—honestly—the thought of leaving Kit was even more unbearable.

Crapshit.

If I’d had the courage to say that, instead of just think it, maybe she’d have smiled.

C
HAPTER
13

I
LDAVAN

We’d heard that a lot of Seraphim were visiting Hawaii or even moving there. Still, it was a shock that some airlines had put on extra flights, and more of a shock I still couldn’t get a seat. When I dug up a cheap last-minute deal—Kona via Honolulu via LA—it was ten and a half hours including the two layovers; I hesitated for all of five minutes, and when I looked again it had evaporated. Eventually, after an hour of hitting refresh, I snagged the last seat on a direct flight from SeaTac to Kona.

It was an oddly private, subdued crowd on my plane. Three or four people were wearing the white Seraphim scarf, but I assumed (because of the clothes, and despite their reserved manner) that everyone else was a tourist, flying to the middle of the Pacific for the usual ritual: extra-deep sunburn; rip-off drinks made from canned pineapple juice with grain alcohol; Cambodian-sweatshop hula souvenirs. But no, these ordinary American couples and singles and buddy groups weren’t about to become beach lobsters. They were new acolytes, converts to the Word of Quinn, going eagerly for initiation at (as they were calling it) the First Epicenter.

An affable-looking granddad with stained teeth and a hearing aid was in the aisle ahead of me after we landed. He’d put on a “Know It Is True” baseball cap. In the little open-air terminal he seemed to be on his own, lower lip trembling as he fiddled with his belt, so I went over and risked talking to him. Why had they traveled all the way to Kona from what was already an Epicenter, the Pacific Northwest?

“Tahoma’s not ready!” he said, and stared at me with watery eyes as if he’d said the most obvious thing in the world. “Tahoma—that’s Mount Rainier, you know—it won’t be ready for a while yet! As a matter of fact—” He looked around, confused, as if he’d dropped something. “As a matter of fact, Mauna Loa isn’t ready either. But it will be! Soon! This is the one we’re going to focus on first, d’you see? The best chance we have of getting onto the stairway. I’m hoping to meet Mr. Quinn himself! And of course there will be time to meet everyone who’s ever been born, because where we’re going there’ll be no end to time! Are you practicing?”

Practicing?

I didn’t know whether he meant it like
Are you a practicing Catholic?
or like
Have you done your piano practice?
Or both.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Practicing. All the time.” Then I pointed up at the sign for the women’s bathroom. “Sorry, got to go!”

“Practicing your chants!” he called after me. “Simplifying your mind.
Ut-QOR-met, bir-ARD-ku, rem-EP-zi, tav-AU—
”

I didn’t need to use the bathroom. But I went in, throwing an apologetic smile over my shoulder, and dithered at the sink, hoping he wouldn’t be there to continue the conversation when I came out. While I stood there, pretending to clean my nails, I thought about you—thought about how torn I was, because my brain wanted to meet Balakrishnan but my heart wanted to get on the next plane back—and then I found myself eavesdropping on a conversation between two dressed-up-nice suburban mom types who’d just come out of their stalls. As they washed their hands and adjusted their makeup, they were talking about how wonderful it was
“to have truly given everything up at last”—excluding the mascara, apparently—and how they’d heard “totally
amazing
”
things about “the arena they’re building up there on the mountain.” When I emerged, Grandpa had drifted over to join a gathering of fifty or sixty people around a huge Samoan woman in an orange muumuu who was standing precariously on a chair. She smiled too much and said “Aloha” too loudly. It looked like she was distributing the traditional leis, but they weren’t leis. They were cheap acrylic knockoffs of the white scarf, complete with the broken golden triangle.

I’d been told a driver would be there for me. For some reason
driver
conjured up a skinny, sandy-haired guy with freckles and a cheap blue uniform, so I wasn’t prepared for the muscular Hawaiian dude with “Chen” on his signboard. He looked like a Special Forces soldier on a fashion shoot, with a fresh white shirt showing off his pecs. More tousled, less neat, and he could’ve had a career doing romance novel covers.

“Ms. Chen? Welcome to the Big Island. My name is Kai Kaiulani. I work for Mr. Smith.”

“Yes. I was told about the ‘Mr. Smith’ bit. I’m really here to see—”

He held up a finger. “Mr. Smith, in public. His compound is a short drive from here. Follow me, please.”

Outside the terminal and away from the jet-fuel fumes, the sun was blazing and the tropical air smelled wonderful, but soon I was enveloped in chilled air in the back of a white SUV the size of an aircraft carrier. I waited until Kai had threaded us around twenty or thirty tour buses, then tried to draw him into conversation. Not much luck. When I asked about the Seraphim, nothing. In response to “So you’re Mr. Smith’s driver?” I only got “I’m his head of security. I also do all his travel arrangements an’ dat.”

An’ dat.
For homework on the flight—or to distract myself from being suspended helpless in a beer can over several thousand miles of water—I’d watched a bunch of videos on Hawaiian pidgin. I was gearing up for the usual experience: getting it all wrong, being laughed at and corrected, then getting it. But Kai had the accent without the language. He dropped words here and there, played loose with verb forms, said
an’ dat
and
togedda
. But that was it. Maybe he was speaking Mainland for my benefit—or did it every day for his employer.

“Not much travel lately,” I said. No response. “Tell me about his health.” No response, followed after a long pause by “Can’t comment on dat. We be there in a few. Relax. Enjoy the view.”

The road followed the coast, but we crested a small rise and saw the Pacific spread out to the horizon like a pale-blue rug, with darker lines running in parallel as if someone had prepared for my arrival by running a vacuum over it.

Kai checked his mirrors constantly. Once, he pulled off the road, waited twenty seconds, and made a U-turn; then he drove half a mile back toward the airport and made another U-turn. Twice, he took detours that seemed to make no sense. I shot off a quick message to Kit, and another to the number Lorna had used, and rewatched for the five hundredth time a ten-second clip of Kit blowing me a kiss. (Her lips barely moved, as if the whole gesture was an afterthought. The power was all in the eyes—in the way they held mine and didn’t move.)

“So,” I said, “the Seraphim are more active here than I thought. What are they doing?”

He couched his reply in such a way that I couldn’t tell whether he was quoting Seraphim propaganda or simply saying what he thought. “Mauna Loa is a sacred mountain. Like all volcanoes! It’s a good point of contact with the Architects. A place where maybe more people can, uh, go up. Experience Anabasis.”

I thought of something Partridge had said. “Have you heard the stories about people experiencing Anabasis and then, um, showing up again?”

“Seraphim not supposed to believe that. Reincarnation, that’s other religions. Quinn said we don’t need the body no more.”

“But some of the relatives have claimed—”

“I know.”

“You—” I didn’t know why I’d started to ask, but I blundered on. “What do you think?”

In the mirror his gaze was hard, unreadable. “I’m not paid to have opinions about eternity, Ms. Chen. That is Mr. Smith’s department.” He drawled
Smith’s
, as if making fun of his own precautions. “This is a volcanic chain of islands. Hawaiians have worshipped the snow goddess Poli‘ahu and the fire goddess Pele for over a thousand years. Poli‘ahu lives on Mauna Kea, which is a few feet taller. Pele lives on Mauna Loa, which is the biggest volcano anywhere in the world. Hawaiian people have lived with liquid fire from the beginning. So Julius Quinn is popular. His ideas are popular.”

I wondered if, in a thousand years of human habitation, it was just fire and lava that had amazed the Polynesians into belief. Or had some of them, deep in the unwritten past, seen something more specific?

The founder and CEO of BalakInd was richer than some medium-sized countries, so I’d pictured a trophy oceanfront villa: white columns that might be Ionian or might be Doric, reflecting pools, all the square footage and domestic warmth of a hotel. The usual billionaire crap. That’s what the rich were like, wasn’t it? Needy. Sad. Desperate to show off. Excluding Iona, of course, who was way too nice and way too interesting to care about showing off. I knew she and Balakrishnan had liked each other, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they’d be alike in that too until we turned inland off the highway into an ordinary suburban neighborhood. There was a sense of the ocean, not a view of it. Kids were on bikes in the street with their red flip-flops up on the handlebars. The houses themselves were small, ranch style, with carports shading stacks of beach gear and well-used Toyota pickups.

We made several turns before drawing up in front of a gate next to a palm tree. Kai slid his window down and spoke his name slowly, formally, into a little metal grille, like he was about to order a burger and fries: “Kai Kaiulani.”

Voice recognition, I assumed. After a short pause, as if digesting, the speaker emitted a satisfied plink. Another pause, then an Indian woman’s voice filled the car—silky, sophisticated, and formal, with a diplomat’s cold politeness.

“You have with you Mr. Smith’s guest, I see.”

“Yes, Mrs. Chaudry.”

He must have seen me in the mirror, craning my neck and looking puzzled; he pointed out a security camera artfully concealed on the far side of the palm tree.

“You were not followed?”

“I was not.” He rolled his eyes.

“I suppose you had better bring her in, then,” the voice said, with what sounded like regret.

The gate hummed open. We drove through onto a short gravel driveway. I could admire Balakrishnan for wanting to live modestly, but this wooden bungalow, on a residential street and surrounded by other small houses, didn’t make sense.

“Stay in the car,” Kai said, and I got my explanation quickly enough. He watched in the mirror as the gate swung closed behind us. When it clicked shut, there was an answering click from in front of us, and a section of the garden wall—or what I’d taken for the garden wall, complete with blood-red hibiscus vines—began to move. It was a concealed second gate. Across a strip of grass, it gave access to the house beyond.

“He owns all these properties,” Kai explained, using a finger to draw a loop around the perimeter. “Security, housekeeper, some of his business employees, a guest house. He uses this one in the middle. It has no access directly from the street.”

The second house was bigger than the first, but only because it had two stories. There was a Japanese rock garden, and beyond that a manicured lawn. Two Indian children, ten or twelve years old, were standing barefoot on the grass. They wore bright pastel shorts and T-shirts. A sister and her slightly younger brother, for sure. They seemed to be playing a game.

“Wait here, please,” Kai said as I got out of the car. He took my bag and disappeared around the side of the building.

Everything was calm, relaxed, and beautiful—in a way it was hard not to find annoying. I thought of you again, of how downright ill you were, and of all the time I’d already spent getting nowhere. I wanted to
hurry
. Instead I was in a sunny garden in Hawaii, watching two children playing.

The girl held a soccer ball. The boy stood a few feet away with his hands out, as if expecting her to throw it. Instead, she tapped it to her forehead three times and turned her body slowly through three-quarters of a turn, so that she was facing me. She cast her big brown eyes in my direction but ignored me. Lowering the ball to waist height, she used her fingers to rotate it, also three-quarters of a turn, in the opposite direction. Then she turned back to the boy, touched the ball to her forehead again, and threw it to him, saying something that sounded like “Jataka-jélup.”

“Akan-jata-kipólnet,” he said, twirling the ball expertly in one hand. A shrill, piping voice—he was younger than I’d thought. His head bobbed in what seemed like a random combination of nods and shakes.