Chapter 15
In the water, Brigid appeared to be standing beside Daryl Morganstern, Cerberus’s theoretical mathematician with whom she had briefly become romantically involved. Less forthright than most of the men in her life, Morganstern had appealed to Brigid on an intellectual level, his inquiring mind challenging hers. But he had died after a stone had been hurled at his skull, the blood cascading down his face. She remembered it, every red drop.
In the water he looked perfect, with his tousled brown hair and those deep brown eyes looking up at Brigid expectantly. The water around him was black, a black so absolute that it seemed like paint. Brigid didn’t think it strange.
“Daryl,” she said, the word coming as a whisper, tripping over her lips fearfully.
Daryl spread his arms wide, reaching up for her. He was naked, or at least shirtless—it was hard to tell. His body was still in the water, hidden in the inky dark. “Come, Brigid,” he crooned. “I’ve missed your touch so much. It’s cold here, so cold without you.”
Her eyes fixed on the rippling surface of the lake, Brigid took a pace forward, one step closer to the lapping edge. “I’m so sorry,” Brigid said, her voice choked. “I left you to die. I had to.”
“I died alone,” he told her, but there was no malice in his voice, just sadness. “Now I’m so cold. Join me, Brigid, and we can keep warm together.”
Brigid took another step toward the lake, her eyes fixed on the vision within. Daryl spread his arms wider, reaching out to pull her in, his smile as perfect as she remembered, just the way it had always been.
“I shouldn’t have left you to die like that,” Brigid declared, her words little more than a whisper. “I should have done something, should have found a way.”
“There was nothing you could have done then,” Daryl reassured her. “But you can change all that now. You can make things right if only you’ll join me. We’ll be happy, oh so happy. My Brigid, my love.”
Brigid took another step, the black waters of the lake lapping at the toes of her boots.
“Daryl,” Brigid said, “I can help you. I want to.”
“Just another step, my dove,” Daryl said. “Just one more.”
Brigid took another step, and the waters covered her toes now, lapping around her boot heels like liquid onyx. If she just held Daryl’s hand again, she knew she could make everything right, could fix everything.
But as she went to take another step, she felt something tugging at her sleeve, pulling her back.
* * *
K
ANE
REACHED
OUT
,
grabbing Brigid’s arm and shaking her. “Baptiste?” he called. “Look at me. Look at me.”
Lethargically Brigid turned, looking away from the water where she stood and staring at Kane. Her eyes were wide, their emerald-green nothing but a sliver where the pupils had dilated. She seemed mystified, as if unable to comprehend what she was seeing.
“D-Daryl?” she asked slowly.
“No,” Kane told her. “It’s me. It’s Kane.”
“Kane? Is that you...?”
“Come on, librarian,” Kane said, shaking her by the shoulders. “Get your files in order.”
It took a few more seconds until Brigid saw him properly, and even then the daylight seemed to hurt her eyes. “Kane? What happened to me?” she finally asked, breathless.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “You sort of zoned out.”
“Like you back in the waiting room when the Mags first fired,” Brigid realized, her senses coming back to her slowly, like lights in a circuit.
“Yeah, I guess,” Kane said. “You were looking at the lake. You kept saying Daryl’s name.”
“Daryl...Morganstern,” Brigid concluded after a moment’s thought. “He’s dead. But I saw him, there in the water. He called to me. Kane, I wanted to join him.”
Still holding her by the shoulders, Kane looked Brigid directly in the eye. “Join me. It’s a lot drier.”
Kane and Brigid shared a bond like no other, something that pulled them through situations that others could scarcely imagine. It was referred to as
anam chara,
a friendship of the souls that reached through eternity, outside of time and space. Some had mistaken this for a romance, but it was far deeper than that; it was a trust, a guardianship, akin to the link a man has with his own heartbeat.
“Let’s get out of here,” Kane said, pulling Brigid back from the dark waters. “I don’t like being here, not out in the open like this.” What he failed to tell her was that he had seen something, too, lying there by the lake in the long grass. A glimpse of something he had all but forgotten, something capable of haunting even an ex-Magistrate.
* * *
T
HEY
RAN
,
WORKING
their way westward where the sun’s rays stretched through the clouds like white fingers. Whatever it was that Brigid had seen in the water, Kane chose not to discuss it. They could do that later, once they had found shelter, well away from the dogged Magistrates and their screaming guns. Grant would have to look after himself for now, as there was no sense in all three of them being in danger.
They were in a business district, all office blocks featuring characterless atriums with benches and unobtrusive sculptures at the front, a place where the workers could relax and eat lunch.
The two Cerberus warriors checked some of the buildings, finding their doors broken or unsecured. All were largely the same; abandoned with that same radial pattern of fire damage, as if some incredible heat blast had hit them from the street.
Some of the buildings included clothing boutiques or food vendors at street level, there to serve the people who worked above them. The boutiques were a testament to the power of fire, burned rags clinging to melted metal hangers on melted metal rails. The food vendors had been ransacked or destroyed, and all of them had that same sickening smell of overripe fruit and stale bread, of coffee left too long on the boil.
Kane kept looking. He told Brigid that he wanted to find somewhere they could defend, but there was more to it than that. He was searching for a clue, for evidence of what had happened here to cause the whole ville to be abandoned. But so much had been burned, whatever records may once have existed were likely sacrificed to fire, man’s most ancient god who took everything in return for heat and light.
“Kane, we have to stop,” Brigid said as they entered the sixth office building. Its brutal lines moved away from the street in steps, each level added like the tiers of a wedding cake, the glass front shattered and its paintwork blistered from heat.
In the lobby, Kane half turned, not giving Brigid his full attention. He was scanning the office directory as he had the others, reading the raised characters there through the smoke damage that had obscured them. “You tired?”
“Yes, but it’s not just that,” Brigid said. “We’re getting farther away from the hospital where we left Grant. Without operational Commtacts, we could lose him entirely—he’d have no way of tracking us down.”
Kane looked up at her then, and Brigid noted his unsettled expression. “There are no insects around, you notice that?”
“What?” Brigid asked.
“No matter where we’ve been, there aren’t any insects,” Kane said. “Not any that I’ve seen. Not even when we were crouched in the grass. That tell you anything?”
Brigid pondered this for a moment. “Something hit this ville,” she said. “Something big.”
“Big enough to kill a bug?” Kane asked doubtfully. “I thought the roaches survived even a nuke.”
“They would,” Brigid agreed. It was a generally accepted truism that cockroaches would survive just about any bomb.
“Makes it all the stranger, doesn’t it?” Kane suggested. “These buildings are open, that hospital was missing a whole wall. It’s not as if there’s anything keeping the insects out. So where are they? And the birds, the dogs, anything?”
“If there’s nothing to feed on...” Brigid began.
“Then they’d feed on each other,” Kane told her. “But there’s still food here, nutrition enough for a bug, at least.”
Brigid glared at him with frustration. “Do you have a point?”
Kane stood by the reception desk of the lobby, its faux-marble facade pulled away by what appeared to be incredible heat. “What did you see in the lake?” he asked.
“I told you—Daryl Morganstern,” Brigid said, irritation clear in her tone.
“A dead man,” Kane murmured, talking now to himself.
“A hallucination,” Brigid reasoned. “I’d thought about him earlier, I must have just...I don’t know, mistaken your reflection.”
“No, you didn’t,” Kane told her. “I saw it, too.”
“What? Daryl?” Brigid asked, stepping closer to him in the abandoned lobby.
“No, someone else,” Kane said with a shake of his head. “In the water there. Someone who died.”
For a moment, just one name came to Brigid’s mind, and she hated herself for thinking it. But she knew she had to ask. “Was it Grant?”
Chapter 16
Kane had a faraway look in his eye, as if reliving whatever he had seen there in the black waters of the lake.
“Kane?” Brigid probed. “Was it Grant?”
“No,” he said. “It was someone from a long time ago, from before I met you.”
Brigid looked at Kane, this noble warrior who had regained his humanity by defying the very system he had been indoctrinated to protect, trying to read his expression. He was struggling with this, trying to comprehend it. “You think it means something?” she asked finally.
“I looked in the water and I saw her face, but I knew it couldn’t be,” Kane explained. “She was dead the first time I saw her, just a kid. Helena Vaughn. She couldn’t be here. The only place she still exists is in my head.”
Brigid ran one hand through her hair, trying to understand. It did not make sense, not yet, at least.
“We should keep moving,” Kane said after a moment. “It wasn’t just dumb luck that we ran into that patrol. There’ll be more Mags out there, and we have to assume that if they see us they’ll try to hunt us down.”
Brigid nodded. “Agreed.”
Together the two of them left the lobby and its ruined glass front, returning to the street of howling wind but keeping to the shadows of the buildings’ forecourts.
“What are you looking for, anyway?” Brigid asked as they trekked along the street.
“Someplace high,” Kane told her, eying the skyline. “I’ll let you know when I spot it.”
* * *
T
HE
D
ARK
M
AGISTRATES
had reconvened outside the hospital with Grant’s body in tow. One of the dark figures—Magistrate South—held a pair of glasses in his hand, turning them over and over as he examined them. Magistrate North had patched up the bullet wound to his leg, wrapping a roll of gauze around it.
The four of them stood over the slumped figure of the Cerberus warrior, speaking in their jagged, screaming language, each fractured syllable like a bird’s caw.
There had been two others, besides this one with the mahogany skin. They had seen them, sensed them, smelled their bloody scents. They were alive against the baron’s wishes, a crime punishable by death. But this one, whom North had shot with his Soul Eater, needed to be taken back to base, where the baron would decide what to do with him. It had been so long since the living had walked the streets of Quocruft.
The dialogue continued for a few seconds, stopping as unexpectedly as it had started. A decision had been reached.
Two Magistrates lifted Grant’s limp body by the arms and legs, marching him to the nearest access point for the Hall of Justice where he would be picked up. The other two returned to their patrol, scouting the abandoned streets for the other living shells, checking for more. Magistrate South shoved the spectacles in the pants pocket of his uniform—evidence.
Around them, the winds howled, banshee cries from the ghost city of Quocruft.
* * *
K
ANE
FOUND
THE
KIND
OF
building he was looking for two blocks later. But as Brigid went to cross the ghostly, abandoned street, Kane stopped her with a gesture.
She eyed him questioningly, worried. He was standing in the shadows, watching something in the distance. When she looked she saw nothing there at first, but after a moment she spotted the movement. It was distant, at least five blocks away, and looked to be two figures carrying another, but it was difficult to tell from this distance. Without Kane, Brigid might not have noticed it from this far out; once again, his point-man sense proved its worth.
“We’ll cross the street on my command,” Kane told Brigid.
“Can’t we find another...?” she began.
“No, look,” Kane told her, pointing up to the roof.
The building was over a dozen stories tall and it was taller than any of the buildings around it. Much of the window glass was missing, a great trail of broken glass lining the forecourt like a barricade where it had fallen. Up on the roof, Brigid could see metallic spines sticking up into the air. It was a radio array, designed to converse with satellites.
“What are you thinking?” Brigid asked in an urgent whisper. “That they’re still receiving transmissions?”
Kane nodded. “And that we could send them,” he told her, raising his eyebrows.
Before Brigid could query that, Kane gestured her to cross the road, and the two of them scurried across the cracked surface and into the forecourt with its glass carpet. Brigid picked her way through the shards until she reached the shadow cast by the awning, while Kane was more direct, keeping pace with her and crushing the glass underfoot, the popping tinkles, barely audible over the incessant howl of the winds.
When they stopped, Brigid looked at Kane quizzically as he stared back down the street, watching for the figures he had spotted there.
“You want to send a broadcast?” she asked. “What, to Cerberus?”
“Yeah,” Kane said. “Unless you’re up for rebooting our Commtacts. I know you’re a dab hand at most stuff, but microwiring, coupled with the respective surgical procedure... Well, under normal circumstances, I’m sure you’d manage, but out in the field...?”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Brigid said, hefting the shotgun so that it rested on her shoulders. “Are we going inside, then?”
“You go,” Kane instructed. “I’m going to wait here, see what John Ghost there is up to.”
Brigid nodded and made her way into the tall building. She knew better than to argue with Kane when he was in a mood like this. He was in hunter mode now; something had piqued his curiosity.
The doors to the tower block were warped and buckled where something powerful had struck them. It looked like the result of a hurricane. Inside, Brigid found a typical office lobby, one long reception desk coupled with a small waiting area that featured a low table for magazines. Everything was blackened with smoke damage and the fabric coverings of the chairs had burned entirely away, leaving the stuffing, melted and congealed, hanging within their skeletal metal frameworks.
After a quick scan of what remained of the office directory behind a sheet of melted plastic, Brigid found what she was after; a monitoring station attached to a media group, likely the owner of the equipment on the roof. The group would have disseminated official information, a mouthpiece for the ville’s baron.
Brigid pushed open a couple of doors—one for a store cupboard, the next for a cloakroom with a long metal rail—before she located the stairwell behind the dead elevators. Like the lobby, the stairwell smelled of fire damage and damp, and Brigid winced as its pungency struck her, making tears stream from her eyes. The stairway door had been closed a long time, so the stench had had nowhere to escape to. Drawing a breath, Brigid began the long trek up eight flights of stairs to the office in question.
* * *
O
UTSIDE
, K
ANE
HAD
MOVED
away from the forecourt and was making his way down the street toward a lone figure he could see moving there. The others had disappeared, but Kane had been watching this one for two minutes now. The winds continued to howl through the streets, wailing like a creature in pain and making it hard to distinguish if the figure was making any noise.
Kane continued toward the figure, sticking close to the shadows as he made his way to the end of the block. He could see clearly now that it was another Magistrate, dressed in dark leathers with the bloodred badge of office pinned to the left breast of his tunic. He wore the outer coat of the Magistrate Division over his uniform, and this, too, featured the red symbol of the Magistrates along with scarlet piping. The Mag seemed to be picking through the wreckage that was strewed on the street, discarding great chunks of melted metal as he searched.
Ducked down in the shadows, Kane watched for almost five minutes, conscious of the weight of the Sin Eater pistol pressing against his wrist. The Magistrate moved normally, but each time he looked up Kane could see the bulging flesh beneath the helmet, distended and colored an angry red, the veins running like dark fingers through it, the skin split here and there. Kane had seen enough corpses to recognize the look. He appeared to be in the second stage after death, the stage known as bloat, when a body’s gases accumulate. And yet the man still walked, going about his business as if nothing was wrong. Kane felt a shiver down his spine as he watched, hoping he was mistaken. There was only one way to find out for sure.
“Hey, Magistrate!” Kane shouted as he stepped out of the shadows. “I heard there was a happening at the big house—you think you could maybe point me the way?”
The Magistrate flinched, his blaster emerging from his sleeve as he looked up to see who dared taunt him. Kane started to run.
* * *
T
HE
STAIRWELL
WAS
DANK
,
dark and it had a smell like burned toast. Brigid climbed the stairs, passing floor after floor as she made her way to the ninth floor. Water was pooled everywhere, its dampness clinging to the walls opposite a line of shattered windows. Kane had the right idea about radio communications, she knew. They just needed the right equipment and she could tap the Cerberus network and alert them to their dilemma.
There was a presence on the staircase. Brigid could feel it, sense it, but when she looked it wasn’t there. It was just out of sight, waiting around the next turn or following behind her. Her mind playing tricks.
From the staircase the floors seemed characterless, just smooth gray concrete with a floor number plated to the wall beside each dull-painted door. The paint of the doors had blistered with heat, a sign that something had struck the building. This was designed as a fire staircase, and it featured heavy doors to every floor. Any fire would not have penetrated that barricade easily, yet the well still stank of burning and the doors showed the evidence of suffering a dose of extreme heat. Maybe it wasn’t fire, Brigid wondered—maybe it was just heat of such intensity it had melted everything in a flash.
Brigid stopped at floor nine. She waited a moment at the closed door that led onto the floor itself, gathering her thoughts and calming her breath. She was in the peak of physical fitness, but hurrying up this stinking staircase still took effort. And there was the thing behind her, the lurking presence with the familiar face. It wouldn’t do to get caught unprepared now, after she had come this far.
Raising the shotgun one-handed, Brigid pulled at the heavy fire door and peered into the floor beyond.
The door opened up straight into an office, open-plan design with low screens that boxed in each section, standing a little over four feet in height. The desks were mostly arranged in blocks of four, with one or two lone desks at the end of each row. They reminded Brigid of cages in a zoo. Two entire walls of windows cast light into the room, painting it in a charmless gloom that would force its occupants to rely on the fluorescent strip lights overhead. The window glass had broken in places, and Brigid could feel and hear the breeze blowing through those holes, fluttering coasters and address cards across the floor like tumbleweed.
Taking a step from the fire door, the shotgun ready in her grip, Brigid called out, “Hello? Anyone here?”
No one answered, which didn’t surprise Brigid in the slightest. She had hoped that perhaps she was wrong, but sadly, like every other building they had checked here in Quocruft, the office was emphatically empty.
Brigid stepped to her left, gazing out of the nearest bank of windows, the breeze tousling her hair. She was at the side of the building, as far from the forecourt as one could get. Her own reflection played across the glass. The reflection was translucent, and it took just a slight adjustment of Brigid’s focus to see through herself and down to the access road beyond, where garbage and delivery wags might have come to service the building. No one down there.
As Brigid turned away, she saw something standing beside her, reflected in the smooth surface of the glass. It was a man, seen only in shadow, his proportions familiar. She turned, looking behind her at where the man—Daryl Morganstern—should have been, but he wasn’t there.
Shaking her head, Brigid turned back to the window for just a moment, searching its reflective edge. He was still there. She couldn’t quite see
him,
only his absence, but she could feel him, watching her. A resentful guardian angel.
Warily Brigid paced the long aisle that ran between desks, seeing more signs of the great heat that seemed to have incinerated so much. Devoid of life, the room had been left to rot, computer units and comm devices spread untidily on the desks, some tipped on the floor. Besides the computers, there was a monitor screen on almost every desk, enough to make Brigid conclude that they had all featured such a device once. She took a few moments to test one of these, trying its switches. They were television sets, a built-in playback device attached to their bases. Nothing worked.
She moved on, spying the seared artifacts on the walls, two dust-drenched coats that had been left on a coat stand between desks. There was a smoke-streaked comm array, designed for taking satellite feeds. Brigid eyed it for a moment, recognizing the setup. Hypothetically, she could use this to contact the Cerberus base, tuning into the Commtacts’ frequency and bouncing a signal off the Keyhole satellite. But of course, that would require power, which was something that this building did not have.
Over to the right, away from the bank of windows, was a long wall that had been used to store recordings. They ran almost the whole length of the wall, double-stacked in places, with occasional gaps where items had been removed. At first Brigid took them to be books, but on closer inspection she saw they were reel-to-reel magnetic tapes: video recordings. The tapes nearest the windows had been melted, their plastic covers liquefied and solidified in new and interesting shapes, like hot toffee sticking to a cooking ladle, but most had survived intact. She pulled one from the shelf at random, reading the identifying label that had been slapped on the box. The label was handwritten over a formatted printout, and it gave the date of the recording, along with the story and the reporter’s name. It was a news recording of some sort, Brigid realized, this one celebrating the opening of a new school.