“Complete the equation,”
Daryl said.
“Kill yourself.”
Chapter 18
His head was pounding and his eyes were closed. And it was cold, really cold. Like the Arctic.
Wherever Grant was, he could hear voices talking.
“...thought the recruitment was over...”
No, not voices—just one voice, talking to itself. A man’s voice, clear in its enunciation but with a weasel kind of whine that made Grant want to hit the speaker.
“...where could this one have been hiding for so long?”
Grant struggled to open his eyes. He was awake but he felt numb, his body unresponsive. He tried again as the voice droned on, willing his eyelids to open.
“It beggar’s belief.”
He felt nauseous just listening to that rodent voice with its penetrating nasal twang.
“Am I to understand the converters are almost at capacity?” the weasel voice demanded. It waited a moment as if listening for a response, before speaking once more. The only response was a stuttered shriek that sounded more like an electronic data feed than a voice. “In which case, we shall send another test subject. Today.”
More of the strange whining, stopping and starting abruptly as if it were the recorded result of a man flicking through television channels. Beneath it, ever-present like a drumbeat, Grant heard the dripping of water.
Plop. Plop. Plop.
“Yes, today,” the whiner replied hotly. “Now. Set things in motion now. We don’t need to wait. Tonight will suffice. Look...”
Tuning out the irritating voice, Grant finally opened his eyes, but it felt as if he had clawed his way up from beneath some great weight. His eyelids opened heavily, as if they had been gummed shut, and he narrowed them almost immediately against any light. It hurt. He had been shot by something, he remembered. When it struck, it had felt like his very core was being ripped from him, as if his organs themselves were being yanked out of his body. It had hurt like hell, whatever it was, but evidently it hadn’t killed him.
The weasel voice was droning on, speaking the kind of techno-babble that Grant had happily left to Lakesh and his desk jockeys.
He was sitting down with his arms secured behind his back. He appeared to be in a long room like an aircraft hangar, with strips of pale green light running its length, painting everything in a putrid glow. Despite the size of the room, it was almost entirely empty apart from a few tables arrayed along the walls, each of them piled with paperwork, folders and printouts. The dripping noise came from close to his right where a basin, its white porcelain cracked, stood against the wall. A single splitter faucet arched over it like a swan’s neck, a steady leak of water dripping from its nozzle.
There was something else, too, at the far end of the room. It was circular and made of metal tubing, looking like a gigantic hula hoop standing on its edge. There were people buzzing about the hoop, men dressed in the dark uniforms of Magistrates, and they gave Grant an indication of the hoop’s size. It was taller than a man, perhaps ten feet in diameter. Behind the hoop sat a stack of machinery, wired together in a hexagonal pattern, and above it a window through which Grant could see the cloudy sky. A way out, then...?
Grant eyed the figures, trying for a moment to identify what it was that they were doing. A strange figure strolled among the Magistrates, with stooped shoulders and a gait that suggested he had trouble walking. He wore a long gray robe and was at least a head shorter than the shortest of the Magistrates. His cranium was larger than a normal man’s, and he appeared so thin that one might presume he was emaciated. Grant’s stomach seemed to drop as he registered exactly what the figure was—a baron, one of the human-hybrid creatures who had ruled the nine villes that dominated the post nukecaust United States of America. But each of the barons had been artificially evolved via a personality download from the alien starship
Tiamat,
physically transforming into towering reptilian creatures known as the overlords. The barons were no more. As the Annunaki, they had enslaved mankind during prehistory and appeared as gods in mankind’s myths and legends. When they returned, they had done so to enslave humanity once more, and only through the efforts of the Cerberus organization had they been stopped. Grant had gone toe-to-toe with several of those would-be gods, barely holding his own against their incredible, superhuman stamina. So how could one of them have missed the download? How was it that this baron remained in his chrysalis state?
“Ah good, it’s awake,” the hybrid said as he shuffled toward Grant, long gray robes brushing against the floor. He was flanked by two pairs of Magistrates, an honor guard for this ethereal creature.
Grant stared up at him from his seat, saying nothing.
“Now, you pose some interesting questions,” the hybrid said in his weasel voice. “Such as where you have been hiding all this time, and just how many of you there are?”
Grant stared at him defiantly.
“It’s been almost a year since the patrols last picked up a straggler,” the baron explained. “Eleven months, six days and nine hours. I thought they had all rotted by now. Apparently I was wrong.”
Grant said nothing, watching as the baron’s face took on an ugly sneer.
“I vehemently dislike being wrong,” the baron told him. “It is a sensation I experience rarely, and it does not agree with my constitution.” He leaned close to Grant, glaring at him. “You can speak, can’t you?” he demanded.
Grant nodded. “When I’ve got something to say,” he admitted with a smirk.
The hybrid figure laughed at that, a trilling sound that reminded Grant of breaking glass. “Oh, very droll,” the baron said after drawing a great breath to curtail his laughter. “You would know me as Baron Trevelyan. Do you have a name?”
“Grant,” Grant told him, his dark eyes scanning the area behind the baron where the black-clad figures continued to work at the metal ring.
The baron noticed where Grant was looking. “You are intrigued, yes?” he said. “By what you see here, by my pathway. I wonder if perhaps you know more about it than you let on.”
“I don’t know what the fuck it is you’re talking about,” Grant admitted.
“Typical human,” the hybrid baron said with a sigh, turning away from Grant. As he did so, Grant began hurriedly working at his bonds. His hands were tied behind his back, cinched tightly at the wrists with some kind of plastic cable. The cable tightened as he tugged against it, and Grant stifled a grunt as Baron Trevelyan twittered on.
“Afraid of what you don’t understand,” the baron was saying, “channeling your fear into anger at the slightest provocation. I must admit that I have not missed their company. The silence has been...magnificent.
“You primitives make such an incessant racket that one can hardly hear oneself thing. It’s been bliss without your kind cluttering up my ville.” Baron Trevelyan turned back to Grant, his eyes like two wells, water washing in the inky darkness of their fathomless pits. “Which brings us back to my original question— Where have you been hiding all this time? And are there any more of you?”
Grant set his jaw, glaring at the baron. “You really think I’m going to answer that?” he demanded.
The hybrid baron nodded very slowly, a ghastly smile like a reptile appearing on his lips. “Of course,” he said.
As Trevelyan spoke, two of the quartet of guards who flanked him stepped forward, dragging Grant—chair and all—along the hard metal decking of the room toward the cracked basin. The faucet was still dripping, a steady, hollow echo that had played against Grant’s ears throughout the conversation with Baron Trevelyan. Poised before the basin, Grant could see the grimy water within, swirling with eddies as one of the silent Magistrates began filling it with water, stopper in place.
“Sooner or later, you must comply with your baron’s wishes. I would recommend sooner,” the baron said as Grant was set down in his chair before the filling basin.
Grant took a deep breath as the cruel hands of the Magistrates grabbed him behind his neck. Then they yanked him up from the chair, his hands still tied, and forced him forward, plunging his head beneath the swirling waters in the basin. The water felt like ice, and Grant got a new insight into how cold
cold
could be.
* * *
I
T
WAS
LIKE
DRAGGING
A
corpse, Kane thought. He was hefting the unconscious Magistrate over his shoulder through the battered doors of the office block. They were wide double doors, designed to impress with their opulence. But the glass had been broken from both, and one hung on its frame, the lower hinge wrenched away at an angle. Despite the damage, the doors had some muffling effect on the high winds that shot through the streets, turning their scream into a dull roar.
“Come on, pal,” Kane muttered, his breath coming in forceful puffs through his nostrils. “Almost there now.”
In the street outside, Kane spotted several dark figures moving, more of the sinister Magistrates conversing in their strained and abbreviated tones. He rolled the Mag from his shoulders, ducking down behind the reception desk as the other Mags passed by. They strode down the center aisle of the street, where a raised concrete line marked the delineation between traffic going one way and the other. Kane watched them walk past the shattered glass facade of the office block, four abreast, their steps in sync. They were searching the area, searching for him and Baptiste, alerted by their colleague who now lay unconscious at Kane’s side. Kane held his breath until the Mags moved on. Kane stared down at the figure he had dragged in from outside. He was still unconscious, those putrid yellow eyes hidden behind now-closed lids. Kane triggered his Commtact to advise Brigid of their situation before remembering that the Commtacts were out of commission. “Damn.”
Swiftly, Kane checked the desk, pulling free an inoperative telephone and a computer and monitor, snapping their leads off so that he could use them to restrain his quarry. There was a potted plant behind the desk, too, the pot twelve inches in diameter. The plant itself had withered and died, just twigs and dry brown leaves remaining. “Don’t want you running out on me,” Kane explained to the dozing figure as he tied his arms and legs with the cables.
Kane felt tense as he tied the Magistrate up, goose bumps running along his flesh where he touched the man’s raw skin. The skin was cold, like fresh meat retrieved from the refrigerator, and it was colored as red as a ladybug.
Once the man was properly tied, Kane dragged him farther into the office, stashing him in a small side room that had once been used to store coats; an upright vacuum cleaner was propped behind the door. The vacuum cleaner wore a coating of dust.
With swiftness borne of practice, Kane checked the Magistrate for other weapons. He had already lost his Soul Eater pistol somewhere on the street. Kane found a knife strapped to the inside leg, by his boot, and took it. Once he was certain that the Magistrate was disarmed, Kane shoved him to the back of the cloakroom, pulling several discarded coats from their hooks and laying them over the unconscious figure. If anyone were to look they would see nothing out of the ordinary, just a couple of coats fallen from their hooks.
Then Kane was back at the door, pulling it open. “Let me check on Baptiste before I get into this with you. That okay?” he asked as he closed the door on the strange Magistrate.
The Mag offered no response.
* * *
A
FTER
A
QUICK
SCAN
OF
THE
building directory, Kane figured that Brigid would be up on the ninth floor where a media business operated. They should have some kind of comm set-up there, through which Brigid might reach Cerberus, either by boosting or replacing the output of her Commtact.
With the elevators out of commission, he located the fire stairs at the back of the building. The stairwell was cold, wind billowing in through missing windowpanes, striking Kane as he hurried up the concrete steps. The light was limited in this stairwell, leaking through the ruined windows in patches, marred where some of them had been stained with smoke.
Kane’s boots splashed through the water pooling on the stairs, blown in through the open windows. The far wall was damp, the concrete dark with water where the sun never reached to dry it. There was no mold, just dampness and the chill that damp generates. Kane could feel that coldness even through the self-regulating environment of the shadow suit he wore beneath his clothes, a deep cold biting at his bones. The power of suggestion. He hurried on, ignoring it.
Two stories up, he heard a girl’s sigh. It sounded wistful, sad. Surprised, Kane stopped, spinning in place, searching for its source. The water on the stairs rippled beneath his boots as he turned, but there was no one behind him.
He pressed on, taking the next flight of stairs at a run, shifting his center of balance by holding his body low. As he turned the stairs at the midflight corner, Kane saw the girl. She was waiting at the next doorway, nude, skin pale with the cold, blond hair dark and heavy with damp.
Surprised, Kane commanded the Sin Eater into his hand, retrieving the weapon from its hidden wrist holster in an instant. He held the gun on the naked girl, eyeing her as she stood in place.
The indifferent light left her partially in shadow, her face hidden in a pool of blackness. Still, Kane recognized her instantly, she looked just as she had the last time he had seen her when she lay on the coroner’s slab in the Cobaltville Hall of Justice.
“Helena,” Kane whispered, the Sin Eater wavering where he had trained it on the teenager in the shadows.
She stepped out into the light then, her bare feet crossing over each other as she took the first of the steps, descending toward Kane. Her face was drawn and pale, the blue eyes wide, yet vacant, as if she were looking through Kane, into his soul. Water ran down her cheeks—tears? Her skin was pocked with gooseflesh where the cold breeze struck it, playing across her naked form.
“Stay where you are,” Kane ordered, bringing the Sin Eater up in a firmer grip.