Those That Wake 02: What We Become (15 page)

With Aaron gone, the feeling of loss filled the room again, became palpable.

She turned to the unfolded cell screen and keyed the number for home. Her mother’s face flickered onto the screen, underlined by a scrolling ad for room fresheners.

“Hi, honey,” she said brightly. “How are you do— What’s wrong?”

“I’ve got some news, Mom, and I don’t think you’re going to love it.”

“Oh no. It’s about Josh, isn’t it? I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s not about Josh. I mean, things aren’t great there, either, but that’s not why I’m calling.”

“What happened? Did he do something?”

“No, Mom. Stop talking about Josh. He was never real, anyway.”

On the far side of the screen, her mother’s face washed with confusion.

“What does that mean, Laura?”

Laura’s shoulders slumped, and she took another deep breath.

“Honestly, Mom, I have no idea. I’m leaving school.” It sounded so harsh in her ears that she fumbled for a lie and added awkwardly, “for a while.”

Her mother’s brow collected between her eyes.

“You’re . . .” The silence stretched out so long that Laura thought the connection had gone bad and there was a frozen frame of her mother stuck on the screen. A new ad extolled the virtue of an all-natural tension-relieving vitamin supplement. “Leaving school,” her mother finally managed to say it.

“For a while.”

“What’s going on, Laura?” Claire Westlake’s voice had acquired a vein of panicky concern. “Are you all right?”

“I’m not all right, as a matter of fact, and it’s because of school and because of Josh and because I’m not—” She wrestled the thought, her mind forcing a word out of her mouth she couldn’t predict. “Me.”

“Laura”—her mother reined her voice back in, playing the steadying angle now—“everything is going to be okay, honey, I promise you. I’d be happy to come to you, take you to dinner. Or why don’t you take a week off and come see us. Your father would love that.”

“I am taking a week off, Mom. I’m going to take a whole bunch of them off.”

“You’re being flippant now, Laura, and that’s just not fair. This is a huge bombshell to drop. Help me understand it.”

“I can’t help you. I don’t understand it myself.”

“Then you need to stay until you do. Running away isn’t the answer.”

“School
is
running away. Leaving school is me
not
running away anymore.”

“You’re going to have to explain better than that, Laura.”

Laura’s elbows went down on the table, and she leaned forward, confronting the screen.

“I’m not a child,” she said through a hard jaw.

“You
are
a child, Laura. You’re on the verge, you’re almost an adult, but we still owe you more taking care of, more being looked after.”

Laura’s head slumped down between her shoulders, and she felt her eyes burning hot.

“Mommy,” she said, letting the tears out—she had never been any good at holding them back. “Mommy.” She brought her face back up and let her mother see her pleading face. “There’s something wrong with me. There has been since I got here. You must have fought it so hard in your own head. You must have prayed it wasn’t so. But this isn’t me. I went off course somewhere, and you know I did.”

Her mother was looking back, biting one edge of her lip. She was crying, too.

“You can’t help me,” Laura said. “No one can help until I know what’s wrong. Leaving school is the first thing that’s felt right since . . . since I can even remember.”

“Just as you want to pull away, Laura, I want to hold you closer.” Her mother managed a weak smile. “Where are you going to go?”

“I’m going to drive for a while, just around New York.”

“You’re going to drive around by yourself?”

“No,” she said. She could give her mother this; at least she could give her this. “A friend is coming with me; Traci.”

“Laura,” her mother’s fingers were flexing, instinctively wanting to reach out and touch her daughter’s face through a screen that wouldn’t permit it. “Come home.”

“Soon, Mom. I promise.” She wiped her tears with a forearm, made a brave go at a smile. “I promise.”

Claire studied her daughter—the
image
of her daughter, Laura reminded herself—through the screen. Her jaw was trembling.

“Being a mother is like having your heart outside your body, Laura. Can you understand that?”

The sense of loss she had been feeling welled up in Laura, and she nodded, unable to speak.

“You call me, Laura. Every night.”

“I will, Mom. I’m not going to drop off the edge of the earth. I’m just taking a drive.”

“Okay. You find Laura and bring her back to us.”

They looked at each other while an ad for Kleenex scrolled below.

“Laura. I was wrong. You’re not a child.”

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you.”

Laura managed to hold herself together until the screen went dark, but then tears came like a tidal flow, racking her body so badly that she had to grab on to the edge of the desk until her knuckles were white. She gasped in, unable to catch her breath, fluid streaming from her eyes and nose, her torso spasming as if in an epileptic fit.

She was dimly aware of the door starting to open. Aaron appeared, caught totally unprepared, and instantly closed himself out once again.

She put her hands over her face to plug the dam, and tears crept through her fingers, dropping onto the desk before the unfolded cell, the totem of technology before which they all prayed now.

She took in gulps of air, let them out slowly.

Not quite finished yet, she managed to stand up and refold the cell. As she weighed it in her hand, the tears tapered away and her ragged breathing filled the room. She took the object by its edge and winged it under the bed again, once more consigning it to darkness.

She used the balls of her hands to scrub away the last of the tears, then marched out of her room to find her future.

ROARKE ADOPTED HIS ACCUSTOMED SOLDIER’S
bearing before the door of Arielle Kliest and knocked.

“Come,” Kliest said from within, and he pushed through and shut the door silently behind him, taking a spot directly before her desk, looking down at her cool, sharp features. “And so?”

“Nothing, ma’am,” he stated as tersely as he would have brought news of resounding success. Judgment was the purview of those in charge. He merely reported facts. “The locator signal was coming from a man named Gerald Fisher. He’s been subjected to a standard interrogation array. There’s no indication that he knows Mal.”

“If Mr. Fisher’s geolocator was functioning as a cloak, now that we’ve taken it out of the equation, why hasn’t Mal’s come back online?”

“Tech has no explanation, ma’am. As you recall, it went offline briefly after we put it in the first time. Some kind of a manufacturing flaw?”

“Not likely,” Kliest said, her voice softer than Roarke would have expected at the news. “And the girl’s apartment?”

“Rose Santoro’s apartment is still empty.”

“And,” she ventured carefully, “no sign of Mal himself?”

“No, ma’am. The space Mal disappeared in . . .” For the first time, a crack appeared in the granite of Roarke’s face, an aperture to the moist, shaking spaces of the inexplicable. “There’s nothing there. It was a short ramp leading up to a tobacco store. Eight feet long, three feet up at its highest point, barely enough space to fit him. There was no exit from it that was not visible to us at the time. I simply don’t have an explanation. I’m sorry, Ms. Kliest.”

She nodded, her eyes unfocused before her.

“I’ll have a security team sent down to pick over it carefully,” she said absently, perhaps not even to him.

“Yes, ma’am. If I may, I’m not sure I’d fully trust a security team at this point. To say that they dropped the ball on this one would be putting it mildly. Mr. Castillo reports that one of them actually pulled a gun on him to assist in Mal’s escape.”

“Yes,” she said, bringing her formidable attention back on to him. “We have that on camera. He climbed down the building,” she said in the same breath, and it took Roarke an instant to register that she was no longer talking about the guard but instead about Mal. “He
climbed down
the building.
Injured,
no less.”

“I could fill in details, ma’am, but that’s about the size of it. I will say, Ms. Kliest, that if Mr. Castillo and I were permitted to carry firearms—”

“Guns are never permitted in the Old Man’s vicinity, as you well know,” she said, tossing the issue aside. “Does it impress you”—her eyes sharpened, studying his reaction with interest—“that Mal managed to escape in such a physically depleted state?”

“No, ma’am.”

“No? I’d have thought you would admire such a high degree of commitment.”

“To be quite frank, ma’am, it made me sick. He’s a child, and he nearly murdered himself to get clear of us.”

She nodded, offering no indication of her own feelings on the subject. Instead, her expression flattened, and she rose from her seat.

“I’m going to need you to join me for the report. He may have some questions.”

“Questions for me, ma’am?” Roarke attempted to pack his sense of unease behind the dispassion of his countenance.

“Does he frighten you, Mr. Roarke?” It was not a taunt. There was a vein of sympathy in the question, and something more, even; a show of warmth.

“It’s irregular, ma’am.” He almost let it stand, but her eyes seemed to be inviting him. “I don’t fully understand what he . . . is.”

She gathered in Roarke’s rigorously self-imposed dispassion.

“Do you know what separates us from the animals, Mr. Roarke?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am?”

“The crucial step we took up the evolutionary ladder that the lower life forms did not,” she said. “What was it?”

“Tool use, ma’am.”

“Exactly so.” She seemed genuinely delighted with him. “Tool use, the ability to manipulate the environment to our own advantage. He”—her head inclined ever so slightly toward the room at the end of the hall—“understands this at a level you and I never could.
Everything
is a tool to him. Every institution we’ve created, every body that governs us, every emotion we feel, every belief we have. To him, they are a lever by which he can shift the balance of the world. He’s human, Mr. Roarke, like us, but more evolved; far, far smarter. He has always understood more deeply than others how to use tools.”

“How?”

She shook her head.

“He tells me what to do,” she said, “and I do it. I know he is interested in Mal, because Mal can help him ascertain the whereabouts of a man named Jon Remak. Remak has access to something the Old Man wants access to, as well. A new and powerful tool, I’m sure. What is the tool?” She shook her head with finality. “He doesn’t share,
ever
. Would you share your tools with an animal? No, you’d expect something quite different from your inferiors.” She studied him, ascertaining whether he gathered the implications. “I will tell you this, though.”

She took another step toward him, and her hand fell onto his. He had often thought of her as an automaton, able to summon or dismiss emotion as the efficient execution of her duties required. But her eyes found his and offered something, an invitation to something deeper. Her hand was warm and soft, and he found, to his surprise, that he liked it there.

“Fear is one of his most useful tools,” she said, her breath tinged with mint. “Make sure there’s none of it in you when you’re speaking to him, because he will use it. It’s like offering him a doorway into your head.”

Roarke gathered the fear and forced it, squealing, into an invincible steel box, which he slid into the recesses of his consciousness. Twenty years of military service and five years of work with that monster Castillo had trained him for at least that much.

He gave her a single, sincerely dispassionate nod. Her hand lingered just an instant longer, then she stiffened, turned, and led him out of her office and down toward the end of the hall.

A beast lived inside Lee Castillo. Sometimes he imagined it as a great, snorting bull bucking at the stem of his brain. Years in the marines had taught him the advantages of staying collected, patient. That same time had also taught him the value of being able to unleash the very worst he was capable of on instant command. The thing had always been in him, but the marines had taught him to direct it. If the beast was in charge, after all, Castillo would never have been able to so calmly approach the Lazarus Services Security office on the thirty-fifth floor. He would never have been able to hold a smile on his face while he asked the man at the desk where security guard Brett Talby was stationed at the moment.

“He’s in briefing, Mr. Castillo,” the man said. “That’s down the hall, first door on the right.”

Castillo did, however, let the beast spring out—just a flash of its horns, a blur of heaving body—to kick open the door of the briefing room. Desks and a podium were set around the room. Cellscreens were set up along the walls. Five startled faces shot up toward Castillo as he entered and picked out the particular face he was looking for.

The beast held staunchly at bay—for the moment—he stood over Brett Talby and put one thick slab of hand down on the man’s uniformed shoulder.

“You recognize me, right, Brett?” Castillo asked.

“Of course, Mr. Castillo,” Talby replied, his eyes nervously darting to the others in the room, who were all riveted to the scene but had made no move to Talby’s defense.

“Of course,” Castillo said. “I’m wondering, Brett, how it is that if you recognize me, you felt like it was a good idea to pull a gun on me.”

A murmur of confusion rose from the bystanders. Talby’s thick, serious face was overcome with bewilderment.

“I don’t understand, Mr. Castillo,” he said. “I never—”

“Yeah,” Castillo said. “A gun. You helped that kid to the elevator and held me back by pointing a gun at me. We’ve got it all on security cams.”

“Security cams?” Talby was starting to realize he had cause to panic. “That’s not—”

His words were cut off by Castillo’s hands, which had suddenly snapped around Talby’s throat. The room stirred, and Castillo looked up, giving them a glimpse of the beast. The room held its position, everyone but Talby, whose hands grasped and clawed at Castillo’s wrists and whose feet kicked and pushed frantically.