Those That Wake 02: What We Become (25 page)

Aaron walked slowly through the town, his eyes sliding suspiciously from storefront to storefront, as they might if he were trying to move through a cave full of sleeping snakes. Did everyone here know they lived in the Librarian’s town? Surely they all knew that the trappings of contemporary technology weren’t welcome here and managed to function without it. But the polite pressing on of strangers, the smiles covering the vague misdirection of questions—were they all, in fact, serving the Librarian in some larger way, part of some vast operation of which Aaron had caught only the merest whiff?

There was Laura going on about how technology was digging the world a tomb, but the truth was it was people who lied to you, hid things from you, betrayed you, and abandoned you.

A woman sitting behind the counter of a bookshop “happened” to look up as Aaron passed and gave him a nod calculated to impart warmth, but looking beneath the surface, all Aaron could see was a knowing show of superiority. He slid his eyes away.

Eventually he came back to the town square, found Laura sitting just as he had left her, hunched with her arms wrapped around her knees, atop a rock with an old burnished plaque on it.

He approached from behind and stopped on the grass several paces away. Her position was nearly identical to the way she wrapped herself up in the corner of the room, lost and alone. Aaron surely knew from lost and alone. Well, alone, anyway. And who had pulled him from that? Frankly, he pulled himself from it, as he solved all problems in his life. But he did owe Laura something.

“When I asked for some time alone,” Laura said without turning around, “I didn’t exactly mean you should stand back there and stare at me.”

“I wasn’t staring at you.”

“Right. Sorry. You definitely
don’t
stare at me, here or in the shower.”

“Damn it, Laura, I’ve had it with—”

She cut him short by turning around. He had chosen to overlook the humor in her taunt, but the fact that she was smiling caught him by surprise. That was not, however, what struck his words from him.

Laura’s eyes had always been bright and alive. Even through the pulsing lights of the dataflow, her nearly luminous blue eyes made the letters and numbers that filled Aaron’s world seem to fade. But from the moment he’d come face to face with her, those eyes had always been drawn inward, studying the flaws and inconsistencies of her fissuring life. Sitting on the rock now, facing him, her eyes were looking outward for the first time, in front of her, at where she was heading. For one small, perfect moment, Aaron was lost in them.

“I’m ready to get the hell out of here,” she said, hopping from the rock with a sprightly spring. “Our first step is going to have to be finding Mal.”

“What? Are you serious? Did you hear what the Librarian said?”

“Yes. And I considered it, like I said I would. But if someone offered you your father back as he was—flawed, troubled, and real—or a perfectly functioning, flawless robot version of your father, which would you take?”

She didn’t bother waiting for his response, but walked past him and back toward the car.

“But, Laura, you can make this new life the real one,” he said, as he fell into step behind her. “That’s your choice.”

She spun on him again, in the middle of the empty street, and this time her eyes were bright with rage.

“I
already
made my choice, and this Remak asshole tore it away from me.”

“Or you chose to leave it behind.”

“I didn’t,” Laura said simply, and turned back toward the car.

Aaron followed her in silence until they got to the car. He stopped at the passenger side and watched her go around.

“It may be,” Aaron said over the roof, “that the only thing of value the Librarian actually said was that you should take this opportunity and make it work for you. If you choose to ignore that, that’s your prerogative. You should know that, as a completely impartial observer, I believe you’re being an incredible fool. I just wanted that out in the open between us because”—he bit down hard before he could get it out of his mouth—“because I owe you that much. That said, just drop me off at the nearest town with a bus station. I’ve already bought my tickets.”

Laura gaped at him over the roof, her face blank with surprise until, like paper tossed into a fireplace, it combusted with rage.

“You child,” she said, her volume escalating. “You fucking child. You can’t blind yourself with your own tiny little interests, all your digital
shit,
now that you got what you wanted.” The curse rang off the storefronts around them, and Aaron could imagine the bookstore owner and the pharmacist leaning toward their windows with prurient fascination. Laura herself was storming around the car toward him now.

“You got the truth you were looking for,” she hammered on, approaching him like a furious parent. For his part, Aaron backed himself up against the car, flinching as she loomed above him. “Dealing with that truth means growing up. And what do grownups do?” She glared at him. “What do they do?”

“Face their problems? Is that the idea?”

“The idea is that grownups take responsibility for more than just themselves. Do you remember what the Librarian said? Remak could change things
inside my head,
and the Old Man knows about him. Imagine what the Old Man could do with that kind of power. Grownups make a choice not to let a monster devour everything good just because they can shut themselves in a room and pretend they won’t get hurt.”

Her breath was coming so hard that he could feel it on his face, hot and angry.

“This Remak and Mal are already fighting that fight,” he said, but even in his own ears, his voice was that of a weak child’s.

Laura’s body relaxed. She stood back on her heels and stopped looming. Those luminous eyes of hers played across his face like a spotlight.

“Sometimes,” she said in a voice born of concern, of knowledge rather than rage, “people have to do things together. Last time it took four of us to beat this thing, apparently. Now, for all we know, Mal is by himself.” Her voice caught on something sharp that threatened to open it up and make it bleed tears.

“You know what people do when they’re together, Laura?” Aaron said, finding his own strength as she allowed her vulnerability to the surface again. “They lie to each other. They abandon and betray each other.”

“They do that. That’s true. That’s the choice your father made. You can choose a different side, because people also teach you and fight for you and offer you a hand when you don’t think you can hold on a second longer.”

Aaron couldn’t remember the last time he wanted to vomit so much.

“You’re in love with this Mal guy, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re in love with some guy you don’t even know.”

Her eyes went into herself again, for just a moment.

“I
do
know him,” she breathed, barely loud enough for Aaron to understand it. Then she walked back around the car and got in.

So . . . how did one capitulate to Laura’s demands without appearing to have backed down? Devising a stratagem, Aaron reached down for his door as the lock snapped shut.

The window slid down two inches.

“If you want to go to the next town,” Laura’s voice issued forth, “you can walk.”

For an instant, just a bare instant, he was struck dumb by her ability to actually take a hard line.

“For God’s sake, Laura,” he countered. “Who’s being a child, exactly? Open the damned door.”

The lock clicked, and he pulled open the door and slid in.

“You’re worse than the Librarian,” he said, buckling his seatbelt. “Won’t even come face to face with me.”

“You did come face to face with the Librarian,” Laura said, starting the car and pulling out.

“Not Ms. Hubert,” he corrected. “The Librarian.”

“Ms. Hubert
is
the Librarian, jackass.”

“She’s— Wait. The Librarian is a guy.”

“A guy would think that,” Laura said, guiding them slowly back the way they had come, around the town square and up through the residences.

“That coward,” Aaron said, shaking his head. “That goddamned coward.”

“Did you want to go back and have a word about it with her?”

Aaron turned back to see the library disappear around the corner.

“Just drive,” he said sullenly.

MAL OPENED HIS EYES AND
looked through a groggy haze at a room he didn’t recognize. It was illuminated in the color of low rage, moist with heavy humidity. Portraits on the wall looked down with judgmental eyes on the bookcases, the long table, the chairs, all in deep, old wood. Mal flexed his arms, his chest, his back, muscles popping and twitching as though he had been asleep for days.

What had woken Mal up was a tight pressure on his arm. He blinked his eyes until they cleared of gummy sleep and saw Rose’s hand, fingers digging into his bicep through the bloody sleeve of his sweatshirt. But Rose wasn’t looking at him.

A surge of voltage lit up Mal’s spine. Sometimes, in a fight, you took one too many shots to the head, and you left yourself for a while. What brought you back was the sense, beneath a truly conscious level, that danger was close to you. That was what Mal felt now: danger, close to him.

He sat up fast, shaking off the hum of his swirling senses, got his feet on the floor, and stood. Arms surrounded Mal, squeezing tightly with shaky strength. Rose pressed up against him as if he were a life preserver in a roaring sea.

Just two or three long strides away, there was a wheelchair. Within it hunched a figure that was impossibly ancient. Its body was gnarled, its face cracked with the deep lines and folds of untold age. As Mal watched, the figure—the monster—rose. Standing, it straightened its crooked body to reclaim a dignity it hadn’t known in many years.

The Old Man came toward them, his face still a grotesque chaos of fissures, his frame still a frail parody of a functioning body. But in his step, in the roll of his arms, in eyes that nearly lit up the room around him, there was a terrible and perverse vitality.

Mal pushed Rose aside and lunged forward, his right fist firing out in a devastating cross. Mal didn’t know how he ended up in this place, but here was the solution to everything in one good, clean punch.

The snap of flesh against flesh rang off the walls, but to Mal it felt as though he had struck an oncoming truck. Shock waves rang up his arm, emanating from his fist, which had been stopped flat by the Old Man’s upraised hand. The skeletal fingers closed around Mal’s fist and held it tightly. He could feel the bone-splintering pressure of the fingers in his knuckles.

“This is the strength of a dozen minds, boy,” the Old Man said, his hot, rotting breath scrabbling up Mal’s nostrils, the sick intimacy of a diseased lover. “Imagine how powerful I’ll be when it’s a thousand. Or a million.”

With a sudden jerk, the Old Man twisted his wrist, and Mal’s arm was wrenched violently to the side, his body following in a mad tumble across the floor. The Old Man turned and looked down on him.

“Your mind is difficult to penetrate. It’s hard and gray, like metal.” The ancient, cracking lips split into a carnivorous smile. “Nevertheless, I’ll wager you’re very, very scared of me right now.”

Rose threw herself onto Mal, one arm raised up to fend off the Old Man’s vibrant eyes.

“No,” she said. “You promised you would let us go.”

“Did I? I feel like a new man since I agreed to that, a different man. However, I still understand the value of a contract. I will honor the word of it as stated. I said I would not stop you from leaving. So, leave.”

Rose pulled at Mal, but he was heedless of her. He came to his feet slowly, appraising his enemy. Once he stood tall, he didn’t move.

“Mal,” Rose said, grasping his arm like a child. “We have to go. We
have
to.”

But Mal was stone, immovable. It was only a matter of time before he found the right line of attack.

“Mal,” she said through tears of frustration, “Remak sacrificed his life so you could live.”

He looked at her.

“He died for you,” she said, still pulling. “You can’t throw your life away like this.”

Mal looked back up at the Old Man, the hideous face taking the scene in archly. Then Mal let himself be tugged backwards, toward the large double doors. The Old Man watched every step of their progress. Rose heaved the doors open and pulled Mal out into the carpeted hall, into the relief of the amber light.

Roarke, sitting in a chair, rose to immediate attention. Mal instantly shifted his stance to account for the new threat.

“I told them I wouldn’t stop them from leaving, Mr. Roarke,” the Old Man’s commanding new voice reached out into the hall. “So it falls to you. Kill them both.”

Roarke took in the strength of the voice, the glimpse of the impossible figure he got through the doorway with analytical dispassion, and came toward Mal and Rose.

“You’re not with your partner now, Roarke,” Mal said. “You’re not ambushing a man with a concussion anymore.”

The gray man nodded and stepped in.

An ample amount of Rose’s time and concentration over the last year had been devoted to studying Mal. He was broad in the chest and shoulders and slim at the waist, but his bones seemed heavy under the dented flesh and smooth muscle. He seemed at times to lumber when he walked, to tread through life with difficulty, as if constantly pushing against a heavy wind.

She had seen him, too, before his fights, wolfing down a meal before pushing out into the twilight, headed for the space beneath the old stone bridge in the park, where he would bloody his knuckles and do worse to the face of another boy who had put money on his own skill and capability. She had seen him often enough after fights, creaking slowly into bed, favoring bruised and battered limbs, muscles, bones. But she had never actually seen Mal fight. She wanted to see him wired and ready for a fight, or return triumphant or, at least, alive. She did not want to see the work, the pain, the
reality
of the violence itself.

What shocked her now, what swept her away briefly from the soggy fear bleeding through her body, was how beautiful Mal looked when he fought. The lumbering, the burden, the weight—all of it was gone. He came unbound, looked nearly—what an alien word to apply to Mal—
joyful
in his movement. His strength was still there, but he had transformed from the weight and heaviness of lead to the supple, graceful movement of mercury as he slid past Roarke’s whipping thrust, slipped beneath his lateral chop and rose up at the man’s side, his own fist flickering like a wasp, catching Roarke across the cheek, leaving a burning welt behind.