Those That Wake 02: What We Become (27 page)

“Make a deposit into Annie’s account.”

“What? Why?”

“Didn’t you see how desperate she was? How hard she was trying? No.” Laura shook her head. “Of course, you didn’t. She’s giving this everything she’s got. Her entire future depends on her going to that nursing school. It will change their lives massively.”

“Are you feeling okay to drive? Because you’re apparently in the middle of a psychotic break.”

“No, Aaron, I’m serious. The money would mean nothing to you, and it would change her life.”

“
That’s
your best argument?” He closed his eyes. “Wake me up when we get to New York. Or don’t, actually.”

“Aaron, if you do this, I will never mention how you were spying on me in the bathroom ever again.”

The pondering silence was cut only by the buzz of cars moving on the highway around them.

“You swear?” he said, looking at her again.

“I do.”

“How much money?”

“One hundred thousand dollars,” she said easily.

“One hun— I know you aren’t serious.”

“Come on. One hundred thousand dollars would barely even show up as a decimal place in your accounts. And that’s enough to stake Annie for the rest of her life.”

Aaron was gone again for a moment. When he came back, he had the tone of an accountant.

“The state school she was referring to has a two-year program to become a registered nurse, the total tuition of which is less than half of what you suggested.”

“Fifty thousand.” Laura made a show of turning it over in her head. What she was really doing was cataloging the fact that the old strategy of doubling your initial bid to ultimately get the amount you really want worked on sneering adolescents as well as budget-conscious parents. “Okay.”

“It’s done.”

Just like that,
Laura thought.
Aaron will forget about this in ten minutes, and Annie will never forget it as long as she lives
.

“Aaron,” she said levelly. “Thank you.”

“Whatever.”

She sighed.

“Why don’t you go ahead and take that nap,” she suggested dryly.

She brought them into Manhattan and around to the East Side Highway, headed for the Lower East Side as directed by Aaron, who was amply baffled that anyone might not know their way around New York.

“This is weird,” Aaron said on their approach. “The data here is really quiet. Usually New York data can’t shut up. But it’s like everything is asleep. Even the newsblogs are intermittent.”

It figured that Aaron would be studying the dataflow to learn something he could have looked out the window to see. There was almost no traffic around them. As they paralleled the city streets, Laura could see very little foot traffic where she expected the usual throngs. She might have pursued it, but then, glancing out the other window, she caught sight of the East River, shimmering in multifarious hues from its constituent chemicals.

“I didn’t think it would actually look like a rainbow,” she said.

“The campaigns are true,” Aaron confirmed. “You must be the only person in the free world who hasn’t come to see it.”

“Is it true about how it got that way?”

“Which truth?” Aaron replied with apparent seriousness. “The one about how chemicals leaked in there during construction and are eroding the island?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“True. In about twenty-five years, the edges of this island are going to start crumbling away.”

“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? Too bad for an entire
island?
”

“Someone will do something about it,” Aaron said with total assurance. “When they need to.”

“You, Aaron.
You
do something about it. Your father—”

“Don’t.”

“Your father died because he chose the wrong side. You want to avenge him, honor his memory? Break the system that killed him. Become more than he was. Make your own choice, not the one he made for you.”

In consideration or peevishness, almost certainly the latter, Aaron remained silent.

As they moved South past the Fifteenth Street exit, Laura caught sight of the spear-like points attacking the sky above the glimmering mirrored dome. The Lazarus Towers. She had only ever seen them on HD. She never would have believed anything could pull an observer’s eyes away from that hideous dome, let alone turn it into a tourist attraction.

But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Make mistakes look like successes. Cover the terrifying truth with shiny lies. She looked at Aaron, studying the towers himself. Where she might once have expected admiration, his face was captured in a look she couldn’t identify.

The apartment building between Orchard and Delancey was a dull white, its opaque windows sending the reflection of the sun shearing back into the world.

There was something wrong on the streets here, something beyond the fact that poverty was being hidden with shiny paint and corporate smiles. There was barely anyone out, and those who were glanced up with edgy glares and quickly pulled their eyes away, scurrying into doorways or around corners.

“What’s going on?” Laura asked, praying that this was not just what the city was always like.

“I’m . . .” Aaron’s voice was low and edgy. “ . . . not really sure. It feels like everyone sees something we don’t.”

“Why would—”

“Look,” he interrupted her. “This is the building. Let’s go.”

He walked into the building as though he owned the place himself, which, in fact, he may very well have, for all she knew. The plain white façade was easy to overlook, to take for granted. This was probably the point, because anyone venturing inside would have entered a wash of grime and dirt that had turned the lobby into a gray smear. The elevator doors slid open with the hiss and grunt of equipment reaching its last legs.

“Wait,” she said, her stomach queasy with doubt. “We can’t just go up.”

“That’s what we’re going to do,” he said, not breaking stride.

“Aaron, please, what if . . .”

He stared at her from within the elevator.

What if I’m not supposed to be here? What if this was all a—

She stepped onto the elevator and stabbed the seventeenth-floor button before he could.

After a rumbling ride, the door wheezed open on a hallway that had lost the battle to filth and lack of care long ago. The metal doors in front of every apartment were etched with obscene pictures, curses.

Her hands were trembling as they came to 17C, and Aaron knocked at it with short, angry blows.

When there was no answer after several moments, Aaron studied the lock with easy disgust.

“It’s a standard lock,” he said with contempt. “I could get us through a cellock with no problem. Honestly, how do people live like this?” He pushed the door once, hard, out of annoyance, and it opened, revealing the torn internal lock mechanism. “Well, that’s convenient.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Someone broke in or something. Maybe they forgot their keys.” He pushed the door open the rest of the way.

“What are you doing?” Laura asked urgently.

“Do you want to have your reunion in this hallway, Laura?”

Laura paused on the threshold, then, her throat clenched with some sort of indescribable dread, she stepped in and closed the door behind her.

The place was tiny. There was a bed, a cinder block that served as a nightstand, a small refrigerator, an aluminum chair positioned before the window, the bars of which, Laura noted, you couldn’t see from the outside.

Aaron plopped himself into the chair as Laura studied every inch of this grimy little place for a clue, just as she had been studying the details of her life for the last year and coming up short.

There was nothing really personal here, and perhaps Laura was relieved. She couldn’t test herself to see if she recognized what might have belonged to Mal. But as she waited, she could feel the fear inside her grow, from the pit of her stomach up through her throat, making her want to vomit. Her fingers and toes were suddenly tingling with it, and her head began to pound with surges of panic; panic and something else besides.

She spun around to face the door just an instant before it opened.

A girl, her shaggy hair nearly hiding her nervous features, jolted in surprise. With her was a large boy, moving slowly, his face bloodied and scarred. Scars Laura recognized, a face Laura knew, had known forever and ever and ever. The boy’s face froze in shock as Laura’s brain split apart, spilling out memories.

ARIELLE KLIEST’S FATHER HAD BEEN
an older man, a Swiss banker who had emigrated from Germany earlier in life. Rumors followed Arielle throughout a childhood spent predominantly in a rigorous Swiss boarding school that her father had not emigrated from Germany but fled it when the Allies had come in at the close of World War II. This was a theory shared both by students and faculty alike, and Arielle could scarcely avoid hearing it. She never asked her father, and not out of fear, but merely for the fact that she didn’t particularly care.

Her mother was a much younger Swiss woman, a vice president of the bank at which her father worked. Her mother was graceful and elegant and possessed of the sort of beauty that belittled rather than enchanted those around her. The union of the two was an efficient and profitable one, and Arielle herself was raised—when she was allowed home—in an environment where acts of ostensible affection and acts of horrific greed and amorality were undertaken with equal dispassion.

On the verge of attaining the presidency of the bank, her mother was torn down by a scandal involving the siphoning of funds into the accounts of a young man she had, apparently, taken up with and planned to abandon Arielle’s father for. Her mother stepped down quietly and, in less than a week, had vanished, passing utterly from the grasp of her family and friends. Arielle never bothered making the effort to search her out. It was not out of hatred, but rather for the fact that she had never been able to summon any sincere feelings of love for her mother to begin with.

The effort of dealing with the scandal and the financial difficulties it brought with it wore her old father away. By the time he died, Arielle had acquired degrees in economics, comparative languages, and semiotics. She was heralded as a genius and accepted the compliment with her family’s signature dispassion. This was the greatest way she could imagine to honor her father once he died, to the extent that she thought to honor him at all.

Since she had been a child in boarding school, among the progeny of the wealthy and the influential, she had heard and repeated stories of the Old Man, a figure that had haunted the dreams and daydreams of these children of the wealthy and influential from their earliest memories. Arielle’s mind gorged on the ripe fruit of stories about his manipulations, theories about which world events bore his fingerprints. Throughout her studies at university, her passing interest in this figure had become a fascination, and much of her spare time was spent researching him. It proved a frustrating pursuit as the so-called facts of his existence traveled by word of mouth and almost nothing was written down, cataloged, stored in any way. Stories blurred into one another, sharing elements, changing shape, until you could grasp nothing solid at all.

To her, that slowly became the Old Man’s nature, his power. He was mist, smoke, always at the corner of your eye, but never quite observable. This ghost haunted her. As she built financial empires and shattered others, there was always this figure of mist and shadow, her inability to grasp him always keeping satisfaction,
true
satisfaction, out of her hands.

Plagued at no time in her life by the vulnerabilities of either love or fear, she stepped off the path she had been blazing through the business world and stepped onto a dark, shadowy path far less traveled.

She moved from city to city, country to country, searching out the rumors. She went from sweating, stinking tents in the hearts of fetid, filthy bazaars to pristine climate-controlled corporate conference rooms seeking anyone,
anyone,
who would even claim that he or she had laid eyes on the Old Man, heard his voice, was in the room next to his, knew someone who had spoken to him. Anything.

The second attack on New York City, the power plant explosion the world would come to call Big Black, made something shift. Allegiances flowed, power structures slipped, and different ones rose. Suddenly, there were power vacuums that needed to be filled.

One day she was having lunch with a young, back-stabbing vice president who bragged with a malevolent smile that things were changing at his company,
things were changing,
and did she know who was going to end up on top? The arrival of a man with gunmetal gray hair and the bearing of a soldier interrupted their meal. Arielle immediately sensed something, and not only because the back-stabbing vice president deferentially excused himself and departed the restaurant. This new arrival didn’t bother to sit down; he merely told her that a car was waiting outside. The Old Man had proffered his hand.

On the other end of that car ride was an apparatus unlike any she had ever seen. She was put in a coordinating position, gathering information from an array of agencies, organizations, and corporations, and from this vantage point her predilection for pattern recognition honed by her study of semiotics allowed her to see something indescribably vast taking place. Like small snapshots of distinct locations that you fit together to create a huge image of an entire city, she saw how a project that belonged to one corporation in France fit into the project of another corporation in Japan, and that the results of each individual project had consequences, profits, rewards on a global scale. The hostile takeover of an obscure company in Dubai, the trading of bonds between a company in Berlin and another in Stockholm, and the introduction of laws preventing civil litigation against corporations in the United States, when all pieced together properly, suddenly explained how vast acres of protected land in Alaska were suddenly opened up for drilling to an American corporation. Pieces fit together, but only if you could see the whole, only if you could see the world as the Old Man did.