Those That Wake 02: What We Become (30 page)

A group of firemen fighting a fire simultaneously broke off to grab one of their own men, strip him naked, and lock him in a burning room.

On the Giuliani Bridge, five people got out of their cars just to haul a sixth, unrelated person out of her car and throw her over the side.

Rose looked up from her cell, her eyes gleaming with terror.

“I’m getting other stuff off private feeds,” Aaron said. “A paramedic broke off a resuscitation to—what the hell?—to strangle his partner. That’s in Jersey City. A group of office workers in Pittsburgh are pulling random people from their desks and drowning them in toilets and sinks. It’s spreading outward. Whatever the Old Man is doing, it’s happening now.” His full attention came back on. “We’ve got to tell Laura.” His face suddenly curled into a scowl. “She doesn’t have her cell. What’s Mal’s number?
Quickly
.”

“Mal doesn’t have a cell.”

“He— Are you joking? What the holy living
fuck
is wrong with you people? Come on.” He was out of the booth and moving toward the door before he had even finished speaking. “Come
on!
”

Rose hurried after him. In the kitchen, Erica didn’t even watch them go. Her eyes never came away from her own cell.

The one thing the owners of these prison-like slum apartments had spared no expense on was the soundproofing of the doors. This may well have been to keep the sounds of pained cries and agonized pleas for help from ringing up and down the hallways. At the moment, however, it left Rose and Aaron standing before the door, straining to gain some kind of clue as to what was going on inside. Rose was certain she could hear the rising and swelling of a voice, and the implication of it clenched her gut with cramps.

Aaron paused before the door, brought his hand up to knock, and, apparently having heard the strains of sounds as well, winced as his hand fell against it.

After a moment of waiting, he knocked again, harder. A moment later, rolling his eyes and expelling a gust of disgusted breath, he pounded hard enough to send echoes down the hall behind them.

“This is ridiculous,” Aaron said when there was still no answer. “Just open it.”

Rose held her position.

“Open it, for the love of Christ. There’s more going on here than Laura’s sweaty little assignation.” He stepped to the side and gestured wildly at the door. When she did not move, he grumbled in disgust and yanked it open himself.

She squeezed her eyes shut tight as it came open.

“What?” Laura’s voice, angry.
“What?”

Because Aaron did not speak, and Rose couldn’t imagine what would give him pause, she opened her eyes. Laura stood in the middle of the room, her face red with anger. Mal slumped on the bed, looking more haggard than Rose had ever seen him, even after the worst bare-knuckle fight of his life.

“There’s . . .” Aaron surveyed the scene, scouring the room for some clue. He, like Rose, could not have missed the disarray of the bed (
her
bed) or the disheveled and untucked look of hastily re-attired clothes. “The Old Man’s plan is happening. It’s huge. And it’s spreading.”

Mal’s head cocked up.

“Say it,” Laura directed him, like the babysitter of a reticent child.

“It’s some kind of mass homicidal mania. Complete strangers are cooperating to murder people they have no connection to. It’s happening all over the place, and it’s getting . . . wait. There’s more.”

Mal was standing now. He took a step closer to Aaron. Laura’s eyes were riveted on him.

“This is coming in from New Haven, Connecticut,” Aaron reported. “There’s . . . This is . . . there’s a group of people breaking down doors in apartment buildings and throwing occupants out the window. Police are—
Jesus!
—police are helping.”

“The Old Man is tearing everything down,” Laura said. “Why? How does this help him?”

“He’s not tearing everything down,” Aaron said, never too distraught to correct someone. “He’s being very choosy about whom he kills.”

“Just like with the Idea, though, there are some minds he can’t control,” Mal said, cataloging his opponent’s weaknesses. “He would have gotten me by now, if he could have.”

“It’s a hostile takeover,” Aaron said. “That’s all it is. He’s using the people he can control to kill the people he can’t control. All of them.”

“Soon it will be our turn,” Laura said. “Then there won’t be anything left but him.”

Rose looked at Mal, at Aaron, both of them stopped short and staring at Laura, waiting for her to explain. Why? What was it about Laura that filled these two with such confidence in her?

“I have to go,” Laura said. “To stop him.”

“No,” Rose said, with a harshness that made her voice unfamiliar in her own ears. “There’s no way. Mal tried, but the Old Man, he’s too strong now.”

“
He’s
not strong,” Laura insisted. “It’s his connection to people’s brains through the neuropleth. We have to strip it from him.”

“Laura.” Mal’s voice was soft, but immovable. “You can’t.”

“No!”
Laura nearly screamed, making Aaron and Rose both jump in their spots. “
No
. You don’t tell me what I can do.”

Mal committed to the fight, took a step toward Laura as if he were stepping into the ring.

“I fought him myself. The minds are powering him now. He’s too strong. You can’t beat him.”

“Wrong,” Laura said, with a suddenly quiet determination. “
You
can’t. You fought him the way you know how to fight. But you’re not prepared to die for it, Mal. I am, if that’s the price,” she said. “Me, for everyone else.”

Mal took a quick, dangerous step forward.

“No.”

“Laura,” Aaron threw in with a dubious tone, “I’ve got to say, I don’t think that’s the best—”

“Yes,” she said, and Rose watched as, right before her, a girl became something far, far greater than herself. Laura’s voice was suddenly light, easy with certainty. “I know you can’t see it, Mal. For you, sacrifice is just another way to give up a fight. That’s why you couldn’t save Tommy when we were inside the Idea, when it offered you Tommy’s and Annie’s lives for your own. But you couldn’t do it. Or you wouldn’t.”

Mal wrestled with the words, the accusation.

“But that’s how Mike beat the Idea and that’s how Remak saved you,” she continued, heedless of the pain she was causing. Or, perhaps, well aware of it. “And that’s how I’ll beat the Old Man. People like him, they don’t understand the power of sacrifice. Sacrifice isn’t giving up the fight, Mal. It’s just saying that the fight is more important than you are.”

A dark, impenetrable silence locked the room down. Rose felt unable to move. Her awe for Laura weakened her knees, made her eyes moist and her chest hollow.

“Where is he, Mal?” Laura demanded.

“Oh, come
on,
Laura,” Aaron said, exasperated. “You don’t need him for
everything
. The Old Man is in the Lazarus Towers.”

She nodded.

“Then I’ll go there. I’ll find a way to tear
him
down.” She turned to the door without anything further. The others watched her with drowning eyes.

“Wait,” someone said, and Rose was astonished to find that it was her.

Laura turned to her, waiting.

“You can’t just walk in there,” Rose said. “That almost killed Mal. They’ll stop you before you get anywhere near him.”

She turned to Aaron.

“It’s true,” he confirmed from within the dataflow in his head. “Security has it locked down.”

“Fix that,” she told him.

“Fix it,” he mumbled. “I could hack in, get you clearance. But they’re not robots; they’d know a teenage girl doesn’t belong there.”

“You could—”

“An escort,” Aaron charged ahead. “I’ll get you an escort to the top, like you’ve been summoned. But that won’t get you to the towers themselves. There are a lot of streets between here and there.”

“It looks quiet,” Rose said, looking up from her cell. “The newsblogs are saying that the MCT is restoring order in the city.”

“They’re ‘restoring order’?” Aaron said. “That’s not good news. Do you remember what Mal said? The MCT is working for the Old Man.”

“He can’t control unlimited numbers of people at the same time,” Mal said. “He’s not that powerful yet. That’s why he needed to arrange things with the MCT and to make sure government forces were taken unaware.”

“He needs to keep things safe and orderly for himself,” Aaron said, “until he
is
that powerful.”

“I’m coming with you, Laura,” Mal said.

“No,” Laura and Rose said simultaneously.

“If you’re going to beat him, to tear him away from the minds that are giving him his power, you have to do it in the neuropleth.”

“Then I’ll find a way—”

“Me,” Mal said. “I’m the way. I told you, when Remak was in me, healing me, he opened up a doorway in my head, a doorway to the neuropleth. I can do the same for you. It’s the only way to meet the Old Man on equal footing. And I’m the only one who can put you there.”

“So do it right now.” Every word Laura uttered to him was a challenge.

“That won’t—” Rose cut herself off when faces turned toward her. “That won’t work. If you want to confront the Old Man in the neuropleth, you have to have . . . Remak called it neural sync. It means your nervous systems have to make physical contact.” The echo of physical contact with the Old Man shivered through Rose’s body as she said it.

“And that means,” Mal said, “that while you’re battling him in the neuropleth, your body will be right there next to him, where he can . . . You need someone there to protect your body.”

The necessity of it was inescapable, but Laura clearly didn’t like yielding.

“Come, then,” she said brusquely.

“Wait,” Rose said. “Remak told me that you can touch other minds while you’re in the neuropleth, but if you try to go into another body like Remak did, you’ll become like him—your own body will turn into what Remak was.”

Laura and Mal cataloged this, added it to their arsenal.

“Laura,” Aaron said, gracing her with a rare glimpse of his full, unadulterated attention. “Are you sure you can do this?”

She looked at him, and, impossibly, a smile broke across her face, soft and deeply sad.

“What’s happening now? Out there.”

“The MCT is mobilizing special squads. They’re shooting people down in the street.”

Laura looked back at him, the inevitability of this out where everyone could see it.

“Laura,” Aaron said, and something unfamiliar and uncomfortable rode his face. “Thank you.” He hugged her ferociously, like a baby animal about to lose its mother. Suddenly, even to Rose, he looked like a child.

Just as suddenly, he released, stepped back, and nodded.

Laura stood before him like a big sister seeing her younger brother off to college. Then, without another word, she turned and went out the door. Mal followed, but at the threshold he stopped himself. He stepped back to Rose, stood directly before her. For the first time, he took her hand in his.

“Find your strength, Rose,” he whispered to her. “It’s in you. Just find it.”

She took in every inch of him carefully, as though he were the most precious thing in the world and he was about to shatter.

He released her hand, turned, and was gone.

THEIR FEET BEAT THE PAVEMENT
as they moved uptown, holding as best they could to niches and recesses. MCT jeeps stalked up the streets like predators. In the distance, plumes of smoke rose into the sky, distant shouts echoed upward, stray gun shots cracked between the buildings. But around them, the concrete canyons resounded with Laura’s and Mal’s lonely footsteps. The city seemed haunted now, by the thing up in that tower, and the MCT was clearing away the last remnants of the living.

“They’re going to see us eventually,” Laura said.

“I know,” Mal replied. “Just one more block.”

Distantly, the Lazarus Towers slashed out of the skyline, its central spire wounding the sky. It was much farther than a block away.

Mal took her by the hand, prepared to sprint the last length. She pulled her hand from him, glared back into his eyes. He turned away.

“There.” He pointed to a spot on the far corner and ran. She followed after him and came to a stop beside him, in front of a grocery store, its doors barred and its window slivered with cracks.

“We have to go in,” he said, holding his hand out to her tentatively.

“In here?” she said, ignoring his hand.

“No. I can’t show you unless you take my hand.”

She put her loose hand in his, offering no message or emotion through it. He pulled her to the edge of the grocery store, toward the stairway of the next building over. Until, suddenly, he was opening a door, and they were walking into a building that hadn’t been there a moment before. It was a single large room, its walls covered with bookshelves. Everything here was gray, not just in its appearance, but in its nature. The books had lost their pigment, the writing on the bindings fading into an illegible blur.

“One of the forgotten places,” Laura said, a memory she was not pleased to have back.

“Yes. Bookstores are slipping away fast now. There’s a network of them throughout the city. There’s a forgotten alleyway behind this one that cuts to another one. I can get us safely to the towers from here.”

She followed him through the heartbreaking rows, a haze of ghostly dust clinging to the air, kicked up by long-absent customers, and now never to fall because gravity forgot its hold on the particles.

He took her through the stockroom, out the back door into an alleyway, the concrete walls oddly rubbery as she brushed by them. He took her through these pale byways that cut through the city, made out of absences; soundless, no wind to blow the dead papers from the places where they lay, slowly receding from existence.

The quiet between Mal and Laura was dreadful. It felt to her like walking down the street with a stranger, her mind churning for something to say, but also firing with the wild anger of what had been done to her.

He pulled them out of the last forgotten place within sight of their destination.