Those That Wake 02: What We Become (32 page)

The sight of it all drove down into Laura’s heart, and a realization overcame her now-distant, simmering rage. Of course, Mal didn’t understand that life wasn’t about happiness. The only true happiness he’d ever known were the glimpses of it he’d had with Laura. Happiness was a fairy-tale word to him, a holy grail at the end of a quest, a goal rather than a road you traveled on, often taking detours and side roads and hopefully finding your way back to it eventually. He thought it was his job to find the happiness for both of them, to hold it and to wrap it around them and to keep it there forever. Mal had come home and seen Laura tearful over a life she had left behind and thought that they were fighting a battle against her misery. So, true to who he was, he found a way to beat it. Or so he thought.

She was swept, then, from this realization as Mal pulled her deeper into him, deeper, deeper, until she was not in him at all, but through the opening within him, exploding outward onto a burning pathway dividing into millions of coursing branches that connected into—God, how many were there?—all the brains on the planet, luminous with their own crackling currents of neural life.

She was in the neuropleth and could feel the doorway to it spring open in her own mind, a glorious gift Remak had left Mal and that Mal had now shared with her.

Then, with heartbreaking abruptness, she was in her body again, in the hallway, looking up at Mal from her own eyes. She staggered, gasping to catch her breath, and he steadied her with a firm hand.

His touch instinctively lit her up, and, looking at him, she saw the echo of herself in his eyes.

“Oh, Mal,” she said, putting her hand up toward his cheek.

He flinched away, unable to keep his eyes on her.

“This is it, Mal,” she said. “This is what we’ve got left. We’re not going to see each other again once we walk into that place.” The words sounded bizarre, fantastical in her ears, like she was performing in some child’s play. “Whatever’s left to say . . .”

His neck was corded with the strain of holding the words down—or trying to force them out. He could not even bring his gaze to her. So she put her hand gently on his chin and turned it, and when his dark eyes found hers, they were streaming tears. In her newly recovered memory, she could find perhaps four instances of Mal truly, fully smiling. There were none of his tears. She had never seen Mal cry.

“Mal,” she said. “Over the course of time, I would have found a way to forgive you. But that’s time we’re never going to have. So instead I’ll tell you that I love you. I never stopped loving you, even when I didn’t know who you were.”

Mal’s chest was shaking with the force of his emotion, and she felt the heat of tears start down her own cheeks, as well. She took his hand and squeezed it.

“You showed me who I am, Mal, and who I could be. I’m strong because of you.”

He was shaking his head, squeezing her hand back, and her fingers throbbed with the pressure of his strength.

“No, Laura.” He got it out in a strangled voice between sobs. “You were always strong. Stronger than me.”

She pulled herself to him, put the side of her head against the hard muscles of his chest, and found his heartbeat, which was her very center.

“Maybe I was strong,” she said. “Maybe. But you taught me how to use it. You taught me how to fight. Sometimes you need to fight, but there are a lot of ways to do it. Please remember, Mal,
please
. Sometimes you need to have the strength to fight in a different way.”

“I love you, Laura. You were always what I was fighting for.”

She came away, pushed to her tiptoes, and kissed him hot and hard on the lips. They stood like that, together, in the silent hall of the monster’s tower, for just a moment.

“Protect me long enough to kick the shit out of him,” she said, finding her fire again.

“I will, Laura.” Mal’s body was relaxing, his face hardening. A fight was nearby. “I promise.”

She tore herself away from him and shoved open the doors, marching in to face the Old Man, or whatever he had become.

CASTILLO ENTERED ROSE’S APARTMENT WITH
the juggernaut force of a charging bull. Without even looking over, his concrete block of a fist blasted into Aaron’s chest.

To say that Aaron had never been struck so hard was to belittle the experience. Aaron had rarely been struck in his life and never harder than when his father had cuffed him as a child for spilling soda on the office laptop. It was more accurate to say that Aaron had never imagined you
could
be hit so hard, that a human appendage could contain such force or a human form could sustain it without being torn apart. Aaron was snapped back as if a chain attached to his back had suddenly been pulled taut. His head crashed against the wall and, such was the nuclear Armageddon of pain radiating from his chest, that he did not even register it.

His vision swam with lights and refracted figures that could not possibly have existed, until his cellenses corrected for him and put the world back into shape. The attacker was advancing on Arielle Kliest, who made no move to escape, but impassively watched her fate barrel toward her.

“There
.
Is
.
No
.
Out
.
”
Each word came out like a killing blow, not meant to convey meaning, but as another way to pulverize. Something had lobotomized this man, excised the human and left only a beast. The beast took Kliest by the arms and, as though grasping a child’s toy, lifted her from the floor and flung her down on the dirty ground, where her skull thudded and she folded. The beast’s foot lifted, a bludgeoning weight poised to come down on Kliest’s delicate neck.

There was nothing Aaron could do. He could not even find enough air to expel a scream from his lungs. What surprised him, though, was that he wanted to stop it, desperately, ragingly, more than he had ever wanted to find the Librarian, to have his father back,
anything
. He did not want to see this woman killed before him.

“You leave her
alone
.”

The beast stopped and turned, now encompassing the third occupant of the room.

Rose had spoken, though Aaron knew this only because she was the last choice left. He certainly did not recognize the sizzle of determination in the voice, since he had barely heard Rose’s voice rise above a fluttering whisper.

As the beast turned, there was its face again, with all the features of a man but somehow not a man’s anymore. Aaron’s cellens grabbed those features, and Aaron put them into his Face Recognition program, and almost instantly a military record came up.

Castillo, Lee. Marine, infantry, special ops, honorable discharge. It buzzed through Aaron’s head with a comforting rush of information, telling him all about his enemy.

The figure advanced on Rose, who held her ground, faltered, pressed herself hard into the wall behind her.

“Castillo,” Aaron gasped from the floor.

Castillo’s head snapped around, a glare cutting through the shadow of his eyes, and he broke off from Rose as though he truly were an animal, a bull, merely pursuing whatever irritation struck him most recently, and that the sound of his name, for some reason, was the greatest offense.

What else did the record say about Castillo? He was thirty-six, six feet three inches tall, three hundred ten pounds. His medical records showed he had a history of high blood pressure and—

Castillo’s shadow fell over Aaron, and the concrete hands took Aaron by the throat and lifted him up.

—a serious injury in his right knee, a piece of shrapnel lodged there from an exploding mine.

“Rose,” Aaron called. “He’s got—” His next syllable was strangled away by the pressure of thumbs on his throat. His air cut off immediately. He was going to die. Die before Laura, even.

He did a proximity ping with his cellense, locked on to Rose’s cell, mentally keyed a call.

Amidst the grunts and strains of violence, Rose’s cell sounded a stupid little wheedle.

Aaron’s cellenses held back the darkness that was trying to claim his vision, showing him Castillo’s face in hideous clarity.

Pick it up,
Aaron screamed silently at Rose.
Pick it up
.

She must have seen his eyes flicker to it. She snatched it from its place by the bed, looked at the screen that held the text Aaron had just sent through:
HIT HIM AS HARD AS YOU CAN IN THE RIGHT KNEE NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The flesh of Aaron’s face, tingling with blood loss as the flow of oxygen to his brain dwindled, felt Castillo’s hot, reptile-dry breath. It would, perhaps, be the last human interaction he ever had.

Rose swept the aluminum chair from its spot and swung it around in a full turn of her body and brought it whistling into Castillo’s right knee with perfect accuracy.

Castillo’s body lurched, his grip released, and he crashed down to one side, never uttering a sound.

Aaron tumbled back to the ground himself, sucking in ragged breaths.

How do you like
that,
Laura? Technology just saved my life.

Castillo’s hand whipped out from the floor, caught Rose’s ankle. Before he could steal her balance, though, the aluminum chair whistled down and buried itself right in his face. The hand held firm on her ankle, but the chair rose into the air once more and, with all the strength those gangling arms could muster, came down again. And again.

Blood and splinters of teeth sprang away like shrapnel at every blow. Through the obscuring hair, Rose’s face was hideous with rage. A dam had broken in Rose, and a bottomless reservoir of fury was being disgorged at Castillo. It was a primordial fury licking up from the lizard brain, unfettered and unstoppable and utterly alien to Aaron, because it could only have been born of a lifetime filled with helpless oppression and cruelty.

Castillo’s face was distorted, malformed, the shape of it lumpy and swollen, the bones of the cheeks, the jaw, the nose concave. Yet, from its bottom center, beneath those dwindling bestial eyes, the coursing blood split apart to show a smile, blood running over the torn lips and tracing between the jagged teeth, delineating each ruined enamel tablet in liquid red.

The smile drove Rose on, her anger animating a frail body that was far beyond its limits. Who, Aaron wondered, was Rose striking in her mind? Who was this revenge actually meant for?

The chair came up and down, her entire body trembling with exhaustion until, finally, the hand at her ankle loosened, released, began to twitch.

The chair came up again but dropped backwards, clanging to the floor, followed presently by Rose, her spent frame huddled on the floor, her chest rising and spasming, gasping for air.

Aaron’s eyes studied her closely, studied the aftermath of pure, unadulterated emotion that would never overcome him. The pain did not subside from his body, but thinned and spread into an evenly distributed throbbing that made his bones and organs vibrate.

He surveyed the room, four fallen figures in various states of disintegration. That, at least, he could do something about.

“Are you all right?” a soft voice asked after minutes had passed.

Aaron focused in again, saw Rose coming to a seated position, the chair lying next to her flecked with blood and strands of gore.

“Superb,” he said in a soggy voice. “Are you all right?”

“No,” she said. “But I never really was. You should call an ambulance.”

“Like I’d trust a city ambulance,” Aaron replied. Even with the wet sound of internal bleeding in his voice, he still managed to sound smarmy. “I’ve already called for a private medical service. They should be here any minute.”

She nodded, then leaned back against the bed, holding her hands up, flexing the chafed and swollen fingers before her eyes, studying the ruin of Castillo between them.

Aaron watched her for a moment, then closed his eyes and waited for help.

THE ROOM WAS LIT IN
red, and the air felt thick and hot. Beads of sweat trickled down the small of Laura’s back.

The thing sat on a throne of sorts, a large wooden chair behind a massive, antique wooden desk. The face creased into a smile at her arrival. It looked to Laura like a nightmare figure out of a fairy tale; one of the old, old fairy tales the way they were before history polished them up and gave them happy endings and made them fit the expectations of happy children. It looked like an old grandfather, sitting in the corner of a dark room, who greeted his young arrival with feral eyes and a smile of sharpened teeth, saliva running down his chin.

“Laura,” the room around her seemed to say as the Old Man moved his mouth. “Little Laura.” His eyes did not even flicker up toward Mal, who stood at the door, his posture loose and prepared.

Laura could feel the Old Man trying to crawl into her, and she held tight to the gasp of fear that wanted to explode from her chest.

“You’re here to destroy me.” The voice vibrated from the walls of her skull as the Old Man rose from his throne. There was a fluid, lithe energy in the decaying limbs as he walked toward her with an easy, rolling gait. “But I am the quiet agreement between interested parties,” he said, standing before her. “I am the invisible lever upon which governments shift. I am the secret in the minds of powerful men. I am the glue that holds your civilization together.” His hand came up, the brittle fingers touching her cheek. Physical contact. In a moment, the hand would move to tear her apart.

“You’re greed and corruption,” she countered, “the tiny secret that scurries for darkness. And it’s time for civilization to run itself without you.”

She threw herself at him, not with her body, but straight through the doorway in her head. The last thing she saw was the moldering flesh of his face split apart, deformed by a twisted shriek of rage. Then there was the pathway of the neuropleth, coursing with voltage.

She shot through the neuropleth, until it bloomed before her, the Old Man’s greatest weapon, greatest power: his brain. If the other brains were bright, sparking things, the Old Man’s brain was a star, hissing and snapping with cracks of synaptic lightning. Umbilicals of neural electricity stretched out like tentacles from a kraken, connecting to every brain Laura could see. As they pulsed, the Old Man pulsed brighter, swelling with the life that belonged to them.