"I can do it for him," she said, calm enough to calm Lucas too, steady enough to bring steadiness to the people clustered outside their carriage, peering in fearfully. She felt them all, so broken, the Lyell's in some of them, cancerous mutations spreading through the rest after days under the empty line of Istanbul.
It was only days ago that she'd flashed through this place, setting up their shield, but it felt like a lifetime. She'd learned so much in her final jump. Everything was different now.
"I can save him," she said, laying her hand on Jake's chest. Such soft, perfect skin. He had always been so gentle, and kind. She'd thought of him as her big brother. "Let me do this."
Tears welled into Lucas' eyes. She could see the grief and the rage there. He'd blamed her for this, she knew that, and understood it perfectly. She hadn't been there when she should have been. She hadn't saved Jake, hadn't prevented their suffering, and who else was there for Lucas to blame? He was powerless and she'd always had the power. Maybe, if she'd tried harder or been better, she could have saved him, and saved them all.
Now she could. Now she was here.
Lucas put his hand atop hers.
"Please," he said. "Anna. Don't do this. Jake is gone. I don't know how you're doing these things, but stop. It isn't right."
Anna didn't understand that. She held Jake in her left hand like a drifting balloon. She could feel him; his happiness, his simplicity, his joy and sadness at being near again to Lucas. It would be the work of seconds only.
"Why not? You always wanted me to do more. I'm doing more."
Tears spilled down his cheeks. "Not like this. He's gone. Let him rest."
She frowned. He took her hand in both of his own and lifted it to his own chest.
"Believe me, Anna. Please. I never had faith before, until I met a man in Maine bunker who taught me what faith was. For years I was fighting for the cure because I thought I could bring him back, but I was wrong. I've seen what happens to signals on the line after they die. They change, Anna. They shift, they mix, they become something new; so there is no 'Jake' left up there anymore, not our Jake. To bring some piece of him back here would be wrong, only a fragment, leaving him torn between impossible realities. I couldn't stand to hurt him again, not like that. He needs to rest, now. Let him rest."
He couldn't stop her. They both knew that. But perhaps he was right. The feel of Jake in her hand was different. He was saying goodbye, perhaps. He was keen to drift on. But then, if she couldn't save him, then she'd have to face the horrible truth that -
She dropped onto her knees, panting wildly. The sobs began, and now that they'd started nothing she could do on the line would stop them. Jake was really dead, and she couldn't turn it back. She felt his shade drifting from her grasp, back up into the mulch of the line, waving with a puckish smile.
"What's happening … to me?" she said in halting gasps, while Lucas hunkered beside her, his arm wrapped around her shoulders, tears pouring down his cheeks too. "I can't," she gasped through the sobs, "I want to, but why can't I-"
He pulled her head against his shoulder and held her tightly while the sobs wracked her. Jake was really dead. She hadn't saved him. She couldn't save him now.
"Shh, it's OK," Lucas said, stroking her hair like her father once had, as if for just this moment she was only a scared and lonely girl rather than a surging goddess.
16. MOSQUE
Afterward, they talked.
The convoy got moving again. Absently, sitting in the back of the corpse wagon with Jake's perfect body glowing nearby, she repaired the slight imperfections in the leper-shield she'd erected only days ago. Now it spread further, and worked cleaner. The people under its umbrella began to heal; from the Lyell's infecting so many of them, from the mutations wrought by Istanbul's broken shield, from the long days beneath the absence of the line.
Everything opened itself to her easily, now. She could read the world in the movements around her. She could feel the angels jumping toward her like footprints on the sand, appearing and resolving, washed away by tides, landing and jumping again.
They were coming for her, these agents of Joran Helkegarde's shadow SEAL. So many things were clear. There was going to be a battle, and she had to be prepared.
"He didn't say anything, at the end," Lucas said. He sat on a stool near the wagon's open back, while the convoy rumbled in a circuit round the dusty Istanbul suburbs. Anna saw familiar mosque domes pass by outside and thought of Ravi, how they'd raced boats in the pools here not so long ago.
Now Ravi was dead, and Jake was dead. That bonded her and Lucas, if nothing else.
"I woke him from the artificial coma," Lucas went on, "it was the only hope, with his heart entering arrest. I thought maybe there was something I could do, something I could say. I gave him the cure I'd been working on." He spread his hands. "For a moment, I thought maybe…" He trailed off. "Maybe he tried to tell me something. His hand shifted. He mouthed something. But I don't know what he wanted to say."
He dropped his head into his hands. There were no tears now, only the heaviness of the grief. This was Lucas' life, now; Anna could feel it settling like a thick fall of snow. They'd had such plans. Together they were going to build a home in Sacramento, and have white picket fences, and adopt some of Drake's children, and finally live.
There'd been so little time for living, Anna reflected. Her life had been such a rush, for so long, filled with revenge, love and revelation. Ravi had been there throughout, and she'd taken him for granted. Of course Ravi had been there. He'd always been there, and she'd always wanted other things.
Now she wanted him. She could feel the pieces of him on the line far above, floating amongst the stellar matter, made of starlight and cosmic dust. That was beautiful. He'd left a hole in her now, and she missed him.
She reached across the gap and took Lucas' hand. He gave it to her. They sat like that for a long time, in a kind of peace.
"We have to bury him," he said at last. "I was waiting. I don't know what for."
"Let's bury him," Anna said. There was time enough for that. Soon the angels would land, and Anna would have to kill again. She could feel the outlines of her future stretching ahead. Many people were going to die at her hands.
They halted on the outskirts of the city, in the parking lot of a cozy mosque with green columns and a cupola that still glinted with tattered gold leaf. In back there was a wall, beyond which lay a small crypt and a patch of open ground studded with old, weed-choked graves.
"You don't often see these," Lucas said, leading the small procession carrying Jake's body. Sulman was there, and Jonathon, and Helen, and Macy too. Anna hadn't spoken to them much, but knew from their downcast eyes that she scared them. She always had, perhaps, but more so now.
"Farsan used to talk to me about Islam," Lucas went on, drifting largely, touching the stone grave markers. They weren't stone slabs, but small, carved columns, unadorned by names or any decoration other than small, intricate floral patterns. "The beauty of it, the peace of it. He laughed when I asked about Sunday school. Jake would have liked him."
Nobody said anything about Jake not being a Muslim. Sulman was, and the burial here had been his idea. "There is one hydrogen line," he'd said. "One God. I would be proud to count Jake amongst my brothers."
Sulman directed them now. They found a quiet corner and dug the grave in turns. Jake's body lay in repose on the gurney, so still and perfect in the hot sun. Lucas dug the most. Anna watched. If Ravi were there, he would be talking to the others with a kind of natural grace, understanding how to bridge the divide between them in a way that Anna could not do. He had taught her how to laugh. Jake too. Without them in her life, she was a serious, quiet person, not easily disposed to chatting, laughing, enjoying the company of others.
She'd never thought of it before.
They laid Jake in the ground and took it in turns to pour soil over him. Sulman said words and sang a beautiful song in Arabic. Lucas took his turn, reciting a few well
-worn prayers. Once it might have been Witzgenstein leading such a ceremony, but of course Witzgenstein was dead.
Anna hadn't told the others that. She didn't tell them about Amo, or what he was doing at Olan Harrison's shield. She didn't tell them about Lara, only days away from the Huangshan range. She didn't tell them about the army of angels Olan Harrison had sent, because they couldn't help with that.
They had their own battles to fight. The angels fell to her.
Lucas stood at her side as various people from Istanbul bunker filed past, offering their condolences. Most of them barely seemed to know where they were, or what they were doing. There'd been so much loss, so much suffering, and they were in the fog of shock still. What did one more death mean? Still, they dropped handfuls of baked red soil into the grave, until the hole became a mound. Macy found a half-carved stone in a corner and laid it atop the pile.
Jake was gone.
The convoy rumbled on.
"He was the best of us," Lucas said, standing at his lab desk, hands on his papers and notes, but seeing nothing.
Anna stood across from him now. She could see at a glance how his research had advanced. Charts on the walls depicted the efforts the bunkers had already made on his behalf. In the last three days seven of the rumbling bunker convoys had made contact, after she'd stood their shields up. They had allowed themselves to be directed by Lucas in their research; now all of them were finally in harmony, aiming for a cure.
Only hours remained.
"The baby's really gone, isn't it?" she asked him.
He looked up. For a moment he wasn't really there, lost in ruminations of his own loss. Then his face drooped, and his eyes focused on her.
"Yes." For a moment he seemed to not know what to say. "I'm sorry, Anna. We ran scans while you were unconscious. I can't see any sign of it."
There was the sympathy again. She smiled back.
"It's all right. I felt it go in the middle of a jump, spreading into me. It changed me. I'm different, now. A part of Ravi's in me, along with the type ones. We're still a family, in a way."
She smiled.
Lucas tried to smile too. Perhaps the thought horrified him. She could see him trying to spare some sympathy for her. "That's a good way to think of it."
"It's the truth. It's what I need from you, now. How many researchers can you command?"
Lucas looked at her blankly for a moment, making the mental adjustment. Then he looked over at Sulman; also sat quietly at his desk, staring at an electron microscope image of a T4 contorting under chemical alteration.
Sulman looked back. "Maybe ten," he said.
"Ten thousand," Lucas said. "Seven bunkers are on the road." He rifled through his notes. "All of them highly skilled. We have chemical engineers, bio-physicists, neuro-programmers, experts in all manner of fields." He looked up, his eyes watery. "What do you need?"
"The cure's in my DNA," she said. "The baby put it there. Now I need you to get it out."
The frail look in Lucas' eyes shivered; stroked by breezes of excitement and guilt. The cure was everything he'd worked toward for years, but if they'd had the cure just a little earlier, Jake might have been saved. So many people might have been saved.
But they hadn't had it then. Anna looked into his eyes and willed him to be strong. This was the man who'd injected himself with a dozen rounds of experimental solutions beneath the totalitarian regime of Salle Coram, where his very existence as a gay man was a crime, where he'd writhed in pain alone on a dirty mattress in the hidden bowels of Maine bunker, all in the hope of a cure. He could do it again now.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe I'm not the right person. I didn't find it when-"
"It's different now," Anna said firmly, cutting him off, "and it can only be you. There isn't time for anyone else. In a few hours I'll be gone. At the very least, the secret in my cells will be changed. I need you to take it now, and crack the code. From there you'll take it to the people. Spread the cure, Lucas. It's what you're meant to do."
Now tired tears welled in his eyes. He didn't question her. He could see her fate was far out of his hands, and perhaps he saw that his own was, too. It showed him that he wasn't weak, wasn't ready to lie down and die. It wasn't only for Farsan that he'd made the cure. It wasn't only for Jake that he'd worked so hard ever since. There were bigger things at play.
The tears retreated. He blinked, and now he was ready again. He'd find the strength because he had to. "How long do we have?"
Anna reached into the line. She felt for the angels, jumping still. Less than a day had passed since she first felt them, in the ocean off American Samoa. They would land in hours, and after that....
"Less than a day. Maybe twelve hours. Then it'll be too late."
He frowned. "Twelve hours?"
She smiled. The pieces were coming into place. She embraced her fate.
"There's going to be big changes. There'll be such work to do. But for now, make me a cure, Lucas. Do it for Jake."
His eyes hardened. He nodded. "For Jake."
17. BOATS
She let the convoy leave without her.
Nobody waved. Everyone had their role, now. After taking their samples, Lucas and Sulman didn't even see her flash away, out onto the road behind them.
It was a suburb; a road layered with sand and spidered with cracks where tough tufts of weed rose through the dirty concrete like lines of beige magma. The low buildings here were shabby, disheveled, abandoned for so long and wearing their coats of dust like old hobos, layer upon layer. She walked over to a bookshop and touched her finger to the glass, drawing a simple message in the grime of years.
Anna & Ravi 4eva
Pressing her face to the glass, she looked through the grit to an interior that had gone untouched for fourteen years. Bookshelves stood in higgledy, leaning ranks, like drunks propping each other up on the way home. The wall behind the cash desk was plastered with pictures of people; famous authors, perhaps, scrawled with Arabic signatures. She didn't recognize any of them. This was just another world she'd never known.
A frozen floater lay on the floor by the door.
Anna squatted on the hot sidewalk, peering in at its wasted peanut face, the white eyes forever locked in an open position. This too was a person. She couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, young or old. For fourteen years this soul had beaten at this door, looking for escape, and nobody had come to help.
"I'm here now," Anna whispered.
Of course she knew it was a lie, just another in a long procession she'd told to reach this point. Destruction was her specialty, not creation, and so too would this be a kind of destruction. Once upon a time she'd had the luxury of freeing the ocean and guiding them to the coast, but she'd long since grown out of that. Every person was a tool to her now, a weapon to be used.
She jumped and landed only inches away, across the glass and inside the dry heat of the bookshop, stippled with gritty shadows cast through the window, washed in the smell of slowly baking books. She laid her hand on the floater's head and listened to the glacial processes ticking away inside.
A grandmother.
She'd been waiting for her granddaughter to come pick up a new storybook, something fresh out of Ankara. All the memories were there still, though gummed together in a soggy ball. Anna knew that if she asked, this frail trace of the woman would resist. She wouldn't want to be a warrior. She wouldn't want to die for a cause she didn't understand.
So Anna didn't ask.
She filled the woman's mind with memories of her granddaughter. She was in danger. She needed to be protected. Then she flicked a new switch inside, and the woman's pale eyes sputtered to light. Her body shifted. She rose to her feet.
"I'm sorry," Anna said, then wrenched the line.
If the woman could have screamed, she would have. The transformation was sudden, irreversible and violent, as the T4 wrought destructive patterns throughout her like a key turning in a lock. Taut gray skin turned black, w
hite strips peeled away like hanging bandages, and a staticky fog fumed out as her telomeres became radioactive sand clocks ticking down to some inevitable eruption.
A leper. She flickered and fritzed like an electric spark, her mind bobbing on the raw vibration of the line.
Anna surveyed the work. It was good. It was only the beginning.
She reached out and felt for all the dull, flat pebbles of quieted floaters around her. There were hundreds of them, thousands, spread throughout Istanbul. Every office, every bedroom, every basement apartment held them. In churches and mosques alike they lay, in spaces that had served as their prisons ever since the first call went out on the line. They hadn't been able to respond then, hadn't been able to throw their bodies on the piles of the demons far to the east, hadn't been able to fulfill their purpose and had instead languished in solitary captivity.
Now they would rise.
Anna jumped to them in a blur; through dark bedrooms, echoey halls, silent conference centers carpeted with the dead, in prisons, schools, shopping malls, bars and restaurants. To each she gave a touch like she was handing down a holy blessing, and brought them back, and used their memories against them, and added them to her army.
Hundreds soon jumped at her back. Thousands.
Once in New York she'd freed the ocean locked in Yankee Stadium, and led them away to their fate. This was the same. It was worse. It was necessary.
Hours ticked by, marked by the steady stitch of angels falling toward her, metronomic meteors arcing across the sky.
One last jump, and she stood beside the Blue Mosque on the Golden Horn, in front of the pools where she and Ravi had last been together, before the world changed. The water had mostly evaporated away, but their two boats still remained, on their sides where they'd left them. Their hulls nestled close together; her racer catamaran and Ravi's souped-up Powerboat. He'd lost the race and pulled her into the water. They'd kissed, and it had just been another kiss, on just another day, except none of that was really true.
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