Maybe an hour later, just as she was finally drifting off to sleep, there was yelling down by the river. The commotion spread quickly through the camp. The army’s here to bust us up, someone yelled. Somebody’s got booze, another shouted. Wild fears and hopes erupted out of the darkness.
A group of people was walking into the camp. They carried backpacks and guns, and wore black and white camouflage outfits. They were apparently well-known, and soon the entire place came alive with cheering and yelling. They were heroes of some sort.
Someone dumped a bucket of gas on a fire, and the concrete of the overpass was seared with the light of an atomic blast. Nora squinted in the brightness, and then her eyes properly saw the newcomers. A huge, expressionless black man. An elderly Chinese woman dragging a shopping cart full of books. And about twenty kids only a few years older than her own. One of the kids was held aloft like a prize and carried around on people’s shoulders. Everyone chanted together.
We can’t take it no longer
And now now now we’re even stronger
The fires were stoked into monsters, and the yelling carried on deep into the night. The rain was driving diagonally in the glow of the headlights off in the distance.
The kid’s hair was a collection of black spikes.
Chapter Thirty: The Big House
By starting at the fountain beside the shimmering glass front doors and running as hard as he could for fifty feet, Thomas could slide across the seamless black and white tile of the echoey kitchen for as much as 3.4 seconds, his personal record, which he had timed on the multidisplay holographic webwatch he had been given when he first arrived.
The cook always yelled at Thomas whenever he slid through the kitchen, but after a few times it became obvious that the threats were idle, and that, unlike his older brother, the kitchen staff, the maids, the chauffeurs, and the guards were unable to do anything more than bellow at him. Once this force field was confirmed, he explored its limits by lobbing fruit at their heads, by placing wheeled toys under their feet, and by spiking their food with laxatives. It was fun for a bit, until the one person Thomas was still unsure of took him aside and had “a brief chat” with him about running around the house and bothering its denizens. The Slideathon, which was one of Thomas’s favorite games, would have to stop, he was told. “Let them do their work, Thomas,” Milagro said. “There are so many other rooms to play in.”
The videogame room, to which the staff continually tried to usher him, was too much. It was like having steak every night (which he did until he became quite ill), or maybe like what getting drunk was like. The banks of screens and flashing lights, the consoles and control panels, the virtual reality apparatus--they felt monstrous and reminded him of that old Asian woman’s story about losing her kids to some costly video game . . . a vague, dreamlike memory from when he and his siblings had lived in that cavern under the city.
The house had twelve bedrooms, ten bathrooms, two kitchens, a movie theater, two wine cellars, a garage with five red cars and three silver ones, and a bunch of rooms that were either offices or something between an office and a living room. The proper exploration and documentation of the house occupied him for over two days. If it hadn’t been raining outside, he estimated that the gardens, lawns, pools, and greenhouses would take another day to fully map.
With the physical limits of the house established, and after he had been told off for pulling pranks on Milagro’s powerless minions, Thomas spent many days in the library, which everyone found funny. They pointed out that everything he wanted to know could be accessed via the many webscreens littered throughout the house. The library was more ornamental than anything. Thomas enjoyed the peace of the place, but after a few days in that low-lit estuary, his mind wandered, despite his best efforts, and he started thinking about his three siblings. And his mother.
One night Thomas saw too much in the library. It was dark and the rain was throwing itself against the windows. His heart ached and his brain festered over things out of his control. He couldn’t stop thinking about them. Until something appeared in the window. He had conjured it, he decided later. He had made it appear. There was no other explanation. It was her face, there was no question about that, but he couldn’t say how long he had stared at it until it disappeared. From between the rain streaks, it looked in at him, smiled, and was gone.
That was why one had to do everything possible to avoid boredom, he then realized. To avoid things like that from happening. Thus there became two areas to stay away from: the videogame room that wrapped him up with lights, and the library that swallowed him in darkness.
But he had also seen their mother’s face somewhere else in that huge house.
After sensing that the library gave him too much emptiness with which to think about things he didn’t want to ponder, he began watching people, studying them. In particular, him. Everyone else was easy: they worked for Milagro and whatever personal lives they once possessed had been shed like old skin. If they still remembered anything of their years before, the memories were well-hidden behind their seamless smiles. But Milagro was unlike any other person Thomas had ever seen.
Milagro was kind to Thomas, and never once raised his voice like he did to his staff. But Milagro was a different person when he was alone. Or when he thought no one was watching him. It was like exploring the house, except Thomas tried to make a map of Milagro.
He would bellow orders to people over the phone, and then pick at his fingernails and stare out the window into the heart of the rain. He walked to the side of the hallways at a quick, nervous pace. He ate mostly green vegetables and fruit. The only alcohol he drank was Petrus red wine. He locked doors behind him. Sometimes he carried a gun hidden under his shirt. He never did anything for entertainment. He had four German shepherds, but these were more like canine versions of his silver-suited guards than pets. He looked at every mirror he passed by, and adjusted his hair endlessly. He cried.
Once, Thomas followed him down a hallway lined with framed photos, which was where he saw the picture of their mother. She was much younger in the photo, and looked a little like Hannah. Her hair was longer and she wasn’t wearing glasses, but it was definitely their mother. She was standing on a dock next to a huge, glassy, black river. A boat, stacked high with luggage and crates, belched smoke skyward. It was somewhere in the jungle. Milagro was there, and he was shaking her hand as she stepped onto the boat. Her other hand held on to the railing of the dock. The sun, overhead and out of view, was captured in a single, intense point of light on the fourth finger of her left hand. The wedding ring radiated a starburst of reflected sunlight that seemed to pierce the very paper the photo was printed on. Looking at the scene made Thomas feel queasy. Although he usually loved figuring things out, he couldn’t bring himself to ponder what the ring meant. From then on he avoided the hallway with the photos whenever possible.
Milagro never talked about her, and except for their conversation when he first arrived, it was like Milagro had forgotten that Thomas was the son of the woman who had stolen his most treasured possession. When Thomas had been snatched in the stairwell of the parkade, he had been thrown in the trunk of the car so quickly that his scream was caught in his throat. But something told him it would be okay. Half an hour later the trunk was opened, and he saw through the rain to where Milagro was standing at the front door of the house. The lawns and gardens stretched palatial into the mist.
“You idiots,” Milagro had snarled at the two guards as they pushed Thomas up the stairs. “Do you know what this is? You threw him in the trunk?” And then, turning to Thomas, Milagro’s horrified anger melted into a massive smile. “Welcome, welcome. Sorry about all this. We’ve met before. Back in my office this morning. It’s Thomas, right? Come on in. We need to talk. Let’s get you some dry clothes.”
And on that first day they talked about a great deal: growing up in all those apartments, what Thomas knew about their mother, the vitamins they had taken for as long as
he could remember, Milagro’s goal to find the cure for cancer. Together, he and Milagro figured out what was going on with the code.
When they were running across the parking lot after escaping from the Milagcorp building, Sean (or “that long-haired jungle freak”, as Milagro referred to him) had demanded their mother tell him which of the four kids the code was hidden in.
“She yelled something. I couldn’t tell what she said, though,” explained Thomas.
Milagro grimaced kindly and patted Thomas on the head. “That’s okay, Thomas.”
The next day, a man arrived to take a sample of Thomas’s blood, which didn’t really hurt, but the doctor’s hands shook noticeably. Afterwards, the doctor placed the vial in a locked briefcase that was handcuffed to his wrist. He was escorted by two armed guards out to an idling sliver car.
Thomas didn’t really put it all together until a few days later when Milagro had a whole bunch of rich and famous-looking people over for dinner. Thomas was driving his mind-controlled car around the ballroom, weaving it in and out of the black pants and high heels, which was difficult to do since you had to watch where you were going while steering the car with your thoughts at the same time.
“Thomas, come over here,” said Milagro. He waved Thomas over to where he was talking to a big, mustachioed man by the fireplace. “Carl, let me show you something. This is the kid I was telling you about--the Nora Graham fiasco?”
The big man bent down to look into Thomas’s eyes and made a low, whistling noise. He stank of cigars and whisky. “Incredible.”
“You are very important, Thomas,” said Milagro. He nodded with satisfaction.
The Fortress of Clouds Page 29