Yve didn’t care what Julie said. Her head hurt, her eyes hurt, and she wanted to get back inside the Chandelier. That was where she truly belonged. And, truth be told, they could get along without Julie. Which explained her response.
“You’re one to talk,” she said, “Prowling around like a restless cat.”
“We’re not going to find anyone sitting at this table.”
“So, what are you young ladies going to do?” asked Old Jules with a smile.
“That’s a good question,” Luna replied calmly.
At exactly that moment, a loud noise came from the front entrance. Not an explosion. Something had happened to Bastin’s team again.
“I don’t think the net has outlived its usefulness yet either,” Donna said. “I’d better stay, I think.”
“I’m sorry, everyone,” said Julie.
“Would it be all right if I took her place?” Old Jules asked politely.
“By all means.” Anna beamed.
“I have some experience with Eyes, you see.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. I didn’t mention it since you were all fighting so magnificently, but if you need an extra pair of hands, I can help. If you don’t mind, of course,” he added to Julie with a wink.
“Not a bit.”
“Off you go, then.”
“Thank you. I’ll remember this.”
Old Jules smiled. “You do that,” he said.
“I will, and if I ever forget it, I’ll just remember it again,” Julie said, smiling back. She spun away from the table, dress dancing like laundry in the wind. “Come on, Jules!”
“But—”
“No buts! I need you if I’m going to get anywhere!”
“Huh? Why?”
“Just come already,” Julie said, grabbing his arm. “You still have Cottontail, right?”
“Oh, uh… Sure.”
“Then let’s go!”
Julie took Jules’s hand and began to run. Jules stumbled after, half-pulled along.
“Good luck, Jules!” Old Jules called, waving as the two of them left the casino.
“Do you mind if I ask a question?” Anna said. “Is your name really ‘Jules’?”
“What do you think, if I may ask?”
“I’m not sure.” Anna giggled. “You’re a funny one.”
Old Jules turned to Yve. “All right” he said. “Julie’s gone. Does your head still hurt?”
“Yes,” replied Yve, apparently with great difficulty.
“Almost done. Let’s keep at it.”
Old Jules looked Yve square in the eye and confirmed that it was there.
The black pupil that had appeared like a tiny pinprick in Yve’s beautiful chestnut iris.
José watched Julie and Jules leave the casino hand in hand.
Yve was humiliated. Julie had ruined everything, made a fool of her. But since this also meant she would not have to waste any more time talking, she didn’t necessarily feel bad overall. Minor details, all of it.
She sat in her chair for a while as if in a daze, gazing at the Chandelier. Its flawless, brilliant light had not changed in the slightest. There was no sign whatsoever of the cankerous infestation within. Was it really a tumbledown shack surrounded by flames, this place she longed for so badly?
I don’t care, she thought, enduring the pain.
She was under no obligation to carry everything on her own back. She would do what she could, just as she had been, until the net unraveled for good. She would act as if nothing had happened and do the best she could.
Yve dived into the net. She resolved not to care anymore what the three sisters or the old man thought of her. She would feign flawlessness, just like the Chandelier, and that would be enough. She would free herself from contempt. From her fat, embarrassing body and her already-departed husband.
Touching down inside the net at her usual position, Yve breathed deeply. Here, she could see. This alone made her happy. She felt omnipotent. Here, she could do anything. Here, she was monarch.
Yve opened her eyes.
She sensed a presence.
Somebody was watching.
She looked up.
A gigantic face floated far above, gazing down from on high.
Its yellowed teeth were bared in a grin.
“Felix …”
Seeing the giant face of her husband, Yve finally realized. Here was the true center of what restrained her, the slippery, cursed funnel from which she could never escape. The face was the true king, and she was a jester at best.
The tiny newborn pupil in her chestnut iris began to throb with silt-black agony, regular as the quartz in a wristwatch.
A little earlier—
A dozen-odd men emerged from the forest into the pool of light from the entrance.
Bastin grinned despite himself. “And there we are,” he said. “They look fine to me.”
“All’s well that ends well,” Stella said with a cheerful smile of her own. “And just in time for steak.”
“Steak?”
“Yes, sir, Joël’s cooking it right now.”
“I see. That’s something to look forward to.”
Bastin turned to face Stella, then pressed the tip of the Catsilver dagger to her adorable button nose.
“Why?” she asked, through voluptuous lips that never lost their composure.
“White blood cells don’t leave the body,” he said. “Jules was very clear on that. So why are you outside the hotel? Steak sounds delicious, but not if you’re the one serving.”
Bastin buried the dagger in Stella’s face. The sharp blade entered without difficulty. A sticky internal fluid derived from the Glue oozed from the wound, spilling down Stella’s neck, over her full breasts and smooth stomach and onto the lawn. The Glue had a raw smell, like trampled summer grass.
The men gathered at the entrance rose to their feet.
“Listen up, everyone,” Bastin said. “The Stella function was hijacked. There’s an intruder in the TrapNet. Watch yourselves.”
The contents of Stella traveled down the blade toward him. Bastin released his grip on the weapon. The Catsilver dagger was sucked inside her quickly, but then the Snowscape it had been loaded with kicked in, freezing her solid. Fire from the Father of Flame came next, exploding outward to consume her.
“Looks like the net’s still operational,” Bastin said. “But we can’t rely on it anymore.”
He issued his orders. There had always been a low but nonzero chance that the TrapNet would be hacked, and Bastin had prepared for it. The Eyes that his men wore around like amulets around their necks were purposefully not connected to the net, to protect them from infection. These stand-alone Eyes were their final weapon.
“Steak might be called off, I think.”
Bastin looked behind him. The men returned.
They were oddly clustered together, moving in clumps, but apart from that there was nothing strange about the scene.
Pascal smiled and waved his hand.
That hand had become a pair of scissors.
Bastin had seen those scissors before. They were Felix’s.
He did not understand exactly what this meant, but he grasped the danger he was in immediately.
Denis, however, shouted a moment earlier: “Scatter!”
The men who had emerged from the forest rolled.
Not individually. As a single clump of men that, after one complete rotation, organized itself into a remarkably large spheroid.
Denis could not believe his eyes.
The bodies of the men were intricately intertwined, forming something like a giant tumbleweed. It rolled right into the men resting in the yard.
There was a scream as the town photographer Henri, with whom Denis had been joking m
oments earlier, was caught up by the ball of bodies. He disappeared into the mass of interlocked limbs, apparently to be disassembled—Denis caught a glimpse inside the ball of countless hands working on the photographer with scissors and swords. Several others nearby were swallowed up by and added to the ball in the same way.
The ball rolled right by Bastin, giving him a chance to observe it from close quarters as he dodged.
The men that were part of it had been connected into a single body. Their limbs had been cut off, their torsos cut open; their parts had been shuffled and put back together again however they would fit. Felix’s scissors for the cutting, and Spider-web for thread. Their lips had been stitched together with thick thread, rendering them mute. Their eyes had been sewn shut too. Some of their mouths had been forced open so that the tongues inside could be stitched to their lower jaws.
All of the men were living. They lived, but the pain they were in looked far worse than death. They were tangled together, pulled whichever way the aggregation went, unable to cry out or even open their eyes. They had been crucified on their own bodies.
As he stared, Bastin also heard an unusual noise. It was the sound of dozens of bones breaking combined with muffled groans of agony. The living bodies of the men were not made to bear the weight of the ball. Its movements plunged them into excruciating pain. Pain of unusual freshness and quality …
Something began to take form in Bastin’s head.
The dizzying swirl of human bodies overlapped in his mind with something else, something different but very similar …
A hand seized Bastin from behind.
He was hoisted into the air. The ball of bodies must have caught him. Now he was on his back, looking up at the sky. The naked bodies beneath him parted, creating an entrance, and Bastin was drawn inside. Hands reached toward him from all sides. They tore his identity boundary apart, forcing Spider-web into him like networking cable.
His thought processes shattered as excruciating agony burst like fireworks inside him.
The men caught up in the ball shared all their pain perfectly through sutures and Spider-web. Bastin was swallowed up into that pulsing agony, became one with it. The ball was a perfect whirlpool of pain, so strong that not the slightest free thought was permitted. The only thought the men could share was of the bottomless pain itself. How their bodies might be cut apart was irrelevant. Where they were made no difference to the pain.
And beneath the pain pulsed a single urge.
An urge to dilute the agony by taking in others who did not share it.
An urge like a thirst.
But just as a castaway who breaks down and drinks seawater makes things worse for himself, adding others to the ball only created more suffering.
Bastin’s amputated arms moved independently, reaching from the ball toward the men yet to be caught up in it. One hand caught Denis by the shoulder and dragged him in.
This snowballing aggregate of pain was something never before seen, and therefore the purest such aggregate in the world. Once it had absorbed all the men, it smashed into the hotel entrance.
The hotel shook with the impact. A thousand bones shattered, and a silent scream rose from the men.
Such cruelty …
José was rigid with frustration at being unable to help. Watching and feeling—was that all he could do?
The three sisters were unable to watch any longer.
Such cruelty.
None of them dared focus their senses directly on the sphere. Its pain would pollute the entire network. Even absent this threat, however, they would have kept their distance out of fear and loathing alone.
There was nothing that they could do.
They were defeated.
Old Jules was a kindly presence beside them, like a warm, gentle arm around the shoulders. There was something in that feeling that the triplets knew well.
Anna realized it first. She turned to stare at the man who called himself Jules, so surprised that she forgot to be afraid.
“Jules …? Are you …?”
Donna and Luna’s eyes snapped open too, as if infected by Anna’s words.
“So you finally noticed,” Old Jules said with a practiced wink from his sole remaining eye.
“But why?”
“I suppose it must be hard to understand. But there’s nothing more to fear. We’re almost at the end.”
The three sisters glanced at the scene at the hotel entrance.
Slamming into the door had deformed the ball of bodies to a surprising extent. It had collapsed almost completely.
“That ball came out of a sealed-off sector, made to be invisible from the net. And it’s not alone. Blind spots were made all over the net—wormholes, you call them—and they’re starting to rupture. The sickness that was brewing inside them is about to spill out. You’ll see far worse than Spiders before long.”
The mass of bodies continued to mutate as it sought purchase on the outside of the hotel. Perhaps it would be most accurate to call it a hand modeled on the vein structure of a leaf—a single palm branching into hundreds of fingers that now gripped the face of the hotel. Tearing off its nails, shedding skin, it crept across the façade like a vine the color of flesh (actually, a patchwork of different flesh tones). The faces of the men, eyes and mouths sewn shut, covered the back of the hand.
“You aren’t feeling guilty about your role as an experimental apparatus for the Spider-web, are you?” asked Old Jules.
“No, not especially,” said one of the three. It mattered little which. Essentially speaking, they had souls—identity cores—of the same quality.
The role played by the three sisters and their family in the Realm had been error recovery for identity cores. This function belonged to the family as a whole, including its aromatherapy business.
The sisters’ mother and younger brother had been an essential part of the function. Now that those two were lost, the function did not operate as it had, but the central part of it remained within the sisters. Using this functionality to test the safety of the web had been one of Jules’s brilliant ideas. The three of them would hold hands, just as they did when healing the AIs’ souls, and probe a sample of Spider-web to check if it contained any elements that were potentially harmful to the TrapNet. The identical triplets would examine the specimen from three directions, and then their results would be compared.
“Let me tell you one thing,” Old Jules said. “The testing didn’t fail. The web wasn’t the weak point in Jules’s plan. His error was underestimating the power behind the Spiders. He didn’t expect whatever it was to have direct, real-time access to Realm authoring and generation. Although I suppose if he had, there wouldn’t be any TrapNet in the first place. There’d be no point in trying to go toe-to-toe against power like that.
“By the way, it might be a good idea to cut the entrance off from the rest of the net right about now.”
The fingers of the hand-vine climbing the hotel walls divided and divided again, narrowing and lengthening as they spread. Glittering eyes from the men in the yard bulged from the fingers here and there like nuts.
“Remind you of anything?” said Old Jules, sounding bitter. “That hand’s a parody of the TrapNet itself. All right, time to prune the net. If they take control of even its edges, the backwash of pain will be incredible. And that’d be the end. We have to buy a little more time.”
“For what?”
“Three things. First, to save Yve. We can’t leave her like this.”
“If you say so.”
All at once, the vines on the outside of the hotel were cut from the net. The front yard disappeared from the sensory reactor. The area they most wanted to monitor was now out of their sight.
Donna sighed. “Things would be different if we had Driftglass,” she said.
“No point bringing that up here and no
w.”
“So, ‘Jules,’” said Anna, sarcastic emphasis on the name. “What are the other two reasons?”
“The next one is more important,” said Old Jules. He jabbed a thumb toward the roof, and said, “We have to keep this hotel together just a bit longer for Jules and Julie.”
“I suppose so. And the last reason?”
“Mmm,” Old Jules said, looking around the sensory engine. “For mischief’s sake. Let’s tweak their noses a bit.”
Mesmerized by Julie’s hair as she ran ahead of him, Jules tripped. He had caught his foot on the carpet in the guest floor corridor as it rippled in disarray. Cottontail fell from his hand and started to roll back down the slanted floor.
“Look out!”
Julie scooped Cottontail up. “This isn’t the time to zone out!” she said. The sound of plaster cracking and wooden doorframes was gradually closing in on them from behind.
Jules got to his feet and looked past Julie down the corridor. It was lined with doors on both sides leading to guest rooms. At the far end, where the noise was coming from, the lights were out. He could not see into the dark. Walls, ceiling, and floor were all severely warped. The hotel’s destruction was in process.
A powerful vibration hit them and the floor rippled woozily again. The sound from the depths came closer. The lights on the ceiling were going out, one by one, as it advanced. Whatever it was, it was destroying the corridor as it came. The floor slipped, its backward slope deepening.
“Come on.” Julie handed Cottontail to Jules.
“Why are you making me carry this?”
“Figure it out, genius,” Julie said, and set off at a run.
“What good will it do us if I’m the one carrying it?”
“I said figure it out!”
Jules flushed with embarrassment.
“The disadvantages of you holding it outweigh the benefits,” he said, following Julie up the sloping corridor. He was almost out of breath.
“Go on,” Julie said.
“Oh! I get it. Too much of the TrapNet got into you.”
The Thousand Year Beach Page 20