The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5)

by Zachary Rawlins

  “That’s right,” Katya said. “Not a chance.”

  “Well, probably not,” Emily said, grinning over Katya’s shoulder. “Not if we all help out. It’s nice to see you again, Eerie.”

  “You too, Emily,” Eerie said, hurriedly taking Alex’s arm. “I think. Thank you for helping with everything.”

  “It was my pleasure,” Emily said. “I’ve been looking after Alex while you were busy.”

  “Don’t be a bitch,” Katya warned Emily. “This isn’t about you.”

  “Oh, I agree completely!” Emily said, laughing. “It’s never been about me, as I recall. I’m perfectly willing to play my own minor part in this affair without complaint.”

  “Cut it out, Emily,” Katya snapped. “That’s enough.”

  “For someone like me, enough is never satisfactory. Not when I can have more,” Emily said. “I don’t wish to be a bother – truly, I don’t – but there is the small matter of the favor, or favors, owed to me by each of you…”

  “Emily!”

  “…well, it is true, I’m afraid,” Emily said, smiling apologetically. “Let’s not worry about that right now. Please, all of you, consider yourself my guests here at the Far Shores.”

  Katya’s eyebrows shot up.

  “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not a guest. I live here! My stuff is here, or was, before someone appropriated my room.” Katya planted herself in front of Emily. “Last I checked, the Far Shores were a part of Central, under the Administration.”

  “They certainly were the last time you checked,” Emily said, nodding. “You have been away, however, and changes have been made in your absence. You could say that the Far Shores has come under new management.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Katya said. “You are taking over the Far Shores?”

  “It’s a past-tense situation, I’m afraid,” Emily said. “I’ve already taken it over. Quite a settled affair.”

  “Is it?” Katya’s hands twitched. “Alice Gallow might have something to say about that.”

  “I’ve already had a bit of a conflict with your Auditor friends, back when they were at strength,” Emily said, gleaming with false modesty. “They were rather conclusively defeated, you see. If they should return…”

  “If?” Alex started. “Is it that bad?”

  “Bad and worse,” Emily confirmed. “If the Auditors return to the Far Shores, in their diminished numbers, they will not be able to contend with my claim of ownership.”

  “You are very confident,” Katya observed.

  “I am indeed,” Emily agreed. “As for the favors I mentioned…”

  “Tomorrow,” Katya said grimly. “Not now.”

  “Whatever do you mean, Katya dear?”

  “These two deserve a day,” Katya said, pointing at Alex and Eerie. “They’ve been through a lot. Hell, we’ve all been through a bunch of shit to see them together again. They deserve at least a day to enjoy that. They’ve earned that much.”

  “But…”

  “No,” Katya said, folding her arms. “Not until the morning. This is non-negotiable.”

  “I’m not sure why you think you are in a position to dictate anything to me, but have it your way,” Emily said, with a bit of a sigh. “A few hours won’t make a meaningful difference. May I at least make a request?”

  “No,” Katya said.

  “Of course,” Alex interjected. “What is it?”

  “I would like to cook dinner for you all, tomorrow,” Emily said. “Would you join me at seven?”

  “I’m not sure,” Eerie said. “Will I have to eat food?”

  “My capabilities in the kitchen are not limited to food,” Emily said demurely. “I’m also quite a good at making candy.”

  “Candy sounds great!” Eerie held tightly to Alex’s arm. “We will come.”

  “There you go,” Alex said, nodding reluctantly. “What she said.”

  “Very well,” Emily said, smiling. “Then you have tonight, and all day tomorrow, to do whatsoever your heart desires.”

  “I wish,” Katya said, sighing. “Them, maybe.”

  “I thought you would appreciate the time,” Emily said, looking at Katya with concern. “To come to terms with your feelings.”

  “Okay, what do you mean by that?”

  The color drained from Emily’s face.

  “I assumed that Anastasia would have contacted you by now. You haven’t heard yet?”

  “Heard what? I haven’t been in touch with Ana. None of my communication implants are working. What do I need to come to terms with?”

  “Why, your brother,” Emily said, her eyes wet. “Timor. Oh, you poor thing. Are you truly unaware?”

  Katya seized her by her arm.

  “What happened to Timor?” She demanded. “Tell me.”

  “Oh, Katya, I’m so sorry, I should have told you right away,” Emily said. “There was a bombing. Timor is dead. I’m told that he died a hero, if...oh, dear. I’m so sorry.”

  Katya took a step back.

  She turned to Alex and opened her mouth, her face white as chalk.

  Then, to his amazement and horror, Katya wailed, pure and primal grief. She dropped to the ground, doubled over as if she meant to be sick, and screamed.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Emily said, nudging Alex. She looked nearly as distressed as Katya. “Go and comfort your cousin!”

  ***

  Marcus had finished digging out one of the roses showing signs of blackspot and was carefully inspecting the root bundle for fungus or rot when an almost imperceptible change to the atmosphere gave him pause. He sighed and looked about, then set aside the exhumed rose and peeled off his gardening gloves.

  “I would have liked it to look better,” he said, surveying the acres of identical, vibrant rose bushes. “With more time, I could have made a better argument.”

  “I don’t know, old friend,” John said, putting his hand on Marcus’s shoulder. “I think it is a triumph. Your garden is magnificent.”

  Marcus looked out at the roses critically.

  “I built all of this out of a memory of a nice day in the wine country and truckloads of mulch. I don’t know,” Marcus said. “It won’t be enough, will it?”

  “It would take an ineffable expression of beauty to preclude the Assembly of the Church,” John said. “You’ve made a glorious statement, an unassailable retort to the coming ugliness. What more could anyone have asked?”

  “Poppies in the fields of Flanders,” Marcus said softly. “The leaves changing in the woods around Bergen-Belsen. Do aesthetics really matter in the face of atrocity?”

  “You brought light and life to the Outer Dark, if only for a moment, and infected a murdered reality with emotion,” John Parson said. “That should count for something, if there is any justice in the world.”

  “I guess that’s the question, then. Is there any?”

  “If we make it, then there is justice,” John said, shrugging. “Job wanted to plead his case to God, even when he knew he was doomed. Can we do any less?”

  “If you have decided to convert, you’ve picked a moment…”

  “I’ll leave matters of faith to you,” John said. “I believe in what I can see, and I’m only trying to save myself.”

  “Is that all?”

  John glanced at him.

  “Not quite,” John said. “There’s Alice. I’ll need you to look after her, if this all goes as I expect. When the time comes…”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “I said, when the times comes, you’ll find her in the White Room. Okay?”

  Marcus gave him a curious look.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not at all, but if it happens, then we have to make the best of it. Trauma is often cathartic, Marcus. We both owe her an effort, at least, don’t you think?”

  Marcus laughed.

  “You’ve changed more than anyone, John.”

  “That’s why I have to try and sto
p this. I have no interest in seeing our dreams supplanted by the whims of a lovestruck adolescent. I’ll destroy her – and myself – before I let that happen.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I, but our hands were forced. By Alice, first, and then by the Changeling. We have to face the world as it is.”

  The artificial sun overhead wavered.

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  Only the outline of the Church of Sleep manifested, but even that was an immediate and total blight on the garden. The roses withered and disappeared into rivers of black mist, Horrors drifted above them, screaming as slow lightning ravaged the sky, shattering even the memory of the sun.

  Above it all was the outline of the Church, looming like the concertina walls of a concentration camp.

  It would have been a vast underestimate to describe the Church flickering back out of existence as merciful.

  “Now that I have seen that,” John Parson said, wiping the blood from his nose, “I might have to consider converting after all.”

  Marcus picked himself up from the ground and sadly surveyed his ruined garden.

  “Well, that was the only hand I had to play,” Marcus said, touching a brown leaf that disintegrated between his fingers. “Did it work?”

  “You’ve bought us time,” John said. “That’s all I can ask.”

  ***

  The texture was like cotton candy, sticky strands that melted to a syrup in her mouth, but the flavor was off, infused with just a hint of almond bitterness, in strange contrast to the sickly-sweet expectation. She felt as if she might gag and panicked when her throat refused to respond.

  Relax, Lóa. I’m here, and there is nothing to worry about. The imperative came from on high, and she instantly obeyed. I regret that I did not arrive earlier, before the damage was done.

  Lóa’s head cleared slowly, returning her to a world that consisted almost entirely of pain, and of an even more distressing numbness in other places. Her head felt like an overinflated balloon, while her fingers and toes were cold and ached, as if she had been out in the snow, barefoot and without gloves.

  She remembered the interrogation chamber. She shuddered at the recollection of Renton Hall in her head, groping her cerebral cortex.

  With a clarity that startled her, she remembered Katya Zharova beating her to death.

  Not quite to death, the voice in her head amended. I felt your protocol blink out, and I ordered the cartel telepaths to locate you. It took longer than usual, thanks to the disturbance in the Ether, but they eventually succeeded. You were dying, with a fractured skull and bleeding in your brain.

  Lóa did not need the reminder.

  It was all perfectly clear, now.

  I joined the channel the telepaths established and immediately began remote surgery, to save your life, and your brain from further harm.

  Telekinetic brain surgery, Lóa thought. Across kilometers and dimensions.

  The kind of thing that only her uncle was capable of, the sort of miracle that he regularly performed in his understated way.

  The surgery was largely successful, Gaul Thule told her. Further procedures were required after I retrieved you. I am just completing the last of the work, reconstructing neural pathways and rerouting cognitive processes to account for the damage. It was extensive, I’m afraid, but I’ve done my best to compensate.

  Brain damage. The thought was like a static discharge through her thoughts, upending everything.

  Control yourself, Lóa, Gaul commanded. You have been very strong, but I need still greater strength from you. Our work is not yet finished, and we both have our roles to play in what is to come. You and Egill are the future of our cartel and our family. This trauma might have changed you, but I will not see you diminished. Do not be afraid.

  His thoughts came with a soothing empathic wave that brushed aside the panic in her chest. She could feel him working in her head, a tingling sensation that migrated across her brain. She felt abstractly itchy, and not at all sure where she would scratch, if she could.

  Lóa could not help but admire his talent. Who else could have performed such radical surgeries, conducting a telepathic conversation with his patient and managing their emotions all the while?

  I’m less impressed, Gaul thought. I’ve done poorly by you, and poorly by your father, and the promise I made him. First Brennan dies, and then I nearly lose you. I apologize, Lóa, sincerely, for all the harm that has come to you, and to the rest of our family, because of my carelessness and preoccupation.

  She wanted to argue, to tell him that he was wrong, that he was always and forever her favorite uncle, but she barely had the focus for the thought. Her brain vibrated with the insistence of a ringing phone on a glass table.

  It’s worse than you know, Lóa. I’ve lost Gabriela.

  She was surprised to hear it, and she was not surprised.

  Her stepsister was a distant presence in her own life, as they had been raised almost entirely apart, except for the last year or two. Lóa was fond of Gabby, but then again, she was an empath, so there was no other possible way to feel.

  They were not close.

  Gabby played the admiring younger sister in conversation, but there was a wildness in her eyes that made Lóa wary.

  She was not surprised to hear it, after all.

  Perhaps you are not, but I am. We had an argument. She wanted to be given something to do, something in the war. I did not have the time or the patience to explain to her the probability that her involvement in the conflict, on any level, would potentially lead to the ruin of our family and our cartel, and I handled it poorly.

  Lóa guessed that her Uncle had succumbed to Gabby’s wheedling, and let her have her way.

  Gabby was nothing if not persuasive.

  I agreed to let her join a routine patrol, well inside the pacified area of Central. I gave her an experienced unit and explicit orders not to do anything dangerous. We received an alarming telepathic transmission, and the unit dispatched to follow up on it found her patrol decimated. All dead, save Gabriela, who is missing.

  Lóa felt something like an electrical shock pass through her brain, and everything went white for a moment.

  I assume that she was taken prisoner by the Black Sun, but that is only an assumption. Another child that I have failed.

  Lóa wanted to object, but it was an abstract desire. Objection required more coherent thought than she could currently imagine.

  I failed Gabriela, and I failed Brennan, but I will not let you go, Lóa. I know there is no making up for mistakes, but I’ve done something by way of apology to you, for all my failings, to try and make it right.

  There was an ineffable moment, a sensation beyond pain or fear, something she had no name or description for, yet was somehow intimately familiar with. It was a little like what she had imagined losing her virginity would be like, or maybe what it was like to be born. She was pierced by a terrible light, and that light tasted of dust on a hot afternoon on an endless and featureless road in the Moroccan desert. She could not remember how to breathe or swallow.

  She was besieged by waves of memories, each flowing seamlessly into the last, without warning or sequence.

  She was ten, and she was eating cake with blue frosting at her birthday party. Her mother smiled as she took a picture, but she looked very tired. It would be only three months later that the first diagnosis would arrive…

  Lóa was seventeen, and doing a year of college at Princeton, just for the experience, since she could never attend the Academy. Her protocol is still very new, and occasionally it activates when she does not mean for it to do so, leading to the occasional awkward conversation about sprinting in the hallways…

  Her brother Brennan has built a remote-control airplane, a model of the P-47 Thunderbolt, and they are about to fly it off one of the cliffs near the Reykjavik estate, a hundred meters above the angry black sea. She does not care about airplanes, but she likes the
doubled symmetrical design of the Thunderbolt, the pleasingly bulbous lines of the fuselage. Her brother sets down the plane on a level piece of ground, and then frowns at it, and the plane leaps into the air, no controller required…

  Her father has remarried, and she is meeting her new family at a formal dinner at Cebo in central Madrid. Her new mother is a woman with swarthy skin and braided brown hair that speaks a bit too quietly to hear across the table. She is only five years older than Lóa, and the way her father is always touching her, resting a hand on her leg or on her shoulder, makes Lóa unaccountably nervous. Her new sister has been seated between Brennan and herself, and Brennan is already completely charmed by the petite, brown-eyed girl. Lóa is less enamored, but still intrigued by the idea of having a sister, the possibility of having a built-in ally and confidant. Almost on cue, Gabriela catches her looking and smiles…

  Lóa is in the interrogation room beneath the Thule estate in Central, lying on the floor with the metallic smell of blood in her nostrils. Her head feels like a broken egg, yolk leaking out onto the tile floor and dripping down the inset drain…

  There. Done, Gaul thought. You can open your eyes, if you would like.

  Lóa opened her eyes.

  The room’s lights were dimmed, but for the first few minutes she could do nothing but blink and cry.

  The room could have been any hospital room, anywhere, but it looked strange to her, like a video with bad fidelity. Everything was dim and crucial details were missing, her uncle little more than a sketch of a man bent over her bed with an uncomfortable expression.

  Lóa wiggled her fingers and toes, and they did what she wanted.

  The relief was enough to fill her eyes with water again.

  She had a headache, and a strange sensation in the back of her head, as if an ice cube were slowly melting beside her quivering grey matter.

  She thought about sitting, and her uncle hurried to assist her, propping her up with pillows.

  She brushed his arm with her fingers. Gaul looked haggard and harried, his pink eyes moist and exhausted.

  Thank you, Uncle, she thought. For saving me.

  “I’d like to say I’ve done my best, but I don’t think that I have,” Gaul said, putting his hand over hers. “I’ve done all that I could, perhaps. I can make an educated guess as to what is coming for everyone, except my family. That does not excuse my negligence, however.”