Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  On the far east side of the lobby is a restaurant, where dozens of scientists and engineers are having lunch, eating everything from veggie burgers to fresh, steaming lobster. The west side has a multi-floor gift shop, where a hundred and one tourists from all around the world are busy sifting through useless knickknacks—cheap gadgets and gizmos cobbled together by people in marketing, posters and banners with famous faces printed in off-color ink (though not Dynara’s), and paperweights of all shapes and sizes, including a fifty-pound replica of a first-generation hovercopter engine.

  The north end of the lobby bears a line of twelve elevators, their shafts clear glass, and they reveal clusters of employees, some in white coats, others in suits, being whisked up past the lobby ceiling, through the fake blue sky. Toward labs housing top-secret projects, meetings about budgets higher than the GDP of some districts, and, I would guess, at least ten hush-hush discussions concerning the mess on the Beltway and the damaged floodway center.

  Teeth pressed together, trying not to seethe, I storm toward the main desk, where a row of receptionists are directing various visitors to various places. I choose the one without a line, and as I close in on her, she plasters to her face that plastic smile all receptionists seem to have surgically implanted during HR training. Hands in my pockets, I stop a foot from her station and let her spill her spiel:

  “Good afternoon, sir! And welcome to Chamberlain Corporation! If you’re here for a tour, you should head to the gift shop on your left and sign in for your tour time at the kiosk next to the door. If you’re here to meet with an employee for lunch, please head to our lovely in-house restaurant there behind you, and the host will assist you in finding a table. If you’re here for a business meeting upstairs, you can sign in here, and I’ll have an escort come to guide you momentarily.” She doesn’t breathe during her entire speech, and when it’s finally over, she sucks in a short breath through her nose, then widens her smile even more.

  I let out the breath I was holding and reply, “I’m here to see Dynara Chamberlain.”

  The receptionist’s smile doesn’t falter, but her hand under the desk inches toward the silent security alarm. She probably has a dozen crazies waltz in every day demanding to see the boss—the mysterious Chamberlain heir who never shows her face in public—and more than one of them has probably threatened her. So she’s ready and waiting to have me dragged out of the building and tossed into the nearest gutter if I so much as hint I’m anything south of legit.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she says in that falsetto that always riles me up. “But Ms. Chamberlain is not available for meetings with members of the public at this time. She—”

  I tug my Ocom out of my pocket, and the woman almost presses the security button, thinking I’ve somehow snuck a weapon past Dynara’s high-end security system. But then she notices what’s on the screen of my tablet: a Level Six clearance badge. Her smile falters, and for a second, she sits frozen, unsure of what to do. This was not in her training manual, skinny redheads with high clearance barging into the building to confront the woman who sits in the throne at its peak.

  The moment of uncertainty passes, however. She smoothes out a wrinkle in her shirt, readjusts her rod-straight posture, and reapplies the smile. “Okay, sir. I see you’re a government official.” Her eyes flick, quick as a mouse, over my poorly dressed body. Skeptical. “So I’ll call up to top level administration and speak with the receptionist there to see if Ms. Chamberlain is willing to meet with you. What’s the name?”

  “Adem Adamend.”

  Her finger stops short of the work screen where her call center window is displayed. “Come again?”

  “Adem Adamend,” I say, enunciating each syllable. “It’s my real name.”

  The smile strains. “Of course, sir.” She dials up another receptionist, with whom she speaks in hushed tones for two minutes, repeating my name several times. At one point, the “top level” receptionist must leave her station to consult someone else for help, because the woman stares me down with her beady eyes, silent and judging, for forty-two of the most awkward seconds of my life. Then her call partner returns, and she finishes her conversation with a surprised gasp—though her smile doesn’t waver again. A tap of her finger, the call ends, and she places her hands, interlocked, on her desk and nods in the direction of the elevators.

  “Please wait at the leftmost elevator, sir. An escort will be with you shortly to accompany you to Ms. Chamberlain’s office.”

  “Thanks for all your help,” I reply through gritted teeth, and then I’m on my way to the elevators with a pair of eyes latched onto my spinal column, so sharp I swear I feel them poking through my skin. With a roll of my shoulders, I block out the sensation of the receptionist’s steely gaze and concentrate instead on the elevator before me, watching for the box’s descent from close to two hundred stories. It moves fast, zipping down past the border of the holographic ceiling—a chariot from heaven—and slows as it reaches the ground floor of the lobby.

  Through the transparent walls of the box, I spy a familiar figure. The elevator dings, and the doors open to reveal Rupert Murrough leaning against the back wall. The tip of his towering head almost touches the ceiling of the box, but his pose, more casual than normal, doesn’t indicate any pinch of claustrophobia. He tilts his chin up in greeting and jerks his elbow back to beckon me forward, and I scuttle into the elevator a second before the doors swish shut.

  Murrough leans forward and pushes the button for Floor 175, and the elevator blasts off toward the pinnacle of the tallest tower in all of Washington. We pass the ceiling of the lobby, and daylight breaks behind me. The back wall of the elevator shaft is as transparent as the box itself. Past a few inches of glass, frosted white by the churning snow, lies the entire city, sprawled out block by block.

  The higher we go, the more I can see, offices and apartments and museums and shopping malls; though my field of vision is limited by the storm. But I realize that, on a clear day, you must be able to see the entire north side of the city, from Pentagon Park, directly in the tower’s shadow, to the place where the Potomac bisects the New Industrial Sector, to the sprawling shopping avenues beyond.

  It’s rare for the scope of something, anything, to leave me breathless.

  Almost like—

  Murrough clears his throat, and I snap out of my reverie. He’s shifted to a corner now, a defensive position, as if he thinks my chicken legs and twig arms might pose a threat to his hands large enough to crush my skull. “You here about Valkyrie?”

  “Did Lance call you?”

  “Yup.”

  I make a noncommittal grunt. “Then you already know why I’m here. No point in asking.”

  “Thought I’d give you a chance to back out.” He glances out the window wall as the wind picks up, large, fluffy flakes blowing past. “You know better than to stoke her ire.”

  “And you—all of you—know better than to think I can move on without the answers.”

  One of his hands slips from its place beneath his elbow and rubs his scrunched-up nose. “True as that may be, kid, you’re still walking into a lion’s den. Can’t in good conscience let you go there without a fair warning. You misstep and she’ll rip you limb from limb—and no, that’s not an exaggeration. I have literally seen a limb go flying across her office. Though I will admit there were extenuating circumstances in that case.”

  My stomach folds in on itself, and I grip the railing on the elevator wall to keep steady. “Well, it’s nice to know she might go easy on me.”

  Murrough blinks at me from beneath his shaggy bangs as he decodes that comment, then chuckles. “Careful, Adamend. You keep that tongue too hot, and you’re liable to lose it one day.”

  “Can’t be worse than being shot in the dick.”

  He snorts. “Hah! Probably not.”

  I check the number on the elevator console. Eighty more floors to go.

  “Say,” I start, “I’ve been meaning to ask you this for
a while, but I was hesitant to pry…”

  He resettles with his arms locked over his chest, the back of his head pressed to the cool transparent wall. “Hm?”

  “You and Dynara…”

  A dark eyebrow arches. “Hm?”

  “Are you to, you know, a couple?”

  For twelve seconds, not a scrap of emotion crosses the face of the stoic Security Captain. Then he bursts out laughing. “By the old gods, kid. For a genius, you’re damn dense sometimes.”

  “So you are together?”

  “Shit, Adamend. Nara and I have been unioned for sixteen years come January.”

  I must stare at him like he’s grown three additional heads because his laughter gets louder and harder, rumbling in his chest. He’s still gasping for air when the elevator finally arrives at the tip-top floor of Chamberlain Corp., a floor so high in the sky that the city beneath resembles a miniature replica of the world I thought I knew. The elevator doors open, and we step out into a well-lit hall, all sleek glass walls and mahogany floors, a play on a classic-modern contrast. Chest quivering with stifled snickers, he leads me down the corridor, toward what I assume is Dynara’s office.

  “You’ve been unioned to Dynara Chamberlain for sixteen years?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you live together?”

  “Yep. At her penthouse down on McKinley.”

  “And you…ah, sleep together?”

  Murrough shoots me a squinty-eyed glare, on the verge of chastising an arrogant boy for asking too-personal questions, but then he drops it to slap my aching back and tease me further: “Often enough.”

  “And you get along?”

  “Most days.”

  “Incredible.”

  “Yeah,” he says, stopping before a set of huge wooden doors, “you’re right about that.”

  One outstretched hand hovers over a scanner pad set into the leftmost door, which reads the print of every finger before it blinks green. Once the locks disengage, he gives the door a hardy push, and it swings open to reveal an office that must encompass a third of the total area of the entire floor.

  At a desk in the center of that office, in a chair three times her size, scrolling away through sets of blueprints for what appears to be a new rocket design, all of them projected across the massive expanse of a window wall that overlooks the city she apparently rules with an iron fist—sits Dynara Chamberlain, the god of war and queen of lies.

  Some restraint breaks in my brain, and I march into the office without invitation, taking long, heavy strides until I’m two feet from her desk. She spins around in her chair, banishing the blueprints from her Oscreen wall, and greets me with a grin so drenched in haughtiness that I almost lose my cool right there and leap across the desk to deck her. “My, you look a bit put out, Adem,” says her high, sly voice. “Got a problem?”

  “Yes, with you.”

  “Oh?” A flutter of her lashes, mocking all the way. “What might that problem be?”

  “All you fucking stand for.”

  “Dear me. Is that hostility I hear in your voice?”

  “No more games!” I slam my fists on her expensive desk, knock over a cup of cooling coffee. The liquid drenches a stack of papers labeled URGENT. “No more. I refuse to dance around like a puppet on your strings, you conniving bitch! You—”

  Dynara Chamberlain slips from her chair, rounds her desk, reels her arm back, and nails me in the gut with her rock-solid fist. I go down like a small sack of bricks…and then vomit on an incredibly expensive carpet.

  When I finally stop twitching, Dynara walks past me and drops into a comfy chair in the “lounge” section of her office. “When you’ve cleaned yourself up and plugged that hole in your brain that let that little temper tantrum out, you can come sit next to me”—she gestures to a nearby chair, identical to her own—“and we can have an informative, genial conversation. Until then, get your ass out of my office and, preferably, to the nearest bathroom. And while you’re at it, call a janitor.” She gestures to the mess I’m still lying in. “The remains of your nasty hospital lunch are unsightly.”

  With a choking breath, I force myself to my feet and stagger back toward the door, where Murrough is still waiting, head in his hand, shoulders shaking in amusement. He kindly moves out of my way and points in the direction of a bathroom at the end of the hall, but before I even make it to the threshold of the office of the cruelest dictator the world has ever known, said dictator has to get one last quip in:

  “Oh, and by the way, as flattering as conniving bitch might be, I prefer the term chess master.”

  * * *

  Seated across from the god of war, wearing hand-me-downs fished out of an engineer’s locker, and still vaguely smelling of vomit and shame, I watch the winter storm recede. Three walls of Dynara’s office are glass, and as the snow thins to a flurry, a whitewashed Washington and the suburban lands beyond come into focus. Rolling hills. Rivers and streams. Apartments and houses and mini-mansions in gated communities. Sports fields and parks. Government offices and courts. And, directly east, the Smithsonian Museum circuit carved in white stone, rising up like icy fortresses on the bones of their old world predecessors.

  The whole of the Earth seen through bulletproof glass. The view from a god’s eye.

  On the other side of the small wooden table, Dynara clears her throat to get my attention. While she waited for me to stop dry heaving after my round trip from the bathroom (during which Murrough fetched me some “new,” unstained clothes), she read through today’s headlines on her Ocom. Anything remotely connected to the Lang case she copied into a message addressed to the company’s PR department for handling (with care).

  Now, her Ocom is on the table, next to a glass of red wine and a patterned porcelain platter decorated with a variety of crackers and cheese. Legs crossed, arms crossed, chin tilted up, she waits for the arrogant redhead to engage her in a conversation that could very well end with him vomiting up blood.

  She almost ruptured my spleen the first time.

  I reach into my borrowed pants pocket and withdraw my Ocom, opening the same textbook I showed Lance back at the hospital. Then I slide the tablet across the tabletop. Dynara glances at the screen, at me, at the screen, at me, and shrugs like the bomb on the page ten seconds from detonation is no more threatening to her than a wounded butterfly. So I reclaim my Ocom, shove it in my pocket, and rap my knuckles in a patterned sequence on the table’s smooth, polished edge.

  “Why did you lie to me?” I say at last. My voice, though soft, rebounds off the cage of glass around us, and I hear my question echoed in a distant corner.

  Dynara plucks her wine glass from the table and takes a sip. “I’ve lied to you about a lot of things, so you’ll have to be more specific.”

  My teeth grit together, but I hold back the automatic response, You know damn well what I mean!, and play her game. “About Valkyrie. About Brennian. About the case that made me quit my job at the IBI and join your little dream hunting troupe.”

  A wry cat’s smile crosses her lips, and she sets the glass back down. “What is it you think I lied about?”

  “Everything.” My wounded stomach rumbles, and another wave of nausea assaults me. I clench my eyes shut and breathe through my teeth until it passes. “So says that textbook I just showed you.”

  “And what does it say exactly?”

  My eyes pop open, and, to my surprise, flames don’t shoot out of my sockets at Dynara’s face. “Exactly? Word for word? It says this:

  ‘Page 24, An Introduction to Nexus Constructs – And so, in an effort to assist agents during echo field, a program was devised that allows coordinators to insert dream constructs of their own design into the echo their Nexus ports are connected to. However, given the time that it takes to manually create dream content in a virtual environment, instead of with the mind, a database of pre-programmed constructs was formed early on; this growing database allows coordinators to send helpful tools to their agent
s at a moment’s notice. Everything from weapons to shields to decoy people are available in the database now, thousands of constructs programmed by dozens of coordinators, always ready to aid field agents in need.’

  “That’s what it says, Dynara.”

  She tosses a cracker covered with a creamy cheese spread into her mouth and hums a sound I interpret as, Impressive. “Did you read the whole book on the way here?”

  “No, I read it back at the hospital. In twelve minutes and sixteen seconds.”

  “All four hundred thirty-nine pages?” Her delicate fingers grab another cracker. “Huh. Not bad.”

  “But we’re not here to discuss my reading skills. We’re here to discuss the book’s content. Specifically, Appendix A, which contains examples of the constructs in the aforementioned database.”

  “Oh, are we?” She reaches for the cheese.

  My hand shoots across the table and swipes the platter away from Dynara. I make a show of lifting it as high as I can extend my arm and then let it slip from my grasp. The platter smacks the floor, shatters into a dozen pieces, and eighty-seven crackers, twelve wedges of cheese, bounce off across the carpet and onto the hardwood floor beyond. Dynara stares at the mess, tosses her last cracker in her mouth, and murmurs, “Careful, or you might be one kidney down at the end of the day.”

  “If you want me to be more cordial, then stop fucking around.” I rip my Ocom from my pocket again and flip through the textbook’s appendix until I find the picture that set off a firestorm in my brain: an old woman in a sunshine yellow day suit. Picture zoomed in until it’s nearly too large for the frame, I slam the tablet on the wooden table before me and point at it with a furiously trembling finger. “That woman, that fake woman, was in the Club Valkyrie dream. And I’d bet the skin on my back, bruised and beaten, that every single other patron in the club during Brennian’s rampage was equally as fake. None of them were actual people. Which is why I haven’t been able to find a single obituary for any of the casualties that day.”