The Duality Bridge (Singularity #2) (Singularity Series)

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  I think safe means locked up, but maybe there will be a way to escape as well. I beseech her with my eyes.

  She’s not happy. “All right.”

  I try to take her hand, but she’s having none of that. We follow Marcus down a corridor to a bedroom at the back of his apartment—at least, I think it’s a bedroom. I’ve never seen an ascender one before. The walls are bare, glowing with some internal light, and there’s no furniture of any kind. Marcus passes his hand over a section of the wall by the door, and a bed melts up from the floor. It’s like the maglev seats in his ship—embedded in the floor until summoned by his transmission to float in the middle of the room.

  Kamali scowls as Marcus and I back out the door. It materializes in place. I’m sure it’s locked, but just in case it isn’t, I hope Kamali takes every opportunity she can to run. Across the hallway is a room with a holo-transmission chair: it’s similar to the one the Resistance used to broadcast their message. Maybe that operation was betrayed by the same people who gave Marcus’s enemies the location of the camp. All I know is I’m exhausted, beaten, and bruised… and that I’m going to tell Marcus whatever he wants and hope like crazy he will deliver on rescuing my mom and the others.

  Marcus gestures to the holo matrix chair. “Have a seat.”

  The last time I was in Marcus’s chair, he was trying to inject nanites in my brain. “I think I’ll stand.”

  Marcus tilts his head, regarding me. “I thought I had your cooperation in this.”

  I fold my arms and stand straighter. “You have my standing-up cooperation.” Weariness is dragging on me. “How about I tell you everything you want to know, and we skip the torture part?”

  “I’m not going to torture you, Eli.” His voice is filled with arrogance. “I have much more effective ways of getting what I want.”

  “Good to know.” I sigh. Man, I’m tired.

  “Let me be clear,” he says. “You have absolutely no worth to me as Elijah Brighton, sometime paint slinger and wistful revolutionary. On the other hand, if you are, in fact, this bridge Lenora designed you to be, then having the power of the Answer in the palm of my hand interests me very much.”

  Great. “Look, I don’t care about the politics. I don’t care who your enemies are. I just want my friends and family back safe.”

  The arrogance drops off his face, replaced by a steely-eyed impatience. “Then I suggest you convince me that my resurrected memories of our last encounter are actually correct and that you do indeed have the ability to commune with my long-dead mother.”

  Commune. So Marcus thinks I speak to the dead. Something tells me to keep as much of the process of the fugue a mystery to him as possible.

  “Right.” I take a breath and close my eyes like I’m going into a mystical communing-with-the-dead trance. But I don’t need to summon the fugue—ever since Marcus’s mother touched her finger to my forehead, every memory of hers has clung to the edges of my mind, just like my own. Lilith. I know her life as well as my own.

  I recall the memories without opening my eyes. “Your mother says she gave you a DNA sequencer for your eighth birthday, but when you stole material from your grandmother’s bathroom to sequence, she couldn’t bring herself to punish you. Later on, she was worried you wouldn’t make friends when you went to the University of Washington at age sixteen, but she waited until you brought home your first girlfriend to tell you. She didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  I open my eyes and lock gazes with Marcus. A rainbow of colors pulse across his skin, a kaleidoscope of emotion I can’t even begin to parse. “And just before she took the pill you handed her so that she could ascend, she wrote a note saying how proud she was of all you had accomplished. She wrote it in her own hand, the old-fashioned way, and tucked it away in a drawer so you would find it later. In case things didn’t go well. And they didn’t go well, did they, Marcus?”

  He moves so fast, I don’t see it coming—I’m just flying across the room, suddenly pinned against the wall with Marcus’s hand at my throat. I claw at his rock-hard ascender grip, but I can’t get any air. He could easily snap my neck, but instead, he’s glaring at me and watching me slowly asphyxiate. I kick and flail and try to speak, but I can’t make a sound. Just as the black spots swarm and threaten to pull me in, he drops me.

  I fall to the floor, gasping and choking and holding my throat, which is blossoming with pain. I stay down, wondering why I’m such an idiot. I’m tired and still fighting the last vestiges of the drugs, but I’m only going to get out of this alive—me and Kamali and my mom and everyone else—if I pull myself together.

  I slowly look up, breathing hard.

  Marcus looms over me. I think he’s still contemplating ways to make me die.

  I don’t speak.

  His glare remains fierce, but he says, “You’ve convinced me.”

  I slump back against the wall. I have to be smarter about this—but before I can figure out the smart move, Marcus hauls me up with his ascender strength. The fabric of my toga bunches in his fist, but it holds me pretty well as he slams me into the holo chair. He grips the back of it and leans over me, getting in my face. I shrink away, but there’s nowhere to go.

  “Well, now, Elijah Brighton.” Curls of angry black writhe up his neck. “Seems like you’re the real deal. Now you get to show me exactly how this parlor trick works.”

  My hands are up in surrender. “Whatever you say.”

  He eases back, his skin turning a neutral gray while he examines me. “I have no illusions about what you are. Religion is based on faith, and I’m not indulging in any of that. There’s no supernatural deity involved in this. You are nothing more than a very interesting genetic anomaly. But science is a wondrous and many-splendored thing—and it has more than enough room to hold the possibility that other planes of reality exist that we cannot directly sense with known technology. Which means that, via some wildly improbable combination of genetic construction and expression, it’s possible you can sense that other plane of reality when everyone before you has failed.”

  “I call it the fugue state.” I rub a hand across my neck, soothing the bruises that have to be showing by now. I can swallow, so there doesn’t seem to be any permanent damage. “And I guess it’s something like that. But I can’t always control it.” Like hardly ever, but I leave that unsaid.

  Marcus taps a finger to his lips while he looks me over. I’m his lab rat now, and I’m certain he’s sorting through all the experiments he wants to run on me.

  He edges forward and peers at my head like he has built-in x-ray vision and can see inside. Which… is possible. This sprouts goosebumps all over my body.

  He nods to himself. “It’s long been known that a God state—a sense of connection with the divine—can be induced in human organic brains. It’s a simple matter of brain chemistry altered in any number of ways. Your garden-variety psychotropic drugs will do it—a few of those can even be produced by the brain under the right circumstances. Some humans are capable of reaching the state through deep meditation or prayer.” He tilts his head to the side and smirks. “Others require sufficient brain damage to the right parietal lobe to bring them closer to God.”

  A small shudder passes through me. I remember Marcus’s delight in making me squirm, so I don’t give him the pleasure. “I must be brain damaged to be cooperating with you.”

  The humor fades from his face. “The question isn’t whether we can induce the state—there are much cleaner ways than tissue damage or drugs. The question is whether what occurs is anything other than a figment of your biochemical imagination. And that, my little genetic oddity, is a question we’re going to answer definitively. Together.”

  He strides over to the wall and taps on it, which summons a door to the slightly-glowing surface. It’s a small cabinet. Marcus reaches in and retrieves something. Whatever it is, it fits in his hand, and I can’t see it until he returns to my chair. He holds up the small device, focusing his gaze on it lik
e he’s transmitting instructions. It looks like a med monitor—the kind that hovers over my mom’s skin, making measurements during the course of her treatment. Marcus finishes whatever he’s doing and looks up.

  “What is that?” I ask, my heart rate kicking up a notch.

  Marcus’s smirk makes my skin crawl. “Your own personal God mode.” Then he moves fast and shoves the small device against my forehead. Only I don’t feel it touch my skin—

  —and the fugue hits me like a punch to the stomach.

  I reel from the sudden inducement, but I’m still in the chair. Marcus hovers over me, watching, only he’s not in his bodyform—his dark brown and very human eyes are keen on my face, searching for something. Then the room expands, blown apart by invisible forces, and Marcus fades away to a pinprick in the distance. I’m weightless, floating over the shining, twisted towers of New Portland. The towers are less substantial, less real, than the beings moving inside them. Now I’m the one with the x-ray vision—only I don’t see the insides of their bodyforms, but rather, their alternate selves. Their fugue-state forms, rich in a dazzling dance of colors and shapes and sizes. I watch, disinterested, floating higher, like I might drift right off the planet, when the landscape spins, and I’m sucked down into a small room. It’s cramped and dark. A woman hunches over a canvas, painting in angry, fast strokes. The room is so small, it feels like a closet, and I’m trapped in it, with her and her wild brown hair and energy of a thunderstorm. She freezes with her paint-stained hand in the air, refraining from another stab at the canvas with her brush.

  She slowly turns to face me.

  I try to back up, but I’m trapped by the darkness surrounding me.

  You’re here, she says.

  I don’t answer.

  She drops the paintbrush to the floor as she stands and stares. The dark hues of its splattered paint are lost in the murkiness that surrounds her and traps me. It has a chill that seeps into me, a familiar black ooze filling my chest. I don’t have a need to breathe in the fugue state, or I guess I never really thought about it, but now… now the darkness feels like suffocation.

  You’re the one, she says, taking a single, careful step at a time, edging closer, like she thinks I’m a wild animal that will spook and run.

  No, I say, shaking my head. I can’t back up.

  Yes, you are, she insists.

  No, I’m not, I say again, desperate to escape the hungry look in her eyes.

  Yesss! Her voice is a siren wail, a screech that stretches as she rushes at me.

  I fling my arms up to ward her off—

  My stomach convulses so hard, I pitch forward in the chair. Lightning fast, Marcus catches me from tumbling face-first into the floor. My entire body curls up, spasming. I can’t control my limbs, can’t straighten out, but somehow Marcus manages to balance me in the chair again.

  He grips the back of it, leaning in and peering at me. “Well, that was very interesting.”

  I’m still fighting to pull air into my lungs—every muscle in my body is clenched.

  “Tell me what you saw,” he demands.

  “A woman,” I gasp the words out. “Painting.”

  “A painter?” His voice is full of disgust. “I need more than that, Eli. I need answers.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” I don’t know what Marcus hopes to get out of this.

  “Then make it work that way.” He pushes away from me.

  “What do you want?” I ask, angry. My body shakes uncontrollably.

  “I want proof!” he roars. He swoops back to me, getting in my face again, and I can see it in his eyes—he wants to kill me. Badly. I have to stop pushing him because he’s way too close to snuffing me out. And whatever reason he has for not killing me at this exact moment… it’s barely enough to hold him back.

  His murderous look stays trained on me. “I want… I want…” But he stops and leans back, shaking his head. “No… not yet.” He turns away. I blink, confused and too weary to sort it out. A moment later, Marcus strides back to me, the crazy-mad look replaced by something much more cunning. “You must understand, Eli. This will change everything. With this power you have, I will change everything. And you will be a key part of that, a critical piece. It will be a new age, and the two of us will be at the center of it. Do you understand?”

  “No,” I say, because I really don’t. My arms are still shaking from the forced fugue, but I manage to cross them to hold them still.

  “You don’t have to, not at first.” His voice cools, and I think he’s fully come back from whatever brink he was hanging over. “You only have to do what I say. In time, you will understand. Back when you were just the embodiment of a whisper—an idea of a savior floating through Orion and stirring up trouble—then you were merely something dangerous. Something that was causing an annoying amount of disruption in my carefully laid plans. But now… now everything that’s ever been out of reach will be at my fingertips. Our fingertips, Eli. In your human terms, it’s quite simply power. Wealth. Eternal life. Everything you could want and things you can’t possibly imagine—that’s what this will be. For you as well as for me. But for now, you need to trust me that understanding how this works is the only thing that matters.”

  “All right,” I say because it seems more sensible to say that than you’re an insane power-mongering murderer. “But I want my family and friends safe. If I get you the proof you want, or whatever it is you’re doing here, then you’ll break them free of whoever is holding them. Right?”

  He leans back and dismisses my words with a wave. “That’s easily done. But first, I need something concrete.” He frowns, a million cycles of thought obviously ticking through his brain. He’s ignoring me.

  I wait. Eventually, my limbs uncramp enough to allow me to lean back in the chair.

  “Can you contact someone who has only recently died?” he asks, as if I know how any of this works.

  “Sure. Maybe. It’s hard for me to control.” The word contact reminds me that he thinks I’m communing with the dead, which obviously isn’t true. Or at least, it isn’t limited to that. Not least because I can see live people, only altered, in their fugue-state selves… including him. Was that Marcus’s soul I saw? I don’t know. All I know is I need to give him exactly what he wants… and no more.

  He stares at the monitor patch again, transmitting something. I’m not entirely sure he’s heard me until he faces me, holding it in the palm of his hand.

  “I want you to contact Thompson,” he says.

  I lean back in the chair, my face twisting up. “Thompson?”

  “Yes. The painter who was murdered to pave your way to the gold medal.” Then he moves faster than I can see and smacks the monitor on my forehead. Before my head can hit the back of the chair—

  —I’m in the fugue. It hits me even harder than before, and I’m sailing backward through a murky vagueness that doesn’t feel anchored to anything. There’s no time or space here, just… waiting. A heavy sense of possibility fills me, like the dark gray nothingness around me isn’t nothing… it’s just waiting to be called into something. Waiting for someone to believe in it, to give it form and wonder, like a lump of clay or sealed tube of paint just waiting to be dipped into and shaped into reality. I tip my head back. The grayness stretches endlessly in every direction. I could lose myself here. Forever undefined. An eternity of not-being.

  But there’s something I’m supposed to do.

  Thompson.

  The gray turns to mist, then vapor, then clears. Thompson’s back is turned to me, like the woman in the fugue before, but he’s not painting. I’m drawn to him like I’m floating on a cloud that dangles my feet above the endless gray. When I reach him, suddenly we’re both standing in an empty room.

  Thompson, I say.

  He turns, looking surprised and confused. I’m lost, he says.

  This hurts me. Like a physical pain, almost as sharp as if someone has plunged a dagger into my chest. It’s so real, I a
ctually look down, but there’s nothing there.

  I didn’t want you to die, I say. This eases the pain a little.

  He nods, but in an absent way, because he’s looking all around the room. There are no doors, no windows, just a gray box formed out of the void.

  I don’t know what to do, he says, frowning.

  You should paint. The words spill from my mouth and swirl to form a canvas alive with color. He’s surprised by it, but he reaches out to move the not-real paint with his hands. Like finger-painting in virtual, only this isn’t a sim. And he’s not happy.

  He pulls his hand back, looking at the colors bleeding down it with disgust.

  I never wanted to paint, he says.

  This strikes me as utterly strange. Thompson was a painter all his life. An Olympic painter. Why wouldn’t he want to do the one thing he was born to do? Then it becomes clear to me, like a web drawn tight around him, connecting him to parents and teachers and patrons… everyone who had a vested interest in Thompson taking the gold.

  But it was never him. Never his choice.

  And he died for it.

  The pain is back in my chest. Who killed you?

  He looks up. You did.

  I shake my head. The pain grows sharper. But I didn’t kill Thompson, I know this. Who poisoned you?

  He steps toward me, anger gathering on his face. You did.

  I shake my head, back and forth, bigger and bigger motions.

  He’s still coming at me.

  No! My shout is a force field, stopping him from reaching me, then flinging him back across the room. He dissipates into mist.

  “Eli!” Marcus’s face is in mine, panicked.

  My body convulses, a ghost of pain in my chest like a hot knife was just yanked out. I slip out of the chair and smack on the floor. The monitor Marcus used to induce the fugue lies next to my face. I’m shaking so badly I can barely see it, but I know what that means: Marcus wasn’t using it. He needed it to induce the fugue, but even after it was turned off, I was still in the gray box with Thompson.