Mike shrugged, trying to look casual. “I can do a dozen, maybe two if they’re all doing the same thing.”
She frowned. “I was hoping for more, but that’s a start. I’m thinking it’s time for us to assemble our own army. I’m sick of this place. I feel like a prisoner in here.” She seemed to ponder something for a moment, then raised her eyes to his face. “Let me know when you can control fifty of them.”
Mike nodded. “Sure thing. Matter of fact, I’ll go down and work with the bots right now.”
Sara smiled and laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’re a good man, Micky.”
No, Mike thought, as he made his way down to the bot bays. No, I am not a good man. But I’m working on it.
In the end, Chuck didn’t know what to tell his team first: that Matt had been killed by the Alphas (presumably) or that it seemed Alexis would face no repercussions for nearly killing Joey Blossom. At least, none beyond being excluded from further work with the Zetas.
The team made his decision for him. When he stepped into the lab after his interview (interrogation) with Lorstad, Eugene took one look at him, then led the entire team into Chuck’s office. Chuck came through and closed the tall glass door. He started to speak, but Lanfen forestalled him by raising her hand.
“First,” she said, “I want you to know that there was a listening device in here an hour ago. I moved it to a different location. It’s in the reconnaissance bay on the other side of the main hall. I have no idea how long it will take them to figure it out because I don’t know how closely they monitor the feeds. We have several ‘safe’ areas we can use without fear of surveillance or having to take out one of their devices. We can still use the exercise room and some areas in the house.”
“O-Okay,” Chuck said, looking around nervously. “What’s second?”
“Second,” said Mini, “we saw Alexis walking around out there like nothing had happened. Isn’t there . . . I mean, won’t she face any kind of consequences for what she did to Joey?”
Chuck leaned his back against the door. “As Kristian pointed out, it was an accident. She didn’t mean to hurt Joey. Kristian’s pulled her from the program, though. She’s not to work with us at all anymore. In fact, I suspect he just told her to stay away from us.”
Mini’s arms, which had been crossed tightly over her breasts, flew out in a gesture of outrage. “Well, I’m glad to hear that, at least. Come on, though, Chuck. It may have been an accident, but it was an accident she didn’t seem to regret at all. She didn’t care about Joey. Doesn’t that warrant some response?”
“Yes,” Chuck said, nodding. “And I agree with you on all of that. But it’s not a response that any of us have the authority to give.”
“I’m sure Lorstad does, though,” Euge piped in. “Critically injuring a staff member doesn’t warrant a transfer or at the very least a hiatus—something punitive?”
“I’m not a part of the Learned’s leadership and neither are you. Look, Euge, like I said, I agree with all of you on this, I just don’t see what we can do.” Chuck kept a genteel tone despite the frustration he felt.
“Fish in a tank,” said Eugene. “We’re fish in a tank.” He leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms.
Chuck spoke amid a breathy exhale: “I’m sorry, everyone. But at this moment it’s between her and her maker. We should just avoid her.”
“Like the plague,” said Euge, and Dice muttered, “No problem there.”
Chuck came farther into the room, framing what he’d say next carefully. “Everyone take a seat. I have a couple of things I need to share with you. One is that Lorstad is very interested in my part in Joey’s recovery.”
“So are we,” said Dice. “What the hell did you do?”
Chuck met Lanfen’s gaze briefly. “I’ve been practicing my zeta abilities with medical simulations—going into the sim software and manipulating it from within. When Joey went down, I reflexively responded as if I were inside a simulation.” He looked around at his team’s faces. Lanfen already understood what he’d done; he watched as, one after another, the rest of the team got it.
“Oh. My. God,” breathed Euge. “You mean you were inside Joey’s—in his head?”
“I inhabited Joey approximately the way that Lanfen inhabits a robot. A human brain and body is, after all, a biomechanism.” He let that sink in for a moment, then added, “That is not the way I explained it to Lorstad, though. He grasped for that interpretation, and I did my best to put him off it—told him I was just manipulating Joey’s wounds from the outside. Don’t know how successful I was. I also went light on Lanfen’s part in rescuing me. Bluntly put, I got lost in there. I couldn’t get out. She had to come in and pull me out. No one outside this group needs to know that, except to know that it’s incredibly dangerous, and we should not be experimenting with inhabiting other humans until we can do so safely. Is that understood?” He looked around the room and watched as everyone absorbed the information.
Finally, Dice spoke for the group and said, “Understood. What else?”
Moment of truth. “Matt . . .” Chuck took a deep breath. “Matt is dead.”
There was silence except for Dice’s whispered “No.”
At length, Eugene asked, “What happened?”
“I don’t know. Lorstad said he was apparently electrocuted while inside the mountain with the Alphas. A bot brought his body out.”
“They killed him?” asked Dice. He looked like death—his skin gray, his mouth a grim line bracketed with white stress lines. It seemed like so long ago, but it hit Chuck that Dice had known Matt the longest—they had been colleagues at MIT before Matt had pulled him into FK. Chuck’s heart reached out to the brilliant engineer even as Dice said, “Sara and the guys killed him?”
“I honestly don’t know. Maybe it was an accident. Here’s what I do know.” He glanced out through the glass walls of their cage. “We need to find a way out of this mountain. We need to get back east and see if we can reach the Alphas and . . . I don’t know . . . talk to them, figure out what’s going on with them. Stop them if we have to.”
“How?” asked Mini. “How do we stop them?”
Chuck shook his head. “I don’t know, Min. I guess that’s something we’ll have to figure out, too.”
Chapter 12
Requiem
Dice was raw inside. Matt Streegman had never been an easy person to like. Respect, admire, rally around, work for, yes. Befriend—that was harder. But Dice had done it. He had gone from being Matt’s student to being his postgrad assistant to being his colleague and his friend. That friendship had been challenged by Matt’s choices, and there had been times Dice felt he was “cheating” on Matt with Chuck, intellectually speaking, but he’d known Matt for over a decade and losing him was one of the hardest things Dice had ever faced.
He lay on his bed staring at the ceiling, missing Brenda desperately. For a moment, he felt horribly alone and lost and found himself fighting self-pity. The moment was broken by a light tap on his bedroom door. It would be Lanfen, making her rounds. He sat up.
“Hey,” he said.
She opened the door and poked her head around it. “You okay, Dice?”
“No. Not really. I’m . . . I miss Brenda and . . .”
“I know. We’re all a bit shell-shocked by losing Matt. But the rest of us are still here. Don’t forget that, okay?”
He smiled wanly. “You read my thoughts.”
“I’ll neither confirm nor deny. You’re clear, by the way.” She made a circular gesture with one index finger at the vaulted ceiling.
He glanced up. “Oh. Oh, yeah. Thanks. Not that it matters. I doubt they can read my handwriting anyway.”
“Your handwriting?”
“I keep a handwritten journal. In kanji and Russian.” He shrugged.
“Funny, I wouldn’t have taken you for the handwriting type.”
He smiled again. “I’m just full of surprises, I guess.”
La
nfen sobered. “If you’ve got any more, keep them under your hat. We need every advantage we can get.”
Dice nodded and wished Lanfen a good night. Then he reached into the top drawer of the bedside table, took out his journal, and opened it. The pages were empty. He gazed at it for a moment through hooded eyes and words faded into view on the pages—kanji characters interspersed with lines of Cyrillic script. Dice turned to the first still-empty page and began to make more characters appear.
Lanfen continued her rounds, worrying a bit over Dice. Matt’s death had hit him hardest, and she sensed he felt lost. Still, he seemed to brighten a bit when she stopped by, and that was at least encouraging. Mini and Eugene were out on the deck enjoying the twilight desert air, so she swept their rooms next, then ended her rounds at Chuck’s door. He was sitting cross-legged in the padded window seat that overlooked the rocky northern escarpment.
“Just came to say good night,” she told him. She gestured at the room, then did an exaggerated parody of a series of kung fu moves that took out the two listening devices that had been inserted during the day.
“Don’t,” Chuck said, stopping her when she’d turned to leave. “Don’t say good night, I mean. Can we . . . talk?”
No hesitation. She closed the door and went to sit across from him on the window seat, their knees touching. They sat in silence for a time, then Chuck asked, “How can he just be dead? How can Matt Streegman just . . . end?”
“Death and birth are two sides of the same coin. You know that. Imagine what it feels like to be a twin whose brother has just disappeared from the womb. You’d think his life had ended, but you’d be wrong. His life in the womb ended, that’s all.”
Chuck smiled. “You’re right. And I’ve used that metaphor before, myself, but when it happens—suddenly—to someone you know, someone you’ve worked with . . .”
He looked out at the desert. Lanfen followed his gaze. The sands had gone silver in the moonlight and shadows stretched out from every rock, bush, and twisted tree as if reaching for freedom.
“Matt and I weren’t friends,” he said. “Not the way you and I are friends. I learned the hard way not to trust him and apparently he didn’t trust me from the beginning—or, at least, he didn’t respect me. So, he manipulated me. He manipulated all of us. But in the end I think he was trying to fix things. He failed, though, Lanfen. He failed. Which means that we can’t.”
He looked up at her then, with his eyes open to the soul. She read the anguish and the uncertainty and, beneath that, the raw determination. She leaned forward and framed his face with her hands, astounded by how much she had come to care for him.
No—that wasn’t right.
How much she’d come to love him.
“Dr. Brenton, I do believe you intend to save the world.” She smiled. “Can I help?”
“Save the world? Lanfen, I’m not even sure I can save us, or the Alphas. This may already have gone too far.”
“I refuse to believe that. You’ll figure it out. You’re good at figuring things out. Solving problems. Making things work. It’s one of the reasons I love you, I think.” He was startled. She used the moment of surprise to lean in and kiss him. It was a deep, no-doubts-left kiss and she gave herself to it completely. He hesitated for the slightest of seconds, but then he, too, fell into the kiss. He raised his hands to cover hers and responded with a flood of passion that washed away any vestige of the quietly controlled scientist. Lanfen well understood what underlay that passion: sorrow, frustration, fear, even anger. That was all right, she told herself. If he needed comfort, she wanted to be the source of that comfort. If he was embarrassed and regretful in the light of day, so be it.
But, somehow, she knew he wouldn’t be.
He pulled out of the kiss but held her hands and her gaze. “I think I’ve loved you since the first time you walked into the lab,” he murmured. “No, I know I have. I just didn’t think . . .” He hesitated and gave her a quizzical look. “Are you sure?”
She drew him back into another kiss and showed him just how sure she was.
Out on the deck, Eugene and Mini stood side by side at the railing, stargazing. They leaned against each other, looking at the same sky, but each was wrapped in his or her own thoughts. Eugene had no way to know what Mini was thinking. She had never liked Matt and certainly hadn’t trusted him, but having someone you know murdered (also by someone you know) would upset even a mind as mundane as Eugene Pozniaki’s. Mini, who was all heart, was unquestionably affected.
“You know the saddest thing?” Mini asked as if they’d been engaged in conversation instead of marking twenty minutes of almost complete silence.
“Mmm. What?”
“Matt was alone in the world. His wife was dead, his family estranged. I wonder if there was even anyone but us to worry about him. The Benefactors had to work hard to cover our tracks. I’m not sure Matt had any tracks for them to cover. He didn’t even have a dog or a cat or a goldfish. We didn’t even know where he was. He was a ghost before he even died.”
Eugene shivered at the thought, but he knew what she meant.
She half-turned to face him. “Eugene, if we get separated for some reason, I want you to know I’m okay. I want you to be able to sense me the way I can sense you.”
He looked down at her. “You can sense me? How does that work?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know how it works. It just does. But it bothers me that you can’t sense me.”
Those last four words made Eugene unutterably sad. “I wish I could. I love you, Mini. You know that.”
“Of course I know that. And you know I love you. So, I have a gift for you.” She lifted her hands, cupped as if she were holding something between them. “Put out your hands.”
Eugene hesitated.
“Your hands,” she said firmly.
He raised his hands in an open cup so she could deposit her gift in them. He realized that there was light leaking from between her fingers—a fey golden light that pulsed in irregular beats. With her hands lifted above his, she opened them to reveal a perfect, miniature version of herself, but with tiny, translucent wings shot through with veins of gold. She let the little creature drop lightly into his hands, and he was surprised she had weight, substance. She tickled.
Euge knew his eyes must be as big as saucers. “Is that . . . a fairy? You just made me a fairy?”
“It’s a mini me,” she said, laughing. “A mini Mini. She’ll be with you anytime you want her and she’ll be your window to my heart and soul.” She laid her hands over her heart. “If we’re apart, you can look at her and see what I’m feeling. And I think she’ll let me be able to feel you more clearly even if we’re not together.”
Eugene looked up over the little fairy’s golden head. She was gazing up at him just the way Mini was. “Mini, I want us to always be together. I mean always. I mean if we ever get out of this luxury prison, I want to marry you. Then you’ll never get rid of me.”
“Our souls are already married, Eugene. The first time we made love was our wedding night.”
Eugene flushed from head to toe with a hot wave of desire. “Um, about the mini you. Will she still be hanging around when we . . . you know?”
Mini laughed. He loved her laugh. It was like music and birdsong and water sparkling over rocks all at once.
“Goose. You can make her come and go with a thought. Try it.”
He looked down into his hands and said, “It’d be cool if you could be invisible.” The fairy Mini vanished with a tiny musical ping.
“Where’d she go?”
“Back into the world between your ears.”
“Why’d she make that sound?”
Mini shrugged and slid her arms around his waist, pulling her body against his in a way that made his brain tilt and his limbic system crash. “I just thought it would be a nice touch.”
Eugene grinned. “My wife, the artist,” he said and lowered his head to kiss her.
Amazing.
Kristian watched the video for the third time and was still in awe of Minerva Mause’s talent. She had somehow taught herself to create, not just a projection that she could manipulate, but a form of semi-independent life—a self-sustaining elemental that would mirror her moods and that could vanish, then retake the form she had given it . . . at the behest of another.
What else might she be able to do with opportunity and the right motivation?
Clearly someone deeply trained via immersion could not easily learn to harness their zeta powers, but what might an established Zeta do if introduced to immersion entrainment? The physiological and neurological changes that had already taken place within Minerva excited him. He needed only to convince her that immersion could open doorways before her that were unimaginable to her now.
He shook his head. Fairies. Minerva Mause had no idea of her true potential. He was determined to find a way to open her eyes to it.
He powered off the monitor, preferring a black screen to their increasing intimacy. He was angered with himself for having to soothe burgeoning feelings that should not exist.
Chapter 13
Councils of War
In the days since Kabul, the Zetas staged equally impressive displays in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, in Ukraine, and among the drug cartels in Ciudad Juárez (for all the latter’s melting into the trees, they couldn’t help themselves, and between the continued violence and drugs, the Zetas were compelled to take action). Every demonstration of their abilities seemed to make Roman Bluth and his cohorts dig their heels in deeper and deeper. This was beyond Margaret Ellis’s comprehension. What could the senator hope to accomplish given the circumstances? Did he really expect that he’d be able to make political hay out of the situation with the Zetas, win a presidential election, and then magically control them?
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