by Jesse Karp
The other boy had a tight dark blond cap of slicked-back hair. Dark blue ice-chip eyes and razor-blade lines—high cheekbones, aquiline nose, sharp chin—made his young face dangerous. Beneath lacquered skin, his slim body was ridged with tight cords of muscle.
Who is that? Rose asked.
Nikolai Brath, Remak said. He was, if Rose sensed properly, disturbed to be seeing this. He was Mal’s best friend.
Mal has never mentioned him, she said.
I’m not surprised, Remak said, his voice haunted.
Each of the six in the clearing was disclosing whether or not they had told anyone where they were.
“No,” said a slim, hard-looking girl with jittery eyes. “I didn’t have a chance.”
Brath, his eyes suddenly dull with lack of interest, pulled a gun from behind his back and shot the girl in the head.
“Jesus!” someone shouted.
“Oh my God!” another voice cried.
Mal hadn’t been hit by the bullet, but his head split apart. What was Brath doing? Brath turned the automatic on another girl. Mal wanted to move, needed to move, to protect her, but his arms and legs were actually paralyzed from the shock.
Betrayal. Rose felt it as sharply as Mal had. His life was filled with it.
And this is the one that hurt him the most, I think, Remak said, as the scene around them shifted again . . .
Mal was in an office, walls, ceiling, desk, chair, devoid of character; simply shapes. In one wall was an elevator, and the door opened to a bottomless shaft, above which two figures were suspended in the air, unconscious. Rose recognized one as Tommy, though he was full-grown now and no longer the boy she had last seen. The other was a pretty girl with short blond hair; Tommy’s girlfriend Annie, Rose assumed.
Between Mal and the suspended figures was a man in a suit, the one from Mal’s nightmare.
“So, here is what you wanted,” said Man in Suit. “Your brother. I am going to let him die shortly, as you can see. But he can be saved. They both can. All you have to do is cross the threshold, push them to the safety of the other side. They will be free, and they will, if their hearts are resilient, recover and perhaps even thrive. Go. Help them.”
Mal stared at Man in Suit without moving.
“Yes. You will fall and die,” Man in Suit said. “But they will live. Not only that, but you will prove by giving up your life that hope has a chance, that human existence can come to more than . . .” Man in Suit looked around him at the industrial emptiness.
Mal could see Tommy from here, hanging, hair a little too long, face trapped in a rigor of tension. And Mal could also see Tommy through a tunnel of years: a boy he used to box with around the living room; who used to steal his little brother’s boxing gloves and give them back with a punch in the arm; with whom Mal used to hide, pressed close together beneath the covers as the sound of their mother’s voice tearing into their father penetrated the walls. But when Mal left, he had never been able to find the strength to take his brother’s hand and pull him out, too. Just like now.
“But sacrifice is not a fight, is it?” Man in Suit asked him. “No. It is a failure to fight. Truly, the ultimate surrender: death,” Man in Suit said. “That is why you will not help him. You are fighting what everybody is fighting in the end. Your father fought it, and lost. And if you go in there, you lose the fight.”
Man in Suit waited. The door to Tommy and Annie remained opened. Mal didn’t move.
“I’m sorry, Tommy.” They were the only pitiful words he could find. “I’m sorry.”
He betrayed Tommy, Rose said, yearning for eyes from which to cry.
He believes he did, in any case, Remak said. The pain of it nearly ruined him.
Rose could feel it, the only pain so horrible, it had robbed Mal of his will to fight.
But by reaching the depths of Mal’s pain, Remak said, we can now find his reason to fight.
Me, Rose said, where am I? Where are his memories of me?
Rose, Mal is running out of time. We have to find—
I can give him hope! Her emotion was so powerful, she felt the electrical charge of herself light up for an intense instant. I can.
All right, Rose. Give him hope. Find yourself.
She sizzled along the pathways of his brain, moving farther into Mal . . .
Mal sat in Rose’s apartment, bruised, aching from a fight. A roll of cash the fight had produced lay on the table near his blood-encrusted knuckles. In front of him, Rose herself sat up in the bed, shook sleep from her eyes. Watching the scene, Rose remembered the moment herself, waking up and finding Mal sitting in the room, waiting for her. The Rose in the memory studied Mal’s face, looked past the bruises, tried out a tentative smile.
Only when Mal snapped to, saw the smile, did she realize that Mal had not really been looking at her at all.
Rose pulled away from that memory, found another . . .
Mal, sitting in the diner where she worked. She sat across from him, on her break. She spoke quietly to him about something she had seen in a park, that maybe they could go back to and see again. He listened to her, but his eyes were focused elsewhere, over her shoulder.
Rose turned away, moved to the next memory . . .
Late at night, in her apartment. His shirt was off, muscles etched in shadows. She came over to him, touched his bare shoulder. Without looking at her, he gently moved her hand away.
Rose felt helpless. Was this the life they had shared? No more than this? She searched for another . . .
Mal, standing in the forgotten park, no more than a day ago.
“What did Remak mean when he said you had to do something for him?” the memory Rose asked him. “What is he holding over you?”
Her eyes were pleading, and all Mal could do was turn away.
Rose yanked back from the memory.
He’s always looking away, she said. What is he looking for?
His hope, Remak said. I’m sorry, Rose. He’s looking for his hope.
What is it? Her voice was empty. She knew the answer already.
Here, Remak said, bringing her along once again toward a round face, vivid in Mal’s mind. The face was framed by black hair tied in a ponytail, a Mets cap pulled low. Bright blue eyes shone out, lighting something up in Mal that Rose had never seen or felt. This was not a face Rose had ever encountered, but she knew whom it belonged to.
Like grabbing a handful of sunlight, the world was suddenly aglow with memories of Laura . . .
Laura, unconscious on the dry, sharp grass of the forgotten forest where Mal had first seen her. Mal’s heart beat faster in his chest.
Laura, her face glistening with sweat, tight with effort as she gripped the hard surface of a rock mountain, reached one hand out for help. Mal reached back, unable to stop looking at her luminous blue eyes.
Laura, in bed, her head resting on his chest, the skin of her cheek warm as she listened to Mal’s heart. Mal held his hands away from her, afraid that if he touched her, she would disappear, as all the good things, all the things worth holding on to, always had.
Laura, screaming at him with tears in her eyes, screaming at him to get up, to keep going, because she made a choice, a choice to be with him forever. Mal’s mind saw her through a haze of despair, which slowly cleared as she stopped screaming and looked deeply into him and gently kissed his lips.
Laura, smiling sleepily back at a mirror, her black hair loose over her bare shoulders. Something deep and utterly unfamiliar consumed Mal: happiness.
Laura, running through a park, glancing over her shoulder, her eyes frantic with worry. Mal yelled to her, Faster, Laura, run faster.
Laura, looking up from breakfast, staring for a moment, her face breaking into laughter, a laughter that gathered so forcefully, it made her gasp for air as her face turned red. Mal, feeling the happiness again, becoming accustomed to it. But even then, small veins of fear and doubt running through it. How long could the happiness last, after all?
La
ura, throwing a highly competent right cross, connecting with the face of a man in a gray suit and sending him stumbling backwards. Mal ran to her, grabbed her, tried to pull her to safety, though she struggled, kicked at the air as he lifted her up and hauled her away.
Laura, in pictures and home movies projected on an old, cracking wall, eating ice cream, dancing, swimming, looking up angrily from homework, the phantoms of her mother and father always there, offering support, comfort, acceptance. Mal turned to look at the real Laura, sitting beside him, to find her face awash in tears.
Rose was overcome with Mal’s feelings, even as her own hatred of Laura—for the idea of what Laura was—redoubled in her.
We’re done here, Remak said. Mal’s mind is awake, alive. All I need to do is heal his body. His tone did not echo the personal implications. Rose was heedless of it, anyway.
You can alter memories, like with Silven and other people you inhabited, she said. You said you could do that.
Yes, if I have to, but it’s not necessary. Look around you, Rose. Mal is fighting again.
There was no denying that. The memory of Laura blazed like it was made of the sun itself. Rose could feel the stirring of Mal’s consciousness around her.
Take Laura away, Rose said. Put me in her place.
Rose, do you know what you’re asking? I might as well erase the memories of his mother, of how he failed Tommy. Those things are who Mal is, just as surely as the scars on his face.
No, you’ve got to, Remak, she said, her voice echoing harshly in the vaulted recesses of Mal’s mind. The emotions, the memories will still be there. It will just be me instead of her. And Mal—
I’m going to heal Mal now, Remak said. He’s going to live.
Fighting Remak was not in her. But here was an opportunity to change things, to become part of Mal, share his strength. She could not fight Remak, but she didn’t need him, either. The neural electricity of Rose became a knife and she plunged downward, straight toward Laura.
But she barely moved at all. Remak’s dominant will held her fast.
Time for you to go, he said.
No! She used all the force of her mind to throw the word at him. But the sense of the word shifted, bent, until it wasn’t a sense anymore but an actual sound.
“No!” Rose was screaming as her eyes came open in the room. As consciousness returned to her own body, she lurched with a sense of vertigo, as if she had been sleeping on a tumbling wave and suddenly come awake on a still bed. Next to her, the body Remak had been in was still and silent on the floor. Across from her, Mal’s bloodied body lay on the bed. Standing over them were two large figures.
“Good timing, Rose,” Castillo said, towering above her, huddled on the floor. “This way, I don’t have to carry you.”
Rose opened her mouth to scream again, but Castillo clamped his massive hand over her mouth even as his other wrapped around her arm and pulled her to her feet.
“You’ve been a hell of a lot of trouble,” he said. “Good thing Mal’s locator came back up, because if I had to go through all the trouble of tracking you two down again—”
“Enough,” Roarke said, hoisting Mal from the bed in preparation to move him. “The Old Man is waiting.”
The Librarian
ALMOST TWO YEARS AGO, a shot rang through the upper floors of the penthouse triplex, enough to send micro-ripples over the surface of the pool that Aaron Argaven had been sitting near. He knew what the sound was, and when he made it to the closed door of his father’s office, he couldn’t bring himself to open it. Was he scared? Aaron had been living with fear for some time now. It had been born when Intellitech began to crumble, and it became the constant, jittery atmosphere in which he lived every day as his father went gibbering down the halls of their home. Everything was to blame: employees, stockholders, board members, even “the Old Man.” That name had been invoked in Aaron’s presence before, a bogeyman for grownups, an urban ghost with an ethereal finger in everything, never mentioned in full seriousness, but never really dismissed either.
There would be no more of that. The shot was not the ignition of fear, but the end of it. The fear was gone now, incinerated by Aaron’s sparking, super-heated anger at his father. The death of this fear had left behind a valuable legacy as well: a mission and the knowledge that since his father was the only person smarter and more powerful than he, the weight of that power had fallen to Aaron now that his father was gone.
Now, here, in this town, Aaron found a sense of disquiet again. It wasn’t the Librarian that made him nervous—surely not; if anything about the Librarian scared him, it was the prospect of not finding him. No, it was the town itself that made him jittery. Laura, the silly twit, walked blithely through it, though it was stomach-churningly clear simply by looking around. Bookstores, smiling pharmacists, and ice cream shops instead of cell stores, datacafés, and receivers in every house and building; there were no towns like this anymore. This was not a town—it was a disguise.
Which meant, in the end, that the Librarian was near. That was what, once again, burned away the fear: the anger that drove Aaron forward would soon be unleashed, and the debt owed for his father’s death was about to be paid in full.
Laura walked—nearly skipped in her unconsciously jaunty stride—up to the glass double doors of the library. It was not lost on Aaron that the glass doors were an open invitation, a standing embrace: “Come see, we’ve nothing to hide.” It was not lost on him, despite the fact that he had a hard time taking his eyes off Laura’s bottom as she pulled one of those doors open and stepped inside.
Through the small foyer papered with the clumsy crayon scrawlings of little children, they entered the library proper. Aaron had, of course, been in libraries before. His school, every Intellitech office, even his family home, had a library: large, climate-controlled rooms filled with screens and keyboards to plug your cell into and rows of HDs whose channels you could key into on your cell and get audio and streaming facts about the images being broadcast. Sometimes, as in the Argaven home and some of the Intellitech offices—though not at school—there was a small section or single shelf or display case devoted to books. The books were always of some sentimental or historical note, the information in them having long ago been transcribed into more useful electronic form.
This so-called library was filled with books, shelves of them, row upon row of confusing, unaligned, irregularly sized bindings, the titles impossible to read at a distance, requiring you to enter the morbid, dusty forest of them. There was not a single cell interface or HD screen visible, not even at the single desk that stood off to their left, behind which was a figure regarding them.
The woman sitting behind the desk, with clear, questioning eyes, her gray-streaked hair cut short to frame her pixyish face, looked up curiously. Surprise might have passed across her features, not expecting visitors in the middle of the day, teenagers who should have been in school. Or it might just have been a look of greeting. Aaron didn’t excel at picking up and reading social cues. Laura had pegged that one, he had to admit.
“Hi,” Laura said brightly. “We’re, uh . . .” She glanced quickly at Aaron and then back. “Looking for someone?”
One could never be sure what sort of gobsmacking idiocy Laura would come up with. Nevertheless, Aaron had to allow, people seemed to respond to her. It was, at any rate, best to let her do the talking right now. Aaron did not feel equipped to speak to this woman—an antique nameplate identified her as Ms. Hubert—without bellowing in her face.
Ms. Hubert remained silent for a stretch—a peculiar response for someone in the service business—then nodded slowly and rose from her chair. She came out from behind the desk, revealing a neat gray suit that seemed to Aaron incongruous in the midst of such a calculatedly homey town. Her hand touched something beneath her work surface, and Aaron heard—felt—the nearly subsonic snik of the cellock activating on the outer doors.
“Follow me,” Ms. Hubert said, turning her back to th
em and proceeding toward the shelves of books. Laura spun toward Aaron, her eyes tense with uncertainty. He patently ignored her, following with his glare the woman’s receding back into the far reaches of the book-lined alley.
Clearly exasperated, Laura huffed, rolled her eyes, and went after the woman. Aaron held his place a moment longer, surveying the space again. No screens, no ports, but a cellock. This place was just another disguise. He went cautiously after them.
Passing between the towering rows of books was distinctly uncomfortable. They smelled of dust and the acid of the pages, and he felt the weight of the metal cases crushing down on him. This was age, inefficiency, the leaden mass of obsolescence. When Laura disappeared from view around the other side, he doubled his pace and came around the corner to see Ms. Hubert standing at a door in a shadowed corner. She reached into a pocket of her slacks, and, again, Aaron felt the technology of a cellock—a whiff of the modern world—activate. Ms. Hubert opened the door, and she waited for them to catch up.
Aaron peered around Laura when he got there, looking through the door and down a flight of stone steps into darkness.
“Where in the name of living hell do you think you’re taking us?” Aaron couldn’t contain himself anymore.
“The cellar,” the woman explained without urgency.
“There is no way—”
Laura went down the stairway. Just to show Aaron up, probably. Ms. Hubert’s curious eyes fell on him. With a sour look, he followed Laura.
With the flick of an ancient switch, a dirty light bulb over the stairs flickered, struggling to produce a halo of sickly light. When they reached the cold, hard floor, they could see another light, isolated amidst groping fingers of darkness. The woman’s heavy footsteps preceded her appearance. They held their ground as she walked between them without a glance and up to a wall that, only now that she had distinguished it by her position, could Aaron tell was actually a metal door, flat and plain and heavy. Laura started toward it, Aaron trailing her, but before they came within striking distance, Ms. Hubert spoke.