by John Dixon
“Right,” Carl said.
“Had a cousin named Carl,” Tex said. “Guess I still do, though I ain’t been home in so long, it’s hard to say. Given his habits, he might’ve gone to his reward in heaven by now.”
Carl said nothing. Let the kid talk, he thought. Make him comfortable.
“He was a snake handler, my cousin Carl, you know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“Ballsy, man. It was a church thing, back in the mountains. Pentecostal. Gospel of Mark and all that. The kid fourteen years old, leading the congregation, standing up there on this little, old, nailed-together stage, handling rattlesnakes as big as your leg and speaking in tongues.” He let out a stream of garbled nonsense that degraded into laughter. “You a snake handler, Carl?”
“Not me,” Carl said.
“So . . . let’s get this straight,” Tex said, squinting one eye. “What are you, the man around here? I see the way the bulls act around you. They’re wearing the boss hats, you’re half their age, and they still do what you tell them.”
“No,” Carl said, “I’m not the man, but I guess you could say I’m the man’s man.”
“The man’s man, huh?” Tex said, and spat on the floor again.
“Look,” Carl said, “you relax a little, I might be able to help you.”
Tex nodded thoughtfully. “Truth be told, I reckon I could use a hand right about now.”
“All right.”
“Hey,” Tex said in a soft voice, his eyes looking hopeful. “You reckon I really gotta get my head shaved?”
“Your grape,” Carl said.
Tex squinted. “My what?”
“Your grape,” Carl said. “That’s what they call your head around here. Might as well get the lingo straight. And yeah, they’re going to shave it.”
“That right there is the worst news I had all day.” He whistled and ran a hand once more through his thick hair. “But I suppose, when in Rome . . . get your grape shaved.”
Carl laughed. “Pretty much.”
A look of concern came onto Tex’s face. “What are they going to do to me, Carl? One guy kept talking about a sweatbox, and I’ll tell you right now, I can’t hack small spaces.”
“Don’t worry,” Carl said. “I can make this go away. No sweatbox, and a fresh start.”
Tex whooped and clapped his hands. “You are the man!”
Carl smiled, but picturing Stark, he said, “No, trust me . . . when you meet the man, you’ll know it.” He turned and crouched, reaching for the door handle. “He’s the most—”
And then he was ducking, rolling sideways, his body reacting automatically before his conscious mind even registered the footsteps racing up behind him. Tex’s boot slammed hard into the metal door, right where Carl’s head had been, and the shed filled with insane laughter.
“Wake up, boss!” Tex shouted, leering at Carl through wild eyes. “Almost took your grape off with that one!”
He almost had, too. A kick like that could’ve broken his neck. Rage leapt up in Carl as hot and fast as a flame, and then he was smelling ashes again.
Tex raised his fists. “Come on then, Carla. Let’s see what you got. I do love to fight!”
Carl advanced slowly and silently, outwardly calm. He’d been nice to Tex, helped him, and the second he’d turned his back, the kid had tried to take his head off—would have taken his head off if it weren’t for the chip.
Rage roared, demanding retribution. Control it, he cautioned himself.
Tex backpedaled to the far wall and picked up the broken mop handle.
Carl walked toward him, arms loose at his sides.
Behind him, the door rattled open, and men’s shouting filled the shed.
“Come on in, boys!” Tex shouted. “The more the merrier!” And he swung the makeshift club with a whoosh.
Without even looking in the soldiers’ direction, Carl stuck out a palm. “Stand down.”
He walked toward Tex, saying nothing.
“You can’t sweet-talk Texarkana Reginald Dubois,” Tex said, and charged, raising the mop handle overhead like a chopping ax.
For Carl, the world decelerated as the chip worked its magic. Tex swung the stick in slo-mo. Carl slid easily under the attack and drove an uppercut into the kid’s stomach.
Tex dropped to the floor, gasping. The broken handle clattered away.
Seeing the traitor crumpled at his feet, Carl braced himself for the red wave. For the chip had done more than make him faster . . .
His eyes found the sharp end of the broken handle a few short strides away, and the beast within him demanded he drive the pointed end into the exposed neck of the sucker-punching thug lying helpless as a sacrifice before him.
Carl’s body took one step in that direction, but he gritted his teeth and stopped himself. No, he told himself, fighting the rage that lived within him now like a dark twin. Don’t do it, don’t give in. When that didn’t work, he thought, Remember Sanderson.
The memory slapped him hard with its sun and sand and screams, allowing him to wrestle his rage temporarily into uneasy submission.
Tex stirred. “Punch,” he gasped, “like a girl.”
“Shh,” Carl said. He plunged his hand into the thick black pompadour and lifted Tex’s head. “Nap time.”
The strike was short and sharp, a palm heel to temple, and Tex went instantly limp, snoring the way some guys do when they get knocked out.
The dark twin within Carl roared, and Carl stepped back, afraid that if he lingered even briefly, he would pick up that broken handle. He turned to discover Rivera and the others staring at him with fear and awe.
“Toss him in the sweatbox,” Carl told them, “but first, shave off that stupid hair.”
TWO
THE GIRL CALLED MARGARITA sat in the hard plastic chair, alternately toying with her long blond ponytail, which remained as strange to her as her new face, and drumming her fingers on the edge of the desk.
This place reminded her of a police station interrogation room. Small and cold, with block walls painted white and a camera mounted high up in one corner. A sparsely furnished space—just two chairs of blue plastic and the table between them, its surface an empty span of nondescript Formica, save for the low divider running across its middle, so you could see the head and shoulders of the person sitting opposite you but nothing below that.
Not that anyone was sitting across from her now.
Half an hour she’d been waiting. Another test? Probably. Often, she felt that everything here in the SI3 Bunker was some kind of test.
She pictured Bleaker somewhere behind the camera, watching her and taking notes with that little recorder of his. The subject exhibits signs of impatience, she could imagine him reporting—and the scene was purely imaginary, not visionary, a distinction of some importance here among the Bunker Bots—shifting of position, eye rolling, finger drumming . . .
She stopped drumming her fingers and turned her attention instead to the magazines stacked beside the desk: dog-eared issues of Sports Illustrated, Time, Reader’s Digest, and, strangely enough, Bird Talk. Did Bleaker have birds? She could imagine him tending small, bright birds—finches, perhaps, or canaries—keeping them warm and safe and well fed but never, ever letting them out of the cage.
Or perhaps Crossman had donated the Bird Talk back issues, the man secretly an unlikely avian enthusiast. It wouldn’t be finches for Crossman, though, and no canaries, either. He would keep hawks, falcons, maybe a bald eagle.
The magazine atop the stack was not Bird Talk but Time. On its cover, a handsome middle-aged man in a tie and tweed waistcoat smiled warmly, surrounded by a dozen beaming children displaying a diversity of ethnicity and regional garb. Person of the Year, the cover announced, Payter Oaks: Lord of Orphans.
Of course, she’d recognized Oaks without the caption. He was the most famous orphan in the world, a rags-to-billions philanthropist, every orphan’s hero.
And of course she was a
n orphan . . . wasn’t she?
Yes, she told herself. You’re an orphan, a recent orphan. She pictured the faces of her parents—Jaime and Rosalinda, she reminded herself—from the file sitting back in her room. You miss them, she told herself, and remembered Crossman frowning at her. Miss them, he had hissed. Tears, tears . . .
The door opened at last, and Dr. Bleaker came in, tall and stooped and smiling apologetically, wearing not a white jacket but a light green button-down, wrinkled and untucked, the sleeves rolled up to reveal flesh as pale and soft-looking as cave fungus, making her wonder how long he’d been a Bunker dweller. She’d go insane if she stayed here long, feeling all that stone and steel—a mile of it—pressing down from overhead. Thankfully, she was leaving soon.
Too soon, in fact. Which was why she needed to hurry.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was stuck in another meeting.”
“No problem,” she said, and forced a smile. She liked Bleaker—compared to most of the Bunker Bots, he was positively warm and fuzzy—but her growing impatience made it difficult to be anything more than perfunctorily polite.
He settled into the chair across from her with a characteristic sigh and began unpacking his valise.
Now he’ll ask me how I slept, she thought, and Bleaker said, “How did you sleep?”
“Fine,” she lied, pleased with her accurate prediction, which of course had been a product not of precognition—how SI3 would love that!—but of pattern recognition. How did you sleep? was the question Bleaker always asked as he unpacked his things, what passed as small talk between the pair.
Right now, she wasn’t in the mood for small talk or routine. Right now, she wanted to learn.
They had already hashed out all the ground-floor stuff, and no matter how amazing it was, they were crawling when she needed to sprint. With only days until her departure, she needed to learn remote viewing now. “Are we moving on today?”
Without looking up, Bleaker said, “Moving on?”
Bitterness rose in her. “I need you to teach me. I know all this stuff. I need you to show me how to range.”
Now he did look up, frowning. “I’m sorry. I know this must be frustrating, but we have to be certain. Until the foundation is finished, there’s no use building a mansion, now, is there?” He lifted his frown into a less-than-convincing smile.
She leaned forward, palms flat on the table. “All right. Let’s get this over with.”
“Okey doke,” Bleaker said, and produced a deck of playing cards with blue paisley designs on the back.
She had seen the cards before. Many times.
Sitting up straighter, she said, “Can’t we move on to something new?”
He raised a pale, soft-looking hand and patted the air. “Patience. First things first.”
First things first. Of all the maddening phrases in the world . . .
Bleaker smiled as he positioned the cards—three as always—fixing them side by side into a thin groove atop the dividing wall between them so that she could see only the backs of the cards and he could see only the faces. He looked at the cards, looked at her, and nodded. Then he thumbed his digital voice recorder to life and started speaking, recording the date, time, location, and their names: Dr. Travis Bleaker and Margarita Carbajal.
As always, hearing Margarita Carbajal jarred her, and for the first time, it struck her that the pleasant, habitually tardy, maddeningly repetitive man sitting across from her almost certainly wasn’t actually named Dr. Travis Bleaker.
She wondered further: Am I even looking at his real face?
Had Bleaker—or whatever his real name was—also had extensive facial reconstruction surgery? Was that a requirement here in this supersecret bunker? Could be. After all, she had needed work after what they euphemistically referred to as “the accident,” but she hadn’t needed half of what they’d done. They’d left her with a beautiful face, but it wasn’t her face. In fact, her own mother, had she still been alive, wouldn’t even recognize her now.
“Shall we begin?” he asked her.
“Let’s try something new, something harder.”
He gestured toward the divider. “The cards first.”
“How many?”
“How many what?”
“You know,” she said. “Cards.”
“You mean how many correct cards.”
“I never miss.”
“You did once.”
“I was hurrying. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means everything.”
“How many correct cards, then?”
Bleaker tidied the cards unnecessarily. “We’ll see.”
“How many?”
Now he looked at her. “Do you really want me to set a number?”
“No,” she said. “But if I do well, can we please move on to something new?”
“Probably,” he said, “if there’s time—but for now, push that out of your mind. Focus.”
Oh, I’ll focus, all right, she thought. She had to blow through these so they could move on to something new, something important, before Bleaker ran off to another meeting.
“You know the drill,” he said. He tapped one card and raised his brows.
She stared hard at the blue paisley pattern, focusing her eyes and mind like knobs on a microscope. Seconds later, the blue design faded, and she was looking at the ghost.
Ghost was her word, not theirs. A ghost was the flip-side image, which she saw as if she were sitting in Bleaker’s seat rather than her own. Not that she was seeing through his eyes; that wasn’t her particular talent. The ghost was in her head, a simulacrum—and that was their word—conjured by her mind, a representation of data her brain was receiving via some quadrant to which she had no direct access.
That part of your brain, Bleaker had told her when they first started working together months earlier, is like a database with no querying language. In time, it will all be open to you.
She believed him. The data was all there, all whole, in her mind, even if she couldn’t access it yet, just as game show prizes—cars; toaster ovens; trips for two to Aruba, airfare included—were all real, all whole, before the smiling host pulled the curtain aside. Some part of her brain knew exactly what was hidden behind the curtain. It just wasn’t very good at sharing that information with her conscious mind yet.
The ghost was faint and blurry and not at all like the actual flip-side of a card. Bleaker said with time, that would change—could change—and she would be able to see a hidden object as if she were actually looking at it, would even be able to study its details. But for now, looking at the ghost was like studying a card doodled by a child and half-obscured by heavy fog.
Come on, she thought, pushing hard with her mind. Let’s have it.
A twinge of pain in her forehead.
You’re pushing too hard, trying to see it too quickly, she cautioned herself, then gritted her teeth and pushed even harder.
Pain solidified, a thrumming wire at the center of her brain, making her squint.
Through the thinning mist, she saw a triangle with no base—a chevron, she thought, another of their words coming to her—and the pain-wire vibrated faster, generating heat.
An involuntary grunt escaped her, but still she pushed, and the ghost grew more distinct, another triangle visible to her now, this one solid, black. . . .
“Ace of spades,” she blurted, and realized she was shaking from the effort and the pain.
“Margarita views an ace of spades,” Bleaker told his digital recorder. “Correct.”
Of course it’s correct, she thought, and pinched the bridge of her nose.
Bleaker smiled approvingly. “That was fast.”
She nodded, thinking, Too fast. She’d pushed too hard, and now she needed ibuprofen and a nap. But she faked a smile and said, “Next one?” Instantly, she knew she’d put too much chirp into her voice, and for a flickering instant, she feared Bleaker would see through her, guess her pain, and stop th
e exercise, but he only nodded, pointed to the second card, and lifted his brows.
She stared at the card, and—oh, crap—the line of fire in her head thrummed, vibrating like a plucked piano wire.
Deal with it, she told herself. You’ve dealt with worse pain. Far worse. She settled back into her seat, trying not to force this one, waiting . . . waiting . . .
Minutes later, slick with sweat and gripping the table with white knuckles, she said, “Eight of diamonds.” It was a tremendous relief, like breaking the surface after nearly drowning, and the hard-earned ghost washed away.
“Margarita views an eight of diamonds,” Bleaker recorded. “Correct.”
“Now can we move on to something new?” she asked, doing her best not to show her intense pain. “I got them both right—and in half the time it normally takes me.”
Bleaker shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Why?”
“You’re close,” he said. “We have to be sure.”
She closed her eyes, struggling against her pain and frustration. When she opened them again, Bleaker indicated the third card and raised his brows.
She took a deep breath, leaned forward, and pushed.
The jack of hearts came to her quickly—but at a price. As Bleaker recorded her success, she shuddered, weak with effort. The thrumming wire in her head glowed red-hot now. The room around her had gone wavy, and her stomach did a slow, greasy roll.
“Now?” she asked.
He looked at her.
“Are we done with stupid cards?” she asked.
He shook his head. “You’re doing very well, but we’re not ready to move on yet. First things first.”
She slammed her hands on the desk. “You heard Crossman. I have days, not weeks . . . days. Then I’m gone.”
Bleaker looked uncomfortable. “When you come back, then.”
“No,” she said, and it was all she could do not to scream it. “I told you I would do all of this if you taught me to see.”
“And we will.”
“I meant now,” she said.
“Don’t raise your voice at me,” he said. His own voice remained maddeningly calm and patient—the voice of a man meant to study glacial melt.