All the King's Men

by Alex Powell

  “You found the coffee,” King said with a smile. “I like it. It’s very warm.”

  “You can’t eat or drink in a domain, it has no substance,” Fox protested.

  Seven took a sip…

  “Come on, sweetie, it’s time to go visit Auntie Helen,” said a voice, and a hand grabbed his, tugging him along.

  “Her house smells like cats,” a voice complained, and he realized it was coming from his mouth.

  “Yes, but she’s promised to have baking done so we can have cake when we get there,” the other voice said reassuringly.

  A brief memory of something sweet and crumbly in his mouth.

  “Okay!”

  And suddenly he was back in the coffee shop, with Fox and King both staring at him. He looked at his coffee in alarm, then up at Fox. “Who is Aunt Helen?”

  Fox stepped forward and took a sip of the coffee. His eyes glazed over for a moment, before he blinked several times, then looked at his coffee in horror. “It’s my memories. Is that why they tell you not to drink or eat anything inside the Cerebrum? Because it gives you data from other people?”

  “I don’t think the Public domain would do the same thing,” King said doubtfully. “Because this is made in your domain, I think it would just be from you.”

  “Why did you drink it, then?” Fox asked, waving his hands, and Seven felt bad about drinking it, even though he hadn’t known that’s what would happen when he did.

  “You let us drink it. You gave us access to it. Subconsciously, you trust us with your memories and gave us a port with which to find them.”

  “I didn’t, though,” Fox argued, looking around wildly. “What if the Cat and the Reaper had made it this far in? They’d have been able to find out lots of things.”

  “I suspect that the coffee machine would have disappeared,” King said. “In fact, in response to your emotional upheaval, it already has.”

  Seven looked around and found that all the spouts and taps were gone. Not only that, the cups they’d had also dematerialized. Fox sank into the nearest chair and put his head in his hands.

  “Why do I trust you, Seven?” he demanded, eyes narrowed. “It’s a stupid idea, when you’re a government agent.”

  “He has the ability to change,” King said. “You know he does—just look at his eyes.”

  Seven turned away, suddenly self-conscious about the difference he’d made between himself and his fellow agents. If people noticed, he would give himself away.

  “If he’s really changed, he wouldn’t be working for the government anymore,” Fox said.

  “I don’t have a choice in the matter,” Seven snarled, gripping the edge of the counter. “I don’t have a body or a place to run to. I’m completely in their control.”

  “You still have your mind,” Fox said. “That’s the strongest part of you.”

  “Yes, but they have possession of the weakest. All it takes is for me to become too much trouble to maintain, and they’ll kill me. Or let me die, if they’re too lazy.”

  “We can get your body back,” Fox said, and moved closer. “We can get all your bodies back, because we know where they are now. We still have hope that we can succeed.”

  “Yes, and the information is trapped in here with you,” Seven said. “You never got a chance to tell your comrades where we are.”

  “They’ll figure it out, I’m sure,” Fox said. “If you and the other agents would turn against the government, then we could give my friends the information and they would be able to do something. Come on, it’s your chance to be free.”

  Seven bowed his head and didn’t look at Fox. “Were you not listening? They would kill us, easily, with the flip of a switch. And you, for that matter. They’ve already got you two—three if you count the spy. Why do you think the others will escape the same fate?”

  “Because they’re not giving up,” Fox said, and Seven felt fingers on his shoulders, squeezing lightly. “You don’t have to give up either. We can win this.”

  “How do you even know our bodies are in the same place as yours?” Seven asked. “They could be in different places entirely, and then you would escape, and that would leave all of us stranded and at the mercy of those we betrayed.”

  “How many top secret bases does Canada have?” Fox asked dubiously.

  “We have a lot of space to put them,” King pointed out, and Seven jumped. He’d forgotten King was even there.

  There was a knock on the door, echoing loudly throughout Fox’s domain.

  Fox turned with wide eyes to look at them. “What kind of government agent would knock?”

  “We’ll have to go and see,” King said reasonably, rising.

  Fox opened his door by increments, trying to catch sight of the visitor. Seven almost thought there was nobody out there until he saw the angry expression on Fox’s pale face. “You,” he whispered, slightly closing the door. “How could you do this to us?”

  Seven looked closer and realized that what he’d thought was just a swirl of snow from Fox’s domain was actually a batch of floating fog.

  “Fox,” a gravelly voice answered, and Seven thought he recognized it from somewhere. “Come now, Fox, you knew that one of us was a spy. You didn’t do a thing to try and find me.”

  “I did, Karl,” Fox protested, glaring out the door. “I didn’t want it to be one of us, not even Simon, who’s a bit of a knob, really. How could you do this?”

  “It was easy,” Karl answered. “Just think of the money. An international company wanted to pay me a fraction of what my work was worth. My life’s work for a pittance! I couldn’t stand for it. I had to find another way. Fox, your work actually helped me with this one.”

  “It did not,” Fox spat and hunched over miserably.

  “That company was one you were researching. I blackmailed them, but that was my downfall. I should have realized they would suspect who I was, with the information I knew. They sold me out to the Canadians. However, I negotiated, and now, if I manage to give them all of you, not only will they give me back my life, they’ll make sure that my research is patented to me alone. I’ll make millions!”

  “You sold us out, your friends, your cause…for money?” Fox said, and Seven could tell he was trying to sound angry, but instead just sounded tired.

  “You’ll understand one day, Fox. Or maybe you won’t, I’m not sure what they’ll do to you once they have all of you. But I think, if you give up what you know now, I can get you a deal.”

  Fox was shaking, tremors running through his body. Seven wanted to do something, anything, to comfort him, but what could he do when he could hardly handle being touched? Fox clenched his fists now, and a muscle in his jaw jumped.

  “What, and sell out everyone like you did?” Fox asked, voice full of disgust. “I don’t think so. Go away, Karl. I would never be able to do something like that to people I care about.” Fox slumped and whispered out the side of the door. “I used to think you were one of them.”

  Karl disappeared, and Fox slumped against the inside of the door. “Seven, can we go back to your domain? I don’t think I can manage to uphold mine just now.”

  Seven nodded, and the private domain around them dissolved, letting his own domain show through. King settled onto the sofa. A door appeared in front of Fox, who went through it without pause. Seven followed in alarm, not knowing where Fox was going. He’d already been in several of the rooms, and might be able to open a door to anywhere if he remembered what it looked like.

  Why couldn’t he stop Fox from opening doors?

  Fox entered Seven’s rarely used bedroom. There wasn’t much point to sleeping when your body was constantly in a state between awake and asleep. Sometimes Seven did, though, and he knew that when he did, his domain stayed intact. Another impossibility, or so they said.

  Fox flopped onto the bed and curled up, unmoving. Seven frowned and sat next to him on the large mattress, far larger than he would ever need by himself.

  “I
knew,” Fox said, voice sharp and broken. “I knew we had a spy who’d betrayed us. I thought all the people I knew would at least have an important reason for giving up their allies. It had to be family, or friends, or something.”

  Seven stretched out beside Fox, watching the lean curve of his back. Fox trembled and Seven tentatively reached out, fingers a hair’s width from making contact with his warm, leather-clad side.

  “Money,” Fox said in despair. “He gave us up for money.”

  Seven put down his hand, gently, hesitantly.

  Fox reached back, and taking a firm hold on Seven’s wrist, pulled him forward. He wrapped Seven’s arm around his waist, clutching Seven’s hand to his chest. Seven went along willingly, carefully draping his own form along Fox’s backside. Fox shuddered and sighed, leaning into Seven’s embrace. Seven gathered him closer, and buried his face in the nape of Fox’s neck.

  It felt warm again, and Seven had a strangely full feeling in his chest as he shifted and closed all the gaps between their two forms. Seven knew Fox was upset, and likely didn’t want Seven’s comfort, but took it because there was no one else.

  But oh, this was bliss.

  Chapter 8: Burning Bridges

  Fox drifted awake in a haze of warmth and sighed. He didn’t want to move, not when it was so comfortable, wrapped in a tight cocoon of content. He felt a soft huff of breath on the back of his neck and frowned, eyes still clamped shut. Sleeping in the Cerebrum was a revelation.

  Oh. There was an arm wrapped around him, and the solid form of a male body against his back. A sharp nose nuzzled the nape of his neck.

  Fox remembered the events of the previous day and froze. Nothing he’d fearfully pondered over the last week could even come close to what had actually happened. All the reasons he’d imagined, all the things a government could do to someone to make them comply, and their traitor had betrayed them for money.

  Seven had tried to comfort him. Seven didn’t even know if he liked being touched, and he’d tried to make Fox feel better. Then again, it seemed to Fox that Seven had a problem with being touched rather than the other way around. He’d certainly had no problems with it in the past, from Fox’s recollection. But as soon as Fox had tried to put a hand on him, he’d shied away.

  No, it wasn’t even that. He’d had no trouble fighting with Joanne. It was the touch of someone who meant to bring pleasure rather than pain that made Seven nervous. If Seven equated touch with intimacy, then Fox might understand where he was coming from.

  He wondered if Seven had ever woken up with someone before. Probably not.

  Fox waited, comfortable and feeling strangely secure. He didn’t try to extract himself from Seven’s arms. He wanted to see what would happen when Seven woke up and found himself in such close proximity to Fox.

  It didn’t take long for the form behind him to stir. To Fox’s surprise, Seven shifted closer, curling around him and pressing his face into Fox’s shoulder.

  “Seven?” he whispered, and the movement stopped abruptly.

  “Sorry,” Seven replied and started pulling away.

  Fox tightened his hold on Seven’s hand. “It’s okay, you know. I don’t mind this.”

  “I…this is…do you…” Seven tried to say something but fell silent and Fox felt him shift again, as if trying to subtly put space between them.

  “You can also move, if that would be better,” Fox assured him.

  Seven stilled and whispered back, “Would you?”

  Fox felt disappointment clench in his stomach, but moved back.

  “No, I meant around,” Seven said.

  Fox carefully disentangled their legs and turned, trying not to shake the bed too much as he and Seven came face to face.

  “Where are your goggles?”

  Seven looked startled, hand flying up to his face. “I don’t…”

  They were still blue, and Fox leaned forward to rest their foreheads together. He didn’t try and transfer domains, just sighed and closed his eyes, tangling their legs together again. Seven made a soft noise and burrowed closer.

  “I know that what I’ve been doing is not right,” Seven said absently. “I do. But until now, no one knew we were prisoners, or wanted to try and save us. I think about it now. What it would be like to be free. I think about it, and I want that. I think that we all do, although the longing was trained out of us long ago. I just never had a reason to think that could change.”

  “You do have a point. This situation is nearly impossible.”

  “Nearly. So you think there’s still hope?”

  “There is always hope for those who refuse to give up.” Fox finally rolled away. As much as he enjoyed the close contact, there were things he had to do, and cuddling was not necessarily conducive. “Come on, I have something to show you. It’s in my domain, but luckily it looks as if we both stay in yours, even if we’re inside mine. How impossibly strange.”

  When they got up, Fox pressed their foreheads together, this time to initiate a domain transfer—if that was what you could call it. It was only fair that he allowed Seven to get closer as well, to let him see what Fox wanted to keep hidden. Tit for tat and all that.

  They were back in Devon, and Fox decided if he ever got out of this mess, the first thing he was going to do was go back home and see his mum. She missed him, he knew, but it hadn’t bothered him so much until he thought he might never see her again.

  As Seven looked around his domain, Fox drew a deep breath, thinking of the clue he’d seen in Simon’s domain, written on the wall in Simon’s spiky, erratic letters. He didn’t like how the clue sounded, what he thought it might say about him. But he still wanted to try to get back all of King’s memories, and to do that, he needed to find his own clue.

  He didn’t want to write down the clue, so he waited for Seven to finish sight-seeing and to sit next to him at one of the tables overlooking the stream.

  One day a desert started

  A sunny summer day

  It grew up from a bitter thought

  The day you went away

  It has no desert flowers

  No springs or signs of life

  It thrives on your abandonment

  The proof of it is rife

  The head in which the desert grows

  Does not wait for your return

  But in retaliation

  All bridges crossed will burn

  It sprung up from a moment

  That sunny summer day

  A mind that burns its flowers

  And always runs away

  Fox recited the words from memory, then looked apprehensively at Seven. Did Seven understand what those words meant? Fox thought he did, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to share the feeling of desolation these words brought up in him. It didn’t matter.

  Seven looked like he was thinking. “It sounds like a poem. Why are you telling it to me? Did you write it?”

  Fox grimaced. “King wrote it.”

  He explained the quest to find all of King’s memories and that there were only two memories left to uncover. He explained that this poem was a clue so that Fox could find the memory hidden in his own mind.

  Seven’s face lit up with comprehension, then he looked away. “It’s talking about your desert. To be fair, it was a hostile place.”

  “The clue doesn’t say anything good about where the desert came from.”

  “Where did it come from? And how does King know it’s there in the first place? Do you ever show it to your comrades?”

  “No. It was supposed to be a defence technique to keep unwanted threats out of my head. Also, it worked, so I’m not sure what this ‘burning bridges’ comment is supposed to mean.”

  Fox hadn’t entirely unravelled what the words meant. He did know one thing for sure: the hostility of his desert was fuelled by pain. The sun burned brighter for times of strife, and it was the best deterrent his desert had.

  King had said something when he’d been in the desert. He still didn�
�t have any of his memories back, but his lack of memories didn’t reduce his incredible intellect. He’d said, “You have more fuel for this heat than you ever imagined.”

  Fox thought about it. “The desert sun and the pain I feel are the same thing. So why does it always burn so brightly, even when I don’t feel like I’m hurt?”

  Seven considered this. “Is it physical pain alone that makes it burn?”

  Fox shrugged.

  “Are you in any physical pain right now?”

  Fox tested the range of his body just to make sure. It was technically his physical body that would feel the pain, but his brain would translate it to his Cerebrum body to some extent. He stretched to see if that would yield any negative results, but his body didn’t bear any leftover aches from his experience with the Dream Dust. “No pain.”

  “So let’s try an experiment. Take us to your desert. By your logic, the desert shouldn’t be as hot right now.”

  Fox paused before concentrating hard. A moment later, they were once again in the endless desert, the image of pyramids far off in the distance wavering in the heat. Seven fanned himself with his hands, then shading his eyes, looked at the sun blazing down on them.

  “You’re not supposed to look directly at the sun. It will make you blind.”

  Seven didn’t listen, and absent-mindedly said, “Nope, still extremely hot. So if it’s not your physical pain that fuels it, what does?”

  It was definitely pain that fuelled it, Fox knew beyond any doubt. He knew it in the same way that King could tell all the agents apart. There was no solid proof of what he knew, but he still had his conviction that it was the truth.

  Fox took them back to Devon.

  “It’s pain, it’s just not the type of pain that I first thought,” Fox said, looking at the wood surface of the table. “I don’t talk about it.”

  Abandonment. That was what the poem had said, and it was speaking to the person who had apparently gone away. Fox was pretty sure only one person fit that description. He’d never spoken of it to anyone, not even the person who shared that particular pain.