“David is a strong person,” Nat cut in. “Not many people could have done what he did. You told me that, Doc.”
“Perhaps we can figure out the significance of the honeybees using what Doc has observed over the past few days,” Joan offered. “There’s a good chance he has all the answers in what he’s already gathered, but doesn’t realize it.”
“Could be,” Nat allowed. “What do you think, Doc? Doc?”
He heard them talking, even registered that they were addressing him, but couldn’t make himself respond.
Nat cracked his hands together in front of Doc’s face, making him jump. “Johann, snap out of it!”
“He’s in shock, Nat,” Joan said, putting a hand on Nat’s shoulder.
“Okay,” Nat said, rising. “Up.” He pulled Doc to his feet. “Let’s walk around a bit.”
“I don’t want to walk around.”
“Tough. Do it anyway.”
Doc pressed his lips together. “You always were an annoying person to have around in a fit of depression.” Nat gave him a level stare, and after a few seconds, Doc felt guilty for snapping at him. “Sorry Nat.”
Nat nodded. “We need to get your blood pumping again.”
Doc allowed Nat to walk him around the room for several minutes and grudgingly admitted he felt better.
“So,” Joan said when Nat allowed Doc to sit down again. “Tell us everything they said about these honeybees, Doc.?”
Doc sighed, trying to remember and wishing yet again that he’d paid more attention. “A lot of it was repetitive. They were very upset at having lost the colony, but they weren’t entirely distressed because it wasn’t the only colony they had. There were other branches to take up the mantel.”
“It sounds like this is some project the collectives are working on,” Joan said, slowly. “If they were tremendously disappointed to lose this ‘colony,’ perhaps it was a major part of what they were trying to accomplish. Yet, they obviously don’t have all their eggs in one basket. There are other possibilities to accomplish their aim, whatever it is. They have to turn to plan B, now.”
Frustration welled up in Doc’s chest. “That doesn’t tell us much. They could be doing anything. One thing is as detrimental as another.”
Nat sighed and rested his palms on a large boulder he stood beside. He wore a disturbed expression, and Doc wondered what he was thinking. Joan noticed Nat’s stance as well and gazed at him expectantly.
“A storm three days ago, you say?” he asked, looking at Joan.
“They say,” she corrected, nodding toward the lolling Arachniman.
Nat nodded. “I’m not sure how, but it’s too big a coincidence to dismiss. This may be tied to the reason I came to find you in the first place.”
“What is that?” Joan asked, then frowned. “Why did you ask about my being at Interchron last night?”
“You were only there for an hour, so I take it you didn’t try to see your daughter?”
“No,” Joan’s eyes narrowed. “I went in the middle of the night. I didn’t want to wake her. Why?”
Nat sighed. “She’s not there, Joan. Hasn’t been...for three days.”
Joan stepped back and held her hands up, palms forward. “What? Where is she?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know. I went out with a tracking team and returned last night. I went looking for David this morning—had a question to ask him—and couldn’t find him. I sensed something wasn’t right. I asked around. Three days ago, a messenger came to Interchron carrying a transmission between collectives, intercepted by one of our networks. It was meant for a member of the team, but none of you were at Interchron when it came in. They gave it to David instead. I talked to people who were nearby when David read the message. They say he looked worried—”
“—Which for him is the equivalent of anyone else’s all-out panic,” Joan put in.
“Yes,” Nat nodded, “and he left. Lila went with him. No one’s seen or heard from either of them since.”
“But,” Joan sputtered, “Lila knew where to find me if she needed me. Why didn’t she come here?”
Doc glare up at Joan from under lowered brows.
“Don’t look at me like that, Doc. Lila keeps her distance out of respect for the team, but she’s been too intelligent for me to lie to since she turned eight years old. She wouldn’t disturb us unless there was a dire emergency, but could reach me if necessary. Why wouldn’t she?”
She directed the last question to Nat and he shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Doc sighed. Once again things were happening they had no control over, or knowledge about. Despite his irritation with Joan, he supposed it was an occupational hazard. Close friends and family members of the team couldn’t help but be aware of their movements. It wasn’t Joan’s fault, yet the irritation made his heart beat faster. It brought him out of his stupor over witnessing Dillon’s death. He pushed memories of the collective ether away, embracing the irritation and letting it fill him.
“Well,” Joan passed a hand over her eyes, “we should go to the Seekers. Have them track David and Lila’s neurochemical signatures—”
“I’ve already done that,” Nat said quietly.
Something about his too-tranquil tone sent chills racing down Doc’s spine.
“When I realized no one knew where they’d gone, I went straight to the Seekers,” Nat said. “I knew I’d be bringing you alarming news and wanted to at least be able to tell you where Lila was.”
“And?”
“The Seekers can’t feel them at all. It’s like they’ve vanished.”
Joan blew out her breath. “So they’ve Concealed themselves, like Marcus and Karl.”
“Actually,” Nat ran a hand through his hair. “There’s something else. The Seekers did find a strange signature right outside the mountain. It’s similar to the one left by Karl when he Travels. The young girl with Traveling abilities who came to us a few weeks ago? Kirsten or Krissy or something? She’s gone, too.”
“They Traveled?” Joan’s eyes grew to the size of saucers. “Why would they Travel without telling anyone?” She turned pleading eyes on Doc. “All this will have to wait, Doc.” She indicated the vegetative Arachniman. “We need to figure out what’s happening. Something big is going down and we didn’t even know about it.”
Doc frowned at his hands, trying to absorb the information and cross it with what he’d learned over the past few days. He stood, hoping it would help him think. “Three days ago, David received a message that sent him running across time. Three days ago, a storm that never existed destroyed some aspect of a project valuable to the Collectives. You’re right, Nat. Too much to be a coincidence.”
“But,” Joan wrung her hands, “what are we going to do, Doc?”
“Yes, Doc. What are we going to do?” The gravelly voice was a sinister whisper.
Nat and Joan both gasped, casting horrified gazes over Doc’s shoulder. Doc simply froze. He didn’t need to see to know what was happening. He knew that voice. He’d heard it on an island in the South Pacific.
He turned slowly to look into the eyes of the Arachniman. Though blood still dripped from its nose and no light shone out from its eyes, its tongue no longer hung out. The tattooed man sat with a straight spine, a smug grin pasted on his face, and behind the unfocused eyeballs, a yellow light glowed.
Doc half turned back to Nat and Joan, raising his hand, palm down, and motioning them to remain calm and silent. Both of them straightened their spines, rolled their shoulders back and assumed a guarded stance.
Doc turned back to face the man that was no longer the Arachniman. He sunk cautiously into the ladder-backed chair they’d picked up after Doc fell out of it. Joan and Nat came forward to stand at his elbows.
“How did you find me?”
The Arachniman barked a deep, raspy laugh. “You stumble clumsily onto my turf, assume I don’t know you’re there, then act like I’m the intruder? Classic Doctor Johann.”
“I’ve been doing this for many weeks,” he lied. “Yet only now, when a former member of the rebellion overcame the collective compulsion to give me a message, do you show up here. You were as surprised to find me in your midst as we are to find you in ours.”
The Arachniman’s eye twitched with uncertainty. The tiniest of motions, yet it was there. Doc was right. B played the pompous, all-seeing dictator, but he hadn’t known Doc could listen in on his collective until Dillon broke away. Once he did, the collective must have realized what was happening. They severed the Arachniman’s link to them, cutting off Doc’s spy-door, and B followed the broken tether into the now-damaged mind of the Arachniman.
Doc silently blessed the foresight that kept him from doing this work inside the walls of Interchron. The cavern they were in was bare and nondescript. B wouldn’t be able to tell much of anything from what he observed through the corpse’s eyes.
“You have evaded me, Johann. That much I admit. I’ve known you were there all along. I hoped to trap you, so I waited. Now the opportunity is gone and here I am. The former member of your rebellion didn’t break away. We let him go, hoping you would latch onto him so we could pull you into the collective. Did he not drill into your head?”
Doc’s mind raced, trying to make connections while B’s eyes glowed at him. Doc lied about being inside the collective for weeks, but B pretended to know Doc was there for that long. He was covering for something he hadn’t realized, and Doc had him in the lie. If he lied about that, why not other things as well?
B played the we-let-him-go card when David broke away from the collective as well. Doc didn’t believe it any more than he believed Dillon had been involved in some scheme to assimilate Doc. He supposed it was possible for Dillon to be forced into it. Yet, he’d come running right at Doc—not stealthy or subtle—and he’d given Doc a message; perhaps a warning. And then the obliteration.
“If that’s true,” Doc said quietly, “why did you kill him right after he’d accomplished his task?”
B regarded him through the Arachniman’s eyes for a long time before answering. “He said something he wasn’t supposed to. He understood the penalty for his actions. Let this be proof to you that we let the first one go. If we’d wanted him dead, his mind would have been vaporized the instant the rebellious thought materialized.”
Doc sighed, disturbed. B was a master at coloring things to his advantage. Yet, what he claimed wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. David might still be a collective spy.
“Why are you here?” Doc asked. “To gloat?”
“Of course. To tell you this war is nearly ended.”
Doc raised an eyebrow. A bold claim. “You think so?”
“Of course. Your so-called friend drilled into your mind. Once the pathway is there, it’s only a matter of time before we exploit it. Another member of your team has one as well. The rebellion is cracking under our weight, Johann.”
Doc frowned. “Another member of my team has been drilled? Who do you mean?”
The Arachniman’s lips curled in the slightest smirk. “Two members of your team are missing.”
Joan tensed beside Doc. He hoped B didn’t see it. The way the Arachniman’s gaze shifted lazily to Joan, then back to Doc, said he had.
“Are they?” Doc asked, trying to play poker, though Joan’s body language wasn’t helping.
“We nearly captured them the other day, and the younger one had a Pathway. We felt it.”
With a gasp, Joan stepped up beside Doc. “What did you—”
“Silence!” Doc cut her off.
The Arachniman’s gaze shifted to her. “You care for him, I see.”
Joan frowned. “Him?”
The Arachniman’s eyes darted between Doc and Joan, but he made no other reply. He must have realized he’d slipped up; given away something they hadn’t known. Suddenly, it all made sense to Doc. B wasn’t talking about David and Lila. B said he’d nearly captured two team members, but neither David nor Lila was a member of the team, just of the rebellion. If David had run into collectivists, B would no doubt have made some snarky comment about his former drone.
No, B meant Karl and Marcus. David drilled into Marcus’s mind when they were on the island. Marcus had been cut off from his abilities via neurological sedative, so he could only channel power through David. To accomplish it, the two brothers linked their minds in much the way the collectives did. It had been a gamble of the highest order. And the only reason any of them made it off the island.
This was the first news they’d heard of Marcus and Karl since the two of them disappeared five months ago. Good news, if disturbing.
Doc turned to Joan and gave her a pleading look. He wanted to convey that she needed to relax, everything was all right, and he knew something important. He didn’t know how to communicate it with his face alone, but his look must have been significant enough. Terror danced across her features and her chest continued to heave, but she stepped back.
Doc turned back to B. “I’m glad you almost captured them rather than actually capturing them.”
“Take your comforts where you can find them, Johann. A former member of my collective drilled into your Healer’s head, yet you let him remain among you. A former member of your own rebellion just drilled into yours. Soon enough we’ll have you all under our thumb. As I said, it’s only a matter of time, now I know where she is.”
Joan once again tensed at Doc’s elbow, but the emphasis B put on the word ‘she’ told Doc that B wasn’t speaking of Lila. He never had been.
“I’m not surprised,” Doc said mildly. “I’m sure you knew her location the moment we returned her to her own time. That doesn’t mean you have the means to get her.”
The Arachniman’s smile turned both twisted and gleeful. “Don’t I?”
A cold hand clutched Doc’s heart. B was toying with them, trying to frighten them, but something about the confidence in that smile...
“How?” Doc asked, barely making an effort not to sound desperate anymore. “If that’s true, don’t you want to brag about it?”
“Let’s just say Dr. Victor is in the house again.”
Doc’s heart stopped for a full five beats and he had to remind himself to breathe. No, it couldn’t be, could it? Beside him, Nat gasped.
“You remember the phrase, I see,” B said, smile widening.
“That project would have taken years to come to fruition.” Doc whispered.
“Yes,” B said. “And we began work on it years ago. One of them is already searching for her. You know they’re unstoppable. It’s only a matter of time. She’s your only chance, Johann, but soon we’ll have her. You will watch her die, as you watched another, so many years ago.”
Rebellion came again, this time from Doc’s left. Nat took a step forward. “You have no right to talk about—”
“Silence,” Doc said. It was a half-hearted whisper, now. The reference to that other, so many years ago, had taken his breath away.
“Ah,” B said, looking at Nat for the first time. “The brother. I thought I recognized your chemical signature, but it’s so insignificant, I passed right over it.”
Doc couldn’t get a handle on his emotions. Primarily, he felt fear. Fear for Maggie, fear for Marcus, fear for the team, fear for the rebellion. He knew a great deal of it resulted from seeing Dillon’s death, but he still couldn’t get control of it. It clutched his chest like an iron fist, making it hard to breathe, harder to think and nearly impossible to react. Beside him, he sensed Nat’s anger, and an underlying sadness. At his right elbow, Joan felt panicked, but also confused.
“Brother?” she asked. “What does that mean?”
“My apologies, Nathaniel,” B cooed. “Have I blown your cover? Are you calling yourself Strellend again?”
Doc barel
y kept his eyebrows from rising. It sounded like B had known Nat and Strellend were synonymous for a long time. Doc turned a questioning eyebrow on Nat, but Nat avoided his gaze. Doc felt Nat’s anger draining away. Profound sadness replaced it.
“What’s it to you?” Nat asked B.
“It’s not,” B answered. “You’ll both be dead within the year.”
“And the Binding,” Nat asked between clenched teeth.
B smiled his sickly-sweet smile again. “As I said, this war is almost done.”
Doc’s chest constricted further. B had never pretended to have an answer to the Binding; not in all the years since it happened. That fact always brought Doc comfort: he was not personally in danger yet.
That, it seemed, had changed.
B fixed his glowing gaze on Doc once again. “Until we meet again, Johann. I pray it will be on a battlefield littered with individuals, with my collective drones standing over them.”
“You don’t pray,” Doc whispered.
“No I don’t,” B said. “I intend. We will meet again soon and it will be across the bloody corpse of the Executioner—” Beside him, Joan drew in a shuddering breath. “—and I will invade the pathway your friend made into your mind so fully, there will be no place left for your identity or your selfish thoughts.”
“You mean my individualistic thoughts?”
“Those are the ones. Good luck, Johann. You’re going to need it.”
Doc knew he should keep B talking, get as much information out of him as he could, but he didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t bring himself to try, and the light faded from the Arachniman’s eyes.
B must have damaged the Arachniman’s autonomic nervous system by being there. When the light disappeared, the Arachniman’s heart stopped beating. The impulses in his brain slowed, then halted. Where before he’d been an empty husk, alive but with no mind, now he became simply a corpse.
Thick silence permeated the room, but for the sound of the three of them breathing. It must have been a full minute before Joan moved. She planted herself firmly between Doc and the corpse, folding her arms and glaring down at him.
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