A Latent Dark (54 page)

She shrugged. Reading her silence as acceptance,
Ostermann’s
smile broadened. “Good,” he said, giving a friendly wave to the men waiting in the observation room.

Stintwell handed him the goggles. She wished Skyla luck and left the room, still angry.

He handed the soft leather cap to her. “I know you know how to wear these. Go ahead.”

She put them on without engaging the lenses. They felt warm and soft and familiar. For the first time since Skyla arrived at the lab, the lights dimmed. She thought she could hear a faint ticking sound from one of the walls.

A panel in front of her slid away, revealing a man. He was young, maybe as old as some of the younger soldiers she had seen. He sat in a chair, unrestrained. His clothes were dirty and torn, his hair disheveled. He looked around his brightly lit room with bored curiosity.

 “Now, you remember the tests?” Ostermann said into her ear. “You remember the way you stared at the illusions? I want you to do that with him now.”

“Just stare at him?”

“But with the goggles on. Do you think you can do that?”

Of course she could do that. She could always do that. They had just never asked. Skyla nodded, thinking of the cold threat from Summers.
Do it for Mom and Rhia
, she thought.
Mom and Rhia, Mom and Rhia, Mom and Rhia.

  “What I want you to do is find out what this man did wrong,” said Ostermann, standing away from her. “Go ahead and begin whenever you’re ready.”

The lenses came down and clicked into place. The world went dark.

She had expected something more interesting than what she actually saw. Compared to some of the monstrous demons she had seen in the past, this man was almost unremarkable, with one exception: he had killed someone.

But it wasn’t that simple. He had been chased—he and his wife. They were being pursued through the forest, heavy black boots stomping after them, branches whipping at his face. He yelled for her to keep going as he ducked behind a tree. The soldier’s footsteps grew louder as he crouched in the shadows.

He sprung from the tree, the small dagger in his hand, slipping it between the black plates of armor as the soldier behind the helmet grunted.

It was hard to watch. The man felt terrible about it and Skyla wanted to reach out and touch his shadow, massage the pain out of it. The chorus of humming vibrated out and all around her.

The machine spoke in her mind, its voice filled with gluttonous joy:
Be my eyes.

“He didn’t really mean t—” she said, but was cut off by a loud click from inside the walls.

The man twitched once and then slumped in his chair. His shadow evaporated like air from a popped balloon, gone forever. The figure that sat in the chair was—empty. It was as if she were looking at a husk. There was nothing there.

She flipped the lenses up, gasping. A sick feeling crept down Skyla’s chest as she looked again for a shadow, but found nothing. The man’s eyes stared out at the world, unfocused and stupid.

Oh God
, she thought,
please let him be alive still. Oh please.

The lights went bright. It hurt her eyes as she blinked it away. Ostermann was up from his seat and staring at the subject. A door opened and several Tinkerers, also wearing white lab coats, gadgets, and belts slung from their shoulders and waists rushed over to the man in the chair.

The subject blinked. Skyla let out a sigh of relief. He was alive, so she thought.

He looked at the men who surrounded him, not with anxiety or recognition. His head turned mechanically from one face to another. His eyes, wide and limpid as a cow’s, glanced at them without recognition. Every movement was automatic. His eyes were vacant.

*

John was standing in a darkened room that gave them a clear view of the test subject and of Skyla, the girl he had traversed the wilderness to find, just to make sure she didn’t end up here. Now he had arrived, late and powerless.

When the wall vanished and the man appeared, he asked Christopher who the subject was. Several clergy gave him irritated looks.

“He’s a bandit,” said the archbishop. “Murdered a soldier in the woods during the Lassimir raid.”

“And what is Skyla supposed to do?”

“Watch and see.”

“Are there others?”

“Oh yes,” the archbishop whispered over the growing vibration from the walls. “We have heretics, bandits, nonbelievers.”

The man sat in the room, confused. He seemed to have been expecting something much worse, an inquisition or a tribunal. They turned Skyla to look at him and when she did—

What did happen exactly?

She said something that John couldn’t quite understand. The next second the man twitched, as if someone had stuck an electric wire in his chest. There was an awed hush from the clergy around him as the man blinked and stared. He appeared almost dead but was clearly still breathing. John stepped closer to the window.

“Born again,” said a voice from behind him.

He turned toward the familiar voice to see Lyle Summers. The man looked lost in a dream.

“What did you say?” asked John.

“He’s born again,” said Lyle. “He’s been given redemption, the chance to make all the right choices now.”

John turned back to the window. The subject blinked and stared, eyes wide and stupid. The Tinkerers who surrounded the man asked him questions, all met with the comprehension of a tree stump.

“He’s—” John began to say
dead
but that wasn’t quite the right word. The man was clearly alive, but blank. His face was slack, as though he had forgotten how to make any sort of expression.

“Pure,” said Lyle. “He’s pure as God wanted him to be. He is closer to the divine right now than any person in this room. Hallelujah.”

A Tinkerer reached out to help the subject from his chair. The man began to scream, high and feral. It was the keening howl of a caged animal.

“What…” said John, but choked over his own horror. “What have you done to him?”

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” said Lyle, unfazed by the shrieking man in the next room.

John could only stare. A fine line of drool dripped from the man’s mouth as he struggled, eyes wide and blind with fear.

 “As you can see,” said a spokesman in the front of the room, “by using a focusing agent we are able to achieve a much cleaner and more thorough burn. We estimate power output will be increased by twenty-percent…”

There was a smattering of applause. John looked around as if in some horrible dream. Outside the window, things were only worse.

Skyla was trembling behind her goggles and staring at the screaming man. John thought he saw something move from the darkest corner of her room. It could have been a tight cluster of insects or maybe a leak of some black liquid. Images of his panicked congregation filled his mind.

“How many people have you done this to?” asked John.
My God,
he thought.
What if they caught James? What if he ends up in that room next?

“Oh, hundreds,” said the spokesman. “In fact, before the accident we were making tremendous progress—”

“Accident?” John gaped.

The archbishop stepped in. “John, let’s take this outside.”

“What accident?” John said.

Laura Stintwell was back in the room with Skyla, consoling her. The Tinkeress seemed confused, unable to understand why the girl was upset.

“What accident?” John said again.

Christopher placed an arm around his shoulder. He began to walk John out and into the hallway.

“John,” said Christopher in his most reasonable voice. “I think maybe you should find a room where you can sit and digest what you’ve seen, come to some reasonable conclusions.”

A door opened and the man stumbled out, propped up under each shoulder by guards. He looked at John with a blank stare, drool staining his chest.

“How long do they live after this?” said John. “How long did the other ones live before they went insane? Did they kill themselves or just wither away?”

The other observers—clergy and tinkerers in the room—had begun to emerge from the darkness, drawn by the argument. Lyle stood off to the side, leaning against the doorway. John turned to face Christopher as they stood in the hall.

“John, I don’t think this is the time—”

 “How many people could you use this on at once?” asked John. He froze as realization began to dawn on his face. He lowered his voice. “How many, Chris?”

“Years ago we were doing quite a few,” said the archbishop, hushed to a near whisper. “We might have been able to turn the tides on the western crusades if we had this device.”

“But it needs a pilot. You can’t just make it
work
; you need someone who will focus it. That’s what Skyla is for. Otherwise it just fires off indiscriminately, chooses its own targets. That’s why that man in my holding pen fainted.”

It took everything John had in him to keep from grabbing the archbishop and shaking him, forcing some sense into his old friend.

Lyle spoke up. “Father, don’t get all high and mighty on us. You’re out of your league.”

John ignored Lyle. Christopher’s eyes shifted awkwardly. John took a step toward him until their faces were almost touching. A small bead of sweat ran down the archbishop’s temple.

“Skyla’s mother,” said John. “She was a… a ‘focusing agent’ wasn’t she?”

“What would you have us do, John?” said Christopher, disappointed. “You yourself were all about forgiveness of the town witch. Does it look like we are burning them here? I thought you’d be happy about this. At least she’s being taken care of and put to use.”

Instead you are using the witches to burn everyone else,
he thought.

John was about to say what was on his mind, but he was cut short when the sound of a gunshot rolled through the hallway like thunder. Heads whipped around to peer down the corridor. Lyle stood up straight, alert and concerned. There was a scream from somewhere in the lab, and then John’s world changed forever.

Chapter 39

“Here?” Gil asked. It was terribly dark, even for someone with two eyes.

“Yes,” said the voice. “Open the panel… that’s right. Now take out the fuse… it’s the long glass tube. That’s right.”

Gil did as she was told in the dark, her tiny fingers feeling deftly over the wires and fuses. Little birds told her lots of things, but she had never listened to one who spoke so well, and none of them had ever known so much about electricity. None of them could pick locks either.

She liked tinkering, even if most of the time she had no idea what she was doing. Still, it was something that kept her busy so she wouldn’t have to spend as much time around Mr. Henry.

This however, felt like a much bigger project than simple tinkering. This was like magic, with so many tubes and pipes, cogs and gears. The fuse box was hidden deep in the recesses of a dark tunnel, something she never would have seen if the raven hadn’t shown her.

“Like that?”

“Perfect,” he said. “Wait—”

She held her breath. “What?” she whispered.