Dead Space: Catalyst (34 page)

Istvan gave a little grunt of anger and frustration. He pushed at Jensi’s head, but Jensi held on.

“Istvan,” he said. “I’m here for you.”

Istvan struck him very hard, in the face, but Jensi held on. He hit him again, and then again, and yet again, but still he held on. He hit him harder and harder, Jensi’s face growing bruised and bloody, his burnt shoulder cracking and bleeding as well. His head was growing loose on his shoulders, but still he held on.

52

Something was beginning to change for Istvan. The veil that had fallen and had been the scrim upon which he had begun to see the other world was growing more and more tattered, no longer able to hold all the images of that world. There were gaps and tears and the other world was beginning to leak out. The images of his mother, Councilman Fischer, and Conn no longer seeming as real as they had felt over the last few days. No, there was something wrong with them: they weren’t real, they were puppets, their motions wrong now, not realistic at all. How could he ever have believed that that was the man he had killed? And how could he have believed they could trade faces with one another?

His hands were still moving, doing something. He was hitting something, he knew, hitting the thing that something or someone was trying to pass off as his brother. No, it couldn’t be his brother—Jensi was millions of miles away, safe on Vindauga. He couldn’t be here. This was just another deception.

The veil was in tatters now, all but gone. He slowly began to relax. He was less distracted, his motions less mechanical. He began to hit the thing masquerading as his brother less and less hard, and finally stopped hitting it altogether.

When he did, Jensi finally let go. He collapsed, bloody and broken, in a heap. Istvan watched him fall and then stood there looking at him. Yes, it looked like Jensi, remarkably like him, and did not continue to shift and change as the other dead had done.

Istvan hesitated. What if it really was his brother? What if he had killed him?

Slowly he crouched down near him and looked closer, examining the lines of his face. His mother’s face had been just as he remembered it, the face she had had the last time he had seen her. It was the face that had been captured in his memory, and this was one of the things that had allowed him to know she wasn’t real, that the Marker was talking through her. But here, Jensi’s face was different than he remembered.

He reached out and touched the face with his hand. “Jensi,” he said. “Is it really you?”

And then the veil came together again, or tried to. He felt a pain in his head and then saw before him, standing on the other side of his brother, his mother. She was there, a ghost, the same ghost he had been seeing for days now, no different.

No, Istvan,
she said.
This is a lie. This isn’t really who you think it is. It’s not Jensi. He’s not real.

“He’s not?” he asked.

He could be convinced, he realized. In fact, he would have been convinced if he could not see the difference between this ghost and the man lying on the floor. His mother’s face was the same as it had always been, not a bit different. But this man on the floor was his brother but older and bruised and bloody. Which meant that he was not a ghost created by the Marker. Which meant that Jensi must be real.

But how was that possible? How could Jensi have come all this way? And why? In his confused way he couldn’t help but realize that if Jensi had come here, had traveled millions of miles to be here, it was for his sake. He had come for him.

So, his brother hadn’t abandoned him after all. Quite the opposite. His brother had come for him. His brother loved him and was looking out for him. But if that was the case, then what about the Marker? Did it love him as well? Was it looking out for him? And what about Briden? Was Briden looking out for him, or was he using him?

No, he realized, if his brother was his friend, then Briden wasn’t. Briden had urged him on, had held him in the other world, had made him feel important. But Briden was no friend to him. Briden just wanted to use him to get at whatever the Marker wanted to tell him.

It was just a moment’s lucidity, the thought quickly rolling under, but it was enough. He had been used and cheated, even if he didn’t understand exactly why. Briden had seen what the Marker had done to him and then had fed on that, had encouraged him to fall further out of step with the world and into the other world. The result of which was here, lying on the floor, in the form of his broken and bloody brother.

He put his hands under Jensi and pulled him up, pressing him to his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said, whispering into his brother’s ear. He wasn’t sure if his brother was living or dead. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said. But Jensi did not answer.

*   *   *

How long he held his brother like that, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps just a few seconds, perhaps a few minutes, perhaps longer. He was drawn from his reverie because Briden was suddenly there, beside him, patting his shoulder.

“You are a true prophet,” Briden was saying. “I knew you would make the right choice. Our work here is too important to let extraneous details get in the way. The only family you have now,” he said as he gestured at the Marker and himself, “is right here.”

Istvan stared at him, and Briden’s smile flickered just a little. Then as Istvan continued to stare, Briden repeated what he had said. Once he was done, Istvan began to smile.

Very slowly and very carefully Istvan stood up, holding the smile frozen and immobile on his face. Briden was still talking, but he was no longer listening to him. He knew now what he had to do. He had to stand there, waiting for his moment, waiting for his chance.

His mother appeared, stared curiously at him, head cocked to one side.
What are you doing?
she asked.
What are you planning?
But he just shook his head. And then it was the councilman he had killed instead, asking the same things but in a very different way. And then, last of all, it was Conn, who seemed the most interested of any of the three to know the answer.

Briden droned on. Istvan watched his mouth, his throat. When he had finished, he looked at Istvan, waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t say anything at all. Briden waited a moment, eyebrows raised, and when there still was no answer forthcoming began to turn away. Which was the moment that Istvan chose to leap on him and break his neck.

Briden went down without a sound, a boneless heap that it was hard to believe had ever been human. His head jutted oddly to one side.

“It seems I was a false prophet after all,” he said to Briden’s corpse, but the corpse didn’t answer.

*   *   *

His thoughts, so briefly lucid, were already beginning to become confused again. He did not know what to do to keep them straight. He kneeled, touched his brother’s bruised and broken face. He massaged his neck, trying to bring him back to consciousness or to life.

Perhaps the Marker can help me,
he thought.
Maybe it wasn’t my enemy. Maybe Briden was the only enemy.

He shook his head. Did he really believe that? No, he didn’t, but he was worried that he might eventually convince himself he did.

He kept talking to Jensi, kept touching him. Slowly, very slowly, his brother’s breathing grew less shallow and he began to come around.

“Jensi,” he said. “Come back to me. Come, brother.”

And slowly Jensi did. One eye was swollen shut and his face was bloody, his cheekbone perhaps collapsed. But he was alive.

“Briden’s gone,” he said, as Jensi opened his eyes.

Jensi blinked, rolled his head first one way and then the other, then asked “What?”

“Briden’s gone,” he said again. “Dead, I mean.”

“Did you kill him?” asked Jensi.

“I broke his neck,” Istvan said in a matter-of-fact way. “Just snapped it.”

But Jensi had closed his eyes again. Istvan shook him gently until he opened his eyes again.

“Briden’s gone,” Istvan said. “It’s just you and me. We can use the Marker for good. We can control it. I know how to talk to it and how to make it listen.”

“No,” Jensi managed to croak. “We can’t. It’s not something we should touch. We should destroy it.”

Istvan gave him a quizzical look. “No, brother,” he said, “you just don’t understand. It knows me. It grew with me. It changed me. It’ll be okay.” He gestured all around him. “You see how it protects us from the creatures it has created from our imperfect flesh, just like you used to protect me? The creatures cannot approach us. It will teach me how to control them, and then we can make this world our own.” He gave a strange smile, one eye darting about independently. “After that, who knows?” he asked.

Jensi shook his head, but Istvan was staring at the Marker now, his gaze unfocused.

“It will give us a purpose, brother,” he said. “It will fulfill us.” He lifted his arm and suddenly Jensi felt his head burning, aching as if it were slowly being torn open from inside. Was it coincidence? wondered Jensi. Or had his brother somehow triggered the pulse by raising his arm? Did Istvan really have control over the Marker?

And then the sensation deepened, intensified. It felt like something was scraping fire along the channel of his thoughts, reworking them, modifying them. He saw, before his eyes, a brief flash of his mother, her startled face staring at him, and then she was gone, and he was seeing instead the Marker. But not seeing exactly—it was going on not outside of his head but inside, and it was as if he was seeing how the Marker came together, how the Marker was what it was. It felt like someone was applying pressure more and more strongly to his mind, forcing information into it, and no matter how he fought to think something else, he could feel it there, pushing its way into him. He clutched his head: it felt like something was living inside of him.
The Marker,
he thought,
the Marker
. It’s trying to infect me. And when he opened his eyes there was the actual Marker above him, implacable and brutal, the images still in his head, indelibly there.

Jensi turned his head to look away from it only to see Callie writhing on the floor, her face contorted and suffering. He watched her slowly rise to her hands and knees, uttering little cries, and start to crawl until she ran into the wall. She pawed it, seemingly trying to move through it, and when she found she couldn’t she began to beat her head against it.

Jensi winced, and then suddenly the pressure in his head faded and he found he could breathe again, the pulse subsiding. He was confused, his head buzzing, but he was still himself.

But Callie didn’t stop. She kept striking her head against the wall, harder and harder, her movement more lost and erratic than it had been at first. A stain of blood had begun to spread on the wall and was beginning to drip down.

“Callie, no!” he yelled, or tried to yell. His voice was little more than a whisper, perhaps nothing she could hear. He rolled over and began to crawl toward her, his whole body aching with pain, but it was too late: before he was even halfway there, she had collapsed.

He continued toward her, but by the time he reached her he knew she was dead. She wasn’t breathing, her eyes were open and glassy. Her neck was oddly loose beneath his fingers, her head resting at the same wrong angle as Briden’s.
What a waste,
he thought, and brushed her eyelids closed.

When he turned away from her, it was to find his brother standing over him.

“It spoke to you,” Istvan said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Jensi.

“It spoke to you,” Istvan insisted. “Now you have its shape inside you.” For a moment he was still, motionless, as if he wasn’t inside his body, then he seemed to come to himself. He gestured past Jensi, at Callie Dexter’s broken corpse. “What happened to her?” he asked, seemingly astonished.

“You’re crazy,” said Jensi. But Istvan ignored him.

“Not everybody can be like us,” said Istvan. “We have to have followers, too.” He walked past Jensi and prodded Callie’s body with his toe, sniffed. “I remember her. I liked her. Yes, she can be with us. She’ll be a follower. We’ll just have to help her along. We’ll carry her away from the Marker and put her where it can reach her and then she’ll come back to life as one of our servants.”

Jensi rolled onto his back, closed his eyes. He tried to push Istvan’s words out of his head, but he couldn’t. They had wormed their way too deeply in. Callie had been right, he realized: his brother was beyond help, beyond saving. He was mad. He couldn’t acknowledge what the Marker was doing, still lived under the delusion that it was helping him even as it attempted to rewire everybody’s brains, manipulated the dead into other forms, and attempted to destroy or transform everything around it. It wasn’t a friend to humans, nor even a friend to just Istvan. No, Jensi suspected it didn’t think of humans as anything but fodder for accomplishing whatever goals of its own it had.

But Istvan couldn’t see it. He had been with the Marker too long, and his brain was strange, wrong, off, which probably made it worse, and made him all the more dangerous. No doubt the same thing had happened to Istvan that had happened to Jensi: the Marker presenting itself to him, imprinting itself onto his brain, trying somehow to spread knowledge of itself through the minds of others. That probably meant that others in this complex, and others in the prison colony, had experienced the same thing, that they now carried around with them the plans and the seed for the Marker.

He shuddered. What would happen if one of these people got off the planet? Was there some way the Marker could control them? Would they suddenly have an uncontrollable urge to what … share what they knew? If that was the case, then before long maybe there’d be not one Marker, but many, and that would mean the end of humanity.

Or maybe it didn’t mean anything. Maybe the images and plans would simply be forgotten in time and it wasn’t dangerous. But was that a risk he was willing to take?

It had to be stopped here.