Dusk (25 page)

But the darkness made it easier for him to
think. The room that Tanner and Jang had been taken to had a table,
which meant there were most likely two or more interrogation rooms.
They could have moved the table, but that was improbable. They had
carried Cyrus past three doors—one in the same hallway as their
room, one that was across from the dais, and one just before they
had tossed him in here. An observation room must have been the room
opposite this room, and the other interrogation room could very
well have been the room immediately next to this one. The soldiers
watching them did not need to be immediately next to the
interrogation rooms to monitor the scientists, but proximity would
ensure a certain amount of security. As far as he could tell in the
short time the door was open, there were no windows or two-way
mirrors in this room, but there could easily have been some form of
microscopic fly-eye cameras embedded in any, or even all, of the
walls. They could be monitoring his body heat to note his position
and bodily changes and they could have embedded microphones
anywhere in the room. No doubt, they were still watching him very
closely because they had scooped him up almost immediately after
Tanner’s feigned outburst, which had been such a remarkable
performance that the memory of it still resonated in Cyrus’s jaw
and temple.

However calming, the darkness became
unnerving as soon as Cyrus realized he was no longer aware of time.
The darkness was persistent, smothering, and Cyrus began rocking
back and forth in his chair to push back the veil of despair. He
lifted the legs off the floor as he rocked, and he let them fall
back again with resounding, metronomic clicks. The darkness
unsettled him, but he only gave into the anxiety to set the bait.
He rocked back and forth for the ruse, then for comfort, and then
as time pressed on without him, he rocked because his thoughts
began to turn against him. He knew he might not ever get out of
this place. They could decide to kill every last one of them. They
could even begin subjecting them to more physical torture or even
experiments. The men holding them didn’t seem the type, but who
ever did? But captured, tortured, experimented on, or set free, the
one thing that was beyond debate, was that he would never see
Darius again. His son was lost somewhere in time, the past that he,
himself, had so recklessly left behind on the hopeful breaths of a
capricious dream—an ill-wrought prayer, a foolish plight to escape
his own demons. Demons that refused to be left behind. Demons that
sat with him now, in this very room, whispering his every
transgression into his ear even as he tried to rock them away—and
they were not wrong.

And the tears came. As real as the chair he
was sitting in. Real as the sound generated by the rhythmic
collisions of plastic against concrete. Real as the icy hand that
now gripped his chest from the inside, making it hard to breathe,
hard to think.

And then Cyrus wanted nothing more than to
lash out at the real enemy. Not Soldier 43235, not The Flying
Monkeys, not Dr. Winberg, not Torus Denali, not Feralynn. His most
loathsome enemy was right here in the room with him and he wanted
to tear his heart out with his teeth. But he was beyond reach.
Beyond reproach. So Cyrus arose, his indignity shaping the
merciless darkness into a form befitting his adversary. He snatched
the chair from the floor and swung it, and then he brought it back
at his assailant, but the demon was elusive, deft. Cyrus spun and
swung again, and then spun back the other way, but the chair
slipped from his hands and careened into the door.

Then as he took a step toward the door, his
legs gave in to the weight he was carrying. He had carried the
burden for too long and they could take no more. He fell against
the wall next to the door and slid down into a heap on the floor.
Sobbing wracked his body, and he clawed at the door. And it seemed,
for a moment, that something on the other side of the door clawed
back.

But the sound had been more a brushing than a
scraping. He pressed his head closer to the wall. The blood
pounding through his temple made hearing difficult, and he couldn’t
tell if the sound was gone, or if his own internal workings were
obscuring it. He took in a deep breath, held it, let it out, and he
focused. He had reached his lowest common denominator. The sum over
all his histories had been reduced to one and only one choice—he
would destroy everything and everyone in this building before he
destroyed himself.

But flopping about like an anaphylactic test
rodent would not help one bit. He needed focus because their
captors had gone way beyond the limit marker. He wasn’t going to be
their test monkey one second longer; the poking and prodding was
over. He had considered it, tested the water, but now they had
cemented it for him—he was leaving and he was taking his friends
with him.

Cyrus pulled in another breath. Savored it.
Let it out. And then he heard it. Faint at first, but then louder.
Smack, smack, shuffle, smack. It was muffled, but it was there.
Then, he realized where his ear was. Over the door sill. And what
he was hearing were footsteps in the hallway.

The cold hand inside his chest began melting
and clarity rushed into his mind again. He continued to breathe
deliberately in case they were still listening, trying to keep his
heart rate up in case they were monitoring him through infrared. As
he breathed, he listened and he calculated. This building could
very well have been a military structure, but it was not designed
to house prisoners. People moved about the halls freely.

He remembered that some stories of being
taken by The Flying Monkeys included a room with a table. Others
did not include the table in their stories, but everyone had been
taken around this corner, either the back way, or the way they had
brought Cyrus—which meant all the scientists, not just the ten in
his room, but all twenty of them, were most likely being kept in
the same area. He needed to put it to the test, but he could do
that very easily, and he could cut two marks with one laser in the
process.

He began sobbing louder and scratching and
beating on the door until one sob wracked his entire body. He
whimpered dramatically and then screamed, “Let me out!”

He thought about how he had felt just moments
ago. How he had wanted nothing more than to bring it all to an end.
How even though his sins were his own, his attitude toward himself
had been engendered by the men that kept him against his will. This
sent his tantrum into a frenzy.

“You infested fuck-holes are gonna pay! Every
last one of you! When they get here, you’ll all be sorry!” He let
his sobs overwhelm him, sank to the floor, and then, almost as soon
as he hit the floor, he lunged at the door again and banged on it
repeatedly. “You hear me, you Fringe-whore fuckmongers!”

“The Vanden Mittoren will be your downfall!
You can’t keep us here forever! Dr. Milliken is too important to
the war! You will drown in the blood of your fucking children
before the Vanden Mittoren are done!” And then he collapsed, his
cheeks still fluttering, nostrils still flaring, sucking in the
tears that had not had time to dry, sending quiet spasms through
his body as he coughed into his arms, curled into a ball, but
keeping his head next to the door seam. He sat there sobbing, not
sure himself if the sobbing was real or feigned. The pain, however,
was very real. Maybe the sobbing was an exaggeration of what he
felt inside. If it was, it was too long coming. Either way, the
whimpers and gasps continued as he tried to take in the muffled
sounds from the hall over the throbbing of his own blood and
exasperation. And he stayed there, curled in a ball, no sound but
his own lament, for impossibly long minutes. He tried to glean how
long he had been there, but seconds, minutes, even hours, were now
blended into an inchoate haze. The darkness held him in
confinement. He was trapped in a fugue. His stupor turned him in on
himself repeatedly, and he was left there tessellating into his own
dread. Time and space warped as he collapsed in on himself, and the
sobs became very real again as he approached his own event horizon.
Then there was a sound, a whoosh, a point outside of his own
existence that blue-shifted into his mind with alarming clarity.
Even there, on the threshold of despondency, it was clear it was a
door opening in the hall. He focused on reigning in his emotion and
making way for the sound waves that squeezed, contorted and
muffled, through the seine of the door seam.

There was a pattering, like the clambering of
a spider in a child’s nightmare, and then a barely perceptible
murmuring—the words were indistinct, garbled, but the anger in them
was clear even through the filter of the seam. Then there was
another pattering, more erratic this time, which grew louder. There
was some clambering, and then another whoosh like the first. This
one was louder and a slight tremor went through the wall—a shiver
that would not have been discernible if Cyrus’s head had not rested
against the door frame. Then there was another whoosh, another
pattering, and then he was alone in silence again.

Cyrus lay there for what seemed like only a
moment, breathing deliberately but calmly into his nose and out
through his mouth, slowing the unreliable expanding and contracting
of his lungs into a voluntary, but relaxed, quiet. Breathing like
this eased his heart rate into a steady rhythm, stilling the
pounding in his temple. As he lifted himself, he realized his legs
had lost most of their feeling. As he stood, his knees wobbled, and
as the blood rushed down into his legs with a tickle, the
precariousness of his stance became evident. As he shambled toward
the chair, it felt as if all the blood that had not rushed to his
legs had settled in his bladder. He picked up the chair and set it
on its legs again. He put up a concerted effort to sit down
gracefully, but halfway through his descent, his leg gave, and he
plopped clumsily into the plastic seat. He propped himself upright,
focusing his awareness on his toes, his knees, his elbows, his
shoulder, and then he flexed the muscles from his neck down to his
toes and back up again. His body protested at first, but as his
blood began to circulate again, his mind became clearer. The noises
in the hall could mean many different things, but the timing was
too convenient to have been much of anything other than what he
suspected. As far as he could tell, this whole operation was a
puppet show, a fiasco orchestrated by men and possibly women who
had never known anything of violence or true combat other than the
occasional skirmish, riot, or melee. Most likely their fathers,
their grandfathers, and even their grandfathers’ fathers had never
seen anything more. Cyrus had no illusions that his own background
was any different, but this put the men who kept them on decidedly
different terms in his mind; he might not be any more experienced
in conflict than them, but their ignorance and methodology made
them easy men to predict and exploit.

• • • • •

—
Do you believe in God, Dada?

—
Yes, Dari, I do.

—
Then why don’t you ever go to church with me and
mommy?

—
Well, it’s mostly because of how I think a god
would have to be. I don’t really like the way churches
anthropomorphize God.

—
Anthropomorphize. Miss Hasabe taught us about
that. That’s what they do in fables when animals wear clothes and
talk and act like people.

—
Yeah, and they usually have the worst, least
admirable characteristics of people. I can’t understand why God
would be as petty and mean as He is portrayed.

—
So what do you think God is?

—
I dunno. I think God is less like a person and
more like an idea. Like trying to explain abstract art to a blind
man; the more you explain, the farther you get from the heart of
the matter.

—
You know, sometimes in church, God sounds more
like Santa Claus. Like he has a naughty list and a nice list and
people go to the altar thingy and sit on his lap to ask for
gifts.

—
You’re right. But I don’t think it should be
like that. I think God is in us all and when we are naughty, deep
down, we know we are falling off the list—our own list—and we
either react to it or we let it tear us apart.

—
Yeah, I usually know I’m being a knucklehead
when it happens. Even if I’m not sure, I have a feeling, like if I
take one more step, I might slip. But you and mommy still love me
even when I slip, even when it’s real bad. The thing I don’t get is
why the Santa Claus god doesn’t love the people who slip
up.

—
Well, that’s the trick. If God doesn’t ‘love’ or
‘hate,’ then I think ‘falling off’ is just people using God as an
excuse to pass judgment on and belittle others.

—
Yeah, but the pastor is closer to God,
right?

—
See, that’s the catch. You should never set any
man above you—no matter what he claims to be—nor should you expect
any man to set another above himself.

—
Well, what about Miss Hasabe? I have to answer
to her all the time—and you and mommy too.

—
Respect and reverence are two different things,
Dari. A man of integrity always answers to the people he respects,
like it or not.

—
What if they don’t respect you back?

—
Make sure you hear these words and hear them
well, regardless of what you do, what you say, who you respect, and
who you do not, at the end of the day, above all else, you have to
answer to yourself and yourself alone—and the mirror accepts
neither lies nor excuses.

• • • • •

“What was that little stunt you pulled yesterday?”
Winberg’s voice was usually condescending, but today, as Cyrus sat
battered and bruised on the floor next to his bunk, Winberg’s tone
had gone way beyond the outer marker.