Immortal Twilight (16 page)

Wide enough to fit a motor car, the basement corridor was painted a dusty shade of white that looked dull and soulless under the artificial lights. All hard surfaces, the corridor echoed as Kane stepped out of the elevator and paced along it, searching for the holding cell where Harold was being kept. Behind him, the elevator doors closed with a huff, the echo of the motor almost subliminal.

A group of porters were hefting the last of the dismantled dream engines into a storeroom near the elevator, and Brigid stood with them, helping them identify parts before filing them away. The dream engines had been taken from the illegal den in Hope, and it had taken three days to bring all the parts over and catalog them for storage. After releasing the muties, the Cerberus cleanup squad had also found a great stash of glist, distilled for maximum effect, which they had seized and brought back to Cerberus for safe disposal, removing it from Hope so that it could do no further damage to potential addicts.

Kane stopped before the open door, a great shutter that could be rolled aside to open almost the entire wall of the storeroom area. “Hey, how’s it going?” he said in acknowledgment.

“Lot of gear here,” Brigid told him, glancing up from her scratch pad over the rims of the round-framed spectacles she wore for reading work.

“Is there much we can use?” Kane asked.

“Sure,” Brigid told him with a smile. “Donald’s already given the VR engine a once-over. There’s some powerful computer processing here for when we need it.”

Kane turned toward the corridor, indicating the bank of interrogation rooms. “Any word from our newfound friend?”

“Who? Harold?” Brigid asked. “Last I saw, Reba was trying to get him to speak. I watched for a while, but it was all pretty tedious.”

Dropping her pad down on one of the crates, Brigid accompanied Kane for the short walk to the interrogation room where Harold was being held. The room had a single door beside which was a large observation window fitted with one-way glass. Brigid and Kane peered through it, pitching their voices low.

Harold was sitting in a low, comfortable chair, both wrists affixed to its arms by separate handcuffs. His clothes had been replaced with a simple jumpsuit, similar to the ones worn by the Cerberus personnel, only in a burnt-red-orange hue to distinguish him as a prisoner.

Reba DeFore was sitting in an identical chair opposite, asking him questions and ticking off the answers with her pen.

“Do you know what year this is?” DeFore asked. There was resignation in her voice, the kind that comes of asking the same question repeatedly and getting no response. Sure enough, Harold continued to stare at her, his jaw open wide, a string of drool gathering slowly at the corner of his mouth. “What year is it, Harold?” DeFore repeated after a pause, but there was no reply.

“Is this what he’s been like?” Kane asked Brigid, poking a thumb at the one-way glass.

“Thrilling, isn’t it?” Brigid said with a note of sarcasm. “Why do you think I was cataloging parts?”

In the interrogation room, DeFore had moved on to another question. “What’s your name? Is it Harold? Is that your name?” She repeated variations of the same question for almost two minutes, giving the prisoner ample time to respond. Harold continued to sit there, staring and drooling.

“Whatever they did to Harold, it seems to be permanent,” Kane observed.

“His mind’s gone,” Brigid agreed. “Broken. Reba could still be asking the same questions a year from now and she won’t get a better response.”

Chapter 17

The edge of Hope

The Pacific Ocean stretched out like a blue glass carpet, lapping against the western edge of the fishing village. Piers jutted into the ocean from the shore, reaching out like splints, as if holding the water at bay. Fishermen sat there with rods twitching in the water, their boxes of bait carefully hidden from thieves. Many of these fishermen had been working these waters for years, either for pleasure or to supplement their larders, or more oftentimes both. Lately, with the influx of refugees, more people had taken to fishing these waters, filling the piers and skimming the ocean in barely floating boats, jerry-built things constructed of old packaging, strips of abandoned buildings and the salvage of other, older boats. To eat was to live, and Hope had so many who yearned to live, even as crime blighted their every waking hour.

One fisherman was in fact a woman, her name Harper Wright. Harper was forty-five with three teenage kids and she had been fishing these waters since she was their age. She had a spot on the creaking wooden jetty that she thought of as home. She had spent so much of her life here, come rain or shine, that she knew every splintered crack, every stain in the wood, and she could tell you how much each split had grown in the years since she had first come here with her brother. Harper had seen fish as long as a man’s arm span, seen seals bask in the sun on the cold winter days and witnessed people cutting open sharks on this very pier on three separate occasions—one of them disgorging a dead toddler whose body had been swallowed whole and remained in one piece despite his ordeal, the skin turned a puffy white where the saltwater had bleached it. Her hair had once been russet-red but now it was streaked with lines of iron-gray, and the lines seemed to get wider and more populous every time she looked in the mirror. She had seen a lot and she had fed her family through it all, even when the refugees had come and tried to take a whole lot more than was right. But in all that time, Harper Wright, forty-five-year-old fisherwoman, had never seen anything like the sight that caught her eyes now.

It seemed to glide on the horizon with the setting sun at its back, a great oval colored the silver-white of a heron’s feather, dawdling thirty feet above the undulating waves. With the way the waves played beneath it, it looked as if it was swaying, creating the illusion of a ripple to the great white bulb as it hovered above. The sun painted that white surface with indifferent streaks of orange and peach, like a child’s finger painting on a plain canvas, exaggerating the sleek curve of the gigantic surface. There was something depending below that oval, too, a long, dark box like a coffin, held in place by dangling wires that looked delicate from this distance but were each the thickness of a grown man’s torso.

And with the great pale blot on the sky came noise; rhythm, music, emanating from somewhere within its silver hide. As it drifted closer, making its languorous way toward the shore, the music became more distinct, the sounds of strings and wind instruments, a deep bass drum keeping time.

It was an airship, Harper realized, but one unlike any she had seen before. She had seen pictures of airships, but they had not been like this. The basic structure was the same, the gigantic hydrogen balloon with the passenger rig hoisted beneath it. But there the similarity ended. The balloon featured a great web of steel struts, huge vents and spines poking from its sides at odd angles, a network of catwalks running from top to tail. There were huge pipes hanging from the undercarriage, too, jutting out fore and aft like the horns of some wild beast.

And the ship sang, pumping out that music with the flourish of a great event. The music wafted across the shoreline, washing against the beach like the ocean’s waves in an uplifting medley of sound.

* * *

A
BOARD
THE
AIRSHIP
,
four immaculately dressed figures were watching through open windows, admiring the sensation their arrival was causing on the ground below.

“Look at them,” Antonia trilled, pointing a white-gloved finger at the people on the beach. “They don’t know what to make of us.”

“They’re so tiny,” Cecily added with a chuckle, “like ants.” She had changed the style of her blond hair. It was now piled in a twist around her head, a hat with a lacy veil propped somewhere in its golden architecture with the sly use of hat pins.

Hugh looked at her admiringly from the other side of the gondola, the mannequin resting beside him with its strings trussed over the chair Antonia had promised to renovate. “They are ants, dear Cecily,” he reminded her, his eyes on the puppet’s carved wooden face. “Insects whose tiny lives are of no matter to we here on this ship. We may burn them with magnifying glasses, should we so desire it. They have no say in our affairs, they live only to entertain us and to be educated by us.”

Algernon was standing in the lower section of the craft where the pilot’s controls were, waving his hands in the air as if conducting the musical recording that pumped from the dirigible’s speakers, a rapier-thin sword in one hand doubling for a conductor’s baton. “Perhaps we should make them dance,” he said, caught up in the music.

“Yes, let’s,” Antonia agreed, leaning with her arms crossed on the sill of the open window, the wind catching her chocolate-colored hair.

Cecily joined her a moment later, and together the two women studied the people below as the airship sailed unhurriedly toward the strip of beach. “There, that one. Do you see?” the blonde woman said, pointing out a figure seated on one of the jutting piers. “Make her dance for us. Make her dance with all the rhythm of a goose.”

Antonia eyed the figure that Cecily had identified, focusing her mind on the unsuspecting woman. It took a few moments to find her way, reaching out tentatively in the way that one might judge the weight of a football before throwing it. There were so many minds down there, each one babbling with thoughts, primarily concerned with what the airship was doing and where it had come from.

The woman took a moment to home in on, and once she had, it took Antonia another few seconds just to rummage in her wide-open mind to be sure she had the right person. She saw through the woman’s eyes, a double sight, layered over her own like a painting on glass. The woman was watching the airship approach, trepidation prodding at her thoughts. Her name was Harper Wright and she had come here to fish.

* * *

H
ARPER
W
RIGHT
WAS
WATCHING
the airship approach when she felt something pluck at her hair. She reached behind her, brushing at the back of her head to dislodge whatever it was, but there was nothing there. Shaking her head, she turned her thoughts back to the airship, its great shadow casting an inky blackness over the shimmering ocean surface.

Pick.

There it was again, that same feeling of something behind her, like a creature in her hair. She swept at it again, running her fingers through her hair and scratching at the back of her neck.

“You okay, Harper?” Old Taylor asked from his usual post beside her. Taylor was ruddy-faced with the prematurely aged features of a man who had spent too many hours sitting in the sea breeze waiting for something to bite. He may have been sixty-five, but could just as easily have been thirty. His grease-stained hat was pulled snug to his head, hiding any hint of the baldness that had taken over his once-full head of hair.

Harper looked at him, her face screwed up in irritation. “I’m... Something keeps scratching me,” she said. “Can you— Would you take a look? Do I have something in my hair back here?” She showed him.

Taylor leaned forward in his chair, keeping one finger resting on the fishing line so he wouldn’t miss a bite. “Can’t see anything,” he admitted after glancing over Harper’s red-and-gray hair.

“You sure?” She checked, feeling the stab of claws or thorns again. Whatever it was, it itched like the devil.

The airship loomed over them both, its shadow drowning them in darkness.

“What in hell’s name is that thing anyhow?” Old Taylor asked.

Harper looked up at it, stunned by its enormity. It was at least one hundred feet long, wide as the church that dominated the old village area of Hope. It was like the church in other ways, too, the spines like the church steeple remade through a fractured lens, a dozen spires writ across the sky by a madman’s brush. The music was louder now, pressing down on them like a physical thing, changing the feel of the air. Old Taylor said something about the music putting the fish off their biting, but Harper couldn’t hear him, not over the sound of the brass section, nor the scratching inside her skull.

Dammit, what the hell was that anyway? she wondered irritably as she clawed fingers through her hair again. There was definitely something there, but it felt almost like it was on the inside.

And then...

The pressure of fingers inside of your head. Like the realization that you have something caught in your tooth, the way you’ll keep working it with your tongue, keep going back to it.

The ghost fingers pushed inside Harper’s skull, pressing against her mind. Half standing over her seat, she stumbled, knocking the fold-up chair with her leg, causing it to go skittering across the pier. Old Taylor looked at her, wondering what she was doing. She stumbled about as if she was drunk, kicking into her box of bait, knocking the end of her rod so that it tipped up on its mount, drooping over the edge of the pier.

“Harper, what’s got into you, girl?” Taylor asked, finally getting up from his seat.

Harper couldn’t answer. The thing was in her head now, jabbing her like a pianist’s busy fingers, tapping out a rhythm. She smelled something in her nostrils, a sweet, musky scent like a woman’s perfume. The smell wasn’t there, not really. It was Antonia’s scent, the one she had dabbed behind her ears and on her wrists in delicate little touches like the brush of summer flowers. The woman was in her mind now, parting great slabs of her thoughts to make way for the jig. In that moment, she forgot the names of her children forever. Harper felt it like a blow to the head, a blow so hard it made her nose twinge, her eyes feel as if they would pop free from their sockets.

* * *

“N
OW
DANCE
,”
Antonia murmured as she peered over the side of the airship.

* * *

B
ELOW
, H
ARPER
BEGAN
to dance, arms and legs splaying in clunky rhythm, feet rising and falling in graceless stomps.

“What’s the joke?” Old Taylor asked, reaching a grizzled hand for Harper’s arm. She pulled from his grip, turning on the spot and raising her arms like a ballerina. “Harper?”

* * *

P
EERING
FROM
THE
AIRSHIP
CABIN
down at the cavorting fisherwoman, Cecily made a face. “She looks like a pachyderm pushed into a party,” she observed.

Antonia looked at her colleague, squinting a moment to see past the angler’s senses and into the cabin again. “Oh, please do allow me a moment to fine-tune things,” she said. “I hadn’t expected her mind to be quite so primitive. There.”

* * *

D
OWN
ON
THE
PIER
, Harper began to move with improved style, her rhythm matching the rhythm of the music emanating from the leviathan above. Old Taylor’s eyes bugged out as he saw the always-practical woman begin to leap and twirl, dancing across the rugged pier like a ballerina on stage.

“I never knew...” Taylor began, but he couldn’t quite explain what it was he had never known about his longtime fishing neighbour.

Harper spun faster and faster, first on her left leg and then on her right, whirling around and around with the grace of a sycamore seed fluttering to the ground.

* * *

C
ECILY
WAS
ECSTATIC
.
“You have it, you really have it,” she cried as Antonia made the simple woman dance.

Algernon shunted a lever on the side of the control column, locking the dirigible on automatic pilot before he strode across to watch. “I concur,” he said with a brief, two-fingered clap. “You’ve made her really quite graceful.”

Antonia smiled a knowing smile. “Merely phase one, my doubting friends,” she said.

Suddenly, down below them, the whole pier seemed to take up the dance, young and old spinning in time, twirling around together, their steps perfectly attuned. Across the beach, more figures began to dance, pulled to their feet by the potent force wrenching at their minds.

Cecily was applauding now, too, her cheeks flushed with excitement. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “Like a Christmas card. All you need is ice skaters to complete the scene. A living, breathing Christmas card.”

With a swish of her skirts, Cecily darted across the cabin to where Algernon sat, mock-conducting the music, and reached for his hand. “On your feet, Algie dear. A young lady should never dance alone.”

Accepting the request in the spirit in which it had been made, Algernon tossed his blade aside and stood, joining Cecily in a lap of the cabin as the music played on.

* * *

B
UT
DOWN
ON
THE
PIER
all was not so wonderful. Harper Wright spun and spun, utterly out of control with the sharp nails pressed into her brain, yanking at her mind. She had all but lost consciousness, could no longer process what was happening to her. She whirled again, another two-step before butting against the wooden barrier of the pier. Red flew from her ears, crimson drops of her blood as her brain began to hemorrhage.

Around her, others were doing likewise, their dance steps becoming more desperate, blood budding from ears and nostrils as their brains went into meltdown.

* * *