The Flicker Men (38 page)

“Try that key,” Mercy said, pointing.

I looked. Mounted on the wall one flight down was a stairwell fire ax. That key, it turned out, worked perfectly.

The doorknob snapped loose on the first strike and bounced down the stairs. Three additional blows brought the locking mechanism to its knees, and we were in.

“After you,” I said, swinging the door wide.

*   *   *

We passed the elevator and walked down the hall into the High-throughput offices. It was much as I remembered. Chaotic. Abandoned. Desks and chairs and empty space. Concrete and carpet. Walking farther in, I saw the yellow police tape. We crossed the room to where one of the windows was broken, its glass shattered into a thousand pieces on the cement floor. Replaced by plywood. Police tape fluttered.

He took his medicine bravely.

I moved farther into the building.

There was a sound. It came from up ahead, down one of the halls. Mercy heard it, too. Our heads swiveled in unison, but there was nothing to see. Just the same empty offices. Nothing moved. The sound didn't come again.

“Stay close,” I said.

Mercy stared at me flatly, eyes half-lidded. She raised her gun. “You stay close.” We made our way side by side, deeper into the rooms. Mercy with her gun, me with the ax.

Other than the glass and the police tape, nothing else seemed to be disturbed. The rooms looked exactly as I remembered them. A series of offices and work spaces. Eventually, we came to the winding stairwell. “Down there,” I said.

We descended. The next floor looked like the last. Empty, abandoned, our footfalls echoing in the metal stairwell. And then came the short hall leading to the black door. The final room.

It was already open.

I looked at Mercy. “This is it.” I could feel my heart beating in my chest.

We stepped inside. The room was empty and dark, but as we crossed the threshold, emergency lights came on, and we could see. The room hadn't changed. Long rows of hardware stood off to the side, draped in shadow. The quartz sphere still sat on its pole at the back of the room.

I let the ax head slide from my shoulder and drop to the floor. The handle was slick in my palm. I gripped it tighter and walked over to the control board.

“Stand back,” I said.

I raised my ax. I thought of Boaz. The way his skull had caved.

The ax came down with a loud crash and carved a gaping hole in the controls. I pulled it from the hole and swung again. The plastic control board seemed to disintegrate, spilling its guts onto the floor at my feet.

Next, I went to the hardware stands. I took a stance like a baseball player, and I swung for the fences—tearing through the thin metal casing to bury the ax head in the machine. I tried to pull it out, but it wouldn't come at first, so I braced my foot against the side of the housing and finally worked it free. I took a step back and swung again, burying the ax deep. I pulled it loose and swung again. Wires and chunks of metal and plastic pulled away, falling to the floor. I moved along the row of hardware, swinging as I went, hitting each part of the machine. It was a long process. I chopped with the ax until each unit housing was hacked open, and my arms were burning, and I was out of air.

Finally, I rested, leaning on the ax handle.

Mercy stood watching. Her eyes tired. It had been a long, hard journey.

“Is it done?”

“One more thing,” I said.

I crossed toward the middle of the room and stood in front of the steel pole. Even in the near dark, the sphere had a sheen. A sixteen-inch diameter sphere of lucent quartz. Had Stuart died for this? The sum of all our work and all my fears.

“The eberaxi,” I said.

Inside the sphere, strange geometries gleamed. The gem. Burned like an afterimage in the quartz.

I shifted my hands on the ax handle, getting a two-handed grip.

“
Ah, ah, ah
” came a voice from behind me.

I turned, and Brighton stepped through the doorway.

 

49

He came forward, moving into the light. More shapes followed him into the room. Big men. Two, then four, then six. They moved along the walls, flanking us, blocking our exit. They stood in the shadows. I let the ax drop to the floor. Brighton carried Stuart's shotgun in his hand.

“It's been a good chase, Eric.”

Brighton was dressed as I'd last seen him. Dark hunter's jacket. Dark pants. His pale eyes seemed to shine. A half smile on his face. “But now,” he said, “the chase is over.”

“How did you find us?” Mercy said, voice so soft that I could barely hear her.

“Now that is a good question,” Brighton said. He crunched across the broken shards of electronics, casually flanking us. Behind him, his men lined the walls. A half dozen bulky shapes in the shadows. “Step away from the sphere, and I'll give you an answer.”

“You know that's not going to happen.”

Brighton chuckled. “What world do you live in, that you think this goes your way?” His feet crunched on the shards of quartz as he pivoted. “But then we are all creatures of our own worlds, aren't we? We fashion them to our likeness, like our gods.” He circled around us. “Have you ever stopped to ask what kind of world you've fashioned for yourself, Eric? If you hand over the sphere, I'll let you walk away. And I won't make you watch me kill her.”

“He's lying,” Mercy said. She pulled her gun and pointed it at Brighton.

Brighton's smile only widened.

“Well, mercy me,” he said. “What have we here?”

“Stay away from us.”

Brighton laughed. “There is a universal form of communication that I've discovered. Language may be fine for conducting business and infiltrating institutions. Befriending you, when befriending you is expedient. Yet for debate of a more fundamental nature, it is inadequate. I've found that at the core, there will always be misunderstanding. Miscommunication. Until you draw your blade.” He raised the shotgun, but he didn't point it. Its muzzle directed somewhere between them.

His smile widened again, showing gleaming white teeth. “You show your steel, and then everything changes. No matter what language you speak. I've seen it on the steppes of Asia, the deserts of Africa. I saw it on the icy shores of Greenland, where a thousand years ago the long path east finally met the long path west. No common language is necessary once your blade is out. The rest of human communication falls away as artifice. Only with steel is perfect communication possible.”

He shifted the shotgun in his hands. “Shall you and I talk, Mercy? Is that what you'd like to do?” He turned toward her, all the good-natured contrivance slowly draining from his face. His eyes were suddenly murderous. “Shall we
deliberate
?”

They stared at each other.

Her eyes gave her away.

I saw it.

The slightest hint.

Brighton saw it, too. The moment before she moved—the decision, in her eyes.

Brighton's skin seemed to flicker as her finger flexed on the trigger—that same aurora flash, and he surged sideways, rotating his body.

Mercy's gun spat fire in the dim light, just as Brighton struck her arm. I heard the bone snap, and Mercy screamed. The gun went flying.

Brighton smiled. A thing to behold. Runnels of flame seemed to flow along his skin, and I could see him two ways. Brighton, the man. And something else entirely. Something bigger. Skull long and large, a pharaonic deformity. He lifted his own weapon at Mercy, smile widening, arm raised, and he cocked the hammer back—

—and then froze.

Slowly, Brighton swiveled his head toward me. His gun never moved.

I had the sphere, held high over my head.

“Kill her, and I destroy it,” I said.

For a moment he did nothing. “So you have teeth after all,” he said. He lowered his weapon. Gone was the smile and the runnels of light. He was just a man again. “But that's not a path you want to go down,” he said. “Do that, and things will go wrong. For both of us.”

Brighton's voice was soothing and rational. The voice of a negotiator, talking a man down from the ledge. “Put the sphere on the floor.”

“Smash it!” Mercy snapped.

“Wait,” Brighton said. His eyes moved quickly between Mercy and me. He held up a bare hand. “There's no need to be rash. We are reasonable people here. The truth is, you don't even know what you're really holding.”

“I do.”

“If you did, you wouldn't have it raised above your head. We've been waiting for this for a long time. Do you know what it's like to have your hard work thwarted? The corrections that shift things the wrong way again and again. What you hold is the end of that. For us and for you.”

“The end of us, you mean.”

He shook his head. “It was your experiment that broke the world—and it's only that sphere that prevents the correction. Normally, the world moves slowly. But things have progressed now. We're past that. Trust me, you wouldn't like to see the world move quick.”

“Why are you doing this? Why try to destroy civilization? What possible reason could you have?”

“Is that what they told you? That I want to destroy civilization?” He laughed. “What I want is so much more than that.” For a moment, he flickered—skin crawling with wasp wings. “I want to stop the cascade.”

“Why? You'll die when it dies.”

“Then I die a martyr. Did you really think this was the only cascade?”

I stared at him, feeling the words sink in.

“There are layers to this that you don't begin to understand,” he said. “Now put the sphere down.”

“No.”

He raised the shotgun to my face. “I could just shoot you, instead.”

“Then I drop the sphere.”

“And then what happens? What do you think you're holding?”

I didn't know what to say. What was I holding? The gem. The fabric of space-time. A strange ball of quartz.

“A detector.” Brighton said. “The greatest detector that's ever been built.”

I looked at him, trying to judge if he lied.

“We knew your friend was on to something, so we funded his projects. What wonders you are. What great things you invent. You never cease to amaze, and here at last, you'd done what we could never do. You still don't see. That sphere takes a perfect picture of space-time. Every proton, every electron, down to the smallest detail. You saw it run, didn't you? The technology to magnify the image might not exist yet, but the image itself now does. The negative. The information is in there if you know how to access it. You managed to detect the state of every quantum particle within range of the sphere. What do you think that does? How does the larger quantum system react to that? It can't.”

“Enough!” I snapped. I raised the sphere higher.

“Wait!” Brighton said. He turned and spoke into the ear of one of his men. The man turned and left the room. “If you won't see reason,” Brighton said, “then we have at our disposal another option to help you decide on a less … destructive resolution to this.” His blue eyes never left my face while he called over his shoulder, “Bring her!”

One of his men entered the room, carrying a struggling form.

“You asked how we knew you were here,” Brighton's said. “Perhaps you should ask your associate. Imagine our surprise. While we were out looking for you, you were on your way here.”

I knew then that they had me.

The man had one large hand across Joy's mouth; his other arm wrapped her waist, carrying her in front of him like a sack of flour. Her feet dangled a foot off the ground.

“Joy,” I said.

“So here is the exchange,” Brighton said. “You let us have the sphere, and you can all live.”

“No,” Mercy said. “He lies.”

“It's your call, Eric, not hers.”

“How can I trust you?” I said.

“You have my word.”

“Not good enough.” My arms were starting to shake. The sphere was heavy; whatever I was going to do, I would have to do it soon, or the choice would be made for me.

“Then all three of you die.”

In the big man's grasp, Joy kicked and struggled. She pulled the hand momentarily from her mouth. “Eric!” Her voice was high and panicked. The hand clamped down hard over her mouth again.

“You have five seconds,” Brighton said.

I looked at Mercy.

“He's lying,” she said. “Smash it!”

“You smash it, she dies,” Brighton snapped. “You can bet your life on that. But there's no reason it has to happen, Eric.” He walked to where Joy struggled in her captor's embrace. He raised his shotgun and pressed the barrel to her temple.

“If I pull this trigger,” he said, “where will her consciousness go? Do dead eyes still collapse the wave?” Brighton's weapon pushed aside a lock of her hair. “You like experiments, Eric. Shall we run this one to see what happens? Make your decision.”

“Wait,” I said, trying to buy more time. Trying to think. I couldn't hand over the sphere, but I couldn't let Joy die. I was already responsible for Satvik's death. Stuart's. I couldn't be responsible for another.

“No more time, Eric. You have one second.”

“Wait!” I snapped. I lowered the sphere to my chest.

“No!” Mercy screamed. She lunged toward me, trying to knock the sphere from my hands, and I almost dropped it. I pulled free, clutching the sphere to my chest. Her grasping hand caught on my shirt pocket and tore the fabric.

At that moment, the little rabbit's foot dropped out of my shirt and skidded across the floor.

All eyes followed it.

I looked at Joy.

There is a moment of clarity when you see a way to the solution. As if it was always right there in front of you, and you had only to see it.

The rabbit's foot came to rest on the cement. Joy's eyes had tracked it all the way. Then her eyes lifted and met mine.