Those That Wake 02: What We Become (12 page)

“Aaron,” she said, her voice soft and calm. “Something’s happened to me. I’m missing a part of myself. Not just the memory of that conversation you have recorded, but that entire part of my life. Something took it out of me and put something else in its place. I remember finishing high school, saying goodbye to my friends, spending a summer with my parents before coming to college; things that, according to you, couldn’t have happened. And you’re right. They couldn’t have. They didn’t. I know it.” She looked out at the open field around them, found it suddenly shadowed by something enormous, something that was hovering over her entire life that she was only now beginning to see. “I don’t remember this Librarian, but I think he must know what happened to me, as well as to your family. We’re going to go together, and we’re going to find him.”

“And,” Aaron said in that voice that made his youth seem to disappear and animated his voice with something dangerous, “we’re going to make him tell us the truth.”

MAL SET HIS CHIN ON
his hand and watched the city pass through the darkened window of Remak’s—Alan Silven’s—limo. The city outside was a thing of gleaming silver and glass. Mal had seen it change around him, from the gray, lifeless place that had bred hopelessness into a living, breathing enemy. Even so, he could hardly believe it was the same city.

The crowds milled, bursting with a harried energy they lacked when their heads had been infected with that Idea. But the energy was all directed back at themselves, used for their own betterment. They were so focused on themselves that the city had wrapped itself in silver, hiding the rusted innards of a tortured and decrepit machine. It was all surface now, because that was as far as people were willing to look.

As if to offer evidence of its own guilt, the city streets opened up before the limousine as it entered the eastern edge of the island: Lazarus Heights. The dome—once a carapace of gray metal, the wire exo-frame making it appear as a hideous bug crawling over the city streets—was now reflecting the gleaming city around it, its surface a mirrored silver. Spearing up at five points along the eastern edge of the dome were the spikes of the Lazarus Towers, which were connected to one another by networks of walkways, enclosed bridges that were the highways of the city’s upper echelon of corporate go-getters. Only the top tier of society, the most influential, the powers that ran the city from behind façades of cash and oil and technology, could afford a place in these exclusive buildings. An average citizen could not enter the towers, not even approach their doorways, without the gaze of the Metropolitan Counterterrorism Task Force’s luminous green goggles falling on them forbiddingly.

Meanwhile, below the spires, people teemed around the dome, tourists lining up for blocks to get in, to see from behind the protective screens the ruined debris that had left a mark on the city. They swallowed the awed lumps in their throats, blinked back tears at what the city had faced, never doubting that it had recovered. How, after all, could a city that gleamed in the rising sun ever have forgotten its own humanity?

In the distance, beyond the towers, the hazy rainbow swell of colors glowed from the East River, both poisoned and beautified by the deadly chemicals that had infected its depths.

“I need to know what the Old Man wants,” Remak said, as the limo pulled up a side street, out of sight of the dome and the towers. “If he knows about the neuropleth, how he plans to use it. Only with that information can I work to stop him.”

Mal turned his somber eyes on the clean, polished face whose own eyes were so keen with intellectual hunger. Not for the first time, Mal thought that Remak’s obsession was most of all that of a scientist, desperate for the facts to tally his theories.

“The last time I was there,” Mal said, “they were carrying me in. I don’t know what kind of security they have.”

“MCT on the outside,” Remak said. Of course, he had this cataloged and ready to go for God only knew how long. “Inside it’s a standard level-twelve tech array: cameras, sonics, cycling digital chip scans, thermographics. Internal security is handled by a private firm: Lazarus Services; exclusively ex-military and ex-intelligence personnel. But above, at the top of the central tower, it’s the Old Man’s private suites. Just him, Kliest, and the two bodyguards. He won’t allow anyone else in proximity—doesn’t even allow them to carry guns around him.” Remak spoke like he was briefing a black-ops specialist, not a battered teenager pressed into service and in way over his head. “You’ll enter through the garage facing the water. Get to the elevators and go up as high as you can. I’ll be assisting: I can jump from guard to guard, control them and the security systems. I’ll get you up as high as possible, get you to the staircase or elevator that will take you closest to the top.

“This is enemy territory, Mal. I don’t have anyone else to ask. By the time you’re within sight of the tower entrance, I’ll be out of Silven and into the guards, ready to assist you. It’s enemy territory, but you’re not alone, Mal. You’re not alone.”

Mal had always been on his own, and he knew it. Nothing was changing now. Remak reached Silven’s well-manicured hand out in an awkward show of camaraderie.

Before it found Mal’s shoulder, Mal’s hand snapped out and grabbed the wrist hard enough to make the eyes wince.

“We’re not friends, Remak,” he said in a low, even voice. “You’re holding Laura over me, so I’m doing what you asked. That’s all.” He let go of the wrist but held the calculating gaze for a moment longer. Then he opened the door and stepped out into enemy territory.

The stimulant the doctor had put into him was making the searing flashes of lightning in his head recede to distant cracks of thunder. So, seeing more or less straight, he walked down the block and turned the corner, where the spires of the Lazarus Towers cut the skyline like a razor. They had done the impossible: they had co-opted the skyline from the dome, drawing the eye away from what had once been the city’s defining reality.

Mal was aware that even at this distance he was already on the spires’ security cameras, maybe not noted by a specific guard just yet, but limping there on their screens, recorded for future review when necessary.

He spotted himself, warped and elongated in the liquid surface of the dome. He avoided Lazarus Heights for many reasons. His mother had lived near here once, with his stepfather, before the neighborhood grew beyond their means and swept them away with the other undesirables. They were not on friendly visiting terms, but circumstances had demanded he show up at their door once upon a time. Back then the dome was a creeping insect, its gray surface an implacable menace, hateful and terrified messages scrawled across its surface, the rot festering at the center of New York’s heart.

He gladly left it at his back and came around the towers and turned so that the luminous rainbow of the East River swelled before him, painting Brooklyn with a weird swirling haze, as it squatted low across the water, in the eternal shadow of its regal brother. During construction of the dome’s new shell and the Lazarus Towers, something had spilled into the river. Not oil, not waste, exactly, but some space-age chemical used to strengthen metals and weatherize porous concrete. Remak said that the molecules of the chemical had bonded with the water and that the river was not, technically speaking, water anymore. It was a new element that created a brilliant surface glow when the sun struck it at certain times of day, but was also, slowly, eroding the edges of the island of Manhattan itself, eating away at the very ground people lived on. That was what Remak had said, based on materials that had passed across Silven’s desk. But there was never any mention of it in newsblogs, on the HD. To the world of people hungry for a new sight, a new experience, it was simply more visual stimulation.

Mal turned in disgust from the river that was not really a river anymore. He walked in the shadow of the towers until he was across from the tallest of them, the impossibly high central tower, the tip of its spire a pointed attack on the heavens themselves.

Probing the warm pulp of his missing tooth to painfully sharpen his focus, Mal spotted the ramp that sloped down from the street, into the bowels of the tower. As he stood and watched, a single car entered, cruising slowly in, the gunmetal garage door sliding open for it and closing behind it like the spiked gates of a medieval castle.

Mal scanned the expanse of street; these were loading docks, maintenance entrances, and a riverside path. Tourists crowded about the railing along the river, gazing down at its hypnotic surface, breathing in fumes that might very well burn out their lungs or give their children cancer. But their attention was all turned away from Mal. Besides them, there were only a few passing cars in the distance. He ran across the street, the asphalt sending small shock waves through his ribs and lacerated flesh.

Along the ramp entrance, there was a slim walkway down the slope that ended in a flat metal door with no handle. A camera with a blinking red light was perched above it. Mal stopped himself at the top of this path waiting for . . . something. A signal.

It took him a full minute to notice that the blinking red light had suddenly gone steady. He went down to the door, and as he reached it, there was an internal click and the door slid inward, permitting entrance. He was done pausing now. All he could do was leave it to Remak to facilitate his passage.

He slipped in, and the door shut behind him with a dull clang, cutting off the outside and putting him into a world of fluorescent half-light and a cavernous expanse perhaps one-eighth filled with sleek, expensive cars and long, ostentatious limos. He crossed the space, holding to the shadowed columns, his feet sounding with agonizingly sharp echoes across the empty space. The ding of an opening elevator door called his attention, and when he saw no one disembark, he knew it had been summoned just for him.

He crossed the last dim space, feeling as though he had entered some mythological underworld, a Hades that his father had once recounted to him in a story of long-dead heroes.

He stepped into the elevator, the suddenly sharp lights pressing dully into his drug-protected brain. The car went so far up and so fast that it compressed Mal’s chest and skull, and he had to grasp the rails with his powerful hands so tightly that his knuckles whitened, bringing the chaos of crosshatched scars into high relief. Then it began to slow, leaving his stomach uncomfortably low, and finally it stopped.

The doors opened, and Mal immediately swung his body back in and pressed up against the wall. It had opened on a small landing with a flight of stairs going up. At the foot of the stairs, a suited figure stood guard.

How could the guard not have seen him, though, with the security lenses giving him a full 180-degree sweep of the space and a thermographic enhancement that would penetrate the wall Mal was hiding behind?

“Mal,” a voice said quietly from around the corner.

Mal leaned slowly around the corner.

The guard maintained his position, suited, cellenses turning him into a human automaton. He had one hand resting calmly on a weapon, small and black and sleek like a wasp, slung over his shoulders. What Mal had missed in his first, brief glance was the second guard, slumped unconscious on the floor.

“I disabled the pertinent security equipment, too,” the standing guard said with Remak’s formal tone. “I’ll move from guard to guard and help you however I can, but I can’t go any higher than this. I don’t know how long it will take them to notice the security equipment, but going faster is better.”

Mal came across the landing, notable in that there was no stairway going down. He looked into the guard’s face, and Remak returned his gaze neutrally.

Mal gripped the banister and began hauling himself upward and past another landing. The Old Man would not be anywhere but at the very top, the space closest to God Himself. Mal stopped on the third landing. There was another flight up, but a sign in black digital letters labeled it as
ROOF ACCESS
. He looked at the featureless door here with the camera above, its red light steady. As he watched, the door slit open with a whispered
whoosh
of sealed air. Mal heard nothing from beyond and so gripped the edge of the door with his fingertips and slowly slid it open.

The narrow hall was thick with a plush carpet that swallowed the sound of Mal’s limping feet. A gentle hum pervaded this place, and it was the only sound he heard, so he followed that down the hallway, which curved gently, conforming to the curve of the spire at the tower’s top. The eyes of ancient faces glared at him from out of marble busts. He passed framed paintings, windows that looked out onto pointillist parks, abstract figures, a wavering man on a bridge holding his head as he screamed.

The hum led him to the very end of the hallway, a set of double doors, which he remembered, even from the last time he was here. His fingers came up and rested against the wood. He could feel the heat even through the surface and remembered its hot prickle on his skin, facing the shriveled, cracking thing in the shadows, the Medusa. It was there now—he swore he could hear it breathing beneath the hum of the heaters.

Sound split through Mal’s reverie. It wasn’t loud, but the hum was so regular, the place so quiet, it shuddered his thoughts like an earthquake: the sharp drone of a voice from back up the hall, Kliest’s voice. He came away from the door gladly.

Where were Roarke and Castillo? Off on a mission? Or sitting here behind one of these other doors, waiting?

Kliest’s voice emanated from two doors back, her office. He stopped at it, leaned his head closer.

“Am I not making myself clear?” The acid tone scalded even through the door. “You simply don’t offer any official statement.”

“I understand perfectly,” came another voice. It had a boxed quality, as though it was not in the room, but coming through a wall-mounted cellscreen. Nevertheless, its deep, articulate tone was familiar. Mal was sure he had heard it before, many times. “But the sort of shakeup you’re talking about, it demands a response. Both in words and in action.”