XOM-B (16 page)

“I didn’t want to worry you,” Heap replies.

“I knew I’d been bitten,” I say.

“I didn’t want to worry you about what would happen if you became infected,” he says.

“Oh,” I say, thinking about what this means. It only takes a moment to sort through the possibilities and pluck out the most likely scenario. “You would have discontinued me.”

“Gently,” he says.

“Is that possible?”

The four guards turn to Heap as though wanting to hear the answer to this question, too.

“Some things happen so quickly that pain, or even the conscious mind, can’t detect it.”

So by gently, he means extremely violently, but quick. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but then he adds, “Far better than being incinerated.” He turns to one of the guards, looking at his reflection in the guard’s reflective face mask. “Isn’t that right, Sir?”

Sir?

The four guards face forward again, none saying a word.

Could Sir be listening through them?

Of course he could.
And probably was. But Heap wasn’t really trying to engage Sir in conversation, he was warning me to watch what I say, which is a good thing because my next line of questioning was going to be about the Councilman himself.

The guards stop, and hold us in place with their still-armed weapons. The glowing white panels on either side of the hall slide open to reveal cells that are little more than luminous cubes. They are featureless in every way.

I’m suddenly shoved from behind, caught off guard, and stumble into the small cell. I catch myself on the far wall and turn around as the door slides shut. I see Heap’s blocky feet for a moment, stepping back into his cell, and then he’s gone, along with the rest of the world. All that remains is endless white radiance.

I spin around, looking for any aberration in the light, but find none. The room doesn’t even look like a cube anymore. If not for the physical sensation of my feet touching the floor, I might think I was floating inside a star.

The absolute silence of the cell begins to feel like pressure on my body.

“Hello?” I say, hoping someone is watching, or listening, and can reply. But my voice seems to be absorbed by the room and no one replies.

When the quiet is finally broken, twenty minutes later, I flinch in surprise. It’s not even a loud sound, just a gentle hiss.

Mist descends from the ceiling. It drifts through the air, bending the light through millions of tiny droplets. A rainbow forms above my head. The streak of color distracts me until the mist reaches my body. It’s like a curtain, a sheet being draped over me, but barely there, almost intangible, because it’s the same temperature as the air all around me. But I can feel it tickling my skin—being
absorbed
by my skin.

The white light of the room flares even brighter, stabbing my eyes with pain that drops me to my knees. My insides suddenly heat up, and sounds that were impossible to hear now come into focus. Voices beyond the door.

“Think he’ll survive the process?”

“I’m not sure. But if he does, perhaps something worthwhile will come from the destruction of the Lowers.”

The words, indifferent to my plight, frighten me, but don’t bother me nearly as much as the people speaking them, Councilman Mohr and Heap.

A whirlwind of agony consumes my body. I lose all sense of the world around me. The floor greets me mercilessly as I fall, curl into a ball and scream.

20.

When I open my eyes again, the white is gone, replaced by black. I reach out a hand, but can’t feel it. I try to sit up, but my body is missing. Opening my eyes was an illusion. I have no eyes. I am nothing. Consciousness trapped in a void.
Am I dead?
I wonder.
Am I energy?

This isn’t exactly how I pictured it, but then I had no basis for what I was imagining death to be like. All of the people I’ve met who’d died and been resurrected were trying to eat me. I was too busy running and fighting to attempt striking up a conversation.

“Is anyone there?” I ask, but then realize it’s just another thought. I have no mouth to speak with.

I lack any real concept of time right now, so I don’t know if I’ve been awake for minutes, or hours. Possibly longer. Every thought could be an eternity or a nanosecond.

Lost and alone, terror sets in. It’s worse than being chased, or bitten, or maybe even incinerated. Not because I’m in pain—I feel nothing—but because the emptiness isn’t empty. It’s full of thoughts, and fears, and anger. With no outside world to distract me, these emotions and the words, looks, touches and experiences that created them begin to consume my mind.

Were Mohr and Heap working against me? Was I really nothing more than an experiment to them both? And if they’re just using me, what about Luscious? Is she just along for the ride because I could save her from the undead? Is she part of the experiment, too? She must be. They all are. And the zombies, these impossible beings, are all part of some kind of elaborate test.

Focus,
I tell myself.
Slow down. Don’t panic.

There’s no context here. Nothing is real. Nothing is … nothing. For it to be any more than that would require something.

A white dot, just a pinprick, appears in the distance.

It is real? An illusion?

Real,
I decide, as it grows to the size of a star.

When the sphere of light reaches the size of my fist, I realize that it is approaching me. If I’m dead, if I’m energy, free in the universe, perhaps it really is a star? What will that feel like? Stars consume energy. Will I become part of the star? Will it destroy what’s left of me?

The glowing orb brightens, surging toward me. Or am I being pulled toward it? No, I think, stars don’t pull in energy, they expel it. The solar wind would push me away.

Not a star.

A black hole.

But it’s not black. It’s—

I scream. The noise is horrible. Tearing and wet.

And real.

The white light envelops me, but I have a voice. And a body. I feel the floor beneath me.

The cell. My luminous prison. I never left.

I push myself up, feeling almost normal, but my body is slick with moisture.
What is this?
I think, rubbing the damp film from my body. The word comes to me in a blink.
Sweat.
Water expelled through my pores. A side-effect of being overheated.

Or overclocked.
It was the mist. They overclocked me. But why? From my limited experience, overclocking is basically a way to speed up the mind’s and the body’s processes, the trigger for which is introduced through some kind of liquid-based medium. Here it was a mist. With Luscious and Jimbo it was a moistened tab of paper. In the Lowers, overclocking was recreational, used to stimulate artificial pleasure. Here? I have no idea. Mohr seemed to think it was dangerous, so why would they risk doing it on purpose, and with a heavier dose? The effects have worn off. My senses are normal. I can no longer hear beyond the walls of this room. Time is still a mystery, though, like my internal clock has been reset.

A black rectangle appears overhead. Its sudden appearance startles me and sends me sprawling to the floor, kicking away from it until I hit the wall.

Just the ceiling, I think, staring up at the widening black gap. The ceiling opens revealing rows of black nozzles. Maybe this isn’t the same room? Maybe this is an incinerator? They could have performed tests and determined me infected without me ever knowing. As this fear builds, a hiss fills the air. For a moment, I assume it’s the sound of flammable gas, but the hiss is followed by a gurgle and then an explosion of liquid.

I shout in surprise as the frigid fluid splashes against my body. I flail and cover my head with my arms, but there is no escaping the deluge. I relax some when I figure out that it’s just plain, cold water. Probably meant to cleanse the sweat from my body, which I suddenly realize is naked.

They
did
perform tests.

My body goes rigid, not from any sense of shame over my nudity, but because there is nothing I can do and nowhere I can run. I just duck my head and endure the spray. Just as the water on my back starts to feel good, waking my senses, the water cuts off.

Somewhere high above, I hear an engine kick on. A moment later, vents in the ceiling, concealed by their blackness, snap open. The cube is filled with a cyclone of warm air. Water drains away through the sides of the floor as the wind peels the moisture from my body. When the water on the floor is gone, the fans reverse direction, sucking the air from the cell and taking the humidity with it. When every surface of the room and my body are as dry as possible, the fans shut down, the vents snap closed and the two halves of the ceiling slide back together.

And then, again, light and nothing but.

I sigh and resign myself to being stuck in this horrible place. I lift my arm, the bitten one that caused all this, and am surprised to find the curved arc of teeth indentations now missing. I inspect my shoulder. Not only is there no shrapnel embedded in the flesh, there is no wound. I twist my back, stretching the skin. The burn’s sting is missing. Was I here long enough for them to heal? And how long would that be? The bite was my first real injury.

“Freeman.”

I shout out and launch away from the voice, striking a wall and falling to the floor. When I spin around, I find Heap leaning into the room, his girth filling most of the door. I shake my head. I thought I was facing the door.

“Are you feeling okay?” Heap sounds hesitant. A little afraid.

“You mean for someone who was severely overclocked, sent to some weird endless abyss and then sprayed and blow-dried?” I make no effort to hide my annoyance.

“Actually, that’s exactly what I meant.”

“Fine,” I confess, and it’s the truth. Aside from my emotional state, which I suspect will recover, I feel as good as I did a day ago. Then I remember the tidbit of conversation I heard between Mohr and Heap.

“Are you sure?” he asks. “It’s not an easy thing to endure.”

“Not that you would know,” I say, “since they didn’t give you the same treatment.”

“How did you know that?”

I shrug. I don’t want to tell him it’s a side effect of the overclocking. “Why didn’t they overclock you?”

“Because I wasn’t bitten.”

“You have—” I notice his armor is now shiny and new. “—
had
bite marks all over you.”

“On my armor,” he says. “You were bitten on your skin.”

“Your face?” I ask.

He grins and the armor on the sides of his face snap together, covering the only small bit of exposed skin on his body.

“I’ve never seen that before,” I remark.

The armor opens again, revealing his mouth. “I don’t often have a need for it.”

I pause for a moment, considering this. I suppose it makes sense. “But why were you and Mohr cleared so quickly? What happened to being questioned?”

His forehead furrows over his four glowing eyes. He wants to ask how I know, again. I can see it. But he doesn’t. “This is our home, Freeman. We are trusted, despite Sir’s … intensity. This tower was constructed in the first two years, post-Grind, as a monument to the two men responsible for … saving us all.”

He says the word “saving” like he’s being forced to and I wonder if we’re being listened to.
Of course we’re being listened to,
I think.

“Mohr has lived here since the doors opened, along with Sir. I started my service here two years later. It’s been a long time.”

“I understand,” I say. “You are trusted. But I am not a stranger. Or an enemy. I was given life by the Council themselves.”

“But you are … unknown,” Heap says, looking unsure of the words. “No one here really knows who you will become. Trust is earned over time.”

“And I’ve only had sixteen days,” I say.

He nods, but adds, “Seventeen.”

With a gasp, I think of Luscious. “Where is Lu—Kamiko? They didn’t—”

Heap shakes his head. “There were no outward signs of her being bitten. She was interrogated, scanned and searched, but nothing else. She’s waiting for you with Mohr.”

Searched,
I worry, thinking about the musical device. But Heap doesn’t seem worried about her condition, so I decide not to as well. “Did Mohr find what he wanted?”

“What…”

“Did ‘anything worthwhile come from the destruction of the Lowers’?”

His eyes reveal nothing. No surprise. No concern. “No,” he says, his voice flat now, hiding his emotions. “He believes you were either never infected, or your body’s defenses purged it.”

I think he’s lying, but decide not to push it because I still trust him and he might not necessarily be hiding the information from me, but from whoever is listening.

Heap’s hand shoots forward. For a second, I think he’s going to strike me, but the thump on my chest is soft, some kind of fabric.

“Get dressed,” Heap says. “And make it quick. Things are changing outside.”

By “outside,” and the tone of his voice, I assume he means the undead situation. I unfold the fabric. It’s heavy and thick, but flexible. A suit of some kind, with pants and a jacket. Both items are primarily black, though a red stripe runs up the sides of the pants and along each arm and shoulder of the jacket.

“It will act like armor,” Heap says. “Bites will not penetrate it.”

I pull up the pants and throw on the jacket, zipping up the front. I move my arms and bend my legs, finding I have a full range of motion. “It’s like a second skin,” I say.

“It
is
skin,” Heap says. “From a cow.”

“A cow? Fascinating. I didn’t realize cows shed their skin.”

Heap looks ready to say something, but closes his mouth.

“You don’t have to keep so many secrets,” I tell him. “I can handle whatever you’re protecting me from.”

“The cow is dead.”

“Oh,” I say, a little stunned. “I’m wearing … a dead cow.”

“You wanted to know,” he says, and now he’s grinning a little bit.

“Well, I’m fine with that,” I say, walking toward the door. “Was its death … gentle?”