She was shifting in and out of memories, sometimes speaking as Brooke, and sometimes speaking as Nobody. I felt a tight pain in the center of my chest, listening to her, fearing again—for the thousandth time—that Nobody wasn’t really dead, that some part of her survived in Brooke’s bloodstream, talking through her and controlling her. Worse than the fear was the guilt, knowing that I was responsible for what had happened to her, and all I wanted was to make that feeling go away. I wanted to make everything go away, to take Brooke and take myself and just disappear somewhere—as if solitude could miraculously cure us both. I didn’t because I couldn’t. There were demons here, and I was the only one who could stop them, and every day I wasted was another day someone else could end up like Brooke. I pushed away my fear and my guilt and locked them up tight, where no one could ever know they were there, and I looked at Brooke with cold, emotionless eyes. If she thought she was Nobody, that was good; we needed Nobody’s memories. I told myself it was true. I glanced at Nathan and let Brooke speak.
“Kanta wanted to unite us all,” Brooke continued, “to bring us all together like a club or a secret society. Club’s not the right word: cabal. He said we were stronger together, and I guess that’s turning out to be true.” She pointed at the photos I’d brought of Applebaum’s chewed-up corpse, turned face down on the little bedside table because she didn’t want to look at them.
“Did Kanta unite them?” I asked. I knew the Withered stayed in touch now and then, which was why Mr. Crowley had caused so much concern when he’d stopped communicating completely. But it had always been a loose group, and the idea that they were actually organized was frightening—it implied focus and direction, and direction implied movement, even if it was only metaphorical. What were they moving toward, and why?
“He only united some,” said Brooke, and she folded herself into a haggard ball, drawing her knees up to her chin and hugging them tight with her thin, bony arms. “The ones who thought like he did. Rack was the worst.”
“Rack,” I said quickly, catching onto a memory. “Mary Gardner said something about Rack.”
“Mary Gardner?”
“Agarin,” said Nathan, using Mary’s Withered name.
“Agarin said something about Rack when she was standing over Agent Potash,” I said. “She said she’d wanted to leave him for Rack, but she didn’t have time so she’d have to kill him herself.”
“You don’t want to be killed by Rack,” Brooke whispered.
“I don’t want to be killed by anyone,” I said, looking through Trujillo’s page of Withered identities. “Who is Rack?”
“The king,” said Brooke.
I glanced at Nathan again. “Rack’s not in Trujillo’s notes. Have you ever come across the name before?”
“It might be a title,” said Nathan. “It’s not similar to any names like Meshara or Hulla, but it’s awfully similar to ‘rex’ and a dozen other words like it. Most Indo-European languages have a word for ‘king’ that’s at least partly related to ‘rack.’”
“You have it backwards,” said Brooke, more confident now. I wasn’t sure if Nobody or Brooke was the more confident personality. “Rack didn’t get his name from their titles; they got their titles from his name.”
Nathan stared at her a moment, then frowned and made a note. “That is a very disturbing thing to think about.”
“Are you saying that Rack is so old,” I asked, “and so influential, that our word for ‘king’ is just his name?”
“Not our word,” said Nathan, “just … a lot of people’s words. The strange part is that Sumerian isn’t an Indo-European language, so that relationship isn’t as strong as I’d like. But the name Kanta is Hindi, which is obviously Indo-European, which suggests that the different Withered might have come from a single point and then spread out. But it would have to be an incredibly long time ago—”
“How long?” I asked.
“To predate Indo-European language?” asked Nathan. He whistled, looking at the ceiling as he calculated. “I’d guess early Neolithic era, maybe even before. Ten thousand years at least, and possibly more.”
“They say they used to be gods,” I said. “With these abilities, at the dawn of human civilization, how could they not be?” I looked at Brooke. “Was Nobody that old?”
“I was a goddess,” she said, staring at the window. “The goddess of beauty and love, and women would come from all over the world to see me—though of course the world was smaller in those days. Just a valley.”
Nathan looked queasy. “I’m not comfortable with the idea that an ancient god ate a man’s leg behind a cheap motel.”
“Rack didn’t eat him,” said Brooke, suddenly very serious. “Rack doesn’t eat legs. He doesn’t even have a mouth.”
I leaned forward. “What do you mean he doesn’t have a mouth?”
She pressed her lips tightly together, then covered the bottom half of her face with her hand. “No mouth,” she mumbled, barely intelligible through her fingers. “No nose, either. Just eyes and soul.”
“A soul?”
“Black tar,” she said. “Ash and grease.” She put one hand on the bridge of her nose, and the other at the base of her sternum, sectioning off about twelve inches of her body. “He doesn’t have a face because he doesn’t need a face. The dead speak for him, and his soul takes whatever it wants.”
“The dead speak for him?” asked Nathan, but I focused on the latter statement.
“What does he want?” I asked. We had to know what he was missing to figure out what he had.