CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The next morning. In Facility 23.
Loraine was propped up on her bunk in the small, windowless, dorm-style room, a cup of coffee on the night table beside her, poring over what she'd written in a notebook the night before.
She'd slept in her clothes. An overwhelming feeling of vulnerability had made her unwilling to undress. Maybe because of Forsythe—or Sean.
And maybe she shouldn't have written out Scribbler's message. Suppose Helman or Forsythe got hold of it? She didn't want them to know about Scribbler, nor get any help from his divination.
But Loraine felt it was important to transcribe the message so she could think about it, try to interpret it. Work out what the words meant for her and Bleak—and for the United States. She could destroy the pages before anyone else saw them. She would wet them, shred them in her fingers, flush them down the toilet.
She had written out most of what Scribbler had channeled—the parts scribbled in red ink. Her photographic memory had served her well, she decided. It seemed right. Her eyes kept returning to one line in particular.
Loraine is beyond the doorway for Gabriel, arms an entrance, Loraine and Gabriel like puzzle pieces made to fit.
Like puzzle pieces made to fit. Soul mates? Two souls created at the same moment, symmetrical to one another, complementary opposites destined to search for one another—and eventually unite. It would explain the strong emotions that came over her when she was around Bleak.
The thought made her heart pound. Gabriel Bleak.
She shook her head, amused at herself.
But if it was true—it was appalling. Everything's been decided for me. And if he was in fact her soul mate, now that she knew it, how could she ever have a relationship with any man besides Bleak? She would always know that the “someone else” was not her “intended,” in the truest sense. She might be destined to be alone because there was every chance Scribbler's “puzzle pieces made to fit” would not be fitted.
Now that she knew what CCA was planning, she couldn't work with them—not really. She could only stall them and wait her chance to get away. And that meant she should stay away from Gabriel Bleak—for his sake. If she got together with him, she was playing CCA's game. Besides, the idea of someone like her, hooking up with...someone like Bleak. A ShadowComm. A man from the supernatural underground...Absurd. Almost like a CIA agent falling for Che Guevara.
When Forsythe debriefed her about the “abduction” by Gabriel Bleak, she'd told him Bleak and the woman Shoella would consider brokering a deal between CCA and ShadowComm, allowing the
Shadow Community to remain free. She had skirted talking about Scribbler and given as little information on Shoella as possible. But she didn't think Forsythe was going to leave it that way. She looked at the notebook, wondering...
...Breslin is afraid of the man within the man who stands on his right, and the crack in the wall lets the Great Wrath through, who darkens like ink in the water those he would conceal, and yet move toward Facility 23 and find the liberating truth on the way to the North...
The man within the man who stands on his right. An image came to her mind, a photo she'd seen in a CCA office: Forsythe with President Breslin, both men smiling for the camera. General Forsythe standing on Breslin's right.
Was Forsythe “the man within the man” Breslin was afraid of? Why “a man within a man”?
... and yet move toward Facility 23...
She had done that—she'd moved right into Facility 23.
Was she supposed to be here? Could it be that she was intended to bring Bleak here—but not for Forsythe's reasons. Not for Helman. Not for Sean.
But for something better—by whatever wanted her and Bleak together.
Gabriel Bleak was resourceful, unpredictable, perhaps more powerful than even he suspected. Bringing him here might be like tossing a wrench into the CCA machine.
But if she was considering that—was it really for strategic reasons? Or did she want to bring Bleak here for herself?
A knock at the door. It was a shave-and-a-haircut knock, without the two bits. She swallowed, but made herself call out calmly, “Who is it?” “Drake Zweig. Got a package for ya.”
Zweig? Ugh. If it had to be someone from her team, she wished it could be Arnie.
Loraine got up, hid the notebook under her mattress, ruefully thinking, Brilliant job of concealment, Agent Sarikosca. It occurred to her to wonder, as she went to open the door, if the room was camera-live. Where would the surveillance cam be? The light fixture?
She unlocked the door. Zweig was in the hall, with Loraine's overnight bag in his hands. He looked exactly as she'd last seen him. “Got your clothes here, from your place.”
He'd been rooting around in her apartment, then. Her clothes. Had they gotten into her laptop? Nothing there would get her in trouble. She just didn't like to think of Zweig chortling over it.
Loraine took the bag. “Thanks, Zweig.”
He just stood there, looking at her, cracking the knuckles on those big hands. She could almost see the wheels turning in his head.
“What's the team working on?” she asked, when she realized he wasn't going to just go away.
“Oh, they're monitoring Coster, and...well, I'll have to check with the General before I talk about it. I'm not sure where your clearance is right now.”
She felt a chill. “What's that supposed to mean?”
“Seemed to be some question about it. Got everything you could need in that bag there.”
“Thanks,” she said sourly. “Did you see my cats?” If they'd hurt those cats...
“I was gonna take them to the pound, like the general said, but that poof that lives next door came over, when I was trying to grab them, and they ran up to him so he picked them up and wouldn't give them to me. Said over his dead body. I was tempted to accommodate him. But what the hell, let him deal with that little loose end.”
Loraine felt like slapping him. Instead she said, as impassively as she could, “Uh-huh. So you hear anything about how long I'm supposed to remain on-site here?”
“Indefinitely, is what I heard. You know, I've got a bottle of bourbon in my—”
She closed the door in his face and went to the bed to unpack her overnight bag. It contained a pants suit she almost never wore, a dress she'd worn to work once, a few other more or less random items, her travel toiletries kit, and some of her underwear, crumpled up at the bottom.
Like he'd gotten at those first. Zweig, fingering her underwear. She was surprised he hadn't put her vibrator in the bag too.
She got undressed, showered, put on the rumpled flat-black pants suit, white blouse. Decided the jacket was too wrinkly. She was just brushing her hair when another, sharper knock came at the door. °
She opened it, knowing, somehow, that it was Forsythe. The general wasn't wearing his uniform. He wore khaki pants, a turtleneck sweatshirt. The sleeves were pulled back, showing beefy forearms. Behind him stood those same two black berets, looking calm but watchful, submachine guns in their hands. Not pointed at anyone. But ready.
Forsythe said, “If I may.”
Not waiting to see if he might, he started through the door, his bulk making her step back to keep from being trampled. She stood with the backs of her knees against the small bed. He looked her up and down, even leaning to look behind her. Not lasciviously, but looking for something. “She doesn't seem to be armed,” he said, half-turned, talking to the soldiers. “Wait outside.”
One of the soldiers nodded, reached over, and closed the door from the outside. She was alone in the room with General Forsythe.
He stood there a moment, audibly breathing, looking at her. Loraine felt as if something was pushing against her forehead, though he hadn't touched her.
“General, is there—”
“Sarikosca, you've been holding out on us. Last night, you kept things back.”
She shrugged. She wondered if he could hear her heart thudding—it seemed loud enough to hear in the hallway. “I hit the broad strokes, General. I wasn't as detailed as I might have been. I was tired last night.”
Forsythe acted as if he hadn't heard. “I knew at the time you were keeping something back but I was pressed for time. Something to see to. Now. Let us see if we can get caught up.”
He grabbed her shoulders and dragged her close. His breath smelled like hot iron. She struggled to pull away—but this was the strongest grip she'd ever felt. It was as if something else was holding her too, keeping her from breaking free. Like the muscular paralysis that comes from an electrical shock.
He pushed his forehead against hers, hard enough that it hurt. She could feel the bone of his skull, grinding on the bone of her brow, the skin seeming barely there at all. “General—this is not necessary!”
“Silence,” he hissed, and she felt his spittle on her face. “Let me in! You are more difficult than Gulcher. Your thoughts are guarded. You are inward. But...” Loraine felt something pushing through her forehead.
Some part of her knew it wasn't physical—not the kind of physicality that body and bone had. The phrase unconventionally bodied came to her. It was a probing from something like that. From Forsythe—and from something else that came through Forsythe.
...Breslin is afraid of the man within the man who stands on his right...
Loraine knew, then. She was certain. That General Forsythe was no longer General Forsythe. For perhaps a long time now, he had been taken over by something inhuman.
Then the entity that was pressing into her forehead showed itself to her inner eye. She was staring into the mouth of a lamprey, a circular mouth with teeth all around, and another circle of teeth within those—and another within those. Inside the innermost ring was something like a polyp, but one that could stretch out, and on the end of the polyp there was an eye, a mucus-colored eye with a black iris, and this eye was rushing toward her, toward the center of her being, pushing into her mind to stare around at her inmost thoughts. It was a rape of the mind; it was a deep, bottomless violation, a stabbingly painful violation, a cold, cutting agony that plunged into the center of her, ripping into her living soul.
She had seen some bad things—pieces of still-bleeding bodies after the bomb attack in Kabul. But she hadn't lost control at that.
Loraine believed a woman should be as strong as any man—and she was stronger than most men. But now... but this time... Loraine screamed.
***
SOMEWHERE. OUTSIDE OF TIME.
A warm day—but not too hot, or humid. The air seemed to wrap around them with a velvety, pristine embrace. Truly it was not Hoboken.
It seemed to Gabriel Bleak that they had been walking for almost two miles. He and Shoella— dressed now, in the clothes they'd worn yesterday—were following a path made by forest creatures, along the bottom of the valley that meandered through the jungled hills. They passed through bands of mist that sparkled in shafts of sunlight; they crossed singing brooks and walked through sudden meadows of tropical flowers droning with bees that never threatened. Occasionally they saw termite mounds taller than a man, looking like models of dried-out hills pocked with tiny caves; they saw a leopard, with a small deer sagging from its jaws, in the crook of a broad-trunked baobab tree. Its muzzle red with feeding, the leopard looked at them with only placid curiosity as they passed—and Bleak could have sworn he heard it purring. They saw a large black buzzard feeding on a dead water buffalo; it ducked its naked red head under its wing, as if in obeisance to them. Flamingos quivering with pink light watched them pass close by and never fluttered in alarm.
And all the time, Bleak felt something, someone, watching.
They paused to eat from two fruit trees; mangoes and guavas, perfectly ripe and tasting as if they were infused with the sunlight—the sunlight that was warming, comforting, but never too hot. They passed through a meadow of fragrant, yellow flowers, like little hands opening to the sun. Beyond the meadow the path ended at a large pond at the base of a hill. Here a stand of gnarled cypresses encircled the pond, which was fed by another, higher waterfall. The thin cascade showed a shoulder of emerald green before tumbling in white lights from a beetling, mossy hillside. Glimmering gold-mottled fish luxuriated under the lily pads in the clear water of the pool. The lichened stones flanking the top of the waterfall seemed the worn, carved remnants of an ancient civilization that had never actually existed.
“Shall we swim?” Shoella suggested.
“Is it safe?” Bleak said vaguely, shading his eyes to look into the pool. Still stunned by all this. “Could be...I don't know...piranha in there or.
Shoella leaned against him, caressed his cheek. “You haven't noticed that nothing here does us harm, cher darlin'? There are no mosquitoes—or if there are, they will not bite us. The bees, they don't sting us. It is the ideal place of the ancestors, with all its pleasures, its shady places and water and food, and none of its harm, not for us. You could embrace that leopard we passed—she would not harm you. And me, I would not harm you.” She grinned. “You could embrace me here on the grass by the pond.”
Bleak drew away from her and squatted to trail his fingers in the water. He had gone on the long walk to make the drug wear off—and to see if this world ended, like a stage set; like a ride at an amusement park. The walk had worked to clear his mind. “This just goes on and on, this world?”
“Yes. The gods created it for us. To go on and on.” After a moment she said, “You're angry.”
“You drugged me. I don't take drugs, Shoella. I tried them a couple times. They make me imagine the Hidden where it isn't, or miss it where it is. I only make mistakes on drugs.”
“This drug was something...special. Because—I didn't think I could get my chance any other way. It did not harm you—just a certain shaman's mixture. Some seeds from Hawaii, some bark from Haiti, some other things. It was only meant to bring us together.”
“You had only to ask. A couple of glasses of beer and a kiss would have worked, Shoella. In fact you could have left out the beer.”
She seemed genuinely surprised. “Truly? Years I felt this way—and you gave me no sign. I thought you wanted that Sarikosca woman, and if I was to have you...”
“I barely know her. Of course you're attractive to me, Shoella. I didn't know if it was wise for us to get together, so I didn't push it. I don't like being pushed into it—not the way you did it. If you'd just—”
“I'm sorry, cher darlin'. To push you. But...there is something else you should know.” She sat down by him, looked at him tenderly, spoke to him gently—but he felt she was talking to him like a perverse kindergarten teacher to a little boy. “I did not bring you here only to keep you away from her —yes, this was in my mind, but there was more. I have cast the bones and splashed the blood; I have listened to the growls of the great powers. The ancestors tell me I must mate, and it must be this year. And I must produce a child! This child”—she pressed her belly—”she is to be my great destiny! And I feel—I see it in the Hidden—that you are the man to make this child with me! I cannot follow my path as a priestess until I do this, Gabe. Life is ritual, my darlin'. If we make love, this is an invocation; if we make a baby, this is to please the powers of the Hidden.... And to do this, I must have you to myself. No one else may have you. Here we are safe, Gabe—safe from the devils at CCA, safe from that pale little liar who looks at you with big eyes and her lips parted...safe!”
“This is all to please your ancestors? And what makes you think those powers are the ones I want to please?” Bleak asked.
“Not just to please them—to weave a great destiny!” She took both his hands in hers; tried to clasp his gaze with hers, leaning toward him urgently. “The beginning of a magical dynasty, cher darlin'! What could be more mervellous!”
Bleak snorted and shook his head, drew his hands away. “And I was selected...for breeding?”
“Not only this! To be the high priest beside the priestess! Oh, Gabriel, you must know I love you. Have loved you since I first saw you, my cher darlin’! So I brought you to paradise.”
“Paradise.” He glanced around at the lovely, womblike tropical forest. A seductive place. But paradise? “Meaning what exactly? Where are we?”
She shrugged. “A... world. We can give it a name. A 'demiworld' some say, but also a real world.” She stretched her legs out, put her feet in the water, splashed it softly. “Magicians know these places. Many a sorcerer, many a sorceress, they create one such, and live there, in their own demiworld. It is...a pocket world, you might say.” She stood, walked a few paces up the bank, picked a purple-red orchid, growing from the base of a cypress that grew in the shallows, and brought it back to him. “Look! Perfect in every detail! Fait by the”—she tapped her head—”and magic. And a person can live there forever. And not die, no never die, in such a place. The wearing down of time, it is not here! It is between the universes and safe—made of the things of this world, and...oh, only the bon Dieu knows. Someday we will feel it right to return to the world of our birth. But until then—I know we can be happy here!”
He shook his head. “You brought your whole house and just dropped it here? Is there a witch under it?”
She laughed softly, tossing the orchid in the pool so it floated in its own dimple, the blossom reflected in the clear water. “It is only a copy of my house. But you and I—we came here entire. We are not here only in our minds. Our bodies are here, our souls, all of us. Forever, until forever is too much—and then we go back. But now, you and me, cher darlin' Gabe. Here you are safe with me.”
He looked at her. “You keep saying 'safe.'“
“Yes. Our enemies were coming for us, Gabe. This place”—she gestured at the world around them—”they cannot come to.” She plucked another orchid.
He wasn't convinced that no one else could come here. He suspected her of using magic that she had stumbled upon—and didn't fully understand.
A thought came to him. “Where is Yorena? I haven't seen your familiar. Unless it was that buzzard.”
“That...no! Yorena—” Her expression became guarded. “I chose not to bring Yorena. I want only you and I.”
Strange, Bleak thought. She was never far from Yorena, and vice versa. “Shoella—do you respect me?”
She looked at him in open surprise. “Of course—bien sur! “
“If you respect me as a magus—as a worker in the Hidden—you know I cannot stay here, if I'm...if someone else makes the decision. That would make me passive, a shrunken man.” She laughed. “You could never be shrunken!”
“Then give me time to think. To feel this place out and understand it. Leave me alone for a while. I suppose I can find my way back to the house.”
She frowned. But she nodded. “Just picture it in your mind, and look for a path. The path will lead back to the house.”
Shoella shredded the orchid with a sudden motion of her long fingers, tears gleaming in her eyes. She turned and stalked away, then, back along the path they'd come.
Bleak sat down on the grassy bank, watching the fish dart at the bits of shredded orchid petal. Just picture it in your mind, and look for a path. The path will lead back to the house.
So this place, this “demiworld,” was responsive—strongly responsive—to the mind of the sorcerer. That had implications.
He had never been to any world but his own before—not in this lifetime—and wasn't sure if the Hidden worked by the same principles here. But he knew the invisible field of living force was there, knew that those same energies, the same potential, the field of the Hidden, was all around him, in this world. He had felt it, since waking here, the way someone else would feel the ground underfoot. You didn't doubt the ground. Until, he reminded himself, an earthquake came.
He needed to know. Could he access the Hidden, here, the way he had in his world? Bleak closed his eyes and looked, with the other kind of seeing.
He saw the forest, around him, the cliff and the waterfall, the whole demiworld, as if it were in photo-negative, its lines etched in luminous purple. Then he made out living energy, seething, rising and falling, between each object, each plant and rock, each blade of grass. When he looked at it, it responded to his attention, pulsing brighter.
So the Hidden was available to him, here—it had a different character, but any world had its own Hidden.
He opened his eyes and saw Shoella's world around him, saw it anew—as lines of force, shaped into foliage, into earth and rock and sky. He searched, looking for the entity he sensed behind the veil of this world. The lines of force shivered, converged, and reshaped...into Yorena.
The bird looked bigger than ever—big as a man. She spread her wings and hovered there, not flapping them, just hanging in the air in front of him, defying gravity, like an emblem on a flag.
“No,” Bleak said. “That's not you, is it, Yorena?” He could sense this was a false image; an external. A mask.
He used his ability to draw on the power of the Hidden—and evaporated the veil of appearance.
Yorena's wings stretched out, changing shape. The familiar's eyes altered shape too; her beak became smaller and formed into a nose. The bird-head developed a mouth, a chin...feathers became clothing...
A man, now, hovered there where Yorena had been. Revealed, exposed—and staring impudently at him.
The man was suspended in the air, about three feet over the middle of the pond, with the waterfall as spectacular backdrop. He looked vaguely familiar, though Bleak didn't immediately know him.
The man was young. He had a military jacket, cammie shirt under it, khaki pants, boots. Long brown hair. His eyes...
“Sean...?” Bleak said, jumping to his feet.
“Surprised you recognize me!” Sean chuckled, drifting slowly toward him, across the water, like someone on a moving sidewalk at the airport. Looking that bored too. “You were aware of me, the whole time, Gabriel. But you couldn't deal with it. Kept hiding from that part of the Hidden, funnily enough.”
Sean had reached the grassy bank, floated not quite within reach, a few feet higher than his brother, Gabriel—so that he could look down on him. “Sean...you're really here?”
“Not exactly. Shoella only just realized, a short time ago, back on Earth, that Yorena was no longer Yorena. Seems to me familiars are just a kind of idea that takes on form and function. They're part of our own minds, like a computer program, that we put out to run in the Hidden. Easy enough for someone with my gifts to capture her familiar and destroy its inner nature. Set my own mind inside it. Make it my little spiritual UAV, a little supernatural drone, to watch you and her! Follow you here. Could have had you earlier—I waited too long, listening in, that night at the Battery. Should have called in the troops to take you in right there. Lost track of you for a while. You're good at creating a chaotic energy cloud around you, to muddy the waters. Been doing it so long you hardly know you're doing it. You slipped away—we set you up with that skip-trace job...and presto! You slipped away again! How'd you do that, by the way?”
“Probably shouldn't tell you that,” Bleak mumbled. Amazed to be talking to his lost brother. Feeling almost numb.
“Why not tell me? We're not enemies, Gabriel! We're brothers! It's all been a stupid misunderstanding! We are to be allies. We've even got the girl, she's waiting for you. The girl you're intended' to have. Not this exiled voodoo priestess you're tangled up with. No—your soul mate, for God's sake, Gabe! The real deal! The true soul mate!”
“Loraine...”
“That's right. You felt it. You suspected. I confirmed it for myself, talking to the Powers—and now you know it. That's what she is: your soul mate—and we've got her! She wants you to come and help us, Gabriel.”
“If she does...it's because she's CCA. Indoctrinated. Doesn't know any better.” After a moment he added sadly, “Like you, Sean.”
“Oh, I know what I'm doing! I'm on the inside, Gabe, you're on the outside—so you should be guided by me. You've got to trust someone sometime!” Sean grinned crookedly. “You and I are like oxygen and fire, Brother. Bring us together”—he raised his hand and fire seemed to leap from the sun overhead, to become a roaring flame in the air above him—”and the fire grows!” He turned and made2 a throwing motion, down into the pool of water, and the fire in the air formed into a ball and shot down to crash like a meteor into a sea, so that a pillar of water surged up, widened into the shape of a ten-foot-high mushroom cloud, boiling and seething in a nuclear explosion, the fire glowing in its heart. “We're like uranium and the atom splitter! Bring us together and the power of the sun is set free!” Sean dismissed the water and it fell back into the waterfall pool, the fire going out with a hiss. Turning toward Bleak, he went on, “You get it? I don't think you do—God, look at your face! Well. I don't like having to collaborate with you much, myself. Wish I didn't need you. I mean, shit—you've had so much already! You got to stay with our parents. Had freedom out in the world. Adventure...women... And what have I had? I've been a prisoner. Been close to escaping too.”
Sean paused, looked up at a small flock of parrots flying by overhead. His voice became low and earnest. “Then Forsythe came along, changed all that for me.” He looked fiercely down at his brother. “You'll see why—if you come with me. The hell away from this half-world. Come to CCA, Gabriel— and you can have Loraine!” Adding bitterly, “You can have the person who completes you. Something I'll never have. I've had that revealed to me too. But you can have it—what everyone yearns for! True love. Completion. Peace. Only, brother, if you want it—you've got to cooperate with us. We're going to change the balance of power of the whole world. And there'll be something for your brother in this: I'll have real freedom for the first time.”
“Yeah? How, exactly, does this come about, Sean?” Bleak asked. Thinking that Sean had a grimace, when he talked, that looked like his attempt to smile. And he always seemed to have his teeth almost clenched. Even though this wasn't him—was some kind of magical projection of him—it was probably how he looked in life.
“How? I'll tell you, Gabe. We...Forsythe, CCA, and I, all of us... we'll stop all magic, except the magic that we control! Imagine it! A monopoly on magic! And that means that the country will be safe for the first time. That's what gets Helman and Breslin wet. No one would dare to threaten America if we had all the magic. The artifact in the north—the thing that makes that cracked Wall of Force—it'll seal up the cracks. But you and I, we'll be on the other side of the wall. You know—figuratively speaking.” Sean made an elaborate shrug, flipping his hand. “Main thing is, long-lost bro of mine, we'll have the full power of the Hidden! Only, we won't have enough power, working alone—not for what's needed. No, see, to do this, to extend control over whole armies, we've got to have an ally. An Unconventionally Bodied Entity—a more powerful one than you've ever encountered. A Great Power. All the big magic is done through working with the Great Powers, the real lords of the Hidden.”
“An ally. Would that be-the Great Wrath?”
“Very good! You were paying attention to what your Scribbler scribbled! Don't look so startled —we've got Scribbler in custody. Your woman buckled, first time Forsythe rammed her mind. Forsythe saw your Scribbler in her thoughts, found her notebook where she'd copied down the lines in red.”
“What's going to happen to Scribbler now?” Bleak asked. Feeling sick, thinking of someone as fragile as Scribbler in the hands of the CCA.
“He'll become one of us, that's all. A recruit. He's fine, don't worry about him. Don't worry about your precious darling Agent Sarikosca either. Worry about us! You and me! We've got to work together—meaning you come back with me. You'll just vegetate if you stay in this place.”
“I've felt you watching since I got here,” Bleak said musingly. “Did you create this place?”
“No—Shoella created it, just as she said, as a way of trying to get away from us. And to keep you isolated so she can use you for her little agenda. She was supposed to be working with us—we had her set up to bring you in, through Coster. He's not entirely the drunk he seems to be. He was supposed to tempt you to come looking for me. But he did manage to make a bridge to Shoella. Planted a little magical charm I had worked up—and made it possible for me to take over Yorena.”
Sean floated down to the bank, walked back and forth—almost strutting as he talked. Bleak noticed Sean, in this world, had no shadow.
It seemed to Bleak that Sean was boasting to him the way a little boy would boast to his father of something he'd done in school sports. “Then I talked to Shoella through the Yorena guise. She was angry at you because you just weren't taking her hints—and we told her that if she got you for us, her ShadowComm people could be free.” He smirked, enjoying the lie they'd told her. “Offered her something else. Told her that you would become hers! We'd basically give you to her! But”—he spread his hands, cocked his head—”something about that Scribbler session changed her point of view.” He grinned crookedly. “Shoella figured out the soul mate thing. She knew if you went to CCA, you'd be with her rival. That if you were with Loraine, any length of time, you'd never leave her— never could leave a soul mate. So she brought you here.” Sean gestured at the gorgeous junglescape around them. “Thought she was clever.” He made a dismissive gesture and grimaced—a grin with clenched teeth. “She has the talisman for the summoning—transported the two of you here. But...too bad for her! She didn't think I could follow but I came right along in the psychic slipstream.” He shrugged, very devil-may-care. “When you've got it, flaunt it.”
When you've got it, flaunt it?'What old movie had Sean taken that from?
“Well, Gabe? You coming with me? It's all waiting for you.”
“I don't think so, Sean. At least not till you answer some questions.” Bleak felt close to tears, seeing his brother like this: a resentful, predatory liar. Too socially naive to hide his real intentions. Hostility showing nakedly on his face.
“Questions.” Sean snorted dismissively. “Like what?”
“Tell me about your...your talents. Like shape changing—to become something like Yorena?”
“Yeah. I can do what you can do—and I can do wore. I can alter my spirit form—I can possess. That's a valuable ally, right? And I can open a path between worlds! I can take you out of this demiworld—this prison of love! You know you can't stay here with Shoella—you can't trust her! She drugged you, kidnapped you here.... You don't want to stay with her—and she can't go with us. That the sacrifice she made. This world emanates from her—she's part of it now.... Hard to pull her out of it and keep her alive.”
Bleak's mouth was papery dry. Reeling inwardly with shock at all this, he hunkered for a moment, to scoop water from the pond—it would be safe to drink from, in this world—and to take a moment to deal with meeting his brother again...and with what he'd said about Shoella. Had she really been playing him against CCA?
“I made you an offer, Gabriel,” Sean said. “You going to help your brother—or not?”
Stalling, Bleak straightened up, wiped his mouth. “There a guy named Gulcher you're working with?”
Sean tilted his head, looked at him with narrowed eyes. Then he levitated into the air, rotating slowly, arms outspread, making a whirlpool in the water beneath him. Despite reacting to him, the water did not reflect him. “Yeah,” he said, as he whirled slowly over the water, like a slow-motion ballet dancer. “We've got a little meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff planned. Gulcher's going to help us with that.”
Bleak wondered if he too could fly, move objects about, in this world. He suspected flying wouldn't be possible because he was here in his physical body; Sean was here as an astral body. “You know Gulcher's a mass murderer, Sean?”
Sean stopped spinning, stabbed an accusing finger. “And you fought in a war! Killed quite a number of people yourself. You shot a teenage boy once, in Afghanistan.”
Bleak felt punched in the stomach, hearing that from Sean. But he said, “He was part of a team that killed my best friend. And he was trying to shoot me.”
“I know—absolutely! You did what you had to. Gulcher figured he did what he had to do—to get out of where he was. And that's all we're doing at CCA, Gabriel! What we have to do. Even if it means working with losers like Gulcher.”
Looking at Sean, Bleak had a sinking feeling there wasn't much left of the boy who'd been abducted from a ranch in Oregon. There was a man with special DNA, extraordinary talents—and inside that man was a disfigured little soul. That was all that was left of his brother. An imp where there should be a man. It was what CCA had made of him, with confinement and testing and isolation and “training,” all these years. It hurt to see it; hurt even more to feel it.
“Sean...” There was so much to say. He didn't know where to start. “Sean, I'm sorry about what happened to you. From what I can find out, they didn't give our parents much choice.”
The facade of brotherly fondness dropped away from Sean. He loomed in midair, staring down at Bleak. “They chose you over me. 'Sure, take that one, we'll keep this one.'“
“I can't blame you for thinking that. But I don't think it was that way. Mom never got over it. She just retreated into her shell. They both got Bible-crazy. And that was a reaction to losing you.”
Sean snorted. “Yeah? They told people I was dead! But I did okay without you and them—I adapted! I made them give me things, at CCA! I showed my worth...and now I'm on top of it.” And he bobbed ten feet higher in the air, for emphasis.
“Sean—you know about Stockholm syndrome? You get kidnapped—and you adapt by identifying with your captor?”
“So that's going to be your attitude! Patronizing, condescending. Disrespecting me.” “Sean—”
“I can take you back. You coming back with me or not?” “No. Not right now. I don't trust them.”
“I can stop you from ever leaving here] I can change the character of this place! I can make it so it's definitely not paradise. Heaven can become hell! You know how? I can bring things here. You going to make me do that?”
“Sean, let's just...start over. Why don't you come with .me? We can go back to earth—but we'll stay the hell away from the Central Containment Authority. Who wants to be centrally contained, or contained any other way?”
“You don't understand. I'm the one who's doing the containing—the controlling!”
“They've manipulated you into believing that.”
“You're putting me down again! You deny my power!” Sean spread his arms, beginning to change. “Look at me and deny this, a*shole!”
Sean joined his outstretched arms up over his head, as if aiming himself into the sky—but suddenly Sean Bleak's whole body spiked downward, feetfirst into the pool of water, into the mud under it, vanishing, all at once, into water and murk, gone from his brother's sight. A geyser of water rising and falling away, a swirl of diffuse mud, was the only evidence, for the moment, that he'd been there.
“Uh-oh,” Bleak said, backing away. Already beginning to draw on the energy of the Hidden. The ground shook. There was a count of three: Sean's voice, booming sourcelessly, from all around.
“One! Two! THREE!”
And on three, the spot in the water where Sean had disappeared erupted outwardly with a visible shock wave, an explosion of water and mud and shredded plants that made Bleak stagger; a shock wave that continued outward into the cypresses around the pool, making them bend and crack and splinter, one of the more slender trees uprooting, falling backward. A stench clung to the air, and a black cloud formed over the pool, starting small but quickly growing, a miniature thundercloud just fifty feet up that spread, extending tentacles of itself into the surrounding forest, crackling within like distant heat lightning. Then the electrical charge built up unbearably—and let go in the form of a crooked, branchy stroke of red-yellow lightning that smashed down into the pool, churning it with foam and sparkling it with electric death. Fish died and bobbed up, pale bellies turned to the darkening sky. The electricity crackled through the ground—right at Gabriel Bleak.
And as Sean's baleful influences struck, Gabriel Bleak hardened the energy he'd drawn from the Hidden into a field of repulsion, a cocoon of light. The assault struck the shield of light and dissipated —into the surrounding forest.
For a moment, an apparition formed, a shape of mist and smoke and dust—Sean's head, big as a dragon's, with a crocodile's jaws and eyes of polished obsidian. It reared over Bleak, its jaws agape. He saw Sean—the child Sean—replicated there in the crocodilian apparition's shiny black eyes, as if Sean were trapped in the obsidian, shouting with fury. “No one's going to pretend I'm not around, not ever again!”
“Sean. This was not the course we agreed on, “ boomed another voice, from somewhere else entirely. A guttural voice, with a faint Deep South accent, Bleak did not recognize. “We need him alive.”
“He won't come to us your way, General!” Sean roared. “It's better to crush him than to let him run free!”
And the energies slammed at Gabriel Bleak again—and Bleak strove to hold them back, afraid he couldn't continue much longer, feeling the pressure more with each second.
It was beginning to hurt, as the charge increased air pressure around him; he was beginning to feel his ribs close to cracking, despite the cushion of protective energy.
“You 're letting your boyish resentment get the best of you. He will come to us. I withdraw you. Come.”
Then came a whining roar of frustration, the force of the roar bursting the crocodilian apparition from within...so that it blew up—and drifted into smoke and mist, which blew away...into the forest. Bleak sank to his knees, resting, immensely relieved.
Then the jungle was silent for three long seconds. One, two, three. And a whisper came, close to Bleak's right ear. Sean's voice.
“Gabriel. I'm opening a way to Shoella's world, from the Wilderness. You won't want to stay here any longer. Don't trust that crazy bitch. She's been way over the edge for a long time. Let them have her... You can't stay here, I've opened the way for predators from the Wilderness. You'll have to leave! I'm going to go.... You'll find your way to us.... The general might not know... “
“Sean...wait!”
But a wind rose—and he felt Sean sweeping away with the wind; felt his brother withdrawn from the jungle paradise, making the leaves flash their paler undersides, the grass giving one long wave, the trees swaying with his departure.
And the demiworld fell into a sullen quiet.
Bleak sighed. Then he got to his feet, took a deep breath, and turned to hurry back to Shoella's house.
But as he went, with each step he was a little more aware of Shoella's world growing dark within itself; it curdled; it began to rot; it sickened, like a woman with a tropical fever. The air grew close and heavy around him; the sun glared, growing hotter, the ground trembled, so that every few steps he stumbled. He heard a thundering and turned to see a great plume of black smoke rising in the distance —a volcano. He hurried on—but before long volcanic ash was falling around him, thick and choking.
The sky was blackening with it. The path was hard to see, and the grass, it seemed to him, was twisting to conceal the way. He visualized the house, as Shoella had told him, and the path reluctantly opened up again, just the merest thread. He plunged along it, coughing, realizing that the protection had been lifted. This was no longer paradise—he was no longer safe from this jungle.
The forest rustled—a large striped antelope ran in terror from a grove of trees on Bleak's left, pursued by hyenas. Seven hyenas, ululating hungrily, tearing at the antelope as it went, making blood spray. Only their bloodlust for the animal, he knew, kept them from going after him.
The trees swayed in a rising wind...ash swirled red around the glaring sun. The face of a three-eyed demon formed from swirling ash—and watched him from on high. “I'm opening a way to Shoella's world, from the Wilderness. “
Then he saw the house, up ahead. He ran toward the back door, shouting for Shoella over the rumbling of the unearthly earth. He saw the waterfall running red—with blood? No, it was dissolved red clay, but it looked like a waterfall of blood, blackening now with ash. A eucalyptus tree swayed, shivered—and fell across a corner of the house, and he heard Shoella shout in fear. The back door was skewed now, the rectangle geometrically distorted with the impact of the tree on the frame of the house.
Bleak rushed through the skewed doorway, coughing, into the kitchen; blinking away black snow, stumbling down the hall, shouting her name. The living room was crushed—the bedroom looked intact.
He found her in the bedroom kneeling on the cracking floor. She'd opened up loose floorboards, under that North African rug, had taken a talisman of brass and hair and glass from its hiding place, gripped it in the long, slim fingers of her right hand. She held it up to him, her mouth quivering, her eyes streaming tears. “Take this in your hand!” Shoella shouted, over the growing rumble.
“Sean—he did this—he said you knew, that you were with them—”
“I know—just take it! And laissez les bons temps rouler. “
He took the talisman, not understanding at first what it meant to her—and realized then that the talisman had guided them here. She shouted certain words in another language. “No, Shoella!”
But it was too late, blackness washed over him, then he was falling through a red-streaked vortex The demiworld was gone—and Bleak was spinning through the center of a tornado that whipped and rippled through space itself. He glimpsed faces flashing by—but one slowed and approached, to race along beside him, murmuring to him—the Talking Light he'd seen as a boy.
“Now I will guide you to The Other... the one who completes you, “ said the spirit of light, its voice resounding in his mind. “As close to her as I can take you. They have protections, you will have to cross their barriers. But you will be close. “
“Shoella!” Bleak yelled. Out loud—or in his mind? Where was his body? He wasn't sure. “We have to help her!”
“Shoella is beyond my help. She is trapped in her imagining, a world coupled with your brother's vision. But you I may guide.... Find The Other and heal her.... Look for my guidance inwardly. “
Then the spirit of light was gone and Bleak could see nothing but the colorless vortex; he felt a tremendous force spinning him around ever faster, spinning him like in a cyclotron, and he felt gravity build up in him, but instead of crushing him it stretched him out, as if he were a man of rubber; his body stretched out to an infinite wire—which suddenly snapped like a broken violin string.
Snap, and he was propelled by the recoil into...
The atmosphere of the planet Earth. Clouds poured by him; a passenger jet was there and gone in a second. A passing crackle of lightning. The lights of cars on a nighttime highway far below...
Down. Slowly, turning like a falling leaf as he descended. His body taking its old shape again. Approaching the solid ground and...
Impact—not bone-breaking hard, but the breath was knocked out of him.
And he was back. He was lying on the ground, facedown. Back in the world he'd grown up in.
Bleak lay there a few long, stammering breaths, letting his heart quiet, his breathing return to normal.
Then, the talisman in his hand, he stood up and looked around.
It appeared to be early afternoon. He was in a copse of dying oaks. He was standing on dry, dead leaves. About a hundred feet away was a sprawling concrete building surrounded by razor wire. A sign said FACILITY 23.