Back on earth, Jenny’s feet never touched the ground either, I reminded myself. I had no body. I was technically dead now, and ghosts didn’t need corporeal luxuries like gravity. I willed myself forward and found it fairly easy to direct my spirit into a smooth glide.
In the center of the spiral was a man. His back was turned to me as he hovered six feet in the air, fixated on his work. His shoulders heaved and his arms swung rhythmically, like a maestro conducting a symphony. In front of him, patterns emerged as three-dimensional waveforms, intertwining and overlapping—at once invisible and somehow brilliantly lustrous. It was like watching a billowing sheet of liquid diamond take shape. All the clever prototypes and models in the Hooles’ house were to this place what Michelangelo’s childhood scribblings were to the Sistine Chapel. The inventor’s hands could finally keep up with his imagination, and the results were staggering.
“Professor?” I said, approaching. “You don’t know me, but I—”
The soul turned. I froze.
He was not Lawrence Hoole.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“You’re . . . you’re Howard Carson,” I managed at last, when my words finally dislodged themselves from my throat.
“That’s right,” the spirit said. He wore a simple white shirt and gray trousers, his shirtsleeves rolled up. When I had seen him through Jenny’s eyes I had felt drawn to him, Jenny’s emotions flavoring my perception. Now that I saw him plainly I felt none of the same attraction.
“You don’t know me,” I started again. “My name is Abigail Rook. I’m from the world of the living.”
“We’re all expatriates here, aren’t we, Miss Rook?” He smiled affably. It might have been a charming smile had I been in the mood to be charmed. Instead his demeanor only made me angry. I didn’t want him to be pleasant and happy and playing with enormous magical science experiments in his own personal heaven. I wanted him to be devastated, racked with guilt at having conspired with villains and left Jenny for the slaughter.
“No,” I said tersely. “I mean that I still belong there. I’ll be going back. I’m only here to get some answers first.”
His smile faltered. “You’re serious?” He descended slowly toward the earth and looked me in the face. His feet touched down at the center point of the grand spiral. “You are serious. You’ve come a long way. What could you want to know that I might possibly be able to tell you?”
“I want to know who you were working for before you died, Mr. Carson. I want to know what you were building for them and how it worked. I want to know . . .” My throat tightened, but I gritted my teeth and took a deep breath, pushing through it. “I want to know who the woman was, and I want to know why you did it.”
Howard Carson’s expression darkened. “Who are you working for?” He stepped around me slowly. “You wouldn’t have come this far just for a story. You couldn’t have come this far alone.” I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes. “They’ve rebuilt it, haven’t they?”
I spun as he circled me. “Rebuilt what?” I demanded. “Tell me!”
The prismatic waves Carson had been creating still hung in the air, but now they began to spin more quickly, their smooth curves peaking in erratic spikes. “We were building the machine that would change the world, weren’t we?” he said coldly. “I never met my employers, but you can tell them from me when you get back up there that I don’t regret what I did one bit.” My blood was pumping in my ears. I wanted to slap him. “And as for the woman—she was definitely worth it.”
“Was she?” I said. “Was she worth dying for? Worth killing for?”
“Yes!” he said. “She was. Anyway, they got what they deserved.” The stars above darkened, and the braids of crystalline light floating all around us began to crack and crumble as they collided, leaving sprays of sharp, brittle shards to glide weightlessly through the skies like flocks of wicked birds. “We all got what we deserved.”
“Did Jenny?” My ire was nearly boiling.
The earth shook as the cogs in the distance suddenly ground to a halt. Carson breathed in and out slowly, his eyes downcast.
“What do you know about Jenny?”
“Jenny is a dear friend, Mr. Carson. So tell me, do you really think she got what she deserved?”
“Jenny.” His head came up. His voice had lost its edge, and he looked as though he had been punched in the gut. “You’ll have to tell me,” he said. “Is she . . . is she happy?”
“Happy?” His concern seemed so earnest. I faltered. “You don’t know what happened to her, do you?”
“How could I know?” he said. “I did what I could to protect her, but in the end all I could do was hope the bastards would not come after my Jenny, too. I’ve taken comfort in the fact that she has not joined me yet, but there is not a day that passes that I don’t worry that the mistakes of my past will be the ruin of her future.”
I tried to make sense of what Carson was saying. “Then . . . there was no other woman?”
“What? Never.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Carson. I think you’ll have to start from the beginning.”
Carson nodded. The world around us melted away. The planets above faded to black. We hovered in empty space. “They are called the Dire Council,” said Carson.
As he spoke, a familiar structure rose up around us. Tall walls stretched up on all sides, and soon we were inside the cavernous Buhmann building.
“How are you doing this?” I asked.
“Practice,” said Carson dolefully. “I have relived each moment of it in my own mind often enough. It is no great undertaking to recreate the details for you now.”
I gazed around me. This time the building was not empty but was filled with complex machinery and busy with workers moving to and fro. A familiar fat man with a curly mustache walked the floor like a foreman, his secretary scurrying after him with her clipboard. It felt like being inside Jenny’s memories, but this time my head did not ache.
“The Dire Council,” Carson repeated. “Mayor Poplin simply called them his benefactors, and for many months I knew them as nothing else, but I do pay attention. At first the work was glorious. I was encouraged to pursue the projects that inspired me. I was given raw materials and seemingly limitless funding. Gradually, though, directives came down with increasing specificity.”