41
Jay ran out of the Cyberdistrict and up the many stairs leading to the elevators, pushing people aside in the name of haste and making sure to look into every camera he could see. It was afternoon and pedestrians crowded the walkways. Strings of curses rose up in his wake like invisible streamers as he knocked his way though. People turned curiously to look at him, remotely assessing his desperation. He had no illusion of getting away, nor did he wish it. Only to make himself seen, to be found as quickly as possible, before any harm came to Faraji—or Billy, if he too had been caught. A suspicious wind breathed in his ear: if his plan failed, or his information was false, he should make as much commotion as he could before they took them all away.
A door opened among the line of elevators above the district and he cut his way in. He screamed savagely for people to keep away. A demure fellow shrugged insipidly at his breech of etiquette, but finally shrugged and allowed the doors to close. Jay pushed the button for floor 125. Forty floors down, the car began to slow its decent of its own accord and stopped at 450. He took a deep breath in, ready to let out another shriek to deter more passengers, but the door didn’t open, at least not immediately.
Less than two minutes passed in expectant silence. The elevator showed no signs of movement.
They had found him.
Another minute passed before the doors opened and revealed Hurn. Without a word he stepped in next to Jay and the doors closed again. The man was alone, but an army might as well have entered. Jay’s breathing constricted. His palms and back began to sweat in clammy outcry. His muscles seized and a fog entered his mind. Hurn was dressed all in fitted black, pants and a free-collar shirt, and his shining black shoes tapped on the tiles. For a moment Jay could not say anything. His powers of speech had been stolen, the righteous courage of only minutes before gone with them.
You have an interesting way of not being found, Jay -----,” said the Colonel.
The two stood as two passengers might have in more normal circumstances, not looking at each other directly, but each seeing the other through the mirrors on the wall. Jay felt the man’s forbidding eyes peeking into his pulsing veins, glacially siphoning the fire from him. He could hear the tapping of the other’s shoes on the tile, and feel that the elevator wasn’t moving, wouldn’t go anywhere. It was all he could do to rip the drive from his pocket and hold it out to the dark figure and stammer.
Please, it’s about your daughter.”
He stuttered the two file names and their directories and the Colonel reached and took the drive from Jay and enclosed it in the palm of his hand, leaving Jay trembling as if touched by a ghost. The man extended his lithe arm and rolled up his sleeve so that Jay could see all the man’s worm-like black augmentations boring their way through his flesh. Jay watched in horrified fascination as four of wired tentacles raised themselves up excitedly. Hurn pressed the drive into their writhing apices. They pressed and sucked at it and in turn brought it deeper into his forearm. Hurn’s eyes did not close, but soon enough the light behind them did seem to diminish. Jay was sure he was scrutinizing the documents.
What came next, he had no idea. Certainly there were two obvious options: the good and the bad. If the two documents were indeed legitimate, and if Hurn believed what Jay believed now, and if his feelings were still intact, maybe then, the good would rule the bad for a time and he would have the chance to run again.
The silence lengthened and as it did Jay’s tension threatened to overwhelm him. Hurn hadn’t moved, blinked, or made even the smallest facial expression. He was a shell. Jay cast about in his memory, hoping Midalin recall might assuage his fears, but unfortunately the effects of the drug were fading and the near photographic storage and recollection was gone. He had only what he could remember naturally, a few facts, the basics of the forms, but his view of the minute details had already faded.
But he remembered the names, and the digital forms on which he had found them.
The first form had been a certificate of death, and on it the name Flora Hurn—dated the same day of the newspaper article he’d read earlier. This, however, was not the damning document. Its only irregularity was its location in the same area of the computer as the second document, in the folder called SEEDS. Jay wished he’d had enough time to sort through this folder and all its many subfolders to determine just what SEEDS was, but he’d had to run, and had only enough time to read the second document.
This little file was the earthquake to shake them all. It was several pages long, but Jay had just managed to read it all. On it, listed under the strangely named field “Cognomen” was, once again the name Flora Hurn. Following this was a series of dates he could neither make sense of, nor recall exactly—but he knew each date was listed after the date on the death certificate. He also remembered vaguely that with each date followed a procedure—difficult for him to understand for their jargon—or what looked like a part number of some type. And, most important of all, in the very last field on the form: Name: Rosie Holgrave. He still remembered the frantic and invaded woman as Blake led her into the old man’s lair, and how Odin had told her that she was “completely connected,” that she was an open book ready to be read. How was it possible? And was this form really proof that Rosie was Hurn’s surviving child—taken while he lay near death, adopted into some new home, and made secretly into someone new . . .
And another question worth asking: was she the only one? Jay also remembered the folder called SEEDS had been huge, with thousands of files, but he hadn’t had enough time to investigate.
What would he do? Jay wondered, looking into the mirror at the still motionless specter. Would this turn this man’s fierce wrath in a different direction? Jay wondered how many people really knew the story of his creation. He was willing to guess that not many knew it as well as he did. He wanted to reach through the hard wall created by pain and fear, but the other man was too powerful to touch.
He could only wait there, feeling alone in the quiet elevator.
The sound that disturbed the hush furor inside was the almost indiscernible ratcheting of the cables and a muted whir as the car moved downward once again. Jay glanced nervously at Hurn but the man still said nothing, cold and vacant faced like a vampyre in its coffin, betraying nothing of his emotions. The elevator passed floor 126, Jay’s original destination, without any pause, and headed down to the lower floors slowly and steadily. Eventually it stopped at floor two, but the doors remained shut. Jay was beginning to panic. He already felt he had made a mistake trusting his intuition. He imagined a crowd of police gathering behind the door, just waiting to rush him. Five interminable minutes dragged to their conclusion, and the silence piled high upon his head.
The doors slid open and graced Jay with the most beautiful moment of his life. Once and once again, the elevators to the right and then left of him also opened. He had not yet marshaled the strength to move, but as he saw both Billy and then Faraji jump from the two open doors, he too rushed out in elation, casting only a brief glance back at Hurn to see the other man’s eyes focused solely on him, before he hugged the other boys.
What happened? I thought I was dead? How did you save us?” Faraji asked almost immediately.
Jay pointed back at Hurn, but the doors were already shutting and the dark figure within was visible for only a second before they were closed and the elevator was rising again.
Him?!” Faraji had seen who was in the elevator. “You got him to help us?”
Jay said quietly that he thought they should just get out of there, get back into the city, that he could explain later and they could figure out just what to do after they were out of the Villa. Faraji and Billy nodded in agreement and followed him as he led the way down the stairs to the bottom of the foyer and ran out the main doors into London Proper.