A Latent Dark (60 page)

“No,” she said and turned to the two Tinkerers on the bed.

Ostermann was holding Laura’s hand now, looking at her with something like confused affection. He looked back up at the girl. “We never agreed on anything,” he said. “She was always the voice of caution, you know? She was always the one to talk me down, make me pause a moment and reflect.”

“Come with me,” Skyla said. “We can find a Physician outside.”

Ostermann shook his head. “No, you take The Reverend Summers. I… we’ve received too much radiation. We were only feet from the guard when he…” He swallowed with some effort. “We’ll never last. You take him.”

Skyla opened her mouth to say something, but Laura interrupted.

“Pall is right and you know it.” Her shadow still clung to the fading body of the Tinkeress. It gave Skyla a kind smile. “You take The Reverend.”

“But he’s awful!” she said in her mind.

“Maybe,” Laura said. “You know better than I, but it’s a waste to try and save us. Besides, I think Pall has a plan.”

Skyla turned to Lyle as he stood before the girl-shaped door. He grinned and held out his hands. “Fly me to salvation, you little witch.”

She shuddered as his shadow, thick as oil, reached out to her with things that were not arms.

“Tell me one thing,” she said to him.

“Oh?” he said. “What’s that?”

“Who killed Melissa?”

“Oh, well that’s confidential, child,” Lyle said. “And since you can’t read minds exactly, I don’t feel the need to tell you until my feet are on a boat.”

“Suit yourself,” she said and tackled the man. They fell backwards through the wall, tumbling into the dim outline that Rhia had left so many years ago.

Pall watched them vanish, and then squeezed Laura’s hand. There was a flinch from her face and she turned to his voice. “You should go before it finds us.” She coughed and yellow liquid leaked out of a hole in her cheek.

“I know,” he said. “I just don’t want to leave you.”

“I’ll meet you there,” she said, her voice but a whisper. “You were always the bold one anyway.” She closed what passed for the remains of her eyes and appeared to sleep.

Pall swayed as he stood. His face had gone numb, but a probing hand told him that it was swollen as bad as Laura’s. He stumbled to the door and opened it.

The hallway was a black tunnel of Swiss cheese, entire sections gone, demolished with the imprints of hooves, claws, and horns. He had a pretty good idea what had made those marks. He had caught glimpses of tails and arms on his way to the bedroom.

We were so close to understanding,
he thought.

Large, man-sized holes were carved out of the floor and walls, where people had imploded into themselves. Their particles had condensed as they fused into singularities, eating all they could before finally dying in a burst of radiation as hot as a sun, charring the surrounding tile.

Pall stumbled past the pits and craters, the shrieks and screams fading now. Occasionally he would hear a gunshot or the pop of another person, probably a prisoner or a guard. He heard the familiar hum of the machine seeking another target.

The gallery was just ahead. Pall began to run.

He leaned against the door. A table was in the way, creaking across the floor as it opened. Once inside, Pall looked around the gallery.

They used to call it the trophy room at one time, the pictures of success hanging everywhere. The people stared at him from within their tiny cells as he pulled a photo from the wall and held it.

It was of a couple, holding hands. He remembered this one, how he had stared at it for hours one lonely night in the lab. They seemed so remarkably peaceful, so happy. Pall looked at it now, this time seeing himself in the abstraction of human figures, seeing Laura. It was all just his imagination of course. The photo faded the longer it was removed from its place, but he clung to that memory, holding it in his mind. He wanted it to be the last memory he had.

Holding the framed photo at his side, Pall looked at the empty space where the picture had been hanging, where the head of a cylinder peered out at him from its tube like a large pupa. A handle protruded from the rounded end, rusted and rough to his charred hands. He grabbed and pulled, bracing his foot against the wall until it gave and slid loudly from its casing. Something deep within the walls roared an ancient, clockwork warning at him.

“Don’t like that, do you…” he muttered as he placed the cylinder on the ground. “Well, I’ve decided I don’t like
you.”

So easy. So very easy, and you know it,
he thought.
You know how vulnerable you are.

He wondered how long before the machine found him as it felt around its hallways, blindly consuming anything it could sense. Pall reached around to the back of the cell and simply rotated the end, reversing the contacts.

So powerful and so fragile,
he thought.
You made us all think you were a god, but you are nothing but a toy, a simple mechanism.

A red light appeared in the depths of the casing and began flashing frantically. He returned the capsule to its hole, stood back, and closed his eyes.

Something massive shrieked deep inside the facility as the power cell creaked once and then burst inward violently, just as the soldier had, only a thousand times more concentrated. Pall watched the surrounding pictures all lean in toward the growing singularity as it feasted on the stored fuel, its stasis removed. Every straight edge along the wall began to bend inward as the expanding gravity well began to feed voraciously on the surrounding canisters.

Pall was amazed at just how peaceful it was at the heart of a black hole.

Chapter 44

Conversation was difficult as James, the priest, and Sarah ran through the streets of Rhinewall. John looked at the shuttered windows, the people who stood aimlessly on the streets, in Confessional lines. He wanted to yell at them, warn them, but then he remembered the fainting man in his pen, the man in the chair. He understood now; Rhinewall was a city filled with empty bodies. Most of the older ones had probably been reprogrammed to fit back into a manufactured society, playacting some dark theater scripted by Clerics and Tinkerers.

“What… did she tell you?” James panted, his legs pumping as they turned a corner.

“She didn’t… tell me anything,” said John, “but I think… they are going to… try and destroy the facility.”

“How?”

John searched his limited knowledge and tried to explain to James as they twisted through the streets and alleyways, over and around empty people standing under awnings and trees. He wasn’t sure how well he explained it, but James was nodding as he spoke. They were still frighteningly close to the cemetery.

“There’s this gallery,” he said finally. “It looks like pictures but that’s actually where they store the fuel… the shadows or whatever… it’s in photographs, but they aren’t photographs… they’re power cells… I think they might even be alive somehow.”

James’s eyes grew wide.

“Yeah,” said John.

“We’ll never get far enough away,” said James.

“Yeah, maybe,” said John.

They had to stop. John was exhausted and Sarah was beginning to slip behind. The outer walls of Rhinewall were still miles away as they gulped air, hands on their knees.

Something hit John in the back of the neck and he slapped a hand over it. “
Ow
!”

Another one stuck him and he turned, irritated to see who had thrown it. Behind a stone wall in the shadows of an alleyway was a girl. He almost thought it was Skyla at first until she emerged from the shadows just enough for him to see her eggshell-white eye.

“Get inside you idiots,” she said, beckoning them.

John turned just in time to see James and Sarah running after her. “What are you doing?” he yelled after them.

James stopped just long enough for John to catch up.

“Are you crazy?” he said to James. “That’s the same girl you oaf!”

James gave a sympathetic nod and then pointed to a patch of shadow resting on the girl’s shoulder. John wouldn’t have even noticed until it moved. It was the biggest damn crow he had ever seen.

“And that’s the same raven,” James said, lumbering off toward Gil as she continued to wave them on.

John had no idea what James was thinking and he didn’t much care at this point. He followed anyway, shooting Gil a suspicious glance. She shoved him into a pair of horizontal metal doors and down into a cellar. They went down further and further until it was too dark for John to even make out the people in front of him.

“Where are we?” John asked, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

A lantern, hanging from a chain against the wall began to glow, revealing a rat’s nest of cushions, crates, and stolen trinkets. Gil plopped down on a mattress, the crow on her shoulder. It regarded him with calm, dark, intelligent eyes.

“Orrin said to bring you here.”

John looked at the crow. The crow looked back. “That’s Orrin?”

Gil nodded. “Sorry I tricked you before,” she said shyly. “Orrin said that wasn’t very nice, but he said I could make it up to you by saving you.”

“He did, did he?”

Gil nodded fervently, greasy hair slapping her cheeks. She raised her mutilated hand and stroked his feathers. “Orrin tells me lots of things. He’s a very smart bird.”

“I didn’t know crows could talk.”

“He’s a
raven,”
she said, as if offended on his behalf. “Orrin says that crows are the retarded cousins of ravens. He’s much smarter than they are.”

“I’m sure,” said John.

“I’ve been collecting metal from the
scrapyards
,” she said. “Orrin says it has to be lead. Nothing else will do. We’ll be safe in here.”

She rapped on the wall behind her and John realized that the entire wall of the cellar was coated with it, propped up by furniture and nailed to beams in places. Shelves with stolen gears and cogs lined the walls, along with stale food and dirty rags.

 “What’s going to happen?” he said, staring up.

The raven croaked. Gil listened to him then smiled at John. “The end of the world.”

John gaped at her and Gil laughed. It was a childish belly laugh, the kind of laugh he remembered from the schoolyard. For all her conniving and deceit, Gil was a bright and clever girl. She reminded him of Skyla. A pet raven suited her, he thought.

Finally she caught her breath and said, “I’m kidding, but you might want to hold onto something. Things might get a little bumpy.”

“Bumpy?”

She nodded. “Orrin says that after the boom you can go. There’s a passage under the city that will take you to the ocean.”

“What about you?” John asked.

“I’ve got Orrin,” she said as if it were obvious. “And Rhinewall is my home. Why would I go anywhere else?”

James had been staring at the raven during the conversation. Finally he cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about shooting at you,” he said, and John realized he was talking to the bird.

I’ve gone from one asylum to another,
he thought.