Disciple: DreamWalkers, Book 2 (27 page)

Adi’s jaw set. “They’re being handled. There’s no need to discuss them.”

Lill shook her head at her friend. Zeke was disappointed as well. Karen had probably manifested wraiths who’d freakishly eaten entire human bodies during the code ones. Was this the time to be secretive with a curator who might have answers? If they’d been straight with him in the first place, perhaps some of this could have been avoided.

Then there was the truth about Maggie. Did Maggie’s bellatorix ability play in to this situation or was it a footnote? Would informing the others that Maggie could kill wraiths inside the sphere mean she’d be taken somewhere worse than the Orbis?

Somewhere more akin to a prison?

“Irregularities. Are you referring to Karen’s notion that a wraith king has been directing her actions?” the curator asked curiously.

“You knew that, sir?” Adi asked.

If Adi hadn’t admitted all the recent irregularities to the curator, what had they discussed all morning? Steak and eggs?

“It was hard to miss. The poor thing babbled about it like a dolly with a pull string. I believe it’s representative of what they refer to in the field of psychiatry as a split personality. This king fellow is the side of her she doesn’t want to acknowledge.”

Though the conclusion lined up with what Zeke suspected about Karen too, he glared at the old man. From Lill’s tension to the paleness of Adi’s normally milk chocolate skin, impending disaster weighed on everyone—except the curator. “What you’re saying is she’s completely nuts, yet you don’t think the fact she’s gone missing is anything to worry about? With her history?”

“A split personality doesn’t automatically make an afflicted individual dangerous,” the curator said. “That’s a myth. Popular media affects what neonati create in the dreamsphere, but don’t let it affect your perception of reality. Prejudices against the mentally ill are beneath us as members of the Somnium.”

“Do you realize how many people she murdered with her wraiths in Harrisburg?” Zeke asked. “Some of them were children.”

“That was a mess,” the curator agreed. “Moody was hard pressed to cover it up. I understand how you might take that situation personally, Ezekiel, but let me assure you, that isn’t going to happen here.”

“Why not?” Zeke asked.

The curator appeared surprised. “For one, there are no children.”

How could the man be so pitiless? Was this what happened to curators, forced to spend nearly all their time in the sphere surrounded by wraiths and the “big picture”? The little pictures, and the people in them, turned into chum. Other alucinators became pawns on a chessboard. For this man, nicking a student in the United States and eating a steak was indeed a vacation.

“I don’t think I’m the one with a distorted perception of reality.” Zeke felt a hand on his arm. Maggie’s. If it had been anyone else, he would have shaken it off.

“I’m a bellatorix,” Maggie said bluntly. But Zeke felt her fingers tighten on his arm, as if she were trying to anchor herself in the conversation instead of hightail it out of here.

Adi stared at Maggie, recognition sparking in her worried features. “My God. Of course.”

“Sorry, Adi,” Lill said. “It’s gotta come out. All of it.”

“I realize the dreamsphere can be unusually intimidating for neonati with conduit blindness, but bellatorixes are a relic of the past,” the curator said gently.

“You didn’t say myth.” Zeke crossed his arms so he could surreptitiously cover Maggie’s hand with his own.

“I never considered it, but it’s the only thing that makes sense,” Adi agreed with a heavy sigh. The doctor, beside her, nodded slowly.

The curator raised white, bushy eyebrows that more than made up for the lack of hair on his head. “Who has been telling you children such folderol?”

“Nobody,” Maggie said. “I killed wraiths inside the dreamsphere and dragged corpses into the terra firma, where they did not turn to dust as expected.”

The curator lowered his chin, and his fury sparked like static electricity in a dark room. “Did I hear that correctly? Wraith corpses in the terra firma? Here?”

“Yes, sir.” Adi stood her ground, expression neutral.

“And I was not informed of this why?”

“I instructed everyone under my command who had knowledge of the materialized corpses to consider it restricted information, including from vigils and curators, until such a time as we were able to determine the cause,” Adi said stiffly. “According to section 6.43.1 of the handbook, a vigil may designate suspicious information as—”

“If the security of other employees may have been breached,” the curator interrupted firmly, “which is a stretch, Ms. Sharma. You have had no reason to believe your fellow vigils, not to mention a curator, would be involved in the manifestation of physical corpses during a code one on your watch.”

Though everyone in the room could tell Adi was in deep shit, the vigil displayed no fear or regret. And she hadn’t even been jolted back into whatever memories Karen had stolen from her. Zeke had to wonder how much of Adi’s decision-making the past few days was Adi—and how much had been skewed by Karen.

But Adi confessed the rest of the information to the curator without flinching. “Then you’ll also wish to know that during the code ones, the manifested wraiths—the ones who weren’t corpses—devoured entire human bodies, which was deemed out of character for the wraith species involved. We’ve recorded similar incidents over the past year but not in these numbers.”

“I want to see these wraith corpses immediately, Ms. Sharma. Until such a time as a tribunal can be convened, you will consider yourself relieved of duty,” the curator snapped, displaying the autocratic side anyone leading a secret organization whose job was to protect the world had to have tucked away somewhere. “As for you, Ms. Mackey, you cannot be blamed for your vigil leading you astray, but there will be no more omissions while you are under my employ. Is that clear?”

“I’m not responsible for the manifestations,” Maggie said slowly and distinctly. “I do not have conduit blindness. I did not hide my own signature in the sphere. The fact that I’m a bellatorix—”

“Was probably caused by the conduit blindness.” The curator rattled his walker, growing annoyed. “The skill—it’s not unheard of, Margaret. But it hasn’t been needed. It’s born of necessity. Which is to say, it’s believed to be born of necessity, since we have no records of an alucinator with the ability in centuries. You were allowed too long in the dreamsphere with insufficient training and protection. That ends today.”

Insufficient training and protection. That stung. Zeke had done his best, and Maggie hadn’t been hurt until Karen had come awake.

“Being a bellatorix isn’t a fable like we’ve been told,” he said to the curator. “You curators know it’s real and what causes it. If you’ve been spying on Maggie all this time, part of the blame—if any blame is required for Maggie to have a skill that seems really fucking useful to me—falls on you.”

He didn’t add “sir”.

The curator’s face reddened, and his eyes seemed to bulge. Zeke wondered if he were about to be relieved of duty as well. But the curator chuckled. “Ah, the passions of youth. I don’t miss them. But you have a point. If we suspected Margaret had conduit blindness, we shouldn’t have let it go so long. Mea culpa. Now that I’m here, we’ll fix it.”

“Why did this happen to me?” Maggie asked.

“There has been a global uptick in wraith density due to the earth’s overpopulation, which all of us are aware of. As such, when the excess wraiths conglomerated around you due to the conduit blindness—”

“Or due to Karen,” Zeke added.

The curator shushed him. “As I was saying, when the wraiths congregated around you, the bellatorix skill developed as an instinctive defense mechanism. We believe it isn’t triggered until wraith exposure reaches a certain concentration. There isn’t much information about it at the Orbis, but there are indicators it used to be more common.”

“What about the wraiths that ate corpses?” Adi asked.

“Hm.” The curator fingered his walker handles. “Influence of a resident bellatorix, I should say. The solidity that allows corpses to persist in the terra firma, courtesy of a bellatorix, might cause other wraiths to seek the same solidity by eating human bodies. We have no contemporary experience with the phenomenon, you understand, but I have no reason to believe the two aren’t connected.”

For someone who had no actual experience with a bellatorix, it sure didn’t sound like the curator was guessing.

“Who else knows of this?” the curator asked.

“The people in this room.” For a moment, Zeke wondered if he should admit that. The curator, who could also confound, could wipe the knowledge from all of them if he decided to bury this. No wonder Adi hadn’t wanted to share everything, such as her investigations into dreamspace healing. The old man’s physical presence and charm were disarming, but she was right.

He was a curator, and his goals weren’t necessarily the same as the worker bees.

But he made no move to touch anyone. “I’ll reference Ms. Sharma’s favorite section 6.43.1 of the handbook and require that this knowledge be kept restricted until such a time as we can determine the extent of Margaret’s abilities. We don’t want alucinators deliberately attempting to activate it. We can’t afford to lose our people that way. It’s suicidal.”

“None of this answers the question of where the hell is Karen Kingsbury and what is she planning?” Lill fingered a scar on her forearm. “Adi, do you remember attacking Zeke in the dreamsphere the night we tried to matriculate Karen?”

“Maggie insisted it happened, but Zeke was unhurt.” Adi frowned. “However, Maggie’s presence—her invisibility—in the sphere raises another concern we must address.”

Zeke caught Adi’s ball and ran with it. “Karen has several abilities she isn’t supposed to. She must be the one with the camouflage. Bet she cloaked Maggie to cause trouble, hoping the wraiths would overwhelm her.”

“Camouflage doesn’t function that way,” the curator insisted. “Either way, an imbalanced L5 who’s been enjoying the hospitality of the coma station for the past year couldn’t magically absorb such a sophisticated technique. Perhaps Margaret’s invisibility stems from her being a bellatorix as well. Studying her should prove fascinating.”

Zeke didn’t like the implications of “studying” when the curator had maintained he would be “training” Maggie. “Maggie’s not a lab rat.”

From Adi’s expression, she was about to object as well. But whatever she was going to say was interrupted by the echo of gunfire, muted but distinct. The hair on the back of Zeke’s neck prickled, quickly followed by the smell.

Wraiths.

Lill pushed into the hallway, unsheathing her sword. Zeke hovered in the doorway so he could cover both areas. The only armed people left in the bunker were himself, Lill, Adi and Maggie, unless the doctor had scalpels tucked beneath her scrubs.

The curator, from the looks of him, hadn’t seen active field duty in forty years.

Red sparkled on the stairs right before Whedon vamps materialized in the hallway. It wouldn’t do any good to shoot them until they were completely in the terra firma, but then—they were as good as dust.

Zeke hoped.

“Code one,” Lill announced. “Adi, call for reinforcements and sound the alarm. This may get rough.”

Zeke drew his gun, wishing he’d worn his sword, despite it being awkward.

“I think we know what Karen has planned,” he said grimly. “I just hope the search parties locate her more quickly than we did in Harrisburg, or a lot of people are gonna die.”

Chapter Eighteen

Maggie unsnapped her gun holster, heart thudding. Adi spoke on her walkie in a buzz of sound. Apparently, the wraiths inside the building weren’t the only ones appearing.

At least nobody could blame this manifestation on her malingering conduits. She hadn’t been in the sphere since yesterday.

Zeke peered into the common room, gaze unerringly finding hers. “I’m shutting this door. If wraiths appear, get me.” He slammed it, a metallic clang.

In the ensuing silence, the curator’s voice echoed.

“I appear to have been mistaken about Ms. Kingsbury.” Unhurriedly, despite the snarls in the hallway, he clomped to a wall and set his back against it. “Ms. Sharma, it seems you have a chance to redeem yourself.”

Adi had drawn a pair of wicked daggers—longer than Maggie’s ten-inch blade, which was as big as Zeke allowed her to carry until she was less clumsy with edged weapons. She had no idea where Adi had hidden her daggers. Inside her baggy scrubs pants?

“Sir,” Adi told the curator, “while I acknowledge your right to remove me from active duty, I do not regret my actions nor consider them in error.” She clicked a few things on her phone, and a code one alarm began to echo through the building.

“Cheeky,” the curator muttered. Or Maggie thought he did—it wasn’t easy to hear anymore. He didn’t look worried that they were essentially stuck in the middle of a code one. Perhaps it had been decades since he’d seen a manifested wraith. Maggie assumed curators would be vetted through the same training programs as sentries or vigils, but who knew? The curators may have a different recruitment system entirely.

Maggie checked her clip like her weapons instructor had taught her and peered through the window in the door. When she pushed her cheek against the reinforced glass, she could see Zeke and Lill confronting several Whedon vamps in the bunker’s hallway. The vampires’ eyes sparked red, and their clawed fingers slashed.

Lill sent a head flying with one elegant swing of her sword. Maggie envied her ease with the blade.

The vamp and its head fizzled into dust. Zeke backed out of the cloud, took aim, and fired three times in rapid succession. His profile was intense but not grim, indicating he didn’t think the challenge was beyond his and Lill’s abilities.

They should be all right, as long as no monsters materialized in here. Adi retreated to the corner of the room farthest from the intercom and issued rapid orders into her walkie.

“Are you combat trained?” Maggie asked Dr. Weir.

“What?” Dr. Weir pointed at her ears. Maggie repeated herself at high volume.

“About as much as you are,” the doctor yelled back. “Not an alucinator—only enrolled in a basic program.”

Some Somnium employees were former civilians. While they tried to recruit as much as they could from the fundi, PhDs were hard to come by.

“Would either of you like a weapon?” she called to the curator and the doctor. One could have her knife, and one could, well, have a chair leg. Unless Adi had spikes in her braid, as Zeke had once suggested.

“Too old to cavort around with swords.” The curator patted the handgrips of his walker. He had trouble making his raspy voice heard above the siren, so Maggie crossed the room to him as he spoke. “According to my physicians, I’m not supposed to stress my heart. I imagine fighting monsters would be against their orders.”

She studied the curator with dismay. Hell. If this situation turned dire, would the old guy have a heart attack? At least they had a doctor on hand.

“I’m best with a knife,” the doctor offered, and Maggie handed hers over. She was best with a gun and worst with everything else, though the knife had served her well when she’d been locked in with zombies.

Adi, temporarily off the walkie, snagged Maggie and the doctor’s attention. “The manifestations are occurring randomly. Conduits everywhere. A sizeable number of wraiths have amassed.”

“If we stay in the bunker and seal the blast doors at the top,” Maggie began, but Adi shook her head.

“That only works if there are no manifestations inside. There’s already been one.” She checked the door window, like Maggie had, and stepped away, satisfied. “It’s being handled.”

The curator patted his hands on his walker in a syncopated rhythm. “Well, this is exciting. I can’t remember the last time I was on an assignment with a code one.”

“Sir, we’re in danger.” Maggie surreptitiously wiped her sweaty palm on her pants. “We could die. It’s not the fun kind of excitement.”

“I’m sure it’s not dire,” the curator said. “The coma station has, what, several hundred soldiers? This is exactly the situation they train for.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t be deadly,” Adi pointed out. “We have a large-scale manifestation on our hands. While, as you pointed out, there are no children on the premises, I consider all Somnium employees and patients as valued individuals who deserve to live.”

Maggie recognized a jab when she heard one, but the curator merely smiled.

“How many?” the doctor asked, countenance pale. Maggie wasn’t sure if she meant how many wraiths or how many casualties.

“Unknown,” Adi answered, “but the horde is preventing the coma station forces from approaching the outbunker. Wraith manifestations have occurred across a ten mile radius, which is unusual, to say the least.”

The curator poked a finger in one of his ears. “Could you possibly turn off the alarm? I think everyone knows there’s a code one by now.”

Adi complied, flicking buttons on her phone. The sudden silence was interrupted by sounds of combat in the corridor, where both Zeke and Lill’s voices could be heard. Maggie resisted the urge to run outside and check. Or help. They could do the job of dispatching wraiths more easily if she wasn’t in the way.

“Got any helicopters?” she asked Adi. The rest of the world hopefully wouldn’t detect the disaster at this remote location as long as the Somnium kept it contained. If the wraiths behaved as they had since Maggie had become an alucinator, they would all converge…

Here. At the outbunker. Looking for her.

On Karen’s orders? Or because Maggie was a bellatorix and wraiths instinctively wanted to eliminate their biggest threat?

“Two choppers.” Adi shook dust out of her pale blue scrubs. “However, one was sent to the research facility with an important payload.”

“The manifested corpses,” Maggie guessed. Visions of a squad of Somnium battle copters blasting apart the horde faded. “Tanks?”

This time the curator answered. “Sadly, no. Nor private jets. Despite the fact we have some very talented accountants and investors on staff, the fundi simply can’t support such extravagant purchases.”

Right now, a few tanks didn’t feel extravagant. The tension in the air was thick enough to punch, like the dreamsphere when the wraiths swirled around her. Maggie took a moment to breathe slowly in and out to calm her racing heart. “In Harrisburg, Karen’s wraiths didn’t attack her, correct?”

Adi nodded. “Mystifying but true.”

“The wraiths aren’t going to converge on her as they would a normal alucinator.” Maggie swallowed. Throughout history, wraiths had focused on killing the alucinator who’d manifested them, with bystanders a delicious side dish. But since the Harrisburg incident—and since Maggie’s awakening—some of the norms had shifted.

At least for Karen and Maggie.

“You seem convinced the young lady controls the wraiths.” The curator’s eyebrows rose. “That would imply one can communicate with them, yet they haven’t that type of intelligence.”

“This isn’t new information, sir,” Adi told him levelly. “The atypical behavior of the Harrisburg swarm has been known for a year.”

“Hm,” the curator mused. “Was other atypical behavior noted in Ms. Kingsbury before Harrisburg? She can confound, which wasn’t known until recently, and I find that curious. I realize she shares a tangible with her young man, but that shouldn’t have—”

“Her mentor,” Maggie said. “Zeke’s her mentor, not her young man.”

“The skill of confounding shouldn’t have been overlooked by any mentor,” the curator stated. “Unless, of course, she was confounding the knowledge out of him. Then there’s her vigil-trapping and your pesky conviction she’s mastered the curatorial camouflage. I do love a puzzle. We need to check the medical records from that time for evidence of—”

“Sir,” Maggie interrupted, “we’ll have time for the fine points later. We have to find Karen. It’s the only way to stop this.” Otherwise the wraiths would keep coming until they were all dead.

Definitely not the good kind of exciting.

What did Karen hope to achieve? Zeke was in her manifestation zone—did she want him dead too?

“She’s not in the bunker,” Adi said. “We even checked the ventilation system. She’s outside.”

Outside, where she’d probably witnessed Maggie and Zeke’s lovemaking. While Maggie didn’t regret being with Zeke and telling him she loved him, it was troubling that this code one was partly due to their lack of discretion.

Then again, Karen had been a ticking time bomb from the moment she’d awoken. Or before. Who knew what could have set her off if Maggie and Zeke hadn’t?

Adi set her daggers on a piece of furniture and deftly rolled her braid into a knot, which she secured with a rubber band. At Maggie’s questioning gaze, she said, “Harder to grab.”

“Outside is a big area.” In fact, that was why the coma station had been built here—it was remote, desolate and uninteresting, even to outdoorsy types, which Maggie wasn’t.

“Ms. Kingsbury was in a coma for a year,” the doctor said. “She can’t have walked far.”

“I don’t think Karen’s as much of an invalid as she’s been pretending to be,” Maggie said. If Adi’s beliefs about healing were true, Karen could energize herself. Maggie remembered Karen’s pink cheeks and lustrous hair. Dreamspace healing would explain her miraculous return to health after a year in a coma, not to mention the injuries that had first made Adi suspicious.

Should they ask the curator about healing? He was watching them avidly, as if they were a play enacted for his entertainment.

“Doesn’t matter where she is. My teams will locate her.” Adi glanced at her phone, frowning. She hasn’t been using the phone to communicate with the soldiers outside, since the walkies’ signals were more dependable during a manifestation.

“You know the wraiths will come after me, right?” Maggie asked. There was no reason not to blurt it out. It was true. “It’s been that way since I became an alucinator.”

“You know, I’m beginning to agree your condition isn’t caused by simple conduit blindness.” The curator shuffled toward Maggie, all vestiges of his ire at Adi gone. He smiled at Maggie as if he’d been given a gift. “My girl, you are a treasure.”

“That’s not how it feels from my perspective.” Maggie rubbed her sweaty palms against her pants again, transferring the gun from hand to hand. If she didn’t have conduit blindness, she’d still have to relocate to the Orbis because she was a bellatorix. But this was the internet age. She and Zeke could remain in touch, and hopefully, one day, be assigned to the same area. Or at least the same continent.

Not that alucinators got much vacation time. Maggie sighed. Then she noticed the ruckus in the corridor had faded.

The door swung open. Lill and Zeke, dusty but unscathed, appeared.

The curator raised a hand. “Ah. Our conquering heroes have returned.”

“Older and wiser.” Lill smacked wraith dust off her clothes.

“Now that the wraiths have been handled, it might behoove Margaret and myself to vacate the premises.” The curator hobbled toward the door, toward Zeke, whose glower could have bored through solid steel. It didn’t affect the old man at all. “We should leave the fighting to those of you who are able-bodied and obey my physician’s orders to avoid stress.”

“You’re not going anywhere until we control the situation, sir.” Adi didn’t appear to be taking her dismissal from employment to heart. She’d lost none of her poise and air of command. “What exactly do you think is happening outside the bunker? A couple zombies shambling around? Look.”

Adi thrust her phone toward them. Some enterprising employee had snapped a digital image of the chaos outside.

The curator wasn’t the only one to whistle at the photo. If it had been blurry and grainy, it would have been easier to ignore, but it wasn’t.

At least sixty wraiths surrounded the vehicles in the parking lot, facing the bunker. The clarity of the photo allowed Maggie to see the types. Dinos. Medusa things. Whedons. Sasquatches. Jasons. Spiders. God, she hated spiders. And—Maggie squinted—more in the distance. Masses of something, dark along the horizon.

Wraiths? Sagebrush? Reinforcements?

Soldiers in the photo fought back to back, blades extended, but there weren’t enough to deal with a horde like that for long. Did the coma station have this much to plow through and more? It was the easiest thing to explain why the reinforcements hadn’t arrived.

“How can there be so many manifestations from the conduits of a single alucinator?” Maggie asked. It was almost as if Karen had been amassing them in the sphere, biding her time, preparing.

“She’s done this before,” Lill said. “Practice makes perfect.”

Would this be the time Karen succeeded in whatever goal she might have?

“I’m gonna need a sword.” Zeke raked a hand through his hair, scattering dust. “And a missile launcher. Let’s hit the armory.”

“I don’t see how the soldiers are going to locate Karen in all that,” Maggie said dubiously.

“Two teams got past the main horde,” Adi said. “The rest are guarding the bunker.”

“They don’t know where to look.” Zeke paced into the hallway and back again. “The bitch could be any direction. Anywhere. Hell, she could be hiding in one of the fucking SUVs and we wouldn’t know.”

“Since she’s actively manifesting,” Maggie said, “can we enter dreamspace as a team and geolocate her signature? Anyone creating conduits has got to be leaving tracks in the sphere.” Geolocation was something Maggie could do—something she understood.

“That didn’t work in Harrisburg.” Zeke paced by the door, every inch of him alert. “Now we know why. The damn curator camouflage. We only caught her in Harrisburg because we stumbled across the house she’d holed up in.”