Less Than Human (42 page)

“If I don’t?” mumbled Ishihara.

“We keep you here and ask you again later,” said Samael above his head. “If you’re still alive.”

Ishihara believed him.

“Where are you from, Jinnosuke?” asked Adam kindly.

“Kita-Kyushu. Moji port.” Ishihara hadn’t intended to reply. While his will was being squashed by remorseless gravity, his
brain had processed question-answer automatically.

“Ah, the Kanmon Straits.” Adam recrossed his legs. “Has your family always lived there?”

Ishihara pulled his thoughts together. “’s … ironic,” he managed. “My family … were Christians … in old days.”

“Did they recant?” Adam leaned forward, interested.

“Yes … or I wouldn’t … be here.”

Samael laughed.

“Then you can, too.” Adam tilted his head and regarded Ishihara expectantly. “Just say ‘You are God.’”

The words barely penetrated the white noise that filled Ishihara’s head. He remembered the wharf at Moji, the way the sky
opened up as he walked out onto the jetty beside the old brick factory building; the way the tiny boats bobbed next to Sunday
fishermen lining the stained concrete; the taste of salt-bitter wind, like blood.

Blood dripped from his nose. He was going to die and never smell the sea again.

“No,” said the woman. She knelt in front of Adam. A red stain from his blood spread across the knee of her trousers.

Something bumped in Ishihara’s chest. For a second he thought he’d had a heart attack. Then he wished he had. Without hair,
the woman’s face looked like a boy’s, but the long bones and deep eye sockets were unmistakable. It was McGuire.

Ishihara shut his eyes. Had she played him the whole way? He heard himself assuring Inspector Funo that McGuire knew nothing
about the Silver Angels.

Someone wiped his face.

“Let him down,” said McGuire. Her voice was closer.

He opened his eyes and met her gray ones. Her skin was stretched like dry paper over her bones. Her eyes pleaded with him
… for what? His thoughts began to blur again.

“But he hasn’t said it,” Adam pointed out.

“Say it,” said McGuire, her lips close to his ear. “I can’t help you unless you say it,” she added in a whisper so faint he
might have imagined it.

He could accept the evidence that she was part of the cult and die in self-disgust and anger. Or he could trust her.

“You are God,” said Ishihara.

T
ell me when he is ready.” Akita swept out the door, Samael close behind him.

The pulley’s engine whirred. Eleanor leaned forward to steady Ishihara’s head, but the novice moved before her. He made sure
Ishihara was flat on the ground before removing the ankle cuffs, then massaged Ishihara’s ankles and raised his head gradually,
in what was obviously a ritual of revival. Eleanor tried to ignore a vision of Man strung up there.

She could hear Samael and Akita out in the corridor. She shut her eyes and concentrated, blanking out the rustles and thuds
from within the room.

“… begin in thirty minutes. We must finish the job.” Akita said.

“She doesn’t need to come tomorrow,” said Samael. “We only need her to carry out the plan. She is an unbeliever still.”

“Perhaps you are right. But I need her tonight. Her presence in the Macrocosm supports me. My memories grow weaker, and I
cannot sustain the flow.”

So that was why he needed her. Whatever “sustain the flow” meant. She shuddered. If that was the price of the interface, surely
nobody would want to pay it.

“And the police?” Samael’s voice was fainter.

“If they knew where we are, they would have attacked by now. Kill that one before we leave, he knows nothing.”

She strained to hear Akita’s last words, a cold pit in her stomach. No doubt Samael would kill her as well as Ishihara once
she and Akita had finished sabotaging the NDN. She had to get Ishihara out of there to warn the police. He’d have more luck
in the real world than she did in the Macrocosm.

Ishihara groaned, and she returned to the present with a start.

He was sitting up, his hands free. He accepted a glass of water from the novice. His eyes met Eleanor’s, but he gave no sign
that he knew her. She hoped he was merely being cautious and didn’t suspect her of being part of the group.

“What happens now?” he asked the novice. His voice was barely recognizable and his face still puffy.

“They’ll send for you soon,” said the novice primly. He took the glass. “Let’s walk a bit, shall we?”

At first Ishihara could hardly stand. With the novice supporting him on one side and Eleanor on the other, he finally managed
a couple of circuits of the room. She could feel him trying not to put weight on her side, but his legs weren’t strong enough
to let him balance properly.

“Are you hungry?” said the novice to Ishihara, now seated in a chair.

Ishihara shook his head.

“Are you?” the novice asked Eleanor.

“No.” The river of flavors in the Macrocosm still lingered on her tongue. “But why don’t you go and eat? I’ll watch him.”

The novice looked shocked. “Can’t do that.”

“Why not? There’s a guard on the door, anyway.” And, she glanced up, a camera on the wall. “He’s not going to resist.” Eleanor
made herself add scornfully, “He’s just a tired old unbeliever.”

Ishihara’s mouth twitched at her Osaka slang.

The novice hesitated, then shrugged. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

Ishihara leaned forward in the chair as the door closed behind the novice. The lines on his face had started to return to
their weary downward furrows. Eleanor felt so glad to see his familiar features that tears stung her eyes.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Keep your voice down.” She sat on the other side of the table, on the stool the novice had used, and folded her arms as though
she was merely watching him. “They’re forcing me to cooperate with them because they know M … Mari is my niece.”

“Cooperate, how?” His eyes took in her shaved head, the implants, then found her left hand. He drew breath in shock.

“Direct neural interface. Akita is sabotaging the NDN and related networks. You have to get word to the police.”

“How many of them are here?”

Four Angels—Samael, Fujinaka/Gagiel, of the narrow eyes, gangly Iroel, and his partner in deceit, Melan. Iroel said at least
twenty novices were training to use the interface, but they might not all be there. In the vid Mari had watched there were
about thirty people praying with Akita, and the floor plan of the basement showed only ten rooms.

“Between twenty and forty, probably.”

He grunted acknowledgment. “How are you going to get me out?”

Eleanor swallowed disappointment. Some part of her had been hoping to hand over the whole thing to him.

“Do they trust you?” he said.

“Not really. W … where are we? I wasn’t awake when they brought me here.”

Ishihara felt the back of his head with a grimace. “I was following a lead in Hirano Ward when they hit me. A warehouse full
of weapons in an abandoned milk factory …” He stopped at her expression. “What’s wrong?”

Surely not the old factory near the Tanaka house? It made sense, Kazu had livelined it years ago on his failed venture. Perhaps
Mari told Taka, who told one of the Angels, and they bought the place. Or were simply using it. She groaned inwardly. Kazu’s
investment had paid off, although not in the way he envisioned.

“One of the Ang …” she began, then stopped. Could Akita hear? If she betrayed Iroel he wouldn’t be able to help Mari. “There’s
a secret tunnel leading outside from the wooden wall,” she whispered.

Ishihara had to lean forward to hear.

“You’ll have to go through there. I can’t think of a way to bluff you out past the main entry.”

“Where on the outside wall?”

“I don’t know.”

He shot her a disappointed look. “Could take a while. And aren’t you being watched?”

She nodded.

“Are there cameras in the corridors?”

She thought of Iroel and how he’d made her kneel as though praying while he made his offer. “Yes.”

Ishihara swore, using a couple of expressions she didn’t know existed in Japanese.

“All we can do is hope everyone is praying too hard to watch the monitors,” she said wearily.

He stared at her hand before asking slowly, “Can you stop him from inside the thing?”

She shook her head, the despair of her failures heavy in her stomach. “He’s been using it much longer than I have. I can’t
do things in there like he can.”

Ishihara nodded. “We’d better get out of here, then.” He bent down stiffly and picked up the cuffs and short length of chain
that had bound his ankles. He folded it around his fist.

“What’s that for?” said Eleanor.

“There’s a guard on the door, right?”

“You can’t attack him before we find the tunnel, it’s too obvious.”

“What, then?” he growled.

“We’ll get him to help us look.”

She hoped like hell that Samael or suspicious Gagiel wouldn’t come and ask them what they were doing.

She’d told the novice, the same pasty-faced, pudgy boy of about eighteen, that Ishihara confessed to her how an informer told
the police there was a secret tunnel out of the factory. She also managed to convince him that rather than disturbing Adam-sama
and the Angels in an important meeting, it would do wonders for his standing if he discovered the tunnel first.

They started with the rickety cupboards at the end of the corridor, opposite the torture room, meditation room one. There
was no sound from meditation room two, next door. In rooms farther away Eleanor could hear a murmur of voices chanting.

“You, try and shift it.” Eleanor poked Ishihara rudely, for the benefit of the novice, and pointed at the cupboard. The pudgy
teenager shifted nervously. He smelled as though he hadn’t had a bath in weeks. Ishihara rolled his eyes at her and put his
shoulder to the first cupboard. It didn’t budge.

“Looks like it’s bolted to the wall,” said Ishihara.

“Don’t you know where it is?” whined the novice.

Eleanor knelt and opened the second cupboard. The door stuck, and when she pulled harder, it opened with a tremendous creak.
She winced at the volume of the sound and peered inside. Dust tickled her nose. There were four shelves, the bottom ones covered
with a jumble of old boxes, brooms, and plasbags of toilet paper. No sign of a false back.

She pulled at the door of the last cupboard. The damn thing was locked. She rattled it once. A pity the interface didn’t give
her superhuman strength as well.

The novice peered over her shoulder. “I think we should call Gagiel-sama. It’s not here.”

Ishihara pushed the boy aside and squatted next to her. He rattled both doors open a crack and inserted his fingers, then
pulled one door, with his foot against the other for leverage.

Half the door came away with a report that echoed down the corridor.

“It’s here!” The novice jiggled his feet in excitement.

Inside the cupboard they could see a gaping black hole, big enough for an adult to crawl in. A damp smell of earth and mold
seeped from it.

“Come on,” said Ishihara.

“I can’t go with you,” hissed Eleanor. “I have to stay with Mari.”

Ishihara half groaned, half cursed, then without giving any sign, kicked the novice’s legs from under him with a vicious scissors
movement.

“I’ll be back.” His legs disappeared into the tunnel.

“Prisoner escaping!” yelled the novice, trying to grab Ishihara’s legs.

“Let me help.” Eleanor bent down and deliberately got in the way. She sprawled with the novice’s legs tangled in hers. His
elbow hit her ear, and she saw stars.

“Hey!” Two green-clothed figures sprinted past them and wriggled after Ishihara.

Eleanor drew her legs away from the novice and stood up against the wall. Her vision was still blurry, and her side ached
where she’d knocked it on the corner of the cupboard. Please god he’ll get away.

Several more novices rushed out of the training room beyond Meditation Room Two and four or five acolytes got in their way
as they ran full tilt around the corner. Everyone cursed and yelled.

“What have you done?” Samael pushed past the acolytes, grabbed her arm and spun her around to face him. He was as taut as
a coiled spring.

“N … nothing.” Her voice quavered convincingly. “Ask him.” She pointed at the pudgy-faced novice, sobbing around a bloody
nose where Ishihara must have kicked him. “I tried to help stop the prisoner.”

Samael cocked his head then laughed, a short, flat sound. “It doesn’t matter. They got him anyway.”

He tugged her by the elbow up the corridor and made her wait until Gagiel and two green-clad novices pushed a dirty and staggering
Ishihara down the alcove stairs.

“Nobody’s going to help you,” sneered Samael. “You’re on your own.”