Craving (46 page)

“If I free you, will you be free?”

There was not even the whisper of a moan.

“I know you want an end to this, but what if I said that there was no end? Would that be unbearable, or could you learn to make use of your gifts? You chose this path for a reason, just because the path is dark, doesn’t mean the reason isn’t valid.”

A raw, jagged stump tapped the window a few feet away as the monster that had devoured it seemed to knock. They wanted out, that much was obvious, but could I trust them to understand, or were they too far gone?

“If I open these doors, you can do as you wish. You can leave, you can run into traffic, you can jump into a bonfire, but if I ask you to join me instead, will you? If I ask you to help me continue on, will you?”

As one, they seemed to nod, and knowing it was all a dream, I put my hand over my heart.

“I’ll send someone for you.”

I walked down to the last door on the right. Moksha’s smiling face waited for me in the window that had been mine.

“I don’t deserve it,” he murmured.

“Mercy is for those who deserve it the least. Just wait for me.”

He shook his head and without another word, he sank to the floor and curled up in the corner. I closed my eyes and the vision terminated.

The knowledge I retained spread to my remaining selves, wandering the halls in search of an exit strategy. In one, I stumbled onto another suite like my own, and in the other, I walked headlong into Karl with a security detail in tow.

“Well well,” he said, and in the echo, I heard another voice say the same.

It was Ananda, seated at the circular table in his room. He smiled up at me, comfortable in his jail.

“The old monk at the monastery is dying,” I said urgently to him. “Wouldn’t it be nice to see him again, to say good-bye?”

His doe-like eyes slowly widened and the eternal smile grew. “Where there are no roads . . .” he replied.

“There you are,” Karl grunted. “And here I was about to send for you.”

Where there are no roads, there you are.

It was a Zen koan, a Katsu moment that my own psyche had handed to me.

I didn’t realize, before that moment, the truth behind the things I had told William. Perhaps the point of the visions was not to see the future so that I may change it. Perhaps it was to see what I needed to know, to see where I should be, to see the value of each step. Maybe the best way to escape was to walk right into the middle of war and survive on dumb luck alone.

Both visions collapsed. My divided mind was reunified.

“If you accept the dharma without question, then you are what you are.”

I jumped to the monastery and swept through the connected room like a fierce wind, but Arthur was not there. For the first time, it seemed, the
jhana
had failed me. I had sought out someone, and the astral plane had not delivered. Arthur was no longer “findable.”

Where is he?

I went room by room, but there was not the slightest trace of him. His room was vacant, the golden Buddha went unconfronted, and it seemed that all of the monks were either praying or sitting by their elder’s bedside.

How was I to contact Jinx for help without an intermediary?

The withered monk stirred and immediately, the other monks offered him water and replaced the cool cloth on his forehead.

The man who had been his attendant leaned forward and whispered something in his ear, but to my surprise, the old man swiped the words from the air. His glassy eyes searched the room and even though he was standing on the brink of death, he found me.

Nihao.

Wrinkles shifted into a toothless grin. He could hear me, but then again, there was a language barrier. But why should language hold me back, if even space and time could not?

“How many languages do you speak?”

“As many as I need to.”

Thoughts and memories were nothing more than electrical signals interpreted by our onboard software. If I inserted myself into his mind, could I take over his body, or learn how to speak to him?

I drifted to him and, somewhat uncomfortably, settled in. It was like a dream. I was certain I was myself, but at the same time, I was him. I saw his youth, not on a rural farm as I had expected, but in a city. I witnessed his life in a flurry of broken memories that reflected one another. I watched him grow old, saw Ananda through his eyes, and most importantly, learned Cantonese.

With a jolt, I pulled free of him to find him half out of bed, the other monks restraining him gently as he pitched forward in shock.

“You should not get up, Father,” said the young man and if I could have, I would have smiled, because I could understand him.

“She’s here,” was his throaty reply.

They condescended, thinking it nothing more than a death rattle.

Tell him to call Sam. Say, “Turn off the cameras at the Vihara,”
I insisted,
and I’ll get Ananda to you.

“Sam,” the old man whispered.

The attendant frowned and bowed his head close to his leader’s mouth. “What is it?”

“Sam, turn off cameras at Vihara.”

He sat back and stared down at the glazed expression, then glanced around. “Bring me the telephone.”

I leapt back to my body and to William’s shock, threw a fist into the air.

“
!”

He jumped. “Huh?”

“Translation: Fuck yes!”

He cleared his throat. “Ah. Then you found a way out?”

“No.”

The furrows formed between his eyebrows. “Oh.”

“When I leave, find Ananda. Then go to the cellars and loose the zombie horde. Stay with Ananda until it’s all over, and when the time comes, take him wherever he wants to go. Okay?”

I waited, wondering if Karl’s talent for forcing others to comply had an expiration, or if William’s willingness to help somehow interfered. To my relief, he seemed more animated. “Yes. Whatever you say, Lilith.”

“Now.” I stood up and smiled down at him. “Look the other way.”

“Where are you going?”

“To accept the
dharma
.”

Chapter 27

What Eva had said in the alley made that much more sense to me now. There was no such thing as false hope. Desire and suffering were balanced with each other, integral to one another, unavoidable, no negative, no positive. Eva’s understanding of this was what put her at odds with the Buddha, the man who had discarded all earthly desire.

Or had he?

The
dharma
was a desire, wasn’t it?

A different kind of desire.

I now gave Eva the benefit of the doubt above all others. What if she had realized something profound about the nature of the Sangha’s wayward thinking? As I looked at William, now happy to think that there was probably a way to get rid of misery by embracing it, I trusted her. Even though she was dead and gone, she was guiding me.

I took a deep breath at the door and turned the handle, certain that Jinx had lived up to his awesomeness. Indeed, no alarms blared, no guards stampeded down the hall. All was silent.

I trotted down the corridor and concealed myself in a corner. A few moments later, William came out to perform his mission. Assured that he and Ananda would be safe, I turned and made my way to the exact place where Karl had been, to show him exactly how dangerous I was.

The door was a large, thick one, the type you’d expect to have bolt locks. As anticipated, he was standing in it, holding an iPad, reviewing the details with a man in a white lab coat.

“The PCR increased the sample size enough to examine,” the man was saying. “In comparison with the base sample and Subject One’s last sample, there are incredible differences.”

“Such as?”

He scowled indignantly. “I hope you realize the complexity of what you’re casually asking us to sum up. This is incredible stuff.”

“I don’t have time for one of your biology lectures, Doctor.”

Karl glanced at his watch, seemingly in a hurry, but Ursula’s gifts overlapped Moksha’s, and I knew him through and through. What had begun as a quest, a fixation, had lost its meaning and as he sat in his office, pondering the effectiveness of his machinations, swirling platelets in a goblet, he had begun to question all of it. He had begun accepting his fate and seeing the bright side. To him, I was not a means to an end anymore; I was just in the way. For him, there was no purpose to any of it.

And men who were hopeless were the most dangerous kind of monster even
without
super powers.

“One would think this would cause you to pay close attention, given how many resources you’ve poured into this project.”

“I care; I just don’t care how fascinating it is for you. Get to the point.”

The man rolled his eyes subtly. “There are two overlapping evolutionary models. Your standard Darwinian binary phylogeny theorizes that speciation, or the division of new species from old ones, resembles branching limbs, as of a tree. One animal has an altered offspring and because of changing circumstances, that animal survives. Following in this way, speciation is a painfully slow process and it cannot explain the incredible variety we’ve amassed in the tiny lifespan of earth.”

Karl’s body language reflected an even greater boredom, though it was the posturing of a vividly depressed soul. “And the other phylogenic model?”

“It’s called a star phylogeny. Basically, if we take samples of all the DNA from planet earth and sequence them, they demonstrate conserved traces of the same retroviruses. The theory postulates that large speciation of a population, where hundreds of new species come from one single ancestor, extends from the attack of these retroviruses.”

Karl sighed and in response, the man’s speech sped up. “Basically, a virus hits and scrambles the DNA of a population. Their offspring are mutated in thoroughly different ways, some survive, and thus begins several new species, like hundreds of fruit falling from the tree, all different.”

I raised an eyebrow at the metaphor.

“What does this have to do with Lilith Pierce?”

I was beginning to wonder the same thing. It sounded like a subject that Jinx would love, but would probably bore me to tears without his colorful lines and nifty graphics. The vision, however, I thought I ought to know, so there I was.

“I’m getting to it,” the man grumbled. I knew, from the irreverent way he spoke to Karl, that he was like Jinx, of another species, concerned only with his “art.” “These viruses, like herpes, for example, folded themselves into the heterochromatin, hid themselves in the genome. Millions of years later, pretty much all mammalian life on earth has the trace of those bygone events . . . except Subject Two.”

I blinked and like Karl, pricked my ears a little more sharply.

“What does that
mean
?”

“Her DNA is being refined. Most of that conserved DNA is extraneous, not integral to the final human phenotype at all, but some of it’s subfunctionalized. Her body is determining which is integral and which isn’t and is shedding the extraneous material. She’s not just incorporating new characteristics, she’s erasing mistakes, reverse engineering the roots of the tree from the fruit alone. This is spectacular!”

Karl became still, so still he looked petrified. Then with a slow, deliberate hand, he smoothed the nonexistent wrinkles on his brow. “What does this mean for her?”

“Well, she’ll be sterile with anyone but her own kind.” He snorted inelegantly. “So effectively, just sterile in general.”

“Besides that.”

“Well . . .” He shrugged lightly. “I guess it means she’s not human anymore. She’s not an Arhat either.”

I might have expected to feel my blood freeze over, or rush from my core to my limbs to spur me to action, but nothing happened. The full weight of all the changes I had endured had not yet impacted my psyche. Either that, or I was comfortable with the idea of not being something I had never asked to be in the first place.

Human isn’t good enough.

“Extrapolate from this. What will it mean for us?”

“I’m not qualified for that,” the man abdicated. “She’s out of my league now. When she’s done refining, it makes me wonder if she’ll start building new.” He turned and looked at the door. “I’ll want more samples to examine over time.”

“Eva passed this to her?”

“Unlikely, since Subject One was not similar in any way.”

“Then . . . could Eva have passed the ability to encode? To incorporate all that she encountered in order to create a new memetic disease?”

“What do you mean?”

Karl’s face became stony. “Could Subject Two absorb all she needs to undo our immortality? Did her sister turn her into a weapon?”

The man looked uncomfortable. “It’s possible, but then again, so is the sudden and spontaneous generation of a third arm.”

Stunned and confused, Karl turned from the man and caught sight of me. His eyes narrowed and like never before, seemed to contain the very fires of hell.

“Well, well.”

Trapped and unwilling to run, I bowed my head.

“Here I am,” I said gently.