Final Empire (23 page)

We blinked back to the South China Sea
, and were inside Fortress 18 within a few minutes. The teleportation left me a little nauseated, and for some reason craving pretzels (it might have been a sodium deficiency; an unexpected side-effect of so much teleportation within such a small timeframe).

After eating dinner, guzzling down a gallon of Dr. Pepper and scouring the kitchen for a bag of pretzels I’d sadly never locate, everyone returned to their rooms for some downtime. We were all exhausted from the trip. I was looking forward to a shower and an evening of binge–watching a series on my HoloFlix account. Unfortunately, that would have to wait. I had a call to make.

Peyton and I trudged into our bedroom. The lights popped on automatically, bathing the already paper white room and décor with even whiter light. I needed to add color at some point in the near future – I felt like I’d been sleeping in a rubber room. The metallic door whooshed closed behind me. Once it had latched shut I swiped open my wrist com, enlarging a holoscreen.

“Want me to step outside?” Petyon asked, pointing towards the exit. “I don’t mind, I can go to the common room while you make your calls.”

“No, stick around. I don’t have any secrets.”

She shot me derisive glance. “Uh-huh. Famous last words, Matty.”

Detective Dzobiak answered my call on the first chime. The camera snapped into focus and his face appeared, displaying his downtown office in the backdrop; his back faced a window that opened to the drizzly grey Manhattan skyline.

“Mox, what have you got for me, man?” He seemed hurried, anxious.

“Well let me put you at ease, Detective. Kenneth isn’t hurting anyone. They’re all fine.”

He tilted his head. “Fine? So you saw the missing people…all of them?”

“We didn’t take a head count,” Peyton added, “but yeah, there were hundreds of people. All of them seemed…” her eyes flicked towards me, and back to the detective, “happy, I guess?”

I shrugged and nodded.

“Damn.” Dzobiak leaned into his chair, rubbing his hand along his neatly trimmed goatee. “So we don’t have missing people at all, then. We have a bunch of people joining a cult.”

“Hey, that’s not really fair,” Peyton replied. “They were
more
than happy. They were blissed out.”

“Like on drugs?” the detective asked.

Peyton shook her head. “No, not like that. At least I don’t
think
so. They just seemed overjoyed to be there. To be in Kenneth’s presence.”

“And they’re in a pyramid,” I added.

“A…” Dzobiak furrowed his brow. “Like, as in pharaohs and tombs and mummies? That type of shit?”

“I didn’t see any mummies,” I conceded. “But then again, we didn’t stay long. The pyramid wasn’t there before. It’s new. He made it using his abilities, if I had to guess. It seems like now, he can generate constructs that last indefinitely – it’s like an all new classification of superhuman. He’s an architect. And the way he took down Darmaki…his speed, his strength…”

“It was intimidating, to say the least,” Peyton added.

Dzobiak leaned in and folded his hands on his desk, his voice lowering in pitch. “I’ll tell you what: the DOJ knows that Livitski is the one who went all Texas Chainsaw on Darmaki and lopped off his hands. Not exactly legal. But, since he helped apprehend the guy who was behind the attacks around the world, the Justice Department and the UN are looking the other way. And since everyone missing is of legal age, and, if what you say is true, they’re going to the island of sound mind and all that, we can’t pin kidnapping on him.”

“So that’s that?” I asked.

“You say he built a pyramid there, and technically the Kerguelen island chain belongs to France. So if they want to pursue him for a building permit violation, they can do it themselves.”

“So he’s not on the hook for anything?” I asked.

“International real estate isn’t exactly in my job description,” he shrugged. “Our satellites can’t get a clear view of the island, and tech guys are working on that now. I don’t know whether he’s blocking us or if it’s just atmospheric…that could be something too. But for now, he’s in the clear.”

“Good,” Peyton said with a cautious smile. She squeezed my thigh, before adding, “This
is
a good thing…right?”

“Yeah, it’s a whole barrel of awesomeness.” I tried to force a smile of my own but I couldn’t manage one. Just the attempt was hurting my face and causing my temples to throb.

“So what’s the problem?” Dzobiak asked. “Are you holding back on me? Is there something else I need to know?”

I massaged my forehead, rubbing my fingertips in small circles. “No, not at all. It’s just…Kenneth
said
he was tracking me – that’s how he knew we were in the Liwa Desert. How he got Darmaki.”

“Uh-huh,” the detective grumbled. “And—?”

“And he was lying.”

“How can you be sure?” Dzobiak asked. I could tell by the way he leaned in towards the holoscreen that I’d piqued his interest.

“Because I just know,” I said. “You have to trust me.”

Dzobiak flashed a quick smile. “Hey man, I
do.
You’re right about a lot of crazy shit and I don’t know what goes on in that big fat brain of yours. I’m sure if you
say
he’s lying, he
is.
But I can’t arrest him for a fib, Mox.”

“And the cult?” I asked. “What do we do about that?”

He let out an exasperated sigh. “What every country does about every cult,” he said. “Nothing. They’re grown-ups, they can believe whatever the hell want, no matter how crazy or stupid or dangerous.”

“But you’re keeping an eye on him?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said, reaching for his coffee mug. He took a quick sip before adding, “but that’s the extent of my authority, here. We can look, but we can’t touch. Unless you bring me some evidence that he’s
done
something, he’s free to keep playing King Tut.”

“You want him arrested?” Peyton asked me, now growing concerned.

“No, I just…some things don’t add up, that’s all.”

“They rarely do,” the detective added. “People aren’t equations you can solve all the time, Mox. They’re not poker or blackjack hands that you can use your freaky calculator brain to work out. Sometimes there’s a wild card in the mix…and you don’t always see it coming.”

And with that our conversation ended. Dzobiak returned to work and I shut down the holo-session.

Peyton crossed the room to her dresser and went through the top drawer, pawing her way through the neatly folded piles in search of pajamas. “I don’t get you sometimes,” she chimed. “You wanted to see Kenneth, you did. You wanted to see if everyone on the island was okay, they were. And you found out how he helped us with Darmaki. Just let it go.”

I fell back on the pillowy white comforter and stared up at the ceiling. “I can’t,” I sighed. “It felt…wrong. Everything on that island, everything inside that stupid pyramid…it was just so bizarre.”

“That it was,” she agreed.

I continued to stare into the utter blankness of the white ceiling and I could hear her padding across the carpet towards me. When she came into view she was wearing one of my tattered old Swamp Thing t-shirts – a shirt I thought she’d incinerated. She leaped onto the bed, pinning me down.

My nostrils were invaded with my own pungent body odor. “Eww…I thought you threw all these old shirts out?”

“Not all of them,” she explained. “I kept a few of them as night shirts.”

“Could you have at least washed the ones you planned on keeping?”

“I
like
your sweaty smell,” she giggled. Her lips pressed to both my cheeks, then my lips. Then she drew back and pushed off my chest, sitting up on my thighs, before saying, “Go talk to her.”

I frowned. “Talk to who?”

Peyton rolled her eyes. “Don’t make me say the B-word,” she said with a tiny grin. “You know exactly who. I know Kenneth isn’t the only thing bothering you. She’s been locked in her room and something is most definitely wrong with her. She needs to talk to someone, and you’re her only friend here.”

Her breezy demeanor was troubling me, like the calm before a storm. Was I supposed to tell Peyton that I didn’t care about Brynja, and that I was going to stay in the room with her – or was this my girlfriend being cooler than I’d given her credit for, granting me permission to talk,
alone
, with her slightly more provocatively-dressed doppelganger? I could suddenly hear the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar resonating through my head: ‘It’s a trap!’

“Okaaay…” I said, easing back up on my elbows.

She blurted out a tiny chuckle and scooted back off the edge of the bed. “
Just go
,” she said, now more forcefully. “It’s no big deal, really. I’ll keep HoloFlix warmed up until you get back.”

“Okaaay…” I slid back to my feet and inched towards the door.

She raised her eyebrows, shooing me off with a playful flick of her hand.

“
But
,” she added, just as I neared the door frame, “we’re not doing another Battlestar Galactica marathon. Tonight we’re watching Cooking with Corben.”

I winced as I pressed my finger into the plate on the wall, triggering the doors to slide open.

“Damn,” I muttered under my breath. “It
was
a trap.”

I navigated the winding narrow hallway to Brynja’s quarters,
where the door had been sealed shut since we’d arrived home from the Liwa Desert. I knocked. And knocked. And knocked again. No answer. I continued to rap until my knuckles ached.

I rubbed the sting from my hand and pressed my back into the metal door. “You can’t stay in there forever,” I called out. I knew she could hear me because these rooms weren’t soundproofed. I’d learned that while traipsing by the maintenance workers’ living quarters one evening, and had heard the moans of a young Australian scientist reverberating through the door with disturbing clarity, calling out the name of a man who most certainly wasn’t her husband.

I called out and knocked again with the back of my hand.

Silence.

“Well I suppose you could
stay in there forever, technically speaking,” I continued. “Because like all my fortresses, this one is self-sustaining. Theoretically you’d have access to desalinated sea water, eco-energy, 3D printed clothing, and whatever else you need for a hundred years. It’s funny because when I’d lock myself in the bathroom as a kid, my mom or my sister would shout ‘you have to come out sometime, Matt!’, which was very true twenty years ago. Now? Not so much.”
The metal door whooshed open at my back, causing me to tumble and splat on the hard tiled floor. Now my back ached more than my knuckles did.

“If I let you in will you shut the hell up?” Brynja said with a heavy groan. She hovered overhead, hands on hips, staring down with a frustrated shake of her head.

As I regained my footing my knees creaked and my muscles flared (probably more from my general lack of fitness than the fall, though it didn’t help matters much). I winced, running the heels of my palms up and down my lower lumbar.

“I can’t promise I’ll stop talking,” I said, “but I’ll try to keep it brief. Fair enough?”

She waved me in with a resigned sweep of her arm.

With Brynja’s length of blue hair pulled into a braid and her face washed clean of make-up, it was more of a mental challenge to carry on conversations with her. Her similarities to Peyton became more apparent; the angle of her cheek bones, the shape of her eyes, the full bottom lip that always curled like a pout even when she smiled. I found myself studying her more often than not; I was lost in thought as I compared the two, letting whatever it was that I was going to say float away into the aether.

She snapped her fingers, inches from my face. “Hey, wake up, buttercup. If you’re sleepy go back to your own room and zone out. I’m busy here.”

My eyes fluttered. “No, sorry, I’m just…sorry.” I glanced around her room; towels, clothes and food containers had been scattered throughout her chamber as if they’d been shot out of a cannon just moments before I’d arrived. “Did I interrupt Fall cleaning?”