Landfall (The Reach, Book 2) (38 page)

Find something you can manipulate, Ursie.  Make him open the gate.  Van Asch is depending upon you.

Ursie dug deeper, uncovering more of the technician’s memories.  He’d eaten processed meat from a can for breakfast, his favourite meal.  He was lusting after a young blonde woman who worked for the Consortium in the finance department on Level Two.

All of this happened within a blink of the eye.  Ursie examined each thought and promptly discarded it as she attempted to find what she was after.

Suddenly she saw a bright flash within the man’s mind and a portal appeared.  The only way she could describe it was like the light at the end of a tunnel.  Something began to pour out of that white void, the likes of which she had never seen before – a slew of images that wormed outward like tentacles, a vast array of them, things she could only describe as tendrils of memories.  It was as if a thousand thought fragments were all trying to occupy the same space, crowding in on one another and overlapping as they attempted to align themselves and move deeper into the man’s mind.  Yet these memories seemed entirely juxtaposed with rest of the man’s consciousness, as if his very thoughts had somehow thrust out in another direction and formed an offshoot.  A tangent.

A split second later, Ursie was overcome by horror and revulsion.  She realised what was happening.

Another psycher was already in this guy’s head.

The tentacle-like protuberances of that other thought stream brushed against Ursie’s own consciousness, and a jarring pain like a bolt of lightning coursed through her skull.  She shrieked in agony and fell backward, and for a moment the world blacked out completely.  When her sense returned she saw the technician lying on the floor nearby, blood leaking from his nose and a vacant expression on his face.

Van Asch was not far away, hunched over on his knees.  He strained to raise his head, then looked right at Ursie.

“Stupid girl,” van Asch growled, picking himself up off the floor.  “Stupid
fucking
girl.”

Van Asch’s sunglasses had been knocked from his face as he’d fallen, and now Ursie beheld his entire face for the first time, free of its disguise.  Immediately she understood why he had been attempting to cover his face with the sunglasses all this time.

His eyes
.  There were ghastly.  Bloodshot and bloated, surrounded by ravaged red skin, these were the eyes of a demon.  A ghoul.  Van Asch advanced on her
, and the muscles around those bloated orbs twitched and spasmed uncontrollably.

“You’re a psycher,” Ursie gasped, climbing to her feet.

“I told you not to use your abilities here,” he grated.

“Who are you?” she demanded breathlessly.  “Who are you really?”

“You should have left him to me.  I would have taken care of this.”

Ursie glanced around the concourse, but there was no one in the vicinity.  It was just her and van Asch and the catatonic technician.

“Tell me the truth,” Ursie gasped, reeling away from van Asch.  “Tell me the truth or you can forget about me coming anywhere with you.”

Van Asch stopped, then a slow smile crept across his face.

“Do you really think you have a choice?”

Ursie thought back over the past few days, about the thoughts that had been floating around in her mind, about the decisions that she’d made, and she realised that he must have been subtly manipulating her the whole time.

“You tried to taint my memories of Knile, didn’t you?  When we went back to our quarters.  You crept inside my head and tried to plant a seed of hate in my mind.”

Van Asch shrugged, mildly amused.  “Your resolve was wavering.  You were having second thoughts, so I gave you a nudge in the right direction.”

“Tell me what you want, van Asch, or I’ll scream so loud I’ll bring every Redman in this place down on us.”

Van Asch seemed to consider her threat, then nodded.

“Very well, I’ll tell you.”  He leaned toward her.  “You’re right.  I’m a psycher, just like you.  But unlike you, I’ve had to deal with this affliction for decades.  I know the blackest depths of it, the horror of it.”

“What are you talking about?  What affliction?”

“This thing we have, this ability to see into others’ minds.  It’s not a blessing, Ursie.  It’s a curse.”

“No,” Ursie said adamantly.  “That’s what I thought when I first discovered I had it.  But then I learned to control it–”

“You can’t control it,” van Asch said stridently, surprising Ursie with his conviction.  “For a while you think you can, but in the end it overwhelms you.  It’s like a muscle.  The more you flex it, the stronger it grows.  You’re a babe, yet.  You’ve barely scratched the surface of what you can do.  Once you’ve used it for two or three decades, you’ll understand.  It consumes you.”  He closed his grotesquely bulging eyes wearily, then slowly opened them again.  “In the end, the voices don’t stop.  The images don’t stop.  They
can’t
be stopped.  They grow louder and more insistent until there is nothing in your mind but screaming.  Screaming!” he yelled, distraught.  With his mask pulled away
, his sanity seemed to be fraying at the edges.

“There must be a way–”

“Look at me, Ursie,” he said, bringing himself under control with great effort.  He pointed at his face.  “I haven’t slept in two years. 
Two fucking years
.  I don’t even exist in a conscious state anymore.  I’m caught in some nightmarish netherworld in which I can never find peace, oscillating between wakefulness and sleep, reality and memories.”  He spread his hands.  “Now, I need this to end.”

“What do you want with me?”

“I need your help to find the cure, Ursie.  I want to save both of us.  You need never experience this hell if you help me.”

“How?”

“By experimenting on ourselves.  By using treatments.  There’s a way to cure this sickness, I’m sure of it.”

“You’re lying.  You have no intention of testing anything on yourself.  You want
to experiment on
me
,” she snarled.  She’d seen enough inside his head to know that his intentions toward her were not pure.  “You want to turn me into your lab rat.”

Van Asch seemed to lose his patience.  “I told you not to look in my head,” he said sharply.

“Too late,” Ursie said.  “I already saw too much when our minds collided.  I’m not the first psycher you’ve recruited, am I?”

“No.”

“You’ve been collecting psychers from all over the Outworlds and the Earth as you search for this cure, haven’t you?”

“I have.”

“And you’ve been conducting your little tests on them, right?  Using electrocution, torture, whatever you can to try to strip their abilities from their minds.”

“Conventional methods have failed,” van Asch admitted matter-of-factly.  “I’ve been forced to pursue extreme–”

“And you don’t stop the experiments until the subject dies.”

“No.  I don’t stop.”

“There never was a company.  It’s just you.”

“This conversation is redundant, Ursie.  You already know the answers, it seems.  Now we have to leave.”

“Not a chance.”

“It’s not an offer anymore.”  Van Asch’s eyes blazed.  “In fact, it never was.”

Ursie’s defiance and her anger wilted under the intensity of his gaze, and, terrified, she turned and began to run down the concourse.  She had not taken more than a few steps before a great, dark tide seemed to sweep over her, like a throng of ghostly hell hounds leaping onto her back.  She was slammed into the unyielding floor hard enough to make her teeth rattle.

She cried out and tried to get up, but it felt like a great boulder had been placed on top of her, pinning her where she lay.

“You’re the strongest one I’ve ever seen, Ursie,” van Asch said behind her.  “Apart from me.”  His footsteps neared.  “We’re going to achieve great things together.”

Through the agony of van Asch’s mind pressing in on hers, only one coherent thought occurred to Ursie.

Get out of his line of sight.  His hold over you will falter if he can’t see you.

She gathered her strength and every last ounce of willpower she possessed.  Then she did something she had never done before.

She lashed out with her mind to cause hurt.  To maim.  To destroy.

It was a primal thing, more instinct than anything else, an act of rage and desperation with no focus or precision.  She felt as though she were blind, swinging her fist at an opponent she could not see and hoping that it connected, knowing that it was over if she did not.

Van Asch shouted in surprise as she struck out, and that weight on her back rippled and shifted to one side.  It was enough for her to wriggle out from underneath it.  She got to her feet and ran, not for the far end of the concourse, but for the nearest corridor.

She was dead if she stayed out in the open.  She knew that with absolute certainty.

Van Asch’s mind was coming at her again, crowding in from all sides like malignant, billowing smoke, threatening to suffocate her and smash her to the floor once again.  She felt it crawling up her back, felt the claws of those hounds again, saw van Asch’s bloodshot eyes in her mind as he fought to overwhelm her.

Then she was in the corridor and the smoke dropped away, now merely swishing around her ankles as she ran.  Still it threatened to trip her and bring her down.

Goddammit, this guy is powerful.  He’s fucking monstrous.

She ran for her life down the corridor, and already she could hear van Asch’s footsteps behind her as he gave pursuit.

39

The two Enforcers kept a firm grip on Duran as they led him out of the elevator and toward Prazor’s office.  Mrs. Appleby edged backward behind her desk as she laid eyes on him, as if he might be a dangerous animal about to leap across the counter to tear out her throat.  As they passed she st
retched out a dainty finger
to press a buzzer on the intercom.  She whispered something into it, then glanced worriedly back at Duran.

“You can go in,” she announced.  “He’s ready for you.”

They proceeded through the doors and into Prazor’s spacious office, where the C
ommissioner was pacing about in front of his desk.  He glanced up as they entered, and as his eyes met Duran’s an inscrutable look came across his face.

“Alec,” he said.  “Thank god you turned yourself in.”

“Not much else I could do,” Duran said coldly.  “You basically put a price on my head.”

“Rubbish,” Prazor scoffed.  “I wanted you found for your own safety.”

“We’ve searched him, Commissioner,” one of the Enforcers at Duran’s side said.  “He’s not carrying.”

“Good.  Take those cuffs of
f him, then.”

The two Enforcers looked at each other, bewildered.  “Commissioner?”

“You heard me.”

“But Duran has–”

“Good god, man.  He’s not a maniac, he’s one of us!  Take them off immediately.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to do your interview in a holding cell, Commissioner?” the Enforcer said as Duran’s cuffs were removed.  “It would be safer–”

“No, no.  Here is fine.”

“His behaviour has been pretty erratic, sir–”

“I’m quite aware of his behaviour, Sergeant,” Prazor said.  “Now step outside so I can talk to the man.”  They hesitated, and Prazor raised his eyebrows.  “Get out!” he cried, pointing imperiously.  The two Enforcers dropped away from Duran, shocked at hearing the usually calm and collected Prazor raise his voice.

As the door clicked shut, Duran turned back to see Prazor slowly walking past his desk, toward the tall bay windows that looked out to the west.  The afternoon sun was at much the same angle as the last time he had been here, a few days prior, on the day that he’d pleaded with Prazor to give him more resources to go after Knile Oberend.

That seemed like a thousand years ago now.

“You’re taking a chance spending this quality time alone with me, aren’t you Commissioner?” Duran said.

Prazor turned and gave him a good-humoured smirk.

“I know you’re not a danger, Alec.  I know perfectly well what you were doing up there in the Atrium.”  He spread his hands wide.  “You were after Oberend.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why you were shooting up the place.  You were trying to bring him down.”

“Yes,” Duran said again.

Prazor grimaced.  “Dammit, Alec, that was irresponsible.  I don’t care how much you wanted that man dead, you can’t just march in there and do that.  Not in the Atrium.  Your hatred for Oberend has twisted your judgement.”

“I’d do it again if I had the chance,” Duran said unapologetically.

“And now you’ve caused me more headaches with the Consortium,” Prazor went on, pacing before the window.  “They want your head on a pike, did you know?  They want you strung up for this.”