The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation (4 page)

Two men entered with humming stunrods in their hands. They both wore mottled camouflage outfits and black combat boots. The man in the front had short, bristly red hair atop a grey-whiskered face. Rivulets of sweat had drawn lines down his dirty cheeks. “We thought it best to wait for the woman to leave,” he offered.

“Yes, that was good of you.”

“You've been expecting us?”

“I saw you in the hills. Two camps, perhaps six men.”

“Seven.” The man brushed a spider from his hair.

“Are you free to tell me who you represent?”

“The Director of the
ERI
said to tell you to remain calm.”

“That's it?”

“We have been instructed to drug you for transport,” the man said and snapped his fingers at his partner. “I know you people dislike hypodermics,” he said conversationally, “so I will offer you a caplet first.” His partner, shorter and darker, with a mosquito net tangled on top of his head like a misshapen fedora, handed forward a plastic case. He had a police-issue firearm holstered on his belt.

The red-haired man advanced with a blue capsule in his fingers and stunrod raised in his left hand.

Zakariah held out his palm.

“On the tongue, sir,” the man instructed.

“Are you going to carry me out?”

“This is a psychoactive sedative. You'll be able to walk. No cuffs. No ropes.”

Zakariah took a deep breath and stuck out his tongue.

The men visibly relaxed as he closed his mouth. They silenced their weapons and smiled at each other. The caplet dissolved instantly. Strange neuro-inhibitors fled for his brain.

“Your reputation precedes you, sir,” the red-haired man offered, patently pleased at the success of his mission.

Zakariah nodded once upward in recognition of the compliment. “Spare me the gallows humour, boys. Let's get on the road before the storm hits.” As the words left his mouth he marvelled at the false nature of language, the poor semblance of meaning the sounds contained, the crude movements of his tongue twisting vibrations in the air to communicate. His thoughts were pure, powerful, his body a mechanical contraption that could never contain or express his true essence. His feet seemed to be miles away, his legs thin stilts reaching to touch impossible depths. His sense of balance cartwheeled as he struggled to stay erect.

A strong arm grabbed his elbow as he pitched forward.

Y
our time is up. Destroy your hard drive.

Rix stared at the pop-up message with numb surprise. Some viral adware had jumped his borders. He checked his active downloads for infiltration. It was late in the afternoon in his timezone, and the locals were hanging out in an after-school chat module.

I'm not kidding. Go.

He pointed to the message and tapped his pinkie mike.

“Get lost,” he said, voice only. Why give some digital parasite the courtesy of video? He tapped delete in his palm, but the pop-up persisted.

I spoke with you earlier. I know about your dad. Your mom went to meet him up north.

Rix felt a sudden surge of hormones sweep through him like a caffeine rush. The doom and gloom girl!

The goons are at the door.

An alarm began to wail and his monitor went bluescreen. Thank God he still had electricity. He stood up and reached behind his computer, found the toggle switch he had rigged on the power supply, and flipped it to overclock. The sound of sparks and a curl of white acridity told him the brain had fried. All of his contacts on the net, all his family connections, digital photos, and documents. Gone forever. No traces, no ripples.

He grabbed his grey duffel bag and lurched out of his room into a narrow hallway beyond, conscious of duty only. His job during a raid was to block the advance while the Eternals made for the tunnels. He was expendable in that regard, a rook on the chessboard.

He met a man with a combat rifle just outside the cafeteria, pointing it casually in his direction. He wasn't wearing a police helmet or an army greysuit, so that meant only one thing. Private enterprise.

“Don't move, kid,” he said.

“I'm not armed.”

“Well, I sure as hell am. They're just tranks, but they hurt like fire.”

Rix dropped his gear and put his arms in the air.

“I'm a citizen,” he said.

“Save it for the blood test, kid.” The goon stepped forward and frisked him quickly. He stepped back satisfied. “We're going for a little walk. Anyone down that hall?” He pointed with his gun, lowered now but available.

“Yeah. Three apartments. Families. They may have been rounded up already.”

“Let's just check, shall we?”

They poked methodically in every room and found the clutter of everyday life. Dirty dishes. Laundry. Rix recognized the smell of burnt hard drives. The Eternals were gone. The goon seemed unconcerned, not tremulous with his weapon. Rix knew the type. Mercenary. Flat emotional response.

They arrived outside to find a grimy transport truck with the back doors wide open. The goon motioned with his gun.

“Is this the truck to Auschwitz?” Rix asked.

“It'll be the Holiday Inn in comparison, kid.”

Rix peered up into the truck, surprised to see such a crowd inside. His friends, some of them Eternal. The transport had been fitted with bus benches and seatbelts for such precious cargo.

“I'm a citizen,” Rix said again. “I've got
ID
in my pack.”

“You look like an activist to me. We have authority to detain you under the Evolutionary Terrorist Omnibus.”

“The
ETO
is under appeal in every civilized state.”

“Oh, so now you're a lawyer?'

“I'm a citizen, I tell you. I haven't got the virus.”

“Then you've got nothing to worry about, do you? You'll be free in a couple hours.” He smiled with undisguised malevolence. “Though I don't know where you'll go. This place will be razed. Get in the truck.”

Rix held his palms up in a gesture of peace. “Just let me show you my
ID
,” he said, stalling for as much time as possible, hoping for witnesses on the street, for rudimentary webcam surveillance—performing this simple public duty for his parents.

A rifle butt hit him hard just below the breastbone.

He doubled over reflexively, gasping for air. He fell forward as gravity claimed him and twisted his chin to avoid serious damage. His face landed just inches from the goon's shiny black boots. His cheek burst into agony and tears squeezed out of his eyes. He could not purchase a single breath of air.

“I tried to warn you, kid. Just get in the damn truck.”

A mercenary always polishes his boots before a big job, Rix noted. He takes pride in his work.

A gargoyle lurked behind every tree. Lithe and noiseless they bounded from trunk to trunk, their scales green and slimy in the gentle mist of rain. They hunted Zakariah like a weakened deer, a slow and crippled stag that stumbled through the underbrush with the strong ones, his protectors. But even the strong ones could not hold the gargoyles at bay.

In time his mind was infiltrated, his thoughts contaminated. Eventually he was given up as a sacrifice to pagan gargoyle gods and carried aloft by screaming dragons up above the trees to the great black anvils where the dragons danced and threw forks of lightning at their foes. His body rocked and trembled with the sounds of warfare.

His stomach heaved and emptied itself, and gargoyles rushed to bring him water and red medicine, bickering and bantering with shrill whoops of malice. They touched him with scaly fingers and iced his temples. A ceasefire held for many days and whispered voices promised life and death, alternately, and each seemed attractive in its turn. Finally Zakariah found refuge in the music, a pleasant hum of music, white music, changeless, still.

In gargoyle heaven they ministered with sheets of white music and cotton towels, their white wings beating time like a pendulum behind his eyes. They forced gargoyle ichors down his gullet and flashed sparks from their eyes into his brain. A silver snake crawled up from the floor and stabbed his arm with pain, drank dry his rich red blood and left him parched and withered like an Egyptian mummy entombed in still white music.

He slept fitfully and woke again to white gargoyles with kind faces and red medicine. They led him from eyrie cave to eyrie cave and washed his body and shaved his face and dried him and dressed him. They laid him down in ashes and dust and asked senseless questions about life before death, about day before dawn. He slept again and woke to a world darker and more ominous. He asked for red medicine and was denied. His viscera contracted at the thought. Two white gargoyles shaved his skull. He prepared to die. Perhaps it would be easier this time.

He remembered his mother dying in this place. He remembered the same white sheets and antiseptic smell, the same clatter of hard heels on hard floors and rolling carts carrying poison. She had died of a heart broken and a soul crushed by life—by foul circumstance and bad karma.

His father and mother had owned an international import-export business in the far east. They were commodity traders, gamblers in expensive suits, a team unmatched in the annals of Chinese corporate finance. In days of renown they built empires of paper currency and lost them again with a bad roll of the dice, a bad technical trade, a change in the weather. Zakariah remembered the strange language of risk and reward—futures and warrants, call options and arbitrage, hedging caps and butterfly spreads; he remembered both the high-flying parties of celebration and the long dark nights of drunken solace. He remembered both victory and defeat through a young child's eyes.

In the end, weary and desperate and confused by alcohol, his father lost a forearm to an American conglomerate that he couldn't satisfy, and, fearing for his life, took his baby daughter from her cradle and disappeared into the night. The import-export company collapsed like crumpled origami and blew away in a cruel wind, leaving behind a single mother and her young son bankrupt and helpless. Zakariah never forgave his father, as he watched his mother slip into psychosis and the careless abuse of prescription drugs. Her personality caved in on itself. Emaciated and bewildered, she starved to death convinced that she was overweight and undesirable, convinced that her baby had been sold into slavery to pay for her mistakes, convinced that life itself was not worth the effort.

In gargoyle heaven she had her reward. In gargoyle heaven all sins were revealed.

Zakariah woke up on Main Street as if from dream to dream, without warning and without standard preparation. He tensed with alarm as V-space suddenly teemed around him, a million minds in motion. He wondered if he should try to move, if he should dash for escape while he had the chance, if he should jump downlevel and disappear like a rabbit in a hole. Out of habit he made no ripple.

The street before him pulsed with colour and mad digital rhythm. Human vitality sparked like a kaleidoscope, a random dance of pure thought. V-space was a place where no gargoyle could lay claim. He drank in the freedom. He was home again.

Are you getting a signal?

Yes, he's here. Be quiet!

I don't have it. I can't scan a thing.

He's the best, doctor. He's invisible. Now finish your job and get out of my brain!

Zakariah waited with uncommon patience. He tested the pulse of greysuits going by and measured his trajectory to the nearest conduit. He knew he could give the gargoyles the slip Sublevel, but once he flinched he would be committed to the full program. He had no idea how tight the gargoyle beam might be. He might have but nanoseconds to escape their tracers. Once free and stable, he would flip the chessboard and put a feedback trace on them, try to locate their base system and schematics. It was a simple gaming routine, now played for bigger stakes than ever. Somewhere his body was being held hostage.

“No delay to destiny,” he murmured and dove for safety. In a blur of speed he locked onto the conduit and slid downlevel like an electric eel in oil. His first priority was a private system check to scrutinize his new wetware; he needed referent dates and copyright tags for basic equilibrium. He realized as soon as he began his dive that he had been completely rewired. The response time was impeccable, flexibility optimum, electronics cool and stable—hard, solid, his use of energy a mere drop in a vast ocean of potentiality, uplevel hardware for sure, incredibly expensive. Not a good first sign.

Safe in the conduit and down several levels without a single tracer online, Zakariah took a moment to inspect his new avatar. Feminine hands with long, silver nails, breasts hanging loose like softballs in front of him, hips flaring out like a lampshade. Holy ghost, he was a woman!

At Sublevel Zero he kicked off into the market square to test his new persona, revelling in the sheer beauty of his system logistics. Interference, drag, and feedback were all immeasurable. Background harmonics were squeaky clean, like ice, like solid superconductors. Mental awareness seemed vast and powerful, superhuman. He wondered if he was legal.

Zakariah approached a coterie of hawkers on the boulevard. One of them noticed him with a wide eye and whispered, “Regent,” to the gang. They scuttled away in different directions.

“Out slummin', ma'am?” said a portly hawker off to his right, wearing a leather cap and a velvet leisure jacket. “For a hundred I'll escort you down the lane,” he offered with an elbow out graciously. “For five I'll take you to the moon,” he whispered as he got closer.

“Is this fellow bothering you, ma'am?” said one of two greysuits that appeared out of nowhere.

“No,” Zakariah said.

The hawker backrolled it to the curb.

“Do you need any aid finding a conduit?” asked the other greysuit, checking his wrist monitor. “You know we must lock on all regents sublevel,” he added apologetically.

“Of course,” Zakariah stammered, feeling a strange sultry voice slip through his lips. “I'll take this conduit here. Sorry to trouble you.” He stepped into a zoomtube and keyed a slow and stately climb upward.

Back on Main Street, Zakariah activated the nearest subterminal. His feed was locked, classified uplevel Prime, so he checked the background harmonics all the way down to the core until he found the crack. His situation seemed utterly ridiculous, impossible. If he was clean, if he was a regent, then the world was his oyster.

There had to be a catch, a glitch in the screenplay. He tossed in the crack code and found his pearl. Helena Sharp, Caucasian, employed by the Eternal Research Institute, unmarried, five-ten,
140
pounds. Eighty-seven years old.

Zakariah shuddered with disbelief and magnified the holovid. Blue eyes, bouncy brown hair, slender nose, taut cheeks—she looked perhaps fifty, tops.

He grabbed his virtual body. He checked muscle tone in his arms and legs, squeezed his buttocks. Only an Eternal could be so well kept. He was in too deep, he had gone too far. Somehow, he had entered a political and ethical minefield by impersonating a public figure. He cringed at the dawning realization. He had been set up for a fall.

He squeezed his breasts and held them up to view. “Who are they trying to kid with this babe?” he asked himself out loud.

He felt the echo of a system monitor sucking his background code, a watcher, a gargoyle, almost subliminal. He lost it immediately, but he knew he was running out of time.

He checked some financial information on Regent Sharp and came up with a bonus. She controlled assets that rivalled the gross national product of a whole directorate—a corporate shadowland of property and investments, a complicated snarl of leveraged financing and venture capital. She had power, influence—her time was chiselled out to underlings at great expense. What an act, what a life! Was Zakariah now required to hold it all together, to save the ivory palace from crashing down? He wondered how far he could get without a physical appearance.

“Is this some sort of psycho-cerebral stim game?” he asked the approaching watcher, and the transmission ended abruptly.

Mia returned home to find the Eternal compound quiet, the windows black like blind eyes, a haze of smoke stratified in the air. Vampires, she thought, and her gut wrenched.