The One We Feed (30 page)

“He’s gone.”

He didn’t ask
when Arthur would be back. “Was only a matter of time, I guess.”

The phrase
tugged a laugh from me. “No such thing for him.”

“Oh?”

“I figured out
how he cheated.” Devlin was reordering the pieces; Ananda had taken Arthur’s
place across the grid without complaint or remark. I sat down beside the hacker,
plucked the black queen from the table and rolled it around in my fingers.

“I think…,” I
said with a sigh, “I think Arthur just told me he’s the Kwisatz Haderach.”

Jinx raised a
studded brow. “That’s it?”

I shrugged. I
could already hear the tirade coming and, needing the familiar warmth of his
impotent intellectual fury, let it blast by me.

“I spend hours
trying to describe character theory for groups of transfinite order,
evanescence in a tangled system, and infinite dimensional topologies, and all I
had to do was talk about standing on a sheet billowing in the wind? This isn’t
laundry day for fuck’s sake! We’re not hanging linens in high wind shear! You’ve
got to be kidding me!” He got up from the table, paced futilely in a circle,
then sat back down in a huff.

I shrugged
again and put the queen back in her place. “Sometimes it’s just that simple.”

“Yeah, well...you’ve
got forever now, so get a friggin’ education.”

“Why bother? When
I need one, there’ll always be time. And if there isn’t, then I’ll just have to
surround myself with people like you and make sure you either really like me,
or really owe me.”

Devlin was
watching me with a hawkish glimmer in his shrewd eye.

“Tell me,
Vlad,” I said casually, leaning my chin on my knuckles while Jinx steamed from
the ears, “You didn’t refer
every
Siren you knew to Mara, did you?”

The smile
curved around his sharpened bicuspid. “Never show all your cards.”

“Any chance
the last Siren is indebted to you?”

His laugh was
like a hiss. “You know me so well already.”

Chapter
23

Stratagem

“He’s rubbing off on you,” Jinx
said, his face stuck to the table. “You’re both mental.”

I leaned back,
my eyes still focused on the game board. Until this point, I had been one of
the pieces, bound by rules and unable to escape, but an idea was blooming in my
mind, an idea
about
ideas. A strategy was forming that would make all
strategy unnecessary.

“Jinx,” I
interrupted quietly. My immortal side-kick sat up like a Pavlovian terrier,
scowling at me as if the weight in my voice was indicative of a beating. “Do
you think what Karl suggested could be true? I know your feelings, but is it
real?”

“You know it’s
real, Lily,” he growled. “You’ve done it now, many times. Doesn’t mean you
should go running into trouble, though. Remember what happened when we tried
that?”

I leaned back
in my chair till it rocked on its hind legs, determined not to think about his
bloody midsection and a side of beef. “What do you think could possibly have
done it to me?”

“Who knows,
who cares, it works!” he nearly shouted, using words I had thought a thousand
times.

What did it
matter? The point was, I could help people, right? But it did not make sense
that either Eva or the past Future Me had created my current incarnation. So if
it was happening, there had to be another source, and, if there was another
source, then there were other paths and possibilities.

“And the
purpose?
Why
would this be happening?”

Jinx heaved an
overly agonized sigh. “I’m really getting sick of this causal bullshit coming
out of people’s mouths. I was tired of it then, and I’m still tired of it now. There
is
never
a reason or purpose for anything. It’s all just physics! Evolution
is unstoppable. Chemicals and atoms work the way they do! No purpose, just
inevitability.”

I don’t think
he expected to see the smile taking root on my face. His eyes narrowed as he
glanced at our companions. Devlin’s mouth ticked suggestively; somehow I knew
he would be the first to understand. Ananda gave no sign he even cared. Jinx
glared at me.

“So what’s the
deal? What am I missing?”

“I think I’ve
been completely wrong about all of this,” I sat up and pulled my legs up under
me in a lotus position. “I thought I had a purpose, that that purpose had to do
with the kind of person I am. I thought I was supposed to save Reesa from Mara,
that all my visions were pointing me that way, but I’m starting to reconsider.”

Jinx looked
around, as if he missed the various electrical components that usually made
sense of the world for him. “What do you mean?”

“It’s all
about ideas and how they fight to survive. It always has been.”

All along Jinx
had been warning me about thinking in a linear fashion, about stringing
thoughts and actions like beads, but I had kept on doing it, even as I
navigated the future with each journey into the
jhana
and got
increasingly adept at recovering from Time-Loop Syndrome, as Jinx had termed
it. To me, I had just been tying knots in time, but my perceived temporal macramé
was not how time
actually
looked. Arthur’s revelation had awakened me,
and the more I thought about how the world seemed to him the more it all made
sense.

What if the
game wasn’t just cause and effect? What if it was taking place on a crazy,
trans-dimensional chessboard drawn by M.C. Escher? What if my “purpose” wasn’t
an extension of who I was but of who I
would
be? What if my myth
was
evolving
backward?

“Reesa doesn’t
need my help,” I murmured.

“Hypnotic
karaoke artists and slavering skin-walkers to the contrary,” Jinx interrupted.

“I need hers.”

Jinx’s mouth
fell open. The tongue ring glinted in the soft light of the chandelier.

“Think about
it. Mara is afraid of her because the Rakshasa listen to her. She anchors them
in communication, something that prevents ignorance and, thus, violence. But
why is it she was sane enough to sing? Why didn’t her transformation happen in
the same way as theirs? Obviously, she had some preexisting ability that somehow
got in the way of what Mara did to her.”

“Okay,” he said
irritably, “it’s a reasonable conclusion, but not the
only
one.” He lay
his head back down on the table and suctioned his ear to its shiny surface.

I closed my
eyes. I relived the memory, hearing her voice echo into the silence and
reverberate in the ears of the ones who might have hurt her. With one song, she
had triggered something within them, some kind of awakening.

“It was Gran. An
idea born from a lifetime of struggle and sacrifice, strong enough to stop
illusions, righteous enough to halt self-loathing, compassionate enough to
accept anything. That’s what her Gran built into her from the first. She was a
revolutionary, like you. You were battling classicism and Gran was battling
discrimination, hatred, ignorance. It’s that absolute moral and ethical
assurance that slices through their conditioning.”

“And you think
that has somehow been augmented by her transformation? You think she has some
unique insight?”

I nodded. I
had seen it first hand, after all. I had watched them try to defend her as Mara
had her pulled from the tank, foaming at the mouth. “Her gift is like a Siren’s,
because no matter what they are thinking, her voice draws out the poison, she
can find the best person, the one who was wounded and forgot itself. But more
than that, she has the
idea
of
complete
individuality, the
permission
to exist as is. That’s what she brings to them.”

Jinx cocked
his vivid head to the side pensively. His mouth had closed and he was frowning
so hard I thought his eyebrow studs would get tangled together. “
She’s
Shamhat, ‘The magnificent One.’”

“Mara knows he
cannot keep her in that coma forever. Unless her will to live fades or his
pharmacologists can innovate as fast as her body, she
will
wake up. When
she does, he’ll lose his army. She
will
unite them and lead them. There
is no other future but that. So...why am I here?”

He, too, was
staring into the distance, seeing what I saw the only way it could be seen:
unfocused.

“Her gift
seems familiar, doesn’t it? Kind of…oh, I don’t know…like my supposed cure?”

He blinked and
I knew he understood. I had accepted his hypothesis. Maybe time did sometimes
move backward.

“You have to
assimilate her gift. Now. Because…because it’s important...back then.”

I bowed my
head. “So, Jinx, I’ll ask again. Why is this happening? What’s the
purpose?”

“It’s
inevitable,” he whispered.

“And if you
were Arthur and knew what he knew, saw things the way that he does, moved
through
his
reality….” I fell silent. His face had gone so pale that his
hair stood out like a stop light.

He got up and
went to the minibar. The hiss of the Redbull can opening was followed by a
sound of meek surrender. He returned and plopped down in his chair, looking at
me as if he’d never seen me before.

“Those are
mighty big clown shoes to fill, Lily. Even bigger than the ones I had for you. The
Rakshasa are not immortal...but if you interact with them there’s a chance….”

“New World
Order.”

He gulped and
the can was empty in a few moments. He flattened the aluminum.

“How do we get
you in?”

I turned to
Devlin. He was about to declare check in two moves. Ananda had his lips pressed
together and was scanning the board with unseeing precision.

“If I wanted
something badly enough, could a Siren make me believe it, no matter what it
was? Even someone like me?”

“I imagine so.”

“I need your
assurances, Devlin, not your imaginings.”

His eyes
darted to mine, dark with annoyance at my interruption of his fifteenth
consecutive win. But before he had been a general, he had been a soldier.

“That’s what
they say. The only way for one of us to resist is to already have everything we
could want.”

Ananda held up
a finger. “Or want nothing at all.”

“What if
someone wanted ignorance?”

Jinx was
shaking his head but knew better than to say anything. If I was anything, it
was stubborn.

“Yes.” Devlin nodded.
“Even that. If you want to forget something, the Siren can make it happen.”

“How close are
you to Mara?”

He began to
laugh, his triumph forgotten for the tastier meat of my sudden assertiveness. “About
as close as you are to your local grocer.”

“You get him
what he needs and the Sangha pays the bills?”

“Essentially.”

“Does he know
you were the supplier?”

He shrugged
and went back to his final move. “Check in two, my dear. You have lost again.”

Ananda held up
his elegant hands in submission. “I am no good at this.”

His opponent
leaned his fanged jaw on his hand and smiled almost lovingly. “I am glad of it.”

“You just like
to win.”

“It’s a
weakness, I’m afraid. If you wanted to cure me of it, one would think you’d try
winning.”

“I do try, but
I simply lose interest. To me, you are not so bad as you are, but if you want
to be cured, perhaps you should not try so hard to remain the same.”

“Your lips to
God’s ears,” Jinx said. “Look, I think I know where she’s going with this, but
if it’s going to work, then she’ll need your help too.”

Devlin’s face became
a stoic mask. “Mara is not someone on whom we play pranks. The chances of
getting past his security are slim, even for me. Why do you think I took Ursula
in? With assets and secrets like mine, I must surround myself with people who
can protect me. It is the same for him. Mara would know I was being deceptive
in an instant.”

“So don’t be,”
I said, getting to my feet. “It’s about winning isn’t it? He knows about you, I’m
sure. He’ll expect you to want something, to be there for something, and I’m
almost positive he has something you want.” He shrugged again which belied the
glint of absolute certainty in his eye. “So make that your goal. All I need is
for you to be there, being you.”

“Why?”

“It will all
make sense.”

He looked up
at me and raised an eyebrow. “I do
not
like being ignorant of the plans.”

I met his gaze
and held it. In only a few short weeks of immortality, I had been places and
done things he could not imagine. I had enough talent in my little finger to
make his world crumble, and it was about time I stop twiddling my thumbs and
make use of it. If I was right, one life no longer mattered, and his discomfort
meant nothing to me. As Arthur had said, I would drain him dry and stomp over
his corpse if he refused me.

Desperate
times.

I dropped my
throat into Karl’s octave and glared at him. “Do as you are asked.”

I turned to
go, longing for the crisp night air of the forest above, for a scent of Arthur’s
trail, but Devlin’s voice bounded after me and paralyzed my spine with a
poisonous sting.

“Dark is she,
but brilliant!” he whispered in a tone like a razor. “Black are her wings,
black on black! Her lips are red as rose, kissing all of the Universe! She is
Lilith, who leadeth forth the hordes of the Abyss and leadeth man to
liberation! She is the irresistible fulfiller of all cravings, seer of desires.
First of all women was she—Lilith, not Eve, was the first! Her hand brings
forth the revolution of the Will and the true freedom of the mind! She is
ki-si-kil-lil-la-ke
,
Queen of Magic! Look on her in lust and despair!”

Arctic streams
ran through my veins. Hairs rose on the back of my neck. . The world vanished
for an instant, until the clattering of the chess pieces brought it back to me.

It seemed as
if, for just one instant, ancient history and impossible future had occupied
the same space.

My breathing
and pulse were erratic. I reached up and clutched at the pain in my chest.

“A modern
Luciferian incantation,” Devlin said, sardonic sludge oozing into his voice. “I
wonder to whom.”