Child of the Fall Read online

  That was alarming. He’d gotten in here undetected. Maybe he was part of the original crew. There must be another entrance, one they hadn’t found yet. She needed to keep him talking now. “There are other people coming? When?”

  “I can’t tell you that yet. You don’t trust me, so I can’t trust you. And you shouldn’t. I wouldn’t in your place.”

  It left them at an impasse. Slowly, so as not to startle him, June righted her chair and sat down. “What happens now?”

  He chuckled, a friendly sound even through the metallic tone the mask put on his voice. “First, a show of good faith.” He motioned to the device. “I see you’ve managed to put it into safe mode.”

  June turned. It was still a depressing metal ring. “Is that what we did?”

  “Yes,” he said as June heard a button pressed. She turned back to Cyril, who had moved a chair with yet another charred robot sitting in it aside so he could turn on a console. “And it would take you weeks to figure out how to reboot it, even with the documentation you have.”

  Cyril started touching controls on the screen, but by the time she could get behind him, he was someplace in the system she didn’t recognize. She recorded what she saw with her phone. Maybe her team could work out where he was from the menus. One thing she did notice was on the edge of the display he worked at. The datastores they’d been trying to decrypt for who knew how many hours were now listed as open. Whatever had blown up the network had cracked them for her. The keys to the kingdom were within reach.

  Cyril misunderstood her gasp. “Don’t worry, dear, you’ll learn how it works in good time. As I said, I need your help. And,” he pushed a button on the screen labeled START, “Voilà!”

  The rumble came back, then the sparkling lake she’d grown used to filled the center of the ring.

  Definitely part of the old crew.

  He sighed. “I’ve advanced your cause by two weeks, and set mine back by the same amount.”

  “Hello?” a new voice asked down the hall. “Is someone here?”

  Cyril’s metallic voice went to a whisper. “Tell no one about my presence. Take the credit. There’s more to come.” He walked into the shadows created by the harsh emergency lighting and disappeared.

  A robot rolled into the main lab. “Oh, hi there, June.” It was Inkanyamba’s voice. “I didn’t think anyone would be here this late. I was just coming to do some cleanup—” He saw the device. “You fixed it?”

  Cyril had to come from the people who built the device. If she turned him in, he’d never tell them anything. More were on the way. The datastores were open, but they could have anything inside them. She still didn’t know how the device worked nor what its real purpose was.

  June made her decision. “Not exactly, but I did figure out how to get it out of safe mode.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “Yes. I got lucky and found a shortcut to the restart sequence. We now have it in the same state we found it in before the activation.”

  “Excellent! Hey, do you think you could help me get the wireless mesh restarted? We’ll need it for tomorrow.” He held up another example of the repeaters she’d used when they first explored the vent room. “I can barely use these.”

  “Sure. You start on the far end, and I’ll get to work here.” June took the components she needed out of a basket on the back of the robot.

  Cyril emerged from the gloom after Inkanyamba left. “Thank you.”

  She pointed at the device. “Thank you. Now, why are you here?”

  “That story is far too long to be told before your friend gets back. But now that I know you’re willing to work with me, I can tell it. Tomorrow, though. I feel as exhausted as you look.”

  He seemed extra vigilant as they walked back to her quarters. “What’s wrong?” June asked.

  “Nothing. Probably nothing. Tell me, are there any new alerts on the local network?”

  June checked. “Apart from ones related to the damage we did when the device activated, no.”

  He relaxed a little. “Good.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. An old man seeing shadows and calling them monsters.”

  Chapter 19

  Mike

  He knew it was bad when Kim wouldn’t tell him how bad it was. He and Tonya drove through the night and arrived before she got up, which was also not good. Kim rarely slept past eight, and it was ten before they arrived at the apartment.

  “Hi, guys,” she said, still in pajamas when she opened the door, arm in a sling. Kim moved like a drugged zombie. “Anyone up for coffee?” Without waiting for a reply, she turned and shuffled back into the kitchen.

  He and Tonya shared a look. Very not good.

  “Kim,” he said as he shut the door behind them, “you need to go to urgent care.”

  She sat down heavily at the dining room table and picked up a steaming mug with her one good hand. Even that small amount of motion made her flinch and groan quietly. “No,” she said. “You guys have been driving all night. You can…get some…sleep…”

  Mike was practiced at taking things from her without touching, but it was still a juggling act to grab the mug before she dropped it. Kim deflated until her head was down on the table.

  If it’d been anyone else, he would’ve picked her up and put her to bed. But this was Kim. If she woke up, she’d be in agony from his touch. It was clear she was already in agony.

  Tonya gingerly reached for Kim’s phone and let it scan her thumbprint so she could access the medical functions. Licensed RN privileges were always useful. Tonya shared the report screen in the common channel.

  When he saw the numbers, Mike sat down hard opposite Kim. Neural blockers were a common, safe way to combat pain. There were few side effects, and turning them off cleared them instantly. The apps that administered the blockers could see the pain levels the brain was dealing with and tailored them so there was no chance for an overdose or abuse.

  Kim’s blockers had maxed out. The app couldn’t ease her pain. Once the AI behind the app knew she was in a safe position, it had put her to sleep. And Mike couldn’t do anything about it.

  A couple of switches on the display changed state. “It’s okay now,” Tonya said, “you can move her. As long as you’re gentle, she won’t wake up.”

  “Should we take her to the ER?”

  Tonya considered it. Kim was a special case. “Yes. I’ll run interference with the staff. We’ll have to call her mom, you don’t have the legal authority to make decisions.”

  “Actually, I do.”

  “Really?”

  “It came up when we were working out our health insurance. I don’t have any relatives the law would recognize, and the only one I recognize is in China. I gave Kim durable power of attorney for my healthcare, and she did the same for me.”

  He could see Tonya was impressed. “That’s a pretty big step.”

  “I know.” The box was still in his jacket, zipped up safe in the inner pocket; he’d checked on the way home. Mike looked at Kim, asleep but not relaxed, and his heart ached. “I never thought I’d need it so soon. We should still call her mother.”

  He gingerly lifted Kim from the chair. The first time he touched her on purpose was when she had collapsed after Watchtell’s assault. Like then, Kim would have no memory of this, but he would. As worried as he was, the physical contact made her real. This physicality, this connection, stirred him. He pulled her close, feeling her warmth, her softness. She smelled good.

  “Hey,” Tonya said, “not too hard, you’ll wake her.”

  They took Tonya’s SUV to the ER. Mike climbed in back, still holding Kim. He knew her face, but not the way it felt, the way her hair moved when he pushed a strand away from her closed eyes. It seemed so magical, and Kim had never experienced it. Never touched anyone without fear and pain. He hugged her again. They would figure this out.

  Tonya interrupted his thoughts. “Take off her sling and examine her arm. Tell
me what you see.”

  He did, holding her hand the entire time. Her fingers were long and delicate. No wonder she was an expert at picking locks. “I don’t see anything unusual.” He turned her arm over. “No, wait, that’s not exactly true. Look at this.” Tonya set the autodrive and turned around. “Look at her wrist.”

  There was a clear line all the way around it where the skin was just slightly higher than the one that covered her hand. This was totally unexpected. “It looks like a sleeve,” he said. If it had been anyone else, he’d be fascinated. Instead, he wanted it gone.

  Tonya felt Kim’s arm with the confidence of long practice examining people in a medical environment. “Yes. There’s something under there. It’s harder than the rest of her skin.”

  He could feel it too. Her skin flexed like normal on one side of the line but didn’t on the other. “Do you think it could be part of her transformation?”

  Tonya sat back, looking as shaken as he felt. “It could. We were probing the way she interacted with higher dimensions and then we got an out-of-control feedback loop. We shut it down pretty abruptly.”

  “So maybe we triggered her transformation externally, and then when we shut it off it stopped her from changing back?”

  Tonya pulled up a screen in their shared vision. Readouts from their failed experiment streamed past. “If it works through the dimensions, we should see…there. God, how did we miss that?”

  A clear chain of feedback routed out through one set of their manifolds, and back through a different one. But the energy lines seemed like they were making an extra round trip in a direction that the sensors weren’t programmed to observe. Maybe more than one.

  “We didn’t know that’s what we were looking for,” he said. Now that he had a root cause, the tension that had threatened to strangle him eased off. Mike sent some threads out to revise their experiment. He wasn’t sure exactly how to reverse this, but he now knew it was possible. “What do we tell the doctors?”

  Tonya sat back and considered it. “Nothing. We didn’t know there was a problem until this morning.” The car bonged as it pulled up in front of the ER. “Okay, Mr. Power-of-Attorney, you’re up.”

  It was his third—no, fourth—visit to a hospital this year, but for the first time he was the one who had to make real-life decisions. The responsibility had its own heft, a mass not of substance but of consequence.

  Tonya said technical things the staff would understand while she translated for him, and after she arrived, for Malinda, Kim’s mom.

  Mike knew exactly what Kim would look like in forty years. He went to lunch parties with that version of her several times a month. Malinda’s accent made her even more intimidating than her daughter.

  “How could you not know what was wrong with my daughter?”

  He had faced her wrath before, but that was over dumb things. This was not a dumb thing. Her anger had an edge of sharp steel. “We were out of town when it happened.” That was so lame, but Malinda seemed to buy it.

  “You, you can watch, no? Be, how do you say, multitasking?”

  He had told Malinda what he was after an overnight stay just before China. “It was a mathematics conference. I had to concentrate.”

  “Well concentrate a little less on your maths and a little more on my Kim. Yes?”

  When confronted with either of them in this mood, Mike knew the best defense was no defense at all. “Yes, ma’am.”

  The doctor came back with the same conclusion that he and Tonya had: an unknown problem with the inner layers of the skin on her left arm. “It’s different enough we can’t pin it down here in the ER. The good news is that it’s not spreading, nor is it life threatening as far as we can tell.”

  “What can you do?” Malinda asked.

  “We’re building up a custom pain therapy for her. It will do a lot to reduce her discomfort. No more zombie shuffling. We’re admitting her because that takes some time to get right, but once it’s ready you can take her home. After that,” he shrugged, “I’ll refer you to the best dermatologist I know. She’ll have to take it from there. One thing, though,” a message landed in Mike’s queue containing contact information from the doctor, “when you get a diagnosis, could you send me a note? We’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  That would be Kim’s call, of course, so he gave the doctor some vague reassurances before he left. It was only after he was gone that Mike realized he’d managed to answer a question without providing any real information at all. Helen might be right, maybe he could be a politician. The thought made him queasy.

  Once Malinda was satisfied that he had been properly disciplined, she went home. Tonya gave a final set of instructions to the nurses and did the same.

  That left him alone with Kim, his thoughts, and the datastores Spencer had pulled down on the raid. They weren’t Trilogy stores; they were from the plant itself. They were still realm based though, and he could open anything that touched the realms.

  Spencer had let Kim’s predictors point out likely targets and grabbed as many as he could. At first the files were mundane operational records, human resource files, and inventories.

  Then he discovered Project Janus.

  Kim had suspected Watchtell hadn’t told them everything, and it turned out she was right. He funded and built an entire secret base inside the power plant. There were detailed operating instructions for a device that promised the ability to explore the transit dimension. Mike recognized the description and the theoretical topography.

  His guesses as to what was going on stopped when he chased down the first footnote.

  Initial Findings of Research Performed on Subject One, a.k.a. Angel Rage, a.k.a. Kimberly Trayne.

  They had discovered Kim’s connection with higher dimensions years before Mike. From that they deduced the existence of the transit dimension. The way they talked about Kim as a thing made him go very still. Vivisection was openly discussed. She’d been right to make a desperate move to escape. They were never going to let her go.

  But she had gotten away. Even veiled in the dry scientific language of the researchers, he could tell it had thrown a wrench in their works. They were worried they’d have to shut the whole thing down.

  But it turned out Watchtell had a solution for that. They called it Project Phoenix.

  The introduction ended with tissue samples were taken from Subject One before their untimely escape and presumed demise. This included gametes. From these it should be straightforward to create new experimental subjects, which assuming our conjecture that the syndrome is inheritable, should manifest the same ability.

  Children. They wanted to make children. He stood up and paced when he read the details. He knew Watchtell was ruthless, that he never stopped at anything to get what he wanted, couldn’t even conceive of objections to the cost. But this?

  He sat down and put his head in his hands. Nobody was this evil.

  He read further. He was wrong. They didn’t want to do it; they did it.

  His name was Will.

  Kim had a biological son. His mother’s name was Emily Ramirez.

  Emily Watchtell Ramirez.

  He used his own daughter. Mike laughed. It was either that or cry. She was ideal, the documents claimed. He could easily observe and control her. In the notes, they talked about her like she was a tool in a box.

  Trilogy thought Mike was the monster, one that would stop at nothing. He was a Buddhist. He felt guilty when he stepped on a bug he hadn’t seen. Watchtell helped coordinate a medical experiment on his own daughter.

  In a report dated last year he found Subject Two has now manifested the full checklist of symptoms. Complete touch phobia accompanied by unmistakable pain signatures identical to Subject One.

  “Hey,” Kim said softly, “what’s wrong?”

  While he had been reading the sun had risen, casting a soft gold light into the room. Kim was sitting up, still in the same pajamas as yesterday. The former terror of corporate Ameri
ca wasn’t that scary with bedhead.

  He’d never seen anything as beautiful. Mike concentrated on her eyes as he broke the news.

  “It’s about the data we got from the power plant’s network. Your name is in the files.”

  Her expression was a swirl of confusion that transitioned into shock and then to rage. Kim’s temper was incendiary, everyone knew that. This time, though, Mike understood where it came from.

  “Watchtell,” she said.

  It was fascinating how she could invest so much hatred in a single word. “Yes. You said they did experiments on you when he held you captive. The files have details on them. They took tissue samples.” Kim would only get annoyed if he tried to sugarcoat it, so Mike plowed straight ahead. “They took your eggs, fertilized them, and implanted them into a surrogate.”

  Saying it out loud made him feel as violated as Kim looked. “You have a son.”

  She pulled her knees to her chest and was silent for a long time. Mike concentrated on her, on staying in the moment. No distractions. He stilled his local threads and became a single being centered here. They would face this together.

  She looked up. “If they did that, it means they wanted to see if my syndrome was genetic. If it could be inherited.”

  “Yes. And it is.”

  Her rage was snuffed by a terrible sadness. “You mean he’s…”

  “He locked up,” Kim’s term for it, “when he turned three. He’s six now.”

  “Is he alone? In a lab? Does he have a family?”

  “Yes, and you won’t believe who it…”

  A thread he’d sent out to search for Emily Watchtell Ramirez came back with a headline.

  Daughter and Grandson of Disgraced Former Chief of Staff Declared Missing.

  Chapter 20

  Spencer

  He had nailed it. Placing his contact information in the plant’s database and calling it Trilogy was a goddamned stroke of genius. Yellowstone had called him up while Mike and Tonya were still walking back through the fucking woods. Using a very light Alabama accent—as a woman—he had said, “Trilogy IT department, how can I help you?”