James Knapp - The Silent Army

What was that? We fixed this. We won.

The TV in the living room was on, but Penny was passed out, still in her bathing suit. I tossed a blanket over her and plodded off to the computer room, where the database was still up on the computer. The shades were drawn, and the lines of light around them were gray. I pulled up the chair and fell into it.

I brought up the database model and stared at it. Nothing looked any different, but it was hard to tell. The huge fractal shape looked the same, and the big dark spot in the middle was still there. The bright star still sat on the rim. Did it not work?

I tried to remember everything Penny had said the night before, but it was fuzzy. From what I could piece together, the ship they kept talking about blew up before it got to shore. Stopping the people on the ship was important. It was so important, they’d sacrificed that woman, the mean one from the elevator …element two, they called her. But that’s what she was for, wasn’t it? Hadn’t Penny said that?

There was a bottle sitting on the desktop, and I grabbed it. I took a swig from it and sighed. My throat ached and my eyes watered.

I brought up the data miner and punched in NICO and REVIVOR. That got a bunch of hits. My hand shook as I called some out on the screen at random and skimmed the passages:

Element Three will be immune to phasing, similar to a revivor, though still alive….

Most likely candidate is Wachalowski, Nico …

…I was not able to successfully influence him, although he could still be read …

…aspects of a revivor, in both mind and body … One entry included a scan of a charcoal drawing someone had done. It didn’t look exactly like Nico, but it was close. His right arm was joined to his body with stitches, and there were black veins branching under the skin.

…will destroy Element Zero.

There was nothing about what I’d just seen; the arm was the same, but there was nothing about his face changing like it did. I tried again, typing in “black” and “eyes,” but that brought up too many references. The ones I bothered to look at talked about bruises, shiners. I typed “face,” and then got stuck. My hands shook as I held them over the keypad.

“Bad dream?” I heard Penny say. I turned and saw her in the doorway, the blanket around her shoulders like a cape.

“Sorry,” I said. “Did I wake you up?”

“No.”

She crossed the room and stood beside me, looking at the screen. She looked at my search history for a minute, then reached over my shoulder and typed with one hand. She erased “face,” and entered something else in:

VAGOTT DEFORMATION

The miner spun around for a few seconds, and then three green points appeared. Like the hits I’d gotten on the green room, all three were inside the dark center of the cloud.

My heart thumped in my chest as I touched one of the entries. The image that popped up made me jump in my chair.

“That’s it,” I whispered. It was just a drawing, but the face was the same as Nico’s had been in the vision; head collapsed like a rotten fruit, on the end of a bent-stick neck. The whites of the eyes were dotted with black spots, and the lips were peeled back over long, crowded teeth. He was dressed in some kind of military uniform, with a name patch on it that read VAGOTT.

“I guess it was a bad dream,” Penny said, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to me.

“What does it mean?”

“No one knows,” she said. “Almost no one’s ever seen it. That’s the best lead we’ve had, and it’s not much.”

“Lead for what?”

“Stuff that happens in the void happens after what Ai calls the Event,” she said, pointing. “It’s empty because no one ever reports seeing anything from that point on.”

“Because they’re dead,” I said.

“Worse than that,” she said. “Nothing phases past that point, which means, if Ai is right, that of all the possible outcomes, almost nothing ever gets through. That’s a pretty big hole.”

“So it’s the end of everything? Forever?”

Penny shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “But for us, and everyone walking parallel …maybe we’re doomed to make the same mistakes.”

I stared back at the screen. The dots stood out, very close to where the entries for the green room were stored. So far, nothing on the other side of the rim looked worth surviving for, but if I’d seen it …

“I thought we stopped it,” I said. Penny squeezed my shoulder.

“Hey, the nukes didn’t go off,” she said. “That seems to trigger the rest, so who knows? Things don’t change overnight. Give it time.”

I nodded, but a bad feeling had wormed its way inside of me, and I couldn’t shake it. Even when I drank most of the rest of the bottle, it didn’t budge. I recognized the uniform Vagott was wearing; I’d seen it before in one of my visions. I’d seen it the last time I was in the green room.

A group of uniformed men came down the hall toward the door, shoving a man in handcuffs ahead of them. Behind them I’d seen a woman, partly in shadow …a small, skinny woman with her hair in a bun, and a beaklike nose. I never got a good look at her face, but it was me.

I was sure it was me.

Four hours after the Senopati Nusantara was destroyed, and two hours after I left Calliope in the hospital, I sat behind a locked door in the Federal Building. Alice Hsieh stood against the wall next to me, her arms crossed in front of her as we watched a display monitor mounted on the wall. In the corner of the ceiling to the left of it, the interrogation room’s camera hung from its wire, unplugged.

On the screen, a recording of one of the many JZI feeds taken from the MSST helicopter showed a clear shot of me standing on the deck while Faye ran through the rain toward me. I watched as Faye grabbed my jacket then tiptoed up to kiss me on the mouth. With the revivor’s black lips pressed against mine, Alice froze the frame.

“You want to explain that?” she asked.

“Believe me, I wish I could.”

I’d thought a lot about that incident since we’d lifted off and the boat sank below us. If I was dosed with truth serum, which could happen before the debriefing was over, I might admit that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Faye’s lips were smooth and dry. When she flicked her tongue between my teeth for that one second, it felt cool against mine. The body armor saved me from the shots she’d fired, but I still wasn’t sure if she’d intended to kill me or not. When she’d said ‘this is for the best,’ did she mean my death, or Fawkes’s escape?

“That revivor has been identified as Faye Dasalia. Do you know that name?”

“You know I do.”

“Then you also remember going through illegal channels to have her body delivered to a secret location inside the city where you personally revived her.”

I nodded.

“You stated at that time that this revivor was destroyed in the factory fire.”

“I said it was most likely destroyed in the fire.”

“When, in fact, you knew damn well it had not been.”

“I didn’t know that.” If she decided to take the gloves off, it would come out that I’d tried to find her since she’d disappeared. That wouldn’t look good.

Alice took a seat next to me and leaned close. She stared into my eyes, and I watched that dark blind spot drift across her face.

“Don’t wait for me to try it,” she said in a low voice. “I know it won’t work.”

“Cards right on the table, huh?”

“Look,” she said. “Sean is dead. I know you’d learned his little secret, and I know that, in spite of that, you still trusted him, and even liked him. I’m taking over his responsibilities, and you’re going to be working with me now. How that goes is going to be partly up to you.”