Blind Lake

I’m perfectly safe, she thought, but in all honesty she was frightened of the Subject, frightened by the obvious weight and substance and implicit animal strength of him. Frightened even of the smell of him, a faint organic stink that was both sickly sweet and richly unpleasant, like the smell of a citrus rind gone green with mold.

Well, then, Marguerite thought, what now? Do we pretend this is a real meeting? Do we speak?

Could she speak? Fear had dried her mouth. Her tongue felt numb as a wad of cotton.

“My name is Marguerite,” she whispered. “I know you don’t understand.”

He might not understand even the concept of a spoken language. She stood staring at him for a long moment. Maybe his silences spoke volumes. Maybe he spoke a language of immobility.

But he wasn’t totally immobile.

His breathing slit opened wider and emitted an almost inaudible wheezing sound. Could this be language? It sounded more like respiratory distress.

How fucking laughable, Marguerite thought, to be here — whatever this place was — and for whatever reason — only to be confronted once again with the impossibility of communication. I can’t even tell whether he’s talking or dying.

The Subject finished his discourse, if that was what it was, exhaling a gust of sour-milk air.

Apart from that, he still had not moved.

If this was an opportunity, Marguerite thought, and not just a hallucination, it was a wasted one. Her fear was laced with frustration. To be so incredibly, implausibly near to him. And still as far away as ever. Still mute, still dumb.

Outside, the shadows lengthened toward nightfall. The pale sky had turned a darker, bluer shade of white.

“I don’t understand what you said,” Marguerite confessed. “I don’t even know if you said anything.”

Subject exhaled and fluttered his cilia.

Yes, he spoke, said a voice.

It wasn’t the Subject’s voice. The sound came from all around her. From the mother-of-pearl arches, or from the shadows farther in.

But that wasn’t the strangest thing.

The strangest thing was that the voice sounded exactly like Tessa’s.

Thirty-Two

Elaine Coster tagged Chris as he headed out the clinic door. “Whoa,” she said, “hang on — where are you going?”

She knew he was freaking out over the disappearance of Tess and Marguerite. The duty nurse had shared with Elaine the story about the girl’s footprints, how they had vanished in the snow. Elaine hated to think of Tess, who had seemed like nice enough kid, out in this bitter weather. But there was daylight coming fast, and the girl shouldn’t be that hard to find, Elaine thought, if only Chris would exercise reasonable patience. As for Marguerite—

“I’m driving out to the Eye,” Chris said.

“The Eye? I’m sorry, but what the hell for? Ari says it’s being evacuated.”

“I can’t explain.”

She grabbed his arm before he could open the door. “Come on, Chris, you can do better than that. You think Tess and Marguerite are at the Eye? How is that even possible?”

Please, Elaine thought, let this not be one more case of Blind Lake lunacy.

“Tess wasn’t just wandering around out there. Her footprints are straight as a ruler, and they’re pointed directly at the Eye.”

“But the footprints stop?”

“Yes.”

“So maybe she just came back to the clinic door. You know, stepping in her own tracks.”

“Walking backwards in the snow? In the dark?”

“Well, what do you think? If she’s at the Eye, how’d she get there? Did she sprout wings, Chris? Or maybe she beamed herself there. Maybe she traveled in her astral body.”

“I don’t pretend to understand it. But the last time she disappeared from school, that’s where she went.”

“You really think she walked that distance in this weather?”

“I don’t know about walked. But I think that’s where she is, I think she’s in trouble, and I think Marguerite would want me to go find her.”

“You can read minds too? Ari and Shulgin and a bunch of other people are already keeping their eyes out for Tess and Marguerite. Let them do their work. They’re better at it than you are. Chris, listen to me, listen to me. I got a call from one of my contacts on the Security force. A whole fucking battalion’s worth of military gear and perso

He smiled at her in a way Elaine didn’t like, rueful and sad. She decided she hated all tall young men with doleful eyes.

“You take it, Elaine,” he said. “It’s your story. You’re the one to tell it.”

Elaine watched him angle his big body into the car, watched as he drove off through the still-falling snow at a reckless speed.

Sebastian Vogel, crammed into his lobby chair like a Buddha into an airline seat, said, “I think I finally figured it out.”

Elaine sat next to him wearily. “Please. No more metaphysical bullshit.” There were things she needed to do. Pack up her server and her written notes and keep them with her, even if some armed bureaucrat wanted to confiscate them. Consider facing the exterior world, whatever the exterior world had become, with its pilgrims and falling airplanes and roadblocks east of the Mississippi.

“Ever since Crossbank,” Sebastian said, “I’ve been wondering why you agreed to take this assignment. A veteran scientific journalist, hired by a frankly second-rate New York magazine to address a subject that’s been done to death, sharing the spotlight with a crank theologist and a discredited scandalmonger. That never made any sense to me. But I think I figured it out. It’s because of Chris, isn’t it?”

“Oh, fuck off Sebastian.”

“You read his book, followed his story in the press, watched his congressional testimony. Maybe you’d already picked up hints about Galliano’s ethical problems. You saw Chris being pilloried, and you knew he was right in spite of all the outrage and bad press. You were curious about him. Maybe he reminded you of yourself at that age. You took the job because you wanted to meet him.”

This would have been less a

“Was he a disappointment?” Sebastian said. “As a personal project?”

I don’t have time for this, Elaine thought. She felt dizzy with lack of sleep. Maybe she could just sit here until the soldiers came for her. All the really important work she’d done was stored in her pocket server, after all, and they would take her server from her only when they pried it out of her cold, dead hands. “When I met Chris I thought they’d beaten him down. He was obviously unhappy, he wasn’t writing, he was a little too free with the recreational chemicals, and he was carrying a load of guilt that was way too big for him.”

“I’m not sure that’s all because of his experience with Galliano.”

“Probably not. I just thought…”

“You wanted to help,” Sebastian said gently.

“Yes. I’m a fucking saint. Now shut up.”

“You wanted to lend him some of your cynicism.”

“He’d be a better journalist if he learned not to care.”

“Though perhaps not a better human being.”

“I’m not discussing this.”

“What he needed, Elaine, and I don’t mean this badly, but what he needed, it wasn’t in your power to give it to him.”

“Speaks the guru.” She bit her lip. “So what do you think? You think he found it? Whatever it is he needs?”

“I think he’s looking for it right now,” Sebastian said.