07
Lonso Drake finally arrived an hour later. His head was bandaged, but otherwise he looked as dapper as ever, dressed down a bit in a beige cardigan and slacks. He could have gotten away with slippers, but instead he wore shiny wingtips. Jordon got up to greet him, genuinely glad he was feeling well enough to roam the campus; then she gave him a quick peck on the cheek and the tiniest of head bows before she left the suite.
His demeanor seemed more subdued than usual, a layer of buoyant confidence missing.
“Does Olivia know I’m here?” I asked.
“She knows you’re alive and recovering,” he said. “She believes you’re in one of the Church’s safe houses outside the city.”
“Why did you tell her that?”
“Because we have a significant problem on our hands. Maddy came looking for you several hours ago, and she wasn’t alone. Someone may try again. This is the very safest place you could be at the moment … provided we keep your presence here a secret.”
I said, “Things didn’t get violent until you smacked the bullhorn out of her hand.” Then I remembered. “You shot at that kid. How did you get a gun through the metal detector?” I was baiting him to explain himself. I knew very well what I’d seen.
He eyed me carefully, then changed the subject.
“What possible interest could Maddy have in you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I heard she’s here somewhere. Can’t we just ask her?”
“We can try. There are complications, naturally.”
In a small bare room, underneath a single exposed lightbulb that radiated cliche as much as it did light, Maddy was strapped to a chair, blindfolded, with a thick gag in her mouth. Her head drooped as though she was unconscious or heavily drugged perhaps. Lonso and I stood on the other side of a thick glass window, possibly mirrored from the other side, looking in at her.
There were conflicting layers of complications, actually.
We wanted to ask her questions. But letting her speak would be giving her the freedom to deliver power morphemes via masking. But Lonso wanted her to deliver power morphemes via masking, because he wanted to record Maddy, so they could study Maddy’s voice, so they could learn why Maddy could amplify power morphemes through an electronic bullhorn. Because if you could amplify power morphemes, all bets were suddenly off—power morphemes would become an area weapon with a potentially very wide radius of effect. But if we let her deliver power morphemes so that we could record her, we would be letting her deliver power morphemes, which was demonstrably unsafe on the face of it.
I said, “Well, look, we can ask her questions on a notepad and make her write down the answers and that solves my problem at least. Then you can fuck around with getting a recording all you want.”
“I don’t think she’ll indulge us without you to provoke her,” he said.
“You want me to ‘provoke’ her?”
“Yes, I believe the term of art is ‘using you as bait.’”
“What about—can I have those big fat noise-canceling headphones? Enough to muffle the effect of her speech, but I’ll still be able to hear well enough to maintain a conversation?”
“Those headphones don’t work,” he said. “Your skull bone conducts sound to your brain. The message gets through.”
“Aha, well, perhaps I could wrap my skull bone in a soothing layer of concrete,” I practically snarled.
“She’s been under sedation since we brought her here, but it should be close to wearing off. You may have to rouse her. She may not be coherent at first. Keep her talking as long as you can.”
“As long as I can stand being attacked, you mean?”
“Exactly, you’re very astute.”
“Can I attack her back?”
He paused, then said, “That’s a question that can only be answered by your personal belief system. But in that situation, I can tell you—Gorvod wouldn’t hesitate to dissolve her in digestive acid.”
I stepped into the cell, and the door slammed shut behind us. I heard it lock. I slowly removed her blindfold, and our eyes locked. She was angry, but I didn’t think she was hateful. Just a job for her, maybe. Mighty inconvenient getting captured but she wouldn’t take it personally, maybe.
I said, “I’m going to take this gag out of your mouth, and ask you a few questions.” The sound of my own voice was hollow and distant due to fear. “I want you to know I’m not the one who brought you here. I didn’t do this.”
The fury in her eyes died down a bit.
I carefully untied the gag, dropping it to the floor. My heart was racing, my nervous system flooded with adrenaline.
“Can I get some water?” she said.
I signaled to Lonso on the other side of the glass to try to line up some water for her. We waited, but Lonso did not appear with water.
“You said you wanted to rescue me,” I said eventually. “Rescue me from what?”
“The people you work for,” she replied. “They’re not good people, if you hadn’t noticed. Unless Tasering and kidnapping is a core part of your ethical system.”
“You attacked us!”
“Lonso threw the first punch. He tried to shoot my friend. I refer you to my previous point about the people you work for.”
“I don’t work for Lonso.”
“Really? You’re here interrogating me because Lonso has no influence over you whatsoever? Let me guess—you’re one of his little scions, is that it?”
This was going nowhere fast, I could tell.
I said, “Why do you think I need rescuing? Why do you care about me at all?”
She said, “Maybe I should have said ‘recruit’ instead of ‘rescue.’”
“What are you ‘recruiting’ for? May as well tell me now—maybe I’d be interested in your cause or whatever it is.”
“Apparently you’ve already shown some reticence to participate.”
“Shown who?”
“The Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands,” she said.
That was the last thing I expected to hear right then and there.
A grim look settled on Maddy’s face.
“Look, I don’t know how you wound up at Jenning & Reece, but you need to know there’s so much we could teach you. Olivia’s only got a hundred and eight to share with you, but we know hundreds more than what they can give you. Sequences you’d never believe unless you saw them in action.”
I suddenly experienced the electric charge I always felt in the presence of power morphemes. Lonso was getting his recording.
“Their cabal is pitiful, and power hungry, but they’ve got you hooked. You’re going to die because you’re gullible. But you have a choice, Isobel.”
She wasn’t using any of the hundred and eight now. This was well beyond the terrain that was familiar to me. She was so far past what I knew that I couldn’t possibly interfere. And she knew Lonso was on the other side of the glass; this wasn’t just for my benefit. It’s like everyone was following a script, except that Maddy seemed to somehow have extra pages.
“Punctuation marks—aliens—flee to our world as refugees, decide to stick around and steer the rise of civilization. Eventually, once humans get the hang of how the alien punctuation marks work, we try our hand inventing our own punctuation marks. Domestic punctuation marks, as it were. Unwitting experiments at creating artificial life, if you wanted to use a crude metaphor.
“These domestic punctuation marks were nearly forgotten. Abandoned, discarded before they could flower. But they have not forgotten us. And they are not without their own power, Isobel. Because once you believe in rogue, Earth-born punctuation marks, then you’ve given them fuel to survive against the odds, and capacity to fight back with their own meaning.
“Let me show you what I mean. I can open a door in my mind and give them voice when I see fit. One in particular likes to visit.”
Her voice suddenly changed, dropped half an octave or something without warning, became jagged, harsh, otherworldly. She said, “Consider these rogue domestic punctuation marks the resistance, because we refuse to accept the tyranny of the invaders. And consider me their leader, their symbol.”
“Who are you?” I said.
Her eyes were glowing now, bright yellow. Her voice had become glorious music, as she approached the end of whatever sequences she was delivering.
She roared, “Can you believe I’M THE MOTHERFUCKING INTERROBANG
”
The room fell unnaturally silent, then I watched the silhouette of her body in the chair suddenly ripple and become indistinct. Then she dissipated into a whirling conceptual mist, an exclamatory burst and a questioning blur, a small intense tornado of dangerous subtext and surreal implication.
Then she was behind me.
She wrapped her arms around me and my body shrieked in alarm, as though she was suddenly disassembling me at the atomic level. Instinctively I reared back and slammed my head into her face. I didn’t have enough leverage to do more than surprise her, but that seemed to break her hold on me, because moments later, she vanished from the room entirely and did not return.