A vessel broken, a need to find his way to the green light, a dry feeling in his throat. The way the world around him seemed both brighter and duller than before.
Break down the wells, clean the grates, plug the taps, wipe and polish around the taps. Clean the counter and all other surfaces around the bar area. Sweep the floors. Stack the chairs. Old Jim knew the closing duties at the Village Bar. But he had no checklist for how to clean up the biohazard site, no checklist for how to cope with Cass being gone. Or how to cope with feeling so beat up that he only got two hours of sleep, and then it was already dawn through the bedroom window, and he felt an urgency to get things done.
What things? For whom?
He returned to the biohazard facility and did what he could to clean up enough to maybe confuse whoever came by to investigate. True, the money would be gone, because he meant to transfer it to bags and a better hiding place, but everything else he did was meant to buy him just a little more time.
The unpleasant need, with a handkerchief over his mouth and nose, evoking Old Decomp, to decant some of the bodies in the barrels, to identify the ones he knew. Mostly lower-level operatives, as if that was all Jack dared, or by some other logic that escaped Old Jim.
Five barrels with a piece of red tape on the side. Ten with orange to mark the money and documents and photos, some of which looked like blackmail material. An inexplicable green to indicate that the rest did, indeed, contain biomedical waste.
Some version of intent laid bare by the documents he found in an old-fashioned briefcase that must have looked tiny in Commander Thistle’s hand. And yet the documents clarified nothing. Studies on “the sweet spot of psychopathy and far-seeing” mixed in with falsified ledgers for the Brigade, a report on out-of-body experiments to “other dimensions” rife with encounters with “beings vaguely reptilian, like crocodiles or alligators,” receipts for meals at a bar in the city of Hedley, which lay beyond Bleakersville. Photographs of Old Jim walking into the Village Bar didn’t bother him, just added to the sense of the site like some Central midden, a grab bag of impulses and obsessions. Had that been due to Commander Thistle or some impulse from Jack that manifested as a kind of madness subsumed by paperwork?
Jack using the Forgotten Coast as his garbage dump, his bank, his liquidation center. There was a map by the barrels that indicated a transit system: break the bodies down here, deposit the remains somewhere else. But even those instructions felt arcane, optimistically alchemical, with what must be the dead hand of Commander Thistle having ritualized this new decomp into superstitious “sites of power.” The sad, too-human diversion of logic into unmarked graves—places marked as “watchers and talismans before God” under trees, in abandoned old slave graveyards, in the dunes overlooking the sea.
If not for Commander Thistle’s pathological quixoticness, it would have made sense, in a way. Remote. Nominally under Jack’s control. Already bearing the scars of past ops. But it also meant Jack had become a monster. The Brute of Brutes. There was at least six submersibles’ worth of money in the barrels. As he stared at that mute array that screamed so loudly at him, he realized that there was no escape. Not really.
This vision he kept having now: of Jack, creating the seeds of a shadow organization within another, a kind of parasite that would soon enough live in the dead husk of the host—or, paranoid thought, some greater power manipulating Jack … and meant to plunge Central into what? Chaos? A cleansing fire? Or just corrupt Central with mind viruses, misdirection, false ideas. So that, eventually, Central would be the shadow, eaten up from the inside.
How long until Jack found out about this breach? Probably less than a week, but no way to be sure because he’d neglected to ask Commander Thistle about his reporting protocols.
He could run away, forge a new identity, but he felt too ancient to pull a Mudder.
Distracted by what he had wanted to tell Cass that had kept slipping his mind. Maybe nothing. But maybe that a mission could be a dysfunctional masterpiece that existed almost like a piece of brilliant but unhinged music. All these strangers shoved together into one purpose, choreographed into a rapid, tight precision around some objective. One bond, so that in life-and-death situations you could depend on someone having your back, taking your pulse.
So that in the end, over time, all that mattered was the moment, breaching the perimeter, kicking in the door, with people you trusted more than a partner, more than anyone else in the world. So he wasn’t going to run away. He was going to stay, and he was going to push even harder. For Cass.
As he finished cleaning up, Old Jim had to sit in the same chair he’d occupied before, opposite Commander Thistle, amid the signs of struggle he had not yet erased, the scuffs and smudges he hoped read like normal wear and tear. He felt less emotion than a lack of emotion, which bothered him.
His whole body was sore and buffeted, his throat raw. He had to finish burying Commander Thistle, make him into an inconspicuous mound amid the marsh grasses, under the sun. No strength and no stomach to stuff the man in a barrel.
The huge, bloodstained leather wallet he’d pried out of the man’s back pocket identified him as “Gus Waldron.” What a name for a monster.
There hadn’t been much in Gus’s pockets, but still more than there should have been—the kind of sloppiness you risked when you recruited a nut of a homegrown operative. Like the folded sheet of control words …
Jack had been manipulating him from the outset, and the Rogue, dead or alive, had released Old Jim from Jack’s spell. From Jack’s bad intentions.
Shouldn’t he be able to see his life clearly now?
022: VETERANS OF THE PSYCHIC WARS
Old Jim woke in the midafternoon, on the living-room couch. He hadn’t meant to sleep so long, or at all, but his body had needed it. This was his night to return to the Village Bar after “being sick.” But now that felt dangerous, so he called Sally and said he’d be taking one more day off work. No, he was fine. Everything fine there? Yeah, except Man Boy Slim was sullen and drunk, and wouldn’t leave. Mudderless, rudderless. Go with God, just not Commander Thistle’s God.
“Oh, also, your daughter called and asked you if you’d feed her pet frogs while she’s gone.”
Cass. He felt a lurch, a dislocation, a surge of … pride, triumph? In how she’d managed to get a message to him.
She’d left something for him in the frog tank.
Maybe Old Jim had been too out of it before to notice, but it felt like a kind of dream, how her apartment stood at the end of a tortuous series of dirt roads amid a mature pine forest. How the afternoon sun came down in a healing way, to then spill golden over the soft pine-straw forest floor.
A series of sleepy two-story rustic wood-frame town houses appeared, nestled into the landscape at odd intervals, such that Old Jim thought he’d reached the last one, gotten lost, only for another to appear teasingly out of the canopy. A true maze of looping switchbacks and the whole time he had a sense of gently falling forward into a ravine. Or a cleft between mountains. No, he had to put that from his mind.
At the end of one wandering lane, closest to the wilder woods: Cass’s place, with the souped-up red hatchback out front. For a moment, his hopes leapt up to defeat his pain. She was still here. But of course she wasn’t.
Around back, he smashed in a window, using a rag from the truck to muffle the noise, and opened the door through the pane, entered with gun drawn. No sound, no sense of anyone inside.
He cleared all the rooms before approaching the frog tank. No one hiding in the closet to surprise him. But as he looked around, he saw the signs of what he took to be Jackie’s intrusion—not in the place being trashed but in how clean it was, how the cushions on the couch were so perfectly placed, and not a hint of clutter. He was willing to bet Jackie’d had the place swept after Cass left.
Still, he checked in the usual places, hopeful he might find something Jackie had missed. But, upstairs and downstairs, the place had been picked clean. Or perhaps Cass had done it herself, anticipating Jackie going through her things.
Even the bed had that look of not being slept in.
He decided he might as well feed the frogs, but of course there were no frogs in the tank. No safe under the floorboards, no frogs in the tank. Had she taken them with her?
A little pirate chest at the bottom of the tank belched water, but Old Jim didn’t think whatever Cass had left him would be inside. No. The chest drew the eye with the flashes of gold paint, the movement. So, he upended the jar of food flakes onto the side table, found nothing at the bottom.
The tank had a thick layer of pebbles beneath the water and a line of green algae at the water line that appeared unbroken against the glass.
Gently, he reached down and trawled, tried not to disturb the sediment, let his hand search through the roughness of the pebbles. The small pleasure of that pitted texture against his fingers soothed, distracted him from the pain in his shoulder where Commander Thistle had hurt him.
He had almost given up when he felt a smooth touch against one finger, felt an electric excitement.
There it was: a tiny plastic packet, easy to miss.
He extracted it, dripping, out of the tank. Inside the packet was a key and a number on a slip of waterproof paper: 92544.
Sitting on the couch next to the tank, he stared at the number. While the lid of the treasure chest rose and fell. Storage locker? Some unit at the Old Decomp storage place? No. It had to be simpler.
It took a while longer than it should have, maybe, but when he’d solved it, the answer made him exclaim and rock back on the couch.
The order of the numbers had obscured the possibility, because there were only six separate apartment complexes, but if he reversed the numbers to 44529, the key could be to another apartment: unit 4, apartment 4529, farther up the slope. If 4529 existed.
Old Jim’s pulse quickened. Maybe Cass had a second apartment. Because she didn’t want anyone to know where she lived. Because she knew Jackie had a key to this one.
Sure enough, after some driving around, Old Jim found 4529. No one was around and he wasn’t even sure the apartments to either side had tenants. The key fit perfectly.
Inside Cass’s real apartment, Old Jim had a moment of blurred déjà vu. The layout was the same, with the same white walls balanced by rustic high wooden beams.
He decided to start upstairs, just the routine security check, one more time. The bedroom was different. She’d dragged a bare mattress up there and had converted the bathroom into a darkroom. He thought she’d sent the film to Failure Island, but instead she had developed it here.
The main difference between apartments was that Cass had used the white space of the bedroom walls to track the Rogue, Henry, her thinking about the Brigade. Most of the S&SB personnel had their headshots taped to that wall, along with their role, rank, important details about their past, their points of view.
There, too, the question: “Did Henry kill the head of ops?” With a checkmark, as if Cass had confirmed the origins of the belt buckle.
The Rogue’s wall consisted of oddities and contradictions, with the same image from the trail cam twenty years ago, photocopied, with her scrawled note: “The sleeper awakens.” He wondered if she’d found it in his pocket when she’d brought him to her apartment, after the bridge, and copied it then, or earlier.
Not much he didn’t know already on the Rogue wall, except a brief section about a man shouting at schoolchildren at recess through a fence twenty years ago, one hundred miles north of the coast and to the west. Cass had noted that the stranger “clutched the chain link so hard he left blood.” The man had then retreated into the swamp. The list of names beside this news item must be teachers and students, and Cass had been crossing them out, one by one, as she’d checked into them.
What did that mean and when had she obtained all of this intel? Long before he’d given her the full files on the Rogue, he gathered, from some of the penciled-in date notations. He remembered her intensity about the Rogue after Old Decomp and should have felt betrayed, but what he felt instead was more complex, because the apartment key felt like trust.
Transcripts from the Mudder’s conversation with him lived on that wall. References to his conversation with Man Boy Slim near the front door. Which meant that Cass had supplemented Central’s bugs with her own. He remembered her severe Realtor’s business suit, bulky enough to hide surveillance equipment, the way she’d looked around the bar.
“Mission critical: What is the Rogue actually reacting to with its actions?”
It? That stood out, handwritten on a piece of ruled notebook paper and attached by a piece of duct tape. Did Cass think the Rogue was a machine?
On the desk in the corner, though, is what he felt she had left specifically for him: three items neatly laid out as if the ultimate debriefing. He took the order seriously—two file folders and a photograph—and considered each in their turn.
When Old Jim had read through the first folder, he sat back in the chair, numb, considering why he didn’t feel more.
Because Cass, somehow, had obtained secret documents pertaining to spells meant to bind him. Starting with the lyrics of the Winter Journey songs he loved, with enough context to make clear that when Commander Thistle had worried Old Jim might be slipping, a little refresher of the lyrics helped bind Old Jim’s soul.
“My back may tear, / my feet may break, / my heart may storm and rage— / Yet I will stay my course.” The song seemed quaint, old-fashioned now, and his fascination with the suite from some other life, because it was … the way he knew, staring at those lyrics, that every time he’d sat down at the piano, he’d reinforced the vigor of his secret mission, submerged his own true self.
At first, Old Jim didn’t know why many of the documents in the file served to reveal the extent of Central’s interference on the biologists’ expedition, their use of the generator to send out subliminal commands, their use of the alligators as the Medic had indicated, and even detailed analysis of the experiments conducted on the Tyrant prior to her “joining” the expedition. Which included alligator-specific drugs for increased alertness, negative reinforcement, a regimen of control and of freedoms, along with supposed “brain augmentation” that had turned the creature into a kind of battle-scarred veteran of Central’s interference.
But then he saw Cass’s point, because Central had integrated what they learned about conditioning into the very program that Jack had hijacked, to mess with Old Jim’s head. Then Jack had set Old Jim loose in the archives, to, in a sense, explore the genesis of his own condition. Had Jack gotten a kick out of that? Rationalized it, somehow? The idea that Old Jim would research and analyze the origins of the pathology imposed upon him?
The grotesque truth in Cass’s handwritten note on the last page: “Reviewing the old files on the biologists’ expedition was part of your conditioning, Jim. That’s how fucked up Jack is.”
The perversity sank in along with a smoldering anger, even if on some level he felt beyond surprise.
To distract, he went on to the second file, which focused on Old Decomp, with a note attached with a paper clip to the front: “I didn’t like the potholes.” No, she hadn’t.
He flipped through it, still trying to adjust to this command center, this access to Cass’s mind. The sharpness of it. The way it contrasted with the person who supposedly had failed at her prior mission. The person who separated the ingredients. The person who made goofy, off-center jokes.
Maybe this is what you did when you failed and you wanted to rise again from the ashes. Maybe you tried to do everything you could to solve the mystery on your own, saddled with a partner who kept falling apart on you. Or maybe this is what you did when every last bit of what you’d said about yourself, what Jackie had said about you, was a lie.
The file contained the infrared spy-satellite images of the area Cass had referenced on the way to Dead Town, and zeroed in on the stone silo. The potholes stood out because they formed a pattern, as Cass had said, with a rough X down the middle and a circle around the outer spokes. Rough, yes, but clearly discernible. If it had been defined by red blinking lights he would have thought it resembled a helicopter landing pad. But, in the context, who knew what it meant? Or if it meant anything at all.
The potholes under that scrutiny had “exhibited unusual properties, similar to the residue from neo-biological substances and related molecular disturbances.”
A type of “pollution” that should not be there, given the history of the place. Yes, the silo had been a burn site before the storage unit had been built next to it, around it. But only for the usual: paper and wood and other “nonchemical waste.”
The site had also been used to incinerate the remains of the biologists twenty years ago. That information Cass had written by hand on the report, so it came from elsewhere. He felt sick to his stomach. Jack must have chosen the silo to dump the expedition samples for that reason.
The intensity of the report bore down on Old Jim, as did the last page, which cited a fire department incident dated to three days before the Rogue showed up at the Village Bar. The parking lot had been on fire. The firefighters had to put it out, cause given as “arson, gasoline,” with the speculation that bored teenagers had been responsible. End of story. Nothing further, but Cass had written “entry point?” in the margin.
Entry point? The little hairs on his neck rose. Like the Rogue had … arrived there?
Cass had flagged two other items in particular: The first indicated that a review of the history of the site going back a decade showed it had “changed significantly” in the past few weeks, a phrasing that, no matter how he rifled through the pages, came with no further explanation. Second, that the parking lot residue matched enough of what had been found on Aguilar and Numi twenty years ago that R&D had wanted to reinterview them, and by that Old Jim knew they wanted blood samples and a full physical as well as a talk.
Except, they could not be found.
What did that mean? The vast outlines of something moving through the deep, of processes that had gotten well beyond contain.
Every next thing left for him felt like distraction from the last.
Old Jim picked up the photograph from Dead Town, which showed the back wall of the second floor of City Hall, behind the chair in the alcove. On the back, she’d written: “There are people at Central, despite the odds, who care about an actual future. Who believe in something real. I’m coming back, promise.”
Promises could be threats. Promises could be meant sincerely, but never kept.
Who the hell was she?
The silencer. The expert aim. The inconsistencies.
Was she a Phantom? Was this what a Phantom did? The rumored faction that never stepped into the light. The “third way” that found both the Brutes and old hands suspect, crude, and nearsighted.
Old Jim doubted she had ever failed on a mission in her life. Maybe she hadn’t been desperate to convince Old Jim to keep her around, so much as make sure that their day-to-day interactions not betray who she worked for.
If everything was up for grabs at Central, then maybe she was suggesting that they could be allies. Offering that to him.
He stared at the photograph for a long time, trying to figure out why she had left it for him. But, as with the address, he finally found it there in the photo—passed this final test.
The faint, indistinct suggestion along two sides, marred by shadow. If he had to bet, Cass was trying to show him the outline of a door. Cass was telling him that a secret room lay behind the chair on the second floor of City Hall, in the heart of Dead Town.
That the Rogue’s lair might lie behind that door.
Downstairs, on his way out, Old Jim checked the fridge, because his mouth was dry and he had a sudden surge of thirst.
But the fridge was empty except for one thing.
A pomelo.
Nothing lived in Old Jim’s head driving back to the house except the need to return to Dead Town, to have a secret room solve a mystery in a way Cass’s secret apartment had not. To see his mission through to the end, no matter what that end might mean. They all wanted him to do it, every possible master he might answer to, even if he wished to punish some of them. He believed Cass wanted it, too, and, perhaps, that meant he worked for the Phantoms now.
A quick dinner of leftovers and back into his office to retrieve a duffel bag into which he placed duct tape, earplugs, a flare gun, a hunting knife, some of the money from the barrels.
While he’d been gone, a new fax had come in. Like a spasmodic quiver from the dead hand of his predecessor, the sheets of paper consisted of the latest sea debris reports, which had become stranger, wilder over time. Dead birds in droves, deep-sea creatures come to gelatinous ruin on the shore, a “tar-like substance” being tested by the Coast Guard, “a diaphanous soft exoskeleton, unknown origins,” and more dead sea creatures. Dolphins. Sharks. No storm to account for it. Mostly in remote places. Mostly just more data to sift through pointlessly. He tossed it on the pile of damaged faxes. Let someone else sort it out.
Old Jim stepped out onto the back deck at sunset, thought he’d retrieve a handsaw he’d left there, too. The sun was almost gone, had the dark-blood aspect of a bad egg yolk running down the side of the sky. He ignored the illusion that the birds wheeled to avoid the streaks. How the black-blue parts of the sky churned with some occult energy.
A shooting pain in his head as something smashed into him and a second sun opened up in front of his eyes. He crumpled back onto the deck, ears ringing, blood pouring into his eyes. He wiped at it feebly, slid down to the deck floor, back to the railing.
Familiar shoes appeared in front of him. Almost as old-fashioned as Commander Thistle’s. Henry had laid him low with a heavy blow, maybe brass knuckles. He pawed for his gun in its shoulder holster, but a hand ripped it off him and tossed it out into the darkness. Old Jim tasted aluminum and disinfectant, wondered from a distant place if he had suffered a concussion.
Henry punched him once in the jaw, then stood back. It hadn’t been a solid punch, Old Jim had turned his face, and it almost gave him back some equilibrium. He struggled to rise and Henry planted a foot on his chest, kicked him back against the railing. Okay, then, he’d rest there for a while, ribs burning inside like they had caught fire. Wipe this blood out of his face, figure out why his left arm felt numb and creaky.
“Hey, Night Commander,” Henry said. “Calling the Night Commander. Still with us?”
Old Jim ignored that, trying to clear his head, because the fireflies had come out and there were so many tiny warm yellow points of light that he couldn’t be sure which were the sparks lighting up his brain from the damage.
Henry squatted to look him in the eyes, but stood far enough away that Old Jim didn’t think his numb left arm could reach for the knife in his boot before Henry kicked him again.
The deck light had come on, giving the vampire a wax museum look—the exaggerated glower of his hollowed-out expression that hid a twisted pleasure.
A faraway glaze to his expression as he launched into a speech, an underlying quaver to his tone that bothered Old Jim, maybe more than the beating.
“What I want you to know, Old Jim, is that you’ve been a failure here the whole time. Because of you and your kind we’re behind—and because of you we don’t even have the right equipment to conduct our research. And because of you, our records to date are almost useless. Without our hands tied behind our backs, it took just a week to get results at the lighthouse here on the mainland. Just a week. And you’re not even with the Brigade are you? You’re … you’re a sort of foreign entity.”
That Henry might be a talker had not occurred to Old Jim.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And now this fire, this catastrophe,” Henry said, talking right over him. “Did you set the fire? Was it you? Because you couldn’t let me take over?”
Old Jim almost missed Commander Thistle’s stripped-down pseudo-religious jargon.
When he didn’t respond, Henry kicked him in the ribs. Old Jim felt something shift a bit, like his body might come apart at the seams, and he curled up on his side, the fire raging stronger and trying to breathe shallow to avoid more pain. Now he could reach his knife, and he willed Henry to come still closer. Just a little closer.
But Henry didn’t. He kept orating—about money, about lost opportunity. About lofty goals. About the dark sciences and how they weren’t Ouija Hicks but the future, and why would the Night Commander want to get in the way of that? Which led back to the question: “Where’s the money? Do you know where the money is?”
The money wasn’t in the barrels anymore, grasping for what he could say to buy some time. His knife was itching to find Henry’s throat.
“It’s at that storage unit place—before you get to Bleakersville,” Old Jim said, wincing as he spoke. “In the stone building out back.”
The place that had “changed significantly.” The only place he knew and Henry didn’t, and maybe he could escape into that dense forest behind the silo.
“The one that burnt down? Do you think I’m stupid?”
“It’s in the ground, buried.”
Henry thought about that a moment, while Old Jim got himself into a sitting position. The more Old Jim saw of Henry, the more something seemed wrong with the flow of the man, as if he had experienced the onset of some wasting disease.
“I need medical attention. You’ll get the money, but you need to get me to a hospital.” Worth a try, just to get a reaction.
Henry sneered. “You’re talking just fine so you’re coming with us. Get up.”
Us?
Old Jim gauged the distance again, but Henry, he saw, had a gun on him, too. That and the little signs of mental stress and anxiety made him feel that Henry might decide to just shoot him. That vibration of energy. A kind of constant vibration below the surface of Henry’s skin. Possibly on mood-altering drugs. Someone who might slip up along the way.
“Okay, I’ll take you,” Old Jim said, like it was still his decision.
But when they walked out front and Old Jim saw it wasn’t Suzanne waiting there, he stopped short so abruptly that Henry almost bumped into him.
The Medic.
Shit.
The Medic took his knife, peashooter, and truck keys. The Medic bound his hands behind his back. The Medic, dressed the same as at the lighthouse, smelling of boot polish, whispered in Old Jim’s ear as he came close, “You pushed me into the sea, sir. Jack said to tell you, ‘You should’ve gotten in the barrel.’ Like a good boy. Sir.”
So much for having a week before Jack found out. Now Jack was having Old Jim brought to the quarry, the back alley, the hidden place by the river. Now Old Jim was going to find out what that felt like, because while an amateur psycho might’ve botched the job, he doubted the Medic would.
The Medic got in on the driver’s side of Old Jim’s truck and Henry shoved him into the middle, so they were squeezed together like awkward livestock. The Medic was going to kill them both, and whether Jack had ordered that or the Medic had taken a special interest didn’t matter.
As the Medic pulled out, Old Jim said to Henry, “I heard you found something in the lighthouse. I can help with that. What did you find?”
Henry couldn’t help himself, not on his favorite topic. “I found what was hidden. It wasn’t hard. It escaped, but I held it, I had it in my hands. It saw me.”
“Shut up, Henry,” the Medic said, and the glint in his eye, the cold-blooded calculus of that look, made Old Jim panic.
“Listen, Henry, listen to me. This guy doesn’t care about the lighthouse. He doesn’t care about what you found there. He will—”
With surprising agility, the Medic turned in his seat and slapped Old Jim across the face. Old Jim slammed back against the seat, stunned, added to his injuries a dull ache and white dots in front of his eyes. An open hand from the Medic was the same as a fist.
“Shut up. Sir.”
The godforsaken dirt roads the Medic favored made tunnels in the darkness, the startling white of sand and dirt in the headlights ethereal, the trees curving over in a way that made them seem alive and interested in Old Jim’s fate.
“I follow dry riverbeds, / in peace, I make my way.”
He was going to die at Old Decomp. He hadn’t gauged the timing well enough, or the intensity of Henry’s hostility. He’d never make it to the secret room.
“Every stream will meet the sea, / and every sorrow will have its day.”
Old Decomp, how it had fallen on sad, hard times in the harsh glow of the headlights. The fire scars, black against the gray, in rough tongues and shredded triangles of damage. The suggestion of the top of the turret having blown off like a teapot kept on a stove too long.
The potholes that in memory had been of hideous regard held that aspect now, a kind of flicker around their edges in the peripheral vision of the headlights. Cass’s report kept rolling around in the back of Old Jim’s brain, as if that could help him now.
The meat barrel that was the Medic squashed out the side of the pickup and soon enough he and Henry were pulling him, protesting, out into the parking lot.
The Medic held him by the arm while Henry got a shovel out of the truck, tossed it on the ground at Old Jim’s feet.
“You’re going to dig up the money. Wherever it is.”
“No,” the Medic said. “He’s not. We will. He’s dangerous. Has no God.” Another one, like Commander Thistle.
“He’s going to kill you, Henry,” Old Jim said. “He’s going to kill us both.” There, he could say it, could imagine it. Somehow that was a relief.
Another blow to his ear that sent him off-balance—the Medic had that move down pat—and he managed to fall to his knees north of the potholes, in the gravel, restraints cutting into his wrists.
This was the kind of place, like the quarry so long ago, where he’d always expected to die. It wasn’t the worst way to meet an end. He liked how the insects chittered on regardless in the trees beyond the light. How he could hear a barred owl’s loopy mating call so clearly. How none of what lay beyond the headlights cared about what went down in the back lots of a bunch of shitty storage units.
He felt a pang of intense regret, of sadness, the cause of which lay somewhere in the trees beyond the light.
“What spot, sir,” the Medic said. “Where, exactly.”
“Right there,” Old Jim said, after a moment of pretending to orient himself. “Waterproof wrapped and one bag per pothole. Some of them.” Would that buy him any time at all?
“You said it was in the silo!” Henry, almost shrieking as if he were unnerved by the place, or the potholes. In the shadow and spotlight, the potholes appeared of uncertain depth and the fuzziness of the slight glow made the quality of the water dubious.
“No, I didn’t.” Always make the enemy unsure of itself.
“You did!”
The Medic reached down, picked up the shovel, threw it effortlessly into the middle of the potholes. It came to rest with a scraping sound that seemed to last too long.
“Dig it up, Henry.”
So the Medic was going to kill Henry first.
“What?” Henry truly didn’t understand.
“We start by believing him, Henry,” the Medic said, as if talking to a child. “Then we punish him if he’s lying.”
Henry hesitated, then nodded. Maybe he was thinking of all the times he’d appeared to be a psychopath to normal people. Maybe he was thinking that he should try doing what someone said for a change. Maybe he was just figuring out when to replace the Medic’s beady eyes with pebbles.
Henry walked into the headlights’ glare, into the middle of the potholes, holding the shovel. His head lay at an odder relationship to his shoulder than usual. He looked around as if having decided none of the potholes looked promising.
“Henry, when are you going to start digging?” the Medic asked.
Henry appeared flushed around the edges, as if about to break into tears. But he began to dig into the potholes, half-heartedly. First one, then a second, both times his shovel finding no purchase, sliding off the gravel. The third time, the flat sound of the shovel hit something hard, and he forgot his caution, elated, and got on his hands and knees, letting the shovel slide to the ground beside him.
A hand shoved into the hole came back empty.
“There’s nothing here. It’s just some sort of cement block in this one.”
“Try another one,” the Medic said patiently. But Old Jim standing beside him could hear the way the Medic’s breathing had become more rapid. The slight tensing of the Medic’s right hand.
Henry looked eager now, like he going to put some heart into it—like he would get up off his knees and pick up the shovel again. Old Jim even believed from the almost-happiness on Henry’s face that maybe he was wrong. Maybe they weren’t both about to die.
But Henry couldn’t get up off his knees. His knees appeared stuck to the ground, or was it the hand still in the pothole that had gotten stuck?
The way his long sleeve runneled downward like black wax into the hole.
How the sides of him rippled as they liquified and fell splashing and thick in streams and pools of nothing like flesh, to feed the holes, which throbbed and hummed green now, come alive in a way that made them seem like too-regular tidal pools on a sheet of rock next to the sea.
How Henry screamed and screamed, like he was being taken apart at the seams. How he spasmed and tried to pull free, but still he was stuck.
Old Jim’s veins turned to ice, the pain in his ribs ossified a century in a moment.
The Medic, mouth open, couldn’t stop watching, the sound coming out of his mouth indescribable but like some sort of huffing creature trying to catch its breath.
A wave of odor, swift and thick, roiled over them. Heavy, electric. That must be what you smelled when the remnants of a person became molecules in the air.
The smell made the Medic bend over in distress, taking two steps back, and, as he tried to straighten up, the man’s gaze swept over Old Jim, and even in that uncertain light and shadow, he could see that the Medic, too late, understood what Old Jim was going to do. Because he’d done it before.
He rammed into the Medic, drove him into the writhing, seething form of Henry, used the impact to fall to the side, clear of the potholes. Henry reaching for the Medic, as if the Medic could still pull him free even though it was too late for that, and how the Medic screamed where Henry’s liquid arms touched him, as if made of burning lava, and how the Medic kept falling into Henry, that never-ending abyss, until Old Jim couldn’t tell which part was the Medic and which part was Henry, and had to look away even as the screams of both began to die.
How Henry and the Medic continued to melt into the parking lot and wash away into the murky water of the holes like something escaping a prison. How the Medic, oddly, became impossible to discern first, and yet Henry still thrashed there for a time.
Like something returning home, all of him, forever, and in the last extremity there came only a gurgle from what was left of Henry’s face and then even that was gone, like something crumbling in the tide and swept out to sea.
A final sob, a final questing of the remains of one last waving hand, and then Henry was gone.
Old Jim stumbled to his feet, to the truck. He could not look back.
He would not look back.
There was a secret room in Dead Town. That’s what the photograph appeared to show, in stark black and white, a spectral outline, a possibility. How the tracker had lit up and shown him Dead Town, Main Street, not some desolate place out in the swamp. How that had to mean something other than a malfunction.
He’d thought about calling Jack when he drove by the Starlight Lounge, but what was the point? The place might be staked out, and Jack would just tell him to come back to Central and debrief, which Old Jim would never do. No bargain to be struck, not with Jack, and, he felt, no time left. The pathetic questions Old Jim would’ve asked Jack—why he had used something precious like the piano as a tool to harm him. Even as all the intricate details of his work for Central came back to him in that moment, like something he was letting go of. Like something too delicate to have been real.
Every rut and bump—he felt it in his body. His left knee wasn’t solid, even in the truck, with no weight on it. His ribs made him wheeze, but he told himself the injury lacked the sharp dagger of pain that meant he should find a hospital. He stank of fatigue and dirt and strange parking lots. Henry kept dissolving in the reflections on the windshield. The Medic kept appearing in the middle of Henry, falling into the oblivion of a terrible death.
By the time Old Jim got to the gate at Dead Town, he was in a mood to smash through with the truck. So he did. He didn’t want to walk far in the dark, so close to water.
Then he slowed the car to a crawl and cut the engine close to the dead meadow. He could’ve used Cass’s help, but some part of him liked being there alone, as if that’s the way it was supposed to be.
The night felt unoccupied to him as he crept down Main Street, the moon strong through reflecting clouds, so he could see without the flashlight. The oak branches created the shadows of monstrous figures across the ground, the moss shining silver off the limbs.
City Hall lay dead and dark in front of him soon enough, and he paused only to listen to the silence—cut through with the chitter of bats, the chirps of flying squirrels.
Old Jim put in his earplugs, in case of an earwig, a centipede, and then went inside. He climbed the stairs with a slowness that felt like delay but veered more toward caution, then negotiated the maze of lamp wires on the second floor until he once more stood in front of the middle alcove.
All was as before. He gently moved the chair to the side, as quietly as he could, and then to a position behind him—a barricade against the unexpected creeping up on him. The moonlight slanted through the windows but did not reach the alcove, so he turned on his flashlight to examine the wall.
It held such a history of abuse over the decades, seen that way, in that stripped-down light. The ravages, the indignities of time, of people passing through long ago. The way the wallpaper, and part of the wall, had rotted, dissolved, been idly pulled down in strips, probably by bored teens smoking cigarettes and telling tales about the Cavalry.
And in the middle of all that, the words and his true name.
The power of seeing that name felt distant now. Inert. Dead. It had done the job of finally unlocking him, and how he wondered if the Rogue had written that name other places—anywhere Old Jim might eventually encounter it. Or if it only existed here, and if so, how had the Rogue been sure he would see it?
Just a name he’d gone by once, no more or less real than “Old Jim,” and what name he would have at the end of all this he did not know.
With trembling hands, flashlight awkwardly positioned between chin and shoulder, he traced the line he thought he saw, remembering the latch at Old Decomp and thinking again about the idea that the Rogue knew Central’s tricks. Such a thin line between knowing and not knowing. Such a secret hiding in plain view. Central had mentioned no secret room in their report twenty years ago. Was it possible they’d missed it?
Somewhere low, as he bent to his knees and squatted, the line broke for an inch or two, down there in the shadows near where once, perhaps, an alligator had slept on the rug like a faithful dog. It broke just enough for his finger to find a depression, an indentation, and to know to both push and pull.
With a pop, a door appeared, pushed just an inch inward. No light shone out from within.
He stood up. He pushed the door open, just enough to enter, and he stepped inside like a thief, like the Jim of old.
The inside was a mirror of the outside room, just smaller, as if the walls here had been insulated with more foam, built with thicker wood and drywall. It had the same high ceilings, here made obvious by the lack of dangling lamps, and spread out before him lay a simplicity he had not expected, as if the Rogue had less complexity to him than in Old Jim’s imagination.
Across the center of the floor, rendered black and white by the flashlight’s gleam, he saw a series of what appeared to be glass jars over rough indentations in the floor, in the pattern Cass had shown him on the Old Decomp parking lot infrared scan. The exact same pattern. The X, the circle around it. The two spokes of the X held little coagulated piles in each declivity. The one closest to him revealed itself as twisted, burnt pieces of what could only be rabbit cameras.
The glass jars had an uncomfortably organic feel to them, and a cloudiness he did not like.
This debris meant nothing except that the Rogue had been a madman, that he had been the kind to believe in monkey’s paws and psychics, in perverse pentagrams and the occult. What practicality was there here? What purpose and use?
But Henry’s fate had taught him to be careful not just of who whispered in your ear but where you placed your feet.
He wrenched his gaze away from the crumpled rabbit cameras to examine the rest of the room. A ragged sleeping bag lay in the far left corner behind the devil’s floor display, dusty and ripped in places. The well of darkness in the right-hand corner came into focus as a vast watermark or fire scar. The indentations in the foreground had the look of suffering fire damage, so perhaps it was the same.
Almost as if tightrope walking, as if the pattern hid some secret depth, Old Jim made his way to the left-hand wall and what had been written there. Checking the far-right corner again before he turned his back on it. He did not like the curious discoloration of it, the vague circle of it, the sense he had that it might be as recent as yesterday or as old as the time of the last biologists huddling in the stairwell, awaiting rescue.
The sensation of lingering on words was peculiar now. He did not like to do it, to scrutinize, preferred to glance, to skim and move on, as if in the cursory slant of his regard he might be spared the power of whatever stared back at him from the letters.
Diagrams, too, featuring the pattern on the floor, with markings and words he could not decipher, as if the Rogue had written out complex formulas for use—but for what kind of use, Old Jim could not tell. Diagrams of energy and dispersal.
There was a pattern to some of the diagrams, a sort of improvisational quality he could sense, and much of it involved the Tyrant, the way the diagrams suggested jury-rigging, suggested that the Rogue had in some biological way used the cameras to create a symbiosis with the beast, and he didn’t know if he had used the right words in his head, but there came a kind of chill that was realization—that at some point the Tyrant might have become not the Rogue’s servant, but some kind of coconspirator. Either the Rogue or the Tyrant modified to accommodate that.
He felt like a caveman encountering the schematic for a spaceship.
In the end, the diagrams spilled off the wall and onto the floor, because there were three pages of further diagrams and notes and names and phrases, including notations to “protect” or to “kill.” He glanced at them, folded them, put them in his pocket for later. Someone wiser than him might have to interpret them.
He halted next in front of a sentence that felt like a confession: “I did not mean to do that to them.” No teenager had scrawled that on the wall. He could see where it repeated, faintly, ever lower on the wall, as if written in a frenzy.
Then, roving higher on the wall, where it might have required a ladder, Old Jim spied a list of names in three neat rows. About twenty names, maybe more, but not on a cursory glance the names of the Dead Town biologists. Craning his neck to try to read the names, he realized they’d been written where a person sitting against the far wall could read them with ease. Maybe start a morning there, contemplating just those names.
But he stopped trying to catalogue names when his flashlight flickered, realized with a curse it would give out soon, and he still had the opposite wall to examine as well. So he stepped past the bulky sleeping bag that looked like a bundle of clothing had been shoved inside and then the watermark to come close enough to the other wall to read it.
“It was winter then, late summer now?”
“The piano is different. Does it matter?”
“Why is there a Commander Thistle?”
Saul Evans’s name, in a delicate hand, and written next to it “the carrier must remain the same.”
Henry’s name.
Gloria’s name.
His name again, but expressed just as “Old Jim.”
Cass’s name, but not her last name. Just “Cass.” Her name had been circled and a greater circle created so that he stood back a step to almost the edge of the bizarre pentagram on the floor to take it in.
Gloria’s name at the center and Cass’s name on the periphery, with lines from “Old Jim” to Cass and Gloria, and from Saul Evans to Gloria only. With a question mark.
He was so puzzled that he didn’t feel alarm or dread. He just didn’t know what to make of it. Some secret op so vast and obscure and with so many moving parts perhaps the Rogue himself had lost the thread. Was that why there were question marks beside the diagram?
Gloria’s name surprised him to the point that he had to wrench himself out of reliving her visit to his house with the cookies, as if what she’d said to him could bring some essential secret out into the light.
Did this mean the Rogue had them all under surveillance? That the Rogue, in his own way, had been watching all of them. The strange behavior of the alligator tracker. The feeling of someone or something in the marsh.
Even through the earplugs, he thought he heard a sound like a drop of water falling into a deep well, felt a wetness on his face. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, like he did know but couldn’t think of it yet and a chill overtook him.
His pulse quickened and he had to stand still for a moment, to catch his breath, to let the resumed ache in his ribs subside. It would hurt much more if he started to hyperventilate.
The weight of the darkness from above felt oppressive in that moment and he realized with something like panic that he hadn’t swept his flashlight up that far. Now it felt like someone might drop on him from above. It felt urgently like someone was about to ambush him.
He didn’t want to see what might be there.
He had to see what might be there.
When he swung the light up, no one clung improbably to the ceiling, waiting to drop onto him, and all his breath, which he had been holding in without realizing it, came out at once.
Something registered at the edge of his peripheral vision. He swung the flashlight onto the sleeping bag. Had there been a movement?
It lay harmless, motionless. Empty?
Into the silence came again the odd drip of water, more urgent now, more as of a body rising from a swimming pool. Of a body pulling itself from a pool of water partway onto land.
He did not want to turn farther to his right. He did not want to be in the room anymore. His mind had gone blank with terror at the sound that should not be there, the sound so thick and weighted as of a very heavy person in the room with him. So that he was back at the bridge behind the Village Bar. In the dark. Feeling like he was alone. And this time he was, with no one to save him but himself.
But he turned anyway.
As there came such a rush of fast, immeasurable speed, as the blackness there raged into abundant and ferocious matter.
The Tyrant.
There was a way in which it was so real and immediate and yet also felt impossible and drawn out. Maybe he could not contain the feverish intensity of it and also the overwhelming beauty of it, how he could be reduced down to his bones by fear and yet also feel so alive.
For there, impossible, in the back of the room, a pool of water of limitless depth had appeared where the watermark had been, the edges stippled with the faint bioluminescence of specks of uncanny algae and duckweed.
While, in the center of that space, filling it, the great head of the beast known as the Tyrant had risen, the last living member of the Cavalry, to regard him with a carious yellow eye—erupting from those supernal waters toward him, the mighty head so armored in scales reflecting its own strange light, as of tarnished silver with the gleam shining through the whorls of that.
The way the bioluminescence at the edges of the pool leapt up as the Tyrant leapt up and intensified, so that it formed a collar around the great beast’s neck, and then fell away, exhausted by the velocity.
Old Jim screamed, dropped the flashlight, and it skittered across the pentagram, went out forever.
He could not escape. He was in the Tyrant’s jaws even as he turned to run. Wider and wider until the pressure held him entire, and he surrendered, lay limp as prey. He thought he was about to die, anticipated the rending of his flesh, the crack of his bones. But that moment did not come.
For the Tyrant had him gently in her jaws, just the slight febrile pricking of those teeth, held tight but not too tight, against his clothes, his skin, and that maw wide and deep enough to hold him secure as he crumpled into agreement with his fate, and he knew somehow, instinctually, to hold his breath as the Tyrant receded back into the pool, into that impossible body of water, that impossible impossible water, and together they disappeared down, down into the depths.
Then there was just the field of golden sunflowers across the wetlands, so rich and full of light as the Tyrant crushed her way through them, carrying him limp in her jaws, that his vision blurred before the intensity of them and he became unmoored from the moment and he was just a relic, an object moving through a field of gold, toward an unknown destination. No one had ever held him so intimately, so without judgment.
Time passed and he felt lulled by the sound of the reeds, the calls of birds, the blazing sun to match the blaze of sunflowers, until, finally, they came to the edge of an open space, amid the trees. A lake, a lagoon. A place so remote that perhaps no one had ever seen this vista as he saw it now.
The Rogue like a dead commander laid to rest, arms folded over his chest, floated in the clear water, a pale, wavery visage from the surface, wearing clothing that flickered and lingered with the light, the shadow, so that all but his face became the sand, the aquatic grasses, the dark blue of the deep water, the light blue of the water in the shallows.
The Tyrant deposited Old Jim on a divot of land that erupted from the edge of the lagoon, then she slipped into the water beside the Rogue. A green rowboat lay up against the divot, at Old Jim’s feet.
Shining from all sides, the surrounding halo of the swamp sunflowers at the lagoon’s edge, thousands of them, so was it the sun that made Old Jim squint or the flowers? While from below, the Tyrant came up out of the depths of the deep blue and embraced the Rogue, who subsided into her and was enraptured by her, and there was nothing of him that was not encircled by her and nothing of her that was not a part of him.
As the Tyrant brought the Rogue close, Old Jim saw that he had lost his camouflage, breathing and yet not breathing, the red brittle starfish of two bullet wounds in the chest. The Rogue’s eyes were closed. The Rogue was dead-alive. The Rogue was staring at him from the belly of the beast, and he wondered now whether, in that connection, he had an audience with the Rogue or with the Tyrant, and whether it mattered.
The Rogue’s left eye opened. That cryptic eye, that alien regard. Staring at an organism become other than a man, but sheltering in a man’s body. What was this new thing that looked so old?
There was the sensation of liquid glass passing through Old Jim and the shards sliding through his mind and then gone. And with the touch he knew Cass’s aim had been true. The Rogue had been mortally wounded and lay now in a kind of never-ending sleep or coma, surrounded by the flowers, yes, but beneath the surface, the dim glimmer, the glint of a darker gold and the same pattern across that shallow bottom, mapped to the secret room, to the parking lot of Old Decomp. And that the Rogue had known Old Jim would come, but not when.
He vomited up all the old words once more, reflexively, as he had at the bridge, but the Rogue just smiled wearily and waited for the assault to end, and by this Old Jim took the Rogue to mean that the force of those words held no sway now. That there had already been countermeasures, that the Tyrant, singing to him every night from the marsh even as Commander Thistle sang different words, had torn him from his dreaming state … into another.
Because the deep truth of it was that, somehow, impossibly, the Rogue was from Central or had originated with Central, long ago and far away.
“Will you tell me what this means?” Old Jim asked. “Please.”
But the Rogue without the Tyrant was nothing, he could see that now. This peculiar pale man who rested in such a repose that in the dead bliss on his face, Old Jim envied him the obliviousness of that.
Because Old Jim wanted, needed the same, and so that’s what he said to the Tyrant: “Let me go. Let me rest.”
The great beast roared, a thunderous, guttural sound steeped in swamp water, in the black reflecting water beyond the lagoon, the land beyond the sunflowers. This water that had protected her these twenty years and there was the unraveling or unspooling of some hidden mechanism and the Rogue fell away, down, down into the depths and from the Tyrant’s open, roaring mouth she breathed out upon Old Jim not words but a cloud of golden particles, so that for a time Old Jim believed he had been dusted with sunflower pollen.
He could see again the armies in the green light, and how some among their ranks bent over as they walked and appeared to be concentrating vast amounts of mental energy toward the strange light. That, on occasion, they cried out in pain, reared back, their eyes rolling into their heads—and quavered in their form, became light, became wave, re-formed as human. As wagons crunched along over an endless plain of bones.
And he gasped, because now he could see that they marched not toward two mountains, but toward ridges across a seabed where the water had receded as some force had expanded, and here, now, from the Rogue’s vantage he could see the remains of vast ships and how, at their back in the far distance, the remains of the lighthouse shone out.
The distant future, not the past, and the future was where the Rogue came from, a future unbearably uncertain, a place where everything was fluid because of what was coming, and if he had no place here, if he had no way to come to rest, the Tyrant told him, he might once he crossed that divide.
But first he had to do the thing he always had, would always do, and what did that mean, when you were a spy, and yet what was one more role to play. Because he hadn’t been supposed to find the secret room, the way the history went, because there shouldn’t have been a need for a secret room, for a Rogue, for an intercession at Dead Town. He could see that now as the dust that wasn’t dust overtook him. The dust was just another kind of language, and perhaps the biggest mistake he’d made was not believing the biologists’ accounts in a literal way.
Because earplugs hadn’t helped him at all, and that meant they couldn’t have helped the psychics on Failure Island any more than the past could ever defeat the future.
And he was falling away, as the Tyrant too now fell away, for the moment was coming and he could see the word for it, the words the Tyrant had given him: Area X. Nothing in the end could placate Area X. The land overwhelmed with a spark from the lighthouse, and what came out manifested under the ground and spread and even when it did not seem to spread it was spreading, and though the coast was still and silent, the people who had been there would still exist in some form, in some place. How this would always happen and yet it could happen in ways much worse. It could happen so that no one ever survived.
Yet Old Jim wasn’t going to get to the end of the mystery, though he’d almost run the gauntlet, been given the outlines. An agent of the future acting on the past, but lost in the variables, unexpected collateral damage, mortally wounded in the process of trying to change … what? Forced to go dormant, underground, to evade the enemy, to avoid the very fate he wished to change—the future colonizing the past, as if every moment had a permeability that could neither be denied nor controlled, like an outstretched hand with the water draining off the sides back into the river. A man walking beside a huge reptile in the reeds. With all of history on the horizon.
The Rogue faded fully into the gold, deep into the gold and the water, enfolded in the Tyrant, who laid him to rest with a gentle affection.
To sleep, to dream, to rise again, someday.
And what day would that be, and did it matter?
Old Jim wondered if he would be there to see it.
The green rowboat with scars of past encounters, with Old Jim in it, and the Tyrant leading him by pulling a rope at the prow. This mundane act, the tactile nature of the landscape around him, made the visions fall away before the crush of swamp sunflowers and the marsh reeds turned russet in the afternoon light. Light, every particle of it a miracle.
How the way the Tyrant moved through the water made the flat, wide nose of the boat nudge wavelets ahead with little gasps, how even through the grasping pockets of water that escaped around the sides of the hull there rose from the bottom the long green fingers of aquatic grasses.
There was nothing in his heart other than relief, of coming to some kind of end, to some kind of answer, even if it required a belief that he still had to muster.
The sun burning down, burning away, held him rapt in the aftermath—and then the sprawl of night sky, torn at by the pale tower of the lighthouse, releasing shapes like the retreat of birds and bats from Dead Town so long ago.
As the night dulled the marsh, the Tyrant sang out to him and soothed, the Winter Journey transformed, and what message did the alligator share with him? Saturated with the sight of the great beast, the sky, the water.
The pilot light of his fear had gone out, and he was neither candle nor flame, but only vessel, and the Tyrant sang words to him he half understood and must obey. What he scribbled on a piece of paper. How he was commanded. But he felt no terror or shame in that obedience, only a kind of sureness of vision. That this was necessary, that this was right.
For, in time, he would shed his self, drift down deep, the bridge a shadow above him, become nestled in the water and the reeds, staring up at a well of distant golden light, soon infiltrated by a green tint.
He was just water, moving through a long tunnel formed by the curving reeds, and at the end of that tunnel, which was time, lay the Tyrant once again, and the Rogue, and perhaps Cass, too, and perhaps she would be the one who extended a hand, told him, “You made it,” and pulled him out of the water into a new world.
When the boat reached the edge of firm land and a trail back toward the Village, he didn’t look back, heard only the sounds of a massive alligator dragging herself into the heart of the swamp.
As he found the road to the bar, a peculiar light made the beacon of the lighthouse beam seem to be tearing through a veil, a conspiracy of atoms that would not obey the normal rules. The black sky, when the beam moved on, a vast wall and a field of stars, and the sky-stars blurred out as of something moving through and past them.
Soon enough, a little car moved slowly past him: Henry and Suzanne headed to the lighthouse, pale faces in the dark. They did not see him or he was no longer something that could be seen, and there came from somewhere a fading urge to catch up and end Henry a second time, along with so little surprise at seeing him alive.
In the bar, he did the things he knew they expected, with precision, and he said the things he usually said, and then he sat down at the piano. There was nothing left in his head now, except what burgeoned beneath the surface, what the Rogue had put there to save him, to change him.
The real Cass, at ten, at the piano, protesting her incarceration on the bench at first, but then banging the keys with him. “Don’t stop,” he was saying or she was saying. Or it’ll be over. Just don’t stop. Just keep going.
There was the signal and there was the sound. The signal he had committed to memory, both the rage of it and the distress beacon to the future buried in it by the Tyrant, and that was not his concern as the shadows began to overtake the bar. As the bar darkened and there came a great thrashing and screaming.
The sound would be love as long as he was able. Love for them both—the false daughter and the real one. For what did it matter which had abandoned him and which had chosen to stay by his side for a time, or why? He could not hold on to the grief of that, wanted only the joy.
All the ways he was being released into the world and the world released into him. The simple relief of that even as his fingers came apart at the piano, the wound in the world that kept attracting the candle, the flame, the vessel. The way he could be in all three places at once now—the present that had annihilated him, the past that had never left him, the future that held him still and trembling like a bird caught in a biologist’s net.
He could see Cass, his daughter, so clearly. He could see the accident, the aftermath, what they had done to him, and the way he could not go back and fix anything, but at least he saw it now, understood it now. The cruelty of Jackie telling him that his failure on a mission had been his false daughter’s. That place by the searing blue sky, the searing sea where he’d betrayed them all and never been right again.
Following the green light, joining the army that labored there, the Exiles there now, too, staring back at him, waiting for him to catch up … or that’s how it seemed to him, as if he had risen above the bar, the marsh, and was leaving that behind because there was no world now. And there had never really been, and Old Jim was just someone Central had pulled apart and remade.
And yet, in some way, some human way, he had still been himself, a self, underneath it all. Underneath it all, he had survived, somehow.
Here are the keys.
This is the music.
Let the music mean something.
Just do as I do.
It doesn’t need to be perfect.
Nothing is perfect, ever. Nothing.
I forgive you.
Can you forgive me?
There shall be a flame that knows your name.
But, perhaps, he knew its name, too.