Written in Fire

CHAPTER 13

Soren stared.

His cage was made of metal tiles eighteen inches across. Six squares high, six wide, and ten long. The floor was concrete. A metal door replaced exactly ten tiles.

Each tile was enameled glossy white and pierced by a lattice of pinholes, which were the only source of light. A constant pale illumination glowed behind them, never dimming or brightening. The only change occurred when gas flowed through the holes from all directions at once, and he would find himself in a sudden swirling mist, like flying through a sunlit cloud.

When that happened there was little choice but to breathe steadily and wait.

Twice each day a tray with a sludgy soup of proteins and amino acids slid through a slot in the door. The tray was attached, and the only eating utensil was a wide paper straw. A plastic toilet fixed to the floor took his waste. Doubtless he was being watched, his vitals recorded by sensitive instruments hidden behind the metal tiles.

The first occasion the gas had flowed was after he had refused food several times in succession. He’d awakened on his bunk (two tiles wide by four long), still naked, a raped feeling in his throat from the scrape of the tube they must have used to feed him. In several other instances, he had clearly been bathed. On one memorable recent occasion, slight chafing around wrists and ankles suggested that he had been strapped down while unconscious, and so perhaps taken somewhere, although there was no way to be sure.

Soren had sought nothingness most of his life. But a blank and unchanging cage was not nothingness. It was his curse made physical. An ocean of time to drown in. No books, no window, no visitors, not even a spider that he might become. His memories were largely not a place to retreat. There had been a few moments of true contentment or even happiness, and he treasured them, striving to recall every detail of a chess game with John, or the way sunlight shadowed the soft hollow of Samantha’s neck. But the mental movies had been screened so many times the colors were fading, and he feared losing them altogether. He could exercise, and meditate, and masturbate, but that left the bulk of the hours untouched.

So he counted.

The sum could be calculated: the pinholes were in offset rows of 48, totaling 2,304 holes per tile. 182 tiles meant 419,328 holes. Minus the 3,456 blocked by his bunk, that left 415,872 holes.

The number itself held no meaning. Its purpose was to provide a benchmark. A way to recognize that he had erred, had missed a pinhole or double-counted one. At which point it was time to return to the beginning. Like Sisyphus, endlessly rolling his boulder up a mountain in Tartarus, endlessly losing it, endlessly beginning again.

Camus had written that one must imagine Sisyphus happy, for his absurd struggle mirrored the efforts of humanity to find meaning in a world devoid of it, and thus the struggle itself must be enough. But Camus had never been in this cage. Neither the physical one nor the one in Soren’s head, where his curse made one second into eleven. With nothing to separate one day from another, it was difficult to say exactly how long he had been here, but perhaps two weeks of “real” time.

Almost six months to him. Six months spent counting pinholes.

So when the door began to move, he did not believe it. Hallucinations had come before. But when he turned his head to look, the door did not snap soundlessly shut. Instead, it crept farther open. It took nearly twenty of his seconds to reveal the man standing behind it. For a full minute of his time they simply looked at one another.

Nick Cooper said, “Hi.”

Cooper had tried to prepare himself.

When civilians said that, they meant taking a deep breath and clenching their fists. But the trick was to go much farther. To imagine the possibilities, good and bad, in detail. To visualize them the way astronauts prepare for a space walk, spending weeks considering what to do if this gasket leaked or that valve failed. It was a method that had served him well in the past, a way to walk into a room already knowing what he might face and how to respond to it.

But no visualization exercise could have prepared him.

The first surge was fear. Raw, primal, deep-chest fear. On some level far below his control, his subconscious mind, his very cells, recognized Soren as the man who had killed him, had slid a carbon-fiber blade into his heart. Even having survived, even having fought back, even having won, the initial fear had a horrifying purity to it.

Quickly, though, other emotions swirled in. Fury at this monster who had attacked his son, had nearly killed his beautiful boy, one of exactly two things Cooper had created that he knew beyond a doubt improved the world. A dirty sense of power which tickled the lizard part of his brain that wanted to root and relish and dominate. A certainty that Soren knew something that could help him, and a voice in his head reminding him of the stakes.

Least expected and least welcome, pity. Something in him was sorry for the shell that stood naked and trembling.

“Hi.” He closed the door and set down the chair. It was just a simple ladder-back, but it looked wildly out of place in this pale prison. Which was part of the reason he’d brought it, of course. A scuffed wooden chair, the kind of furniture no one noticed, and yet here it seemed almost to have its own gravity. He trailed a hand along the slats, then sat down.

“I bet,” Cooper said, “you never expected to see me again, huh?”

Soren just stared. His whole manner had a reptilian blankness to it. It was how he’d beaten Cooper in the first place. Everyone else’s body betrayed their intentions, but Soren’s perception of time meant that he essentially had no intentions.

Remember the restaurant. One second you’re having breakfast with your kids, the next there’s screaming and a rain of blood, and this man showing the same lack of expression as he analyzes the motion of a second bodyguard and puts his knife where it will do the most damage.

He killed two guards, bisected your hand, and stabbed you in the heart, and the only time you knew what he was going to do was when he put Todd in a coma.

“Do you know where you are?”

Nothing.

“I realize that you’re not exactly a people person,” Cooper said, “but the whole interaction thing works better if you use your words.”

Nothing.

Cooper leaned back and crossed a leg at the knee. He studied the man. Skin pale and pulse steady, though elevated from the readings he’d noticed on the monitor outside. No tremor in the hands. No widening in the pupils.

Could he have lost track of reality? This place would be enough to drive a normal man mad, much less Soren.

There was a scar on his left shin, healing but still shiny. No surprise; the last time they’d met, Cooper had stomped the leg with enough force to snap the tibia and drive it through muscle and skin. Adopting a smug smile, he gestured at the scar. “I see they fixed you up.”

The muscles around Soren’s eyes contracted, and his nostrils flared. Just the tiniest flicker, but enough for Cooper to catch, and he pushed his advantage. “How about the hand? Jerking off lefty since I broke all the fingers on your right?”

Again, the quick flash, there and then gone.

“I know you understand me,” Cooper said. “The lights might be off, but you’re home. So let’s make this easier. Take a seat.”

For a moment, the man stood still. Then he moved to the edge of the bunk and sat down. Each play of muscle was precise, each motion graceful.

Sure they are. He’s got eleven times longer to make them.

“So. Where to begin.” Cooper laced his hands behind his head. “You’re in New Canaan, and I have to tell you, every day since I kicked your ass has been better than the one before. First, the Holdfast and the United States came to an agreement, and the army left without firing a shot. Then, as a display of good faith, Erik Epstein put his rather formidable resources to work. Last Thursday John Smith was shot and killed.”

Though he’d been projecting cocky ease, Cooper’s eyes never left Soren’s face. He saw the pulse jump, saw the intake of breath, saw the faint flush in his cheeks and the sheen of his eyes. For a moment, he looked almost human. Gotcha.

It had been one thing to know that Smith and Soren had gone to the same academy, to hear Shannon describe them as friends. But there was no telling what that actually meant in Soren’s case. Finding out was the main point of this exercise.

And now you have. Turns out, this stone-eyed psychopath does care about someone.

Let him sit with the loss of that for a while.

“There’s more, a lot more, but you’re getting the general trend. Crisis averted, revolution over, much rejoicing. At this point, we’re basically mopping up. I tell you so that you can consider your position.” There was the temptation to keep pushing, but basic interrogation technique said to let the guy stew, and that would only be more powerful here. Cooper stood and stretched. “We’ll talk more. When we do, you can help me or not. Honestly, I don’t much care—but then, I’m not the one in a cage.” He scooped up the chair and stepped toward the door.

“Wait.”

The voice came from behind, and it was only in that moment that Cooper realized he’d never actually heard the man speak before. He turned. “Yeah?”

“Do you know what I do in my cage?”

“Not much, from what I’ve seen.”

“I relive moments. Again and again. Moments like you dying.” Soren’s voice was flat. He stared with blank eyes. “Beside the broken son you couldn’t protect.”

Cooper smiled.

Then he spun from the hips, bringing the chair up as he did, the legs of it cracking into Soren’s face. The force knocked the man sideways, his hands whipping back in a failed attempt to catch himself. He tumbled off the bunk and hit the ground hard as Cooper stepped forward, bracing the chair in both hands and raising it high, already visualizing the maneuver, a brutal downward stab, and another, and another, the solid wooden legs tearing the skin of Soren’s neck open and crushing his trachea, spasms and panic soon fading to nothing but the twitches of a—

Soren has a T-naught of 11.2.

It took you maybe half a second to swing that chair. Which would have felt like six seconds to him.

That’s an eternity in a fight. But he didn’t move.

And he’s not moving now.

—dead man.

“No.” Fingers clenching, teeth aching, Cooper made himself take a breath. He stepped back. Slowly, without turning away, he moved toward the door. “It won’t be that easy.”

On the ground, Soren rocked up on an elbow. Spat blood.

And staring right into Cooper’s eyes, began to laugh.

As the door locked behind him, pneumatic bolts thunking into place, somehow Cooper found himself face-to-face with Soren.

The monster had escaped.

Cooper slid into a fighting stance, readying the chair for a blow—

It was a hologram. A high-resolution tri-d projection captured by the hundreds of tiny cameras mounted behind the cell’s walls. In it, Soren laughed soundlessly as he wiped blood from his nose.

The control room was typical of the new-world thinking that defined the Holdfast. No bars, no windows, no need for guards. Banks of monitors displayed the vital statistics of not only Soren, but the half dozen other men and women held here. Each facet of the octagonal room held a door to another cell, and outside it, a detailed holographic projection of the person within. They paced, did pushups, stared. One wall of the room was glass, and beyond it lay a fully stocked medical bay, including a robotic surgery prosthetic, a dozen clenched arms hanging from the ceiling like a spider on a line. The whole thing was run remotely—food trays filled and delivered, environment controlled, gas administered, surgery undertaken, all by entering commands in a computer.

As Cooper watched, Soren returned to his bunk and lay back down, his expression indecipherable. Beyond the image, there was a flash of purple.

“Go ahead and hit the holo,” Millie said, brushing vivid bangs to cover one eye. “If you want to.”

Cooper took a breath, let it out. “I’ll pass.”

“You could go to my game room. Erik had it designed. It’s the same resolution, but the characters are controlled by a predictive network. You move and the system makes the holos react. He’ll fall, bleed, scream. You won’t actually feel the chair hit, though.”

“Haven’t figured out how to do that yet, huh?”

“They have,” she said. “But it takes a brain implant. You run a cable into it, and it makes you see and feel everything like it’s real. It’s pretty cool, but I don’t like the idea of something in my brain.”

“Me either.” And I shouldn’t have let Soren into mine. Cooper set down the chair, dropped into it, and rubbed his eyes. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I liked it.”

He looked up, surprised. Superficially, she looked like an average eleven-year-old girl. Four and a half feet tall, baby cheeks, rounded shoulders, coltish legs with knees together. The purple hair was unusual, but it was clearly a distraction—look at my hair, not at me—and the bangs gave her cover to retreat behind.

Her eyes, though, were something else. Something older. It was in the way she examined things. There was none of the self-conscious diffidence of a little girl.

And that’s a tragedy, Cooper thought. Because no matter what she’s seen, no matter that her insights help the world’s richest man shape the future, she is still a little girl who should be playing with toys, not diagnosing monsters. He saw a flicker of a smile on her lips, and got the sense she was picking up on his thoughts. To change the subject, he said, “You liked it?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand, why would you—”

“Because you’re pure.”

He laughed before he could stop himself. “Sorry, Mills, but pure is about the last thing I am.”

She sat down on the opposite chair, pulled her knees up, and wrapped her arms around them. A little girl’s posture, but like her eyes, the smile she gave him belonged to an older woman. It was a look that said, Aww, aren’t you adorable. I’m going to bat you around for a while. “Why did you hit him?”

“I lost control.”

“No, then you would have killed him.”

“I almost did. Until I realized he was trying to goad me into it.”

“Of course he was,” she said, “but you still want to. It wasn’t just anger. I could see it. You want to kill him because he hurt your son. Because he’s hurt a lot of people. But also because you feel sorry for him.”

“You were here to read him,” Cooper said drily, “not me.”

“I can’t. The way he sees the world, I don’t . . . it’s like looking at someone through a kaleidoscope. What I see isn’t right. It’s warped and blurry and just wrong.” She shrugged. “So I read you instead.”

That was a sobering thought. A reader of Millie’s ability observing him in an emotionally charged scene like that one, well, she’d have all of his true secrets: the impulses he knew he should hate himself for having, the urges that dwelt in the dark places, even the part of him that relished the role he’d just inhabited.

The thought, a voice from his subconscious, shocked him. Is that true? Are you comfortable with being a torturer?

Because you shouldn’t kid yourself. That’s what happens next. Soren knows something that will help you find John Smith. You’re as certain of it as you are of the fact that he won’t willingly tell you.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“Is it?” He shook his head. “I didn’t enjoy being the person I was in there. Most of me didn’t, anyway. I know why it’s important, and I’ll do worse if I have to. But I don’t know that it’s okay.”

“Why?”

Her question didn’t sound entirely sincere; it had a leading tone, like it was meant to instruct. Coming from an eleven-year-old, that should have been irritating, but Millie wasn’t just any kid, and he decided to answer honestly.

“Because it’s not his fault. He didn’t chose to be born a freak. He never really had a chance. Everything he is, it’s because of his gift. It put him outside the rest of us, forever.”

As he said it, he realized that the same thing applied to her.

And then he saw her reading him thinking that. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“It’s not. I hate this for you. You deserve a normal life.”

For a long moment, neither said anything, then Millie ran a hand through her bangs, let a purple curtain fall between them. From behind it, she said, “I come here sometimes. To watch him.”

“Soren? Why?”

“Because I can’t read him. Sometimes the voices from everyone else, even the people who care about me . . .” She blew a breath. “It’s quiet here. Quiet, but I’m not alone.”

He let that lie amidst the hum of computer fans and the motion of holograms. Finally, he checked the time. “I’m sorry, Millie. I have to go.”

“Oh?” She looked at him. “Going to see Shannon, huh?”

He nodded.

“Are you going to tell her you had sex with Natalie?”

Cooper opened his mouth, closed it. Screened a dozen responses. “You think that’s a mistake?”

“How would I know? I’m eleven.”

He laughed, stood up. Put a hand out as if to touch her, a tentative move, not sure she’d welcome it. When she didn’t flinch, he gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Don’t stay too long, okay?”

“Sure.”

“By the way, you were right. I do feel sorry for Soren.”

“Even though he hurt your son.”

“Yes.” He shrugged. “It won’t stop me. But it doesn’t make what I have to do okay.”

“You see?” she said. “Pure.”