Steal the Lightning Page 19

  I had seen her do her act at Big Hollow, with Cleary’s security. This time, though—this was different.

  “It’s personal,” she breathed. “Preston’s expecting me . . .”

  They put her on hold. They put her on hold for ten minutes.

  No one came back to her.

  She hit end call.

  “Promising,” she said. “They asked me what my business was.”

  “I’d ask the same! Jesus—”

  She smiled, tucking her phone away.

  “I did acting classes, once upon a time,” she said. “I thought it’d be good for opera.”

  “Acting what, for God sake?”

  “Shakespeare. Ibsen. You know? But I was pretty broke, and I knew this girl, did film and TV work, and she got me a few auditions. Never made any money. But—you know. Young black woman, total unknown—two kinds of parts, basically. Maybe you can guess which that one was? If you try hard?”

  Chapter 51

  Tell Him It’s Copeland

  There was nothing very flashy about Second Eden.

  The frontage would have fitted any middle range hotel. The Johnny Appleseed cartoon leered down at us in bas-relief, wielding an apple the size of my fist.

  I asked her, “Ready?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  “You’re OK? I’m not being patronizing, honest. But I think we’re close to a god here. If it sparks off any, you know, any reaction, or you don’t feel right—”

  “Chris,” she said. She took her phone and makeup from her purse. “I’ve been acting like I’m this guy’s entertainment for the night. I think I ought to touch my face up. Don’t you?”

  “Well, you probably shouldn’t take the role so seriously . . .”

  “Jealous?” She dabbed a lipstick at my nose, and I ducked back. “Maybe I’m a method actor? Thought of that?”

  Then she was business-like at once. “All right. Let’s get this done, OK?”

  Cool air blew across the lobby. I hesitated, relishing the AC, taking in the new surroundings: soft lights, pop music, and rich, deep carpeting . . .

  A woman lay upon the floor, some ten yards in. She wore a pink dress and her hair was streaky-blond. She looked as if she’d fainted, but no one went to help her. People just stood around, chattered, stared at her.

  Angel said, “Hey,” and quickened her pace.

  As we approached, though, the woman seemed to wake. She sat up, tipped her head back, ran her fingers through her hair. She looked about twenty, twenty-five; a model or a showgirl, possibly. She stretched, yawned, and snaked onto her feet. Then, without a glance towards the onlookers, she turned, quickly and deliberately, and walked into the wall.

  There was a tiny phut sound, like a bulb blowing.

  She disappeared.

  The same instant, her image flashed back into life, just as we’d first seen her, supine, sleeping, sprawled across the carpet. She sat up, threw her head back . . .

  “It’s holograms,” a man was telling his wife. “Like Star Trek, see? They got projectors—” He cast about, then pointed. “There, see?”

  “That’s a security camera,” she said.

  “No, no. It’s a projector. See?”

  We left them arguing—them, and the ghost-woman, and walked into the gaming hall.

  Casinos don’t have clocks. Nothing to tell you if it’s night or day. Time shrinks or stretches, moves in rhythm to your mood. It’s unreal, trippy: bursts of color, noises everywhere . . .

  But there was something else going on here. I caught it, after a moment: little movements in the shadows, a flicker in the corner of the eye. Things you couldn’t look at straight on. A scent of lemon and ammonia, gone almost the moment you acknowledged it. A whisper, cutting through the din of slot machines and disco tunes, a voice that seemed to say something but you could never afterwards remember what.

  “Check your reader.”

  Anybody near would probably have thought that we were looking at our phones.

  “Jesus, Chris—”

  Readings were up. Almost off the scale.

  I went over to the welcome desk, put on a little swagger, hands in pockets, shoulders rolling. The fellow working there looked young and well-scrubbed, like he was just about to leave for church.

  “I’m here to speak to Preston McAvoy,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if you let him know that I’ve arrived. Preston McAvoy,” I said again, and handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Tell him it’s Copeland. Copeland, from the Registry . . .”

  I did my poshest voice.

  It was meant to sound like Churchill, but it came out more like Basil Fawlty.

  “The name again, sir?”

  So I spelled it, and he typed it into the computer, and of course it drew a blank, and I asked for him to call his supervisor, which he did, and then—because I didn’t actually want to see his supervisor, just let him know that I was there—I walked away.

  Angel said, “Vegas is a big place, Chris.”

  “Trust me, he’s here.”

  I watched the banks of slot machines, gaudy engines with names like Robin Hood and Goldenville and Da Vinci’s Diamonds, and I watched the players, drawn here regardless of the off-the-Strip location, the lack of gimmickry and show-business pizzazz.

  But I was missing something. There was something that I wasn’t seeing, something in the mood, the atmosphere, the very function of the place. Or if I saw it, then I didn’t understand . . .

  A young man, one foot up on the machine, finger tapping in a kind of spasm, beating out a code. A woman, motionless with concentration. An older man, hunched forward, his face just inches from the screen. He looked like he was going to fall asleep but had to play one final game—and then another, and another . . . It was after midnight. Every single slot was occupied. Every one. Lights flashed and burst: a heart pulsing an endless stream of colors, and over to the right, a big, bright star, and Jagger’s cartoon mouth, and after that an arch through to the next room and the hanging jewel of lights over the blackjack tables, and still more activity, and I could feel the buzz, everyone amped up, and fizzing with adrenaline.

  The taste of metal in my mouth.

  Lemon. Ammonia . . .

  I caught it, and I wasn’t even playing.

  I heard drum rolls and a waterfall of fake piano notes, a trumpet-whoop to mark a minor win—then, for maybe two minutes, the machines were silent. There was only background music, oldies, Clapton and Diana Ross.

  That jogged my memory.

  I’d had a summer job at SkyLux Lighting, years ago, when I was growing up. Factory work. To keep us going, they’d play pop music, but only at specific times: an hour, when we first arrived, a half hour after lunch, and then a final hour before we all went home. Calculated, I suppose, to maximize production.

  To Angel, I said, “It’s a factory.”

  These bright, fantastical machines, manned around the clock, kept going on a fuel of alcohol and cigarettes, panic and yearning—there was purpose here. Intent. No clocks, no breaks, no knocking off. The sheer force of concentration was phenomenal. I saw people sitting rigid, frozen, utterly bound up—

  “This isn’t normal.”

  “I know.” She looked around. “It’s like midnight in the crack house. Don’t you get that feeling? You try and peel these guys off of the slots, they’d probably leave skin behind.”

  “It’s what every business wants to be. Gambling as religion . . .”

  One of the housekeeping staff went by, pushing a cart bigger than she was. The cart, like her uniform, was dark blue, blending with the shadows. Even garbage collection was kept unobtrusive, so as not to break the spell.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, I’m trying to find Mr. Preston McAvoy . . .”

  I started it in earnest, then. I asked bar staff, I asked croupiers, I even asked security, though I was careful to be specially polite with them.

  I asked anyone, and everyone, and told them all exactly who I was.

 
; “Copeland, I’m Registry . . .”

  It took me two hours, four drinks, and ten bucks in the slot machines, but finally, I got an answer.

  Chapter 52

  God of Air

  It was a good suit, but he didn’t wear it well. He was nearly as wide as he was tall; he looked like the flank of a mammoth, carved off and remade as a human being. A full black beard covered his lower face. The suntan didn’t quite hide scarring on his temple, and the cheekbone that side had been broken and not set level. His face had taken damage, and his fists, by the look of them, had doled a fair bit out, as well. He slouched towards us, nodded to me, to Angel. “Ma’am.”

  “ID?” he asked me.

  He wasn’t impolite; just far too jaded to consider saying please. I handed him my passport and he took about as much interest as the cop had in Big Hollow. Angel proffered her card but he waved it away. “No trouble, ma’am.” To me, “You have employment ID?”

  I had. I had a card that named me as a specialist in power conservation for the home and workplace, which I was not. I had a card which named me as an expert in alternate energy supplies, which I was also not. But I played this one up-front. I gave him my Registry ID and this, at least, he took some interest in.

  “Mr. Copeland.” He walked away, taking my ID with him. I glanced at Angel. She shrugged, slipped from the bar stool, and we followed.

  “So how come he doesn’t want my docs?” she said. “Kind of insulting, don’t you think?”

  There was a door marked staff. He opened it. I was expecting an office, but it was little more than a cupboard. A computer terminal, scanner and printer had been stashed inside. A suit, wrapped in plastic, hung from a hook on the wall. He scanned my ID, flipped it over, scanned again. His fingers were like dish mops on the buttons. Then he handed me the card. We waited. Presently his phone rang. He answered it, grunted a few times, and hung up.

  After that, we followed him across the gaming hall. He was so wide there were times he had to turn sideways to slip between the crowds and the machines, but he moved with a surprising speed.

  We were near the kitchens now. There was an elevator door. No call button, only a keypad, which he tapped, blocking the number from my sight. Then he took his phone, and glanced at it.

  “ID checks out, by the way,” he said. “That’s why I’m going to show you this. If not, you’d be looking at the back alley now.”

  Angel said, “I didn’t catch your name, sir.”

  “No,” he said. “You didn’t.”

  We went up. It took a few moments. No one spoke.

  When the door opened, I looked for a floor number. There wasn’t one. We were in a small, windowless lobby, across from a large door. The door had a shiny, copper-colored surface but was pocked and tarnished, thick with dust. There were wall lights to either side, casting a thin, pale twilight over everything. In the corner stood a folding chair and a table with a Starbucks cup on it. There was debris on the floor. Parts of machinery, old sandwich wrappers. Tiling underneath, checked red and white.

  The elevator door slid shut.

  “I feel it, Chris.”

  “Me too.”

  There was a metal taste down in my throat. I felt the air on my face, sniffing, exploratory, tasting my skin, my sweat. Examining me.

  I had a creeping feeling on the back of my neck.

  “You’ve got a fucking god.”

  The man’s face was impassive as a stone. He moved towards the big door, flipped up the cover on the keypad.

  “It’s not contained, is it?”

  A glass ashtray, left amid the dust and debris on the floor, began to edge its way across the tiles. Shadows shifted in the corner. The thing was awake, responding to our presence.

  I said, “Call the elevator.”

  “Elevator’s right there. But you strike me as a curious man, Mr. Copeland. Thought you’d like to see this.”

  He keyed a number in, wrenched at the door handle. The door stuck. He put his weight against it and it shuddered inwards, scraping something on the floor. A length of metal edging had been caught beneath it. The big man kicked at it till it came loose.

  We were looking at a large room, once a meeting place or reception hall, perhaps. The molded ceiling was now cracked and at the far end it had bellied down as if about to break. Windows were boarded up. Several large machines stood in the corners. I didn’t know exactly what they did, but I’d seen something like them back in GH9, and again in Chicago, last year. But these looked beaten up, ramshackle. The nearest had been bludgeoned with considerable force: the front panels were bent, the display screen dead, the chassis scratched and dented. Others showed loose wires, and one, a poorly-fitting hood, as if bolted on from some unrelated mechanism. There were cables taped across the floor, looped in a cloverleaf. The pattern wasn’t adequate, I saw that right away. Whatever was in there, it was complex, and it was powerful. And the pattern had to match that: to trace its lines of strength, to map its contours and react accordingly. A harsh white ceiling light made everything look like a child’s drawing, deep, black shadows under bright, blank surfaces. The air began to move again.

  I said, “We need to go.”

  The big man said, “Relax. It’s an empty room.”

  “It’s anything but.”

  He took a few steps forward, raised his hands.

  “You see it. You look.”

  Dust and small items began to move across the floor. Old screws, a pocket lighter, pieces of wood, a dusty copy of the Appleseed picture—in motion and assembling into patterns, like iron filings caught in a magnetic field.

  “You’ll start hearing things now, pretty soon,” he said. “It likes to see us. It likes it when we visit.”

  “I know it does. I work with this stuff.”

  “Good. Then you should know that things aren’t going how they should here.”

  He looked at me directly then. There was a faint lift of the eyebrow—the closest thing I’d yet seen to expression.

  “You people fix this, right?”

  “I can take away the problem for you, if you want.”

  “‘Take away.’ That doesn’t sound like what we want.”

  And I heard it now: high up, grating on my nerves. Vibrations in the back of my skull, resonating with the sound. I dug my fists into my pockets, squeezed hard. Behind me, Angel drew a breath.

  Dust rose in shifting, intricate formations. White light caught it, made it seem a solid thing, yet shifting, like an ocean. It glittered, sparked. I felt something on my foot, and looking down, I saw a silver nail, dragged in the wake of lighter debris. It rolled across my shoe and inched along the floor, moving as if in stop-motion, inch by inch.

  “System’s set to power the building, and it does. Except there’s trouble.” The man displayed one meaty palm. “Things happen, aren’t meant to happen. It needs . . . ah, hell, I don’t know what it needs. Insulation, I guess. Something like that.”

  The dust had risen to his knees. He stooped a little, and with one hand batted at his trouser legs.

  Something howled, an awful, electronic feedback. There was an odor—sickly, chemical. I said, “We’re going now. Please open the elevator door.”

  The man looked up. Was it an act, this unconcern? Or was he genuinely unaware what he was dealing with? As we backed out, the light flipped off. He seized the heavy door and pulled it shut. I heard the lock click into place. A moment later, something boomed against the other side. I saw the door shake, and a little puff of dust fell from its surface.

  “Gonna carry on like that an hour or more,” he said. “Should quiet after. Most times, anyhow.”

  He called the elevator. The door slid back immediately. The lift had been there, waiting, like he’d said.

  We started down. Another thunderclap roared down the shaft.

  I told him, “You’ve got trouble.”

  “We have an inconvenience. I was hoping you could help us settle it.”

  “Where’s Prest
on McAvoy?”

  “There is no Preston McAvoy.”

  “Johnny Appleseed. Whatever you want to call him.”

  “Johnny Appleseed. Now, that’s a character in funny books, uh-huh?”

  “You know who I mean.”

  We walked towards the entrance hall.

  “No, Mr. Copeland, I’m afraid I don’t. But I hope that you’ve enjoyed your visit with us, and I hope that we’ll be seeing you again, when you have something we can use. In the meantime—have yourself a good night.”

  He handed me a card: black, embossed with gold. I glanced at it, hoping for some handy revelation—a name I knew, perhaps even Appleseed, or McAvoy—but of course, it was nothing of the kind.

  “Mr. Shwetz?” I called out after him.

  He didn’t look around.

  “Everybody wants you.”

  “Yeah. I’m dead popular.”

  Partway along the street I stopped and turned. I could get a view up the front of Second Eden, all the way to the top floor, if I craned my head back.

  I expected the roof to blow off. Or something like that, anyway.

  It didn’t. But as we headed back to the hotel, I was pretty sure that half the people on the street weren’t really there. They flickered in and out, visible for three, four seconds, in mirrors and through windows and showing up just for a moment in the shadow of a passing car, then vanishing, dissolving into nothingness again; and I could feel the energy, flowing out into the town, draining off into the world like water down a gutter.

  “Second Eden,” Angel said. “They should have read what happened to the first.”

  Chapter 53

  Message from a Dead Man

  I woke up in the dark.

  There was a sound, not music, this time, but something small, familiar. I struggled for a moment, trying to recall it from the fog of sleep.

  Phone.

  My phone had buzzed.

  Two days ago, I’d e-mailed Preston McAvoy. It was one thing, finding his Registry account still active. But I’d put that down to corporate inefficiency; like most big companies, the Registry could get a little ragged round the edges.