Steal the Lightning Page 24

  “You’ve no idea.”

  “No. Listen.” I was angry now. I’d planned on staying calm, but it got me anyway. “You’re the one with no idea. And let me tell you: the way things are right now, I am the only person here who might, just possibly, be able to get you out. To get you home. You understand?”

  He didn’t answer. I said, “Something in the wallpaper?”

  Silence. And then, “Words.”

  He moved his fingers back and forth across the wall.

  “Like braille?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “My words,” he whispered. “Written here.”

  But there was nothing written there, nothing at all.

  “You’ve lost,” he told me. “All of you. All you people. Whatever you do, you’ve lost.”

  “OK . . .” I let him see me nod. “Tell me what I’ve lost, exactly.”

  “The world.”

  “World’s still here.” I spread my hands, looked right and left.

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Explain.”

  “You can’t see it yet. It looks normal to you, I bet. The way it always did.”

  I felt a little shiver of uncertainty. A sense I should have had this conversation somewhere else, away from any gods.

  I’d thought I’d be OK, but I was getting spooked.

  I told him, “You’re an amateur. Don’t try and frighten me. Every bloody job you’ve done, you’ve botched. And I’m the guy who’s got to clean up after you.”

  I went on with my work, but watched him from the corner of my eye.

  He just stood there by the wall. He didn’t move.

  “You’re not control.”

  “Well. First prize for that.”

  “You don’t know what I’ve done. What I’ve achieved.”

  I pretended to be concentrating, laying out the cable. He didn’t like that—that I’d stopped paying attention. The need to boast caught hold of him. I let him talk. He sounded cocky, pompous, but he couldn’t get the whine out of his voice.

  I wondered who’d upset him as a kid to make him such a chippy little shit. Or maybe he was like that anyway. Nature or nurture?

  I emptied out the reel, linked up the next one. Acted like I wasn’t listening.

  “It’s in the name, see? Johnny Appleseed.” I heard him pull a breath, waiting for an answer that I wouldn’t give. “Scattering the seeds, see? Seeds like bombs, to blow a little hole in everything. That’s what I do. To break the locks and doors, tear the walls down. No more guilt. No more bad.” His hands moved on the wallpaper like he was reading all of this. “It’s happened, see? It’s already happened. And you can’t tell. You think it’s how it always was. Only it’s not.”

  “Almost done here now,” I said.

  “You still think you’re in charge. You think the gods all bow to you.” He waved a hand, sweeping away everything—the rooms, the corridor, the city itself. “The world’s already gone. The gods are free. This thing you’re looking at—it’s props. Stage flats. And I’m the one who did it. I’m the one who let them out. They’re here. Directing everything. Their hands, their voices. What you’re seeing—your world—is just a memory. To them, it ended years ago—”

  He was breathing hard. His hands were pressed against the wall, lungs gulping the air. He made a weird, ratcheting sound in his throat.

  “I don’t know who’s more crazy,” I said, “you or Ballington.”

  I packed the gear away.

  “Come on,” I told him. “Get yourself downstairs. Get a drink, for God’s sake. Whatever.” Over my shoulder, I said, “For all I know, the world came to an end ten years back. Who cares? I’ve still got work to do.”

  Chapter 63

  Thirteen

  The elevator had a false ceiling, translucent panels resting on a metal frame. I climbed onto a chair and lifted off the corner piece. A Musketeers wrapper and quite a bit of dust fell out. There were lightbulbs round the top of the cubicle. A trapdoor in the roof. I rattled at the handle till I felt it give, then swung it open.

  I was on the thirteenth floor. Above, I saw Angel, leaning from a rectangle of light. She’d been making friends with Shwetz. He’d given her the elevator keys. Brooding, bitter over what had happened, he hadn’t even asked her why she wanted them. Now she kept the door on fourteen wide. She dropped a cable, flicking it until it flipped towards me and I caught it. After that, she unspooled a few dozen feet, keeping the other end plugged to the box upstairs. I dropped the trapdoor and I put the ceiling panel back in place, lifted slightly, so the cable hung into the elevator carriage, piling on the floor.

  So far, so good.

  I took a roll of tape, and started anchoring it to the walls.

  Thirteen was the problem, though. I could set up a perimeter on three sides without entering the room itself. Even then, though, I could feel the presence there. I never seemed to be alone. I kept looking behind me. Every time I saw an open door, I’d have the feeling someone must have just walked through it. Then I’d have to check, just to be sure. I never saw a soul. That didn’t make the sense of it any less strong.

  It was like I’d said to Angel: most of the time, you get feelings, and you push them to the side, and do your job.

  But sometimes—sometimes, you’ve got to listen. Sometimes they’re warnings, they’re signs.

  They mean you need to get out. Fast.

  Garbage shifted as I stepped into the hallway. A dusty ottoman swiveled on its legs, and turned as if to face me. Papers lifted on a breeze I couldn’t feel, shuffling across the floor. I unspooled the cable. Then I reached the back door to the god room.

  I took a breath, and felt myself hunch down, defensively.

  I opened it.

  “Hush,” I said.

  I stepped inside.

  The light came on.

  “Hush now. Everything’s OK.”

  It was like somebody looked up and saw me. But there was no one there.

  “Hush, hush, hush.”

  I unreeled the cable. I laid it out, moving quickly, quietly.

  I did that room in record time.

  To Ballington, I said, “Don’t use the elevator.”

  “I own this building.”

  “Mr. Ballington. I need you to follow safety procedures. You and everybody else. I’ve marked a safe route for you all. You take the public elevator to the eleventh floor, then cut through and take the stairs up to the thirteenth. Otherwise I can’t guarantee your safety. Or the success of the retrieval.”

  He put a hand up to his chin. He put his head on one side, as if I’d said something risible yet still, just possibly, amusing.

  I said, “You need to follow everything I say. Immediately. Understand?”

  He smirked at me.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes. That’s so.”

  He smiled, nodded, radiating his contempt.

  But he didn’t have an answer.

  So I reckoned there was just a chance he saw the sense of what I’d said, and might even obey.

  Chapter 64

  Not Mecca or the Vatican

  “They had a plan. Their first plan. They were going to use the Vatican.”

  McAvoy was calmer now. I took him coffee, and I tried not to get angry with him. I tried really hard on that.

  He’d pushed himself into a corner of the office, away from Ballington’s crew. He might not like me, might not trust me, but I was just about the closest thing he had here to a friend.

  What he wanted wasn’t help, though. What he wanted was to boast.

  “They had such big ideas. I told them, you’re all stuck on religion, because that’s the way it’s always been. But you don’t need religion. You need something like religion. I said that, said it straight out.”

  He was smug. I had an urge to knock him down a bit, but I held back.

  “They didn’t listen . . . ?”

  “They were talking, all of them. Not thinking right. The plan�
��we’d take fragments, hothouse them. Grow them. Not over hundreds of years, not like the old gods. We’d do it in just months. In weeks. They’d worked out how much energy they’d need. What the input had to be. Equations, calculations . . . The sites had to be current, see? In use. Lourdes. Mecca. The Vatican. I saw where they were going wrong. They had . . . small minds. So small.”

  “Stop a minute. Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The Registry. They wanted Lourdes, the Vatican—”

  “Who in the Registry? Was this at GH9? Is it R&D?” A bad suspicion crossed my mind. “It’s not a guy named Shailer, is it?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I want to know.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, because they all gave up. Every single one of them. Apart from—” He tapped his chest. “I saw the answer. I saw it without even thinking. Like a gift. From God. Uh-huh.”

  His eyes were much too bright. His fingers twitched.

  “Some people go to church, they pray. I wanted somewhere everybody prays. Even the atheists.”

  “A gambling hall, a battlefield . . .”

  “I did it.”

  “But the Registry. They knew what you were up to? They knew you were here?”

  His lower jaw stuck out. The skin around his eyes creased up.

  “They knew that you were still alive?”

  “Oh. Well.” He looked up then. His smile was wide. And suddenly, I could see it: the picture on the poster. It was not his looks, it was attitude, spiteful and cocky: Johnny Appleseed, that grinning little monster.

  “The Registry,” he said. “Of course they know. I grew a god. I grew a great, huge, powerful god. From a piece. From a chunk the size of a pea.” He circled his fingers, smug now. “I didn’t even need a church.”

  “You don’t have shielding,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “It’s like building a bomb in your backyard. You’ve no control over what’s happening here, you’ve no safety measures, you—”

  “It’s a different world,” he said.

  “Not that different.”

  “I changed it. And that is why the Registry will take me back. I did their work for them, the work that they were scared to do. The work they said was dangerous. Unethical. The work that didn’t fit their PR plan. You see now? You with me?” He folded his arms, put his chin up in the air. “See why a fucking amateur is more important than you’ll ever be?”

  Was this the man I’d chased here from New York? Who’d sold off pieces of a god, and killed old ladies from afar, who’d made test runs on the homeless and done botched jobs for a billionaire? Who’d found the secret of creating brand-new gods, in this crucible in the Nevada desert?

  He was dirty and emaciated. There were yellow stains under his arms. I could smell him, even from a yard away.

  But I’d no more doubts that he was everything he claimed to be.

  And that meant he was right: the Registry would save him. Protect him, cherish him, and treat him like a favored son.

  Too bad I’d found him first . . .

  Chapter 65

  The Elevator

  The thirteenth floor.

  I had put down cables in the room, quickly and without finesse: one path down the center, to the door, and out into the elevator lobby; two arcs round the edge. A leaf pattern. Basic, apprentice work. I’d not much hope of capturing the Second Eden god, even though I got a flask there, ready. Mostly, I just wanted it contained, the way that McAvoy had so spectacularly failed to do.

  I dragged the table from the corner, knocked the coffee cup onto the floor, and set up the control box. I put it near the elevator, facing the containment room. The elevator lobby wasn’t big, and it felt crowded now. I’d got an audience. It wasn’t how I liked to work, but this time round, I’d got a reason for it.

  There was one person I wanted there. Just one. Only I didn’t want him knowing that. So I’d invited everyone.

  I was aware of Silverman, shadowing me while I worked, his lens fixed on my face, my hands, closing for a shot of the control deck. Then he crouched in front of me, the camera pointing up under my nose. “Hey,” I told him. “Give it a break, will you?”

  Eddie-boy drank beer. He had a crate of it, and he’d offered round the bottles, only nobody was taking. There were a couple of Ballington’s soldiers, and Shwetz leaned on the wall beside the elevator, his suit rumpled and blotchy, eyes narrow with resentment. Him, I’d said I needed—for his knowledge of the building, and the god. Maybe he’d guessed those weren’t the real reasons. He didn’t speak, he didn’t interact, and under that stone-face exterior, I guessed he was still seething. Which was something else I’d factored in, as best I could.

  Angel was upstairs, right above us, floor fourteen. The key to everything.

  I’d got my phone back. Still bugged, not that it mattered anymore.

  I called her, kept the line open. I powered up the gear, and had her do the same thing, overhead.

  “Stay low. Start slow. Then bring it up.”

  I counted out, a walking pace: “One. Two. Three.” I put a charge through the perimeter. “Hold that,” I said.

  We stopped.

  From the lobby, I could see into that big room, with its primitive containment loops, and ramshackle old engines shoved into the corners. I could feel the god. I could feel the air starting to move, hear the faintest rattle, like a flag rippling in the wind. The perimeter was up. The roof was on. Down below, on twelve, I’d got another charge running, just as a block. No way out down there.

  Eddie-boy pointed with his beer bottle. “I don’t see—” But his voice trailed off. The light had changed. The shadows in the room began to shift. Perspectives deepened. There were hints of other shapes there, distant cities, landscapes . . . Smells I found evocative, though I could not say why—an evening wind across a harbor, say, the tang of ozone and the sour smell of refuse . . . and something chemical—factories, perhaps, across a bay? At once, I seemed to see great clouds of smoke, luminous, against a great, dark sky . . . An image out of childhood, maybe, or some long-forgotten journey . . . Visions, conjured by the presence of a god.

  I don’t know what the others saw.

  I bent to the control box, checked the levels.

  “Angie?” I said. “Getting anything?”

  Her voice came back, crackly, broken, much too far away. “For a minute, I thought . . . No, no. I’m good.”

  I looked up, caught movement somewhere in the big room. A sense that somebody had been there while my head was turned.

  That wasn’t possible.

  “Pattern in the carpet,” Angel said. “It’s kind of weird.”

  “I got that too. Don’t let it worry you.”

  Something flickered in the center of the room, a sudden agitation. Dust began to whirl into the air. It swirled up; in seconds it was strong enough to raise the smaller debris off the floor. It spun, sliding back and forth, a tiny, indoor hurricane, a monster made of air—

  “Might want to knock it up a notch,” I said. “I think he’s on his way.”

  I raised the power a few degrees.

  Something had startled it, and I was pretty sure that something wasn’t me.

  I heard a sharp, high buzzing in the air. I put my free hand up to my ear.

  The stairwell door came open.

  And the movement in the room stopped dead.

  Debris dropped and clattered. Dust clouds fled across the floor. The silence was as sharp as glass.

  Edward Ballington, Senior, strolled into the lobby.

  His face was flushed, his shoulders hunched. He had a hunter’s look, eyes moving rapidly, taking in everything. He came directly to me.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “It’s an empty room.”

  Captain Ghirelli had come with him. He stood, expressionless, hands at his side.

  The perfect little soldier.

  Ballington was close. I fe
lt the heat from him. He stepped behind me and I felt him as he moved from one side to the other, the warmth against my back.

  “Your human side’s seeing an empty room,” I said. “The rest of you—well. You tell me.”

  “Human side,” he said.

  “Come on. It’s not just you in there, is it?”

  I was talking quietly, partly because I didn’t want everybody joining in, partly because I wanted him close by. Listening. Peeping round my shoulder. Watching me.

  Right where he was.

  You put two gods together, and it’s like two cats. Maybe they’ll cozy up. Or they’ll hiss, and snarl. Maybe even tear each other limb from limb.

  From what I knew of Ballington, I’d counted on his rage, his anger, his obsessive self-assertion.

  But he was too calm now. Too much in control. That, I’d not expected.

  Ghirelli said, “Sir,” and motioned him aside.

  I caught his sleeve. “You’re safe,” I said, and drew him back to me. “You ought to see this.”

  There was nothing in the big room. No movement, not even a flicker of the light. Had I gone too fast?

  “See the machines in there?” I was desperate to keep his interest. “They’re what holds it here. Not very well, in this case. Look familiar?”

  He grunted an assent.

  “Lousy, jerry-rigged stuff. The Registry is better. We don’t use that kind of thing.”

  I was trying to keep him near. And then I caught it once more: the scent of sea water, and something harsh, the stink of distant factories . . .

  Into my phone, I said, “I’m going to try something.”

  I sent a small charge down the middle of the room. I held it there. When that got no response, I kicked a spike along it, then dropped back.

  I glanced at Ballington. He was watching now intently, head sunk down between his shoulders.

  “See anything?” I said.

  “I see a window. Floating in the air. Could be an archway. Or a door.”

  “All right. That’s good.”

  “The door is to the future.”

  “OK.”

  I took hold of his wrist. I held him there.