Worldwielder, page 8
She hadn't been looking at him much that last day, though. She'd been too focused on the game. She'd tried to finagle the opening into the Giuoco Piano, but Kyle, as usual, had other plans, and it had turned into a Sicilian Defense, Scheveningen Variation. She'd responded with the Keres Attack, but it had backfired as he broke open the center, threatening her exposed king. His last move, Rook to D8, had left her thoroughly troubled, the hazard of having to resign looming over her. Even Tringov hadn't thought there was a suitable defense in that situation. But Kyle wasn't exactly a grandmaster. Perhaps she could find a way out…
Before she'd decided what to do, though, Kyle had received a text and announced he needed to leave to help his mother. “See you later, Pineapple,” he'd said, scooping up the chessboard and giving her a kiss on the cheek.
“When are we finishing the game?” she'd asked, on autopilot.
“Tomorrow morning—at ten.” Then he'd run off.
The game. That was all she'd thought about, even as he waved at her one last time before disappearing through his front door. She hadn't waved back. She hadn't expressed any well-wishes about his mother's health. She hadn't said see you later. She'd been too lost in thought.
Even after two years, she hadn't managed to forgive herself for that careless oversight. Something as small as a neglected smile, wave, or word of affirmation was made an unconscionable sin in her mind, and only because it was the last time she'd seen him.
The next morning, she'd been out on the grass at ten, waiting, but he never came. He didn't answer his phone either. And there was no one at his house when she went to check. A few days later, a cleanup crew hired by the property management company had come and emptied the house. They knew nothing about its former owners. For that matter, neither did anyone else. The thought now occurred to Melissa that Kyle's mother was dead, killed by Luud or whoever else had kidnapped him. She'd probably tried to stop them, thus suffering the very fate Melissa had narrowly escaped from twice. And now, no trace remained of her or her son but in Melissa's memory.
Not for long. Melissa's mind came crashing back to the horrors of the present, and she realized she never would be able to give Kyle the wave she should have, or the smile, or the glance.
She didn't realize she'd been crying until the tears stopped all of a sudden. They stopped because of something else she didn't notice until it was gone: a mind. Right outside her cell door. Someone had been there a moment ago, and was now hurrying down the hall away from her.
Her eyes flew to the crack below the door. An object waited there. She ran over and snatched it up. It was a key, small and gold, a note fixed to one side of it. It read thus:
I believe you. Good vibes. -Z
She read it over, stunned. Z… Zhang? The dude with the out-of-control hair situation?
It was the only explanation. So the Gallery Guard—or Gs, as the wanted list had called them—weren't all bad, nor were they all of one mind. She scanned the door for a keyhole, but found none. Then she thought to look at the bracelet they'd snapped on her. Here there was a keyhole and… yes, the key fit. But she couldn't very well take it off. They'd notice as soon as they came for her… which turned out to be now.
A clang sounded as the door latch was thrown back. Without thinking, Melissa popped the key into her mouth and clamped her lips shut. The door slid aside, revealing Dez and Dulce and their pair of impish grins. “Ochka, pleeska,” Dez said. “Ees we again.”
Melissa rushed to grab her chess set and backpack. Then the women pulled her out of the cell, down the corridor, and to the elevator. She did her best to remain calm, with limited success. The key didn't seem a very helpful gift at the moment. So she could get her bracelet off. Great. She'd still be stuck in the Gs’ base, still without a locutor, still without any idea where to find Kyle.
“Reelax, pleeska,” Dulce said as they rode the elevator up. “Ees not so bad. You not even reemember eet.” Then the sisters laughed at the joke, which was about the least amusing thing Melissa had ever heard.
She expected them to take her elsewhere in the base. Perhaps there was a department called Memory Modification, where they would drill into her skull and suck out part of her brain. Instead, they returned to the Veritas Vestibule. Dez pulled out her locutor, and before Melissa knew it, they were back in the cold, dark, foggy Gallery.
Now the key made sense. Dez and Dulce had relaxed their grip on her arms, no doubt thinking they'd catch her easily if she ran off, due to the bracelet. But if she could remove that, she'd just need one of their locutors…
Except she knew it wouldn't be that easy, not for her. Even the thought was terrifying. As they led her out of the LOGIKOS corridor and into the Gallery's central chamber, she tried to work up her nerve. As they led her down another hall over which the word TARACHODIS was written, she tried harder to work up her nerve. And as they stopped at one of the ramshackle ladders between columns of paintings and told her to climb, she gave up trying to work up her nerve. There was no escape now. They were obviously taking her to a higher painting, and there would be no running from them on those narrow ledges. She'd blown her opportunity.
Numbly, she ascended. They didn't tell her to stop until the floor of the Gallery had long ago disappeared, only a thick blanket of fog visible below. The ceiling, if there was one, remained out of sight.
They led her down the narrow ledge, which couldn't have been more than two feet wide, to a small painting whose canvas was completely black. The plaque below it said Xech. When Dez's locutor made contact with its surface, they were pulled into the freezing darkness between worlds.
Once again, Melissa almost fell over when they landed—or alighted, as she'd heard Dez and Dulce call it—and she was too dizzy to make out much except that, like the Gallery, this place was dark and cold and foggy.
When her vision cleared, she saw there was little more to make out. They stood on dirt, near a lamppost with a dim tungsten light. Beneath it were three people, two Gs and a man in dirty rags, the same one who'd been in the elevator earlier. Only he wasn't babbling or pleading now. He wasn't doing or saying anything. His face was strangely vacant, his eyes glassy. His mind was the color of the sea, which Melissa knew meant calm. But she knew there was more to it than that. She had a sinking suspicion he'd just had his memory wiped. That was the price for being caught by the Gs in the Gallery. She gulped, nearly choking on the key.
Dez and the same G as before exchanged nods.
“Dez.”
“Toulouse.”
Then Toulouse and his partner dragged their captive a short distance away and disappeared in a swirl of blue energy.
At the lamppost, Dez shoved Melissa into a rusty metal chair.
“How long unteel thee pull gets reed of all thee memorees?” Dulce asked her sister.
Dez examined a watch on her wrist and sighed. “All of eet? Seveeral hours.”
“The pull?” Melissa asked.
The women froze, their eyes shooting towards her as though she were a corpse that had just raised its hand. They stared, unblinking, for several long seconds. “Thees not normal,” Dulce murmured. “They not seeposed to be talkeeng…” She grabbed Melissa's jaw and turned it this way and that, peering closer at her.
Melissa was moments away from jerking her head free and demanding some answers when the answers found her all on their own, and she realized moving or saying anything more could be disastrous.
Dez and Zusman had earlier referred to the pull, Melissa realized. The pull of Veritas had been Zusman's exact words, like the pull was some force that suffused the world. And here they were on a different world and Dulce was making a similar implication. There was only one explanation. This world, like Veritas—maybe like every world—had an effect on the mind. A pull. And its pull made people forget things. The glassy-eyed man who'd been here when she'd arrived was under its influence.
They weren't going to wipe her memory after all. They were going to let the pull of Xech do it for them. Or so they thought.
The relief she experienced almost made her laugh and cry and jump up and down, but she stifled the impulse. The women were still staring at her, and she knew if she were to have any chance of getting out of here, she'd better start acting like the pull would make her act, like that man had acted.
Dez snapped her fingers in front of Melissa's eyes. “Pleeska, you hear we now?” After receiving no reply, she shrugged. “Ees notheeng to worry about. Sometimes pleeskas take a momeent to forgeet.”
They turned and sat on opposite sides of a nearby card table, Dez removing a deck of cards from her pocket. A game began, punctuated every so often by bickering about some point of play. As they played, they didn't give Melissa the slightest glance.
She tried again to muster her nerve, but again failed. Every time she thought about going over and taking one of their locutors, an image of Luud, complete with his knife and sadistic grin, flashed in her mind. They weren't Luud, sure, but if they were willing to wipe her entire memory, she suspected they'd also be willing to kill her. After all, in the interests of keeping the Gallery a secret, what would the life of a sixteen-year-old girl mean?
Nothing. Nothing at all. I can't do it.
You have to.
Maybe in a few minutes.
You'll say the same thing then.
What if something goes wrong?
What if something goes right?
She would have continued to argue with herself but for the miracle that happened then. Dez and Dulce, weary of their game, put down their cards, leaned back in their chairs, and shut their eyes. A minute later, their snores resounded into the fog.
Melissa didn't hesitate. She spit the key into her left hand, slid it into the bracelet's lock, and turned it. The metal band split in the middle. She tossed it aside.
Now the hard part.
With bated breath, she crept towards the slumbering women. Inches away, she reached out a hand for the clip holding the locutor to Dez's belt. It looked like a simple carabiner. Easy enough to release. She closed her fingers around it.
Then Dez's snoring ceased. Her eyes shot open. Her head shot towards Melissa. Her mind shot bright red. In a nanosecond, she was on her feet and preparing to lunge.
Melissa scampered backwards, but one of her fingers remained caught in the carabiner. She didn't get far. However, her mistake had the unintentional effect of pulling Dez off her feet. The woman tumbled forward. She tried to catch herself by turning and grabbing the card table, but her hand missed. Her face didn't.
She crashed into it—right in the nose. A muffled cry escaped her.
Somehow, the locutor had come detached from her belt during this frenzied moment, and Melissa was reaching her hand into its dark portal before she even knew what she was doing. Dulce had wakened by this point and was screaming at her incapacitated sister, “Thee pleeska has a secreet aegis! She heed eet from we! She ees getting away!”
The world of Xech vanished around Melissa in a swirl of blue. It was only then she remembered the narrow ledge outside Xech's painting, the ledge on which she'd have to alight, without losing her balance, if she were to avoid falling to her death.
Yeah, not gonna happen.
She was, as usual, correct in estimating her own ineptitude. The blackness disappeared, leaving her shivering and dizzy, and everything was moving too quickly. Her left foot made contact with the ledge, but her right met air. In another moment, her head was level with the ledge and dropping fast. She managed to twist herself around as she fell, reaching up with her left hand, and at the last second, her fingers grasped the metal lip of the shelf. The locutor remained wrapped around her right hand.
Then her tenuous hold on the shelf gave out. She would have tumbled to her death, but she’d been swaying back and forth as she clung to the ledge, and she now fell at an angle towards the Gallery wall. Specifically, towards a painting on the wall. She just had time to make out that it depicted a woman being pulled ten different ways by ten different men and that the plaque below it read Kagu, before everything around her vanished once again.
ELEVEN
The shadowy in-between place tore and pressed at her. She could make out the familiar outlines of trees, mountains, hills, and the like speeding past her. She'd seen this before with the Gs, but what she hadn't realized was that they had control over it. By moving her body, she could adjust the speed and direction at which she traversed the shadow world. She'd earlier assumed that entering a world's painting took you to one specific place in the world, but she now saw you could choose to alight anywhere you wanted. This shadow world functioned as a sort of preview of the place you were going.
To Melissa, though, it was rather like being dropped behind the controls of a military fighter jet in midair. She could see there were controls at her disposal, but had no idea how to work them, let alone save herself from crashing.
And crash she did, alighting some twenty feet in the air above the dark, algae-covered surface of a swamp. She plunged several feet into the quagmire, flailing madly to escape, forgetting everything she'd ever learned in swimming lessons. Before she'd inhaled more than a mouthful or two of sludge, her hands made purchase with something solid, and she wrenched herself from the bog, coughing and convulsing.
What greeted her above it was no friendlier. The instant she was free, microscopic needles of pain began dancing across the exposed areas of skin on her arms and face. She glanced at her hand and saw, to her horror, a volley of droplets striking her skin, leaving in their wake tiny red patches. Acid rain.
In a frenzy, she raced to locate the nearest source of cover. This turned out to be a tree, old and knotted, a broad gap in its gnarled roots providing a shelter of sorts. In the safety of this opening, she crouched low to the ground and clutched her backpack over her face as the deluge continued.
It was about then she realized the locutor was gone.
She sprang to her feet, but head collided with the root ceiling above her, knocking her over. She massaged the bruise and stared out at the swamp, its surface aflame in ripples from the acidic bombardment. The locutor was down there. And even if she could get up the courage to survive another plunge into the water, emerging from the cover of the tree for any length of time might mean sacrificing her skin.
A wave of hopelessness hit her. She sank to the ground. A moan escaped her, inaudible above the rain. Her screams, however, could be heard just fine. Impassioned. Desperate. Dozens of them. Until her voice gave out. After that, there was nothing to do but wait for the rain to stop.
A few hours later, it did. She stepped from the root shield and prepared to disrobe, but her eyes quickly fell on a tiny object floating on the surface of the swamp.
A mutilated pebble of metal was all that remained of the locutor.
***
During the next twenty-four hours, Melissa began to reconsider her decision to escape from the Gs. Whatever the horrors they might have subjected her to, a slow and miserable death from dehydration in the swamp seemed a worse fate. And dehydration it would be, for the water bottles she'd brought in her backpack had been ruptured in her discommode of a landing, and the swamp water itself looked about as appetizing as the contents of a septic tank.
In her bleaker moments, she hoped the Gs would find her here. There was a chance of it, she thought. They might be looking for her in all the worlds nearby Xech. Otherwise, she was up a creek with no locutor. As well-meaning as Zhang's gift of the key had been, he clearly hadn't known who he was dealing with. She could make a wreck of the most elementary tasks, even if her life depended on them. But not just her life, she realized. Kyle's too.
In her bleakest moments, she wondered if she shouldn't have come looking for him at all. She recalled with disquiet her foolish and ill-considered attempts at searching for him in the weeks after his disappearance, attempts that had gotten her nothing but trouble.
She hadn't set out to look for him immediately, though. First, she'd lapsed into a state of denial and shock. She'd been sure he would call her and explain the whole thing, so after school, she would trudge up to her room and sit there, not moving a muscle, just staring at her phone and waiting. No call came. No letter. No e-mail. No knock on the door. But still she waited, because life had come to a screeching halt without Kyle. She could do nothing else.
Her parents began asking questions, as parents are wont to do, or having hushed conversations about her when they thought she couldn't hear.
After a week, no longer able to deny the facts, Melissa lapsed into an even worse state. Now the tears came, the screaming, the smashing things, the missed classes. Her parents' questions became glares, their hushed conversations lectures. They knew why she was upset, but had little sympathy for her. Friends move away, they said. You make new ones, they said. Life goes on, they said. Melissa could only glare back at them and wish they could see how violently red her mind was. She could never explain what Kyle meant to her. Words would never do justice to her feelings.
Eventually, her emotions quieted enough for her to think sensibly, and she determined that sitting around would get her nowhere. So she embarked on the scariest quest of her life, an investigation that brought her in contact with more people in a week than she had any desire to speak to in a decade.
She began with the unassuming family of five now occupying Kyle's old house. They listened to her impassioned plea for any information on the home's former occupants, then shooed her out with nothing more than polite promises that they'd be in touch if they heard anything.
The police were even less helpful. Without any concerning evidence, they had no regard for the concept of missing. The mere fact that Melissa hadn't heard from her best friend in a month, a friend who ordinarily wouldn't have gone two hours without calling her, didn't suffice.
