Tanaka’s gun barrel closed and opened and closed again. She gestured him forward with her chin.
“Miller?”
The detective shrugged. “Give me a minute. I’ll see what I can do.”
Jim felt that same oddness. Flexing his phantom limb, an awareness that he was doing something, but not of what exactly it was. The cramp in his gut came again, higher now. Closer to his chest. The pain rose and fell again quickly.
“Try now,” he said.
Tanaka moved to one side, and the sentinel ignored her. She moved past it, and it remained inert. Tanaka gestured Teresa forward, and the girl went as Tanaka watched the sentinel, waiting, it seemed, for an excuse to defend them. Jim went last. His breath was shallow and fast. He couldn’t feel his legs below the knee.
“We’re running out of time on a lot of fronts here,” Miller said. “Any play you want to make, you’d better make it soon.”
“Thank you,” Jim murmured, “for your support and advice.”
Ahead of them, the light went from blue to white. Jim fired his thrusters, moving into a chamber like a sphere a hundred meters across. Other passages like the one they’d come through were touches of darkness in the brightness. The light itself felt wrong— thick, tangible, jittering, alive. It made Jim’s skin crawl.
From opposite sides of the sphere, dark filaments wove a huge web like a stalactite and a stalagmite reaching from the roof and floor of a cave to touch at a single point. Or like the wings of a great dark angel.
At the center was something the size of a human being. A man with his arms outstretched, cruciform. Thick cables of the filament wove into his sides, his arms, his legs. He was still dressed in Laconian blue, except his feet, which were bare.
Jim knew the face almost before they were close enough to see it.
“Daddy?” Teresa said.
Chapter Forty-Four: Teresa
From the moment they entered the station, Teresa had been watching James Holden die.
She’d known something was wrong with him as soon as she’d gotten to the rendezvous. She’d been around him for years, first in the State Building on Laconia, where he’d been a figure of danger and subtle threat. Then on his ship, where he’d become something smaller, gentler, and more fragile. She knew his moods, the way he used humor to cover over the darkness that haunted him, the vulnerability he carried with him, and the strength. She was fairly certain he didn’t know that about her, and that was fine.
He had never reminded her of her father, though. Not until now.
She didn’t put her finger on it. Not at first. She struggled with her own intrusive thoughts. The boy’s voice that seemed to be just behind her speaking in a language she didn’t know but understood anyway. The eerie, almost choral voice encouraging her to let her sense of self go. The woman who had given a child up for adoption and now was torn between guilt and relief. And then the Korean boy again, still lamenting his sister. It took effort for Teresa not to listen, not to engage, to hold herself to herself, and so that was what she thought Jim was doing too.
For hours, she followed Colonel Tanaka’s lead, weaving in and out of the cave-maze of the station while her mind sparked and slipped. It was like a nightmare she was trying not to wake up from, and the effort kept her from consciously noticing the little things that were wrong with Jim. The way his skin tone had changed. The difference in his eyes. And more than anything, the sense of disconnection, like he was slowly peeling away from what she thought of as reality.
Once he forgot to turn off his mic, and the nonsense he was muttering to himself—I forgot how much I didn’t miss your gnomic cop stories and I hear you and Duarte’s doing the same thing, using people like building blocks for something he wants—spilled out over the radio.
Other times, he seemed almost normal. He checked in on her and how she was doing, the same way he sometimes did on the ship. He talked with Tanaka about how to use heat to find a path for them. At those times, he seemed the way he usually did. Himself. And then they’d start moving, and he would start to drift again.
They found a passage of the same blue-glowing metallic substance as the station’s shell and had started down it when Tanaka opened the private channel between them.
“There’s a conversation that you and I need to have,” the colonel said. “Captain Holden is compromised.”
“We’re all compromised,” Teresa said.
“Not what I’m talking about. He injected himself with a live sample of the protomolecule. The eggheads stabilized it as much as they could, but in my estimation he is losing function quickly.”