I thought the only terrible surprise remaining would involve those Nihilim. Wrong. When Panthea opened the final suite in that corridor and freed the last woman, my heart felt painfully bitten when I recognized Keiko Ishiguro—that sweet, shy, slip of a girl with lustrous ink-black eyes—who had cared so tenderly for Rafael, the orphanage dog, after Annie Piper went away to college and to her abduction.
Later, I would learn that Keiko’s cousin Ichiro Sugimura, her only living relative, had not been her relative at all or anything else he claimed to be. Soon after she moved to Austin and found a job there to be close to the only family she had, Ichiro introduced her to Malik Maimon, who courted her and proposed marriage. He was as much a fraud as Ichiro. Before the wedding could occur, Keiko awakened to find that she was locked in the Oasis. Thereafter she was schooled by Bodie Emmerich to satisfy his more extreme desires and subsequently those of the most eminent and depraved visitors.
When she saw me in that hallway, she came into my arms, and we hugged each other fiercely. With a sob of grief but allowing herself no tears, she said, “Annie,” and I said, “Yes, I know.”
She was no less astonished by the sight of me than I was to find her in that hateful place. I’d thought that Annie’s subjugation to the predator Emmerich must be coincidence. But no. Two girls from Mater Misericordi? condemned to this living hell couldn’t merely be attributed to the Fates indulging in a sick and dirty joke. If human treachery wasn’t to blame, then the Nihilim were. The orphanage that had been a haven for some had been a stalking ground for others.
From beyond the milling Specials, Bridget saw me holding Keiko. Although neither of us was gifted with telepathy, her shocked and compassionate expression told me that she knew the general shape of the extraordinary and dreadful discovery that had just been thrust on me and Keiko.
Emmerich’s death didn’t mean that our escape was a less urgent matter than if the creep had been alive. At any moment, the soul children would rise. Addicted to pleasure by habit and most likely also by drugs that Emmerich included in their diet, they would be greedy for all the sensation that they had to wait for nightfall to experience. Shattered by the discovery that their guru and sole means of support was dead, a lot of them—if not all—would seek the one pleasure still offered: vengeance.
Sparky, Panthea, and Winston led the freed prisoners out of that deepest level of the Oasis. They climbed the stairs toward the communal floor that included the orgy chambers and the private rooms in which residents of the hive even now prepared to swarm. Bridget and I followed.
In the gold-and-crystal vestibule, over the shuffling of feet, I heard a wretched sobbing issuing from the open door to Emmerich’s apartment. Having found his master lying lifeless in red silk, Tim staggered forth. His brow and one cheek glistened with blood from the scalp wound that I had inflicted. His face, which he’d thought handsome, was wrenched now into an ugly expression that might have been part grief but that largely conveyed the shock and fear of catastrophic change. The billions of dollars that had been used to instill and feed Timothy’s addiction and his years of idleness would now go to estate taxes and otherwise be locked away in trusts for the delectation of attorneys and to pay off the lawsuits that would make it into court in a decade or so. Convicted of whatever crimes he might have committed against the Specials, if in fact he ever participated in their abuse, he would find the accommodations of prison far less comfortable than those of the Oasis.
When Soul Timothy saw me, his face contracted with bitterness. His brow seemed to thicken as if he were undergoing a metamorphosis, and his eyes shrank in their sockets. The changes weren’t physical, but the alchemy of fierce emotion. He bared his teeth and reached toward me as he approached.
Bridget leaned past me, her gun in a two-handed grip, and squeezed off two shots before I could bring my Glock to bear. She was Sparky Rainking’s granddaughter in more than name. Timothy’s shriek quieted when most of his throat dissolved. The sound of his body meeting the floor was as final as the thud of a coffin lid.
“You’re something,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I still owe you one for taking out the two thugs at the Sweetwater Flying F Ranch.”
All of us hurried through the communal chambers, past entrances to the five hallways where the cultists had yet to fling open the doors to their rooms. Momentarily they would burst out, attired for easy disrobing, ready to feast and drink and have their rec drugs in a macabre celebration of their vacuity. This was Prince Prospero’s castellated abbey in “The Masque of the Red Death,” although the doomed partiers here were hiding out not from a plague but from the truth of themselves.