Anna shuddered as if speaking the truth tore something loose in her. “Okay, all right, damn you, yes. That night, while she still lived, we took your Emily below.”
“Into the basement?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“We healed her.”
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.
“And then?” he asked.
“Your precious bitch is in a stasis chamber, suspended animation, unaware of her condition.”
“She . . . she’s been there for ten years?”
“We promised Patrick, when our work is done, when changing Emily’s destiny poses less risk to our mission, we’ll release her.”
“And if you never succeed in your mission?”
“She remains in suspended animation.”
“No. Not any longer. Bring her to me.”
Anna looked again at the framed photograph she held. Her face flushed and twisted with a pure hatred of which Emily would never have been capable, a hatred seeded in a childhood of beatings and cruel rejection and perpetual fear. She might want to know what love was, might yearn for it, but she remained a victim of her fallen future and of her twisted physiology. She threw the picture at him, and he ducked, and it knocked against a wall. She swept the other photographs from the dresser to the floor, pivoted toward David, and declared, “All right, deny me! Treat me like shit! Spit on me! I can pull the plug on your precious princess. Then you’ll have exactly what you started with—nothing.”
He turned away from her, toward the armchair where he had left the tote bag that contained the bomb.
The Corley avatar had quietly entered the room and stood now between David and the chair.
| 94 |
She is here. Emily was here, in the realm below, waiting to be awakened from a long, unnatural sleep. She hadn’t been lost forever, though he might yet lose her—fail her—again.
As David backed off from the avatar of the dead contractor, which was inhabited now by one of Anna’s two nameless comrades, Corley spoke to her. “We should do with him what we did with her. Suspended animation in a stasis chamber. Let them sleep away the century together, while we change it.”
“He deserves a harder judgment,” Anna said, her Emily face ugly as it never had been before, distorted by bitterness.
“The protocols—”
“Fuck the protocols! Look at him. Handsome and well formed. Like my hateful father. His kind loathed me on sight, sent me away at birth. His kind ran the sanitarium where we were kept. His kind tormented me all my childhood, all my life. Tormented all of us. His kind beat me, reviled me. By their arrogance and stupidity, people of his era made us the creatures that we are.” Her fury was white-hot. If she could have killed David with a look, he would already be ashes. “He wants nothing of me even now, even when I walk in Emily, live in Emily, even when I’m as beautiful as she is. Even beauty isn’t enough for him. I disgust him. My being her isn’t enough for him, he needs me actually to be her. I want him dead. Both him and her. Both dead.”
“Settle yourself,” Corley said sharply. “Your authority is no greater than mine. We live by the protocols. He’ll be placed in a stasis chamber to dream through the years.”
She took several deep breaths. “There’s no justice. There never is. There never has been. Screw it. All right then. But it doesn’t end with this. Damn if it does.” Anna took a step toward David. “You’ll never have her. Never! If we fail to change the future for the better, you’ll sleep forever or until the stasis chamber fails and you suffocate in it. And if we succeed, if we undo the mess your generation and others have made, the last thing I’ll do before we close down the bridge is terminate your precious Emily Carlino and let you wake up without hope. No matter what, you’re never getting out of this house with what you came here to get. Have a taste of my despair, David. Take a deep drink of it.”
Legions of rain marched across the roof, lightning napalmed the sky, cannonades of thunder rocked the night, and it seemed the earth was a battlefield, pole to pole, where armies clashed ceaselessly, from time immemorial to time’s end, good pitched against evil, evil against good, neither able to achieve a permanent triumph. There was no joy, no light, no certitude, no peace except what existed between two hearts that were true to each other and, in being true, found the forgotten Truth of the world.
Do not fail her, not again.
As Corley reached into a pocket, perhaps intending to withdraw the compact Taser-like device that he’d used in the cemetery, David drew Ulrich’s pistol from the small of his back, from under his sport coat, and fired two rounds point-blank. An arc of blood slicked through the air. The big man dropped and lay as if he were stone shaped in a human form, his head cracked like a broken melon.