Finch sat down slowly. Didn't take his eyes off the man. Left hand groping across the cushions. Where was his gun?
"I've been waiting for someone like you," the man said. "You won't understand it, but I'm going to give you what I know. Just in case."
The window behind the man no longer showed the city. What it did show was so impossible and disturbing Finch had to look away. And yet the image entered into him.
The man said Finch's name. Except he didn't say "John Finch." He used Finch's real name. The one buried for eight long years.
Finch tried to slow his breathing. Failed. Chest felt like something was going to explode.
He must be inside the man's memories.
Then why is the man sitting across from you?
"Who are you?" An obvious question. But it kept pounding against the inside of his skull. So he had to let it out.
The man laughed.
"I didn't say anything funny."
"More to the point," the man said, "who are you? And who are you with?"
"Shut up. This is just one of your memories. Manifesting in me. It isn't real."
Blindingly, unbelievably bright, a light like the sun shot through the window. The night sky torn apart by it. Through the tear: a turquoise sea roiling with ever-changing patterns.
"You don't have to understand it. Not now," the man said.
Didn't know if he was inside a mushroom or outside the universe. Glimpses of the city from on high: each street, each canal, an artery filled with blood. Hadn't known there could be so many shades of red. Spiking into his eyes.
"Be careful," the man said, echoing Rathven, and took Finch's hand. The man's hand was warm. Calloused. Real. "Don't lose your self, no matter what happens."
The man and Feral and Sidle disappeared. The window became a huge mouth, and they were all nothing more or less than memory bulbs within it. Finch fell through the same skein of stars he had seen in the gray cap's memory.
Woke up:
Teetering on the battlements of an ancient fortress, looking out over a desert, the sand flaring out for miles under the seethe of dusk. Moments from someone else's childhood. A parent's death. Sitting in a blind. Crawling through tunnels.
Woke up:
A cavern glittering with veins of some blue metal, huge mushrooms slowly breathing in and out. Seen in a flash of light that faded and kept fading but never went out: more caverns, an old woman's face, framed by white hair; another woman, in her twenties, her thirties, her forties. A shadowy figure hobbling down a street.
Woke up:
The insane jungle of the HFZ, almost floating above it, through it, coming out into a clearing ringed by twelve green men planted in the ground, arms at their sides, their mouths opening and closing soundlessly. And the jungle was made of fungus, not trees, poured over trucks and tanks and other heavy machinery junked and rusted out and infested with mushrooms, some of it still slowly, slowly moving. And back to the fortress, at the edge of a man made cliff, many hundreds of feet above the desert floor, and out in the desert a thousand green lights held by a thousand shadows motionless, watching. A sound of metal locking into place. A kind of mirror. An eye. Pulling back to see a figure that seemed oddly familiar, and then a name: Ethan Bliss. Then a circle of stone, a door, covered with gray cap symbols. And, finally, jumping out into the desert air, toward a door hovering in the middle of the sky, pursued by the gray cap, before the world went dark.
Wake up ... Came out of it seconds, centuries, later. To find Feral and Sidle watching him. Feral on the floor near the couch. Sidle on the windowsill, a large black moth trapped between his clockwork jaws.
The phone was ringing and ringing. Reached out for it. Put it to his ear.
"Are you okay?" Rath's voice.
"I'm going to be fine. I think."
Hung up.
Closed his eyes.
TUESDAY
I: The fanaarcensitii. You said he had fallen from a great height. Did anything you saw in the memory bulbs support that idea?
F: Instinct. I didn't trust what I saw.
I: Why not?
F: Because I haven't felt the same since I ate them. Because they were scenes out of a nightmare. I don't know.
I: There's one strange thing in all of this.
F: Just one?
I: A mention of a fortress. In a desert. Do you know the name of this place?
F: No.
I: I think you do.
F: I don't even know if it was real or not.
I: Is this real?
[screams]
I
oke to a weight on the bed next to him. Went rigid. Sucked in his breath. Reached for his gun. Then relaxed. Recognized the smell of her sweat, some subtle perfume behind it. Sintra Caraval. The woman who had been part of his life for the last two years. She smelled good.
He could feel her staring at the back of his head. Her breath on his back. He smiled. Didn't open his eyes. She kissed his neck.
She was naked. Smooth, soft feel of her br**sts against his shoulders. He was instantly hard. Opened his eyes. Turned over on his back. Sintra turned with him so she was nestled under his left arm. A surge of happiness startled him. Through the window: dim light creating shadows out of the darkness. Her brown skin somehow luminous against it. She'd told him she was half nimblytod, half dogghe. Tribes that had lived in Ambergris since before settlement. Before the gray caps.
Even in the darkness, Finch knew her face. Thick, expressive eyebrows. Green eyes. Full lips. A thin scar across the left cheek he'd never gotten her to talk about. A nose a little too long for her face, which gave her a questioning look.
An exotic lilt to the ends of her sentences as she whispered in his ear: "I let myself in. I wasn't trying to startle you."
He started to get up, to lock the door. She pushed him back down.
"I locked the door behind me. No one else can get in."
Finch stopped resisting her. The key was the greatest act of trust between them. Was that good or bad?
"Sintra," he said sleepily, bringing his right arm around to cup one warm breast. "I could get used to you. I really could." Not really listening to what he was saying. Still waking up. Reduced to the kind of meaningless words he'd mouthed at fifteen. Having sex in his room with the neighbor's daughter while his father was out.
"You could get used to me?" she said.
When mock-angry with him, she raised her eyebrows in a way he loved.
"A bad joke," he said. Hugged her closer. "I'm already used to you." Kissed the top of her head. Relaxed against her, the shudder that had been building up overtaking him. Then gone.
Then, more awake: "Let's escape. Tonight."
He'd worked it out in his head hundreds of times. Along the shore of the HFZ at dusk. A rowboat. Not a motorboat. To the end of the bay. Then either west to the Kalif's empire or south to Stockton. West because it was easier to get through the security zones in the desert. He knew places there. Places his father had shown him on maps.