"And if I said no? If I said no, you'd just fade away and this would all be over?"
"Yes."
Thinking again about Wyte. About Stark under the influence of Wyte's memory bulb. At what price? And: You knew you might die. Why aren't you willing to do this?
Because it's not real.
Looked out at the green lights beginning to appear. Above, the blurred gleam of stars obscured by dust.
"It's up to you, Finch," Shriek said.
"How do we do it?" Finch asked. "I cut open my own head and you pop out?" And what happens to me then?
"It's nothing like that," Shriek said. "Nothing like that. You open yourself to me, and then I open myself to you. Then you sleep for awhile. When you wake up, I am out of you. I can feed off of moisture. Off of the air. What I take from you will be no larger than the weight of a baby. And I will do the rest. Then we go our separate ways. You'll never see me again." Except when I look in the mirror. "I know you're afraid. But what happened to Wyte was invasive. Hostile. He had a parasite inside of him. Something made possible by the gray caps."
This isn't invasive?
The green lights were closer. He could almost make out the forms of the creatures gathered out there in the desert. Waiting to take Zamilon for themselves. Who could say their cause was any less just? The Lady in Blue didn't even know what they were.
"How do I know you're not hostile? I `open up' and you take over."
"I won't. I promise. I can't. It wouldn't last for long."
"What's the risk if I say yes?"
Shriek hesitated. Then said, "I won't lie to you. It's a sacrifice. I will be doing things to your body to make my own. Stealing from your tissue. Robbing you while you're already weak. You won't be the same afterward. Even after you recover from the torture. You'll have dizzy spells. Headaches. You may not sleep for awhile. When you do sleep, there will be nightmares as your mind flushes out my memories. But you'll be setting me free. And I won't take it from you unless you let me."
"You're saying it'll almost kill me."
"And heal you, too," Shriek said. "In the short term, I can make your flesh knit faster. I can shield you from the aftershock of what the Partial did to you. And a part of you will always be with me. Even after you die, you will live on because I will still be alive." Shriek grinned, showing his teeth. "I'm hard to kill."
Lost time. Lost worlds. A man who had lived for more than a hundred years, only to die in a crappy apartment as part of a larger game by a species that had come from a place so distant they'd spent centuries trying to find it again.
A giving up. A giving in. That's what Shriek was offering him. It tempted him. He had nothing left. Nothing of worth. No master plan. No better life waiting. Just his own death. Too much for him, and too little, standing there on the battlements of a place re-created by a passenger in his brain.
Finch searched the face of the dead man for honesty or deceit. Saw himself reflected back.
"How do we start?" he asked.
"For you, it's easy," Shriek said. "A mental trick. Just think back to the time when you went from being Crossley to being Finch. Imagine that instant as exactly as you can. Every detail you can remember. While you concentrate on that, I will enter through the `gap' created. That's as simply as I can put it ... The rest you won't feel."
A hopeful expression on Shriek's face.
The thought that maybe this was happening in the seconds before his death. That the last week had taken place in a single moment in his head. That none of it was real. Even the parts that seemed real. Those least of all.
Finch shuddered. Closed his eyes.
"Let's get this over with."
The creation of John Finch happened at night. Cold for once. The flares and tracers of battle over the darkened skyline. The roar of the tanks. The gunfire of attacking infantry. A percussive music playing all over southeast Ambergris. Near the Religious Quarter. Heavy losses for the Hoegbotton side. A series of tactical mistakes.
They stood on the street behind the clinic, him and his father. Next to a burning trash can. His father was a hunched figure who kept coughing up blood. By then his father had been very sick.
John Crossley had a folder full of documents for his son. James had a suitcase stuffed with identity cards, certificates, incriminating photographs. Had checked John Crossley into the clinic under the name "Stephen Mormeck." Someone they'd picked out of the phone book.
A clinic in Frankwrithe territory. Because of the rash of refugees. Because F&L had less reason to hate John Crossley.
"Is there anyone you want me to contact?" he'd asked his father.
A shake of the head, the great mane of gray hair. "No, no one. Make a clean break. For both of us." A gruff laugh. By then, he was selfmedicating with whisky early in the day. That night next to the trash can, John Crossley had been drunk for two days.
But his eyes were clear. His arm steady as he handed the folder to his son. "Everything you'll need. For John Finch. Including a way to rejoin the Hoegbotton Irregulars."
Two years before the Rising. Six months after Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe had joined forces against the gray caps. Five months since his father had been denounced as a Kalif spy and they'd had to go on the run. The posters were everywhere. One of a row of traitors.
"I didn't do what they say I did. Not the way they say I did it. I never got anyone killed. I never ..."
His father had never told James how they'd come to be betrayed. Which of the many people who had come to the house in the valley over the years. And James didn't have a clue, because his father kept pushing him further and further away from that part of his life.
James reached down, opened the suitcase. Felt the click of the clasps against his fingers. "It's all here. Every last document. Every last photograph." From the old house in the valley. James had gone there earlier that night, snuck in. Returned to the clinic in an army truck, along with a few other civilians with ties to Hoegbotton's trading arm. Wyte had stood watch for him, then gone out the back way and melted into the night. Wyte knew every street in the city. He'd have been back home with his wife before midnight.
Two in the morning now.
"What are you waiting for? Start shoveling this stuff into the fire," his father said.
Still, he hesitated. Watched the smoky flames rising into the darkness, the sparks mimicking the flares in the distance.
"If we burn all of the photographs, I'll forget what you look like."
His father didn't miss a beat. "But not who I am. And if you don't do it, there's no clean break, son."