The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4) Read online

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes,” Eerie assured her. “I’ve been ready for a while.”

  “Now you tell me,” Katya muttered, propping up her backpack on an adjacent chair. “Okay, then, let’s...”

  “Vivik?” Eerie glanced from the window, and for a moment, Vivik could have sworn that he saw tiny golden lights, swirling like fireflies in the depths of her pupils. “Can you make this one big?”

  It hardly took effort. The window jostled and expanded its way to the center of his field of view.

  The window was utterly black.

  Each of them was quiet, for their own reasons. The only sound in the room was the ticking of the institutional and largely unnecessary analog clock mounted on the wall.

  “Is that...” Eerie paused, gulped, and then continued. “Is that Alex?”

  Vivik nodded slowly, staring at the black.

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “The window has looked like that since the Anathema took him. I don’t know why. Maybe that’s…what the Outer Dark looks like?”

  Eerie reached tentatively toward the window, her fingers hovering over the illusionary surface, and Vivik almost told her to stop. He was too concerned with Rebecca’s imminent arrival, though, and curious as to how the Changeling had identified a black rectangle as being a view of Alex.

  The tip of Eerie’s finger touched Alex’s window, and then she flinched, putting a frostbitten finger in her mouth, as a protracted display of brilliant light forced Vivik to cover his eyes. The light penetrated his eyelids, tormenting his eyes with a frigid, blue-white radiance. When the glow diminished enough to be safe, Vivik blinked open his eyes.

  Each of the windows generated by his Vigil Protocol reflected the same view – a vista of pure black, visual echoes of the window that Eerie touched. The windows flickered in sequence, a wave of interference passing through each like a ripple in a pool of water, and then, for a moment, each window showed the ghost image of what might have been a face. The image was impenetrably dark, but it was the dark of an unlit night, not the blank void the window had stubbornly offered since Alex was taken. The features of the face were indistinct, intermittently illuminated by what might have been distant lightening, but the face could have belonged to Alex.

  The windows flickered and went out, the Vigil Protocol shutting down of its own accord. Vivik and Katya shared an uncertain glance, while Eerie hummed happily to herself.

  The Changeling reached for her laptop, tapped a few keys, and then looked at Vivik and Katya expectantly.

  “You should probably know that this isn’t an apport,” Eerie said with a guilty look, “We won’t get there all at once. We’ll have to walk. A long way. I don’t know how long it will be until we finish, because that isn’t decided yet. I don’t know how to stop one of the trains, and I’m not sure that I would want to ride one, even if I did. This is all very strange, even for me. I don’t...I just wanted you to know.”

  Katya glanced uneasily at the door, while Derrida trotted over to nudge Eerie’s hand.

  “Not one bit of that made sense, Eerie. I’m not waiting around here for Rebecca to show up, though,” she said firmly. “Still in.”

  “I wish we had more time.” Vivik shook his head. “I’d like to understand all this better. But I still want to go.”

  Eerie nodded, and tapped her keyboard once more.

  “Okay,” she said brightly. “We’ll finish the stories on the way!”

  They packed rapidly and left with seconds to spare, leaving behind the faint smells of sandalwood and dog. The room sat silent for almost a minute, then the door burst open, and Rebecca charged in, red-faced and wheezing.

  “They’re already gone,” she gasped, resting her hands on her knees. “Fuck this job.”

  One.

  There was something like darkness.

  The long interval was nothing like sleep. It might have been something like death, but as he had no prior experience, it was impossible for him to judge.

  He was at the shore of a placid ocean, standing on a shore of colorless sand. On the horizon, darkness gathered above the marine layer, ominous and distant. There was no sense of place, or of the passage of time, and for that he was grateful.

  The faint aftertaste of nostalgia lingered, and he was occasionally struck with an inarticulate sense of unraveling, but he was not unhappy. His head was filled with a mystifying stew of brief impressions and unfocused longing; a terrible dread that evoked the primal fears of childhood, and worse, a pervading sense of vulnerability; a flight of Monarch butterflies beside the Pacific Ocean; the smell of sandalwood.

  Some of these things belonged to him, he suspected, but the rest felt borrowed, or perhaps inherited.

  It was difficult to formulate thoughts. He considered the darkness, and was relieved not to see much of anything. If the abyss looked back into him, like that Nietzsche quote, then it was likely no more impressed than anyone else ever had been with what it saw.

  He was fine with that, too. Fine with whatever, really, if nothing was demanded of him, and none of it hurt.

  Occasionally, he had fits. These intervals were immediate and catastrophic, an avalanche of disjointed impressions and sensory overload. He could make out very little of those intermittent episodes, and what he could recall he preferred to forget. They existed as brief spells of light and noise, viscera and blood; then they were over and he did his best to put them out of his thoughts, which were otherwise pleasantly empty.

  He could not measure time in the dark, but to him it seemed that the episodes grew in intensity and frequency. He was troubled by the suspicion that, further into the darkness than he could see, something was growing – or perhaps emerging.

  More episodes. Uncertain time.

  He came to understand by degrees. This was an invasion.

  He felt the edges of a presence, circling distantly around him, drawn as a shark to blood. The episodes came with increased clarity. He brought back things from the fits, talismans and omens, visions and portents. There was too much light, for an instant, and then it was gone so fast his pupils had no time to dilate. The blood on the stainless-steel tools that haunted his episodes looked fake, comically red. There was a persistent hum, like the sound of live electrical lines, and masked figures moved on the other side of a transparent shell with disquieting urgency.

  He tried to hold on to the darkness, but it grew brittle and thin, collapsing beneath the weight of his visions and crumbling in his hands.

  There were dim impressions of what might have been a surgical chamber, of cold and close confinement.

  Fear washed over him, and he felt a maddening urge to shiver.

  His mind did a trick, then, and he watched with the dumb appreciation of an audience at a magic show, amazed by the sleight of hand. The dark presence and the sense of invasion were banished in an instant.

  He stood in Rebecca’s office.

  She smiled and took his hands, squeezed them within her own. He hesitated, and then reached for her, and she immediately wrapped him in a tight embrace.

  “I’m sorry, Alex,” Rebecca said, fingers digging into his back. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  He let himself be comforted, but knew immediately that it could not be real. The sweatshirt he pressed his face against held not even a trace of cigarette smoke.

  ***

  They followed a rambling path through the Academy, following the woods on the edge of campus part way, and then entering the Main Library via a rear fire door, blocked from closing with a cardboard insert. They wound through obscure stacks and foreign language collections, descended into the basement, and then followed another set of stairs back out into a dim, cool courtyard, filled with broad ferns and lichen-coated rock. Tall, crimson-leafed maples filtered the sunlight, and scattered amongst the greenery, worn headstones peeked from beneath a carpet of bright green moss. Derrida sniffed at the stones curiously for a moment, then lost interest, sticking close to the Changeling’s heels.

>   “Eerie?” Katya bent to try and read one of the markers, but it was illegible, the stone softened with age and the inscription lost. “Where are we?”

  “The library,” Eerie said, paying her very little attention. “A reflection garden.”

  “I didn’t even know the library had a garden, and I’ve been here a million times,” Vivik admitted, hurrying after the Changeling. “Does it have a name?”

  “Yes,” Eerie replied, leading them across the garden with an obvious lack of interest. “It has been forgotten, though, and I won’t remember it for quite some time.”

  Hidden between two medium-sized boulders, Eerie led them to an inset stair, the concrete crumbling beneath their feet as they walked. They had to pick their way carefully, running their hands along the mossy rock, as the stair was only faintly lit by sunlight from above. The stair led to a modern looking door, kept from closing by a concealed scrap of cardboard, the same as the previous doors.

  The hallway on the other side was modern, and they blinked in discomfort at the brightness of the interior lighting. The walls were painted beige while the floor was sticky linoleum. An illuminated sign at one end informed them that there was a fire exit on that side, and Eerie headed toward it. Katya hesitated a moment, hearing distant conversation from the other direction, and then hurried after.

  “Eerie?” Katya called out. “Where are you taking us?”

  “Fire exit,” Eerie said, pointing at the sign.

  “I figured that. But next?”

  “Fire exit,” Eerie repeated, pushing the door open and then holding it for Derrida, revealing a view choked with old-growth conifers and yellow pines. “Then a tunnel, then the woods. And on the other side of the woods, if we are lucky, the tracks.”

  “I still don’t…”

  “Come on!” Eerie hurried ahead of them. “It isn’t far. Or maybe it is. We should hurry, either way.”

  ***

  “You built this?”

  “We built this, together.”

  “In my head?”

  “In your head.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “It’s deep work. Way down in your noggin. Not the kind of thing you can hold on to. Nobody ever remembers this, by design. Unless you need it.”

  Alex inspected his hands. They were completely normal, but that felt wrong, somehow.

  “I guess I need it now, huh?”

  “I’m afraid so, kiddo,” Rebecca said, stroking his hair. “I’m really sorry.”

  “You keep saying that. Is it really so bad?”

  She stopped to think about it.

  “You promised you wouldn’t keep things from me, anymore. Remember?”

  “Not really,” Rebecca admitted. “We must have built this simulation before that happened.”

  He sat up, wiped his eyes, and tried not to look at the wet spot on the front of her UCLA-blue sweatshirt.

  “I wasn’t planning on keeping any secrets, though,” Rebecca explained, grinning at him. “I don’t really know any.”

  “Because you aren’t really you. You’re a telepathic simulation, implanted in my mind during one of our sessions.”

  “Yes.” Rebecca nodded encouragingly. “The scope of the simulation is limited, but you’d be surprised what we managed to wedge into it. I know just about everything the real me knows – at least, I think I do – and I know all sorts of things about you.”

  “What about outside this office?” Alex picked up a coffee cup on the low table in front of the couch and examined it. It was cracked, stained with a brown ring, and emblazoned with a Bruins logo – all as he remembered, down to the last detail. “What would happen if I went for a walk?”

  “There’s nothing outside,” Rebecca explained, shrugging and getting up to wander the office. She seemed lost and weirdly naked without a cigarette in her hand. “Outside the scope, you understand. We can go for a walk, though, if you’d like. The simulation includes a couple different potential scenarios, though I think the beach is the nicest…”

  The world shimmered.

  “Maybe later.” Alex rubbed his left eye, which was watery and itched persistently. “I’m still trying to get a handle on what’s going on.”

  Rebecca sighed and took a seat on the desk.

  “Do you want me to just tell you?”

  Alex nodded.

  “For sure? You might be happier, not knowing.”

  “Now you have to tell me.”

  “No, that’s not true. Even if I am just a simulation, I’m an empathic simulation. I can fix it so you won’t worry about anything…”

  “Uh, no thanks. Not again.”

  “You may change your mind,” Rebecca said. “This is a tailored example of a general-issue field implant. Every Operator working for Central receives one; safe to assume that the Black Sun and the Hegemony provide their own variants. It’s a failsafe, a psychic refuge for the Operator in trouble. It only activates in the event of capture and interrogation.”

  “You mean torture, don’t you?” A surge of dread sickened him. “I’m being tortured again, aren’t I?”

  Rebecca winced and looked away.

  He started to wish that she would just light a damn cigarette.

  “Not necessarily.” She pursed her lips, brushed at stray hair. It was difficult not to think of her as Rebecca. “You are definitely being interrogated. This simulation wasn’t the only thing we built in your head.”

  “Oh. Great news.”

  “Don’t be like that! It’s nothing sinister. We built a wall inside your head, Alex – not the telepathic barrier you already know about, you understand, but another one, much deeper. It triggered when you lost consciousness. You must have been injured when you were captured, or shortly after.”

  He looked at his hands again, flexed his fingers.

  Everything felt perfectly normal and utterly weird.

  “I think maybe I was hurt,” he said slowly, brow creased with effort. “I think.”

  “You were in the field, so...”

  “Who took me prisoner?”

  She smiled apologetically.

  “No way of knowing, really. This simulation has no access to real-time information.”

  “Right, of course. I’m sorry! It’s just that you seem so real.”

  “Real enough,” she said, walking over to pat his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “This is so bad.” Alex covered his face with his hands. “Do you remember how bad it was for me, the last time I was captured?”

  “I do.” Rebecca hurried over and sat beside him, stroking his hair. “Yes.”

  “It’s not…do you think it’s Weir? Again?”

  “I can’t answer those questions.” When Rebecca spoke, it sounded like an apology. “That doesn’t mean I can’t help you, though.”

  “Oh?” Alex glanced at her uneasily. “You’re just a figment of my imagination, right? What the hell are you supposed to do?”

  “Within my limitations, just about anything the real me could.” Rebecca scowled at him. “Up to and including beating the snot out of you if you don’t behave yourself.”

  “Ah. Right. It really is you.”

  “I told you,” Rebecca said, mussing his hair fondly. “I’m here to help, you little shit.”

  “Okay, not to be a dick – but, really, what can you do?”

  “I can help you calm yourself, help you face this situation with all the bravery and cunning that you can muster. I can teach you to ignore pain, to disregard fear and anxiety. I can provide you with the tools to survive, to hold on to your sanity, and to outwit your interrogators. We can work on your meditation, do some yoga, chat a bit; a little cognitive behavioral therapy never hurt anyone. Do you play racquetball? The simulation includes a racquetball court.”

  “What? Why?”

  “The simulation includes a selection of the favorite activities of each of the Auditors, for recreational purposes.”

  “You have to tell me
,” Alex said. “Who plays racquetball?”

  “It’s none of your business what Min-jun does in his free time,” Rebecca said, laughing. “The simulation does a decent lager, if you’re interested. Cannabis, Xanax, and bourbon, too.”

  “What did you put in here for me?”

  “You don’t seem to have many interests,” Rebecca said, with an uncomfortable shrug. “There’s one or two things, but the main thing we could come up with was sleep. You could take a nap.”

  “Maybe later. I feel like I should be nauseous, you know…”

  “…but the simulation doesn’t allow for it. Yeah, I know.”

  “I’m not sure I get the point to all this.” Alex wrapped his arms around one of the couch pillows and held it to his chest. “This is just a dream, isn’t it? I’ll have to wake up soon. You said they are working their way past the shields you installed, right? Can’t be long.” Alex shuddered. “This is a fucking joke.”

  “It’s a simulation, Alex,” Rebecca reminded him, tight-lipped. “Even if we only had a few seconds to work with, subjectively we would still have all the time in the world. The least of this is a pause button. You understand?”

  Alex nodded slowly.

  “Now, cheer the fuck up.”

  Well-being flooded Alex chest like water from a broken main. He leaned the back of his head against the couch, and sighed with contentment. He gave Rebecca a sheepish smile.

  “Sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing,” Rebecca said, with a wolfish grin. “Save ‘em for the real deal. Whatever it is that you’re up to, I’m sure that I’m gonna be pissed when I rescue you.”

  “Rescue?” Alex perked up. “Do you mean it?”

  “Of course,” Rebecca assured him. “We implanted a covert tracking protocol that went active after you failed to return to Central. Analytics will approximate your location, based on last known position and probability mapping. According to my last update, you were in training for Audits. Is that still true?”

  “I think so.” Alex shrugged. “I think I also might wanna quit.”

  “Everyone feels that way at some point. Don’t attach too much importance to it. What is important is that your status makes your recovery a priority Central. Every available resource will be dedicated to your liberation.”