Absynthe, page 28
Morgan was certainly not okay, but that hardly mattered. “Done,” Liam said. “I’ll arrange for a telegram to be sent in the morning.”
Morgan smiled fleetingly. “Thanks, pal.”
“Sure thing.” Liam leaned deeper in his chair, crossed one leg over the other. “So how much do you remember since Dr. Ramachandra’s office?”
“Not much. I was drugged most of the time; to keep me docile, I suppose.” Morgan’s eyes searched the ceiling. “I remember climbing out of the rumble seat of the Model A. I remember firing the grenade at the wallbuster. I remember running, like you told me, as Kohler was headed toward you. Then I got dizzy and fell. Some people took me. They injected me with something. The next thing I remember, I was in a hospital room with no windows. People came and went. No one would answer my questions. Not that I could talk very often. Whenever I started asking too many questions, they gave me another shot, and I went woozy again.”
“Did you overhear anything? Did they talk about what they meant to do with you?”
Morgan shook his head. “They only ever talked about my condition. I got the impression it was on purpose, like they never talked about anything more if I was in earshot.”
“Were there others like you and Dakota there?”
“No. There was only ever the two of us.” Morgan considered a moment. “But this I do remember. They said we were rare. One in a million. After the windowless room, I recall bits and pieces about the flashtrain.” He smiled. “I remember staring up at you after you cut a hole in the roof.”
“Alastair did that.”
“You know what I mean. Then a long train ride. And being taken to the room where you found me.”
Liam thought back to their harrowing escape from LuxCorp. “Just before Dakota attacked me, you were both captivated by something in the Pinnacle. What did you see?”
“I didn’t see anything.” Morgan paused, swallowing hard. “You know that feeling you get when you’re alone in a forest, and you feel like someone’s watching you?”
“Sure.”
“It was like that, but ten times worse. A hundred. It felt oppressive. Hungry, like it wanted to devour me and Dakota. Part of me felt like it already had.”
“Did it speak to you?”
“Not speak, exactly. It was weird. It felt like it wanted me to join it, for my sake as much as its own. But at the same time, there was terror riding just below the surface, as if failure would mean our collective destruction.” He shrugged. “I suspect Dakota felt it more strongly than I did.”
“Yeah.” Liam touched the back of his neck, which still felt numb. “Thanks for that, by the way.”
“You kidding me?” A bit of the old Morgan returned as he laughed. His eyes crinkling, he looked more than a little like his mother. “I can never thank you enough for coming for me.”
“Well, we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Morgan’s look became haunted, so much so that Liam felt like he’d erred by bringing up how much danger they were still in. “Can I share a secret with you?” Morgan asked after a time.
“Of course.”
“In the room I was in. You came to me several times. You asked me about the Uprising, what I knew of it, who was in it.”
Liam was confused at first, but understanding soon dawned.
“It was Kohler,” Morgan went on, confirming Liam’s suspicions. “He was fishing for information, information I thankfully didn’t have.” As a pneumatic hiss of some sort came through the walls, a common occurrence in the Nest, tears gathered in Morgan’s eyes. “Part of me wonders if this is all just another attempt. Part of me wonders if you’re Kohler.”
“I’m not.”
“But how do I know?”
Liam stood there, dumbfounded. How could he convince Morgan of the truth? “I kissed your sister,” he finally blurted.
“What?”
“You remember when we were fifteen and I said I’d never kissed a girl before? I mean, besides my mother and Nana?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, Audrey heard us talking, and a few days later she called me into her room when I was on my way up to get you. She asked if I wanted to kiss her, just to get it over with.” Liam shrugged, feeling the perfect idiot. “So I did. It was wet and warm and the most wonderful thing I’d ever experienced. You walked in on us. I thought for sure you’d guessed because I felt my face turning beet red. I stood there, silent as a lamb, but Audrey jumped in and said she’d told me off for calling Lily a little girl to her face and that it had embarrassed her. You believed her, and I was so relieved. I felt like I’d been caught stealing a sip of whiskey from your da’s liquor cabinet.”
Morgan’s bloodshot eyes had gone distant, then they lit up. “We went fishing that day.”
Liam nodded.
“You hardly said a word the whole time. You just had that stupid grin on your face.”
“I told you it was because my grandmother had given me money for a movie.”
Morgan’s eyes went wide with shock. “You never went?”
Liam had told him it was for Charlie Chaplin’s latest. “Nope.”
“But you went on and on about it the next day. You told me all the details, and they were right.”
Liam grinned. “Audrey had seen it. She filled me in after we kissed again.”
“Thief!” Morgan cried, shaking a finger at Liam. “Rapscallion of the highest order! Stealer of my sister’s virtue!”
“I never stole her virtue,” Liam said. “Only a few kisses.”
Morgan’s eyes narrowed, but he was smiling at the same time. “How many times?”
“We did it on and off for another month.”
“Why did you stop?”
“She found a boyfriend.”
“Lance,” they said together.
“You must have been heartbroken,” Morgan said with a sly smile.
Liam shrugged. “I was actually. Audrey was my first true love.”
“And I never knew it.”
Liam winked at him. “I’m good with secrets when I want to be.”
Morgan shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe it all. His eyes were distant again, but now his look turned wistful.
“You should get some sleep,” Liam said.
“You should too.”
As Liam nodded and headed for the door, Morgan called, “Liam?”
Liam stopped, the door halfway open. “Yeah?”
“Thanks again.”
The words had come out strangely, sounding very unlike Morgan, and suddenly all thoughts of Audrey vanished. “You’re in safe hands, Morgan.”
“I know.”
With that Liam left, closing the door behind him with a soft click.
Thirty-Three
The Nest was a hive of activity in the days that followed. Zeppelins came and went at all hours. Members of the Uprising arrived, others departed. Grace remained on the station, but was so busy she had no time to speak with Liam. And Liam, for his part, didn’t try to force it. The few times he saw her, she looked exhausted—the last thing she needed was him taking up more of her time.
Stasa and his team focused much of their efforts on Morgan and Dakota, but also Ruby, the psi they’d rescued from the P&L building, and Alan, the thrall victim from the domes.
“Where’s William?” Liam asked one day, realizing he hadn’t seen Alan’s son.
He and Stasa were sitting at a tiny table in the canteen, each of them having just finished a spectacularly salty helping of biscuits and gravy. The floor beneath them rocked slightly, the result of high winds buffeting the Nest while the engines held them in place over the landscape, somewhere above Virginia.
Several seconds passed before Stasa replied, “I’m afraid William is dead.”
The news hit Liam like a load of bricks. He’d assumed William had remained at the domes for safety’s sake. “How? When?”
“Shortly after your trip to Novo Solis, he suffered a severe heart attack. The medical team did their best to revive him, but he died a day later.”
Liam couldn’t help but think of William, how he’d beat his own father bloody after Liam had interrupted the experiment. “Did it have anything to do with my visit to the domes?”
Stasa, seemingly distracted, refocused on Liam. “What?”
“Was it because I interrupted the experiment?”
“No, Liam.” Stasa looked wretched, worse than Liam had ever seen him. “If anything, I’m the one to blame. The stresses of our experiments were clearly building within him without my realizing it.”
“I’m so sorry, Stasa. And poor Alan. Does he know?”
“An equally tragic tale. We informed Alan about William’s death, of course, but now he says he never had a son.” Stasa tapped the side of his coffee cup absently. “Deep down, I think he knows the truth. It’s just his way of coping with his son’s death, a story he’s made real.” After a deep breath, he stood and squeezed Liam’s shoulder. “I’d better get back to Morgan.”
“Of course.”
As the days went on, Liam held onto his primary hope—that Morgan might still be cured—like a lifeline. Every evening, he checked in with Stasa to see what progress he and his team had made, and each time, Stasa told him to temper his expectations. “We’ve isolated the scourge strain in Morgan and Dakota. We’re running cultures. Soon we’ll be able to run a few experiments. We’re making progress. Good progress. The best thing you can do is to focus on something else.”
Knowing he was right, Liam threw himself into learning how to cast better illusions. The following day, he recruited Clay and Bailey to help him. They met on one of the landing pads under a bright sun. It was chilly, the Nest maintaining such a high altitude, but the sky was clear save for a scattering of white, tufted clouds in the distance, and the sun shed a bit of warmth.
“For now,” Liam said, “I just want to create something and have you tell me how accurate it is, how solid.”
Bailey nodded with an encouraging smile.
Clay, meanwhile, shrugged. “Why not? Got nothing better to do.”
After a deep breath, Liam concentrated and summoned a simulacrum of Alastair climbing up from the bowels of the Nest. He made the fake mechanika walk easily, whirring sounds and all, until he came to a stop between the three of them.
Clay devolved into a sudden coughing fit as he looked the fake Alastair up and down. “Not bad,” he said between coughs. “Can barely see the seams.”
For a time, Bailey watched Clay more than the illusion, but when Clay’s coughing finally subsided, she refocused her attention. “Make him talk.”
“What shall I say, Miss Bailey?” said the illusory Alastair, perfectly capturing the pitch of his tinny speaker.
With the wind tugging at Bailey’s dark hair, she walked around the illusory Alastair, peered into his glowing blue eyes. “Not bad at all,” she said with a raise of her eyebrows.
It was then that Liam spotted the real Alastair wandering along the far side of the Nest. He was ambling over a catwalk suspended between the two other landing pads, staring down as if nervous of falling.
“Alastair!” Liam called.
Rarely did Alastair acted surprised in any way, but he did then. His frame jittered. He turned and looked about, then fixed his blue-eyed gaze on Liam.
“Come join us!” Bailey shouted.
Alastair paused, as if nervous he would be intruding, but then he navigated the set of catwalks and walkways required to reach their platform. When he arrived, he stared at the illusory Alastair for a good long while. “I must say, it’s very good, sir.”
He’d hardly said the words when the fake Alastair suddenly disappeared. Liam felt it in his gut, like an especially strong hunger pang. The real Alastair’s presence, Liam understood, had created doubt in everyone, including Liam himself, which made it that much more difficult to maintain the illusion.
“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Alastair said, staring at the place where the other Alastair had been standing. When no one responded, he looked about. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes, Alastair, it is,” Liam said with a soft chuckle.
Taking a deep breath, he slipped into the half-dream state and tried again. After a few moments, they heard the sound of clanking on the metal stairs, and a new, fake Alastair rose up from the bowels of the Nest. He strode across the platform and stopped near the real Alastair.
It was a good test, this particular illusion. On the one hand, it was a relatively simple illusion. They all knew what Alastair looked like. They expected him to act a certain way. Their own memories of him fueled Liam’s efforts, making the final result easier for their minds to accept. On the other hand, it was challenging because everyone knew it was an illusion.
“Impressive!” This came from Grace, who was approaching over a railed walkway from a neighboring platform. She wore tawny pants and the leather airman’s jacket she’d worn when she’d rescued him from the paddy wagon. “Now pass control of the illusion to Bailey.”
Liam shook his head, confused. “But she’s not an illusionist.”
“I don’t need to be.” Bailey’s tone made it clear she’d done this sort of experiment before. “You’ve already created it. I’m only carrying it forward.”
Like setting a paper boat on water, he released the illusion. A moment later, the fake Alastair went back down the stairs.
“Now transfer it to Clay,” Grace said.
Liam did, and the fake Alastair climbed back and retook his place in their circle.
“Very good,” Grace said. “Now, the most difficult of all, try transferring it to Alastair.”
Liam tried, but the moment he did, the fake Alastair disappeared. He tried again and again, summoning the simulacrum, then handing it over to Alastair, but each time he did, the illusion vanished.
“Are you trying to stop it?” Liam asked him.
“Oh, no, sir.” He sounded surprised at the accusation.
“Can you feel it happening? The illusion disappearing?”
Alastair blinked, as if he couldn’t quite piece together what was going wrong. “Not really, sir, no. It’s there one moment and then it’s just gone.”
“Maybe he can’t,” Clay said.
It was something Liam had been thinking but hadn’t wanted to voice. It was clear that whatever had happened to Alastair after the war, whatever process the Cabal had put him through to harvest his brain and turn him into a mechanika, had robbed him of some higher-level abilities. This could be one of them.
Alastair stared at Clay as if digesting what he’d just said, then his head swiveled toward the horizon. He looked shell-shocked, a soldier who’d become numb to the bombardment happening all around him.
“I’m sorry, Alastair,” Liam said.
“It’s all right, sir. I can still help where I can.”
Liam paused. “You don’t have to help, you know. You’re your own person now.”
Alastair shrugged his mechanikal shoulders. “Thank you, sir, but I’m happy where I am.”
Liam was half-tempted to try and talk him out of it, but what right did he have to do that? If Alastair was content, why should Liam try to dissuade him?
When they broke a short while later, Grace asked Liam to remain while the others went below. The wind tugging at her golden hair, she said, “I’ve been wondering if you’ve had any more memories from the war.”
Things had been so crazy, he hadn’t had a chance to tell her about his memory of talking with then-Major De Pere during the war, and seeing Colette’s break-up with Sergio. He did so, giving her the broad brush-strokes.
“It’s curious,” she said when he was done, “your memories and Colette’s returning in sequence as they are.”
“I’ve thought about that too.” He shrugged. “The first memory, the one of Kohler tricking me into shooting that soldier, was powerful. Maybe my subconscious is just moving naturally to the memories that followed.”
“Could be,” she said as she brushed the bangs from her eyes. “See if you can’t lean into it. Follow the trail of breadcrumbs.”
“I will,” Liam said, “because it feels like there’s something important just ahead, something that flipped the power dynamic.”
“I don’t disagree, but what do you mean specifically?”
“Well, during the war, De Pere was only a part of Project Echo. It was an important part, to be sure, but he wasn’t the primary decision-maker then. All the really important decisions were coming from President Nolan, and from Colette herself through her back-channel to Nolan. So how did De Pere wind up at the center of things? And why did he want to be in the first place?”
“All very good questions,” Grace said.
Standing there, staring at the various compartments that made up the Nest, Liam felt the weight of his responsibilities bearing down on him. “I feel terrible I can’t remember more, faster. I feel like I’m letting everyone down.”
“Believe me, I understand the sentiment, but don’t feel badly about not making more progress. Sometimes it’s a matter of not overthinking and letting the mind do what it wants.”
Liam nodded. “Okay, I’ll try.”
A sly smile broke over Grace’s face. “I just told you to not try.”
“I’ll try that too,” he said with a wink.
Grace laughed.
Thirty-Four
Late that night, Liam went to visit Morgan before going to bed. He expected to see the nurse in the observation area outside his room, but found Stasa sitting in her place. On the desk before him was a nearly empty bottle of vodka and a glass, half full.
With a hint of a slur, and his Hungarian accent noticeably stronger than normal, Stasa said, “I gave Theresa the night off.”
