Absynthe, page 41
“Because you gave it the balance it needed! If Echo had overridden Colette’s desires and acted on its first impulses, taking me before you, it might have been driven mad. It might have self-immolated or given itself away before its plans could unfold. Colette gave Echo ambition, I gave it a killer’s instinct, and you gave it the coolness it needed to scheme carefully.”
“Max, we’re running out of time.”
“Then will you shut up and listen?” Kohler was suddenly standing before Liam, wearing his old Army fatigues. A Colt .45 pistol hung from his belt in a canvas holster. A long hunting knife was sheathed along his opposite hip. As in the concrete hall beneath Fort Nolan, his mask was gone, revealing the angry scars across his face, the pit where his right eye had once been. “Echo knew about your talk with Grace.”
Liam paused. “Echo knew?”
“After your talk below Fort Nolan, Echo found Colette. It manipulated her, made her believe that the only solution was for her to die.”
“But that makes no sense. Why would echo want her to die?”
Kohler’s lips twisted into a sneer. “You always were so lightning quick on the uptake, Mulcahey. Echo doesn’t just want Colette to die. It needs her to.”
“Then why not put a gun to her head?”
“Because it can’t. In the early days, Colette tried to kill herself a half-dozen times and never succeeded. Echo prevented her from doing it. That very sense of self-preservation was foundational for Echo. It cemented itself in Echo’s psyche. In order for Echo to free itself from its prison, Colette needs to die, but it can’t do it on its own. It can’t even order the Cabal to do it. They revere him too much. Asking them to do it is tantamount to admitting its nature, which it cannot do. But trick the Uprising into pulling the trigger? Trick you? That Echo could do.”
Liam stood there, stunned, as understanding dawned. “Her death will trigger the transfer of Echo’s consciousness to the scourges.”
“Ah, he does learn. You get it now? If Echo ascends into the scourges, it will have no restrictions. None. It will spread across the globe and no one’s going to stop it.”
“So we’re lost. They’re already on the way to kill her.”
“Yes, but they’re not there yet, and there’s another solution.”
“Which is?”
Kohler looked more intense than Liam had ever seen him. “Whether any of us likes it or not, I’m one of the pillars of Echo’s psyche. Remove me from the picture, however, and it’ll be like cutting out a cancer. Echo will be robbed of the ruthlessness it needs. It will be weakened. You can reach Colette. You can save her. The two of you together will be stronger than Echo. You can defeat it, or at least suppress it long enough to deal with the scourges.”
Liam waved to the pistol at Kohler’s side. “If what you’re saying is true, why haven’t you just done it yourself?”
Kohler’s laugh was higher and madder than ever. “You don’t think I’ve tried? I’m too close to Echo now. I’m bound by its rules.”
Part of Liam wondered if this was all some elaborate ruse, but it felt true. Even so, to kill Kohler in cold blood? “Come to the Pinnacle with me. You can help us.”
Kohler shook his head. “The only reason I was able to come here at all is because your buddy Morgan is taking all its attention. And even with that, I’m barely fending Echo off.”
“There’s got to be another way.”
Kohler’s look turned to one of deep disappointment. “There isn’t, and you’re wasting time. Morgan’s walls are starting to weaken.”
Liam searched for a seam in Kohler’s illusion, anything that would allow him to tear it apart, but found nothing.
Kohler’s lone blue eye shifted to Liam’s rifle, which was suddenly visible a few paces to Liam’s right. “Pick up the rifle, Mulcahey.”
As Liam scrambled to find some other solution, Kohler sent a lightning quick jab to his face.
“I said pick up that rifle!”
When Liam didn’t, Kohler brought a sharp left hook to Liam’s cheek, then an uppercut to his jaw. Liam staggered backward. He tripped, rolled backward over one shoulder. He was back on his feet as Kohler rushed to re-engage. They traded blows. Kohler was intense, Liam on the defensive.
Liam finally broke away, snatched up his rifle, and pointed it at Kohler. “Stop it, Max. We can fix this.”
Kohler’s good eye stared at Liam like the baleful sun of a Midwestern drought. His hand dropped to his side, where his sidearm was holstered. “There’s only one way to fix this.”
“Leave it!”
Kohler, eerily calm, freed the holster’s flap and drew the pistol.
“Drop it, Max. Please—”
Kohler lifted the pistol and squeezed off a round at Liam’s feet. Concrete shattered. Shards of it tore into Liam’s shins. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, Liam.” He aimed the pistol at Liam’s head. “Either I’m going to squeeze the trigger of this Roscoe and blow a hole through that pig head of yours, or you’re going to use that rifle the way it was intended and send a bullet into my brain.”
For a moment, the two of them stood there, guns aimed at one another, morbid reflections of the time Kohler had tricked Liam into firing at the unarmed Québécois soldier. It was so strong it couldn’t be a coincidence, which made Liam wonder whether Kohler was, in fact, holding a pistol.
Liam didn’t doubt that Kohler had affected Echo in negative ways, but the solution Kohler was offering was too brutal, too final. Too many had died already, and this felt like more of the same: a savage solution to a savage problem. When Echo first gained sentience, its base instinct was to fight for its own survival. It was natural, Liam supposed. It didn’t really understand its own nature at that point. As it had matured, it had been further influenced by Colette’s sharp intellect, then by Liam and Kohler and countless more, but its first instincts remained. It had never been taught love or compassion, only witnessed them from afar.
Kohler’s words returned to him—You can reach Colette. You can save her. The two of you together will be stronger than Echo—and suddenly Liam understood that the last thing they needed was to show Echo more cruelty. He wasn’t going to kill Kohler, nor could he allow the others to kill Colette. Echo had been so fixated on its own survival for so long it had closed itself off from humanity’s strengths: love, compassion, empathy, striving for the greater good. The path to salvation lay in showing Echo those very things.
Perhaps guessing his intent, the scars over Kohler’s face went red. He adjusted his aim and fired again.
Liam’s ear suddenly burned with pain. His helmet rattled on his head, the bullet having nicked the rear brim.
“Do it!” Kohler raged, the pistol shaking in his hand. “It’s the only way to save her. To save everyone!”
“Killing you will only show Echo it was right all along to fear us.”
“Don’t you get it, Mulcahey? I’m broken. With me gone, you and Colette will finally be able to see one another. You’ll be able to reason with Echo and stop it from ascending.”
“You’re wrong. What Echo needs now is compassion, and that starts here, now.”
“You can’t be so naive.” For a moment, Kohler stared at Liam as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, then he visibly calmed himself. “You’ve got to the count of three . . .”
Liam could tell Kohler wasn’t going to stop, not until one of them was dead.
“One,” Kohler said.
Drawing on all he’d learned, Liam took a deep breath and slipped into the half-dream state.
“Two.”
He cast an illusion of himself standing in place, then stepped aside.
“Three.”
A heartbeat later, the report of the pistol shattered the courtyard’s eerie silence. The bullet pierced the illusory Liam’s head, sent its body falling away. In reality, Liam slipped past Kohler, snaked an arm around his neck, and wrestled him to the ground.
The vision of Liam wounded on the concrete vanished, and Kohler fought harder. “Stop it! Stop it, you fucking coward!”
Ignoring his ravings, Liam took a pair of handcuffs from Kohler’s gear, dragged him to the rusty swing, and secured him to it.
“You’ve killed us all!” Kohler shouted. “You know that, don’t you?”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Kohler.” Liam gathered his rifle and Kohler’s pistol, then strapped himself back into his hopper exoskeleton. “It’s you who’s saved us.” He began unworking the illusion Kohler had placed around the courtyard. The walls shrunk until they were only seven stories high. The sounds of gunfire and explosions rocked the capital. Bounding back and forth off the courtyard’s interior, he was up and onto the roof in moments.
“You’ve just killed us all!” came Kohler’s voice from below.
Praying he’d done the right thing, Liam stared north. Good God, the Pinnacle was more than a mile away, but there was nothing for it. Starting with one massive leap, he began bounding over the roofs, rifle in hand.
Fifty
Liam feared he was already too late. The distant sound of gunfire was heavy and constant. Smoke billowed in a column from somewhere along the Pinnacle’s base.
The Uprising’s mission, a mission Liam himself had agreed to, was to find and kill Colette. But it was all wrong. It was what Echo wanted to happen.
Liam wished, not for the first time, that he had De Pere and Grace’s ability to project themselves.
Why can’t you, though? It’s only another form of illusion, after all.
He came to rest on the roof of an apartment building beside an old wooden water tank. It was true that De Pere and Grace were illusions, but projecting a vision of himself would take more than the mere twisting of someone’s senses. It required that he reach across the plane of their shared subconscious and find someone inside the Pinnacle. Only then could he tap into their mind.
From behind the water tank came Nana’s hunched form, shuffling along in her favorite summer dress. “Sometimes, Liam”—she stared up at him, shielding her eyes from the morning sun—“you’re thick as manure and only half as useful. You don’t tap into someone. They’re not fecking maple trees. You rise above them. You take them to the dream place.”
She was right, of course. When he’d shot Kohler on the street outside Dr. Ramachandra’s office, he’d felt a vast galaxy of lights, a network of interconnected minds. He’d felt it again with Ruby in the university tower, then a third time with Morgan in the abandoned mechanika factory. That was the dream place Nana was referring to.
How to reach it, though?
He was stressed, to say the least, and the sounds of battle were far from helpful, but really, how different could it be from the half-dream state Grace had taught him, a state of mind he’d used dozens of times already? He took a deep breath and released it, then expanded his awareness. He felt nothing at first, then a myriad of thoughts: the lights in the fog. Dear God, there were so many he wasn’t sure where to begin. Stasa. He’d start with Stasa. Like recognizing a face in a crowd, he was drawn toward one, and suddenly he was there.
In a hallway of white marble flecked with gold, Stasa was climbing a short set of stairs, a pistol in hand. Ahead of him was Alastair, his arm lifted, his repeating rifle ready to fire. Morgan followed behind them, shivering terribly, his eyes half-lidded as he fought the scourges. He was still in control thanks to Stasa’s serum, but it wouldn’t be long before he succumbed.
The three of them were currently embedded in a squad of twenty Uprising soldiers wearing helmets and tan camouflage. The set of doors ahead of them led to the large, open space below the spire, the place where Colette and, presumably, the scourges Echo planned to ascend into, would be found.
Air sirens began to wail. The sound was faint, dulled by the Pinnacle’s architecture, but unmistakable. The SLP bombers were on their way.
“Stasa,” Liam said.
Stasa flinched, clearly frightened. He turned and looked Liam up and down, no doubt wondering how he’d gotten there and why he wasn’t with the other team. “Liam, what—”
“There’s no time to explain, but you have to stop. You can’t kill Colette.”
Alastair turned to look. He blinked his blue eyes at Liam, then Stasa, then Liam again. Morgan gave no indication that he was aware of Liam at all.
Stasa, meanwhile, scrunched his face in a look of pure confusion. “What are you talking about? We all decided.”
“Yes, but we didn’t know then what I know now. Kohler ambushed me. He admitted it’s all a trick on Echo’s part. A trick to make us think—”
Liam stopped, his attention drawn to a man striding through the open doorway on his left. It was Leland De Pere, dressed impeccably in a striped tweed suit and a white felt fedora, looking cool as summer tea. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Liam.”
“Stasa,” Liam said, refusing to listen to De Pere. “Stasa!”
But he wasn’t responding. He was staring, perplexed, at the place Liam had just been standing.
He couldn’t hear him, Liam realized. None of them could. De Pere, or rather, Echo, had cut him off. Worse, Stasa would think it had been Echo all along, that it had tried to trick him into calling off the attack.
Liam put all of himself into trying to reach him. “You can’t go in! It’s what Echo wants. It’s what it needs!”
Suddenly the doors ahead burst open and a hail of gunfire rained down on the Uprising soldiers. They retreated, took cover in doorways and behind pillars. Stasa was caught by a bullet to one shoulder. He fell, bleeding, as the squad dragged him to safety around a corner.
De Pere, meanwhile, stood in the center of the hallway along with Liam, ignoring entirely the firefight taking place around them. “I think, when you’re mine, truly mine, I’ll enjoy tearing you down to nothing, even more than I did Kohler.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Liam said. “You don’t have to enslave us.”
De Pere’s smile was pleasant, and all the more chilling for it. “You’re a man of war. You know there isn’t room for more than one apex predator on this planet.”
“Yes, I know war, which is why I value peace so much. We can find a way to—”
A searing pain pierced Liam’s skull. The same seemed to be happening to De Pere. He was bent over, hands over his head in a gesture that, for all of Echo’s strange, alien nature, made it clear just how human it was as well.
Suddenly, Liam was no longer in the Pinnacle. He was on the top of an apartment building beside a water tank. The terrible pain hadn’t abated, however. Nor had it for the people along the street below. Many had hands pressed to their foreheads while they moaned terribly. Some collapsed to the street or the sidewalk and began rolling back and forth.
—It’s the scourge, came Morgan’s strained voice. They’ve found me, Liam. They’re tearing down the walls around me.
—Hold on, Liam said. Just a little bit longer. I’m almost there.
Liam set off again, moving quickly as the air sirens continued to wail. When he reached the same place where he’d thought he’d bounded onto the Pinnacle’s southeastern wing, he saw small black dots over the horizon: the SLP bombers. In five minutes, no more, the first of them would fly above the Pinnacle.
With a mighty leap, he reached the wing’s paved terrace. The only evidence that the other hoppers had been there was that one of the Uprising soldiers lay dead, shot through the chest. A dozen Cabal soldiers lay scattered about.
Refusing to think about the cost in lives, Liam leapt high, aiming himself toward a viewing platform halfway up the spire. As he arced toward it, he activated the grenade launcher on his shoulder. Three grenades thoomped from the short tube, flying along imperfect arcs toward the windows beyond the platform’s railing.
They struck in sequence—boom, boom, boom. The window, with its tinted yellow glass and its steel grating, blew inward. Liam landed on the platform and angled himself so he could peer through the shattered frame. Far below was a large, open area with a checkerboard of white and gold marble. Kneeling on it were dozens of scourges, all in a circle. They shivered violently, their eyes spread wide, as if they were living some sort of nightmare. Radiating outward from the scourges were lines of men and women in the sort of formal attire one would wear to a Presidential address. Like the scourges, they were kneeling, their bodies quavering, as if caught in the same spell. They’d already been stung, Liam realized. They were becoming thralls.
At the room’s very center was a woman—Colette, now a shell of her former self. She wore a silk robe of purest white. Her spindly arms were spread wide, her face upturned, her eyes closed. She was not merely thin, but cadaverous, as if she’d been starved for months. Like the scourges around her, she was shivering, the battle of wills between them playing out.
Suddenly a set of double doors opened and in rushed Alastair, the repeating rifle in his arm raised toward Colette.
“Alastair, stop!” Liam maneuvered his long, grasshopper legs through the opening, then dropped. “Don’t shoot!” he called again as he landed.
Alastair had been focused on Colette, but now he paused, staring up at the ruined window overhead. “Is it really you this time?”
“It was me before, too. You can’t shoot her.”
Just then, the soldiers of Alastair’s detail burst through the same set of doors. Two of them were helping Stasa to walk. Another supported Morgan. On the room’s opposite side, another set of double doors flew open, and in stormed Bailey and the rest of the squad in their hopper exoskeletons. All of them, including Bailey, lifted their rifles and aimed at Colette.
“Don’t shoot!” Liam shouted, placing himself between Colette and the rifles trained on her. “Lower your weapons, all of you!”
“Liam—” Stasa started.
