Yorena flew down from above and settled on Shoella's left shoulder. Shoella scratched the back of the familiar's neck and said to Loraine, “I had to see you two together, and I had to bring us into a room with Scribbler, to get his Sight, and...Gabriel and I will discuss it. Someplace else. Alone.” She 214 touched her blouse, where she'd tucked away the folded, red-inked paper torn from Scribbler's scroll.
Shoella glared up at the one working streetlight as if that's what she was mad at, streetlights. But Yorena seemed to glare at Loraine. Who exactly
was
Shoella angry at? Bleak wondered. Hadn't this been her idea? Hadn't she been talking about working with CCA, if they could retain their freedom? “Shoella—” He waited as a police car and then another sirened by on the avenue, going downtown, followed by the whine of an electric bus. “You feel like you can interpret the writing he gave us?”
“Later. She...” Shoella nodded at Loraine. “She doesn't have to hear. She only had to be there with us when he did it.”
Bleak looked curiously at Loraine. “What made you rub Scribbler's hand like that? I've never seen him let anyone else touch him.”
“Why?” Shoella snorted. “So she could read what he wrote.”
Loraine shook her head. “I'm sure he'd have shown me anyway. I just wanted to.” She took a long, slow breath, frowning in thought. “I don't know. I just felt like he needed it. I felt sorry for him. Like he'd gotten close to me in some way and looked into me and when he did...1 don't know how to say it.”
Bleak nodded. This woman could surprise him. Which was something he liked. “I don't want to spend any more time around this woman,” Shoella snapped. Not looking at Loraine as she said it.
Why this desire in Shoella to get away from Loraine? Bleak wondered. Was it jealousy—or mistrust because she was CCA?
The look in Shoella's eyes suggested it was something personal. As if she too suspected a bond between Bleak and Loraine. An extraordinary bond.
He seemed to hear Oliver's bitter voice again:
“I suppose you know that Shoella's in love with you. “
“I'll be going soon, Shoella,” Loraine said, in a low voice. “Bleak-what did it mean...what it said about me, and you? I didn't exactly...follow.”
Bleak pretended to be interested in looking at Yorena. “I don't know for sure. It appears you and I are connected in some way. Linked somehow. But I don't know how. Not yet.” He had a suspicion, though. And the suspicion renewed that feeling of embarrassment. Of feeling naked.
Loraine nodded quickly, as if glad to have put the question behind her. “And—what did the...the
divination
mean, 'the President is afraid of the man within the man'? And what is the Great Wrath?”
“I don't know that either. Eventually it'll show itself to us, as the facts start to unfold. I do know that this oracle often tends to be surprisingly literal.”
“By this oracle—you mean, um, Conrad?”
“No, he's just a medium for the message. Just the transmitter. We say, 'Scribbler says this,' but we don't mean it's really him saying it. His vocabulary doesn't even extend to a lot of the words he writes.” Bleak paused, thinking about how to explain it. Feeling a breeze off the East River. It smelled of the river's living murk. “No, the oracle is an entity in the Hidden that is trying to help, but it has to do it indirectly. It doesn't seem to make sense when the oracle speaks because you aren't caught up to the truth yet. That's something you find out later—then you see what it meant. But I could guess at one thing—if it says 'a man within the man' about someone around President Breslin—it's talking about some kind of diabolic influence.”
Loraine's eyes widened. “Diabolic influence. Around the president?”
Shoella said sharply, “Evil souls like to be with evil souls.” She gave Loraine a look that conveyed matter-of-fact hatred as effectively as a hard slap to the face. “The president approved your Central Containment Authority. I know what your people have done to my people.” Shoella seemed to loom over Loraine as she spoke, her voice becoming a hiss. “I should tie you to a roof and let Yorena eat your eyes. I should call the baka who eats minds—and I should say, 'Feed on her!' But”—Shoella made a gesture of exasperation and drew back from Loraine—”you are to be of use, some kind of bridge, this the oracle says, so I got to bring you here...and let you walk away.” Adding, her voice barely audible, “Though you are sure to betray me.”
Loraine remained outwardly unmoved, watching Shoella closely during the diatribe but not showing any fear, and not arguing.
“Sarikosca here won't betray us,” Bleak said. “Scribbler would have warned us. The Hidden seems to say she won't. Seems to say we should trust her. I know it doesn't make sense—but...”
He turned to Loraine—and for a moment, when she looked back, he felt an electric connection between them. He felt a stirring, a pull. Then, lips parted as if she were catching her breath, Loraine looked quickly away. “But she won't betray us,” he said again.
“I didn't mean she will betray me like that,” Shoella said softly. She turned to him, adding more forcefully, “Now, Bleak, you come with me. We need to talk. And she must go.”
Loraine turned to Bleak, their gazes intersected again, and though her face was impassive he saw, quite clearly, the depth of emotion in her eyes. “I...had better go anyway,” she said. “I'm not going to tell anyone about Scribbler. Or Shoella. I will talk to them about the possibility that CCA could be in a different kind of...of relationship with ShadowComm. A new deal.”
“You could answer some questions, yourself,” Bleak said, holding her gaze. Not letting her go just yet. “What is happening in the north? Where does the wall come from? What's happening to it?”
“I can't tell you those things. I took an oath.”
“How about Facility Twenty-three? It was in the red scribble. That sounds like it'd refer to something of yours—something belonging to CCA.”
She looked at the sidewalk. “It is CCA's, yes. I haven't been there yet. It's their most clandestine facility.”
“That where the ShadowComms go?”
She didn't deny it. “Not just there. But Twenty-three is one of the most...” She shrugged. “Like I say, I haven't been admitted there yet.”
“But you know who's there?” Bleak took a step closer to her. Could feel the aura of life around her; could feel the outer edges of her mind as if feeling the static electricity in a cat's fur. He realized, all of a sudden, that he wanted to take her in his arms.
But if he did, she would probably draw back from him—and Shoella might do anything. Might try to kill them both.
Still, Loraine tolerated him, standing so close; she looked up into his face. And he asked her softly, “Is Sean there? Is my brother in Facility Twenty-three?” He knew, somehow, with the two of them so near each other, that she couldn't keep herself from answering. But he didn't know exactly why that was.
She swallowed. Then nodded. “I think he probably is.”
They were standing so close...he could almost—
“Gabriel,” Shoella said, her voice husky with warning.
Loraine stepped decisively back. Then she forced a thin smile, a parting nod. “I'll be in touch. I have to go...they'll be looking for me.” She fished in her purse, found a business card and a pen, wrote a number on the back of the card. “That's my personal cell phone.” She gave it to Bleak and turned to walk away, toward the west.
Yorena squawked, and Shoella glanced at the creature in irritation. “Shut up. You don't know that. You don't know anything. It might go any way at all.”
Bleak glanced at the familiar. “What did Yorena say?”
“Lies. Yorena's very emotional. Very pessimistic. Nothing to repeat.” Shoella looked in a pocket for a cell phone. “I'll call a cab.”
He turned and watched Loraine walk away. He felt a tearing inside. A completely irrational feeling.
All this is irrational. Trusting her. Feeling this way as she walks away. Makes no sense.
“Maybe Yorena is right,” Shoella said softly, watching Loraine narrowly. “Maybe I am making a big mistake, letting her go. I could send Yorena after her, Gabriel. One quick clawing at the woman's neck, in the right spot, tear that big vein, she would probably die.”
Bleak looked at Shoella in dull shock. Finally he said, “You've got better judgment than that, Shoella. That woman won't betray us.”
Shoella just shook her head in sullen disgust. Bleak stared after Loraine, then put the card in his wallet, thinking that something monumental, something key and important, had happened tonight... and he had no idea, exactly, what it was.
And when Loraine walked away, he felt something else: a sinking inside him, a lost feeling, a groping in darkness...as if he were suddenly missing some precious part of himself.
In your right hand you hold her despair...
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Almost two hours later. Upstate New York. A warm and sticky night. Just outside Facility 23.
Dying oaks, crumbling inwardly from a blight, stretched out their branches alongside the access road with lugubrious crookedness. As the young soldier drove her up to the facility gate, Loraine told herself there was nothing special, outwardly, about the facility. Surrounded by razor wire, floodlights, and cameras on steel poles, it was just another sprawling, generic government structure, with a cryptic sign but no clear markings. But there was something about it...
The air conditioner in the government car was broken; the driver had apologized, but there was no time to go to the motor pool for another—she'd received a cell phone call from Dr. Helman summoning her here within minutes of leaving Bleak. Sweat gathered on her brow and blew away in the air washing through the car's open windows. Her clothes chafed her, under the armpits, and at her collar. The young Special Forces driver, a stocky white man in a uniform and black beret, had hardly spoken since she'd got in beside him.
She stared at the bland facade of Facility 23, thinking,
Sean Bleak is in there somewhere.
In a place that hummed with frightened desperation.
Now what brought that on?she
thought. But since her first encounter with Bleak, she'd felt more intuitive, more sensitive, than she ever had before.
She pondered her sense of deep but indescribable connection to Gabriel Bleak. She'd felt him watching her as she walked away, down Ninety-fifth Street. Felt it as clearly as you'd feel a cool breeze on the back of your neck.
Maybe all this exposure to the supernatural had her imagining things. Seeing Krasnoff project his visions; seeing Soon Mei open the Hidden. Glimpsing her fate scribbled in red ink. She was seeing the unearthly everywhere.
No—it was more as if her boundaries had been fractured. Her assumptions about reality had flown to pieces. It was as if hidden doors, secret passages, were everywhere, no matter where you went. As if she had been walking down the corridor of life looking for a door where the walls looked blank, then she'd discovered the doors
were there
all the time. They were simply invisible, until you learned to see them. She was starting to sense things she'd never sensed before.
And her newly kindled intuition told her that Facility 23 was one big bad omen.
Deal with it,
she thought, as the sedan drove through the gate to the first checkpoint. The driver spoke to the guards, flashlight beams made Loraine blink, then the car was waved on. It drove along a narrow asphalt road around the building to stop at a nondescript gray metal door in a big, otherwise featureless concrete wall in the back.
The gray metal door opened, as she got out of the car, and Dr. Helman was waiting for her in its rectangle of cold light, bobblehead nodding. “I apologize in advance,” Helman said, as she walked up to the building's back door. “I should let you read the file of the man you're about to meet, first. But there isn't time. Events press. Time grows short. You must meet him now.”
She followed him into a building, and down a corridor—for much of its length a blank, doorless corridor, like so many others she'd walked through—Loraine thinking it strange Helman hadn't mentioned her meeting with Bleak. Maybe they didn't have her under surveillance after all. Not all the time. But there was another possibility....
***
SHE KNEW IT WAS him, before Helman introduced the man sitting at the table: “This is Sean Bleak. Sean, Agent Sarikosca.”
They were in a small, windowless conference room with a large flat-screen TV at one end; a glossy pine-finish, oval conference table with a few chairs, concrete walls painted light green. An opaque glass hemisphere in the center of the ceiling probably held a surveillance camera. Just outside the open door were two guards, alert to a call from Helman. Apparently Helman didn't trust Sean.
“I don't want to call her Agent Sarikosca,” Sean said as she sat across from him. A peculiar, twisted little smile as he said it; a pettish, whispery voice; ice-chip blue eyes. Long sandy hair. He wore a paramilitary outfit. On him it looked almost like the clothing of an inmate in a military prison.
Not an identical twin. But much like Gabriel Bleak—and very much unlike him.
“You'll call her what protocol demands, Sean,” Helman told him, sitting at the end of the table, frowning over a complicated remote control. “General Forsythe wants a structured environment for you. Your privileges are contingent on staying within that structure. That means following protocol.”
Sean chuckled at that; eyes flicking at Helman with barely concealed contempt. “You invoke Forsythe's name to keep me in line.” She noticed he had a way of talking with his mouth nearly shut. “You know he's special; that he's the one I respect. But don't pretend I've got any real freedom.” Sean looked at Loraine, added hastily, “Not that I don't ever leave this place. I've been in places like this most of my life—but there were other places too.” It seemed important to him to tell her that he was more than some lab rat, here. “There was a place up in the mountains, in the trees. I had a nanny, she was a good old girl. I had a tutor who was kind of like a dad to me. In a sort of way. I had play dates with kids, for a while. Till that got weird. I even got taken to Disney World one time. I've got the latest game consoles. Lately I go on what they like to call virtual excursions. We've got some pretty good VR gear. And I've had women—”