A Darker Place (49 page)

It was insane, sure, but Ana could not keep from wondering: Just how big a fire would it take to transmute a man into an immortal?

She had been right her first night here, terribly close to the truth: This really was Texas revisited, and Utah. Here she was again, with two young hostages in the hands of her enemy and the responsibility for the entire community on her shoulders; the difference was, this time she knew it. In Texas another woman, a far different Ana, had selfishly walked away from the only people who mattered to her, so engrossed in her own problems that she was blind to the signs, deaf to the warning bells, dangerously, murderously ignorant.

No more. She could see this man playing with his vision, turning it over in his big, hard hands, changing and shaping it until it matched his idea of perfection. A moment’s fear, a sudden conviction that “they” had infiltrated to his bosom and were about to take his Work away from him, and he would move instantly to set the final Transformation in motion. She could all but smell
the danger, and her ears rang with the ghostly echo of gunfire, her nostrils twitched with the remembered stink of fresh blood and old death.

Her only hope was to keep her wits about her and to get help.

On her own, she could do little more than seize Jason and Dulcie and flee, evading the camouflage-clad guard and hoping to make it as far as the main road and the arms of the constabulary. But what then, when their abrupt departure was discovered and Jonas realized that his chance for immortality was slipping away from him? Would he reach out for another and set off on his ultimate quest? And if so, who would be Ana’s substitute? The innocent Sara? Or perhaps young, blond Deirdre? And what would it do to Jason and Dulcie when they eventually found out what their salvation had cost? What does it profit a man, that he gain his life and lose the world?

Ana could not both protect the two children and keep an eye on Jonas, not for long. She had to have help. She could try to break into the phone system, call Glen—but had he even received her last letter yet? And how long would it take him to set up a response in a foreign country? A long time, knowing governments; longer even than it would take her, a private citizen of a foreign country, to work her way through the local authorities until she found someone. Too long. Furthermore, although she longed to hear Glen’s cold and competent voice, craved his presence with a lust stronger than sex, a single man on a white horse was not about to make much difference.

Once, long long ago, she had thought that fear was the energy that kept her persona together, a potential resource like pain or desperation that with acceptance and rigid concentration could be shaped and used. Not
this kind of fear. This fear was too deep to be grasped, too slippery to be handled, too disorienting to be accepted; it left her utterly alone and directionless, wishing she could crumple into a corner and weep like a child.

That was not possible. She just had to pull herself together—the ghosts of murders past were getting in her way, obscuring her vision of what was and what she must do. Her only option was the same one she had been following since she arrived here, that of watch and wait. This was no time to lose control, and the all-too-obvious fact that she had no business being here, that she was no longer capable of doing this work, could not be helped. She would just have to shove her panic back into its box and do her best: There was no one else.

And think about it: Jonas wanted her voluntarily, which meant that he either had no wish to drag her into the alembic with him or, more likely, he could not envision the necessity. She needed to see the basement, to examine the alembic itself and to see if there was any sign of a nitrate bomb. She would have to convince him of her need to see his workshop, just as she had convinced him that he needed her as the key to his great Transformation. Work herself in to his side, hope he left his telephone open or—better—that modemed computer, and get a message to Glen.

Yes, she had to have help. Agreed, there was no way she could do this alone for more than another few days. The best way for obtaining that help was the same way she always had: Write a journal entry for Glen.

Only this time she’d have to make damned certain that nobody found it, because there would be no pretty subterfuge here. Write down the truth, in all its detail, and then she would either get herself a map of the estate and sneak off to a mailbox, or feed the pages through
Jonas’s scanner and slap the result into an e-mail to Glen. That would take less time than Jonas had been gone to urinate.

Buy time, call for help, act normal.

And the hardest of these is normality.

From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly

The smell of food in the dining hall filled Ana with nausea, but she craved something hot to drink. She took a mug and filled it from the big urn, added sugar, and took it to her corner, where she cupped her hands around it as if the tiny heat it gave off would drive away the coldness of her bones. Three mugs later her thirst was slaked but she was still shivering in the warmth of the dining hall.

Then she looked up and saw Dulcie, and one glance at the child’s expression cut her shivering off. Dulcie needed her; there was no time for weakness.

“Hello, Dulcinea,” she said gently. “How’s my squire this evening?”

The child shrugged, a motion so like her brother that Ana wanted to reach out and pull Dulcie to her, burying that sad, remote little face in her embrace. Instead, she put her mug down on the table and stood up, casually holding out her hand to the girl.

“Why don’t you show me your room, Dulcie? Then I’ll show you where mine is. Sorry my hand’s so rough and covered with Band-Aids—I spent the afternoon digging and I got a bunch of blisters. I shouldn’t call them Band-Aids, though, should I? Here they’re sticking plasters. I wonder why they call them plasters? Plaster is that white stuff they cover walls with, that turns really hard and you can paint it. You remember that gray mud that Tom and Danny were using back in Arizona, that would get big blobs in their hair and when they came to meals they’d look really funny? Oh my little sweetheart, what’s the matter?”

Dulcie had drifted to a halt halfway up the stairs and was now just standing, one hand limp in Ana’s, her
shoulders drooping and her head down. She was crying. Ana sat down on the upper step and pulled Dulcie to her. The child was pliable but unresponsive, weeping as if she were too tired and dispirited to do anything else. Ana crooned wordlessly and rocked her, oblivious to the people coming and going on the stairway, aware only of the small, warm head of hair tucked under her chin, and the slack hopelessness of this young body, and eventually the shuddering intake of breath as the tears tapered off. When the tears ended, some of Ana’s own hopelessness seemed to have worked itself out as well.

“Where is your room, Dulcie?” she asked. The child stood without speaking, and they continued up the stairs and down the hallway, Aria’s hand resting on the back of Dulcie’s neck. Dulcie chose a door and Ana followed her in. She picked up the child and sat her down on the bed with the teddy bear from the pillow, and then sat next to her. Dulcie leaned into Ana’s arm.

“What’s wrong?” she asked the child again.

“I want to go home.”

“Home to Arizona? To where Steven is? Or home—?” Where was the child’s home, anyway?

“To Steven.”

“Why are you unhappy here? Jason’s here.”

“No.”

“He isn’t?” Ana looked quickly around the room: shoes in the corner, a familiar plaid shirt over a chair, books and papers on the desk—all reassuring signs that a teenager lived there.

“He’s always doing things. Talking to Her, or That Man.”

“Jonas, you mean? And who’s ‘Her’?”

“The girl.” Dulcie’s voice vibrated with disgust.

Ah. “Do you mean Deirdre?” Dulcie nodded. “Dulcie, listen to me. Jason loves you. He’s just excited to be in a new place, and it’s hard for him to keep his mind
on things. I’ll have a talk with him, okay? Ask him to settle down a little?”

Dulcie nodded, then said, “But I still want to go home.”

Ana thought for a minute and decided it was best not to bring That Man into it at all, but, rather, to dwell on the positive side. “There are some nice things here. Have you seen the barn with the horses? And there’s lots of kids.”

“I can’t understand them.”

“Their accents, you mean?”

“They talk funny. Like on TV.”

“You know, I’ll bet they think you talk funny like TV, too. There’s a lot of American shows on English television.” Not that the Change kids saw much TV, come to think of it, but never mind. “Come on, let’s go see the horses go to bed.”

Ana spent the next hour coaxing and amusing the child out of her feeling of abandonment. Dulcie found the horses beautiful, the lambs amusing, the cats still at the kitchen door, and the voices around her not quite as unintelligible as she had thought. At the end of their tour they went to see Ana’s room. Ana let her look around, bounce on her bed, and paw through her meager belongings, and then told the child that she could come to visit anytime she wanted.

They talked for a while about church mice and other important matters, and then Ana took Dulcie down a set of stairs and along the long corridor and around a corner to the room the child shared with her brother. Jason leapt out of his chair at their entrance, looking worried and angry, but before he could berate Dulcie for disappearing, Ana broke
in
.

“Oh, Jason, there you are. Sorry I didn’t leave you a note to tell you I’d taken Dulcie down to see the animals in the barn, I should have realized you’d wonder where
she was. Dulcie, maybe you should pop in and have a bath after petting all those horses and playing with the cats. Need a hand?”

After the child was dispatched to the bathroom down the hall, Ana lingered to talk with Jason about school and work and how he had spent his day. His dark eyes were alive with enthusiasm and she enjoyed the rare—the formerly rare—sight of Jason Delgado smiling, twice. His animation and willingness to talk to her at length about ordinary things were disorienting but steadying, and as enormously comforting as the physical contact with his sister had been earlier.

“You know,” she told him gently when he paused to draw breath, “Dulcie seemed kind of lonely and a little upset tonight. You’ve been busy, and she was feeling left out. Though I’m glad you’re enjoying it here.”

“It’s all right,” he said, adding, “I like some of the people.”

“You’re going to miss the basketball,” she said.

“Season’s over anyway.”

“Tomorrow after lunch, let’s get together and look at what you and the others need to do to finish the school year. Dov and I brought the final exams with us” (a thousand years ago, it seemed) “so maybe you could take them early and have the summer ahead of you.”

“You don’t think we’ll be going home before school’s out, then?”

“Doesn’t sound like it to me. Why, did Steven say you were?”

“Nobody said anything,” he said with a wry grimace. “Just ‘get on the plane.’ I didn’t even know we had passports.”

She did not tell him that it was standard procedure at Change for new members to apply for passports, or whenever possible for minors to have the application
made for them. International experiences (carefully monitored, of course) were used as a selling point by the school.

“Well, I hope you get to see something of the country while you’re here.” Dulcie was making final splashing noises down the hall. “Tomorrow is our half day, you know that?” Once a week, in addition to Sundays, the Change residents had an afternoon free. Thursday was theirs. “After the school meeting, assuming I’m free, I’d like to take you two for a walk. I have a little surprise for you. You personally, I mean.”

Jason nodded, concealing his interest well, and went to supervise the nightgowning of his sister. Ana waited to give Dulcie a good-night kiss, and then she returned to her room. She had intended to join the evening meditation, now that Jonas had acknowledged her existence, but she felt weary and distant, and when she had to make an effort to exchange a few simple words with her next-door neighbor, she knew she could not bear the entire gathered community. She closed her door, jammed the chair under the knob, tugged the curtains as closed as they would go, and sat on the hard bed, her skin crawling with tiredness and a cold that did not come from the soft night. Too tired even for sleep, twitching with the day’s tensions, she took out her diary and got to work.