Page 23 of Antihero

Evan considered.

He reached through his shirt, magnetic buttons parting, and drew from his appendix holster. The 1911 spun once in his hand.

The handle stuck out, proffered to Rawlings.

The whole flash of movement happened before anyone else could react.

It took a full two seconds for Rawlings to come off high alert. He’d drawn back, tense on his heels, but he breathed himself back down into his loafers again and took the pistol.

Evan looked past him. Now the staircase was curling up from the west side again—no, south? He stared up at the landing floating way above, a Verona arc of balcony, from which now issued voluminous coughing and sounds of gagging.

Evan reset himself. “Want to show me what’s going on?”

11All of Her All at Once

Anca stirred into hazy consciousness. Her eyes couldn’t open. Swelling, a crust of dried blood across her left lid. Her insides ached and her face ached and her parts ached, all of her all at once, a raw throbbing. Acrylic or fiberglass, slick against her bare bottom. The air was damp and liquid sloshed around her, a soupy, fetal immersion. Her nostrils stung. Pain in the side of her neck, the bulge of her shoulder, remembrances of needle punctures.

Bathtub. She was in a bathtub. The water, no more than three inches deep. No, not water. Chemical something. The fumes, they were burning her nose. Pungent, sharp, metallic. Bleach? No, hydrogen peroxide, like she used to scrub stains out of her worn-thin carpet.

Memories rushed her, blips of semi-awakeness. Animal grunts. Malign laughter. Hands on her, all over her, squeezing and grabbing and tweaking. Pressed into a bare mattress, stomach down, limbs spread, fire and more fire inside. Ski masks looming overhead, non-faces bulging with drugged distortion, dark eyes and smeared wet lips.

Her head lolled forward, an ache clenching her neck and shoulders. She felt presence around her, stirring, a strong masculine scent. Titters, voices. She scrunched her eyes shut hard and tried to pry them open, her right eye yielding a slit.

Moldy grout fingering between cracked white tiles. A jaundiced light slanting through a filthy high-set window. Her knobby knees before her, the soft white flesh of her thigh marred with thumb-wide bruises. The periphery swam into blurry view. Jeans and bare waists and torsos, several forms rimming the bathtub. One of the men had a tattoo of a goat skull covering his left pectoral, phallic ram horns spiraling up, a cyclops eye peering out from its bony forehead. Her insides seized, bringing fresh pain.

“She’s up, she’s up.”

A voice from the other room. “Hit her again.”

With terror, she lifted her gaze.

Dark ski masks hovered above, peering down, smooth black-nylon heads. In the dirty light, she cowered, naked, defiled, the object of a bestial séance.

One of the bare-chested men moved, a syringe flashing in his hand.

A prick at her neck, a burn in her blood, and she tumbled back down into darkness.

12Lion’s Den

As Evan and Joey glided up the grand staircase, the dizzying interior of Tartarus seemed to warp and stretch. Joey slid a steadying hand along the banister, a smooth ribbon of African blackwood. Perched high on the wall atop a ledge of Japanese zelkova wood, carvings of the three monkeys peered down at Evan, larger and more menacing than they’d appeared before.

A gurgled shout from above: “—supposed to bend the knee to ‘settled science’?”

“It’s been like this,” Rawlings said discreetly and somehow over both shoulders as he led, “for a while.”

They reached the landing, the voice growing louder: “—as if truth is arrived at by some tepid consensus rather than thrusts of genius that punctuate the equilibrium of an age. Curse Copernicus in his slumber, slingshot Darwin out of the firmament! We don’t need their disruptive ilk when it comes to—” A muffled blur, like shouting into a pillow.

At Evan’s side, Joey stayed close enough that their elbows brushed.

The hallway to the master suite snaked off to the right. Evan was certain that last time he was here, it darted the other way. There were restroom doors and hidden doors, and then the most important door of all floated into view. Upholstered in plush scarlet fabric, it hid the nerve center of Devine’s operation. Fed by illicit database connections and lenses hidden in the nooks and crannies of the vertiginous mansion, the AI data-gathering system matched every face to an identity and that identity to every digital impression it had ever made. It augmented Devine’s roaring frontal lobe, cold and preternaturally powered, all-seeing and psychopathically efficient.

Once the system had your biometrics captured, there was no way to stop it chainsawing through your tree rings. Evan’s Woolrich button-up and Joey’s poplin blouse sported discreet lab-engineered patterns designed to disrupt machine-vision algorithms, rendering them indiscernible to surveillance lenses. This was a formality. At regular intervals, Joey ensured that any digital crumbs they might leave behind proliferated into a hydra head of gnashing dead ends.

“—no, no, no,” the voice, now taunting. “Let’s waddle forward together at the pace of eighty-seven-percent agreement, leaving no peer-reviewed Ph.D. behind.”

The double architectural doors at the end of the hall seemed to recede as they approached. A drumroll of tapping dress shoes and then an assistant type shot through and skittered past them, chest heaving, nostril flanges pinked to a pre-cry hue. Ejected from the room after her, an incomprehensible burst of glossolalia heavy on fricatives.

They neared the double doors. Or drew farther away from them.