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Edilio spoke to the lieutenant assigned to escort them through the facility. “I don’t mean to make work for you, but could you please see if you can get u
s a different table? Round, not rectangular.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sam nodded and said, “You’re thinking Knights of the Round Table?”
“Something like that,” Edilio said. “I thought we should sit as equals, at least the nine of you.”
“Good idea,” Dekka said. “But there’s no nine plus, Edilio, there are ten.”
“The Ten Musketeers,” Simone suggested.
Food was carried to them and coffee poured, and at last they sat around the rectangular table, exhausted, drained, and devoid of any ambition but to sleep for a very long time.
“So this is our lair,” Cruz said, looking around at what had once been a very different lair.
“Yep,” Dekka said.
They sat swiveling idly in their chairs and looking around, all feeling lost and disoriented. No one knowing what they should do next.
The end of battle, and the troops sit quietly awaiting the next round.
But Malik had already decided on the next round.
“I have a plan,” Malik said. “We all know how this ends. The ten of us have power, but there are too many possible dangers, not just to us, but to the whole human race.”
Shade sighed. “I had a feeling this was coming.”
“What?” Dekka asked.
“Malik wants to go Over There.”
“If Francis is willing. Maybe, just maybe, I can make contact with the Watchers.”
Edilio spoke up again, and Malik was relieved to see him taking up the role of organizer. Someone had to do it. “I think,” Edilio said, “that when we are in a battle we need one person in charge. But if we’re going to hang together as a group for months, possibly years, I think we should vote on the big things. And this sounds like a big thing.”
The vote was unanimous. Malik had known it would be.
CHAPTER 41
Meet Your Maker
SITE L WAS even stranger seen from the other side. It was fascinating to see the n-dimensional deconstruction of the massive steel doors. Fascinating to see the forest of wire and fiber-optic cable all surging with clouds of photons. Fascinating to see through subterranean walls into the surrounding earth, with tree roots visibly sucking water and nutrients, earthworms eating and excreting, insects crawling on legs that seemed to move apart from the body they were connected to.
All fascinating. And in another time and place Malik might have simply reveled in observing and taking mental notes and formulating hypotheses. . . . Malik had always been one of the smart kids, the ones who barely bothered to crack a textbook because school was just that easy. He’d imagined a future life working at MIT or CERN or NASA. A future of intellectual adventure, of searching for answers.
On many occasions those happy daydreams had included Shade, working beside him, or perhaps teaching at a university, the two of them with a neat little home in a nice neighborhood. Maybe kids. Sure, why not? Any child borne by Shade would be brilliant and beautiful. And as to their moral and ethical upbringing, well, Malik figured he’d better take a hand in that.
And none of those fantasies mattered anymore. All of that was dead. Dead and buried.
Malik was trapped in a life where his only escape from mental invasion by the Watchers was to de-morph back to a body that would die within an hour in agony. That was his reality.
His reality also included having seen a morphed Shade lying on the steel floor of a helicopter so mangled that he had needed no extra dimensions to see her bones and arteries and intestines. She had looked like a crab run over by a truck. He had begged her to de-morph. How many times? A hundred? With tears streaming down his face, he had begged her, and he had to his shame prayed—yes, prayed—to the Watchers.
Don’t let her die. Without her I have nothing.
The Watchers had merely watched. Malik had sensed no pity, no concern, just curiosity. Like they were scientists peering down through a microscope at amoebas.
