Prophet, p.25
Prophet, page 25
Adam thinks about that. It can wait, but he doesn’t want it to. He rips off the Band-Aid. “Rhodes and I decided to dose me again.” Rao pushes off the wall. Looks at Adam closely. “When are you planning to do this?”
“Already done.”
“Fuck’s sake, Adam.” Rao grits his teeth.
“Let’s talk about it inside.”
“Fucking let’s.”
In the room, Rao sits down heavily on his bed. “What happened?” he demands.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“It means nothing happened,” Adam repeats. “I didn’t manifest anything. Rhodes administered a single dose.” He shrugs off his jacket and rolls up his sleeve. Shows Rao the crook of his elbow. The injection site stings, and there’s a dull ache there, like a bruise under his skin, but he’s just showing Rao his arm. There’s nothing there. “I guess it happened again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My blood work showed no Prophet. I’m not normal, Rao. It doesn’t work on me like other people. It did what it did to me last time, then it must have just come out of me. Like today.”
Rao blinks at him. “Fuck off.”
“What?”
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“Then fuck right off. It didn’t just come out of you, last time,” Rao says. He sounds incredulous. Insulted. Adam frowns, confused. “I took it out of you. I— Fuck, Adam, I drew it out of you. It was me.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Adam says. He feels stupid. Distant. He tries to remember the day. He thought he remembered everything. The injection, the manifestation. But the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes there are breaks in his memory. There was the clock. The clock, everything about it and everything it meant. All the grief he’d felt back then, all the grief he’d buried since, all of it out in the room for everyone to see. He could barely breathe through it. Couldn’t think through it. And then—then he could. He knew that Rao was there. He’d asked to leave. They’d left. There were stoplights somewhere. In the vehicle. In the car. That’s what Adam remembers.
“What about any of this makes sense?” Rao counters. Adam silently agrees. “What did Veronica say?”
Adam crosses the room, sits on the other bed. “She said . . .” He pauses. Hates that he does. Stupid. “Rhodes said that it didn’t want me.”
Rao crows with sudden laughter. “Story of your life,” he splutters.
It’s weird how quickly Adam forgot how to handle Rao saying things like this. The insults that aren’t quite insults. It’s the purest form of Rao familiarity: find the weak joint and pull until the structure groans into near collapse. Adam isn’t ready for it, this punch to the gut.
Internal problem.
It obviously shows on his face. Rao winces.
“Sorry, Adam.”
“It’s fine,” he says. It nearly is.
Adam’s grateful when Rao goes to take a shower. He sits on his bed and stares at the chaos surrounding Rao’s. Clothes on the carpet and discarded mugs and candy wrappers on the nightstand. He’s gotten pretty good at ignoring Rao’s clutter, but right now he can’t. He picks up the mugs, brings them to the kitchenette, and washes them. Puts the trash where it should be. Picks the clothes off the floor, folds them, lays them on the bed, and he’s squaring the books on the nightstand when Rao reappears wearing a waffle robe and hotel slippers. Every time Adam’s cleaned like this before, Rao’s given him shit for it. But now he looks amiably at Adam. “Cheers,” he says. “I’m a messy bastard. Okay if I order in some pizza?”
Pizza’s turning into their Big Talk food in the motel, Adam thinks as he chews slowly on a slice. He’s going to have a Pavlovian response to pepperoni after this. He’s going to order a Meat Lover’s one day and start opening up to the server about his relationship with his mother.
“Alright. I’ve waited long enough, I think,” Rao says, mouth full.
Adam blinks at him. “For what?”
“A thank you. I saved your life, Adam.”
He’s talking about Prophet. Drawing it out of him. Did he?
“Did you?”
“Yes, you prick.”
But he can’t tell. He can’t tell with me. “Today, with Rhodes,” Adam says, “you weren’t there. It came out of my skin without you around—”
Rao holds up a hand to stop him speaking, looks away, mouth moving silently. He’s doing a run. “Well. I obviously know fuck all about what’s going on with you. But I can draw it out of people. Other people.”
“That . . . changes a few things.”
Rao exhales, puffing up his cheeks. “No shit. I think I can cure people,” he says, then grins. “I can cure people.”
“How?”
“Fuck knows.”
“Rao.”
“No, really. Adam, I don’t know how to run that. I don’t know what I can check. I have no idea about the mechanics of this shit, and I don’t know why I can draw it out,” he says quickly. “It feels right, though. When I did it for you, it felt—” He stops. Shakes his head.
“I have a fucker of a headache, Adam.”
“I know, Rao. Do we tell Rhodes about this?”
“We’ll have to. I have to,” Rao says. He rubs his face. “I’m seeing her first thing tomorrow to go through my scans. I’ll do it then.”
*
Veronica’s office delights Rao. It seems more like a prop-filled stage than a space a human uses for work. When she invites him to join her behind her desk, he takes a seat and looks up at her monitor. It’s showing a photograph of a village in the Cotswolds. Honey-coloured stone houses, lush meadows, a ribbon of road climbing a hill. Bibury, he thinks. Back when he was a student, he’d visited it with his parents on holiday, staying near Cirencester in a country house hotel. Amiable political talk with his father over breakfast on the terrace, ragged peacocks dragging their tails across dew. Rao necking mimosas under a sky luminous with mist and the promise of a hot summer’s day. His mother wrinkling her nose at the state of the peacocks here, she and Rao sharing one of those moments of laughter that punctuate all his memories like gold.
“How are you feeling?” Veronica enquires.
“Fine,” he answers. I miss my mother, he thinks.
“No symptoms?”
He shakes his head. Trying to explain his episodic hallucinatory experiences would be tedious. Besides, they’re private. “Let’s look at my brain, Veronica,” he says.
She taps at the keyboard and Bibury is replaced with his scan results. The image shifts and roils as she moves through sections of his skull. Thunderclouds, he thinks. The way they roil and rise on a summer’s afternoon. She raises a pencil, taps the screen with its point. The minute click of graphite on glass as she moves it from place to place. “Frontal, limbic, paralimbic, midbrain regions,” she says. “Increased activity in these conforms to previous research in the neurobiology of nostalgia. But your reward centres—hippocampus, substantia nigra, the ventral tegmental area, and ventral striatum—are all in an intense state of arousal.”
Rao waggles his eyebrows.
“Not that kind,” she says. “Many pointers for further investigation, Rao. For now, let’s just say Prophet affects your brain differently than it does other people’s.”
Maybe, he thinks, my brain is just different from other people’s. She’s dropped the “Mr,” he notes. Pity. He’d rather liked the formality.
“Perhaps now might be a good time for us to discuss the passivity you raised, in relation to events in the test room,” she murmurs.
“Absolutely we should,” he says. “That whole thing in the test room, that was down to me.”
“You induced Rubenstein to dose himself?”
He freezes momentarily. “Not . . . not that bit. What happened afterwards. I physically drew the substance out of him. It came out of his skin, right out of the palms of his hands where I was touching them, and it went into mine. Like osmosis.”
She looks hungry again. Leans forward. “Not like osmosis. Not at all like osmosis.”
“I’m not a bloody biologist, Veronica. Capillary action, osmosis, whatever you want to call it. It came out of Adam, went into me.”
“Did it affect you?”
He makes a moue. “A little bit. Got dizzy for a while.”
This is by far the greatest understatement of his life, he thinks. He should get an award.
“Are you and Lieutenant Colonel Rubenstein romantically attached?”
He laughs, surprised. But of course she’d ask that. “No.”
“You’re close?”
“He doesn’t really do ‘close,’ Veronica.”
That gets a different smile. She’s got a host of them lined up for every occasion, and they’re all almost right. “I wonder if we might replicate this phenomenon,” she says.
“You want me to take it out of someone else? Very happy to try.”
Flores looks worse. Greyer, the smile on his face stranger, his cheeks appreciably more sunken, his skin angrier where the cassette tape is pressed against his jaw. Rao walks closer, sees now that the patch of white hair at his temple runs downwards across the centre of an eyebrow, how his bitten fingernails have grown during his trance. The mark on his face is faded but still visible. “How did he get that bruise?” he enquires lightly. Adam’s looking at it too.
“Oh, an accident,” Veronica says. It’s a lie. “You’re sure you want to attempt to extract Prophet from this particular subject?”
“It’s Flores or no one.”
“And you believe you can cure him?”
“I’m going to try.”
“I’ll call a porter. We’ll take him down to the test suite and set up. It’ll take about twenty—”
“We’re doing this here. Here and now or not at all.”
Veronica isn’t happy about that. “Rao—” she begins. He shakes his head firmly, then looks down at Flores, feeling a little self-conscious. Is this a performance? Maybe. He’s not worried about his ability to get Prophet out of him. He can do that. It’s a fact. But he’s less sure how Flores will respond to the process. It’s complicated. Too many variables—physiological, psychological. Far too much resting on this.
What’s resting on this?
Hunter, he thinks. He’s not quite sure when it became important that he stayed in her good books, but life’s full of surprises.
“Rao?” Adam’s voice, just behind him. He sounds concerned.
“I think he’ll be fine, Adam. Really.”
Adam frowns.
Rao looks back down at Flores, considers him carefully. It isn’t going to matter where he touches him. It just needs to be bare skin. But his arms or wrists don’t seem quite enough of a show, and his neck and face don’t seem right somehow. “Veronica, be a dear and expose his chest area for me?”
She walks forward, pulls at the cotton bow behind Flores’s neck, tugs the blue cotton gown to expose a stretch of skin. Seeing it, Rao holds his own thumbs to steady his hands. They’re shaking. A memory, out of nowhere. The morning six days after his seventh birthday when he’d seen what looked like a fat, furry grub clinging to a wall by an oleander bush at the back of his uncle’s house. Stubby wings, tiny feet like grappling hooks on pale grains of sandstone. He’d come back to look again a few minutes later and was entranced: the stubby wings had turned to swept-back planes patterned with geometric greens and purples and pinks. It wasn’t a grub after all. More like a jewel, alive, and so beautiful it made it kind of hard to breathe to look at. He found out by doing the questions that it was a moth. He wanted to touch it and knew he should not, but most of all he wanted to show his mother, so he went to find her. When he brought her back the moth wasn’t just pinned like a brooch on the wall anymore. It was vibrating, wings shivering with a buzzing noise like electricity lines in a storm. His mother saw that he was nervous of it, and she told him that the shivering meant the moth was readying itself for flight, getting itself warmed up before it could leave, and that was true. Scales in his mouth, soft dust. History. Scintillating dots, just for a moment, in front of his eyes. He blinks, steps forward, and lays both hands on Flores’s upper chest, fingers spread wide.
A sharp intake of breath. He’s surprised that Flores is warm, that’s all. Despite the steady rise and fall of his chest, that wasn’t a thing he’d expected.
A few seconds tick past and the sensation begins, that hot-cold confusion across his palms and fingers. Fuck, he thinks numbly. He knows this feeling, and he’s spent a lot of time doing his very, very best to make it go away. Too late, Sunil, he thinks. But you’re saving Flores. And then the thinking stops. Prophet has seeped into his skin and all the thinking is just a dot, a dot smaller than the size of the dot over a letter i drifting in the open ocean and the ocean might be water, he thinks it could be, but it doesn’t have depths, or tides, or waves, and it’s not blue, or even the black of deep water, it’s not got edges, either, it’s not water, it’s definitely not water, and he feels a twist of panic that picks him up and wrenches at him so hard he knows, for one screaming, yawning gulf of a second, that his brain is gone, that this is madness—
And then it’s done.
He’s back, for whatever given value of back this is, he knows he is, and he’s looking at his hands. They feel a little unfamiliar, but they’re his. And the skin beneath them is Flores. And the sound he’s hearing is coughing, and that’s Flores too. And the eyes that are looking back at him from Flores’s face, between the coughs that wrack his ribcage, are the tiredest he’s ever seen. They’re trying to focus on his face. He drops his gaze, doesn’t want Flores to meet his eyes. Because he feels ashamed of what he’s done. Flores didn’t ask for this. Flores didn’t ask. And Rao swallows, turns his hands, stares at his palms. Nothing. They look normal. But it’s in him.
“Rao?”
Rao stands. He feels a thousand years old. And then, a moment later he doesn’t. Quite chipper, actually. “Adam,” he exclaims, beaming. The expression on Adam’s face is perhaps the most complicated he’s ever seen it. He has no idea what it means. Obviously.
He bursts out laughing.
“You ok?” Adam asks.
“Yeah, I’m fine. And not the way you use that word, Adam. I’m honestly superb. Hunter’s going to be psyched. Look at this Lazarus shit!”
There’s a clatter. It’s the tape Flores was holding; it’s fallen to the floor. Flores is ignoring it, is trying to sit up, Veronica by his side. No, he’s not trying to sit up, Rao realises. He’s trying to get away from her.
“Veronica, think you should give him a moment, you know? And about twenty feet? Ta.”
Rao turns back to Flores and this time looks him right in the eye. “Back with us?”
Flores blinks. Tries to speak.
Adam speaks first. “What do you remember,” he says.
Orders, Rao thinks. Adam’s good at giving them. Flores’s haggard eyes track up to Adam’s and stay there. When Adam asks again if he remembers anything at all, Flores nods. The horror in his eyes as he does is naked, unbearable. Worse than anything Rao saw in Kabul. Rao reaches down to take one of his hands, squeezes it gently. Keeps hold of it until Flores’s expression slips back to hazy bewilderment. Then Flores rouses himself, tugs at Rao’s hand, looks up at him again. Opens his mouth and manages something like a whisper. None of the words are audible, but Rao knows. He knows what gratitude is.
CHAPTER 45
Rhodes tells Rao three times to leave Flores to their nursing team. He ignores her. Now she’s clenching her fists. Looks close to attempting physical persuasion. Adam permits himself a brief, therapeutic rehearsal of exactly how he’d take her down, then casts it from his mind. “Rao,” he says softly, keeping his eyes on Rhodes. “Let them take over.” He gets a weary look but Rao complies.
As Rao sits heavily on the examination couch in the treatment room Rhodes led him to, Adam decides he looks okay. Irritated, more than anything, as Rhodes takes hold of a wrist and examines his hand, telling him she observed filaments of Prophet extruding from Flores’s skin into his own. She’s speaking animatedly of possible mechanisms for this transferral when a nurse puts his head through the door and requests her attendance.
As soon as she leaves, Adam steps forward.
“I think you need some fresh air.”
“What?”
“If you’re up to it, we should take a walk,” he says. “Outside.”
“You think they’ll let me out, after this?”
After what Rao just did in there, Rhodes would give him anything he asked for. She’d gift wrap it. Adam keeps that observation to himself.
“Yes,” he says.
*
Adam brought him out here, Rao assumes, because he’s got something to say he doesn’t want anyone else to hear. But he’s not speaking, shows no sign of wanting to speak, and it’s been more than five minutes, and he’s walking fast, and Rao’s already bored with the scenery, the marked-up construction plots and rows of half-built townhouses, and he’s tired after healing Flores—
“Ok,” he says. “What is it?”
Adam slows and turns. His voice is deep and full of concern. “You’re sure about all this, Rao?”
“Stop fussing. I’m fine.”
He nods, once, after the briefest pause. “You could fix Miller.”
“I can, yes.”
Another nod. They pace another forty yards in silence. Eventually, Rao stops, exasperated.
“Adam. Why are we out here?”
“You tested if Miller knew about the project.”
“Yeah. She didn’t.”
“What about Richard Clemson?”
