Outlanders 50 the janus.., p.17
Outlanders 50 The Janus Trap, page 17
Brigid looked at him, flinching for a moment from his penetrating gaze.
“I…I know I shouldn’t have hidden…” “I’m not here for her, Baptiste,” Kane said. “I’m not here to take her away and I’m not here to hurt her. Now, why don’t you go sit down while I look in your bathroom cabinet?” Brigid looked perplexed. “My bathroom…?” “Sit,” Kane instructed, gesturing to the couch. Brigid let out a long breath that she didn’t realize she had been holding, and then she walked across the little room and sat with Abigail. As Kane disappeared into the bathroom, Brigid examined the wound on her niece’s arm, telling her that she shouldn’t scratch it. “Is the Magistrate man going to shoot us, Auntie?” Abi asked, her voice a whisper. “He says he won’t, munchkin,” Brigid assured her, though she wasn’t nearly half as certain as she tried to sound. The Magistrate returned with a package of gauze pads, a bottle of disinfectant and a roll of tape. He handed them to the redhead and stood over her as she cleaned the girl’s wound and dressed it once more. “So, why are you here, Magistrate Kane?” Brigid asked as she blotted disinfectant around the wound. “I saw you in the market,” Kane began. “Did you see me? I saw you and I felt something, like déjà vu.” Brigid looked up at him and smiled, her face still wet with tears. “Are you… You’re not trying to come on to me, are you?” “Shit, no,” Kane answered, looking a little embarrassed. “It’s…it’s hard to explain, but I think that maybe you and I know each other. In another life, somehow.” “Abi, stop squirming,” Brigid said, and she didn’t bother to look up as she carefully dressed Abigail’s wound. “With the best of respect, Magistrate, that does sound a lot like a come-on.” Kane ignored her, knowing that the only way to really explain what he meant was to give her all the facts. If she was the enemy, he would know, wouldn’t he? “I was attacked,” he told her, “by a girl, but something strange happened. I was at- tacked in the street by a girl who wasn’t there.” “I recall a poem about a man who wasn’t there again today, and the narrator wishing he’d go away,” Brigid stated. “What’s that?” Kane asked. “It’s a sort of nonsense poem.” Kane nodded and sighed. “So this girl attacked me, maybe eighteen years old, and she was like nothing you’ve ever seen. Her body was covered in tats, weird stuff like circuitry, and her clothes—they were so strange.” “This is very interesting, Magistrate,” Brigid said, “but I’m not really seeing how it connects to me.” “We fought, me and this strange-looking girl, and then she disappeared,” Kane said. “I was standing there and she just went, like she’d never even existed. And if she doesn’t exist,” Kane said thoughtfully, “then neither do you, Brigid Baptiste.” “What makes you say that?” Brigid asked, scoffing. “Because I got the same vibe off her as I did off you when I first saw you in the Market Square,” Kane told her. “So I don’t exist,” Brigid said. “That’s just great. Thanks for dropping by and scaring my niece and wrecking my apartment, Magistrate.” “Stop calling me that,” Kane said quietly. “Stop calling me Magistrate. It’s Kane.” “Well, Kane,” Brigid told him, “I’m not really following any of this. I think per- haps I should call your superiors.” Kane scratched his head, felt the pressure of his conflicting emotions, his strange, nonsensical thoughts. “The thing of it is,” he said, “what if she did exist? What if she exists and you exist and I exist, but we’re it? What if everything else here is…a trick?” “What?” “I have this idea,” Kane told her, “that maybe we’re all Magistrates stuck in some big prison. At first I thought that maybe you were the jailer, but I’m pretty certain that’s not the case. I think you’re a prisoner, too, and that’s why I know you.” “You don’t know me,” Brigid said, “and I think you need medical attention. You’re deranged. I thought you were going to…to take Abi from me.” Kane looked at the beautiful woman, her pretty little niece, and he cursed him- self. He had come in here and terrified them and made things worse for everyone and he had proved nothing, solved nothing. He drew the dark glasses from his pocket, placing them over his eyes once more as he turned to leave. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t say anything about your niece in this one-person apartment, okay?” “Thank you,” Brigid said, “Kane.” As Kane reached the door the old question came back to him. He turned and looked at Brigid Baptiste as she watched him. “Baptiste, what is Cerberus?”The color drained from Brigid’s already pale face and her jaw dropped. “What?” she asked. It was the island. The island in the report, the island that looked like a three-headed dog. And the dog. The lazy dog. The lazy dog that the quick brown fox never jumped over. But why wouldn’t he jump over a lazy dog? It made no sense. It was like the man who wasn’t there, and he wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish… “Close the door,” Brigid said in a hushed voice, feeling nausea rising in her gut. “Close the door and come inside.” Kane did so, pushing the door shut. “What is it?” “Kane,” Brigid began, standing up from the couch, feeling suddenly woozy, “I’m going to show you something that would get me arrested and locked away for a long time. But if you’re right, I think it holds the answers.”
“I’d already have you on the illegal child, if I wanted.” Kane smiled sympathetically. “I think we’re past all that now.” Brigid told Abi to sit quietly as she led Kane to her bedroom. Kane looked around him, seeing the jumbled clothes and the chair that had been shoved against one wall. Brigid reached for the wardrobe doors and opened them. Inside, Kane saw the old DDC computer on the little shelf-cum-desk, its screen still glowing where Brigid had been working on it before he had arrived. “That,” Kane stated, “is the kind of violation I can’t turn a blind eye to. It would mean my badge.” Brigid ignored him. She was in deep already; there was no turning back now. “Read the screen, Kane,” she said. Kane leaned over her shoulder, looking at the glowing words through his dark lenses: “The quick brown fox never jumps over the lazy dog.”“Is this another of your nonsense poems, Baptiste?” he asked. “It’s a mnemonic,” she told him. “An old-fashioned way to test the keyboard of a typewriter. The phrase uses every letter of the alphabet.”
Kane read the screen again, then looked at Brigid. “Nice, but what am I looking at?” Brigid was calculating it in her head then, but she already knew the answer. “Why does the quick brown fox never jump?” she asked. “Why ‘never’? It’s point- less.” “It’s just a phrase,” Kane said. “All the letters, right?” Brigid shook her head. “You don’t need never,” she assured him. The n’s in brown, the e in the, and so on. The word is redundant.” Kane looked at it, realizing that she was right. The v and r were already present in over. “Your point being?” he prompted. “I think you’re right, Kane,” Brigid said thoughtfully. “I knew it all along, and that phrase proves it.”
NURSE ELAINE WAS PLUMPING the pillows behind Grant’s head, leaning over him, all curves and swells beneath her starched white uniform. “Do you know,” Grant said, “you must be just about the most perfect woman I ever saw.”
Elaine blushed, shaking her head in denial as she eased him back down onto the bed. “No, I mean it,” Grant assured her. “I mean, if you asked every man on this ward to describe his dream girl, I’m pretty sure they’d all say it’s you.” “Grant, please,” Elaine whispered, moving closer to him, “you’re embarrassing me.” She bent at the waist, leaning close to his face. “Someone will hear,” she said, that mischievous twinkling in her eye. Grant closed his eyes in a long blink, and behind the lids he saw the thing he had seen in the theater, the beast that she had been overwhelmed by. He opened his eyes and she was still there, hot breath brushing against his face. “What is Cerberus?” Grant asked, his eyes never leaving hers.
“‘THE QUICK…BROWN…fox…’”
Kane read the phrase aloud, shaking his head. “I don’t get it, Baptiste, what does this mean? Who is the fox?” Brigid smiled indulgently as she explained. “There is no fox and there is no dog. It’s just a phrase used by typists in the Beforetime to ensure that the keyboard worked. You see?”
Kane glared at her. “I see nothing.” “You don’t understand how my mind works,” Brigid began. Kane cut her off. “Don’t start believing that that makes you special,” he advised her. “I don’t understand how any woman’s mind works.” Brigid laughed and shook her head. “I have this incredible memory,” she said. “I mean, I can remember details that other people never even noticed. I can recall everything. It’s called an eidetic memory.” Kane looked at her blankly. “Okay, and so this proves…?” he prompted. “Let’s say that we’ve been tricked somehow, fooled into believing that we belong here, in Cobaltville,” Brigid proposed. “We’d remember coming here, right?”Kane nodded. “Unless someone did something to our heads,” he said, beginning to follow her line of reasoning. “Exactly,” Brigid cried. “And, you see, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you are trying your damn luck if you think you can fool someone with a photographic memory.” Kane laughed. “Go on.”
“They changed our brains,” she said, “our very way of thinking. Fooled us into believing what we see, what we feel. But I knew. From the very start, I knew. I just didn’t realize.” “And the quick brown fox…?” Kane asked. “He jumps over the lazy dog, always has, always will,” Brigid explained. “Those bastards thought they could fool me, but my subconscious knew all along.” “I still don’t get it,” Kane admitted after a few seconds. “Every letter of the alphabet is contained in the sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,’” Brigid told him. “By inserting the word never, my subconscious was telling me not to trust the alphabet, words, the very device through which we comprehend the world. To not trust what I saw, what I felt. Everything we are told here is a lie.” Kane nodded slowly. “But if that’s the case, if you’re so smart, why did you need me to bust in here and point it out to you?” He wasn’t mocking her, Brigid knew; it was an entirely reasonable question in the circumstances. “They distracted me,” she realized. “They put something in my way that I couldn’t see past, like a wall or a blind or…” Suddenly, Brigid stood up and stepped away from the computer nook. “What is it?” Kane asked as she pushed past him, exiting the bedroom as though sleepwalking, oblivious to his questions. “What’s wrong?” Brigid ignored him as she walked into the apartment’s lounge and looked at the little girl sitting on the couch, gazing into the three-dimensional diorama of the fume. “Abigail,” she said, her voice trembling, “come here, please. Come give your aunt a hug.” Abigail looked confused as she got up from the couch, placing the fume to one side and walking across to Brigid. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked. Brigid shook her head and pulled Abi close, holding her tight. “Oh no, munchkin,” she said, “you didn’t do anything wrong.” Kane watched the scene from the bedroom doorway, feeling confused and irritated. “Baptiste,” he called. “Do you think you can explain this a bit more clearly?” Brigid let go of her niece and held her out before her, looking at her familiar features, those emerald eyes that matched her own. “Go play with the fume, Abi,” she said quietly. “I have to work in my room for a little while. Okay?”
Abi turned and leaped onto the couch, picking up the fume and immersing her- self into its virtual world. Brigid turned and walked back to the bedroom, pushing the door closed once Kane had joined her. “It’s Abigail,” she told Kane. “She’s my emotional center— she holds me here in this world. But I don’t think that she’s real, Kane. I think she’s just a cruel trick to stop me from seeing what’s going on all around me. All around us.” “That little girl?” Kane asked. “She seems so innocent…”“She is,” Brigid said. “She has my eyes—did you notice that?” Kane nodded. “I thought maybe she was your daughter when I first saw you.” “That wouldn’t have been enough,” Brigid said. “My sister died in a crash and so I took care of her only daughter. She’s like my daughter with added guilt layered in. I look at her and I feel so guilty, Kane, that I never spoke to Bronwyn for years and years.” “Your sister?” Kane asked. “Ye—” Brigid began and stopped herself. “Probably no, probably just another, carefully constructed lie. I believe you now, Kane, but do you have any idea what you’ve stumbled on?”
Chapter 15
Domi’s eyelids shot open, and her twin crimson orbs took in her shadowy surroundings. She lay in her familiar place, the right-hand side of the double bed that she shared with her lover, Lakesh. She turned to him in the darkness of the room, her eyes piercing the gloom until she made out his shape. He lay on his side, his breathing slow and deep, a slight snort at the end of each breath. Asleep, Domi raised herself on one elbow and her eyes searched the room, peering into the darkness. There was no one there, nothing out of place. And yet she could feel it; something was wrong. Pushing the covers from her body, she sat up in bed and looked more carefully about her, ears straining to pick up the slightest noise. Nothing. Just the faintest buzzing of the electricity that powered the sockets and lights, the deep, almost subliminal humming of the air-conditioning. Domi felt a cold shiver run down her spine and reached behind her, touching the back of her neck. It was clammy with sweat and, when she ran her hand over her shoulder, she found her back was slick with a sheen of sweat, as well. Cold sweat.
She was alert now, conscious of everything around her, her senses checking the information that came to them. Domi was a child of the Outlands, used to surviving by wits alone. Her spatial awareness, her sense of a place, of an environment, often came across to others as uncanny. It wasn’t. It was merely that she had trained herself to pay the closest attention to the smallest of details—often her life had depended on it. She sat up in bed, feeling the cool breeze playing across her sweat-damp back, across her chalk-white arms, her bare, alabaster breasts, her bone-white torso, feeling the way her heart was thundering against her ribs. She calmed herself, taking a deep breath through her nostrils, sucking in the sweet, purified air that was fed to the whole of the Cerberus complex from the subterranean air-conditioning units. As she drew the breath, her nostrils flared and her lips pulled back, showing her gritted teeth, and a snarl emerged from low in her throat. “Wake up,” she told Lakesh, tapping at his shoulder with her hand. Lakesh’s body shifted, and he grumbled something unintelligible. “Wake up now,” Domi urged, pushing Lakesh by the shoulder, rocking him back and forth.
Lakesh turned. “What is it, dearest sweet?” he said, the words coming out in a muddle between the slow, heavy breaths he expelled. “Thing wrong,” Domi said, slipping into the abbreviated language of the Out- lands. “Very wrong. Wake and dress. Quick-speed.” Lakesh began to move then, despite his body’s protestations. The chron by his bed read 3:08 a.m. and he had no idea what was going on. All he knew was that he wanted to sleep and that Domi would never wake him for anything less than a critical reason. “Lights,” he stated, the word sounding loud to his ears. Immediately, the bedside lamps automatically switched themselves on at their dimmest setting. Lakesh sat on the bed, shielding his eyes and blinking away the muzzy, heavy feeling of sleep as he gathered his wits. He could feel Domi behind him, a still presence in the bed, taking in her surroundings in that incredible, almost trancelike way she would when she felt intimidated or in danger. “What is it, Domi?” Lakesh said, his voice clearer now as he shook away the last vestiges of sleep. Sitting atop the bed, Domi took in another breath through her nostrils, concentrating as she slowly inhaled. “Something in air,” she decided. “Something foul.”
Lakesh turned to his ashen-skinned lover, concern drawn on his face. “Darling, you’re forgetting yourself,” he said gently, “talking in Outland.” Domi’s eyes were narrowed slits, and the fierce red irises turned to Lakesh, watching him for a second. “Sorry. Old feels,” she said, trying to bring herself out of it. Lakesh leaned on the bed, gently placing his hand on Domi’s shoulder, stroking her sopping-wet back. “What is it that you feel, dearest one?” he asked in a soft, gentle tone. Domi turned to look at him, then suddenly she leaped from the bed and rushed to the wardrobe. In a moment, she was tossing a bundle of clothes to her lover. “Get dressed quickly,” she said as she stepped into a pair of panties, “and don’t breathe.” Lakesh looked at her, incredulously, for the duration of five seconds or more. Then, knowing better than to question the strange, wild girl, he stood up and began getting dressed.
WHEN THEY LEFT their quarters, Domi and Lakesh found the corridor empty. Lakesh was dressed in his usual jumpsuit and had, on Domi’s insistence, tied a kerchief over the bottom half of his face to act as a filter for the air. Domi wore a pair of camo pants, flat boots with twin knives held in sheaths on the inside leg and an olive vest top. Like Lakesh, she had placed a kerchief over her mouth and nose, but she pulled it away to sniff the air. “It’s out here, too,” she told Lakesh as she slipped the kerchief back in place over her nose. “There’s something in the air.” “I can’t smell anything,” Lakesh said, though he didn’t doubt Domi. “It’s not a smell,” Domi told him, “it’s a weight, a heaviness. There’s a density to the air that shouldn’t be there.” Lakesh made his way down the corridor, passing the closed doors of the personnel sleeping quarters until he reached an equipment locker that had been molded into the wall over the nook holding a fire extinguisher. He opened the cabinet and pulled out two breathing filters, small gas masks that could be strapped or held over the bottom half of a person’s face. He passed one to Domi as they continued down the corridor toward the fire door that led to stairwell D. Once they were in the concrete-walled stairwell, Lakesh pushed down the kerchief, letting it hang around his neck, and held the mask over the lower half of his face. “What’s going on, Domi?” he asked, his voice now muffled behind the mask. Holding her own re-breather to her mouth, Domi checked up and down the concrete staircase before she answered Lakesh’s question. “I’m not sure, but there’s definitely something coming through the air vents. Could be a malfunction.” Lakesh nodded. “Sounds like a glitch. Let’s check out the machine room,” he said, leading the way down the staircase to the lower levels of the Cerberus re- doubt. Warily, Domi followed, her senses on high alert.
