The infinity cure, p.8
The Infinity Cure, page 8
“Hey, you don’t know that,” he said, not sounding like he was even convincing himself. “Maybe he did help organize it. Maybe the FBI has proof.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said. “If they had proof, then they had advance knowledge, and they could have taken him earlier. There was no reason for doing it the way they did—unless they were profiling him.” She paused, thinking. “Or looking for some excuse to arrest him in particular.”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “I’m worried something’s going to happen to him in custody. You know what aqueans are up against. It’s the same damn story of what your ancestors faced, Dee, and mine too. Things got gradually better for us, but they’ve found a new target, a new group that people don’t understand and are willing to let be oppressed.”
“That’s it, now I know you dig the guy,” Demonte said with a chuckle. “You’ve always been cynical, but I’ve never known you to be a social justice warrior.” He saw her face and sobered. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to make you laugh. Or at least get annoyed and tell me off.” He shrugged. “I get it, it was hard to see him taken away like that. But what are we supposed to do? Fight the FBI?”
Hiroe exhaled. “I guess I don’t know. But given everything that’s happened tonight—the weird thing Lottie said on the sound system, the other people disappearing, whatever the fuck is going on with Faith Benedict—I refuse to just accept that this arrest, or detainment or whatever you call it, is on the level.
“Something really odd is going on here. Maybe several things, coincidentally, or maybe it’s all connected. But I can’t just let them take away the guy who started trying to figure out what’s really happening. There’s a chance he’s been taken for that, or for another equally bad reason, and I can’t assume everything’s okay for him right now.”
This time Demonte didn’t try to come up with a jokey reply. He looked serious, as if he were trying to think of a course of action, but his head was shaking slightly. Hiroe felt her heart sink. She stared desolately at the ground, trying to tune out the din of the guests, who had gradually returned to their drinking and chatter as if nothing had happened.
That’s when she spotted something that might help them.
She reached down and scooped up Louvin’s rucksack. He must’ve put it on the floor before he raised his fist to support the protesters, and it had lain crumpled there, apparently unnoticed by any of the guests or staff.
“Is that—?” Demonte started to ask and stopped in disbelief.
“Yep,” Hiroe said with the first glimmer of hope she’d had since Louvin had been taken away. “Bruno.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I didn’t do anything,” Louvin said for the tenth time as he was half-dragged along by two agents. He knew better than to resist, but they seemed to always keep him slightly off balance with unexpected pushes and pulls that made him stumble. Then they’d yank him up roughly as if they thought he’d been trying to fight them.
This time when he said it, the agent stopped and threw him against a wall. His bound wrists banged against it painfully, the plastic restraints cutting into his skin, but he suppressed the urge to recoil from the wall.
“Okay then,” the agent said. “You’re not here because of the demonstration. So why exactly are you here?”
“Faith Benedict invited me here,” Louvin said, trying to sound compliant and reasonable despite his pounding heart. “She said she’d heard of my poetry performances and wanted me to open the program with one. I knew what she’s been doing for aquamycosis research, so I said yes. That’s it.”
“You acted pretty pleased by the demonstrations for someone who’s on board with this event,” the agent said.
“Because I respect dissenting viewpoints and the right to free speech,” Louvin replied, speaking rapidly but trying to sound dispassionate. “Just because I agreed to come here doesn’t mean I agree with Faith building her home by the Trench, or with her giving money to anti-science fringe theorists. We don’t all have to approach things the same way; I chose to speak at the event, but I think protesting the event is also valid and important.”
“So it was just a coincidence, even though you’ve been at similar demonstrations yourself?”
“Yes. I swear.”
“And your sister working here?” the man snapped. “Is that just another coincidence?”
Louvin was puzzled. What did that have to do with the protests? “Yes. At least, I think so. I guess Faith could’ve heard of me through Villanna …”
The agent pulled him off the wall, swung around and slammed him chest-first against the other one. “Why don’t you cut the bullshit and tell me what’s really going on? What were you doing sneaking around with the Black guy and the Asian chick earlier?”
Louvin struggled to stay calm and not resist even as the agent pushed his head against the wall, his cheek grinding into the surface. “It’s like we told you then, we noticed some people had gone missing. We were worried they might be lost or hurt like that woman who broke her leg, so we were trying to find them. That’s all.”
The agent grabbed him again and he flinched, but this time he started dragging him down the hall again. Louvin staggered and almost fell but didn’t complain.
The two men took Louvin in a water car to a nondescript building that hadn’t been on his tour earlier. Once the water drained from the port, they took him past rooms from which he could hear voices, angry and frightened.
His heart ached; he’d recognized several demonstrators from past actions he’d participated in. He was transported in an elevator to a lower floor, and here there were no sounds of any other prisoners.
The agent’s assistant tapped the wall to open a door, and Louvin was shoved between the shoulder blades, his hands suddenly freed from the shackles at the same time. He stumbled in, barely keeping himself from falling, and turned around.
The two men stood in the doorway. “Take this time to get your story straight,” the agent said. “We’re going to figure out what’s going on with you, so you’d do well to cooperate with us when we come back.”
The door slid shut, and Louvin was alone in the quiet, bland room. It didn’t appear to have been built to be a cell; the only furnishing was an air mattress with no bedding.
Louvin sat down on the mattress and put his head between his hands. He retraced the night’s events with disbelief. How had it all led to this—locked away alone, suspected of what, he wasn’t sure exactly? The agents hadn’t spent much time asking him about the protest, so he doubted that was the real reason he’d been detained.
He thought about Faith Benedict. She hadn’t gotten a good look at him in her room, had she? Could this be retaliation for discovering her secret? It didn’t seem likely. Maybe Bruno could help him find out who the agent was working for if …
Bruno. Louvin’s body flooded with panic as he realized for the first time that his bag was gone.
He retraced his steps in his mind, finally concluding that he’d dropped the bag at the party and forgotten to pick it back up.
He pictured the bag being thrown out—compacted into nothing, incinerated, or abandoned somewhere. His anguish overcame him and he collapsed across the bed. The thought of losing his best friend outweighed even his fear that he could’ve caught aquamycosis from Faith.
Still, he knew Bruno was practically immortal. He was heartbroken and wracked with guilt, but he took some comfort knowing he’d survive whatever happened, and maybe they could find one another again. Hiroe, on the other hand … he could only hope she was finding help for her possible exposure to aquamycosis.
Despite his worry, thinking about her made him remember their furtive encounters, and his heart raced. She’d been immediately striking to him, from the moment he saw her. He’d never had a serious attraction to a human before, but there was something about her. He was a little scared of how she made him feel, since he was pretty sure she was just having fun with him.
That thought made him feel even more alone. He slumped lower, overwhelmed and hopeless.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“How do you know this’ll even work with a human?” Demonte asked. “Or whether it really happened at all before—maybe the kid already knew where Faith Benedict was.”
Hiroe had thought of both possibilities. She had to at least give it a try.
They’d slipped unobtrusively out of the party—the goon at the door had left by then and they were free to exit the ballroom—and found a secluded spot. Hiroe had set the bag down and unfastened its closures. There was the yellowish mass, not appearing to move or react when exposed to the light.
She grimaced with slight disgust but tried to regulate her reaction before touching it. Who was she to deny the existence or—well, not humanity exactly—her mind lost its way on that particular train of thought. She steeled herself, tried to think positive thoughts, and lowered her hand slowly onto the blob.
She’d expected a wet, slippery, viscous thing. None of those words described what she was feeling. It wasn’t like air, liquid, or solid. It wasn’t cold or warm. It wasn’t wet or dry. It wasn’t pleasant or unpleasant. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever touched before.
What it was was sentient. As soon as she came into contact with it, she felt its acknowledgment and awareness of her. It knew who she was. It didn’t say her name—didn’t speak in words inside her mind or anything—but she knew it knew. The power of that feeling pushed the physical sensation of touching it out of her mind.
She shut her eyes and Bruno came into full focus in her mind. She felt its worry about Louvin and its gladness about her getting in contact with it. She understood that it didn’t have those emotions at all, but that its awareness had some analog to the emotions she was experiencing. It didn’t care in the way that a person cared, but it was deeply involved in Louvin’s life.
It managed to share with her in a few sensations, a few weirdly colorful images, the long history it had with Louvin, starting with the boy swimming innocently over the ocean floor as Bruno, also much smaller then, sat in the sand, equally innocent of the fact that it was about to meet a person who would become its closest companion.
Hiroe saw in a flood all the times the two had lain together at the bottom of the ocean, sharing Louvin’s hopes and fears for his future, Bruno’s quiet observation of life. Then their life together on dry land, Bruno experiencing Louvin’s every triumph and failure with him and providing a feeling of home in the midst of the alien world he’d been dropped into.
In a very short time, Hiroe believed Bruno: It had some equivalent to friendship with Louvin and some sort of drive to help him that was as strong in its own way as Hiroe’s.
She sensed, too, that it knew what she and Louvin had done, but rather than feel embarrassed, she felt more comfortable. To Bruno, their acts were as elemental as the tide, or its own self-contained reproductive method. It imparted to her some understanding of how that worked and how it felt to Bruno as well, and she took it as Bruno’s attempt to share something equally intimate so she wouldn’t feel they an imbalance in terms of what they knew about one another.
She pushed her wanting to help Louvin into the mass, and they communed on the problem. Though no complete solution presented itself, they agreed that finding him was the first priority. Bruno shared her viewpoint that he might be in danger in the hands of the agents.
Bruno then stretched its awareness. She almost felt it envelop her and then expand beyond her. She saw things it passed almost like they were on a heat map, except it wasn’t temperature that made them colorful. It was her human mind’s interpretation of Bruno’s version of vision that it was sharing with her.
It spread into the ocean and past the buildings Hiroe already knew about. Past that, another building stood. Less adorned than the others, at least as far as Hiroe could tell through the distorted filter of Bruno’s sight, and without the elaborate gardens around it. She couldn’t see any tunnels to it and wondered, heart sinking, if it could only be reached by car.
Bruno went inside, spreading through the walls as easily as it had the ocean waters. They came across occupants. Hiroe understood through Bruno’s understanding that these were aqueans, housed three or four to a small room, seated on the floor, lying down, pacing the few scant feet they could in the cramped space.
Aqueans, but not Louvin. Bruno confirmed this in each room it expanded into. These must be the protesters, they agreed. It was spreading more slowly—it was getting to its limit, and it took longer to sense the intricacies of people rather than ocean topography or building layouts. They encountered two humans as well, one walking the halls, another seated in a chair. Guards, Hiroe and Bruno concurred.
Then it found a lower floor, a basement carved into the ocean bed. It spread downward and there he was, a lone figure, slouching on the floor, his back to the wall. Hiroe’s relief and whatever Bruno would call what it experienced dovetailed and she felt as if she might pass out from the combined emotion.
A sensation of vertigo came over her as Bruno’s shared vision receded at lightning speed, returning their awareness to the building they were in, then the room, then the small space the two of them occupied together, and the next thing Hiroe felt was her back pressing into the floor, and Demonte’s hand tapping her cheek, coaxing her to wake up. She’d fallen when she lost consciousness, her hand slipping out of the bag and losing contact with Bruno.
When she was lucid enough to speak, she told Demonte what Bruno had shown her.
“So he’s here, he’s alive, and he’s unhurt,” Demonte said. “Those are three good things we didn’t know before. Could Bruno tell what he was thinking?”
Hiroe shook her head. “It can only really read minds through touching someone,” she said. “If it’s in a room with someone it can get a pretty good sense of what’s going on, like reading their energy or body chemistry or something. But as far away as Louvin was, it couldn’t sense anything about his mood or thoughts. Judging from the way he was sitting he didn’t look seriously injured, but we don’t know whether or not he was in pain.”
“Did you see any guards?”
“Only two,” Hiroe replied. “Unless we didn’t get through the whole building before Bruno got tired out.”
Demonte shook his head. “It’s too fucking weird that you talk about that goo like it’s a person.”
Hiroe cringed inwardly, thinking of Bruno picking up on their conversation, but also not wanting to get into it with Demonte. “It’s definitely not a person, but it’s very … compatible with us. It’s easy to be with. I can see why Louvin is friends with it.”
She could see Demonte’s skepticism, but he changed the subject. “So what now?”
“Well.” Hiroe set her jaw stubbornly. “I want to get him out.”
“You’re kidding,” Demonte said flatly.
She bit her lip. “He—he didn’t do this. And if he did, how is it a federal crime to protest, or organize a protest? Whether or not he was involved, he was not trespassing; Faith invited him here!” She took a shaky breath. “Bruno’s worried too. It doesn’t think the FBI guy was being above board about why he took Louvin away.”
Demonte sighed with an air of resignation. “Okay,” he said. “Say you’re right—how do you plan to do it?”
“I—I can’t,” Hiroe said, her voice low with shame. “There’s no tunnel, so the only way to get there is through the water. I know I couldn’t do it alone, and plus I’d be no use once I was out in it. I’d freeze. I’d panic.” She looked steadily at him.
“Oh you’re fucking kidding me,” he said. He knew she wasn’t. “You expect me to risk my whole career? My life? For some punk kid you have a crush on?”
“Dee, please,” she said, with effort. “You have to get him out of there.”
He sighed again, running his hand over his close-cropped, graying curls and then scrubbing at his stubbled cheek.
“Damn,” he said. “I forgot what a pain in the ass you were to work with.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
She described the way to the prison as best she could, but insisted he take Bruno with him in case he got lost.
She touched the blob with some affection to tell it to take care of Demonte, that he really was a good guy despite his bluster.
Bruno understood. It didn’t have any need for acceptance from humans anyway. She asked it for a favor before they left, and despite being a little worn out from its previous seeking, it obliged.
A few minutes later, she parted ways with Demonte and Bruno, and headed purposefully in the direction Bruno had just shown her.
* * *
Demonte was also following Bruno’s directions, albeit secondhand. And that was the way he wanted it to stay. He’d be goddamned if he was going to stick his hand in a bag full of slime. It was bad enough he was about to go try to outsmart the FBI just to please a woman who didn’t give two shits about him.
And who must give a lot more than that about the kid, if she’d willingly entered a water car with him. He’d never seen her so much as take a river cruise, or go for a day at the beach, as long as he’d known her. Any body of water made her tense up, even start shaking if she got close enough to it.
She’d told him what happened with Elise, once, while they’d been drinking heavily after work together, and she’d begged him not to bring it up later.
He never did, but he thought about it every time he saw her fear around water, and he tried to shield her from any assignments that might put her in a triggering situation. He was surprised she was holding it together as well as she had, being deep underwater for an extended period of time. Maybe she’d grown out of it somewhat, or maybe not having him to protect her had forced her to find an inner strength she—and he—didn’t even know she’d had.
He tried to push the old days out of his head. It’d been a while since he’d talked his way into a place he wasn’t meant to be under false pretenses, and he needed to get in the right frame of mind for it.
