Adam turned around and wiped his hands on his shirt and listened as distant screams and the isolated sound of grating metal funneled their way into the cell from other parts of the prison. He frowned. They were ready. They were as ready as they were ever going to be. Apparently he and the council had overestimated the human race, the human faculty. It would be easy. All their high risers and monuments and engines and underdeveloped technology would collapse immediately. Like face card towers in the wind.
It would a plague of locusts of biblical proportions.
A plague of reunions and old friends.
From the corner of the cell, “You're jumping into this.”
Adam swore and jerked around, one hand smashing into the iron grating, the other plunging into Jin's lukewarm chest. He half expected to see the Chinese bastard smirking at him in the half-light. His fingers smoothing out his suit, adjusting his tie, wiping his neck clean.
But the man was silent.
His eyelids were swollen shut, his mouth was slack; petrified in the act of forming a second “please”.
The voice had come from the corner, veiled by lacy darkness.
“Who's there?” Adam's fingers twitched.
“Reason.”
“I don't think you know who you're dealing with.”
A laugh. “Of course I do. The real question is whether you know.”
Adam moved forward and lifted a hand. “Know what?”
“Listen, kid. I'm not going to play games with you. I'm here to give you a little piece of advice: you're jumping into this.”
Adam felt a laugh – a hoarfrosted sound – ripped out of his throat and stopped. “The humans? I'm moving too fast? No, you listen to me. A hundred other poor bastards have been chained up to that grate and everyone of them has died the same way. Begging and praying.”
“You're working off of flawed information. Statistics, my friend. A hundred out of six billion.”
“One hundred carefully chosen individuals.”
“Carefully butchered.”
Adam shrugged. “Regardless, I have my information. The time is now.”
Silence. Adam's heart felt as if it was beating at his ribcage with a bar of iron, snapping each cantilevered bone like withered twigs. He could hear the crunching. Approaching footsteps through a forest floor littered with shed branches. Fallen bones. Broken bones.
He didn't know why he was so afraid.
He had the Gift after all.
Maybe it was because torture was a private affair. Something as holy and as spiritual as walking through that forest or playing music or loving a woman. Sexual. Torture was sexual. And Adam felt violated in a way with the presence of this intruder. He felt as if he had been caught naked in an ocean of twisted sheets with a dead woman beside him, marinating in textile waters. Her lack of breath – or Jin's lack of breath in this case – as loud and as incriminating as screams shattering down canyon walls.
Original sin.
He had been caught elbow-deep in original sin.
Forgive me, Father.
Moving slowly, his breathing liquid and heavy, an old man stepped out of the shadows; the geography of his face contorted by little valleys and mountains in the half-light. He stood erect, but walked as if the ground was freckled with broken glass, and his smile – an empty smile – looked like a knife wound, bleeding wheezing gasps.
His white hair was a halo.
“You've underestimated us,” he whispered.
“Us?”
A second liver-spotted laugh. “Godssakes, isn't it obvious? I'm not in Kansas anymore, kid.”
Behind them, Jin's corpse festered.
And then.
“A human?” Adam asked. His voice was flat and disbelieving. The distant screams of the prison accompanied his heartbeats like music. Not possible. The Neanderthal bastards didn't have the technology. They didn't have the capacity to be standing in front of him. The bridge spanning across a constellation of dimensions like an ocean trillion marble-sized stars was just to big, too expansive.
So who was this man?
Some subconscious product of Jin's torture. The embodiment of the Chinese man's screams, his gasps, his pleas, his pain. Maybe. A hallucination. Mental smoke and mirrors. Adam felt his fingers kneading the air slowly – the fingers of a composing pianist – and little blue hemorrhages of energy arched between his thumb and ring finger. Spastic charges. The crumpled old man – this intruder – with skin like crepe paper and veins like worms in front of him was guilt incarnate, if such a thing was possible.
But real or not, he had to go.
The old man glanced at Adam's fingers and smiled.
“Apparently, I'm not welcome any more.”
“No.”
“It was just a piece of advice, my friend. You've underestimated us. You've undercalculated. There is a reason you're here and we're there.”
Adam smirked and felt the energy spasms tripping over his fingers lazily wind up his wrist and eat up his hand. “Not for long.”
“Obviously, you won't be swayed.”
Adam continued to smirk.
The old man shrugged and opened his mouth to speak again.
Adam lifted his hands, his smirk twisting, his eyes igniting, and pushed the Gift at the old man hard. Like lightning from the hand of some mortal Zeus, unbastardized energy ruptured from his hand, spilled into the room, and screamed at the withered man in front of him.
Who was smiling.
Always smiling.
And then he was gone.
Adam's Gift crashed against the opposite wall like the tide against a seaside cliff, blasting the wall, searing the bricks, raping the darkness. Fatigue punched him in the gut and he inhaled sharply as the last inchworm sparks crawled among the bricks.
Sweat was beading on his face.
Adam fell to his knees - the consequences of the power surge scything away his strength – and stared at the place the old man had vacated, his mind blank, his ears deaf. A human.
Impossible.
A small Chinese corpse watched wordlessly.
***
Los Angeles, California
Paul Ackroyd woke up staring down a killing field of chess pieces; corpses strewn across shag carpet. In front of him was a white rook.
It came into focus slowly – inches away from his nose – and then around it, fallen piano-key colored comrades. It took him a moment to realize he was on the ground, lying prostrate like some kind of wheezing Vitruvian Man. Everything hurt. Everything was on fire. He felt as if someone had sprayed him down with gasoline and had flicked a lit match onto his back. Flames running up and down his spinal cords like crowns. Nodding metronome heads and smiling with ragged crimson teeth.
Hell, he hurt.
And his only companion was a white rook.
Reluctantly, his hearing returned, and suddenly shouts and curses and whispered voices obscured by a rainstorm of static slipped into his ears like grains of sand. He tried to move his arm, his head, his legs, but it was as if someone had snipped all the nerve endings in his body off with wire clippers. And now, instead of commanding limbs to move and heads to turn, his nerves were bleeding fire.
Distant words solidified, drenched by rain drops of static.
“Godssakes, I swear, man. He just fell right over. Right off of his chair.”
White wing-tipped shoes passed behind the rook silently. Paul was vaguely fascinated by the change in perspective he was experiencing. Everything was different on the floor. Everything looked bigger, sharper, clearer. He tried to smile, but his jaw felt wired shut by a million contorted coat hangers. Here he was experiencing life from the point of view of a rook and all his useless body could do was produce phlegm decayed gasps.
Someone had knelt beside him and was gently feeling his bones, massaging his skeleton.
“So just out of nowhere.”
“Just out of nowhere. Put me in check and then passed out. I swear.”
Wing-tipped shoes again, parked in front of his vision. “Any other reactions.”
“Yeah. He started whispering stuff.”
“Nonsense?”
“Sounded like it.”
“I told Ted to take him off of that God-awful medication. Listen, I want you to stick around a little while longer, okay?”
“Whatever you say.”
Sirens made rapid-fire conversation outside, and if looked up far enough, Paul could see a window – a mouth punched out of sterilized-white plaster – being painted red, brushstrokes throbbing with a chromatic pulse rate.
An ambulance.
They called an ambulance.
What the hell happened?
I'm not in Kansas anymore, kid.
Shadow stained images of prison walls and a man with a face like a ceramic masquerade mask – hollow and blank – and a twisted little Chinese corpse corrupted his vision, replaced the rook and the wing-tipped shoes. Paul inhaled sharply and felt as if someone had kneed him in the groin. Disoriented, bile rose up his throat and choked its way through his lips and onto the carpet. He choked again. Globules of spit and stomach acid freckled his lips.
Where was he?
Where had he been?
The ends of his bones seemed to flare up like cigarette embers as hands were slipped under his stomach and his thighs, he was lifted and then placed on a stretcher. His new perspective suddenly seemed overwhelmingly constrictive. He couldn't move. He couldn't talk. He like some kind of shattered Gothic gargoyle, lying at the feet of Notre Dame.
The rook was staring at him. Smiling at him.
Acute, blistering pressure was gathering like clotting blood behind his eyes, causing the ceiling – scarred by a host of pumping fan blades, a hundred motorized scythes – to spin carousels above him. More bile up his throat and through his lips. Violent brass knuckle convulsions in his stomach. Paul wanted to swear, he wanted to yell, but invisible hands were wrapped around his neck, tightening, asphyxiating.
Little screams queued up behind his teeth.
His stretcher was moving now, three paramedics jogging by his side with all the grace of angels. They looked beautiful to Paul. Sketched in contrast to the corrosively white halls with a perfection that Raphael in painting cherubims couldn't have achieved.
His stomach knotted again and his muscles spasmed.
Ataxia possessed his fingers and they started playing piano.
He felt himself losing control.
One hundred carefully chosen individuals.
Past the receptionists desk, past martial rows of orderlies, and through the doors, sliding aside like Guillotine blades. Raindrops strafed his chest, his face, his legs like machine gun bullets as they emerged outside. A chorus of shouts and orders rose; mist from a lake, ascending above the rain.
Carefully butchered.
He felt the stretcher catch, its legs retract as it rattled into the back of an ambulance.
Now, instead of water-pregnant sky, faces were above him, blurred theater masks, and hands fluttering over his body like spring-time finches. And above them, the rain assaulted the vehicle with stiletto blades.
With a gasp, Paul lost consciousness.
