Sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark hotel room, Leisha could feel her belief in the law leave her, as if the air itself were being sucked out of the room. She was choking, falling into a vacuum of cold and dark. The law wasn’t large enough. It couldn’t hold Sleeper and Sleepless together after all, couldn’t provide any ethical way to judge behavior, and without judgment there was nothing. Only lawlessness and the mob and the void—
She tried to stand, but her knees buckled. Nothing like this had happened to her before. She found herself on the floor, on her hands and knees, and a still-rational part of her mind said, heart attack. But it couldn’t be. Sleepless hearts did not give out.
Cold—
Blackness—
Emptiness—
Daddy—
The opening of the hotel-room door brought her back. It opened from the outside, without alarms. Leisha staggered to her feet. Across the room, beyond the bed, a figure stood silhouetted in the doorway, a thick figure carrying something even thicker. Leisha didn’t move. Her own people—Kevin’s people—had installed the security for this room, making it identical to her apartment in Chicago. No one in Conewango had the entry codes.
If it was a stranger, if Sanctuary was organized for assassination as well as theft…
The assassin would at least be good. Sleepless always were.
An arm stretched out from the dark figure. A hand fumbled for the manual switches.
“Lights on,” Leisha said clearly.
The blocky shape was a suitcase. Alice stood blinking in the sudden light. “Leisha? Are you sitting in the dark?”
“Alice!”
“Your apartment codes opened both doors…don’t you think you should change them? There’s a bunch of reporters in the lobby—”
“Alice!” Then she was across the room, sobbing—she, who never cried—in Alice’s arms.
“Didn’t you know I’d come?” Alice said.
Leisha shook her head against Alice’s chest.
“I knew.” Alice released her, and Leisha saw that Alice’s face shone with some strong emotion. “I knew that this would be the night for you. The night you’d fall into the Hole. I knew it yesterday—I felt it.” She laughed suddenly, very shrill. “I felt it, Leisha, do you understand? It was like being hit with a load of bricks. I felt that you’d be in your worst trouble tonight, and I knew I had to come.”
Leisha stopped sobbing.
“I felt it,” Alice said yet again. “Across 3,000 miles. Just the way it’s happened to other twins!”
“Alice—”
“No, don’t say anything, Leisha. You weren’t there. I know what I felt.”
Leisha saw that the powerful emotion blazing on Alice’s face was triumph.
“I knew you needed me. And I’m here. It’s all right, Leisha, honey, I know about the Hole, I’ve been there—” She reached again for Leisha, putting her arms around her, laughing and crying. “I know, honey, it’s all right. You’re not alone. I’ve been there, I know…”
Leisha hung onto her sister with all her strength. Alice was pulling her back from the dark place. The void, the Hole. Alice, whose bulk anchored Leisha short of the edge, solid as earth. Alice, who now would never be unreachable again. Not now that Alice had known something before Leisha did. Not now that Alice had saved Leisha by becoming the one thing she hadn’t lost.
“I knew,” Alice whispered. And then, stronger, “Now I can stop sending all those damn flowers.”
It wasn’t until later, after they’d talked for hours and Alice was starting to look sleepy, that the comlink shrilled. Leisha had turned it off; only a priority override could get through. She turned her head toward the screen. Two passwords flashed there. The link’s fuzzy logic had admitted them simultaneously, apportioning one voice per speaker:
“Susan Melling here. I must—”
“This is Stella Bevington. I just accessed the nets. The—”
“—talk to you immediately. Call—”
“—pendant the newsgrids say was—”
“—me on a shielded—”
“—found at that parking garage—”
“—line as soon as you can!”
“—is mine.”
“We’ve finished our research,” Susan’s image said on the comscreen. Her gray hair straggled in greasy strands from a careless bun; her eyes burned. “Gaspard-Thiereux and I. On Walcott’s Sleepless redundancy codes in DNA.”
Leisha said evenly, “And?”
“Is this an unshielded line? Hell, forget that. Let the press tap. Let Sanctuary tap. Hey, Blumenthal—you listening?”
“Susan, please—”
“No please about it. No thank you, no nothing. That’s why I wanted to tell you this myself. No nothing. The equations can’t work.”
“Can’t—”
“There’s a gap that can’t be closed between shutting down the sleep mechanism at the preembryonic genetic level and trying to do the same thing after the brain has begun to differentiate at roughly eight days. The reasons the gap can’t be closed are quite clear, quite specific, quite biologically final. They have to do with the tolerance of genetic noise in those genetic texts that are repetitions of regulatory systems. You don’t need the details—the result is that we will never be able to convert a Sleeper into a Sleepless. Never. No one. Not Walcott, not the superbrains at Sanctuary, not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Walcott is lying.”
“I…I don’t understand.”
“He made the whole thing up. It’s very plausible, plausible enough to take good researchers a while to check. But essentially it’s a lie, and there’s no way a scientist with his famous withheld final step could not know that. Walcott knew. His research is a lie. He came to you with this stupendous discovery he knew would be shown to be a lie, and Sanctuary committed fraud for patents that are a lie, and Jennifer Sharifi is being tried for murder because of a lie.”
Leisha couldn’t take it in. None of it made any sense. She was very aware of Alice across the room, standing completely still. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “But it’s a lie. You hear that, press? You hear that, Sanctuary? It’s a lie!”
She started to cry.
“Susan…oh, Susan…”
“No, no, don’t say anything. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry. That’s the one thing I didn’t mean to do…Who’s that with you? You’re not alone?”
“Alice,” Leisha said. “She—”
“It’s just that I thought maybe I could become what I created. Stupid idea, huh? All of literature shows that the creators can’t become the creations.”
Leisha said nothing. Susan stopped crying as abruptly as she had started, tears drying on her old, soft, wrinkled skin. “After all, Leisha, that wouldn’t do, would it? For the creators to become the creations? Who would there be to go on perfecting the art if we all got to be patrons?” Then, in a different voice, she said, “Bring Walcott down, Leisha. Like any other quack who sells worthless hope to the dying. Bring the bastard down.”
“I will,” Leisha said. But she didn’t mean Walcott. In a sudden dizzying rush, she saw who it was that had been committing theft, and how, and why.
15
Jordan opened his apartment door, sleepy and Astonished. It was 4:30 in the morning. Leisha Camden stood there with three silent bodyguards.