Sheathing her blades, Matilda makes her way back into the main room. James holsters his pistol, “It looks clear, but stay on your toes.”
She doesn’t mask the annoyance in her voice “Sure.”
James moves towards the window and looks out the same dirty glass.
“There’s a room at the end of the hall if you need it. Maybe you might want to change.”
Matilda frowns.
“Yeah, that was my plan.”
James finally makes eye contact with her.
“What?”
Matilda shakes her head. “You still have it, James.”
James looks down at the golden band clipped to his belt. With unconcealed hesitation, he hands Hank’s key over to her.
“Look just… just be careful.”
She snatches the key from his outstretched hand.
“I’m not going to break it, James.”
Spinning on her heel, she tromps back down the hallway. She makes it halfway before she hears him speak.
“I wasn’t talking about the band.”
She stops momentarily but continues towards the adjacent room. Once inside, she closes the door and tosses the band onto the ancient, sagging bed. First things first – she needs to change into some fresh clothes. Then she’ll unlock the mysteries of Hank’s key.
The Taciturn sighs, thankful to have a moment to himself. His mind has been running a million miles a minute, and it’s time to throttle back a bit. Despite its lamentable condition and likely degree of filth, a battered sofa chair beckons to him from one of the room’s dingier corners. First, he goes to the window for a quick look outside.
He doesn’t want to believe any part of the Jersey Devil story, but having hunted most of Cyberside’s mutants and anomalies, he knows there is always just enough truth to even the most farfetched stories to keep a Taciturn’s life interesting. Even so, there is something about the Jersey Devil legend that just doesn’t make any sense. Mutations in the Cyberside rely on a certain degree of scalability. If there’s one Scry, it means there will be hundreds more.
If there is some mutation in the Wharton Forest, he should have seen or heard of other instances. But everything is limited to just this area. This would imply that it’s not actually a mistake in the code, but potentially something intentional – something created by the System. Whatever is in Wharton, if it has spooked the Enclave enough to force all the outlying towns to evacuate… then James would just as soon not engage it.
He moves away from the window and grabs a dirty glass from the litter-strewn floor. Adding some water, he creates an improvised ashtray. Exhausted, he summons the will to light one of his few remaining cigarettes and places the pack on the table. Unsure how long Matilda will need, James takes the moment to relax.
As the smoke rises towards the ceiling, James recalls his journey with the Scry girl. Hank and the Spire, Virginia and Neverland, Donovan and Babylon. Closing his eyes, James begins to imagine what their altercation with Simmons will be like. Each time he has met someone he knew from the real world, his life in the Cyberside has invariably taken a turn for the worse.
He wearily exhales a plume of smoke. Well, maybe not invariably. His time with Stephen wasn’t that bad, but it seems like ages ago. Back when he was still getting to know the Scry girl. Matilda. If any single person can be said to have changed his life the most since he became a Taciturn, it’s her. James cannot decide if it has been for the best or not.
He has certainly killed more people since meeting her. But the body-count is not his primary concern – rather, it is the alarming array of emotions he has felt, that even now gnaw at his every still moment. Emotions he has spent a long time suppressing, by no means with constant success.
He puts his cigarette out in the glass. Matilda definitely has one thing right. They sure as hell wouldn’t be where they are now, if not for her.
James lights another cigarette and stares down the hallway.
Chapter 18: “Outcasts”
Matilda sits cross-legged on the worn bed, staring intently at Hank’s key. The gold band contains information on everything and everyone indexed in the Spire, but the Scry is reluctant to pick it up. After Neverland, Matilda has felt something changing within her. As much as she has tried to ignore it, there’s still a nagging feeling that she might not actually want to know who she was before all of this.
She shakes her head. With everything they’ve been through to get the keys, she can’t possibly stop now.
“All right, little crown. Tell me who I am, will you?”
With trembling hands, Matilda places the band on her head and waits for something to happen. After a few terrible moments, she wonders if Hank has played some final cruel trick on her – until a buzzing sensation slowly fills her head. Nebulous at first, the sensation gradually turns into sound, the sound into recognizable speech. What starts as a handful of voices quickly swells to a chorus of hundreds, of thousands. The voices engulf her in a maelstrom of emotions, data, and memories. She lets the current take her.
The room starts to spin, and Matilda feels herself yielding control, surrendering focus. Before collapsing on the bed, the girl notices a small child standing outside the cabin window…
…Matilda floats in a universe of data. There are no boundaries here. No limits. She inhabits a horizonless world where everything is carefully stored, meticulously sorted, instantly recalled. Matilda feels acutely insignificant amid the overwhelming vastness of information.
She seizes a memory stack at random, analyzes its data, discards it, and reaches for another. And another. And another. Everything within her reach, everything in sight, reveals its myriad levels of interconnectedness. She just needs more data to comprehend the grander pattern. In the next stack she examines, she finds a faint but unmistakable echo of herself, which in turn leads her to another extensive, linked cluster of correlated data-points.
Navigating from one cache of memories to the next, Matilda slowly but systematically widens the scope of her interpretational analysis. As though working a grand-scale puzzle, she starts at the far-flung edges and moves inward, tracing the manifold leads, links, logs, and directories – begins, at last, to apprehend the correlational constellations amid the sprawling, star-field chaos of data. Begins, at last, to recognize the singular facet and form of her own memories.
As the final fragment falls into place, Matilda sees a picture of herself – minor and incomplete, but unmistakable – for the first time.
Excitement and worry surge through her as she accesses a personal memory – a real-world memory.
…she is five years old and it’s her first day at yet another school. Autumn is unusually warm this year in New York. Matilda looks down to find the same uniform as that worn by all the other children. There are so many other kids, and she’s excited to meet them all. The day plays out in what must be a matter of seconds but she experiences all of it, just the same.
Days continue to roll by, and Matilda becomes close friends with two of her classmates, Donna and Maxine. Each day ends with excitement to see them again tomorrow. Each day when classes end, all her friends are picked up by their parents. She, on the other hand, is not. After school, a polite, professional driver arrives to take her back home. She guesses the other children’s fathers don’t go on as many business trips as hers. They must be lucky, to still have their mothers around.
Matilda wills herself out of the remembrance. For an indeterminate string of moments, she can still hear the sounds of children playing, still detect the fading smells of chalk and freshly cut grass.