Jay nodded and glanced over at Blaise. The boy was staring down at his grandfather with a look of ferocious intensity on his face. His eyes glistened, and for a moment Jay thought he saw a tear there. Then he realized it was only the moving readout on the monitor, reflected in the iris of his eyes. "C'mon, Blaise," he said. "There's nothing we can do here."
They passed through the waiting room again on the way out of the hospital. Up on the television screen, the convention was going crazy. Jesse Jackson was standing at the podium. People were screaming, balloons were falling from the ceiling, signs were waving madly, and the band had struck up a rousing chorus of "Happy Days Are Here Again." Jay had a bad feeling. He stopped by the nurses' station. "What's happened?" he asked the nurse on call.
"Jesse just gave a speech. You should have heard him, it brought tears to my eyes. He's throwing his delegates to Hartmann. It's all over but the voting."
Over? Jay wanted to tell her. Lady, it's just beginning. But he chewed his lip and said nothing.
Blaise stood in front of the television, looking almost happy. When Jay came back over, he looked up eagerly. "They're going to nominate Hartmann, just like George said they would."
The network cut away from the convention floor to the streets of Atlanta. Thousands of jokers were dancing in the streets. Outside the Omni the "Hart-mann" cry went up, louder and louder. An impromptu parade was starting on Peachtree, a conga line that grew as it moved. Piedmont Park was one huge explosion of joy. The network cut from park to convention floor to street, letting the moment speak for itself. Jay put his hand on Blaise's shoulder and was just about to say that it was time they got back to the hotel when the boy said, "Hey, look, Sascha."
Jay looked. They were showing Piedmont Park, where a dozen jokers were dancing giddily around a bonfire while fifty others watched. He was standing just behind the dancers, the flames of the fire shining off slicked dark hair, pencil-thin mustache, and that pale eyeless face.
"Sonofabitch," Jay said. He'd almost forgotten about Sascha. He shouldn't have; the skinny fuck had some answers he needed. He was about to tell Blaise to head back to the Marriott on his own when he remembered what the kid could do with his mind control. All of a sudden Jay had a better idea. "Hey, kid," he said. "Want to play detective?"
Brennan didn't believe in ghosts, but whatever was approaching from down the dark tunnel and speaking in Chrysalis's voice couldn't be Chrysalis. Chrysalis was dead. He'd seen her in her coffin. The face in the window had only been a dream.
He backed away until he stood against the side of the tunnel and couldn't move anymore.
"Daniel," the voice said, "I want to help you," and the speaker stepped into the light.
Brennan lowered his bow, dumbfounded. He couldn't believe his eyes. It was Chrysalis. A miniature Chrysalis, perfect in every detail, but no more than eighteen inches tall.
Now he knew why the window had appeared so large in what he thought was his dream.
He squatted down to see her better as she approached fearlessly. The manikin mimicked her perfectly, down to the red painted fingernails, down to the tiny perfect heart beating in the cage of her ribs, down to the off-the-shoulder wrap that left one minute breast bare, invisible but for a tiny dark. nipple, smaller than an eraser on the tip of a pencil. "Who are you?" Brennan asked.
"Come with me and I shall tell you everything." She smiled at him, turned, and walked back down the dark tunnel.
He watched her for a moment, then, knowing he wasn't going to learn anything by remaining in the darkness, followed her, stopping only to pick up his flashlight.
The corridor was short, but it took several minutes to traverse because the miniature Chrysalis took very tiny steps. Brennan shuffled slowly behind her. He directed his light to the end of the tunnel, eventually discovering that it ended in what seemed to be a blank wall. When they reached it, the little Chrysalis called out and a hidden panel slipped open. Suspicious red eyes peered out.
"I have brought the archer," she said.
"He could hurt us," the watchman said in a deep, surly voice.
"She said to trust him when his word was given." The little Chrysalis turned and looked at Brennan. "Do you promise not to hurt us?"
Mystified and bewildered, Brennan said, "I promise." There was the sound of creaky bolts being thrown and protesting metal squeaked on rusty runners. Dim light spilled from the hidden door as it swung slowly open.
"Then enter," the watchman said.
Brennan and the little Chrysalis stood at the threshold of a corridor. There were twenty or so beings in it. None were over eighteen inches tall; some were a lot smaller. Some were perfectly formed manikins, other grotesque parodies of humanity, test models discarded by the Creator and never put into mass production. Some looked more like animals than people, but all stared at Brennan with intelligence in their eyes.
"She said to trust you. She said you would help," the watchman said from the small platform that had been bolted next to the hidden door's peephole. He was one of the human-looking ones, though his leathery skin hung in folds over his nearly naked body like an overcoat that was six sizes too big.
"Who are you?" Brennan asked in a small voice.
"We were Chrysalis's eyes and ears," the Chrysalis manikin said proudly. "We moved about the city, unseen and undreamed of by the big world, and brought her the news that she was so eager to hear. She gave us a place to live, warm and dry and out of sight." She wiped at a tear that dripped down a crystalline cheek. "But now she is dead."
"It's you," Brennan said in a soft voice, "who's been leaving me notes and calling me up."
"That's right," the tiny Chrysalis said. "We only tried to help. We stopped when we realized that we were confusing and hurting you. We were only trying to help you find out who murdered our lady. We tried to help the detective, too, but he only called us names and chased us."
"Then you don't know who killed her?" Brennan asked. The manikin shook her head. "We never spied on the Lady. It was a rule. She liked her loneness, even if at times she was sad in it."
Brennan nodded. "But you know where she kept her files."
"She would come and knock and we would let her in. Then we would tell stories of what we'd seen, what we'd learned in our hiding places in the world outside. She would bring food and drink and we would eat as she wrote things down. Once she never came for months. We wrote ourselves, but it was no fun without the lady."
"Where?" Brennan asked. "Where did you write?"
The tiny joker pointed a tiny finger to the chamber at the end of the corridor.
More of the tribe were in the hallway, watching Brennan with eyes that were frightened and distrustful, angry and sad. One of the jokers, who looked like a tiny monkey with too many legs, turned on a shaded lamp as Brennan approached. The more skittish of Chrysalis's tiny spies peered at them silently from the dark edges of the room.
The chamber was simply furnished with a comfortable chair, an antique desk, and a Tiffany lamp. Notebooks and binders and stacks of paper cluttered the desk. As Brennan glanced through them he saw snippets about the sex life of politicians and the drug habits of bankers, notes on alliances between cops and gang figures, and even a list of which Dodgers had trouble with high fastballs and which were suckers for curveballs in the dirt.
Brennan frowned. "Is this it?" he asked the homunculus. "How in the world did she keep track of everything? Didn't she have a computer?"
"She didn't need a computer," the Chrysalis manikin told Brennan. "She had Mother."