Tim recovered fast. He drew back and stood up straight and made his face a bland mask of endurance. “I didn’t mean to insult you, Michael. Sure, you’re important. But so is Laura and so is your mother. And so am I.”
Michael moved back toward Laura. Instinctively, he reached for her hand. She looked at him quizzically. But they touched and there was a flash—brief but significant—of real power.
Now, Michael thought. Now, while they’re unprepared, or never.
“We’re leaving,” he said.
It was not an argument, just a flat declaration of fact, but he surprised himself by saying it. Laura’s eyes widened and then she looked at him and made a tiny nod.
He reached for his mother’s hand. Tim said, “I don’t think that’s realistic. I don’t think you’ve considered your position here.” Michael said, “But I have.” There was a kind of circuit going now, the three of them touching. He felt Laura’s wounded vanity, his mother’s passivity and resignation. And under that— buried but potent—these small, faint surges of power. Gather that, he thought. Put it together. A better world. Those forests and those cities. It was only a step away.
And Tim, sensing something now, said, “Hey—oh, Christ, wait a minute—”
No more waiting, Michael thought. The room filled with a curious odor, hot motor oil and charred metal, like some huge machine gone into terminal overload. Far away, Michael thought he heard a savage and barely human howl of pain.
And the prison magic loosened a little around him.
Tim said, “God damn you, stop it!” Karen reached out toward Tim with her free hand. She understood now what was happening; it was obvious. Tim backed off a step. Karen said, “Come with us.” Adding, “It’s going to be dangerous for you here.”
But we don’t have time for this, Michael thought.
He wasn’t sure he could sustain the critical effort. An alarm bell was clattering in the corridor; he saw shadowy figures beyond the doorway.
Tim shook his head. “No!”
“They might kill you. They could do that.”
Tim said defiantly, “Listen, they’ll kill you! They won’t let this happen! They’ll send him after you and this time they’ll let him fucking have you!”
The Gray Man, Michael thought.
“Timmy,” Karen said, “it’s not a game. You should have learned that a long time ago.”
But Tim only shook his head, and Michael thought, He looks like Willis … it was odd, but you would swear they were blood relations. That anger. That fear …
Karen shook her head no.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
And Michael thought, Now! But hesitated in spite of himself and felt the moment slipping away, a sudden recoiling.
I can’t do this!
It was the voice of the frightened ten-year-old and Michael was paralyzed by it.
I can’t do this! They’re too strong for me! I want somebody to come get me—I want to go home—
But there was no home. He knew that now. Only his mother in this cell, his father living in bliss and ignorance by the side of a very distant lake. And Tim, of course, had lied; the Novus Ordo was nothing like a home.
The clangor of alarms. Feet in the hallway.
Laura’s hand tensed against Michael’s.
And he had then what he identified—a moment of lucidity among this shrilling noise—as a genuinely adult thought: that home is not a place after all but a thing you make, a territory you stake out. It was an act of wilclass="underline" a thing you did.
Karen sensed his hesitation, shot him a fearful look.
Laura whispered, “It’s out there, Michael… please, I know it is.” Home.
He held the word inside him. Those forests and those cities. Home, he thought…
And then the walls gave way, and there was only time and possibility and a great and simultaneous motion; and Michael closed his eyes against the brightness and opened them on a high blue sky very far away.
Chapter Twenty-four
1
Cardinal Palestrina followed Carl Neumann into the empty cell.
Its emptiness was shocking and he could see that shock in Neumann’s face, a numbed incomprehension. Neumann seemed to radiate loss, a grief as profound as if a child had died here. Timothy Fauve, the collaborator, stood motionless in a corner, stealing glances at Neumann the way an exposed field mouse might regard a passing hawk. For long moments no one spoke.
Finally it was Neumann who broke the silence, with an action rather than a word. In a single motion he turned to the homunculus, which had followed him down these long corridors into the room, and kicked the unfortunate creature squarely in the ribs. It traveled some feet across the floor and came to rest limply against a wall. It looked dead.
Cardinal Palestrina turned away.
It’s over now, he thought. There is no Plenum Project; there is no secret weapon. All this effort and constraint had come to nothing. There was the collaborator—Tim—the man cringing by the wall—but Neumann had explained that he was not, in himself, very powerful; that his talent was a crabbed, unsavory magic that opened narrow doors into ugly and marginal places; that his alcoholism and drug addiction had eroded even that.
And there was Walker… but Walker had been wounded with clumsy neurosurgery, gutted until he was nothing more than a passive psychic bloodhound, a hunting machine. So the Project had ended and probably Neumann’s career with it; there would be censure, an enforced retirement.
And in the long run, Cardinal Palestrina thought, what else might this mean? A potential advantage in the war irrevocably lost; the alliance with the Americans weakened; years of entrenchment and bloodshed and compromise.
So this was a disaster. A terrible thing had happened today.
But Cardinal Palestrina felt the hammering of his own heart, and it was a kind of giddiness—a vicarious triumph: strangely, as if the Devil had taken a beating here today.
2
Walker learned from a distressed mage what had happened in the containment cell, and he hurried there looking for Neumann. Approaching down the hallway, he felt it himself—a rupture in the fundamental magics of the DRI, as obvious and as significant as a hole blown in a wall.
Neumann looked up as he entered. Just seeing Neumann’s eyes, Walker registered the enormity of the escape.
But I brought them here, he thought. I did my part. It was a contract (though never written or spoken), and, Walker thought fervently, I fulfilled my part of it. Payment due, he thought.
But Neumann’s expression swept away his certainties.
He thought for the first time, Maybe it’s too late. Maybe they won’t give it back—what they took from me. What I lost.
He touched his fingers to the scar running along-side his eye. He was not conscious of the gesture.
“It’s not the end,” Neumann was saying. He was addressing Palestrina, and there was a pleading note in his voice. “We can start again. Start from first principles.”
Cardinal Palestrina shook his head. “You’re talking about years. Generations.”
“Not necessarily!”
“Our needs,” Palestrina said, “are unfortunately more immediate.”
“Needs!” Neumann was shouting now. “You never cared about that! Oh, you pretended. Strategic necessity. The global view. You said all the words. But none of that ever mattered, did it? Just this priggish hand-wringing, this Jesuitical nonsense, the fucking moral order—”