But Palestrina merely turned and left the room.
Neumann’s hands curled and flexed helplessly. He looked, Walker thought, like a wounded dog.
“Fucking Papist,” Neumann whispered.
Walker stepped forward. His mind was whirling. So much had happened and he understood so little of it. Make me whole, he wanted to say; that was the bargain; you promised me that. But he knew from Neumann’s face that it would do no good.
So he said, simply, “Do you want me to find them?”
Neumann focused on Walker—a blank, intent I gaze.
“Yes,” he said. “And kill them?”
It was all Walker had to offer. It was everything. He understood how fragile the sorcels of entrapment; had been, how long they had taken to devise—more than two decades since the day he had offered three gifts to three children: small potent binding magics. It was an edifice, moreover, which could not be rebuilt … certainly not within Neumann’s lifetime.
“They’re dangerous,” Neumann said, performing {Walker guessed) this same calculation of loss and revenge … his anger and his hatred revving up like a machine, the machine that had operated this building for so many years. “They know about us here. That could be a problem.” He sighed. “Yes, kill them.” Walker looked at Timothy Fauve, staring now openmouthed from his place against the wall.
“What about this one?”
“Begin with him.”
3
Tim watched the Gray Man advancing.
His outrage was instantaneous. Not for this, he thought.
I didn’t do any of it for this.
Christ, and how many miles had he traveled to come here since he left that house in Polger Valley two decades ago? How many fucked-up menial jobs and days without food and nights on some raw rained-out interstate hitching Detroit to Chicago to Des Moines to Points fucking West? How many empty bottles, how many insulted veins? How many lame dodges through crippled worlds like (admitting it now) this one? And for what?
So he could hand over his sisters to be killed? And be killed himself for his trouble? No. Oh, no.
He looked into the eyes of the Gray Man, his fists bunched. He said, “I trusted you!” Walker didn’t laugh.
Home! Tim wanted to say. I came home! And you showed me! Kingdoms! Empires! You owe me that!
As Walker reached for him.
Tim stood up straight. He felt what Walker was about to do, some presentiment of it, the opening of the world’s walls around him. He looked Walker in the eye, but there was no recognition there; only a shadow.
Walker touched him. All over now. “Fuck you,” Tim said. “You were never my father.”
And tumbled away into chaos… only the echo of him left to bounce around these old stone walls.
Chapter Twenty-five
1
We can’t hide,” Laura said. “I’m not even sure we can run.”
But Michael was more optimistic. “Moving around helps. I think it’ll gain us some time, at least.”
So they thumbed a ride up the broad highway that ran between Ville Acadienne and the crossroads of the Urban North, startled into silence by the forests and the flights of birds, by the hugeness of this country they had come to. The driver said he was up from the Chickasaw towns, visiting his family there, and they were welcome to ride as far as he was going. So they traveled that night and a part of the next day northward, and when Laura admitted they didn’t have any money—or none that was useful here—the driver bought them all breakfast at a roadside diner. He would have taken them farther but they demurred; he had done enough already.
They walked for an afternoon. At dusk, they knocked at the door of an old stone farmhouse and asked for shelter for the night. The woman who answered—a pretty woman in a peasant skirt and thick, rimless eyeglasses—said they could have the loft and leftovers, and it was a good thing the weather had warmed up.
Alone with a naked light bulb and what seemed like a feast of bread and cheese and faintly alcoholic cider, they talked about the future.
“We have to get back where we can operate,” Laura said. “At least for a while.”
Michael had thought this over. “Soon,” he said. “But we’re all right here for now.”
“He’ll come after us,” Laura said.
“Probably.”
She looked around. “Well. At least it’s a friendly enough place.” She regarded Michael curiously. “Have you been here before?”
So Michael told them about the Commonwealth, the way he had dreamed it, the cities and the wilderness, the flying machines and the highways and the railroads. The kind of place it was—how he had dreamed it, and then dreamed it real, and then dreamed his way out of prison with it. He wanted to tell them what it meant to him, but there were no words for it; he could only enumerate its features and hope they understood.
Maybe they did. He saw the way Laura looked at him, her intensity, and wondered if she hadn’t dreamed of this place herself—faintly, distantly, a door she had never quite managed to open.
2
Karen sat back and listened to Michael talk, the roll of his voice now that the prison spells had been lifted. She wondered again whether he hadn’t grown a couple of inches. A trick of the light or perspective, but she could swear he was taller, and there was something in his voice, a firmness, that was new to her.
The shadow, at least, of adulthood. And she realized suddenly that Michael must have passed his sixteenth birthday back in the prison of the Novus Ordo.
It was a disturbing realization.
After a time Michael went and sat in the broad loft window, surveying the tableland that stretched away into the darkness—standing watch—while Laura and Karen talked in small whispers amidst the hay. Because they had come so far, Karen thought, it was possible to think things that were unthinkable—even to say them. She found herself telling Laura what she had been thinking, about Michael, her failure. “What hurts is that I couldn’t save him. All his life, I would look at him, I would think, I won’t do to him what Daddy did to us … I won’t let him lead that kind of life. But I was fooling myself.” The wheel, she thought. Maybe she had never beaten him but she was as harmful an influence as Daddy had ever been. We bend our children, she thought bleakly; and our children, bent, bend their children; and the wheel turns, and it grinds out broken lives.
“But,” Laura said, “you did save him.”
Karen shook her head.
“I mean it,” Laura said. “The only reason we got this far is because of Michael. His talent, the strength of it. But that’s not a fluke or a mystery. Maybe any of us could have been like him. But we have chains on us… we have all the inhibitions Willis beat into us. I think the only reason Michael’s different is that he isn’t carrying around all that pain. No one ever made him afraid. Maybe you never prepared him for this—well, Christ, who could?—but you never made him afraid of himself. And that’s why they couldn’t cage him.
“So it comes to something,” Laura persisted. “It does matter. You loved him, and that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s the only thing that matters. You loved him and you made him strong.”
Maybe, Karen thought. But…
But she was drifting off to sleep now, leaving behind the loft and the cool air and the silhouette of the barn’s old beam and pulley against a starry sky. She pulled this borrowed woolen blanket over her shoulders and let her thoughts meander.