“For that, I’m glad,” Gregor said carefully, watching Danal and not wanting to start an argument, respecting the other’s decision. “I’m not sure it would be a kindness to give her memories back, to pull her away from… wherever she is.”
Danal closed his eyes for a moment. He once again ran through the visions of his death experience, rapidly now—the chimes, the tunnel, the light, the familiar welcoming presences around him. He was suddenly struck by something he had not realized before. While he could no longer remember the identities of those other gathered spirits, his escorts, he was convinced that Julia—the real Julia—had not been there. This perplexed him, for surely she would have come to welcome him into death?
Breathless, young Rikki dropped to the platform from above with a loud thump, too agitated to use the ropes. His face lit up when he found Danal. “I’ve found her! Again! There’s another Julia!”
Danal lurched off the hammock and landed on the balls of his feet. “What?”
“It’s hard to explain, but I’ve found another Julia!”
Gregor interrupted, keeping a serious expression on his face. “How could you have found someone else? You’re supposed to be on guardian duty.”
“Oh, I gave up some of my time for the searches,” he answered curtly and turned his attention back to Danal.
But Gregor raised his voice. “And put us all in jeopardy? All Wakers?”
“It was only for a little while. Nothing happened.”
Danal stopped any further argument with his own impatience. “What are you talking about, Rikki?” He looked at the Servant Julia who stood motionless beside them.
The boy Waker shrugged. “My search routines kept churning away, deeper and deeper into The Net. See, after we had located her”—he indicated the Servant Julia—“I forgot about the routines. I didn’t think they’d come up with anything different—that’s for sure.
“But I found someone else, hidden really deep. She seems to have only the faintest hint of a correlation with this Julia, or your Julia. But it’s real. I can’t tell you anything more, but she is alive. Not a Servant.”
“Where is she?” Danal whispered.
“Tough security. In a quarantined hospital complex, held in absolute isolation. It’s almost as if they don’t want anybody to see she’s there, you know?”
Danal focused his eyes off in the distance, feeling hope again. With his double-think mentality, it would be just like Nathans to have created a decoy Julia, this Servant, made to look like the real Julia through surface-cloning, just as the imposter had taken Danal’s own place as Vincent Van Ryman. What if the real Julia was still alive, locked away someplace, a final card for Nathans to play?
What if Julia was still alive?
His breath came in short bursts. “I have to know.” He looked around at all the faces, pleading. “But how am I going to get in, if he’s got tight security all around?”
After a moment of silence Laina chuckled a bit. “Piece of cake.” She straightened the skirt of her white nurse/tech outfit. “After all, it’s just another medical center.”
PART IV
Confrontation
34
The polished visor hid Jones’s impatient smile as he hurried through the back passageways to the neo-Satanists’ sacrificial grotto. Some of the walls bore graffiti, most of it influenced by the cult. Reddish mood-light poured from fluorescent panels above, but the place stood empty so early in the morning. He knew Nathans would be there.
Jones couldn’t wait to tell the other man. He’d never imagined he could discover something so important, so incredible all by himself—certainly not in the barracks, certainly not on a community Net terminal. The knowledge made him proud with a happy self-confidence he had never experienced before. He had done something, accomplished something, completed a meaningful and important purpose.
Because of Nathans’s insistence on absolute secrecy regarding his connections to the Guild, Jones was forbidden to show his Elite Guard colors in any area frequented by the neo-Satanists, though the man’s public involvement with the cult itself was murky at best. The precautions seemed a bit extreme to Jones, but he knew Nathans must have his reasons.
Jones wore his old white uniform, a plain Enforcer again, strangely out of place. He felt he was lowering himself now that he had earned the right to wear Elite Guard blue, but, on the other hand, the white armor brought back a spark of nostalgia. The old uniform had made him comparatively unobtrusive, even at dawn, when he’d entered the mass-trans station. The outbound cars were nearly empty, with most commuters traveling the opposite direction, streaming into the Metroplex for the workday.
Sitting alone, Jones looked at the scratched transplastic window, fidgeting in his armor and staring up at the sky. As curfew finished for the night, one late patrol hovercar rushed silently overhead, making for its Guild hangar.
At the destination-request terminal Jones entered the confidential code used by the neo-Satanists, ensuring that a special transport would be waiting for him when he reached the last stop on the fringe line. He sat and waited, drumming his fingers on the seat as a stream of darkness and light passed the window.
When forming the cult, Nathans had diverted his own workers from their regular labor to the construction of a spectacular secret ceremonial chamber deep at an unknown end of the mass-trans system. Later, anyone initiated into the cult received the special destination code that allowed them to enter the grotto.
As he disembarked, Jones’s skin crawled in unconscious reaction to his own superstitions. The Guild served a purpose, and now that he knew more he could respect that; he could see the importance of the Enforcers, especially the Elite Guard—but neo-Satanism was something else altogether. He didn’t understand why Nathans would bother with it.
Breathless, Jones brought himself to the bottom of the stairs and stopped short in front of the doorway that led into the High Priest’s private chambers. The chronometer on the lower right-hand corner of his visor said “6:13 a.m.”; he was a few minutes late already.
A mere handful of people knew the password to enter the private chambers, and Jones hummed the mnemonic to himself, “Roy G. Biv Deserves Fudge.” Nathans had trusted him with the password, though Jones was uneasy with his increased amount of assistance in neo-Satanist activities. In his stiff white gloves Jones punched the letters one at a time.
The iron-studded door crawled open, protesting. Clouds of grayish-brown smoke curled upward from the doorway, reeking of sulfur. Jones automatically switched on the mask filters behind his visor and stepped into the room, baffled. Had something caught on fire? He tensed—was Nathans all right?
Low orange lights suddenly came on, and an impossibly heavy footstep thundered down as a huge figure came into view.
Jones took a step backward in utter disbelief. The figure was a nightmare, a demon nine feet tall with bulbous muscles and brick-red skin. Curved horns like massive construction tools rode on its forehead, and a purple glow stabbed from its eyes as the creature gazed at Jones. It opened its mouth in a snarl as it stomped forward, exposing white fangs like sharpened pencils.
Though it walked on cloven hooves and ungainly animal-like legs, it moved with frightening speed and fluidity. Blue arcs of electricity skirled up and down its swishing arrow-tipped tail.
Jones yelped and in one liquid motion he drew a pocket bazooka in one hand and a projectile weapon in the other. He crouched and aimed—