For a long moment, John just stared at him, the cigarette held almost to his lips but not quite.
As if he’d forgotten it was there.
CHAPTER 13
Soren stared.
His cage was made of metal tiles eighteen inches across. Six squares high, six wide, and ten long. The floor was concrete. A metal door replaced exactly ten tiles.
Each tile was enameled glossy white and pierced by a lattice of pinholes, which were the only source of light. A constant pale illumination glowed behind them, never dimming or brightening. The only change occurred when gas flowed through the holes from all directions at once, and he would find himself in a sudden swirling mist, like flying through a sunlit cloud.
When that happened there was little choice but to breathe steadily and wait.
Twice each day a tray with a sludgy soup of proteins and amino acids slid through a slot in the door. The tray was attached, and the only eating utensil was a wide paper straw. A plastic toilet fixed to the floor took his waste. Doubtless he was being watched, his vitals recorded by sensitive instruments hidden behind the metal tiles.
The first occasion the gas had flowed was after he had refused food several times in succession. He’d awakened on his bunk (two tiles wide by four long), still naked, a raped feeling in his throat from the scrape of the tube they must have used to feed him. In several other instances, he had clearly been bathed. On one memorable recent occasion, slight chafing around wrists and ankles suggested that he had been strapped down while unconscious, and so perhaps taken somewhere, although there was no way to be sure.
Soren had sought nothingness most of his life. But a blank and unchanging cage was not nothingness. It was his curse made physical. An ocean of time to drown in. No books, no window, no visitors, not even a spider that he might become. His memories were largely not a place to retreat. There had been a few moments of true contentment or even happiness, and he treasured them, striving to recall every detail of a chess game with John, or the way sunlight shadowed the soft hollow of Samantha’s neck. But the mental movies had been screened so many times the colors were fading, and he feared losing them altogether. He could exercise, and meditate, and masturbate, but that left the bulk of the hours untouched.
So he counted.
The sum could be calculated: the pinholes were in offset rows of 48, totaling 2,304 holes per tile. 182 tiles meant 419,328 holes. Minus the 3,456 blocked by his bunk, that left 415,872 holes.
The number itself held no meaning. Its purpose was to provide a benchmark. A way to recognize that he had erred, had missed a pinhole or double-counted one. At which point it was time to return to the beginning. Like Sisyphus, endlessly rolling his boulder up a mountain in Tartarus, endlessly losing it, endlessly beginning again.
Camus had written that one must imagine Sisyphus happy, for his absurd struggle mirrored the efforts of humanity to find meaning in a world devoid of it, and thus the struggle itself must be enough. But Camus had never been in this cage. Neither the physical one nor the one in Soren’s head, where his curse made one second into eleven. With nothing to separate one day from another, it was difficult to say exactly how long he had been here, but perhaps two weeks of “real” time.
Almost six months to him. Six months spent counting pinholes.
So when the door began to move, he did not believe it. Hallucinations had come before. But when he turned his head to look, the door did not snap soundlessly shut. Instead, it crept farther open. It took nearly twenty of his seconds to reveal the man standing behind it. For a full minute of his time they simply looked at one another.
Nick Cooper said, “Hi.”
Cooper had tried to prepare himself.
When civilians said that, they meant taking a deep breath and clenching their fists. But the trick was to go much farther. To imagine the possibilities, good and bad, in detail. To visualize them the way astronauts prepare for a space walk, spending weeks considering what to do if this gasket leaked or that valve failed. It was a method that had served him well in the past, a way to walk into a room already knowing what he might face and how to respond to it.
But no visualization exercise could have prepared him.
The first surge was fear. Raw, primal, deep-chest fear. On some level far below his control, his subconscious mind, his very cells, recognized Soren as the man who had killed him, had slid a carbon-fiber blade into his heart. Even having survived, even having fought back, even having won, the initial fear had a horrifying purity to it.
Quickly, though, other emotions swirled in. Fury at this monster who had attacked his son, had nearly killed his beautiful boy, one of exactly two things Cooper had created that he knew beyond a doubt improved the world. A dirty sense of power which tickled the lizard part of his brain that wanted to root and relish and dominate. A certainty that Soren knew something that could help him, and a voice in his head reminding him of the stakes.
Least expected and least welcome, pity. Something in him was sorry for the shell that stood naked and trembling.
“Hi.” He closed the door and set down the chair. It was just a simple ladder-back, but it looked wildly out of place in this pale prison. Which was part of the reason he’d brought it, of course. A scuffed wooden chair, the kind of furniture no one noticed, and yet here it seemed almost to have its own gravity. He trailed a hand along the slats, then sat down.
“I bet,” Cooper said, “you never expected to see me again, huh?”
Soren just stared. His whole manner had a reptilian blankness to it. It was how he’d beaten Cooper in the first place. Everyone else’s body betrayed their intentions, but Soren’s perception of time meant that he essentially had no intentions.
Remember the restaurant. One second you’re having breakfast with your kids, the next there’s screaming and a rain of blood, and this man showing the same lack of expression as he analyzes the motion of a second bodyguard and puts his knife where it will do the most damage.
He killed two guards, bisected your hand, and stabbed you in the heart, and the only time you knew what he was going to do was when he put Todd in a coma.
“Do you know where you are?”
Nothing.
“I realize that you’re not exactly a people person,” Cooper said, “but the whole interaction thing works better if you use your words.”
Nothing.
Cooper leaned back and crossed a leg at the knee. He studied the man. Skin pale and pulse steady, though elevated from the readings he’d noticed on the monitor outside. No tremor in the hands. No widening in the pupils.
Could he have lost track of reality? This place would be enough to drive a normal man mad, much less Soren.
There was a scar on his left shin, healing but still shiny. No surprise; the last time they’d met, Cooper had stomped the leg with enough force to snap the tibia and drive it through muscle and skin. Adopting a smug smile, he gestured at the scar. “I see they fixed you up.”
The muscles around Soren’s eyes contracted, and his nostrils flared. Just the tiniest flicker, but enough for Cooper to catch, and he pushed his advantage. “How about the hand? Jerking off lefty since I broke all the fingers on your right?”
Again, the quick flash, there and then gone.