Sea of Silver Light (110 page)

CHAPTER 38

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"Stephen?" Renie scrambled along the ledge, searching desperately for some way to crawl down to the boy, but the path ended within a few meters, rejoining the wall of the pit like heat-fused glass. "Stephen! It's me, Renie!"

His head tilted up slowly, his shadowed eyes catching a glint of slow fire from the stars high above, but he gave no other sign of recognizing her. Could she be wrong? It was dark here in the pit despite the distorted, weirdly bright stars overhead, as dark as late evening, and he was many meters away.

Renie crawled back and forth at the end of the path like a leopard trapped on a branch. "Stephen, talk to me. Are you okay?"

He had stopped crying. As the echoes of her call died away she heard him sigh, a trembling exhalation that stabbed at her heart. He was so small! She had forgotten how small he was, how vulnerable to the world and its cruelties.

"Look." She struggled to keep the fear out of her voice. "I can't find a way down, but maybe you can find a way up to where I can reach you. Can you look, Stephen? Please?"

He sighed again. His head sagged. "There's no way up."

Renie felt something so powerful it was like a hard thump on her chest. It was his voice, unmistakably his. "Damn it, Stephen Sulaweyo, don't you tell me that without trying." She heard the anger in her voice, an anger born of exhaustion and terror, and tried to calm herself. "You don't know how long I've been looking for you, how many places I've been trying to find you. I didn't give up. You can't give up, either."

"No one was looking for me," he said dully. "No one came."

"That's not true! I tried! I've been trying." Tears were in her eyes, blurring the already strange scene into complete nonsense. "Oh, Stephen, I've been missing you so much."

"You're not my mother."

Renie froze, leaning out over the long fall down to the river. She wiped the tears from her face. Was his brain damaged? Did he think Mama was still alive? "No, I'm not. I'm your sister, Renie. You remember me, don't you?"

It took him long moments to answer. "I remember you. You're not my mother."

How much did he recall? Perhaps he had invented a protective fiction about their mother still being alive. Would she frighten him into some kind of catatonia if she disputed it? Could she afford the risk? "No, I'm not your mother. Mama isn't here, but I am. I've been trying to find you for . . . for a long time. Stephen, we have to get out of here. Is there someplace you can climb up?"

He shook his head. "No," he said bitterly. "No place. I can't climb. I hurt."

Slow down,
she told her rabbiting heart.
Slow down. You can't help him if you get in a panic.
"What hurts, Stephen? Talk to me."

"Everything. I want to go home. I want my mother."

"I'm doing my best. . . ."

"Now!"
he screamed. His arms thrashed—he was hitting himself on the head. "Now!"

"Stephen, don't!" she shouted. "It's okay. It's okay. I'm here now. You're not alone anymore."

"Always alone," he said bitterly. "Just voices. Tricks. Lies."

"Jesus Mercy." Renie felt like her swelling, aching heart would choke her. "Oh, Stephen. I'm not a trick. It's me, Renie."

He was silent for a long time, a tiny shape barely distinguishable from the nodules of stone along the bottom of the pit. The river murmured.

"You took me to the ocean," he said at last, his voice calmer now. "There were birds. I threw . . . threw something. They grabbed it in the air." There was a tone almost of wonderment in his voice, as though something had been given back to him.

"Bread. You threw pieces of bread. The seagulls were fighting over it—do you remember? It made you smile."
Margate
, she remembered. How old had he been? Six? Seven? "Do you remember that man playing music, with the dog? The dog that danced?"

"Funny." He said it as though he did not quite feel it. "Funny little dog. Wearing a dress. You laughed."

"You laughed too. Oh, Stephen, do you remember the other things? Your room? Our apartment? Papa?" She saw him stiffen and silently cursed herself.

"Shouting. Always shouting. Big. Loud."

"It's okay, Stephen, he. . . ."

"Shouting! Angry!"

Something rippled across the stars above, a lurch of shadow that for a moment turned the great cavern dark and set Renie's heart pounding again, she did not take a breath until she could see Stephen's small, huddled form once more.

"He does shout sometimes," she said cautiously. "But he loves you, Stephen."

"No."

"He does. And I do. You know that, don't you? How much I love you?" Her voice cracked. It was horrible to be so close and yet be separated. All she wanted to do was grab him and hold him and kiss his face, pull him close and feel the tight curls of his hair, smell the little-boy smell of him. How could a real mother feel more?

The memory of his father seemed to have pushed the child into sullen silence once more.

"Stephen? Talk to me, Stephen." Only the murmuring river answered. "Don't do this! We have to find a way out of here. We have to get you out. But I can't do anything unless you talk to me."

"Can't get out." The voice sank so low she could hardly hear. "Tricks. Hurt me."

"Who hurt you, Stephen?"

"Everyone. No one came."

"I'm here now. I've been looking for you a long time. Won't you try to find a way to climb up to me?" She crawled back along the path, away from the dead end, looking for a place where it might be possible to get down the steep stone wall. "Tell me some other things you remember," she called. "How about your friends? Do you remember your friends? Eddie and Soki?"

His face tilted up. "Soki. He . . . he hurt his head."

She felt a chill race up her spine. Did he mean Soki's seizures, the convulsions Renie had seemed to provoke when she had questioned him? How much did Stephen know about that? Could he have buried memories of the boys' first time in that horrible nightclub, Mister J's? "Yes, Soki hurt his head," she said carefully, waiting to see what would come next.

"He was too scared," Stephen said quietly. "He . . . pulled away. And he hurt his head." A strange tone crept in. "I'm . . . I'm so lonely."

Renie closed her eyes for a moment, trying to squeeze back tears, but was terrified that Stephen might vanish when she wasn't looking. "Can't you remember any nice things? You and Eddie and Soki—didn't you use to play soldiers together? And Netsurfer Detectives?"

"Yes . . . used to. . . ." Stephen sounded exhausted, as though even their brief conversation had made him dangerously weak. He said something else, an unintelligible mutter, then fell silent. Again panic flared in Renie's midsection.

"I really need you to do something," she said. "Okay? Stephen, listen to me. I need you to get up. Just stand up. Can you do that?"

He sat, slumped, his head down on his chest.

"Stephen!" This time, she could not keep the terror out of her voice. "Stephen, talk to me! Damn it, Stephen, don't you dare stop talking to me." She raced back down to the lowest point of the path, then leaned out until she could feel her weight tip to the outermost edge of balance. "Stephen! I'm talking to you. I want you to get up. Do you hear me?" He had not moved for half a minute now. "Stephen Sulaweyo! You pay attention! I'm getting really angry!"

"No shouting!"
His sudden cry seemed loud as a thunderstroke. It bounced against the walls of their prison, broke into echoes.
"Shouting . . . shouting . . . shout . . . out. . . ."

Renie was clinging to the ledge. The surprise of his explosive bellow had almost toppled her. "Stephen, what. . . ?"

" 'That's some vicious-bad wonton!' said Scoop."

Renie felt her heart skip, stumble. He was quoting from the Netsurfer Detectives story she had read him in the hospital—but that was not what made it hard for her to breathe.

"He left his holo-striped pad floating in midair as he turned to his excited friend. I mean, there must be major trouble—double-sampled!'. . . ."

Darkness hemmed her in, a narrowing circle. She felt dizzy and sick.

Stephen was speaking to her in her own voice.

"What . . . what are you doing. . . ?"

"That's enough, boy!"
It was Long Joseph's snappish tone now, perfect in every way, as though recorded and played back.
"Had enough of your nonsense. You get it done or I beat the skin from your backside! Damn, if you make me get up again when I'm resting I'll slap your face around the other side of your head. . . !"

Worst of all, Stephen was laughing with his own voice even as he was speaking with his father's.

"Don't do that!" Renie was shouting too, now. "Stop it! Just be Stephen!"

"But why in the name of God would anyone have a security system like that?"
Suddenly, staggeringly, it was Susan Van Bleeck's voice that echoed up from the floor of the pit, waspish and shrewd, but Stephen was still laughing, a cracked hilarity that was almost a sob.
"What on earth could they be protecting?"
Doctor Susan, a person Stephen had never met, from a time after he had been in his coma. Susan Van Bleeck, who was dead.
"Have you got yourself involved with criminals, Irene?"

And for a moment she felt she could bear no more, that the horror was too great. Then, abruptly, she understood. Her fear became a little less, became a fear only for herself, but what diminished was replaced by a desolation so large as to be almost incomprehensible.

"You're . . . you're not Stephen, are you?" Abruptly, the voices died. "You never were Stephen."

The thing that looked like her brother still sat by the river, hunched, shadow-draped.

"What have you done with him?"

It did not reply, but seemed to grow less visible, as though slowly merging with the stone of the great pit. An expectant stillness grew in the air, the crackling tension before a lightning storm. Renie felt her skin tingle and crawl. Suddenly there did not seem to be enough oxygen to fill her lungs.

Anger began to rise again inside her, a bleak fury that this bizarre thing, this conglomeration of code, should pretend to be her brother—the same inhuman thing that had taken him in the first place. She pushed it down and concentrated on breathing. She was in the heart of it, somehow. Everything around her must be part of the Other, part of its mind, its imagination. . . .

Its dream. . . ?

She would accomplish nothing if she infuriated it. It was like a child—like Stephen at his very worst, two years old and full of screaming resentment, almost beyond language and rationality. How had she dealt with him then?

Not very well,
she reminded herself.
Patience—I was never as patient as I should have been.

"What . . . what are you, exactly?" She waited, but the silence remained unbroken. "Do you . . . do you have a name?"

The thing stirred. The shadows lengthened. Overhead, the stars seemed to grow fainter and more distant, as though the universe had suddenly hastened its expansion.

But it's not the real universe,
she told herself.
It's the universe inside . . . inside this thing.
"Do you have a name?" she asked again.

"Boy,"
it said, using Stephen's voice again, but with a strange, hitching cadence.
"Lost boy."

"Is that . . . is that what you want me to call you?"

"Boy."
A trudging aeon seemed to pass.
"Have . . . no name."

Something in the way it spoke pierced her own misery, her terror, even her rage at the theft of her brother.

"Jesus Mercy." Her eyes welled again with tears. "What have they done to you?"

The thing at the bottom of the pit seemed to become even less visible. The wash of the river was loud now, a continuous rush and mumble; Renie thought she could hear voices twining through it. "Where are we now?" she asked. "What are you doing here?"

"Hiding."

"Who are you hiding from?"

It seemed to consider for another long moment.
"The devil,"
it said at last.

For an instant, even though she did not know exactly what it meant, Renie felt she could feel what it felt—the hopeless, uncomprehending fear, the abused, devastated resignation.

Why me?
she wondered.
Why did it let me in? Into . . . whatever this is? Was it because of the way I feel about Stephen?

And even as she considered, her thoughts a thin membrane of rationality over deepening terror, she understood something about the thing that spoke to her—understood it in a deep, almost instinctual way.

It's dying.
Its light, the flame of its existence, was flickering. Not just its words but everything around her, the lading light, the thinning air, proclaimed it. Such weariness could precede nothing but extinction.

It may be using Stephen to speak to me,
she thought.
Wearing him like a mask. But not just a mask. The way it reacted when I mentioned Papa, somehow it knows what Stephen knows, and even what I know. Feels what he would feel.

"I think you can get free." She did not entirely believe it, but she could not simply wait here for everything to end, abandon herself and her friends and all the children this thing had devoured to the destruction she felt sure would come if the operating system stopped functioning while they were still imprisoned inside it. "I think we can escape. My friends might even be able to help you, if you let us."