Soul and Blade (10 page)

“It was last year. I was seven.”

I know they died in an IRA-related incident so I don’t ask about it. “I’m very sorry, Rory.”

He shrugs. “It doesn’t hurt me as much as it hurts him.” He nods at the wall. I turn back, scared Rory is there, but he’s not. No one is. “Who?” I ask.

“The other me. He’s too sad to come here, ever.” His eyes darken almost as they widen. “Wanna know a secret?”

I nod.

“Promise not to tell anyone?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

He swallows and looks around. “He found something that makes the hurt go away. A bad man came and showed him how, and he never comes here now.”

I was sort of expecting the bad man but still not liking that I have struck gold. “Where is the bad man?”

He puts a finger to his lips. “We can’t talk about it. Ya can follow me tonight, when the sisters are sleeping. I’ll take ya.”

I lift my pinky finger, and he wraps his tiny digit around mine. I shake and get up, creeping from the bathroom and back out onto the street, leaving him there until later. There are still no people milling about or even walking up the roads. As silent as a grave.

10. BELLE OF BELFAST

W
alking around the streets, I get a bit turned around. Firstly, these memories are linked directly to Rory’s memory from when he was little, so they are old. And secondly, they are based on the mind of a child, so they repeat. His world used to be quite small.

I pass the same chocolate shop three times before I even realize each shop looks more than just similar to the last one.

He’s being led through a flash of his childhood that he once revealed while under hypnosis. Angie was the only person there, so she remembered it perfectly, and fortunately had a recording of it. Of course he spoke highly of it all.

Either way, it works to our advantage. Angie believes that if I can persuade “Rory the little boy” to help me stop “Rory the monster,” then we might find out exactly what went wrong. Where he went astray in his life.

She has created what she considers the most intense dreamscape ever. It leads from his childhood to his teenage years in the gangs of Belfast and eventually the IRA.

She explained to me how his parents’ lives had changed everything for him. They had believed in the IRA’s cause, participating in the bombings in the ’80s, resulting in the deaths of many innocent people. They themselves died during their terrorist activities, leaving poor Rory an orphan.

Rory himself had been part of the Manchester bombing in 1996. I vaguely recall the details of the day. I know more than two hundred people were injured, but luckily none died. When he got caught for being a terrorist, he became a narc for British intelligence at only sixteen. He ended up in the British military and then MI6, where I met him.

Angie is hoping she can trigger the memories using subliminal messaging and repetition to change the scenery in his mind, giving me a couple of days in each part of his psyche.

I am not so hopeful.

I have a terrible feeling Rory was never much of a good guy except as a little boy, but Angie has to have hope. She spent a lot of years in love with him.

The road ends and I turn around to go back, when something catches my eye. It’s a boxing ring. I walk to it, taking the side path to the dusty old windows. I peek inside, seeing boys boxing. None of the few rings is clean or nice. It’s part of the gray that is Belfast in Rory’s head.

“Don’t go in there,” a voice whispers from behind me. I turn, expecting something scary like Rory as an adult, but I see it’s only little Rory. His eyes are wide. “That’s where the bad kids go to learn to fight. They train so they’re ready to fight the English for the next uprising.” He looks from side to side before he whispers again, “All the bad kids from the boys’ house go there.”

I offer him a hand. “Then we won’t go inside.” I feel like a character from
The Sound of Music.
I even speak softly when I talk to him, like a Disney princess would.

“We have to hurry. I saw some shadows, and that’s always a bad thing,” he says and runs down the road, dragging me with him. “The shadows are always watching me. They’re with him, the bad one. They peek around the corners and scare me.”

I don’t know what he’s talking about. I haven’t seen anything.

We hurry along the silent streets to an old burned-out building, looking more like a skeleton or a husk than something a little boy should play in. We run across rubble and old bricks until he gets to a sheet of plywood. It’s got some graffiti on it saying the rebellion is coming. He pulls it back for me and nods. “Inside with ya, then.”

I hesitate, scared he’s actually scary Rory and this is where he traps me and hurts me until I’m crazy too. Or crazier.

“Hurry,” he whispers and looks back. He looks too scared to be faking, so I climb through into the dark room. He comes in right behind me, bumping into me.

“We have to go this way.” He wraps his tiny hand around my middle finger and pulls me down a dimly lit corridor—about the creepiest place I have ever been. The old paneling is coming loose; some of it is burned and the rest of it is flaking away from the wall. The lights don’t stay on. They flicker, making my insides tighten.

The floors have holes and the wallpaper nearly touches them as it flakes off. It smells dank and horrid.

When we get to the steps, he pauses. “The stairs always fall away when I try to climb them. I don’t think I’m supposed to come.”

I look down on his little face and smile. “Ya have been so brave. Why don’t ya wait out front, and if I don’t come back right away, it doesn’t mean I won’t ever. I will. I’ll find ya again and I’ll take you to the good people. Deal?”

He lifts his pinky and shakes mine. “There’s an elevator too. But I don’t think it works.” He turns and bolts, leaving me standing there in the condemned building.

“Shit,” I mutter and walk around, looking for the elevator. If I know Rory, the stairs will be a trap. If he is aware of me, he will make the stairs something terrible.

I have not been inside a person’s mind like this before, not completely. When we started out, we did mind runs with the engineers and doctors, letting them lead us and show us the clues we leave ourselves. Memories we install into the run to stop from getting lost or stuck. My run was with Dash—simple and straightforward, unlike our relationship.

The minds are linked, so letting ourselves get lost can mean not finding our way back out, even after we are disconnected. It’s why the testing was so stringent, with only two people passing—Rory and me.

But I haven’t been in a changing mind like this one, where I am not pretending in order to create comfort and stability. I am me, and he is aware of how mind runs work. Tricking him wouldn’t work: firstly, I’m a girl, so I can’t pretend to be him, and secondly, he’s a master at this. If the new bot doesn’t kill his old one, he will be in control when he finds me.

The moment he becomes aware of me being here, he will control the game and I will end up in a cell again—or worse.

I walk in circles, passing the same flaking wallpaper and broken doors until I see a hallway that’s new. I turn down it, listening for the sound of him.

When I get halfway I see the glisten of two metal doors. My stomach does leaps and hops, warning me like that robot on that show with the Robinsons, begging me to turn around. But I don’t. I walk straight up to the rickety-looking piece of junk and press the button. It creaks and groans, shaking the whole building.

“Shit!” I whisper and look around.

The doors open, no ding. Of course no ding. I sigh and step in, waiting for the bottom to fall out and for me to go sailing through the dark into whatever hell he has planned. But the doors creak and scrape, closing slowly. The jerking start of the machine makes me jump, and the pace feels like the cables are vibrating from corrosion, but the elevator goes up.

It stops on the first floor, opening slowly. Opening onto a street. Clowney Street, cementing the idea that this is just a construct in Rory’s mind. A bunch of boys with rickety bikes ride hard. They are chasing a boy who is running for his life. I’d know his face anywhere. He screams until they land on him, diving from their bikes like uncoordinated ninjas. They scratch and hit and tug until they turn him over, and then the pummeling starts. He screams and I slam my back against the wall of the shitty elevator, pressing the button for the second floor. I don’t know if I love Angie’s method of getting me through the timeline of his life.

The elevator creaks and groans in a plea to be put out of its misery, but when it stops on the second floor, I am stunned at the transformation in Rory. He’s in the boxing ring and maybe fourteen. He’s fighting with the agility and strength closer to that of the man I always knew.

A man is screaming at the boys as they fight—creepy on a different level of creepy, but Rory is eating it up. He is fierce and focused.

The doors close and I start to feel like Bill Murray in
Scrooged
.

The third floor does not hold what I expect—it’s Rory tied to a chair and being lectured by an Irishman, surrounded by inspectors from Scotland Yard. The old man shouts, “You have a choice in life, Sonny. Be a loser like yer da was or man up and join a worthy cause. We found drugs on ya, we have enough to put ya away fer a long time. Ya need to think on that. Ya wanna be a washed-out drug junkie or a military man—something to be proud of?”

Rory winces; his jaw is set.

One of the policemen walks over with a folder. He places it on the table. “This is what happened to your mother and father, Rory. They were IRA. They caused this bombing. These are the faces of the innocents. Is this what you want too? Is this who you are?”

Rory’s eyes lower and his jaw clenches so tight I swear his teeth are going to break. He lowers his face in defeat, as silent tears stream down his cheeks. I step back. I know where he ended up. I know he ended up in the military and he was young when he got there.

The doors squeal shut and I feel sorry, sorrier than I ever have for him. I skip the next floor and press five. I know where the fourth floor leads—right to the military. I know what he did there. We had a similar career.

The doors open on the fifth floor and my memories start to blend with Rory’s. We were both here on the day this scenario played out. This was the first day we officially met, though we both knew who each other was before this.

It’s the first day of testing for the mind runs.

I step out onto the floor, stunned at how much I have forgotten about how the room looked.

Dash is there. He walks across the foyer, nodding his head at me. His lips toy with a grin, the naughty one, and his eyes catch my ass as I walk past him. He
was
into me right from the start. It’s just too weird.

I plunk into my desk, the one I sat in that first day.

Rory walks in, taking my breath away a little. He’s strong and young and handsome and fresh from the military undercover units. His eyes are still clear, that evil isn’t there yet. I thought I might have seen it in the boxing ring, but it’s not there now.

He offers a sarcastic grin and sits next to me, just as he did when this moment really happened. “Ya think it’s going to be like those drug tests where we see the future? Or pick the right card? Like
Ghostbusters
?”

I stare and look back at the front of the room. A younger Angie is there. Her eyes are on Rory straightaway. She noticed him right off the bat. I wonder how much that influenced their choices in picking us: Dash gluing his eyes to my ass and Angie tugging at her collar while staring at Rory. Surely that changed outcomes.

“All right, settle in. We know yer curious, and once we have all the confidentiality reports done, we will begin,” Angie shouts at us all.

Dash dips to speak to her and she beams, shrugging and lifting her fingers up into her long red hair. His eyes draw toward me, but he nods at her, returning the smile and folding his broad arms across his chest. He’s flexing.

Holy shit!

Are they flirting?

They totally have a thing and I missed it?

My chest tightens.

I glance down at the desk, wondering how many other things I’ve missed. Have they been having an affair all along? She is always there. His family likes her. They know her so well. For a colleague, that’s so strange. She isn’t a friend, she’s a workmate.

Oh my God.

She’s an ex-girlfriend and he didn’t tell me to prevent it from being weird.

Oh my God.

I feel sick.

I am an idiot. Of course she sent me back into Rory’s brain. She’s trying to turn me into a mental case. Now that things aren’t working out with Rory, she wants Dash.

I glance at the desk, seeing the box carved in it with the four-leaf clover. I know that means that inside the desk is something to take me home.

But there’s a niggle of a whisper that tells me Rory is onto me and is setting me up. If he’s onto me, he’s making this what it is. Angie and Dash were never more than friends, and rarely hung out until I came along—as far as I recall. She knows his family because of functions his family has put on.

Or is that what they told me so it wouldn’t be weird?

Fuck
!

I cover the box and stare at the head of the class.

Angie smiles and nods. “All right, we have to congratulate ya all for making the cut. Dr. Dash and I are both very excited about this trial. We think this has some amazing applications in the world of coma patients. But until it’s safe enough to use on the weak, we want to mess around with yer heads and try it out on you—the strong.” She laughs and everyone laughs with her.

I want to hold her down and make her confess to loving my man and tricking me. But clearly that is not rational. And it would make a ripple.

She looks at Dash and continues, “We are hoping some of you, at least two, will be able to make the headway we need to get this program off the ground. Ideally we’d like to see a man and a woman proceed.”

“But as this is the preliminary process, let’s move to the most important part.” Dash clears his throat. “We give you the director of this program, the vice president.”

We all clap, even I do. I might not laugh at the jokes, but I’ll be damned if I don’t clap for the man who got me my job and stepped into his own as the president after the brothel scandal.