Synthetic: Dark Beginning (24 page)

Chapter 27

Kora sat in Mud's dim apartment while Vaughn made more tea. He'd told her he loved her, but which her? The ugly monster who cared for the dying, or the cute, blue-headed nymph who gunned down synthetics who didn't measure up to her impossible standards? There was only one thing Kora knew about herself, whatever the version, and that was that she didn't deserve Vaughn. He was too handsome and too good. She watched him in the kitchen, whistling as he poured hot water into her cup. She didn't belong with beautiful creatures like Vaughn. She belonged with Mud. She felt a wave of sadness as she imagined Mud's ragged form, alone back here in the dark, with beautiful hands grasping the same kettle that Vaughn now held. 

“Maybe we’ve been going about this search in the wrong way,” said Vaughn, interrupting her thoughts. “We need to investigate things from every angle to get the full picture.”

“You’re beginning to sound like Gus.”

“That’s not a bad thing. We should both start thinking more like Gus.” Vaughn scratched his chin in a Guslike manner that drew a smile to Kora's lips. “What would he be doing right now if he’d managed to drag that hump through the pipe?”

Kora sipped her tea and set it down on the table. “He’d probably be rattling on about how we need to think more like Caleb.”

“You’re right. That’s exactly what he’d be doing.”  Vaughn paced the small room with his hands behind his back. “Was tonight the first time Caleb visited you alone?”

“No, he came to my room once before and signed that he was sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

Kora didn't want to talk about it, but if it had to do with finding Mud, she'd have to say something. “Caleb used to be a big, abusive jerk to me.  I know you won't believe me because he's
such a great guy
, but it's true.”

“I believe you,” said Vaughn.  “None of us really know what he was like years ago except you, Ruby, and Humphrey.”

She smiled at him.  If Gus were in the room right now, he'd be trumpeting in Caleb's defense so she appreciated Vaughn's open mind.  And his abs that showed through his damp shirt.

“What if in addition to apologizing to you,” continued Vaughn, “he’s been trying to convey a message to you from Mud.”

A cold sweat prickled her skin. Gus had proposed the same idea. “But why didn’t Caleb just write this all down and hide the note before he lost his mind?”

“Maybe he was afraid Ruby would find it. He needed to hide his secret in a way that ensured Ruby would never find it and if she did, she wouldn't understand what it meant.”

“Gus said that Ruby never pays attention to toys and kids stuff.”

Vaughn pushed his hair out of his face. “The tea party. Ruby never goes into the kitchen and Caleb has been tending that thing for as long as I can remember.”

“Gus thinks it’s a historical reenactment.”

Vaughn’s eyes lit up. “Man, that kid had it all figured out. Maybe all these years, Caleb has performed Mud’s last moments over and over again, right on the kitchen table, and I never paid any attention.”

“He used stuffed animals, Vaughn. It would have been weirder if you had paid attention.”

Vaughn stared right through her as if she was a ghost. “Caleb is the key to this whole thing. We need to crawl inside of his head.”

“That would definitely give us a better view.”

“Of course it would!” Vaughn grabbed the flashlight and sprinted for the door. 

“Wait!” Kora bolted after him but it took her a while to catch up. 

“If you want to hide something,” said Vaughn without slowing down,  “you put it out of reach. For Caleb, that’s about thirteen feet up.”

“But these caves are all low and I don’t remember any with ceilings high enough for storage.”

“Except the first one. You were still unconscious so you don’t remember, but there was a slight echo to my footsteps when I entered the first room.”

“Even if I had been conscious, I wouldn’t have noticed.” Kora hurried to keep up as Vaughn ran back through the labyrinth of tunnels. “Do you even remember how to get back to the entrance?”

“Years of navigating secret tunnels gives you an uncanny sense of direction.”

Kora could tell when they were close to the canal because she could smell the ocean. And garbage.  Vaughn pointed the flashlight up at the ceiling. It was several feet higher and more squarely dug than the other rooms, as if Humphrey had lowered his ambition after tackling this first cave. Vaughn circled the flashlight beam around the walls until it stopped on a dark mass hovering directly above the main door. “I see something.”

“So do I, but how do we get it down?”

“Let me take a look.” Vaughn sprung straight up into the air where he seemed to levitate for a moment as if suspended by strings, then returned to the ground in an elegant crouch. “There’s definitely a body up there.” He handed the flashlight to Kora, who directed the beam at the body, then took another leap.  This time, he landed on the edge of the shelf where he balanced with unnatural grace as he reached down and scooped the stiff shape into his arms.

Kora felt overwhelmed when Vaughn held the strange object out for her to see. “That’s Mud. I recognize him.”

“Let’s take him back to his apartment where we have more light.”

They backtracked to the steel door that still stood ajar, and Kora held it open as Vaughn carried the body over to the bed beside the heater. Mud was dressed in a ragged, gray smock and delicate scarf stained with mold. Like everyone else in the house, his hair was jet black and he wore it closely cropped against his scalp. His leathery skin was a deep red like the bark of a tree. A deep pit gouged the space where his eyes should have been and the rest of his face melted away from this depression like ash off a volcano. The hint of a mouth stretched above his chin like a flesh wound made with a knife.  When Kora pried it open, she saw his tongue was gone. But by far, Mud’s most striking features were his hands: perfectly molded as if acid had devoured a beautiful man up to his elbows before evaporating into thin air.

“Where are his ears and nose?” asked Vaughn, who looked more horrified by this corpse than all the others combined.

“He doesn’t have any. He never did.” Kora ran a hand over the cascading flesh, leaving finger trails in the dust. “About two months after I awoke down here, Caleb brought about ten bodies down from Ruby’s lab. One of them was still alive and I could barely tell that it was a man. At first, I thought he’d been burned but that’s just how Ruby made him.”

“You saved him?”

“He was the first, and for a long time it was just the two of us down here.  He was a close friend.”

A tumble of thoughts poured through Kora's head as her eyes traveled from Mud’s hideous deformity up to Vaughn’s perfectly sculpted face. “A week ago, I would have killed him rather than save him.  What have I become?”

“A better person.” Vaughn wrapped his arms around her. Her knees weakened, it felt so delicious, but she pulled away and peered into Mud's cavernous eye socket. “There’s something down there the size of a pen tip.”

He picked up the flashlight and shined it into the hole. “Do you have a pair of tweezers?”  Kora ran into the kitchen where she found a sharp knife. “You’re the surgeon, I should let you do this part.”

Kora shook her head. She wanted him to do it for some reason. “What do you see down there?”

Vaughn wrenched out a tiny object and held it up in the light. “Looks like a little camera.”

“Caleb rigged up a cybernetic camera so Mud could see.”
Kora paused with the words still on her tongue: “Mud saw.”

“Caleb could do something like that?”

“According to Humphrey, Caleb was brilliant with electronics and I seem to remember something similar.”

“I believe it. Some of the toys he built, years ago, are amazing.”

She unbuttoned Mud’s smock and ran her finger over a deep gash that ran all the way down his sunken chest at the level of his heart. “Here's his knife wound.  I wonder…”

“What is it?”

“Gus and I found a crayon drawing in the chest of the toy Mud that sits at the tea party table.”

“So you think maybe the real Mud has something in his stuffing as well?”

“Give me that knife.”

Vaughn looked away as Kora sliced the wound that gaped open like an old wallet. “This incision was made after he was already dead.” Kora inserted the knife and spread the wound so she could peer inside the crusty hole.

“Can you see anything?”

“I think so.” She pushed her hand deep inside Mud’s chest cavity. “It’s hard to grab onto, but I think I’ve got it.” Kora pulled out a small turquoise box with Tiffany & Co. written on the lid.

“What the hell?” said Vaughn.

Kora laughed.  “I certainly know who this is from. Mud couldn't remember his real name, but he could remember two things about his life before he was monsterized by Ruby: he gave his wife jewelry from Tiffany's, and he wanted revenge on Randall. He also claimed that he sky dived from the edge of space, but no one believed that one.”
She unwrapped the ribbon and lifted the lid to find an object the size of a quarter.
She held it up. “This is what we’re after. Hopefully it’s worth all the trouble.”

“What is it?”

“An old drive of some kind.” Kora turned the tiny device over in her hand. “I bet it was originally in Mud’s brain. Let’s see.” With Vaughn’s help, Kora turned Mud onto his side. Someone had removed the entire occipital bone allowing them to peer into Mud’s empty skull.

“How did you know it was in his brain?”

Kora thought for a moment. “He wanted a photographic memory so Caleb added this drive for storage. Mud was a demanding guy.”

“But why go to all the trouble of removing something from his brain to stuff in his chest cavity?”

Kora rolled Mud gently onto his back once again. “It has to do with the sign for love.” She crossed her arms over her own chest. “Mud is the reason Caleb and I both know sign language. It was the only way to communicate with him.”  She smiled down at Mud's quiet, destroyed face.  “He was wonderful.”

“If he was so wonderful, what was he doing living here by himself?”

“He was a hermit.”  She grinned at the look on Vaughn's face.  “I know, but it's how he wanted to live.  He preferred to be among the dead.”

“Where did everyone else live?”

“On the other side.  It's hard to explain.  Would you like me to show you?”
The idea of seeing her old home, once again, filled her with excitement.

“Maybe some other time,” said Vaughn.  “We should head back up to the surface.”

Kora backed away from him.  “You can go, but I'm staying here.”

A quick series of emotions spun over Vaughn's face, finally landing on outrage. “The hell you are!” 

He tried to grab her hand but she fled to the far wall.  “If I go back, Ruby will have you, Ivan, and Caleb killed.”

Vaughn stalked toward her. “She's threatened that for years.”

“But this time it's real,” pleaded Kora.  “She's angry that I fixed your stomach.”

“Good.  I'm glad.” He lunged at her but she managed to shove the table between them.

“I need to stay here, Vaughn.  There are other parts of the catacomb where I can live.  I've done it before and I see, now, that Ruby was right—it's where I belong.”

“Ruby's never right!  This is madness. You're coming with me if I have to throw you over my shoulder!”
He tossed the table aside and it crashed into the kitchen.

Kora felt the cold wall against her back. She knew she could hurl Vaughn away like Caleb, but she didn't want it to come to that. Unlike Caleb, Vaughn was the last person on earth she wanted to harm. “I don't like who I became up there. You've seen for yourself what Mirafield turned me into and I won't let it happen again.” 

Vaughn leaned an arm on either side of her and their eyes met. He was so close that if she wanted, she could push up onto her toes and kiss him. “We've all done things we regret,” he said calmly, “and if you stay down here, I'm staying with you. I'll die before I let you bury yourself alive in this hell all alone.”

She'd expected a lot of things from him, but not this. Kora hung her head. While she belonged down here, he didn't. “What should we do, then?”

 Vaughn smiled in relief. “We'll steal a car from the garage and escape. I left a device in the Aston that lets me disrupt the force field.”

He picked up Mud and she followed him back through the maze to the first room. He swiftly deposited Mud back on his high burial shelf, then grabbed her hand and guided her to the water.

She gazed into the dark, murky pool that moved slightly with the swaying of the tide. “I'll have to drown again.”

Vaughn put his arms around her and this time, she didn't pull away. “I'll move fast and before you know it, we'll be back on shore.”

Kora leaned back against his chest. The only other arms that made her feel this safe were Ishmael's but unlike her squid's friendly embrace, Vaughn's touch made her tremble in a way that had nothing to do with cold or danger. “If I wake up a thousand years from now embedded in a glacier, I'll be really pissed.
”