The 88th Floor (6 page)

Rees didn’t want to nod, but he did.

“
Of course you do,” Kurush
said. “And do your dreams not seem more vibrant and alive than this
banal prison we’ve created for ourselves? That is because we are
born of dreams, Nicholas, not of reason. We are shaped in His
image, the fruits of His terrible and divine genius. Even now He
seeks to reach across the cold gulf of space and touch us, to give
us but a glimpse of our destiny. It’s a grave burden to endure such
secrets for so long, Nicholas. You must help me now to carry on the
work of a thousand lifetimes.”

A part of Rees’s mind, the rational,
conscious portion, tried to raise his gun again, but his body would
not obey. It was too much under the sway of his unconscious mind,
the dreaming mind. And it had seen. It had seen it with Rees’s own
eyes, seen the swelling, pulsating plain of flesh and bone; it had
seen the thing that would drive mankind to horrors and virtuosities
beyond his meager imaginings. It had been but a glimpse, but it was
seared in his soul so strongly that even death would not free him
from the sight of it.

Trust those eyes of yours, Detective.

Had those words been a warning or an
invitation? Perhaps there was no difference between the two.

Kurush stepped closer and placed his hands
on Rees’s head.

“
This is not the end,
Nicholas,” he said. “There is never an end, only the infinite
beginning.”

And then Rees saw more.

The horror of the previous sight was but the
surface of a power unfathomably greater than even a madman could
conceive. The man who called himself Aran Kurush, the man shot dead
only a day earlier, carried Rees through the nightmare until he
could at last go no farther had to turn away before his very being
was incinerated.

But Kurush did not look away. He offered
himself up to the annihilation of his insane-savant lord’s embrace
and for one brief instant, the essence of its crawling chaos bleed
into the eighty-eighth floor, seeped through the cracks of time and
space to brush against the waking world. A rush of catastrophe and
mad invention swept across the globe with the speed of a wayward
thought, reshaping lives and altering destinies for all time.

Then it ended.

The air quivered around Rees as the Sircotin
Technologies building, perhaps unable to reconcile the
impossibility of what had taken place within its walls, collapsed
from the strain of the event. But Rees was no longer there. He
floated aimlessly in a cold, nameless oblivion, his mind still
struggling to rationalize, to forget; anything to blot out the
madness undergirding the true nature of the universe. It tried to
deny the irrevocable changes that exposure to such truth had
wrought upon Rees’s body, to convince him that he could simply
return to the empty, rote schema of conscious existence.

But he had seen.

***

Agent Reilly, having experienced but the
faintest of glimpses into Rees’s memories through their direct
neural connection, leaned forward in her chair and exhaled,
trembling. After a few minutes she called the doctor back to the
interrogation room.

“
Do you have the
results?”

“
Yes, Detective Rees’s DNA
seems to be rewriting itself. While much of it matches his own
records, other sections already appear to match that of the body
Doctor Morgan examined.”

It wasn’t quite the report she’d expected.
Perhaps there was still time.

“
Thank you, Doctor. Will
he regain consciousness when you remove the input jack?”

“
No, not for several
hours.”

“
Then unplug him and get
your equipment out of here.”

After the doctor left, Reilly pulled her
chair up to the table to write her report on the case. She didn’t
know how to begin the report or how to end it. If it was Rees’s
fate to tread the same path as this mysterious Aran Kurush, then
his body would have to be incinerated, although there was a chance
that even that might not halt its cellular activity. Perhaps, she
thought, the ashes could be encased in concrete and buried far
below the surface, or even shot into the cold reaches of space.

Rees twitched as she scribbled down her
thoughts. She wondered if he was dreaming, if when he woke up he
would remember the things his mind had worked so hard to conceal.
Perhaps, she thought, she had destroyed what remained of Nicholas
Rees and given him over to madness. Even if she hadn’t, how long
would it be before he was transformed into something more, or maybe
less, than human?

Every time he moved, a stray thought about
what she had seen in his memories came to her mind. It was oddly
appropriate, she thought, that the two of them were closed in that
room together, for they now shared the same burden of a terrible
knowledge that would haunt him for eternity, and her until her
dying day.

Reilly stopped writing and looked up to see
that Rees was awake and staring directly at her. There was
something in his eyes she hadn’t noticed before, something cold and
alien.

“
Hello,
Amanda.”

She reached for her sidearm, but she was too
slow. Rees tore free from his restraints effortlessly and flung the
table across the room with a flick of his wrist. Before she could
take aim, he slapped the gun out of her hand, seized her by the
throat, and hoisted her up against the wall.

“
Please, Amanda,” he said,
smiling, “don’t do anything rash.”

Her eyes darted up to the corner of the room
where she knew the observation cameras were trained on them. For a
moment, she wondered why no one outside had reacted to the
situation. Then she remembered what had happened to Morgan under
the watchful eye of Sircotin’s cameras.

“
I’m so glad that you want
to share in my experiences,” Rees said. “Your doctor’s clumsy
prodding could only recover so much, I’m afraid. There’s so much
more for you to see!”

Reilly tried to talk, but she scarcely had
enough air to breathe.

Rees leaned closer to her and fixed his
inhuman gaze upon her eyes.

“
Such lovely eyes you
have, Amanda. Top of the line construction. Sircotin’s DeepSight
2600 series, yes? A wonderfully sophisticated design, though I’m
not sure they can handle what I have to show you. Suitable for a
glimpse, yes, but to see it whole?”

Reilly’s vision flickered as her cyberoptic
implants received a transmission from some foreign source. The
features of the room twisted apart and Rees’s face melted away to
reveal a vision from the deepest corridors of a mind that was no
longer recognizably human.

Slowly, an image took shape and Reilly
screamed. She reflexively threw up her hands to blot out the sight,
but the direct link to her eyes remained unobscured. Frantically,
she dug her nails into her skin and tore at the soft flesh
surrounding the implants.

“
Yes,” Rees said. “Such
beauty… ”

Blood ran down Reilly’s fingers as she
ripped into her eye sockets to grasp desperately at the source of
her torment. Finally, she severed the tiny wires that connected the
cyberware to her nervous system and her vision went black.

Rees released her then and her body
collapsed in a limp heap. The intense, burning pain radiating from
her mangled eye sockets was almost soothing compared to the
horrible images scorched into her shattered mind. Her entire body
shook as she sobbed uncontrollably.

“
You’re not ready,
Amanda,” Rees said. His voice was at once distant and frightfully
close, seeming to come from many mouths at once. “Perhaps when my
work is done, you will be. Everyone will be.”

Plunged in darkness, Amanda Reilly remained
at the mercy of her memories. She did not hear Rees leave the room
or hear the dying screams of the men outside. Little more than a
broken shell, her body quivered sporadically. The garbled sounds
coming from her throat echoed against the metal walls of the
interrogation room.

Microscopic nanites were already working to
repair her damaged tissue and her artificial heart soon stabilized
her metabolism. By the time her backup team arrived to investigate
Rees’s escape, her physical wounds would be repaired.

But there was no technology on Earth that
could hope to restore the fragmented remains of her sanity.

Thank you for
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The 88
^th
Floor
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THE WALLS OF
DALGOROD
sample

PROLOGUE

A hideous shrieking woke Lyov just before
dawn.

Disoriented, he rolled out of bed and
stumbled to the armor he’d stripped off just a few hours earlier.
His wife clamped her hands over her ears as she sat up.

“
What is that?” Anushka
asked.

“
The horses. Something has
them spooked.”

The sound died by the time he pulled on his
hardened leather hauberk, replaced by the low droning of blown
horns. Lyov strapped his sheathed sword around his waist. The blade
was old, chipped, and dull in places, better suited for battering
an armored man in the practice yard than for cleaving flesh.

He turned to Anushka. She stared at him, her
eyes wide.

“
Wake the children and get
to the cellar,” he said.

“
But where are
you—”

“
Do as I say!”

Lyov left her sitting there bewildered, his
long strides carrying him through the small house to the front
door. He undid the bolt and stepped into the muddy street.
Scattered groups of armed men rushed past him on their way to the
town’s outer defenses. The acrid smell of smoke drifted through the
cold air, and a faint, orange glow welled just over the roofline of
the buildings across the street. He heard men shouting somewhere in
the distance.

Mirona’s
breath
, he thought.
They’re here
.

He drew his sword and hurried to join the
rest of the militia at his designated post along the town’s wooden
palisade. As he neared the fortification, the shouting grew louder,
along with the sound of clattering weapons. By the time he reached
the open stretch of ground separating the wall from the town’s
buildings, flames had consumed the guard towers nearest the gate. A
group of armed men did their best to hold the gate shut as burning
timbers collapsed around them, but many were already wounded.

Before Lyov could join them, more than a
dozen figures armed with long, narrow clubs clambered over the
palisade and dropped into the midst of the defenders. Between the
spreading flames and the savage club blows, the militia could not
hold its ground. Several men abandoned their positions, scattering
as the invaders struck their comrades dead. The massive door broke
with a thunderous crack to reveal a horde of attackers waiting to
pour into the town. They cut through the remnants of the militia
and charged across the clearing, howling and snarling like ravenous
wolves. Those carrying torches flung them at the houses’ thatched
roofs while the rest smashed through doors and chased down any
wounded defenders still trying to escape.

Anushka!

Lyov turned and ran.

He had gone only a few yards when one of the
attackers tumbled from the roof of a building just ahead of him.
The fiend rushed at him, growling. Lyov scarcely got his sword up
in time to deflect a blow from the invader’s club. The impact sent
a shiver down his arm, and he frantically gave ground as the
invader pressed in on him.

Lyov could not get a good look at the
Dikarie in the darkness, but he moved as gracefully as a wolf, and
his growling voice sounded nearly as feral. Despite Lyov’s
considerable strength, he was not an accomplished swordsman, and
his ripostes proved clumsy and inaccurate. The Dikarie turned most
of them aside, and the others missed the mark completely. He
managed to keep his footing in the mud, but his attacker proved
less careful. An overeager lunge left him slightly off-balance.
Lyov threw his weight against him to send them both crashing into
the mud. He adjusted the grip on his sword and plunged the blade
into his attacker’s unprotected back.

Lyov went on stabbing after inflicting the
mortal wound, fearful that the fiend might rise again. Once the
Dikarie stopped moving, Lyov rolled the body over to get a better
look at its face. Although he had heard many stories about the
Dikarie, he had never actually seen one before. Most of the stories
sounded too outlandish to believe, and some learned men insisted
the Dikarie were nothing more than men still mired in barbarism.
While seeing one up close did not help him to separate truth from
fiction, he knew one thing for certain:

This was not a man.

A long, bony ridge extended from the eye
sockets and ran along the sides of the shorn skull just above the
temples. Black markings adorned the skin, beginning at the top of
the scalp and tracing down to the bridge of the nose. Two sets of
canines sprang from the upper and lower jaws, one slightly longer
than the other. The bone structure differed from a normal man’s,
with more bone along the cheeks, eyes, and temples. It looked
primitive and crude, like a hunk of stone waiting to be chiseled
into some useful shape.