The pain was coming back. Everywhere. The veil fading. He backed up to the table. Got his hands around a knife. Tilted it downward. Cut himself free after a minute. Didn’t care what he had to cut through to do it.
Stumbled past the Partial. Past Heretic. To his jacket. Found the vial. Opened it. Stood there, trembling.
The Photographer had said it was poison. Bliss had said in liquid form it would rejuvenate Shriek. Shriek was gone. But the figment in his mind had been right about one thing: one way or the other, he was going to die without help.
Downed it in one gulp. Tasted like dirt and chocolate. Sprinkled with some sharp yet familiar herb.
Fell heavily to the floor. Sat there as the energy left him. As his wounds laid him out flat on his back. As he gasped. Every inch of his body crying out in an endless agony.
2
Finch and Shriek stood in the cavern by the underground sea. In front of Samuel Tonsure’s one-room shelter.
“You’re a hallucination,” Finch said. Wouldn’t look at Shriek. “I’m dying. I’m having a conversation with myself.”
Shriek said, “Remember how Wyte had Otto inside of him? In a different way, you have me inside of you. I entered your mind when you ate my memory bulb.”
Something had lived inside of Wyte. When it came out, Finch had shot it. Then sliced it apart as it squealed.
“That’s impossible.”
“Do you really know what’s impossible anymore?” Shriek asked. “Are you in a position to have an opinion that means anything anymore? You will still die there, on the floor, Finch, if you don’t believe in me.” Felt an immense pressure in his skull. A kind of pulse. “That’s me,” Shriek said. “Me, trying to get out.” His eyes burned with a deep and abiding fire. “I was still regenerating. Healing. But I altered the memory bulb. I encoded it with a copy of me. When you ate it, I entered your brain. If my body had lived, if the real me had lived, I would have eventually become less than an echo. A stray thought. An impulse for tea instead of coffee. Unexpected sadness or joy. You would have carried me, decaying, for the rest of your life. But that didn’t happen. They’ve killed me and I’m all that’s left. Now it’s my mission.”
Tea not coffee. The strange surge of energy during the shoot-out. Sadness or joy. Emotions not his own. Not Crossley’s, either.
“There is no mission now.”
“You’re wrong, Finch. Very wrong.”
Finch, disgusted: “Like Wyte and Otto. I’ll die and you’ll come out of me. Like a fucking parasite.”
Shriek frowned. “No. Not like Wyte and Otto. Not like that at all. Otto ate Wyte from the inside out. I’m just a passenger, gone soon enough. If you help me.”
“Help you do what?”
“Manifest in the real world. Become flesh and blood. Complete the mission while there’s still time.”
“But you’re just a … an imitation.”
“It’s not the best way. It’s just the only way now.”
“My mind’s playing tricks on me.”
“Listen to me, Finch. It was Bliss who found me in this cavern. Who brought me to the rebels. I wasn’t even human anymore. I wasn’t, in any sane sense, alive. I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it. If I could come back from a hibernation of so many years, then maybe you’ll understand why a copy of me might be able to reenter the world.”
Bliss again. On the walls of Zamilon. Finding Duncan Shriek. Bending the ear of the Lady in Blue.
“When I wake up, you’ll just be a memory of a dream.”
“You’re not hearing me. You won’t wake up. Your body is shutting down.”
“Then take over. It’s a weak enough machine,” Finch said with self-contempt. “How can I stop you?”
Shriek waved his hand. They stood on the battlements of Zamilon. No one there but them. Cold and windy. Out in the desert: shadows gathering.
“I can’t force you. It would take too much time. We don’t have that kind of time. You’d die first. And right now the Lady in Blue is holding off the invaders at Zamilon. She’s waiting for a miracle. I’m that miracle.”
“And if I said no? If I said no, you’d just fade away and this would all be over?”
“Yes.”
Thinking again about Wyte. About Stark under the influence of Wyte’s memory bulb. At what price? And: You knew you might die. Why aren’t you willing to do this?
Because it’s not real.
Looked out at the green lights beginning to appear. Above, the blurred gleam of stars obscured by dust.
“It’s up to you, Finch,” Shriek said.
“How do we do it?” Finch asked. “I cut open my own head and you pop out?” And what happens to me then?
“It’s nothing like that,” Shriek said. “Nothing like that. You open yourself to me, and then I open myself to you. Then you sleep for a while. When you wake up, I am out of you. I can feed off moisture. Off the air. What I take from you will be no larger than the weight of a baby. And I will do the rest. Then we go our separate ways. You’ll never see me again.” Except when I look in the mirror. “I know you’re afraid. But what happened to Wyte was invasive. Hostile. He had a parasite inside of him. Something made possible by the gray caps.”
This isn’t invasive?
The green lights were closer. He could almost make out the forms of the creatures gathered out there in the desert. Waiting to take Zamilon for themselves. Who could say their cause was any less just? The Lady in Blue didn’t even know what they were.
“How do I know you’re not hostile? I ‘open up’ and you take over.”
“I won’t. I promise. I can’t. It wouldn’t last for long.”
“What’s the risk if I say yes?”
Shriek hesitated. Then said, “I won’t lie to you. It’s a sacrifice. I will be doing things to your body to make my own. Stealing from your tissue. Robbing you while you’re already weak. You won’t be the same afterward. Even after you recover from the torture. You’ll have dizzy spells. Headaches. You may not sleep for a while. When you do sleep, there will be nightmares as your mind flushes out my memories. But you’ll be setting me free. And I won’t take it from you unless you let me.”
“You’re saying it’ll almost kill me.”
“And heal you, too,” Shriek said. “In the short term, I can make your flesh knit faster. I can shield you from the aftershock of what the Partial did to you. And a part of you will always be with me. Even after you die, you will live on because I will still be alive.” Shriek grinned, showing his teeth. “I’m hard to kill.”
Lost time. Lost worlds. A man who had lived for more than a hundred years, only to die in a crappy apartment as part of a larger game by a species that had come from a place so distant they’d spent centuries trying to find it again.
A giving up. A giving in. That’s what Shriek was offering him. It tempted him. He had nothing left. Nothing of worth. No master plan. No better life waiting. Just his own death. Too much for him, and too little, standing there on the battlements of a place re-created by a passenger in his brain.