TWENTY-SIX

When I return to the room in Malibu, I find the majority of the kids still deep in a trance, although a few are starting to scratch. I can only assume the Cradle is psychically attacking the Telar who were protecting Haru and his inner circle, or at least the men and women who were related by blood to them. From working with the kids, I know they have a deep distrust of any Telar and would just as soon kill them all.

Leaving Umara’s body beside Lark’s, I flee the room and hurry upstairs. I want to get out of the main building before the children start dying. I don’t want to see them suffer. But I run into Matt, who is armed to the teeth, and he tells me that Seymour’s looking for me.

“He discovered you switched the vaccine for the virus,” Matt says.

“I stained the virus blue so it looked the same as the vaccine. How did he find out?”

“Remember, this vaccine works as an antidote, too. You get a shot, you should begin to feel better right away. Seymour believed he was giving out the permanent cure. He’d give the kids a shot and a few minutes later he’d ask how they were feeling. The kids kept saying they felt the same. That made him suspicious, but he wasn’t given a chance to drill them. You swept in and gathered the kids together for your last session. So Seymour went looking for Charlie. He found him in the bottom basement and showed Charlie a sample of what he’d been injecting the kids with. You know Charlie, he invented this stuff. He just had to smell it to know you had tricked Seymour into shooting the kids up with a pure strain of the virus. Seymour freaked out, he tried to burst in on your session. If I hadn’t stopped him, he would have disrupted your attack on the Source.”

“Did you see everything that happened in the room?”

“Not in your room. I was too busy keeping order. I had Seymour and Charlie screaming at me, along with Cynthia and Thomas Brutran. I was lucky to keep them at bay without hurting them.”

“Thanks for backing me up,” I say.

Matt shakes his head. “I can’t say I agree with how you handled the situation. Why use Seymour? He has a soft heart. I would have hated it but you should have had me give the kids the shots.”

“The kids in the Cradle are sensitive. The ones in the Lens can almost read minds. I know you can block your thoughts, but there was a chance they would have picked up that you were hiding something. To be safe, I chose Seymour. He loves kids. I’m sure he felt good about giving them the shots, protecting them from the virus. I wanted the kids to sense his goodwill and nothing else.”

Matt nods his approval. “Clever. But now you’ve got a problem. Seymour’s demanding that you immediately give the kids the vaccine.”

“Does Charlie support him?”

“Sort of. He wants to talk to you first.”

“Then we’ve got to get them both out of here, and fast.”

Matt is torn. “Isn’t it enough to leave the kids in the Lens infected? According to what Freddy told us, the Cradle needs them to focus its power. Otherwise, the Cradle should be harmless.”

“The psychic gap between the most powerful kids in the Cradle and those in the Lens is not as great as you think. Even if we kill all the kids in the Lens, there’s no guarantee that Brutran or the remaining children won’t create another Lens in a few months. We can’t take that risk. We have to follow Hercules’ example and destroy all the heads of the monster.”

“But even he ran into a head he couldn’t destroy.”

“I can’t worry about that part of the story right now.”

Matt is a mass of emotion. Like Seymour, I know he’s always had a soft spot for kids. “Has Charlie told you how they’re going to die?”

“I know it ain’t going to be pretty.”

“It’s going to be bloody awful. It might be more merciful if I stayed behind and took care of them.”

“No. Some of these kids are related to adults who work in this building. They are ‘planned children.’ The IIC paid the parents extra to have the kids on special days and in special places. It goes back to what Freddy told us. But their parents love them just the same and they’re not going to stand by and let you put a bullet in their little darlings.”

“But they’ll convulse and hemorrhage. They’ll die in agony.”

“More the reason we get out of here now.”

“Wait. You want us all to leave?”

“Except for the infected kids, I want the building evacuated.”

Matt finally gets it. “Are you saying the war’s over? That the Source has been destroyed?”

“They’re all dead and buried under a mass of sand.”

Matt smiles. “My mother will be pleased. She’s been fighting those bastards for thousands of years.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. A Telar grenade hangs loose from a clip and bumps against my hand. “Matt. I don’t know how to tell you this.”

He lowers his head. “No,” he says.

“She told me she talked to you about it on the ride down.”

He turns away and my hand falls uselessly at my side. He pounds the wall. “This can’t be happening! Not again!”

I stand there feeling utterly useless, extremely vulnerable, and totally damned. “She died to disrupt the Telar Link. She sacrificed herself so they could be killed.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I’m not sure I understand it myself. It seems that long ago the Telar developed a remarkable Link and tapped into a spiritual realm of light and joy. And they were able to channel that light into the lives of their people. It was only later they discovered that they were immortal.”

“My mother told me this story last night.”

“Did she tell you that she was the last member of that original Link? The reason the Telar were immortal was not because they possessed some secret knowledge. It was because they were blessed from this high realm. To this day, it’s like your mother functioned as a vehicle for this blessing.”

“Are you saying that she protected them?”

“Yes. Just by being alive, she made them virtually impossible to kill. That’s why she had to give up her life to stop them.”

His pain turns ugly. “How?”

“Excuse me?”

“How did she die?”

“She asked me . . . I killed her. I broke her neck.”

The look of horror on his face takes me to the time outside the cave. When I told him I was trying to transform Teri into a vampire to save her. He killed me then and it looks like he could kill me again. He is so strong. Yet he gestures helplessly.

“You couldn’t have done that, Sita. Not you, not again.”

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I know apologies are useless. All I can say is that I did what I had to do.”

“Did you leave her down there? With the sick kids?”

“Yes. But as far as I know, most of the kids are still in a trance.”

Matt reaches out a trembling hand and touches my neck. I can’t bear to see the pain in his eyes and so I close my own. I feel his fingers touch my skin. It’s possible I have a second left to live, and afterward an eternity of fiery damnation to look forward to. Yet, whatever he does to me, I feel I will deserve it.

His touch turns to a gentle caress. “I’m proud of you,” he says.

I open my eyes. “Matt?”

“Everything you’ve done so far . . . I would never have had the courage. That includes what you did to my mother.”

I swallow. “If there had been any other way.”

“There wasn’t.” He takes back his hand and stands at attention. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Have all the adults been inoculated?”

“Charlie says we have a hundred percent containment of the virus when it comes to the adults.”

“We have to isolate the kids in the bottom level of the basement.”

“Those in the Lens or all of them?”

The question and answer to that will haunt the rest of my life.

“All of them,” I say. “First isolate the kids and then enlist the help of IIC security and start moving the adults out fast. Lie if you have to. Say the vaccine isn’t working the way we expected on the children and we have to quarantine them more carefully.”

“Keeping IIC security in line will be difficult.”

“It’s why you’re here. It’s a job only you can do. I’ll get Seymour and Charlie and we’ll meet outside. Oh, where’s Shanti?”

“I assume she’s where you left her.”

“I put her in an empty room above the Cradle. She’s probably still there. I’ll get her.”

“What about Cynthia Brutran and her husband?”

“Order them out of the building.”

“Their daughter is one of those who’s going to get sick. I don’t care how evil Cindy is, she’s not going to leave Jolie. Not without a fight.”

“I’ll take care of Brutran. The key is to move fast.”

Matt fiddles with the Telar grenade pinned to his chest. “I understand what has to be done.” He leans over and gives me a quick kiss on the lips. “You didn’t have a choice.”

“How can you be so understanding?”

“I don’t have a choice.”

Matt tells me about a van he’s placed outside the main entrance and gives me several sets of keys. He explains about the vehicle’s cell phones and hidden weapons. But I know he has something up his sleeve he’s not telling me about.

I run toward the isolated room where I left Shanti but bump into her in the elevator. She was on her way to see me. Her eyes are big and red and I can see she’s been crying. She hugs me when we meet.

“Did it work?” she asks.

“It worked.”

“Is Umara okay?”

“She didn’t make it.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t have time to explain. I need you to get to a black van that’s parked out front.” I hand her a set of keys. “Wait there until I arrive. I won’t be long.” I turn to leave.

“Wait! Sita, there’s something wrong with the vaccine. The kids are coming out of the session. I saw their hands and legs. They’ve got worse blisters than Seymour and I had. They’re real sick.”

“Trust me, I’ll handle it. Right now I need you to get to the van.”

“Is Seymour coming?”

“I’ll get him. Now go!”

Unfortunately, it’s the Brutrans I run into next, not Seymour and Charlie. We meet in a stairway between the basement floors. Tom and Cindy are both armed and have half a dozen guards with them. They plant themselves firmly in my way. But they’re below me, I have the high ground, and that makes a bigger difference than they realize.

Cindy and Tom have semiautomatic handguns. They don’t point them at me but they don’t exactly avoid me either. They look tired and desperate.

“Where are you going?” Cindy demands.

“To the basement to get Charlie and Seymour.”

“They’re there but I’ve placed them under guard.”

“Why?”

“This is still our building,” Cindy says. “I’ve been monitoring you the last ten minutes. You’re gathering your friends and preparing to leave. In all this time, you haven’t stopped to call me. I haven’t been debriefed.”

“You want a debriefing, I’ll give you one. The Source has been wiped out. Our business is finished. My people and I are getting out of here. Do you have a problem with that?”

“You’re damn right we do,” Tom says. “You’re leaving behind hundreds of sick kids, and as far as we can tell, no cure. One of those kids is our daughter.”

I pause. “Has Jolie begun to show symptoms?”

Cindy nods. “Many are sick. I moved Jolie to our clinic and sedated her to decrease her pain. But Matt has managed to collect all the vaccine. We’re not sure how. We only know we can’t find any. Even Charlie is out.”

Matt is strong and capable of making his own decisions. While I was traveling through the underworld, he must have guessed my general plan and taken control of the vaccine.

“Release Seymour and Charlie and I’ll see what I can do about getting more vaccine.”

“No,” Tom says. “They’re the only insurance we have.”

“In other words, we don’t trust you,” Cindy says.

“I just destroyed the Telar. That’s why we decided to work together, isn’t it? I have also inoculated the bulk of your people against a potentially fatal virus. From my perspective, I’ve upheld my end of the bargain. Now, in return, you put a gun in my face and tell me my friends are hostages.”

Tom sweats over the trigger on his gun. “Give us the vaccine for the children and you and your friends will be free to go.”

“Those kids are assassins. They can strike the mind of anyone in the world. I can’t just leave them here in your hands. They’re too powerful.”

Tom frowns. “Are you saying you’re going to kill them?”

I turn to Cindy. “How should I answer that?”

Cindy studies me and suddenly the light dawns inside.

“You want me to decide,” she gasps.

I shrug. “I’m not Jolie’s mother.”

“But you care for her,” Cindy says.

“You can give the children the vaccine on one condition. You’ve got to separate them. You’ve got to spread them across the globe and make sure they have no contact with each other. You have the resources to do this. But if you deviate from this rule, I’ll hunt them down and kill them. After I kill you.” I pause. “That’s my deal. Take it or leave it.”

Tom’s trigger finger shakes with anger. “You’re in no position to dictate what direction our firm must take. Especially when it comes to our children.”

“They’re not your children. They’re no longer under your control.”

Tom is ready to explode. “What are you talking about?”

“Ask your wife.” I turn to her. “Cindy?”

She points her gun between my eyes. Her arm is steady but her gaze is distant. It is not an easy decision to make, and I sympathize. That’s why I’m dumping it in her lap. Jolie is a monster and she’s a little girl. She is both and she is what they made her to be.

Cindy doesn’t answer. But she pulls back the hammer on her gun.

Her husband stares at her in wide-eyed amazement. “Cindy?”

“I’m thinking,” she whispers.

“About what?”

“Love.”

Tom snorts. “Don’t fall to pieces on me right now. I need you. Jolie needs you. We have to secure a supply of that vaccine. Until we do, we’ll always be at the mercy of this witch.”

“The effects of the last vaccine we gave you are permanent,” I say.

He glares at me. “Like we trust you.”

I don’t respond. His remark is irrelevant. His wife is in charge. I have given her more authority than I ever imagined I would. She continues to stare at me, her gun held ready. Even if she pulls the trigger, she’ll miss. All of them combined are no match for me.

“Tom,” Cindy says quietly.

“What?”

“Shut up.”

His handsome face swells with blood and his gun trembles. “Jolie’s life is in jeopardy! If you think you can choose this time to talk to me like that, then you—”

Cynthia Brutran shoots her husband in the forehead. Her handgun is a .45; it has heavy stopping power. A spray of bloody brains explodes out the back of his skull and paints the stairway wall. His body drops and rolls down a flight of stairs. It comes to a halt in a pool of blood, his eyes wide open, staring at nothing.

The IIC guards come to full alert. The stakes of our confrontation have risen. Cindy turns the gun back on me. “I’ve come to a decision.”

“I can see that,” I say.

“I leave here with you and Jolie. You find the real vaccine and give her a shot. Her symptoms better fade in a few minutes.”

“Why follow us? What’s your purpose?”

“You know our business is far from over.”

She refers to the game, CII, Cosmic Intuitive Illusion, and whatever else the kids have programmed onto the Internet.

“Release Seymour and Charlie,” I say.

“Agreed.”

“What do you want me to do with the rest of the children?”

“You made them sick. You decide.”

She tries to throw the responsibility back at me.

“Call your guards and tell them to let Seymour and Charlie go,” I say. “Get your daughter. I’ll meet you outside the main entrance in a few minutes.”

She taps my forehead with the tip of her gun. “Sita?”

“Cindy?”

“No tricks.”

“Sure.” But I suspect it won’t be up to me.