Trapped

23: FIRE IN THE HOLE

Another Rosalind had appeared — Jode, escaped from wherever one went when tapped with a red and green ‹BINK›-rod. The Lucifer had sneaked around the far side of the laser cage. While the rest of us were watching Impervia cut her arm, Jode had moved into position just beyond the cube's airlock shack. The Lucifer had obtained an Element gun from one of the fallen Keepers; and the gun was set to shoot flames.

Impervia's clothes ignited. Beside her, the Caryatid was also engulfed in fire… but the Caryatid waved the blaze away before it could singe a single hair. She turned and grabbed the flames surrounding Impervia as if they were solid matter; then the Caryatid yanked backward, pulling the fire with her, like tugging a crackling red cloak off Impervia's body. A quick flick of the Caryatid's wrists, and the flames winked out in mid-air. Curls of smoke wreathed Impervia from head to foot, but the woman beneath seemed unharmed.

Jode, alas, was a fast learner. The Lucifer must have tried flames to begin with because they'd cause the most agonizing death… but when fire proved ineffective, Jode switched immediately to bullets.

A burst of high-velocity slugs rattled toward Impervia and the Caryatid, some rounds striking home while others zinged past to ricochet off the rock walls. Annah threw herself to the ground; I joined her, but in the instant before I dropped, I saw the Caryatid point toward Jode and shout a single incomprehensible word. Her pet fireball shot across the room toward the alien, the ball's blazing heat augmented by fire from Jode's own flamethrower… and I prayed the inferno would hit its target with enough energy to incinerate Jode on the spot.

It didn't. Head down, I heard a clatter and a heavy whoof of air. When I looked up, the Element gun had been knocked from Jode's grip and all fires in the room were snuffed… including the flameball the Caryatid had sent toward the alien. Sebastian had obviously told his nanite friends to stop the violence until he could sort everything out.

Therefore Jode was still intact. The Caryatid had slumped to the ground, her face ashen; one arm hung limply, while the other hand pressed hard against her opposite shoulder. Blood seeped between her fingers from a deep wound just below her collarbone. There was another mess of blood near her waist where a second bullet had plowed its way through the plump rolls of flesh she called love handles… but the Caryatid didn't have a free hand to stop the bleeding down there. Perhaps she didn't even know about the second wound: the shot in her upper chest, piercing ribs and muscles and internal organs, might have eclipsed the pain of a straight in-and-out hole through simple fat.

Besides, the Caryatid wasn't concentrating on her own injuries. Her gaze had turned toward Impervia… who'd been knocked off her feet by the gunfire. When she hit the rock floor she landed in an awkward heap, with no attempt to make a graceful breakfall. Blood gushed out of her in a high-pressure fountain, an arc of it streaming into the air. The blood had to be pouring from an artery, but her body was so crumpled, I couldn't tell where she'd been hit. In the leg? The chest? The throat?

Abruptly the red geyser stopped… as if the heart supplying the pressure had ceased to pump. Impervia didn't move; nothing moved except the edge of the blood pool, trickling across the uneven ground, flowing toward the lowest point in the chamber.

I thought to myself, She would have preferred to die in righteous battle. But battle deaths are often the easy way out for people blind to other possibilities. If Impervia had to die, better that her last act was cutting her own arm. Not stupid fisticuffs, but proving she was human.

"What's going on?" Sebastian roared. At least, I think he wanted it to be a roar. It came out closer to a whine. He'd seen Impervia was flesh and blood; he'd also seen her gunned down by his precious Rosalind. Except that he could see two Rosalinds: Jode and Dreamsinger. "Who are you?" he yelled at the Lucifer.

"I'm Rosalind," Jode answered. "The real Rosalind."

"You aren't," the boy said… but he cast a furtive glance at Dreamsinger.

Jode caught the look. "That's another of my mother's doppelgangers. Created by sorcery. She rolled me aside when you weren't looking, but—"

Sebastian interrupted, "What do you mean, rolled you aside?"

"Pushed me sideways. Out of this world. But I had a magic wand that let me come back."

Jode held up a small rod as wide as my pinkie-finger and twice as long. He pushed a button on one end, and suddenly the rod sparkled with lights, like red and green sequins glittering in the dimness. I bet when the rod touched you, it made a soft ‹BINK›.

Dreamsinger glared. "Where did you get that?"

"Stole it from one of my mother's sorcerers. A gullible man who always wore orange."

Jode couldn't hide the taunt in those words. The ‹BINK›-rod had come from the Spark in orange armor — Mind-Lord Priest, killed at the winter anchorage. With such a rod in hand, Jode had apparently avoided the fate of the Lucifer in the tobacco field: when Dreamsinger had "rolled" Jode aside, the alien shapeshifter could use its own ‹BINK›-rod to return. Apparently, such rods could both send you away and bring you back.

Even wearing Rosalind's face, Jode looked smug. And the Lucifer wasn't finished. "Do you want to see who's real?" Jode asked Sebastian. "Use your powers to dispel all the sorcery in this room. You'll see the whole truth."

Dreamsinger had time to narrow her eyes — her beautiful Hafsah eyes, so calm and perfect. Then something went thud in my head, like a concussion from the inside out: things rearranged themselves in my brain, making my body as weak as water. If I hadn't been down on the floor already, I think I would have collapsed. But the dizziness passed in seconds; when my vision stopped reeling, the woman in Sebastian's arms had changed.

The first thing I saw was red — full body armor colored sorcerer's crimson, made of plastic and molded in the shape of a chunkily voluptuous female figure. This was no graceful Hafsah in harem pants; the armor wasn't as bulky as plate mail, but it possessed a similar stolidity. The breasts and hips built onto the underlying shell had the crude excess of a Stone Age fertility carving… so extreme they were almost a parody. Especially in contrast to the woman beneath.

I could finally see the real Dreamsinger because she wasn't wearing her helmet — she must have decided to remove it when she started kissing Sebastian. Surprisingly, the Sorcery-Lord looked the same age as the girl she portrayed: Dreamsinger was a reedy weedy sixteen-year-old whose tan skin revealed vivid acne pimples. Her facial features would have fit in well on the streets of Seoul, but her hair was dyed an unnatural red, the same bright shade as her armor. She hadn't touched up the hair coloring for quite some time, as evidenced by a deep darkness at the roots.

Behold the all-powerful sorceress: a plain-faced poseur decked out like a femme fatale. But I reminded myself Dreamsinger was still lethal — perhaps more than ever, now that her disguise had been stripped away.

Sebastian cringed back from her, sliding along the wall of the airlock shack. Dreamsinger didn't go after him. One hand twitched, and suddenly a rod appeared in her grip, identical to the one held by Jode. She thumbed the activation button, waking red and green glitters along the rod's length. Meanwhile, her other hand snapped into a sorcerous pose, some fingers bent, some splayed, aimed at Sebastian in case he tried a psionic attack; but the boy did nothing except stare aghast.

"Don't look at me that way," Dreamsinger told him, not lowering her guard. Her voice had changed from Hafsah's purring alto into a high and scratchy soprano. "You can see I'm a Spark Lord — you must recognize the armor. So don't get ideas about taking me on. I doubt if you'd win… and if you did, my brothers and sisters would come after you. You wouldn't like that. You wouldn't like that at all."

Sebastian was still staring in horror. "What… when…"

Dreamsinger laughed — a false laugh I'd heard from teenagers many times before. Trying to sound amused and superior when her feelings had just been hurt. "When did I take over Rosalind's place? Did you sleep with me when you thought you were sleeping with her? That would have been just awful, wouldn't it? But I'm not the one you have to worry about, dear brother. I only stepped in a short time ago… while you were killing my Keepers."

Sebastian looked outraged. "They were trying to kill me!"

"True. I knew they wouldn't succeed, but at least they distracted you so I could make my substitution. A valuable sacrifice, don't you think?"

"No," Jode said. The Lucifer hadn't moved since Sebastian knocked away the Element gun. "Sacrifices are only valuable if they accomplish their goal. Otherwise, they're just deaths."

"Rosalind…" Sebastian began.

"You're in for a surprise." Dreamsinger laughed again. This time her laughter sounded more genuine. And mean-spirited. "Dear brother Sebastian, do you realize you've fulfilled your final purpose?"

The boy glared at her. "What do you mean?"

"You were used to gain access to this station. To shut off the electricity. To cut the cables feeding this room so nothing will happen even when the water finally spills around your dam. On top of that, your lovely wife just tricked you into dispelling every enchantment in this room. My Chameleon glamour wasn't the only spell you removed; you also erased thirteen charms of protection to prevent this cage from opening." Dreamsinger made a mock bow toward the Lucifer. "Clever you. But your kind has always been clever."

"More so recently," Jode said.

"So you believe."

"What are you talking about?" Sebastian demanded.

Jode gave a nasty smile. "You'll never know, boy. You've outlived your usefulness."

The Lucifer made a darting motion with its hand. Something went bang, like thunder.

For a moment I was certain the bang meant Sebastian's death: some murderous alien surprise that would beat the boy's psionic defenses. The Lucifer might have planted a booby-trap while consummating the sham marriage — one long deep kiss and a tiny curd of maggoty white could have slid down Sebastian's throat. That curd might lodge itself in the boy's stomach, stealing atoms and molecules from nearby tissues to build an explosive chemical… or perhaps the curd could mutate into an explosive all its own. One way or another, Jode must have a trick for blowing people up from the inside: that's how it got the Mind-Lord, blasting him to pieces above the winter anchorage.

But the explosion we'd heard didn't come from Sebastian — the bang erupted back near the exit tunnel. Jode's leer of triumph dissolved to bewilderment… and Dreamsinger laughed at the sight.

"I'm not the only one who's predictable," she told Jode. "I knew you'd rig the boy for a fatal finish… so I removed your surprise from Sebastian's small intestine. Switched it by sorcery to the corpse of one of my Keepers. As I said, they made a valuable sacrifice — without them, I couldn't save one of the most powerful psychics the world has ever known."

Jode's face twisted with fury. The Lucifer's right hand turned puffy, as if the creature was so enraged it didn't have enough self-control to retain its Rosalind form… but the moment passed and the hand resumed human shape. Sebastian seemed to have missed the brief transformation — he was too busy staring at the alien's fierce expression. "I don't understand," he said. "Rosalind, what's this about?"

"She's not Rosalind," said the Caryatid. Her voice was wheezy — the bullet through her shoulder must have pierced a lung. But she struggled to her feet, still pressing her wound with a blood-drenched hand. "The real Rosalind is dead. Murdered by this bag of skin filled with pus." She took a shaky step toward Jode. "We found Rosalind's body last night. Dead in her dorm room. The thing you married was her killer."

"No," Sebastian whispered. "No. The Rosalind I married… she was my Rosalind. She knew things — secrets only we… how could anyone else know?"

"How do you think?" The Caryatid took another step toward Jode. "This thing is called a Lucifer. It's a shapeshifter; it can look like anyone it wants. If it made itself look like you and visited Rosalind in her room… secrets would naturally spill out. Amongst other things."

Bile boiled up in my throat. I remembered the position of Rosalind's corpse: lying naked in the bed, arms and legs splayed wide. If Jode had come to her in Sebastian's form soon after supper… if Jode had said, "I know we didn't plan to get together till later, but I just couldn't wait…"

I could guess what the Lucifer would want. Not just talk. Not just secrets. Jode wanted the perversity of bedding the girl before killing her. Certainly, there were practical reasons for such an atrocity: seeing the girl naked in order to duplicate any moles, birthmarks, etc., hidden by her clothing; learning if there was anything distinctive in how she made love. Fundamentally, though, the Lucifer was just so damnably evil it wanted to be astride Rosalind when it spewed curds into her mouth — filling her with death and horror at the moment the betrayal would be most shattering.

Jode liked to cause pain; it was that simple. The Lucifer reveled in the anguish on a victim's face just before the face went slack. Even now, though the alien hadn't managed to kill Sebastian, Jode must have enjoyed the boy's look of dawning revulsion.

"No," Sebastian whispered. "No."

"Oh yes," Jode said. Then three things happened almost simultaneously.

First: Jode lunged toward Sebastian, slamming a fist toward the boy's face. The blow didn't make contact — Sebastian's nanite friends would never permit that — but the boy reflexively retreated from the attack. Backward. Into the airlock shack that led to the electric cage. At some point when we'd been distracted by other things, Jode must have opened the shack door. Still backing up, Sebastian tripped over the lip of the airlock doorway and fell to the floor inside. He didn't hit the ground hard — his nanite friends cushioned the fall — but Jode shut the door behind the boy and threw a lever on the shack's outer wall. The inner door of the airlock, the one to the prison cube's interior, slid open in response to the button. The mass of dusty black inside the cage, quiescent all this time, lurched instantly toward Sebastian and rolled over him like a midnight avalanche.

Second: the Caryatid cried, "Damn you!" and erupted into flame. Spontaneous human combustion — an age-old legend dismissed by scientists, but if anyone could manage the feat, it was the Steel Caryatid. She lit no match to start the blaze; she simply waved her hands, and suddenly she was burning. Not just on fire… the Caryatid was fire, a woman turned an inferno: advancing on Jode as her legs withered to ash, then continuing forward as flame incarnate, a final conflagration accelerating across the room and roaring into the alien at full speed. Jode was just turning away from shutting Sebastian in the airlock. The fire struck the Lucifer blind-side and ignited its Rosalind clothing. A howl of pain. A wet sizzle. There was nothing left of the Caryatid at all, her flesh and bones incinerated in a flash; but Jode was awash in searing flame.

Third: Dreamsinger turned toward the burning alien. The light of the flames lit her face with orange intensity, but the Spark Lord's expression was blank. She'd been caught by surprise when Jode and the Caryatid acted. I think Dreamsinger had expected someone to attack her, she wasn't prepared to be ignored, treated as if she meant nothing compared to more important targets. Now as she approached Jode-in-flames, I couldn't tell if she intended to put out the fires incinerating the alien or to stoke them higher. Dreamsinger apparently couldn't decide either — she moved slowly, distractedly fingering the ‹BINK›-rod in her hands, finally coming to a bemused stop in front of the Lucifer ablaze.

Which is how she was standing when the Element gun went off.

She was hit by a volley from all four barrels — bullets, fire, acid, sound. The first three attacks stopped short of their target as the force field around Dreamsinger's armor blazed into violet life. Bullets turned to molten lead as they hit the energy barrier; fire and acid splashed the violet glow but couldn't reach the gawky girl inside. Only the hypersonic waves got through… and I assume they would have been stopped as well if Dreamsinger had been wearing her helmet.

Without that helmet, she was vulnerable to simple sound. Amidst the clatter of bullets and the whoosh of flame, she gasped and crumpled to the floor.

A Spark Lord defeated. Unconscious.

Elizabeth Tzekich raced around the corner of the laser cage and ran to what she thought was her daughter. Knife-Hand Liz held an Element gun; its barrels were still smoking.

Tzekich was followed by the same two bully-boys we'd seen in Nanticook House. They'd all come around the far side of the prison cube: moving quietly, hidden by the great alien mound in the cage and by the noise the rest of us had been making.

I didn't know how long Tzekich had been listening, but obviously she hadn't understood that the girl who looked like Rosalind was actually an alien shapeshifter. Or maybe she had heard and didn't believe it. We'd told her the previous night that her daughter was dead, replaced by some kind of double… but she hadn't believed it then, either. And who knows what goes through a mother's mind when she sees what looks like her daughter enveloped in flame? She only had our word this wasn't the real Rosalind; and she wasn't prepared to trust us.

Not when her daughter was burning.

The moment Tzekich reached the fiery Jode, she tossed her gun aside and whipped off her thick winter coat. She used the coat to swat the flames, muffling Jode's body when the fire had been beaten down enough to be smothered. By then, Jode's face was black and flaky, scraps falling from the creature's cheeks like bits of burnt paper; but the Lucifer still retained some semblance of Rosalind, enough to fool a frantic mother. Tzekich was murmuring teary words in a language I didn't understand — leaning close as if she wanted to kiss the girl but was too afraid of damaging the blistered face.

"You know what's going to happen," I whispered to Annah.

"Yes," she said. "If the Lucifer's still alive…"

"It is. Bits of it. Remember, each curd is a separate organism. What Opal called cellules."

"And even if the cellules on the surface got burned, there are plenty alive underneath?"

"Right. So as soon as Knife-Hand Liz gets too close…"

Annah shook her head. "Jode won't attack her. Jode will say, 'Oh yes, I'm Rosalind, please save me, Mommy.' Anything to kill time until the cage runs out of power and the thing inside gets loose."

"How can we stop it?"

"We can't. Only Sebastian can. He can start the Falls flowing again. Reconnect the cables he cut."

I looked into the prison cube. There was no sign of the boy under the mass of black that had deluged him. The giant Lucifer had returned to the main part of the cage, hauling the boy with it — like a crocodile dragging a meal back to its lair. "How do we know he's still alive?"

"We don't," Annah said. "But his psionic powers give him a chance. They might have formed a barrier between him and the monster. An air bubble."

"If he's still alive and his powers are working, why hasn't he escaped on his own?"

"I don't know. Maybe he needs our help."

That almost made me laugh. "So we just waltz into the cage and rescue him?"

Annah pointed to the Element gun I was holding. "The flames and acid should drive the monster back. And Sebastian's powers will protect him from the blasts. I hope." She shrugged. "It's the only chance we've got to beat Jode. What all the others died for. We have to try."

I hesitated. "What if the Ring tries to stop us?"

She kissed me, soft and sweet. "Leave the Ring to me. You save Sebastian." Before I could react, she scrambled to her feet and shouted, "Hey! You! Knife-Hand Liz!"

I don't know if the Ring-folk had realized we were there — we'd been down on the floor and out of the action, on the opposite side of the cage. Now the two bully-boys whipped up their guns, so jumpy they might have cremated Annah on the spot; but she held her hands high and harmless, her own Element gun slung out of sight behind her back.

"Hello," she said, walking slowly toward them. The Ring-men tracked her with their gun barrels. "We've never met, but I know you. Do you know me?"

The bully-boys stared without answering. Elizabeth Tzekich, cheeks smeared with tears, looked up from what she thought was her daughter. "I've watched you from a distance. The don on Rosalind's floor. What the hell's going on?"

"My friends told you everything last night. A monster killed your daughter and took her place. That creature is now at your feet."

Tzekich looked down at the burnt figure wrapped in her coat. A whisper came from Jode's throat. "Mother…"

"It thinks you're gullible," Annah said. "It wants to play on your sympathies. Then, when you're no longer useful, it'll kill you as heartlessly as it did Rosalind."

"So you claim."

"Talk to it," Annah said. "In your own language. Ask questions only your daughter could answer."

Tzekich stared piercingly at Annah. Then she turned to the Lucifer at her feet and said something in her native tongue. Jode only groaned, "Please, Mother, it's me…"

In English.

I nearly laughed. Annah, clever Annah, must have suspected Jode couldn't speak whatever Balkan dialect Knife-Hand Liz used with her real daughter. Mother Tzekich didn't give up immediately — she tried several more sentences with short pauses after each: probably questions Rosalind could answer easily… but not Jode. The shapeshifter only gasped, "Mother!" repeatedly, trying to fill the word with so much anguish, it would touch a stony heart; but the look on the mother's face had changed to loathing.

She knew the truth: this wasn't Rosalind, it was Rosalind's killer. And a woman who'd earned the name Knife-Hand Liz had no pity for such an enemy.

Her bully-boys felt the same way. Whether or not they spoke Tzekich's language, they could see what was going on; when this "Rosalind" couldn't answer simple questions, the bodyguards shifted their guns toward Jode. They'd realized the Lucifer was a deadly threat, and they wanted the monster in their sights.

The Ring-men were right about Jode being dangerous. But they shouldn't have taken their eyes off Annah… who reached behind her back and swung her Element gun to bear on Knife-Hand Liz.

Tzekich either saw Annah's move or had an inborn sense of when a weapon was aimed at her. She looked up, no fear in her eyes, and said, "What is this about?"

"It's about you leaving. Your daughter is dead and I'm sorry… but there's nothing left for you here. Just go."

Softly Tzekich asked, "Without revenge?"

Annah waved the gun's muzzle toward Jode. "If you want to incinerate that monster, be my guest."

"And what about the teachers who were supposed to keep my daughter safe? Or the psychic boy who was the cause of everything? This creature, this Lucifer… it wanted to use the boy, yes? If not for Sebastian, my Rosalind would still be alive."

"And if not for your own actions, the same!" Annah's voice was sharp. "Rosalind came to our academy because you'd made so many enemies, the girl wasn't safe elsewhere. But do you blame yourself? No. You blame the teachers, you blame Sebastian, you want everyone else's head to roll. But heaven forbid you take any responsibility."

Annah gestured her gun once more toward Jode. "There's the real killer. No one will stop you from doing your worst. Snuffing out that monster might be the noblest deed you'll do in your life — not just revenge, but justice. How many people get such a gift? To vent their grief on a thing of pure evil. To take a vengeance unquestionably right. But you get only the demon; nothing more."

Tzekich looked into Annah's eyes, staring past the muzzle of the gun. Softly she said, "My daughter has been murdered. If I could kill the whole world, it wouldn't be enough. Don't you understand revenge?"

Annah didn't answer right away. I don't know what was going through her mind — what memories of her family, its vendettas, its hatreds. The previous night, she'd talked about people who hungered for revenge, who considered it more important than life itself: "an absolute necessity, a religious imperative."

I wondered what Annah had seen — what atrocities her family had committed, what horrors had been done to them in return.

"I understand revenge," Annah said. "It can't stop itself. Someone else has to put it out of its misery."

She fired her gun into Knife-Hand Liz's face.

An instant after Annah pulled the trigger, she dove forward onto Jode's body. I thought she must be diving for cover… as if hitting the floor was any protection.

The Ring-men fired on her at point-blank range.

Gushes of flame lit the chamber. The smell of burning gas mixed with the bitterness of acid. Bullets caromed off the rock walls so fiercely, I buried my face against the floor and covered my head with my arms.

Moments later, a gun blew up. I heard the explosion as shattering metal: a pressurized ammunition chamber filled with flammable gas or acid that was breached by a bullet and burst its deadly payload into the world. I didn't know whose gun it was — Annah's or one of those held by the Ring — but they were all so close together, it didn't make a difference.

Total mutual destruction in the first half-second. Burnt, shot, corroded.

As I lay listening to the roar of weapons, I realized Annah must have known what would happen. What she'd be forced to do. Even if Tzekich hadn't explicitly threatened Sebastian or the school, violent retribution would still have hung in the air. "My daughter has been murdered. If I could kill the whole world, it wouldn't be enough." Sooner or later, Tzekich might lash out against the boy… or the academy… or someone Annah loved.

Like me.

So Annah made sure that wouldn't happen.

She also granted Elizabeth Tzekich's final wish. The way Knife-Hand Liz looked into Annah's eyes… had she been pleading for an end? Her daughter was dead; her heart was broken; and though she spoke of revenge, perhaps Mother Tzekich was actually asking for release.

One can be so crushed with grief, one prays for death so the pain will stop.

Believe me, I know.