Lies of the Beholder Page 5

  No. Please. Not Tobias.

  Ivy cried out, kneeling and trying to help Tobias. Ngozi backed away, horrified.

  I reeled.

  NOT TOBIAS!

  Armando came at me again, and I fled. I pushed off the hot dog cart and ran with my bleeding arm cradled against my chest. Warm liquid soaked through my shirt, wetting my skin. I shoved through the crowd, knocking people over in a wild attempt to stay ahead of Armando.

  He flowed after me, more ghost than man or aspect. Obstructions didn’t stop him; he passed right through a crowd of people unhindered. He didn’t bother to pretend like the others. He didn’t need to try to preserve my sanity.

  I shoved past a family, scrambling, and somehow got to the front of the crowd, right up near the stage. I’d gotten turned around, confused in my flight.

  Red sparks splashed against the wall, then flickered and died. I looked over my shoulder. Radiant, inconsistent, dying light illuminated Armando. His eyes were dead, the eyes of a drowned corpse. He followed, inexorable, brandishing the bloody knife.

  “I will cut them out of you,” he whispered, voice somehow audible over the sounds of people cheering the show or yelling at me. “I will cut them all out.”

  I collided with someone in the crowd, and they shoved me the other way. My arm protested as I hit another group, and these crushed the wind from me, smashing me between them. Armando flowed through them, his face appearing from someone’s back like a stain seeping through a wall.

  I screamed again, pushing people away from me, my arm flaring with pain. I squeezed through the stuffy, sweating, screeching, horrible mass. I squirmed and shouted and scrambled and finally … I burst from the back of the crowd into open air.

  Armando slammed into me from behind, hitting me with his shoulder, throwing me to the ground. I hit the concrete sidewalk and gasped at the pain.

  “Cut them all out.”

  I rolled over, and stared up at Armando—who was backlit by an explosion of sparks in the night. He grinned.

  Then a bullet took him in the forehead.

  He stumbled, shaking his head. More shots followed, like fireworks. Each took him in the face, with almost no spread. He finally collapsed back to the dusty ground, dropping the knife.

  I pulled myself away from the corpse, up onto the sidewalk, then twisted about. Never had I been so happy to see J.C. Still holding his sidearm out before him, he stepped over to me and squatted down. “Yup,” he said, “a part of me knew I’d have to shoot that guy someday.”

  I looked back at Armando, lying in an expanding pool of his own blood. J.C. nodded for me to hold my arm out so he could inspect the wound, and I did so, feeling numb.

  “So,” J.C. said, pulling a bandage from his pocket, “you going to tell me why you were so eager to keep me away?”

  “Wha … what?”

  “Leaving me in a slum, running off from the mansion before I could get back to you. Even my car here got caught in traffic.”

  “That was real.”

  “Still feels like you’re being reckless. On purpose.”

  No. I wasn’t. I just … just wanted to get to Sandra. I tried to explain, but then I felt a ripping sensation. Nauseatingly familiar, as it had happened to me earlier today, with Armando. Loss. Information leaving me forever.

  This one was much worse. A thunderbolt compared to a twig snapping.

  I moaned, huddling into myself, as it left me forever: all the random bits of knowledge that didn’t fit into another aspect’s expertise. The trivia that touched everything I did, everything I had learned, wrapped up in a single wonderful man.

  Tobias …

  Tobias was gone.

  “What?” J.C. asked. “What is that look on your face, Skinny? What happened?”

  “He got Tobias,” I croaked.

  “Where?” J.C. demanded.

  I pointed the way back through the crowd.

  J.C. took off running, and I lurched to my feet and followed, leaving Armando’s corpse. I didn’t think it could get up and come after us again … but there was no guarantee. Nightmares didn’t follow the rules.

  By now, the real people had opened a space around me, and backed away as I moved. One got used to this sort of thing in a big city, even if I didn’t look like the usual homeless drunk. A few Good Samaritans asked if I needed help, but I managed to brush them off and make my way back toward the hot dog cart.

  The two men from earlier had left. Ngozi knelt by Tobias’s body, her arms covered in blood. She’d tried, bless her, to bandage him.

  It hadn’t been enough. J.C. was down on one knee beside Tobias, his handgun held limply. Ivy stood nearby, one arm wrapped around herself while she smoked a cigarette with the other hand. Damn. She’d given that up years ago. J.C. rose and walked over to her, and she leaned into him, crying softly on his shoulder.

  I just …

  I stared at the body.

  Tobias had been the very first. A calming, optimistic voice pulled from the shadows and nightmares. I remembered sitting at night in a chair, lights off, surrounded by whispers—and then hearing him for the first time.

  He had been my lifeline to sanity.

  “What…” Ngozi said. “What do we do now?”

  I didn’t know.

  “We have to keep moving,” J.C. said, still holding Ivy. He needed the comfort as much as she did. “We’ve drawn attention. Look.”

  Though the spark show had ended—and someone was starting to spray down the stage with water—security was making its way past the dispersing crowd. A few people turned toward me, gesturing animatedly.

  “We can’t … just leave him,” Ivy said.

  “There’s a way out,” I whispered. “A way to fix this. Sandra. She knows.” I stumbled over to the hot dog cart. On the counter was a note and the pouch with the cell phone in it. The note read simply, “We’ll be in touch.”

  I grabbed both pouch and note, and—though it pained me to do so—I left Tobias’s remains. It felt wrong. It felt awful. I’d come back for him though. I’d give him a proper burial.

  He’ll just lie there, I thought, with people walking through him. Never knowing what they’re treading on. The great man they could never see, could never know.

  Had to keep moving.

  I limped away, still cradling my cut arm as the security guards called after me. They hurried to catch up, but then I approached my limo, which was still parked at the curb.

  Barb opened the door, and the two guards backed off. I’d suddenly moved from “random homeless drunk” to “above my pay grade.”

  I climbed in, then used my foot to kick the door back open as Barb tried to close it after me. Ivy, J.C., then Ngozi entered and slumped into seats.

  Barb peeked in. “Um, all in?”

  “No,” I whispered. “But we can go anyway.”

  “Sure thing!” she said, chipper. “Anything I can get you? Some water, or—”

  “You can shut up.”

  She closed the door, perhaps a little too firmly. I missed Wilson, and …

  Oh, hell, Tobias was dead.

  I lay down on the seat as J.C. knelt by me and worked on the bandage some more.

  “Right,” Ivy said, taking a deep breath. “Right. We need a plan. I can’t believe how much this hurts … but we need a plan. Steve, this can’t happen again.”

  The car started. Barb flipped on the intercom. “Are we going anywhere specific?”

  “No,” I said. “Just drive. Please.”

  Anywhere but here.

  EIGHT

  I didn’t know what type of phone this was.

  I turned it over in my hands as the car pulled onto the freeway. Beside me, Ivy helped Ngozi clean the blood off her hands using the limo’s sink and water bottles.

  Why did it matter what kind of phone it was? Because Tobias had known everything about phones. Not just the devices themselves, but all about the companies that made them. The history of technology was just one of his many littl
e quirks. I’d grown used to having that knowledge comfortably in the back of my brain, not really that important, but still … there.

  I tried texting Sandra a few times, but she didn’t respond. Finally, at a suggestion from J.C., I texted saying I’d turn the phone back on in an hour—then took out the battery, so I couldn’t be traced using the phone, just in case.

  “J.C.,” Ivy said. “Call the mansion.”

  He did so, dialing Kalyani, then putting her on speaker.

  “Is there news?” she asked immediately.

  “We…” Ivy took a deep breath. “We lost Tobias.”

  Silence.

  “You lost him,” Kalyani finally said. “As in … he ran away?”

  “He’s dead,” J.C. said. “Gone.”

  Kalyani gasped.

  “We need to prevent something like this from happening again,” Ivy said. “I want you to gather all the aspects and get them into the White Room. Let us know if anyone is unaccounted for.”

  “Yes. Yes, okay,” Kalyani said. “But … Tobias. Are you sure?”

  “Yes, unfortunately.”

  “How is Mr. Steve?”

  Ivy looked at me. “Not well. Call us back when everyone is together.” She hung up.

  I stared straight ahead, numb, feeling only the motion of the car on the road.

  Get to Sandra.

  But would she be able to do anything? Her voice on the line, the way she’d spoken, hadn’t sounded like someone who had the answers. Not the right ones, at least.

  It was something to think about other than Tobias. Looking up, I was startled to find my aspects all frozen. Like statues, not moving, not breathing. As I realized it, they jerked into motion again, Ngozi drying her hands and telling J.C. about the two men from the hot dog cart.

  I checked my phone, and saw that half an hour had passed while I’d sat there, zoned out, thinking about Sandra and Tobias.

  The phone buzzed. It was Kalyani calling me.

  “Hello,” I said, switching it to speaker.

  “Everyone is accounted for, Mr. Steve,” Kalyani said. “Nobody has vanished. We’re all here. Even Leroy, who just got back.”

  That meant no more nightmares. For now.

  “What do you want us to do?” Kalyani asked.

  I looked at Sandra’s phone. Did we just wait for her, or that Kyle fellow, to “be in touch”? Or did I do something more?

  “Options?” I said, looking at my team.

  “The older man,” Ivy said, “Kyle, he sounded like he was a business type. Not security. So…”

  “So maybe there’s a record of him, and where he works,” I said, nodding. “But we’ll need a way to search him out. Ngozi. How’s your mental image of him?”

  “Excellent,” she said.

  “Great. Kalyani, you still there?”

  “Yup.”

  “Grab Turquoise.”

  Turquoise was one of my older aspects. He came on, speaking with a weird mix of a Texas accent and a stoner drawl. “Hey, man. This has been crazy, huh?”

  “Don’t use that word lightly around me, Turquoise,” I said. “Ngozi is going to describe someone to you. Can you draw him?”

  “Sure. Like one of those guys. From those shows.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Cool.”

  I nodded to Ngozi, who started describing Kyle. Round face, thinning hair, big forearms—like he worked out—but not really an athletic build. Big nose.

  Kalyani turned the phone to video mode and showed what Turquoise was drawing. Ngozi coached him to make tweaks, with some input from Ivy, and he did a remarkable job. My brain could memorize complex details quickly. We just needed a way to get the information out.

  “Cool,” Turquoise said when we were done. “Kind of looks like a potato who is pretending to be a man, and is worried someone will call his bluff.”

  “You’re a weird dude, Turquoise,” I said.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “Hey, Chin?” I asked. “You listening?”

  “Here,” my computer expert said, leaning down and waving into the camera.

  “Can you run that sketch through some kind of facial recognition software?” I asked.

  “No, but I can tell you who he is anyway.”

  “What? Really?”

  “Sure,” Chin said. “I read an article on him recently—that’s Kyle Walters, a local entrepreneur. He’s made a few waves in local tech circles.”

  I frowned, Googling the name. “Kyle Walters. President of Walters and Ostman Detention Enterprises.”

  “… Detention Enterprises?” Ngozi asked. “Like, prisons?”

  “For-profit prisons,” Chin said, reading. “He made news by purchasing a game company. It was a moderately big deal in some circles.”

  I nodded slowly. Whatever Chin knew came from me. I must have read about Kyle during one of my many information binges, where I tried to absorb as many news stories and articles as possible, for future reference.

  “Video games and prisons?” Ivy said. “That’s an odd pairing.”

  “Yeah.” I scrolled up on the article. “President of the company. Why did he bother coming to meet me himself?”

  “Meeting you is quite the experience,” Chin said. “He’s said to be a hands-on type. Guess he just wanted to see you for himself.”

  I frowned, studying the article.

  “What?” Ivy asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just … I think I used to know something about that structure he’s standing in front of.” I glanced at the caption below the picture. “‘Eiffel Tower’? Looks like some kind of art installation.”

  “Yeah. A big one.” Ivy shook her head. “Strange.”

  “That’s ‘art’?” J.C. said. “Looks like someone forgot to finish the thing.”

  I sat there, waiting for Tobias to explain it to us, then felt again like I’d been punched. He was gone. I took a deep breath and did some further searching into our Kyle Walters fellow. I found some clips of him talking at tech conferences, giving speeches full of buzzwords.

  But he owned prisons. What was he doing at these conferences? They weren’t even security conferences. Applied Virtual Reality Summit, I read. Huh.

  “He’s based locally?” I asked. “Where?”

  “Here,” Ivy said, showing me her phone, with an address listed. “He owns an entire building in a suburban office park.” It appearing on her phone meant I had that address tucked in the back of my brain somewhere, from when I’d memorized local business lists. So I hadn’t lost everything with Tobias.

  “You seem to be coping remarkably well,” Jenny said, “now that the initial shock has worn off. Can you explain how your aspects are helping you to recover?”

  Startled, I looked up. There she was, sitting across from me in the limo. J.C., with wonderful presence of mind, pulled his gun and leveled it right at her head.

  “Is that necessary?” she asked.

  “We just had an aspect go crazy and kill one of my best friends,” J.C. said. “I will blow the back of your head across that seat if I think it will save anyone else.”

  “You’re not following the rules,” I said to her. “Appearing and vanishing? That’s dangerous. Nightmares don’t follow the rules.”

  She pursed her lips, and for the first time seemed to get that idea. She nodded, and J.C. looked at me.

  “You can put it away,” I said to him. “She’s obviously not a nightmare. Not yet.”

  He obeyed, holstering it with deliberation as he leaned back in his seat, still watching her. We made fun of J.C., but I’ll admit he can be casually intimidating when he really wants to be. Ivy settled in next to him, legs crossed, staring daggers at Jenny. Ngozi had missed the entire exchange, because she was suddenly fixated on how dirty the inside of the cupholder was.

  “It seems to me,” Jenny said, “that you all are very quick to point a gun—but very slow to ask the difficult questions.”

  “Such as?” I asked.
>
  “Such as why is this happening?” Jenny asked. “Why are you losing aspects? What is causing your hallucinations to behave in this way?”

  “My brain is overworked. Too many aspects, too much going on with them. Either that or I’m emotionally incapable of handling change in my life.”

  “False dichotomy,” Jenny said. “It could be a third option.”

  “Such as?”

  “You tell me. I’m just here to listen.”

  “You realize,” I said to her, “that I already have a psychologist aspect.” I nodded toward Ivy. “She gives me lip, but she’s good at her job, so I don’t need another.”

  “I’m not a psychologist,” Jenny said. “I’m a biographer.” She wrote some things in her notepad, as if to prove the point.

  I looked out the window, watching streetlights pass on the side of the road. We’d pulled off the freeway, and were heading down a dim neighborhood street. The patches between the lights were dark—almost like nothing existed, except where those streetlights created the world.

  I pushed the intercom button. “Barb, GPS an office building called Walters and Ostman Detention Enterprises. Should be on 206th. Take us there.”

  “Roger, boss,” she said.

  “Tell me, Mr. Leeds,” Jenny said. “Do you want to be cured?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Say you’d lose us all,” Jenny said. “No more aspects. No more knowledge. No more being special. But if you could be normal, would you take that trade?”

  When I didn’t answer immediately, Ivy shot me a betrayed look. But what could I say? To be well.

  To be normal.

  I did everything I could to remain sane, to shove my psychoses off onto the aspects. I was the most boring of the lot, by design. That way I could pretend. But did that mean … mean that I’d welcome losing the aspects?

  Could I really live without them?

  “I miss Tobias already,” J.C. said softly. “He’d have broken this silence. Said something to make me smile.”

  “Tell me about him,” Jenny said. “I barely got to meet him.”

  It felt like she was trying to worm her way in, dig information from my brain.