Spin State - Chris Moriarty [208]
Then she heard something.
Footsteps. Echoing around the next turn in the hall, up the next flight of stairs, across the floor over her head. Footsteps and a mocking quicksilver laugh flickering across the dead link like heat lightning.
She tracked the sound through cold dark halls, across vast, rubble-choked courtyards. She’d almost given up when she stumbled through a half-open door and saw the arches of the cloister, the wind-whipped, moonlit tangle of wild roses.
She stepped out from under the arcade, one hand up to shield her face from the wind. Someone was sitting on the bench under the roses. She saw the tarnished copper of rain-soaked curls. She saw Roland’s golden eyes glinting out of the shadows.
She ran.
Both of them were cold and slick with rain, and a dead leaf had blown against his face like a little black moth so that she had to brush it off before she could kiss him. “You came,” she whispered.
And then she was kissing him, searching for him with lips, hands, heart, her mind stripped of everything but her need for him.
He took hold of her shoulders and pushed her away from him. She looked into the golden eyes and saw . . . nothing.
“No,” she whispered. “No.”
“He couldn’t come. I’m supposed to tell you he’s sorry.”
The rain stopped. The darkness around them deepened. She glimpsed tall windows flung open to the lowering clouds, and realized that they stood on the threshold of the hall of doors.
Roland pointed to a door like all the others. “There,” he said.
Then he was gone.
She pushed it open and stepped into a darkness blacker and more storm-charged than the sky outside.
“Who is it?” a voice said.
It was not a friendly voice. Not a friendly question.
“Me,” she said. “Catherine. Don’t you know me?”
“Oh, yes. We know you.”
The lights came on. She was alone in an empty room.
“Why did you come here?” the voice asked. It was the walls, or whatever was behind the walls, speaking to her.
“I need to access the AMC station net.”
Silence.
“I need to.”
“And why should we help you?”
We?
“Because—”
Another voice spoke. Words she couldn’t make out. Whispers. Suddenly the room was boiling with whispers. She stepped back, feeling for the door behind her. “But Cohen said—”
“Yes.” A new voice now, even colder than the first. “Tell us about Cohen. Tell us what Cohen said to you.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” she breathed.
“Wasn’t it?”
She felt for the doorknob again, her hand trembling. She touched something, gripped it. But instead of metal, she felt skin.
Someone shoved her forward into the center of the room, and she fell on her knees, hands pressed over her ears to shut out the hateful, hissing accusations.
“It’s not my fault!” she screamed, over and over again. But she couldn’t block the voices out. It was her fault, they kept saying. It was all her fault. All of it.
“Are you all right?” McCuen asked.
She looked at him, chest heaving. She glanced at Bella, who was staring at her, wide-eyed. “I’m fine,” she lied. “Glitch on my commsystem.”
Then she heard Cohen talking to her.
She opened her eyes in VR to find Hyacinthe taking her hand, drawing her to her feet, tugging her back toward the terrible room.
But this was no Hyacinthe she had ever known. This was a mere memory dump, an interactive tutorial triggered by her entry into the memory palace. It explained how to access networks, bank accounts, corporate records, how to run an empire it kept insisting was hers now. It explained everything except the only thing that mattered: that if she was here, if this program was running, Cohen must be gone.
“I still need to get into the AMC net,” she said when he was done. She felt numb, as if her voice were coming from someone else’s throat.
But the others wouldn’t let her in, wouldn’t do it for her. And even with Hyacinthe’s help she couldn’t make them do it. “Cohen wanted this!” she said