The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [162]
“Turn around,” she ordered. He did.
Voices outside. Close. In the main hall. She quieted the physician with a hand and went to the door, leaning over him. She could feel the doctor’s eyes peering up at her and she kneed him not so gently in the chin and cinched the billow of her T-shirt at her waist.
“Goddammit. I was right. We should have done this at a hospital.” It was her mother. Unmistakably Elizabeth. Even the anger recognized the resemblance. Two pairs of footsteps rushed down the hall toward Woodward’s spiral and she didn’t hear the reply, if there was one.
Canada knocked her forehead hard against the upright washer, as if she could restart her spider with a tap.
“Your mother loves you very much,” the doctor said.
That caused her to laugh, although the staccato noise she expelled didn’t sound much like one.
“She never wanted you to have it. The implant. There was too much risk. And she had other plans for you. Large plans, Canada. But your father insisted. And with that thing in your head, your mother couldn’t go forward. She couldn’t trust you when you were part machine. Not after what it did to your father.”
She shook the matches at him.
“She wanted you to join us, Canada. To join the tradition.”
She couldn’t imagine what that meant, but the term was familiar to her from Marlena’s journals. That and another one. “Harmonia,” she managed to say, almost in answer to herself.
The doctor nodded. “Marlena tried to contact you. You were supposed to think it was all part of the product recall, just ten years overdue. No one would suspect anything, not even you. You’d think you were sick. That the seizures had returned. Then after it had been removed and placed inside another who could use it to its greatest potential, your mother would ask you to join her, join us, in the tradition. But there are people, people among us, who want you dead. They want to destroy your device. They think killing you would please their God.”
“Shut up.” She scratched her temple with a corner of the matchbox. She didn’t want to get to the next part. That the people who wanted to kill her included Wayne Jennings.
The doctor said, “The mathematici believe you could be trusted to join us. Unfortunately, acusmatici seem to have brought Steve Rhodes to their way of thinking. But we’re talking about a world, believe it or not, in which your mother is more powerful than Steve Rhodes. She can protect you, Canada. I doubt anyone else can.”
He said, “She’s had people following you since you got here. Keeping an eye out for your safety. This Jennings fellow who killed your friends in Las Vegas, he’s likely working for Rhodes. For the acusmatici. If he kills you and gets away, they’ll set him up with a new identity somewhere. If he gets caught, they’ll cut him loose and no one will believe that he’s sane. Anything he says about Steve Rhodes or the tradition or anything else will be written off as a delusion. The police will say he was just a stalker. It’s so easy to turn the truth into a lie and the lie into a truth.”
Canada couldn’t make sense of any of it. Everything coming from his mouth was just raw, meaningless data.
“Rhodes betrayed us. He was supposed to be watching you for us. For your mother. After Marlena died, we suspected he might have turned, and your mother sent Jameson to save you. To bring you here for the procedure.”
Jesus Christ. She rubbed her sweaty forehead into her arm, her mind spinning. The truth of it was finally hitting her. Nada had told Bea that English Judson had been in her apartment. But it had been Wayne all along. Vallentine was right about Wayne.
She counted the friends she had left, friends as good as the rapist