“Pull the blinds, Adina,” said the older woman.
This was done, and the lights in the small reception area were turned out. Adina followed Qadira and the other Arklight women into the back room. She was careful to step around the bodies instead of over them. A superstition that persisted among the sisterhood. She was also careful not to step in the pools of blood.
The women gathered in a half circle around the man seated on the chair in the middle of the room. He was short, fat, hairy, trembling, and naked. His arms and legs were lashed to the chair with many turns of strong electrician’s tape. He was not gagged, but one woman stood with the tip of a long-bladed knife resting on his flaccid penis. The man kept his mouth shut, though terror sweat coursed down his body.
Qadira pulled over another chair so that it faced him. She sat down, crossed her legs, and rested her hands in her lap.
“Tell me,” she asked mildly, “do you know who I am? Who we are?”
“You are insane, is who you are,” gasped the man. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” said the old woman. “Your name is Volken Çalhano ğlu. You own this business, and many other businesses. You are very rich, very powerful, and very influential.”
“Then you know what will happen to you if you hurt me,” he snarled.
Qadira smiled. “You haven’t answered my question. Do you know who we are?”
The man did not answer, clearly afraid of what the consequence of a wrong answer might be.
“My name is Qadira. This girl is Adina. Isn’t she lovely? Very smart, too. Very tough. These other women are my sisters. Not blood kin, but sisters all the same.”
“What is this all about? What do you want with me? Why did you attack my people? Are you insane?”
“It is very likely that I am insane. At least by certain standards. Adina is quite mad in her way. She would have to be, considering what she’s been through in her life. What we’ve all been through.”
The man looked suspicious. “I… I don’t have anything to do with that.”
“With what? With slavery and sexual subjugation? Oh, please, we both know that you do. Oddly, though, that’s not why we’re here. Mind you, we would have paid you a visit eventually. Your name is on our list, and has been for some time.”
“List? What are you talking about? What list? Who are you?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard of us, Mr. Ohan.”
The name seemed to burst in the air, and it made the man recoil. “O-Ohan? I do not know this name. You… you have the wrong man.”
Qadira flicked a tiny glance at the woman with the knife, who made the slightest motion. Not to destroy, but to draw a thin bead of blood from the helpless man’s penis.
“That was the only lie we will allow you, Ohan,” said the old woman. “Lie again and my sister will do more than prick you.”
Ohan’s jaws were locked shut with terror.
“Now,” said Qadira, leaning slightly forward, “you sent a team to Syria to recover a book. One of the Unlearnable Truths. No… shhh… don’t speak yet, because you don’t know what I’m going to ask, and you really do not want to give the wrong answer, do you?”
The man glanced around at the faces of the women. He saw no flicker of pity or compassion or mercy. He looked at the girl and tried to appeal to her with his eyes.
Adina smiled at him, which made Ohan return the smile. An ally. A friend. A hope.
Then she held out her hand to the woman with the knife. That woman glanced at Qadira, who nodded; then she handed the blade to Adina, who took it and slid the flat of it under Ohan’s testicles with such delicacy and skill that the scrotum was lifted but not cut. The steel was so cold it felt like a burning brand, and Ohan had to bite back his own scream. Adina’s smile never faded, never even flickered.
“We are the Mothers of the Fallen,” said Qadira, and when that did not register on Ohan or break through his terror, she added, “but you will know us as Arklight.”
Ohan’s eyes went wide and his bladder released, splashing on the knife.
The old woman nodded. “Yes, you have heard of us. Good. Then you will know what we will do if you do not tell us everything we want to know.”
“You… you’ll… kill me anyway?”
“Everyone dies, Ohan. The question is whether you want to die screaming as a eunuch or quickly as a man? The choice is entirely yours. However, you’ll tell us either way. Everyone does.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
I stood in the ORB, arms folded across my chest. Nikki’s eyes glittered with all the things she wanted to tell me.
“Okay,” I said, “hit me.”
An image flashed on that showed a bloody crime scene, and I recognized it from the news. This one was uncensored, with nothing pixilated. There were body parts all over and everything was awash in blood. That wasn’t what Nikki wanted me to see, though. On the wall above the couch were two words written in what I had no doubt was blood.
Deep Silence
“Mr. Howell wasn’t the first person to use that phrase. Or, at least something like it,” she said. “‘Suicide’ and ‘suicide note,’ along with a lot of variations, were among the keywords we added to the general pattern search. And since you had the idea that God Machines might be somehow connected, I accessed the Gateway incident reports prior to you, um… blowing the place up.”
Doc snorted. I ignored them both.
“Not everyone who committed suicide left a note, and not all of the notes had anything to do with what Howell wrote,” said Nikki, “but there were a few that talked about the ‘silence’ or the ‘quiet’ or the ‘big nothing.’ There were five out of nineteen suicides. The likelihood of that, even for a base in Antarctica, is too much.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Then I added those phrases to my search and started looking for suicide notes left in areas where there has been some kind of seismic activity. I went back ten years, but we didn’t start getting hits until the earthquake in Valparaiso two years ago. The big one that knocked down the hotels, remember?”
“Sure. It was horrible.”
“In the weeks leading up to the earthquake, there was a sixteen percent jump in suicides, and a lot of them were people who had not sought therapy or treatment for depression. Neither, by the way, had the Speaker of the House. In Valparaiso there were suicide notes of different kinds. One of the victims wrote: ‘I can’t hear my own thoughts.’ I think that would qualify as a ‘deep silence,’ don’t you think?”
“Sure as shootin’ sounds like it to me,” agreed Doc. “You’re even smarter than you are pretty.”
Through her second round of furious blushing, Nikki said, “And we’re looking into police incident reports and crime scene files for hundreds of other suicides in areas where there have been quakes. All over the world, too, with translations of words and phrases slowing us down just a little. Not enough to keep us from seeing a pattern.”
“Deep silence,” I murmured. “When we were being attacked outside of the Capitol Building people were saying stuff about silence. One woman kept asking why she couldn’t hear her own head. Someone else, a reporter I think, kept screaming and asking if people could hear him. There were others, too.”
“Yes,” said Nikki. “Whatever this is, however it works, this is a symptom.”
“You got any answers, Doc?” I asked.
“Without having a God Machine to tinker with,” she said, “no. Best I can do is make horseback guesses, but that’s all they’d be. I need you to get one of those doohickeys for me, Cowboy.”