Somewhere on the other side of the Plexiglas came the harsh clang of a metal door slamming open.
Jazz gasped and jumped back, shaking, tingling all over, staring at Borden, who looked just as stunned and ruffled as she felt. His lips were damp, still parted, a little swollen and red. She wanted to touch them. No, she wanted to devour them. Again.
She swallowed hard, looked away and moved as far from him as it was possible to get in the narrow confines of the tiny cubicle. She heard him pulling in deep breaths, and out of her peripheral vision making fussy, nervous movements, smoothing his jacket, his shirt.
I can’t believe I did that.
It already seemed like a strange daydream, and she might have convinced herself it hadn’t happened at all, except that she could still taste him, still smell him on her skin and, oh, that felt so…good.
“Later,” he said quietly.
“In your dreams,” she shot back. Unsteadily.
“Yeah, I’m almost certain that will happen, too.”
On the other side of the barrier, she heard jingling metal. Shuffling shoes. And then saw a shocking orange blaze of a jumpsuit—Jazz thought irrelevantly that Ben McCarthy was wearing the same color, right now—sidle awkwardly into the frame of the window.
The legendary Max Simms had arrived.
Where McCarthy filled out his prison garb in flat planes and intimidating angles, Simms was entirely different. Slender, lost inside the ill-fitting outfit, with giant blue eyes and wispy white hair and a face that looked gentle and sensitive and old before its time. He stood maybe five foot five, at most, and his shoulders were stooped like an arthritic ninety-year-old. It looked like his restraints weighed more than he did.
He fixed those mild blue eyes on Borden, who had risen to his feet, and nodded. Borden returned the gesture and settled back on the very edge of his chair…and then Simms turned his attention to Jazz.
It was like having all the air sucked out of the room. Like being in the center of the brightest spotlight in the universe, a beam so bright that she felt one instant away from combusting, so bright that there was no hiding in any corner because there were no shadows left, anywhere.
Simms blinked, mild as milk, and settled into a plastic chair that a deputy thumped down on concrete for him on the other side of the glass. He rested his elbows on the table and flicked on the old-fashioned intercom on his side of the barrier.
Borden reached over to turn on the one on their side of the glass.
“Mr. Simms,” Borden said. “Thank you for seeing us, sir. How are you?”
Simms nodded slightly, still staring at Jazz. She no longer felt that appalling rush of—of what? Focus? Intensity? — but she could feel herself shaking from the aftermath. “It’s good to see you again, James,” he said. He had a pleasant, quiet voice, nothing remarkable. A little deeper than she’d expected. “I see you brought Ms. Callender with you.”
“Had to,” Borden said. “There was a letter—”
“Yes, I know,” Simms said. “May I see it? Just flatten it against the glass, if you don’t mind.”
She fumbled it out of the envelope in her pocket, unfolded it and slapped it against the barrier for him to read. He had fussy little reading glasses that he fished out of his jumpsuit pocket and placed far down on his nose. His pale blue eyes moved in short jerks down the page.
“Ah,” he murmured, and removed the glasses as he sat back. “That’s interesting, don’t you think?”
“The part about me getting killed? Yeah. I think it’s pretty damn fascinating,” she said, and folded the letter back into the envelope. “Thanks for agreeing with me.”
He smiled. It looked like a nice, kindly sort of expression. “I like you,” he said. “Why do you think I had them hire you?”
“I don’t understand how a guy who’s behind bars for killing five people has the right to hire me to do anything,” she said. “And furthermore, you don’t pay me, so far as I know.”
“I set up the Cross Society,” Simms said, eyebrows raised. “Where did you imagine that money might have come from? Investments I made, with my own funds. So in a way, you continue to be paid by me, but you’re quite right in legal terms. I haven’t hired you. I have no assets, no rights, no existence beyond these walls, Jasmine. I rely on the friendship and goodwill of others.”
He sounded like the worst kind of con artist, the religious kind, the one bilking Ma and Pa Kettle out of their farm money while diddling little Ellie May out behind the barn. “You don’t get to call me Jasmine,” she snapped, “and I’ve got no friendship and no goodwill for you, so let’s cut to the chase. It was a long drive out here, I’m tired, and I got myself pretty well beat up today, so if you don’t mind—”
Simms looked up sharply, and the image she’d been forming of him dissolved under the force of that gaze again. What the hell was that? It was like a storm in her head, a white-hot merciless laser boring right through everything she thought, everything she was….
“Do you understand what an eidolon is?” Simms asked, and didn’t wait for her answer, as if he already knew it. “It’s the essence of a thing put into another form. The Greeks thought it a god made flesh, but it doesn’t have to be a god, it can be anything that acts as a god. An avatar of power.”
“Eidolon Corporation,” she said. “You named it that.”
“I did,” he admitted. “I hired incredibly smart people to do research. To put some scientific framework around what I already knew to be true. I set the agenda, I directed the research, and I created a monster. A monster which turned on me, as you might have guessed.”
“Fascinating,” she said. “What does that have to do with me?”
He blinked at her. “You mean nobody’s told you?”
“Told me what?”
Simms’s blue eyes took on a liquid shine, something eerie and strange.
“That you are one of the two people that I believe will bring down the beast. Bring down Eidolon, before it’s too late.”
She cocked her head, shot a look from him to Borden and back. “Too late for what?” She was sure she was going to be sorry she’d asked.
She wasn’t wrong.
“Too late to stop the end of life as we know it,” Simms said, as if that made all the sense in the world.
Crazy. This was crazy talk, and she felt trapped in this tiny airless room with Borden and this crazy man across from them. She ached all over and wanted to go home, crawl into bed and forget all of this. Give back the damn money, call it a day—
“How?” she asked.
“Does it matter?” Simms shrugged. “It’s the sort of thing you can’t prove, Jasmine. If it happens, then there are no witnesses to testify. If it doesn’t, well, no one can ever be certain I wasn’t crazy.”
Crazy. Even he had the word in his head—or maybe he’d picked it up out of hers. Maybe he really was some sideshow freak mind reader. “Humor me,” she said.
“Very well.” Simms leaned his elbows on the table on his side of the glass, and the light slid over his pale, thin skin. She could see the cold pulse of blue veins underneath. “I suppose you expect me to say something very movie-of-the-week, the new hot disaster terror in all the tabloids. Ebola, or some such. In fact, it’s much more prosaic than that. War.”
“War won’t destroy life as we know it. It might kill a large number of people, but—”
“Forgive me for my inexact description,” Simms interrupted her, “but I meant the destruction of human civilization. The world, of course, will continue. Damaged, fragile, but certainly not shattered beyond repair. But humans? It will take thousands of years to recover. Or, if there is another catastrophe, never.”