“It was stupid.”
“Not in any way we could predict. Anyway, what we have to think about now is getting out of here.” Michael said, “We can’t.” “You don’t know that.”
His eyes were empty, cynical. “You must be able to feel it. There are more than four walls in this room. I guess some sort of magic. We could walk out of any ordinary cage… so they had to build a special one.”
Laura opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. What he said was true and even Karen could feel it, a dulling, a suppression. Nowhere to look but up, down, left, right. It was ironic, in a way: all those years she had wanted to feel this, this utter ordinariness, to be anchored this firmly in one time and place. Well, here she was. But it was not an anchor; it was a leash; it was a chain.
She retreated to a corner and thought about Tim.
They had trusted him because he was family. But she guessed family had never meant that much to him. Maybe there was no reason it should. Family was Willis, with his flattop Marine haircut and his big fists. Family was Jeanne, taking him into her lap and laying an ice bag over his bruises. Those moments—Timmy bruised and curled in Mama’s lap—were the only tender moments Karen could remember between Timmy and Mama, and she guessed there might be some connection there, a clue to Tim’s willful meanness. I have been bad and beaten for it: now this is my reward.
So he doesn’t care, she thought, that we hate him for it. He wants the hate. He would be rewarded for it: by the Gray Man, or the faceless magicians who had confined them here. She wondered what reward they’d promised him. But it hardly mattered. The kingdoms of the Earth. A paperweight.
She thought: Tim became the thing Willis always feared. So, ultimately, it was Willis’s fault… this was the harvest of his frightened love.
But the question followed: Have I done any better?
All she had ever wanted was to protect Michael. And that was all Willis ever wanted, she thought, to protect us—he claimed so. But it wasn’t enough. He had admitted that. It’s not worth jack shit. He tried to protect us with fear, she thought, and I tried to protect Michael with ignorance. And here we are. It doesn’t get worse than this. I wounded him, she thought bleakly, as badly as Willis wounded Tim. And here we are.
It goes on, she thought, the wheel turning, and it never gets better, and maybe that was the most frightening thing of all, that for all her wanting and all her trying she was not, in the end, any better than Willis Fauve.
2
Cardinal Palestrina moved quietly with Carl Neumann beside him to the open door of the cell. “They’ll hear us,” he said.
“They can’t,” Neumann said, and his voice boomed down the corridor. “They can’t hear or see us out here. It’s part of the spell. Look: you can look at them. Go on, Your Eminence.”
Cardinal Palestrina stepped reluctantly forward.
He felt like a voyeur, a Peeping Tom. There was no visible barrier, no reassuring glass, only empty air between himself and these three people. And magic. But magic was so intangible. They were asleep.
There were reed mats on the floor for them and blankets to help fend off the subterranean chill, for this was one of the Institute’s lowest levels. The two middle-aged women and the teenaged boy slept with troubled expressions. Understandably, Cardinal Palestrina thought. They had been through so much. Kidnapped, held against their will…
He said, “Have you spoken with them?”
Neumann shook his head. “Only briefly to the boy, when he arrived. We’re using the brother to break them in—get them accustomed to captivity.”
“Ah, the brother. They talk to him?”
“Grudgingly. He’s their only contact.”
“The child,” Cardinal Palestrina said.
“Yes. He’s the important one.”
“He doesn’t look like much.”
“It doesn’t show,” Neumann said.
An ordinary boy, oddly dressed. Hard to imagine him stepping across worlds. Cardinal Palestrina, who had considered himself credulous—and a model of faith—had discovered since his journey to America that his pedestrian mind balked at miracles.
Harder still to imagine this child as an effective weapon against the Islamic armies. He told Neumann so.
Neumann said, “But the potential is enormous. You have to understand—it’s the purity of him. The others are all haltered in some way. Half-things. Compromised by their circumstances, or their genes, or their fear…or like Walker, hobbled by clumsy surgery. By comparison, the boy is a distilled essence.
3
“Soon,” Tim said, “they’ll be moving you out of here.”
It should have been good news. Karen hated this room, its narrowness, the unsheltered corner toilet—and the pervasive numbness she felt here, the prison magic. But surely, she thought, they would not be moved to a better place. Not unless it was equally imprisoning, or they had been rendered somehow harmless. She did not relish the future. The magic worked on her like a sedative or a powerful tranquilizer; otherwise she might have been too frightened even to think.
Tim said, “It won’t be so bad.”
He was dressed in clean clothes, a little old-fashioned-looking, an odd cut, tweedy and Victorian. Probably that was what people here wore. There was something maddening about the way he looked—his cocked head and carefully inexpressive eyes, this attitude of patience. As if he were the one enduring some hardship.
Simple and potent. He can transport himself into the Arabic heartlands. Or carry our armies there.” “Surely not willingly?”
“When we’re done with him,” Neumann said.
The surgery. Cardinal Palestrina thought, The cauterization of his soul. The subtle cutting.
He said, “And the one who’s collaborating—the brother—did you do that to him? Cut him in that way?”
“No,” Neumann said calmly. “No, not Tim… we didn’t have to.”
Laura, across the room, stood up in the clothes she had been wearing for three days and said, “What did^ they offer you? That’s what I keep asking myself. Why would you do a thing like this?”
Tim looked offended. Offended but patient. He said, “Why does anybody do anything? Maybe I didn’t have a choice. Think about it. Maybe the reasons are obvious. I was serious, you know, what I said about this place. It is home. For me, anyway. And it could be home for you, if you would give it a chance. Home,” he said earnestly, “is an important thing.”
“The kingdoms of the Earth,” Karen said, surprising herself.
He turned to face her, startled.
“A paperweight,” she said. “I remember.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But you do. That’s what they offered you.” Sedated, distant even from herself, she was able to say this. It had been on her mind. “That’s what they offered you. A place to rule. A kingdom. You relished that.” She shook her head. “Bigger than Daddy. Oh, Timmy, you were always so literal-minded. You took everything so seriously.”
Incredibly, he was blushing. He drew himself up and said, “You make it sound like a fairy tale. But hey, it is a fairy tale. We’re leading fairy tale lives. That should be obvious by now.”
Laura said, “You believed them? These people— the people who put us here—you think they care about what happens to you?”