The tower to which Valentine escorted him seemed to pierce clouds, yet was still made diminutive by the nearby Prudential Building. They took the elevator to the nineteenth floor and were admitted into an apartment by someone who seized the whole of his attention the instant he saw her.
Valentine made introductions but Clay heard them as if at a distance. Ellie, he said her name was. By now Clay had grown oddly accustomed to seeing his face on other males. Even that new one, Daniel, was no great surprise as he slouched in a lounger across the room, seeming to glare from behind inscrutably dark lenses.
But here was new overload … a new gender. The first of her kind? As far as he was concerned, she was. He need not pretend to be captivated. What a postmodern Eve she made, arms folded across her chest, wearing black tights and a shapeless gray sweater, appraising him with eyes that had never learned to turn away in coy aversion. Graham would have loved her, her smile with its near-mystic potential for cruelty. Nina would desperately want to be her friend, learn where she had her hair razored and dyed.
"Welcome to God's Little Cesspool," she said, and smartly arched her eyebrows at Valentine before returning to a cross-legged perch on the floor.
"She's beautiful, isn't she, Clay? In her way. Don't you think so?" asked Valentine.
Clay found it such an unlikely remark from the man he wasn't sure it hadn't been sarcastic. Although Valentine seemed more interested in how Daniel Ironwood reacted to it than in Clay's response. Jealous? Was he trying to make Daniel jealous?
Whatever the intention, it appeared to provoke some rise out of him.
"What the hell's he doing here tonight, Patrick?" Daniel slid forward in his chair, muting down the TV with a remote. "You too for that matter. You know what night this is."
Valentine squared himself, going to stone. "Just a friendly social call. You have a problem with that?"
But Daniel was not backing down. "What is it you're running up here, some kind of winter camp for chromo mutes? I was hoping for a little privacy tonight, or are you forgetting?"
"Oh you, you're so cute when you can't adapt to change," said Ellie, and she actually sounded lighthearted, an amused mediator. She looked up at Clay. "This is purgatory, is what this is. This is where we come after a life of unrequited sex."
"Then where do you go after here?" he asked.
"For me, a convent, I think that's all that's left. The rest of you, you're on your own." Ellie rocked back and forth on the floor with a bark of feral laughter. "I was made to wear a wimple and rosaries."
"That isn't what I was told," said Daniel. He had retreated a few inches into his chair, coiled and sullen.
"Oh, slutty insinuations now, is it?" She rubbed her temples with the slightest air of theatricality. "Strangest thing, I'm starting to feel a headache coming on, it could last all night. I might have to ask you all to leave." She leveled a glance at Daniel, just shy of ferocious. "Alphabetical order by last name."
Valentine stepped forward to smooth them out, telling them to knock it off, while Clay was struck by the immense rarity of this summit. Four of them, Helverson's progeny all, two on the books and the other two off. Had this many ever been in one place at one time? Bickering already, though, and whereas he had been overcome by a disgusted pity for Timothy Van der Leun, for Daniel Ironwood he wasted no time fomenting a razored dislike. Entirely reactionary, of course — Don't want me here? Fine, asshole, I'm not crazy about your company either.
Four of them. How many would it take in a room before they hit critical mass and began the bloody scramble for territory and dominion?
As Valentine gesticulated to the seated Daniel, Clay sank onto the couch, leaned forward to run a finger through the dust on the heavy black and gray marble-top table. Did he know any symbols for disillusion that he could draw? No. Pity. It would have felt proper, commemorating the moment when he realized that even among his own genetic kind he really did not belong, not in any familial sense. There was no feeling of unity, nor even gallows humor — Hey, sorry about your DNA, I'd donate you mine if I thought it would help — but rather a pervading sense of a struggle for leverage. Double their numbers in here and they might well begin killing each other.
Valentine left the other two, came over to bid him step onto the smallish balcony. Clay frowned but followed; the man would not have brought him all this way to throw him nineteen floors to the street. The sliding glass door slammed behind him and the warmth of the apartment was forsaken. The winds up here were frigid but bracing, oddly welcome, cleaner than at ground level. The sound of traffic became a long-distance echo.
"They'll work it out," Valentine said. He went to the very edge of the balcony, fearless despite the snow and ice underfoot, and leaned against the railing. In his long topcoat and contoured skull he looked ready to fly. "Arguments are important. A sign of passion. All the bodily systems are primed then."
Clay turned to the glass, the curtain open on the other side. Beyond, Ellie and Daniel squabbled, silently to Clay … but, if body language was any indication, with waning vehemence. He had no doubt that if pressed, she would hold her own with ease. Wondering, too, what it would be like to be with a woman so akin to himself they could be joined halves of the same damaged egg, a broken yin to a shattered yang. Such a genetically incestuous union could be glorious, or terrifying. Maybe they would immolate themselves in the flames of taboo and leave nothing but smoldering ash.
"Somehow I can't believe your only purpose here is to run a matchmaking service for us," Clay said. "There has to be more on your mind than that."
Valentine faced him, now leaning back against the railing. What trust, or what confidence in his own authority; one shove and he could plunge to an icy death. "I have the world on my mind. And our place in it. I've lived years you never have. That makes me a valuable resource to you. It makes you a legacy to me."
"Why do you even care? I wouldn't."
"Because I'm the one that job falls to." Valentine pulled his hands from his pockets, scooped snow from the railing and began to pack it into a tight ball. "Have you ever killed anyone?"
"No. But there were doctors who said it was just a matter of time."
Valentine kneaded the snowball, smoother and rounder, veins popping out all across his muscular hands. "Sometimes you'll hear people say the first kill is always the hardest, and after that it gets easier. But they're ignorant on the subject. You can discount everything they say. It's the second that's the hardest. Because you've done it once, and this time you know what to expect and you know how messy it can be. How long it can take some people to die. That's when you have to look inside yourself and ask if you have what it takes to do it all over again. Nothing can be very hard when you're ignorant … only when you're fully informed."
He lifted the snowball, a perfect sphere of dense white ice. "From this height, the right angle? It just might kill." He lobbed it over the railing toward the sidewalk below. "That's the beauty of random chance. All you have to do is be willing to take the gamble."
Clay strolled to the edge, peered over and down. He saw the occasional pedestrian trudging through this winter's night, but no signs of calamity, of death from above. "You lost this one."
"And somebody won and never knew it. And all's right with the world. I could drop another tomorrow during rush hour and win, and all would still be right with the world." Valentine dusted his hands of melting snow and pocketed them. "I hope you understand that, Clay. Of the rest of them down there, not one in a hundred thousand would understand. But I think we should appreciate that element of life, because even though we may be new beings, I think what they consider wrong with us has instead unlocked something that's been buried for a very long time. The propensity for assuming a natural mastery — because we're not weighed down by the same petty little sentiments."