“You a doctor or something?”
He smiled. “I’ve been a lot of things, but not a doctor. I used to take care of a bunch of boys who tended to hurt themselves or each other on a regular basis.” Another, briefer flash of pain.
“Sleep-away camp?”
“Nope. Orphanage. Here… let’s take a look at that arm.”
Jack laid the Tokarev on the table and shrugged out of his jacket. The lining of the left sleeve was soaked. Same with the long-sleeved tee he was wearing beneath it. The tee he could throw away, but the bomber jacket was an old friend. Maybe he’d take it downtown to Tram’s place and see if he knew a way to clean it up. Couldn’t bring a bloody jacket just anywhere.
Bill was staring at the gun. “Do you carry that everywhere?”
“Not mine. But one just like it did this.”
Bill stared a moment longer, then pulled a pair of scissors from a paper bag on the Lady’s table. He pointed them toward the torn sleeve of Jack’s T-shirt.
“That’s got to go.”
“Do it.”
He cut over Jack’s shoulder and around and under his armpit, then rolled the bloody fabric down and off. He shook his head as he inspected the wound.
“That’s going to need stitches, which I can’t help you with.”
Jack took a look and winced at the sight of the open, two-inch-long gash running across the skin at the lower end of his deltoid. The bleeding was down to an ooze.
“I know someone who can.”
He hoped Doc Hargus was around and available.
“I can butterfly it until you get to him.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
The Lady helped Jack wash the blood off his arm in her shower. The barest woman’s bathroom he’d ever seen. Not one cream or lotion, not even a toothbrush or toothpaste.
“Where do you keep the towels?” he said after the blood had swirled down the drain.
“I’m afraid I don’t have any. I don’t bathe.”
Of course she didn’t. She didn’t need to. He made do with the rest of his T-shirt.
As Bill was cutting strips of adhesive tape, Glaeken walked in with Weezy. After calling Glaeken, Jack had let Weezy know about the attack on the Lady. He wanted her input.
Glaeken dropped into a chair next to Jack and glanced at the wound. He didn’t seem impressed, or even sympathetic. After all the wounds he’d no doubt collected over his thousands of years, this probably qualified as a scratch in his book.
Weezy was another story. Concern tightened her features as she went down on one knee next to him and closely inspected his arm.
She’d been a skinny, goth type during their childhood together, but on the chunky side and living in sweatsuits when she rocketed back into his life last year. These days she’d slimmed some and dressed in fitted jeans and sweaters. Her dark hair was longer and tied back in a simple ponytail. No trace of the heavy eyeliner she’d worn as a teen.
“Does it hurt?” she said, and chewed her upper lip.
“Not as much as you’d expect.”
Bill dabbed it with something that foamed the blood and made it feel like a nest of hornets was attacking it.
Jack squeezed the chair’s armrest with his free hand and said, “Okay. Make a liar out of me. Now it hurts.”
“Sorry,” Bill said. He dabbed again. “Needs to be done.”
Weezy bounced up and stepped around to the other side of the table where the Lady stood watching in silence.
“Are you all right?”
The Lady nodded. “Not the slightest harm done.”
Weezy turned to Glaeken and Jack. “I don’t get it. What happened?”
Jack didn’t get it either. He hadn’t wanted to get into the details over the phone, so he gave them a quick run-through now.
When he was done Weezy turned to the Lady and said, “It sounds as if they knew just where you’d be.”
“No question,” Jack said. “They jumped out directly in her path and began firing.” He looked up at the Lady. “Do you take the same route every day?”
She nodded. “Since I began walking again.”
Weezy turned to Jack. “You’re sure they were from the Order?”
“Sure as I can be without seeing a sigil brand.” He pointed to the Tokarev. “They used that and spoke a foreign language. Drexler seems to favor Eastern Europeans for the rough stuff and Eastern Bloc types favor Tokarevs and Makarovs.”
Glaeken frowned. “But the Order wouldn’t attempt such a thing without clearance from the One. And Rasalom knows very well that bullets can’t hurt the Lady.”
Jack grabbed the pistol and ejected the magazine, then popped out the 9mm rounds one by one.
“I thought he might be using some supersecret Lady-killing ammo, but these are standard jacketed hollowpoints.”
“If they are of this Earth,” the Lady said, “they cannot harm me.”
“Maybe he was making sure that was still true,” Weezy said. “You’ve been damaged, you’ve been weakened, you can’t change your looks, you can’t hop around the globe like you used to. If you lost those abilities, he had to wonder if maybe you’d lost the invulnerability as well. Even you weren’t sure right after you survived the Internet outage.”
Jack remembered that. To test herself, she’d thrust a knife blade into her hand. To everyone’s relief, the wound had closed instantly.
Glaeken was nodding. “Yes, that makes sense.”
“You know what this means, don’t you?” Weezy said, looking around at them. “Rasalom has been watching us, clocking and tracking our movements.”
Something tightened in Jack’s chest. He didn’t like the idea of anyone tracking him, especially Rasalom.
“Maybe not yours or mine,” he said. “But obviously the Lady’s-especially the Lady-and probably Glaeken’s too.”
Weezy turned back to the Lady. “Is there a way we can hide you?”
“I cannot hide. The purpose of my existence is to proclaim this world’s sentience.”
“Hide you from Rasalom, not the Ally.”
“I don’t think there’s a way to do that,” Glaeken said.
The Lady thought a moment. “There might be. I am not always aware of what the One and the Otherness are doing. Perhaps there is a way to keep them unaware of what I am doing. I shall consult the noosphere.”
“Consult?” Weezy said. “But you’re a part of it.”
“Not anymore. I am still its creation, but no longer its appendage, no longer directly fed by it. I must reconnect regularly now.”
She closed her eyes and stood still and silent. Utterly. She didn’t need to breathe and did so only to speak.
Bill stared at her, then at the three of them. “At the request of my new friend here,” he said, gesturing to Glaeken, “who’s some fifteen thousand years old, I’m patching up a man with no identity who got wounded protecting a woman who’s not really a woman, or at least not a human woman, and is even older than my friend, and for whom the Internet was crashed in an attempt to kill her. What happened to the world I used to know-or thought I knew? I’ve gone through bizarre, life-changing experiences, but they take a backseat to what I’ve seen and heard the past couple of weeks.”
Jack knew how he felt. Weezy had always known there was a Secret History. Jack had learned gradually, piecemeal, over a period of years, and was still adjusting. He gathered Bill had been thrown headfirst into the Secret History. And the cosmic shadow war that fueled it.
Two nameless, unimaginable forces in a tug-of-war for control of the sentient realities across the multiverse. Earth occupied one of those universes, and was one of the prizes. Not the gold medal, just another piece of the sentient mosaic the forces were assembling. Without sentience, a world had no value, and had no place in the mosaic.
That was why the Lady was so important. As the avatar of humanity’s collective consciousness, a product of the noosphere, she was the beacon that announced this world’s sentience to the multiverse. Extinguish that beacon and this world, this corner of reality would appear worthless.