Hero (Gone 9)

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Francis asked. “I’m worried you might get hurt or whatever and it would be my fault.”

“You took me into the Triunfo to take down Dillon Poe,” Malik said. “I was fine. Weirded out, but fine.”

They were talking quietly in the separate dining room of the suite because a sunburned Armo and Cruz were watching a movie in the living room, and Shade was reading something on a laptop provided by the casino hotel’s management. Dekka had gone down to replace a broken taillight on her precious motorcycle, involuntarily assisted by two starstruck guys from building maintenance.

Malik had not exactly cleared this experiment with the others. He worried that if they knew what he was up to, they’d come up with an endless list of objections, and he didn’t want more delay. The others did not have the Dark Watchers constantly, constantly in their heads. They could watch a movie. They could read. Malik was straining just to avoid screaming half the time, not from physical pain but from the crushing humiliation and impotent anger that came from having alien consciousnesses poking through your mind, seeing the world through your eyes.

Using me. Violating me.

There were times when anger would almost suffocate him, and that was not a feeling Malik liked. Malik was about doing things, fixing things, and above all, understanding things. Passively raging at invisible creatures in his head was not good for him; it was toxic and foul. It made him feel weak.

It had been wonderful going to bed the night before with Shade. It had been her move. The assumption had been that the two guys, Malik and Armo, would share a room, but Shade had said, “I want you close so I can keep an eye on you.”

Awkward had not begun to cover Malik’s feelings. He’d thought of objecting but had not been able to come up with a good rationale. So he’d just nodded and excused himself to take a shower.

I was not hard to persuade.

Then Shade had joined Malik in the shower where they helped each other get very, very clean.

It was the closest Malik had come to being able to ignore the ongoing horror that was his true body now, and the loss of privacy and sanctity that twisted his mind. But even as they were making love, the Dark Watchers had been there, making Malik feel that in some way he was betraying Shade by exposing their intimacy to the voyeurs in the shadows.

Enough. Enough feeling bad. Time to do something.

“Okay, so something simple to start with,” Malik suggested to Francis. “The hallway is on the other side of this wall. Shall we?”

Malik squeezed her hand and smiled encouragingly at Francis, whose eyes became swirling rainbows of color, a rainbow that spread over her face.

There was a sudden feeling of the whole world tilting sideways, like Malik was looking at it through a prism. Colors shifted toward ultraviolet, and then the world seemed to unfold as if every object, the chairs, the bed, the walls, were origami. They

unfolded and refolded into impossible shapes, nothing still, nothing permanent. He looked at Francis and saw not a girl but a silhouette of light containing rainbows.

Then he chanced to look down and saw his own feet and legs and nearly screamed, because the view was of the burned-down-to-the-bone legs that were his de-morphed reality.

He quickly looked away and ordered himself to stay calm, but by that point they were standing, still holding hands, in the hallway outside, and reality was reassuringly 3-D again.

“Wow.”

“Are you all right?” Francis asked anxiously.

“That is one serious roller coaster,” Malik said.

“Yeah. Totally freaked me out the first time.”

“I would imagine so,” Malik said dryly. “Are you up for another?”

Francis shrugged assent.

“Do you have any control over how fast we move?”

“I don’t know. You want me to go slow?”

“Try, yes,” Malik said. “How about we go from here down to the casino?”

They were still holding hands, and again the world tilted, shifted toward ultraviolet, and came apart as if all of reality was no more substantial than tissue paper. This time Malik carefully avoided looking at his own body, and instead found himself in a slow-moving tornado of things almost impossible to recognize. Was that the floor unfolded? Was that what a bed looked like from extradimensional space? He saw water pipes with water running not through them but beside them. He saw what were surely fiber-optic data lines, but they were writhing blue serpents surrounded by a hurricane of colorful dots.

He passed humans, men, women, a child, the inhabitants of the rooms between the suite and the casino floor far below, though up, down, above, and below had a very different meaning here. He saw people as paper-thin faces glued onto an explosion of gray matter; he saw their intestines sluggishly pumping food; he saw them as arms and legs spread out into a kind of diagram, with bone exposed and muscles twitching unattached, and arteries with blood both inside . . . and somehow not.

With his free hand, Malik reached toward a shimmering light seemingly made up of discrete, sparkling bits like so many fireflies, but there was nothing to touch. He tried again, reaching his hand to touch a deconstructed wall, and saw his fingers trace lines in dust but unable to go deeper into what he could see so clearly.