Villain (Gone 8)

Peaks twisted off the cap and took a long drink. Then he said, “I need to know everything you know about the Dark Watchers. What do they want? And more importantly, will they help?”

“They don’t help. They just watch. Sometimes they get impatient; sometimes they laugh. Sometimes you can kind of tell they don’t want you to do something. But they don’t interfere. See . . .” He leaned forward, casting house-of-horror shadows on his face. “This whole thing, the rock, the FAYZ, all this? It’s a TV series, Tom. They’re just waiting to see how it all comes out.”

CHAPTER 6

Do You Feel My Pain? How About Now?

“MALIK, HOW . . . ARE you okay?” Shade asked.

It had not been hard to get Malik away from the hospital. Everyone in or near the hospital, from the parking lot attendant to the armed guards oustide Malik’s room to the chief of medicine had been literally knocked to the ground by a blast of crippling agony.

Shade drove. Cruz sat in the back behind Malik, who rode shotgun. The wave of projected pain had ceased, and Malik was Malik again.

Mostly.

In sidelong glances, Shade saw the subtle differences. Malik was not quite Malik, he was a version of Malik, a reconstruction of Malik from his own memory, a Malik morph. A scar was gone from his lip. His shoulders were wider. His face was sleeker. He was a very realistic avatar of Malik.

Shade knew Cruz’s view was even more disturbing. Seated behind Malik, she saw the back of his head and neck, areas Malik had not seen every day of his life and therefore did not picture, so that back there his hair was less detailed, like a blurry photograph or cheap animation.

Shade understood: When Cruz was in morph she could pass as anyone whose picture she had seen, or who she had met in real life. But the front, the part cameras saw, was invariably more detailed than the back. Sometimes, if she had only a front picture, the back was so vague as to be empty space, so that she could easily appear to be a flawless Morgan Freeman, but with nothing from the ears back.

It was Malik’s clothing that was the least convincing part. It looked too clean and too crisp. Like paper rather than fabric. And his loopy, curly, poodle hair, one of many things Shade had loved about him, now had the too-sharp look of black ribbon.

“I’m . . . different,” Malik said. “I’m . . . I don’t feel the pain, but I know it’s there. It’s like it’s on the other side of frosted glass. I . . .” He seemed to drift away for a moment. Too long a moment.

Shade sought Cruz’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They were heading northeast, away from the Pacific, away from Los Angeles, with no destination in mind but not here.

Malik spoke again, and his voice was smaller somehow, as if it came from a distance. “This is a morph, isn’t it?” He tapped his arm and rubbed the skin.

Shade felt her insides turn to lead. She wanted to weep. Wanted to end her life, to escape the weight of guilt that crushed her, that she knew would go on crushing her, that would never leave her alone.

“Yes, Bunny,” Shade said. Long ago that had been her affectionate name for him, back when they had been close.

Malik nodded. “I’m afraid I’m a bit confused.”

Shade nodded, but could not speak. She brushed as unobtrusively as she could at tears.

Cruz saw this and spoke up. “Malik, you were burned. Badly. Very badly, my friend.” Then she added a word weighted with sadness. “Fatally.”

“But . . . ,” Malik said. Then he was silent again, working it through, seeing the terrible truth of it. “If I de-morph, I’ll die. I’ll die in terrible pain, won’t I? Shade?” Panic put a sharp edge on his words.

Shade gripped the steering wheel so hard her fingers were white. “Yes, Malik,” Shade whispered.

The silence stretched again, each silence more damning than the one before, each one like a razor’s cut on Shade’s heart, on her belief in herself. She wanted to say that she was sorry, so terribly sorry, but those words would mean nothing to him, or to her.

“I never saw myself the way I am now, did I?” Malik asked. “Burned, I mean.”

“You were bandaged up,” Cruz said.

“I feel them,” Malik said.

Both girls knew what he meant, but Shade asked anyway, because not to would have made her seem indifferent.

“Them?”

Shade was not indifferent, she was destroyed inside. But she had to drive the car. And she had to figure out what to do next. So she had to understand Malik, which meant understanding what she had led him to, which meant coming face-to-face with the human cost of her own stupid, stupid, reckless decisions. And that way lay only more guilt, more self-loathing. The cold, dead-eyed shark that Cruz always said was the other half of Shade struggled to rise within her, but the weight of self-loathing was too much. Shade felt herself on the edge of a precipice, teetering beside an endless black hole.

“The Dark Watchers,” Malik said. “I won’t ever be able to get away from them, will I?”