This choice: Share "Will Prescott" out with your partners • Go Back...Chapter #76All In One and One In All by: Seuzz   "Right." You scramble back onto your haunches, giving the horrified Joe and Frank an eyeful of your cock, which having stiffened to the consistency of granite is starting to throb. "Get'cher clothes off." You snap your fingers as their jaws drop. "Tell Darrow he can watch, but he's not to—"
"Will!" Joe shouts.
"What?"
"We're not gonna have a threesome!"
You blink. It actually hadn't occurred to you that maybe your words and actions could be construed that way. And it takes you another two slow blinks of the eye to see how Joe could have made such a wild mistake. And even then you're filled more with contempt for his mistake than embarrassment for your words.
"Mind out of the gutter, Franz," you snap. "We're gonna copy and swap, that's all. I like your idea to share and share alike. Obvious when you put it that way."
"We're sharing Hal around?" Frank asks, and casts a glance over at the nine bottles that hold Swann's essentia.
"Sharing Prescott around," you cheerfully riposte. "We all three already got the same anima, you and me are sharing imago too, so we'll just pop my old face onto Franz and I'll give you both some of Prescott's essentia. Then we'll all have equal shares of the original genius."
"And Hal?" Joe asks.
"Oh, he's mine, same as Franz is yours and Giuseppe's, uh, his." You chuck a chin at Frank. "We'll be The Three Musketeers all over again!"
"It's generous of you to share yourself, Will," Joe starts to say.
"Hal," you correct him. "Might as well get used to calling things by their proper names!"
Joe and Frank look at each other. "Are you feeling okay, Will?" the latter says, and by the way the tendons in his neck flex you are guessing he's just armed himself.
"I'm fine. Don't worry about me, lads." You snap your fingers at them. "It's like when you guys woke up inside these two back in Saratoga Falls. 'Squiffy' is the word I'd have applied to you two, you were so pleased wi' yourselves."
They exchange another look. Then Frank shrugs. "If that's the way you want to do it, er, Hal."
"Brilliant. Alright, step up, Franz. Time waits for no man, not even you. Pop those back into me," you say, pointing to the essentia you drew out of the original Swann, "and draw two pints of Will Prescott for y'self and Giuseppe." You lay down and waggle your fingers. "Can't wait to run the thing myself."
* * * * *
Despite your eagerness to finish the operations when you wake, you spend a good couple of minutes with your nose close to the sigils, snuffling and rubbing at them, as though their magic might seep in through your skin. You mutter and squawk to yourself a couple of times when you think you've spotted a mistake or a place where the sigils could be tightened even further, but you decide after closer examination that you were wrong. "Love to shake the hand of whoever designed this thing," you chuckle.
When Frank's patience is obviously exhausted, though, you follow through on your proposal. You add the "Will Prescott" face to Joe's stock of disguises, and you add the Prescott essentia to both of them. Then, to make the parallels between you and the other two Stellae even more pronounced, you put yourself under a third time and have your colleagues stitch Hal Swann's mental imago onto your own anima, so that, just as Frank and Joe do not lose their knowledge and personality when changing faces, you won't lose Hal's.
There's one other operation to go, though. You summon Jacob into the bedroom. "Down to your knickers," you order him, and you repeat it when he only frowns. "Why?" he asks.
Joe sees the problem and makes the solution before you do. "Out of your clothes," he orders Jacob after swiping his own chest, and that's when Darrow complies. "Useful for ordering your golems around," he tells you with a grin. "Who is this guy and what are we going to do with him?" he asks after you've got the mask off Jacob.
"Oh, he's just one of the useful idiots. Got a dozen of 'em down in Cambridge, five and six in two cells. This one and his mates are trying to slip a sleeper into the Fane biomedical program for me." With the firing of one candle you blow Darrow into his constituent pieces. "I told you not to get dressed, Giuseppe," you tell Frank. "Trousers off and back on the table."
"I can't believe the police haven't been in to see what all the noise is," he grumbles as he takes his jeans off yet again.
* * * * *
You and Frank, he now reconstituted with Jacob Darrow's face, mind, and essentia, get dressed. In his twill trousers, hiking boots, button-down shirt and shabby blazer, your partner looks a lot more respectable than you; but then, his clothes are part of his hipster costume, along with his closely trimmed chestnut beard, his NHS glasses, and pert black trilby. Your clothes are only functional.
Speaking of which: "Fetch me my legs and arms," you tell Joe as you dress.
"Your what?"
"My charms. You made me take 'em off before you let me in."
"Did you—? Er, did Hal, take everything off like we asked?"
"All but this'n." You show Joe the underside of the tongue of your left trainer, which has a complex squiggle drawn on it. Not that he can see it, for the canvas and the marker are alike black. "It almost scuppered your plot. If I'd had the other lot with me we'd be having a much different waffle right about now."
He tosses you your kit from the other room, and you draw out the charms and protections that the former incarnation of Hal Swann used to protect himself. A chain necklace with a small pendant, the latter made of a fragment of depleted uranium encased in a lead shell; one red armband with powerful protective charms inscribed in a permanent marker; a red bandana, similarly inscribed and folded about in another charmed pattern, which you tie in a knot just above your left knee; from a belt loop on your trousers flutters a trailing white ribbon inscribed with Maoist slogans in the original Chinese characters, but wound through with a crimson thread that spells out another powerful enchantment. The safety pins that double as buttons on your jacket (the zipper long ago busted) have tiny sigils inscribed on their heads.
"Got a pencil?" you ask Joe after you're on your feet and are straightening out and settling into your clothes. "Wait. Desk, right?" You wheel and yank out the center drawer and turn it upside down, dropping five writing implements, two notebooks, and a packet of tissue onto the floor. You knock over the chair for good measure.
"You have to make a mess everywhere you go, don't you?" Joe says.
"'S'in the blood, Franz. Stars." You study the pattern made by the debris—a kind of makeshift I Ching—before plucking up one of the pencils. "Got an address for you. A face waiting as well."
"You're adding me to one of your cells?"
"Naturally." To Frank, as you scribble down an address in Cambridge for Joe: "Put the van around front, and don't let the fascists make a row about it."
After he leaves, you and Joe wrangle the operating tables into the elevator and down to the lobby. You leave him to finish checking out of the hotel and find his own way to Cambridge as you and Jacob move the tables into the van. As your driver pulls into traffic, you slouch down with your knees about your ears. You've already got Hal's "wand" out.
It's an original model iPhone, its screen cracked (intentionally; Swann spent days calculating and recalculating the angle and force before he struck it with a hammer) and its case held together with duct tape whose sticky side is blackened with sigils that resemble circuitry. You become so absorbed as you scroll through Hal's notes and calculations, knitting your plans into his, that Jacob has to ask you three times before you grunt an acknowledgment that you're listening. "Just keep asking," you mutter back. "I'm bound to pick up sooner or later."
"So you mentioned Paige back there," he says. "I assume you it was Paige you were talking about when you said you had a sleeper at Cambridge."
"Only sleeper you know about." You turn the iPhone onto its side, which has the effect of deciphering the otherwise innocuous text hidden there. "Leave Hal's games to me, I'll get you in where I want."
"You have other ways into Fane?"
"More than I could count even if we all three took off our pants and shoes."
"Is that what you're checking up on? Possible ways in?"
"Patience, grasshopper. World is a cloud of butterflies, and I'm listening to the beat of their wings."
Well, it sounds deep. But even though it's Hal's special skill to lurk and listen until he senses that fortune is galloping in the direction he wants to go, he knows that the world is too chaotic to be fully decipherable. You are, actually, trying to fit together and read a complex jigsaw puzzle that until an hour ago was meant to serve the original Hal Swann's purposes, but which is now meant to serve yours. You just don't want Jacob chattering at you.
So you sink deeper into your seat, and your long, clever fingers dance rapidly across the iPhone's screen, never laying a wrong touch while every now and then stroking a line on the spider-web crack when you need to bring up an otherwise special and inaccessible app.
Paige Knotts is one promising lead: a punk-rebel girl with a talent for maths and chemistry who you have—through her friends—maneuvered into a Cambridge program financed by Fane.
There's another Fane plot you're investigating at Cambridge, involving a rowing team.
But there are so many others, for Hal, like Fane, has tentacles everywhere.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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