This choice: Continue as Will Prescott • Go Back...Chapter #18Spoiler--7 by: Seuzz   "Sulva," you say into the darkness. You blink your eyes open.
There's another knocking at the door.
"Hello?" you call.
Joe's hissing laugh sounds in your ear. "You are seriously asleep, dude."
"Where—? What?" You put out your hand to twitch on the lamp, and only succeed in knocking it off the bed stand.
"Just open the door, okay? I should come in before someone sees me."
You scramble up, and that wakes you up enough to finally realize you've got your phone to your ear, and that Joe is talking to you through it while also drumming repeatedly on your front door. At least you make to the entryway without breaking your toes on anything, and let him in.
He doesn't bother to put on a light, just snaps his finger to activate a glow of his own. "You were deep under," he laughs.
"Uh huh." You realize you've still got the phone to your ear, and slide it into the pocket of your pajamas. "What are you doing here? I thought Patterson— Did something happen?"
"No, everything's fine. But he texted me, said he was moving to another location tonight, and he wanted me to handle a special briefing for you."
"Oh, right. Did he explain why he moved out of here?" You get the living room light on, and gesture Joe over to a couch. "I mean, I know the reason he was pretending to have a fight with me, it was the body we found in the freezer." You blink repeatedly, for your brain is crawling along in first gear. "How did you guys set that up?"
"You liked that?" Joe grins. "You know we rigged up a golem of that one guy, Muniz, right? Yeah, we got that set up without him realizing what we were doing, which made it the perfect fake, since it didn't realize it was a fake, and it acted just like him. Oh, man," he laughs again. "Of course, before that, I was having so much fun with the real Muniz and his fake Frank sidekick!" He hoots and snickers.
"I know, I heard the interview with—" You sigh deeply. It's very hard to think with your brain soaking in an inky pool of exhaustion.
"Yeah, so, anyway, Hal also rigged the golem's mask up with a little bomb inside it, a mortality spell. Scatterbrain only had to chant a detonation phrase over it and poof! So it went off?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Cool! By the way, how are they explaining the guy's death?"
"They've put down to an overdose of the cryogenic juice. And a cylinder that got switched." This doesn't make any sense, and you briefly wonder if you're asleep, and this is a crazy dream. "There was physical evidence of all that," you protest.
"'Cos we set the spell up to mimic those effects. We studied the pistol that Muniz had on him—me and Hal and Steve did, I mean, because we were all at the house. Patterson suggested using that as the basis of the spell, since those pistols are used all the time by Diana. He said it would make it easy to cover up the real cause of 'death' that way."
"But the cylinder got switched. The wrong kind of cylinder got attached to Muniz," you say. Joe only blinks. "Someone had to palm the correct cylinder and replace it with a lethal one."
"So, is it impossible to switch out cylinders?"
"But when did it happen? None of us can figure out how the cylinders got palmed!"
"Why is that a problem?" Joe asks impatiently. "How long did it take you to find the body?"
"About twelve hours after death."
"Oh, Stars!" Joe rolls his eyes. "And I tease Patterson about being dumb. Are you really saying he couldn't get down into that freezer during those twelve hours and make the switch?"
"Oh. I guess he could have done it that way," you admit. "Yeah, okay, so he kills the golem with the magic words while they're packing it away, and then later he sneaks down to switch out the cylinders so it looks like—"
"I'm so glad I could help you solve your little mystery," Joe says dryly. "Meanwhile, we've got another little mystery to set up." He's had a package under his arm all this time, and he unwraps it. "Look familiar?"
It's the portrait of "Scotty": a photograph of a milky, out-of-focus blob, attached to a dartboard. "Whoa, how'd you get that out of—?"
"I didn't. It's a duplicate," says Joe. "But you got super-drunk the other night, and we talked to Nash about it because it worried us. He says the reintegration is probably unstable. He said he warned you about that."
"Mm. Yeah. It's a bad design they're using, and he and I weren't able to seriously improve on it before—" A shiver runs through you. "Is Nash worried that something's gone wrong with my installation?"
Joe's expression is not encouraging. "He doesn't know, but he's worried about all the switching back and forth. It might be setting up a strain. That's why we don't want to wake you up anymore, not if we can help it. Things are well in hand, I think we can take it from here without you. And besides that—" Joe takes a folded slip of paper from his pocket. "Nash gave me a— Well, let's call it a 'patch'. He wants us to set up a new reintegration procedure, for the final reintegration when all this is done. He's worried that if we use the current procedure at the end, it might leave you vulnerable to a fugue state. The new procedure, because it will only be used once and not reversed, will nail you back to normal."
"Oh. But what's that got to do with Scotty's picture?"
"Part of the association." Joe takes out a dart, and punctures a complex pattern in the board, then leans it against the back of the sofa, with the dart stuck toward the bottom. "What does that look like?"
"Uh, a bunch of holes in a blurry pictures. And a dart."
"Well, take another look at it. Patterson suggested it, since you already started this design on the one back at Diana." He traces a finger. "Three diamonds, arranged in a triangle. That's twelve holes. The thirteenth hole, with the dart still in the hole, here in the middle. That's the stem, and with the three diamonds it looks kind of like a clover, right?"
"If you squint at it. But why—?"
"Thirteen holes, thirteen victims. This is what Scotty's portrait will look like when we're done. You see this pattern, and it will reintegrate you.
"Ah. Clever. Except I still don't understand why it has to be a clover pattern."
"I don't either, but Patterson just described it in the text he sent me. Now, get comfortable, because I'm going to put you under for rewiring."
He snaps his finger, and begins to speak, but you can't make out the words because your ears have gone out of focus ...
Continue as Terry Kipper: "Exiles"  | Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
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