Chapter 31

31.
         
         Even if he had been able to, Brown wouldn’t have slept. As it was, the itching from his wrists was constant enough that it refused to be ignored. Just when he was starting to get used to it, the sensation would shift to an entirely different feeling and he would have to start the process all over again.
         He guessed he had been in this room for about two days. Maybe more, but no more than three. Not sleeping gave you plenty of time to count the hours and what little light he could glimpse through the shuttered window gave him some ideas of how much time was passing. It was passing slowly, whatever time had gone by. I guess you don’t want my grateful thanks after all, he noted sardonically to his absent friends.
         Some time ago he had gotten the impression something had gone terribly wrong. The woman who had tried to torture him before, if she wanted to call it that, had confirmed those sentiments. Tristian was here, definitely, and most likely with Ranos. Hopefully they hadn’t been stupid and come alone, but Tristian wouldn’t have thought of safety in numbers and Ranos didn’t know enough about how things worked to suggest something different. Even Prescotte and Tritan, as unproven as they were, would be some benefit. Prescotte had been in charge of the castle guard where he came from and could be wickedly clever when he put his mind to it. And Tritan, well, the Slashtir was scary looking, but not so effective without someone telling him who to hit. But just the sight of him might cause everyone to give up.
         The best thing to have done would have been to flood the villages with hundreds of soldiers, which could have been done in about thirty seconds once the order had been given. Unfortunately that wasn’t an order Tristian could give, as much as the soldiers respected him, he couldn’t go and start organizing all out assaults, no matter who was captured. Brown’s next in command would be able to in his absence but wouldn’t have any reason to do so unless a credible threat was suspected. Right now, he was just missing. It was too little to go on to mobilize that many people. Not that he didn’t wish someone had just said damn the regulations and done it anyway but the last time he had seen that happen was the last time he had watched television. The General, for all his lateral thinking, had never been exceptionally keen on encouraging mavericks and Brown, for better or for worse, had kept that unspoken policy in place.
         So no rescue yet, although help was clearly on the way. It was taking longer than he had expected, which he didn’t think could be a good thing. Time was on the mindbenders’ sides, the more drawn out this became the more time they had to organize. Even now he didn’t even know how many were actually here. There was the tall, solemn fellow who talked to him the first time they questioned him. Then he showed up again with a shorter guy and a younger woman. The younger woman he had seen several times since, although she never spoke, she would merely come in, stare at him for a few minutes and then leave without a word. It was downright creepy and Brown wasn’t sure if the woman was strange or this was a new way to try and torment him. The first time he got into a staring contest with her but found to his dismay that she wasn’t blinking long after his eyelids were burning and had dried out. Each time after that he had just pretended to be asleep.
         Then of course there was the other woman who had used him for a punching bag before. He had a feeling she would be back, if he was one to keep score he would have to say they were about even right now, with his little revenge. The look on her face had been priceless, and definitely worth the suffering it took to get it. Sometimes you had to take the victories where you could. The dried blood from that incident was still over his face, caked and crusted but without fingers he really had no way to remove it. At least his face felt normal again, he didn’t even want to think about how much she had broken. But being dirty he could deal with, easily.
         So four so far, then. Four . . . and one more. The bastard who had attacked them on the road. He hadn’t seen that guy since, but Brown had made a mental note to ensure that no matter what else happened on this planet, they didn’t leave that monster behind. Even if he didn’t have hands, Brown would strangle the man himself. Just because his soldiers could regenerate didn’t at all diminish his guilt and helplessness at watching his men cut down. It all came down to him, as the leader. He was responsible for them. They were good men, well trained, capable and effective. He wouldn’t have taken them if that hadn’t been the case. So the problem hadn’t been them. It was him. The whole time. The blame and the guilt. He hoped that Tristian had been able to remove the bodies to someplace safe, but it didn’t blunt the consequences of his mistake. He had not acted fast enough, had not coordinated properly, and five men died, Kara had been hurt, and here he was, useless to all of them.
         The now familiar creaking sound of the opening door stilled whatever thoughts were beginning to churn into his head. Now who is it? The door peeked open a tiny crack, just enough to admit a small girl. Brown recognized her instantly. He knew he was in a house where a decent sized family lived, he could hear them through the door all the time, their voices leaking to him through the wood of the walls and the floor, ghosts out of synch with his time, just missing him by a split second each time. He had never seen any of them, except for this little girl. It was her room he was inhabiting at the moment. She never spoke to him and rarely even looked at him, all she did was come into the room to sleep, always closing the door tightly behind her. Not that he would be able to open the door anyway, unless he used his teeth, or kicked it out. Either way, he suspected it was locked from the outside, at least when she wasn’t there. Or even when she was. Sometimes he was tempted to jump the girl and force her to let him out but something kept stopping him. He couldn’t attack a kid. For all the unpleasant things he had done as a soldier, beating up children so far thankfully hadn’t been one of them. His situation wasn’t so desperate yet that it required those types of measures.
         He wondered if she thought him some kind of bogeyman, or ghost, or just a weird figment of her imagination that she didn’t pay attention to anymore. Either way, he didn’t bother her. There was no point. He had better things to do. Like stare at the wall and wish someone would burst through it to rescue him. It certainly would save him the trouble of doing something rash, like throwing himself out the window and praying he only broke one leg so he could at least crawl away. The problem was he was sure everything was being watched. The entire village was their eyes and ears, and his movements would be spotted instantly. He needed a better way. There had to be some way out of here.
         So lost in his thoughts, Brown didn’t notice that the girl hadn’t performed her usual nighttime tradition of simply going to bed. Instead she was standing near the bed, her small, pale eyes shining at him in the almost total darkness. If he weren’t several times her mass, he might have found it frightening, but he had seen too many horrifying things in the past few years to really be rattled anymore.
         He expected the staring contest to go on for a few minutes before the kid got tired of it and went to bed.
         Brown really didn’t expect her to talk.
         “So, when you get your head chopped off, and it heals,” the little girl said, “what about your memories, you know all that stuff in your brain? Does it come back? Or do you have to start all over again?”
         It took him a second to realize what she had just asked him, so unexpected was the question. Shifting his position into more of a crouch, as best he could with no hands, Brown fixed her with his most impenetrable gaze and did his best to stall. He didn’t have to answer. But he sure as hell wanted to know what prompted this question.
         The girl stared at him for another moment and then gave a strangely high pitched laugh, covering her mouth as if embarrassed. “Was that an inappropriate question? I’m so sorry, I didn’t know. Certainly we don’t want you to give up any buried secrets now, right?” She swung her hands in a very girlish manner, absently kicking at a bedpost. Her face turned very serious, an expression that somehow didn’t look out of place on her. “None of this is going to end well, you know that, I hope. If you don’t then I’m telling you. We’re all going to kill each other. It’s the only way it can really end.”
         “Unless I do what?” Brown asked, spitting out the words before he realized he had vowed to not say anything. Something about the resigned acceptance in the girl’s voice provoked speech in him, making her words impossible to pass by without comment. “What would you like me to do?”
         “Do?” the girl asked him in return, and her smile was a thing much older than her. The laugh she emitted was a drunken, heavy sound that immediately was absorbed into the floorboards, sinking beyond his hearing before he even had time to grasp its forlorn angularity. “At this point I don’t imagine there’s really anything you can do, even if you were so inclined. Which you’re not. I can tell. I don’t have to be a mindreader to see what’s written all over you. You’ve come too far to stop fighting now. They could cut off all of your limbs and you’d still try to bite them, or crawl away or something absurd like that . . . people like you, its in the genes, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.” She hopped onto her bed, letting her legs kick freely, her hands folded neatly in her lap. The look on her face was awkward and seemed beyond her years, like her muscles weren’t yet able to form those kinds of expressions.
         “Then why don’t you just let me go?” Brown inquired, letting what was left of his hands clank together as they touched on the floor. The damn things were so heavy, though on the bright side he suspected he was building quite a bit of muscle. It occurred to him suddenly that he was speaking to the girl as if she were a mindbender herself. It also occurred to him that he had no idea if she was one or not. That mystery disturbed him a great deal. Best play this straight and see where it takes us. “The people looking for me are going to tear you guys apart until they find me. If you let me go you’ll save yourselves a lot of trouble.”
         “Will we?” the girl asked sharply and for a second Brown thought he saw someone else sitting there. He was forced to blink to clear the static from his vision. “If we just let you go, everyone will go away, just like that.” He thought he heard someone snap their fingers. The girl made no motion. “Do you really think that’s true? Or do you think I’m that stupid?”
         “Which question would you like me to answer?”
         The girl smiled, almost shyly. She raised a hand to speak but then dropped it and cocked her head to the side, as if listening. Brown noticed that the house had gone very quiet. The various noises of the home had fallen into a sort of ambient background state for him and so while he didn’t notice them when they were around, their absence was certainly warning enough. Had they all left? He found a strange tenseness infusing his limbs and the sudden desire to run as far as he could.
         “Well don’t we like our drama,” the girl said in a bored tone, bouncing back to her feet. Her face became pensive as she faced him, wringing her hands together in a strangely nervous and distracted fashion. “We could let you go, right now . . . but would that really change anything? Can you honestly say that, once released, you’ll simply turn around and go back to wherever it is you people come from? Now that you’ve seen this place, can you really walk away?”
         Brown stared at her for a few moments. Then, slowly, he said, “You could leave, too.”
         The girl laughed quietly. “No, I don’t think so. You can only uproot yourself so many times.” She dragged her stocking clad foot on the floor, creating a soft, scratchy noise, sounding distant in the near dark. “No, it’s either here or nothing, I think.” Brown realized that he couldn’t see her face anymore. The shadows were draped over it like a veil. There was a muted quality to her voice, as if she was speaking from the bottom of some dark well. “But who knows? Anything can still happen.”
         Brown went to answer, although he wasn’t sure what to say, when the girl suddenly looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. He was startled to see that someone her face looked different, even though she hadn’t changed.
         Her mouth worked silently for maybe ten seconds, her eyes wide as she stared at him. He went to stand up, to go to her, for what reason he wasn’t sure. She was just a little girl. That’s all. Nothing more. Brown didn’t know why he hadn’t seen that before.
         Then, she burst into tears and darted from the room, the door opening and closing with a brittle thud before he could spring to his feet. The shredded sobbing of her departure hovered in the air like fallen leaves, part of the air itself, refusing to decay.
         Some time later, Brown wasn’t sure how much later, he heard more footsteps outside the door, gradually growing closer. It sounded like more than one pair, unless the echoes were just a second out of time with one another. A pale and unwashed brightness was trying to push through the nearly opaque barrier of the window. Brown pushed himself back into a light crouch from his sitting position, ignoring the pain it caused in his shins and ankles. Even if he was too stiff to walk down a flight of stairs, at least he looked ready, and that’s all that counted.
         Shortly after, or maybe a long time after, there was a soft shuffle of footsteps right outside the door. Immediately after it opened again, admitting the thin, tired looking man that he had spoken when he first came to this room. Now what? Brown thought. They could only go over the same damn ground so many times before it just became tedious. He had to give them credit, what they lacked in cleverness they certainly made up in perseverance. Anyone else would have just given up by now. Mandras had definitely known how to pick followers.
         The man looked at him for a minute, as if trying to ascertain that he did indeed exist. Then, with a strange deliberate slowness, he turned back and touched the doorknob with one finger. He was too far away for Brown to see the expression on his face.
         Then, with the same exactness as before, he strode across the room, stopping less than a foot away from Brown. Still silent, he sat down neatly on the floor, drawing his legs in so he was sitting crosslegged. Even with Brown crouching, he was still about eye level with the man. And while the darkness lent itself to false shadings, it seemed to Brown that this was a man who looked very worn down, wasting away even as he sat there, his vitality leaking into some pocket dimension, through a tear so small the man couldn’t find it. Or perhaps he simply didn’t care.
         But when he spoke his voice was as smooth as ever, perhaps a little rougher around the edges. There was still a marked assuredness there that nothing could seem to sand down. Brown had to admire that, even as he plotted to eliminate it completely.
         “I have not come to question you any further,” the man said, resting his hands on his knees. “I do not see any point to it, at least from my perspective. You are more than capable of evading my questions, or simply stonewalling me . . .” there was no admiration or condemnation in his statement, he was merely stating a fact. Brown thought he heard a sort of chilled resignation in the man’s voice, the kind that set off tiny warning alarms in his head. Something wasn’t right here. Something had happened. And it hadn’t been good.
         He was tempted to interrupt with something to irritate the man, to throw him off balance. Looking into his eyes, Brown got the impression that wasn’t such a good idea, and let him speak.
         “In a short time, you will be taken away from here,” and then Brown did almost speak. “My companion is outside, waiting for me to finish. She is also trying to listen . . . but she cannot. Anything we say here will not be heard except by the two of us.” The man paused, as if waiting for Brown to comment. Brown saw no reason to suspect the man was lying, but he really didn’t have anything to say to the man that he wouldn’t say to any of the others. It wasn’t like they had become close friends during his time here. If this was an attempt to win his trust, he would have to try a little harder. The mention of going somewhere else disturbed him more than a little, however. That couldn’t be a good thing. On the other hand, it might be a good time to make a break for it. He’d have to play this one by ear.
         “All we ask for is to be left alone,” the man said, his words sorrowful but his voice utterly flat. “That is my only plea. I do not know what you thought our purpose was here, but I assure you it was peaceful. We only sought to live here, nothing more.”
         “It’s out of my hands now, don’t you think?” Brown murmured, not sure who he was talking to. This man’s hushed melancholy was affecting him as well. Between him and the girl, Brown was beginning to get a sinking sense of doom about the whole affair. “Even if you let me go right this second . . . after all I’ve seen, I can’t simply walk away.” He shook his head, feeling a weary weight settling on his shoulders. This was nuts, all of it. He was stuck in this room, his friends were running around trying not to get killed, and neither side had anything the other needed, making bargaining absolutely useless. Furthermore, the only thing that would help would be for either side to simply disappear. Unfortunately, Brown had a suspicion that wasn’t going to happen and he wasn’t sure if it was really a bad thing or not. Fixing the man with his firmest stare, he said, “Listen, if you let me go, I can’t promise anything, but . . . I can give it a chance. You can get a chance to prove it to me. That what you say is true. That you mean no harm here.” The man said nothing. Brown took a deep breath and added, “It’s the best you’re going to get. It’s better than being wiped out.” He tried to keep the begging from his voice. But he wanted this over. He didn’t want to kill these people. Not all of them.
         “Prove it,” the man replied, rolling the word around on his tongue. His gaze flicked down to the floor, then quickly back to Brown. “And if we cannot . . .”
         “Then I take you down,” Brown answered simply, meeting the man’s gaze without hesitation. They needed to know this. He could be nothing less than honest here. If he had hands they would be shaking now. This moment could very much go either way for him.
         “Yes . . .” the man muttered, his gaze dropping back to the ground, his expression suddenly pensive. His fingers drummed a tense, lazy rhythm on the floor, the sound of raindrops striking long dead bodies. “And we could . . .” he said, without looking at Brown, his tone insisting to no one at all. “Once you saw, that’s all you need . . . just to see. Then you’d know, you’d understand. Yes . . .” he said, throwing the last word out at Brown.
         Abruptly, in a swift motion that forced Brown to rock back onto his heels in surprise, the man stood up, a plant growing impossibly tall before him. “I’m sorry, no,” the man said, his voice numbed and coming from a radio station tuned somewhere distant. He wasn’t even looking at Brown, or anything at all. “I’m sorry,” he said again. This time he did turn to look down at Brown. “The time passed already and the option is gone.” His speech was distracted and vaguely sad. Brown debated whether it was worth it to jump him again. He spun away from Brown, clasping his hands behind his back. “And I’m only wasting your time now.” He paced a few steps toward the door, then stopped. “All the things I might have asked you, if there had only been more time . . .” It wasn’t clear who he was speaking to. Brown shifted his stance, getting on one knee, ready to spring at any second. When he opens the door. He’s barely paying attention. “So much you could have told me, I think . . .”
         Save me the regrets, pal, just open the door, Brown thought darkly, sliding forward a few paces silently. He could easily cover the distance and knock the guy out before he even knew what was happening. His heart began to race faster, but Brown took a deep breath to calm himself. Who knew if he noticed stuff like that?
         With a scrap of his boots the man spun around again, his eyes burning through the mottled gloom to regard Brown. Brown stopped moving, held himself perfectly still. He couldn’t read the man’s eyes. There was just nothing there.
         “I have just one question,” the man asked softly, almost apologetically. “If you could just answer this . . .” he stopped, bowed his head as if checking himself. When he looked at Brown again there was an emotion there not easily quantifiable. “The camp . . . you know the one I mean, I’m sure . . .” he appeared to be struggling to keep his words deliberately paced, “The camp. Do you know . . . what happened to them? Do you know?”
         Damn. Of course he knew. He had been there. After it was all over. It wasn’t exactly something he wanted to go into. Why didn’t this guy know? Was he testing him? But no, the naked questioning in his voice was real enough. He must have left before it happened. All of them. I’m so sorryBrown thought to no one in particular. He was saying that a lot lately. This has gone totally wrong for you, he thought, looking at the man and wondering if he really could read his mind. Ever since the beginning. And it’s not going to get any better.
         He was tempted for a second to lie, but only for a second. Licking suddenly dry lips, he exhaled slowly, looking toward the ground as if for support, and finally looked up at the man, saying, “They . . . they’re all dead. I’m sorry.” The man didn’t respond at all. Brown felt an insane need to explain further. “It was . . . Belmodeus came, and he killed them. We didn’t know he was there and . . . all of them.” His words didn’t make any sense. It didn’t matter. “There were no survivors. No one left.” Don’t you see? he wanted to scream. Don’t you see how pointless this all is. You’re fighting for no one anymore, least of all yourselves. Don’t let it come to this. But he knew it would, even as the words left his mouth. “They’re all gone. I’m sorry.” Did he say that last part? He could barely hear his voice. He didn’t know.
         The man stared at him for a long time. Brown thought he had shut down completely, and would just die there, in that position, decomposing into a standing skeleton. Brown braced himself, waiting for an outburst, a denial, anything. But nothing came. The man merely stood there, as if waiting for Brown to heap more misery onto him. I don’t have any more, he told the man. I’m sorry.
         And then the man simply turned around and walked to the door. The only sound was the loose clack of his footsteps. Brown slid forward again, preparing himself for the attack. He hated to take advantage of a man in his state, but he had no choice. And it wasn’t that much of a choice to begin with. He had to get out of here. It had to be done. He could always apologize later.
         Come on, buddy . . .
         His hand on the doorknob, the man said to Brown in a dead voice, without turning around, “Thank you. Because you were so kind as to give your name to us, Joe . . . I am Valreck. I do not think we will see each other again. Good bye.”
         And then he flung the door open and stepped through, leaving it wide open. In that fractional moment he was gone.
         Now! Brown thought, leaping to his feet and racing for the door, his knees protesting the sudden use after being cramped for so long but this was no time to argue with his body. Let him pull a muscle, he could always heal it later. Sometimes regeneration came in handy. Once I get out I can-
         He had taken perhaps five steps when the woman from before stepped out from alongside the doorway, a sinister smile evident on her face.
         Ah crap, Brown had time to think, and then the world wrenched and dissolved into crumbling cubes, falling apart into circles, losing depth and width and height and finally leaving him with absolutely nothing at all.