Quicksilver(68)

“His masquerade is well maintained,” she said. “I didn’t see through it until he spouted that crap about what we love being defined by what we hate and how much we hate it.”

“Oh,” I said, somewhat deflated. “I didn’t see him for what he was until we closed the deal and gave the money to Wallace. And then I only got a brief glimpse of his . . . of his hand-tentacle thing. I didn’t know if you’d seen the truth of him. I was trying to get your attention and warn you.”

“Yes, dear,” she said. “I knew that you weren’t just doing an imitation of a man choking on a fish bone.”

“You kept touching Erskine. How could you know what he was and still touch him?”

“At first I wanted to distract him from your meaningful throat clearing. But each touch brought me a vision.”

“You mean a presentiment?”

“No. Little visions, brief but frightfully vivid.”

“Visions of what?”

“I’ll tell you after we’ve loaded this baby.”

On the blacktop lane, she turned right and drove past the Explorer, in which Sparky Rainking waited behind the wheel.

At a back-seat window, in the care of Panthea, Winston watched us drift toward a stop. He looked surprised that we’d survived. For an instant, as our stares locked, I saw myself through his eyes—saw the Mercury Mountaineer, my face pale in the light of the instrument panel—and I felt what he was feeling, the powerful delight and the love of an innocent canine heart. The connection lasted maybe two seconds, but the impact of it left me breathless for half a minute.

Bridget pulled onto the shoulder, stopped, and reversed until the liftgates of the vehicles were aligned.

When I could breathe, I said, “Something just happened. I’m developing your animal psychic-telepathic-whatever thing. I saw myself through Winston’s eyes. I felt what he was feeling.”

“I’ve never seen through an animal’s eyes. You’re ahead of me in that department, Quinn.”

“What next?” I wondered.

“What indeed?”

In the light of the westering moon, the four of us quickly transferred our luggage from the Ford to the Mercury.

If as a child I ever imagined becoming a supernaturally gifted guardian of something or other, I’d never have thought that my powers would be so lame as they turned out to be, nor would I have imagined that I’d spend a significant part of my time dickering for used cars. If the idea was to keep me humble, so I wouldn’t become arrogant like the Rishon of the first universe, it was working.

When we were all aboard our new wheels, with Bridget again in the driver’s seat and Sparky in back with Panthea and the dog, I said, “Are we going to lay a trap for them? Are we going to take down the Nihilim, Erskine? What about Wallace? He’s not a Nihilim. He’s a dork, a pathetic feeb, but he’s also a bad guy.”

“We aren’t taking down either of them. They’ll be too wary. Anyway, we can’t exterminate all the Nihilim in the world. We’re only one of many teams. Isn’t that right, Panthea?”

“So I believe,” said Panthea Ching.

“Besides,” Bridget said, “when I touched Erskine, I saw where we need to go, and we need to go there soon. Things are about to get wild and desperate.”

Before I could ask what our destination might be, Sparky said, “What the hell happened in that stupid damn autonomous zone?”

By the time we explained, we had cruised several miles on the two-lane blacktop and then turned onto a gravel road, which was when I finally asked Bridget where we were going and what she’d seen in her series of quick visions occasioned by touching the Nihilim.

“Tonight, we’re going to ground. Tomorrow . . .” She fell into silence, and in her profile I saw, for the first time, unalloyed fear. The happy warrior who found at least a thread of humor woven through every danger, every horror, could find nothing to make her smile at what waited for us tomorrow, could apparently not even bring herself to speak of our destination.

From the back seat, Panthea Ching said, “It’s a weird place about six miles outside the town of Ajo.”

Bridget looked at the rearview mirror. “You’ve seen it, too?”

“The moment you touched the Nihilim,” Panthea said, “I received a vision of the place we must be tomorrow. He calls it ‘the Oasis.’ He says that the dark waters are holy, that they confer eternal life.”

“He who?” I asked.

“He conceals his true name, calls himself ‘the Light.’ He calls his flock of followers his ‘soul children.’ But they’re neither his flock nor his children in any sense. Some have succumbed to his propaganda, been brainwashed into a condition of pretend happiness. Others live in abject misery. In truth, they are his slaves. This Erskine and Wallace you met, they regularly supply him with drugs—recreational drugs but also pharmaceuticals that he uses to control the soul children.”

Sparky said, “Any guy who calls himself ‘the Light,’ somebody needs to switch him off.”

“And the Oasis is no refuge, no haven,” Panthea said. “Every day in that place is night. His darkness is a reduction of ordinary darkness, a bitter black syrup of hopelessness. Of all the things worth dying for, nothing is more worthy than dying to put an end to the Light and his Oasis. But . . .”