Quicksilver(88)

I was a champion of the law (aluf shel halakha), a guardian of the natural law (Legis naturalis propugnator). I had never asked to fill the terrible role of a scourge. But I couldn’t simply unpin a badge from my shirt and walk away, for it was pinned to my heart. With no concern that the sound would travel far in this solid and well-insulated structure, I shot Bodie Emmerich three times. The bullets did even to him what bullets do to anyone.





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In the circular vestibule with the gold-leafed sapphire-inlaid ceiling and the cunning crystal walls, fractured light shaped us with prisms and graced our skin with rainbows.

Panthea bypassed the fingerprint scanner and put her hand flat on the door to the quarters where the Special Selections were kept. The electronic lock released and the door came open.

A corridor, less grand than those through which we’d made our way before, served twelve small suites, each with a stout door and an electronic lock. Here we discovered that Bridget and I could now fling them wide, as Panthea had done, with no need to say open sesame.

Our talents were maturing so that we might fulfill the task that had been set before us. I was excited but also apprehensive, because there would be no way back to the Quinn I had been when we fully became what we were becoming.

Now that Annie Piper was dead, there were six women and three men in these rooms. At first they came forth with trepidation, sure that they were being called to the suites of visitors whose desires might include inflicting humiliation or physical pain. On standby prior to the fall of night, they were disciplined to be ready to be used by visitors or Bodie Emmerich, perhaps by the merciless live-in physicians who practiced medicine in this place, and by others. They were all dressed demurely and in white, the better to project the purity and the innocence that especially inflamed those who traveled to this remote sink of corruption to abuse them.

As Emmerich had promised, they were preternaturally beautiful, though not in a bold, salacious sense. Ethereal. Elegant. None was unnaturally thin or frail, but each nonetheless seemed delicate, breakable. Their eyes were wells of sorrow, yet also bright with intelligence and challenge. When we threw open the doors to their rooms, they didn’t immediately understand our intentions, could only assume that we meant to be their absolute masters. And yet they neither bowed their heads submissively nor gave us the satisfaction of evident fear, which would have been wanted by those they were accustomed to serving.

They appeared haunted, as well they might, but they were of the type who, across this troubled world and throughout time, had the character to endure, to survive the reeducation and hard-labor camps where so many others perished, and in time to stand before a court and testify against those who had enslaved and tortured them. They were of that character in spite of the beauty that could have eased them through the world, and they would have possessed it if they had not been beautiful. If we hadn’t come along, Bodie Emmerich would eventually have learned, to his surprise, that one of these—whom he thought had been born to be emotionally broken again and again for the pleasure of others—would prove not to have been broken at all, and would have found the perfect moment to break him as thoroughly as I had done with three bullets.

As they were released from their cells one by one, they became quietly excited by the prospect of freedom. However, they were too smart and too battered by experience to let down their guard or even to share words of encouragement with one another. The Way had been a path of fire and broken glass for them, and they might expect the way out to be no less gruesome.

While we freed them and counseled them as to the manner and route by which we’d be leaving, I wondered how many Nihilim thrived in the Oasis, where they were, and when they might attack. If they did indeed sometimes eat human hearts for the taste and symbolism of that repast, they would seek a salad, an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert from Sparky, Panthea, Bridget, and me.

I thought the only terrible surprise remaining would involve those Nihilim. Wrong. When Panthea opened the final suite in that corridor and freed the last woman, my heart felt painfully bitten when I recognized Keiko Ishiguro—that sweet, shy, slip of a girl with lustrous ink-black eyes—who had cared so tenderly for Rafael, the orphanage dog, after Annie Piper went away to college and to her abduction.

Later, I would learn that Keiko’s cousin Ichiro Sugimura, her only living relative, had not been her relative at all or anything else he claimed to be. Soon after she moved to Austin and found a job there to be close to the only family she had, Ichiro introduced her to Malik Maimon, who courted her and proposed marriage. He was as much a fraud as Ichiro. Before the wedding could occur, Keiko awakened to find that she was locked in the Oasis. Thereafter she was schooled by Bodie Emmerich to satisfy his more extreme desires and subsequently those of the most eminent and depraved visitors.

When she saw me in that hallway, she came into my arms, and we hugged each other fiercely. With a sob of grief but allowing herself no tears, she said, “Annie,” and I said, “Yes, I know.”

She was no less astonished by the sight of me than I was to find her in that hateful place. I’d thought that Annie’s subjugation to the predator Emmerich must be coincidence. But no. Two girls from Mater Misericordi? condemned to this living hell couldn’t merely be attributed to the Fates indulging in a sick and dirty joke. If human treachery wasn’t to blame, then the Nihilim were. The orphanage that had been a haven for some had been a stalking ground for others.