Chapter 44

The idea of Priya working with Vaughn made a certain amount of sense. One of Vaughn’s early claims was that he would use brain implants and electrical nerve stimulators to give the paralyzed the ability to walk again.

Under that scenario, Kurt could imagine Priya meeting up with Vaughn, working with him, helping develop the science that was needed to make such a leap. But getting involved in cloning, being part of the kind of experiments that were being run, that would be the red line for her. It would mean a break with Vaughn.

Kurt guessed she never got the chance. Either Vaughn had forced her to stay, or she’d chosen to hang around willingly, playing her part, pretending to help Vaughn while acting like the agent of resistance within his organization. But if he understood what Kai had just said, she was in deeper than he could imagine.

“She’s with TAU,” Kurt said. “Connected to the machine?”

“She’s part of TAU,” Kai said. “They’re one and the same.”

Knowing what he knew of Vaughn’s desire to merge with a machine, Kurt accepted the idea of Priya’s merging or being imprisoned with TAU. He couldn’t imagine how it had happened, or what it looked like, but in some ways it didn’t matter. Whatever the path had been, this is where it led.

Kurt focused on Kai. “She communicates with you?”

“The Gray Witch can speak to all of us,” Kai said.

“Can you ask her questions?”

“There are few words,” Kai said. “Mostly just feelings. Words can be listened to, but TAU does not understand feelings except for pain and fear.”

Kurt felt a sense of rage building toward Vaughn that was unlike anything he normally experienced. Usually cold and logical, he was fighting a nearly uncontrollable desire to punish Vaughn. Not just to stop him from whatever madness he was trying to bring about, but to exact a measure of vengeance on him for what he had done to Priya and the pain he and his machine seemed to enjoy causing.

He put the feeling away, compartmentalizing it, saving it for some other more useful time.

Kurt couldn’t imagine how Priya was reaching the outside world without the machine she was linked to knowing it, but the more complex a machine was, the more avenues he assumed would exist.

He turned to the drawings of purple, blue, and black, with their white chalk skeletons and the lopsided asterisk.

“Priya put these images into your mind, didn’t she?”

“Dreams of the Gray Witch,” Kai said, as if the Gray Witch and Priya were not the same person. “She shows us the truth.”

Kurt pointed to the first drawing. The men coming out of the mouth-like cave. “Who are these people?”

“The children of TAU. The brothers.”

He pointed to the skeletons in the next panel. “And the dead?”

“Those of your kind. Outsiders. Others.”

“Why are the ‘others’ dead?”

“To make way for the Children of TAU.”

The dream began to sound like a nightmare. “And how do they all die?”

She pointed to the mist. “The flying things. They bring the end of your kind.” She pointed to the pictures. “The sea boils and the clawed wings emerge. They block out the sun. After that, fighting begins. Fires and smoke. What you call ‘sit-tees’ are empty. Everything is empty. There are no more people. Only TAU.”

Kurt took a closer look at the third panel. The scratch marks that he’d assumed to be rain, or mist, or dust, were actually thousands of painstakingly etched little daggers, tiny marks with a longer body and a short crossing stroke. Flying things. Like the insects the crew of the Isabella had found.

“Do the flying things eat the grass and the trees?” Kurt asked, realizing terms like “farms” and “crops” would mean nothing to her.

“They eat everything,” she said. “And they bring…” She struggled again, reaching into her mind for a word that Priya had conjured for her, but was meaningless other than the phonetic sound. “They bring the vy-russ.”

“Virus.”

“Vi-rus,” she repeated, nodding. “And the people are no more.”