CHAPTER 12

IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST VISIT TO THE REDEEMER’S LAW PROJECT, YOU ARE COMING INTO THE STORY ALREADY IN PROGRESS. YOUR EXPERIENCE HERE WILL BE FAR LESS CONFUSING IF YOU USE THE CHAPTER INDEX ON THE RIGHT TO GO BACK TO THE INTRODUCTION. OR AT LEAST TO THE PROLOGUE.

-- DAN

CHAPTER 12

Later that night Diedra sat on the edge of her bed while her cat, a gray tabby named Elmer, rubbed around her ankles and purred. She watched the cat, but thought of Matt Sinclair.

“All right, Diedra,” she said quietly. “Try to be objective about this.” She attempted a mental list: Matt Sinclair was 1) talented, 2) intelligent, 3) mysterious. His paintings in the gallery had touched her...intimately? Was that the appropriate word? If his social ineptitude in her office actually was caused by shyness—shyness in someone like him, she had trouble believing that—she could begin to find Matt Sinclair enormously appealing.

But he was also a little creepy. No, not creepy, that word made her think of greasy-haired pedophiles. Matt Sinclair was...sinister. She remembered his face in the storm’s lightning.

And the painting, the horrible one he’d replaced with the crystal tree—a tiny sliver of her mind insisted that she’d only imagined that painting, since simple paint on canvas couldn’t do what that painting had done to her.

She remembered an H.P. Lovecraft story she’d read in college, “Pickman’s Model.” The artist, Pickman, had painted pictures of horrible, twisted creatures, pictures that drove anyone who saw them to the edge of insanity, and sometimes over the edge. But there weren’t any horrible creatures in Sinclair’s painting. Not any she could see, anyway. The horror was...inherent? Maybe that was the right word. Maybe saturated would be better.

Diedra shuddered, felt as if she’d been touched by some kind of spectre, as if the painting had been a sort of doorway into a dark, cruel place. As if it had swung wider and wider as she stood there. Could she spend time with a man who’d created such a thing? Could she be exposed to more of it?

And for that matter, painting aside, how had Sinclair not known someone was in the apartment? She’d gone over it and over it, and unless he was the archetypal scatterbrain, he should have realized something wasn’t right when he found the door unlocked. He had to have come in from the outside; he dropped his keys there in the bedroom.

Diedra didn’t believe for a second that Matt Sinclair was scatterbrained.

She suspected that she was missing something obvious, some perfectly sensible explanation for all the weirdness, but she still couldn’t think of what it might be.

She picked up her cat, regarded him seriously and said, “Okay...okay, yeah.” The cat purred. “I’ll go, and I’ll figure out exactly what his story is. I’ll be Lois Lane, investigative reporter.”

The cat meowed, which she figured probably meant, “Please put me down.”

Diedra didn’t feel like Lois Lane. She felt like a scared girl in swiftly rising waters.

# # #

After spending four days with Garrison Vessler, Brenda Jorden was thoroughly sick of him. She’d discovered that, after so long with just Scott and Ned Fields there in the house with her, she’d grown accustomed to the relative isolation. Apart from her professional loathing of Vessler, now he was getting in her way and on her nerves.

Maybe if Scott had gotten more solid results from his nightly scans, Vessler would already be gone by now. But Scott hadn’t, and Vessler—“The Icicle,” some of the group’s members called him—decided to stick around and offer his own brand of misguided fatherly encouragement.

It made her want to retch.

On returning from a necessary trip into town, she opened the front door and found Vessler standing in the kitchen, slicing thin disks off a pepperoni. Over his shoulder he said, “What do you like on your pizza?”

She hesitated, closed her gaping mouth, and said, “Doesn’t matter. Where’d your boys go?”

“I sent them to their hotel. I’ll stay here.”

She closed and locked the door, bit back words. Garrison Vessler, standing in a kitchen in stocking feet, making a pizza, for God’s sake. Ever since he found Scott Charles he’d been on his way down, down and out. She repressed a shudder at the thought of what might happen if Vessler were allowed to remain in his position...or, far worse, to advance in rank.

Jorden slipped off her own shoes and padded down the hallway to Scott’s room, where she opened the door without knocking. He lay on his bed, reading a magazine, and when he saw her his face went a little slack.

The magazine dropped out of his fingers as she sat down on the edge of the bed, and she plucked it off his chest and let it fall to the floor. For a few seconds the air around them filled with a scent, a heavy, musky aroma with an acrid undercurrent. Jorden touched Scott’s neck, and the scent quickly faded. His eyes glazed over completely.

Jorden glanced out the door at the hallway, listened for approaching footsteps, and heard Vessler clanking around in the kitchen still. She wrinkled her nose and turned back to Scott.

“You’re doing very well,” she said. He nodded, trancelike. “Do you remember the rules?” He nodded again. “Say them.”

He barely whispered. “Do what you say to do. Don’t do what you say not to do.”

“Correct. And what else?”

“Keep it our secret.”

“Right. And?”

“Act natural.”

“Very good. Very good. Now, it’s time to forget about this again and just be Scott. Ready?”

Nod.

Scott’s eyes closed, and Jorden got up from the bed and went to the door.

He’d wake up in a few seconds, forget about today’s dose just as he had every other day’s dose, and be his usual neurotic, psychologically crippled self.

She closed Scott’s door, secure that her own red pinpoint would never register on his screen. A few people knew—Stamford, Fields, a handful of others. Those who had to. Aside from them, her own augmentation, as well as the plans she had for its use, were none of the group’s business.



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