Chapter 117: Saint Enterings
The sub-basement of Saint Halvard’s Auxiliary Care was not on the building’s official floor plan.
It had not been on the plan since nineteen eighty-three, when Aris had built the altered structure on his first job out of engineering school. The corridor down to the chamber was concrete on six sides, lined with lead, sheathed in copper mesh. The walk from the freight elevator to the chamber door was sixty-three meters.
Marcus walked first.
The brother walked second, on his own feet, in a clean white shirt and dark pants and a long coat he had not worn since he was twenty-six. He carried nothing. The piece in his chest pulsed once every four seconds. Caleb could see the pulse through the cotton of the shirt as they walked. He let himself check it for only a second at a time.
The Mimic walked third.
It had come out of Sector Nine at oh-seven-eleven, while the Hacker was in the office on the forty-second floor watching a counter on her central monitor. The counter had not yet hit sixty. The Mimic had stepped through the cell door at oh-seven-fourteen, walked through a containment hallway no one had cleared, and met Marcus at the freight elevator at oh-seven-thirty-two without speaking.
Caleb walked fourth.
The dampener case was in his right hand. The brass inhibitor key was in his left coat pocket. The frequency disc from Aris was clipped to the inside of his collar. He had not eaten since the night before. His silver marks were warm.
Soma, Iseul, Nadiah, and Elara were not in the corridor.
They were above.
The perimeter team had taken positions in a four-point ring around Saint Halvard’s at oh-six-fifty-five. Olamide was on a channel from Lagos. Iris was at the freight elevator with a rifle and an order to seal the elevator on Marcus’s signal. The order would not be given until everyone Marcus wanted out was out.
They stopped at the chamber door.
It was a circular steel door, six feet across, set into the concrete. Caleb’s grandfather had designed it in nineteen sixty-eight, ten years before he had used it for the first time. The mechanism had not been opened since November fourteenth, nineteen ninety, when Marcus had sealed his father’s body inside a refrigeration cabinet on Vesper Street and come down here to confirm that the chamber was still functional and still waiting.
Marcus put the activator on the lock. It engaged, and his attention went to Caleb.
"The key." Caleb gave him the brass inhibitor key.
Marcus turned the activator. The lock clicked open. The activator stayed in place. The activator needed the frequency disc next.
Marcus did not put the frequency disc in. His attention moved from the brother to Caleb to the Mimic.
He said: "I want to say something before the door opens. I want to say it once. I will not say it again. After today I will not have to say it again."
The corridor was silent.
He said:
"I have spent forty-six years preparing for the next twelve minutes. I have been a bad husband and a bad father and a worse brother. I have been a moderately good son. I have been an exceptional architect. I do not regret the architecture. I regret the rest. I am asking the three of you to come into the chamber with me knowing that I am not asking for forgiveness. I am asking for twelve minutes. After the twelve minutes I will be quiet. Whatever happens, I will be quiet. That is what I have left to give you."
The brother put his hand on Marcus’s arm.
He did not say anything.
The Mimic turned its featureless face toward Marcus and inclined its head once.
Caleb said: "Open the door, Dad."
Marcus put the frequency disc into the activator and turned it. The door opened.
The chamber was a circular room thirty feet across.
The walls were lined with the same concrete-lead-copper sandwich as the corridor, three feet thick at the floor and tapering to two feet at the ceiling. The ceiling was a dome. A single channel ran in a spiral up the dome from the center of the floor to the apex.
In the center of the floor was a plinth.
The plinth was the thirteenth plinth.
Twelve of them sat in the vault three sectors away with eleven statues on them and one piece in a containment cell. The thirteenth was here. It was a stone block four feet square, with a shallow basin carved into the top, the basin lined with a metal Caleb’s visor could not identify. Around the basin, twelve small wells were inset into the stone. Each well was a different shape. One was a shape Caleb recognized. It matched the segmented coil he had seen in Sector Nine.
The brother walked to the plinth and stopped at the edge of the basin.
He said: "I’m ready, Father."
Marcus said: "I know, son."
Caleb set the dampener case on the floor beside the chamber door, opened it, and took the dampener into his right hand.
The cylinder was warm now, though it had been cold in the case. The single recessed button glowed faintly under his thumb. He did not press it.
His gaze crossed the chamber to his father.
Marcus had walked to a small console at the far wall. He was preparing the seal. The console had not been touched in thirty-five years. Marcus had built it. Marcus’s father had drafted it. Henry had imagined it in nineteen seventy-seven and not lived to see it.
The Mimic walked to the plinth.
It stood opposite the brother, on the other side of the basin.
It did not speak.
It put its long, jointed hands on the rim of the basin, one on each side. The marks on the underside of its hands lit faint silver.
The chamber door closed behind Caleb.
It closed by itself. The mechanism Caleb’s grandfather had designed decades ago did not need a hand on it from the inside. The lock engaged. The frequency disc held it.
The chamber lights came up.
They were not warm white. They were the cold, even blue of operating-room lights.
The brother took off his coat.
He set it on the floor.
He unbuttoned the shirt.
The piece in his chest pulsed once every four seconds, a circle the size of a coin under the sternum, pale purple at the edges and silver at the center where the carriage layer had reset two days ago.
He climbed onto the plinth.
He lay down in the basin.
The basin was sized for him.
It had been sized for a body like his for forty-six years.
His eyes lifted to the spiral channel in the dome above him.
He said, to the ceiling, to his father, to no one in particular: "Begin."
Marcus began.
The console came alive under his hands.
The Mimic placed its palms flat on the basin’s rim.
Caleb’s silver marks went hot.
The dampener in his hand began to count down. Twelve seconds. The window. He did not know yet when the window would open.
He held the dampener.
He watched his brother on the plinth.
He waited.
