Alexander's Army

  But that soon changed. The elevator went down one floor and stopped. The side wall slid away, revealing a bean-shaped transport pod lit by a faint blue light. Mulrooney pointed to the only seat.

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll be in the pod behind. Put your bag inside the scanner at the front.”

  “It’s just sandwiches and a pair of underpants.”

  “Both potentially dangerous,” he quipped. “This thing moves fast. You might feel nauseated, but it’s no worse than a bumpy subway ride. Get comfortable before the door seal closes. Once it does, you won’t be able to move. The pressure in the pod will clamp you in position. Most people prefer to lean back. Don’t be afraid. It’s perfectly safe. You’ll be released when we reach our destination.”

  “Where are we going?”

  He glanced at my book and smiled. “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Get in.”

  I’d always wondered what a bobsled ride would be like. And now I knew. The door seal closed with a comforting beep. The blue light dimmed. Three spots on a console lit up in sequence, and the pod began to move. It gathered speed rapidly, squirting along a narrow tube without ever grinding against the walls. I had no idea what was propelling us. And all I could see of the way ahead was the faint reflection of my anxious face. We were banking and descending, that much I knew, but we could have been going anywhere.

  After a stomach-tugging two-minute journey, my body jarred and we began to slow down. The pod came to a halt by a silver platform. The door beeped and opened like a rolltop desk. I grabbed my bag and climbed out. Mom would have been pleased to know that her cheese and pickle sandwiches were still intact.

  Mulrooney’s pod pulled in behind mine. “Okay?”

  Just about. I nodded.

  “It gets easier the more you do it.” He stepped across the platform to a set of closed doors. He laid his hand on a screen and the doors slid open. Beyond them was what looked like the concourse of a modern subway station, with escalators running in different directions.

  “How deep underground are we?”

  “We’re not underground,” he said. “We’re underwater.”

  So he hadn’t been lying about the book. “Is this a submarine, then?” We walked into the heart of the concourse. A couple of nerdy types came past us. They were wearing pale orange uniforms with the rearing black unicorn patched onto the arm. They glanced at me but didn’t speak.

  “Techies from level two,” said Mulrooney. “UNICORNE employs a lot of them. They keep mostly to themselves and their computers.” He led me onto one of the escalators. “To answer your question. No, it’s not a sub — but it is a submerged craft.”

  Craft. My heart banged against my ribs. Back in my room, I had a notebook that had once belonged to Freya. In it was a drawing of something out at sea. A mysterious craft that I’d never identified and never had the chance to talk to her about. Was I standing in it now, riding an escalator? I looked up at the high-domed ceiling lights arranged to resemble a spiraling shell. How could something as huge as this be submerged in the ocean and not collapse under the pressure of the water? “Is this alien technology?” I asked. A young woman on a stairway going down turned her head.

  Mulrooney laughed again. He raised the hand that held the book and flattened it against the middle of my chest. “You read too much. This way.”

  We were on the next level by now, heading toward a row of circular elevators. Like the pod, each was lit by a faint blue light. “Step inside,” said Mulrooney, choosing one for us. “It’s voice-activated.”

  I shuffled in, holding tight to my bag.

  The elevator said, State your endpoint.

  “Level five,” Mulrooney answered, stepping in beside me.

  The lighting in the car turned green.

  Passenger one. Retinal identification required.

  “It means you,” Mulrooney said. “Look into the camera.” He pointed at a small eye above the door. “It’s going to scan you. Try not to flinch.”

  A bright light zapped my eyes, making the back of my head feel warm.

  Confirmed, said the elevator. The door swished shut.

  “How?” I said. “How does it know me?”

  “Klimt, I’m guessing. Last time you were here.”

  So it wasn’t just the tattoo on my ankle. They had retinal images and who knew what else? A flare of light passed down the car’s wall. I touched my hand to it, half expecting a shock. “Why aren’t we moving?”

  “We are,” Mulrooney said. “We change floors every time the light pulses. This thing lifts and revolves simultaneously. There’s some kind of motion-dampening software built into it — so newbies like you don’t throw up everywhere.”

  The door opened and the car turned blue again.

  “This is where we part company, Michael.”

  The elevator had brought us to a brightly lit corridor, at the end of which was a sturdy wooden door. Carved into the door at about my head height was the rearing unicorn.

  “We call this the kennel.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the Bulldog that lives in there.” He gestured at the door. “Think of this as a privilege. Not many get invited to level five.” He patted my shoulder to encourage me out. “Remember, he bites. Be polite. Good luck.”

  With that, the elevator door closed and Mulrooney was gone. At the same time, the wooden door clicked open. I moved down the corridor and spoke through the crack. “Hello?”

  “Come in, Michael,” said a voice as deep as an orchestra pit. A well-educated voice, what Mom would call old-school English. The voice of the man I’d seen giving orders in the lab. I gripped my bag strap to stop my hand from shaking, remembering a game Dad used to play with me and Josie when we were young. A tag game in which we had to run from one end of the garden to the other without being caught by Dad, “the bulldog.” British bulldog, one, two, three. That’s what he’d say to start the game. I found myself saying it in a whisper now.

  British bulldog. One, two, three …

  I took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

  The size of the room took me by surprise. It was rectangular and absurdly long, with a shining marble floor and the kind of decorative ceiling work I’d only ever seen in pictures of stately homes. Three enormous chandeliers filled the space with sparkling light. The Bulldog was sitting behind a large oak table that had dimensions matching the shape of the room. There were no chairs on either side of him and only one opposite him. His head was bent over a folder of notes. He was writing in generous fountain-pen strokes. The backs of his hands were dark with hair, but the hairs of his head were silvery gray, matching the coal-gray fabric of his suit. There was a telephone on the table and an hourglass, weirdly. A green onyx ashtray added a dash of color. Three cigar stubs stood in the tray like chicks in a nest. There were no windows, but on the wall behind him were four huge panels of different colors, each painted with a stylized unicorn head.

  “Sit down,” he said without looking up. A voice that carried Class A confidence. Someone used to dirty work, sorting things out.

  “Why am I here?”

  “You’re a UNICORNE agent. I control you, Michael.”

  “I thought Klimt —?”

  “Klimt takes orders from me. Everyone takes orders from me.”

  He raised his head. Now I could see why they called him the Bulldog. He was fat in the face, with flabby jowls of flesh all around his mouth. Deep inside the crumpled layers of his skin were gray eyes shielded by a pair of bushy eyebrows. The corner of his left eye was slightly wet. He dabbed it with a handkerchief while I was looking. He reminded me of a Wild West gunslinger. If this were a cowboy movie, he’d be the one with the pistol hidden underneath the table. It scared me to think that despite his age — sixty, maybe — he’d be quicker on the draw than me.

  He lowered his head and went back to his notes. “We need to talk about your loyalty,” he said, oiling the words with a touch of spite. “I unde
rstand from Klimt that you breached our trust. Spoke out about UNICORNE. That he’s had to bring you in.”

  So that’s what this was. A dressing-down. “I was scared, because of what my reality shift did to Freya.” I could feel my toes curling into my socks. The Bulldog had taken his first bite out of me.

  He continued to scratch away at his notes. Pinned to one corner of the sheet was a photograph. It looked like it might be a school shot of Freya. “Klimt explained the risks when he recruited you. He tells me you were more than keen to join us.”

  “He confused me. He said he knew about my father.”

  “You think he misled you?”

  I folded my arms. The gravelly authority in his voice made me want to wrap up as tight as I could. My shoulders felt like they’d been winched up by a crane. “Klimt says a lot of things that don’t make sense.”

  He opened a drawer and took out an ink pad and a rubber stamp. Despite the futuristic surroundings, some things, it seemed, could not be improved upon. “Look around you, Michael. What do you see? This is not an amateur organization that passes whispers in smoke-filled alleyways.”

  “What are you, then?”

  He funneled a breath through his bulbous nose. I gulped, thinking I’d overstepped the mark. But no reprimand came. Instead, he reached forward and upturned the hourglass. Orange-colored sand began to drain through the neck. “You’re not the first to want answers,” he said. “Your father was particularly inquisitive. Ask what you like while the sand is falling. But bear in mind what you already know: UNICORNE is a clandestine body. By its nature, some things cannot be revealed. When the timer is done, we will test your loyalty.”

  “How? What are you going to do?” I looked over both shoulders, wary that someone might be approaching with a loaded syringe — or worse. At the far end of the room was another door. Maybe, if I needed to, I could escape via that.

  “The timer runs for exactly three minutes.”

  And we had to be twenty seconds in already. Dry-mouthed, I asked, “Is it true about Dad? Really true?”

  He sat back in his chair, a look of disappointment wearying his eyes. He dabbed at the wet one again. “Your father went to New Mexico to investigate claims of a discovery of dragon DNA, yes.”

  “Even though dragons don’t exist?”

  “Nor do ghosts, in most people’s minds. Yet you have convincingly demonstrated otherwise.” He laced his fingers the way Klimt often did. “You’re wasting sand, Michael. Klimt has told you what we know. For all intents and purposes, Thomas disappeared three years ago. If we train you to control your shifts, we might have a means of locating him, though nothing, of course, is certain.” He opened the box containing the ink pad. “I hear you’re competent in the art of flecking. If you don’t believe me, read my eyes.”

  I was ahead of him there. One thing I’d inherited from Dad was the ability to detect when people were lying by seeing minute changes of color in their eyes. Gold flecks were a positive sign; green or red usually meant they were hiding something. So far, the Bulldog had told the truth. All gold.

  “What does UNICORNE do? And I don’t mean ghost hunts and other stuff. What’s your real purpose? Why do you recruit Talens like me and Mulrooney?”

  He drew back his jacket cuff and picked up the stamp. Silently, he pressed the mold into the ink. Sand fell. Valuable seconds ticked by. No reply was coming. Wrong line of questioning.

  I sighed and tried again. “This thing. This craft. Where did it come from?”

  More silence. He lifted the stamp.

  “Can it fly?”

  “Underwater?” He licked his thumb and lifted a corner of the notes.

  “You know what I mean. Can it move?”

  “Yes.”

  I chewed my lip. “Was it on the surface the night that Rafferty Nolan died?”

  Rafferty Nolan was a girl I’d investigated previously. Just before she’d died in a tragic accident, she had seen what appeared to be a craft off the coast of Berry Head, the same craft Freya had drawn in her notebook. This craft, I was guessing.

  The Bulldog looked me dead in the eye. “People see many strange things at sea.”

  Evasive. Again. But still flecking gold. I changed my approach. “Last time I was here, you were doing an experiment, trying to get me to contact Dad’s … consciousness or something. I was in a pod of fluid. Why didn’t I drown?”

  This time, he gave a reasonable answer. “If you could cast your mind back to the earliest days of your birth, you would know that you spent many weeks immersed in a sac of fluid, not unlike what you experienced in the pod. You were suspended in a mixture of electrolytes and other vital substances designed to aid neural transference.”

  “Neural what?”

  He looked at the timer as if to say, How long have you got?

  Not long. The sand was diminishing fast. “There were creatures, like small octopuses, swimming in the fluid. Klimt knows I saw them. You can’t deny it.”

  “Is this a question or an observation, Michael?”

  “A question. Stop stalling.”

  He looked at me harshly. “Impertinence will only cost you time. Your father was an expert in knowing what to ask and when to ask it. That is one characteristic you have sadly not inherited from him.” He lifted the top two sheets of paper, stamped the third, and let the second fall back. “The creatures are called Mleptra.”

  “Are they alien?”

  His hand went back to the pad.

  I said more urgently, “They were repairing Klimt. I saw wires in his head. I know I didn’t imagine it. He’s not human, is he?”

  He stamped the second sheet. “Klimt is a masterpiece of engineering. He is built, primarily, from a substance called graphene, a compound with many remarkable properties, including the ability to conduct electricity at speeds far in excess of any silicon-based product. Klimt’s mode of calculation is beyond the scope of common understanding. He is unlike anything on this planet. Comparing his mind to ours would be like comparing Einstein’s to a gnat’s. He is more than human.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  He glanced at the timer again. Almost done.

  “You can’t give a machine feelings,” I argued. And yet I’d seen it in the hallway at home when Klimt had glanced at The Tree of Life painting. How had they made him register sorrow? Wasn’t that what made us different from androids? We had emotions; they didn’t?

  The Bulldog went to the ink pad for a final time.

  And there was something else that didn’t add up. In the lab, Klimt had also been immersed in a pod of fluid hooked up to mine, communicating with me throughout the experiment. And yet I’d seen the Mleptra repairing him. How could a machine that was smarter than Einstein blow a circuit just by talking to me? How could I “break” a supercomputer? I looked at the timer. The final wedge of sand was about to fall. Too rushed now to know how to phrase the right questions, I put Klimt to the back of my mind and said, “Is that a file on Freya?” I didn’t dare lean over the desk, but I was sure it was a photograph of her.

  He pressed the stamp to the pad with a little more weight. “You’re a talented boy, Michael, but a dangerous one. Your latest reality shift has upset the natural order of things. You’ve stirred up the pond. The silt of the universe is rising to the surface. UNICORNE will need to set things straight.” He stamped the top sheet. This time I saw the result. The standard UNICORNE symbol with a word underneath it: MAUVE.

  “Is that why you had her killed — to set things straight?”

  He sat back, tapping his thumbs together. The sand had run through the timer.

  “I did not have Freya killed. I had her immobilized.”

  “What?”

  He reached to one side of the desk and pressed a button. The red panel to his left divided at its center and slid apart, revealing a tank of amber-colored fluid. Many years ago, Dad had taken the family to SeaWorld, where we’d watched sharks and seals and other marine creatures swimming about b
ehind glass like this. But there were no familiar marine creatures here, just Freya, floating in an upright position, attended by a host of hardworking Mleptra.

  “That’s impossible,” I gasped, not for the first time that day.

  The Bulldog leaned down and pressed another button.

  A stream of bubbles erupted from Freya’s mouth. Her arms jerked from the shoulders to the wrists. Moments later, her eyes blinked open.

  Dark brown eyes. Clear eyes.

  Human.

  Pushing my chair aside, I ran around the table and pressed my hands flat against the wall of the tank. It was slightly warm and not made of glass, more like a thick computer screen or membrane. Freya, I mouthed, fogging the surface. “Can she see me?”

  “No,” said the Bulldog. He screwed the top onto his fountain pen and put it away in his jacket pocket. “The girl is in an artificial state of consciousness, controlled by the Mleptra. They are monitoring her brain activity and other physiological signs. Don’t raise your hopes, Michael. She’s deeply unstable.”

  Even as he spoke, I watched Freya grow a set of feathers along one arm. Three Mleptra immediately clamped her head. One, I noticed, changed color near her heart. A whole bunch of them lined up along her arm. Although they resembled an octopus in shape (six tentacles, not eight, I now noticed, and two much smaller “feeler” fingers), they moved more like crabs, sometimes scuttling, most often gliding across the surface of her skin. They reminded me a bit of the toe-nibbling fish that Ryan and I had seen once in town. For a few weeks before it shut down, a store had opened in a corner of the mall, advertising something called fish pedicures. One Saturday morning, we’d stood outside its window, watching people put their feet into tanks full of tiny skin-biting fish. I thought it was gross and was relieved when Ryan got us busted for sticking a pair of fake teeth into his mouth and doing a piranha impression. But the Mleptra weren’t chewing Freya’s toes. They seemed to be making little pinpricks in her skin with the spikes that protruded from the ends of their tentacles. Whatever they were, these things, they were helping her. The feathers receded.