Light Shaper (28 page)

“What happened?” Barrow asked, his voice softer than usual.

Rigel stopped hugging him quite so tightly and suddenly backed away until he was sitting against the wall. There was a haunted look in his eyes.

“My flatmate, Misha,” he said in a dull monotone. “She’s dead.”

“What…. How?”

“After I got home from the fire, we talked for hours. Then we went to bed. She was okay then, I swear. Then I slept, and it suddenly felt cold….”

Barrow shivered and couldn’t help showing it.

“Anyway, I was just falling asleep when… when I heard… she screamed. I rushed to her room,” he said, his eyes lost somewhere in the distance. “And I saw something move next to her bed, but then I turned on the light, and there was nothing. And Misha…. She was….”

He choked up but managed to control himself this time.

“Did you call the police?” Barrow asked.

“Yes. And her father. They told me to stay—I should have stayed—but…. Steve… Atlas told me something just before the explosion. It showed me horrible events that happened hundreds of years ago on the night of the Cataclysm. It told me the thing that had caused it was loose again and tonight, right before I turned on the lights, I saw it standing over Misha. Please believe me. I’m not insane. It was—”

“A shadow,” Barrow said in a whisper, realizing that his nightmare had been real. “A shadow in the dark.”

He met Rigel’s reddened eyes, and there was horror and understanding shared between them.

RIGEL DIDN’T
know what to say. Seconds ticked by in silence, and the only thing he could do was stare at Steve in shocked horror. He had been afraid Steve would not believe him, that he would kick him out of his apartment. Somehow, this was much worse.

“You’ve seen it?” Rigel asked in a small voice.

The other man nodded, more like a jerk of his head, really. “Just now,” he said gruffly. His eyes darted to the back of the room, where his bed was.

“Before I came in?” Rigel asked. He sniffled.

“Yes.”

Rigel looked around the apartment, half expecting that shadow he had seen to jump out from a corner, but there was nothing there. Besides, that weird feeling he had gotten when he had discovered Misha was not present either. It had been awful then. He’d felt the same cold as before, but it was not physical cold. It was more of a sense of emptiness, of something being horribly wrong with the world.

He closed his eyes, unwillingly flashing back to the image of Misha lying in her bed, the covers bunched up around her. Her eyes had been open, frozen in a rictus of such terror as Rigel had never seen. She had not been breathing, and Rigel had felt no pulse. He should have stayed there, he knew he should have, but all the awful things he had been forced to live through that day had piled up in his mind, and this new crisis had simply been too much. He remembered calling the police and Misha’s father. Then there was nothing in his memory until he stumbled across a working terminal to look up Steve’s address. And now he was here. He wondered vaguely if he was in shock.

“So,” Steve said to him, crossing his hands over his massive chest. “Why did you come?”

Rigel opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. What could he say? That he didn’t have anybody else in the world? That he had hoped Steve would somehow protect him despite the fact Atlas didn’t exist anymore?

He felt suddenly embarrassingly self-conscious. He had barged in and broken down in front of a guy who was basically a complete stranger, with absolutely no idea what he planned to do after that. It didn’t help that Steve was glowering at him with that angry frown, his hair all messy and his face still showing the signs of the fight from earlier. He was probably mad at Rigel’s show of weakness. It occurred for the first time to Rigel that this guy was probably as strong as he looked, maybe because now Steve was shirtless instead of wearing a guard uniform. His powerful muscles defined the contours of his shoulders and arms, and Rigel felt intimidated by him.

He shouldn’t have come.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, trying to get to his feet. “I don’t know why… I just….”

But Steve’s warm hand on his shoulder stopped him. Steve pushed him down gently, back onto the floor. Rigel couldn’t help but remember the way it had felt when Steve had held him while he cried a few minutes earlier. He thought about how good it had felt to feel the weight of Steve’s arms around him, to breathe in his scent of sweat and shampoo.

What is wrong with me?
Rigel thought, bringing his legs up to his chest where he sat to hide the inappropriateness of his sudden reaction. He began to blush, and he was so terrified Steve would notice that it drove the crisis away from his mind for a second. Then Steve called him back down to reality.

“You know what the thing was,” he said slowly, giving Rigel a searching look. “It’s got something to do with the reason why Tanner was after you, why we were kidnapped and taken to CradleCorp. Is that right?”

“Yes,” Rigel admitted. “It’s… kind of complicated.”

“That’s fine. Tell me what you know.”

And so Rigel told him. He recounted everything he knew from the very beginning, everything Atlas had shown him of the shadow that had come hundreds of years ago and was back. He also told him everything Tanner had said, and explained exactly how Rigel had been able to make it out of CradleCorp that second time. Steve had been really surprised when Rigel told him Atlas had self-destructed.

“So Atlas is gone? Just like that?” he said, disbelieving. By then they had spent so long talking that the sun had come out fully, and the morning light fell through the window. It illuminated Steve’s fiery red hair, his intimidating green eyes, and the patch of hair between his sculpted pectoral muscles.

“Yes,” Rigel said, forcing himself to concentrate and stop staring. “But it told me where to go, like I said. I have to reactivate its main Self in the cradle room, up at the ancient military compound of Haven III. I’m not sure I understand it all. I got the idea that Atlas is, like, a part of something bigger, something that is still dormant in the desert. And now I think I don’t have a choice but to go there or find some place to hide. That… thing, that shadow, is after me. I felt it in the apartment, and I felt it as I was coming here. I need to go to the ruins, find some way to reactivate Atlas’s main, um, computer or whatever. Besides, I can’t stay here. Richard Tanner will not let me get away that easily, I don’t think. I had never spoken to him before last night, but the guy is insane. You heard him when he was shouting for anyone who could hear to shoot me, during the fire. I know he’s going to send his assassins after me again. I just have nowhere else to go.”

As he said it, the enormity of what he was admitting finally hit home with Rigel. He truly didn’t have anywhere to go. He could not stay in the city, not if Tanner wanted him dead. The Auroran police force would not keep him safe if only half the rumors of corruption among their ranks were true. He didn’t have that much money or many possessions he could sell. He knew for a fact that he would not be able to afford a ticket to another Haven even if he got the entirety of his savings out of the bank right now. Leaving the city to go live somewhere else close by wasn’t even an option. There was nothing but desert and wastelands for hundreds of kilometers in every direction.

He was trapped. And the shadow was hunting him on top of everything else.

“Hey,” Steve said in a deep voice. “Rigel, man. Snap out of it.”

Rigel looked up into Steve’s green eyes. “Sorry,” he said. He stood up.

Steve stood up also. “What’s the matter?”

“I think I’d better go,” Rigel told him. “The longer I stay here, the more likely it is that I get you in trouble again. I got to do this thing that Atlas told me before it’s too late. I have to leave now.”

He did not add,
Before I chicken out.

Rigel turned and walked to the door. He had opened it and stepped through the threshold when Steve said, “Hey.”

“What?”

Rigel expected some gruff dismissal. Instead, he was surprised to see that Steve looked a little uncomfortable.

“I owe you,” he said. “And you’re probably going to need some help, going out to the desert as you are. For that thing you’re doing.”

Rigel’s eyes opened wide. “I….”

“I mean,” Steve added hastily, “if you want. I’m here because of you, after all. You saved my life last night at CradleCorp, and that’s not something I can forget. You came back for me. You got me out of that fire. If you hadn’t been there, I would have been dead by the time anybody had thought about going looking for me.”

“But Tanner will come after you too,” Rigel protested weakly.

“I thought about that. But he will come for me whether I go with you or not. He’ll send his assassins if only to prevent me from ever helping you again. I have to admit, I was thinking about leaving Aurora for good last night, after you left. I’ve done some things…. Let’s just say I’m in the same boat as you right now.”

“But—”

“Also,” Steve interrupted, “I think you forgot that it came for
me
. This shadow thing, whatever it is. I saw it, Rigel. It came very close to doing… I don’t know. I don’t want to find out. I just know that I don’t want to end up like your friend Misha. You haven’t seen it creep up on you in the night, scaring the living shit out of you and leaving you powerless to do anything. I don’t want what happened last night to happen again.”

“So you’ll… help me?” Rigel said, and he couldn’t help the smile of tentative relief that broke over his face.

“Yeah,” Steve answered, grinning in return. Rigel’s heart skipped a beat at the sight. “Just let me put on some clothes first.”

Rigel waited on a chair while Steve changed. He looked around curiously at the apartment, noticing it was very small and had almost no furniture. It reminded him a lot of the student dorm he had been in when he was still in art school. There were a couple of empty beer cans on the table, rumpled shirts stashed in a corner next to two random dumbbells, an empty box of takeout on the kitchen sink, and an old computer that had seen better days. He tried not to look at Steve as he put on clean clothes, but it was hard not to. It was obvious that Steve was serious about working out, and despite the relative messiness of his place, he was meticulous in his personal hygiene, judging from how long it took him to get ready. Rigel watched him now and then as he shaved, brushed his teeth, and walked around the apartment stashing small things into a gym bag. He was slightly startled when Steve pulled out a gun from under his mattress and put it in the bag.

“You have a gun?” he asked.

“Yeah, and so have you. I hope you know how to use it.”

Rigel had almost forgotten, but Steve was right. The gun he had taken from the security guard back in CradleCorp was hidden under his shirt, tucked under his belt. He wondered how Steve knew, then thought maybe Steve had felt it during the hug.

Steve went to a small minibar in his bathroom and took out not food, but several small bottles with different labels that looked like medicine plus a few disposable needles. He put everything carefully in the bag.

Steve saw him looking.

“Not going to throw them away if I can still use them before they go bad. These things were expensive.”

“What are…?”

Steve flexed his biceps as an answer. The muscles bulged, straining against the T-shirt.

“You can’t get this big without them,” Steve told him. “It’s taken me years.”

“I can tell. You look amazing,” Rigel blurted.

Steve blinked in obvious surprise, and Rigel felt himself getting hot and uncomfortable. He could have kicked himself. Rigel stood up hastily, bumped one of his hand braces on the back of a chair, and yelped at the pain in his wrist. The chair fell loudly to the floor, of course. Rigel was mortified.

He heard Steve chuckle, but he didn’t dare look around to see his expression.

“Come on, Rigel,” he said, walking past him to open the door. “I got what I need, and the sooner we get away from this place the better. Diana Herrera might come looking for us here. Or that other shadow thing, whatever it was. I’d rather get a move on.”

“Sure. Let’s, um, let’s go.”

They left the apartment, and Steve led him not down, as Rigel had supposed, but up. They climbed a few more stories until they were at the very top level of the building. Steve shouldered a heavy door out of the way, and Rigel followed him out onto the roof.

It was beautiful up there. The sun was out, but it was still low enough on the horizon that its rays were crimson and golden, bathing the tops of the buildings in fiery strokes of light. Rigel walked all the way to the edge of the roof, looking down at the winding streets that were already busy with people moving about. To the north he could just about make out the beginning of the desert and the spire of a tall radio tower in the distance. It wasn’t hot yet. This was one of the best times to be out and about in Aurora precisely because it was light enough to see, but it was also the coolest it got during the day.

The sun climbed a bit higher in the sky, its light glinting off thousands of windows. Rigel followed the extent of the urban sprawl with his sight, realizing he wouldn’t be able to live in this city again if Tanner kept on chasing him. For the first time since the beginning of all the craziness, he felt something like loss. He had never known anywhere else but here. He was neither a trader nor a wealthy person, to go on trips to other Havens. He knew about them from school, of course, at least the Havens that had not fallen. They had always been abstractions, though. They were things he knew existed but that he also understood he would never see. Now everything was different. He would have to do what Atlas had told him to do, and then if he survived, he would have to find a way out of the city for good.

“You okay, Rigel?” Steve asked, coming up behind him.

“Yeah,” Rigel answered, still looking out over his city. “I guess.”

“All right, then. What do you want to do first?”