Chapter 23 — The Witness.131 #2
I do not know how long. Long enough to get past panic and out the other side into something flat and useless.
Long enough to do the math I had been avoiding, which was that the only person on this island who knew where I was had built the man on the wall, and the only person who would have looked for me thought I was on a boat being free, and that the documentary of my life was going to be very short and shot entirely by the people taping my mouth.
And then the door opened, and Don walked in, and my heart went all the way down through the floor.
Because Don had the smile on. The wrong one, the empty one, the all-the-way-to-the-teeth-and-nowhere-near-the-eyes one I had watched them install at the talent show.
“Pleasant tides,” he said to the two minders, soft and warm. “I asked if I could sit with him a while. I’ve been where he is. It helped me, in the worst of it, having someone who’d been down there too just be near.”
One of them hesitated. “The Keeper said nobody talks to him.”
“I won’t say a word. I’ll just be with him.” Don’s voice was all glass and patience. “So he knows somebody chose to come.”
And the minders let him by, because it was exactly the kind of thing the place ran on, the saved coming back to sit with the drowning.
They had taken Don too. The last clear-eyed man on the island, the one whose eyes had stayed his own through all of it, sent in glassy and gentle to sit over me while they fixed whatever I was, and I lay on the floor with my mouth taped and had nothing left.
He crossed the room. He crouched down in front of me. He looked at me with that terrible tenderness.
And then his face changed, all at once, the glass sliding off it, and the man underneath was dry as a bone and wide awake and furious in a cold contained way I had only ever seen one other place, which was the mirror.
“You,” Don breathed, barely a sound, the two minders still murmuring to each other across the room, “are the worst undercover asset I have ever had the misfortune to recruit. I told you to bring me what was off. I did not tell you to walk into the engine room.”
He got the tape off my mouth in one motion, a hand cupped to muffle the sound of it.
“Don.” My voice came out wrecked. “You’re.”
“Faking. Yes. Keep your voice down or I’ll put the tape back.
” He had a little folding tool out and was working at the zip tie on my wrists, fast, his back to the minders, his shoulders doing the relaxed glassy thing while his hands did something else entirely.
“A week of tap-dancing for those vultures. Do you have any idea what that costs a man with a spine? I told you home would keep. That was me telling you to hold on, you absolute potato.”
It all landed at once, the flicker I’d filed and forgotten, home’s still there, it’ll keep, and I felt like the slowest man alive.
“They processed you,” I said.
“They tried. I let them think it took. It’s the only thing on this island worth more than a passport, looking processed.
” The wrist tie gave. He started on my ankles.
“I’ve got eleven days of recordings, a list of names that stopped going home, and a publisher who thinks I’m in Portugal.
What I did not have, until about ninety seconds ago when one of the faithful told me where they’d stashed the morning’s idiot, was the room.
The actual room. And there it is. The whole thing. No one’s ever gotten in here.”
He glanced up at the wall of half-built Caspian, and something in his journalist’s face went briefly, hungrily alight.
The minders had noticed us by now, the murmur changing key.
“Don?” one of them said, uncertain. “Is the Keeper alright with this?”
“Change of plan.” Don stood, and the glassy warmth poured back over him so completely that the man vanished and the convert was all that was left, and he walked toward the two of them with his arms a little open and his voice gone soft.
“She wants you both up at the broadcast, it’s all hands, I’ll sit with him. ”
For a second it almost worked. One of them turned half for the door, already easing into the relief of a simpler evening.
But the other one didn’t move. He looked at Don, and then at me, loose on the floor where a bound man should have been, and something behind his soft face did the math and didn’t care for the answer.
He shook his head, slow, and leaned to murmur something to his partner.
So Don stopped waiting.
He took the nearer one by the collar and put him on the floor, brisk and certain, a man who had plainly been a good many things before he was a convert.
The other turned to me, and I understood that I was, apparently, in this.
I would like to report that I moved like a man in a film.
I had been zip-tied on concrete for the better part of an hour and my legs had gone somewhere without me, so what I actually did was lunge, mostly downward, and get my arms around his middle, and we went over into a bank of cable together in a heap.
He could have flattened me. I could not have stopped him.
But he was a soft-faced man who had come to this island to heal, and the moment we landed he went limp under me and started to beg.
“Please,” he said. “Please, please stop. Don’t.”
All the tide-calm gone out of him in a blink, no serenity left at all, just a soft scared man on the floor pleading with me not to hurt him. I wasn’t going to. I couldn’t have, in the state I was in. He begged anyway.
That was the whole of my heroics. Don tore the duct tape off the roll they’d used on my mouth, and we bound the two of them at the wrists, which they allowed, because of course they did.
He was already turning to the rack, to the machine, his eyes running the stacks the way mine ran a room for the light.
“Right,” he said. “I need whatever they keep the surveillance on and I need it in the next four minutes, because the second I’m not babysitting you the Keeper’s going to wonder why, and I would like to be a rumor by then.”
This was the one thing in that room I actually understood.
Not the render farm. The storage. I had spent two years of my life pulling footage off drives in editing bays, and there is a particular kind of box, squat and ugly and humming, that exists to hold an ocean of recorded hours, and there were three of them racked at the end, seafoam-labeled, because of course they were, because the app that ate my texts and counted Mom’s likes and locked her out of her own face had been recording all of it, all of us, every aligned soul, the whole time.
The surveillance that had caged the island, sitting in a box.
I did not have time to take the box. I took the drives out of it, three of them, palm-sized and warm, and put them in my pockets where my passport was, the way you’d pocket the only two things in a burning house worth a damn, and Don watched me do it with open approval.
“Nice work,” he said. “Mind sending me the footage on those?”
“We’ll collaborate.”
And then we were at the door, and he had it open a crack, and the daylight came in white and ordinary, and out past it was the covered walk and the kitchens and the path down to the dock where a boat I could still, even now, get on was waiting to take a free man back to his life.
Don had a hand flat on my chest, holding us in the gap, reading the walk.
“Clear in ten seconds,” he murmured. “We go left, we go quick, we go separate at the kitchens. You make the dock and you do not stop. And whatever happens between here and the water, you keep those drives dry. Everything those people did to everyone is on there, real and provable, the whole book and every last body, and it is worth precisely nothing soaked and salty. Keep it dry, get it off this rock, and that’s the whole job, Sean. Go home.”
Two people had told me to go home in two days, and both of them had been right, and I stood in the cracked-open door of the room where they kept their fake god with the proof of everything in my pocket and the exit ten clear seconds away, and I thought about my mother.
Not the cult. Not the grift, not the names that stopped going home, not the documentary that was suddenly, impossibly, sitting in my trousers.
Her. Just her, who in about eight hours was going to be stood up in the light in front of the whole basin and a camera pointed at every stranger she had ever measured herself against, and paraded, and broadcast, the cult’s prize, the proof that it worked, and who thought I was already gone.
“No,” I said.
Don closed his eyes for one second, the specific weariness of a man who has watched a plan get a conscience.
“Sean.”
“They’re putting my... uh, Solena, on live tonight.
The whole world’s going to be watching her at the exact moment I can prove the whole world’s a lie.
” I was already stepping back from the door, the drives warm against my leg.
“I’m not taking the proof home, Don. They’re putting her in front of the whole world tonight, and it’s the only chance I’ll ever get to make her see what’s under all of it. Even if she never forgives me for it.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Out past the door, somewhere down the bright walk, a voice was calling the cohort to gather, the broadcast pulling the whole island toward the deck like a drain.
“That is a much worse plan than the one where you go home.” Don’s mouth did something that was almost, against everything, proud. “What do you need?”