was not Big Brother. He was just a bad parent. And the earth was quite used to his kind by that time.
Wyn leaped down the rest of the way. In the second before he landed, he grabbed the two center Sleeper Devils and slammed them into the floor. It cracked beneath his might. Their black blood bespattered his sunglasses. One died instantly. The other exhaled one last word before death. “ Thanks.”
Elsewhere in the Black Building… Lowen the Dark Man had been on the uppermost floor the whole time, watching this scene play out through the eyes of his Sleeper Devils. He could see and hear their thoughts as if they were his own. They always thought about him. His power over them made them do so. The nigh-life of a Sleeper Devil was to always think of Lowen, of doing his will, of loving him – if you could call that love. His power made them think that their nigh-life was perfectly natural. They thought it was unnatural to disobey him. They could not imagine living their nigh-lives without the echo of his voice always inside their heads and penetrating their hearts. He was like that jingle that gets stuck in your head – only his jingle was the torpid twinkling sounds of death always on the horizon, death that never quite dawns.
Lowen the Dark Man was in a room that he had made to be as much like Khariton as possible. Everything was egg-shaped in some way: The desk and the computer, the tables and the chairs and the sofa and television monitors. The only object that was not ovular was the operating table in the middle of the room. It was shaped like a T. Theo was clamped to it with very strong metal bars. He was sweating from suffering pain recently and he was shivering from the cold air. His body lay along the length. His arms were strapped to the sides. Theo looked like the Son of God on the Cross.
Lowen did not know how to make a Blood Vivicanti: He did not know how to do a peripheral blood stem cell transplant. But he did know how to possess a human. For years he had known how to brutally Guantánamo souls.
He had been trying to possess Theo that night. But his usual method was not working. Normally his violet ghost would have issued out from his host body like a mist rising from the skin. After that, his ghost would have enshrouded his next victim like a thick cloud and he would have seeped into their bodies, shoving out their souls. But the body of a Blood Vivicanti was protected somehow – perhaps by the mind, perhaps by some sheer indomitable willpower. Lowen could not shove out Theo’s soul. He could not make room for himself. And he found this both annoying and impressive. That made him even more desirous to possess the body of a Blood Vivicanti. He was like an addict when the pleasure stops and the pain of dependence kicks in.
Lowen had already learned from Theo everything that Wyn had told him about the Red Man: That the Red Man had been scientifically developed on Khariton, that his name was Silent because Kharetie scientists would not give him a voice to add to society, and that he had come to take Lowen’s ghost back to the planet to potentially fix the cracks in the Great Harmony. Lowen laughed at that. He laughed to think of his note of discord being so powerful that it cracked the planet’s once commonplace life. But he also wept that the Great Harmony was now called “the Noise.” He had fond memories of harmonizing with someone else.
Lowen could relate to the Red Man as I could relate to Nell. Those who are misunderstood and ostracized by society usually do feel that peculiar bond of fellowship.
But the Dark Man felt no bond with Theo whatsoever. In fact, he already considered Theo to be his private property. The Red Man’s blood – Kharetie blood – was flowing through Theo’s veins. And who else should have Kharetie blood but a ghost from