to take in the humid, salty air, exposed muscle contorting.
Seelie had her Monopoly token in her hands. Her fingers glided over the tarnished metal race car, her gaze looking, looking away, checking again and again.
“This isn’t happening,” she whispered. “This is a nightmare.”
Sahni’s discarded, eyeless face made a liquid splat on the wet tile floor. He had shucked his skin to the waist now, like a pair of unbuttoned overalls. His flaccid cock slid down his hips, baring sexless muscle and bone beneath. Etchings adorned his bones. In every exposed spot, along his femurs and his collarbone and the curves of his ribs, a scrimshaw needle had drilled jagged Germanic runes into the ivory like dark tattoos.
“Oh,” he said in a familiar voice. “It is most certainly happening, Ms. Barron. You should have gone home when you were given the chance. Now we are much too late for anything but regrets.”
Nell knew him, even without a face. His lean and tall frame, his careful enunciation and his crisp accent.
Jai Sahni and Dieter Rime were the same man. No. Rime was the man. Sahni was a suit made of human skin.
When he was a security guard working for the competition, Nell thought, her mind racing, feverish, he didn’t go to work for Leda Swan. Rime murdered him. Skinned him. Wore him as a disguise to pull off the theft.
Rime reached down and peeled one of Sahni’s feet off. Then the other. He circled the chamber, slow, smiling, and now he left smears of scarlet in his wake. He paused beside one of the carefully hung bodies. Amber’s. He took her hand, his lidless eyes fixed on Seelie, and lifted the fold of Amber’s arm to touch his throat.
Then he spoke, breathless, in a perfect imitation of Amber’s voice.
“He has a gun, Seelie. He killed Ducky and Dee right in front of me. He’s crazy!”
Seelie shook her head, stumbling backward toward the open door. “No. No.”
He let the arm fall, dangling limp, and replied in his own voice.
“It is so easy to lure someone in,” he explained, “when they believe they’re meeting a trusted friend. My favored method, really. If Ms. Bluth hadn’t interfered, I would have taken you with ease.”
“What are you?” Tyler whispered.
“A soldier,” he said. “I am a veteran of the battles no one remembers. I have fought for nations long fallen, under flags you’ve never seen. I have fought under stars you’ve never seen.”
His eyes swiveled in their glistening sockets, studying Tyler for a moment.
“You, I’ll keep. I don’t have any men of color in my collection these days. It’s a practical consideration—I prefer skins that will make me less visible to the authorities, not draw attention—but what’s the fun of a wardrobe without variety?”
His exposed tendons stretched as he turned to regard Nell.
“You, I’m ambivalent on. As for Ms. Barron, your pelt will be put to good use. Namely, to keep your father pacified and thinking all is well, until the final contracts are signed and we have his money in hand. I’ve already been practicing your voice.”
Frozen in the grip of terror, all Nell had was her instinct. Her core drive, the one thing worth more than her own life: get the story.
“What’s it all for?” she said. “We know what the Loom does. The data it harvests could earn billions. Instead, you’re using it to hunt for spies and lucid dreamers. Why?”
“Over two centuries ago, Ms. Bluth, the father of your nation called upon a power he did not understand and could not control. My current employer was brought in by the opposing party, to set matters right and shift the odds in their favor. An ongoing process but, thanks to the Loom, one we’ll finally resolve in short order.”
“What’s in the grave? The one you’re trying to dig up.”
He walked as he answered her, sidestepping around the chamber, graceful without his skin.
“Have you heard the maxim that he who controls the past controls the future?”
“Sure,” Nell said.
“It’s true. Speaking of truths, I have good news and bad news.”
He reached to the rack on the wall. His wet fingers curled around the stock of a shotgun. An assault model, stubby and boxy and black as midnight.
“The good news is,” he said, “there is an afterlife. I’ve seen it.”
Rime lifted the shotgun from the rack and cradled it in his hands, leaving bloody smears along the pump.
“The bad news is, it isn’t heaven.”
38.
“Run,” Tyler shouted. Seelie was first through the door, diving through the gap, back