Tag: mystery

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher studied the faces in the room. Again, there were a myriad of different expressions, from those who looked confused or irritable to those more prepared to believe. If this had been a movie, Christopher thought, someone’s face would betray their guilt when Cain accused them of harboring a murderer. He didn’t see anything like that, but he supposed that whoever had done it had already fooled him once, back when the deed was done, and he had known more back then.

“Look,” the Secretary of the Treasury said, “If this man really is God-Speaker, shouldn’t it be a simple thing for him to tell us who killed him? Or are you claiming that he doesn’t know either?”

“That would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Christopher said. “Unfortunately, I only just visited the chamber. It’s been a long time, and the jump was unexpected, for obvious reasons. I’m beginning to recover my memory, but it’s going to take a while. Days, at least.”

“Why bother revealing yourself now?”

“We thought it best to have it all out in the open,” Cain said.

“I’m still curious how you got here,” said a voice from the far end of the table. The tall, skinny, bald man.

“Well,” Cain said, “I had agents around Christopher for years. I had them push on things here and there, where I could. For example, making sure he got a promotion that would put him in the position to travel north.”

Christopher’s eyes widened.

“No shit. I thought some things about that whole process seemed strange. You had people in the company?”

“Of course.”

Christopher shook his head.

“So Sean Wallace probably did deserve the job more than I did. I thought he was going to get it.”

Cain frowned at him.

“Does that really matter at this point?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“In any case, an opportunity to get him to Alaska finally came up. At that point, I decided I had no choice but to bring someone else in on the project. I told Cas what I had been doing, or at least what little she didn’t already know. We put a team in place. We made arrangements so that Christopher would be on a plane with our people. He would be drugged, the plane would be taken off the grid, and would land here, at the airstrip.”

“We have an airstrip?” Christopher asked.

“It’s tight and carefully camouflaged,” Cas said, “and only used for special cases and emergencies. But yes.”

“As it turns out, the airstrip wasn’t used,” Cain said. “You got on the plane, but the plane never arrived. We lost contact with the team during the flight. We were only able to find the crash site a few days ago. I thought we would have nothing but forensics to try to piece together what happened.”

“That certainly seems to paint Cas in a suspicious light,” said a man in a smart green uniform. The name rose to the surface of Christopher’s mind: General Simon Reese, Director of Military Operations. His purview would be mostly local to the mountain; the military administration. No doubt one of the people who would most often vie with Cas over certain arenas of authority.

Cas held up her hands.

“Cain had access to all the same information I did.”

“No offense, Cas, but I’ll reserve any judgment,” Cain said. “Perhaps God-Speaker can shed some light on what happened?”

Once again, all the eyes in the room shifted to Christopher. He took a deep breath.

“I don’t have all the answers, but I can fill in some blanks. I woke up on the plane—drugged, I now realize. I discovered pretty quickly that it was empty. No other passengers, no crew, just me. I would have to guess that your team bailed out while I was still sleeping, and they assumed that I would ride that plane right into the side of a mountain. Instead, I tried to fly it, and when that failed, I jumped.”

Christopher remembered his confused thoughts in those frantic moments. The drug they had given him was certainly part of it, but there was something else. He remembered waking up, seeing a strange vision of a cave, hearing strange voices. He remembered something compelling him to fly the plane, to change direction, and finally, to jump into the lake.

His eyes widened. “I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know I was God-Speaker. But some part of him must have been awake in the back of my head. I changed the direction of the plane, and I jumped. I don’t know if that’s something I…Christopher…would have done on his own. I landed in a lake and somehow managed to swim to shore. I was hurt and I’m sure I was verging on hypothermia. Practically delirious. I found a bunker, one of the furthest of the old Razor Mountain out-buildings, although I wasn’t aware of that at the time. And when I punched some random keys on the keypad, it just happened to be the right code.”

“God-Speaker guided you,” Cain said. He wore a faint smile and glaze-eyed look of religious conviction. It made Christopher uncomfortable, but to the God-Speaker portion of his mind, this seemed only appropriate.

“The bunker saved my life and gave me the opportunity to recover,” Christopher said. “Not knowing who I really was, or where I was, I only hoped to be rescued. But days went by with no sign of human life, apart from the cryptic things I occasionally heard on the radio. Eventually, I decided to investigate other locations marked on a map that I found in the bunker.”

“The numbers station,” Cas said. “Coded orders.”

“Did you sense that you needed to go toward the mountain,” Cain asked, with the air of a defense attorney leading the witness.

“No, not back then,” Christopher said, honestly. “It was just a strange-looking peak in the distance. All I was hoping for was to find people and get back home. So I made a makeshift sled, packed supplies, and set off. I won’t bore you with the details, but I hiked until my supplies were gone, and all I had managed to find was what appeared to be the ruin of a building.”

“Where were you, exactly?” Cain asked. “It could have been that failed Tokamak site from the ’40s.”

“I don’t think it’s important,” Christopher said. “What matters is that I was out of food and lost in the woods, and I probably would have died if someone hadn’t found me.”

“Who found you?” asked the bald man at the end of the table.

“Some exiles,” Christopher said. “Traitors who fled the mountain and were holed up in another one of those old out-buildings.”

“Hold on,” Cas said. “You’re telling me there is a group of deserters that left the mountain without authorization? Why hasn’t this come up in any of our cabinet meetings?”

General Reese held up a hand.

“That situation is already handled. Two of the traitors gave themselves up, along with the positions of the rest. We rounded them up a few days ago.”

“All of them?” Christopher asked.

General Reese glanced away for a moment, and Christopher read a flash of uncertainty on his features.

“There’s one who is still at large, but the situation will be wrapped up soon.”

“I want them unharmed,” Christopher said. “Especially the girl that your soldiers are no doubt chasing aimlessly through the woods right now.”

“I don’t think we should be discussing sensitive intelligence in this meeting,” the bald man at the end of the table said, “at least until we understand this situation.”

“He clearly already has knowledge of the situation,” General Reese muttered.

“Write it down,” Christopher said, pointing at the general. “No harm to any of them.”

“They’re traitors.”

“They’re the only reason I’m here, alive, right now,” Christopher said. “When I was lost in the woods, and someone from the mountain was taking pot-shots at me, that girl got me out safely, and those exiles took me in. Granted, they immediately interrogated me, but it was a much more pleasant interrogation than what I received when I got to the mountain proper.”

“How did you finally get here?” Cain asked.

“Those two traitors who gave themselves up,” Christopher said. “They wanted a little extra bargaining power, and at least one of them was convinced that I was some kind of spy. So they tied me up and snuck me out from under their compatriots. Then they brought me here, gave me up to the authorities, and begged for mercy.”

Christopher turned to General Reese. “Did they get any mercy?”

“They’re incarcerated in preparation for military tribunal,” General Reese said.

“So was I,” Christopher said. “I was thoroughly interrogated in a variety of ways that we will reevaluate in the near future.”

“Our methods with outsiders are not new,” General Reese said, scowling. “Perhaps you’ll be able to remember who instituted those policies in the next few days.”

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher let Cain lead the way into the conference room. The cabinet members were already seated around the long, rectangular table. The group was quite old, most of them white-haired and heavily wrinkled. Through windows along one side of the room Christopher could see a panoramic view of the city below.

He had waited in a nearby room for the rest of the cabinet to arrive for the meeting. “Better to explain once than invite questions from each and every one of them as they enter,” Cain had said. Of course, that meant that Christopher would now truly make a spectacle of himself as the stranger entering the most private meeting of the de facto rulers of the city.

“Who is this, Cain?” one man grumbled, before Cain had even made it to his seat. Some of the others had taken notice of the stranger in their midst as well. They watched as Cain pulled out the chair at the head of the table and gestured for Christopher to sit. There it was, the king on his throne.

Cain cleared his throat.

“There really ought to be more fanfare, but I suppose we’ll make do. This man was born Christopher Lamarck, but he is, in fact, the reincarnation of our long-missing leader, God-Speaker.”

He pulled out a chair next to Christopher and sat, as if the matter was now settled. For a moment, it was quiet enough that Christopher could hear the clock on the wall ticking.

And then the clamor of voices rose up like a wave to crash over him. He leaned back in the chair involuntarily.

He was distinctly aware though, of a feeling lurking beneath the discomfort and uncertainty. There was a giddy, self-satisfied feeling. It came from a place that Christopher was beginning to recognize as God-Speaker’s influence, and it was slowly growing.

“What kind of game are you playing, Cain? He’s been dead for decades.”

“This is absurd. Why would he need you as his mouthpiece?”

“How is this possible? Are you sure?”

The general feeling Christopher heard in the cabinet’s exclamations was disbelief. One or two of the secretaries immediately suspected Cain of some sort of soft coup. One or two others, however, seemed more willing to hear him out. Christopher did not consider himself terribly good at reading people’s emotions, but God-Speaker did. Christopher noted the crease of a brow here, the shape of a mouth over there. It was almost like a movie, where the camera zoomed in on some tiny clue, and the voice-over explained what it all meant.

Christopher found that he recognized some of these people. There were familiar faces. He had names or titles for some, but not for others.

A woman in a black silk blouse stood and held out her hands over the arguing secretaries like a benediction. Christopher’s brain helpfully offered up a name and title: Cassandra Bell, Director of Intelligence Operations.

“Everyone, stop. This isn’t productive. Let them speak, and then have your argument when there’s something substantial to argue about.”

Cain stood as well.

“Thank you, Cas.”

She nodded and sat.

“I think I know more than most, but I’d still like to hear what you’ve been up to. From the beginning.”

“If he’s really God-Speaker, why don’t you just let him speak?” asked a man at the far end of the table, whose name Christopher couldn’t yet recall.

“I’d actually love to hear what Cain has been up to,” Christopher said. “I haven’t gotten the full story yet.”

“Of course,” Cain said. “As most of you know, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time down in the basement, in the chamber of voices, the resurrection chamber, the place where the oracles learn their craft.”

“Or at least where they used to learn it,” someone muttered.

“Yes, yes, we all know about the basement. Can we get on without your mystical pomp and circumstance?” someone else said.

“This is the culmination of half a lifetime of work,” Cain said. “I think I should be allowed a little ceremoniousness.”

Christopher sighed. These were the rulers of Razor Mountain. He could imagine the years of petty squabbling that had gone on in his absence.

“While I appreciate all your hard work, I think we had better be concise for now,” he said.

Cain nodded.

“After the body was found and the Secretary of Justice was…convicted…I began spending as much of my time as possible down in the heart of the mountain. At first, I was simply hoping to find clues to the murder, or some explanation as to why nothing had happened when the oracles were sent back with their warnings. And very slowly, I began to see glimpses of things.”

“Is this all going to boil down to you seeing the truth in a vision?” said a man halfway down the table. The Secretary of the Treasury, Christopher thought.

“Is that strange to you?” Cain asked. “Is that any different from what the oracles do? What God-Speaker does?”

“The oracles are a rare few,” the man said, “and they all age out of their abilities when they’re far younger than you. And of course God-Speaker is altogether different.”

“Be that as it may, I began to see things,” Cain continued. At first it was nothing but jumbled images. Eventually I began to notice the same things repeating: the same rooms in a particular house. The same few people over and over again. And all of it revolved around one person: a child named Christopher.

“Now I will readily admit, I had no evidence. I had only grief. But I had an unshakable feeling that this child was God-Speaker. I became convinced that he had reincarnated, as he always does, but it had somehow gone wrong and he was far away from the mountain.

“It was at this point that I enlisted help for the first time. I began “borrowing” external operators from Cas every now and then, and I collected as much information as I could on this boy, while doing my best to not reveal who I thought he was.”

Cas Bell smiled. “I will say, it took me entirely too long to realize what your suspicions were. You’re not the worst spy.”

“In any case,” Cain continued, “Our people found the boy, his family, and his house: everything I had seen in my visions. I discovered that Christopher was born on the same day God-Speaker died, perhaps even the very moment of his death. It was too perfect to be a coincidence. The more I learned, the more convinced I was, and more determined to keep my beliefs hidden. I knew I needed to bring him back here, but I didn’t know how to do it without revealing what I knew, or putting him in danger.”

“What danger, exactly?” said a tall, bald man at the far end of the table.

“He had just been murdered,” Cain said. “There was no reason to believe it wouldn’t happen again, especially if he came back in the body of a small child.”

“McCaul was already locked up,” someone said. Christopher recognized that name. Moira McCaul had been the Secretary of Justice, head of the civilian police under the mountain.

“McCaul never had a trial, and she wouldn’t have been convicted if she had,” Cain replied. “That was a sham, and I think most of you know it. You all wanted some sense of closure, but there was never enough evidence to know who did it.”

“We’ve been over and over that case a dozen times,” the bald man said.

“Not enough, it seems,” said a woman near Christopher’s end of the table. She was clearly the youngest of the secretaries. Christopher suspected she must be the new Secretary of Justice, the deputy who had taken the position when her boss was imprisoned. He couldn’t come up with a name.

“There is very little doubt in my mind that someone in this room was responsible for God-Speaker’s murder,” Cain said bluntly. “And if they did it once, they’ll do it again.”

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

They walked to a less populous, more industrial-looking neighborhood at the edge of the main cavern. Christopher felt a sense of familiarity, even more so as Cain led him to a door and unlocked it. Once again, they were back in the maze of dull hallways.

“We might still be able to turn your unexpected arrival to our advantage. If it surprised me, then the others are even more in the dark.”

“There’s just one big problem,” Christopher said. “I hardly remember anything, and what I do remember is a disconnected jumble.”

“Well,” Cain said, “we could wait for you to recover more of your memories, but everyone has their spies. They’ll all find out eventually. If we give you more time, we give them more time.”

“Including the killer, if they’re still around,” Christopher said. “How many of the original secretaries are still working?”

“Most of them,” Cain said. “Everyone has just gotten older. The Secretary of Justice was replaced. The Secretary of Education died of cancer ten years back. Her deputy took over as well. That’s been the way that succession has been handled. But her deputy wasn’t as interested in the role once she found out more of the details of the job, so we had to pull the next in the hierarchy. There’s too much distrust in the group for any kind of election process.”

“If we reveal…me…what was your plan?”

Cain stopped walking and looked at his watch.

“There’s a cabinet meeting scheduled for today, about thirty minutes from now.”

“I just sit down with them and tell them I’m God-Speaker?” Christopher said.

“Something like that. I can do as much of the talking as you’d like.”

“And then all hell will break loose?”

“Undoubtedly. Some of them might be willing to believe, especially if you can offer them some proof. Others will be skeptical. If the person who killed you is in that room, they’re going to be extremely worried.”

“It’ll paint a target on my back,” Christopher said.

“You’ve already got a target on your back,” Cain replied. “This way we’ll know to watch out, and everyone else will be watching too. If we wait, we won’t know when or if they know about you. They’ll still have an opportunity for a cover-up. If we reveal you to everyone, then you can hunker down and wait for your memories to return. The traitor will know that they have very little time. They’ll either slip up, or be forced to flee.”

“So I’m the bait,” Christopher said.

“You are the bait.”

“I’m not entirely excited about this plan,” Christopher said.

Cain nodded. “Do not misunderstand. I am only making a suggestion. The moment you opened your eyes in that room, you became my leader again. You are God-Speaker. Whatever you want to do, we will do. I’ve spent half of my life trying to bring you back, and I didn’t do it to order you around.”

Christopher sighed.

“No. I’m practically a stranger here now. You’re the one who has been in the middle of this for years. If you really brought me back here, then I think it’s only right that we continue to follow your plan.”

“You say that like this is all carefully thought-out,” Cain said. “The truth is that I’m improvising.”

Christopher felt a twist of fear in his stomach, but also excitement. It would be dangerous, maybe deadly.

“Then let’s improvise together,” Christopher said.

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

The walk back up from the depths was slower. Christopher felt shaky and a little weak, like he had been running laps for too long. They took the elevator back up into the utility hallways, where every corridor looked more or less the same. Christopher recognized it, or at least pieces, in a way he hadn’t before. This was familiar. This was home.

Cain led him out into the city. They stuck to the side streets. There were people going about their business here and there. Christopher felt like someone who had moved away from the town where they were born and raised and returned for a visit many years later. Most of the familiar landmarks were in their expected places. In fact, very little had changed. He found himself studying the faces of the people they passed, looking for any that he recognized. An older woman stood out to him, but he couldn’t place her or summon her name from his jumbled memories.

Their journey was accompanied by a faint murmuring, and Christopher eventually realized it wasn’t the voices in his head. It was Cain talking to himself. He seemed to be having a mumbling internal debate.

“You seem uneasy,” Christopher said. He wondered at the choice of words. Would he have said it the same way before his visit to the chamber below the cavern? Was he speaking, or was it God-Speaker? Was there a difference?

“I had so many plans,” Cain said. “Years upon years of plans, and none of them worked out. Then you fell out of the sky, quite literally, by the stories I’m told.”

“This wasn’t part of the plan?” Christopher asked.

“Not exactly. All at once, everything is falling into place. I wasn’t prepared, but we just have to make the best of it.”

“And how do we do that?” Christopher asked.

“Exactly what I was trying to figure out,” Cain said.

“What’s the situation?” Christopher asked.

Cain looked up, his distracted gaze refocusing, as though seeing Christopher for the first time.

“Of course. I’m sorry if I overstep my bounds. It’s just that you’ve been gone so long. We’ve had to make do.”

Christopher laughed. “Assume I know nothing about what’s going on. Overstep away. I’m not even sure I know who I am yet.”

“There’s something very important,” Cain said. “Do you remember what happened to you, before…”

A flash of memories assaulted Christopher. Pain and blood. The dark office. Falling. Scrambling. A looming shape and a glint of light on the edge of a knife. The memories did not form a neat sequence. They tumbled out in a disordered mess, like some cartoon closet overflowing with forgotten things.

“I was stabbed,” he said. “It was unexpected.”

“Yes,” Cain said. “We found your body. Your former body. Do you know who did it?”

Christopher tried to piece the memories together. He had known the person in the moment, but the memory was focused on other, more immediate concerns. He shook his head.

“No. Someone I knew. Someone I trusted.”

“Do you remember a face? A name? Anything?”

Christopher could sense long pent-up frustration behind Cain’s words. He shook his head.

“It’s all a blur. I remember the pain and the knife. I don’t know whose hand held it.”

Cain sighed. “This is the mystery that has haunted me these long decades while you were gone.”

“There were no clues?” Christopher asked. “I…it was a meeting with someone.”

“You had many meetings, every day,” Cain said. “But who you were meeting with was not common knowledge. You had a tendency to keep things secret, unless others really needed to know.”

That word, “secret,” reverberated within Christopher. It was deep in his core, the desire to hide things, the inability to trust, the unwillingness to let his guard down, or show any weakness. For all the good it had done him.

“I think you’ve probably barely begun to understand the secrets I’ve kept,” Christopher said.

Cain smiled.

“These things happen over a few thousand years.”

“There were no clues left behind?” Christopher asked.

Cain sighed. “Precious few. There are surveillance systems throughout the city, but not in your office or home, or the immediate surroundings. At least none that we were able to find. Nobody knew who you might have met with, or nobody was willing to say.”

“What about the office itself?”

“There was plenty of blood,” Cain said. “Two or three smeared footprints that yielded no matches. No murder weapon ever found.”

“So whoever killed me was never caught?”

“Things got messy fast, once you were found,” Cain said. “The cabinet met, and accusations were thrown around. There’s no hierarchy among us, and nobody trusted anyone. The investigation was difficult because of it. There was a sort of trial held, but you can imagine how well that goes when everyone is simultaneously prosecutor and possible suspect. In the end, we held a vote. The Secretary of Justice was imprisoned.”

“You don’t think he did it?” Christopher asked. He couldn’t call up a memory of the Secretary of Justice.

“She,” Cain said. “There was some circumstantial evidence, but nothing concrete. Nothing that would have held up in an actual court. It wasn’t a trial, more like a desperate attempt to put the thing behind us and try to keep the place running.”

“Who do you think did it?” Christopher asked.

“I don’t know. There wasn’t enough evidence to say. I abstained from that vote.”

“What happened after that?”

Cain shrugged. “Some of the others pretended that it was resolved. Myself and one or two others quietly decided to keep looking into it. The Deputy Secretary of Justice was promoted to the council.”

“No more murders?” Christopher asked.

“Not among us. Murder isn’t unheard-of in Razor Mountain, but it’s rare. There’s been nothing that seemed related.”

“I would have assumed this person was trying to consolidate power,” Christopher said. “Maybe it was really just a grudge.”

“Maybe,” Cain said. “Maybe they were after power, but they knew that another killing would completely upend the system. Putting the Secretary of Justice away at least had some semblance of a resolution to the whole bloody ordeal.”

“Was there some attempted coup then?” Christopher asked.

“Nothing so obvious,” Cain replied. “Just years of endless jockeying for power. Arguments over little slivers of administrative control that fall somewhere between our individual domains.”

Christopher shook his head. “Of course, I never bothered to think about what might happen if I were gone.”

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher lay on the floor, groaning.

“What did you do to me?”

Cain still stood in the doorway of the room, as though he were blocked by an invisible wall.

“What does it feel like?”

Christopher rolled onto his back and struggled to push himself to the edge of the room, eventually coming to rest with his back against the curved wall. There was a deep thrumming behind it, an endless note played below the range of human hearing.

“It feels…crowded,” Christopher said, squeezing his eyes closed, hands pressed against his temples.

He lay with the wall inches from his face, a matte gray, not-quite-metallic texture with strange shapes etched into the surface. But it was distant and unreal, like an image on a screen. Christopher felt lost inside his own head, a misty void filled with half-formed shapes. They milled around aimlessly, whispering. They were lonely, desperate for someone to listen to them, but Christopher also sensed a frustrated haughtiness; a royal irritation. They needed him, and they hated him for it.

It was possible to ignore the voices only because there were so many of them. If he concentrated, he might be able to pick out coherent ideas, but when they all washed over him it was just noise. That noise was a carrier signal, and he could follow it back to its source.

It was above, in the darkness and the weird, eye-rending purple light. Or perhaps it was in the walls, or the mysterious throb of hidden machinery beneath his feet. Despite his difficulty tracking its physical location, he was sure that it was buried with him under the mountain. Mentally, he had no trouble following that thread back to its origin. It was a vessel and a prison. It had brought the voices here, saving them from one disaster, only to deposit them into a new one. The voices had brought their tools with them, but they were unable to use them.

Christopher found himself laying on the floor in the fetal position. Cain squatted in the entrance to the room, watching him with some sort of pent-up emotion that Christopher couldn’t read. The scene barely registered.

Christopher found a place of memories. With a jolt, he recognized them as his own. They were past lives, a long, unbroken sequence back through time. He could see they were there, but he couldn’t fully process them. They went back so far that the world, the people, became almost unrecognizable.

When he reached the end of this human lineage, it didn’t stop. Shrinking back in horror, he saw another sequence of lives. The voices. They went back much farther, in endless generations before humanity; before any life on Earth was more complex than sludge in a fetid tide pool. They had experienced so much, and knew things far beyond human understanding.

He reeled away from those ancient, foreign memories, but the sequence of human memories called to him. He felt his connection to them. They wrapped around him like a warm blanket that threatened to suffocate. He could see flashes of the past, moments of memory, but they were jumbled and confused.

Instinctively, he found a balance between this new internal world and the external world he had lived in before entering this room. He couldn’t tell if it was something he had discovered or something remembered. In any case, he sat up, his head no longer spinning. He took a deep breath.

“I think I understand,” he said.

“Do you remember?” Cain asked. Christopher could sense the excitement under the calm facade.

“Some things,” Christopher said. “This place…jostled everything loose. I remember your face. I remember you, but younger. I know bits and pieces. I think it will take a while for everything to come back.”

“Do you remember who you are?” Cain asked.

“Tutanarulax Qatqa,” he said, his tongue stumbling over the strange words. “I’m God-Speaker.”

Cain nodded.

“But I’m still Christopher. It’s…not comfortable.”

“You never told me what it was like,” Cain said, “so there’s not much I can do to guide you.”

“Of course I didn’t,” Christopher said. “I hardly told anyone anything. This is so odd. It’s like seeing different viewpoints out of each eye.”

“Do you need some time?”

“I’m fine,” Christopher said, standing. “I mean, I can stand up again without falling over. I can tell what’s real and what’s not. Mostly. But it’s going to take a while to integrate. Days, maybe weeks. It’s never happened like this before.”

They stood together in silence for a moment.

“That last jump did not go well,” Christopher said.

“Yes, I know,” Cain replied.

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“Don’t be a fool,” God-Speaker said. He shielded his body with his already bloody arm as he slid backward across the carpet, away from the man. “You know how this will end for you.”

In the back of his mind, God-Speaker was enraged. How had he missed this? The rest of his thoughts were focused on the moment, on the loaded gun in the drawer of the table a few feet away. The voices also echoed in his thoughts. They were locked in their chamber far below, but omnipresent in his mind, screeching their many opinions of the situation.

Reed loomed, following God-Speaker with steady determination.

“I don’t care.”

The man lunged and God-Speaker flung himself backward. He found the leg of the table and pulled it, tumbling the heavy copper and stained glass lamp into Reed’s path. The man took his time stepping over it, then dove onto God-Speaker knife-first.

God-Speaker fumbled desperately with the drawer of the table. He managed to get his hand on the handle of the gun, but the knife caught him below his ribs. He felt a hot, wet rush as the blade sank into his abdomen.

The pain pushed out everything else. It was beyond anything he had physically experienced in the centuries of his many lives. The world was obscured by a red fog. He no longer knew where the gun was. Worse than the pain was the fear. What lay beyond the darkness that threatened to engulf him?

The voices screeched, and God-Speaker reached out to them with his thoughts. Proximity to their chamber mattered, but only a little. It was easier to connect up-close, but the distance was as much a function of his mind as it was of the physical space between. It didn’t really matter.

The voices had power. They wanted desperately to use it themselves, but they couldn’t. They were trapped. So God-Speaker used their power. He reached out from himself, from his physical body that lay bleeding on the floor of his office, from his physical brain slowly being drained of oxygen.

He reached out into the Razor Mountain, seeking the candidates he had already identified. Normally, this would be done in precise ritual, with everyone in their designated place. He did not know where to find them. He groped out with his mind, but it was imprecise. Even this sixth sense began to fade as his body shut down.

He found his consciousness floating far afield. He was beyond the city now, out of the rock, skimming over landscapes, chaotic and varied. Places and people appeared and faded in vague, disconnected visions. His mind was lost in the vastness of the world.

Somehow, all of his carefully laid plans, all of his contingencies and protections had failed him. The universe was powered by an inherent entropy, a randomness that could never be fully tamed. That was why the voices were here. Even their immortal kingdoms had eventually fallen. Despite their incredible powers, they had been forced to flee, bodiless ghosts in search of compatible hosts. Would the same thing happen to God-Speaker? Would his mind fly out beyond this world, eternally searching for someplace to land?

No, he was not one of the voices. He didn’t have their machines. He would die. Really die.

This revelation was enough to give him one more burst of desperate energy. He reached out, groping for anything he could catch. He anchored himself in a place: a city, a building, a room. By feel, by intuition, he found a presence that felt welcoming, unresisting. Why were some people amenable to him, and others incompatible? That was still a mystery; one that even the voices couldn’t answer.

It didn’t matter. He had found his escape hatch. Teetering on the edge of death, he found a person, a personality, that he could sink into.

It was a new mind, still shocked by light and the blurred shapes it brought with it. This mind sensed a warmth, the smell of life, of satiation, of comfort. It already had felt the great loss of the peaceful, quiet warmth where it had begun. Everything was too bright, to rough, too cold. On top of all these shocks, God-Speaker intruded, an alien presence. One more shock.

God-Speaker sank into that mind, that sea of thought-subsuming darkness. There was nothing else to do. He felt the sharp edges of consciousness blur and fade.

As the faculties of language fell away from him, God-Speaker heard words: human voices speaking.

“Did you decide?”

“I think so.”

“And?”

“I think he looks like a Christopher.”

“Then that’s his name. Christopher.”

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

God-Speaker left Cain in the borehole chamber, shuffling his papers. This was the furthest extent of the cave system, so he had to walk for a few minutes before reaching the secured door that led back into the outer neighborhoods of the city. From there, he made his way into the bustling city center. Among the shops and offices was a central pillar made in the tapered hourglass shape of a stalagmite and stalactite that had fused. It was actually engineered—carved from the rock over many years, like almost every space in the city.

The bottom of the pillar was sloped, and some of the tallest buildings were piled up against it. The upper half was painted like the ceiling so that it would at least partly blend into the artificial sky.

God-Speaker walked to a narrow space between two larger buildings, where there was a nondescript door with no handle. He waved his hand over the hidden chip reader in the wall nearby, and the door clicked open.

Inside, there was another door set up in a sort of airlock system. God-Speaker glanced up at the corner of the little room, where the glint of a reflection was the only sign that a small camera was watching. Anyone entering this space would be observed, and if they weren’t authorized they could be held until someone came to retrieve them. God-Speaker waved his hand next to the door on the opposite wall, and it opened to let him past.

From there, he was in the little catacomb of hallways and back rooms within the pillar. Although it was smaller, it was much the same as the restricted-access areas out beyond the exterior neighborhoods. Down the hall from the entry vestibule was an elevator. One wall was made entirely of glass, and God-Speaker looked out over the city as he rode up. To provide this visibility, narrow slits had been carved from the stone, cunningly hidden from below. The view took on a stuttering kinetoscope quality that made the city appear small and artificial, like an elaborate model village. The elevator continued up beyond the sky-painted ceiling of the cavern, and the tiny buildings vanished from view, blocked by a blur of rough rock speeding by outside.

High above the city, God-Speaker stepped out into hallways that were notably nicer than the utility areas below. There was carpet, doors and trim made from real wood, and occasional pieces of art on the walls. The lighting, hidden in the ceiling, was warm and inviting.

From the elevator, it was a short walk to God-Speaker’s main office. He had kept to his schedule, but he found Reed already sitting in a chair outside the office door when he arrived.

“You’re early,” God-Speaker noted, as he unlocked the office door.

“I wouldn’t want to keep you waiting,” Reed said.

The man stood and followed God-Speaker into the office. God-Speaker walked around to the other side of his desk and sat. Reed waited, standing, until God-Speaker gestured to the chair on the opposite side. God-Speaker noted that the lanky man showed signs of distress. He had a tendency to pick and fiddle, always doing something with his fingers when his mind was otherwise occupied; but when he really had something on his mind he was entirely still.

Now, he sat in the chair, his fingers steepled against his chin, unmoving as a statue.

“Did you find anything of interest?” God-Speaker asked.

Reed blinked slowly. “I have done extensive digging. I looked through all of his accounts myself. As you indicated, some of the accounting is a little…unorthodox…but I found no signs of anything nefarious.”

“What about other things? Anything outside the finances to raise a red flag?”

Reed sighed. “No. There are the usual interpersonal conflicts here and there. Some people find him a little bit grating. Some seem to appreciate his apparent earnestness.”

God-Speaker nodded. This was what he now expected, and perhaps it explained Reed’s tenseness. The man thought the absence of evidence would be taken as a failure on his part.

“I think it’s clear, but tell me, what is your opinion after this initial investigation?”

“I am sure there is more that could be done,” Reed said, “but I have found nothing to indicate that Cain is anything more dangerous than a young and opinionated person who is still figuring out his new position.”

God-Speaker nodded. “I agree. I’ve spent more time with the man over the past few days, and I realized that I may have misinterpreted some of his actions.”

“Are you sure that was wise, sir? What if he had turned out to be a threat?”

God-Speaker shrugged. “I have managed to take care of myself for quite some time.”

“Of course,” Reed said. “But people are unique. You have admitted that even you are not always able to read certain people.”

“I manage,” God-Speaker said irritably. “In any case, I think we can end this investigation. I am satisfied that we’ve come to the correct conclusion with Cain.”

“Very well,” Reed said. He was still nearly frozen in the chair. “Regardless of the outcome, I appreciate the trust you put in me for this…delicate matter.”

“Thank you for taking it seriously,” God-Speaker said. “Although I have noticed that some of your reports have been delayed while I distracted you with this.”

“It will be taken care of,” Reed said.

“Very well,” God-Speaker replied, standing. “I think we’re done here. You’re dismissed.”

Reed nodded and stood slowly. God-Speaker was struck once again by how tall and thin he was. He stood a head above God-Speaker, but surely weighed less.

Now that the situation with Cain was cleared up, God-Speaker could focus on the matter of his aging body. He stepped over to the bookshelf, trying to recall which of his replacement candidates was tallest.

He was not prepared for the searing pain in his right shoulder. He cried out and turned, his left hand instinctively reaching over. He felt wetness. Blood.

God-Speaker turned to face Reed. The man stood with a long, thin-bladed knife in his right hand, his face contorted, his jaw working as his teeth clenched.

“What are you doing?”

Reed struck again. God-Speaker raised his arm as a shield, and the knife cut deep into the muscle, scraping against bone. God-Speaker stumbled back and fell against the bookshelves before sliding down onto the carpet.

“I’m doing what that idiot Cain should have done. What we all should have done, years ago.”

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The borehole was unsettling. A perfectly-cut cylindrical hole in the stone floor, about three feet in diameter. A spotlight stationed at the edge shone down into the depths, only serving to highlight the endless darkness beyond the reach of the light. A few pipes snaked down the sides of the pit, test runs for much larger pipes that would eventually fill every inch of the available space.

Cain stood over the hole like a proud parent, shuffling nervously as he waited for God-Speaker’s opinion. God-Speaker leafed through the reports he had been given: charts showing temperature readings at various depths, reports of durability and heat dissipation for various materials and radiator arrays, and costs and expected maintenance for all of it.

God-Speaker had to admit it. Assuming all the numbers were accurate, Cain had actually undersold the project. He had diverted some funds in ways that God-Speaker didn’t like, but the project showed incredible potential. It would be an order of magnitude more efficient than much of their current infrastructure, and cheaper to maintain. Even more impressive, the improvements were all down to Cain and his engineers. God-Speaker hadn’t even contributed his usual breadcrumbs of knowledge gleaned from the voices beneath the mountain.

“There are some discrepancies in your accounting that we will need to address,” God-Speaker said, and he could see Cain’s shoulders begin to sag, “but I have to admit, you were correct. What we’re looking at here is the future of our heat and electrical generation.”

Cain’s back straightened, and he grinned.

“It won’t go through as fast as you’d like it to,” God-Speaker continued, “but I do think we will need to allocate more resources and move up the project timeline. Can you have all the necessary reports ready for the full cabinet meeting at the end of the month?”

“Of course. I can have them ready by the end of the week.”

God-Speaker peered over the edge again. He wasn’t particularly afraid of heights, but it still made him uneasy. This was the visual inverse of the voices’ chamber: an endless hole where light faded into darkness, in opposition to that room deep under the mountain where there was no ceiling, only the black void above and a harsh blue light that seemed to emanate from the darkness itself.

Cain shuffled again, clearly trying to find the right words to express himself.

“I…I wanted to apologize for my behavior. I know it’s not an excuse, but I’m very excited about the things my people are working on. I’m sure you know…it’s the engineering I love. Interacting with people…I’m not so good at it. And the finances always seem to get in the way.”

God-Speaker had been watching Cain, and was beginning to realize that he had read the man wrong. What he had seen as aggression and ego was a combination of fear and passion: love of his work and the worry that he wasn’t good enough to do it, that it might all be taken away.

“I’m sure I have only exacerbated the issue,” God-Speaker said. “I failed to listen to your concerns, and I underestimated your abilities.”

Cain was visibly relieved. God-Speaker also noted the subtle changes in his stance when receiving even such a mild compliment.

“I will try to work on the ways I interact with the rest of the cabinet,” Cain said, “and I’ll be better at keeping myself in check in our meetings.”

“You don’t need to apologize, and you don’t need to worry,” God-Speaker said. “You’re new to the position. These things will come with time and experience. Remember, this is a job for life, or at least as long as you want to do it. Take the long view. You don’t need to accomplish everything right away. Pace yourself. Think about what will have the most impact over decades, and focus on that. It’s easy to become distracted trying to run everything, but you have people below you to help with that. This is a lesson I still need to relearn myself from time to time.”

Cain nodded, now the picture of the dutiful employee.

“I have another meeting,”: God-Speaker said. “Will you excuse me?”

“Of course.”

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The man stared at Christopher long enough for it to become uncomfortable.

“I was told you wanted to talk to me,” Christopher said.

Cain smiled. “I did, indeed.”

Christopher waited for more, but once again the silence dragged on.

“I’m sorry,” Christopher said, “I’m not sure what’s going on here.”

“Forgive me,” Cain said. “I’m afraid I was not quite prepared. You see, there’s a project I’ve been working on for a very long time. It’s a rather…emotional thing for me. It started years ago, and I have to admit I thought there was no hope of finishing it. Every time I thought I had solved it, there was a catastrophe. Recently, I thought I had finally seen it over and done with. The work of half my life, wasted. And for Razor Mountain, far more than that.”

Christopher frowned. “I don’t understand. What does this have to do with me?”

“I’m sure it will sound a little absurd, but you are vitally important to this project. You, here in Razor Mountain, have renewed my hope that I can finally succeed.”

“I…I don’t want to get your hopes up,” Christopher said. “I don’t really understand what this project could be that I somehow have to be involved to make it work.”

Cain nodded. He stepped forward and put a hand on Christopher’s shoulder.

“I understand. It sounds absurd. It’s difficult for me to explain. I think we had better take a walk, so you can see it for yourself. Then it will all make sense.”

“Lead the way, then,” Christopher said.

Cain walked past him, back to the elevator. Christopher followed him in, and the doors closed. Christopher watched as Cain took out a little key and unlocked the metal panel he had noticed on the ride up. Behind it was a ten-digit number pad. Cain tapped in a long sequence of numbers, and there was a prolonged beep. Then Christopher felt the elevator begin to gently descend.

Christopher counted silently to himself again. It had taken about thirty seconds for the ride up. Now, he gave up after hitting one hundred on the way down. They were clearly descending deeper into the mountain than he had before. The old man seemed content to stand side-by-side in silence, but Christopher felt increasingly awkward. Despite his companion’s apparent frailty, Christopher was acutely aware of the imbalance of power between them. Cain looked utterly self-assured, and as usual, Christopher had no idea what was going on.

The elevator doors opened onto a hallway of polished, unadorned black stone. Cain stepped out without looking back to see if Christopher was following. He looked as though he were just out for a stroll. Christopher exited the elevator, and the doors closed behind him. He reached out a hand and let his fingers trail over the slick, glassy surface of the black stone. He had expected it to be cold, but it was not.

“It’s surprisingly warm down here,” Christopher said, as much to break the silence as to suss out any information from the strange old man. “I suppose that’s part of what you do?”

Cain nodded. “I make sure the temperatures are comfortable in the city proper,” he said. “We love to pump up geothermal heat wherever we can. But down here, it stays warm with no effort on my part.”

The light in the hallway came from narrow slits in the ceiling every twenty feet or so, creating a pattern of alternating darkness and light that reminded Christopher of night driving on the highway, street lights passing by. It was almost hypnotic. The effect also made it difficult to judge how far the hallway stretched ahead, although Christopher could tell that it eventually curved to the left, out of sight.

“What is this place?”

“This is one of the oldest parts of the city, or so I’m told,” Cain replied, chuckling. “Much older than me, and that’s saying something.”

“How old is Razor Mountain?” It seemed like a potentially sensitive question, but Christopher sensed a guileless openness from his guide.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Cain said. “Maybe better.”

The walls, the ceiling, the floor were all perfectly smooth and seamless. As far as Christopher could tell, it was precisely square and the dimensions didn’t vary, although it was hard to tell with light reflecting off the polished surfaces.

As they made their way around the curve, Christopher began to realize that the path formed a spiral. It started gently, but steadily tightened. The light also began to change. The narrow slits grew further and further apart, and the gaps of darkness between deepened. Then, there were no more lights. But even as they walked away from the faint reflections, Christopher could still see the path forward.

For a moment, a memory asserted itself: waking on the dark plane, groggy and confused. The sensation of a lightless cave; looming shapes and smothering darkness.

At first, he thought he might be imagining the blue glow. Then he decided it must be a translucency in the surrounding rock. It was so faint that he had a hard time seeing it, except in his peripheral vision. But it had an electric energy that made him feel like he had been shuffling in his socks on carpet. He blinked, and the glow intensified. He could see it through his eyelids.

When the spiral could get no tighter, the hallway opened onto a cylindrical room.

The walls here were different, metallic and dull.. The blue was searing, and for a moment Christopher held up his hands to cover his eyes. It did nothing to it out. He realized he was still holding the tattered paperback, and felt momentarily silly, hauling it around for the sake of a brief joke.

He couldn’t help but take a step into the room. He looked up, and saw darkness. The room extended upward beyond his sight. The blue glow pulsed deep in the center of that darkness, like the iris of a distant, giant eye trying to focus on him.

“This is your project?” he muttered.

Cain came up slightly behind him and made a small gesture that seemed to encompass both the room and the two of them. “This. This is my project.”

“What exactly do you expect me to do?”

“Just look around and tell me what you see,” Cain said.

Christopher took another step toward the center of the room. The book slipped from his hand, his limbs far away and oddly disconnected.

“I see…symbols and shapes on the walls. Incredibly delicate. There’s some kind of pattern there, but I can’t quite tell what it is. It’s all in that blue light. What is that light?”

Cain sighed. “I’m afraid I don’t know. I can only ever see it out of the corner of my eye. I’ve spent so many nights pacing around this room, but I can never quite see it.”

There was a distant thud that reverberated through Christopher’s body. Somehow, he had fallen to his knees, but he didn’t feel it. He was numb. He could hear someone whispering, many voices whispering. It was a crowd speaking over one another, many languages that he couldn’t understand.

And then he could.

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She opened the door, and he followed her out and down the stairs. They walked down the street toward the big cavern crowded with buildings that Christopher had come to think of as “downtown” Razor Mountain. The few people they passed ignored them. It felt strange to be even slightly anonymous.

“So what’s this Secretary of Energy’s name?” Christopher asked. “What should I know about him? Or her?”

“His name is Cain Dolus,” Speares said. “I’d suggest you call him Mr. Dolus though. As far as important government officials go, I think he’s pretty laid back, but it wouldn’t hurt to be polite in your situation.”

Christopher almost replied with, “Thanks, Mom,” then thought better of it. It was probably best to not irritate one of only two people who had shown kindness to him since his rough landing. He realized he had begun to think of Speares as a friend, but he suspected his calibration for social interactions was a little broken thanks to all the loneliness and torture.

“I’m honestly not sure what else to tell you,” Speares said. “I don’t know why he’s taken an interest in you.”

“Have you talked with him before?”

“Sure,” she said. “I do work for the cabinet from time to time. But I don’t know him particularly well. It’s a relatively small circle of people who interact with them on a regular basis.”

“Sounds like a lonely job for them,” Christopher said. “Kings and queens of a tiny little kingdom.”

“Not even. They have bosses just like the rest of us. Only my boss isn’t the president of the United States.”

They followed the road into the big cavern, but this time Speares led Christopher down side streets, around the outer edge where other avenues led back into the smaller caves. The underground complex already seemed impossible to Christopher, but he began to realize it was even larger than he had initially thought. He wondered how far out all those caverns went, and what was required to maintain the structural integrity with a million tons of stone above their heads.

They took one of these side streets, and something about it struck Christopher as more bland than the others he had seen. This wasn’t one of the odd little neighborhoods with its own transplanted style. It was more like a warehouse district, a road lined with low gray stone rectangles in the shape of buildings. Some of them had wide roll-up garage doors that looked like loading docks, although Christopher wondered what the purpose was when he had seen no vehicles to load and unload.

“Are we meeting in a warehouse?” Christopher asked.

“No. But the higher-ups have their own private areas of the city, and the entrances tend to be in…nondescript areas.”

“I see.”

They stopped at one of the loading docks, and Speares banged on the metal door three times. For a moment, there was silence, then the door rattled and rolled up, revealing two men in uniform with submachine guns, lit from behind by bright fluorescent lights.

“This is where I leave you,” Speares said.

Christopher looked into the impassive faces of the soldiers, then back at Speares. He suddenly felt like a kid being dropped off at the first day of school.

“Thanks for treating me like an actual human being.”

She nodded. “I hope this works out for you.”

“If not, maybe I’ll see you around.”

Christopher stepped through, and the door clattered back down behind him, locking out the outside world. One of the soldiers waved him down the hall. The other followed behind as he went.

The hallway was similar to the maze of corridors outside his old prison cell. Their footsteps echoed ahead and behind. It led to a heavy metal door that retracted into the wall when the soldier swiped his hand over the reader. Beyond that was another door, and this one turned out to be an elevator. The soldier stayed outside while Christopher entered.

“Where do I go?” Christopher asked.

“Only one way to go, when you get up there, sir,” the soldier replied. He gave Christopher a slight nod as the doors slid closed.

Christopher counted to himself as the elevator went up. It didn’t feel like it was going particularly fast. There was no floor indicator and no buttons, although there was a locked metal panel in the wall that Christopher thought might hide some controls.

He stopped counting at thirty-three as the doors opened. On the other side was a short hallway, but this felt completely different. The walls were painted a soft cream color here, and adorned with little landscape paintings. The floor was carpeted, a pattern of overlapping squares in various shades of gray. There were baseboards of some dark red wood. The lighting was softer and warmer than the harsh fluorescents down below.

It wasn’t exactly opulent, but it had the feeling of a nice corporate office or private doctor’s waiting room.

Christopher stepped out, and the elevator doors slid closed quietly behind him. Upon closer inspection, he saw there were four of the little paintings, two on each side of the hallway, depicting the same scenery in four seasons. Ahead were a pair of plain wooden doors that matched the baseboards. They had been left open to an office. Christopher could see a big, old-fashioned wooden desk, a bookshelf, and a side table with a lamp and a bottle of liquor on it.

He walked forward slowly. It was oddly quiet, and he realized he had grown used to life underground where there were echoing stone surfaces everywhere.

He started when a man stepped into the doorway from inside the office. He was older and a little paunchy, with thick gray hair, neatly combed, and jowels beginning to show on his lined face. He looked up, saw Christopher, and smiled, but there was some strange emotion in it. Sadness, Christopher thought, or maybe exhaustion.

“So,” he said, “You’ve finally arrived.”

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