When he got to the bottom of the shaft, he groped around until he found the lux torches, then pulled one off the wall. He hadn’t been able to use them before because he hadn’t wanted to cast yellow light into any of his brother’s cells. Now that Dazen was in the yellow cell, it didn’t matter anymore.
He found the controls and pulled the levers to bring the yellow cell up. It would take about five minutes for the cell to lift and rotate into position. He’d built it that way so that his brother would always think that the place where the window sat was a weakness in the design, when in fact he’d hardened that spot above all others.
The wait gave him time to think about the spasm of creative genius he’d had in constructing this prison. He’d built the first, blue cell in a month, and then spent the better part of a year constructing all the other cells. He wondered how much different the world would be if he’d simply killed his brother and turned his attention immediately to fighting the Spectrum and changing the injustices he saw them committing everywhere. A waste, all for one man.
Never had the guts to let him go. Never had the guts to murder him in cold blood.
Slowly, slowly, the orb came into view, and then slowly settled. There was a slide to pull back to reveal the window, but Gavin found himself looking blankly at that slide, afraid to pull it open.
Ridiculous. He was here to die. He was here to let his brother out. This should be easy. It was all finished. His heart hammered protests in his chest, and he thought it was going to seize up. His throat constricted. He was sweating.
He pulled back the slide.
A man charged from the other side and swung a club straight at his face.
Gavin threw himself backward. His brother’s lux torch hit the yellow luxin window and shattered in a flash of released yellow brightwater. But the prisoner wasn’t finished. He didn’t laugh with cool resolve at scaring Gavin. Instead, he attacked with the fury of a rabid wolf, beating the lux torch against the window with great blows until the wood shaft splintered in his hands, broke.
“You motherfucker!” the prisoner shouted. “I am going to kill you and everyone you ever loved. I’m going to rip your fucking head off and sodomize you with it.”
Gavin stood, brushed himself off, and put his own lux torch into a bracket.
“You hear me, Gavin?” the prisoner shouted. “You think you’re so clever. Good! You know what? You are clever. You always wanted me to say you’re the smarter brother. You know what? You are. You know what else you are? You’re the weaker brother. You ever wonder why I’m father’s favorite? Look at this. This prison. Ingenious. And pathetic. I thought you made this prison to prove you were smarter than me, brother. I know better now. You made it because you can’t kill me. Because you’re afraid.
“That’s why father loves me. Oh, I’m a disappointment, too. He wishes his son were both smart and ruthless, fearless, but he had to choose one, and he chose me. And he chose right, you spineless, scrofulous sack of shit. Because I can hold a grudge. I can nurse it, feed it, grow it. And I will. You’re going to sit out there, worrying. Just like when you were a kid, huh? You still get the bad dreams, don’t you? You still wake up crying, don’t you? You still piss yourself, Gavin? Now you’ve got a reason to. I’m coming!” The prisoner was so close, his spit flecked the window.
“You could kill me,” he said, “but you won’t. I bet you think about it every single morning when you send me my bread. I could poison this, you think. I could just not feed him, you think. But you can’t. You don’t have it in you. You know, Gavin, you’re right. You don’t. But I do. If our positions had been reversed, I’d have killed you as you lay unconscious at Sundered Rock. I would have cut off your head and filled your mouth with your own feces and put you on a pike. Because that’s how you win, Gavin. That’s how you show you can’t be crossed. Peace through terror, Gavin. That probably doesn’t even make any sense to you, does it? No, you were always like mother, all sweet manipulations and bullshit. She-”
“Mother’s dead,” Gavin said. He didn’t want Dazen to slur her in his moment of anger.
“Fuck her,” Dazen said. “As good a liar as she was, she never even bothered to pretend she didn’t love you more.”
What?
“You killed her?” Dazen asked, seeing a chink in Gavin’s armor in the shock on his face. “You shrive her first? What’d she tell you? Do you think she was honest with you, even then? Or was she angling you to do what she wanted, even then? She might be dead, but I bet she’s not gone, is she? Little spider bitch.”
“That’s your mother you’re talking about, you sick bastard,” Gavin said.
“So what’re you going to do, little brother? Make me stop? You’ll do nothing, like always. You’re going to wait for me, and have your nightmares. I got out of the other prisons, and I’ll get out of this one. You know, I was worried at first, when I fell into the green. I thought that blue was the only one, and green-that was cruel, brother, brilliant. I thought then that there must be seven prisons, one for every color. But there aren’t, are there?”
Gavin said nothing.
“You couldn’t make a cell of superviolet. There’s no way you can make one of sub-red. I don’t think you could make one out of orange or red either. I think this is the last cell. I think I’m a hair’s breadth from ending everything you’ve ever built.”
“You might be surprised,” Gavin said quietly.
“You’re a failure, little brother. An embarrassment. An empty shell.”
Gavin stood looking at his brother in the pitiless yellow light.
“Karris never told you about our night together, did she?” the prisoner said.
“You’ve regaled me with your sexual prowess before. I’m not interested,” Gavin said. The prisoner wasn’t in his right mind. He’d just fallen into the yellow prison in the last twelve hours, doubtless thinking that this time he was really going to escape. The disappointment, the heartbreak would be enough to make anyone lash out. But Gavin didn’t want to hear it.
“So she didn’t.” Dazen laughed, an edgy, grating laugh unlike any Gavin had ever heard from him. “I used to be kind of ashamed of it, really. But I’m past that now. She wasn’t quite so eager as I might have made out before. We were at dinner, my men and her and her father, and I was telling these outrageous jokes, and even her father laughed along, and I had this moment, Gavin, when I realized just how different I am. How I can do whatever I want. I put my big cock in the world, and the world shuts up and takes it. I talked about fucking Karris all night long and making sure she was up to my standards and that coward laughed along. Can you believe it? And Karris, little coward Karris, she just got drunk.
“Sad to say, it was nothing special. She didn’t give me much of a ride after I got mounted. You ever try to finish while the woman’s bawling? And I know it wasn’t because I took her maidenhead. You took care of that, didn’t you?”
“You sick piece of-”
“I didn’t think I was going to be able to finish. I was drunk and she wasn’t doing much for me, with all her tears. But then she said your name, and I knew I had to. To show you that you couldn’t take what was mine. And do you know what’s mine? Anything I want. Anyone. She kept crying afterward so I kicked her out. I was kind of embarrassed, to tell you the truth.” He shrugged. “I got over it.” He leered at Gavin, saw how aghast he was. “She never mentioned it, huh?”
Gavin couldn’t speak.
“You never married her, did you?”
Gavin felt gutted. He’d told his brother a hundred lies about his happy little life and his happy little wife. “No.”
The prisoner’s face contorted. His eyes darted to the side, then back to his gaoler. “Sixteen years of lies, crumbling, huh? You’re probably better off without her anyway. You think while she was making the rounds of the Guiles she slept with father, too?”
Begging his brother to stop or commanding him to stop talking about Karris would be equally ineffectual. “I thought… I always thought you were the good brother,” Gavin said.
“Good brother?” the prisoner barked. “Like we’re the good twin and the bad twin? We’re not twins, Gavin, and neither one of us is good.”
“Have you always been like this, or have you gone mad down here?” Gavin asked.
“You made me, little brother, just like I made you.” Dazen tossed the shattered pieces of the lux torch away. “Now why don’t we end this farce? Open the door. Release me.” He spread his hands wide and leaned against the window, intent on Gavin.
