'Obviously Vavara, Szwart and Malinari had been trying to get someone's attention, and they'd succeeded. And Trennier had provided them with a way out.
'Well, the rest is sheer conjecture. I'm trying to remember all of this from a dream, after all, and it's a dream I've tried so hard to forget! And even at the time it was fragmentary, as dreams usually are; and Zek, my Zek… she wasn't at her best. But who would be in her… in her situation?'
Once again Trask fell silent, choking on his own emotions. In a little while, when Liz quietly inquired if she should make coffee, he simply nodded. Then for a time no one said anything, not even Jake…
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Zek's Passing
It was several minutes before Trask could continue, but eventually: 'Let me try to tell it the way I saw or received it/ he said. 'It was night at the Refuge, two hours ahead of our time in London. Zek had been awakened by her pager, a call from one of the two-man night-nursing staff. Bruce Trennier was already down in the sump; whatever the trouble was, he'd said it couldn't wait. The forecast said heavy rain, and the resurgence was prone to flash-flooding. If there was a blockage, the pressure could create all kinds of fresh problems down there.
'Which was why he had gone down at night, with a tool box, a powerful torch, and an ancient, battery- powered landline telephone that was probably on the blink, because contact was weak and intermittent. But even before Zek got to the duty room, she sensed that something was wrong. Not with Trennier, you understand — for she didn't even know about him — but just generally wrong. Zek was a very strong telepath, as I've said, and there was… what? A presence? A probing in the psychic aether? Some kind of interference? Whatever, something wasn't right with the 'static' — the term used by telepaths to define the background hiss and babble of thoughts emitted by the people around them — and it was something she'd never experienced before.
'Now, in E-Branch we have rules: we don't use our talents on each other, never. Myself, I have an excuse: my thing's automatic,
as was Darcy Clarke's before me. Darcy wasn't in charge of what he did — in fact, he didn't do anything — his thing simply took care of him. He was a deflector, the opposite of accident-prone, as if some kind of guardian angel was constantly on duty looking after him. Darcy could have crossed a minefield in snowshoes without getting hurt, except his talent wouldn't have let him. But don't think it made him careless. On the contrary, he used to switch off the power before he'd even change a light bulb! Or maybe that was just another form of his talent in action.
'My thing is the same: if someone lies to me I can't help but know it. It's not that I want to, not every time, it's just something that happens. But a telepath has a choice: to tune in on the thoughts of others or simply to ignore them. And most telepaths can turn the static down or even switch it off. Which is just as well, or they'd never get any sleep.
'So in E-Branch we don't mess with each other. Let's face it, it has to be the easiest way to lose friends. If your partner is in a bad mood, you really don't want to know that you're pissing him off just by being in the same room!
'But Zek… she was the same with everyone. At work — in the foreign embassies, or working criminal cases — she was the best. Outside of work, she switched off; she wasn't interested in the many perverse little thoughts that are flying around out there. And it was the same at the Refuge. She had enough on her plate just working with those poor sick kids, let alone probing the minds of her colleagues. And incidentally, she was the only esper out there. It's quite some time since E-Branch maintained any real presence in Radujevac.
'I mention these things so you'll see why she didn't immediately switch on to the truth of what was going on. Zek didn't use her talent as a matter of course, only where it was needed. And as for Trennier being down in the sump: she didn't find out about that until she'd reached the duty room. And even then she wasn't much bothered. Not at first.
'For that wasn't the reason she'd been woken up; no, that was because, being E-Branch, she was the Senior Officer in situ at that time. And any problem with the kids, the Senior Officer had to be informed. That's what it was, the kids. And as far as Zek was concerned — half-awake and all — that's all it was. But they were really going to town. Or rather, they weren't. That's what was wrong with the static: not that its flow had been interrupted, but that it just wasn't there. It was as if… as if the kids had all come awake at the same time and were listening to something. But listening intently, to the exclusion of everything else. And whatever it was they could hear… they didn't much like it.
'That was why they were using their pagers, every last one of them; also why the duty room's switchboard was lit up like a Christmas tree, and why Zek had been woken up and called in for her opinion.
'But she didn't get to voice that opinion, for as she entered the duty room and saw the switchboard, two things happened simultaneously. One: she reached out with her mind — to one of the kids, a case she'd been working with and knew intimately — and two, the old-fashioned landline telephone jangled and went on jangling. Of course it was Trennier, but a damned insistent Trennier.
'First the kid, a Romanian orphan of maybe eighteen years. Zek broke into his mind…
'… And someone was there! Not just the kid, but someone, something, else. Something incredibly intelligent, that crawled and observed and was thirsty for knowledge, something that felt like cold slime, and left a cold, cold void behind it! And when Zek's talent touched it, she 'felt' a recoil, and then a question — 'Who?' — as whatever it was tried to fasten on her, too.
'Then she was out of there, snatching her thoughts back as if they'd contacted a live wire, closing them down and erecting her mental barriers as things began to make sense.
'By which time one of the duty nurses was answering Trennier's call. This was a male nurse, one who Zek knew to be solid as a rock; but as he listened to Trennier's hysterical
babbling over that tinny old telephone wire, so his eyes widened and his mouth fell open.
'Zek took the phone from him, told him to go and see what was wrong with the kids. The other nurse had already left, and now she was on her own — well, except for the terrified voice of Bruce Trennier, reaching up to her from the sump.
'He told her about the body in the monitor pipe, said that it had been shoved, or crushed, all the way in, almost its full length. But despite the awesome force that must have been exerted to cram it in there head first — because the pipe was only eighteen inches in diameter, and the male figure was… Ug — there was still some kind of horrible life in it; the feet kept twitching! And that wasn't the worst of it. Whoever or whatever had done this awful thing was still down there. Trennier had heard something, and he'd seen movement in the inky darkness between him and the open duct!
'And now Zek knew beyond a doubt what was happening here. She didn't want to believe it, but she knew anyway. In the eye of her mind, suddenly she could see the whole story: something had happened to stop the water flowing from Perchorsk, and the Starside Gate was open again. It was the only possible explanation. The children were feeling the influence of whatever Trennier was experiencing, and the 'darkness' between him and his only escape route had to be, could only be—
'—Wamphyri! How didn't matter, but they were back. Back in our world this time, and Bruce Trennier was down there with them. And the kids… their vulnerable minds had been discovered and explored by more powerful minds, or one more powerful mind at least. Sensing it as mice sense a cat, the orphans had reacted — not without justification. Knowing the Wamphyri, Zek knew that their thoughts were terrible things — knew also that the cat was already bunching its muscles, preparing to spring.
'Her mind must have flown every which way. Her responsibilities to the Refuge, the children, E-Branch… even to me, God damn it! The fact that out of the Refuge's double handful of staff she was the only one who knew anything about the Wamphyri.
And the sure knowledge that if they broke into the Refuge, into Romania, the world, then the nightmare would be on us all over again. All of these things galvanizing Zek into activity. But the right or wrong activity — who could say? She only knew she must do something.
'And how to tell Trennier, still hysterical on the phone, that he was already as good as dead or changed
