Part Thirty-Seven
She catches flashes: dreams, memories, blurry mixes of the two.
Vaughn is gazing down at her. She is lying beneath him and somewhere, in the distance, there are wedding bells. The windows are open. The late afternoon light filters in and the breeze is soft and smells sweetly of flowers. She smiles; she is happy. He leans down to kiss her . . .
"What is it?"
"Ma'am, you—you asked for a status update."
"And you drew the short straw."
"I . . . The device is nearly completed. It's just the rotation speed that's not quite—"
"You'll let me know the moment it's ready."
. . . and when she opens her eyes again it's not Vaughn above her, but Julian Sark. It's much later; the wind is chilly. She sees the sharp angles and even planes of his face only by low lamp light. "Sorry, love," Sark says, "the honeymoon is over." He drags her from the bed, even as she fights him, cries out, scratches at his hands. There is a full length mirror, and he yanks her in front of him, in front of it. She looks at her reflection. Sydney looks back. She feels something press against her temple, and it's a gun. Sark is holding a gun to her head. Sydney's head.
Milo Rambaldi talks to her sometimes. Milo Rambaldi, or the voice's memory of him. He says he is sorry. He tells her that he tried to stop this. But that now it is probably too late.
"No, please!" she cries, but her voice is barely a whisper. Sydney is smiling. Sark's reflection is kissing the side of her neck, as she leans her head into the barrel of the gun. She says, knowingly, "Some part of me always knew."
Milo Rambaldi is sitting at a desk, hand moving furiously as he scribbles down his revelations, prophetic whispers, formulas, visions of miraculous devices and a woman, lovely, heartbreaking: damned. The voice talks to him too. It tells him about what the world will become, the mess people will make of it. Corruption, pain, cruelty. It's unthinkable now, but it only gets worse, so much worse. The voice whispers that they must destroy it, that now is not the right time, that what they need hasn't been invented yet, but he has a plan, he has a way, but events must be set in motion here, now. Rambaldi is crying. He doesn't want the world to end. But he doesn't want the visions to stop either.
Her cheeks are wet with tears. She is standing in front of the mirror but the man behind her is gone, and so is the gun, and it is her own face looking back at her at last. She is wearing a wedding dress. The hem is dipped in blood
To have and to hold, the voice whispers, till death do us part.