Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Read Online Free

his memories, and his sense of himself. Being extracted from his body in infinitely small grains. Like sugar being sucked up through a straw.”
    “Rest,” I said. “Try not to talk.”
    “Remember what I told you about the accident in Patagonia? How I was falling, and I knew I was going to die?”
    I dabbed at his face with an antiseptic wipe. “Aye. You said you felt calm about it. Accepting.”
    He nodded. “Like it was meant to be. And when I didn’t die, when I woke up in the hospital, I felt terrible, as if I’d been rejected. This was the same. For a minute, when I managed to climb out of the crevasse and get to Daniel, I felt that I was no longer inside my body. I was up there, with them, and I wanted to be with them.”
    “With the Architects? And you wanted them to take Daniel?”
    “I had to fight it. It was like, the whole time I was running to him, grabbing him, and getting him back to you, I was having a sort of argument with myself about what was best. It’s—I’m sorry, it’s hard to put into words.”
    A minute earlier I’d not wanted him to talk about it; I’d not wanted to know, not yet; now I was frustrated that he couldn’t be more articulate.
    “Try,” I said. “Try, Rosko. I’m a mite confused right now. Atheist Encounters Ancient Gods? It’s hard to process. I’ve been trying not to believe my own eyes. So far, you’re not helping.”
    He shook his head. “I can’t help with that. I don’t know what they are, Morag. But believe your eyes is all I can say. They’re real, and it’s like they want to take a person’s experiences to another place.”
    “Which is what Shul-hura’s religion was preaching three thousand years ago in Babylon, according to the tablets Bill and I translated. It’s also what Julius Quinn says in Anabasis . Taking our experiences out of the body to some place where they don’t depend on the body. All of which makes no sense, because the mind depends totally on the brain. All that afterlife stuff is rubbish.”
    “I’d have agreed with you completely, until today.”
    “So you’re telling me you’re a convert to the Seraphim now?”
    “I don’t know what I’m telling you. It’s too strange. I want to know why part of me did believe that their taking Daniel was in his own interest—and another part of me didn’t believe it. And I want to know why I felt sorry for them: Why did I feel that these gods, or whatever the hell they are, were needy and desperate? And why did I sense that they wanted Daniel, but not you or me?”
     
    You weren’t listening to any of this, or you didn’t seem to be. You were crouched close to me, alert but calm, rubbing a pinch of dirt between your fingers like a tracker scanning the ground for evidence. I allowed myself a sip of optimism. Your body language wasn’t right for a Mystery. More nearly normal than that, more relaxed.
    “Daniel,” I said, crouching next to you. “It’s Morag. Look at me. ”
    You were still wearing your dad’s down mountain jacket, the one he’d slipped off and passed to you on the summit, before the fight with Mayo and the fall into the crevasse. A madman’s bar chart of drying blood stretched from its collar all the way down one sleeve; right at the end, near the Velcro cuff, there was a rust-colored handprint. It looked as if you’d been bleeding from the neck, but the red cells were all Rosko’s, deposited there when he’d carried you. I grabbed your wrists. “Daniel Calder. Please. Look at me.”
    You did. And with a flood of relief I saw, or thought I saw, that it was you. Not that awful blank look of the Mysteries. But your eyes held mine for only a second, before darting away, settling on my forehead, my nose, my eyes again, my chin. As if you didn’t recognize me—or as if you didn’t even grasp that I was a person. Your gaze came back to me again, and slid off me again. Drawn back to the river.
    “Daniel, what happened up there?”
    You said nothing. It was