Billy’s been doing his best, through this monologue, to keep his facial expression neutral, but at this he can feel a look of dismay crack through.
“Oh yes,” Ollard says. “I slit their throats with a ceremonial blade. And then I set the valley ablaze and watched it die. And that? Watching my verdant mountaintop be scoured clean by fire? That, Billy Ridgeway, felt good. And that’s when I knew that there was one last satisfying puzzle for me. The puzzle of how to make that experience be the only experience. For me, for everyone. The puzzle of how to burn the world.”
They’re both silent for the rest of their progress through the aisle. At the end of the aisle is another large door, this one painted red and lacking the little safety window.
“Every puzzle has its solution,” Ollard says, pausing in front of the door. “And so here we are. The Neko of Infinite Equilibrium. The tiny machine that just gets hotter and hotter. The Little Engine That Could. You wanted to see it? Here it is.”
He pulls open the door and enters the room. It’s about the size of a suburban garage. The floor is ashily chalked with a set of concentric rings, and at the center of those rings sits a pair of sawhorses, and suspended between the sawhorses is the feline form of the Neko. Red ears, red collar, deep and expressive eyes. It beckons benignly. Surrounding the Neko is a kind of iridescent globe, like a huge, perfect soap bubble, only giving off an aura of timeless indestructibility, not exactly what soap bubbles are known for.
Billy squints at the shimmering sphere.
“One seal,” says Ollard. “The only seal that remains between the Neko and this world. The five others have fallen before me. This final one is—interesting. A diabolical intelligence lurks in its architecture. It almost makes me believe that Lucifer and I could have been friends, if circumstances had been different. That might have been nice. I could have used a friend.”
“Uh-huh,” says Billy. He’s not really listening anymore. He’s become distracted by the realization that this is the moment: all he has to do is give Ollard a quick squirt of chemicals in the face, grab the Neko, and tear ass out of here. You can do this, he tells himself. He curls his fingers around the pepper spray in his pocket, flips the flip-top with his sweaty thumb. And he yanks the canister out and aims it—
It turns into a live dove in his hand.
He releases it with an inadvertent flourish, and it flutters out into the room, wheels in a circle, and is out the door and gone. Ollard watches it go.
“Billy,” he says, piteously.
Shit, Billy thinks.
Ollard contorts his left hand into some gnarled position, like he’s throwing a gang sign, and Billy is lifted off the ground, about three feet into the air.
This can’t be good, Billy thinks, although he retains some degree of faith in Lucifer’s ward: he is, after all, not in pain. Not yet.
“See, Billy, this is what I was saying about hard-asses,” Ollard says, calmly. “Hard-asses just charge on ahead, trying only the most obvious methods. You think I would have taken you down here and shown you the Neko if there were any chance, any chance at all, that you could have pulled a cheap snatch-and-grab on me?”
He walks in a half circle around Billy, gets in close to Billy’s ear, and drops his voice. “I am disappointed, actually, a little disappointed,” he says. “You almost had me convinced that you were a person pretending very sophisticatedly to be a person who was pretending very poorly to be a hard-ass. But no. No, it turns out you were a hard-ass after all, just a very very bad one, which at least has the merit of being a strategy I haven’t seen before.”
“You can’t hurt me,” Billy says, with a bravery that he doesn’t actually feel. His facial muscles—all his muscles, actually—have gone slack and jellylike; he feels like he has the physical coordination of an infant. He can’t quite manage to fully close his mouth again after he speaks. A thin string of drool hangs off of his lip; he can’t reach for it to wipe it away. This is starting to suck.
“I noticed that, actually,” Ollard says. “It is curious.”
Billy is about to crow triumphantly about the ward, as triumphantly as he can manage through his rubbery mouth, but then he realizes that the less Ollard knows in this particular situation, the better, and he should just shut up now, thanks very much.
“Let’s run a little diagnostic,” Ollard says. He turns to a rack of gray utility shelving at the wall and busies himself there for a minute, leaving Billy hanging in space. When he returns, he has a kind of leather holster slung at his hip; emerging from the holster are six or seven slender rods. Some are gnarled branchlike things and others are smooth, polished, ebon cylinders. Magic wands?