Body Surfing

door to a basement. But the doctor seems to love the idea of something not being what it seems. Or his automobile: from the outside it appears to be an antique, but underneath it is completely new.”
    Q. turned back to her when he reached the bottom of the steps. “Where are you going with this?”
    Ileana leaned over and turned a bottle of Chateau Lafite. “I’m going right here.” It lay near the floor of the wine cellar, but even in the oenologically subdued lighting she had spotted it immediately: all the other bottles were furzed with dust, but this one was clean. That had told her something: not simply that the bottle was another of the doctor’s secret levers, like the book that opened the door to the basement, but that he turned it often, as if he spent a lot of time here.
    A section of cellar wall opened with a barely audible click. Q.’s gasp was not nearly as quiet.
    “Ileana!”
    The huntress was glad she was looking the other way, because it hid her rolling eyes. Her companion was as hysterical as a little girl.
    She took her time standing up, turning to face the room.
    “My my my. What have we here?”
    The section of wall had opened to reveal a twelve-by-twelve cubicle—a bunker really, with cement walls and a single window filled with three-inch Plexiglas. The room had only a single piece of furniture: an elaborate contraption that looked a bit like a chiropractor’s chair, save that its movable head-, arm-, and legrests were equipped with steel restraints.
    The doctor had spared no expense in building his cage: it was not only escape-proof but soundproof as well, which meant that the doctor’s fists beating against the inside of the two-ply Plexiglas window made absolutely no noise in the outer chamber. The silent tableau reminded Ileana of a television her family had owned when she was a little girl, which had a picture but no sound.
    “Did you—?” Q.’s face was aghast. “But why?”
    “The doctor’s part in this hunt is done. I merely wanted to make sure he didn’t attempt to join in where he wasn’t wanted.”
    She walked over to a small console and flipped a switch. The doctor’s voice echoed tinnily out of tiny speakers.
    “Ileana! Open this door immediately!”
    “He knows your real name!”
    “The doctor knows many things he shouldn’t.”
    “Do you blame me for doing my homework? As you yourself have said, this is a war we’re engaged in. The more we know about the enemy, the better our chances of winning.”
    “And yet almost all of your research seems to have been directed against the Legion.” Ileana turned to Q. “For a technophobe, the doctor is a surprisingly good hacker. He’s managed to access the accounts of more than twenty different agents, including the personal archives of half a dozen previous hunters. He knows our names, our demons’ names, the most intimate details about what the Mogran made us do, as well as the identities of all the hosts we’ve killed during the course of our hunts. If this information fell into the hands of the authorities, our entire operation would be destroyed.”
    “Ileana.” The doctor’s voice had taken on a stern paternal tone that almost drove the huntress into a frenzy. “Look at this room. Look at all this equipment in front of you. Do you think I set it up merely to extract information?”
    Ileana’s hand reached for the switch. She’d had enough of the doctor’s soothsaying. But Q.’s hand swatted hers away.
    “I want to hear this.”
    The doctor turned desperately to the boy. “There are many within the Legion who believe the Mogran aren’t supernatural beings. Not spirit, Q., not magic, but simply another kind of energy.”
    Ileana scoffed. “Listen to him at your peril, Q. He will fill your brain with even more nonsense than Leo did.”
    “Until now, no one has ever been able to investigate the accuracy of this theory. There was neither the technology nor, more to the point, a test subject. But now we have both. We have this laboratory, and not one but two Mogran within our reach.”
    “And what if we do catch one of them, doctor? What if your machines tell you that the Mogran are not supernatural beings, but mere physical phenomena? What will that do for us?”
    “If the Mogran are in fact beings of energy, then they are subject to the laws of energy. That means there may be other ways of protecting yourself from them besides the sigil. There may be other ways of stopping them, as well,