The Infinite Sea

50

I’M SITTING ALONE in a windowless classroom. Blue carpet, white walls, long white tables. White computer monitors with white keyboards. I’m wearing the white jumpsuit of new recruits. Different camp, same drill, down to the implant in my neck and a trip to Wonderland. I’m still paying for that trip. You don’t feel empty after they drain your memories. You’re sore as hell all over. Muscles retain memory, too. That’s why they have to strap you down for the ride.

The door opens and Commander Alexander Vosch steps into the room. He carries a wooden box that he sets down on the table in front of me.

“You’re looking well, Marika,” he says. “Much better than I expected.”

“My name is Ringer.”

He nods. He understands exactly what I mean. More than once I’ve wondered if the information gathered by Wonderland flows both ways. If you can download human experience, why couldn’t you upload it? It’s possible the person who is smiling at me now contains the memories of every single human being who’s been through the program. He may not be human—and I have my doubts about that—but he may also be the sum of all humans who have passed through Wonderland’s gates.

“Yes. Marika is dead.” He sits down across from me. “And now here you are, rising phoenixlike from her ashes.”

He knows what I’m going to say. I can tell by the twinkling in his baby-blue eyes. Why can’t he just tell me? Why do I have to ask?

“Is Teacup alive?”

“Which answer are you more likely to trust? Yes or no?”

Think before you respond. Chess teaches that. “No.”

“Why?”

“Yes could be a lie to manipulate me.”

He’s nodding appreciatively. “To give you false hope.”

“To gain leverage.”

He cocked his head and looked down his narrow nose at me. “Why would someone like me need leverage over someone like you?”

“I don’t know. There must be something you want.”

“Otherwise…?”

“Otherwise I’d be dead.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long moment. His stare pierces down to my bones. He gestures at the wooden box.

“I brought you something. Open it.”

I look at the box. Look back at him. “I’m not going to do it.”

“It’s just a box.”

“Whatever you want me to do, I won’t. You’re wasting your time.”

“And time is the only currency we have left, isn’t it? Time—and promises.” Tapping the lid of the box. “I spent a great deal of that first precious commodity to find one of these.” He nudges the box toward me. “Open it.”

I open it. He goes on. “Ben wouldn’t play with you. Or little Allison—I mean Teacup; Allison is dead, too. You haven’t played a game of chess since your father died.”

I shake my head. Not in answer to his question. I shake my head because I don’t get it. The chief architect of the genocide wants to play chess with me?

I’m shivering in the paper-thin jumpsuit. The room is very cold. Smiling, Vosch is watching me. No. Not just watching. This isn’t like Wonderland. It isn’t just your memories he knows. He knows what you’re thinking, too. Wonderland is a device. It records, but Vosch reads.

“They’re gone,” I blurt out. “They’re not at the hotel. And you don’t know where they are.” That has to be it. I can think of no other reason why he hasn’t killed me.

A crappy reason, though. In this weather and with his resources, how hard could it be to find them? I clamp my cold hands between my knees and force myself to breathe slowly and deeply.

He opens the lid, removes the board, and takes out the white queen. “White? You prefer white.”

Long, nimble fingers set up the board. The fingers of a musician, a sculptor, a painter. He rests his elbows on the table and laces those fingers to make a shelf for his chin, like my father did every time he played.

“What do you want?” I ask.

He raises an eyebrow. “I want to play a game of chess.”

Staring at me silently. Five seconds becomes ten. Ten becomes twenty. After thirty seconds, an eternity has passed. I think I know what he’s doing: playing a game within a game. I just don’t understand why.

I open with the Ruy Lopez. Not the most original opening in the history of the game; I’m a little stressed. As we play, he hums softly, tunelessly, and now I know he’s deliberately mocking my father. My stomach rolls with revulsion. To survive I built walls, an emotional fortress that protected me and kept me sane in a world gone dangerously insane, but even the most open person has a private, sacred place where no one else may go.

I understand the game within the game now: There is nothing private, nothing sacred. There is no part of me hidden from him. My stomach churns with revulsion. He’s violated more than my memories. He’s molesting my soul.

The mouse and keyboard to my right are wireless. But the monitor beside him isn’t. A lunge across the table, a wallop upside his head, and a wrap of the cord around his neck. Executed in four seconds, over in four minutes. Unless we’re being watched, and we probably are. Vosch will live, Teacup and I will die. And even if I manage to take him out first, the victory will be Pyrrhic, assuming Evan Walker’s claim is true. At the hotel, I pointed this out to Sullivan when she said Evan had sacrificed himself to blow up the base: If they can download themselves into human bodies, they can also make copies of themselves. The set of “Evans” and “Voschs” would be infinite. Evan could kill himself. I could kill Vosch. Wouldn’t matter. By definition, the entities inside them are immortal.

You need to pay close attention to what I’m telling you, Sullivan said with exaggerated patience. There’s a human Evan who merged with the alien consciousness. He’s not one or the other; he’s both. So he can die.

Not the important part.

Right, she snapped. Just the insignificant human part.

Vosch is leaning over the board. His breath smells like apples. I press my hands into my lap. He raises an eyebrow. Problem?

“I’m going to lose,” I tell him.

He feigns surprise. “What makes you think so?”

“You know my moves before I make them.”

“You’re referring to the Wonderland program. But you’re forgetting that we are more than the sum of our experiences. Human beings can be marvelously unpredictable. Your rescue of Ben Parish during the fall of Camp Haven, for example, defied logic and ignored the first prerogative of all living things: to continue living. Or your decision yesterday to give yourself up when you realized capture was the little girl’s only chance to survive.”

“Did she?”

“You already know the answer to that question.” Impatiently, like a harsh teacher to a promising student. He gestures at the board: Play.

I wrap a hand around my fist and squeeze as hard as I can. Imagining my fist is his neck. Four minutes to choke the life out of him. Just four minutes.

“Teacup’s alive,” I tell him. “You know the threat to fry my brain won’t make me do what you want me to do. But you know I’ll do it for her.”

“You belong to each other now, yes? Connected as if by a silver cord?” Smiling. “Anyway, besides the serious injuries from which she may not recover, you’ve given her the priceless gift of time. There is a saying in Latin. Vincit qui patitur. Do you know what it means?”

I’m beyond cold. I’ve reached absolute zero. “You know I don’t.”

“‘He conquers who endures.’ Remember poor Teacup’s rats. What can they teach us? I told you when you first came to me; it isn’t so much about crushing your capacity to fight as it is your will to fight.”

The rats again. “A hopeless rat is a dead rat.”

“Rats do not know hope. Or faith. Or love. You were right about those things, Private Ringer. They will not deliver humanity through the storm. You were wrong, however, about rage. Rage isn’t the answer, either.”

“What’s the answer?” I don’t want to ask, don’t want to give him the satisfaction, but I can’t help it.

“You’re close to it,” he says. “I think you might be surprised how close you are.”

“Close to what?” My voice sounds as small as a rat’s.

He shakes his head, impatient again. “Play.”

“It’s pointless.”

“A world in which chess does not matter is not a world in which I wish to live.”

“Stop doing that. Stop mocking my father.”

“Your father was a good man in thrall to a terrible disease. You shouldn’t judge him harshly. Nor yourself for abandoning him.”

Please don’t go. Don’t leave me, Marika.

Long, nimble fingers clawing at my shirt, the fingers of an artist. Face sculpted by the merciless knife of hunger, the infuriated artist with the helpless clay, and red eyes rimmed in black.

I’ll come back. I promise. You’re going to die without it. I promise. I’ll come back.

Vosch is smiling soullessly, a shark’s smile or a skull’s sneer, and if rage is not the answer, what is? I’m squeezing my fist hard enough to force my nails into my palm. Here’s how Evan described it, Sullivan said, wrapping her fist in her hand. This is Evan. This is the being inside. My hand is the rage, but what is my fist? What is the thing wrapped up in rage?

“One move from mate,” Vosch says softly. “Why won’t you make it?”

My lips barely move. “I don’t like to lose.”

He pulls a silver device the size of a cell phone from his breast pocket. I’ve seen one before. I know what it does. The skin around the tiny patch of adhesive sealing the insertion point on my neck begins to itch.

“We’re a little beyond that stage,” he says.

Blood inside the fist that’s within the hand clenching the fist. “Push the button. I don’t give a shit.”

He nods approvingly. “Now you’re very close to the answer. But it is not your implant linked to this transmitter. Do you still want me to push it?”

Teacup. I look down at the board. One move from mate. The match was over before it began. When the game is fixed, how do you avoid losing?

A seven-year-old knew the answer to that question. I slide my hand beneath the board and hurl it toward his head. I guess that’s checkmate, bitch!

He sees it coming and ducks easily out of the way. Pieces clatter on the table, roll lazily on the tabletop before falling off the edge. He shouldn’t have told me that the device is linked to Teacup: If he pushes the button, he loses his leverage over me.

Vosch pushes the button.

51

MY REACTION IS months in the making. And instantaneous.

I leap across the table, drive my knee hard into his chest, and knock him straight back onto the floor. I land on top of him and smash the heel of my bloody hand into his aristocratic nose, rotating my shoulders into the blow to maximize the impact, textbook perfect, just like my trainers at Camp Haven taught me. Drill after drill after drill until there’s no need to think: Muscles retain memory, too. His nose breaks with a satisfying crunch. This is the point, the instructors told me, when a wise soldier withdraws. Hand-to-hand is unpredictable and every second you remain engaged increases the risk. Getting off the X was the expression. Vincit qui patitur.

But there’s no getting off this particular X. The clock’s down to the final tick; I’m out of time. The door flies open and soldiers pour into the room. I’m taken down quick and hard, yanked off Vosch and thrown face-first onto the floor, a shin pressed against my neck. I smell blood. Not mine, his.

“You disappoint me,” he whispers in my ear. “I told you rage wasn’t the answer.”

They pull me to my feet. The lower half of Vosch’s face is covered in blood. It smears his cheeks like war paint. His eyes are already swelling, giving him a weird, piglike appearance.

He turns to the squad leader standing beside him, a slender, fair-skinned recruit with blond hair and soulful dark eyes.

“Prep her.”

52

HALLWAY: LOW CEILINGS, flickering fluorescents, cinder-block walls. The press of bodies around me, one in front, one behind, two on either side holding my arms. The squeak of rubber-soled shoes against the gray concrete floor and the faint odor of sweat and the bittersweet smell of recycled air. Stairwell: metal rails painted gray like the floors, cobwebs fluttering in corners, dusty yellow lightbulbs in wire cages, descending into warmer, mustier air. Another hall: unmarked doors and large red stripes running down each gray wall and signs that read NO ACCESS and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Room: small, windowless. Cabinets on one wall, a hospital bed in the middle, vital signs monitor beside it, screen dark. On either side of the bed, two people wearing white coats. A middle-aged man, a younger woman, forcing smiles.

The door clangs shut. I’m alone with the White Coats, except for the blond recruit standing at the door behind me.

“Easy or hard,” the man in the white coat says. “Your choice.”

“Hard,” I say. I whip around and drop the recruit with a punch to the throat. His sidearm clatters onto the tile. I scoop it up and turn back to the White Coats.

“There’s no escape,” the man says calmly. “You know that.”

I do know that. But escaping isn’t the reason I need the gun. Not escaping in the sense he means it. I’m not taking hostages and I’m not killing anyone. Killing human beings is the enemy’s goal. Behind me, the kid writhes on the floor, making hiccupping, gurgling sounds. I may have fractured his larynx.

I glance up at the camera mounted in the far corner of the room. Is he watching? Thanks to Wonderland, he knows me better than anyone on Earth. He must know why I took the gun:

I’m mated. And it’s too late to resign the game.

I press the cold muzzle against my temple. The woman’s mouth comes open. She takes a step toward me.

“Marika.” Kind eyes. Soft voice. “She’s alive because you are. If you aren’t, she won’t be.”

It clicks then. He told me rage isn’t the answer, and rage is the only explanation for him hitting the kill switch when I upended the board. That’s what I thought when it happened. It never occurred to me that he might be bluffing.

And it should have. There’s no way he’d give up his leverage. Why didn’t I see that? I’m the one blinded by rage, not him.

I’m dizzy; the room won’t stay still. Bluffs inside bluffs, feints within counterfeints. I’m in a game in which I don’t know the rules or even the object. Teacup is alive because I am. I’m alive because she is.

“Take me to her,” I say to the woman. I want proof that that one fundamental assumption is true.

“Not going to happen,” the man says. “So now what?”

Good question. But the issue has to be pressed and pressed hard, as hard as I press the gun against my temple. “Take me to her or I swear to God I’ll do it.”

“You can’t,” the young woman says. Soft voice. Kind eyes. Hand outstretched.

She’s right. I can’t. It could be a lie; Teacup could be dead. But a chance remains that she’s alive, and if I’m gone, there’s no reason to keep her that way. The risk is unacceptable.

This is the bind. This is the trap. This is where the road of impossible promises dead-ends. This is the only possible outcome of the antiquated belief that the insignificant life of a seven-year-old kid still matters.

I’m sorry, Teacup. I should have finished this back in the woods.

I lower the gun.

53

THE MONITOR FLICKERS on. Pulse, blood pressure, breathing, temperature. The kid I took down is back up, leaning against the door, one hand massaging his throat, the other holding the gun. He glowers at me lying on the bed.

“Something to help you relax,” the woman with the soft voice and kind eyes murmurs. “A little stick.”

The bite of the needle. The walls disappear into colorless nothing. A thousand years pass. I am ground to dust beneath the heel of time. Their voices lumber, their faces expand. The thin foam beneath me dissolves. I am floating on an unbounded ocean of white.

A disembodied voice emerges from the fog. “And now let’s return to the problem of rats, shall we?”

Vosch. I don’t see him. His voice has no source. It originates from everywhere and nowhere, as if he’s inside me.

“You’ve lost your home. And the lovely one—the only one—that you’ve found to replace it is infested with vermin. What can you do? What are your choices? Resign yourself to live peaceably with the destructive pests or exterminate them before they can destroy your new home? Do you say to yourself, ‘Rats are disgusting creatures, but nevertheless they are living things with the same rights as me’? Or do you say, ‘We are incompatible, these rats and I. If I am to live here, these vermin must die’?”

From a thousand miles away, I hear the monitor beeping, marking the beat of my heart. The sea undulates. I rise and fall with each roll of the surface.

“But it isn’t really about the rats.” His voice pounds, dense, thick as thunder. “It never was. The necessity of exterminating them is a given. It’s the method that troubles you. The real issue, the fundamental problem, is rocks.”

The white curtain peels away. I’m still floating, but now I’m far above the Earth in a black void awash with stars, and the sun kissing the horizon paints the planet’s surface beneath me a shimmering gold. The monitor beeps frantically, and a voice says, “Oh, crap,” and then Vosch’s: “Breathe, Marika. You’re perfectly safe.”

Perfectly safe. So that’s why they sedated me. If they hadn’t, my heart probably would have stopped from shock. The effect is three-dimensional, indistinguishable from reality, except I would not be breathing in space. Or hearing Vosch’s voice in a place where sound does not exist.

“This is the Earth as it was sixty-six million years ago. Beautiful, isn’t it? Edenic. Unspoiled. The atmosphere before you poisoned it. The water before you fouled it. The land lush with life before you, rodents that you are, shredded it to pieces to feed your voracious appetites and build your filthy nests. It may have remained pristine for another sixty-six million years, unsullied by your mammalian gluttony, if not for a chance encounter with an alien visitor one-quarter the size of Manhattan.”

It whizzes past me, pockmarked and craggy, blotting out the stars as it barrels toward the planet. When it breaks through the atmosphere, the lower half of the asteroid begins to glow. Bright yellow, then white.

“And thus the fate of the world is decided. By a rock.”

Now I’m standing on the shores of a vast, shallow sea, watching the asteroid fall, a tiny dot, a pebble, insignificant.

“When the dust from the impact has settled, three-quarters of all life on Earth will be gone. The world ends. The world begins again. Humanity owes its existence to a bit of cosmic whimsy. To a rock. It really is remarkable when you think about it.”

The ground shudders. A distant boom, then an eerie silence.

“And therein lies the conundrum, the riddle you’ve been avoiding, because confronting the problem shakes apart the very foundation, doesn’t it? It defies explanation. It renders all that’s happened impossibly discordant, absurd, nonsensical.”

The sea roils; steam whips and swirls. The water is boiling away. A massive wall of dust and pulverized stone roars toward me, blotting out the sky. The air is filled with high-pitched screeching, like the screams of a dying animal.

“I don’t have to state the obvious, do I? The question has been bothering you for a very long time.”

I can’t move. I know it isn’t real, but my panic is as the thundering wall of steam and dust bears down. A million years of evolution has taught me to trust my senses, and the primitive part of my brain is deaf to the rational part that screams in a high pitch like a dying animal, Not real not real not real not real.

“Electromagnetic pulses. Giant metal rods raining from the sky. Viral plague…” His voice rises with each word and the words are like thunderclaps or the heel of a boot slamming down. “Sleeper agents implanted in human bodies. Armies of brainwashed children. What is this? That’s the central question. The only one that really matters: Why bother with any of it when all you need is a very, very big rock?”

The wave rolls over me, and I drown.

54

I’M BURIED FOR MILLENNIA.

Miles above me, the world wakes. In the cool shadows pooling on the rain forest floor, a ratlike creature digs for tender roots. Its descendants will tame fire, invent the wheel, discover mathematics, create poetry, reroute rivers, level forests, build cities, explore deep space. For now, the only important business is finding food and staying alive long enough to make more ratlike creatures.

Annihilated in fire and dust, the world is reborn in a hungry rodent digging in the dirt.

The clock ticks. Nervously, the creature sniffs the warm, moist air. The metronomic beat of the clock speeds up, and I rise toward the surface. When I emerge from the dust, the creature has transformed: It’s sitting in a chair beside my bed, wearing a pair of jeans stiff with dirt and a torn T-shirt. Stoop-shouldered, unshaven, hollow-eyed inventor of the wheel, inheritor, caretaker, prodigal.

My father.

The beep-beep of the monitor. The dripping IV and the stiff sheets and the hard pillow and the lines snaking from my arms. And the man sitting beside the bed, sallow and sweaty, covered with grime, restless, nervously plucking at his shirt, bloodshot eyes and wet, swollen lips.

“Marika.”

I close my eyes. It’s not him. It’s the drug Vosch pumped into you.

Again: “Marika.”

“Shut up. You’re not real.”

“Marika, there’s something I want to tell you. Something you should know.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me,” I say to Vosch. I know he’s watching.

“I forgive you,” my father says.

I can’t catch my breath. There’s a sharp pain in my chest, like a knife driving home.

“Please,” I beg Vosch. “Please don’t do this.”

“You had to leave,” my father says. “You didn’t have a choice, and anyway, what happened is my own damn fault. You didn’t make me a drunk.”

Instinctively, I press my hands against my ears. But his voice isn’t in the room; it’s in me.

“I didn’t last long after you left,” my father tries to reassure me. “Only a couple hours.”

We made it as far as Cincinnati. A little over a hundred miles. Then his stash ran out. He begged me not to leave him, but I knew if I didn’t find some alcohol fast, he’d die. I found some—a bottle of vodka tucked underneath a mattress—after breaking into sixteen houses, if you can call it breaking in, since every house was abandoned and all I had to do was step through a broken window. I was so happy to find that bottle, I actually kissed it.

But I was too late. He was dead by the time I made it back to our camp.

“I know you beat yourself up over that, but I would’ve died either way, Marika. Either way. You did what you thought you had to do.”

There’s no hiding from his voice. No running from it, either. I open my eyes and look straight into his. “I know this is a lie. You aren’t real.”

He smiles. The same smile as when I made a particularly good move in a match. The delighted teacher.

“That’s what I’ve come to tell you!” He rubs his long fingers against his thighs, and I can see the dirt encrusted beneath the nails. “That’s the lesson, Marika. That’s what they want you to understand.”

Warm hand against cool skin: He’s touching my arm. The last time I felt his hand was against my cheek, in hard, stinging slaps while the other hand held me still. Bitch! Don’t leave me. Don’t you ever leave me, bitch! Each bitch! punctuated by a slap. His mind was gone. Seeing things that weren’t there in the profound darkness that slammed down every night. Hearing things in the awful silence that threatened to crush you every day. On the night he died, he woke up screaming, clawing at his eyes. He could feel bugs inside them, crawling.

Those same swollen eyes staring at me now. And the claw marks beneath them still fresh. Another circle, another silver cord: Now I am the one seeing things, hearing things, feeling things that aren’t there in awful silence.

“First they taught us not to trust them,” he whispers. “Then they taught us not to trust each other. Now they’re teaching us we can’t even trust ourselves.”

And I whisper back, “I don’t understand.”

He’s fading away. As I drop deeper into lightless depths, my father fades into depthless light. He kisses me on the forehead. A benediction. A curse.

“You belong to them now.”

55

THE CHAIR IS EMPTY AGAIN. I’m alone. Then I remind myself I was alone when the chair wasn’t empty. I wait for the pounding of my heart to subside. I will myself to stay calm, to control my breathing. The drug will work its way through my system and I’ll be fine. You’re safe, I tell myself. Perfectly safe.

The blond recruit I punched in the throat comes in. He’s carrying a tray of food: a slab of gray mystery meat, potatoes, a mushy pile of beans, and a tall glass of orange juice. He sets the tray by the bed, pushes the button to raise me to a sitting position, rotates the tray in front of me, then stands there, arms crossed, as if he’s waiting for something.

“Let me know how it tastes,” he whispers hoarsely. “I can’t eat solid food for three more weeks.”

His skin is fair, which makes his brown, deep-set eyes seem even darker. He isn’t big, not buff like Zombie or blocky like Poundcake. He’s tall and lean, a swimmer’s body. There’s a quiet intensity about him, in the way he carries himself but especially in the eyes, a carefully contained force coiled just beneath the surface.

I’m not sure what he expects me to say. “Sorry.”

“Sucker punch.” Drumming his fingers on his forearm. “You’re not going to eat?”

I shake my head. “Not hungry.”

Is the food real? Is the kid who brings the food real? The uncertainty of my own experience is crushing. I am drowning in an infinite sea. Sinking slowly, the weight of the lightless depths forcing me down, forcing the air from my lungs, squeezing the blood from my heart.

“Drink the juice,” he scolds. “They said you should at least drink the juice.”

“Why?” I manage to choke out. “What’s in the juice?”

“A little paranoid?”

“A little.”

“They just drained about a pint of blood from you. So they said make sure you drink the juice.”

I have no memory of their taking my blood. Did that happen while I was “talking” to my father? “Why are they draining my blood?”

Dead-eyed stare. “Let’s see if I can remember. They tell me everything.”

“What did they tell you? Why am I here?”

“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” he says. Then: “They told us you’re a VIP. Very important prisoner.” Shaking his head. “I don’t get it. In the good old days, Dorothys just… disappeared.”

“I’m not a Dorothy.”

He shrugs. “I don’t ask questions.”

But I need him to answer some. “Do you know what happened to Teacup?”

“Ran away with the spoon, what I heard.”

“That was the dish.”

“I was making a joke.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Well. Fuck you.”

“The little girl who choppered in with me. Badly wounded. I need to know if she’s alive.”

Nodding seriously. “I’ll get right on that.”

I’m going about this wrong. I was never good with people. My nickname in middle school was Her Majesty Marika and a dozen variations of the same. Maybe I should establish a rapport beyond eff-you. “My name’s Ringer.”

“That’s wonderful. You must be very satisfied with that.”

“You look familiar. Were you at Camp Haven?”

He starts to say something. Stops himself. “I have orders not to talk to you.”

I almost say Then why are you? But I catch myself. “It’s probably a good idea. They don’t want you to know what I know.”

“Oh, I know what you know: It’s all a lie, we’ve been tricked by the enemy, they’re using us to wipe out survivors, blah, blah, blah. Typical Dorothy crap.”

“I used to think all that,” I admit. “Now I’m not so sure.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

“I will.” Rocks and rats and life-forms evolved beyond the need for physical bodies. I’ll figure it out, but probably too late, though it’s probably already too late. Why did they take my blood? Why is Vosch keeping me alive? What could I have that he could possibly need? Why do they need me, this blond kid, or any human? If they could genetically engineer a virus that kills nine out of ten people, why not ten out of ten? Or, as Vosch said, why bother with any of it, when all you need is a very big rock?

My head hurts. I’m dizzy. Nauseated. I miss being able to think clearly. It used to be my number one favorite thing.

“Drink your damn juice so I can go,” he says.

“Tell me your name and I’ll drink it.”

He hesitates, then: “Razor.”

I drink the juice. He picks up the tray and leaves. I got his name at least. A minor victory.

56

THE WOMAN IN the white lab coat shows up. She says her name is Dr. Claire. Dark, wavy hair pulled back from her face. Eyes the color of an autumn sky. She smells like bitter almonds, which is also the odor of cyanide.

“Why did you take my blood?”

She smiles. “Because Ringer is so sweet, we decided to clone a hundred of her.” There is not a hint of sarcasm in her voice. She disconnects the IV and steps back quickly, as if she’s afraid I’ll leap from the bed and strangle her. Strangling her did occur to me, briefly, but I’d rather stab her to death with a pocketknife. I don’t know how many stabs that would take. A lot, probably.

“That’s another thing that doesn’t make sense,” I tell her. “Why download your consciousness into a human body when you can clone as many as you like in your mothership? Zero risk.” Especially since one of your downloads can go all Evan Walker on you and fall in love with a human girl.

“That’s a good point.” Nodding seriously. “I’ll bring that up at the next planning meeting. Maybe we need to rethink this whole hostile-takeover thingy.” She motions toward the door. “March.”

“Where?”

“You’ll find out. Don’t worry.” Claire adds, “You’re going to enjoy it.”

We don’t go far. Two doors down. The room is spare. A sink and a cabinet, a toilet and a shower stall.

“How long has it been since you’ve had a decent shower?” she asks.

“Camp Haven. The night before I shot my drill sergeant in the heart.”

“Did you?” she asks casually, as if I’d told her I used to live in San Francisco. “Towel right there. Toothbrush, comb, deodorant in the cabinet. I’ll be right on the other side of the door. Knock if you need anything.”

Alone, I open the cabinet. Roll-on antiperspirant. A comb. A travel-sized tube of toothpaste. A toothbrush in a plastic wrapper. No floss. I’d hoped there’d be floss. I waste a couple of minutes wondering how long it would take to sharpen the end of the toothbrush into a proper cutting instrument. Then I slip out of the jumpsuit and step into the shower, and I think of Zombie, not because I’m naked in a shower, but remembering him talking about Facebook and drive-thrus and tardy bells and the endless list of all things lost, like greasy fries and musty bookstores and hot showers. I turn the temperature as high as I can stand it and let the water rain over me until my fingertips pucker. Lavender soap. Fruity shampoo. The hard lump of the tiny transmitter rolls beneath my fingers. You belong to them now.

I hurl the shampoo bottle against the shower wall. Slam my fist into the tile again and again until the skin on my knuckles splits open. My anger is greater than the sum of all lost things.

Vosch is waiting for me back in the room two doors down. He says nothing as Claire bandages my hand, silent until we’re alone.

“What did you accomplish?” he asks.

“I needed to prove something to myself.”

“Pain being the only true proof of life?”

I shake my head. “I know I’m alive.”

He nods thoughtfully. “Would you like to see her?”

“Teacup is dead.”

“Why do you think that?”

“There’s no reason to let her live.”

“That’s correct, if we proceed from the assumption that the only reason to keep her alive is to manipulate you. Really, the narcissism of today’s youth!”

He presses a button on the wall. A screen lowers from the ceiling.

“You can’t force me to help you.” Fighting down a rising sense of panic, of losing control of something I never had control over.

Vosch holds out his hand. In his palm is a shiny green object the size and shape of a large gel capsule. A hair-thin wire protrudes from one end. “This is the message.”

The lights dim. The screen flickers to life. The camera soars over a winter-killed field of wheat. In the distance, a farmhouse and a couple of outbuildings, a rusty silo. A tiny figure stumbles from a stand of trees bordering the field and lurches through the dry and broken stalks toward the cluster of buildings.

“That is the messenger.”

From this height, I can’t tell if it’s a boy or girl, only that it’s a small child. Nugget’s age? Younger?

“Central Kansas,” Vosch goes on. “Yesterday at approximately thirteen hundred hours.”

Another figure comes into view on the porch steps. After a minute, someone else comes out. The child begins to run toward them.

“That isn’t Teacup,” I whisper.

“No.”

Crashing through the brittle chaff toward the adults who watch motionlessly, and one of them holds a gun, and there is no sound, which somehow makes it more terrible.

“It’s the ancient instinct: In times of great danger, be wary of strangers. Trust no one outside your circle.”

My body tenses. I know how this ends; I lived it. The man with the gun: me. The child crashing toward him: Teacup.

The child falls. Gets up. Runs. Falls again.

“But there’s another instinct, far older, as old as life itself, nearly impossible for the human mind to override: Protect the young at all costs. Preserve the future.”

The child breaks through the wheat into the yard and falls for the last time. The one with the gun doesn’t lower it, but his companion races to the fallen child and scoops it off the frozen ground. The gunman blocks their way back into the house. The tableau holds for several seconds.

“It’s all about risk,” Vosch observes. “You realized that long ago. So of course you know who will win the argument. After all, how much risk does a little child pose? Protect the young. Preserve the future.”

The person carrying the child sidesteps the one with the gun and rushes up the steps into the house. The gunman drops his head as if in prayer, then lifts his head as if in supplication. Then he turns and goes inside. The minutes spin out.

Beside me, Vosch murmurs, “The world is a clock.”

The farmhouse, the outbuildings, the silo, the brown fields, and the blur of numbers as the time display at the bottom of the screen ticks off the seconds by the hundredths. I know what’s coming but still I flinch when the silent flash whites out the scene. Then roiling dust and debris and billowing smoke: The wheat is burning, consumed in a matter of seconds, tender fodder for the fire, and where the buildings used to be, a crater, a black hole bored into the Earth. The feed goes black. The screen retracts. The lights stay dim.

“I want you to understand,” Vosch says gently. “You’ve wondered why we kept the little ones, the ones too young to fight.”

“I don’t understand.” Tiny figure in acres of brown, dressed in denim overalls, barefoot, running through the wheat.

He misreads my confusion. “The device inside the child’s body is calibrated to detect minute fluctuations in carbon dioxide, the chief component of human breath. When the CO2 reaches a certain threshold, indicating the presence of multiple targets, the device detonates.”

“No,” I whisper. They brought him inside, wrapped him in a warm blanket, brought him water, washed his face. The group gathered around him, bathing him in their breath. “They’d be just as dead if you dropped a bomb.”

“It isn’t about the dead,” he snaps impatiently. “It never was.”

The lights come up, the door comes open, and Claire comes in wheeling a metal cart, followed by her white-coated buddy and Razor, who looks at me and then looks away. That got to me more than the cart with its array of syringes: He couldn’t bring himself to look at me.

“It doesn’t change anything.” My voice rising. “I don’t care what you do. I don’t even care about Teacup anymore. I’ll kill myself before I help you.”

He shakes his head. “You’re not helping me.”

57

CLAIRE TIES a rubber strap around my arm and taps the inside of my elbow to bring up a vein. Razor stands on the other side of the bed. The man in the white coat—I never got his name—is by the monitor, holding a stopwatch. Vosch leans against the sink, watching me with bright, flinty eyes glittering, like the crows’ in the woods on the day I shot Teacup, curious but curiously indifferent, and then I understand that Vosch is right: The answer to their arrival is not rage. The answer is rage’s opposite. The only possible answer is the opposite of all things, like the pit where the farmhouse once stood: simply nothing. Not hate, not anger, not fear, not anything at all. Empty space. The soulless indifference of the shark’s eye.

“Too high,” murmured Mr. White Coat, looking at the monitor.

“First something to relax you.” Claire slides the needle into my arm. I look at Razor. He looks away.

“Better,” White Coat says.

“I don’t care what you do to me,” I tell Vosch. My tongue feels bloated, clumsy.

“It doesn’t matter.” He nods at Claire, who picks up the second syringe.

“Inserting the hub on my mark,” she says.

The hub?

“Uh-oh,” White Coat says. “Careful.” Eyeing the monitor as my heart rate kicks up a notch.

“Don’t be afraid,” Vosch says. “It won’t harm you.” Claire gives him a startled look. He shrugs. “Well. We ran tests.” He flicks his finger at her: Get on with it.

I weigh ten million tons. My bones are iron; the rest is stone. I don’t feel the needle slide into my arm. Claire says, “Mark,” and White Coat clicks the stopwatch. The world is a clock.

“The dead have their reward,” Vosch says. “It is the living—you and I—who still have work to do. Call it what you like, fate, luck, providence. You have been delivered into my hands to be my instrument.”

“Appending to the cerebral cortex.” From Claire. Her voice sounds muffled, as if my ears have been stuffed with cotton. I roll my head toward her. A thousand years go by.

“You’ve seen one before,” Vosch says, a thousand miles away. “In the testing room, on the day you arrived at Camp Haven. We told you it was an infestation of an alien life-form attached to the human brain. That was a lie.”

I can hear Razor breathing, loud, like a diver’s breath through a regulator.

“It is actually a microscopic command hub affixed to the prefrontal lobe of your brain,” Vosch says. “A CPU, if you will.”

“Booting up,” Claire says. “Looking good.”

“Not to control you…,” Vosch says.

“Introducing first array.” Needle glinting in fluorescent light. Black specks suspended in amber fluid. I feel nothing as she injects it into my vein.

“But to coordinate the forty thousand or so mechanized guests to which you will play host.”

“Temp ninety-nine point six,” White Coat says.

Razor beside me breathing.

“It took the prehistoric rats millions of years and a thousand generations to reach the current stage in human evolution,” Vosch says. “It will take you days to achieve the next.”

“Link with the first array complete,” Claire says, bending over me again. Bitter almond breath. “Introducing second array.”

The room is furnace-hot. I’m drenched in sweat. White Coat announces that my temperature is one hundred and two.

“It’s a messy business, evolution,” Vosch says. “Many false starts and blind alleys. Some candidates aren’t suitable hosts. Their immune systems crash or they suffer from permanent cognitive dissonance. In layman’s terms, they go mad.”

I’m burning. My veins are filled with fire. Water flows from my eyes, trickles down my temples, pools in my ears. I see Vosch’s face leaning over the surface of the undulating sea of my tears.

“But I have faith in you, Marika. You did not come through fire and blood only to fall now. You will be the bridge that connects what-was to what-will-be.”

“We’re losing her,” White Coat calls out, tremble-voiced.

“No,” Vosch murmurs, cool hand on my wet cheek. “We have saved her.”

58

THERE IS NO DAY or night anymore, only the sterile glow of the fluorescent lights, and those lights never go out. I measure the hours by Razor’s visits, three times a day to deliver meals I can’t keep down.

They can’t control my fever. Can’t stabilize my blood pressure. Can’t subdue my nausea. My body is rejecting the eleven arrays designed to augment each of my biological systems, each array consisting of four thousand units, which makes a total of forty-four thousand microscopic robotic invaders coursing through my bloodstream.

I feel like shit.

After every breakfast, Claire comes in to examine me, tinker with my meds, and make cryptic remarks like, You better start feeling better. The window of opportunity is closing. Or snide ones like, I’m starting to think the whole very-big-rock idea was the right way to go. She seems to resent that I’ve reacted badly to her pumping me full of forty thousand alien mechanisms.

“It’s not like there’s anything you can do about it,” she told me once. “The procedure is irreversible.”

“There is one thing.”

“What? Oh. Sure. Ringer the irreplaceable.” She pulled the kill switch device from her lab coat pocket and held it up. “Got you keyed in. I’ll push the button. Go ahead. Tell me to push the button.” Smirking.

“Push the button.”

She laughed softly. “It’s amazing. Whenever I start wondering what he sees in you, you say something like that.”

“Who? Vosch?”

Her smile faded. Her eyes went shark-eyed blank. “We will terminate the upgrade if you can’t adjust.”

Terminate the upgrade.

She peeled the bandages away from my knuckles. No scabs, no bruises, no scars. As if it hadn’t happened. As if I’d never pounded my fist into the wall until the skin split down to the bone. I thought of Vosch appearing in my room completely healed, days after I smashed his nose and gave him two black eyes. And Sullivan, who told the story of Evan Walker torn apart by shrapnel and yet, somehow, hours later, able to infiltrate and take out an entire military installation by himself.

First they took Marika and made her Ringer. Now they’ve taken Ringer and “upgraded” her into someone completely different. Someone like them.

Or something.

There is no day or night anymore, only a constant sterile glow.

59

“WHAT HAVE THEY done to me?” I ask Razor one day when he carts in another inedible meal. I don’t expect an answer, but he’s expecting me to ask the question. It must strike him as weird that I haven’t.

He shrugs, avoiding my gaze. “Let’s see what’s on the menu today. Oooh. Meat loaf! Lucky duck.”

“I’m going to vomit.”

His eyes widen. “Really?” He looks around for the plastic upchuck container, desperate.

“Please, take the tray away. I can’t.”

He frowns. “They’ll pull the plug on you if you don’t get your shit together.”

“They could have done this to anyone,” I say. “Why did they do it to me?”

“Maybe you’re special.”

I shake my head and answer as if he were serious. “No. I think it’s because someone else is. Do you play chess?”

Startled: “Play what?”

“Maybe we could play. When I’m feeling better.”

“I’m more of a baseball guy.”

“Really? I would have guessed swimming. Or tennis.”

He cocks his head. His eyebrows come together. “You must be feeling bad. Making conversation like you’re halfway human.”

“I am halfway human. Literally. The other half…” I shrug. It coaxes out a grin.

“Oh, the 12th System is definitely theirs,” he says.

The 12th System? What did that mean exactly? I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s in reference to the eleven normal systems of the human body.

“We found a way to yank them out of Teds’ bodies and…” Razor trails off, gives the camera an abashed look. “Anyway, you have to eat. I overheard them talking about a feeding tube.”

“So that’s the official story? Like Wonderland: We’re using their technology against them. And you believe that.”

He leans against the wall, crosses his arms over his chest, and hums “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” I shake my head. Amazing. It isn’t that the lies are too beautiful to resist. It’s that the truth is too hideous to face.

“Commander Vosch is implanting bombs inside children. He’s turning kids into IEDs,” I tell him. He hums louder. “Little kids. Toddlers. They’re separated when they come in, aren’t they? They were at Camp Haven. Anyone younger than five is carted off and you never see them again. Have you seen any? Where are the children, Razor? Where are they?”

He stops humming long enough to say, “Shut up, Dorothy.”

“And does that make sense: loading up a Dorothy with superior alien technology? If command decided to ‘enhance’ people for the war, do you really think it would pick the crazy ones?”

“I don’t know. They picked you, didn’t they?” He grabs the tray of untouched food and heads for the door.

“Don’t go.”

He turns, surprised. My face is hot. The fever must be spiking. That has to be it.

“Why?” he asks.

“You’re the only honest person I have left to talk to.”

He laughs. It’s a good laugh, authentic, unforced; I like it, but I am feverish. “Who says I’m honest?” he asks. “We’re all enemies in disguise, right?”

“My father used to tell this story about six blind men and an elephant. One man felt the elephant’s leg and said an elephant must look like a pillar. Another felt the trunk and said an elephant must look like a tree branch. Blind guy number three felt the tail and said an elephant is like a rope. Fourth guy feels the belly: The elephant is like a wall. Fifth guy, ear: The elephant is shaped like a fan. Sixth guy, a tusk, so an elephant must be like a pipe.”

Razor stares at me stone-faced for a long moment, then smiles. It’s a good smile; I like it, too.

“That’s a beautiful story. You should tell it at parties.”

“The point is,” I tell him, “from the moment their ship appeared, we’ve all been blind men patting an elephant.”

60

IN THE CONSTANT sterile glow, I measure the days by the uneaten meals he brings. Three meals, one day. Six, two days. On the tenth day, after he sets the tray in front of me, I ask him, “Why do you bother?” My voice like his now, a throaty croak. I’m soaked in sweat, fever spiking, head pounding, heart racing. He doesn’t answer. Razor hasn’t spoken to me in seventeen meals. He seems jittery, distracted, even angry. Claire’s gone silent, too. She comes twice a day to change my IV bag, look into my eyes with an otoscope, test my reflexes, change out the catheter bag, and empty the bedpan. Every sixth meal, I get a sponge bath. One day, she brings a tape measure and wraps it around my biceps, I guess to see how much muscle I’ve lost. I don’t see anyone else. No Mr. White Coat. No Vosch or dead fathers pumped into my head by Vosch. I’m not so out of it that I don’t know what they’re doing: holding vigil, waiting to see if the “enhancement” kills me.

She’s rinsing out the bedpan one morning when Razor comes in with my breakfast, and he waits silently until she’s finished, and then I hear him whisper, “Is she dying?”

Claire shakes her head. Ambivalent: could be no, could be your guess is as good as mine. I wait till she’s gone to say, “You’re wasting your time.”

He glances at the camera mounted in the ceiling. “I just do what they tell me.”

I pick up the tray and hurl it onto the floor. His lips tighten, but he doesn’t say anything. Silently, he cleans up the mess while I lie panting, exhausted from the effort, sweat pouring off me.

“Yeah, pick that up. Make yourself useful.”

When my fever shoots up, something in my mind loosens, and I imagine I can feel the forty-four thousand microbots swarming in my bloodstream and the hub with its delicate lace of tendrils burrowed into every lobe, and I understand what my father felt in his dying hours as he clawed at himself to subdue the imaginary insects crawling beneath his skin.

“Bitch,” I gasp. From the floor, Razor looks up at me, startled. “Leave me, bitch.”

“No problem,” he mutters. On his hands and knees, using a wet rag to mop up the mess, and the tart smell of disinfectant. “Fast as I can.”

He stands up. His ivory cheeks are flushed. Deliriously, I think the color brings out the auburn highlights in his blond hair. “It won’t work,” he tells me. “Starving yourself. So you better think of something else.”

I’ve tried. But there’s no alternative. I can barely lift my head. You belong to them now. Vosch the sculptor, my body the clay, but not my spirit, never my soul. Unconquered. Uncrushed. Uncontained.

I am not bound; they are. Languish, die, or recover, the game’s over, the grand master Vosch mated.

“My father had a favorite saying,” I tell Razor. “We call chess the game of kings because, through chess, we learn how to rule kings.”

“Again with the chess.”

He drops the dirty rag into the sink and slams out the door. When he returns with the next meal, there’s a familiar wooden box beside the tray. Without a word, Razor picks up the food and dumps it into the trash, tosses the metal tray into the sink, where it lands with a loud clang. The bed hums, maneuvering my body into a sitting position, and he slides the box in front of me.

“You said you didn’t play,” I whisper.

“So teach me.”

I shake my head and say to the camera behind him, “Nice try. But stuff it up your ass.”

Razor laughs. “Not their idea. But speaking of asses, you can bet yours I got permission first.”

He opens the box, pulls out the board, fumbles with the pieces. “You got your queens and kings and the prawns and these guard-tower-looking things. How come every piece is like a person except those?”

“Pawns, not prawns. A prawn is a big shrimp.”

He nods. “That’s the name of a guy in my unit.”

“Shrimp?”

“Prawn. Never knew what the hell it meant.”

“You’re setting it up wrong.”

“That could be because I don’t know how to freaking play. You do it.”

“I don’t want to do it.”

“Then you’re conceding defeat?”

“Resigning. It’s called resigning.”

“That’s good to know. I have a feeling that’ll come in handy.” Smiling. Not the Zombie high-voltage type. Smaller, subtler, more ironic. He sits beside the bed and I catch a whiff of bubble gum. “White or black?”

“Razor, I’m too weak to even lift—”

“Then you point where you want to go and I’ll move you.”

He’s not giving up. I didn’t really expect him to. By this point, wafflers and wusses have been winnowed out. There are no pussies left. I tell him where to place the pieces and how each one moves. Describe the basic rules. Lots of nodding and uh-huhs, but I get the feeling there’s a lot of agreeing and not much grasping. Then we play and I slaughter him in four moves. The next game, he falls into arguing and denying: You can’t do that! Tell me that isn’t the stupidest damn rule ever. Game three and I’m sure he’s regretting the whole idea. My spirits aren’t being lifted and his are being totally crushed.

“This is the dumbest-assed game ever invented,” he pouts.

“Chess wasn’t invented. It was discovered.”

“Like America?”

“Like mathematics.”

“I knew girls just like you in school.” He leaves the point there and starts to set up the board again.

“That’s all right, Razor. I’m tired.”

“Tomorrow I’m bringing some checkers.” Spoken like a threat.

He doesn’t, though. Tray, box, board. This time he sets up the pieces in a strange configuration: the black king in the center facing him, the queen on the edge facing the king, three pawns behind the king at ten, twelve, and two o’clock, one knight on the king’s right, another on his left, a bishop directly behind him and, next to the bishop, another pawn. Then Razor looks at me, wearing that seraphic grin.

“Okay.” I’m nodding, not sure why.

“I’ve invented a game. Are you ready? It’s called…” He taps on the bedrail to produce a drumroll. “Chaseball!”

“Chaseball?”

“Chess-baseball. Chaseball. Get it?” He plops a coin beside the board.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s a quarter.”

“I know it’s a quarter.”

“For the purposes of the game, it’s the ball. Well, not really the ball, but it represents the ball. Or what happens with the ball. If you’d be quiet a second, I could explain all the rules.”

“I wasn’t talking.”

“Good. You give me a headache when you talk. Name-calling and Yoda quotes about chess and cryptic elephant stories. You want to play or not?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He places a white pawn just in front of the black queen, saying that’s him, the batter.

“You should lead off with your queen. She’s the most powerful.”

“That’s why she bats cleanup.” He shakes his head. My ignorance is astounding. “Real simple: Defense, that’s you, flips first. Heads, it’s a strike. Tails, a ball.”

“A coin won’t work,” I point out. “There are three possibilities: strike, ball, or a hit.”

“Actually, there are four, counting fouls. You stick to chess; I’ll handle baseball.”

“Chaseball,” I correct him.

“Anyway. If you flip a ball, that’s a ball, and you flip again. Comes up heads, though, and then I get the coin. See, that gives me a chance to get a hit. Heads I connect, tails I miss. If I miss, strike one. And so on.”

“I get it. And if you flip heads, I get the coin back to see if I can field it. Heads I throw you out…”

“Wrong! So wrong! No. First I flip, three times. Four times if I get a TT.”

“TT?”

“Two tails. That’s a triple. With a TT you get one more flip: heads is a home run; tails, just a triple. Heads-heads is a single; heads-tails is a double.”

“Maybe we should just start playing and you can—”

“Then you get the coin back to see if you can field my potential single, double, triple, or homer. Heads, I’m out. Tails, I’m on base.” He takes a deep breath. “Unless it’s a home run, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Are you making fun of me? Because I don’t know—”

“I’m just trying to absorb—”

“It kind of sounds like you are. You have no idea how long it took me to come up with this. It’s pretty complicated. I mean, not like the game of kings, but you know what they call baseball, don’t you? The national pastime. Baseball is called the national pastime because, by playing it, we learn how to master time. Or the past. One of ’em.”

“Now you’re the one making fun of me.”

“Actually, I’m the only one making fun of you right now.” He waits. I know what he’s waiting for. “You never smile.”

“Does it matter?”

“Once, when I was a kid, I laughed so hard, I peed my pants. We were at Six Flags. The Ferris wheel.”

“What made you laugh?”

“I can’t remember now.” He slides his hand beneath my wrist and lifts my arm to press the quarter into my upturned palm. “Flip the damn coin so we can play.”

I don’t want to hurt his feelings, but the game isn’t that complicated. He gets very excited on his first hit, triumphantly fist pumping, then proceeding to move the black pieces around the board while he calls the play in a hoarse, high-pitched imitation of an announcer’s voice, like a kid playing with action figures.

“It’s a deep drive into center field!” The center-field pawn slides toward second base, the bishop second baseman and the pawn shortstop drop back, and the left-field pawn runs up, then cuts toward center. That’s with one hand while the other manipulates the quarter, turning it in his fingers like a ball spinning in flight, lowering it as if in slow motion to land in center-left field. It’s so ridiculous and childish that I would have smiled if I still smiled.

“He’s safe!” Razor bellows.

No. Not childish. Childlike. Eyes fever bright, voice rising in excitement, he’s ten again. Not all things are lost, not the important things.

His next hit is a blooper that drops between first base and right field. He creates a dramatic collision between my fielder and baseman, first base sliding back, right field sliding up, then smack! Razor cackles at the impact.

“Wouldn’t that be an error?” I ask. “It’s a catchable ball.”

“Catchable ball? Ringer, it’s just a dorky game I made up in five minutes with a bunch of chess pieces and a quarter.”

Two more hits; he’s three runs up at the top of the first. I’ve always sucked at games of chance. Always hated them for that reason. Razor must sense my enthusiasm waning. He amps up the commentary while sliding the pieces around (despite my pointing out they’re my pieces, since I’m on defense). Another drive deep center-left. Another floater behind first base. Another impact of first baseman and outfielder. I don’t know if he’s repeating himself because he thinks it’s funny or because he has a serious deficit in imagination. There’s a part of me that feels as if I should be deeply affronted on behalf of chess players everywhere.

By the third inning, I’m exhausted.

“Let’s pick it up again tonight,” I suggest. “Or tomorrow. Tomorrow would be better.”

“What? You don’t like it?”

“No. It’s fun. I’m just tired. Really tired.”

He shrugs like it doesn’t matter, which it does, or he wouldn’t shrug. He slips the quarter back into his pocket and packs up the box, muttering under his breath. I catch the word chess.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.” Cutting his eyes away.

“Something about chess.”

“Chess, chess, chess. Chess on the brain. Sorry chaseball has nothing on chess in the sheer thrill category.”

He shoves the box under his arm and stomps to the door. One last parting shot before he goes: “I thought maybe I’d cheer you up a little, that’s all. Thanks. We don’t have to play anymore.”

“Are you angry at me?”

“I gave chess a chance, didn’t I? You didn’t see me bitching.”

“You didn’t. And you did. A lot.”

“Just think about it.”

“Think about what?”

He shouts across the room: “Just think about it!”

He slams out the door. I’m out of breath, shaky, and can’t figure out why.

61

I’M READY WITH an apology when the door opens that night. The more I think about it with my feverish mind, the more I feel like the bully at the beach who kicks over some little kid’s sand castle.

“Hey, Razor, I’m—”

My mouth drops open. There’s a stranger holding the tray, a kid around twelve or thirteen.

“Where’s Razor?” I ask. Well, more like demand.

“I don’t know,” the kid squeaks. “They handed me the tray and said take it.”

“Take it,” I echo stupidly.

“Yeah. Take it. Take the tray.”

They pulled Razor off Ringer duty. Maybe chaseball’s against regs. Maybe Vosch got ticked, two kids acting like kids for a couple of hours. Despair is addictive, for the one watching it and the one experiencing it.

Or maybe Razor’s the ticked party here. Maybe he asked to be reassigned, took his chaseball and went home.

I don’t sleep well that night, if you can call it night under the constant sterile glow. My fever shoots up to a hundred and three as my immune system launches its final, desperate assault on the arrays. I can see the blurry green numbers on the monitor inching upward. I slip into a semi-delirious doze.

Bitch! Leave me. You know why they call it baseball, don’t you? It’s a deep drive into center field! I’m done. Take care of yourself.

The grungy silver turning in Razor’s fingers. It’s a deep drive. A deep drive. Lowering toward the board in slow motion, where the fielders come up, second base and shortstop go back, left goes right. Blooper on the first-base line! Fielder races up, baseman back, boom. Fielders up, infield back, cut to the right. First baseman back, right fielder up, boom. Up, back, cut. Back, up. Boom.

Over and over, let’s go to the instant replay, up, back, cut. Back, up.

Boom.

Now I’m wide-awake, staring at the ceiling. No. Can’t see it as well. Better with my eyes closed.

Center and left slash down. Left cuts across:

H

Right steps up. First base runs back:

I

Oh, come on. Ridiculous. You’re delusional.

When I got back to our camp that night with the vodka, I found my dead father curled into a fetal position, his face covered in blood where he had clawed at the bugs born inside his mind. Bitch, he called me before I left to find the poison that would save him. He called me another name, too, the name of the woman who left us when I was three. He thought I was my mother, which was ironic. From the time I was fourteen, I was more like his mother, feeding him, washing his clothes, taking care of the house, making sure he didn’t do something catastrophically stupid to himself. And every day I went to school in my perfectly pressed uniform and they called me Her Majesty Marika and said I thought I was better than everybody else because my father was a semi-famous artist, the reclusive genius type, when the truth was that most days my father didn’t know what planet he was on. By the time I got home from school, he’d be full-on delusional. And I let people on the outside hold their delusions, too. I let them think I thought I was better, the way I let Sullivan think she was right about me. I didn’t just foster the delusions. I lived them. Even after the world crashed around us, I clung to them. But after he died, I told myself no more. No more brave fronts or false hopes or pretending everything’s okay when nothing is. I thought I was being tough by pretending, calling it being optimistic, brave, keeping my head up or whatever bullshit seemed to fit the moment. That’s not tough. That’s the very definition of soft. I was ashamed of his disease and angry at him, but I was just as guilty. I played right into the lies right up to the end: When he called me my mother’s name, I didn’t correct him.

Delusional.

In the corner, the camera’s blank, soulless eye staring.

What did Razor say? Just think about it!

That’s not all you said, is it? I ask him, looking blankly back at the blank, black eye. That isn’t everything.

62

I HOLD MY BREATH when the door opens the next morning.

All night I seesawed between belief and doubt. I wallowed in every aspect of the new reality.

First option: Razor didn’t invent chaseball any more than I invented chess. The game is Vosch’s creation for reasons too murky to see clearly.

Second option: Razor, for reasons only clear to Razor, has decided to seriously mess with my head. It wasn’t just the hardhearted and resilient who survived the winnowing of the human race. A lot of sadistic assholes persisted, too. That’s the way of every human catastrophe. The douchebag is nearly indestructible.

Third option: All of it is entirely in my head. Chaseball is a silly game made up by a kid to take my mind off the fact that I may be dying. There’s no other point, no secret messages traced on a chessboard. My seeing letters where there are no letters is the human brain’s tendency to find patterns, even where there are no patterns.

And I hold my breath for another reason: What if it’s the squeaky-voiced kid again? What if Razor doesn’t come back, ever come back? There’s a real possibility that Razor is dead. If he was trying to secretly communicate with me and Vosch figured it out, I’m sure Vosch’s response would be one thing and only one thing.

I let out my breath slow and steady when he steps into the room. The beeping of the monitor kicks up a notch.

“What?” Razor asks, narrowing his eyes at me. He senses something’s up right away.

I say it. “Hi.”

His eyes cut right, cut left. “Hi.” Drawing the tiny word out slowly, as if he’s not sure if he’s with a lunatic. “Hungry?”

I shake my head. “Not really.”

“You should try to eat this. You look like my cousin Stacey. She was a meth addict. I don’t mean you literally look like a meth addict. Just…” Face turning red. “You know, like something is eating you from the inside.”

He pushes the button beside the bed. I rise. He says, “You know what I’m addicted to? Sour Patch Kids. Raspberry. Not so crazy about the lemon. I have a stash. I’ll bring you some if you want.”

He sets the tray in front of me. Cold scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, a blackened, crusty thing that may or may not be bacon. My stomach clenches. I look up at him.

“Try the eggs,” he suggests. “They’re fresh. Free range, organic, chemical free. We raise them right here in camp. The chickens, not the eggs.”

Dark, soulful eyes and that small, mysterious, beatific smile. What did his reaction mean when I said hi? Was he startled I offered him a halfway human greeting or was he startled because I had figured out the real point of chaseball? Or was he not startled at all and I’m picking up cues that aren’t there?

“I don’t see the box.”

“What box? Oh. It was kind of a stupid game.” He looks away and says softly to himself, “I miss baseball.”

He’s quiet for the next couple of minutes while I move the cold eggs around the plate. I miss baseball. A universe of loss in four syllables.

“No, I liked it,” I tell him. “It was fun.”

“Really?” A look: Are you serious? He doesn’t know that I am 99.99999 percent of the time. “You didn’t seem too down with it at the time.”

“I guess I’m just not feeling well lately.”

He laughs and then seems surprised at his own reaction. “Okay. Well, I left it in my quarters. I’ll bring it someday if nobody swipes it.”

The conversation meanders off the game. I discover Razor was the youngest of five kids, grew up in Ann Arbor, where his dad worked as an electrician and his mom as a middle school librarian, played baseball and soccer and loved Michigan football. Until he was twelve, his great ambition was to be the starting quarterback for the Wolverines. But he grew tall, not big, and baseball became his passion.

“Mom wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer, but the old man didn’t think I was smart enough…”

“Wait. Your dad didn’t think you were smart?”

“Smart enough. There’s a difference.” Defending his father even in death. People die; love endures. “He wanted me to be an electrician like him. Dad was a big union guy, president of his local, stuff like that. That was the real reason he didn’t want me to be a lawyer. Suits, he called them.”

“He had a problem with authority.”

Razor shrugs. “‘Be your own man,’ he always said. ‘Don’t be the Man’s man.’” He shuffles his feet, embarrassed, like he’s talking too much. “What about your old man?”

“He was an artist.”

“That’s cool.”

“He was also a drunk. Did more drinking than painting.” Though not always. Yellowed photographs of showings hanging crooked in dusty frames and the students buzzing in his studio nervously cleaning brushes and the cathedral hush that fell when he walked into a crowded room.

“What kind of shit did he paint?” Razor asks.

“Mostly that. Shit.” Not always, though. Not when he was younger and I was small and the hand that held mine was stained with rainbow colors.

He laughs. “The way you joke. Like you don’t even know it’s a joke, and it’s your own joke.”

I shake my head. “I wasn’t joking.”

He nods. “Maybe that’s why you don’t know it.”

63

AFTER THE EVENING meal I don’t eat and the forced banter and the minuscule awkward silences that drop between our sentences, and after the board comes out of the wooden box and he’s set up the pieces and we flip to see who’s the home team and he wins, I tell him I think I can handle my own fielding, and he smirks, Yeah, right, let’s go, girl, after he’s sitting beside me on the edge of the bed and after weeks of learning to let go of my rage and embrace the howling emptiness and after years of erecting fortress walls around pain and loss and the feeling that I will never feel again, after losing my father and losing Teacup and losing Zombie and losing everything but the howling emptiness and that is nothing, nothing at all, I silently say the word:

HI

Razor nods. “Yeah.” He taps his finger on the blanket. I feel the tap against my thigh. “Yeah.” Tap. “Not bad, though it’s cooler when you do it in slo-mo.” He demonstrates. “Get it now?”

“If you insist.” I sigh. “Yeah.” I tap my finger on the bedrail. “Well, to be honest I don’t really see the point.”

“No?” Tap-tap on the blanket.

“No.” Tap-tap on the rail.

The next word takes over twenty minutes to trace:

HLP

Tap. “Did I ever tell you about my summer job before there were no more summer jobs?” he asks. “Dog grooming. Worst part of the job? Expressing the anal glands…”

He’s on a roll. Four runs and not a single out.

HOW

I won’t get an answer for another forty minutes. I’m a little tired and more than a little frustrated. This is like texting with someone a thousand miles away using one-legged runners. Time slows down; events speed up.

PLN

I have no idea what that means. I look at him but he’s looking at the board, moving the pieces back into position, talking, filling in the tiny silences that drop, stuffing the empty space with chatter.

“That’s what they actually called it: expressing,” he says, still on the dogs. “Rinse, wash, rinse, express, repeat. So freaking boring.”

And the black, soulless, unblinking eye of the camera, staring down.

“I didn’t understand that last play,” I tell him.

“Chaseball isn’t some lame-ass game like chess,” he says patiently. “There are intricacies. Intricacies. To win, you gotta have a plan.”

“And that’s you, I guess. The man with the plan.”

“Yes, that’s me.”

Tap.

64

I HADN’T SEEN Vosch in days. That changes the next morning.

“Let’s hear it,” he tells Claire, who’s standing beside Mr. White Coat looking like a middle-schooler dragged into the principal’s office for bullying the scrawny kid.

“She’s lost eight pounds and twenty percent of her muscle mass. She’s on Diovan for the high blood pressure, Phenergan for the nausea, amoxicillin and streptomycin to keep her lymphatic system tamped down, but we’re still struggling with the fever,” Claire reports.

“‘Struggling with the fever’?”

Claire’s eyes cut away. “On the upside, her liver and kidneys are still functioning normally. A bit of fluid in her lungs, but we’re—”

Vosch waves her off and steps up to my bedside. Bright bird eyes glittering.

“Do you want to live?”

I answer without hesitating. “Yes.”

“Why?”

The question takes me off guard for some reason. “I don’t understand.”

“You cannot overcome us. No one can. Not if you numbered seven times seven billion when it began. The world is a clock and the clock has wound to its final second—why would you want to live?”

“I don’t want to save the world,” I tell him. “I’m just hoping I might get the opportunity to kill you.”

His expression doesn’t change, but his eyes glitter and dance. I know you, his eyes say. I know you.

“Hope,” he whispers. “Yes.” Nodding: He’s pleased with me. “Hope, Marika. Cling to your hope.” He turns to Claire and Mr. White Coat. “Pull her off the meds.”

Mr. White Coat’s face turns the color of his smock. Claire starts to say something, then looks away. Vosch turns back to me.

“What is the answer?” he demands. “It isn’t rage. What is it?”

“Indifference.”

“Try again.”

“Detachment.”

“Again.”

“Hope. Despair. Love. Hate. Anger. Sorrow.” I’m shaking; my fever must be spiking. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Better,” he says.

65

IT GETS SO BAD that night, I can barely make it through four innings of chaseball.

XMEDS

“Heard a rumor going around they took you off your meds,” Razor says, shaking the quarter in his closed fist. “True?”

“The only thing left in my IV bag is saline to keep my kidneys from shutting down.”

He glances at my vitals on the monitor. Frowning. When Razor frowns, he reminds me of a little boy who’s stubbed his toe and thinks he’s too big to cry.

“So you must be getting better.”

“Guess so.” Tap-tap on the bedrail.

“Okay,” he breathes. “My queen is up. Look out.”

My back stiffens. My vision blurs. I lean to the side and empty my stomach, what little is inside my stomach, onto the white tile. Razor leaps up with a disgusted cry, toppling the board.

“Hey!” he shouts. Not at me. At the black eye above us. “Hey, a little help here!”

No help comes. He looks at the monitor, looks at me, and says, “I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m okay.”

“Sure. You’re fine, just fine!” He goes to the sink, wets a clean towel, and lays it across my forehead. “Fine, my ass! Why the hell did they take you off the meds?”

“Why not?” I’m fighting the urge to hurl again.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you’ll die without them.” He glares at the camera.

“Maybe you should hand me that container over there.”

He dabs at the crud sticking on my chin, refolds the cloth, grabs the container, and places it on my lap.

“Razor.”

“Yeah?”

“Please don’t put that back on my face.”

“Huh? Oh. Shit. Yeah. Hang on.” He grabs a clean towel and runs it under the water. His hands are shaking. “You know what it is? I know what it is. Why didn’t I think of it? Why didn’t you think of it? The meds must be interfering with the system.”

“What system?”

“The 12th System. The one they injected into you, Sherlock. The hub and his forty thousand little friends to supercharge the other eleven.” He puts the cool towel on my forehead. “You’re cold. You want me to find another blanket?”

“No, I’m burning up.”

“It’s a war,” he says. He taps his chest. “In here. You gotta declare a truce, Ringer.”

I shake my head. “No peace.”

He nods, squeezing my wrist beneath the thin blanket. Squats on the floor to gather the fallen chess pieces. Curses when he can’t find the quarter. Decides he can’t leave the vomit just lying there. Grabs the dirty towel he used to wipe my chin and swabs the deck on his hands and knees. He’s still cursing when the door opens and Claire comes into the room.

“Good timing!” Razor barks at her. “Hey, can’t you at least give her the anti-puke serum?”

Claire jerks her head toward the door. “Get out.” She points at the box. “And take that with you.”

Razor glowers at her, but he does it. I see again the tightly contained force behind his angelic features. Careful, Razor. That’s not the answer.

Then we’re alone, and Claire studies the monitor for a long, silent moment.

“Were you telling the truth earlier?” she asks. “You want to live so you can kill Commander Vosch? You’re smarter than that.” In the tone of a mother scolding a very young child.

“You’re right,” I answer. “I’ll never get that chance. But I’m going to have the opportunity to kill you.”

She looks startled. “Kill me? Why would you want to kill me?” When I don’t answer, she says, “I don’t think you’re going to live through the night.”

I nod. “And you’re not going to live out the month.”

She laughs. The sound of her laughter causes bile to rise into my throat. Burning. Burning.

“What are you going to do?” she says softly. She yanks the towel from my forehead. “Smother me with this?”

“No. I’m going to overcome the guard by smashing his head in with a heavy object, and then I’m going to take his gun and shoot you in the face.”

She laughs through the whole thing. “Well, good luck with that.”

“It won’t be luck.”

66

CLAIRE TURNS OUT to be wrong about me being dead by morning.

Nearly a month later, by my reckoning of three meals per day, and I’m still here.

I don’t remember much. At some point they disconnected me from the IV and the monitor, and the silence that slammed down after the constant beeping was loud enough to crack mountains. The only person I saw during that time was Razor. He’s my full-time caretaker now. Feeds me, empties my bedpan, washes my face and hands, turns me so I don’t develop bedsores, plays chaseball in the hours when I’m not delirious, and talks nonstop. He talks about everything, which is another way of saying he talks about nothing. His dead family, his dead friends, his squad mates, the drudgery of winter camp, the fights borne of boredom and fatigue and fear (but mostly fear), the rumors that when spring comes the Teds are launching a major offensive, a last-ditch effort to purge the world of the human noise, of which Razor is very much an active part. He talks and talks and talks. He had a girlfriend, her name was Olivia and her skin was dark like a muddy river and she played clarinet in the school band and was going to be a doctor and hated Razor’s dad because he didn’t think Razor could be a doctor. He lets it slip that his given name is Alex like A-Rod and his drill sergeant named him Razor not because he was slender but because he cut himself shaving one morning. I have very sensitive skin. His sentences are without periods, without commas, without paragraphs, or, to be accurate, it’s all one long paragraph with no margins.

He shuts up just one time after nearly a month of the verbal diarrhea. He’s going on about how he won first place in the fifth-grade science fair with his project about how to turn a potato into a battery when he stops in midsentence. His silence is jarring, like the stillness after a building implodes.

“What is that?” he asks, staring intently into my face, and nobody stares more intently than Razor, not even Vosch.

“Nothing.” I turn my head away from him.

“Are you crying, Ringer?”

“My eyes are watering.”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me no, Razor. I don’t cry.”

“Bullshit.” A tap on the blanket.

Tap-tap on the railing. “Did it work?” I ask, turning back to him. What does it matter if he sees me cry? “The potato battery.”

“Sure it worked. It’s science. Never a doubt about it working. You plan it all out, follow the steps, and it can’t go wrong.” Squeezing my hand through the blanket: Don’t be scared. Everything’s set. I won’t let you down.

It’s too late to go back now anyway: His eyes wander to the food tray beside the bed. “You ate all the pudding tonight. You know how they make chocolate pudding without chocolate? You don’t want to know.”

“Let me guess. Ex-Lax.”

“What’s Ex-Lax?”

“Seriously? You don’t know?”

“Oh, so sorry I don’t know what Ex-Lax-who-gives-a-shit is.”

“It’s a chocolate-flavored laxative.”

He makes a face. “That’s sick.”

“That’s the point.”

He grins. “The point? Oh God, did you just make a joke?”

“How would I know? Just promise me nobody slipped Ex-Lax into my pudding.”

“Promise.” Tap.

I last for a few hours after he leaves, long after lights-out in every other part of the camp, deep into the belly of the winter night, before the pressure becomes unbearable, and then, when I can’t take it anymore, I start shouting for help, waving at the camera and then rolling over to press my chest against the cold metal railings, pounding my fist into the pillow in frustration and fury, until the door bursts open and Claire charges in, followed closely by a big bear of a recruit, whose hand immediately flies to cover his nose.

“What happened?” Claire says, though the smell should tell her all she needs to know.

“Oh, crap!” the recruit burbles behind his hand.

“Exactly,” I gasp.

“Great. Just great,” Claire says, throwing the blanket and sheet onto the floor and motioning for the recruit to help her. “Fine job, missy. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

“Not yet,” I whimper.

“What are you doing?” Claire shouts at the recruit. Gone is the soft voice. Vanished are the kind eyes. “Help me with this.”

“Help you with what, ma’am?” He has a flattened nose and very small eyes and a forehead that bulges in the middle. His belly hangs over his belt and his pants are an inch too short. He’s huge; he’s got about a hundred pounds or more on me.

It won’t matter.

“Get up,” Claire snaps at me. “Come on. Get your legs under you.” She takes one arm and Jumbo Recruit takes the other and together they haul me out of the bed. Big Recruit’s smushed-in face is twisted with revulsion.

“Ah, God. It’s everywhere!” he softly wails.

“I don’t think I can walk,” I tell Claire.

“Then I’ll make you crawl,” she snarls. “I should just leave you like this. It’s so perfectly metaphorical.”

They haul me two doors down and into the shower room. Big Recruit is coughing and gagging and Claire is bitching and I’m apologizing while she strips off the jumpsuit and throws it at Jumbo Recruit, telling him to wait outside. “Don’t lean on me. Lean on the wall,” she orders harshly. My knees are buckling. I hang on to the shower curtain to keep upright; I haven’t used my legs in a month.

With one hand locked around my left arm, Claire pushes me under the water, bending at the waist to stay dry. The spray is icy. She didn’t bother to adjust the temperature. The slap of cold water against my body is like an alarm going off, snapping me from a long winter’s hibernation, and I reach up and grab the showerhead pipe coming from the wall and tell Claire I think I’ve got it; I think I can stand; she can let go.

“Are you sure?” she asks, holding on.

“Pretty sure.”

I wrench the pipe downward with all the force I have. The pipe breaks off at the joint with a metallic squeal and the cold water gushes out in a ropey snarl. Left arm up, slipping through Claire’s fingers, then I’ve got her by the wrist and I swing my body toward her, rotating my hips to maximize the blow, and slam the jagged edge of the broken pipe into her neck.

I wasn’t sure I could break a steel pipe with my bare hands, but I was pretty sure.

I have been enhanced.

67

CLAIRE STAGGERS AWAY, blood pouring from the two-inch puncture wound in her neck. The fact that I didn’t drop her doesn’t surprise me; I’d assumed she would be enhanced, too, but I’d hoped to get lucky and sever her carotid artery. She fumbles in the pocket of her lab coat for the kill switch. I anticipated that. I toss the broken pipe away, grab the bolted-in shower rod, break it from its brackets and smash one end into the side of her head.

The impact barely rocks her. In a millisecond, faster than my eyes can follow the motion, she has the end of the rod in her grip. I let go in half a millisecond, so when she yanks there’s nothing holding the other end, and she stumbles back into the wall, hitting with enough force to crack the tiles. I barrel toward her. She swings the rod toward my head, but I anticipated that, too—counted on it, when I rehearsed this in the thousand silent hours beneath the constant glow.

I grab the other end of the rod as it arcs toward me, first with my right hand, then with the left, hands shoulder-width apart, and power the rod into her neck, spreading my legs for the balance and leverage necessary to crush her windpipe.

Our faces are inches apart. I’m close enough to smell the cyanide breath trickling out of her parted lips.

Her hands are on either side of mine, pushing back while I push forward. The floor is slick; I’m barefoot, she isn’t; I’m going to lose the advantage before she blacks out. I have to drop her—fast.

I slide my foot to the inside of her ankle and kick out. Perfect: She falls to the floor and I follow her down.

She lands on her back. I land on her stomach. I clamp my knees tightly against her sides and shove the rod down hard into her neck.

Then the door behind us flies open and Jumbo Recruit lumbers in, gun drawn, shouting incoherently. Three minutes in and the light in Claire’s eyes is fading, but it’s not all the way out, and I know I have to take a risk. I don’t like risk, never did; I just learned to accept it. Some things you can choose and some you can’t, like Sullivan’s Crucifix Soldier, like Teacup, like going back for Zombie and Nugget because not going back meant there’s no value to anything anymore, not life, not time, not promises.

And I have a promise to keep.

Jumbo’s gun: The 12th System locks in on it and thousands of microscopic droids go to work augmenting the muscles, tendons, and nerves in my hands, eyes, and brain to neutralize the threat. In a microsecond, objective identified, information processed, method determined.

Jumbo doesn’t have a prayer.

The attack happens faster than his unenhanced brain can process it. I doubt he even sees the curtain rod whizzing toward his hand. The gun flies across the room. He goes one way—for the gun—while I go the other—for the toilet.

The tank lid is solid ceramic. And heavy. I could kill him; I don’t. But I smack him hard enough in the back of head to put him out for a long time.

Jumbo falls down. Claire rises up. I sling the lid toward her head. Her arm rises to block the projectile. My enriched hearing picks up the sound of a bone snapping from the collision. The silver device in her hand clatters to the floor. She dives for it as I step forward. I slam one foot on her outstretched hand and with the other kick the device to the other side of the room.

Done.

And she knows it. She looks past the barrel of the gun leveled at her face—beyond the tiny hole filled with immense nothingness—into my eyes, and hers are kind again and her voice is soft again, the bitch.

“Marika…”

No. Marika was slow, weak, sentimental, dimwitted. Marika was a little girl clinging to rainbow fingers, helplessly watching the time wind down, teetering on the razor’s edge of the bottomless abyss, exposed behind her fortress walls by promises she could never keep. But I will keep her final promise to Claire, the beast who stripped her naked and baptized her in the cold water that still roars in the broken shower. I will keep Marika’s promise. Marika is dead, and I will keep her promise.

“My name is Ringer.”

I pull the trigger.

68

JUMBO SHOULD HAVE a knife on him. Standard issue for all recruits. I kneel beside his unconscious body, slip the knife from its sheath, and carefully cut out the pellet embedded near the spinal cord at the base of his skull. I slip it between my cheek and gums.

Now mine. No pain when I cut it out, and only a small amount of blood trickles from the incision. Bots to deaden sensation. Bots to repair damage. That’s why Claire didn’t die when I rammed a broken pipe into her neck and why, after the initial gush, the bleeding quickly stopped.

Also why, after six weeks flat on my back with very little food and a burst of intense physical activity, I’m not even out of breath.

I insert the tiny pellet from my neck into Jumbo’s. Track me now, Commander Asshole.

Fresh jumpsuit from the stack under the sink. Shoes: Claire’s feet are too small; Jumbo’s much too large. I’ll work on shoes later. The big kid’s leather jacket might come in handy, though. The jacket hangs on me like a blanket, but I like the extra room in the sleeves.

There’s something I’m forgetting. I glance around the small room. The kill switch, that’s it. The screen got cracked in the melee, but the device still works. A number glows above the flashing green button. My number. I swipe my thumb over the display and the screen fills with numbers, hundreds of sequences representing every recruit on the base. I swipe again to return to my number, tap on it, and a map pops up showing my implant’s precise location. I zoom out and the screen fills with tiny, glowing green dots: the location of every implanted soldier in the entire base. Jackpot.

And checkmate. With a swipe of my thumb and a tap of my finger, I can highlight all the numbers. The button on the bottom of the device will light up. A final tap and every recruit neutralized, gone. I can practically stroll out.

I can—if I’m willing to step over several hundred corpses of innocent human beings, kids who are no less victims than I am, whose sole crime is the sin of hope. If the wage of sin is death, then virtue is a vice now: A defenseless, starving child lost in a wheat field is given shelter. A wounded soldier cries out for help behind a row of beer coolers. A little girl shot by mistake is delivered to her enemies in order to save her.

And I don’t know which is more inhuman: the alien beings that created this new world or the human being who considers, if only for an instant, pressing the green button.

Three large clumps of stationary dots hover on the right side of the screen: the sleeping. A dozen isolated individuals on the periphery: sentries. Two in the middle: mine in Jumbo’s neck, his in my mouth. Another three or four very close, on the same floor: the sick and injured. One floor down, the ICU, where only one green sphere glows. So: barracks, observation posts, hospital. A couple of the sentry dots are manning the magazine building. I won’t have to guess which two. I’ll know in a few minutes.

Come on, Razor, let’s go. I’ve got one last promise to keep.

Watching the gusher pour from the broken pipe.

69

“DO YOU PRAY?” Razor asked me after an exhausting night of chaseball, while he packed up the game board and pieces.

I shook my head. “Do you?”

“Damn right I do.” Nodding his head emphatically. “No atheists in foxholes.”

“My father was one.”

“A foxhole?”

“An atheist.”

“I know that, Ringer.”

“How did you know my father was an atheist?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then why did you ask if he was a foxhole?”

“I didn’t. It was a freaking—” He smiled. “Oh, I get it. I know what you’re doing. The disturbing thing to me is why. Like you’re not trying to be funny but trying to prove how superior you are. Or think you are. You’re not either. Funny or superior. Why don’t you pray?”

“I don’t like putting God on the spot.”

He picked up the queen and examined her face. “You ever checked her out? She is one scary-looking she-bitch.”

“I think she looks regal.”

“She looks like my third-grade teacher, a lot of man and very little wo.”

“What?”

“You know: heavy on the male, light on the fe.”

“She’s just fierce. A warrior queen.”

“My third-grade teacher?” He studied my face. Waiting. Waiting. “Sorry, tried that joke once. Epic fail.” He placed the piece in the box. “My grandma belonged to a prayer circle. You know what a prayer circle is?”

“Yes.”

“Really? I thought you were an atheist.”

“My father was an atheist. And why couldn’t an atheist know what a prayer circle is? Religious people know about evolution.”

“I know what it is. I’ve got it,” he said thoughtfully, dark, intense eyes still on my face. “You were, like, five or six and some relative remarked in a very positive way what a serious little girl you were, and from then on, you thought seriousness was attractive.”

“What happened in the prayer circle?” Attempting to get him back on track.

“Ha! So you don’t know what it is!” He set the box down and scooched farther onto the bed. His butt now touching my thigh. I eased my leg away. Subtly, I hoped. “I’ll tell you what happened. My grandma’s dog got sick. One of those purse dogs that bites everybody and lives about twenty-five years, biting people. So her petition had to do with God saving that mean little dog so it could bite more people. And half the old ladies in her group agreed and half didn’t, I’m not sure why, I mean a God who doesn’t like dogs wouldn’t be God, but anyway, there was this big debate about wasted prayer, which became an argument about if there could be such a thing as wasted prayer, which turned into a fight about the Holocaust. So in five minutes it went from a nippy old purse dog to the Holocaust.”

“So what happened? Did they pray for the dog?”

“No, they prayed for the souls of the Holocaust. Then the next day the dog died.” And now he was nodding thoughtfully. “Grandma prayed for him. Prayed every night. Told all us grandkids to pray, too. So I prayed for a dog that terrorized and hated me and gave me this.” He swung his leg onto the bed and pulled up his pants to expose his calf. “See the scar?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Well, it’s there.” He pushed down the pants leg but kept his foot on the bed. “So after it died, I said to Grandma, ‘I prayed really hard and Flubby still died. Does God hate me?’”

“What did she say?”

“Some BS about God wanting Flubby in heaven, which was impossible for my six-year-old brain to process. There are nippy old purse dogs in heaven? Isn’t heaven supposed to be a nice place? It bothered me for a long time. Like, every night, while I said my prayers, I couldn’t help but wonder if I even wanted to go to heaven and spend eternity with Flubby. So I decided he must be in hell. Otherwise, theology falls apart.”

He wrapped his long arms around his upraised knee, where he rested his chin and stared into space. He was back in a time when a little boy’s questions about prayer and God and heaven still mattered.

“I broke a cup once,” he went on. “Playing around in Mom’s china cabinet, part of her wedding set, this dainty little cup from a tea set. Didn’t totally break it. Dropped it on the floor and it cracked.”

“The floor?”

“No, not the floor. The cu—” His eyes widened in shock. “Did you just make the same…?”

I shook my head. He pointed his finger at me. “Naw, I caught you! A moment of lighthearted levity from Ringer the warrior queen!”

“I joke all the time.”

“Right. But they’re so subtle that only smart people get them.”

“The cup,” I prodded him.

“So I’ve cracked Mom’s precious china. I put it back in the cabinet, turning its cracked side toward the back so maybe she won’t notice, even though I know it’s only a matter of time before she does and I’m dead meat. Know where I turn for help?”

I didn’t have to think hard. I knew where the story was going. “God.”

“God. I prayed for God to keep Mom away from that cup. Like, for the rest of her life. Or at least until I moved away to college. Then I prayed that he could heal the cup. He’s God, right? He can heal people—what’s a tiny freaking made-in-China cup? That was the optimal solution and that’s what he’s all about, optimal solutions.”

“She found the cup.”

“You bet your ass she found the cup.”

“I’m surprised you still pray. After Flubby and the cup.”

He shook his head. “Not the point.”

“There’s a point?”

“If you’d let me finish the story—yes, there is a point. Here it is: After she found the cup and before I knew she’d found it, she replaced it. She ordered a new cup and threw away the old one. One Saturday morning—I guess I’d been praying for about a month—I went to the cabinet to prove the prayer circle wrong about wasted prayer, and I saw it.”

“The new cup,” I said. Razor nodded. “But you didn’t know your mom replaced it.”

He threw his hands into the air. “It’s a fucking miracle! What’s cracked has been uncracked! The broken made whole! God exists! I nearly crapped my pants.”

“The cup was healed,” I said slowly.

His dark eyes dug deep into mine. His hand fell to my knee. A squeeze. Then a tap.

Yes.

70

IN THE BATHROOM, the gush becomes a stream, the stream becomes a trickle, the trickle becomes an anemic dribble. The water slows and my heart quickens. My paranoia was getting the better of me. A decade passed while I waited for the water to be cut off: the go signal from Razor.

The hall outside is deserted. I already know that thanks to Claire’s tracking device. I also know exactly where I’m going.

Stairs. One flight down. One last promise. I pause long enough on the landing to slip Jumbo’s sidearm into the jacket pocket.

Then I slam through the door and hit the hall running. Straight ahead is the nurses’ station. I sprint straight toward it. The nurse pops out of her chair.

“Take cover!” I shout. “It’s going to blow!”

I swerve past the counter and race toward the swinging doors that lead to the ward.

“Hey!” she shouts. “You can’t go back there!”

Any day now, Razor.

She hits the lockdown button on her desk. It doesn’t matter. I hurtle into the doors at full speed and smash both off their hinges.

“Freeze!” she screams.

The entire length of the hallway remains; I won’t make it. I’ve been enhanced, but I can’t outrun a bullet. I skitter to a halt.

Razor, I’m serious. Now would be a very good time.

“Hands on your head! Now.” Struggling to catch her breath. “Good job. Now walk toward me, backward. Slow. Very slow, or I swear to God I’ll shoot you.”

I obey, shuffling toward the sound of her voice. She orders me to stop. I stop. I’m still, but the mechanisms inside me aren’t. Her position is fixed: I don’t have to see her to know exactly where she’s standing. The hub’s dispatched the managers of my muscular and nervous systems to execute the directive when called upon. I won’t have to think when the time comes. The hub will take over.

But I won’t owe my life entirely to the 12th System: It was my idea to grab Jumbo’s jacket.

And that reminds me:

“Shoes,” I murmur.

“What did you say?” Her voice is quivering.

“I need shoes. What size are you?”

“Huh?”

At the speed of light the hub’s signal fires. My body doesn’t move quite that fast, but double the speed that is probably necessary.

Right hand jams into Jumbo’s baggy sleeve, where I slipped the ten-inch knife, pivot to the left, then throw.

And down she goes.

I pull the knife from her neck, slide the bloody blade back into the left sleeve of the jacket, and check out her shoes. A pair of those white, thick-soled nurse’s shoes. A half size too big, but they’ll work.

At the end of the hallway, I step into the last room on the right. It’s dark, but my eyes have been enhanced: I can see her clearly in the bed, fast asleep. Or doped. I’ll have to determine which.

“Teacup? It’s me. Ringer.”

The thick, dark lashes flutter. I’m so jacked up by this point, I swear I can hear the tiny hairs thrumming the air.

She whispers something without opening her eyes. Too soft for the unenhanced to hear, but the auditory bots transmit the information to the hub, which relays it to the inferior colliculus, the hearing center of my brain.

“You’re dead.”

“Not anymore. And neither are you.”

71

THE WINDOW BESIDE the bed jiggles in its frame. The floor quivers. Bright orange light floods the room, winks out, then an earsplitting roar and a fine mist of plaster floating down from the ceiling. The sequence repeats. Then again. Then again.

Razor’s hit the magazine building.

“Teacup, we have to go.” I slide one hand behind her head and lift gently.

“Go where?”

“As far as we can.”

Bracing the back of her head with one hand, I hit her in the forehead with the heel of the other. The precise amount of force, no more, no less. Her body goes limp. I heave her out of the bed. Another blast as the ordnance in the magazine continues to detonate. I kick out the window. Bitter cold air crashes into the room. I sit on the sill facing the bed, cradling Teacup against my chest. My intent alerts the hub: I’m two stories above the ground. Reinforcements race to the bones and tendons in my feet, ankles, shins, knees, and pelvis.

We deploy.

I flip as we drop, like a cat falling off a countertop. We land safely, like a cat, except Teacup’s head bounces up on impact and smacks me hard under the chin. In front of us the hospital. Behind us the blazing ammunition storehouse. And to our right, exactly where Razor said it would be, the black Dodge M882.

I throw open the door, shove Teacup into the passenger seat, jump behind the wheel, and take off across the parking lot, cutting hard to the left to make the turn north toward the airfield. A siren screams. Floodlights blare. In the rearview mirrors, emergency vehicles race toward the burning magazine. The fire brigade will have a hard time of it since someone has shut down the pumping station.

Another hard left, and now straight ahead are the hulking bodies of the Black Hawks, glistening like the bodies of black beetles in the harsh light of the floods. I grip the wheel hard and take a deep breath. This is the trickiest part. If Razor couldn’t kidnap a pilot, we’re all screwed.

A hundred yards away, I see someone jump from one of the choppers’ holds. He’s wearing a heavy parka and toting an assault rifle. His face is partially obscured by the hood, but I’d know that smile anywhere.

I hop from the M882.

And Razor says, “Hi.”

“Where’s the pilot?” I ask.

He jerks his head toward the cockpit. “I got mine. Where’s yours?”

I pull Teacup from the truck and jump inside the chopper. A guy wearing nothing but a drab green T-shirt and a matching pair of boxer shorts sits behind the controls. Razor slides into the copilot seat beside him.

“Fire her up, Lieutenant Bob.” Razor grins at the pilot. “Oh. Manners. Ringer, Lieutenant Bob. Lieutenant Bob, Ringer.”

“There’s no way this is going to work,” Lieutenant Bob says. “They’ll come after us hard.”

“Yeah? What’s this?” Razor holds up a mass of tangled electrical wire.

The pilot shakes his head. So cold, his lips are turning blue. “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I, but I’m guessing they’re very important for the proper operation of a helicopter.”

“You don’t understand…”

Razor leans toward him and all his playfulness is gone. His deep-set eyes burn as if backlit and the coiled force I sensed from the beginning springs free with such ferocity, I actually flinch.

“Listen to me, you alien sonofabitch, you fire this mother-effing stick buddy up ASAP or I’m—”

The pilot shoves his hands into his lap and stares straight ahead. After getting one into the chopper undetected, my biggest concern was getting a pilot to cooperate. I lean forward, grab Bob by the wrist, and bend his pinky finger backward.

“I’ll break it,” I promise him.

“Go ahead!”

I break it. His teeth clamp down on his bottom lip. His legs jerk. His eyes swim with tears. That shouldn’t happen. I press my fingers against the back of his neck, then turn to Razor.

“He’s implanted. He isn’t one of them.”

“Yeah, well, who the hell are you?” the pilot squeals.

I pull the tracking device from my pocket. There’s the hospital and the magazine surrounded by a swarm of green dots. And there are three dots glowing on the airstrip.

“You cut yours out,” I say to Razor.

He’s nodding. “And left it under my pillow. That was the plan. Or was that the plan? Shit, Ringer, wasn’t that the plan?” A little panicky.

I drop the knife into my hand. “Hold him.”

Razor understands immediately. He grabs Lieutenant Bob and puts him in a headlock. Bob doesn’t put up much resistance. I worry now that he might go into shock. If he does, it’s over.

There isn’t much light and Razor can’t hold him perfectly still, so I tell Bob to chill or I might sever his spinal cord, adding paralysis to the problem of a broken finger. I pull out the pellet, toss it onto the tarmac, yank Bob’s head back, and whisper in his ear, “I’m not the enemy and I haven’t gone Dorothy. I’m just like you—”

“Only better,” Razor finishes. He glances through the window and says, “Uh, Ringer…”

I see them: The glow of headlights expanding like a pair of stars going supernova. “They’re coming, and when they get here, they will kill us,” I tell Bob. “You too. They won’t believe you and they will kill you.”

Bob stares into my face, tears of pain streaming down his.

“You have to trust me,” I say.

“Or she’ll break another finger,” Razor adds.

A deep, shuddering breath, shaking uncontrollably, cradling his wounded hand, blood trickling down his neck and soaking into the collar of his T-shirt. “It’s hopeless,” he whispers. “They’ll just shoot us down.”

On impulse, I reach forward and press my hand against his cheek. He doesn’t recoil. He becomes very still. I don’t understand why I touched him or what’s happening now that I am, but I feel something opening inside me, like a bud spreading its delicate petals toward the sun. I’m freezing cold. My neck is on fire. And the little finger on my right hand throbs to the beat of my heart. The pain brings tears to my eyes. His pain.

“Ringer!” Razor barks. “What the hell are you doing?”

I pour my warmth into the man I touch. I douse the fire. I caress the pain. I soothe his fear. His breath evens out. His body relaxes.

“Bob, we really have to go,” I tell him.

And two minutes later, we do.

72

AS WE ASCEND, the truck screeches to a stop and a tall man steps out, and his face is a study in deep shadows thrown by the floods, but I see his eyes with eyes enhanced, bright and hard like the crows’ in the woods, polished blue while the crows’ were black, and it must be a trick of light or shadow, the small, tight smile he seems to wear.

“Keep us low,” I order Bob.

“Where are we going?”

“South.”

The chopper banks; the ground rushes toward us. I see the magazine burning and the spinning lights of the fire trucks and recruits swarming around like ants. We pass over a river, black water sparking in the spillover light from the floods. Behind us now, the camp is an oasis of light in a desert of winter dark. We plunge into that dark, skimming six feet above the treetops.

I slide into the seat next to Teacup, lean her into my chest, and pull her hair to one side. I hope this is the last time I have to do this. When I’m done, I crush the implant with the heel of the knife.

Razor’s voice squawks in my headset: “How’s she doing?”

“Okay, I think.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Good.”

“Glitches?”

“Minor. You?”

“Smooth as a newborn baby’s ass.”

I ease Teacup back into the seat, stand up, and open compartments until I find the chutes. Razor rattles on as I check the assemblies.

“Anything you want to say to me? Like, I don’t know, Thank you, Razor, for saving my ass from a lifetime of alien servitude after I punched you in the throat and generally acted like a douchebag? Something along those lines? You know, it wasn’t exactly like taking a walk in baseball, secret codes embedded in bogus games and slipping laxative in pudding and rigging explosives and stealing trucks and kidnapping pilots with fingers for you to break. Maybe Hey, Razor, I couldn’t have done it without you. You rock. Something like that. Doesn’t have to be word-for-word, just something to capture the general spirit.”

“Why did you?” I ask. “What made you decide to trust me?”

“What you said that day about the kids—turning kids into bombs. I did some asking around. Next thing I know, I’m in the Wonderland chair and then they take me to the commander and he’s all down on my ass about something you said, and he orders me to stop talking to you because he can’t order me to stop listening, and the more I think about it, the stinkier it gets. They train us to terminate Teds and then load down toddlers with alien ordnance? Who’re the good guys here? And then I’m like, who am I here? It got really angsty, a real existential crisis. What tipped it for me, though, was the math.”

“Math?”

“Yeah, math. Aren’t all you Asians really good at math?”

“Don’t be racist. And I’m three-quarters Asian.”

“‘Three-quarters.’ See? Math. It comes down to simple addition. As in it doesn’t add up. Okay, so maybe we get lucky and seize the Wonderland program from them. Even super-superior aliens can screw up, nobody’s perfect. But we don’t just snatch Wonderland. We have their bombs, we have their track-and-kill implants, their super-sophisticated nanobot system—shit, we even have the technology capable of detecting them. Wha duh fuh? We’ve got more of their weapons than they do! But the real kicker came that day they jacked you up, when Vosch said they lied to us about the organism attached to human brains. Unbelievable!”

“Because if that’s a lie…”

“Then everything’s a lie.”

Below us the land is covered in a blanket of white. The horizon is indiscernible in the dark, lost. Everything is a lie. I thought of my dead father telling me that I belonged to them now. Instinctively, I gather Teacup’s little hand into mine: truth.

I hear Bob say in the headset, “I’m confused.”

“Relax, Bob,” Razor says. “Hey, Bob. Wasn’t that the major’s name at Camp Haven? What’s it with officers and the name Bob?”

An alarm sounds. I return Teacup’s hand to her lap and shuffle forward. “What is it?”

“Company,” Bob says. “Six o’clock.”

“Choppers?”

“Negative. F-15s. Three of them.”

“How much time before they’re in range?”

He shakes his head. Despite the cold, his shirt is soaked in sweat. His face shines with it. “Five to seven.”

“Bring us up,” I tell him. “Maximum altitude.”

I grab a couple parachute rigs and drop one into Razor’s lap.

“We’re bailing?” he asks.

“We can’t engage and we can’t outrun. You’re with Teacup. Tandem jump.”

“I’m with Teacup? Who are you with?”

Bob glances at the other rig in my hand. “I’m not bailing,” he says. And then, just in case I didn’t hear or don’t understand: “I’m. Not. Bailing.”

No plan is perfect. I’d planned for a Silencer Bob, which meant my plan entailed killing him before we bailed from the chopper. Now it’s complicated. I didn’t kill Jumbo for the same reason I don’t want to kill Bob. Kill enough Jumbos, murder enough Bobs, and you’ve plunged to the same depths as the ones who shove a bomb down a toddler’s throat.

I shrug to hide my uncertainty. Toss the rig into his lap. “Then I guess you get incinerated.”

We’re at five thousand feet. Dark sky, dark ground, no horizon, all dark. The bottom of the lightless sea. Razor is looking at the radar screen, but he says to me, “Where’s your chute, Ringer?”

I ignore the question. “Can you give me a sixty-second ETA on their range?” I ask Bob. He nods. Razor asks the question again. “It’s math,” I tell him. “Which I’m three-quarters really good at. If there are four of us and they mark two chutes, that leaves at least one of us on board. One, maybe two of them will stay with the chopper, at least until they can take it down. It’ll buy time.”

“What makes you think they’ll stay with the chopper?”

I shrug. “It’s what I’d do.”

“Still doesn’t answer my question about your chute.”

“They’re hailing us,” Bob announces. “Ordering us to set it down.”

“Tell them to suck it,” Razor says. He stuffs a piece of bubble gum into his mouth. Taps his ear. “Popping’s bad.” Jams the gum wrapper into his pocket. Notices I’m watching and smiles. “Never noticed all the crap in the world until there was nobody left to pick it up,” he explains. “The Earth is my charge.”

Then Bob calls out, “Sixty seconds!”

I tug on Razor’s parka. Now.

He looks up at me and says slowly and distinctly, “Where’s your freaking chute?”

I haul him out of the seat one-handed. He chirps in surprise, stumbling toward the back. I follow him, squat in front of Teacup to remove her harness.

“Forty seconds!”

“How are we going to find you?” Razor yells, standing right next to me.

“Head for the fire.”

“What fire?”

“Thirty seconds!”

I haul open the hatch door. The blast of air that punches into the hold blows Razor’s hood off his head. I scoop up Teacup and press her into his chest.

“Don’t let her die.”

He nods.

“Promise.”

Nods again: “I promise.”

“Thank you, Razor,” I say. “For everything.”

He leans forward and kisses me hard on the mouth.

“Don’t ever do that again,” I tell him.

“Why? Because you liked it or because you didn’t?”

“Both.”

“Fifteen seconds!”

Razor maneuvers Teacup over his shoulder, grabs the safety cable, and shuffles back until his heels touch the jump pad. Silhouetted in the opening, the boy and the child over the boy’s shoulder, and five thousand feet beneath them, the limitless dark. The Earth is my charge.

Razor releases the cable. He doesn’t seem to fall. He is sucked out into the ravenous void.

73

I HEAD BACK to the cockpit, where I find the pilot’s door unlatched, the seat empty, and no Bob.

I wondered why the countdown stopped; now I know: He changed his mind about the whole bailing issue.

We must be in range, which means they don’t intend to shoot us down. They’ve marked the location of Razor’s drop, and they’ll stay with the chopper until I bail or it runs out of fuel and I’m forced to bail. By this point, Vosch has figured out why Jumbo’s implant is on this aircraft while its owner is in the infirmary being treated for a very bad headache.

With the tip of my tongue, I push the pellet from my mouth and lick it onto my palm.

Do you want to live?

Yes, and you want that, too, I tell Vosch. I don’t know why and, hopefully, I never will.

I flick the pellet from my hand.

The hub’s response is instantaneous. My intent alerted the central processor, which calculated the overwhelming probability of terminal failure and shut down all but the essential functions of my muscular system. The 12th System has the same order I gave Razor: Don’t let her die. Like a parasite’s, the system’s life depends on the continuation of mine.

The instant my intent changes—Okay, fine. I’ll parachute out—the hub will release me. Then and only then. I can’t lie to it or bargain with it. Can’t persuade it. Can’t force it. Unless I change my mind, it can’t let me go. Unless it lets me go, I can’t change my mind.

Heart on fire. Body of stone.

There’s nothing that the hub can do about my snowballing panic. It can respond to emotions; it can’t control them. Endorphins release. Neurons and mastocytes dump serotonin into my bloodstream. Other than these physiological adjustments, it’s as paralyzed as I am.

There must be an answer. There must be an answer. There must be an answer. What is the answer? And I see Vosch’s polished, birdlike bright eyes boring into mine. What is the answer? Not rage, not hope, not faith, not love, not detachment, not holding on, not letting go, not fighting, not running, not hiding, not giving up, not giving in, not not not, knot, knot, knot, naught naught naught.

Naught.

What is the answer? he asked.

And I answered, Nothing.

74

I STILL CAN’T MOVE—not even my eyes—but I’ve got a pretty good angle on the instruments, including the altimeter and fuel gauge. We’re five thousand feet up and the fuel won’t last forever. Inducing paralysis might stop me from jumping, but it won’t keep me from falling. The probability of terminal failure in that scenario is absolute.

It has no other option: The hub releases me, and the sensation is like being hurled the length of a football field. I’m shoved back into my body, hard.

Okay, Ringer 2.0. Let’s see how good you are.

I grab the handle of the pilot’s door and kill the engines.

An alarm sounds. I kill that, too. There is the wind now and only the wind.

For a few seconds, momentum keeps the chopper level, then freefall.

I’m thrown to the ceiling; my head smacks against the windshield. White stars explode in my vision. The chopper begins to spin as it drops, and I lose my grip on the door. I’m tossed around like a die in a Yahtzee cup, grasping at empty space, searching for a handhold. The chopper flips, nose up, and I’m flung twelve feet into the rear of the aircraft, then slung back as it flips again, smashing chest-first into the back of the pilot’s seat. A hot knife rips across my side: I’ve broken a rib. The loose nylon strap of the pilot’s harness smacks me in the face and I snatch it before I’m thrown again. Another flip, and the centrifugal force whips me back into the cockpit, where I smash into the door. It flies open and I jam my white-soled nurse’s shoe against the seat for leverage and heave myself halfway out. Release the strap, lock my fingers around the handle, and push hard.

Roll, pitch, flip, somersault, flashes of gray and black and sparkling white. I’m hanging on to the handle as the chopper rolls pilot side up and the door slams closed on my wrist, snapping the bone and tearing my fingers from the handle. My body bounces and twists along the length of the Black Hawk until it whacks into the rear wheel, rocketing straight up, and when the tail rotates skyward, I’m shot toward the horizon like a rock from a slingshot.

I have no sensation of falling. I’m suspended on the updraft of warmer air pressing against the colder, a hawk sailing in the night sky on outstretched wings, behind and below me the tumbling helicopter prisoner to the gravity that I deny. I don’t hear the explosion when it crashes. Just the wind and the blood roaring in my ears, and there is no pain from the beating inside the chopper. I am deliriously, exhilaratingly empty. I am nothing. The wind is more substantial than my bones.

The Earth rushes toward me. I am not afraid. I’ve kept my promises. I’ve redeemed the time.

I stretch out my arms. I spread my fingers wide. I lift my face toward the line where the sky meets the Earth.

My home. My charge.

75

I AM FALLING at terminal velocity toward a featureless landscape of white, a vast nothingness that gobbles up everything in its path, exploding toward the horizon in all directions.

It’s a lake. A very big lake.

A frozen-over very big lake.

Going in feet-first is my only option. If the ice is more than a foot thick, I’m done. No amount of alien enhancement will protect me. The bones in my legs will shatter. My spleen will rupture. My lungs will collapse.

I have faith in you, Marika. You did not come through fire and blood only to fall now.

Actually, Commander, I did.

The white world beneath me shines like pearls, a blank canvas, an alabaster abyss. A screaming wall of wind pushes against my legs as I draw my knees to my chest to execute the rotation. I have to go in at ninety degrees. Straighten too soon and the wind will knock me off-kilter. Too late and I’ll hit with my ass or my chest.

I close my eyes; I don’t need them. The hub’s performed perfectly so far; time for me to give it all my trust.

My mind empties: blank canvas, alabaster abyss. I am the vessel, the hub the pilot.

What is the answer?

And I said, Nothing. Nothing is the answer.

Both legs kick out hard. My body swivels upright. My arms come up, fold themselves over my chest. My head falls back, my face to the sky. My mouth opens. Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath, hold.

Vertical now, released by the wind, I fall faster. I hit the ice straight on, feet-first, at a hundred miles an hour.

I don’t feel the impact.

Or the cold water closing over me.

Or the pressure of that water as I plummet into inky darkness.

I feel nothing. My nerves have been shut down or the pain receptors in my brain turned off.

Hundreds of feet above me, a tiny point of light, a pinprick, faint as the farthest star: the entry point. Also the exit point. I kick toward the star. My body is numb. My mind is empty. I’ve completely surrendered to the 12th System. It isn’t part of me anymore. The 12th System is me. We are one.

I am human. And I am not. Rising toward the star that shines in the ice-encrusted vault, a protogod ascending from the primordial deep, fully human, wholly alien, and I understand now; I know the answer to the impossible riddle of Evan Walker.

I shoot into the heart of the star and hurl myself over the edge onto the icecap. A couple of broken ribs, a fractured wrist, a deep gash in my forehead from the pilot’s harness, totally numb, completely out of breath, empty, whole, aware.

Alive.

76

I REACH THE SMOLDERING wreckage of the chopper by dawn. The crash site wasn’t hard to find: The Black Hawk went down in the middle of an open field covered in a fresh fall of snow. You could see the fire’s glow for miles.

I approach slowly from the south. To my right, the sun breaks the horizon and light shoots across the winterscape, setting ablaze a crystalline inferno, as if a billion diamonds had fallen from the sky.

My water-soaked clothes are frozen, crackling like kindling when I move, and sensation has been returned to me. The 12th System perpetuates my existence to perpetuate its own. It’s calling for rest, food, help with the healing process; that’s the purpose of giving me back my pain.

No. No rest until I find them.

The sky is empty. There is no wind. Smoke curls from the mangled remains of the chopper, black and gray, like the smoke that rose over Camp Haven carrying the incinerated remains of the slaughtered.

Where are you, Razor?

The sun climbs and the glare coming off the snow becomes blinding. The visual array adjusts my eyes: A dark filter with no discernable difference from sunglasses drops over my vision, and then I see a blot in the perfection of white about a mile to the west. I lie flat on my stomach, using a breaststroke motion to dig myself a small trench. At it draws closer, the dark imperfection takes on a human shape. Tall and thin, wearing a heavy parka and carrying a rifle, moving slowly against the ankle-gripping snow. Thirty minutes crawl by. When he’s a hundred yards away, I rise. He drops as if shot. I call his name, not loudly, though; sound carries farther in winter air.

His voice floats back to me, high pitched with anxiety. “Holy shit!”

He slogs for a few steps, then takes off running, lifting his knees high and pumping his arms like a determined cardio fiend on a treadmill. He stops an arm’s length from me, warm breath exploding from his open mouth.

“You’re alive,” he whispers. I see it in his eyes: Impossible.

“Where’s Teacup?”

He jerks his head behind him. “She’s okay. Well, I think her leg might be broken…”

I step around him and start walking the way he came. He trudges after me, fussing for me to slow down.

“I was about to give up on you,” he puffs. “No chute! What, you can fly now? What happened to your head?”

“I hit it.”

“Oh. Well, you look like an Apache. You know, war paint.”

“That’s the other quarter: Apache.”

“Seriously?”

“What do you mean, you think she broke her leg?”

“Well, what I mean is I think her leg might be broken. With the help of your x-ray vision, maybe you can definitively diagnose—”

“This is strange.” I’m studying the sky as we walk. “Where’s the pursuit? They would have marked the location.”

“I’ve seen nothing. Like they just gave up.”

I shake my head. “They don’t give up. How much farther, Razor?”

“Another mile? Don’t worry, I got her tucked away nice and safe.”

“Why’d you leave her?”

He looks at me sharply, dumbstruck for a second. But only for a second. Razor doesn’t stay speechless for long. “To look for you. You told me to meet you by the fire. Sort of generic directions. You could have said, ‘Meet me at the crash site where I put this chopper down. That fire.’”

We walk for a few minutes in silence. Razor is out of breath. I’m not. The arrays will sustain me until I reach her, but I have a feeling that when I crash, I’ll crash hard.

“So what now?” he asks.

“Rest up a few days—or as long as we can.”

“Then?”

“South.”

“South. That’s the plan? South. A little elaborate, isn’t it?”

“We have to get back to Ohio.”

He stops as if he’d run into an invisible wall. I trudge on for a few steps, then turn. Razor is shaking his head at me.

“Ringer, do you have any idea where you are?”

I nod. “About twenty miles north of one of the Great Lakes. I’m guessing Erie.”

“What are you— How are we— You do realize Ohio is over a hundred miles from here,” he sputters.

“Where we’re going, more like two hundred. As the crow flies.”

“‘As the…’ Well, too fucking bad, we aren’t crows! What’s in Ohio?”

“My friends.”

I continue walking, following the imprint of his boots in the snow.

“Ringer, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but—”

“You don’t want to burst my bubble butt?”

“That sounded suspiciously like a joke.”

“I know they’re probably dead. And I know I’ll probably die long before I reach them, even if they’re not. But I made a promise, Razor. I didn’t think it was a promise at the time. I told myself it wasn’t. Told him it wasn’t. But there’re the things we tell ourselves about the truth, and there’re the things the truth tells about us.”

“What you just said makes no sense. You know that, right? Must be the head injury. You usually make a lot.”

“Head injuries?”

“Now, that definitely was a joke!” He frowns. “Made a promise to who?”

“A naïve, thick-headed, stereotypical jock who thinks he’s God’s gift to the world when he isn’t thinking the world is God’s gift to him.”

“Oh. Okay.” He doesn’t say anything for a few shuffling steps, then: “So how long has Mr. Naïve Thick-headed Stereotypical Jock been your boyfriend?”

I stop. I turn. I grab his face with both hands and kiss him hard on the mouth. His eyes are wide and filled with something that closely resembles fear.

“What was that for?”

I kiss him again. Our bodies pressed close. His cold face cradled in my colder hands. I can smell the bubble gum on his breath. The Earth is my charge. We are two pillars rising from an undulating sea of dazzling white. Limitless. Without borders, without boundaries.

He brought me from the tomb. He raised me from the dead. He risked his life so I might have mine. Easier to turn aside. Easier to let me go. Easier to believe the beautiful lie than the hideous truth. After my father died, I built a fortress safe and strong to last a thousand years. A mighty stronghold that crumbles with a kiss.

“Now we’re even,” I whisper.

“Not exactly,” he says hoarsely. “I only kissed you once.”

77

AS WE APPROACH, the complex seems to rise from the snow like a leviathan from the deep. Silos, conveyors, bins, mixers, storage and office buildings, an enormous warehouse twice the size of an airplane hangar, all surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence. It seems creepily symbolic, fitting somehow, for this to end at a concrete plant. Concrete is the omnipresent human signature, our principal artistic medium on the world’s blank canvas: Wherever we went, the Earth slowly disappeared beneath it.

Razor pulls aside a section of the rotting fence for me to duck through. Color high in his cheeks, nose bright red from the cold, soft, soulful eyes darting about. Maybe he feels as exposed as I do in the open, dwarfed by the towering silos and massive equipment, beneath the bright, cloudless sky.

Maybe, though I doubt it.

“Give me your rifle,” I tell him.

“Huh?” He’s clutching the weapon against his chest, trigger finger nervously tapping.

“I’m a better shot.”

“Ringer, I’ve checked it all out. There’s nobody here. It’s perfectly—”

“Safe,” I finish for him. “Right.” I hold out my hand.

“Come on, she’s right over there in the warehouse…”

I don’t move. He rolls his eyes, tips his head back to consider the empty sky, looks back at me.

“If they were here, you know we’d already be dead.”

“The rifle.”

“Fine.” He shoves it at me. I pull the rifle from his hands and smash the stock against the side of his head. He drops to his knees, eyes on my face, but there’s nothing in those eyes, nothing at all.

“Fall,” I tell him. He pitches forward and lies still.

I don’t think she’s in the warehouse. There’s a reason he wanted me to go in there, but I don’t believe that reason had anything to do with Teacup. I doubt she’s within a hundred miles of this place. I have no choice, though. A slight advantage with the rifle and Razor neutralized, and that’s all.

He opened up to me when I kissed him. I don’t know how the enhancement opens an empathetic pathway into another human being. Maybe it turns the carrier into a kind of human lie detector, gathering and collating data from a myriad of sensory inputs and funneling it through the hub for interpretation and analysis. However it works, I felt the blank spot inside Razor, a nullity, a hidden room, and I knew something was terribly wrong.

Lies within lies within lies. Feints and counterfeints. Like a desert mirage, no matter how hard you ran toward it, it stayed forever in the distance. Finding the truth was like chasing the horizon.

As I enter the shadow of the building, something loosens inside. My knees begin to shake. My chest aches like I’ve been hit with a battering ram. I can’t catch my breath. The 12th System can sustain and strengthen me, supercharge my reflexes, enhance my senses tenfold, heal me, and protect me against every physical hazard, but there’s nothing my forty thousand uninvited guests can do about a broken heart.

Can’t, can’t. Can’t go soft now. What happens when we go soft? What happens?

I can’t go inside. I must go inside.

I lean against the cold metal wall of the warehouse, beside the open door, where darkness dwells, profound as the grave.

78

ROTTEN MILK.

The stench of the plague is so intense when I step inside that I gag. The olfactory array immediately suppresses my sense of smell. My stomach settles. My eyes clear. The warehouse is twice the size of a football field and sectioned into three ascending tiers. The bottom section, in which I’m standing, had been converted into a field hospital. Hundreds of cots, wads of bedding, and tipped-over carts of medical supplies. Blood everywhere. Glistening in the light streaming through the holes in the partially collapsed ceiling three stories over my head. Frozen sheets of blood on the floor. Blood smeared on the walls. Blood-soaked sheets and pillows. Blood, blood, blood everywhere, but no bodies.

I climb the first set of stairs to the second tier. Supply level: bags of flour and other dry goods, ripped open, contents strewn by rats and other scavengers, stacks of canned goods, jugs of water, barrels of kerosene. Stockpiled in anticipation of winter, but the Red Tsunami caught them first and drowned them in their own blood.

I climb the second set of stairs to the third tier. A column of sunlight cuts through the dusty air like a spotlight. I’ve reached the end. The final level. The platform is littered with corpses, stacked six high in some places, the ones on the bottom wrapped carefully in sheets, the ones closer to the top hastily tossed there, a discordant jumble of arms and legs, a twisted mass of bone and desiccated skin and skeletal fingers grasping uselessly at the empty air.

The middle of the floor has been cleared. A wooden table sits in the center of the column of light. And on the table, a wooden box and, beside the wooden box, a chessboard, set up in an endgame that I instantly recognize.

And then his voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere, like the whisper of distant thunder, impossible to place.

“We never finished our game.”

I reach forward and topple the white king. I hear a sigh like a high wind in the trees.

“Why are you here, Marika?”

“It was a test,” I whisper. The white king on his back, blank stare, the eyes an alabaster abyss looking back at me. “You needed to test the 12th System without me knowing it was a test. I had to believe it was real. It was the only way I’d cooperate.”

“And did you pass?”

“Yes. I passed.”

I turn my back to the light. He’s standing at the top of the stairs, alone, face in shadow, though I swear I can see his bright blue, birdlike eyes glittering in the charnel dark.

“Not quite yet,” he says.

I aim the rifle at the space between those glittering eyes and pull the trigger. The clicks echo from the empty chamber: Click, click, click, click, click, click.

“You’ve come so far, Marika. Don’t disappoint me now,” Vosch says. “You must have known it wouldn’t be loaded.”

I drop the rifle and shuffle backward until I knock against the table. I press my hands on the top to steady myself.

“Ask the question,” he orders me.

“What did you mean, ‘Not quite yet’?”

“You know the answer to that.”

I pick up the table and hurl it at him. He slaps it away with one arm, and by that time I’ve reached him, launching myself from six feet away, hitting him square in the chest with my shoulder and wrapping my arms around him in a bear hug. We fly off the third level and smash onto the second. The boards beneath us give a thunderous crack. The impact loosens my grip. He wraps the long fingers of one hand around my neck and slings me twenty feet into a tower of canned goods. I’m on my feet in less than a second, but he still beats me, moving so fast, his rising traces an afterimage in my vision.

“The poor recruit in the washroom,” he says. “The nurse outside the ICU, the pilot, Razor—even Claire, poor Claire, who was at a distinct disadvantage from the beginning. Not enough, not enough. To truly pass, you must overcome what cannot be overcome.”

He spreads his arms wide. An invitation. “You wanted the opportunity, Marika. Well. Here it is.”

79

THERE’S LITTLE DIFFERENCE between what happens next and our chess game. He knows how I think. He knows my strengths, my weaknesses. Knows every move before I make it. He pays particular attention to my injuries: my wrist, my ribs, my face. Blood streams from the reopened wound on my forehead, steaming in the subzero air, running into my mouth, my eyes; the world turns crimson behind a bloody curtain. After I fall a third time, he says, “Enough. Stay down, Marika.”

I get up. He puts me down a fourth time.

“You’ll overload the system,” he cautions me. I’m on my hands and knees, watching dumbly as blood spatters from my face to the floor, a rain of blood. “It could crash. If that happens, your injuries might kill you.”

I’m screaming. Pouring from the very bottom of my soul: the death howls of seven billion slaughtered human beings. The sound ricochets around the cavernous space.

Then I’m up again for the last time. Even enhanced, my eyes can’t follow his fists. Like quantum particles, they’re neither here nor there, impossible to place, impossible to predict. He flings my limp body from the platform to the concrete floor below, through which I seem to fall forever, into darkness thicker than that which engulfed the universe before the beginning of time. I roll onto my stomach and push myself up. His boot slams into my neck and stamps down.

“What is the answer, Marika?”

He doesn’t have to explain. Finally, I understand the question. Finally, I get the riddle: He isn’t asking about our answer to the problem of them. He never was. He’s asking about their answer to the problem of us.

So I say, “Nothing. Nothing is the answer. They’re not here. They never were.”

“Who? Who’s not here?”

My mouth is full of blood. I swallow. “The risk…”

“Yes. Very good. The risk is the key.”

“They’re not here. There are no entities downloaded into human bodies. No alien consciousness inside anyone. Because of the risk. The risk. The risk is unacceptable. It’s a… a program, a delusional construct. Inserted into their minds before they were born, switched on when they reached puberty—a lie, it’s a lie. They’re human. Enhanced like me, but human… human like me.”

“And me? If you are human, what am I?”

“I don’t know…”

The boot presses down, crushing my cheek against the concrete.

“What am I?”

“I don’t know. The controller. The director. I don’t know. The one chosen to… I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Am I human?”

“I don’t know!” And I didn’t. We’d come to the place I could not go. The place from which I could not return. Above: the boot. Below: the abyss. “But if you are human…”

“Yes. Finish it. If I am human… what?”

I am drowning in blood. Not mine. The blood of the billions who died before me, an infinite sea of blood that envelops me and bears me down to the lightless bottom.

“If you are human, there is no hope.”

80

HE LIFTS ME from the floor. He carries me to one of the cots and gently lays down my body. “You are bent, but not broken. The steel must be melted before the sword can be forged. You are the sword, Marika. I am the blacksmith and you are the sword.”

He cups my face. His eyes shine with the fervor of a religious zealot, the look of a street-corner crazy preacher, except this crazy holds the fate of the world in his hands.

He runs his thumb over my bloody cheek. “Rest now, Marika. You’re safe here. Perfectly safe. I’m leaving him to take care of you.”

Razor. I can’t take that. I shake my head. “Please. No. Please.”

“And in a week or two, you’ll be ready.”

He waits for the question. He’s very pleased with himself. Or with me. Or what he has achieved in me. I don’t ask, though.

And then he’s gone.

Later, I hear the chopper come to take him away. After that, Razor appears, looking as if someone shoved an apple under the skin that covered his cheek. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. He washes my face with warm, soapy water. He bandages my wounds. He binds my fractured ribs. He splints my broken wrist. He doesn’t bother to offer me water, though he must know I’m thirsty. He jabs an IV into my arm and hooks up a saline drip. Then he leaves me and sits in a folding chair by the open door, cocooned in the heavy parka, rifle across his lap. When the sun sets, he lights a kerosene lamp and places it on the floor beside him. Light flows up and bathes his face, but his eyes are hidden from me.

“Where’s Teacup?” My voice echoes in the vast space.

He doesn’t answer.

“I have a theory,” I tell him. “It’s about rats. Do you want to hear it?”

Silence.

“To kill one rat is easy. All you need is a piece of old cheese and a spring-loaded trap. But to kill a thousand rats, a million rats, a billion—or seven billion—that’s a little bit harder. For that you need bait. Poison. You don’t have to poison all seven billion of them, just a certain percentage that will carry the poison back to the colony.”

He doesn’t move. I have no idea if he’s listening or even awake.

“We’re the rats. The program downloaded into human fetuses—that’s the bait. What’s the difference between a human who carries an alien consciousness and a human who believes that he does? There is no difference except one. Risk. Risk is the difference. Not our risk. Theirs. Why would they risk themselves like that? The answer is they didn’t. They aren’t here, Razor. They never were. It’s just us. It’s always been just us.”

He bends forward very slowly and deliberately and extinguishes the light.

I sigh. “But like all theories, there are holes. You can’t reconcile it with the big rock question. Why bother with any of it when all they had to do was throw a very big rock?”

Very quietly now, so quietly I wouldn’t hear him without the enhancement array: “Shut up.”

“Why did you do it, Alex?” If Alex is really his name. His entire history could be a lie designed by Vosch to manipulate me. The odds are it is.

“I’m a soldier.”

“You were just following orders.”

“I’m a soldier.”

“It’s not yours to reason why.”

“I. Am. A. SOLDIER!”

I close my eyes. “Chaseball. Was that Vosch’s, too? Sorry. Stupid question.”

Silence.

“It’s Walker,” I say, my eyes snapping open. “It has to be. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s Evan, isn’t it, Razor? He wants Evan and I’m the only path to him.”

Silence.

The implosion of Camp Haven and the disabled drones raining from the sky: Why did they need drones? The question always bothered me. How hard could it be to find pockets of survivors when there were so few survivors left and you had plenty of human technology in your possession to find them? Survivors clustered. They crowded together like bees in a hive. The drones weren’t being used to keep track of us. They were being used to keep track of them, the humans like Evan Walker, solitary and dangerously enhanced, scattered over every continent, armed with knowledge that could bring the whole edifice crashing down if the program downloaded into them malfunctioned—as it clearly did in his case.

Evan is off the grid. Vosch doesn’t know where he is or if he’s alive or dead. But if Evan is alive, Vosch needs someone on the inside, someone Evan would trust.

I am the blacksmith.

You are the sword.

81

FOR A WEEK, he is my sole companion. Guard, nursemaid, watchman. When I’m hungry, he brings me food. When I hurt, he eases my pain. When I’m dirty, he bathes me. He is constant. He is faithful. He is there when I wake and there when I fall asleep. I never catch him sleeping: He is constant, but my sleep never is; I wake several times a night, and he’s always watching from his spot by the door. He is silent and sullen and strangely nervous, this guy who effortlessly conned me into believing him and in him. As if I might try to escape, when he knows I can but won’t, when he knows I am imprisoned by a promise more binding than a thousand chains.

On the afternoon of the sixth day, Razor ties a rag over his nose and mouth, clumps up the stairs to the third level, and comes back carting a body. He carries it outside. Then back up the stairs, his tread as heavy empty-handed as it is burdened with a corpse, and another body descends to the bottom. I lose count at one hundred twenty-three. He empties the warehouse of the dead, piling them in the yard, and at dusk, he sets the pile on fire. The bodies have mummified and the fire catches quickly and burns very hot and bright. The pyre can be seen for miles, if there are any eyes to see it. Its light glows in the doorway, laps across the floor, turns the concrete into a golden, undulating seabed. Razor lounges in the doorway watching the fire, a lean shadow haloed like a lunar eclipse. He shrugs out of his jacket, removes his shirt, rolls up the sleeve of his undershirt to expose his shoulder. The blade of his knife glimmers in the yellow glow as he etches something into his skin with the tip.

The night wears on; the fire dwindles; the wind shifts and my heart aches with nostalgia—summer camps and catching lightning bugs and August skies aflame with stars. The way the desert smells and the long, wistful sigh of wind rushing down from the mountains as the sun dips beneath the horizon.

Razor lights the kerosene lamp and walks over to me. He smells like the smoke and, faintly, like the dead.

“Why did you do that?” I ask.

Above the rag, his eyes swim with tears. I don’t know if he’s teary from the smoke or something else. “Orders,” he says.

He pulls the IV from my arm and wraps the tubing over the hook on the stand.

“I don’t believe you,” I say.

“Well, I’m shocked.”

It’s the most he’s spoken since Vosch left. I’m surprised that I’m relieved to hear his voice again. He’s examining the wound on my forehead, face very close because the light is dim.

“Teacup,” I whisper.

“What do you think?” he says crossly.

“She’s alive. She’s the only leverage he has.”

“Okay, then. She’s alive.”

He spreads antibacterial ointment over the cut. An unenhanced human being would have needed several stitches, but in a few days no one will be able to tell that I was injured.

“I could call his bluff,” I say. “How can he kill her now?”

Razor shrugs. “Because he doesn’t give a shit about one little kid when the fate of the whole world is at stake? Just a guess.”

“After all that’s happened, after everything you heard and everything you saw, you still believe him.”

He looks down at me with something that closely resembles pity. “I have to believe him, Ringer. I let go of that and I’m done. I’m them.” He nods toward the yard where the blackened bones smolder.

He sits on the cot next to mine and pulls down the makeshift mask. The lantern between his feet and the light that flows over his face and the shadows that pool in his deep-set eyes.

“Too late for that,” I tell him.

“Right. We’re all dead already. So there is no leverage, right? Kill me, Ringer. Kill me right now and run. Run.”

I’d be off the cot before he could blink again. A single punch to his chest and the augmented blow would shove a shattered rib into his heart. And then I could walk out, walk away, walk into the wilderness where I can hide for years, decades, until I am old and beyond the capability of the 12th System to sustain me. I might outlive everyone. I might wake one day the last person on Earth.

And then. And then.

He must be freezing, sitting there with nothing but a T-shirt on. I can see a line of dried blood across his biceps.

“What did you do to your arm?” I ask.

He pulls up his sleeve. The letters are crudely drawn, big and blocky and shaky, the way a little kid makes them when he’s first learning:

VQP

“Latin,” he whispers. “Vincit qui patitur. It means—”

“I know what it means,” I whisper back.

He shakes his head. “I really don’t think that you do.” He doesn’t sound angry. He sounds sad.

Alex turns his head toward the doorway, beyond which the dead are borne toward the indifferent sky. Alex.

“Is Alex really your name?” I ask.

He looks at me again and I see the playfully ironic smile. Like hearing his voice again, I’m surprised at myself for missing it. “I didn’t lie about any of that. Only the important stuff.”

“Did your grandmother have a dog named Flubby?”

He laughs softly. “Yes.”

“That’s good.”

“Why is that good?”

“I wanted that part to be true.”

“Because you love mean little nippy purse dogs?”

“Because I like that once upon a time there were mean little nippy purse dogs named Flubby. That’s good. That’s worth remembering.”

He’s off the cot before I can blink again, and he’s kissing me, and I plunge inside him where nothing is hidden. He’s open to me now, the one who sustained me and the one who betrayed me, the one who brought me back to life and the one who delivered me back to death. Rage is not the answer, no, and not hate. Layer by layer, that which separates us falls away, until I reach the center, the nameless region, the defenseless stronghold, an ageless, bottomless ache, the lonely singularity of his soul, unspoiled by time or experience, beyond thought, infinite.

And I am there with him—I am already there. Within the singularity, I am already there.

“That can’t be true,” I whisper. Within the center of everything, where nothing is, I found him holding me.

“I don’t believe all of your bullshit,” he murmurs. “But you’re right about this: Some things, down to the smallest of things, are worth the sum of all things.”

Outside, the bitter harvest burns. Inside, he slips the sheets down, and these are the hands that held me, the hands that bathed and fed and lifted me when I could not lift myself. He brought me to death; he brings me to life. That’s why he removed the dead from the upper tier. He banished them, consigned them to the fire, not to desecrate them but to sanctify us.

The shadow that wrestles with light. The cold that contends with fire. It’s a war, he told me once, and we are the conquerors of the undiscovered country, an island of life centered in a boundless sea of blood.

The piercing cold. The searing heat. His lips sliding over my neck and my fingers feeling his shattered cheek, the wound I gave him, and the wounds on his arm—VQP—that he gave himself, then my hands sliding down his back. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. The smell of bubble gum and the smell of smoke and the smell of his blood, and the way his body slides over mine and the way his soul slices into mine: Razor. The beat of our hearts and the rhythm of our breath and the spinning stars we could not see, marking the time, measuring the shrinking intervals until the end of us, him and me and everything else.

The world is a clock and the clock winds down, and their coming had nothing to do with that. The world has always been a clock. Even the stars will wink out one by one and there will be no light or heat, and this is the war, the endless, futile war against the lightless, heatless void rushing toward us.

He entwines his fingers behind my back and pulls me tightly against him. No space between us anymore. No spot where he ends and I begin. The emptiness filled. The void defied.

82

HE LINGERS BESIDE ME until our breath evens and our hearts slow, running his fingers through my hair, staring at my face intently as if he cannot leave until he’s memorized every aspect. He touches my lips, my cheeks, my eyelids. Runs the tip of his finger along the length of my nose, around the curve of my ear. His face more in shadow, mine more in light.

“Run,” he whispers.

I shake my head. “I can’t.”

He rises from the cot, but I have the sensation of falling as he remains still. He pulls on his clothes quickly. I can’t read his expression. Razor has closed himself off to me. I am bound inside the emptiness again. I can’t bear it. It will crush me, the absence I lived with for so long that I hardly noticed. Unnoticed until this moment: He showed me how enormous the emptiness was by filling it.

“They won’t catch you,” he presses. “How could they ever catch you?”

“He knows I won’t run as long as he has her.”

“Oh Christ. What is she to you, anyway? Is she worth your life? How can one person be worth your whole life?” It’s a question he already knows the answer to. “Fine. Do what you want. Like I care. Like it matters.”

“That’s the lesson they taught us, Razor. What matters and what doesn’t. The one truth at the center of all the lies.”

He picks up his rifle and slings it over his shoulder. He kisses me on the forehead. A blessing. A benediction. Then he picks up the lamp and walks unsteadily to the doorway, the watchman, the caretaker, the one who does not rest or grow weary or falter. He leans against the open door, facing the night, and the sky above him burns with the cold light of ten thousand pyres marking the time ticking down.

“Run,” I hear him say. I don’t think he’s speaking to me. “Run.”

83

ON THE EIGHTH DAY, the chopper returns for us. I let Razor help with my clothes, but besides a couple of sore ribs and a pair of weak legs, the twelve arrays collectively known as Ringer are fully operational. My face has completely healed; not even a scar remains. On the ride back to the base, Razor sits across from me, studying the floor, looking up at me only once. Run, he mouths. Run.

White land, dark river, the helicopter banks hard, swooping around the control tower at the airfield, close enough for me to see a tall, solitary figure behind the tinted windows. We set down in the same spot from which we took off, another circle complete, and Razor puts his hand on my elbow to guide me into the tower. On the ride to the top, his hand wraps briefly around mine.

“I know what matters,” he says.

Vosch stands at the other end of the room with his back toward us, but I can see his face reflected dimly in the glass. Beside him stands a burly recruit gripping a rifle to his chest with the desperation of someone hanging over a ten-mile-deep gorge by a shoestring. Sitting next to the recruit, wearing the standard-issue white jumpsuit, is the reason I’m here, my victim, my cross, my charge.

Teacup starts to get up when she sees me. The big recruit puts his hand on her shoulder and pushes her back down. I shake my head and mouth to her, No.

The room is quiet. Razor is on my right side, standing slightly behind me. I can’t see him, but he’s close enough that I can hear him breathing.

“So.” Vosch draws out the word, a prelude. “Have you solved the riddle of the rocks?”

“Yes.”

I see him smile tightly in the dark glass. “And?”

“Throwing a very big rock would defeat the purpose.”

“And what is the purpose?”

“For some to live.”

“That begs the question. You’re better than that.”

“You could have killed all of us. But you didn’t. You’re burning the village in order to save it.”

“A savior. Is that what I am?” He turns to face me. “Refine your answer. Must it be all or nothing? If the goal is to save the village from the villagers, a smaller rock would have achieved the same result. Why a series of attacks? Why the ruses and deceit? Why engineer-enhanced, delusional puppets like Evan Walker? A rock is so much more simple and direct.”

“I’m not sure,” I confess. “But I think it has something to do with luck.”

He stares at me for a long moment. Then he nods. He seems pleased. “What happens now, Marika?”

“You’re taking me to his last known location,” I answer. “You’re dropping me in to track him down. He is an anomaly, a flaw in the system that can’t be tolerated.”

“Really? And how could one poor human pawn pose any danger whatsoever?”

“He fell in love, and love is the only weakness.”

“Why?”

Beside me, Razor’s breath. Before me, Teacup’s uplifted face.

“Because love is irrational,” I tell Vosch. “It doesn’t follow rules. Not even its own rules. Love is the one thing in the universe that’s unpredictable.”

“I would have to respectfully disagree with you on that point,” Vosch says. He looks at Teacup. “Love’s trajectory is entirely predictable.”

He steps close, looming over me, a colossus cut from flesh and bone with eyes clear as a mountain lake boring all the way down to the bottom of my soul.

“Why would I need you to track him or anyone down?”

“You lost the drones that monitor him and all the others like him. He’s off the grid. He doesn’t know the truth, but he knows enough to cause serious damage if he isn’t stopped.”

Vosch raises his hand. I flinch, but his hand comes down on my shoulder, which he squeezes hard, his face glowing with satisfaction. “Very good, Marika. Very, very good.”

And beside me, Razor whispers, “Run.”

His sidearm explodes beside my ear. Vosch backpedals toward the window, but he isn’t hit. The big recruit goes down to his knees, ramming the recoil pad of his rifle against his shoulder, but he isn’t hit, either.

Razor’s target was the smallest thing that is the sum of all things, his bullet the sword that severs the chain that bound me.

The impact hurls Teacup backward. Her head smacks into the counter behind her; her stick-thin arms fly into the air. I whip to my right, toward Razor, in time to see his chest blown apart by the kneeling recruit’s round.

He pitches forward and my arms come up instinctively, but he falls too fast. I can’t catch him.

And his soft, soulful eyes lift up to mine, at the end of a trajectory that even Vosch failed to predict.

“You’re free,” Alex whispers. “Run.”

The recruit swings the rifle toward me. Vosch steps between us with an enraged, guttural cry.

The hub lights up the muscular array as I sprint straight for the windows overlooking the landing field, leaping from six feet away and rotating my right shoulder toward the glass.

And then I’m in the open air, falling, falling, falling.

You’re free.

Falling.

84

COVERED IN ASH and dust, five gray ghosts occupying the woods at dawn.

Megan and Sam finally drifting off to sleep, though more of a passing out than a drifting off. She was clutching Bear to her chest. Wherever there is someone in need, Bear said to me, I will go.

Ben watching the sun rise with his rifle across his lap, silent, wrapped tight with anger and grief, but mostly grief. Dumbo, the practical one, digging in his rucksack for something to eat. And me, wrapped tight, too, with anger and grief, but mostly anger. Hello, good-bye. Hello, good-bye. How many times do I have to relive this cycle? What happened wasn’t hard to figure out; it was just impossible to understand. Evan found the baggie that Sam dropped and blew (literally) both Grace and himself to lime-green oblivion. Which had been Evan’s plan from the beginning, the self-sacrificing, idealistic, alien-human hybrid asshole.

Dumbo came over and asked if I wanted him to take a look at my nose. I asked him how he could miss it. He laughed. “Take care of Ben,” I told him.

“He won’t let me,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “the real wound your medical mojo can’t touch, Dumbo.”

He heard it first (the big ears maybe?), head coming up, looking over my shoulder into the trees: the snap and crackle of the frozen ground breaking and dead leaves crunching. I stood up and swung my rifle toward the sound. In the deep shadows, a lighter shadow moved. A survivor of the crash who followed us here? Another Evan or Grace, a Silencer finding us in his territory? No. Couldn’t be. No Silencer would be caught dead tramping through the woods with all the stealth of a bull in a china shop—or they would be caught dead doing it.

The shadow raised its arms high in the air and I knew—knew before I heard my name—that he’d found me again, keeper of the promise he couldn’t make, the one I had marked with my blood and who had marked me with his tears, a Silencer all right, my Silencer, stumbling toward me in the impossibly pure light of a late winter’s sunrise promising spring.

I handed my rifle to Dumbo. I left him. The golden light and the dark trees glistening with ice and the way the air smells on cold mornings. The things we leave behind and the things that never leave us. The world ended once. It will end again. The world ends, then the world comes back. The world always comes back.

I stopped a few steps from him. He stopped, too, and we regarded each other across an expanse wider than the universe, within a space thinner than a razor’s edge.

“My nose is broken,” I said. Damn that Dumbo. Made me self-conscious.

“My ankle’s broken,” he said.

“Then I’ll come to you.”