Written in Fire

EPILOGUE

For the third night in a row he’d gone to bed shivering, his mind on rails, racing on paths he didn’t choose at speeds he didn’t care for. There were sweats and a cough, too, but it wasn’t the cold that was getting him.

When he woke, it was nearly noon, the sun pouring through the window. Some scout of his consciousness, ranging ahead of his waking self, warned him that he was about to feel awful again. He took a breath and lay still.

Nothing. He felt fine.

Hawk rolled out of the cot. The lodge was a two-room log cabin with lacquered walls and the smell of smoke from the woodstove. He staggered to the bathroom and took the longest leak in history. The toothbrush was someone else’s but better than nothing, even though 532 of the bristles bent out in tired waves.

He was halfway through his bottom teeth when he realized that he knew how many bristles were bent. Without any effort or thought, he’d known it as certainly as he knew that if he dropped the toothbrush it would fall: 532 bristles, which represented 21.28 percent of the total number. He smiled. Finished brushing. Spat.

The night of the battle, after the militia had passed, he’d forced himself off the kitchen floor and into the garage. It took twenty minutes of alternately stalling out and grinding gears to get the hang of the Jeep, but by the time the gunfire started, he was out of town, riding west. Around midnight he’d let himself into the hunting cabin with a rock, intending to hit the road first thing. But he’d woken with his brain on fire, and everything since had been a blurry fugue.

In the kitchen he ate canned corn while the coffee dripped. When the machine hissed, he reached for a mug, but wasn’t paying attention, and it slipped off the counter and tipped end over end.

It was beautiful.

Hawk didn’t have the mathematics to describe it, but he could see the formula clearly, the way gravity and air resistance and momentum were dancing, and he found it so fascinating that he took a few seconds to watch, just made it spin slower and slower until he could examine every detail: the inside stained in distinct rings, a faint fingerprint on the handle, the way dust swirled around it and sunlight gleamed off the rim as the mug drifted slowly to the floor.

When it hit, it burst into fragments that vectored predictably, and he could hear the sound of each piece as it clicked against the tile, and for some reason they made him think of John.

In the maintenance tunnel, lecturing on the importance of contingencies, John had been paying only a small fraction of attention to the boy behind him. But then he’d stopped and stared full focus. “I need to tell you something, Hawk. Something important. There’s a very good chance I won’t make it out of this. If that happens, just remember that you’re the future.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will,” John had said, and then they had climbed up the ladder and a few minutes later he was dead.

He was right, Hawk thought. There wouldn’t have been any point in explaining then. But you understand now.

He understood other things, too. That John had been using him, that when he’d referred to turning a pawn into a queen, this was what he’d meant. It was okay. He’d still cared about Hawk, had treated him like a man, given him a name and a purpose and his heart’s desire. The reasons might matter, but not as much as the facts.

Hawk took a new mug and poured a cup of coffee, drank it slowly, thinking. Then he went outside and climbed into the Jeep. As he reached for his seat belt, a fit of coughing racked him, and he leaned against the steering wheel until it passed. When he could breathe again, he took a tissue from his pocket.

Then stopped.

Wadded up the tissue.

Wiped his nose with his hands, and rubbed them together.

The gas tank was three-quarters full. Figure it held sixteen gallons, with a fuel efficiency of roughly twenty-two miles per, call it three hundred and fifty miles per full tank. With the money he’d found in the safe house, he could fill the Jeep eight, maybe ten times. He’d need food too, and cash for contingencies—thank you, John—so assume twenty-five hundred miles.

Hawk called up a mental map, the image as crisp as if he were looking at the real thing, right down to the scale in the corner.

First, Salt Lake City.

Then Reno.

Sacramento.

San Francisco.

Los Angeles.

Northeast to Las Vegas, southeast to Phoenix.

Spin back to end the trip in San Diego.

Total distance, 2440 miles.

Forty hours if he did it straight. But he’d want to eat in restaurants, go to church, ride buses. Given the latency he’d experienced, though, he couldn’t dawdle too much. So spend, say, four days shaking hands and sneezing his way through metropolitan areas encompassing a population of, let’s see . . .

Nine million people.

Hawk coughed, smiled, and started the Jeep.

There was a long way to go.

END OF THE BRILLIANCE TRILOGY