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 go
es 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.