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."