He kicked Phong in the ribs. One broke with a satisfying snap.
Phong yelped.
“Shhh,” Lubin murmured soothingly. He brought the heel of his boot down on Phong’s outstretched hand, ground it back and forth. Phong screamed.
Lubin spent a moment contemplating Phong’s right leg—the intact one—but decided to leave it unbroken. There was a certain aesthetic in the asymmetry. Instead, he brought his foot down again, hard, on the broken left one.
Phong screamed and fainted, escaping into brief oblivion. It didn’t matter; Lubin’s hard-on had been assured with the first snapping bone.
Go on, he urged himself.
He walked unhurriedly around the broken man until he found himself next to Phong’s head. Experimentally, he lifted his foot.
Go on. It doesn’t matter. Nobody cares.
But he had rules. They weren’t nearly so inviolable as when he’d been Guilt Tripped, but in a way that was the whole point. To make his own decisions. To follow his own algorithm. To prove he didn’t have to give in, to prove he was stronger than his impulses.
Prove it to who? Who’s here to care? But he already knew the answer.
It’s not his fault. It’s yours.
Lubin sighed. He lowered his foot, and waited.
“A man named Xander gave you a vial,” he said calmly, squatting at Phong’s side a half-hour later.
Phong stared wide-eyed and shook his head. He did not seem pleased to be back in the real world. “Please...don’t—”
“You were told that it contained a counteragent, that it would kill off ßehemoth if it was disseminated widely enough. I thought so myself, at first. I understand that you were only trying to do the right thing.” Lubin leaned in close. “Are you following me, Phong?”
Phong gulped and nodded.
Lubin stood. “We were both misinformed. The vial you were given will only make things worse. If you hadn’t been so busy trying to kill me you could have saved us both a lot—” A sudden thought occurred to him. “Just out of interest, why were you trying to kill me?”
Phong looked torn.
“I’d really like to know,” Lubin said, without the slightest trace of threat in his voice.
“You—they said people trying to stop the cure,” Phong blurted.
“Who?”
“Just people. On the radio.” Alone, helpless, half his bones broken, and still he was trying to protect his contacts. Not bad, Lubin had to admit.
“We’re not,” he said. “And if you had been in touch with Xander and Aaron and their friends lately, you’d know that for yourself. They’re very sick.”
“No.” It was probably meant to be a protest, but Phong didn’t seem able to put any conviction into the word.
“I need to know what you did with that vial,” Lubin said.
“I...I ate it,” Phong managed.
“You ate it. You mean, you drank the contents.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t disseminate it anywhere. You drank it all yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Why, may I ask?”
“They say it cure ßehemoth. I—I first stage already. They say I dead by winter, and I could not get into forts...”
Lubin didn’t dare touch the man, not with his isolation skin in tatters. He studied Phong’s exposed and reddened skin, at the blisters rising across it. If there had been any obvious signs of either ßehemoth or Seppuku, they were now indistinguishable under the burns. He tried to remember if Phong had presented any symptoms prior to being shot.
“When did you do this?” he asked at last.
“Two days. I felt fine until...you...you...” Phong squirmed weakly, winced at the result.
Two days. Seppuku was fast, but all the symptomatic vectors Lubin had encountered had been infected for longer than that. It was probably only a matter of hours before Phong started presenting. A day or two at most.
“—to me?” Phong was saying.
Lubin looked down at him. “What?”
“What you do to me?”
“A lifter’s on the way. You’ll be in a medical facility by nightfall.”
“I’m sorry,” Phong said, and coughed. “They say I be dead by winter,” he repeated in a weak voice.
“You will be,” Lubin told him.
Matryoska
Clarke didn’t make the call.
She’d had closer contact with Ricketts than anyone except the person who’d assaulted him, and she’d checked out clean. She was willing to bet that the people of Freeport were clean too.
She wasn’t willing to bet that the trigger fingers would agree with her.
She knew the arguments. She knew the virtues of erring on the side of caution. She just didn’t buy them, not when the people making those decisions sat in untouchable far-off towers adding columns of empty numbers and Bayesian probabilities. Maybe the experts were right, maybe the only people truly qualified to run the world were those without conscience—clear-eyed, rational, untroubled by the emotional baggage that the sight of piled bodies could induce in the unblessed. People weren’t numbers, but maybe the only way to do the right thing was to act as if they were.
Maybe. She wasn’t going to bet the town of Freeport on it, though.
They were nowhere close to a cure, according to the dispatches. There was nothing anyone could do for Ricketts except poke at him. Perhaps that would change at some point. Perhaps it would even happen before Seppuku killed him, although that seemed vanishingly unlikely. In the meantime, Lubin was good at his job—maybe a bit past his prime, but easily more than a match for a handful of infected ferals who didn’t even know they were being hunted. If the Meatzarts needed live samples, Lubin was the man to provide them.
There was no need to feed this skinny kid into that system. Clarke had learned a few things about research protocols over the years: even after the cures are discovered, who bothers rehabilitating the lab rats?
Taka Ouellette, maybe. Clarke would have trusted her in an instant. But Clarke didn’t know where she was or how to reach her. She certainly didn’t trust the system to deliver Ricketts into her exceptional arms. And Ricketts, surprisingly, seemed content where he was. In fact, he seemed almost happy there. Maybe he’d forgotten the old days, or maybe he hadn’t been very well-off even then. But by the time he’d fallen into Clarke’s orbit he knew only the grubby, dying landscape upon which he expected to live his whole short life. Probably the most he’d dared hope for was to die in peace and alone in some sheltered ruin, before being torn apart for his clothes or the dirt in his pockets.
To be rescued from that place, to wake up in a gleaming submarine at the bottom of the sea—that must have seemed magical beyond dreams. Ricketts came from a life so grim that terminal exile on the ocean floor was actually a step up.
I could just let him die here, Clarke thought, and he’d be happier than he’d ever been in his life.
She kept her eyes open, of course. She wasn’t stupid. Seppuku was afoot in the world, and Ricketts had vectored it all the way from Vermont. At the very least there was some thug with a stolen motorbike to worry about. She tested everyone that Miri swallowed, no matter what their complaint. She read encrypted dispatches intended only for those in the loop. She watched public broadcasts aimed at the ferals themselves, transmissions from high-tech havens in Boston and Augusta: weather, MI schedules, waiting times at the ßehemoth forts—incongruously, coding tips. She marveled that the castle-dwellers would dare present themselves this way, as if they could redeem themselves by sending public service bulletins to those they’d trampled in their own rush to safety.