She crawled away from the wreck and toward Silas, pulling herself by the roots of the grass. Dizziness overcame her, and she collapsed back, looking up into the sky. Slowly, she became aware of stars. There seemed to be millions of them spread out above her. Had they always been so bright? The buzzing of the engine grew more frantic. She rolled to her stomach and continued crawling.
Silas wasn’t Silas anymore when she found him. He was mud and blood and bits of broken bone, pulped into something that looked like it never could have been alive. Never could have been a man whose face she’d kissed. She followed a long, splintered arm to a hand and laced her fingers into his. She recognized the hand. Those same long fingers, with the same long nail beds.
Blood ran into her eyes again, and this time she did not wipe it away. She let the blood blur the world away while she sat rocking. She wasn’t able to pretend he was still alive, but she could believe he was still whole and lying in the grass beside her. She rocked him to sleep, singing softly.
It took her a long while to stop.
She let go, without looking down. She didn’t want to see what was left of him. She didn’t want to see the blood again.
She looked instead toward the car and the building.
She tried to get to her feet and was surprised to be able to do so. The limp was bad, but she could walk.
Her feet made shiny trails in the dewy grass.
When she got to the car, she leaned against it, and the world swayed again. She moved around to the mangled front end and looked down. The wall itself was pushed in, a crumble of cinder blocks.
The gladiator was dead.
Like Silas, it was reduced to little more than an arm dangling from a mass of flesh. That, too, seemed fitting. She couldn’t tell where the head used to be. She wanted to find the eye and gouge it out. She wanted to taste its blood, carve out its heart. At that moment, nothing was too gruesome. After a moment more, she realized she wanted only to walk away.
She was tired. But there was still so much for her to do. In the distance, the city was still dark; something had happened to the power again, and not just at the lab. She knew there would be no one coming for quite a while. They had other problems to deal with. Besides, how would they even know? Had some alarm been tripped? Without power, she doubted it. No, nobody was coming.
Very carefully, she picked her way through the hole the car had made in the wall and moved inside the building. The air was thick with dust. Lab benches lay strewn about the floor, their contents reduced to puddles and shards of glass. She looked around but didn’t recognize the room. She’d worked in this building for months, but everything looked different now in the darkness. She could not connect what she knew of this place with what she was now looking at. They were part of different universes.
Stepping over the larger pieces of glass as she crossed the room, she barely felt the chemical burns to the bottoms of her bare feet. She swung the door open and stepped into the hall. As she walked, she slowed occasionally to look at the nameplates on the doors. It was too dark to decipher the writing, but when she found one about the right size, she ran her fingers across the raised letters. She was running on autopilot. She continued on, checking the next two doors in the same way. When she found the room she was looking for, she went inside.
The mass spectrometer sat in the far corner before a bank of computers. She followed the copper tubing to the tanks chained neatly inside their safety rails. The windows in the room let the moonlight in, and she could read the sign over the tanks: Dangerous, Highly Flammable. The mass spectrometers used hydrogen.
She unchained the hook and pushed the tank over. The copper tubing snapped, and she quickly turned the nozzle off. It was too heavy to carry, so she rolled it instead, using her feet to guide it down the long, dark hall.
When she finally got back to the shattered room, the tank made submarine pinging noises as it rolled across the remaining fragments of cinder block. It came to a stop at the pile of debris near the car.
She bent and very carefully backed the nozzle off until she heard the soft hiss of the tank. Then she gave it a quarter-turn in the opposite direction, resealing it. She stood. The floor was already covered in spilled, fuming chemicals that made her eyes water, but in the corner, she found two bottles of stoddard solvent and monomethlyamine. She unscrewed the cap of solvent and made a trail down the hall, pouring the liquid, moving deeper into the building. When the bottle was empty, she dropped it to the floor and unscrewed the other cap. She poured the contents out on the floor in a broad pool and then walked back to the room. Her head swam with the fumes. She almost fell once, but something told her that if she fell to the puddled floor, she would never get up.
She stumbled against the broken nose of the car and slipped across something wet and sticky. She didn’t look to see what it was. The car still rumbled and popped, the electric motor still racing.
She moved around to the hole in the wall and stuck her face through for a deep breath. She breathed. A minute passed. Her head cleared slightly, and she bent back toward the hydrogen tank. She turned the nozzle until the hiss came again, then she stood and moved quickly out through the hole. The wet grass stung the bottoms of her feet as she walked back toward Silas’s body. She dropped to her knees. The world drifted away. She was happy to let it go.
The explosion, when it came, was far worse than she had anticipated.
The shock wave knocked her on her stomach, and the car cart-wheeled past her on the right. Flames shot high into the air.
When the heat became too much, she faced the choice of leaving Silas’s side or being cooked alive. She relinquished her spot and rolled away through the steaming grass. She went several dozen yards before collapsing. She reached for a piece of twisted metal wreckage lying nearby and pulled it toward her. She lifted it and crawled into the cool wetness underneath. The lab burned high into the dark sky, and after a long while, the world went away again.
CHAPTER FORTY
Vidonia sat in the glare of the equatorial sun. She looked out at the shimmering blue Pacific as it slapped at the crowded beach.
A gentle offshore breeze tousled her short hair and cooled the little dots of perspiration as they welled up on her skin. Over the last few years the sun had pushed her complexion past golden and into a deep, warm brown. She liked it; darker skin was so much less forgiving of her scars. She wanted them to show.
She finally gave up on the novel she was holding and let it slip from her fingers and drop to the sand. The bookmark tumbled out of place, but she barely noticed. She’d already left the story behind. She’d never open the book again.
The truth was that she’d been having trouble maintaining interest in any book; it had been a long time since she’d been able to immerse herself wholly in a context of somebody else’s manufacture. So much in her had changed. She missed the escape of make-believe stories, but a person can’t always decide what parts of themselves they shed. It was the price of new skin. A new life.
She twirled the straw in her Coke and melting ice and took a long sip. Her eyes moved to the sound of splashing. “Samuel,” she called out.
The boy’s head snapped around. He was big for four years, already taller than the six-year-old cousin he was wrestling with in the waves. It seemed she was always buying pants for him because his legs were too long.
“Not so far out,” she called.
“Se faz favor, Mae,” he replied.
“No.”
Such a big boy. She watched him roughhousing in the surf. The sun shone off his wet skin. Since he’d started school, he’d taken to speaking Portuguese more and more often at home. The other children were influencing him. Sometimes this worried her. Other times it was a comfort. He was a smart boy, the teachers said. He could be anything he put his mind to. She wondered, And what would that be?