I AM FALLING at terminal velocity toward a featureless landscape of white, a vast nothingness that gobbles up everything in its path, exploding toward the horizon in all directions.
It’s a lake. A very big lake.
A frozen-over very big lake.
Going in feet-first is my only option. If the ice is more than a foot thick, I’m done. No amount of alien enhancement will protect me. The bones in my legs will shatter. My spleen will rupture. My lungs will collapse.
I have faith in you, Marika. You did not come through fire and blood only to fall now.
Actually, Commander, I did.
The white world beneath me shines like pearls, a blank canvas, an alabaster abyss. A screaming wall of wind pushes against my legs as I draw my knees to my chest to execute the rotation. I have to go in at ninety degrees. Straighten too soon and the wind will knock me off-kilter. Too late and I’ll hit with my ass or my chest.
I close my eyes; I don’t need them. The hub’s performed perfectly so far; time for me to give it all my trust.
My mind empties: blank canvas, alabaster abyss. I am the vessel, the hub the pilot.
What is the answer?
And I said, Nothing. Nothing is the answer.
Both legs kick out hard. My body swivels upright. My arms come up, fold themselves over my chest. My head falls back, my face to the sky. My mouth opens. Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath, hold.
Vertical now, released by the wind, I fall faster. I hit the ice straight on, feet-first, at a hundred miles an hour.
I don’t feel the impact.
Or the cold water closing over me.
Or the pressure of that water as I plummet into inky darkness.
I feel nothing. My nerves have been shut down or the pain receptors in my brain turned off.
Hundreds of feet above me, a tiny point of light, a pinprick, faint as the farthest star: the entry point. Also the exit point. I kick toward the star. My body is numb. My mind is empty. I’ve completely surrendered to the 12th System. It isn’t part of me anymore. The 12th System is me. We are one.
I am human. And I am not. Rising toward the star that shines in the ice-encrusted vault, a protogod ascending from the primordial deep, fully human, wholly alien, and I understand now; I know the answer to the impossible riddle of Evan Walker.
I shoot into the heart of the star and hurl myself over the edge onto the icecap. A couple of broken ribs, a fractured wrist, a deep gash in my forehead from the pilot’s harness, totally numb, completely out of breath, empty, whole, aware.
Alive.
I REACH THE SMOLDERING wreckage of the chopper by dawn. The crash site wasn’t hard to find: The Black Hawk went down in the middle of an open field covered in a fresh fall of snow. You could see the fire’s glow for miles.
I approach slowly from the south. To my right, the sun breaks the horizon and light shoots across the winterscape, setting ablaze a crystalline inferno, as if a billion diamonds had fallen from the sky.
My water-soaked clothes are frozen, crackling like kindling when I move, and sensation has been returned to me. The 12th System perpetuates my existence to perpetuate its own. It’s calling for rest, food, help with the healing process; that’s the purpose of giving me back my pain.
No. No rest until I find them.
The sky is empty. There is no wind. Smoke curls from the mangled remains of the chopper, black and gray, like the smoke that rose over Camp Haven carrying the incinerated remains of the slaughtered.
Where are you, Razor?
The sun climbs and the glare coming off the snow becomes blinding. The visual array adjusts my eyes: A dark filter with no discernable difference from sunglasses drops over my vision, and then I see a blot in the perfection of white about a mile to the west. I lie flat on my stomach, using a breaststroke motion to dig myself a small trench. At it draws closer, the dark imperfection takes on a human shape. Tall and thin, wearing a heavy parka and carrying a rifle, moving slowly against the ankle-gripping snow. Thirty minutes crawl by. When he’s a hundred yards away, I rise. He drops as if shot. I call his name, not loudly, though; sound carries farther in winter air.
His voice floats back to me, high pitched with anxiety. “Holy shit!”
He slogs for a few steps, then takes off running, lifting his knees high and pumping his arms like a determined cardio fiend on a treadmill. He stops an arm’s length from me, warm breath exploding from his open mouth.
“You’re alive,” he whispers. I see it in his eyes: Impossible.
“Where’s Teacup?”
He jerks his head behind him. “She’s okay. Well, I think her leg might be broken . . .”
I step around him and start walking the way he came. He trudges after me, fussing for me to slow down.
“I was about to give up on you,” he puffs. “No chute! What, you can fly now? What happened to your head?”
“I hit it.”
“Oh. Well, you look like an Apache. You know, war paint.”
“That’s the other quarter: Apache.”
“Seriously?”
“What do you mean, you think she broke her leg?”
“Well, what I mean is I think her leg might be broken. With the help of your x-ray vision, maybe you can definitively diagnose—”
“This is strange.” I’m studying the sky as we walk. “Where’s the pursuit? They would have marked the location.”
“I’ve seen nothing. Like they just gave up.”
I shake my head. “They don’t give up. How much farther, Razor?”
“Another mile? Don’t worry, I got her tucked away nice and safe.”
“Why’d you leave her?”
He looks at me sharply, dumbstruck for a second. But only for a second. Razor doesn’t stay speechless for long. “To look for you. You told me to meet you by the fire. Sort of generic directions. You could have said, ‘Meet me at the crash site where I put this chopper down. That fire.’”
We walk for a few minutes in silence. Razor is out of breath. I’m not. The arrays will sustain me until I reach her, but I have a feeling that when I crash, I’ll crash hard.
“So what now?” he asks.
“Rest up a few days—or as long as we can.”
“Then?”
“South.”
“South. That’s the plan? South. A little elaborate, isn’t it?”
“We have to get back to Ohio.”
He stops as if he’d run into an invisible wall. I trudge on for a few steps, then turn. Razor is shaking his head at me.
“Ringer, do you have any idea where you are?”
I nod. “About twenty miles north of one of the Great Lakes. I’m guessing Erie.”
“What are you— How are we— You do realize Ohio is over a hundred miles from here,” he sputters.
“Where we’re going, more like two hundred. As the crow flies.”
“‘As the . . .’ Well, too fucking bad, we aren’t crows! What’s in Ohio?”
“My friends.”
I continue walking, following the imprint of his boots in the snow.
“Ringer, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but—”
“You don’t want to burst my bubble butt?”
“That sounded suspiciously like a joke.”
“I know they’re probably dead. And I know I’ll probably die long before I reach them, even if they’re not. But I made a promise, Razor. I didn’t think it was a promise at the time. I told myself it wasn’t. Told him it wasn’t. But there’re the things we tell ourselves about the truth, and there’re the things the truth tells about us.”