“What you just said makes no sense. You know that, right? Must be the head injury. You usually make a lot.”
“Head injuries?”
“Now, that definitely was a joke!” He frowns. “Made a promise to who?”
“A naïve, thick-headed, stereotypical jock who thinks he’s God’s gift to the world when he isn’t thinking the world is God’s gift to him.”
“Oh. Okay.” He doesn’t say anything for a few shuffling steps, then: “So how long has Mr. Naïve Thick-headed Stereotypical Jock been your boyfriend?”
I stop. I turn. I grab his face with both hands and kiss him hard on the mouth. His eyes are wide and filled with something that closely resembles fear.
“What was that for?”
I kiss him again. Our bodies pressed close. His cold face cradled in my colder hands. I can smell the bubble gum on his breath. The Earth is my charge. We are two pillars rising from an undulating sea of dazzling white. Limitless. Without borders, without boundaries.
He brought me from the tomb. He raised me from the dead. He risked his life so I might have mine. Easier to turn aside. Easier to let me go. Easier to believe the beautiful lie than the hideous truth. After my father died, I built a fortress safe and strong to last a thousand years. A mighty stronghold that crumbles with a kiss.
“Now we’re even,” I whisper.
“Not exactly,” he says hoarsely. “I only kissed you once.”
AS WE APPROACH, the complex seems to rise from the snow like a leviathan from the deep. Silos, conveyors, bins, mixers, storage and office buildings, an enormous warehouse twice the size of an airplane hangar, all surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence. It seems creepily symbolic, fitting somehow, for this to end at a concrete plant. Concrete is the omnipresent human signature, our principal artistic medium on the world’s blank canvas: Wherever we went, the Earth slowly disappeared beneath it.
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.
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 leveclass="underline" 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.