“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.”
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 souclass="underline" 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.”
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?”