Very quietly now, so quietly I wouldn’t hear him without the enhancement array: “Shut up.”
“Why did you do it, Alex?” If Alex is really his name. His entire history could be a lie designed by Vosch to manipulate me. The odds are it is.
“I’m a soldier.”
“You were just following orders.”
“I’m a soldier.”
“It’s not yours to reason why.”
“I. Am. A. SOLDIER!”
I close my eyes. “Chaseball. Was that Vosch’s, too? Sorry. Stupid question.”
Silence.
“It’s Walker,” I say, my eyes snapping open. “It has to be. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s Evan, isn’t it, Razor? He wants Evan and I’m the only path to him.”
Silence.
The implosion of Camp Haven and the disabled drones raining from the sky: Why did they need drones? The question always bothered me. How hard could it be to find pockets of survivors when there were so few survivors left and you had plenty of human technology in your possession to find them? Survivors clustered. They crowded together like bees in a hive. The drones weren’t being used to keep track of us. They were being used to keep track of them, the humans like Evan Walker, solitary and dangerously enhanced, scattered over every continent, armed with knowledge that could bring the whole edifice crashing down if the program downloaded into them malfunctioned—as it clearly did in his case.
Evan is off the grid. Vosch doesn’t know where he is or if he’s alive or dead. But if Evan is alive, Vosch needs someone on the inside, someone Evan would trust.
I am the blacksmith.
You are the sword.
FOR A WEEK, he is my sole companion. Guard, nursemaid, watchman. When I’m hungry, he brings me food. When I hurt, he eases my pain. When I’m dirty, he bathes me. He is constant. He is faithful. He is there when I wake and there when I fall asleep. I never catch him sleeping: He is constant, but my sleep never is; I wake several times a night, and he’s always watching from his spot by the door. He is silent and sullen and strangely nervous, this guy who effortlessly conned me into believing him and in him. As if I might try to escape, when he knows I can but won’t, when he knows I am imprisoned by a promise more binding than a thousand chains.
On the afternoon of the sixth day, Razor ties a rag over his nose and mouth, clumps up the stairs to the third level, and comes back carting a body. He carries it outside. Then back up the stairs, his tread as heavy empty-handed as it is burdened with a corpse, and another body descends to the bottom. I lose count at one hundred twenty-three. He empties the warehouse of the dead, piling them in the yard, and at dusk, he sets the pile on fire. The bodies have mummified and the fire catches quickly and burns very hot and bright. The pyre can be seen for miles, if there are any eyes to see it. Its light glows in the doorway, laps across the floor, turns the concrete into a golden, undulating seabed. Razor lounges in the doorway watching the fire, a lean shadow haloed like a lunar eclipse. He shrugs out of his jacket, removes his shirt, rolls up the sleeve of his undershirt to expose his shoulder. The blade of his knife glimmers in the yellow glow as he etches something into his skin with the tip.
The night wears on; the fire dwindles; the wind shifts and my heart aches with nostalgia—summer camps and catching lightning bugs and August skies aflame with stars. The way the desert smells and the long, wistful sigh of wind rushing down from the mountains as the sun dips beneath the horizon.
Razor lights the kerosene lamp and walks over to me. He smells like the smoke and, faintly, like the dead.
“Why did you do that?” I ask.
Above the rag, his eyes swim with tears. I don’t know if he’s teary from the smoke or something else. “Orders,” he says.
He pulls the IV from my arm and wraps the tubing over the hook on the stand.
“I don’t believe you,” I say.
“Well, I’m shocked.”
It’s the most he’s spoken since Vosch left. I’m surprised that I’m relieved to hear his voice again. He’s examining the wound on my forehead, face very close because the light is dim.
“Teacup,” I whisper.
“What do you think?” he says crossly.
“She’s alive. She’s the only leverage he has.”
“Okay, then. She’s alive.”
He spreads antibacterial ointment over the cut. An unenhanced human being would have needed several stitches, but in a few days no one will be able to tell that I was injured.
“I could call his bluff,” I say. “How can he kill her now?”
Razor shrugs. “Because he doesn’t give a shit about one little kid when the fate of the whole world is at stake? Just a guess.”
“After all that’s happened, after everything you heard and everything you saw, you still believe him.”
He looks down at me with something that closely resembles pity. “I have to believe him, Ringer. I let go of that and I’m done. I’m them.” He nods toward the yard where the blackened bones smolder.
He sits on the cot next to mine and pulls down the makeshift mask. The lantern between his feet and the light that flows over his face and the shadows that pool in his deep-set eyes.
“Too late for that,” I tell him.
“Right. We’re all dead already. So there is no leverage, right? Kill me, Ringer. Kill me right now and run. Run.”
I’d be off the cot before he could blink again. A single punch to his chest and the augmented blow would shove a shattered rib into his heart. And then I could walk out, walk away, walk into the wilderness where I can hide for years, decades, until I am old and beyond the capability of the 12th System to sustain me. I might outlive everyone. I might wake one day the last person on Earth.
And then. And then.
He must be freezing, sitting there with nothing but a T-shirt on. I can see a line of dried blood across his biceps.
“What did you do to your arm?” I ask.
He pulls up his sleeve. The letters are crudely drawn, big and blocky and shaky, the way a little kid makes them when he’s first learning:
VQP
“Latin,” he whispers. “Vincit qui patitur. It means—”
“I know what it means,” I whisper back.
He shakes his head. “I really don’t think that you do.” He doesn’t sound angry. He sounds sad.
Alex turns his head toward the doorway, beyond which the dead are borne toward the indifferent sky. Alex.
“Is Alex really your name?” I ask.
He looks at me again and I see the playfully ironic smile. Like hearing his voice again, I’m surprised at myself for missing it. “I didn’t lie about any of that. Only the important stuff.”
“Did your grandmother have a dog named Flubby?”
He laughs softly. “Yes.”
“That’s good.”
“Why is that good?”
“I wanted that part to be true.”
“Because you love mean little nippy purse dogs?”
“Because I like that once upon a time there were mean little nippy purse dogs named Flubby. That’s good. That’s worth remembering.”
He’s off the cot before I can blink again, and he’s kissing me, and I plunge inside him where nothing is hidden. He’s open to me now, the one who sustained me and the one who betrayed me, the one who brought me back to life and the one who delivered me back to death. Rage is not the answer, no, and not hate. Layer by layer, that which separates us falls away, until I reach the center, the nameless region, the defenseless stronghold, an ageless, bottomless ache, the lonely singularity of his soul, unspoiled by time or experience, beyond thought, infinite.