CASSIE SITS. The white chair whines. She rotates back to face the white ceiling. I fastened her in.
“I’ve never done this,” she confesses. “Almost, back at Camp Haven.”
“What happened?”
“I strangled Dr. Pam with one of these straps.”
“Good for you,” I say sincerely. “I’m impressed.”
I step over to the keyboard. I’m certain I’ll be asked for a password. I’m not. I touch a random key and the launch page pops up on the central monitor.
“What’s going on?” she asks. She can’t see anything from the chair except the white ceiling.
Data bank. “Found it.” I click the button.
“Now what?” she demands.
Everything is in code. Thousands of numerical combinations, which I guess represent the individuals whose memories have been captured by the program. Impossible to know which sequence is Walker’s. We could try the first one, and if that isn’t him, work our way down the list, but—
“Ringer, you’re not talking.”
“I’m thinking.”
She sighs loudly. She wants to say something like I thought you said you were good at that, but she doesn’t.
“You can’t figure out which one is Evan’s,” she says finally.
“We’ve gone over this,” I remind her. “Even if I could locate his data, you don’t know that his memories will lead you to him. After he was downloaded, Vosch probably—”
She lifts her head as far as she can from the chair and snaps, “He’s in there somewhere. Give me all of them.”
At first I’m sure I didn’t hear her correctly. “Sullivan, there are thousands of them.”
“I don’t care. I’ll go through every goddamned one till I find him.”
“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.”
“Oh, what the hell do you know, huh? How much do you really know, Ringer, and how much of what you ‘know’ is shit that Vosch wants you to know? The truth is you don’t know shit. I don’t know shit. Nobody knows shit.”
Her head flops back. Her hands clutch the straps. Maybe she’s thinking of strangling me with one.
“You said Vosch downloaded them all,” she goes on. “And that’s how he knew the way to manipulate you. He carries all those memories inside him, so it must be safe. Perfectly safe.”
I’m ready to execute the command, if for nothing else but to shut her up.
“Why are you afraid?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Why aren’t you?”
I hit the execute button, sending tens of millions of unfiltered memories into Cassie Sullivan’s brain.
92
HER BODY JERKS against the restraints. The fabric starts to tear; it may rip apart. Then she stiffens like someone suffering a seizure. Her eyes roll back in her head. Her jaw clenches. One of her fingernails snaps off and flies across the room.
On the monitors the sequences race by in a blur, too fast even for my enhanced vision to follow. How much data is contained in the minds of ten thousand people? What’s happening to Sullivan is like trying to stuff the solar system into a walnut. It will kill her. Her mind will blow apart like the singularity at the moment of creation.
I’ve no doubt Vosch used Wonderland to download individuals’ experiences—I’m certain he downloaded mine—I also have little doubt those experiences were purged somehow after they served their purpose. No single human being can contain the sum of all that human experience. At the least, it would shatter your personality. How can you hold on to the core of your reality in the midst of so many alternatives?
Sullivan moans. Her cries are soft, coming from deep in her gut. She’s weak. You knew better. You should have taken her place. The technology they’ve infected you with could handle this; the 12th System would have protected you. Why did you let her do it?
But I know the answer to that question. The 12th System can only enhance the human body—it is helpless against fear. It cannot give me the one thing that Cassie Sullivan has in abundance.
I thought I knew what courage was. I was even arrogant enough to lecture Zombie about it. But I had no idea what true, undiluted courage was until this moment. That unidentifiable something I saw in her eyes is part of it, the root from which her courage sprang.
My finger hovers over the abort button. Would it be an act of courage to push it? Or the final failure of my human side—the part of me that hopes when there is no hope, believes when there is no reason to believe, trusts when all trust has been broken? Would pushing the button be Vosch’s ultimate victory over me? See, Marika, even you belong to us now. Even you.
It’s over in less than five minutes. An eternal five minutes; the universe took shape in less time.
The monitors go blank. Cassie goes limp. I approach her gingerly. I’m afraid to touch her. Afraid of what I might feel. I’m in fear for my own mind, my own sanity. Plunging into a single human consciousness is dangerous enough; I can’t fathom being immersed in thousands.
“Cassie?”
Her eyelids flutter. I see the white ceiling reflected in her green eyes. And something else. Something shocking. Not horror. Not sorrow. No confusion or pain or fear. None of the things she must have found in Wonderland.
Instead, her eyes, her face, her entire body has ignited with the opposite of all those things, there all along, unconquerable, undefeatable, immortal. The root of her courage. The foundation of all life, often obscured, never lost.
Joy.
She takes a long, shuddering breath and says, “We’re here.”
93
HER FACE GLOWS. Her eyes shine. A smile plays on her lips.
“You wouldn’t believe . . . ,” she whispers. “You don’t know . . .”
I shake my head. “No, I don’t.”
“It’s so beautiful . . . so beautiful . . . I can’t. Oh God, Marika, I can’t . . .”
She’s sobbing. I take her face in my hands, begging the hub to keep me out. I don’t want to be where she is. I don’t think I could bear it.
“Sammy’s here,” she cries. “Sammy’s here.” And she strains against the frayed restraints as if she could somehow wrap her arms around him. “And Ben, he’s here, too. Oh God, oh Christ, I called him broken. Why did I do that? He’s strong . . . he’s so strong, no wonder they can’t kill him . . .”
Her eyes roam the featureless white. Her shoulders shake. “They’re all here. Dumbo and Teacup and Poundcake . . .”
I back away from her. I know what’s coming. It’s like watching a runaway train bearing down. I fight a nearly overwhelming urge to run.
“I’m sorry, Marika. About everything. I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.”
“We don’t have to go there, Cassie,” I mutter weakly. Please, don’t go there.
“He loved you. Razor . . . Alex. He couldn’t admit it to anyone. He couldn’t even admit it to himself. He knew before he did it that he would die for you.”
“Walker,” I say hoarsely. “What about Walker?”
She ignores me or she doesn’t hear the question. She is here and she is not. She is Cassie Sullivan and she is everyone else.
She has become the sum of us.
“Rainbow fingers,” she gasps, and I stop breathing. She’s seeing my father’s hand holding mine. She remembers the way that felt, the way it made me feel, my father’s hand in mine.
“We’re out of time,” I say, to pull her out of my memories. “Cassie, listen to me. Is Walker there?”
She nods. She starts to cry again. “He was telling the truth. There was music. And the music was beautiful . . . I see it, Marika. His planet. The ship. What he looked like . . . oh my God, that’s disgusting.” She shakes her head to clear the image. “Marika, he was telling the truth. It’s real . . . it’s real . . .”
“No, Cassie. Listen to me. Those memo
ries aren’t real.”
She screams. She thrashes against the restraints. Thank God I haven’t untied her yet or she might tear out her own eyes.
I don’t have a choice now. I’ll have to risk it.
I grab her shoulders and force her back into the chair. A cacophonous blast of emotions explodes in my mind and for a second I’m afraid I’ll black out. How does she endure it? How can one mind bear the weight of ten thousand others? It defies comprehension. It’s like trying to define God.
Inside Cassie Sullivan is a horror so profound, there are no words. The people downloaded into Wonderland lost every person who mattered to them, and most of those downloaded people were children. Their pain is hers now. Their confusion and sorrow, their anger and hopelessness and fear. It’s too much. I can’t stay within her. I stumble backward until I smack against the counter.
“I know where he is,” she says, catching her breath. “Or at least where he might be, if they brought him back to the same place. Untie me, Marika.”
I pick up the rifle leaning against the wall.
“Marika.”
I walk to the door.
“Marika.”
“I’ll be back,” I manage to choke out.
She screams my name again and now I don’t have a choice. If he hasn’t heard us before, he’s certain to have heard her now.
Because I have heard him.
Someone is descending the stairs at the other end of the mile-long corridor. I’m not sure who it is, but I know what it is.
And I know why it’s coming.
“You’ll be safe here,” I lie. The hopeful kind of lie you tell children. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
I open the door and stagger from light into darkness.
94
EVEN WITH MY ENHANCED SPEED, I won’t be able to reach the stairway door before he does. But with a little luck, I can get within the firing range of an M16.
I’m certain it’s Vosch. Who else could it be? He knows I’m here. He knows why I’m here. Creator to his creation, creature to her creator, that’s our bond. Only one way for me to break it. Only one way to be free.
I explode down the hallway, a human missile. I hear him coming. He must hear me coming.
The range of an M16 is 550 meters, one-third of a mile. The hub calculates my speed and the distance to the stairwell. Not going to happen. I ignore the math and keep running. Nine hundred meters—eight—seven. The processor embedded in my cerebral cortex goes berserk, running the numbers over and over, coming up short, and sending me messages of escalating urgency. Run back. Find cover. No time. No time, no time, notimenotimenotimenotime.
I ignore it. I don’t serve the 12th System. The 12th System serves me.
Unless it decides that it won’t.
The hub pulls the plug on the drones that enhance my muscles: If it can’t stop me, at least it can slow me down. My speed drops. Abandoned, I’m running like an ordinary human. I feel chained and unbound at the same time.
The lights in the hall blaze to life. The stairway door flies open and a tall figure lurches into view. I open fire, charging forward, closing the gap as fast as I can. The figure stumbles, careens against the far wall, and brings up its hands instinctively to cover its face.
I’m in range now—I know it, the enemy knows it, and the hub knows it. It’s over. I lock in on the figure’s head. My finger tightens on the trigger.
Then I see a blue jumpsuit, not a colonel’s uniform. Wrong height. Wrong weight, too. I hesitate for an instant and in that instant the figure lowers its hands.
My first thought is for Cassie—that she suffered Wonderland when Wonderland wasn’t necessary. She risked everything to find him . . . until he found her.
Evan Walker has a knack for finding her; he always has.
I stop a hundred meters away but I don’t lower my rifle. Between his leaving and our reunion, there’s no telling what happened. The hub agrees with me. No risk if he’s dead, enormous risk if he’s not. Whatever value he had is gone now, contained in the consciousness of Cassie Sullivan.
“Where’s Vosch?” I ask.
Without a word, he lowers his head and charges. He’s halved the distance before I open fire, first overriding the hub’s insistence I aim for the head, then its demand I retreat before he reaches me. I put six rounds into his legs, thinking that will drop him. It doesn’t. By the time I give in to the hub’s shrieking command, it’s too late.
He knocks the rifle from my hands. So fast I don’t see the blow coming. Don’t see the next one, either, the fist that smashes into the side of my neck, hurling me into the wall. The concrete cracks on impact.
I blink, and his fingers lock around my throat. Another blink and I break the hold with my left and punch as hard as I can with my right, dead center into his chest to break his sternum and drive the shattered bone into his heart. It’s as if I rammed my fist into a three-inch-thick plate of steel. The bone cracks but does not break.
I blink again, and now my face is pressing against cool concrete and there’s blood in my mouth and blood on the wall I’ve been rammed into—only it isn’t a wall; it’s the floor. I’ve been flung a hundred yards and landed flat on my stomach.
Too fast. He moves faster than the priest at the caverns, faster than Claire in the infirmary bathroom. Faster than Vosch, even. It defies the laws of physics for a human being to move that fast.
Before the alien processor in my brain uses the nanosecond it needs to calculate the odds, I know the outcome:
Evan Walker is going to kill me.
He lifts me from the floor by the ankle and slings me against the wall. The blocks splinter. So do a number of my bones. He doesn’t let go. He smashes my body against the other wall. Back and forth until the concrete breaks apart and rains to the floor in a fall of dusty gray. I don’t feel anything; the hub has shut down my pain receptors. He lifts my body over his head and slams it down against his upraised knee.
I don’t feel my back break but I hear it magnified a thousand times by the auditory drones embedded in my ears.
He drops my limp body to the floor. I close my eyes, waiting for the coup de grâce. At least he’ll make it quick. At least I know that the 12th System’s final gift to me will be a painless death.
He kicks me onto my back. Then he kneels beside me, and his eyes are fathomless pits, black holes that no light can penetrate or escape. Nothing lives in those eyes, neither hate nor rage nor amusement nor the mildest curiosity. Evan Walker’s eyes are as blank as a doll’s, his stare as unblinking.
“There is another,” he says. “Where is it?” His voice is affectless, without a trace of humanity. Whoever Evan Walker was before is gone.
When I don’t answer, the thing that was Evan Walker, with obscene gentleness, cups my face in its hands and slices into my consciousness. The entity raping my soul is itself soulless, alien, other. I can’t pull away; I can’t move at all. With enough time—time that it doesn’t have—the 12th System might be able to repair the damage to my spine, but for now I’m paralyzed. My mouth comes open. No sound comes out.
It knows. It releases me. It rises.
I find my voice, and I scream as loud as I can. “Cassie! Cassie, it’s coming!”
It lumbers down the hall toward the green door.
And the green door will open. She will see him with eyes that have seen all that he’s seen and a heart that’s felt all he has felt. She’ll think he has come to save her—that his love will deliver her once again.
My voice wilts into a pitiful whimper. “Cassie, it’s coming. It’s coming . . .”
No way she hears me. No way for her to know.
I pray she won’t see it coming. I pray that the thing that was once Evan Walker will be quick.
95
SILENCER
AT THE END of the hall is a gr
een door. On the other side of the green door is a white room. Inside that room its prey is bound to a white chair, the goat tied to a stake, the wounded seal trapped in a powerful current. It will crush her skull. It will rip her heart still beating from her chest with its bare hands. The one Evan Walker had saved on that first day so upon this final day his soulless remains can kill her. There is no irony in this cruelty; there is only cruelty.
But the chair is empty. Its prey has vanished. The Silencer examines the straps that held her arms. Hair, skin, blood. She must have ripped herself free.
It lowers its head, listening. Its hearing is exquisitely acute. It can hear the other human breathing nearly a mile away at the other end of the corridor, the one whose back it had broken, whose bones it had shattered against the concrete walls. It can hear the breaths of the soldiers huddled in safe rooms throughout the base, waiting for the all clear to sound, their quiet voices, the rustle of their uniforms, their galloping hearts. It can hear the electricity thrumming through the wires inside the walls of the room. It sifts through the confusing jumble of noise to isolate its prey. It seeks a single heartbeat, a solitary breath close by; she can’t have gone far.
There is no satisfaction when it pinpoints her location. A shark feels no satisfaction at the detection of the baby seal in the surf.
It lunges from the room on legs it cannot feel: The processor in its brain has nullified the pain from the wounds, and the arterial drones have shut off the flow of blood to the bullets’ entry points. Its legs are as numb as its heart, as insensitive as its mind.
Three doors down, on the right. It stands for a moment outside the door, frozen, hands loose at its sides, head bowed, listening. Somehow its prey had known the combination and entered this room. It does not ponder how she could know the code. It does not pause to consider why the girl was in the white room or what had happened to her there. Where the prey came from and its life before it got there—these things are irrelevant. Beneath the seal’s silhouette on the surface, the beast rockets upward from the deep.