There was a deadly silence in the room, as if the space were caught in a time before and a time after. Through the opening there came a man in a black shirt that covered his arms and circled his long neck. He had a sharp nose and a short crop of gray hair. His eyes, as blue and deep as an ocean, took stock of the room.
Hotspur Chance was no longer in the highest-security prison in the known world. His long wait was over.
He was out.
The first words he spoke were not aloud but inside his vast and complicated mind.
I am Hotspur Chance. I am free once more.
Hawk, the only Intel in the resistance, heard the voice in his head and knew what had happened before anyone else outside the room. These words were heard by Hawk because he was an Intel. Hotspur may not have been able to control Hawk’s mind as he wished he could, but he could make him hear his voice. He’d been doing it for quite some time already. It was the voice Hawk had been hearing all along, not the voice of a dead man but of someone who was very much alive.
Hotspur looked at Wade, then Clara. “Where’s your mother?”
Neither of them answered, Wade because he didn’t know and Clara because she surely didn’t want to be the one to tell.
“Gretchen is dead,” Meredith said, not out of spite but simply because it was.
Hotspur feigned disbelief for the shadow of a second. His mind veered through the various points of fact that made such a statement impossible. Gretchen is a second pulse, she’s careful, she’s methodical. She’s unkillable. And yet, something about the way Meredith was looking at him broke through the veil of his logic. It was true. Gretchen was no more. The unexpected part of that equation was that he didn’t care.
“Don’t listen to her,” Andre said. “She’s fine. And you’re out! I’ve freed you at last.”
Hotspur had been imprisoned in the Eastern State for more than a decade, but he didn’t appear very much different than he had when he went in.
“It seems as if they’ve treated you kindly,” Andre said. “You look well.”
Hotspur ignored Andre and turned to Clara and Wade. “What’s happening outside?”
“Just your basic mayhem,” Wade said. “Nothing we can’t handle.”
Hotspur nodded his approval of the situation.
“Does he know?” Hotspur asked them.
Clara and Wade looked at each other, then back at Chance.
“He has no idea,” Clara said.
Hotspur raised an eyebrow in surprise—it was a big secret, one he thought sure would find its way out—but there it was. He turned to Andre. “You’ve been a good soldier. Very good indeed. You’ve played a vital role in shaping the future of the world. It’s going to be remarkable. We’re going to fix it my way. The right way. This is good information. Dwell on it, down through the ages.”
Andre laughed awkwardly, as if he didn’t quite understand what was being said, and then Hotspur moved his eyes to the left in a sharp, flitting line. Andre lifted off the ground, flew through the air, and slammed into the wall over Meredith’s head. As he slid down in a heap on the floor, Meredith rose up to the ceiling in the way of a floppy-armed sock puppet and hit hard, then back to the floor she went, hitting with bone-crunching finality. The two bodies lay in a grizzly hug, limbs entangled around each other, faces nearly touching.
Andre could feel the life ebbing out of him as Hotspur came close, leaned down, and spoke.
“Gretchen was never yours. She was only ever mine. She was loyal to the end, as you have been.” He paused, looking once more at Clara and Wade, then back at Andre, who was fading fast. “I feel you should know; these children are not yours. They are, of course, also mine. My perfectly engineered seconds. But I thank you for watching over them in my absence. That was a kindness.”
Hotspur Chance knew everything Andre had known, because Andre was a first-generation Intel. Their minds were connected, which had served an important purpose during all the years Hotspur was imprisoned. There would be no need to get Hotspur Chance up to speed. He already knew what had been happening in the world outside through the lens of Andre’s mind.
Hotspur turned his head toward Meredith and breathed deeply the cool air of freedom.
“You should not have betrayed me. I’m afraid the boy will have to go.”
Meredith felt a jolt of air enter her lungs. It would prove to be one of her last breaths, but enough to knock a single tear free from her eye and feel it rolling down her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
She was speaking to Andre, not Hotspur Chance.
“I appreciate you saying that,” Hotspur said, standing as he looked out and saw shadows moving across the spires of the Eastern State. “But I don’t forgive you. Penance must be paid. I’ll see to it.”
Hotspur looked again out the window, as if calculating the outcome of different events. “Clara, you bring me out, move me to the safe house. Wade, remove that young man from the equation.”
Wade, though reeling emotionally from all that was happening around him, relished the idea of killing Dylan Gilmore. It felt like the one thing that could take away all the pain and confusion he was feeling. He did have one nagging problem with the idea.
“What about the prison?”
Hotspur gave Wade a cool stare and answered without the slightest hesitation. “Move it off the city. Can you do that?”
Wade’s true father, a man he hadn’t seen but had surely felt for a decade, was giving him a chance to be a hero.
“Hell yes, I can do it.”
“I believe you can. Just make sure you take care of Dylan in the process. We can’t have him out there, not anymore.”
Wade soaked up the praise and responsibility like a sponge. He had two tasks to occupy his mind, both with the capacity to please his father. It was exactly what he needed.
A moment later Hotspur, Clara, and Wade were gone. The room was quiet, and with the last of her strength, Meredith pressed the sound ring on her ear. She used up her breath to speak to her son.
“He comes only to kill, this man without a heart. Now you must run.”
When her hand fell away, it landed softly on Andre’s chest, where it remained as they both drifted up and out into the arms of eternity.
Chapter 18
The Last Light of Day
All the nights of standing outside Faith’s window had been a kind of trial by fire for Dylan. He was thankful for it as he heard his mother’s voice and felt a surge of strength return to his mind. She had ordered him to run; and if that’s what she wanted, then that’s what he would attempt to do. He had no way of knowing Meredith was dead; no one on the sound ring did. And he didn’t know that Andre had perished as well, a fact that would later prove troubling in ways he didn’t expect. In the span of a few seconds and without the slightest idea that it had happened, Dylan was orphaned on the face of the earth.
Unrelenting rocket fire had blown a quarter of the prison free, which was a few hundred thousand pounds less for Dylan to hold in the air. There was still a massive, almost incalculable weight beneath him, but he could feel the difference. Hawk, who was at his best when multitasking, had tapped into the drone command center and hard coded the system to attack nothing but falling debris and do so with brutal force. Like a classic arcade game of Asteroids, one of Hawk’s favorites, drones blasted falling chunks of concrete into smaller pieces no bigger than watermelons. The fallout still inflicted damage, but nothing like a slab as big as a bus would have. Hawk was orchestrating a huge save from the edge of a forest more than a thousand miles away.
When Dylan made his first attempt to move, sliding sideways toward the edge of the Eastern State, he knew instantly it was a mistake. The prison dropped precariously fast on one side, then Dylan flipped upside down and the whole building started spinning out of control. The prison wasn’t falling, but it had been torn off its center like a gyroscope, flipping and turning in wild directions. If it free-fell now, it would do even more da
mage, like a giant, spinning mace cut loose from its chain and launched at a china shop.
Dylan righted his position, held steady, and slowly brought the prison back to center.
I can’t move, and I can’t leave this thing here, Dylan thought. How am I supposed to run?
He had been trained to remain cool under pressure, but the sound of Hawk’s voice and the message he delivered pushed Dylan right to the edge.
“Whatever you do, make it fast. I think Clara and Wade are on the move. I’m calculating under a minute if they’re heading your way.”
Dylan glanced to one side, where drones were flying everywhere. He was within a few hundred yards of the outermost edge of the Eastern State. Three football fields; it was a long way off, but not insurmountable. Dylan put the force of his mind into a new kind of thinking, in which he imagined himself as the top of a pendulum that would not move, no matter how much weight shifted underneath him. Dylan forced the prison to rock one way, then the other, like one of the old rides at Six Flags that was shaped like a Nordic ship at sea, slashing through the air. The prison rocked up on his right side, and he felt the strain of incredible weight. Then it lowered beneath him and rocked high on the other side, toward the edge of the city. Back and forth, higher and higher, the weight like a magnet pulling against Dylan’s will. One last rock in the direction of the inner city, then back under and hard to the outside, and Dylan let go.
He hadn’t fully realized the weight of what he had been holding on to. This fact was quadrupled because the prison was made of the one thing that could kill him in the end. It was a suffocating burden, and the release was like a giant gasp of pure oxygen. His strength returned in a wave of power that heightened every color and sound.
The prison flew up and out, not nearly enough to clear all the buildings, and Dylan moved like lightning underneath. When it came down on his hands he was already driving upward, pushing his mind to places it had never been, forcing everything he had into the weight of a stone monster that threatened to kill millions of people below.
Wade was out of the spire and up in the air, where drones remained as thick as a swarm of mosquitoes. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, but there it was. The prison was being carried across the sky by the guy he hated more than anyone else in the world.
Off in the distance, Hotspur and Clara were already far from the Eastern State. Hotspur watched with interest as Dylan did the job he’d sent his son to do. The prison was moving fast, like a freight train across the sky, as Hotspur took Clara’s Tablet in hand and relayed a message to Wade.
“Looks like he’s done your job for you.”
Blood surged in Wade’s head. He’d never been so angry in his life, and that was saying a lot for Wade Quinn.
“Let’s see if you can finish half of what I asked you to do before the sun goes down.”
Dylan delivered one last push, giving it the full thrust of his mind, and launched what was left of the prison over the final spires. The mass of stone and metal tumbled end over end, a quiet moment of strange splendor before it hit like a meteor falling from space.
“Dylan!” Hawk yelled. “You have company. Better make a run for it.”
But it was too late for that. Wade slammed into Dylan’s back before he could turn around. He was so exhausted from the effort of the past hour, and so used to the counterweight of something so large, that he couldn’t stop Wade from pushing him. Wade stayed a few feet back, held on to Dylan like a tractor beam, and pushed. Fifty, a hundred, two hundred miles per hour and heading straight for the crash site. At that speed, if Dylan hit all that concrete, he’d never live through it.
There was simply nothing left in his engine. All the gas was gone, and Dylan’s mind sloshed with confusion as if heading into a dream. Wade turned sharply toward the sky, pushing for the clouds.
“Let’s make absolutely sure this does the job,” he said, driving Dylan up into the blue.
Hawk was already at work, his fingers flying across his Tablet, trying desperately to rearrange a sequence of drone codes. With only a few seconds to spare, he tapped out the final command. Every drone in the air space above the Eastern State angled out of the city on a collision course with the prison. They were capable of speeds topping four hundred miles an hour, and Hawk set them to red line. As Wade turned in the sky and started down, the power of his mind flipped Dylan end over end. He pushed Dylan past two hundred miles per hour and stayed right behind him.
“Come on,” Hawk said. “Faster.”
A hundred drones were coming in hot, gathered like a swarm as they charged for the prison. They hit with a violence that rocked the buildings in the Eastern State, one after the other, demolishing the prison in a great cloud of dust. Wade stopped short, but Dylan was still regaining his bearings as he disappeared into the plume of debris. The drones had blown a hole fifty feet deep, clearing away all signs of concrete or stone. When Dylan hit, it was the cool impact of dirt on his skin that finally broke through. Like being slapped in the face, the contact with something as pure and fresh as earth itself fired his senses back online.
Wade watched, waiting for the dust to clear, but it was a massive cloud and patience was not one of his virtues. He dived into the fog of dust and debris, hoping to find a lifeless body he could bring up to the surface like a trophy, something he could wave in front of his father and say Look! I did this!
“Dylan,” Hawk said. “If you can hear me, now would be an excellent time to get the hell out of there.”
A split second later Dylan burst from the cloud on a path leading directly away from the Eastern State. Before Wade reappeared from the dust cloud, Dylan was already a mile away and gaining speed. No one, not even Wade Quinn, was going to catch Dylan now.
Wade didn’t have the heart to call Clara and report what had happened.
After a decade apart, it had taken him less then fifteen minutes to fail his father not once, but twice.
Clooger breathed a sigh of relief in the operating room. No one else had made it out, or so it seemed, but at least Dylan had escaped. There were no windows here, but because they were in a hospital, there were backup protocols when the grid went down. Somewhere in the bowels of the building there must have been a generator or two with enough gas to power the lights, but even that was fading fast. The bulbs were burning at about 20 percent, which made him feel as if the sun was going down though it was only one o’clock in the afternoon. A few short hours and so much had changed. It was, he thought once more, the way of war. It could turn on a dime like that and really surprise a guy.
Faith was out cold. The fresh blood and Clooger’s handy stitching work had saved her, but she was exhausted in any case. Clooger had only rarely seen a second pulse with an injury, but when he had, the healing was always fast. Hawk had surmised that this was because a second was protected from everything outside the healing process. No germs or viruses could interfere, no infection could set in. Once the threat was removed—in this case titanium—the healing was efficient and rapid. Clooger had given Faith a sedative against her wishes, but it was for the best. She needed to sleep through the day, long enough for Dylan to return so the three of them could leave together under the cover of night.
Only Clooger knew where they were all going and how desperate the situation had become. Meredith, despite her constant deflecting, had told him plenty over the years. He alone knew that Hotspur Chance wouldn’t waste any time setting the world on a different path. It was a lot for one man to carry, but then again, he was the only adult left. It came with the territory.
Hawk had waited until Dylan was clear of the Eastern State and Faith was sleeping before making a certain death official.
“Meredith’s sound ring has gone cold. She’s gone. Sorry, guys.”
Dylan and Clooger were both in that strange state of mind where they had already known it was true. They knew intuitively, before Hawk verified the fact, that Meredith was dead. But somehow hearing it made it ten times more real.
Neither of them spoke as they endured the news in the cocoon of their own thoughts.
Thinking of his mother, Dylan felt confused and alone. She’d been driven by forces he’d never fully understood. It was as if she’d been given the knowledge of some future catastrophe only she could prevent. Whatever it was, his mother had risked everything to try to stop it. And it appeared that she’d failed. That was the hardest part of knowing she was gone. Meredith, who had always seemed invincible, had failed.
“You might as well know,” Hawk went on after a long silence in which he watched a line of deer move into the field in front of the HumGee. “All our single pulses are gone. And Andre, too. I’m tapped into the Eastern State security system, so I’m getting this first- hand. Someone they’re calling Prisoner One is out. And they’re reporting four unidentified flying people—that’s gotta be Wade, Clara, Dylan, and this Prisoner One; they’re saying those four have been deemed the most wanted people on Earth.”
Hawk knew Prisoner One was Hotspur Chance, but somehow saying it made it more real than he was willing to admit until they were all together again. It was a secret he would hold on to for a few more hours.
“Dylan, I’m sorry about Meredith,” Clooger said, his voice cracking as he pressed his sound ring and tried to zero in on what good remained. “But you know I’ve got Faith right here. She’s fine. She’s waiting for you.”
Night was approaching as Dylan flew low, down the middle of a street in a deserted neighborhood. When he found the house he was looking for, the one with the red door and the yellow trim, he pressed into the sound ring.