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 green 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.
She is close—very close. It hears her breath on the other side of the door. It discerns the beat of her heart. She’s pressing her ear against the door, listening.
The Silencer’s hand draws back, fingers curled into a fist.
Rotating its hips into the blow to maximize force, it smashes its fist through the reinforced door. On the other side the prey recoils, but too late; it catches a handful of her hair. She rips free with a startled scream, leaving behind a wad of curls in its hand.
The Silencer tears the door from its hinges and springs inside. The prey is scrambling across the wet floor, slipping as she goes, between two rows of junction boxes that line either side of the narrow aisle.
It has cornered her in one of the complex’s electrical rooms. There is only one way out, and to escape, she must pass the Silencer—and that will be impossible.
The Silencer does not rush. There is no hurry. It glides across the puddled water deliberately, closing the gap. The prey pauses near the back wall; perhaps she realizes she has nowhere to run, no place to hide, no choice but to turn and face the thing that sooner or later must be faced. She veers to her right and jumps, reaching for a handhold in the three-foot space between the top of a box and the ceiling. Her hand wraps around one of the incoming lines and she hauls herself into the tiny niche.
She’s trapped.
The oldest part of its human brain is alerted before the highly advanced processor embedded in its cerebral cortex: Something is not right.
The Silencer pauses in its charge.
Item: A thick, rust-colored high-voltage cord dangling loose—cut or pulled free from the junction box.
Item: A thin sheet of water covers the floor and pools around its feet.
The processor in its brain cannot slow down time but can slow down the host’s perception of it. In the ache of time grinding to a crawl, the power line falls from the prey’s hand in a graceful, sweeping arc. The light sparks off the exposed wires as they descend languidly as snow.