I glance up at the camera mounted in the far corner of the room. Is he watching? Thanks to Wonderland, he knows me better than anyone on Earth. He must know why I took the gun:
I’m mated. And it’s too late to resign the game.
I press the cold muzzle against my temple. The woman’s mouth comes open. She takes a step toward me.
“Marika.” Kind eyes. Soft voice. “She’s alive because you are. If you aren’t, she won’t be.”
It clicks then. He told me rage isn’t the answer, and rage is the only explanation for him hitting the kill switch when I upended the board. That’s what I thought when it happened. It never occurred to me that he might be bluffing.
And it should have. There’s no way he’d give up his leverage. Why didn’t I see that? I’m the one blinded by rage, not him.
I’m dizzy; the room won’t stay still. Bluffs inside bluffs, feints within counterfeints. I’m in a game in which I don’t know the rules or even the object. Teacup is alive because I am. I’m alive because she is.
“Take me to her,” I say to the woman. I want proof that that one fundamental assumption is true.
“Not going to happen,” the man says. “So now what?”
Good question. But the issue has to be pressed and pressed hard, as hard as I press the gun against my temple. “Take me to her or I swear to God I’ll do it.”
“You can’t,” the young woman says. Soft voice. Kind eyes. Hand outstretched.
She’s right. I can’t. It could be a lie; Teacup could be dead. But a chance remains that she’s alive, and if I’m gone, there’s no reason to keep her that way. The risk is unacceptable.
This is the bind. This is the trap. This is where the road of impossible promises dead-ends. This is the only possible outcome of the antiquated belief that the insignificant life of a seven-year-old kid still matters.
I’m sorry, Teacup. I should have finished this back in the woods.
I lower the gun.
53
THE MONITOR FLICKERS on. Pulse, blood pressure, breathing, temperature. The kid I took down is back up, leaning against the door, one hand massaging his throat, the other holding the gun. He glowers at me lying on the bed.
“Something to help you relax,” the woman with the soft voice and kind eyes murmurs. “A little stick.”
The bite of the needle. The walls disappear into colorless nothing. A thousand years pass. I am ground to dust beneath the heel of time. Their voices lumber, their faces expand. The thin foam beneath me dissolves. I am floating on an unbounded ocean of white.
A disembodied voice emerges from the fog. “And now let’s return to the problem of rats, shall we?”
Vosch. I don’t see him. His voice has no source. It originates from everywhere and nowhere, as if he’s inside me.
“You’ve lost your home. And the lovely one—the only one—that you’ve found to replace it is infested with vermin. What can you do? What are your choices? Resign yourself to live peaceably with the destructive pests or exterminate them before they can destroy your new home? Do you say to yourself, ‘Rats are disgusting creatures, but nevertheless they are living things with the same rights as me’? Or do you say, ‘We are incompatible, these rats and I. If I am to live here, these vermin must die’?”
From a thousand miles away, I hear the monitor beeping, marking the beat of my heart. The sea undulates. I rise and fall with each roll of the surface.
“But it isn’t really about the rats.” His voice pounds, dense, thick as thunder. “It never was. The necessity of exterminating them is a given. It’s the method that troubles you. The real issue, the fundamental problem, is rocks.”
The white curtain peels away. I’m still floating, but now I’m far above the Earth in a black void awash with stars, and the sun kissing the horizon paints the planet’s surface beneath me a shimmering gold. The monitor beeps frantically, and a voice says, “Oh, crap,” and then Vosch’s: “Breathe, Marika. You’re perfectly safe.”
Perfectly safe. So that’s why they sedated me. If they hadn’t, my heart probably would have stopped from shock. The effect is three-dimensional, indistinguishable from reality, except I would not be breathing in space. Or hearing Vosch’s voice in a place where sound does not exist.
“This is the Earth as it was sixty-six million years ago. Beautiful, isn’t it? Edenic. Unspoiled. The atmosphere before you poisoned it. The water before you fouled it. The land lush with life before you, rodents that you are, shredded it to pieces to feed your voracious appetites and build your filthy nests. It may have remained pristine for another sixty-six million years, unsullied by your mammalian gluttony, if not for a chance encounter with an alien visitor one-quarter the size of Manhattan.”
It whizzes past me, pockmarked and craggy, blotting out the stars as it barrels toward the planet. When it breaks through the atmosphere, the lower half of the asteroid begins to glow. Bright yellow, then white.
“And thus the fate of the world is decided. By a rock.”
Now I’m standing on the shores of a vast, shallow sea, watching the asteroid fall, a tiny dot, a pebble, insignificant.
“When the dust from the impact has settled, three-quarters of all life on Earth will be gone. The world ends. The world begins again. Humanity owes its existence to a bit of cosmic whimsy. To a rock. It really is remarkable when you think about it.”
The ground shudders. A distant boom, then an eerie silence.
“And therein lies the conundrum, the riddle you’ve been avoiding, because confronting the problem shakes apart the very foundation, doesn’t it? It defies explanation. It renders all that’s happened impossibly discordant, absurd, nonsensical.”