“Keep us low,” I order Bob.
“Where are we going?”
“South.”
The chopper banks; the ground rushes toward us. I see the magazine burning and the spinning lights of the fire trucks and recruits swarming around like ants. We pass over a river, black water sparking in the spillover light from the floods. Behind us now, the camp is an oasis of light in a desert of winter dark. We plunge into that dark, skimming six feet above the treetops.
I slide into the seat next to Teacup, lean her into my chest, and pull her hair to one side. I hope this is the last time I have to do this. When I’m done, I crush the implant with the heel of the knife.
Razor’s voice squawks in my headset: “How’s she doing?”
“Okay, I think.”
“How’re you doing?”
“Good.”
“Glitches?”
“Minor. You?”
“Smooth as a newborn baby’s ass.”
I ease Teacup back into the seat, stand up, and open compartments until I find the chutes. Razor rattles on as I check the assemblies.
“Anything you want to say to me? Like, I don’t know, Thank you, Razor, for saving my ass from a lifetime of alien servitude after I punched you in the throat and generally acted like a douchebag? Something along those lines? You know, it wasn’t exactly like taking a walk in baseball, secret codes embedded in bogus games and slipping laxative in pudding and rigging explosives and stealing trucks and kidnapping pilots with fingers for you to break. Maybe Hey, Razor, I couldn’t have done it without you. You rock. Something like that. Doesn’t have to be word-for-word, just something to capture the general spirit.”
“Why did you?” I ask. “What made you decide to trust me?”
“What you said that day about the kids—turning kids into bombs. I did some asking around. Next thing I know, I’m in the Wonderland chair and then they take me to the commander and he’s all down on my ass about something you said, and he orders me to stop talking to you because he can’t order me to stop listening, and the more I think about it, the stinkier it gets. They train us to terminate Teds and then load down toddlers with alien ordnance? Who’re the good guys here? And then I’m like, who am I here? It got really angsty, a real existential crisis. What tipped it for me, though, was the math.”
“Math?”
“Yeah, math. Aren’t all you Asians really good at math?”
“Don’t be racist. And I’m three-quarters Asian.”
“‘Three-quarters.’ See? Math. It comes down to simple addition. As in it doesn’t add up. Okay, so maybe we get lucky and seize the Wonderland program from them. Even super-superior aliens can screw up, nobody’s perfect. But we don’t just snatch Wonderland. We have their bombs, we have their track-and-kill implants, their super-sophisticated nanobot system—shit, we even have the technology capable of detecting them. Wha duh fuh? We’ve got more of their weapons than they do! But the real kicker came that day they jacked you up, when Vosch said they lied to us about the organism attached to human brains. Unbelievable!”
“Because if that’s a lie . . .”
“Then everything’s a lie.”
Below us the land is covered in a blanket of white. The horizon is indiscernible in the dark, lost. Everything is a lie. I thought of my dead father telling me that I belonged to them now. Instinctively, I gather Teacup’s little hand into mine: truth.
I hear Bob say in the headset, “I’m confused.”
“Relax, Bob,” Razor says. “Hey, Bob. Wasn’t that the major’s name at Camp Haven? What’s it with officers and the name Bob?”
An alarm sounds. I return Teacup’s hand to her lap and shuffle forward. “What is it?”
“Company,” Bob says. “Six o’clock.”
“Choppers?”
“Negative. F-15s. Three of them.”
“How much time before they’re in range?”
He shakes his head. Despite the cold, his shirt is soaked in sweat. His face shines with it. “Five to seven.”
“Bring us up,” I tell him. “Maximum altitude.”
I grab a couple parachute rigs and drop one into Razor’s lap.
“We’re bailing?” he asks.
“We can’t engage and we can’t outrun. You’re with Teacup. Tandem jump.”
“I’m with Teacup? Who are you with?”
Bob glances at the other rig in my hand. “I’m not bailing,” he says. And then, just in case I didn’t hear or don’t understand: “I’m. Not. Bailing.”
No plan is perfect. I’d planned for a Silencer Bob, which meant my plan entailed killing him before we bailed from the chopper. Now it’s complicated. I didn’t kill Jumbo for the same reason I don’t want to kill Bob. Kill enough Jumbos, murder enough Bobs, and you’ve plunged to the same depths as the ones who shove a bomb down a toddler’s throat.
I shrug to hide my uncertainty. Toss the rig into his lap. “Then I guess you get incinerated.”
We’re at five thousand feet. Dark sky, dark ground, no horizon, all dark. The bottom of the lightless sea. Razor is looking at the radar screen, but he says to me, “Where’s your chute, Ringer?”
I ignore the question. “Can you give me a sixty-second ETA on their range?” I ask Bob. He nods. Razor asks the question again. “It’s math,” I tell him. “Which I’m three-quarters really good at. If there are four of us and they mark two chutes, that leaves at least one of us on board. One, maybe two of them will stay with the chopper, at least until they can take it down. It’ll buy time.”