“Ringer, I’ve checked it all out. There’s nobody here. It’s perfectly—”
“Safe,” I finish for him. “Right.” I hold out my hand.
“Come on, she’s right over there in the warehouse . . .”
I don’t move. He rolls his eyes, tips his head back to consider the empty sky, looks back at me.
“If they were here, you know we’d already be dead.”
“The rifle.”
“Fine.” He shoves it at me. I pull the rifle from his hands and smash the stock against the side of his head. He drops to his knees, eyes on my face, but there’s nothing in those eyes, nothing at all.
“Fall,” I tell him. He pitches forward and lies still.
I don’t think she’s in the warehouse. There’s a reason he wanted me to go in there, but I don’t believe that reason had anything to do with Teacup. I doubt she’s within a hundred miles of this place. I have no choice, though. A slight advantage with the rifle and Razor neutralized, and that’s all.
He opened up to me when I kissed him. I don’t know how the enhancement opens an empathetic pathway into another human being. Maybe it turns the carrier into a kind of human lie detector, gathering and collating data from a myriad of sensory inputs and funneling it through the hub for interpretation and analysis. However it works, I felt the blank spot inside Razor, a nullity, a hidden room, and I knew something was terribly wrong.
Lies within lies within lies. Feints and counterfeints. Like a desert mirage, no matter how hard you ran toward it, it stayed forever in the distance. Finding the truth was like chasing the horizon.
As I enter the shadow of the building, something loosens inside. My knees begin to shake. My chest aches like I’ve been hit with a battering ram. I can’t catch my breath. The 12th System can sustain and strengthen me, supercharge my reflexes, enhance my senses tenfold, heal me, and protect me against every physical hazard, but there’s nothing my forty thousand uninvited guests can do about a broken heart.
Can’t, can’t. Can’t go soft now. What happens when we go soft? What happens?
I can’t go inside. I must go inside.
I lean against the cold metal wall of the warehouse, beside the open door, where darkness dwells, profound as the grave.
78
ROTTEN MILK.
The stench of the plague is so intense when I step inside that I gag. The olfactory array immediately suppresses my sense of smell. My stomach settles. My eyes clear. The warehouse is twice the size of a football field and sectioned into three ascending tiers. The bottom section, in which I’m standing, had been converted into a field hospital. Hundreds of cots, wads of bedding, and tipped-over carts of medical supplies. Blood everywhere. Glistening in the light streaming through the holes in the partially collapsed ceiling three stories over my head. Frozen sheets of blood on the floor. Blood smeared on the walls. Blood-soaked sheets and pillows. Blood, blood, blood everywhere, but no bodies.
I climb the first set of stairs to the second tier. Supply level: bags of flour and other dry goods, ripped open, contents strewn by rats and other scavengers, stacks of canned goods, jugs of water, barrels of kerosene. Stockpiled in anticipation of winter, but the Red Tsunami caught them first and drowned them in their own blood.
I climb the second set of stairs to the third tier. A column of sunlight cuts through the dusty air like a spotlight. I’ve reached the end. The final level. The platform is littered with corpses, stacked six high in some places, the ones on the bottom wrapped carefully in sheets, the ones closer to the top hastily tossed there, a discordant jumble of arms and legs, a twisted mass of bone and desiccated skin and skeletal fingers grasping uselessly at the empty air.
The middle of the floor has been cleared. A wooden table sits in the center of the column of light. And on the table, a wooden box and, beside the wooden box, a chessboard, set up in an endgame that I instantly recognize.
And then his voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere, like the whisper of distant thunder, impossible to place.
“We never finished our game.”
I reach forward and topple the white king. I hear a sigh like a high wind in the trees.
“Why are you here, Marika?”
“It was a test,” I whisper. The white king on his back, blank stare, the eyes an alabaster abyss looking back at me. “You needed to test the 12th System without me knowing it was a test. I had to believe it was real. It was the only way I’d cooperate.”
“And did you pass?”
“Yes. I passed.”
I turn my back to the light. He’s standing at the top of the stairs, alone, face in shadow, though I swear I can see his bright blue, birdlike eyes glittering in the charnel dark.
“Not quite yet,” he says.
I aim the rifle at the space between those glittering eyes and pull the trigger. The clicks echo from the empty chamber: Click, click, click, click, click, click.
“You’ve come so far, Marika. Don’t disappoint me now,” Vosch says. “You must have known it wouldn’t be loaded.”
I drop the rifle and shuffle backward until I knock against the table. I press my hands on the top to steady myself.
“Ask the question,” he orders me.
“What did you mean, ‘Not quite yet’?”
“You know the answer to that.”
I pick up the table and hurl it at him. He slaps it away with one arm, and by that time I’ve reached him, launching myself from six feet away, hitting him square in the chest with my shoulder and wrapping my arms around him in a bear hug. We fly off the third level and smash onto the second. The boards beneath us give a thunderous crack. The impact loosens my grip. He wraps the long fingers of one hand around my neck and slings me twenty feet into a tower of canned goods. I’m on my feet in less than a second, but he still beats me, moving so fast, his rising traces an afterimage in my vision.