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BLAM!
and the door flies open. Startled, I throw the pillow aside and look up. Runner’s hair is ruffled, his expression wild. Sandra looks puzzled. We stare at each other. ‘What the heck?’ I manage to say.

‘I was worried,’ she says.

‘I’m okay,’ I answer and lie back down to stare at the ceiling. The door closes.
 

‘Micka.’ Runner’s voice. He’s still here.

‘Fuck off.’

‘You hate me.’

‘Yes.’ I watch the dead fly spinning in circles.

‘Why?’

‘Because most of the time you treat me like a person. It makes me trust you. Then you treat me like a weakling, and this hurts.’

‘Sandra told me that she wants to offer you an apprenticeship.’

‘I don’t give a shit.’

‘Look at me, Micka.’

I sit up.

‘I want you to take the offer.’

‘You said we’ll all be dead in ten or fifteen years. I’m not spending the little time I’ve left going on hikes with
her
, sticking my feet under
her
armpits, and dragging
her
around wrapped up as a tent-sausage. If I have to shoot people to keep us hanging in there for a little longer, then I’ll shoot people.’

He is leaning against the door, his jaws are working, and his eyes are the deepest black. ‘I have one condition.’ A raspy whisper.

I nod. Whatever.

‘You’ll get a poison implant. The moment you are captured, you’ll use it to kill yourself. You’ll die within two minutes.’

I nod again.
 

He lowers his head and leaves my compartment.

‘This might come as a little unexpected.’ Runner’s cautious tone pricks my ears. He slides the wagon door open and beckons me into…
 

…absurdity.

‘What…is this?’ My chin feels loose, as if it’s about to come off its hinges. The room is filled with screens that show moving images, a babble of voices without owners, and an illuminated round thing hovering above the floor. It looks precisely like the globe we had at school, except for the lights flickering and trailing across it. But this one is huge! And punch me in the face if a woman didn’t just walk
through
it!

Bleep bleep bleep
a machine complains as she hurries to it, pressing buttons, reading something off a screen.
 

My knees feel a little wobbly.

‘The flight is delayed by five hours. Snowstorm,’ she says.

I hear myself producing a weak ‘Fl…’

Runner flicks his gaze toward me. He’s obviously enjoying this. ‘We are flying to Taiwan. You are pale.’

‘Of course I’m pale!’ I bark. ‘The fastest I’d travelled before I met you was with a donkey cart!’

I really want to slap that grin off his face.

‘Come.’ He nods to the globe. The door slides back into its frame. ‘We are here.’ He points to where the Alps slide into the lowlands. As if I don’t know where we are. I’m not brain-amputated, I’m just…ignorant. As are most of the people living in small villages, tending to their cabbages and goats while having no clue about satellites, artilleries, the BSA, or the end of the world.
 

‘The train’s destination is here — an abandoned military airport west of former London, where our plane will be waiting for us,’ he says.

‘There’s water,’ I point out.

‘Yes. A ferry ships the train across the channel.’

“Channel” makes the wide stretch of water sound rather cute. But when I compare that to the vast seas, it’s tiny. ‘Will I see the ocean?’

‘Yes. Taiwan is here.’ He walks around the globe and points to an island in the pale blue.

‘The other side?’ I cough.

‘In total, we’ll travel forty-eight hours. Most of this time will be spent with an introduction to various assault rifles and an assessment of the situation. I don’t think we should start on explosives this early.’ He scratches his chin.

Explosives. Assault rifles. Situation. Sure. I nod, matter-of-factly. Nothing can rattle me.
 

I’m not good with bullshitting myself. And I need to get my breathing back to normal.
 

‘Kat,’ Runner says to the woman with the efficient movements, the severely short brown hair, and quick eyes. ‘The first simulation, please.’

She clicks buttons on a rectangular…whatever thing, and the globe begins to grow hot. No, pink, all over.
 

‘This is the human population before the Great Pandemic,’ Runner begins. ‘And this is how it shrank during the pandemic. You’ll notice the characteristic pattern. Coasts and large cities clear before everything else. The first cities to disappear had three factors in common: a population size of greater than ten million, an elevation at or below sea level, and an air hub…’ He looks at me, making sure I follow. ‘…an international airport with at least fifty incoming and outgoing flights each day.’

I nod as if I could grasp anything of what he’s saying. Ten million or more in a single city? How is this even possible? How do you feed so many people? Didn’t they all starve to death in winter? Maybe they flew in food, but from where? I shake my head; it doesn’t want to wrap itself around all this strangeness.

Kat and Runner show me how ten billion people in pink die. It takes only seconds. Cholera comes down in purple, pushing pink aside like waves washing away grains of sand. Tuberculosis is yellow and has always been there, thinning the pink gradually, while purple swallows big chunks. Black is the blossoming of the BSA and similar groups, the spreading of violence, raging like fire across the planet, leaving only small and scattered dots of pink behind. Then, for a moment, the BSA dissolves to seemingly irrelevant black pinpricks, scattered by disease and war and a lack of people to recruit. It looks peaceful, the lit-up globe. Green and blue, but mostly blue.

‘How does the ocean taste?’ I whisper.

‘Salty,’ Runner says.

Nothing happens on the globe until slowly, gradually, more and more of the tiny pink dots blacken, only to disappear a second later. Then it stops.

‘This is our current situation. The data we collected allows us to make a rough assessment of the BSA’s future development. Kat, the predictive model, please.’

She pushes another button and all pink dots are washed away by black streaks travelling across the globe until Earth is wiped clean of human dots, no matter the colour.
 

‘We tested more than five thousand variations. The predictions all fall into a window of ten to fifteen years. After that, our species is gone. But that’s not the remarkable part. The next one, Kat.’

I’m not sure I heard correctly. Did he say it’s not shocking that all of us will be dead soon? My palms are hurting and I look down at my hands. My nails have left red half-moons on my skin. I flex my muscles and try to breathe.

Runner’s hand points to Taiwan — healthy-looking pink splotches, not a single black one. ‘This happened in the past three months.’ He gives Kat a nod. At the edge of the island, one pink dot after the other blackens then fades into nothingness.
 

‘It began at the west coast and slowly spread inland. So far, we have observed a population loss of twenty percent, until two weeks ago, when we lost contact. Not a peep from Taiwan since.’

He walks to a large screen. His fingers fly over small buttons that have letters printed on them. ‘Satellite images show that the BSA stopped moving two weeks ago; one day later we lost contact. The problem is…’ He looks up at the woman. His expression reminds me of the day he lay bleeding in the snow.
 

‘In the past two weeks, Kat and her team screened every single satellite image we took of this region. They can’t find anything.’

‘Why is that a problem? The BSA is gone. Shouldn’t we all be happy?’

‘No, Micka, the
people
are gone. Within days, every single one of them disappeared.’

My tongue is still a little swollen. Gingerly, I push it around in my mouth and let the bead click against my teeth. I like it, this oyster pearl on a steel stud impaling my tongue. When I bite down hard on it, a liquified gas will be released from the hollow pearl. I can choose to either die alone, or take someone with me. The toxic kiss. There’s something magic and sexy about it.
 

The intrauterine implant sits silently in my teenaged womb, ready to poison whatever might lodge in there. I told them I don’t plan to get pregnant anyway. All male Sequencers have an implant, so there seemed to be no need for me to get one, too. They said it didn’t matter. They said that sometimes, it’s not the woman’s choice with whom she has sex. I told them my toxic oyster pearl will take care of rapists. The white-coats shook their heads no. ‘If all raped women killed themselves, there wouldn’t be any women left,’ they said. ‘You keep the pearl intact until you are captured by the BSA. Then you take down as many of them as you can.’

With that, the topic was closed.

I press my forehead against the window while watching the Tibetan Plateau slip past. It’s so near, I feel as if we could touch down softly any moment now. The rising sun paints the snow orange. I wish I could walk there forever, eating snow and sunshine.

Runner believes that whatever awaits us in Taiwan will decide our species’ survival. If the Taiwanese were able to kill the BSA’s troops in such a short time, we could learn from them. But he’s not sure why they would be hiding now. They might still be fighting, concealed by the dense jungle. Ever since he spoke about the prospect of a good fight, his eyes shine clearer and his body stands taller. Runner is itching for battle.

But chances are that it was disease killing everyone in only a few days. Soon, birds will transmit the pathogens to the continent and an epidemic will spread like fire through the whole of Asia. He’s told me of the Black Death, and how it travelled along trading routes from Asia into Europe. It happened in the fourteenth century, killing one-third of the European population. But the remaining two-thirds did not murder each other. ‘Our ancestors must have been nicer people,’ I said.
 

‘Unlikely,’ he’d answered. ‘They had primitive weapons, and killed each other in hand-to-hand combat mostly. Their witch-hunts were disorganised. We, on the other hand, are extraordinarily effective killers. Push a button and end millions of lives.’ Then he gave me a single nod and stuck a pin the size of a fruit fly to the cockpit door while I walked to the back of the aircraft.

With my left fist tucked under the stock of his unloaded .50 calibre highly accurised rifle, I gazed through the scope, taking aim at the tiny target only thirty metres away from me. I exhaled, emptying my lungs of air, and curled my right pinky, the next finger and the next, and — in one smooth move — the index finger, too. The trigger produced a
click
. The green laser dot didn’t stray from the pin.

‘Good. But this rifle is made for long-range shooting. Once we arrive, you’ll need to learn triangulation and the effects of gravity, spin drift, and wind force on the bullet’s path. I’ll teach you how to hit a target from a great distance. And we’ll not be using the laser pointer.’

‘Okay,’ I said.
 

My indifferent answer gave him a pause. He took the pin from the door and stood. ‘The muzzle velocity is one thousand metres per second. This rifle doesn’t punch holes into people; it rips them apart. Whoever shows up in your finder, Micka, you own them. You own their lives.’

I remember how cold my face felt when Runner finished speaking.

It was as cold as it is now. With my cheek pressed against the icy plastic window, I try to catch a last glimpse of the Tibetan Plateau. After a short moment, it’s gone.

Is this how it ends? I wanted to take my own life and now I’ll take the lives of others.

Preview of Book Two: Fog