Paradox (10 page)

She’s been sleeping for over two hours!

She staggers to her feet, her neck stiff and her shoulder on fire. “Todd!” she calls.

Todd … Todd … Todd …

The echo boomerangs around the hollow chamber.

Okay, think
. Ana tries to quell the panic surging in her.
He’s probably just gone to check on the others, to see if the worm is gone. He’ll be back in a few minutes
. But … 
two hours?

And why would he go by himself, without waking her?

Ana stumbles out into the main chamber, where a corridor winds out of sight in both directions. Which way did they come in?

To her right, the trail curves gently downward, while to the left it takes a sharp turn up. This is a mountain cave, going in and up the mountain, so it seems clear that going down will lead back to the exit. Ana heaves the pack onto her back, with a wince of pain for her still-aching shoulder. She aims the map ahead and turns down the gently sloping path.

The way narrows pretty quickly and the ceiling grows steadily lower. She follows the winding corridor until finally she sees a circle of daylight near the floor—the entrance! She switches off the map and, pushing her pack before her, emerges, blinking, into the sunlight of the woodsy copse. The air is fresh and cool compared to the dank mustiness inside the cave and, best of all, there is absolutely no worm noise.

Of course, Todd is nowhere in sight.

It’s not as if she expected him to be hovering outside the
cave, waiting for her, but she still can’t help feeling left behind. Unexpectedly there’s a flash in her mind: the image of an open grave with a cascade of dirt pouring down onto a polished wooden casket. A quaking emptiness and tangible sense of isolation punches her in the gut.

What was that?
A reclaimed memory, obviously, or some fragment of one. She considers suddenly the benefit there might be in the complete loss of one’s past. Just a sliver of that scene was almost enough to send her to her knees. What would it feel like to carry the weight of the whole experience?

With effort, Ana pulls herself back to the present and sets off for the first cave opening. As she navigates the slope, she remembers the food packets Todd had pressed on her back in the cave. She finds them in one of her front pockets, suddenly ravenous. In short order she tosses down three water capsules, a packet of dried fruit, and two tabs of desiccated bran muffins. A full-sized energy bar rounds off the meal.

The silence holds as she makes her way down the slope. Once she clears the trees in front of the first cave, though, her heart sinks.

This is no longer an entryway: it’s a burial site. The worm is gone, but it’s taken half the mountain face with it. All that’s left is a rockslide of rubble, boulders bigger than she is heaped in a pile twenty or thirty feet high.

No one is getting out of this cave.

Something inside Ana shrivels to a tiny point of focused light. In desperation she touches her circlet, pulls up the map,
and holds it out in front of her. The blinking red-dotted line is still there, steady as ever.

What now?
Todd came into her life out of nowhere, and Ysa and Chen were around for only a few minutes before the worm appeared. What scares her, what truly terrifies her, is how much she suddenly feels like she needs them in order to go on. For a moment she actually considers just pitching her tent and waiting here for Todd to find her. Waiting until they can move forward together, as a team, conducting their joint mystery-mission.

And that thought, that terrible, desperate need, is enough to galvanize her to action. In less time than it takes her to formulate the thought, Ana has decided. Nothing has changed since she first set foot on Paradox. She has the map; she knows the final destination.

She can’t wait around for anyone. She doesn’t need anyone else. She can’t afford to.

She’s going on alone.

No sooner has she made this decision than Ana is on her way. She lines up the map, charts the quickest way up the mountain, then sets off at a brisk pace. It seems like just a few minutes ago that she and Todd were tearing along this same route, the worm’s crushing din behind them, and Ana again suppresses a pang over her missing companions.

Once she leaves the lowlands behind, the mountainside is rocky and almost completely bare of plant life. There’s some hardy scrub and a few spindly skeleton plants that might have come straight from the Dead Forest. But that’s it.

Over everything rises the permeating smell of sulfur. It’s so strong, in fact, that less than half an hour into her climb, Ana’s eyes start watering. She leans into the slope, shifts her
backpack so it’s centered between her shoulders—wincing as she grinds her still-painful shoulder—pops another water capsule, and climbs on. There’s no trail, no path, no obvious way up. After skidding down several mini rock slides, she pulls up her map and zooms in and out, looking for an easier course of ascent. Then she sees it: a stream winds all the way up the mountain, leading right to the peak. She’ll have to go a little out of her way at first, but then she can follow it straight to the top.

The farther she climbs, the better Ana’s shoulder feels. She’d thought the constant motion would worsen the pain, but the opposite seems true. It’s as if she’s jarring things back into place. Unless she pokes the spot with her fingers, the pain is just a dull twinge. Her forehead, too, is almost as good as new; when she touches it, she can hardly tell where the peri ends and her own skin begins. There’s just the smallest raised scar where her skin was hanging open a few hours ago.

She glances at her circlet. Almost two hours have passed since she woke up alone in the cave. She can’t help wondering whether Todd and Ysa and Chen are all right.

She stops to catch her breath and wipe some of the sweat from her forehead. And then—just up ahead, she sees a dark glint in the pale sunlight. The stream! Ana gets moving again with renewed energy. But when she reaches the bank, a cloud of fumes sweeps over her and she has to cover her mouth and nose against the smell.

“That’s not water at all,” she whispers. “It’s—”

It’s a river of lava, issuing from the summit of the volcano and coursing down the slope in a wide, lazy flow. It’s over six feet across and moves soundlessly, coal black with a tinge of red and little curlicues of steam rising from it. Heat waves ripple on the surface.

Unpleasant as it may be, it’s a surefire ticket to the top of the slope. Holding her breath in ten- to fifteen-second intervals, she turns and starts walking along the bank.

Hold. Count, gulp, hold.

And like this the time slips away.

She’s walking some, climbing more, sometimes resorting to grabbing at rocks and lugging herself up steep inclines. In these places, the lava pours down from the sheer rock face in a macabre cascade. It flows so slowly that it almost appears static, each fold and ripple like the photographic negative of a waterfall. It’s eerie and magical and horrible all at once.

Ana’s so transfixed by the stream that she nearly misses the sparkle. But then she looks up, and—
could it be?
Yes, there it is, just up ahead … a twisting strand of glinting light.

It all comes back in a rush: the irresistible pull, the quick slip into another world, the fullness of being even for just a few minutes someone who knows herself inside and out. Another strand means another memory, hers for the keeping.

The craving is like a dull ache in her core, shocking her with how quickly it takes over every aspect of her awareness.

Ana shrugs off her backpack, lets it fall behind her, and runs.

A gust of wind catches the memory strand as Ana approaches, tugging it just out of reach. She stretches her arms above her head. She
has
to catch that strand.
Has to has to has to
.

In a pocket of stillness the glittering thread drops down toward her. It glides over her hands, coating her in its mirror-light spray … and she is gone.

“—have to go! He’s dead, damn it, don’t you understand?” I feel myself crumple inside. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Wasn’t it just hours ago that I was thinking about that playoff game? When did everything go so hellishly wrong?

Jackson’s yelling now, his voice rough. I don’t want to hear what he says, and I pull the receiver away from my ear. I don’t want to hear that Brian’s as good as dead now that he’s infected and that my being there won’t bring him back, that I’ll just get sick too if I go back home, that my place is here in the lab. Where there’s still a chance
.

I slam the phone back onto the receiver and jump up. I’ve got to get out of here. I’m halfway across the office before I even finish forming the thought. But then Pat’s in front of me, head sticking out of his cube, eyebrows creased in worry
.

“Hey,” he says. “I heard about Brian. I’m so sorry.”

I’m crying so hard I trip over that stupid fold in the carpet that nobody ever bothers to fix, and I crumple to the floor. What does it matter? What does anything matter? Right in front of me there’s a paper stuck to the wall, a paper I taped up less than twenty-four hours ago, this week’s company lunch sign-up. The day after tomorrow. Will anyone still be alive to make that pizza order?

“We’re going to make it through this,” Pat says, though I can hardly hear him above my sobbing. “You’ll see—things will get better. What about the new theory?”

“The whole world,” I snap. “The whole world’s gone to hell. What does our research matter if everyone’s
dead
? So there’s some kind of core interlinked entity, so it’s theoretically reversible—so what? We still don’t know how to stop it in the first place, how to keep away the—”