The Last Star (25 page)

62

THE GROUND RECEDES.
Zombie dwindles, becomes a black dot against gray earth. The road swivels to the right like the second hand of the terrestrial clock, marking the time that’s lost, the time that cannot be taken back. Turning north, climbing, the explosion of countless stars, and the burning center of the galaxy a backdrop for the mothership glowing phosphorescent green, its belly full of the bombs that will erase the last remaining footprint of civilization. How many cities in the world? Five thousand? Ten? I don’t know, but
they
do. In less than three hours, in the utter silence of the void, the bay doors will slide open and thousands of guided missiles carrying warheads no larger than a loaf of bread will vomit forth. A single orbit around the planet. After ten centuries, all we had built will be gone in a day.

The debris will settle. Rains will bathe the scorched and barren ground. Rivers will revert to their natural course. Forests and meadows and marsh and grasslands will reclaim what was cut and razed, filled and leveled and buried beneath tons of asphalt and concrete. Animal populations will explode. Wolves will return
from the north and herds of bison, thirty million strong, will again darken the plains. It will be as if we never were, paradise reborn, and there is something ancient inside me, buried deep in the memory of my genes, that rejoices.

A savior?
Vosch asked me.
Is that what I am?

Across the aisle, Sullivan is watching me. She looks so small in that oversized uniform, like a little kid playing dress-up. How odd we ended up together like this. She disliked me from the moment she laid eyes on me. About her, I just thought there wasn’t much
there
there. I’d known a lot of girls like Cassie Sullivan, shy but arrogant, timid but impulsive, naïve but serious, sensitive but flippant. Feelings matter to her more than facts, particularly the fact that her mission is a futile one.

Mine is hopeless. Both are suicidal. And neither is avoidable.

My headset crackles. It’s Bob. “We’ve got company.”

“How many?”

“Um. Six.”

“I’m coming up.”

Sullivan starts when I unbuckle. I pat her shoulder on my way to the copilot’s seat.
It’s okay. We were expecting this.

Up front, Bob points out the incoming choppers on his screen.

“Orders, boss?” With only a hint of sarcasm. “Engage or evade, or you want me to set her down?”

“Hold course. They’re going to hail—”

“Wait. They’re hailing us.” He listens. I have a visual on them now, dead ahead, flying in attack formation. “Okay,” he says, turning to me. “Three guesses. First two don’t count.”

“They’re ordering us to land.”

“Now it’s my turn: ‘Up yours.’ Right?”

I shake my head. “Say nothing. Keep flying.”

“You do realize they’ll shoot us down, right?”

“Just let me know when they’re in range.”

“Oh, so that’s the plan.
We’re
shooting
them
down. All six of them.”

“My bad, Bob. I meant let me know when
we’re
in range. What’s our speed?”

“A hundred and forty knots. Why?”

“Double it.”

“I can’t double it. Max is one-ninety.”

“Then max it. Same heading.”
Right down your throats, here we come.

We leap forward; a shiver ripples down the chopper’s skin; the engines howl; the wind screams in the hold. After a couple of minutes, even Bob’s unenhanced eye can see the lead chopper coming straight at us.

“Ordering us down again,” Bob yells. “In range in thirty!”

“What’s going on?” Sullivan’s head pokes between us. Her mouth drops open when she focuses on what’s bearing down.

“Twenty!” Bob calls.

“Twenty
what
?” she shouts.

They’ll pull up, I’m sure of it. Pull up or break formation to let us pass. They won’t shoot us down, either. Because of the risk.
The risk is the key,
Vosch told me. By now he knows about the dead strike team and the commandeered chopper. Constance wouldn’t have done that and Walker’s been captured. That leaves just one person who could have pulled off something like this: his creation.

“
Ten seconds!
”

I close my eyes. The hub, my ever-faithful companion, shuts down my senses, plunging me into that space without sound, without light.

I’m coming, you son of a bitch. You wanted to create a human without humanity. Now you’re going to get
one.

63

EVAN WALKER

THE ROOM
into which they threw him was small, bare, and very cold. When they pulled off the hood covering his head, the severity of the light blinded him. Instinctively, he covered his eyes.

One of his captors demanded his clothes. He stripped down to his briefs.
No, those too.
He dropped the shorts and kicked them toward the doorway, where the two boys wearing camouflage stood. One of them—the younger one—giggled.

They stepped out of the room. The door clanged shut. The cold and the silence and the blaring light were intense. He looked down and saw a large drain in the center of the tiled floor. He looked up, and as if looking up was the signal, water burst from the overhead sprayers.

He staggered back against the wall and covered his head with his hands. The cold bored into him, through skin to muscle to bone to marrow, until his knees buckled and he sank to the floor, head balanced on his upraised knees, arms wrapped around his legs. A disembodied voice boomed in the tiny space. “
STAND. UP.
” He ignored it.

Instantly, the water changed from freezing cold to scalding hot, and Evan leapt to his feet, mouth hanging open in shock and pain. The blazing light cut through the steaming mist and splintered
into countless rainbows that bobbed and spun, radiant against the colorless tile. The spray turned cold again, then abruptly stopped.

He leaned against the wall, gasping, and the voice boomed, “DON’T TOUCH THE WALL. STAND WITH YOUR FEET TOGETHER AND YOUR HANDS AT YOUR SIDES.”

He pushed off from the wall. Never, not even on the bitterest winter day on the farm when the wind roared across the fields and tree branches broke under the weight of ice, never had he been this cold. This cold was a living thing, a beast with his body clamped between its jaws, and those jaws were slowly crushing him. Every instinct told him to move; physical exertion would increase his blood pressure, raise his heart rate, speed warmth to his extremities.

“DON’T MOVE.”

He couldn’t concentrate. His thoughts spun like the uncountable rainbows let loose by the spray. Closing his eyes might help.

“DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES.”

The
cold.
He imagined the water on his naked body freezing solid, ice crystals forming in his hair. He will go into hypothermic shock. His heart will stop. His hands balled into fists and he dug his nails into his palms. The pain will focus his mind. Pain always does.

“OPEN YOUR HANDS. OPEN YOUR EYES. DON’T MOVE.”

He obeyed. If he did everything they said, followed every order, complied with every demand, they would have no excuse to use the one weapon for which he had no defense.

He would bear any burden, endure any hardship, suffer any torment if that suffering added a single moment to her life.

He had been willing to sacrifice an entire civilization for her sake. His own life was infinitely small and meaningless, the costless price. He always knew, from the day he found her half buried
in the snow, what saving her meant. What loving her meant. The cell door slamming shut, the death sentence handed down.

But they had not brought him to this room of cold and shattered light to kill him.

That would come later.

After they had broken his body and crushed his will and dissected his mind down to the last synapse.

The undoing of Evan Walker had begun.

64

HOURS PASSED.
His body grew numb. He seemed to float inside his own insensate skin. The white wall in front of him stretched to infinity; he was floating in an endless nothingness, and his thoughts became fragmented. His mind, starved for stimuli, flung out random images from his childhood, Christmases with his human family, sitting with his brothers on the front porch, squirming in the pew at church. And much older scenes, from a different life: the breathtaking sunsets of a failing star, skimming over mountain ranges three times the height of the Himalayas in silver fliers, cresting a hill and seeing beneath him a valley devoid of life, the crop destroyed by the ultraviolet poison of their dying sun.

If he closed his eyes, the voice screamed at him to open them. If he swayed, the voice screamed for him to stand still.

But it was only a matter of time before he collapsed.

He didn’t remember falling. Or the voice screaming at him to get up. One moment he was upright, the next he was curled into
a ball in a back corner of the white room. He had no idea how much time had passed—or if any had passed at all. Time did not exist in the white room.

He opened his eyes. A man was standing in the doorway. Tall, athletic, with deep-set eyes of striking blue, wearing a colonel’s uniform. He knew this man, though they had never met. Knew his face and the face behind the face. Knew his given name and knew his human name. He had never seen him before; he had known him for ten thousand years.

“Do you know why I’ve brought you here?” the man asked him.

Evan’s mouth opened. His lips cracked and began to bleed. His tongue moved clumsily; he could not feel it.

“Betrayed.”

“Betrayed? Oh no, quite the opposite. If there is one word to describe you, it is
devoted.
” He stepped to one side and a woman wearing a white smock wheeled a gurney into the room. Two soldiers followed. They scooped him from the floor and dumped him onto the gurney. Above him, a single drop of water clung to a sprayer nozzle. He watched it quiver there, unable to look away. A cuff was wrapped around his arm; he didn’t feel it. A thermometer was run across his forehead; he didn’t feel it.

A bright light was shone in his eyes. The woman probed his naked body, pressing on his stomach, massaging his neck and pelvis, and her hands were deliciously warm.

“What is my name?” the colonel asked.

“Vosch.”

“No, Evan. What is my
name
?”

He swallowed. He was very thirsty. “It can’t be pronounced.”

“Try.”

He shook his head. It was impossible. Their language had
evolved as a result of a very different anatomy. Vosch might as well ask a chimpanzee to recite Shakespeare.

The woman in the white smock with the warm hands slid a needle into his arm. His body relaxed. He wasn’t cold or thirsty anymore, and his mind was clear.

“Where are you from?” Vosch asked.

“Ohio.”

“Before that.”

“Can’t be pronounced—”

“Never mind the name. Tell me where.”

“In the constellation Lyra, the second planet from the dwarf star. The humans discovered it in 2014 and named it Kepler 438b.”

Vosch smiled. “Of course. Kepler 438b. And of all places from which you could choose, why the Earth? Why did you come here?”

Evan turned his head to look at the man. “You already know the answer. You know all the answers.”

The colonel smiled. His eyes remained hard, though, and humorless. He turned to the woman. “Get him dressed. It’s time for Alice to take a trip down the rabbit hole.”