The Last Star (35 page)

93

HER FACE GLOWS.
Her eyes shine. A smile plays on her lips.

“You wouldn’t believe . . . ,” she whispers. “You don’t know . . .”

I shake my head. “No, I don’t.”

“It’s so beautiful . . . so
beautiful
 . . . I can’t. Oh God, Marika, I
can’t 
. . .”

She’s sobbing. I take her face in my hands, begging the hub to keep me out. I don’t want to be where she is. I don’t think I could bear it.

“Sammy’s here,” she cries. “Sammy’s
here.
” And she strains against the frayed restraints as if she could somehow wrap her arms around him. “And Ben, he’s here, too. Oh God, oh Christ, I called him broken. Why did I do that? He’s strong . . . he’s so
strong,
no wonder they can’t kill him . . .”

Her eyes roam the featureless white. Her shoulders shake. “They’re all here. Dumbo and Teacup and Poundcake . . .”

I back away from her. I know what’s coming. It’s like watching a runaway train bearing down. I fight a nearly overwhelming urge to run.

“I’m sorry, Marika. About everything. I didn’t know. I didn’t understand.”

“We don’t have to go there, Cassie,” I mutter weakly.
Please, don’t go there.

“He loved you. Razor . . . Alex. He couldn’t admit it to anyone. He couldn’t even admit it to himself. He knew before he did it that he would die for you.”

“Walker,” I say hoarsely. “What about Walker?”

She ignores me or she doesn’t hear the question. She is here and she is not. She is Cassie Sullivan and she is everyone else.

She has become the sum of us.

“Rainbow fingers,” she gasps, and I stop breathing. She’s seeing my father’s hand holding mine. She remembers the way that felt, the way it made
me
feel, my father’s hand in mine.

“We’re out of time,” I say, to pull her out of my memories. “Cassie, listen to me. Is Walker there?”

She nods. She starts to cry again. “He was telling the truth. There
was
music. And the music was beautiful . . . I
see
it, Marika. His planet. The ship. What he
looked
like . . . oh my God, that’s
disgusting.
” She shakes her head to clear the image. “Marika, he was telling the truth. It’s real . . . it’s
real
 . . .”

“No, Cassie. Listen to me. Those memories aren’t real.”

She screams. She thrashes against the restraints. Thank God I haven’t untied her yet or she might tear out her own eyes.

I don’t have a choice now. I’ll have to risk it.

I grab her shoulders and force her back into the chair. A cacophonous blast of emotions explodes in my mind and for a second I’m afraid I’ll black out. How does she endure it? How can one mind bear the weight of ten thousand others? It defies comprehension. It’s like trying to define God.

Inside Cassie Sullivan is a horror so profound, there are no words. The people downloaded into Wonderland lost every person
who mattered to them, and most of those downloaded people were children. Their pain is hers now. Their confusion and sorrow, their anger and hopelessness and fear. It’s too much. I can’t stay within her. I stumble backward until I smack against the counter.

“I know where he is,” she says, catching her breath. “Or at least where he might be, if they brought him back to the same place. Untie me, Marika.”

I pick up the rifle leaning against the wall.

“Marika.”

I walk to the door.

“
Marika.
”

“I’ll be back,” I manage to choke out.

She screams my name again and now I don’t have a choice. If he hasn’t heard us before, he’s certain to have heard her now.

Because I have heard
him.

Someone is descending the stairs at the other end of the mile-long corridor. I’m not sure who it is, but I know
what
it is.

And I know why it’s coming.

“You’ll be safe here,” I lie. The hopeful kind of lie you tell children. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

I open the door and stagger from light into darkness.

94

EVEN WITH MY ENHANCED SPEED
, I won’t be able to reach the stairway door before he does. But with a little luck, I can get within the firing range of an M16.

I’m certain it’s Vosch. Who else could it be? He knows I’m here. He knows why I’m here. Creator to his creation, creature to her creator, that’s our bond. Only one way for me to break it. Only one way to be free.

I explode down the hallway, a human missile. I hear him coming. He must hear me coming.

The range of an M16 is 550 meters, one-third of a mile. The hub calculates my speed and the distance to the stairwell. Not going to happen. I ignore the math and keep running. Nine hundred meters—eight—seven. The processor embedded in my cerebral cortex goes berserk, running the numbers over and over, coming up short, and sending me messages of escalating urgency.
Run back. Find cover. No time. No time, no time, notimenotimenotimenotime.

I ignore it. I don’t serve the 12th System. The 12th System serves me.

Unless it decides that it won’t.

The hub pulls the plug on the drones that enhance my muscles: If it can’t stop me, at least it can slow me down. My speed drops. Abandoned, I’m running like an ordinary human. I feel chained and unbound at the same time.

The lights in the hall blaze to life. The stairway door flies open and a tall figure lurches into view. I open fire, charging forward, closing the gap as fast as I can. The figure stumbles, careens against the far wall, and brings up its hands instinctively to cover its face.

I’m in range now—I know it, the enemy knows it, and the hub knows it. It’s over. I lock in on the figure’s head. My finger tightens on the trigger.

Then I see a blue jumpsuit, not a colonel’s uniform. Wrong height. Wrong weight, too. I hesitate for an instant and in that instant the figure lowers its hands.

My first thought is for Cassie—that she suffered Wonderland when Wonderland wasn’t necessary. She risked everything to find him . . . until he found her.

Evan Walker has a knack for finding her; he always has.

I stop a hundred meters away but I don’t lower my rifle. Between his leaving and our reunion, there’s no telling what happened. The hub agrees with me. No risk if he’s dead, enormous risk if he’s not. Whatever value he had is gone now, contained in the consciousness of Cassie Sullivan.

“Where’s Vosch?” I ask.

Without a word, he lowers his head and charges. He’s halved the distance before I open fire, first overriding the hub’s insistence I aim for the head, then its demand I retreat before he reaches me. I put six rounds into his legs, thinking that will drop him. It doesn’t. By the time I give in to the hub’s shrieking command, it’s too late.

He knocks the rifle from my hands. So fast I don’t see the blow coming. Don’t see the next one, either, the fist that smashes into the side of my neck, hurling me into the wall. The concrete cracks on impact.

I blink, and his fingers lock around my throat. Another blink and I break the hold with my left and punch as hard as I can with my right, dead center into his chest to break his sternum and drive the shattered bone into his heart. It’s as if I rammed my fist into a three-inch-thick plate of steel. The bone cracks but does not break.

I blink again, and now my face is pressing against cool concrete and there’s blood in my mouth and blood on the wall I’ve been rammed into—only it isn’t a wall; it’s the floor. I’ve been flung a hundred yards and landed flat on my stomach.

Too fast.
He moves faster than the priest at the caverns, faster
than Claire in the infirmary bathroom. Faster than Vosch, even. It defies the laws of physics for a human being to move that fast.

Before the alien processor in my brain uses the nanosecond it needs to calculate the odds, I know the outcome:

Evan Walker is going to kill me.

He lifts me from the floor by the ankle and slings me against the wall. The blocks splinter. So do a number of my bones. He doesn’t let go. He smashes my body against the other wall. Back and forth until the concrete breaks apart and rains to the floor in a fall of dusty gray. I don’t feel anything; the hub has shut down my pain receptors. He lifts my body over his head and slams it down against his upraised knee.

I don’t feel my back break but I hear it magnified a thousand times by the auditory drones embedded in my ears.

He drops my limp body to the floor. I close my eyes, waiting for the coup de grâce. At least he’ll make it quick. At least I know that the 12th System’s final gift to me will be a painless death.

He kicks me onto my back. Then he kneels beside me, and his eyes are fathomless pits, black holes that no light can penetrate or escape. Nothing lives in those eyes, neither hate nor rage nor amusement nor the mildest curiosity. Evan Walker’s eyes are as blank as a doll’s, his stare as unblinking.

“There is another,” he says. “Where is it?” His voice is affectless, without a trace of humanity. Whoever Evan Walker was before is gone.

When I don’t answer, the thing that was Evan Walker, with obscene gentleness, cups my face in its hands and slices into my consciousness. The entity raping my soul is itself soulless, alien,
other.
I can’t pull away; I can’t move at all. With enough time—time that it doesn’t have—the 12th System might be able to repair
the damage to my spine, but for now I’m paralyzed. My mouth comes open. No sound comes out.

It knows. It releases me. It rises.

I find my voice, and I scream as loud as I can. “
Cassie! Cassie, it’s coming!
”

It lumbers down the hall toward the green door.

And the green door will open. She will see him with eyes that have seen all that he’s seen and a heart that’s felt all he has felt. She’ll think he has come to save her—that his love will deliver her once again.

My voice wilts into a pitiful whimper. “Cassie, it’s coming.
It’s coming . . .
”

No way she hears me. No way for her to know.

I pray she won’t see it coming. I pray that the thing that was once Evan Walker will be quick.

95

SILENCER

AT THE END
of the hall is a green door. On the other side of the green door is a white room. Inside that room its prey is bound to a white chair, the goat tied to a stake, the wounded seal trapped in a powerful current. It will crush her skull. It will rip her heart still beating from her chest with its bare hands. The one Evan Walker had saved on that first day so upon this final day his soulless remains can kill her. There is no irony in this cruelty; there is only cruelty.

But the chair is empty. Its prey has vanished. The Silencer examines the straps that held her arms. Hair, skin, blood. She must have ripped herself free.

It lowers its head, listening. Its hearing is exquisitely acute. It can hear the other human breathing nearly a mile away at the other end of the corridor, the one whose back it had broken, whose bones it had shattered against the concrete walls. It can hear the breaths of the soldiers huddled in safe rooms throughout the base, waiting for the all clear to sound, their quiet voices, the rustle of their uniforms, their galloping hearts. It can hear the electricity thrumming through the wires inside the walls of the room. It sifts through the confusing jumble of noise to isolate its prey. It seeks a single heartbeat, a solitary breath close by; she can’t have gone far.

There is no satisfaction when it pinpoints her location. A shark feels no satisfaction at the detection of the baby seal in the surf.

It lunges from the room on legs it cannot feel: The processor in its brain has nullified the pain from the wounds, and the arterial drones have shut off the flow of blood to the bullets’ entry points. Its legs are as numb as its heart, as insensitive as its mind.

Three doors down, on the right. It stands for a moment outside the door, frozen, hands loose at its sides, head bowed, listening. Somehow its prey had known the combination and entered this room. It does not ponder how she could know the code. It does not pause to consider why the girl was in the white room or what had happened to her there. Where the prey came from and its life before it got there—these things are irrelevant. Beneath the seal’s silhouette on the surface, the beast rockets upward from the deep.

She is close—very close. It hears her breath on the other side of the door. It discerns the beat of her heart. She’s pressing her ear against the door, listening.

The Silencer’s hand draws back, fingers curled into a fist.

Rotating its hips into the blow to maximize force, it smashes its fist through the reinforced door. On the other side the prey recoils, but too late; it catches a handful of her hair. She rips free with a startled scream, leaving behind a wad of curls in its hand.

The Silencer tears the door from its hinges and springs inside. The prey is scrambling across the wet floor, slipping as she goes, between two rows of junction boxes that line either side of the narrow aisle.

It has cornered her in one of the complex’s electrical rooms. There is only one way out, and to escape, she must pass the Silencer—and that will be impossible.

The Silencer does not rush. There is no hurry. It glides across the puddled water deliberately, closing the gap. The prey pauses near the back wall; perhaps she realizes she has nowhere to run, no place to hide, no choice but to turn and face the thing that sooner or later must be faced. She veers to her right and jumps, reaching for a handhold in the three-foot space between the top of a box and the ceiling. Her hand wraps around one of the incoming lines and she hauls herself into the tiny niche.

She’s trapped.

The oldest part of its human brain is alerted before the highly advanced processor embedded in its cerebral cortex: Something is not right.

The Silencer pauses in its charge.

Item
: A thick, rust-colored high-voltage cord dangling loose—cut or pulled free from the junction box.

Item
: A thin sheet of water covers the floor and pools around its feet.

The processor in its brain cannot slow down time but can slow
down the host’s perception of it. In the ache of time grinding to a crawl, the power line falls from the prey’s hand in a graceful, sweeping arc. The light sparks off the exposed wires as they descend languidly as snow.

Too far from the doorway to run. And the boxes on either side of the Silencer are flush with the ceiling; no open space into which it can jump.

The Silencer leaps, extending its body to its full length parallel to the ground, flying a foot above the floor, arm outstretched, fingers spread wide, its only hope to catch the crimson cord before it makes contact with the water.

The line that gracefully falls slips through the Silencer’s fingers. The light glints off the wires as they touch ground, silently, like falling snow.