Kendra began to work again. She escaped into the pristine logic of her microscopes, and, when she occasionally stalled on the mind plague, she turned her skills to other projects, daring to reexamine the
archos
tech for weaknesses. There must be some way to destroy it.
Her handlers let her play with different lines of research because it kept her happy. She also came to understand that they hoped her efforts would jump-start new possibilities in their weapons programs. Too late, she discovered Ruth’s vaccine in her own blood along with the booster nanotech. Too late, she learned she’d repeated her unholy mistake, providing them with the power to tear the world apart again.
She went on strike. It didn’t last. The MSS used sleep deprivation, drugs, and cold to compel her. She quit eating, but they inserted a gastric feeding tube and IVs to sustain her—and when she failed to rouse herself, the pain began. Electricity. Knives. She swore to help again just to make it stop.
She’d become erratic. She knew that. Sometimes she exaggerated her behavior when she was actually in control of herself, creating opportunities to conceal and deceive. It also helped that she’d picked up a good deal of their language by then. She pretended she wanted to be one of them, which she hoped was comforting to her overseers. She refused to speak in anything except Mandarin, deliberately confusing her words and mixing her written notes.
Kendra knew they hoped to improve the mind plague to introduce thoughts to infected people, not only disrupting their capacity to think but shaping and encouraging cooperative moods. They were years away from this magic. Merely teaching the nanotech to interrupt higher brain function was impressive enough—but, showing ambition, she convinced them to increase the nano’s AMU to allow the space necessary to eventually house those programs. The Chinese didn’t realize the extra bulk she built into it also held a coded message.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t be sure anyone would ever find her cry for help. Worse, she didn’t make the mental leap to using the new self-governing markers to reverse who the mind plague infected until after they’d taken both kinds of nanotech away from her.
Her best chance to stop them was her continued work with the
archos
tech. She crafted a new machine plague, first paring down its size for increased speed. She also replaced its heat engine with a simple protein-based reaction. That was easy. The
archos
tech was nothing if not efficient in disintegrating organic tissue, which she taught it to burn for energy. It would be enough to destroy everyone in their nanotech programs, including herself.
At last she was ready. Too late. More than anything, those bleak, miserable words summed up her life. Too late. She hadn’t been able to cut her wrists deeply enough on her mountaintop, and she’d kept eating in small amounts even after she swore an oath to God and the devil to let herself waste away, but the pared-down
archos
tech would kill her exactly as the original model should have done years ago. Kendra never expected to survive beyond opening the first or second vial.
She was wrong.
Saint Bernadine had been retrofitted by the Chinese. Even so, the missiles’ shock waves brought most of the building down. Trapped in its dark halls, their research teams and military personnel needed hours to pull each other free. At least a dozen people were hurt or missing. No one else came to help. They kept her away from the windows, and the gloom was everlasting, but Kendra thought it was afternoon before they escorted her to her basement labs to recover her gear. Major Su said they needed to be ready to move.
There weren’t enough of them to carry everything, so Kendra filled her pockets with sample cases and flash drives—and eight slim vials of nanotech. Then they brought her outside into the growing beat of a helicopter.
The aircraft flew out of the south as she walked away from the other men and women, staring out across the black, flattened city. They let her keep her distance. They were accustomed to her moods, and there was nowhere for her go.
The helicopter landed in an area cleared by Major Su’s men. Kendra didn’t know if they intended to ferry her to the sister lab or if they were bringing those teams north. Maybe she should have waited. She didn’t have that much self-control. She screamed in anguish and rage as she threw the first vial.
Major Su fell with his cheek eaten away, clawing at his pistol. Others were torn apart through their necks and chests. Like the original
archos
tech, her accelerated machine plague found its quickest entrance through the sinus cavities and lungs.
Watching them die was hellish.
It felt like coming home.
She had killed unimaginable numbers and, more personally, she had directed people to murder and cook eighteen human beings on her little mountaintop. What were a few more? Kendra delighted in feeling anything other than helpless. She became a dark goddess—the destroyer of the worlds.
Laughing, she strode toward the chopper as the pilots powered up again. They began to lift away. She threw another vial, hoping to feel the nanotech across her own body in the blistering wind. But her aim was true. The vial passed through the open side door and the plague never escaped the aircraft, which wheeled onto its side and slammed into the ruins a hundred yards away. Then she was alone except for three wounded and a woman who called herself Jane, one of her caregivers, who had always been respectful and sweet.
Kendra killed them, too.
A second helicopter came as she hiked into the rubble. It buzzed past her only to return, landing in the city ahead of her ... and she met Chinese soldiers in the ash as the chopper flew back overhead. Her mind disappeared. She must have killed them all, but she had no memory of it. When she gradually returned to herself, she was sobbing against the straight, solid little face of a mailbox. Somehow she’d found one thing that was still upright, although caked with soot. The mailbox remained bolted to the sidewalk and she leaned against it, surrounded by untold miles of flattened buildings and debris.
It was the third helicopter that brought Cam to her.
Alekseev and Obruch argued
together in the cockpit until Deborah cut in, hearing something she didn’t like. “We need to see this through!” Deborah called forward.
“We are not convinced this hunt is useful,” Alekseev said. “Let us try to get her out of here.”
Cam shook his head. “For what? The answer is here.”
“You are mad,” Alekseev said, but then Obruch shouted,
“Tya! B M010 cmopoHy!”
He banked the chopper to the left. They were about hundred feet above the blast-swept neighborhoods. At first, Cam couldn’t tell what had drawn Obruch’s gaze. There were no variations in the pattern below. The homes were small, eroded squares. The streets formed less-cluttered lines in the wreckage. Then he saw a group of structures with a hint of red in the torn rooftops, which was unusual. There were also the shapes of parking lots in front and a big athletic field on the other side. A school campus?
“Kendra, look,” he said. “Kendra?”
Her bulging eyes were locked on something he couldn’t see, so Cam swung away from her again. As they flew closer, he noticed two circles in the ash where helicopters had lifted off, scouring the rubble. It was the rotors’ force that had revealed what was left of the red tile roofs.
“Bom uMeHHo,”
Alekseev said. Then, in English, “We’re putting down. Be ready.”
They landed close against the slumping dune of the largest building, which had probably been a gym, leaving Kendra and Obruch in the helicopter. She was catatonic. Obruch drew his sidearm.
Deborah and Alekseev flanked one side of the building as Cam and Medrano took the other. His body clattered with two AK-47s and a submachine gun. Medrano and the others carried the same or more. The chopper’s noise meant there was no chance of surprising the enemy. No one expected even enough time to reload, so they would kick in as many doors as possible before they were killed themselves.
Cam’s heart rattled like the metal slung across his back, but his head was clear—even disappointed. The campus was empty. Everyone was gone except for four bodies lined up on the floor of one classroom. From their injuries, they’d been hurt when the buildings dropped. The Chinese must have evacuated, first bringing their scientists to Saint Bernadine and then marshalling the remainder of their personnel to find Kendra after an emergency radio call that she was loose.
Cam didn’t say it, but his disappointment turned into a new anxiety. What if the data and samples they needed were in the wrecked Chinese helicopters?
They swept the campus more thoroughly, trying to identify which areas had been used for labs and offices. Ten minutes later, Medrano yelled for them to bring Kendra to a building near the athletic field. It had been shielded from the blastwave by other buildings. There was a gaping hole in the roof and one wall was down, but more than a third of its classrooms were intact.
Cam went to help Obruch. Kendra didn’t want to leave the chopper. She’d nestled into the back seat and tried to pull free when Cam touched her leg.
“We’re here,” he said. “We found the sister lab.”
It was no use. They were forced to drag her outside—but her mood changed as they half carried her through the fallen buildings. Her giant eyes filled with curiosity. Maybe she’d forgotten her safe little nest in the helicopter.
“What do you think?” Deborah asked when they escorted Kendra inside. There were opaque black plastic tents in two of the rooms, although the plastic was split or sagging, pelted by debris. Clean room suits sprawled on coatracks that had been knocked to the floor. More to the point, there were several desks that had been loaded with microscopy gear. Most of the equipment was on the floor. Another room held rows of laptops and larger computers, file cabinets, and a dry-erase board covered with the deft, boxy symbols of written Mandarin.
Cam felt an unusual flash of optimism. The Chinese had been unable to carry even the beginnings of this stuff in their first flight to Saint Bernadine, and they couldn’t possibly have expected American troops this deep into the blast zone. They must have planned to come back for the majority of their equipment. In fact, we’re lucky they were hit so hard, he thought.
The few planes and
helicopters they’ve been able to make operational have been busy
all
day with other
problems
—
but
that’ll change. This luck can’t
last.
“We need to hurry,” he said.
Kendra was subdued but responsive. She nodded and said, “Let me see. I can see. Let me see.”
Was she consciously referring to the sky outside the roof? Cam didn’t think so, but it was getting dark. The unending twilight had become something deeper. Beyond the ash clouds, the sun was going down.
Cam left Kendra with Deborah to help the other men. Medrano had located the power room on the collapsed side of the building. All three of the labs’ generators were buried. Worse, most of the fuel cans had ruptured. “I can get one of these running,” Medrano said, “but we’d better move it first or this place will ignite.”
Cam, Alekseev, and Obruch pulled away the wreckage as Medrano tried to salvage some electrical lines, hampered by his broken arm. Then he identified which generator he wanted. By now, they could barely see. There were no stars or moon beneath the fallout. The night would be absolute.
Obruch produced a small penlight, which he ran to give to the women as Cam and Alekseev dragged the generator into an open spot of concrete. “Give me two minutes,” Medrano said, splicing his new line to the classrooms.
Kendra’s response was less satisfying when they hurried into the lab. “I need three hours,” she told them, rummaging through endless files as Deborah said, “There’s a machining atomic force microscope. It looks like it’s okay. She thinks she has what she needs.”
Alekseev took Cam aside. “This is madness,” he said.
“No. We’ve come too far to quit. Either she can do it or she can’t. There’s no sense in running away. Where would we go? The chopper’s nearly empty.”
“They were keeping aircraft,” Alekseev said in his odd English. “I will check the fuel.”
“Where would we go?” Cam said. “Your side is gone. So is ours. But go ahead—check for fuel. We’re going to need every weapon we can make if we’re going to hold this place against enemy troops.”
Alekseev paused. “You are speaking of something like your Alamo,” he said. “Yankee Doodle do or die.”
Cam almost smiled. Alekseev had his American history mixed up, but not its spirit. They were a nation created by rebels and underdogs who never did quite figure out how to manage their own success. Cam wanted to see them back on top again. “The Chinese won’t expect us here,” he said, “so we have surprise on our side. That should work against the first group that shows up.”
“What about the next?”
“Best case scenario, we won’t have to last that long.”
“Do you believe her estimates? Three hours?”
“Yes. You know who she is.”
“We know who she was,” Alekseev corrected him.
“I think she’s ... motivated.” Cam chose the word carefully. “She wants to make things right. Do you understand? She wants to do something good.”
The generator rumbled outside and the lights sprang on, flooding the building. “Got it!” Medrano called. Kendra screamed, thrashing her arms in the sudden brilliance. Deborah grabbed her, talking fast, as the men scrambled to turn off as many switches as possible. They didn’t want to be the only star in the night.
When they were done, Alekseev walked over to Cam again. “We must seal this tent,” Alekseev said, indicating the black plastic. “She can work inside it.”
