The Burning Skies (51 page)

It all snaps into focus.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I’m operating,” he replies.

He’s not kidding. He’s got her strapped back into the chair, her blood filled with painkillers so she can’t feel a thing. She can see through only one eye. The other one’s dangling in the zero-G beside her nose. He’s plucked it out. The optic nerve is
hanging there, along with tangles of circuitry that lead back inside her eye socket. He’s got his razorwire extended from one hand into the circuitry. But she sees something else, too: droplets of blood floating in front of her, and she suddenly realizes that—

“You’ve cut through my skull,” she says.

“Trepanation,” he replies. “Of a sort.”

Messing with her brain. She can’t see what he’s up to there. But she can feel it. Colors surge against her. Landscapes churn past her. Some moon’s hovering somewhere out in front of her. It starts to swell ever larger.

“Have you found the door?” she mutters.

“You’re the door,” he says. “You always were.”

“I never wanted that.”

“That never mattered.”

Everything goes black.

P
rowling through corridors of dark. Climbing up stairways filled with light. Watching from behind the screens as the clock keeps on ticking and the ship keeps on moving away from the farside toward the only libration point invisible to Earth. The fleet that’s deployed there is the largest in existence. It’s the ultimate strategic reserve. If the war to end all wars begins it’ll lay waste to the Eurasian bases on the farside even as it duels with the L4 fortresses—even as its squadrons scramble left and right around the Moon to envelop the Eurasian nearside operations.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’ll just stay put. There are so many battle scenarios flitting through Stefan Lynx’s head, and none of them really matter: they’re just the projections from which he’s reverse-engineering the actual composition of the fleet and mapping out the vectors via which he’s going to penetrate to its heart. That fleet stacks up in Lynx’s mind like some vast
web. The only thing that counts now is confronting the spider at its center. Whether or not Szilard is guilty is incidental—there’s a larger game afoot. The ultimate run’s under way. Lynx has never felt so high. Beneath him engines surge as the ship keeps on taking him ever higher.

S
he wakes again. She’s in a zeppelin. She’s been here before. She’s looking out a window at a burning city far below.

“Hello Claire,” says Jason Marlowe.

She whirls. He’s sitting cross-legged against the far wall. He’s smiling like he did right before she killed him.

“You’re dead,” she says.

“And you should know,” he replies.

“Why are you here?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that.”

“I’m being fucked with, Jason.”

“By who?”

“By Carson. He’s inside my head.”

“Was wondering why it’s feeling so crowded in here.”

“You’ve been here all along?”

“I wish you’d joined us, Claire.”

“I wish I had too.”

“We were Rain.”

“Maybe we still are.”

“No,” he says. “You killed us all.”

“There’s really no one left?”

He replies. But as he does so his voice is drowned in static. Even as his mouth blurs.

“What’d you say?” she asks.

He speaks again. The same thing happens.

“You’re being blocked,” she says.

“No,” he says,
“you’re
being blocked.”

“Try it again,” she says.

“I said you’re blocked, Claire.”

“Am I?”

“Why is it so hard for you to admit? Is it because you always thought I was the weak one?”

“You weren’t weak. I was just stupid.”

“It’s not too late to save the world.”

“I can’t even save myself.”

“Carson might do it for you,” he says.

“I doubt it.”

“You should have joined us.”

“You said that already.”

“Because it bears repeating.”

“If the Rain had won, it wouldn’t be any better.”

“Why not?” he asks.

“They didn’t even have
a program
, Jason. They had no idea what they were going to do once they’d taken over.”

“Yes they did. Take humanity to the next level.”

“What does that mean?” She points through the window at the sky. “Huh? Other than more fucking spaceships—
what does that mean?
They were divided among themselves. They couldn’t decide whether they should rule humanity as cattle or raise the race to some kind of posthuman status. They would have fought among themselves as soon as they took power.”

“Christ, Claire. They already
were
fighting among themselves. That was their genius. They were at war with one another the whole time. They stabbed their leader in the back—”

“You mean Sinclair?” She feels some kind of pressure building in her head.

“—and then they fell to bickering. They fell apart even as they had it all within their grasp.”

She feels like her skull’s about to explode.

“And I could say the same of you,” he adds.

The pain goes nova.

• • •

C
louds whip by. The islands of Indonesia flit past. Sarmax watches the world reel below, and it’s a ld that’s dead to him. His mind feels the same way. There’s no light left in it. His Indigo’s gone. He knows she must have died long ago. And even if she didn’t, she’s dead now that the Throne’s destroyed what’s left of the Rain. Yet somehow Sarmax feels like he killed her twice. He wishes he’d made sure of her the first time.

But nothing’s ever sure. And the dead have a way of refusing to stay that way. She’s still burning in his head.

It’s all he has. It’s fine by him. Asia creeps closer as he readies for one last run.

S
he’s in some room making love to Jason and it’s so long ago. She’s fifteen and so is he. She’s riding him for the first time and she’s wishing she could stay this way forever. He’s telling her he loves her. Telling her this really happened. She’s telling him she believes him—telling him that she wants to live with him forever in that long-gone country of the past. She feels as though she’s never getting out of here, that her mind’s a cage and she’s never even going to see the bars. And now she’s on top of Jason and her hair’s dangling across his face and he’s gasping and she’s crying and begging him not to grow any older and he’s moaning
the future’s already here
and then he shimmers and fades and vanishes and she’s weeping and telling him she’ll find him but all there is to find is the note under the pillow that says
you know I know you lie
.

• • •

H
atchet man with too much downtime. Man of action who’s unaccustomed to the undertow of his own mind: it’s hauling against him in ayahuasca rhythms as he watches the Moon dwindle and stares at the lights flickering off Lynx’s spaced-out face. Linehan knows he was never supposed to get this far. He should have been nailed once he’d helped bring down the Elevator. He was a loose end that should have been snipped. In a way he was. It’s almost like everything that’s happened since has been part of some fucked-up afterlife. As though the tunnel beneath the Atlantic was really the journey to the underworld.

And back. Because four days ago he made it through the temple of the Jaguars and out into a whole new world. And yet it’s ended up being a lot like the life from which he’d been spat. New bosses, old bosses—makes no difference in the end. The higher you get, the more dangerous you are to those you serve and the more lethal your missions become. Living on the edge—and Linehan has been there so long he wonders if he was ever anywhere else. It’s all he has, this crazy game where the rules change as fast as you can make them up. He’s had his mind blown these last few days. He never knew how good he was until he went rogue from SpaceCom—never dreamed he’d be capable of pulling it off with no cards to show and even fewer to play.

And now he has to go and do it one more time. He remembers the Throne’s briefing. The president said the Rain were gone, but that they’d so shaken up the world it was about to go over the cliff anyway. He looked at Linehan and said
soldier, you’re a hero
. He said,
I need you on the moon
. Linehan remembers saying
sir, yes, sir
. Remembers asking where was Spencer.

Which is when the Throne told him he’d be working with Lynx this time, that Spencer’s one hell of a razor, but
that Lynx is even better. Linehan just shrugged. He liked Spencer. Loved him, even—loved to hate him, really—and he worries that with the guy gone maybe his luck’s run out at last.

Which would be a shame. Because coming back to L2 is coming back to where it all began. He trained there, came up through the ranks there. And it was the machinations of L2 that left him on Earth running for his life. Now he’s back to take the life of the man who once controlled his. The Throne said he can retire once that’s happened. Linehan has some vague notion of what such a life would be like: a life without someone to pursue, a life without someone to run from. He has some idea of just heading out to Mars—just rigging a hab halfway up some mountain and spending his days watching red sprawl below and universe cruise by overhead. He knows that’ll never happen. He knows what happens to those who live by the sword. He wants it no other way.