The Infinite Sea (30 page)

70

IN THE BATHROOM,
the gush becomes a stream, the stream becomes a trickle, the trickle becomes an anemic dribble. The water slows and my heart quickens. My paranoia was getting the better of me. A decade passed while I waited for the water to be cut off: the go signal from Razor.

The hall outside is deserted. I already know that thanks to Claire’s tracking device. I also know exactly where I’m going.

Stairs. One flight down. One last promise. I pause long enough on the landing to slip Jumbo’s sidearm into the jacket pocket.

Then I slam through the door and hit the hall running. Straight ahead is the nurses’ station. I sprint straight toward it. The nurse pops out of her chair.

“Take cover!” I shout. “It’s going to blow!”

I swerve past the counter and race toward the swinging doors that lead to the ward.

“Hey!” she shouts. “You can’t go back there!”

Any day now, Razor.

She hits the lockdown button on her desk. It doesn’t matter. I hurtle into the doors at full speed and smash both off their hinges.

“
Freeze!
” she screams.

The entire length of the hallway remains; I won’t make it. I’ve been enhanced, but I can’t outrun a bullet. I skitter to a halt.

Razor, I’m serious. Now would be a very good time.

“Hands on your head!
Now.
” Struggling to catch her breath. “Good job. Now walk toward me,
backward.
Slow. Very slow, or I swear to God I’ll shoot you.”

I obey, shuffling toward the sound of her voice. She orders me to stop. I stop. I’m still, but the mechanisms inside me aren’t. Her position is fixed: I don’t have to see her to know exactly where she’s standing. The hub’s dispatched the managers of my muscular and nervous systems to execute the directive when called upon. I won’t have to think when the time comes. The hub will take over.

But I won’t owe my life entirely to the 12th System: It was my idea to grab Jumbo’s jacket.

And that reminds me:

“Shoes,” I murmur.

“What did you say?” Her voice is quivering.

“I need shoes. What size are you?”

“Huh?”

At the speed of light the hub’s signal fires. My body doesn’t move quite that fast, but double the speed that is probably necessary.

Right hand jams into Jumbo’s baggy sleeve, where I slipped the ten-inch knife, pivot to the left, then throw.

And down she goes.

I pull the knife from her neck, slide the bloody blade back into the left sleeve of the jacket, and check out her shoes. A pair of those white, thick-soled nurse’s shoes. A half size too big, but they’ll work.

At the end of the hallway, I step into the last room on the right. It’s dark, but my eyes have been enhanced: I can see her clearly in the bed, fast asleep. Or doped. I’ll have to determine which.

“Teacup? It’s me. Ringer.”

The thick, dark lashes flutter. I’m so jacked up by this point, I swear I can hear the tiny hairs thrumming the air.

She whispers something without opening her eyes. Too soft for the unenhanced to hear, but the auditory bots transmit the information to the hub, which relays it to the inferior colliculus, the hearing center of my brain.

“You’re dead.”

“Not anymore. And neither are you.”

71

THE WINDOW BESIDE
the bed jiggles in its frame. The floor quivers. Bright orange light floods the room, winks out, then an earsplitting roar and a fine mist of plaster floating down from the ceiling. The sequence repeats. Then again. Then again.

Razor’s hit the magazine building.

“Teacup, we have to go.” I slide one hand behind her head and lift gently.

“Go where?”

“As far as we can.”

Bracing the back of her head with one hand, I hit her in the forehead with the heel of the other. The precise amount of force, no more, no less. Her body goes limp. I heave her out of the bed. Another blast as the ordnance in the magazine continues to detonate. I kick out the window. Bitter cold air crashes into the room. I sit on the sill facing the bed, cradling Teacup against my chest. My intent alerts the hub: I’m two stories above the ground. Reinforcements race to the bones and tendons in my feet, ankles, shins, knees, and pelvis.

We deploy.

I flip as we drop, like a cat falling off a countertop. We land safely, like a cat, except Teacup’s head bounces up on impact and smacks me hard under the chin. In front of us the hospital. Behind us the blazing ammunition storehouse. And to our right, exactly where Razor said it would be, the black Dodge M882.

I throw open the door, shove Teacup into the passenger seat, jump behind the wheel, and take off across the parking lot, cutting hard to the left to make the turn north toward the airfield. A siren screams. Floodlights blare. In the rearview mirrors, emergency vehicles race toward the burning magazine. The fire brigade will have a hard time of it since
someone
has shut down the pumping station.

Another hard left, and now straight ahead are the hulking bodies of the Black Hawks, glistening like the bodies of black beetles in the harsh light of the floods. I grip the wheel hard and take a deep breath. This is the trickiest part. If Razor couldn’t kidnap a pilot, we’re all screwed.

A hundred yards away, I see someone jump from one of the choppers’ holds. He’s wearing a heavy parka and toting an assault rifle. His face is partially obscured by the hood, but I’d know that smile anywhere.

I hop from the M882.

And Razor says, “Hi.”

“Where’s the pilot?” I ask.

He jerks his head toward the cockpit. “I got mine. Where’s yours?”

I pull Teacup from the truck and jump inside the chopper. A guy wearing nothing but a drab green T-shirt and a matching pair of boxer shorts sits behind the controls. Razor slides into the copilot seat beside him.

“Fire her up, Lieutenant Bob.” Razor grins at the pilot. “Oh. Manners. Ringer, Lieutenant Bob. Lieutenant Bob, Ringer.”

“There’s no way this is going to work,” Lieutenant Bob says. “They’ll come after us hard.”

“Yeah? What’s this?” Razor holds up a mass of tangled electrical wire.

The pilot shakes his head. So cold, his lips are turning blue. “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I, but I’m guessing they’re very important for the proper operation of a helicopter.”

“You don’t understand . . .”

Razor leans toward him and all his playfulness is gone. His deep-set eyes burn as if backlit and the coiled force I sensed from the beginning springs free with such ferocity, I actually flinch.

“Listen to me, you alien sonofabitch, you fire this mother-effing stick buddy up ASAP or I’m—”

The pilot shoves his hands into his lap and stares straight ahead. After getting one into the chopper undetected, my biggest concern was getting a pilot to cooperate. I lean forward, grab Bob by the wrist, and bend his pinky finger backward.

“I’ll break it,” I promise him.

“Go ahead!”

I break it. His teeth clamp down on his bottom lip. His legs jerk. His eyes swim with tears. That shouldn’t happen. I press my fingers against the back of his neck, then turn to Razor.

“He’s implanted. He isn’t one of them.”

“Yeah, well, who the hell are
you
?” the pilot squeals.

I pull the tracking device from my pocket. There’s the hospital and the magazine surrounded by a swarm of green dots. And there are three dots glowing on the airstrip.

“You cut yours out,” I say to Razor.

He’s nodding. “And left it under my pillow. That was the plan. Or was that the plan? Shit, Ringer, wasn’t that the plan?” A little panicky.

I drop the knife into my hand. “Hold him.”

Razor understands immediately. He grabs Lieutenant Bob and puts him in a headlock. Bob doesn’t put up much resistance. I worry now that he might go into shock. If he does, it’s over.

There isn’t much light and Razor can’t hold him perfectly still, so I tell Bob to chill or I might sever his spinal cord, adding paralysis to the problem of a broken finger. I pull out the pellet, toss it onto the tarmac, yank Bob’s head back, and whisper in his ear, “I’m not the enemy and I haven’t gone Dorothy. I’m just like you—”

“Only better,” Razor finishes. He glances through the window and says, “Uh, Ringer . . .”

I see them: The glow of headlights expanding like a pair of stars going supernova. “They’re coming, and when they get here, they will kill us,” I tell Bob. “You too. They won’t believe you and they will kill you.”

Bob stares into my face, tears of pain streaming down his.

“You have to trust me,” I say.

“Or she’ll break another finger,” Razor adds.

A deep, shuddering breath, shaking uncontrollably, cradling his wounded hand, blood trickling down his neck and soaking into the collar of his T-shirt. “It’s hopeless,” he whispers. “They’ll just shoot us down.”

On impulse, I reach forward and press my hand against his cheek. He doesn’t recoil. He becomes very still. I don’t understand why I touched him or what’s happening now that I am, but I feel something opening inside me, like a bud spreading its delicate petals toward the sun. I’m freezing cold. My neck is on fire. And the little finger on my right hand throbs to the beat of my heart. The pain brings tears to my eyes.
His
pain.

“Ringer!” Razor barks. “What the hell are you
doing
?”

I pour my warmth into the man I touch. I douse the fire. I caress the pain. I soothe his fear. His breath evens out. His body relaxes.

“Bob, we really have to go,” I tell him.

And two minutes later, we do.

72

AS WE ASCEND,
the truck screeches to a stop and a tall man steps out, and his face is a study in deep shadows thrown by the floods, but I see his eyes with eyes enhanced, bright and hard like the crows’ in the woods, polished blue while the crows’ were black, and it must be a trick of light or shadow, the small, tight smile he seems to wear.

“Keep us low,” I order Bob.

“Where are we going?”

“South.”

The chopper banks; the ground rushes toward us. I see the magazine burning and the spinning lights of the fire trucks and recruits swarming around like ants. We pass over a river, black water sparking in the spillover light from the floods. Behind us now, the camp is an oasis of light in a desert of winter dark. We plunge into that dark, skimming six feet above the treetops.

I slide into the seat next to Teacup, lean her into my chest, and pull her hair to one side. I hope this is the last time I have to do this. When I’m done, I crush the implant with the heel of the knife.

Razor’s voice squawks in my headset: “How’s she doing?”

“Okay, I think.”

“How’re
you
doing?”

“Good.”

“Glitches?”

“Minor. You?”

“Smooth as a newborn baby’s ass.”

I ease Teacup back into the seat, stand up, and open compartments until I find the chutes. Razor rattles on as I check the assemblies.

“Anything you want to say to me? Like, I don’t know,
Thank you, Razor, for saving my ass from a lifetime of alien servitude after I punched you in the throat and generally acted like a douchebag
? Something along those lines? You know, it wasn’t exactly like taking a walk in baseball, secret codes embedded in bogus games and slipping laxative in pudding and rigging explosives and stealing trucks and kidnapping pilots with fingers for you to break. Maybe
Hey, Razor, I couldn’t have done it without you. You rock.
Something like that. Doesn’t have to be word-for-word, just something to capture the general spirit.”

“Why did you?” I ask. “What made you decide to trust me?”

“What you said that day about the kids—turning kids into bombs. I did some asking around. Next thing I know, I’m in the Wonderland chair and then they take me to the commander and he’s all down on my ass about something
you
said, and he orders me to stop talking to you because he can’t order me to stop
listening,
and the more I think about it, the stinkier it gets. They train us to terminate Teds and then load down toddlers with alien ordnance? Who’re the good guys here? And then I’m like, who am
I
here? It got really angsty, a real existential crisis. What tipped it for me, though, was the math.”

“Math?”

“Yeah, math. Aren’t all you Asians really good at math?”

“Don’t be racist. And I’m three-quarters Asian.”

“‘Three-quarters.’ See?
Math.
It comes down to simple addition. As in it doesn’t add up. Okay, so maybe we get lucky and seize the Wonderland program from them. Even super-superior aliens can screw up, nobody’s perfect. But we don’t just snatch Wonderland. We have their bombs, we have their track-and-kill implants, their super-sophisticated nanobot system—shit, we even have the technology capable of
detecting them.
Wha duh fuh? We’ve got more of their weapons than they do! But the real kicker came that day they jacked you up, when Vosch said they lied to us about the organism attached to human brains. Unbelievable!”

“Because if that’s a lie . . .”

“Then everything’s a lie.”

Below us the land is covered in a blanket of white. The horizon is indiscernible in the dark, lost.
Everything is a lie.
I thought of my dead father telling me that I belonged to them now. Instinctively, I gather Teacup’s little hand into mine:
truth.

I hear Bob say in the headset, “I’m confused.”

“Relax, Bob,” Razor says. “Hey,
Bob.
Wasn’t that the major’s name at Camp Haven? What’s it with officers and the name Bob?”

An alarm sounds. I return Teacup’s hand to her lap and shuffle forward. “What is it?”

“Company,” Bob says. “Six o’clock.”

“Choppers?”

“Negative. F-15s. Three of them.”

“How much time before they’re in range?”

He shakes his head. Despite the cold, his shirt is soaked in sweat. His face shines with it. “Five to seven.”

“Bring us up,” I tell him. “Maximum altitude.”

I grab a couple parachute rigs and drop one into Razor’s lap.

“We’re bailing?” he asks.

“We can’t engage and we can’t outrun. You’re with Teacup. Tandem jump.”

“I’m with Teacup? Who are you with?”

Bob glances at the other rig in my hand. “I’m not bailing,” he says. And then, just in case I didn’t hear or don’t understand: “I’m. Not. Bailing.”

No plan is perfect. I’d planned for a Silencer Bob, which meant my plan entailed killing him before we bailed from the chopper. Now it’s complicated. I didn’t kill Jumbo for the same reason I don’t want to kill Bob. Kill enough Jumbos, murder enough Bobs, and you’ve plunged to the same depths as the ones who shove a bomb down a toddler’s throat.

I shrug to hide my uncertainty. Toss the rig into his lap. “Then I guess you get incinerated.”

We’re at five thousand feet. Dark sky, dark ground, no horizon, all dark. The bottom of the lightless sea. Razor is looking at the radar screen, but he says to me, “Where’s your chute, Ringer?”

I ignore the question. “Can you give me a sixty-second ETA on their range?” I ask Bob. He nods. Razor asks the question again. “It’s math,” I tell him. “Which I’m three-quarters really good at. If there are four of us and they mark two chutes, that leaves at least one of us on board. One, maybe two of them will stay with the chopper, at least until they can take it down. It’ll buy time.”

“What makes you think they’ll stay with the chopper?”

I shrug. “It’s what I’d do.”

“Still doesn’t answer my question about your chute.”

“They’re hailing us,” Bob announces. “Ordering us to set it down.”

“Tell them to suck it,” Razor says. He stuffs a piece of bubble gum into his mouth. Taps his ear. “Popping’s bad.” Jams the gum wrapper into his pocket. Notices I’m watching and smiles. “Never noticed all the crap in the world until there was nobody left to pick it up,” he explains. “The Earth is my charge.”

Then Bob calls out, “Sixty seconds!”

I tug on Razor’s parka.
Now.

He looks up at me and says slowly and distinctly, “Where’s your freaking chute?”

I haul him out of the seat one-handed. He chirps in surprise, stumbling toward the back. I follow him, squat in front of Teacup to remove her harness.

“Forty seconds!”

“How are we going to find you?” Razor yells, standing right next to me.

“Head for the fire.”

“What fire?”

“Thirty seconds!”

I haul open the hatch door. The blast of air that punches into the hold blows Razor’s hood off his head. I scoop up Teacup and press her into his chest.

“Don’t let her die.”

He nods.

“
Promise.
”

Nods again: “I promise.”

“Thank you, Razor,” I say. “For everything.”

He leans forward and kisses me hard on the mouth.

“Don’t ever do that again,” I tell him.

“Why? Because you liked it or because you didn’t?”

“Both.”

“Fifteen seconds!”

Razor maneuvers Teacup over his shoulder, grabs the safety cable, and shuffles back until his heels touch the jump pad. Silhouetted in the opening, the boy and the child over the boy’s shoulder, and five thousand feet beneath them, the limitless dark.
The Earth is my charge.

Razor releases the cable. He doesn’t seem to fall. He is sucked out into the ravenous void.