The Infinite Sea (34 page)

82

HE LINGERS BESIDE ME
until our breath evens and our hearts slow, running his fingers through my hair, staring at my face intently as if he cannot leave until he’s memorized every aspect. He touches my lips, my cheeks, my eyelids. Runs the tip of his finger along the length of my nose, around the curve of my ear. His face more in shadow, mine more in light.

“Run,” he whispers.

I shake my head. “I can’t.”

He rises from the cot, but I have the sensation of falling as he remains still. He pulls on his clothes quickly. I can’t read his expression. Razor has closed himself off to me. I am bound inside the emptiness again. I can’t bear it. It will crush me, the absence I lived with for so long that I hardly noticed. Unnoticed until this moment: He showed me how enormous the emptiness was by filling it.

“They won’t catch you,” he presses. “How could they ever catch
you
?”

“He knows I won’t run as long as he has her.”

“Oh Christ. What is she to you, anyway? Is she worth your life? How can one person be worth your whole life?” It’s a question he already knows the answer to. “Fine. Do what you want. Like I care. Like it matters.”

“That’s the lesson they taught us, Razor. What matters and what doesn’t. The one truth at the center of all the lies.”

He picks up his rifle and slings it over his shoulder. He kisses me on the forehead. A blessing. A benediction. Then he picks up the lamp and walks unsteadily to the doorway, the watchman, the caretaker, the one who does not rest or grow weary or falter. He leans against the open door, facing the night, and the sky above him burns with the cold light of ten thousand pyres marking the time ticking down.

“Run,” I hear him say. I don’t think he’s speaking to me. “Run.”

83

ON THE EIGHTH DAY
, the chopper returns for us. I let Razor help with my clothes, but besides a couple of sore ribs and a pair of weak legs, the twelve arrays collectively known as Ringer are fully operational. My face has completely healed; not even a scar remains. On the ride back to the base, Razor sits across from me, studying the floor, looking up at me only once.
Run,
he mouths.
Run.

White land, dark river, the helicopter banks hard, swooping around the control tower at the airfield, close enough for me to see a tall, solitary figure behind the tinted windows. We set down in the same spot from which we took off, another circle complete, and Razor puts his hand on my elbow to guide me into the tower. On the ride to the top, his hand wraps briefly around mine.

“I know what matters,” he says.

Vosch stands at the other end of the room with his back toward us, but I can see his face reflected dimly in the glass. Beside him stands a burly recruit gripping a rifle to his chest with the desperation of someone hanging over a ten-mile-deep gorge by a shoestring. Sitting next to the recruit, wearing the standard-issue white jumpsuit, is the reason I’m here, my victim, my cross, my charge.

Teacup starts to get up when she sees me. The big recruit puts his hand on her shoulder and pushes her back down. I shake my head and mouth to her,
No.

The room is quiet. Razor is on my right side, standing slightly behind me. I can’t see him, but he’s close enough that I can hear him breathing.

“So.” Vosch draws out the word, a prelude. “Have you solved the riddle of the rocks?”

“Yes.”

I see him smile tightly in the dark glass. “And?”

“Throwing a very big rock would defeat the purpose.”

“And what is the purpose?”

“For some to live.”

“That begs the question. You’re better than that.”

“You could have killed all of us. But you didn’t. You’re burning the village in order to save it.”

“A savior. Is that what I am?” He turns to face me. “Refine your answer. Must it be all or nothing? If the goal is to save the village from the villagers, a smaller rock would have achieved the same result. Why a series of attacks? Why the ruses and deceit? Why engineer-enhanced, delusional puppets like Evan Walker? A rock is so much more simple and direct.”

“I’m not sure,” I confess. “But I think it has something to do with luck.”

He stares at me for a long moment. Then he nods. He seems pleased. “What happens now, Marika?”

“You’re taking me to his last known location,” I answer. “You’re dropping me in to track him down. He is an anomaly, a flaw in the system that can’t be tolerated.”

“Really? And how could one poor human pawn pose any danger whatsoever?”

“He fell in love, and love is the only weakness.”

“Why?”

Beside me, Razor’s breath. Before me, Teacup’s uplifted face.

“Because love is irrational,” I tell Vosch. “It doesn’t follow rules. Not even its own rules. Love is the one thing in the universe that’s unpredictable.”

“I would have to respectfully disagree with you on that point,” Vosch says. He looks at Teacup. “Love’s trajectory is entirely predictable.”

He steps close, looming over me, a colossus cut from flesh and bone with eyes clear as a mountain lake boring all the way down to the bottom of my soul.

“Why would I need you to track him or anyone down?”

“You lost the drones that monitor him and all the others like him. He’s off the grid. He doesn’t know the truth, but he knows enough to cause serious damage if he isn’t stopped.”

Vosch raises his hand. I flinch, but his hand comes down on my shoulder, which he squeezes hard, his face glowing with satisfaction. “Very good, Marika. Very, very good.”

And beside me, Razor whispers, “Run.”

His sidearm explodes beside my ear. Vosch backpedals toward the window, but he isn’t hit. The big recruit goes down to his knees, ramming the recoil pad of his rifle against his shoulder, but he isn’t hit, either.

Razor’s target was the smallest thing that is the sum of all things, his bullet the sword that severs the chain that bound me.

The impact hurls Teacup backward. Her head smacks into the counter behind her; her stick-thin arms fly into the air. I whip to my right, toward Razor, in time to see his chest blown apart by the kneeling recruit’s round.

He pitches forward and my arms come up instinctively, but he falls too fast. I can’t catch him.

And his soft, soulful eyes lift up to mine, at the end of a trajectory that even Vosch failed to predict.

“You’re free,” Alex whispers. “
Run.
”

The recruit swings the rifle toward me. Vosch steps between us with an enraged, guttural cry.

The hub lights up the muscular array as I sprint straight for the windows overlooking the landing field, leaping from six feet away and rotating my right shoulder toward the glass.

And then I’m in the open air, falling, falling, falling.

You’re free.

Falling.

84

COVERED IN ASH
and dust, five gray ghosts occupying the woods at dawn.

Megan and Sam finally drifting off to sleep, though more of a passing out than a drifting off. She was clutching Bear to her chest.
Wherever there is someone in need,
Bear said to me,
I will go.

Ben watching the sun rise with his rifle across his lap, silent, wrapped tight with anger and grief, but mostly grief. Dumbo, the practical one, digging in his rucksack for something to eat. And me, wrapped tight, too, with anger and grief, but mostly anger. Hello, good-bye. Hello, good-bye. How many times do I have to relive this cycle? What happened wasn’t hard to figure out; it was just impossible to understand. Evan found the baggie that Sam dropped and blew (literally) both Grace and himself to lime-green oblivion. Which had been Evan’s plan from the beginning, the self-sacrificing, idealistic, alien-human hybrid asshole.

Dumbo came over and asked if I wanted him to take a look at my nose. I asked him how he could miss it. He laughed. “Take care of Ben,” I told him.

“He won’t let me,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “the real wound your medical mojo can’t touch, Dumbo.”

He heard it first (the big ears maybe?), head coming up, looking over my shoulder into the trees: the snap and crackle of the frozen ground breaking and dead leaves crunching. I stood up and swung my rifle toward the sound. In the deep shadows, a lighter shadow moved. A survivor of the crash who followed us here? Another Evan or Grace, a Silencer finding us in his territory? No. Couldn’t be. No Silencer would be caught dead tramping through the woods with all the stealth of a bull in a china shop—or they would be caught dead doing it.

The shadow raised its arms high in the air and I knew—knew before I heard my name—that he’d found me again, keeper of the promise he couldn’t make, the one I had marked with my blood and who had marked me with his tears, a Silencer all right,
my
Silencer, stumbling toward me in the impossibly pure light of a late winter’s sunrise promising spring.

I handed my rifle to Dumbo. I left him. The golden light and the dark trees glistening with ice and the way the air smells on cold mornings. The things we leave behind and the things that never leave us. The world ended once. It will end again. The world ends, then the world comes back. The world always comes back.

I stopped a few steps from him. He stopped, too, and we regarded each other across an expanse wider than the universe, within a space thinner than a razor’s edge.

“My nose is broken,” I said. Damn that Dumbo. Made me self-conscious.

“My ankle’s broken,” he said.

“Then I’ll come to you.”