My left hand tingled. It tingled all the time, and it was cold, like the blood was cut off. I woke up to it every day. I stared in the dark and listened to the whispering.
It was still dark. I was still in the med unit, and I was still on dope. Nico managed not to kill me getting the bomb out, but he left a hell of a hole.
When I was out, I dreamed I was back in Juba. My left arm was a stump, and I grabbed my hand off the floor and threw it. The mob went for it. They fought over it and ate it. The crunching sound was burned into my brain, but in the dream, all I heard was a hiss. It was like static. When I woke up, I could still hear it. It was like a sound from deep in my head. Quiet, but steady. It made me think of voices, all whispering.
I thought it was the drugs at first. It wasn’t the drugs.
What the fuck did you do to me, Buckster?
Someone knocked on the door. I figured it was the nurse on duty, but when the door cracked, it was Wachalowski’s ugly mug I saw. He had one arm in a sling and stitches over one eye. There was stubble on his face, and he looked older than usual.
“You’re awake,” he said.
“That your FBI training?” He smiled, even though I could see it hurt.
“Can I come in?”
“Knock yourself out.”
He came in and closed the door behind him. He pulled up a chair next to my bed and sat down.
“How are you feeling?”
“How do you think?”
The whole thing got messed up. It was supposed to be easy. It was cakewalk; he was an old man. I thought I’d get in good with the Feds. I thought I’d get in good with him.
“I’m sorry, Cal.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I should never have—”
“Oh, shut the hell up,” I said. “Is that why you’re here? Because you think this is your fault? Because you feel bad?”
“No.”
“Because I swear I will fucking pop you—”
“That’s not why I came. I wanted to see how you were.”
“What are you, my dad?” I didn’t really know what I was talking about, though. I never had a dad. He didn’t answer anyway. He just smiled again, and I thought he looked relieved. It hit me, then, how tired he looked.
“I’m just glad you’re still here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”
He was quiet for a minute, and I added, “I like you too. Fucker.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“You can get me the hell out of here.”
“You’re going to be here a little while. Sorry.”
I shrugged.
“It beats being dead. Thanks for coming to get me.”
“You’re welcome.”
“So, is it over?”
“No.”
“It never is.”
I looked up at him, and watched the orange light flicker in his pupils. In my head, those voices whispered. It was like wind.
“I hear things,” I told him. “In my head. I don’t think it’s from the JZI.”
He made a cutting motion across his throat, shutting me up. His face got serious.
It’s not from the JZI.
Then what? What do you know?
Something happened back on the boat.
What?
We were about to get mobbed. The revivors were homing in on you, and I needed you out to make the cut. I stopped your heart.
You stopped my heart?
I was counting on the JZI to revive you. It did—
How long was I out?
Not long. Your heart began to beat again, obviously, but for a few minutes your vitals were flat.
Are you saying I was dead?
For a few minutes, yes.
“A few minutes?” I snapped. He made the cutting motion again. “No, don’t fucking shush me—”
Cal, be quiet. It was that or they’d have torn you apart. I didn’t know you’d been injected.
Injected. I remembered Buckster and the case. I remembered the needle they stuck in my neck.
Injected with what?
Fawkes got his hands on an experimental revivor prototype developed at Heinlein Industries. It’s introduced through the injection of a serum. Buckster and his followers were distributing it. You must have been injected with it before I got there.
So what are you saying? What does this mean?
It means you’re wired, Cal. When your heart stopped, it activated. Some kind of connection was formed to a revivor network.
I can’t be wired.
I’m sorry. You are. If you die now, you’ll come back.
My teeth went on edge. My dead hand made a fist.
They can’t do that.
They did do it.
Well, fucking undo it.
I’m working on that.
Working on it?
I don’t know for sure what we’re dealing with yet. Just keep it quiet for now.
I can’t keep it quiet. It’s talking in my fucking head. Get it the fuck out.
“Cal, calm down,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder and eased me back. “Calm down. I will. Understand?”
My heart was pounding, but my gut hurt and I felt dizzy. I nodded.
“I’ll come get you in the morning,” he said. “We’ll figure it out from there.”
I nodded again.
I don’t want to come back.
I won’t let that happen.
Promise me.
“I promise,” he said. It was easy for him to say, but I believed him. I felt a little better, knowing he had my back.
“You’ve got a few hours left before sunup,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”
I sighed and settled back. I think the drip was kicking in again. I watched him get up and walk back to the door. My brain still buzzed, even through the morphine. When I was sure he was down the hall, I cracked the bed frame with my fist.
Sleep.
I didn’t scare easy. I wasn’t so dumb I never got scared, but I didn’t scare easy. I never was scared to die, not in Bullrich and not in Juba, but lying in that bed, I was scared. I was scared to die.
I won’t let that happen.
My heart was beating fast. I tried to slow it down, but I couldn’t.
You better not, Nico.
You better not let me come back.
“Zoe,” a voice said.
It was dark, and I felt weightless. My arms and legs floated in the warmth that surrounded me. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt totally relaxed. I felt totally content.
“Zoe …”
I opened my eyes just a little. Nico was there. He wore slacks and a white undershirt. His clothes and his shoelaces kind of floated around him like he was underwater. His arms were out by his sides and his body was limp, like he was suspended in space. One of his arms was normal, but the other one, the one with the tattoo, was a totally different color. The skin was gray, and I could see black veins bulging underneath.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“It’s not too late,” he said.
“Too late for what?”
He didn’t answer; he just stared at me. His shirt moved, and I could see where the gray arm joined the rest of his body. There was a clean seam there, but the black veins had started to cross it and branch under his regular skin. When he opened his mouth, I could see blood on his teeth. It began to slowly drift out from between his lips, forming a cloud. I was floating too. We were both underwater, but we could both still breathe.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked him.
“It’s not too late to save them,” he said.
“They’re already saved,” I told him. “The ship blew up. We fixed it.”
Nico shook his head slowly.
The blood coming out of his mouth was turning everything pink. It started to get darker, until he seemed to turn red in front of me.
“You can still save them.”
I opened my mouth to ask who, when his face changed. His eyes bugged out and his mouth opened wide like he was trying to scream. His body convulsed in the water, muscles standing out under the skin.
“Nico?”
Black dots appeared in the whites of his eyes and began to bleed like ink blots.
“Nico!”
All at once his face collapsed, the skin pulling tight against the skull underneath until I couldn’t recognize him anymore. I screamed as his lips peeled back to show teeth and bloody gums. His eyes bulged as the skin around them sank back into the sockets. The skin around his neck wrinkled, and the whole base of his skull melted away underneath the skin.
He reached out for me, his misshapen head bobbing on the end of what was left of his shriveled neck, as black clouds began to bleed into the water around us.
I tried to scream again, but I couldn’t breathe. When I tried to take a breath I choked, and panic pricked in my chest.
I can’t breathe….
Thrashing, I began to hear a low rumbling sound. Above me, I could hear water splashing. I opened my eyes all the way and he was gone. The blood was gone and the darkness was gone too. There was light up over my head, rippling like it was on the surface of the water. There was smooth plastic under the palms of my hands, and when I kicked, my heel thumped against something hard.
Pushing off the floor, my face broke the surface of the water and I gasped. I was sitting in a tub full of warm water. It was bubbling around me. I started coughing until water dribbled out of my mouth and nose. Where the hell was I?
Looking around, I saw I was still sitting in the hot tub where Penny and I were hanging out the night before. There were empty bottles and glasses sitting on the marble edge of it. I held up my hands and saw that they were wrinkled like prunes.
I must have passed out. I’d passed out and slid underwater. How long had I been down there? I could have drowned.
“What was that?” I gasped. “What the hell was that?” I tried to stand, but the heat had me woozy. It took a minute for me to get myself up onto the edge. The marble was cold on my butt as I swiveled my legs out and put my feet down on the floor.
I slipped and almost fell, but I managed to grab the sink in time. My body felt like it weighed a ton. In the mirror, I saw that my face was dark red.
When I got my balance back, I let go of the sink and peeled off my bathing suit. I tossed it on the floor and took one of the big, white robes off the hook on the bathroom door. It was cool and soft when I wrapped it around myself.
I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. In the living room, I could hear Penny snoring on the couch. My stomach turned when the cool air hit me, and my hands started to shake a little. I ducked back into the bathroom and found an open flask that sloshed when I shook it. I tipped it back and swallowed until no more came out. It burned going down, and my stomach rolled, but it didn’t reject it. After a minute, it calmed down and I started to feel a little better, but I couldn’t get the image of Nico’s deformed head out of my mind.
What was that? We fixed this. We won.
The TV in the living room was on, but Penny was passed out, still in her bathing suit. I tossed a blanket over her and plodded off to the computer room, where the database was still up on the computer. The shades were drawn, and the lines of light around them were gray. I pulled up the chair and fell into it.
I brought up the database model and stared at it. Nothing looked any different, but it was hard to tell. The huge fractal shape looked the same, and the big dark spot in the middle was still there. The bright star still sat on the rim. Did it not work?
I tried to remember everything Penny had said the night before, but it was fuzzy. From what I could piece together, the ship they kept talking about blew up before it got to shore. Stopping the people on the ship was important. It was so important, they’d sacrificed that woman, the mean one from the elevator …element two, they called her. But that’s what she was for, wasn’t it? Hadn’t Penny said that?
There was a bottle sitting on the desktop, and I grabbed it. I took a swig from it and sighed. My throat ached and my eyes watered.
I brought up the data miner and punched in NICO and REVIVOR. That got a bunch of hits. My hand shook as I called some out on the screen at random and skimmed the passages:
Element Three will be immune to phasing, similar to a revivor, though still alive….
Most likely candidate is Wachalowski, Nico …
…I was not able to successfully influence him, although he could still be read …
…aspects of a revivor, in both mind and body … One entry included a scan of a charcoal drawing someone had done. It didn’t look exactly like Nico, but it was close. His right arm was joined to his body with stitches, and there were black veins branching under the skin.
…will destroy Element Zero.
There was nothing about what I’d just seen; the arm was the same, but there was nothing about his face changing like it did. I tried again, typing in “black” and “eyes,” but that brought up too many references. The ones I bothered to look at talked about bruises, shiners. I typed “face,” and then got stuck. My hands shook as I held them over the keypad.
“Bad dream?” I heard Penny say. I turned and saw her in the doorway, the blanket around her shoulders like a cape.
“Sorry,” I said. “Did I wake you up?”
“No.”
She crossed the room and stood beside me, looking at the screen. She looked at my search history for a minute, then reached over my shoulder and typed with one hand. She erased “face,” and entered something else in:
VAGOTT DEFORMATION
The miner spun around for a few seconds, and then three green points appeared. Like the hits I’d gotten on the green room, all three were inside the dark center of the cloud.
My heart thumped in my chest as I touched one of the entries. The image that popped up made me jump in my chair.
“That’s it,” I whispered. It was just a drawing, but the face was the same as Nico’s had been in the vision; head collapsed like a rotten fruit, on the end of a bent-stick neck. The whites of the eyes were dotted with black spots, and the lips were peeled back over long, crowded teeth. He was dressed in some kind of military uniform, with a name patch on it that read VAGOTT.
“I guess it was a bad dream,” Penny said, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to me.
“What does it mean?”
“No one knows,” she said. “Almost no one’s ever seen it. That’s the best lead we’ve had, and it’s not much.”
“Lead for what?”
“Stuff that happens in the void happens after what Ai calls the Event,” she said, pointing. “It’s empty because no one ever reports seeing anything from that point on.”
“Because they’re dead,” I said.
“Worse than that,” she said. “Nothing phases past that point, which means, if Ai is right, that of all the possible outcomes, almost nothing ever gets through. That’s a pretty big hole.”
“So it’s the end of everything? Forever?”
Penny shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “But for us, and everyone walking parallel …maybe we’re doomed to make the same mistakes.”
I stared back at the screen. The dots stood out, very close to where the entries for the green room were stored. So far, nothing on the other side of the rim looked worth surviving for, but if I’d seen it …
“I thought we stopped it,” I said. Penny squeezed my shoulder.
“Hey, the nukes didn’t go off,” she said. “That seems to trigger the rest, so who knows? Things don’t change overnight. Give it time.”
I nodded, but a bad feeling had wormed its way inside of me, and I couldn’t shake it. Even when I drank most of the rest of the bottle, it didn’t budge. I recognized the uniform Vagott was wearing; I’d seen it before in one of my visions. I’d seen it the last time I was in the green room.
A group of uniformed men came down the hall toward the door, shoving a man in handcuffs ahead of them. Behind them I’d seen a woman, partly in shadow …a small, skinny woman with her hair in a bun, and a beaklike nose. I never got a good look at her face, but it was me.
I was sure it was me.
Four hours after the Senopati Nusantara was destroyed, and two hours after I left Calliope in the hospital, I sat behind a locked door in the Federal Building. Alice Hsieh stood against the wall next to me, her arms crossed in front of her as we watched a display monitor mounted on the wall. In the corner of the ceiling to the left of it, the interrogation room’s camera hung from its wire, unplugged.
On the screen, a recording of one of the many JZI feeds taken from the MSST helicopter showed a clear shot of me standing on the deck while Faye ran through the rain toward me. I watched as Faye grabbed my jacket then tiptoed up to kiss me on the mouth. With the revivor’s black lips pressed against mine, Alice froze the frame.
“You want to explain that?” she asked.
“Believe me, I wish I could.”
I’d thought a lot about that incident since we’d lifted off and the boat sank below us. If I was dosed with truth serum, which could happen before the debriefing was over, I might admit that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Faye’s lips were smooth and dry. When she flicked her tongue between my teeth for that one second, it felt cool against mine. The body armor saved me from the shots she’d fired, but I still wasn’t sure if she’d intended to kill me or not. When she’d said ‘this is for the best,’ did she mean my death, or Fawkes’s escape?
“That revivor has been identified as Faye Dasalia. Do you know that name?”
“You know I do.”
“Then you also remember going through illegal channels to have her body delivered to a secret location inside the city where you personally revived her.”
I nodded.
“You stated at that time that this revivor was destroyed in the factory fire.”
“I said it was most likely destroyed in the fire.”
“When, in fact, you knew damn well it had not been.”
“I didn’t know that.” If she decided to take the gloves off, it would come out that I’d tried to find her since she’d disappeared. That wouldn’t look good.
Alice took a seat next to me and leaned close. She stared into my eyes, and I watched that dark blind spot drift across her face.
“Don’t wait for me to try it,” she said in a low voice. “I know it won’t work.”
“Cards right on the table, huh?”
“Look,” she said. “Sean is dead. I know you’d learned his little secret, and I know that, in spite of that, you still trusted him, and even liked him. I’m taking over his responsibilities, and you’re going to be working with me now. How that goes is going to be partly up to you.”
“Sean had my back. He wasn’t my shadow.”
“He watched out for you,” she said. “That’s all he ever tried to do. I can do the same thing.”
“I don’t need a chaperone.” She smiled.
“Think of me as your wingman,” she said. “The partner you’re inevitably going to get assigned? Think of him as your shadow.”
“I won’t partner with someone I know is reporting on me.”
“Then you’re free to quit,” she said. “Leave the bureau. But I’ll promise you this—certain people think you’re significant, and we’ll be keeping an eye on you, if we have to lock you away somewhere to do it.”
I stared at the screen and the image of Faye with her lips on mine. Alice was serious. I had no doubts about that.
“This is bigger than you,” she continued. “You can’t hide from us. We already know what you eat for breakfast, so it’s a safe bet we know about your old girlfriend, and that secret deal Fawkes tried to make with you.”
“I never considered that offer.”
“The way I see it, you’ve got three options: you can trust that we know what we’re doing and that stopping Fawkes is the right thing, you can trust that Fawkes is right and team up with him, or you can try to just check out—leave the bureau and walk away. Only one of those options is going to result in you walking around a free man.”
She wasn’t bluffing. If she wanted to, she could have me detained and held indefinitely. But I didn’t think that was her plan.
“What’s it going to be?” she asked. “You know how Fawkes wanted this to play out. If you won’t trust us, can we at least agree that his way can’t happen?”
“We can agree on that, yes.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded.
“We didn’t stop him,” I said.
“I know.”
“The rest of the nukes and his army might have been destroyed along with that ship, but he still has one card left to play.”
“Project Huma,” she said. “I know.”
When I’d used the device MacReady had Bhadra smuggle to me, I’d picked up hundreds of nodes. They hadn’t been activated yet, but for them to be useful to Fawkes, he must have some way to kill them and bring them back quickly.
“The attack on Concrete Falls was two months ago, and already he’s injected close to six hundred people,” I said. “If it works the way it’s supposed to, that’s six hundred revivors he could have inside the city, under his command, at any time.”
She nodded.
“He won’t use Second Chance as a front again, but he’ll set up his operation somewhere else,” I said. “Every day that goes by, he’ll add more to his ranks.”
“You’re with us, then?”
“Yes.”
She tossed the remote down on the table between us, then sat on the edge. She looked down at me.
“This footage is going to go away,” she said. “It’s going away, because if it doesn’t, you could have fresh charges brought against you and be placed under an internal investigation. We need you free to act.”
She looked a little bit relieved. They needed me, or thought they did. I saw it on Ai’s face in the restaurant when she tried to control me and couldn’t. Even before she told me she’d seen me kill Fawkes, there was something in her eye. I didn’t get what it was at the time, but now I thought maybe it was hope.
You kill Fawkes.
“I’m an agent of the FBI,” I said. “I work for them, not her.”
“Agreed,” she said, “but we’re pulling out the stops on this one. You’ll get everything you need to help track them, and Fawkes, down. We have a long reach, Agent, and we plan to use it. That means control of the city, including local law enforcement and the media. We’ll bring on Stillwell Corps to help cover the ground we need to cover.”
She was expecting an argument, but she didn’t get one. The truth was that even with those steps, finding the people who’d been injected was going to be difficult at best. They were third-tier citizens, and most of them were homeless, transient, or undocumented. Even for those who had a valid identification or address, the clinics that processed them had been destroyed along with their records. They were scattered over a huge area, and six hundred, even six thousand, was a drop in a very big bucket.
“I’ll help you,” I said. “You find the carriers, and I’ll track down Fawkes. This won’t end until he’s stopped.”
Alice nodded. I stood up, and she stood to face me. She held out her hand, and there was a look in her eye, a blind certainty that bothered me. Fanaticism was dangerous. With Fawkes creating new soldiers at a rate of six hundred a month, though, things could get out of hand quickly. There were literally millions of third-tier citizens scattered throughout the city. If he was allowed the resources and the time to make all of those millions rise, there would be no way for anyone to stop them.
I shook her hand, and she smiled faintly.
“You’re doing the right thing,” she said, and all I could think of was the way Motoko had looked at me from across the table the night we met. I remembered how sure she was when she said I would join them, like it was beyond anyone’s control.
Even mine.