95

SILENCER

AT THE END of the hall is a green door. On the other side of the green door is a white room. Inside that room its prey is bound to a white chair, the goat tied to a stake, the wounded seal trapped in a powerful current. It will crush her skull. It will rip her heart still beating from her chest with its bare hands. The one Evan Walker had saved on that first day so upon this final day his soulless remains can kill her. There is no irony in this cruelty; there is only cruelty.

But the chair is empty. Its prey has vanished. The Silencer examines the straps that held her arms. Hair, skin, blood. She must have ripped herself free.

It lowers its head, listening. Its hearing is exquisitely acute. It can hear the other human breathing nearly a mile away at the other end of the corridor, the one whose back it had broken, whose bones it had shattered against the concrete walls. It can hear the breaths of the soldiers huddled in safe rooms throughout the base, waiting for the all clear to sound, their quiet voices, the rustle of their uniforms, their galloping hearts. It can hear the electricity thrumming through the wires inside the walls of the room. It sifts through the confusing jumble of noise to isolate its prey. It seeks a single heartbeat, a solitary breath close by; she can’t have gone far.

There is no satisfaction when it pinpoints her location. A shark feels no satisfaction at the detection of the baby seal in the surf.

It lunges from the room on legs it cannot feel: The processor in its brain has nullified the pain from the wounds, and the arterial drones have shut off the flow of blood to the bullets’ entry points. Its legs are as numb as its heart, as insensitive as its mind.

Three doors down, on the right. It stands for a moment outside the door, frozen, hands loose at its sides, head bowed, listening. Somehow its prey had known the combination and entered this room. It does not ponder how she could know the code. It does not pause to consider why the girl was in the white room or what had happened to her there. Where the prey came from and its life before it got there—these things are irrelevant. Beneath the seal’s silhouette on the surface, the beast rockets upward from the deep.

She is close—very close. It hears her breath on the other side of the door. It discerns the beat of her heart. She’s pressing her ear against the door, listening.

The Silencer’s hand draws back, fingers curled into a fist.

Rotating its hips into the blow to maximize force, it smashes its fist through the reinforced door. On the other side the prey recoils, but too late; it catches a handful of her hair. She rips free with a startled scream, leaving behind a wad of curls in its hand.

The Silencer tears the door from its hinges and springs inside. The prey is scrambling across the wet floor, slipping as she goes, between two rows of junction boxes that line either side of the narrow aisle.

It has cornered her in one of the complex’s electrical rooms. There is only one way out, and to escape, she must pass the Silencer—and that will be impossible.

The Silencer does not rush. There is no hurry. It glides across the puddled water deliberately, closing the gap. The prey pauses near the back wall; perhaps she realizes she has nowhere to run, no place to hide, no choice but to turn and face the thing that sooner or later must be faced. She veers to her right and jumps, reaching for a handhold in the three-foot space between the top of a box and the ceiling. Her hand wraps around one of the incoming lines and she hauls herself into the tiny niche.

She’s trapped.

The oldest part of its human brain is alerted before the highly advanced processor embedded in its cerebral cortex: Something is not right.

The Silencer pauses in its charge.

Item: A thick, rust-colored high-voltage cord dangling loose—cut or pulled free from the junction box.

Item: A thin sheet of water covers the floor and pools around its feet.

The processor in its brain cannot slow down time but can slow down the host’s perception of it. In the ache of time grinding to a crawl, the power line falls from the prey’s hand in a graceful, sweeping arc. The light sparks off the exposed wires as they descend languidly as snow.

Too far from the doorway to run. And the boxes on either side of the Silencer are flush with the ceiling; no open space into which it can jump.

The Silencer leaps, extending its body to its full length parallel to the ground, flying a foot above the floor, arm outstretched, fingers spread wide, its only hope to catch the crimson cord before it makes contact with the water.

The line that gracefully falls slips through the Silencer’s fingers. The light glints off the wires as they touch ground, silently, like falling snow.