25

HE SPRINGS TOWARD ME, an explosion of pale pink and black. A flash of tiny teeth, and the gun flies from my hand. The blow breaks my wrist. The next punch, flying faster than even my enhanced eyes can follow, hurls me six feet straight back into the silo. The metal screeches, folds around my body like a taco. Now Constance’s words come home: You’ve reached a conclusion without knowing all the facts.

She wasn’t going into those caves to neutralize survivors. She was going in to silence a Silencer.

Thanks, Connie. You might have told me.

The fact that I don’t die on impact saves my life. The phony priest pauses, cocking his head at me in a weird, birdlike way. I should be dead or at least unconscious. How is it that I’m still standing?

“My! This is . . . curious.”

Neither of us moves for several seconds. I’ve thrown off his game. Stall, Ringer. Wait for Constance to come back.

If Constance comes back.

Constance may be dead.

“I’m not one of you,” I say, pulling free of the metal nook. “Vosch gave me the 12th System.”

His bemused expression doesn’t change, but his shoulders tense. It is the only explanation that makes sense, yet it makes no sense.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” he murmurs. “Why would the commander enhance a human?”

Time to lie. The enemy taught me that great things can be accomplished by the smallest of lies.

“He’s turned on you. He’s given the 12th System to all of us.”

He shakes his head and smiles. He knows I’m full of shit.

“And we’re coming for all of you now,” I go on. “Before the pods can bring you to the ship.”

My rifle lies on the ground a yard from his foot. I don’t know where my sidearm ended up. The knife is very close, lying about halfway between us. He’ll expect me to go for the knife.

Okay, so the lie doesn’t seem to be working. I’ll try the truth, but my hopes aren’t high. “I’m probably wasting my breath here, but you should know that you’re as human as I am. You’re being used, just like they’re using everyone else. Everything you think you know about who you are, everything you remember, is a lie. Everything.”

He nods, smiling at me the way you smile at a crazy person. That’s your cue, Constance. Jump out of the shadows and plunge your knife into his back. But Constance misses her entrance.

“I’m really at a loss,” he says. “What should I do with you?”

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “What I do know is I’m going to take that knife and bleed you out like a pig.”

I don’t look at the knife. I know if I look, I won’t stand a chance—he’ll see through the ruse instantly. By not looking, I force him to look. He glances down only for a second, but a second is longer than I need.

The tip of my steel-toed boot catches him under the chin and his little body flies ten feet before thumping down hard. Before he can get his feet beneath him, the knife leaves my hand and rockets toward his throat; he bats it into the air, then catches the knife on its descent, a move so wickedly graceful, I can’t help but admire it.

I dive for the rifle. He beats me to it. His fist slams into my temple and I fall. My mouth smacks the ground; my upper lip splits open. Here it comes. Now he’ll slit my throat. He’ll pick up the rifle and blow my brains out. I’m a piker, an amateur, a newbie still adjusting to the augmentation he’s lived with since he was thirteen.

He twists a fistful of my hair into his hand and flings me onto my back. Blood filling my mouth, I gag. He towers over me, all five feet three of him, knife in one hand, rifle in the other.

“Who are you?”

I spit the blood from my mouth. “My name is Ringer.”

“Where are you from?”

“Well, I was born in San Francisco—”

He kicks me in the ribs. Not full force. Full force would have punctured a lung or burst my spleen. He doesn’t want to kill me—not yet.

“Why are you here?”

I look into his eyes and answer, “To kill you.”

He flings the rifle away. It sails a hundred yards, arching over the road into the field beyond. He seizes me by the throat and hauls me into the air. My toes leave the ground. His head turns: the curious crow, the alert owl.

Against the next attack there is no defense. His consciousness lances into me, a savage thrust that rips into my mind with such force that my autonomic system shuts down. I am plunged into darkness absolute. No sound, no sight, no sensation. His mind chews through mine, and what I feel in him is a hatred wider than the universe, pure rage and utter disgust and, weird as it sounds, envy.

“Ahhhh,” he sighs. “Who do you seek? Not the ones who were lost. A little girl, a sad, soulful boy. They died that you might live. Yes? Yes. Oh, how lonely you are. How empty!”

I’m holding Teacup against me in the old hotel, fighting to keep her warm. Razor is holding me in the bowels of the base, fighting to keep me alive. It’s a circle, Zombie, bound by fear.

“But there is another,” the priest murmurs. “Hmmm. Do you know? Have you discovered it yet?”

His soft chuckle is cut short. I know why. There’s no guessing: We are one. He’s dredged up Constance and that stupid, vapid soccer-mom smile.

He flings me away like he flung the rifle—disdainfully, a useless piece of human-made garbage. The hub prepares my body for impact. There’s plenty of time for that while I sail through the air.

I smash into the rotten porch railing of the white farmhouse. The wood explodes with a loud wallop as the old boards crack beneath me. I lie still. The world spins.

Worse than the physical beating, though, was the pummeling of my mind. I can’t think. Fragmented, disconnected images explode into being, fade, bloom again. Zombie’s smile. Razor’s eyes. Teacup’s scowl. Then Vosch’s face, cut from stone, massive as a mountain, and the eyes that pierce to the very bottom, that see everything, that know me.

I roll onto my side. My stomach heaves. I throw up on the porch steps until there’s nothing left in my stomach, and then I throw up some more.

You have to get up, Ringer. If you don’t get up, Zombie’s lost.

I try to stand. I fall.

I try to sit up. I keel over.

The Silencer priest felt them inside me—I thought they were gone, I thought I had lost them, but you never lose those who love you, because love is a constant; love endures.

Someone’s arms are lifting me up: Razor’s.

Someone’s hands steady me: Teacup’s.

Someone’s smile is giving me hope: Zombie’s.

I should have told him when I had the chance how much I love the way he smiles.

I rise.

Razor lifting, Teacup steadying, Zombie smiling.

You know what you do when you can’t stand up and march, soldier? Vosch asks. You crawl.