94

EVEN WITH MY ENHANCED SPEED, I won’t be able to reach the stairway door before he does. But with a little luck, I can get within the firing range of an M16.

I’m certain it’s Vosch. Who else could it be? He knows I’m here. He knows why I’m here. Creator to his creation, creature to her creator, that’s our bond. Only one way for me to break it. Only one way to be free.

I explode down the hallway, a human missile. I hear him coming. He must hear me coming.

The range of an M16 is 550 meters, one-third of a mile. The hub calculates my speed and the distance to the stairwell. Not going to happen. I ignore the math and keep running. Nine hundred meters—eight—seven. The processor embedded in my cerebral cortex goes berserk, running the numbers over and over, coming up short, and sending me messages of escalating urgency. Run back. Find cover. No time. No time, no time, notimenotimenotimenotime.

I ignore it. I don’t serve the 12th System. The 12th System serves me.

Unless it decides that it won’t.

The hub pulls the plug on the drones that enhance my muscles: If it can’t stop me, at least it can slow me down. My speed drops. Abandoned, I’m running like an ordinary human. I feel chained and unbound at the same time.

The lights in the hall blaze to life. The stairway door flies open and a tall figure lurches into view. I open fire, charging forward, closing the gap as fast as I can. The figure stumbles, careens against the far wall, and brings up its hands instinctively to cover its face.

I’m in range now—I know it, the enemy knows it, and the hub knows it. It’s over. I lock in on the figure’s head. My finger tightens on the trigger.

Then I see a blue jumpsuit, not a colonel’s uniform. Wrong height. Wrong weight, too. I hesitate for an instant and in that instant the figure lowers its hands.

My first thought is for Cassie—that she suffered Wonderland when Wonderland wasn’t necessary. She risked everything to find him . . . until he found her.

Evan Walker has a knack for finding her; he always has.

I stop a hundred meters away but I don’t lower my rifle. Between his leaving and our reunion, there’s no telling what happened. The hub agrees with me. No risk if he’s dead, enormous risk if he’s not. Whatever value he had is gone now, contained in the consciousness of Cassie Sullivan.

“Where’s Vosch?” I ask.

Without a word, he lowers his head and charges. He’s halved the distance before I open fire, first overriding the hub’s insistence I aim for the head, then its demand I retreat before he reaches me. I put six rounds into his legs, thinking that will drop him. It doesn’t. By the time I give in to the hub’s shrieking command, it’s too late.

He knocks the rifle from my hands. So fast I don’t see the blow coming. Don’t see the next one, either, the fist that smashes into the side of my neck, hurling me into the wall. The concrete cracks on impact.

I blink, and his fingers lock around my throat. Another blink and I break the hold with my left and punch as hard as I can with my right, dead center into his chest to break his sternum and drive the shattered bone into his heart. It’s as if I rammed my fist into a three-inch-thick plate of steel. The bone cracks but does not break.

I blink again, and now my face is pressing against cool concrete and there’s blood in my mouth and blood on the wall I’ve been rammed into—only it isn’t a wall; it’s the floor. I’ve been flung a hundred yards and landed flat on my stomach.

Too fast. He moves faster than the priest at the caverns, faster than Claire in the infirmary bathroom. Faster than Vosch, even. It defies the laws of physics for a human being to move that fast.

Before the alien processor in my brain uses the nanosecond it needs to calculate the odds, I know the outcome:

Evan Walker is going to kill me.

He lifts me from the floor by the ankle and slings me against the wall. The blocks splinter. So do a number of my bones. He doesn’t let go. He smashes my body against the other wall. Back and forth until the concrete breaks apart and rains to the floor in a fall of dusty gray. I don’t feel anything; the hub has shut down my pain receptors. He lifts my body over his head and slams it down against his upraised knee.

I don’t feel my back break but I hear it magnified a thousand times by the auditory drones embedded in my ears.

He drops my limp body to the floor. I close my eyes, waiting for the coup de grâce. At least he’ll make it quick. At least I know that the 12th System’s final gift to me will be a painless death.

He kicks me onto my back. Then he kneels beside me, and his eyes are fathomless pits, black holes that no light can penetrate or escape. Nothing lives in those eyes, neither hate nor rage nor amusement nor the mildest curiosity. Evan Walker’s eyes are as blank as a doll’s, his stare as unblinking.

“There is another,” he says. “Where is it?” His voice is affectless, without a trace of humanity. Whoever Evan Walker was before is gone.

When I don’t answer, the thing that was Evan Walker, with obscene gentleness, cups my face in its hands and slices into my consciousness. The entity raping my soul is itself soulless, alien, other. I can’t pull away; I can’t move at all. With enough time—time that it doesn’t have—the 12th System might be able to repair the damage to my spine, but for now I’m paralyzed. My mouth comes open. No sound comes out.

It knows. It releases me. It rises.

I find my voice, and I scream as loud as I can. “Cassie! Cassie, it’s coming!”

It lumbers down the hall toward the green door.

And the green door will open. She will see him with eyes that have seen all that he’s seen and a heart that’s felt all he has felt. She’ll think he has come to save her—that his love will deliver her once again.

My voice wilts into a pitiful whimper. “Cassie, it’s coming. It’s coming . . .”

No way she hears me. No way for her to know.

I pray she won’t see it coming. I pray that the thing that was once Evan Walker will be quick.