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On impulse, I reach forward and press my hand against his cheek. He doesn’t recoil. He becomes very still. I don’t understand why I touched him or what’s happening now that I am, but I feel something opening inside me, like a bud spreading its delicate petals toward the sun. I’m freezing cold. My neck is on fire. And the little finger on my right hand throbs to the beat of my heart. The pain brings tears to my eyes. His pain.
“Ringer!” Razor barks. “What the hell are you doing?”
I pour my warmth into the man I touch. I douse the fire. I caress the pain. I soothe his fear. His breath evens out. His body relaxes.
“Bob, we really have to go,” I tell him.
And two minutes later, we do.
72
AS WE ASCEND, the truck screeches to a stop and a tall man steps out, and his face is a study in deep shadows thrown by the floods, but I see his eyes with eyes enhanced, bright and hard like the crows’ in the woods, polished blue while the crows’ were black, and it must be a trick of light or shadow, the small, tight smile he seems to wear.
“Keep us low,” I order Bob.
“Where are we going?”
“South.”
The chopper banks; the ground rushes toward us. I see the magazine burning and the spinning lights of the fire trucks and recruits swarming around like ants. We pass over a river, black water sparking in the spillover light from the floods. Behind us now, the camp is an oasis of light in a desert of winter dark. We plunge into that dark, skimming six feet above the treetops.
I slide into the seat next to Teacup, lean her into my chest, and pull her hair to one side. I hope this is the last time I have to do this. When I’m done, I crush the implant with the heel of the knife.
Razor’s voice squawks in my headset: “How’s she doing?”
“Okay, I think.”
“How’re you doing?”
“Good.”
“Glitches?”
“Minor. You?”
“Smooth as a newborn baby’s ass.”
I ease Teacup back into the seat, stand up, and open compartments until I find the chutes. Razor rattles on as I check the assemblies.
“Anything you want to say to me? Like, I don’t know, Thank you, Razor, for saving my ass from a lifetime of alien servitude after I punched you in the throat and generally acted like a douchebag? Something along those lines? You know, it wasn’t exactly like taking a walk in baseball, secret codes embedded in bogus games and slipping laxative in pudding and rigging explosives and stealing trucks and kidnapping pilots with fingers for you to break. Maybe Hey, Razor, I couldn’t have done it without you. You rock. Something like that. Doesn’t have to be word-for-word, just something to capture the general spirit.”
“Why did you?” I ask. “What made you decide to trust me?”
“What you said that day about the kids—turning kids into bombs. I did some asking around. Next thing I know, I’m in the Wonderland chair and then they take me to the commander and he’s all down on my ass about something you said, and he orders me to stop talking to you because he can’t order me to stop listening, and the more I think about it, the stinkier it gets. They train us to terminate Teds and then load down toddlers with alien ordnance? Who’re the good guys here? And then I’m like, who am I here? It got really angsty, a real existential crisis. What tipped it for me, though, was the math.”
“Math?”
“Yeah, math. Aren’t all you Asians really good at math?”
“Don’t be racist. And I’m three-quarters Asian.”
“‘Three-quarters.’ See? Math. It comes down to simple addition. As in it doesn’t add up. Okay, so maybe we get lucky and seize the Wonderland program from them. Even super-superior aliens can screw up, nobody’s perfect. But we don’t just snatch Wonderland. We have their bombs, we have their track-and-kill implants, their super-sophisticated nanobot system—shit, we even have the technology capable of detecting them. Wha duh fuh? We’ve got more of their weapons than they do! But the real kicker came that day they jacked you up, when Vosch said they lied to us about the organism attached to human brains. Unbelievable!”
“Because if that’s a lie . . .”
“Then everything’s a lie.”
Below us the land is covered in a blanket of white. The horizon is indiscernible in the dark, lost. Everything is a lie. I thought of my dead father telling me that I belonged to them now. Instinctively, I gather Teacup’s little hand into mine: truth.
