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“What was that for?”
I kiss him again. Our bodies pressed close. His cold face cradled in my colder hands. I can smell the bubble gum on his breath. The Earth is my charge. We are two pillars rising from an undulating sea of dazzling white. Limitless. Without borders, without boundaries.
He brought me from the tomb. He raised me from the dead. He risked his life so I might have mine. Easier to turn aside. Easier to let me go. Easier to believe the beautiful lie than the hideous truth. After my father died, I built a fortress safe and strong to last a thousand years. A mighty stronghold that crumbles with a kiss.
“Now we’re even,” I whisper.
“Not exactly,” he says hoarsely. “I only kissed you once.”
77
AS WE APPROACH, the complex seems to rise from the snow like a leviathan from the deep. Silos, conveyors, bins, mixers, storage and office buildings, an enormous warehouse twice the size of an airplane hangar, all surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence. It seems creepily symbolic, fitting somehow, for this to end at a concrete plant. Concrete is the omnipresent human signature, our principal artistic medium on the world’s blank canvas: Wherever we went, the Earth slowly disappeared beneath it.
Razor pulls aside a section of the rotting fence for me to duck through. Color high in his cheeks, nose bright red from the cold, soft, soulful eyes darting about. Maybe he feels as exposed as I do in the open, dwarfed by the towering silos and massive equipment, beneath the bright, cloudless sky.
Maybe, though I doubt it.
“Give me your rifle,” I tell him.
“Huh?” He’s clutching the weapon against his chest, trigger finger nervously tapping.
“I’m a better shot.”
“Ringer, I’ve checked it all out. There’s nobody here. It’s perfectly—”
“Safe,” I finish for him. “Right.” I hold out my hand.
“Come on, she’s right over there in the warehouse . . .”
I don’t move. He rolls his eyes, tips his head back to consider the empty sky, looks back at me.
“If they were here, you know we’d already be dead.”
“The rifle.”
“Fine.” He shoves it at me. I pull the rifle from his hands and smash the stock against the side of his head. He drops to his knees, eyes on my face, but there’s nothing in those eyes, nothing at all.
“Fall,” I tell him. He pitches forward and lies still.
I don’t think she’s in the warehouse. There’s a reason he wanted me to go in there, but I don’t believe that reason had anything to do with Teacup. I doubt she’s within a hundred miles of this place. I have no choice, though. A slight advantage with the rifle and Razor neutralized, and that’s all.
He opened up to me when I kissed him. I don’t know how the enhancement opens an empathetic pathway into another human being. Maybe it turns the carrier into a kind of human lie detector, gathering and collating data from a myriad of sensory inputs and funneling it through the hub for interpretation and analysis. However it works, I felt the blank spot inside Razor, a nullity, a hidden room, and I knew something was terribly wrong.
Lies within lies within lies. Feints and counterfeints. Like a desert mirage, no matter how hard you ran toward it, it stayed forever in the distance. Finding the truth was like chasing the horizon.
As I enter the shadow of the building, something loosens inside. My knees begin to shake. My chest aches like I’ve been hit with a battering ram. I can’t catch my breath. The 12th System can sustain and strengthen me, supercharge my reflexes, enhance my senses tenfold, heal me, and protect me against every physical hazard, but there’s nothing my fort
y thousand uninvited guests can do about a broken heart.
Can’t, can’t. Can’t go soft now. What happens when we go soft? What happens?
I can’t go inside. I must go inside.
I lean against the cold metal wall of the warehouse, beside the open door, where darkness dwells, profound as the grave.
78
ROTTEN MILK.
