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The stench of the plague is so intense when I step inside that I gag. The olfactory array immediately suppresses my sense of smell. My stomach settles. My eyes clear. The warehouse is twice the size of a football field and sectioned into three ascending tiers. The bottom section, in which I’m standing, had been converted into a field hospital. Hundreds of cots, wads of bedding, and tipped-over carts of medical supplies. Blood everywhere. Glistening in the light streaming through the holes in the partially collapsed ceiling three stories over my head. Frozen sheets of blood on the floor. Blood smeared on the walls. Blood-soaked sheets and pillows. Blood, blood, blood everywhere, but no bodies.
I climb the first set of stairs to the second tier. Supply level: bags of flour and other dry goods, ripped open, contents strewn by rats and other scavengers, stacks of canned goods, jugs of water, barrels of kerosene. Stockpiled in anticipation of winter, but the Red Tsunami caught them first and drowned them in their own blood.
I climb the second set of stairs to the third tier. A column of sunlight cuts through the dusty air like a spotlight. I’ve reached the end. The final level. The platform is littered with corpses, stacked six high in some places, the ones on the bottom wrapped carefully in sheets, the ones closer to the top hastily tossed there, a discordant jumble of arms and legs, a twisted mass of bone and desiccated skin and skeletal fingers grasping uselessly at the empty air.
The middle of the floor has been cleared. A wooden table sits in the center of the column of light. And on the table, a wooden box and, beside the wooden box, a chessboard, set up in an endgame that I instantly recognize.
And then his voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere, like the whisper of distant thunder, impossible to place.
“We never finished our game.”
I reach forward and topple the white king. I hear a sigh like a high wind in the trees.
“Why are you here, Marika?”
“It was a test,” I whisper. The white king on his back, blank stare, the eyes an alabaster abyss looking back at me. “You needed to test the 12th System without me knowing it was a test. I had to believe it was real. It was the only way I’d cooperate.”
“And did you pass?”
“Yes. I passed.”
I turn my back to the light. He’s standing at the top of the stairs, alone, face in shadow, though I swear I can see his bright blue, birdlike eyes glittering in the charnel dark.
“Not quite yet,” he says.
I aim the rifle at the space between those glittering eyes and pull the trigger. The clicks echo from the empty chamber: Click, click, click, click, click, click.
“You’ve come so far, Marika. Don’t disappoint me now,” Vosch says. “You must have known it wouldn’t be loaded.”
I drop the rifle and shuffle backward until I knock against the table. I press my hands on the top to steady myself.
“Ask the question,” he orders me.
“What did you mean, ‘Not quite yet’?”
“You know the answer to that.”
I pick up the table and hurl it at him. He slaps it away with one arm, and by that time I’ve reached him, launching myself from six feet away, hitting him square in the chest with my shoulder and wrapping my arms around him in a bear hug. We fly off the third level and smash onto the second. The boards beneath us give a thunderous crack. The impact loosens my grip. He wraps the long fingers of one hand around my neck and slings me twenty feet into a tower of canned goods. I’m on my feet in less than a second, but he still beats me, moving so fast, his rising traces an afterimage in my vision.
“The poor recruit in the washroom,” he says. “The nurse outside the ICU, the pilot, Razor—even Claire, poor Claire, who was at a distinct disadvantage from the beginning. Not enough, not enough. To truly pass, you must overcome what cannot be overcome.”
He spreads his arms wide. An invitation. “You wanted the opportunity, Marika. Well. Here it is.”
79
THERE’S LITTLE DIFFERENCE between what happens next and our chess game. He knows how I think. He knows my strengths, my weaknesses. Knows every move before I make it. He pays particular attention to my injuries: my wrist, my ribs, my face. Blood streams from the reopened wound on my forehead, steaming in the subzero air, running into my mouth, my eyes; the world turns crimson behind a bloody curtain. After I fall a third time, he says, “Enough. Stay down, Marika.”
I get up. He puts me down a fourth time.
“You’ll overload the system,” he cautions me. I’m on my hands and knees, watching dumbly as blood spatters from my face to the floor, a rain of blood. “It could crash. If that happens, your injuries might kill you.”
I’m screaming. Pouring from the very bottom of my soul: the death howls of seven billion slaughtered human beings. The sound ricochets around the cavernous space.
Then I’m up again for the last time. Even enhanced, my eyes can’t follow his fists. Like quantum particles, they’re neither here nor there, impossible to place, impossible to predict. He flings my limp body from the platform to the concrete floor below, through which I seem to fall forever, into darkness thicker than that which engulfed the universe before the beginning of time. I roll onto my stomach and push myself up. His boot slams into my neck and stamps down.
“What is the answer, Marika?”
He doesn’t have to explain. Finally, I understand the question. Finally, I get the riddle: He isn’t asking about our answer to the problem of them. He never was. He’s asking about their answer to the problem of us.
