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I close my eyes. The hub, my ever-faithful companion, shuts down my senses, plunging me into that space without sound, without light.
I’m coming, you son of a bitch. You wanted to create a human without humanity. Now you’re going to get one.
63
EVAN WALKER
THE ROOM into which they threw him was small, bare, and very cold. When they pulled off the hood coverin
g his head, the severity of the light blinded him. Instinctively, he covered his eyes.
One of his captors demanded his clothes. He stripped down to his briefs. No, those too. He dropped the shorts and kicked them toward the doorway, where the two boys wearing camouflage stood. One of them—the younger one—giggled.
They stepped out of the room. The door clanged shut. The cold and the silence and the blaring light were intense. He looked down and saw a large drain in the center of the tiled floor. He looked up, and as if looking up was the signal, water burst from the overhead sprayers.
He staggered back against the wall and covered his head with his hands. The cold bored into him, through skin to muscle to bone to marrow, until his knees buckled and he sank to the floor, head balanced on his upraised knees, arms wrapped around his legs. A disembodied voice boomed in the tiny space. “STAND. UP.” He ignored it.
Instantly, the water changed from freezing cold to scalding hot, and Evan leapt to his feet, mouth hanging open in shock and pain. The blazing light cut through the steaming mist and splintered into countless rainbows that bobbed and spun, radiant against the colorless tile. The spray turned cold again, then abruptly stopped.
He leaned against the wall, gasping, and the voice boomed, “DON’T TOUCH THE WALL. STAND WITH YOUR FEET TOGETHER AND YOUR HANDS AT YOUR SIDES.”
He pushed off from the wall. Never, not even on the bitterest winter day on the farm when the wind roared across the fields and tree branches broke under the weight of ice, never had he been this cold. This cold was a living thing, a beast with his body clamped between its jaws, and those jaws were slowly crushing him. Every instinct told him to move; physical exertion would increase his blood pressure, raise his heart rate, speed warmth to his extremities.
“DON’T MOVE.”
He couldn’t concentrate. His thoughts spun like the uncountable rainbows let loose by the spray. Closing his eyes might help.
“DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES.”
The cold. He imagined the water on his naked body freezing solid, ice crystals forming in his hair. He will go into hypothermic shock. His heart will stop. His hands balled into fists and he dug his nails into his palms. The pain will focus his mind. Pain always does.
“OPEN YOUR HANDS. OPEN YOUR EYES. DON’T MOVE.”
He obeyed. If he did everything they said, followed every order, complied with every demand, they would have no excuse to use the one weapon for which he had no defense.
He would bear any burden, endure any hardship, suffer any torment if that suffering added a single moment to her life.
He had been willing to sacrifice an entire civilization for her sake. His own life was infinitely small and meaningless, the costless price. He always knew, from the day he found her half buried in the snow, what saving her meant. What loving her meant. The cell door slamming shut, the death sentence handed down.
But they had not brought him to this room of cold and shattered light to kill him.
That would come later.
After they had broken his body and crushed his will and dissected his mind down to the last synapse.
The undoing of Evan Walker had begun.
64
HOURS PASSED. His body grew numb. He seemed to float inside his own insensate skin. The white wall in front of him stretched to infinity; he was floating in an endless nothingness, and his thoughts became fragmented. His mind, starved for stimuli, flung out random images from his childhood, Christmases with his human family, sitting with his brothers on the front porch, squirming in the pew at church. And much older scenes, from a different life: the breathtaking sunsets of a failing star, skimming over mountain ranges three times the height of the Himalayas in silver fliers, cresting a hill and seeing beneath him a valley devoid of life, the crop destroyed by the ultraviolet poison of their dying sun.
If he closed his eyes, the voice screamed at him to open them. If he swayed, the voice screamed for him to stand still.
But it was only a matter of time before he collapsed.
He didn’t remember falling. Or the voice screaming at him to get up. One moment he was upright, the next he was curled into a ball in a back corner of the white room. He had no idea how much time had passed—or if any had passed at all. Time did not exist in the white room.
He opened his eyes. A man was standing in the doorway. Tall, athletic, with deep-set eyes of striking blue, wearing a colonel’s uniform. He knew this man, though they had never met. Knew his face and the face behind the face. Knew his given name and knew his human name. He had never seen him before; he had known him for ten thousand years.
