Page 129 of Lone Wolf

“I heard you.”

“Killing me is a measure to ensure that I won’t erase other people. But now I won’t erase anyone else.”

Allman’s tone was shot through with spoiled disbelief that he couldn’t talk or negotiate or think his way around Evan. That Evan existed in a world he’d dismissed as irrelevant. The real one.

Evan said, “It’s too late.”

“But that’s not fair.”

Evan brought his hand to his forehead, felt the warm pressure of his palm. The wind riffled his hair, cooled the sweat at the hollow of his throat. Was this really a conversation he was having?

“What’s the point of it going any further between us?” Allman asked. “I said I was sorry. I said I will leave the Hill girl alone. I said I won’t do it again. I give up. You win. What’s to be gained by your coming after me?”

There was no way to explain something like that and especially no way to explain it to someone like Allman.

“It’s merely a waste of resources,” Allman said. “Yours and mine. You playing offense, me playing defense—and eventually I will play offense, too. There’s so much work to be done in the world for you and me. There is nothing here for either of us or the world to gain. Our conflict over this matter is resolved, concluded. I concede defeat and agree to your terms. Why be enemies?”

He was like a child. A broken child.

“I’m sorry you don’t understand,” Evan said. And he meant it.

“And you will be sorry,” Allman said, “that you don’t understand me.”

Evan hung up the phone and breathed, felt the coolness in his lungs.

For everything Allman had created, there was a nothingness at his core. And that nothingness stretched out its tentacles through a billion screens, wound its way around the bones of anything it touched. And squeezed.

Such bleakness. Such nihilism. And a predatory avarice as limitless as the World Wide Web itself. Evan couldn’t act on any of that.

But he could act for Benjamin and Jayla Hill.

He looked out across his city, all those people driving home and working late and settling into their evenings, wrapped in the comforts of the modern world.

For a brief private moment alone in the darkness, he wished he could be any one of them.

58

Dirt-Diving

Joey came in sometime past two o’clock and started when she saw Evan sitting at the kitchen island in the darkness.

“X! You okay?”

“Yes.”

She sloughed off her jacket, let it hit the floor behind her, and trudged over. She pulled up a stool. “No vodka?”

“No vodka.”

“Why not?”

“Preparing.”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s like that now.”

“It’s like that,” he said.

“When’s it going down?”