First the gun. He pulled the magazine from the frame. Just as he suspected: no bullets. He thought the gun had been too light. Evan allowed himself a quiet laugh. The irony was too much. Their primary mission had not been to kill, but to sow mistrust among the survivors and drive them like frightened sheep to slaughterhouses like Wright-Patterson. What happens when the sowers of mistrust become its reapers? Reapers. He fought back a hysterical giggle.
He took a deep breath. This was going to hurt. He sat up. The room spun. He closed his eyes. No. That made it worse. He opened his eyes and willed himself to remain upright. His body had been augmented in preparation for his awakening. That was the truth the dream of the owl disguised. The secret that the screen memory kept him from seeing and therefore from remembering: While he and Grace and tens of thousands of children like them had slept, gifts had been delivered in the night. Gifts they would need in the years to come. Gifts that would turn their bodies into finely tuned weapons, for the designers of the invasion had understood a simple, though counterintuitive, truth: Where the body went, the mind followed.
Give someone the power of the gods and he will become as indifferent as the gods.
The pain subsided. The dizziness eased. He slid his legs off the edge of the bed. He needed to test the ankle. The ankle was the key. The other injuries were serious but inconsequential; he could manage those. Gently, he applied pressure to the ball of his foot, and a lightning bolt of agony rocketed up his leg. He fell onto his back, gasping. Overhead, dusty planets were frozen in orbit around a dented sun.
He sat up and waited for his head to clear. He wasn’t going to find a way around the pain. He would have to find a way through it.
He eased himself onto the floor, using the side of the bed to support his weight. Then he forced himself to rest. No need to rush. If Grace returned, he could explain that he fell out of bed. Slowly, by inches, he scooted his butt along the carpet until he was flat on his back, seeing the solar system behind a shower of white-hot meteors that cascaded across his field of vision. The room was freezing, but he was sweating profusely. Out of breath. Heart racing. Skin on fire. He focused on the mobile, the faded blue of the Earth, the dusky red of Mars. The pain came in waves; he floated now in a different kind of sea.
The slats beneath the bed were nailed into place and weighed down by the heavy frame and mattress. No matter. He wiggled into the tight space beneath, the bodies of decayed insects crunching under his weight, and there was a toy car on its back and the twisted limbs of a plastic action figure from the time when heroes populated children’s daydreams. He broke the board free with three hard whacks of the heel of his hand, scooched back the way he came, and broke the other end free. Dust settled into his mouth. He coughed, sending another tsunami of pain across his chest, down his side, to curl anaconda-like around his stomach.
Ten minutes later he was contemplating the solar system again, worried that Grace would find him passed out, clutching a four-by-six bed slat to his chest. That might be a little more difficult to explain.
The world spun. The planets held still.
There’s a hidden room . . . He had crossed the threshold into that room, where a simple promise threw a thousand bolts: I’ll find you. That promise, like all promises, created its own morality. To keep it, he would have to cross a sea of blood.
The world unloosed. The planets bound.
20
NIGHT HAD FALLEN by the time Grace returned, her arrival presaged by the glow of a lamp expanding in the hall outside. She set the lamp on the bedside table, and the light threw shadows that engulfed her face. He did not protest when she drew down the covers, unwrapped the bandages covering his wounds, and exposed his body to the frigid air.
“Did you miss me, Evan?” she murmured, fingertips slick with salve sliding over his skin. “I don’t mean today. How old were we then? Fifteen?”
“Sixteen,” he answered.
“Hmm. You asked me if I was afraid of the future. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“Such a . . . human question.”
The fingers of one hand massaging him while the fingers of the other slowly unbuttoned her shirt.
“Not as much as the other one I asked.”
She tilted her head inquisitively. Her hair fell over her shoulder. Her face lost in shadow and her shirt falling open like a curtain drawn back.
“What was that?” she whispered.
“If you’d not been, for a very long time, inexpressibly lonely.”
The coolness of her fingers. The heat of his seared flesh.
“Your heart is beating very fast,” she breathed.
She stood up. He closed his eyes. For the promise. Just outside the circle of light, Grace stepped out of the pants that pooled around her ankles. He did not watch.
“Not so lonely,” Grace said, her breath caressing his ear. “Being locked in these bodies does have its compensations.”
For the promise. And Cassie the island he swam toward, rising from a blood-filled sea.
“Not so lonely, Evan,” Grace said. She touched his lips with her fingers, his neck with her lips.