Staring at me silently. Five seconds becomes ten. Ten becomes twenty. After thirty seconds, an eternity has passed. I think I know what he’s doing: playing a game within a game. I just don’t understand why.
I open with the Ruy Lopez. Not the most original opening in the history of the game; I’m a little stressed. As we play, he hums softly, tunelessly, and now I know he’s deliberately mocking my father. My stomach rolls with revulsion. To survive I built walls, an emotional fortress that protected me and kept me sane in a world gone dangerously insane, but even the most open person has a private, sacred place where no one else may go.
I understand the game within the game now: There is nothing private, nothing sacred. There is no part of me hidden from him. My stomach churns with revulsion. He’s violated more than my memories. He’s molesting my soul.
The mouse and keyboard to my right are wireless. But the monitor beside him isn’t. A lunge across the table, a wallop upside his head, and a wrap of the cord around his neck. Executed in four seconds, over in four minutes. Unless we’re being watched, and we probably are. Vosch will live, Teacup and I will die. And even if I manage to take him out first, the victory will be Pyrrhic, assuming Evan Walker’s claim is true. At the hotel, I pointed this out to Sullivan when she said Evan had sacrificed himself to blow up the base: If they can download themselves into human bodies, they can also make copies of themselves. The set of “Evans” and “Voschs” would be infinite. Evan could kill himself. I could kill Vosch. Wouldn’t matter. By definition, the entities inside them are immortal.
You need to pay close attention to what I’m telling you, Sullivan said with exaggerated patience. There’s a human Evan who merged with the alien consciousness. He’s not one or the other; he’s both. So he can die.
Not the important part.
Right, she snapped. Just the insignificant human part.
Vosch is leaning over the board. His breath smells like apples. I press my hands into my lap. He raises an eyebrow. Problem?
“I’m going to lose,” I tell him.
He feigns surprise. “What makes you think so?”
“You know my moves before I make them.”
“You’re referring to the Wonderland program. But you’re forgetting that we are more than the sum of our experiences. Human beings can be marvelously unpredictable. Your rescue of Ben Parish during the fall of Camp Haven, for example, defied logic and ignored the first prerogative of all living things: to continue living. Or your decision yesterday to give yourself up when you realized capture was the little girl’s only chance to survive.”
“Did she?”
“You already know the answer to that question.” Impatiently, like a harsh teacher to a promising student. He gestures at the board: Play.
I wrap a hand around my fist and squeeze as hard as I can. Imagining my fist is his neck. Four minutes to choke the life out of him. Just four minutes.
“Teacup’s alive,” I tell him. “You know the threat to fry my brain won’t make me do what you want me to do. But you know I’ll do it for her.”
“You belong to each other now, yes? Connected as if by a silver cord?” Smiling. “Anyway, besides the serious injuries from which she may not recover, you’ve given her the priceless gift of time. There is a saying in Latin. Vincit qui patitur. Do you know what it means?”
I’m beyond cold. I’ve reached absolute zero. “You know I don’t.”
“‘He conquers who endures.’ Remember poor Teacup’s rats. What can they teach us? I told you when you first came to me; it isn’t so much about crushing your capacity to fight as it is your will to fight.”
The rats again. “A hopeless rat is a dead rat.”
“Rats do not know hope. Or faith. Or love. You were right about those things, Private Ringer. They will not deliver humanity through the storm. You were wrong, however, about rage. Rage isn’t the answer, either.”
“What’s the answer?” I don’t want to ask, don’t want to give him the satisfaction, but I can’t help it.
“You’re close to it,” he says. “I think you might be surprised how close you are.”
“Close to what?” My voice sounds as small as a rat’s.
He shakes his head, impatient again. “Play.”
“It’s pointless.”
“A world in which chess does not matter is not a world in which I wish to live.”
“Stop doing that. Stop mocking my father.”
“Your father was a good man in thrall to a terrible disease. You shouldn’t judge him harshly. Nor yourself for abandoning him.”
Please don’t go. Don’t leave me, Marika.
Long, nimble fingers clawing at my shirt, the fingers of an artist. Face sculpted by the merciless knife of hunger, the infuriated artist with the helpless clay, and red eyes rimmed in black.