“Where’s Teacup?” My voice echoes in the vast space.
He doesn’t answer.
“I have a theory,” I tell him. “It’s about rats. Do you want to hear it?”
Silence.
“To kill one rat is easy. All you need is a piece of old cheese and a spring-loaded trap. But to kill a thousand rats, a million rats, a billion—or seven billion—that’s a little bit harder. For that you need bait. Poison. You don’t have to poison all seven billion of them, just a certain percentage that will carry the poison back to the colony.”
He doesn’t move. I have no idea if he’s listening or even awake.
“We’re the rats. The program downloaded into human fetuses—that’s the bait. What’s the difference between a human who carries an alien consciousness and a human who believes that he does? There is no difference except one. Risk. Risk is the difference. Not our risk. Theirs. Why would they risk themselves like that? The answer is they didn’t. They aren’t here, Razor. They never were. It’s just us. It’s always been just us.”
He bends forward very slowly and deliberately and extinguishes the light.
I sigh. “But like all theories, there are holes. You can’t reconcile it with the big rock question. Why bother with any of it when all they had to do was throw a very big rock?”
Very quietly now, so quietly I wouldn’t hear him without the enhancement array: “Shut up.”
“Why did you do it, Alex?” If Alex is really his name. His entire history could be a lie designed by Vosch to manipulate me. The odds are it is.
“I’m a soldier.”
“You were just following orders.”
“I’m a soldier.”
“It’s not yours to reason why.”
“I. Am. A. SOLDIER!”
I close my eyes. “Chaseball. Was that Vosch’s, too? Sorry. Stupid question.”
Silence.
“It’s Walker,” I say, my eyes snapping open. “It has to be. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s Evan, isn’t it, Razor? He wants Evan and I’m the only path to him.”
Silence.
The implosion of Camp Haven and the disabled drones raining from the sky: Why did they need drones? The question always bothered me. How hard could it be to find pockets of survivors when there were so few survivors left and you had plenty of human technology in your possession to find them? Survivors clustered. They crowded together like bees in a hive. The drones weren’t being used to keep track of us. They were being used to keep track of them, the humans like Evan Walker, solitary and dangerously enhanced, scattered over every continent, armed with knowledge that could bring the whole edifice crashing down if the program downloaded into them malfunctioned—as it clearly did in his case.
Evan is off the grid. Vosch doesn’t know where he is or if he’s alive or dead. But if Evan is alive, Vosch needs someone on the inside, someone Evan would trust.
I am the blacksmith.
You are the sword.
81
FOR A WEEK, he is my sole companion. Guard, nursemaid, watchman. When I’m hungry, he brings me food. When I hurt, he eases my pain. When I’m dirty, he bathes me. He is constant. He is faithful. He is there when I wake and there when I fall asleep. I never catch him sleeping: He is constant, but my sleep never is; I wake several times a night, and he’s always watching from his spot by the door. He is silent and sullen and strangely nervous, this guy who effortlessly conned me into believing him and in him. As if I might try to escape, when he knows I can but won’t, when he knows I am imprisoned by a promise more binding than a thousand chains.
On the afternoon of the sixth day, Razor ties a rag over his nose and mouth, clumps up the stairs to the third level, and comes back carting a body. He carries it outside. Then back up the stairs, his tread as heavy empty-handed as it is burdened with a corpse, and another body descends to the bottom. I lose count at one hundred twenty-three. He empties the warehouse of the dead, piling them in the yard, and at dusk, he sets the pile on fire. The bodies have mummified and the fire catches quickly and burns very hot and bright. The pyre can be seen for miles, if there are any eyes to see it. Its light glows in the doorway, laps across the floor, turns the concrete into a golden, undulating seabed. Razor lounges in the doorway watching the fire, a lean shadow haloed like a lunar eclipse. He shrugs out of his jacket, removes his shirt, rolls up the sleeve of his undershirt to expose his shoulder. The blade of his knife glimmers in the yellow glow as he etches something into his skin with the tip.
The night wears on; the fire dwindles; the wind shifts and my heart aches with nostalgia—summer camps and catching lightning bugs and August skies aflame with stars. The way the desert smells and the long, wistful sigh of wind rushing down from the mountains as the sun dips beneath the horizon.
Razor lights the kerosene lamp and walks over to me. He smells like the smoke and, faintly, like the dead.