“Why did you do that?” I ask.
Above the rag, his eyes swim with tears. I don’t know if he’s teary from the smoke or something else. “Orders,” he says.
He pulls the IV from my arm and wraps the tubing over the hook on the stand.
“I don’t believe you,” I say.
“Well, I’m shocked.”
It’s the most he’s spoken since Vosch left. I’m surprised that I’m relieved to hear his voice again. He’s examining the wound on my forehead, face very close because the light is dim.
“Teacup,” I whisper.
“What do you think?” he says crossly.
“She’s alive. She’s the only leverage he has.”
“Okay, then. She’s alive.”
He spreads antibacterial ointment over the cut. An unenhanced human being would have needed several stitches, but in a few days no one will be able to tell that I was injured.
“I could call his bluff,” I say. “How can he kill her now?”
Razor shrugs. “Because he doesn’t give a shit about one little kid when the fate of the whole world is at stake? Just a guess.”
“After all that’s happened, after everything you heard and everything you saw, you still believe him.”
He looks down at me with something that closely resembles pity. “I have to believe him, Ringer. I let go of that and I’m done. I’m them.” He nods toward the yard where the blackened bones smolder.
He sits on the cot next to mine and pulls down the makeshift mask. The lantern between his feet and the light that flows over his face and the shadows that pool in his deep-set eyes.
“Too late for that,” I tell him.
“Right. We’re all dead already. So there is no leverage, right? Kill me, Ringer. Kill me right now and run. Run.”
I’d be off the cot before he could blink again. A single punch to his chest and the augmented blow would shove a shattered rib into his heart. And then I could walk out, walk away, walk into the wilderness where I can hide for years, decades, until I am old and beyond the capability of the 12th System to sustain me. I might outlive everyone. I might wake one day the last person on Earth.
And then. And then.
He must be freezing, sitting there with nothing but a T-shirt on. I can see a line of dried blood across his biceps.
“What did you do to your arm?” I ask.
He pulls up his sleeve. The letters are crudely drawn, big and blocky and shaky, the way a little kid makes them when he’s first learning:
VQP
“Latin,” he whispers. “Vincit qui patitur. It means—”
“I know what it means,” I whisper back.
He shakes his head. “I really don’t think that you do.” He doesn’t sound angry. He sounds sad.
Alex turns his head toward the doorway, beyond which the dead are borne toward the indifferent sky. Alex.
“Is Alex really your name?” I ask.
He looks at me again and I see the playfully ironic smile. Like hearing his voice again, I’m surprised at myself for missing it. “I didn’t lie about any of that. Only the important stuff.”
“Did your grandmother have a dog named Flubby?”
He laughs softly. “Yes.”
“That’s good.”
“Why is that good?”
“I wanted that part to be true.”
“Because you love mean little nippy purse dogs?”
“Because I like that once upon a time there were mean little nippy purse dogs named Flubby. That’s good. That’s worth remembering.”
He’s off the cot before I can blink again, and he’s kissing me, and I plunge inside him where nothing is hidden. He’s open to me now, the one who sustained me and the one who betrayed me, the one who brought me back to life and the one who delivered me back to death. Rage is not the answer, no, and not hate. Layer by layer, that which separates us falls away, until I reach the center, the nameless region, the defenseless stronghold, an ageless, bottomless ache, the lonely singularity of his soul, unspoiled by time or experience, beyond thought, infinite.
And I am there with him—I am already there. Within the singularity, I am already there.
“That can’t be true,” I whisper. Within the center of everything, where nothing is, I found him holding me.
“I don’t believe all of your bullshit,” he murmurs. “But you’re right about this: Some things, down to the smallest of things, are worth the sum of all things.”
Outside, the bitter harvest burns. Inside, he slips the sheets down, and these are the hands that held me, the hands that bathed and fed and lifted me when I could not lift myself. He brought me to death; he brings me to life. That’s why he removed the dead from the upper tier. He banished them, consigned them to the fire, not to desecrate them but to sanctify us.