He has lost his glasses. His eyes are capillaried with the infection. His face matches their color—reddened with blood—his own or someone else’s. He opens his mouth, but not to stammer out a hello. His intention is to bite. When he creeps toward her, she says, “Don’t,” but he doesn’t slow, so she swings again, and then again, striking him across the belly, the shoulder, the wrist. She hears the glass inside the telescope tinkle, and something damply crack inside his body, but not even that stops him, so she puts her whole body into a swing to the temple.
He falls to the floor in a heap. She waits for a moment, trying to decide whether to check for a pulse, when she sees his chest expand with breath. She retrieves the pistol from the floor and tucks it in her belt. Even if he stands up and lurches toward her, even if he means to kill her, she won’t use it. She tells him that she’s sorry, that she hopes she can make this right.
?
In the room of doors, Hannah creeps toward the red one. The floor is tacky and fluorescent with the many worm trails leading from it. A sound comes from the other side, a squelching and popping, like tongues moving in mouths. There is no knob to turn, no lock to pick. She pushes at it and it won’t give. Tries to pry it open with the blade, with her fingers. Nothing. So she waits. Knowing it will be only so long before they find her again. The fanged and winged guardians of this place.
At last the door coughs open and a worm pushes through, nosing the air, blindly creeping forward. She hacks at it and steps over the spasming remains and enters the room before the door can close.
The space opens up into a high rocky chamber with a vast red lake at its center. The surface bubbles and steams, appearing volcanic. From it breach the worms. They slime onto the shore and glop and twist their way toward any of the hundreds of exits. The light makes her squint. The sulfuric reek makes her gag.
A worm rolls toward her and she slashes at it. And then another. And then another. Trying to hem her in, to tangle her legs, bring her down. She slices and stabs her way toward the lake. Before her the worms bleed out and crumble, the digitized code of them scattering like kicked LEGOs. And the more she swings, the longer and sharper and faster and hotter the sword seems to grow in her hands. A white light comes off it, and within that light—in the very grain of the sword—exists the code, honed to deadliness, weaponized to counter the virus.
But there is no end to the worms. She can track hundreds of them, and every second another breeds its way from the muck. She could swing the blade until her arms fell off and not make enough of a nick.
Her whole life she had felt powerless, because of her age, her gender, her dead eyes, and her broken family. She isn’t a kid anymore. She’s no longer a girl. She doesn’t wear secondhand clothes or stumble around with a cane and pretend not to hear people whispering about her. Her father didn’t run away and her mother didn’t die. She isn’t even human. She has no limitations. This world is hers to own.
So she tightens her grip. Turns in a half-circle. Swings. And releases. The sword spins through the air in a flashing arc. Headed toward the womb of the thing, the core of it all. When the point plunges into the lake, white lines zigzag outward from it, as if she has tossed a stone onto ice. There is a sizzling sound. The white streams continue to zigzag and cross and expand, gradually lighting up the lake, the walls, the ceiling with a multiplying force.
In this chamber, the worms slump and crumble, while elsewhere spiders curl up, bats fall, skeletons collapse, fleshy curtains blow off their rods, clocks chime midnight, and shadows limp to the corners and die. The Dark Net is suddenly and completely aflame with light.
But Portland remains infected. To cure the real world, Hannah must escape the digital. So she follows Derek’s beacon program onto the thumb drive.
And when her aunt Lela steps again into Cheston’s apartment office, she finds the computer terminal aglow—no longer red, but white—and the thumb drive so hot the sun might be trapped in it.
Chapter 30
THEY WALK DOWN the middle of the street, through the Pearl District, a familiar place reduced to ruin. Lela, Juniper, and Derek, with Hemingway trotting beside and before and behind them, perking his ears and sniffing at the rubble, the crashed cars, the occasional body. The wind pushes trash around, cartwheels the Metro section of The Oregonian, which Lela stomps in her passing. Dawn is coming. A pink light rashes steadily across the lane of sky above them. If not for the growing brightness, they would not be able to see the crows that follow—hundreds of them—silent except for the beating of their wings. Feathers pinwheel down like black snow. The birds are a boiling confusion. To look at them causes motion sickness.
They remind Juniper of the threat they face. The milling, roiling uncertainty of the virus as it channels through the digital landscape, hunting for someplace to roost. It’s difficult to fight and comprehend in that way. He remembers a verse from Proverbs: The locusts have no king, yet all of them go out in bands.
At first that might seem the case—that the virus is a kingless horde—but would the Nazis have risen to power without Hitler, would the heroin trade have flourished without Pablo Escobar or Al Qaeda without Osama bin Laden or the Red Skeletons without Sam Creel? A monstrous face anchors every evil, makes it feel singular and conquerable. Even a hurricane has an eye.
And Juniper knows the eye of this storm is the one who goes by Cloven. Every time Juniper pulls the trigger—shooting more than sixty people who come racing out of doorways and alleys, their eyes giving off a faint red light—he hears that subterranean voice, he sees that pale, bent face.
Juniper tries not to kill, aiming for the knee, the thigh, the shoulder. There has to be hope for them yet, some sort of salvation, even if they appear doomed by the infection. In the five blocks they travel, he leaves behind a wake of brass cartridges that smoke and glint and litter the street. Lela hands him fresh magazines to slam into place.
Something is burning nearby. The smoke gives the air the quality of an erased chalkboard. The data center looks like any other building—squat and brick, the sort of place you’d expect to house a small-town DMV or post office. They only know they’re in the right place because of the Paradise service vans parked in the lot. When Derek named the address earlier, Juniper noted it was directly above The Oubliette. That’s why Babs stationed his club there, and that’s why Cheston wished to take control of it—to tap into the digital artery overhead.
As they start for the building, a voice sounds behind Juniper, deeper than any human register, the voice he has been waiting for. “Timothy Milton,” it says.
They turn to see the thing that speaks. A man. He wears a black suit with a narrow red tie. His hair is slicked back into an inky ponytail. His face is obscured by a set of VR goggles that emit a red quavering light. He is flanked by two hounds, their snouts bristling with teeth. “Or would you prefer Timmy? Tim Tim?”
He, Cloven, looks different than he did twenty years ago. Not older. But updated. Yet even from here—twenty yards away—Juniper can hear the tendons that creak like old ropes when he lifts an arm and curls his fingers in a wave.