“DON’T MOVE.”
He couldn’t concentrate. His thoughts spun like the uncountable rainbows let loose by the spray. Closing his eyes might help.
“DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES.”
The cold. He imagined the water on his naked body freezing solid, ice crystals forming in his hair. He will go into hypothermic shock. His heart will stop. His hands balled into fists and he dug his nails into his palms. The pain will focus his mind. Pain always does.
“OPEN YOUR HANDS. OPEN YOUR EYES. DON’T MOVE.”
He obeyed. If he did everything they said, followed every order, complied with every demand, they would have no excuse to use the one weapon for which he had no defense.
He would bear any burden, endure any hardship, suffer any torment if that suffering added a single moment to her life.
He had been willing to sacrifice an entire civilization for her sake. His own life was infinitely small and meaningless, the costless price. He always knew, from the day he found her half buried in the snow, what saving her meant. What loving her meant. The cell door slamming shut, the death sentence handed down.
But they had not brought him to this room of cold and shattered light to kill him.
That would come later.
After they had broken his body and crushed his will and dissected his mind down to the last synapse.
The undoing of Evan Walker had begun.
64
HOURS PASSED. His body grew numb. He seemed to float inside his own insensate skin. The white wall in front of him stretched to infinity; he was floating in an endless nothingness, and his thoughts became fragmented. His mind, starved for stimuli, flung out random images from his childhood, Christmases with his human family, sitting with his brothers on the front porch, squirming in the pew at church. And much older scenes, from a different life: the breathtaking sunsets of a failing star, skimming over mountain ranges three times the height of the Himalayas in silver fliers, cresting a hill and seeing beneath him a valley devoid of life, the crop destroyed by the ultraviolet poison of their dying sun.
If he closed his eyes, the voice screamed at him to open them. If he swayed, the voice screamed for him to stand still.
But it was only a matter of time before he collapsed.
He didn’t remember falling. Or the voice screaming at him to get up. One moment he was upright, the next he was curled into a ball in a back corner of the white room. He had no idea how much time had passed—or if any had passed at all. Time did not exist in the white room.
He opened his eyes. A man was standing in the doorway. Tall, athletic, with deep-set eyes of striking blue, wearing a colonel’s uniform. He knew this man, though they had never met. Knew his face and the face behind the face. Knew his given name and knew his human name. He had never seen him before; he had known him for ten thousand years.
“Do you know why I’ve brought you here?” the man asked him.
Evan’s mouth opened. His lips cracked and began to bleed. His tongue moved clumsily; he could not feel it.
“Betrayed.”
“Betrayed? Oh no, quite the opposite. If there is one word to describe you, it is devoted.” He stepped to one side and a woman wearing a white smock wheeled a gurney into the room. Two soldiers followed. They scooped him from the floor and dumped him onto the gurney. Above him, a single drop of water clung to a sprayer nozzle. He watched it quiver there, unable to look away. A cuff was wrapped around his arm; he didn’t feel it. A thermometer was run across his forehead; he didn’t feel it.
A bright light was shone in his eyes. The woman probed his naked body, pressing on his stomach, massaging his neck and pelvis, and her hands were deliciously warm.
“What is my name?” the colonel asked.
“Vosch.”
“No, Evan. What is my name?”
He swallowed. He was very thirsty. “It can’t be pronounced.”
“Try.”
He shook his head. It was impossible. Their language had evolved as a result of a very different anatomy. Vosch might as well ask a chimpanzee to recite Shakespeare.
The woman in the white smock with the warm hands slid a needle into his arm. His body relaxed. He wasn’t cold or thirsty anymore, and his mind was clear.
“Where are you from?” Vosch asked.
“Ohio.”
“Before that.”
“Can’t be pronounced—”
“Never mind the name. Tell me where.”
“In the constellation Lyra, the second planet from the dwarf star. The humans discovered it in 2014 and named it Kepler 438b.”
Vosch smiled. “Of course. Kepler 438b. And of all places from which you could choose, why the Earth? Why did you come here?”
Evan turned his head to look at the man. “You already know the answer. You know all the answers.”
The colonel smiled. His eyes remained hard, though, and humorless. He turned to the woman. “Get him dressed. It’s time for Alice to take a trip down the rabbit hole.”
65