This time it was Raiff who started swinging a bit, but Alex didn’t join him. “Just not how what you think I know can stop them.”
Raiff braked himself with his feet. “I’m not sure what it is, only that it’s the key to defeating them.”
“Which you couldn’t do up close and personal back home.”
“There was no point in trying. The lucky among us made it over to this world. We’ve been hiding among you for generations.”
“Not so lucky, considering there’s this guy who’s trying to exterminate you.”
“Langston Marsh, and his modern-day Fifth Column, is your problem now too.”
“What’s a Fifth Column?”
“A clandestine group organized toward a singular purpose not in keeping with the greater interests of society.” Raiff started to chuckle, then stopped. “I can see why you need a tutor.”
“Hey, lay off me. I’m your only hope, remember.”
“You might be this world’s only hope.”
Silence settled between them just as Sam approached and handed Raiff back the cell phone he’d lent her. “So what do you want to hear first, the good news or the bad news?”
87
GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS
“TURNS OUT DR. DONATI, MY boss at Ames, has been trying to reach me too,” Sam continued.
“Is that the good news or the bad news?” Alex asked her.
“Both, I guess. He had to call me back because he said his regular line wasn’t secure.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“He knows what’s happening,” Raiff concluded, “doesn’t he?”
“Some, not everything. He was trying to reach me about a pattern of events I found, a pattern that mimics another from eighteen years ago when Laboratory Z was destroyed.”
“The wormhole,” Raiff said.
“Yes. Donati thinks he can figure out where it’s going to open this time.”
Alex looked toward Raiff. “So it’s closed now and has been for eighteen years. I get that. What I don’t get is where the androids, cyborg soldiers, are coming from. You said they were being manufactured here, on this planet. So where?”
“If I knew that, I would’ve already destroyed them.”
“So who’s building them?”
“I’m not sure. But the better question was your first one: where are they being built, and the answer is probably lots and lots of locations scattered throughout the world.”
“Because these cyborgs are going to be the ones doing the heavy lifting when doomsday kicks in, right?” Alex asked.
“I apologize for the crack about you needing a tutor,” Raiff said, smiling thinly.
Sam kicked at some pebbles collected on the ground. “So if we can figure out how to shut them off, doomsday gets postponed, maybe for good.”
“Maybe that’s what they think I know,” Alex said to Raiff. “How to turn all these robots off.”
“Cyborgs,” Sam corrected. “Androids.”
“Whatever.”
“There’s a difference.”
“Explain it to me again after we find the switch. We need to figure out what it is I’m supposed to know, so we can stop them in their tracks,” Alex said to Raiff again.
“We need those drawings, Dancer.”
“There’s something else we need,” Alex told him. “My CAT scan results. My doctor saw something before they killed him, a shadow, he called it. Now we need to see it too.”
Sam studied Alex’s wrist, then made a grab for it.
“Hey!” he protested, pulling away.
Not to be outdone, she latched onto his forearm and pulled it toward her. “You’re still wearing your hospital bracelet.”
“I forgot all about it.”
“Good thing.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s got your patient ID number on it,” Raiff realized.
“And that’s what the hospital will file all your test results under,” Sam told him.
“Meaning—” Alex began.
“Yeah,” Sam said, reading his mind. “I’ve done some volunteer work at CPMC. I know the layout.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Only for the last day or so.”
“What about those drawings, Dancer?” Raiff reminded him.
“It’s Alex. Alex.”
“‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’”
“That’s Shakespeare,” Sam noted.
“Hamlet, specifically.”
“I know who I am, Raiff,” Alex insisted.
“Do you?” Raiff asked him, expression gone flat again. “Do you really?”
“By the way,” Sam interjected, squirming a bit, “no, I couldn’t find a bathroom. So, if the two of you don’t mind, could we get moving?”
88
WILDER