He was holed up in a ruined military base by the sea, trying to make a water purifier out of scavenged parts, when the old man spoke from the tablet. There is no room for mistakes, he said. You’re hopelessly outgunned and have virtually no resources. The only one on your side is me, and I’m dead. God help you, boy. You’ve got the one chance, so make the most of it.
The old man’s gravity shook him. He hid the laptop and went out into the favelas but another epidemic must have come and gone because the boys he’d known had vanished, replaced with pinch-faced children who spoke in the voice of the deeper south.
The Clan’s ninja loved the dark so the dark became his hunting ground. Their grace was inhuman, fluid, wholly jointless. They turned to ash when they died, so he didn’t get a good look at one until he shot down a hovercraft and found the pilot trapped in the wreckage—its body was strangely formless, like a viscous mix of oil and coal; the jewels that were its eyes tracked the barrel of his gun.
He shot the struts out of bridges, loosed viruses in their reservoirs, launched missiles into the power plant on the cliffs above their city. With great effort he taught himself the mathematics needed to decrypt their archives, and then nearly despaired, for he found that he’d only been killing servants, that the Clan lords dwelt up the gravity well in eternal night and silence, their satellites an archipelago rising away from the Earth. The last and most remote, the Void Star, was the only point of light in a blank span of sky. The final chamber was there, he read, as he might have expected. It was a long way away, but at least he knew where he was going.
He stowed away on a Clan shuttle headed into low Earth orbit. The battles in the satellite’s cramped tunnels reminded him of the favelas’ density and confusion. In the satellite’s robotics dump he found power armor; its hull was cracked, but the tablet taught him how to weld it.
On the next satellite he met his first shadow lord and killed it in the dark. He took to waiting for the shuttles out on the satellite’s hulls, at home in his armor, staring up at the galaxies glittering coldly, the empty space where the Void Star glowed. By the tenth satellite he’d found his rhythm, though there was always an eeriness about them when everyone else was dead. Now and then the old man spoke from the tablet, but where at first he’d been encouraging now he was full of rage and obscenity, railing at him to purge the world, and finally Kern stopped listening.
In the penultimate satellite he stood on the thick glass of a porthole, looking down past his feet at the Earth, a brilliant coin in the night. His Gauss rifle clicked as it cooled from burning out the hive/core. He hated his enemies for dying and leaving him alone, but by then there wasn’t far to go.
The last shuttle was cramped, its elliptical walls complexly incised, as though it were purely ceremonial and never intended for use. He felt like he was falling as his destination approached.
The last lord of shadows stalked the empty corridors of his island in the night, howling to itself, raking the walls with its claws. When he had burnt its body with napalm (the lords, he had discovered, were prone to resurrect), he set himself to hunting down the surviving ninja—he found and killed the last one in a vicious struggle in the shuttle bay, and that was that.
The shadow lord’s jangling severed steel claw was the key to the lock in a wide spiral door that opened onto rickety stairs rising in the empty spaces between the station’s walls. He knew it was the end, and time to go for broke, so he dialed the Gauss rifle to MAX-AUTO as he crept up the dusty steps past structural beams. He was expecting to find a last horror lurking but the stairs ended under flickering fluorescent lights before a disconcertingly ordinary-looking laminate door on which was taped a piece of paper where The Final Chamber! was written in black marker. He gingerly took off his helmet, pressed his ear to the door, heard what might have been laughter.
He went in hot, bursting through the door, firing everything he had, or trying to, but his guns had become lifeless, and his missiles didn’t launch; he glided to a halt in a conference room in the middle of an applauding crowd. Thin carpet, office furniture and out the window blue sky and white thunderheads. Impression of men, white and Asian, and dressed formally, as though for an occasion, except for a few shaggy ones in T-shirts and sandals. From the ceiling hung a banner with CONGRATULATIONS! next to a logo like a stylized centaur. The old man was there, clapping steadily, but he seemed calm, and wore a suit like all the rest. The old owner, the man from the pictures he’d found so long ago, was there, too, looking decades younger.
He tried to draw his pistol but his weapons had vanished and so had his armor. A short man in a dark grey suit stepped forward and said, “This world was created for you, but now it is ending.” He explained that they were engineers who had designed a laptop to save children in the far reaches of the world. It was meant to be their school, to teach them everything, to draw them in and hold them while they grew. It would make poverty unimaginable, the relic of a barbarous past.
They told him their names and their titles in turn; it took a long time, but they seemed to think it was important. “Aaron Levy, data architect,” said the laptop’s former owner, who was handsome and distant. “Sol Eagleman, Chief Psychology Officer,” said the old man, smiling.
The short man said, “Keep the laptop for as long as you need it, but when you’re done with it, please give it away. It’s made to last, and it’s always looking for the next child to help. Meanwhile, there is a last gift, the final thing we have to offer.”
A door opened—beyond it were books, shelf upon shelf of them, receding into the distance. He said, “It’s all the libraries in the world.”
11
Theater
Irina follows Magda through the labyrinth of W&P’s offices, aware that Magda is glad to be getting rid of her, glad herself that she can soon be alone, lose herself in the machines.
Magda gestures to a door, smiling falsely. “Let us know if there’s anything you need,” she says with a slight involuntary bow.
The theater is a steep slope of black seats descending to the white screen that spans the wall, like a rich man’s private cinema, though the space evokes tactical briefings more than film. Clean and quiet, here. Irina closes the door behind her and sits, aware of the empty space, the silence.