The tank lid is solid ceramic. And heavy. I could kill him; I don’t. But I smack him hard enough in the back of head to put him out for a long time.
Jumbo falls down. Claire rises up. I sling the lid toward her head. Her arm rises to block the projectile. My enriched hearing picks up the sound of a bone snapping from the collision. The silver device in her hand clatters to the floor. She dives for it as I step forward. I slam one foot on her outstretched hand and with the other kick the device to the other side of the room.
Done.
And she knows it. She looks past the barrel of the gun leveled at her face—beyond the tiny hole filled with immense nothingness—into my eyes, and hers are kind again and her voice is soft again, the bitch.
“Marika . . .”
No. Marika was slow, weak, sentimental, dimwitted. Marika was a little girl clinging to rainbow fingers, helplessly watching the time wind down, teetering on the razor’s edge of the bottomless abyss, exposed behind her fortress walls by promises she could never keep. But I will keep her final promise to Claire, the beast who stripped her naked and baptized her in the cold water that still roars in the broken shower. I will keep Marika’s promise. Marika is dead, and I will keep her promise.
“My name is Ringer.”
I pull the trigger.
68
JUMBO SHOULD HAVE a knife on him. Standard issue for all recruits. I kneel beside his unconscious body, slip the knife from its sheath, and carefully cut out the pellet embedded near the spinal cord at the base of his skull. I slip it between my cheek and gums.
Now mine. No pain when I cut it out, and only a small amount of blood trickles from the incision. Bots to deaden sensation. Bots to repair damage. That’s why Claire didn’t die when I rammed a broken pipe into her neck and why, after the initial gush, the bleeding quickly stopped.
Also why, after six weeks flat on my back with very little food and a burst of intense physical activity, I’m not even out of breath.
I insert the tiny pellet from my neck into Jumbo’s. Track me now, Commander Asshole.
Fresh jumpsuit from the stack under the sink. Shoes: Claire’s feet are too small; Jumbo’s much too large. I’ll work on shoes later. The big kid’s leather jacket might come in handy, though. The jacket hangs on me like a blanket, but I like the extra room in the sleeves.
There’s something I’m forgetting. I glance around the small room. The kill switch, that’s it. The screen got cracked in the melee, but the device still works. A number glows above the flashing green button. My number. I swipe my thumb over the display and the screen fills with numbers, hundreds of sequences representing every recruit on the base. I swipe again to return to my number, tap on it, and a map pops up showing my implant’s precise location. I zoom out and the screen fills with tiny, glowing green dots: the location of every implanted soldier in the entire base. Jackpot.
And checkmate. With a swipe of my thumb and a tap of my finger, I can highlight all the numbers. The button on the bottom of the device will light up. A final tap and every recruit neutralized, gone. I can practically stroll out.
I can—if I’m willing to step over several hundred corpses of innocent human beings, kids who are no less victims than I am, whose sole crime is the sin of hope. If the wage of sin is death, then virtue is a vice now: A defenseless, starving child lost in a wheat field is given shelter. A wounded soldier cries out for help behind a row of beer coolers. A little girl shot by mistake is delivered to her enemies in order to save her.
And I don’t know which is more inhuman: the alien beings that created this new world or the human being who considers, if only for an instant, pressing the green button.
Three large clumps of stationary dots hover on the right side of the screen: the sleeping. A dozen isolated individuals on the periphery: sentries. Two in the middle: mine in Jumbo’s neck, his in my mouth. Another three or four very close, on the same floor: the sick and injured. One floor down, the ICU, where only one green sphere glows. So: barracks, observation posts, hospital. A couple of the sentry dots are manning the magazine building. I won’t have to guess which two. I’ll know in a few minutes.
Come on, Razor, let’s go. I’ve got one last promise to keep.
Watching the gusher pour from the broken pipe.
69
“DO YOU PRAY?” Razor asked me after an exhausting night of chaseball, while he packed up the game board and pieces.
I shook my head. “Do you?”
“Damn right I do.” Nodding his head emphatically. “No atheists in foxholes.”
“My father was one.”
“A foxhole?”
“An atheist.”
“I know that, Ringer.”
“How did you know my father was an atheist?”