“Your office?”
“This way.”
They backtracked a short length of hall, and Silas pushed through a door.
“Another stairwell?” she said.
“Can’t be any worse than the last.”
And it wasn’t. At the top of the landing was a single shining emergency light. One flight up, Silas pushed into another dark hall. This space he knew by heart. He’d walked it every day for the last twelve years. His office door was locked. He dug for the key, but his pockets were empty except for the eggs.
Had he left his keys in the car?
It didn’t matter. He stepped back and threw his shoulder into the door. It snapped from the jamb easily and swung inward on warped hinges.
Vidonia followed him into his office, shutting the door behind them. Silas went to the window and looked out. Darkness. Swaying trees. Above, Orion with his crooked belt.
Silas opened the closet and pulled the bow from the top shelf. Two arrows leaned against the corner. The first, he knew, was bent beyond use, knocked crooked by the corner of the target he’d used on the property behind the lab. The second arrow would have to do. He picked it up and ran his thumb over the field point. It was not so dull as a spoon, but it was close.
Silas decided not to think about it. It was the only weapon they had. It either would or wouldn’t be enough.
They waited.
“This isn’t how I wanted it to end,” Vidonia said.
“Who says it’s going to end this way?”
“I mean, if it does. If it does end like this …”
“What?”
“I wanted more time,” she said.
“We’ll have it.”
After a short while, they heard the clicking. It had tracked them.
“Get in the closet,” Silas said. “No matter what, stay there.”
She nodded and slipped inside. “Silas,” she said from the shadows, the beginning of a question.
He motioned for her to shut the door. She did.
S
ILAS MOVED
behind his desk, bow slick in his sweaty hands. The clicking talons moved steadily closer, the sounds growing louder as the creature progressed down the hall. It was almost there. Silas touched the dull tip of the field point again, hoping it could still bite. It had to. But he’d have to be close in order to make sure that he didn’t miss. He didn’t trust his nerves.
The footsteps halted just outside the office door. Silas dropped to the carpet behind the desk, gripping the bow tightly. His heart beat in his ears. His mouth was bone dry, throat closing in on itself.
The doorknob did not turn this time.
The door exploded inward and splintered against the wall. Silas heard the creature enter the room, heard its breath coming in long, ragged drafts. Silas waited. The talons were silent on the carpet, so he tracked the creature by its breathing. It stank of sulfuric acid and burned flesh. It moved along the far wall toward the closet. The breathing stopped.
Wood crackled, and Vidonia screamed. The creature yanked her from the closet by her leg.
“Hey!”
Silas jerked to his feet and cocked the arrow back. The gladiator held Vidonia upside down by the calf, shaking her violently. The skin on its face and chest was a tattered ruin, sprouting great white sheaths of dead flesh that drooped like potato peelings.
One eye looked out from the wreckage of its face, wheeling toward Silas.
Aiming for the eye, Silas released the arrow.
He knew immediately that it was high.
The shot went wide and imbedded deep in the upward arch of the gladiator’s wing. It screamed and dropped Vidonia to the floor. She landed on her head with a thump, then rolled away toward the wall.
The creature turned its head and reached over its shoulder, gripping the arrow in its hand. It snapped the shaft off, and Silas could see that the wing was torn. Dark blood poured from the wound. The single remaining eye rolled on him again, filled with rage and pain.
It roared loud enough to shake the room, and the useless bow slipped from Silas’s hand and thumped to the floor.
It came for him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I
gnoring the pain in his fingers, Evan twisted the last wire tightly. He was finished. For better or worse, the link was made whole again. He dropped the cord to the floor and stood, easing the kinks out of his thighs with the palms of his hands.
When he looked up at the screen, Pea was lying back on his elbows in the sand, gazing out over the water into the gloom. He hardly seemed godlike anymore. The long black hair showed streaks of gray, and the body had wasted, becoming thin and frail. Ribs stretched the skin at his sides, and dark crescents arched under each eye.
The light had gone out from those eyes, and Evan couldn’t put a name to what had crawled in to fill the space.
Even the world behind Pea had begun to dim, as if the energy to exist was seeping away. The gliders sank in slow circles, losing altitude on the withering updrafts. A few had fallen to the beach and lay flopping like fish, dying. The waves of the sea had lost their will, becoming anemic versions of their former selves. They lapped softly against the sandy shore, like the soft kisses of a dying man to his children. The place was winding down, coming to rest; any fool could see that.
Pea simply sat in the sand, looking out at all that he had made. All that he could not save.
A brief puff of offshore breeze blew the hair away from his face.
Lying there, he looked like any man, preoccupied, his mind elsewhere, on his troubles.
“It’s finished,” Evan said.
Pea turned his head suddenly, as if surprised at being spoken to. “Finished?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose it is a good thing.” Pea turned his head back to the skyline. “Was
I
good?”
“You were.”
“No, I don’t think I was.” He shook his head sadly. “And my greatest sin still lies before me.”
“What are you going to do?”
For a long while, Pea didn’t answer, and Evan thought perhaps he hadn’t spoken loud enough. But then Pea turned and the fire was back in his eyes. “Tell me,” the god said. “Do you think there can be forgiveness?”
“For some things. Not for others.”
“I think you are right. Papa, I think you are right, but I do not care.” He stood, brushing the sand off his naked flesh. “It is almost over. The threads are coming apart.”
“It was a fine tapestry.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” The god’s eyes were on the horizon, narrowing to slits.
What was he looking at? How far can a god’s eyes see? Into the next life?
“It’s time,” Pea said. He gave Evan a last sorrowful look. “They’ll never hurt anybody again. All for you, Papa. I do this for you.”
“What are you doing?”
“The lines of power go both ways. I can follow the lines to the source. They have no defense; they never expected. Now they will pay for what they’ve done.”
And then the god closed his eyes and put his hands to his face. There was a flash of light, and the god burst out across the sea in a plume of
frothy wind, and what he left behind was just Pea, collapsed at the shoreline, a boy again. Just a child.
Evan didn’t understand why it had happened, but he knew the threads of Pea’s personality had unfurled, split somehow, leaving Pea just a lonely child crouching in the sand. Out on the flat sea, the new wind raised huge gouts of water as it headed for the horizon. There was a flash of light, and the swirling wind was gone. Evan knew that the other part of Pea, the god part, had left this place forever—had traveled out through the lines of power on a final terrible errand.
He didn’t know where it went, but he knew they had run out of time. “What have you done?” he wondered aloud.
Evan looked back to the boy. He was seven years old again, and he was crying. The boy lay crumpled on the sand, barely conscious. His dark eyes rolled blindly. “Papa, are you there? Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
“I can’t see you.” The boy’s voice cracked as the tears slid down his cheeks. “I’m scared, Papa. What’s happening?”
“I’m here. It’ll be okay.”
Evan picked up the headset he had assembled and adjusted it to fit around his skull. In his hands, it looked like just so much ruptured wiring twisted together at odd angles. Blood still stained the linkages. He vaguely wondered if it would electrocute him. Carefully, he stuck the leads to his temples, finding the old dish-shaped scar tissue.
There were no tetherings to hold him in an upright position this time, so he thought it best to lie on the floor. He cleared a place near the screen with his foot, wiping away the shards of wire that had accumulated.
He sat and made a final adjustment to the headset. Then he lay down. The floor was hard and flat against the roundness of the back of his head. Above him, the ceiling spread away in panels.
He placed the visor over his face and one last time willed the world away. Willed it to never come back again.
The shoddy wiring turned the trip into something he experienced
rather than a simple transfer of consciousness. It was not the gentle slide into nothingness that he remembered. He felt the inward fall like a burning in his brain—a frying of neurons that he could almost smell. His soul conducted through the wiring. Eventually, black faded upward to gray, and colors swam. Night fell in his head, then out of it. He opened his eyes and looked at Pea, crouched in the sand. Recognition blossomed in the child’s dark eyes.
“Papa.”
Evan tried to move toward the boy but couldn’t. The interface was crude and uncoordinated; his legs spilled him into the sand. The boy ran to him and wrapped his thin arms around his shoulders, planting cool kisses on his cheek.
Evan’s strength gradually returned, and he rolled over and sat up on the beach. He pulled the boy into his lap and squeezed, feeling the tiny body tremble in his arms. He looked down at himself, and he wasn’t rage a hundred feet tall. He was himself. Evan. Flaws and all.
“Papa, I’m scared.”
“Shhh, Pea. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Everything has to die, Pea.”
“What’s going to happen, after?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there a heaven?”
“A wise man told me that there is no heaven here.”
“Then what will happen?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll be with you.”
“You’re not going to leave me again?”
“I’ll never leave. I promise.”
“Papa, it’s coming.”
In the distance, a sound came like the emptiness between atoms. It was a sound Evan heard equally with every part of his body. Though he couldn’t see it with his eyes, his mind sensed the hole, the vast nothingness that rushed toward them from across the water.
To his left, he suddenly perceived a twist of light, and when he
turned his head, he was looking out through a portal into the tech chamber. It wasn’t a screen on this side, just a rectangular gap, and through it he saw his body lying on the floor. Above his fallen shape, the ceiling lights flickered. The city power was coming back on. Which was why this place was losing the energy to exist.
The sand began to tremble under him, and the boy clung tightly to his neck. The sound in the distance grew louder, rushing toward them, sucking the sea into blackness as it approached across the water. The soft air currents reversed direction, falling back toward the black that swelled from the horizon, lifting the sand off the beach in horizontal flows that whispered past their ankles.
A glider squawked as it tumbled across the sand. The world shifted. Evan squeezed the boy harder, locking his arms around his narrow back.
The sound revved into a deafening roar, and the beach shook violently, sliding away beneath them.
Evan dug his legs into the sand, trying to hold on, but it spun past him in a swirling river, pulling them upward toward the black sky. In the last moments, the boy whispered, “Thank you for staying, Papa.”
Evan clutched at the boy’s small form as they lifted free, falling upward toward the howling darkness, and then light flashed—an afterimage like a detonating sun, illuminating the entire universe in a single glorious, scorching blast of incandescence.
Then the screen went blank.
The lights in the anteroom shined bright and strong.
Then went out again. The city went dark.
On the floor, Evan’s body forgot itself, and his heart ceased beating. Evan and Pea were no more.
T
HE ENGINEERS
in the control room jumped to their feet and cheered at their consoles. The screen on the far wall told the story. Phoenix was alive again. The boxes were all lit, representing eleven million fully functioning units. They’d won. Whatever had been sucking away the power had been cut off.
The supervisor, Brian, smiled broadly. He looked at Mr. Sure, who was also smiling. They had managed to shunt all the power away from that thirsty grid in the technical district outside of San Bernardino. Problem solved.
“What the hell do you think that was?” the supervisor said out loud to no one in particular. Already, it had moved into the past for him. His smile was straight and wide and relieved.
“I don’t know,” the technician answered.
As Brian looked at the gauges, his own smile began to fade.
The gauges were all normal, except for one. He glanced up at the cheering crowd and saw that nobody else had noticed. He considered not bothering, not saying anything.
Let them cheer
. Instead, he motioned to Mr. Sure, pointing to the console with his other hand.
Mr. Sure eyed the gauge. “What’s this?”
“The heat dump,” he said.
“I can see that. Why is it doing that?”
The dial continued its upward swing, climbing like the tachometer of the world’s most powerful muscle car. It climbed steadily through orange. The supervisor looked down at the men in the chamber. The cheering stopped as, one by one, they took notice of the small display in the far-right corner of the wall screen.
Whatever it was they thought they’d beaten had come back to strike a final blow. Mr. Sure thought of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. Fukushima. Precautions had been taken. It could never happen again, that’s what they’d said. What they’d promised. This would be worse. The needle climbed toward red without slowing. Nuclear cascade.