Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 3) (32 page)

CHAPTER 48

“One second,” her voice said through the wall. Then, “Stupid freaking lousy pieces of—” The door jerked open.

The device around Shannon’s right thigh was clear plastic filled with glowing green gel, stretching from two inches above her knee to two inches below her groin and bound with weird centipede-looking straps that twitched and burrowed as she moved. No doubt it was the best the Holdfast could offer—he’d never seen anything like it—but the overall effect was a cross between steampunk jewelry and medieval torture device. She saw his expression, said, “What?”

Cooper tried not to laugh. He really did. But that only made it worse. What started as a muffled snort quickly threw off the reins. It was the exasperated,
you gotta be kidding me
look on her face, that and the notion of the Girl Who Walks Through Walls using crutches, her lissome grace reduced to bumps and lurches.

“Yeah, go ahead and laugh, asshole.”

He made an effort to stop, found that he just couldn’t.

“Enjoy yourself,” she said. “Don’t mind me.”

“Sorry.” He finally managed to lock it down. “Sorry. You look great.”

“Ha-ha.”

“No, really. Where can I get one of those?”

“Keep on like that, you’re gonna find out.”

He stepped in, took her head in his hands, and kissed her. They took their time, a dance of tongues and lips. When they finally broke it, he said, “Hi.”

“Hi.”

He glanced down. “Does it hurt?”

“Not with the pain pills. And according to Epstein’s doc, two weeks wearing the monstrosity, two weeks of physio, I’m good as new. Not bad for a snapped femur.”

“Yaa. Hearing ‘snapped’ and ‘femur’ in the same sentence sends shivers down my spine.”

“Pretty heroic, huh?” She gestured him in. “You know, I survived a spectacular midair collision to save the world.”

“Well, officially,
I
saved it. It says so on all the channels.”

“Jesus.” Shannon hobbled to the couch and lowered herself down. “You were already cocky. Now you’re going to be insufferable. Beer?”

“Sure.”

She winked. “In the fridge. Grab me one too.”

The kitchen was tiny. There was nothing in the refrigerator but hot sauce, mustard, and beer. It looked a lot like his own. “Should you have this with the pain pills?”

“Definitely.” She accepted it, took a long swallow. Cooper glanced around the apartment, cataloging the gun cleaning kit on the counter, the muted tri-d, the books propped facedown—she’d once told him that when she liked a book she snapped the spine so it could lie flat while she ate—the Murphy bed folded into the wall, the desk in the corner, stacks of junk spread out beneath the leaves of a plastic plant. A place for an un-life, a half-life. A way station for a life lived elsewhere. He smiled. “Remember when we were driving here? Before everything. Our fake passports had us married.”

“Tom and Allison Cappello.”

“Right. We were making up the backstory, how we’d worked together at some desk job. I asked if you’d ever actually had a desk, being a smartass, and you hit it back, said something like, ‘Yeah, it does a good job holding my fake plant.’”

“True story,” she said. “That desk is a team player.”

“You didn’t mention all the random crap on it.”

“It’s not random. I know where everything is. How’d your call with the prez go?”

“Kind of amazingly.” He filled her in.

“Wow,” she said. “Are you going to take the job?”

“I don’t know yet. I told her I needed a vacation first.”

“Oh? Where are you going?”

“We. Where are
we
going.” Cooper sat beside her on the couch. “We never got that date. How about we do it somewhere warm? I’m thinking rum drinks and coconut oil and palm trees. No guns. No plots.”

“No one trying to kill us?”

“For a week or two. Of course—” He glanced down at her cast, said, “I was also picturing you in a bikini.”

She laughed, that good deep one he’d always liked. “As soon as I can move my leg, I’m going to kick your ass.”

“I look forward to it, gimpy. In the meantime, there’s something else we should do.”

“Yeah? What?”

“Fold that bed out of the wall and carry you to it.”

“Is that right? Got a thing for the handicapped, Cooper?” Her smile was slow and wicked. “I don’t even know how we’d manage it.”

“Nick,” he said. “You call me Nick. And I bet we can figure it out.”

They did.

EPILOGUE

For the third night in a row he’d gone to bed shivering, his mind on rails, racing on paths he didn’t choose at speeds he didn’t care for. There were sweats and a cough, too, but it wasn’t the cold that was getting him.

When he woke, it was nearly noon, the sun pouring through the window. Some scout of his consciousness, ranging ahead of his waking self, warned him that he was about to feel awful again. He took a breath and lay still.

Nothing. He felt fine.

Hawk rolled out of the cot. The lodge was a two-room log cabin with lacquered walls and the smell of smoke from the woodstove. He staggered to the bathroom and took the longest leak in history. The toothbrush was someone else’s but better than nothing, even though 532 of the bristles bent out in tired waves.

He was halfway through his bottom teeth when he realized that he knew how many bristles were bent. Without any effort or thought, he’d known it as certainly as he knew that if he dropped the toothbrush it would fall: 532 bristles, which represented 21.28 percent of the total number. He smiled. Finished brushing. Spat.

The night of the battle, after the militia had passed, he’d forced himself off the kitchen floor and into the garage. It took twenty minutes of alternately stalling out and grinding gears to get the hang of the Jeep, but by the time the gunfire started, he was out of town, riding west. Around midnight he’d let himself into the hunting cabin with a rock, intending to hit the road first thing. But he’d woken with his brain on fire, and everything since had been a blurry fugue.

In the kitchen he ate canned corn while the coffee dripped. When the machine hissed, he reached for a mug, but wasn’t paying attention, and it slipped off the counter and tipped end over end.

It was beautiful.

Hawk didn’t have the mathematics to describe it, but he could see the formula clearly, the way gravity and air resistance and momentum were dancing, and he found it so fascinating that he took a few seconds to watch, just made it spin slower and slower until he could examine every detail: the inside stained in distinct rings, a faint fingerprint on the handle, the way dust swirled around it and sunlight gleamed off the rim as the mug drifted slowly to the floor.

When it hit, it burst into fragments that vectored predictably, and he could hear the sound of each piece as it clicked against the tile, and for some reason they made him think of John.

In the maintenance tunnel, lecturing on the importance of contingencies, John had been paying only a small fraction of attention to the boy behind him. But then he’d stopped and stared full focus. “I need to tell you something, Hawk. Something important. There’s a very good chance I won’t make it out of this. If that happens, just remember that you’re the future.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will,” John had said, and then they had climbed up the ladder and a few minutes later he was dead.

He was right,
Hawk thought.
There wouldn’t have been any point in explaining then. But you understand now.

He understood other things, too. That John had been using him, that when he’d referred to turning a pawn into a queen, this was what he’d meant. It was okay. He’d still cared about Hawk, had treated him like a man, given him a name and a purpose and his heart’s desire. The reasons might matter, but not as much as the facts.

Hawk took a new mug and poured a cup of coffee, drank it slowly, thinking. Then he went outside and climbed into the Jeep. As he reached for his seat belt, a fit of coughing racked him, and he leaned against the steering wheel until it passed. When he could breathe again, he took a tissue from his pocket.

Then stopped.

Wadded up the tissue.

Wiped his nose with his hands, and rubbed them together.

The gas tank was three-quarters full. Figure it held sixteen gallons, with a fuel efficiency of roughly twenty-two miles per, call it three hundred and fifty miles per full tank. With the money he’d found in the safe house, he could fill the Jeep eight, maybe ten times. He’d need food too, and cash for contingencies—
thank you, John
—so assume twenty-five hundred miles.

Hawk called up a mental map, the image as crisp as if he were looking at the real thing, right down to the scale in the corner.

First, Salt Lake City.

Then Reno.

Sacramento.

San Francisco.

Los Angeles.

Northeast to Las Vegas, southeast to Phoenix.

Spin back to end the trip in San Diego.

Total distance, 2440 miles.

Forty hours if he did it straight. But he’d want to eat in restaurants, go to church, ride buses. Given the latency he’d experienced, though, he couldn’t dawdle too much. So spend, say, four days shaking hands and sneezing his way through metropolitan areas encompassing a population of, let’s see . . .

Nine million people.

Hawk coughed, smiled, and started the Jeep.

There was a long way to go.

END OF THE BRILLIANCE TRILOGY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In 2010, on a climbing trip with my buddy Blake Crouch, I fell in love with an idea. We were camping at fourteen thousand feet, bullshitting and sipping bourbon when it happened. Like most love affairs, it started with a sense of intrigue, swiftly progressed to flirting, and before either of us knew it, we were both gaga over reckless notions. Blake’s became the wildly successful
Wayward Pines
trilogy. Mine culminates in the book you’re now holding.

It’s been a long, wonderful journey, spanning five years, three books, and three hundred thousand words—and those are just the ones I kept. In that time my wife and I sold a condo, bought a house, had a daughter, laughed and cooked and traveled. That journey is now at an end, and like most experiences that change you, its ending brings both joy and regret.

It’s been such a pleasure to live in this world, to hang out with Cooper and Shannon and Natalie and Ethan and Quinn—sorry, Bobby, really I am—and John Smith and Erik Epstein and Hawk, and the notion of that time being behind me is a melancholy one indeed. But while I may return to this world at some point, I think that those stories are done; everyone got their shining moments and their blackest midnights, and I am grateful to them for letting me hitch a ride.

There are a number of other people I’m grateful to as well, and while few of them have a body count, like my imaginary friends, they are all badasses.

My literary agent, Scott Miller, is a fine man and a good friend, a believer from the beginning. Jon Cassir whips Hollywood into line and looks suave doing it. Thank you both, gentlemen.

It remains an honor to work with Thomas & Mercer, publishers extraordinaire. No power in the ’verse can stop my editor and FF, Alison Dasho. Jacque Ben-Zekry bends the world to her will, and it thanks her and asks her for another. Gracie Doyle kicks ass and chews bubblegum. Additional huge thanks to Tiffany Pokorny, Alan Turkus, Mikyla Bruder, Daphne Durham, and Jeff Belle, brilliant and dedicated folks whose love for story burns like a star.

Shasti O’Leary Soudant did an amazing job re-envisioning the covers of the whole series. Jessica Fogleman caught approximately one million errors I’d made. Caitlin Alexander brought vision and style to her edit, and did it crazy-fast.

My old friend Dr. Yuval Raz was incredibly generous with his time and knowledge. Both the biological basis for brilliance and the methodology to burn down the world belong to him, a juxtaposition that tickles me.

When I was stuck, when I was insomniacal, when I was rocking back and forth sobbing and picking at my skin, my boys Blake Crouch and Sean Chercover were always there to get me through. The words are all mine, but plenty of the solutions are theirs.

As always, boundless thanks to my parents, Tony and Sally, and my brother, Matt. I love you all.

My girls are my life. Thank you to my grown-up love g.g. and our little love, the brilliant, fearless, and very silly Jocelyn Sally Sakey.

Finally, dear reader, thank you. This is what I have wanted to do since I was four years old, and I am grateful for every moment of it. And so I say again: thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Jay Franco

Marcus Sakey’s thrillers have been nominated for more than fifteen awards. They’ve been named
New York Times
Editors’ Choice picks and have been selected among
Esquire
’s top five books of the year. His novel
Good People
was made into a movie starring James Franco and Kate Hudson, and
Brilliance
is currently in development. Sakey lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter.

For more information, visit
MarcusSakey.com
.