Element Zero (26 page)

What’s happening?

Something was wrong. Inside me, something was very wrong. The scratching in the back of my neck started to burn. I reached back, and when my hands touched the back of my head, I felt the skull melt away under the skin and hair there. Heat trickled down into my stomach, and under my fingers the skin pulled tight across the knobs of my spine.

Error.

Pain pricked my gums like needles and I felt my tongue peel down the middle into two pieces. My cheeks collapsed as the skin pulled taut around my neck, and the walls around me shifted from green to a colorless gray.

The word flashed more urgently, then winked out. The crawling under my skin stopped.

Primary node network construction failed.
The new words floated under the first ones. A few seconds later, they both faded.

My head felt big and heavy. It wobbled as I turned, and when I did, I noticed a strand of drool had oozed down from my lower lip. When I wiped it with my hand, I saw something black in it.

I turned again and caught my reflection in the steel of the headset panel. I tried to scream, but nothing came out.

“This is how it begins,” Noelle said.

I stared at my face, distorted in the polished metal of the switchbox. My neck was shriveled to a bent stick, and my head bobbed at the end. I could barely support it. The back of my skull had melted away under the skin. My lips were pulled back to show my teeth. The gums pulled away and there was blood there, and saliva that drooled from the end of my chin. It was what Ai and the others had termed the Vaggot Deformation.

My eyes stared out of sunken sockets, the whites spotted with broken black veins. I turned back to Noelle and tried to speak, but I couldn’t form the sounds. All that came out was a guttural wheeze.

“Without the building blocks it requires, it tries to use the tissue around it,” she said. “It fails, but drags its victims into a state between life and death, and the spread never stops.”

I got a flash of streets full of surging bodies, eyes blank and staring, and deformed heads that shook at the end of crooked necks. They moved through the wreckage of an abandoned city, not understanding the things around them.

“The living are forced underground,” she said. “You are seeing the last remnants of humanity.”

My reflection worked the swollen halves of its black tongue as I tried to speak. Noelle stepped close to me and looked into my eyes.

She leaned in and put her arms around me. I felt her cold hand on the back of my vulture’s neck, and rested my chin on her bony shoulder. I felt her breath in my ear as she whispered one last time.

“Someone has to do it,” she said. “You know in your heart this is true. Destroy the city, and you can stop this. It’s the only thing that can stop this. You have to—”

The room warped in front of me. I staggered forward as Noelle disappeared. The green concrete walls faded and I was back at Alto Do Mundo, in the war room, where Penny stood shaking me.

“Zoe!”

I touched my face. It was normal. I ran my hands over the back of my neck. I was okay. It wasn’t real. None of it was real, but . . .

“What happened?” Penny asked. “What did you see?”

I turned and vomited onto the tiled floor. Even as I retched, I couldn’t shake the horrible feeling of being trapped in that deformed body.

“Zoe, come on. We’re leaving.”

I looked around and saw that men in black body armor had surrounded us. They all had automatic rifles and were standing at attention. Ai had approached us, her face pale as she stared into my eyes.

“What did you see?” she asked.

“I . . . ”

“They’re swarming out there,” one of the guards said. “We’re not going to be able to get past them!”

“The blockades are to keep us in until he can destroy the towers,” Penny said. “Heinlein’s satellite is recharging to fire again right now. We don’t have a choice. We have to leave now.”

“What did you see?” Ai asked again.

“I know what I have to do,” I told them, trying to spit the puke taste out of my mouth.

“We don’t have time for this,” Penny said. “We’re going to the roof. Come on.” No one moved.

“Tell me what you saw,” Ai said.

“You were right,” I told her. “The city is going to burn . . . it will be gone in an hour.”

Ai didn’t answer. She didn’t push any further. She didn’t make me say the last part of what was going through my mind, the part I didn’t want to think about.

Penny put one of her arms around my waist. She pulled me along as we began to move again.

“Is that true?” she whispered in my ear. “Are we too late? Is this it?”

“Yeah,” I said. I saw the mistake we’d made, the same mistake made over and over, but I’d seen it way too late.

It was true.

9

WORMWOOD STAR

Faye Dasalia—Heinlein Industries Perimeter

I awoke into darkness, at the thin edge of the void. There was no light and no sound as I hung suspended over the abyss.

It’s time, Faye,
it seemed to say.

I know.

Primary systems initializing.

The words floated in the dark as energy collected in my cold chest. My physical body was awakening, but I felt disconnected. The synthetic blood that had gelatinized in its web of veins warmed. It thinned and began to flow as the low vibration of my heart began.

Never mind that,
the presence soothed.
It’s time to sleep now.

Secondary systems initializing.

Distantly, I picked up sounds. I heard the whistle of wind and the low creak of metal. I was sitting on a hard, rough surface that was cold to the touch.

Tertiary systems initializing.

Faye . . .

Not yet,
I thought.
Soon. Not quite yet.

I opened my eyes and a dim light seeped in. I sat inside a small space with humid air and dirty metallic walls. Just ahead was the opening of a large steel duct. Thick frost had formed around its lip. It was quiet, except for the sound of breathing. There was someone behind me.

What happened? How did I get here?

I searched, and found my last coherent memories. I focused in on that section of the field until a bright point of light rose from out of the rest to present itself to me.

Faye, take him now.

I had been standing inside the hidden lab, its walls covered with data. MacReady lay on his back, still-warm blood pooling around his dead body. Fawkes had one hand on my throat, his lifeless eyes locked on mine. I was under the control of someone else.

Nico.

I wasn’t sure what he’d done. Somehow he’d managed to assert full control. He used me to target Fawkes’s spinal cord, and fired my bayonet. . . .

The image flickered and the memory collapsed. It shrank to a point of light and receded into the sea of others. It was the last in the chain. After that there was nothing until I’d awoken here, inside the room.

I put one hand on the floor. Black blood had congealed there, and I felt it squish in between my fingers.

“Hold on,” a voice said. I recognized it as Dulari’s. Something probed at the back of my neck.

Calibrating . . .

“Okay,” she said. Her breath blew like smoke through the cold air.

Warmth tingled down my spine, and I turned my head. Dulari Shaddrah crawled across the floor from behind me, her right sleeve soaked through with blood. Her red fingers were curled around the grip of a pistol.

“Where are we?” I asked. My voice reverberated in the small space.

“One of the cooling ducts,” she said. “The inflow is from outside; the air here is safe for you.” She turned the dimmer on a small electric lamp she’d placed in one corner, and the room got brighter. I could see a film of sweat on her face and neck despite the fact that she shivered in the cold.

“How did I get here?”

“You walked,” she said. “I took you offline for a while. Any memories that hadn’t been committed to longer term got lost. Sorry.”

Breath blew from her nostrils as she winced. I checked the temperature in the room and realized it was just below freezing. She wouldn’t stop shaking.

“What about Fawkes?”

“He got away,” she said. “He made it outside the building and he’s heading for the transmitter. He’s going to try to destroy it.”

“Why?”

“Because he knows it’s over. He lost control of the nukes. The military is on its way. He set something in motion today, and he wants to make sure no one stops it, even after he’s destroyed.”

Tears brimmed in her eyes and her nose ran. She rapped out her words as she tried to keep her teeth from chattering. I wanted to offer her some kind of warmth, but I didn’t have any to give.

“What did he do?”

“It’s what we did,” she said. “Me and the others. I thought we could stop them, but what we created—what I created—wasn’t fully tested before Fawkes released it. It’s out there now, Faye. I don’t know what will happen, but it scares me. . . . ”

She reached behind me and dragged over a large metallic case. Her fingers could barely work the security latch, but she got it open. Inside, there was a small box and some kind of folded material.

“Fawkes destroyed any stores of the original Huma product,” she said. “He knows that if anyone gets access to the transmitter array, they can initiate another code change, but to do that they’ll need something to fall back on.”

She opened the small box. The inside was lined with foam, and two clear cylinders were nestled there. Each was filled with black fluid.

“These are the last samples of the current gen-M10 blood inside the country,” she said, holding the box out to me. “You have to get it to the soldiers who come and tell them what to do. They can still stop this.”

I took the box. She patted the bundle of cloth inside the case, leaving bloodstains.

“You’ll have to cut through the middle of Pratsky to get there, but the air is still saturated with Leichenesser,” she said. “This suit will protect you. Fawkes will be forced to go around the building’s perimeter to get to the transmitter. You can beat him there if you go now.”

“What about you?”

She shook her head. “I’m not going,” she said. “I’m sorry . . . I can’t . . . reconcile what I did.”

“You didn’t know,” I said.

“This is still our fault.”

I nodded. She lifted the gun and put the barrel against her temple. She took a deep breath and frowned, trying to hold it steady. A tear rolled down one cheek.

“We were wrong to do what we did,” she said. “Get that sample to the soldiers. Promise me.”

Her blood coursed hot beneath her skin. The mass of heat in the middle of her chest pulsed quickly now.

“I will.”

“You’re more human than some humans, Faye,” she said, and her lips twitched into a crooked smile as she squeezed her eyes closed. As I watched, her finger tightened on the trigger and the pistol went off two feet away from my face. The report boomed down the duct as Dulari’s body jerked, and the gun clattered next to her as she fell to the floor with a thud. Blood burbled from the hole in an arc before subsiding to a steady stream that trickled through her thick hair. Steam began to rise from the pool as it slowly expanded.

I removed the suit from the case and managed to climb into it. By the time I formed the seals and straightened the hood’s mask, Dulari’s body was cold.

Nico,
I called,
are you there?
After a minute, he picked up.

I’m here.

Where are you now?

Approaching Heinlein’s perimeter.

Are you coming for Fawkes?
I asked.

Yes.

I picked up the box containing the samples and snapped it shut before stowing it in one of the suit’s pockets. I picked up Dulari’s gun from the floor next to her body.

Then meet me at the transmitter.

Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo

We had reached the stairwell when Ai’s phone rang inside her jacket. She took out the phone and answered it, signaling for the guards to wait. She listened without speaking for a few seconds; then I saw her face change.

“Are you certain?” she asked. She nodded, then said, “I see. Thank you.”

She snapped the phone shut and put it back in her pocket.

“Mr. Vaggot has succeeded in regaining control of the nuclear satellite,” she said. My heart jumped in my chest.

“Are we sure?” Penny asked.

Ai nodded. She looked confused. “It has been confirmed,” she said. “A superorbital strike is being levied against The Eye now.”

“That’s good, right?” Penny asked, but Ai shook her head.

I took a long drink off the bottle and let the warmth seep down into my belly. Osterhagen would never have let the nukes launch once he got control of them back, but Osterhagen was dead now. He and all the rest of his men in the UTTC. They were all dead.

But Vaggot wasn’t. He wasn’t inside TransTech; he was off on the Stillwell base. If Vaggot had just retaken control of the nukes, then he’d still be inside the system. There was still time.

“Someone has to do it . . . it’s the only thing that can stop this . . . ”

The visions had been telling me what had to be done all along. I just didn’t want to listen. Like Noelle, I didn’t want to believe it, I didn’t want to face it, but that was before everything else. That was before Nico and Karen, and all the people I’d killed and would probably end up killing later. The city was a pit, full of bad people. Was it really worth saving anyway?

Blocking out the chaos around me, I reached out for Vaggot. I found his consciousness and eased my way into it. The relief he was feeling washed over me and actually made me feel calmer.

Mr. Vaggot,
I said, and I sensed him stiffen at the intrusion.

Who is this?
he wondered, still doubting if what he was experiencing was real. I eased in further, through the cloud of his consciousness to the sharp, defined map of colors beneath. He stiffened again when I made contact, and then I felt him begin to give himself over to me without even knowing it.

Leave the satellite as it is
, I told him. He resisted that, but he didn’t move.

What?

Can that satellite really destroy the entire city?
I asked.

Easily.
I felt fear. A cold, white membrane, like a sheet, began to ripple in an unseen wind beneath the rest of the colors of his mind.

All of it?
He knew something was wrong. He sensed, I think, what might ride on his answer, and I could feel that he didn’t want to tell me, but he did.

Ten times over,
he said.

The image of those collapsed faces staring back at me filled my mind. The feeling of my own skull as it melted away, and the feeling of my own tongue as it divided in my mouth had wormed their way into my brain. Even as the explosion across the city grew, I couldn’t shake the alien thoughts that took over in the vision as everything that was me slipped away. Whatever the nature of Noelle’s image when it came to me, I knew she was right. Ai had been wrong all this time: Fawkes wasn’t Element Zero at all. Element Zero was something else completely. It was the person Ai had been searching for, the person who was supposed to stop the disaster, what she first saw in Noelle and then Penny and then me. The one that would save the world from not only Fawkes but also from them, and with the same fire they’d been so desperate to avoid.

Are they disarmed?
I asked him. Again he resisted me, but again, he answered.

Yes.

Rearm them.

All along we’d been waiting for some key event to make the star and the void disappear, but now I saw that we couldn’t have both. There was no way to stop both. Stopping one meant letting the other happen. To save the world, the city had to burn. To save the city, the world had to end. Someone had to choose.

Fear and anxiety began to course through Vaggot’s mind again as he did what I wanted.

“Wait,” I heard one of the men in the hallway say. “Wait. The launch sequence just initiated.”

“What?” someone else asked.

“The ICBMs just went active again.”

“Is it Fawkes?”

I felt Ai’s attention turn to me. “Zoe, what are you doing?”

When I opened my eyes, I saw her standing in front of me as the wind from outside whipped through her hair. The fragments of her consciousness were gathering focus, and turning that focus onto me. She knew, but she was too late.

Mr. Vaggot,
I said.
Launch the missiles.