The Infinite Sea (31 page)

73

I HEAD BACK
to the cockpit, where I find the pilot’s door unlatched, the seat empty, and no Bob.

I wondered why the countdown stopped; now I know: He changed his mind about the whole bailing issue.

We must be in range, which means they don’t intend to shoot us down. They’ve marked the location of Razor’s drop, and they’ll stay with the chopper until I bail or it runs out of fuel and I’m forced to bail. By this point, Vosch has figured out why Jumbo’s implant is on this aircraft while its owner is in the infirmary being treated for a very bad headache.

With the tip of my tongue, I push the pellet from my mouth and lick it onto my palm.

Do you want to live?

Yes, and you want that, too,
I tell Vosch.
I don’t know why and, hopefully, I never will.

I flick the pellet from my hand.

The hub’s response is instantaneous. My intent alerted the central processor, which calculated the overwhelming probability of terminal failure and shut down all but the essential functions of my muscular system. The 12th System has the same order I gave Razor:
Don’t let her die.
Like a parasite’s, the system’s life depends on the continuation of mine.

The instant my intent changes—
Okay, fine. I’ll parachute out
—the hub will release me. Then and only then. I can’t lie to it or bargain with it. Can’t persuade it. Can’t force it. Unless I change my mind, it can’t let me go. Unless it lets me go, I can’t change my mind.

Heart on fire. Body of stone.

There’s nothing that the hub can do about my snowballing panic. It can respond to emotions; it can’t control them. Endorphins release. Neurons and mastocytes dump serotonin into my bloodstream. Other than these physiological adjustments, it’s as paralyzed as I am.

There must be an answer. There must be an answer. There must be an answer. What is the answer?
And I see Vosch’s polished, birdlike bright eyes boring into mine.
What is the answer? Not rage, not hope, not faith, not love, not detachment, not holding on, not letting go, not fighting, not running, not hiding, not giving up, not giving in, not not not, knot, knot, knot, naught naught naught.

Naught.

What is the answer?
he asked.

And I answered,
Nothing.

74

I STILL CAN’T MOVE
—not even my eyes—but I’ve got a pretty good angle on the instruments, including the altimeter and fuel gauge. We’re five thousand feet up and the fuel won’t last forever. Inducing paralysis might stop me from jumping, but it won’t keep me from falling. The probability of terminal failure in that scenario is absolute.

It has no other option: The hub releases me, and the sensation is like being hurled the length of a football field. I’m
shoved
back into my body, hard.

Okay, Ringer 2.0. Let’s see how good you are.

I grab the handle of the pilot’s door and kill the engines.

An alarm sounds. I kill that, too. There is the wind now and only the wind.

For a few seconds, momentum keeps the chopper level, then freefall.

I’m thrown to the ceiling; my head smacks against the windshield. White stars explode in my vision. The chopper begins to spin as it drops, and I lose my grip on the door. I’m tossed around like a die in a Yahtzee cup, grasping at empty space, searching for a handhold. The chopper flips, nose up, and I’m flung twelve feet into the rear of the aircraft, then slung back as it flips again, smashing chest-first into the back of the pilot’s seat. A hot knife rips across my side: I’ve broken a rib. The loose nylon strap of the pilot’s harness smacks me in the face and I snatch it before I’m thrown again. Another flip, and the centrifugal force whips me back into the cockpit, where I smash into the door. It flies open and I jam my white-soled nurse’s shoe against the seat for leverage and heave myself halfway out. Release the strap, lock my fingers around the handle, and push hard.

Roll, pitch, flip, somersault, flashes of gray and black and sparkling white. I’m hanging on to the handle as the chopper rolls pilot side up and the door slams closed on my wrist, snapping the bone and tearing my fingers from the handle. My body bounces and twists along the length of the Black Hawk until it whacks into the rear wheel, rocketing straight up, and when the tail rotates skyward, I’m shot toward the horizon like a rock from a slingshot.

I have no sensation of falling. I’m suspended on the updraft of warmer air pressing against the colder, a hawk sailing in the night sky on outstretched wings, behind and below me the tumbling helicopter prisoner to the gravity that I deny. I don’t hear the explosion when it crashes. Just the wind and the blood roaring in my ears, and there is no pain from the beating inside the chopper. I am deliriously, exhilaratingly empty. I am nothing. The wind is more substantial than my bones.

The Earth rushes toward me. I am not afraid. I’ve kept my promises. I’ve redeemed the time.

I stretch out my arms. I spread my fingers wide. I lift my face toward the line where the sky meets the Earth.

My home. My charge.

75

I AM FALLING
at terminal velocity toward a featureless landscape of white, a vast nothingness that gobbles up everything in its path, exploding toward the horizon in all directions.

It’s a lake. A very big lake.

A frozen-over very big lake.

Going in feet-first is my only option. If the ice is more than a foot thick, I’m done. No amount of alien enhancement will protect me. The bones in my legs will shatter. My spleen will rupture. My lungs will collapse.

I have faith in you, Marika. You did not come through fire and blood only to fall now.

Actually, Commander, I did.

The white world beneath me shines like pearls, a blank canvas, an alabaster abyss. A screaming wall of wind pushes against my legs as I draw my knees to my chest to execute the rotation. I have to go in at ninety degrees. Straighten too soon and the wind will knock me off-kilter. Too late and I’ll hit with my ass or my chest.

I close my eyes; I don’t need them. The hub’s performed perfectly so far; time for me to give it all my trust.

My mind empties: blank canvas, alabaster abyss. I am the vessel, the hub the pilot.

What is the answer?

And I said,
Nothing. Nothing is the answer.

Both legs kick out hard. My body swivels upright. My arms come up, fold themselves over my chest. My head falls back, my face to the sky. My mouth opens. Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath,
hold.

Vertical now, released by the wind, I fall faster. I hit the ice straight on, feet-first, at a hundred miles an hour.

I don’t feel the impact.

Or the cold water closing over me.

Or the pressure of that water as I plummet into inky darkness.

I feel nothing. My nerves have been shut down or the pain receptors in my brain turned off.

Hundreds of feet above me, a tiny point of light, a pinprick, faint as the farthest star: the entry point. Also the exit point. I kick toward the star. My body is numb. My mind is empty. I’ve completely surrendered to the 12th System. It isn’t part of me anymore. The 12th System
is
me. We are one.

I am human. And I am not. Rising toward the star that shines in the ice-encrusted vault, a protogod ascending from the primordial deep, fully human, wholly alien, and I understand now; I know the answer to the impossible riddle of Evan Walker.

I shoot into the heart of the star and hurl myself over the edge onto the icecap. A couple of broken ribs, a fractured wrist, a deep gash in my forehead from the pilot’s harness, totally numb, completely out of breath, empty, whole, aware.

Alive.

76

I REACH THE SMOLDERING
wreckage of the chopper by dawn. The crash site wasn’t hard to find: The Black Hawk went down in the middle of an open field covered in a fresh fall of snow. You could see the fire’s glow for miles.

I approach slowly from the south. To my right, the sun breaks the horizon and light shoots across the winterscape, setting ablaze a crystalline inferno, as if a billion diamonds had fallen from the sky.

My water-soaked clothes are frozen, crackling like kindling when I move, and sensation has been returned to me. The 12th System perpetuates my existence to perpetuate its own. It’s calling for rest, food, help with the healing process; that’s the purpose of giving me back my pain.

No. No rest until I find them.

The sky is empty. There is no wind. Smoke curls from the mangled remains of the chopper, black and gray, like the smoke that rose over Camp Haven carrying the incinerated remains of the slaughtered.

Where are you, Razor?

The sun climbs and the glare coming off the snow becomes blinding. The visual array adjusts my eyes: A dark filter with no discernable difference from sunglasses drops over my vision, and then I see a blot in the perfection of white about a mile to the west. I lie flat on my stomach, using a breaststroke motion to dig myself a small trench. At it draws closer, the dark imperfection takes on a human shape. Tall and thin, wearing a heavy parka and carrying a rifle, moving slowly against the ankle-gripping snow. Thirty minutes crawl by. When he’s a hundred yards away, I rise. He drops as if shot. I call his name, not loudly, though; sound carries farther in winter air.

His voice floats back to me, high pitched with anxiety. “Holy shit!”

He slogs for a few steps, then takes off running, lifting his knees high and pumping his arms like a determined cardio fiend on a treadmill. He stops an arm’s length from me, warm breath exploding from his open mouth.

“You’re alive,” he whispers. I see it in his eyes:
Impossible.

“Where’s Teacup?”

He jerks his head behind him. “She’s okay. Well, I think her leg might be broken . . .”

I step around him and start walking the way he came. He trudges after me, fussing for me to slow down.

“I was about to give up on you,” he puffs. “No chute! What, you can fly now? What happened to your head?”

“I hit it.”

“Oh. Well, you look like an Apache. You know, war paint.”

“That’s the other quarter: Apache.”

“Seriously?”

“What do you mean, you think she broke her leg?”

“Well, what I mean is I think her leg might be broken. With the help of your x-ray vision, maybe you can definitively diagnose—”

“This is strange.” I’m studying the sky as we walk. “Where’s the pursuit? They would have marked the location.”

“I’ve seen
nothing.
Like they just gave up.”

I shake my head. “They don’t give up. How much farther, Razor?”

“Another mile? Don’t worry, I got her tucked away nice and safe.”

“Why’d you leave her?”

He looks at me sharply, dumbstruck for a second. But only for a second. Razor doesn’t stay speechless for long. “To look for you. You told me to meet you by the fire. Sort of generic directions. You could have said, ‘Meet me at the crash site where I put this chopper down.
That
fire.’”

We walk for a few minutes in silence. Razor is out of breath. I’m not. The arrays will sustain me until I reach her, but I have a feeling that when I crash, I’ll crash hard.

“So what now?” he asks.

“Rest up a few days—or as long as we can.”

“Then?”

“South.”

“South. That’s the plan?
South.
A little elaborate, isn’t it?”

“We have to get back to Ohio.”

He stops as if he’d run into an invisible wall. I trudge on for a few steps, then turn. Razor is shaking his head at me.

“Ringer, do you have any idea where you are?”

I nod. “About twenty miles north of one of the Great Lakes. I’m guessing Erie.”

“What are you— How are we— You do realize Ohio is over a hundred miles from here,” he sputters.

“Where we’re going, more like two hundred. As the crow flies.”

“‘As the . . .’ Well, too fucking bad, we aren’t crows! What’s in Ohio?”

“My friends.”

I continue walking, following the imprint of his boots in the snow.

“Ringer, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but—”

“You don’t want to burst my bubble butt?”

“That sounded suspiciously like a joke.”

“I know they’re probably dead. And I know I’ll probably die long before I reach them, even if they’re not. But I made a promise, Razor. I didn’t think it was a promise at the time. I told myself it wasn’t. Told
him
it wasn’t. But there’re the things we tell ourselves about the truth, and there’re the things the truth tells about us.”

“What you just said makes no sense. You know that, right? Must be the head injury. You usually make a lot.”

“Head injuries?”

“Now, that
definitely
was a joke!” He frowns. “Made a promise to who?”

“A naïve, thick-headed, stereotypical jock who thinks he’s God’s gift to the world when he isn’t thinking the world is God’s gift to him.”

“Oh. Okay.” He doesn’t say anything for a few shuffling steps, then: “So how long has Mr. Naïve Thick-headed Stereotypical Jock been your boyfriend?”

I stop. I turn. I grab his face with both hands and kiss him hard on the mouth. His eyes are wide and filled with something that closely resembles fear.

“What was that for?”

I kiss him again. Our bodies pressed close. His cold face cradled in my colder hands. I can smell the bubble gum on his breath.
The Earth is my charge.
We are two pillars rising from an undulating sea of dazzling white. Limitless. Without borders, without boundaries.

He brought me from the tomb. He raised me from the dead. He risked his life so I might have mine. Easier to turn aside. Easier to let me go. Easier to believe the beautiful lie than the hideous truth. After my father died, I built a fortress safe and strong to last a thousand years. A mighty stronghold that crumbles with a kiss.

“Now we’re even,” I whisper.

“Not exactly,” he says hoarsely. “I only kissed you once.”