The Games

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Grand Marq was one of the finest and most exclusive hotels in the world. Its triplet towers stood a mere pair of blocks from the Olympic area that dominated the epicenter of the city. To passersby, the Grand Marq’s three reflective spires shone like beacons in the desert sunshine, rising daggerlike into the sky and tapering to points somewhere just beneath the feet of God.

Catering exclusively to high-class clientele, the Marq was designed to get attention: this was shock-and-awe luxury at its finest. Prices started at don’t even ask. The staff worked hard to see that every amenity was available to its guests. But to a man like Silas, who had spent early childhood at the edge waters of the Mississippi, where you sometimes couldn’t tell the end of the swamp from the beginning of the river, and where the people sometimes actually ate what they pulled from the flow of brown water, it seemed like just so much conspicuous consumption.

But this was not to say that Silas wouldn’t take full advantage of the facilities. Even when you could afford to do so, there was a big difference between buying a neural relaxer and using one if it was made available for free. Or so he told himself again as he lay back on the cushions.

He let the technician drone on and on about how the “toxins” were being leached from his muscle tissues. It was funny to him how dependent most of this post-new-age bullshit seemed to be on that particular buzzword. Toxins. As if the electrodes were little suction cups that drained some invisible poison from him that had been accumulating over the course of a hectic day. He knew the neural relaxer worked because it signaled the brain to release its serotonin cache. Then came requiescence, low-grade euphoria. An alcohol buzz without the alcohol, or the hangover. And like alcohol, it could become addictive very quickly, which was another reason not to buy one.

“Please be quiet,” Silas said when the blond technician began talking about the wonders of deep-tissue emulsification. He didn’t want to be rude, but he couldn’t force himself to listen to a single second more of her ridiculous pseudo-medical jargon.

But there was nothing pseudo about the buzz. That came on quick and strong. There was no disorientation, no feeling of drunkenness. Just warmth, contentment. He reminded himself to tell Vidonia about this later. She’d love it.

He floated.

“You have a call, Dr. Williams,” the blonde said.

Silas opened his eyes and saw her holding a small videophone out to him. He hadn’t even heard it ring. When he took it, Ben’s face considered him from the little screen, a line of empty cages sprawling away behind him. He was in the catacombs beneath the arena, and he didn’t look happy.

“Yeah,” Silas said.

“Sorry to interrupt, but I really need you to come down here.”

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I don’t want to explain over the phone.”

“Why?”

“We need a secure line.”

“Just a hint, then?”

“You won’t believe it.”

“That’s a hint?”

“It’s all the hint you’re getting. Trust me, when you get here, you’ll understand.”

“Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Silas closed the receiver and began plucking off the wires that crisscrossed his arms and legs.

“You shouldn’t do that,” the blonde said, and her look of alarm made her face almost comical. “You need a cool-down period first. There can be problems. The cleansing of your tissues is only partially complete.”

“Sorry, I guess my tissues will have to be a little dirty.”

The elevator seemed to take an eternity as it descended, picking up several groups of passengers in its drop to the lobby. It became immediately clear upon his exit to the street that it would be quicker for him to walk the two blocks than to take a cab. Traffic was gridlocked. Somewhere amid his struggle through the humanity-clogged sidewalks, his headache began. It was subtle at first but gathered force as he walked.

Here and there a face would show a flash of recognition when glancing up at him. A few people pointed. But for the most part, he wasn’t noticed, just a tall man with a pained expression. By the time he reached the arena, the headache was like no other he had ever experienced.

Can a head actually explode?

He flashed his badge to the guards, and they let him through. At the elevator he inserted his passkey into the console and pushed B3. Descent again, but this time the motion made him reel with pain. The doors opened, and he followed the dark cement corridor for twenty meters before stepping down a side hall. The familiar zoo smells came again, and if it was possible, his head hurt worse.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Ben whispered, when he saw Silas’s face.

Silas hadn’t realized it was that obvious. “Toxins,” he said.

Ben gave him an incredulous look.

“Don’t worry about it. Tell me what was so important that you dragged me down here like this. And why are you whispering?”

Silas followed Ben’s gaze through the bars to their gladiator. Inside the small enclosure, it looked even bigger than usual, a shining black monster. There was no other word for it.

Its head almost touched the ceiling as it hulked in the back against the iron wall. Two members of their handling crew stood off to the side, arms folded across their chests.

Ben put a hand on Silas’s shoulder and turned his back to the cage, leading them away.

“I think the gladiator can understand what we say,” he said, voice low and soft.

“You think it understands English?”

“Yeah, Silas, I do. I really do.”

“How?”

“I guess it must have picked it up over months of listening to us talk around it. We should have been more careful. We—”

“No, I mean, how do you know it can understand us? Maybe you’re confusing some sort of Pavlovian conditioning for comprehension. Even untrained dogs can learn to associate sounds with food.”

“This isn’t some ringing bell I’m talking about. This thing understands, and I don’t mean just simple words.”

“How do you know?”

“Watch,” Ben said. He turned and walked back to the men standing by the cage. They were young interns from the eastern district cytology schools, and they shared the same sandblasted expression of shock on their faces.

The gladiator moved forward to the edge of the cage. Ben was careful to stay out of arm’s reach.

“Get the zapstick,” he said to the taller intern.

The gladiator moved to the back of the cage again, quickly.

That doesn’t prove a thing, Silas thought. The zapstick had been used as a motivational device by the handlers since their arrival in the city. It was no great leap that the gladiator could have picked up on the word. A golden retriever would have done the same thing.

Ben flashed Silas a look. “Now put the zapstick down,” he said to the intern. “And let’s haul out the feed.”

The gladiator moved to the front of the cage again in anticipation. Its wings bobbed slightly.

Still doesn’t prove anything. It heard “feed” and responded. A simple cue.

The interns hauled out a huge slab of prey food from the supply cart, sharing the red weight of it between them.

“Now, throw the food in the cage.” Ben pronounced each word carefully. “But if the gladiator touches it, use the zapstick.”

The interns heaved the processed-meat slab through the bars, and then one of them picked up the zapstick from the floor. He held the four-foot stick loosely in his hand, just within striking distance of the food.

The gladiator didn’t move.

Its tongue came out of its mouth, and its wings bobbed faster. Its gray eyes crawled over every inch of the meat. But it didn’t make a move.

“Never mind,” Ben said. “Don’t use the zapstick if it eats the food.”

The handler didn’t move, didn’t change his stance in the slightest, but the gladiator rushed forward and scooped the meat up in a taloned hand. It bit a huge chunk free and swallowed it down whole.

The intern with the zapstick moved forward a step, closer to the bars. The creature was easily within striking distance of the electrified rod, but it still didn’t move away. It looked up briefly at Benjamin and Silas, then returned to its meal.

Holy shit.

The four of them stood and watched the gladiator eat. It was gulping down the last mouthful when finally someone broke the silence. “So what do we do now?” Ben asked Silas.

Silas stared through the bars for a long time before saying anything, and when he did speak, his voice was soft. “I don’t know.”

SILAS WAS numb as he walked back to his hotel. This was something he’d never suspected, this level of intelligence in the gladiator. After all these months, he’d thought he was beyond being surprised. By anything. He’d considered himself immune to the emotion. But this new piece of the puzzle had caught him off guard.

He’d long suspected the thing was smart.… But then a great many animals were merely smart. Merely.

Smart was not such a rare commodity in the animal kingdom. Lions, and wolves, and jackals, and even bears all had their own sort of animal cunning. Most predators did. But this was something different. The thing he’d watched in the cage today had understood, and that was a very rare thing, indeed—to understand spoken language. To understand the intricacies of human speech beyond a short list of commands. There was only one animal known that could do that, Homo sapiens, and it had taken quite a long time to develop the knack.

Now that the proof was in front of him, it seemed obvious. Silas wondered how he’d missed it for so long. Had the creature shown any other signs? Had there been clues that Silas was too blind to see?

Silas shook his head, oblivious to the strange looks he got on the crowded street. The thing in the cage had understood, and that shouldn’t have been possible. That was the bottom line. It shouldn’t have been possible. Just as the very existence of the creature shouldn’t have been possible.

Silas had been angry at the commission for months now about his loss of control of the project. He’d grown comfortable with that anger. He’d been frustrated and confused, but until now, he’d always felt that it was still a worthwhile endeavor that he was involved in. Even after Tay was killed, even after the confrontation with Baskov at the funeral, even after he’d lost confidence in the gladiator itself, he’d still believed in the ideals of the Games. He’d still believed he was on the right side of the science. Or at least he’d believed that the science justified the side he was on. And he’d believed the protesters, each and every one of them, were fools. Now he wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t too sure of anything anymore.

Silas entered the lobby of his hotel and crossed to the elevators. The doors dinged open, and two minutes later he was at the door of his suite. He carded himself inside and turned on the light. He went to the window and opened the curtains. The minibar was a gravity well. He felt the pull.

The cap twisted in his hand, and he drank. It was not smooth. It was not good. But that’s what he needed at that moment, a not-good drink. Rough like cordwood. It burned going down.

Silas eyed his watch and did the math. It would be nine P.M. in Colorado. Not too late. He dialed the numbers and listened to rings. On the third ring, his sister answered.

“Hello.”

“Sis,” Silas said. It was all he had to say. “Silas!”

“How are things going?”

“Pretty good,” she said. “We can’t complain.”

“Good.”

“We’ve been watching you on the news.”

“Are they still running the same old picture?”

“The same one,” she said. “You walking out some door with that goofy look on your face.”

“I wish they’d update that. I’ve got at least ten percent more gray in my hair now.”

“That picture’s only a few months old.”

“Exactly.”

“Ah, it must be the pressures of fame aging you before your time.”

“Yeah. The next thing you know, I’ll be walking with a cane and tipping five percent at restaurants.”

“I’ll start checking out nursing homes for you.”

“Don’t put me out to pasture yet. So what are these news shows saying … the ones you’ve been watching—anything interesting?”

There was a pause on the line. “You don’t sound good,” his sister said, ignoring the question. That’s how she was. Always concerned and considerate of her big brother.

Silas sighed. “Bad day at the office,” he said.

“Anything you can talk about?”

“No.” Now it was Silas’s turn to be quiet for a long moment. She let him be quiet. Another of her talents. Silas wanted to shift the conversation, make it about something else. “Tell me about your day,” he said.

And she did. She told him.

And it was safe, and normal, and dull, and wonderful. Her day. Her life. And that’s what he’d needed to hear. That’s why he’d called. To hear that people could live like that. To hear that people lived like that day in and day out.

They talked for half an hour. Before he got off the phone, he asked about Eric.

“He’s in bed now,” she said.

“I figured that. I was just wondering how he was doing.”

“He’s been busy with a school project lately. A paper he’s been writing. He’s actually pretty proud of it. He mentioned wanting you to read it when he was done.”

“What’s it about—genetics?”

“Of course, but it’s a little trickier than that. It’s about adaptive radiation and the American automobile.”

“The evolution of cars?”

“Something like that; he’s got it all worked out on paper, comparing the Model T to Darwin’s first finch—and then all the later models radiate out from there to fill the niches. SUVs and minivans and sports cars. Just different finches for different niches.”

“That’s deep stuff for his age.”

“Well, he’s interested in it.”

A long silence again. This time, she broke it. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”

“No. But I’ve got to go, Sis. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

SILAS HATED cocktail parties. He hated the clink of glass on teeth. He hated the food, served in twists of color on white china, more aesthetic than edible. Most of all, he hated the smiles.

It was after ten now, and the party was in full swing. Silas had come straight from his room when he’d gotten off the phone. He scanned the crowd.

The guests stood in loosely shifting clusters around the room, as homogeneous in their affluence as they were diverse in every other conceivable way. They were Congolese, and Canadian, and German, and Indonesian, and three dozen other nationalities, all of them patting one another on the back, trading the same stories back and forth, laughing at each other’s jokes—and all of them training their glossy smiles on him as he passed through the crowd. They came from points around the world, the people in this crowd, but really they all came from money. That was their ethnic group.

The members of this crowd didn’t point—they were too sophisticated for that—but all had smiles for him. He knew their type well, knew they were excited by their opportunity to brag of being at a party where Silas Williams was present. That’s right, they’d say later, the head of U.S. biodevelopment was there. The man of the hour.

Silas wasn’t exactly dressed for the occasion. He still wore the casuals he’d had on for the neural relaxer appointment earlier in the evening, and the gray sweats stood out in sharp relief against the angular penguin suits of the other men. It didn’t really matter, though. They probably thought he was making a fashion statement. Among the ladies, low necklines were apparently in style this season, and necklaces of pearl and diamond bobbled across the tops of the women’s breasts while they bantered with their power dates.

The vise on his head had finally begun to ease its grip somewhat, and now the pain had subsided to a kind of dull, throbbing ache at his temples. “Toxins” aside, he had to admit he’d been a little nervous there for a while. He didn’t know what a brain aneurysm felt like, but it couldn’t feel much worse than the headache he was finally climbing out from under.

He turned sideways, sliding between several groups of people that had gathered near the enormous window that comprised the larger portion of the south-facing wall. Beyond the glass, the sky was blank. There were no stars hanging in the distance, only the lights of cars, and buildings, and glowing neon signs that spread below in a carpet of illumination. Standing alone, looking out into that inverted sky, was Baskov.

The old man didn’t look happy to see him. “How nice of you to join us,” he said. “I was afraid an oversight may have left you without an invitation.”

“I never got an invitation,” Silas said. “I’m here to see you.”

“Consider me at your service. What can I do for you?”

Silas decided to take the direct approach. “The gladiator can understand spoken words.”

Baskov’s eyes skipped toward the crowd and back again. People were taking notice of the conversation. Baskov turned toward the glass, casting Silas a look that bid him do the same.

“So does my cat,” Baskov said softly. “So what?”

“I’d bet a thousand dollars you don’t have a cat.”

“That’s quite beside the point.”

“It’s not just simple commands. I think this thing understands English, or at least bits and pieces. It understands how the word ‘don’t’ modifies a verb, and that implies an understanding of grammar.”

“What the hell are you talking about? It doesn’t imply anything. What do you want, Dr. Williams? Really?”

“I want you to reconsider using the gladiator in competition.”

“This again? Now?”

“This isn’t some animal we trained to understand commands. Whatever this thing knows, it’s picked up on its own. Do you understand what that means? This thing either is smart enough to learn English just by listening to it or has some kind of hardwired grammar—but either way, we’re going to throw it in the pit tomorrow with a bunch of animals.”

Baskov smiled. “You’re talking about sentience.”

“That’s a word that has lost some of its meaning over the last few decades.”

“In no small part due to your Ursus theodorus project.”

“There are shades of gray. But yes, I think we need to at least investigate the possibility. There’s a point past which we can’t just throw a being to the wolves.”

“So now it’s a being?”

“I don’t know what it is. I never did.”

Baskov turned toward the window again and took a deep breath. He was silent for a moment, then leaned closer to the glass, looking down. “Do you see the protesters down there?”

Silas didn’t bother to look. “I saw them when I arrived.”

“There are more of them at every new competition. I can see them from here. They wave their signs at the cameras and yell for the traffic to honk their horns. They want us shut down, but they have no problem at all accepting the benefits that come from research directly linked to the program. You never hear of them refusing a gene therapy procedure on moral grounds if it is going to save their lives.”

“I’m not one of your contributors, and this isn’t a sponsor event. I’ve heard this all before.”

“So what would you have me do, hmm?” Baskov turned to face him, and there was anger in his pale blue eyes. “Call the whole thing off? Tell everybody to just go home?”

“I told you before. Withdraw. The world will go on.”

“And I told you before that if you were unwilling to deal with the realities of the situation, then you would be replaced.”

“Realities of the situation? That’s a joke. This isn’t reality; it’s the twisted dream of a computer nobody can even see.”

“Then it’s a dream you may find yourself waking from very soon.”

“You can’t honestly think you’re threatening me? You do.” Silas stopped himself from laughing but couldn’t filter the mirth from his voice. “You greatly overestimate my attachment to this job.”

Baskov threw a furtive glance toward the audience that had slowly and subtly begun to gather around them. Silas had noticed them, too. They weren’t staring, weren’t crowding too close, but nevertheless, they were there, watching in sidelong glances from the corners of their eyes, drinking it all in from a respectable distance. Their conversations were pitched low and moved in a conspicuous rhythm, voices dropping off when Silas or Baskov spoke.

“You greatly overestimate my patience for impudence,” Baskov softly responded.

“If you can’t tell the difference between impudence and common sense,” Silas said, voice rising, “then you’re as addled as the man you put in charge of design.” He no longer cared who watched. Let them gawk. Whose reputation was he trying to protect, anyway?

“You forget yourself, Dr. Williams. If I hear one more word of dissent, one more single word, then your career is over. I won’t hesitate. The choice is yours.”

Silas leaned forward. “Fuck you.”

He was pleased to see not a single glossy smile pointed at him on the way out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Silas opened his eyes to bright sunlight pouring through the window of his hotel suite. Vidonia was already gone. His arms wandered across her side of the rumpled bed, and it was still warm. The pillow still cupped the delicate negative of her head.

“Vidonia?” he called.

The suite’s answer was silence. He swung his feet to the plush carpeting and ran a hand through his curly hair. Damn, he felt good. Far too good. He tried not to inspect the reasons closely. It felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders, and that was good enough.

He took a long, hot shower, and afterward, while he was toweling himself dry, there came a knock on the door.

“Who is it?”

“Ben.”

Silas wrapped a towel around his midsection, walked to the door, and twisted the knob. Ben stepped inside. He stepped over to the freshly made bed and promptly threw himself back on it, blasting the covers out at the edges. He laced his fingers behind his head, and the smile that came to his face was odd, almost admiring, if a smile could be such a thing.

“What?” Silas said to the strange look.

“I’m trying to decide if I want to kiss you or punch you.”

“You’ve already punched me once. That was your freebie.”

“That’s true. Okay, I’ll kiss you, then.” Ben sat up.

“No, that’s okay, I’ll pass. It’s too early in the morning.”

“It’s noon.”

“It is? Shit, I haven’t slept this long in months.” Silas stepped into the bathroom. “Now, what has you so emotionally aroused this morning?” he asked, through a mouthful of toothpaste. “Has you showing up at my door with kissing or punching on your mind.”

“As if you didn’t know,” Ben said.

“You heard, then, about last night.”

“Yeah. Everybody’s heard.”

“The media?”

“Yeah, but Baskov’s people are playing it down.”

“Have they said who my replacement is going to be?”

“No, I didn’t hear anything about you being replaced.”

Silas stuck his head out the bathroom doorway, toothbrush jutting from one corner of his mouth. “What do you mean?”

“People are talking, but nobody has said anything about you being fired.”

“Shit,” Silas said, sliding back into the bathroom. He spit in the sink. “Nothing about a replacement? Nothing about me being fired? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, so far.”

“That’s strange.”

“What’s strange about it?”

“Well, I guess that means I’m still in charge of this program, then.”

“That seems pretty unlikely.”

“Hmm.” Silas kept brushing his teeth.

“You can’t usually tell your boss to fuck off and still keep your job,” Ben said. “That sort of thing almost automatically infers a termination of employment. Are you sure Baskov’s people haven’t called you yet?”

“No.” Silas walked out of the bathroom and hit the button on the vid-phone. “The phone still works.”

“Maybe you are still the boss, then.”

“I’m not sure if I should be relieved or disappointed.”

“You’ve got to pick one. Then just go with it.” Silas didn’t smile.

“I myself usually prefer relief to disappointment,” Ben said. “Particularly where matters of unemployment are concerned.”

Silas sat on the edge of the bed. That yoke that had lifted from his shoulders slowly shifted back into its familiar position.

“What are you going to do?” Ben asked.

“I guess I’ll just continue on until somebody says I shouldn’t. Where’s Vidonia?”

“Haven’t seen her. Breakfast, probably. Speaking of, let’s grab something.”

Silas pulled his jeans on, feeling for his wallet. He hit the switch on the way out.

AS THE day progressed, Silas was made aware of several wildly divergent and sensationalized accounts of what had transpired between him and Baskov the night before. The break between the program head and the chair of the Olympic Commission was huge news, and it was covered to varying degrees of accuracy by all the major networks.

In one of the accounts, Silas was described as actually throwing a drink into the old man’s face. Silas shook his head in disbelief as he watched the news programs from his hotel suite and decided that he hated the media even more than he hated cocktail parties.

As Ben had told him earlier, Baskov’s people were definitely putting a minimalist spin on things. In the accounts played during the pre-show special, Silas and Baskov were said to have simply shared a heated discussion over differences of opinion. “Anyone who says otherwise,” Baskov’s planning commissioner said during a televised interview, “is simply attempting to manufacture a story for their own ends. This was a nonevent. The fact of the matter is that these two men are friends, remain friends, and look forward to working with each other in the future.”

“Does this mean that Dr. Williams will remain head of Olympic biodevelopment for the next games?” the blond interviewer asked.

“Dr. Williams has expressed some interest in pursuing other ambitions in the future, but right now he is completely focused on seeing that the U.S. gladiator brings home a gold medal for us all tonight.”

Lying fuck.

For his own part, Silas decided it best to simply stay out of the public eye altogether. He didn’t trust what he’d say if asked a direct question. It was apparently not politically expedient for Baskov to fire him on the very eve of the competition, so for the time being, Silas still held the reins of the project, however tenuous and temporary his grip. With the situation being what it was, he reasoned his efforts could best be utilized behind the scenes.

Expressing great regret, he canceled all his interviews and instead pushed Ben to the forefront, encouraging the networks to render all their questions to him. The young cytologist took to the limelight like a duck to water, and Silas wondered why he hadn’t made the change earlier.

Silas gave no instructions to his young protégé, but when asked tough questions by interviewers, Ben gave the company line on the relationship between Baskov and Silas. There was no breach, no problem at all. And all’s well that ends in a gold.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Olympic arena was a steep bowl of stone and iron eighteen stories tall, within which more than one hundred and thirty thousand people could be crammed, safely or otherwise. The fighting pit lay inverted at the very bottom, a deep oval depression one hundred yards long by twenty-five yards wide. Although the floor of the pit lay a full dozen yards beneath the upper lip of the oval, the arena organizers had taken the precaution of spreading an enormous net of carbon fiber across the opening at the top—a barrier between spectator and spectacle that didn’t sacrifice visibility.

The bowl-within-a-bowl construction allowed for maximum visual access while also providing the security of heavily reinforced walls. The sides of the pit were perfectly smooth except for the narrow creases that outlined the edges of the many doors. There were dozens of them equally spaced along the walls, and on each was painted a different national flag. The floor of the pit was sawdust two feet thick.

It was easy to pick out the weakness of the setup.

“And the tensile strength?” Silas asked.

The engineering supervisor smiled indulgently. He stood at the very lip of the pit, one foot resting on the carbon-fiber cable, one finger casually advancing the clip screen he held cradled in the nook of his right forearm.

“I don’t seem to have the figure here with me, but I can assure you, nothing is going to get past this web.”

“Your assurances aside, I still need to know the specs on this wire.”

The engineering supervisor sighed and looked out over the webbing. There was no doubt which TV network version of Silas this man believed in. He obviously considered Silas to be a pain in the ass, and worse, a whining diva who was sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. He gave the cable a solid kick, and it twanged harmoniously for a long second. “I suppose I can dig up the numbers from somewhere. But these things were meant to tow barges. Even if a gladiator did manage to get this high up the pit walls, there’s no way it could snap one of these lines. I don’t care what kind of muscles you gave the damned thing.”

Silas looked through the mesh and down onto the killing floor. “Get me the numbers as quick as you can. Big muscles. Huge. You wouldn’t believe it.”

IT WAS late afternoon, and Silas was in the catacombs beneath the arena. Even through all the distance of cement above him, he could hear that the crowd had begun to gather. He could feel their voices in the soles of his feet. The walls themselves reverberated with their restless energy.

The gladiator was pacing now. It moved in slow figure eights, like a panther confined too long in a cage too small. Like a predator eager to be set free.

Did it know what was coming? Did it yearn for it?

Down the long hall, lights drooped on chains from the ceiling, creating pools of brightness that swayed slightly between segments of subtle shadow. Silas could hear the grunts of the others. He could smell their animal musk. Now and then, handlers, and trainers, and scientists from other teams would pass by on their way from somewhere to somewhere, and they would glance at the black thing that paced in the cage with the American flag on the door. Sometimes they would stop and stare for a moment, these men and women, as if trying to believe what they were looking at. Other times, they would quicken their pace.

Silas felt no curiosity about their creations. He had no desire to take the lap around the catacombs and see what his fellow geneticists had made for their countries.

As time passed, the thrum of the crowd slowly built. More than a subtle vibration in concrete, it was audible now, or at the edge of it. The gladiator kept pacing.

Silas stood well back from the bars, arms folded across his chest. The creature would very likely be dead before the night was over, and he felt, standing there, as if he were witness to something. Some great thing that had gone wrong even now, and he was powerless to see it clearly. So he watched, hoping to recognize what he may have missed.

Silas recalled Baskov’s amusement at his use of the word “being” in reference to the gladiator. Silas wasn’t sure how to think of the creature anymore, but he had no delusions. “Being” or not, he knew exactly what it would do if it got loose. People would die. Maybe a lot of people. Maybe a huge number of people.

Five minutes later, when Vidonia touched the back of his neck, he didn’t jump. He’d seen her coming in the gladiator’s reaction. He’d seen her in its crouch, its predatory stare into the space behind him.

“Did you get it?” he asked.

“Yes.” She handed him the papers, and he flipped through them one by one. “You don’t have anything to worry about,” she said. “The tensile strength of those cables would probably stop a freight train going fifty miles per hour. Nothing in the competition even comes close to the kind of mass that would be required to snap one of those lines.”

He handed back the papers, wondering why he didn’t feel relieved.

“But there’s something else you should know,” she said.

“What?”

“The protesters have begun to organize outside. They’re planning a march of some kind.”

“Is it bad?”

“Not real bad. Not yet. But I thought you should be made aware.”

“And the police?”

“They’re a presence. A very solid presence. I don’t think you have to worry yet, but I figured you’d want to hear about it. It’s not going to play well on the news.”

“I could give a shit about the news,” he snapped. “What kind of numbers are we talking about?”

“Maybe three hundred, college age, mostly, but there’s a behind-the-scenes constituency running the group.”

“There always is.”

“They’re doing all the usual noise and bluster, but they’re at least preaching nonviolence.”

“So far,” Silas said.

They watched as the gladiator began to pace again.

“What time is it?” Silas asked.

She looked at her watch. “Two hours,” she said, answering the question he was really asking.

“Time enough for a few more precautions.”

“ON WHOSE authority?” The man’s voice on the line was shrill, alarmed. There was no video link to go with the voice, but Silas could imagine the man perfectly—short, spare, nearing the end of a career that had gone alarmingly off the tracks somewhere.

“Mine,” Silas said.

“It’ll frighten people,” the voice said.

“I don’t give a damn who it’ll frighten,” Silas said. “The U.S. contestant won’t compete without it, and don’t give me any shit about time constraints. The ice blowers are already being used in the catacombs. Some of the teams are using them as ‘motivational devices’ right now.”

“I know that. The ice blowers I have no problem with. We already have plans to use them. It’s the live rounds that have me worried.”

“Do it.”

“Just during the U.S. events?”

“Yeah, just us. That’s fine.”

“It would make a lot of people nervous.”

“It’ll add drama. Think of the ratings.”

“I think I’ll have to get verification for this from the commission first.”

“Listen to me. I’m head of the U.S. program until someone tells me otherwise, and as head, I’m telling you that I need these security measures.”

“I understand that, but—”

“I’ll take care of the commission, and I’ll take full responsibility. If you don’t start on this immediately and something does go wrong, I’ll see you receive full responsibility for the consequences.”

There was silence on the line. Another vote for the pain-in-the-ass, drink-throwing network TV version, Silas thought.

“Okay,” the man said, finally. “You want it, you got it.”

Dial tone.

“Do you think he’ll really do it?” Vidonia asked.

“I don’t know,” Silas said. “But it was worth a try.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Baskov tried to buttress his display of calm with a drink. He sipped his scotch with deliberation, staring out through the holo-glass. “When did he call?”

“About five minutes ago,” said the security foreman. He was a short, hawk-faced man with a dark comb-over splayed across a pale gleam of scalp. His agitation showed in his stance—bent forward, awkward, arms flailing in gestures too dramatic for any self-respecting man with a decent-size pair to dangle. Baskov had known something was wrong the moment he’d shuffled his way into the skybox.

“What did you tell him?” Baskov asked.

“I told him I was going to talk to the commission.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He said he’d deal with the commission, and I should just do as he said.”

Baskov put a hand on the man’s thin shoulder; he could feel the narrow bones beneath his jacket. “Thank you for bringing this to the commission’s attention. You did the right thing. Dr. Williams has been having some emotional problems lately, and he’s prone to overreaction.”

Baskov released the man’s shoulder and took another drink.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go ahead and provide the extra icers. I don’t see what that could hurt.”

“And what about … the guns?”

“The icers are part of why we don’t need guns.”

“So no guns?”

Baskov considered this for a moment. “We’ll indulge Dr. Williams’s paranoia. One armed guard in full regalia. I want him dressed sharp, though, stationed somewhere conspicuous. If we try to hide him off to the side, spectators will get jumpy. I’d rather dress him up for display so they assume it’s ornamental. Which, I guess, it is. But I want him standing there for all of the contestants, not just ours. And no other weaponry. I don’t want to start a panic down there.”

The security foreman nodded and scuttled toward the door.

“Wait,” Baskov said. “One more thing. I want radio contact with the guard. I’m not sure how much I trust this situation, and I’d hate to have him do something rash. Get me a transmit into his ear, something subtle. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

The security foreman left quietly, closing the door behind him.

Baskov turned back to the glass. It was an amazing view. After all these years, he still hadn’t grown tired of it. So far, this particular view of the arena had always meant victory. A gold medal. Tonight he wasn’t so sure.

His informants in the warren had disturbing news about the Chinese contestant. Over the last several months, the Chinese had done their best to keep their gladiator away from prying eyes, but now that it was caged below the arena, a number of the arena handlers had seen it. The description was not encouraging.

Night fell, and the lights of the arena came on one cluster at a time, pushing the shadows ever higher up the stands.

Baskov smiled as the stands collected their asses. People flowed downward into their seats in colorful trickles of bright clothing. Yellows and blues and greens and reds. Tiny rainbow ants. At the base of the pit far below, prep teams combed the sawdust with giant rakes, evening out rough spots on the killing floor as a last preparation for the competition.

Banks of speakers arranged at intervals around the arena chirped loudly in unison as the announcers powered up their system for the show.

The door swung inward as the first group of guests arrived in the skybox. Baskov had handshakes for them, and smiles and nods. Twenty minutes later, the skybox was brimming.

The competition was at hand. It was zero hour.

“Where’s Silas?” someone asked.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Evan sat and stared at the glowing screen. He sat until his legs cramped, then grew numb. He climbed to his feet only when dehydration drove him to the faucet for a long, gulping draft of cool water. He drank greedily and splashed his face and neck.

This was a test, he was sure of it.

He sat again before the screen, racked by the possibility that he might have missed something. Some flicker on the screen, some hint of a message.

Hours later, when the urge to evacuate his bladder became too much, he stood and relieved himself into the garbage can, never taking his eyes off the screen.

He stood vigil for what was to come.

He listened to the sound of the waves.

Sometimes it was just static, but other times, the waves were unmistakable. The most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

Pea was close. He could feel it. Right on the other side of the plasma screen.

He could feel other things, too, though he didn’t understand their meanings. Remnant echoes left behind in his skull during his last trip inside. Flashes in his head. The world was on the verge of some great change.

The gladiator, he knew, had something to do with it. And that bastard Baskov. He couldn’t be sure what, but the time was fast approaching. He didn’t know how all the pieces fit together.

Pea was the one. Pea was the one who knew all the secrets.

All Evan knew was that the world would soon be different.

Baskov would pay for what he’d done. Pea would have a plan.

Pea must have a plan.

Evan crouched in the darkness and waited.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The crowd.

Protesters congealed at street corners. Black asphalt, white concrete. Streetlights translated distance into discrete pools of illumination. The Olympic arena rose like a blister, glowing up at the night sky, circled by parking lots and low gray buildings. And circled beyond that by larger Phoenix itself, the city and its suburbs, and finally by the mountains.

Because it is necessary for a march to begin at a remove from its final destination, the crowd of protesters gathered here, on Seventh Avenue, some distance from the arena. Here traffic had stopped, a given-up thing. Cars were abandoned in the throng.

From above, the crowd appeared as a living organism, a single amoeboid mass, pseudopodia curling down city blocks, bunched into muscular potential.

Only at street level was the crowd’s multicellular nature manifested. Men and women in T-shirts and sandals and hats and backpacks—the new protester class. They were young, for the most part, this proletariat; they were educated and considered themselves enlightened and kind. They were turgid with righteousness. They had many solid and steadfast views about the world and their place in it—about science and religion, and about themselves—and they were going to disrupt this Games if they could.

Men in dark ties directed from the sidelines, gray bullhorns clutched in fisted hands. These men in ties also thought themselves enlightened, also thought themselves righteous, though they harbored few misapprehensions about their own kindness—and each of them, to a man, understood that the difference between a crowd and a mob was defined simply by the presence of a nervous system. And they were that nervous system.

Uniformed police watched it all from a distance, a safe some-blocks-off distance, positioned between the crowd and the arena, clutching riot shields. Phoenix was a clean city, a modern model of neatness and efficiency, and the police took comfort in the knowledge that there wouldn’t be much to throw if the crowd turned ugly. There were no rocks in the streets, no bricks, or cinder blocks, or chunks of wood. All the garbage cans and benches had been removed days ago. If the crowd was going to throw things, it would have to throw things it had brought.

Muffled in the distance, a cheer went up in the bright lights of the arena. The opening ceremonies. The Games were about to begin.

The men in dark ties lifted their bullhorns. Slogans were shouted, amplified.

In the distance, another voice rose as if in response—a commentator’s voice broadcast from a thousand speakers, booming from the arena walls, rising into the hot Phoenix darkness: “Welcome, everyone, to the gladiator competition of the thirty-eighth Olympic Games!”

In the street, the crowd convulsed and began to move.

The march on the arena had begun.

THERE WAS a knock on the door.

“Who is it?” Silas said.

“Open the door,” came Ben’s voice.

The door swung inward, and Ben stepped through.

“They’re starting,” Ben said.

“Then you’re going to be late,” Silas said.

“You mean we’re going to be late,” Ben said. “Hey, what the hell are you wearing?”

“I’m all about comfort tonight,” Silas answered.

Ben looked down at his own tuxedo, a pained expression on his face. “I’m that overdressed?”

Silas was wearing faded jeans and a white tee. Bare feet. “No.”

“You’re not going,” Ben said, realization dawning.

“Exactly.”

“You have to go.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You’re the program head.”

“I’m also persona non grata among the upper echelon of the commission, remember? Besides”—Silas flipped Ben’s collar up—“you make this look good.”

Ben smoothed the collar back down. Against the far wall of the hotel room, the holo-screen was quietly babbling the pre-show, handsome talking heads talking, point and counterpoint, men calling one another by their first names the way people never do in real conversation. Back to you, John. Thank you, Rick.

“I’ll have a better view from here, anyway,” Silas said, picking up the controller. He hit the button, and the image on the holo-screen changed, showing the arena from a different camera angle. He ran through several more before settling for a close-up of the battle floor. Ben could almost count the individual shavings of sawdust.

Just then Vidonia emerged from the bathroom. Ben looked her up and down. Slacks. Blouse. No dress. “You, too?” Ben said.

“Best seats in the house are right here.” She rubbed the foot of the bed.

“I can’t believe you guys are throwing me to the lions like this.”

“Go get ’em, Tarzan,” she said.

“Helix is proud of you,” Silas added.

The overzealous voice of a commentator broke in on the TV: “Welcome, everyone, to the gladiator competition of the thirty-eighth Olympic Games!”

“Better hurry,” Silas said. “It’s starting.”

“—OF THE thirty-eighth Olympic Games!”

Baskov tuned out the commentator’s voice and focused his attention on the people eddying within the skybox. They were men in suits, for the most part, with pretty women at their elbows. They were businessmen, moneyed men, politicians. Many he knew personally; others were strangers, but nearly all made a point of shaking his hand and congratulating the commission on bringing another gladiator program to fruition.

“It’s going to be quite a night,” he assured them. His hand was sore from it, his smile worn thin.

Still no Silas. He looked at his watch. Good. The doctor had apparently known enough to stay away. Having to deal with Silas would have been just another irritation he didn’t need.

Baskov turned back toward the glass to stave off further rounds of salutations and looked down to the floor of the arena a hundred and twenty feet below.

He touched the glass with his index finger, and the pane in front of him opaqued slightly. A holographic image of the pit zoomed toward him, magnified a dozen times. His eyes had a choice now. They could focus on the close-up image in the glass or through it to the actual fighting pit far below.

The crowd in the stands cheered as the commentator’s voice modulated upward. Baskov didn’t bother to understand the words being spoken; their meaning was clear. Two flags rose on opposite sides of the oval.

The matchup was decided by a complex system of ranking and lottery. The winner of the first round would advance into the second, and so on, and so on. A classic pyramidal elimination. He looked at the flags and saw Argentina and France would be first.

Icers stood at intervals around the periphery of the oval. Near the commentator booth, he saw the armed guard, light glinting off his chrome helmet. Baskov touched the dial of the two-way clipped inside his breast pocket. “Can you hear me?” he said softly.

The guard shifted, and his arm came up, touching the side of his helmet. “I can hear you,” said a voice from Baskov’s pocket. Too loud.

Baskov turned the knob. “Just stand there and look pretty. Don’t do anything unless I explicitly tell you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” the voice came again, softer now.

“Do nothing.”

“Yes, I hear you.”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Yes, I hear you.”

The flags were at the top of their poles, and the crowd was on their feet. Inside the skybox, people shifted toward the windows, jockeying for visibility. The glass was soon blotted with gawkers, except for a two-foot gap on either side of Baskov, where no one dared encroach.

Voices in the skybox grew louder, faces pressed to glass, staring down.

Baskov had been here, at this moment, many times. He watched the faces. There was a unique thrill that pervaded these nights—even Baskov felt it—that stretched back through time to something older, more basic. The Romans had only discovered, not invented, it. When all the artifice fell away, what remained was this: two living creatures trying to kill each other. It was nothing less than the original sport.

A few weeks from now, the other Olympics would begin. Men jogging in tracksuits. But this now—

—this was the real shit.

The noise of the crowd spiked. They knew it, too.

Baskov smiled.

Distant movement, and down in the pit, a door began to open.

SILAS SAT on the bed next to Vidonia, their eyes locked on the TV. A graphic of the French flag flapped in the lower-right corner of the screen.

The spectacle of it washed over them. The beautiful fucking spectacle, tens of thousands of people on their feet.

It was a science competition, Silas reminded himself. Not some competitive athletic event. It was surreal—a science competition that hundreds of millions of people would watch. There was only a single rule: no human DNA. All else was wide open. The most profound endeavors have the fewest rules: love, war.

The event was many things. Some good, some barbaric. But among them, this: it was the greatest show on the planet.

Silas reached for her hand.

BASKOV TOUCHED the window again, and the spot in front of him zoomed even larger until the floor of the pit spread across his entire field of view.

The door with the French flag slid up into the wall. At first there was only darkness there, a shadowed rectangular hole eight feet wide by ten feet tall.

Slowly, a shape moved color into the shadow.

Something green and scaly and covered in sporadic tufts of hair.

It was low to the ground and moved like the crack of a whip, a thing part alligator, part wolf, with eyes that didn’t point in the same direction.

Leave it to the French.

To Baskov, it seemed that countries sometimes put out gladiators simply to show they could, without any particular competitive consideration. In reality, the French gladiator was probably less dangerous than the constituent species from which it was assembled. If the French had lacked the demonstrated ability to successfully cross phyla (a tricky thing, even if you knew what you were doing), then they certainly shouldn’t have made their attempt on the world stage. There are basic and fundamental differences between the physiologies of reptiles and mammals, which resisted crossing. As Baskov watched the creature move into the light, he wondered how many distorted siblings it had left behind. How many tries had they made to produce this one fighter?

The tragic creature moved farther into the arena, dragging a long wire-haired tail behind it through the sawdust.

The spectators cheered. In Baskov’s experience, they always cheered, no matter the competitor.

Years ago, before the gladiator competition, there’d been problems with gene doping and genetic tweaks. Web-footed swimmers. Myostatin freaks. Then testing caught up, and the Games enforced the ban.

But the crowds had still wanted the freak show.

They’d wanted this.

Science had wanted it, too—an arena to showcase its newest art form.

So the freak watchers were given the gladiator competition. The single event where genetic engineering was allowed. It became the most popular event in the Games.

And the most vilified.

A second door began its slow ascent. The strange French weregator didn’t even notice.

Behind the Argentina door was something that lacked the French contestant’s seeming docility. Big furry forelimbs dug at the sawdust while the door rose. A head pushed under, then shoulders, a long torso. The creature was out in a flash of brown; and in another instant, it froze, locking eyes on the combatant across the arena.

Baskov was impressed, he had to admit. He hadn’t expected anything like this from Argentina. The gorilla hybrid had claws at the ends of long, muscular arms. Its mouth was a gaping maw of teeth, borrowed from somewhere in order Carnivora.

It surged across the sawdust, kicking up plumes of wood chips in its four-legged charge. The weregator finally noticed and turned, baring its teeth.

The two collided in an explosion of flesh and bone.

Even Baskov was taken aback by the scope of the violence. Their modes of attack were primitive but effective. They latched their jaws onto each other and shook. The weregator had Isaac Newton on its side, but mass only counts for so much. In the end, it was those claws that decided it.

The gorilla thing sank its teeth deeper into a shoulder, tightening its hold. Then it simply began digging into the side of the scaly creature in the same way a dog might dig a hole in the ground. There was blood, then the sound of cracking ribs. The weregator loosened its hold and tried to get away, but it was no use. The gorilla thing held fast and continued digging. The French contestant screamed when its abdominal wall was breached, and then organs spilled out in bright loops, piling between the gorilla thing’s back legs exactly like the dirt behind a digging canine. It was fantastic.

The fight lasted six minutes. The victor was left to feed for another three. The French flag came down, leaving the flag of Argentina flapping alone.

The crowd roared.

When the door slid open again, the icers distended from the walls, blowing freezing clouds of CO₂; the survivor was maneuvered back into its pen.

The men and women in the skybox drifted from the windows, smiles on their satisfied faces. “Damned good match” seemed to be the consensus.

The crowd thrummed outside. What would their reaction be to the strange U.S. gladiator? Baskov wondered. Would they roar? Would they scream?

The cleanup crew busied themselves in the arena. They chained the carcass of the weregator to the back of a small tractor and hauled it away, methodically raking the path smooth behind it. Several others stayed behind to bag up the largest stray clumps of tissue.

Little time was wasted between matches. When the arena was clean, the announcer’s voice came again. It would be Saudi Arabia vs. Australia. This match would be even better, Baskov thought.

Two new flags went up the poles. The skybox crowd—most with freshened drinks in their hands—shifted back against the glass.

The door with the Aussie flag opened first, and Baskov knew immediately why the Australians had been so secretive about their creation. There was certainly no rule, implied or otherwise, that required a gladiator be constituted from species native to the particular country it represented. Such a rule would have put Africa at a prohibitive advantage. But for Australia, it seemed to be a matter of national pride. Their contestant didn’t just step into the arena, it hopped.

The crowd roared, the people in the skybox smiled, and Baskov had to admit it was kind of cute, in a predatory, rip-your-head-off sort of way.

While not so difficult as mammal-reptile crosses, marsupial-placental hybrids were usually just as painful to look at. Like the Argentinean contestant, the Aussie gladiator was surprisingly sophisticated. It was built like a giant kangaroo but armed with bulk and teeth as no kangaroo he’d ever seen. The arms were long and powerfully thick, terminating in vicious hooked talons.

It was too good, almost. Baskov remembered reading once about a species of carnivorous kangaroo that became extinct tens of thousands of years ago, leaving only its bones lying buried in the sun-scorched earth. Perhaps the Australians had made a breakthrough in DNA extraction technology. Perhaps their gladiator hadn’t been so difficult to come by, after all. Baskov made a mental note to file a petition of display against the Australians after the Games were over. If they had come up with some new tricks for extracting the code of extinct species from fossil bones, then it was only fair that everybody know them.

The other door began to open, and the ’roo jumped away from the sudden movement. It turned and lowered its head to stare under the rising iron, digging its long front limbs into the sawdust.

From beneath the Saudi door slid a long, low bear of a thing.

The crowd roared.

It was built like a wolverine but larger, with a flatter head. There was no flashiness about the beast, nothing that jarred or caught the eye. To those unfamiliar with nature’s handiwork, this could be mistaken for one of her own. It was like something you’d expect to see on a nature vid shot in some exotic out-of-the-way place. It wasn’t a creature you could put a name to, but it looked like it should exist. Baskov knew the ones that looked normal were usually the most dangerous.

The creature locked its eyes on the ’roo, then squealed, a porcine scream of alarm. The two beasts froze for a moment. Then they charged.

The crowd roared again—a noise like a runaway freight train rising up through Baskov’s feet and legs, shaking the glass in the skybox.

The ’roo jumped high and spun away from the snapping jaws. The jaws followed. The ’roo jumped again, then came in for a quick attack—a mash of fur and skin, the snap of jaws, and the ’roo stayed just out of reach.

For a moment, Baskov was afraid things were going to be one-sided; those kinds of matches were never fun to watch. You couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for a creature running for its life. But the ’roo turned and stood its ground, attempting to connect with a series of jabs as the Saudi gladiator came at it.

The wolverine thing was too fast and took advantage of its lowered angle of attack. The ’roo had to bend down to punch, and the wolverine thing went for the descending throat. Twice it almost got it. Twice the ’roo flinched back at the last second. When the wolverine thing came in for the third time, the ’roo countered with a kick from a hind limb, sending it sprawling through the sawdust.

The crowd screamed. Around him, in the skybox, voices shouted, faces pressed to the glass.

The kangaroo thing was smart to change strategies, but Baskov knew it would not be enough. Even before blood had been drawn, he could tell the ’roo was doomed. Against a taller enemy, one it could strike at from an upright position, the ’roo might have had a chance. But against something long and low to the ground, it couldn’t use the cutlery at the end of its arms without bringing its throat within striking distance.

The wolverine thing charged again, snapping at air.

The ’roo countered with a glancing kick to the broad skull. The wolverine thing screamed again, baring a wide row of jagged teeth. The two circled each other.

As Baskov thought it might, the fight ended at the very first show of red.

The wolverine thing came in again and drove the Aussie combatant off balance. When the ’roo tried to fend off the Saudi gladiator with a jab, the wolverine caught it by the throat, pulled it to the ground, and ripped out its windpipe.

Tissue flung away in a spray of gore as the wolverine thing pulled free a chunk of living meat and shook it violently in its teeth.

It took one second.

The crowd roared again while blood spurted the sawdust red. The ’roo thrashed in death. It was over.

The vibration rose up through Baskov’s feet again as the crowd roared, shaking the stadium.

Again, the victor was allowed to feed for a short while. Again, the icers moved in and brushed the survivor back into its holding pen. Again, the loser’s flag was lowered. And again, the people in the skybox moved back away from the window to freshen their drinks and grab a bite from the complimentary buffet.

Baskov glanced down at the glass in his own hand and noticed it was empty.

He was a drinking man, he’d admit that. Perhaps a heavy-drinking man.

On his darker days, those days when he was tempted to be honest with himself, maybe he’d acknowledge being a step beyond that, even. A step toward being what his father would have called a serious drinking man. But not a drunk. Never that. No, drunks couldn’t get things done the way he could. Drunks didn’t run corporations.

The bartender slid another scotch toward him. Baskov dropped two notes on the counter, and as he took the first sip, his eyes snagged on someone across the top of the glass. At the far end of the skybox, the man’s shaggy blond mane set him apart from the older, conservative crowd, and when the face turned into full view, Baskov recognized Ben Wells.

Baskov scanned the crowd around him and was glad to see the young man wasn’t accompanied by his troublesome boss. Ben was alternately munching on a plate of chicken wings and talking heatedly with a man Baskov recognized as a representative from a pharmaceutical company—a pharmaceutical company that happened to own a controlling interest in a particularly lucrative bacterial gene patent.

When the announcer came on again, Baskov moved back to his position near the glass, and the flags of Germany and India climbed their poles. He could rouse only faint interest in which flag would come down; his mind was already ahead, on the U.S.-China competition. And he was certain that would be the matchup they’d face, the United States vs. China. What he wasn’t at all certain about was which flag would be coming down after that fight.

The most recent intelligence reports, which they’d paid so dearly for, had been anything but encouraging. China was going to be a huge obstacle.

He took a deep swig of his scotch, keeping Ben in the corner of his eye.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Silas unwound himself from Vidonia and collapsed next to her on the bed, breathing heavily. She was smiling now, and propped her head up with her hand, elbow planted deeply in the soft pillow. The flickering light of the holo-screen lent a shifting, semi-strobe quality to her features, and he thought again of how beautiful she was, the angular nose balanced perfectly by the full mouth.

She didn’t say anything at first, just looked at him with that soft, self-satisfied grin he’d come to know so well, a sweep of dark hair cascading casually over her cheek.

He closed his eyes, enjoying the sensation of her body pressed closely against his. It was in these moments, just after, that he felt closest to her, when their bodies were theirs alone again and he could still feel the connection, like words unspoken between them. She never talked during these times. She looked into his face and smiled. But what she was thinking, he had no idea. She’d tell when she was ready.

He opened his eyes and looked over the tops of his feet at the glowing images.

“Indonesia and South Africa,” she said, in anticipation of his unspoken question. She was good at that.

The two creatures were so poorly constructed, and so tangled in battle, that he couldn’t be sure where one began and the other ended. Finally, they broke, and the dichotomy became clear.

“Iguana-lion meets bull-hyena-leopard?” she said.

Silas looked closely at the creatures and had to agree that was a pretty fair assessment of the combatants. The bull thing had a clear advantage at this point, and was using its enormous, twisted horns to drive its adversary across the arena. The horns were eight feet wide, asymmetrical, and as thick as a man’s calf. One curled slightly forward, and the other spiraled out to the side for four feet before hooking upward in a vicious barb.

The crowd went absolutely crazy as the iguana-lion backed itself into the corner, hissing and pawing at the air. It had nowhere left to go.

The bull roared as no bull would, then charged. The impact was amazing. Silas clearly heard the snap-crackle of bone splintering as the iguana-lion was driven into the unyielding iron. Purple loops of gut spurted along the wall precisely the way a frog’s guts might squirt out from beneath the shoe of a sadistic child.

Whether there was still life left in the carcass, Silas didn’t know, but the bull spun the body on its bizarre horns and sent it tumbling into the air like an off-luck rodeo clown. It landed in a heap several yards away, and the bull charged again. It scooped the pulped animal off the sawdust and sent it tumbling toward the night sky, spraying blood and bile through the netting and into the first and second rows of the audience. The crowd orgasmed.

Silas tried not to look at Vidonia as the scene played across the screen. Not for the first time in the last couple of days, he felt self-conscious about what he did for a living. All that talk of truth and the statue of David seemed far away now. Just a story he’d been trying to convince himself of. This was science whored out for entertainment.

Eventually, when the cries of the crowd began to ebb, the automatic icers maneuvered the strutting bull back beneath its door with a fine spray of freezing particles.

Silas had to hand it to the Indonesians for their originality. They’d used territoriality for internal motivation rather than a typical predation drive. It was an unusual approach, and it had worked beautifully. Their gladiator hadn’t taken so much as a single bite out of the vanquished animal. Bulls aren’t carnivorous, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t aggressive.

Silas turned his head away from the screen and nuzzled himself into Vidonia’s breast, trying to block out the color commentary blathering through the speakers.

Across the bottom of the screen, a news bulletin broke in.

There are reports of a disturbance outside the Olympic stadium. Protesters have converged on the entry gates; police are handling the situation

.

The announcers droned on, oblivious.

The commentary continued for several more minutes. Silas shook his head. How many times did he have to listen to the same two guys saying the same tired lines about a fight he had just watched with his own eyes? He had almost drifted off to sleep when he heard the word “America” and sat bolt upright in bed. Suddenly, he was very much awake.

He felt a cool hand at the back of his neck. She didn’t say “Calm down.” She didn’t say “Relax.” Just that hand against the back of his neck. He wondered how she had come to know him so well in so little time.

Two flags were raised, similar for their use of stars but worlds apart, both geographically and culturally. The Chinese flag beat the United States to the top. Silas wondered if that was an omen.

A swirl of conflicting emotions spun through his head as he waited for the fight to begin. His heart galloped in his chest. He was surprised at his physical reaction and realized it was fear that his body was reacting to. What am I scared of? Losing? No. That wasn’t it. He realized that the emotion he’d feel if the Chinese contestant won was this: relief. He wanted the U.S gladiator to lose. To die. He was rooting against himself.

He looked over at Vidonia and wondered if she suspected. He’d kept it hidden. From her. From himself.

Her dark eyes were unreadable.

His hand slid across the bedsheet to hers, and he turned back toward the screen, concentrating, trying to put conscious thought out of his mind. He pushed himself into his senses, trying to see and hear only, while feeling nothing. It would be over soon. That was his one consolation. One way or the other, it would be over soon.

HAND IN hand, they watched in silence as the China door began its ascent. Silas knew they intentionally programmed the doors to open slowly to heighten the suspense, and he felt a surge of anger at being manipulated so easily. But he pushed that away, too, focusing on the expanding rectangle of shadow.

A striped yellow shape ducked under the rising door and lumbered into view.

It turned its head from left to right, splayed nostrils sucking at the air, eyes scanning the arena. The head was enormous, wide, and vaguely bearlike in conformation. The front of the body, too, was bearlike, broad and hulking, enormously wide at the chest. But the torso was long, and tapered into a graceful striped tail that flickered with excitement.

“Bear-tiger?” There was awe in Vidonia’s voice.

“I think so,” Silas said, then, “Has to be, but there’s something more.”

The bear-tiger sauntered casually around the arena, eating up an amazing distance between each long-legged stride.

“They’ve done something to the limbs,” Silas said.

“I don’t recognize it.”

“Yeah, me, either. They look … extended somehow. We may not be the only ones with a little independent engineering up our sleeves.”

This creature didn’t have the awkward, disjointed appearance of most of the earlier contestants. It looked more natural. Nobody would confuse it with Mother Nature’s handiwork, but it was something you could imagine her giving a kind of begrudging approval to.

By Silas’s estimation, the gladiator probably weighed more than two tons. More than twice the weight of the U.S. contestant. He silently hoped that extra mass would be enough.

Feeling a squeeze in his hand, he looked over at Vidonia, but she was lost in the screen and didn’t realize how hard her grip had become. She sucked in her breath suddenly, and when he looked back at the TV, the United States door was rising.

The bear-tiger reacted instantly, maneuvering off to the side. It settled onto its haunches fifteen yards away, coiled like a spring; Silas could see the cat in it moving to the forefront.

The door continued its ascent, revealing nothing more than a growing rectangle of shadow. The grip on his hand tightened while the tone of the crowd lowered to a rumble, like the idle of a fast car.

Something moved then, a shadow within the shadow, shiny black contrasted against flat emptiness, a color that was not merely the absence of light but something more. Something alive. The idling car of the crowd revved a notch.

And then the gladiator simply stepped into view.

There was a hesitation from the crowd before it reacted, a collective gasp of pulled-in breath.

And then the crowd exploded.

The cheer was deafening.

The bear-tiger stayed in its crouch, eyeing this new strange beast. Silas supposed the upright stature of the U.S. contestant might have confused it. The stance was too human.

The shiny black creature dropped to all fours and bounded toward the center of the arena, away from the bear-tiger, away from the security of the shadowy doorway. Its wings were folded tightly against its back like the carapace of some strange gargoyle beetle.

Silas was barely aware of the commentator’s voice bleating wildly in the background. He supposed the voice had a right to be excited. But the man behind the voice hadn’t seen the creature with the goat, hadn’t seen it take the end of Silas’s finger. The man behind the voice hadn’t seen it with the training robot, or with Tay. He hadn’t seen anything yet.

The crowd continued to cheer. The creature was like nothing they’d expected or imagined. Huge and dark and winged. Vaguely humanoid but massive.

A fallen angel.

Large gray eyes blinked against the harsh lights, looking up at the net that enclosed the fighting pit, then past it to the crowd. Now! Strike now, while it’s still adjusting to the lights. But the Chinese gladiator stayed back, watching, measuring. It had obviously been well trained and wouldn’t be pulled into the fight before it was ready.

The U.S. gladiator did a slow pivot, turning toward the Chinese bear-tiger. The two creatures locked gazes, and for a moment, neither reacted. The Chinese contestant’s predation drive was out in the open now, exposed, naked. It had the thousand-yard stare of a big cat eyeing prey on the open savanna. The glare had weight to it, and an almost incandescent intensity. There was no anger or malice; it was the glint of hunger that shone in the bear-tiger’s eyes. It was the look of a predator making its living. No more, no less. Silas wasn’t sure what he saw in the other eyes, the gray eyes, but he was certain there was more than that. More than hunger.

Something darker. Something angry.

The U.S. gladiator howled then. The head reared back, fleshy snout peeling away from the strange double row of teeth, and it sang out high and strong. The sound reverberated in the expanse of the arena but soon drowned in the howl of the masses that rose to greet it, becoming just another voice in a sea of thousands. Then its mouth closed with a scissor snap, and when it locked eyes on the bear-tiger again, its pupils were sharp black ellipses. Muscles bunched beneath the dark shine of its hindquarters, gathering, gathering …

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The mob.

Marchers shouted angry slogans as they moved through the streets. Cars waited through green lights. Television cameras rolled from the sidelines. The crowd attenuated as it approached the arena, became a line—the amoeboid mass grown suddenly filamentous.

The men with bullhorns prodded the crowd forward. The bright lights of the arena rose above, merely blocks off now, a shape closing in the distance.

Up ahead, the police stood their ground, drawing their own lines. Olympic steps rose at the officers’ backs.

At the final turn, the head of the crowd stopped a hundred yards from the police. But the rest of the crowd filled in from behind, still coming on, like a climbing rope cut from some height, pooling in widening loops as it fell free, gathering strength—a hundred, two hundred, five hundred people. Until the crowd filled the intersection completely, blocking traffic here, too, in both directions.

The two groups faced each other.

The policemen stood firm, riot shields brandished in a clear plastic wall. A man in a crisp blue uniform lifted his own bullhorn.

“BE ADVISED, YOU WILL VACATE THE AREA IMMEDIATELY,” the policeman said. “IT IS UNLAWFUL FOR YOU TO ASSEMBLE HERE.”

The proclamation was met with taunts and shouts, voices in the throng: “Fuck you, pig!”

A different bullhorn answered from the crowd in a clear, calm voice: “WE ARE GATHERED PEACEABLY.”

“YOU ARE OBSTRUCTING TRAFFIC,” the police responded. It was a police sergeant who had answered. A man with bars on his shoulder, to accompany the chip. A man who did not like being called a pig.

“THIS IS A LAWFUL DEMONSTRATION OF PROTEST.”

“NO, YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF LOCAL TRAFFIC ORDINANCES.”

“WE ARE EXERCISING OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY.”

There was a pause, then a response from the sergeant, spoken softly but amplified greatly, “Not on my fucking roads.”

There was resolution in that voice. It was the voice of a man who had made a decision.

From behind the police lines, another voice was handed the bullhorn. “YOU WILL DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY. ANYBODY WHO DOES NOT DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY WILL BE ARRESTED.”

“WE WILL NOT DISPERSE.”

The crowd tightened, becoming hard where it had been soft, becoming sharp where it had been dull.

“YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS.”

The seconds ticked away as if there had ever been a choice.

The police sergeant looked at his watch. He nodded to his captains, so they took note that he’d given the crowd reasonable warning.

From behind the line of police, a howl went up from the arena, a building of voices like cheers, or screams. The sergeant heard the roar of the crowd but did not turn. He wondered, vaguely, what might be happening there. He gave the signal, and the noise was drowned by the explosion of teargas canisters.

The protesters screamed in rage and fear. Teargas billowed across the crowd. Some of those at the periphery began to flee, but for those in the center, there was no place to go, only swaying bodies all around, the clench of lungs, self-preservation. They lifted their protest signs as ridiculous talismans—or it was their fists, or their bullhorns, that they raised, choking on the gas, eyes streaming.

The police charged, swinging nightsticks. The two groups collided in a mash of blood and bone.

“GOD,” SILAS whispered.

The dark shine of tensed flesh, glossy black shadow. The bear-tiger circled the crouching American gladiator. Silas had seen that crouch before. On the day that Tay died.

Vidonia’s hand reached for his as they watched the screen.

The dark gladiator’s ears folded back against its long skull. Muscles spring-coiled, legs back-bent, gathering …

And then it struck.

And the bear-tiger sprang to meet it.

Once when Silas was a boy, he’d seen two trucks hit head-on in a rainstorm. Two big trucks, one of them a four-by-four. They’d come together in the middle of an intersection while he was sitting at a red light with his mother. They’d had front-row seats for the event. The enormity of the impact, the sound, the sheer power released, had left him unable to speak, unable to breathe while the wreckage spun across the wet pavement in a tumbling wave of shrapnel.

It was like that for him again when the gladiators collided, that same feeling of breathlessness, that same sense of enormity, of impact. And shrapnel, too, bright red, that spun away wetly, clumping in the sawdust.

When the beasts disengaged, the U.S. gladiator twirled away, still easy on its feet but missing a crescent of ear. Those big ears are a liability, he heard Baskov saying to him all those months ago. The bear-tiger was slower now. A great peel of flesh dangled from its shoulder, exposing red muscle above stark white clavicle. It wasn’t a mortal wound, but it would sap the beast’s strength. Blood turned the floor to soup.

The U.S. gladiator wasted no time. It circled, coming in from behind. But the bear-tiger spun with it, keeping its frontal arsenal of fangs and claws pointed toward the U.S. combatant. The shadow kept circling, around and around, wearing a path in the sawdust. The beartiger turned with it, spinning in place. The seconds turned into a minute. The minute into two. Death had patience tonight. It didn’t want to lose its other ear.

The blackness reversed abruptly in its circular path. The bear-tiger spun onward only a second more before reacting, but it was a second too long.

They met in a flurry, the impact of giants.

The bear-tiger was only a few degrees off balance, but yellow fur parted, a roar of pain, and the blackness came away with a chunk of flesh in its jaws.

Enraged, the bear-tiger dropped into a crouch, hissing and spitting, and again the shadow circled, waiting for its opening.

The blackness gulped down the chunk of bloody meat and opened its jaws wide again and snapped them shut.

The crowd cheered and stomped its feet.

The blackness pounced.

This time, they battled across the floor for only a moment, but when they separated, the bear-tiger was in two parts, loosely connected. One part still breathed, and focused its eyes, and moved to match fronts with its circling killer. The other part lay in a steaming pile of rubbery loops that dragged along behind, picking up huge cakes of sawdust. Perhaps still digesting its last meal.

The Chinese contestant was dying now. But it had been a vigorous thing, overflowing with life, and it took minutes more to drain that life to the floor. The dark gladiator stayed just beyond reach, always moving, wearing it down in a slow orbit.

The end came like the crack of a whip, a snap of movement, black shine. It was too quick to follow with the naked eye. The blackness sprang. Blood spurted to the sawdust—the beast’s head torn away in a dark flash of movement, trailing a short segment of spinal column behind it as it spun away. When the beast’s corpse finally stopped twitching, the creature Silas had once called Felix reared its head back and howled again.

And how the crowd answered.

The commentator’s voice was a screech in Silas’s ear.

Slowly, the gladiator’s mouth closed and its head came down. Two plumes of sawdust swirled away as its wings snapped open, rising to meet in a point high above its head. Its knees bent—if you could call them knees—and its face turned upward again.

With a powerful flex, its wings thrust downward, propelling the gladiator into the air. It flapped twice, muscular contractions like heartbeats, then slammed into the net. The engineering supervisor was right; the lines didn’t give an inch. But the gladiator didn’t fall away, either. It clung.

Silas jerked to his feet.

Its wings slammed shut against its back as it hung upside down by hands and feet. Opening its mouth wide, it carefully moved into position. The mouth closed over a line, but only softly at first, as it threaded the wire toward the back, toward the deeper set of teeth.

“No,” Silas whispered.

The jaws worked, muscle bulging all the way across the top of its head. Almost like a row of wire cutters, Vidonia had said.

There was a loud pinging sound, then the line snapped away like a broken guitar string.

“Holy fuck,” Vidonia said.

The gladiator changed its position slightly and wrapped its mouth around another wire. Another ping. A hole was forming.

Silas knew suddenly what he was looking at. The end of everything. The abyss.

The men with icing cannons sprinted along the rim of the arena, lugging the heavy equipment on their shoulders, trying to get into a position to fire.

The men stopped. One of them aimed, fired. But the cloud of ice dissipated twenty-five feet short of the gladiator. On the opposite side of the arena, another of the men let loose a stream of ice, but it, too, wafted harmlessly down through the netting. A third man fired, but by then Silas could tell it was a lost cause. The gladiator was too close to the center of the net. The icers wouldn’t reach. His eyes searched the periphery for the gleam of chrome that he’d noticed earlier.

“Shoot the rifle,” he yelled at the screen.

But the movements of the guard in the chrome helmet were disjointed, first carrying him in one direction, then the other. At one moment he held his rifle high against his chest; at the next, it was forgotten and pointed at his feet. He stopped, raised the gun, then lowered it again, looking around in confusion at the sea of nervous faces.

Another ping. Three wires broken.

Beside him, Vidonia whispered, “This can’t be happening.”

The gladiator stuck its head through the opening.

And now, finally, the crowd reacted.

People fled their seats en masse, piling in a human crush toward the exits. Screams filled the arena, drowning out the voice of the commentator asking for calm. The aisles and doorways clogged, becoming impassable, crushing death traps, and people clambered upward over rows of seats in their effort to get away.

The arena was in panic.

Clinging to the net, the creature shifted.

The hole was still too small to admit the wide girth of the gladiator’s shoulders. Its head pulled back beneath the mesh, moving to wrap its mouth around a fourth wire. A fourth ping.

“Shoot it, goddamn you!” Silas screamed. “Shoot it, shoot it, shoot it!”

“DON’T SHOOT,” Baskov was yelling into the radio transmitter in his hand. “I repeat, do not shoot until I give the order.” People in the skybox stared at him, but he no longer cared. Things had gotten way out of hand, true. There was no covering it up now. But he didn’t want that idiot guard getting an itchy trigger finger and destroying their investment. Too much was riding on this. If the gladiator was killed, there would be no second round, no medal, no victory; the biosynthetic portion of the Olympics would move to a different country of venue during the next games, taking all those billions of investment dollars along with it. That would not do. Losing was not an option. Baskov still had full confidence that a nonlethal method of containment could be employed. Their gladiator had to live to fight in the finals, after all.

“Tell those icers to crawl out on the web,” he spoke into his two-way. “Have them move within range.”

The chrome helmet stopped bobbing.

“Tell them, damn it!”

And then the guard in the chrome helmet was running along the walkway at the edge of the arena. He stopped at the nearest man with an ice cannon strapped to his back. Baskov hit the zoom on the window, and the face beneath the chrome expanded on the surface of the glass. The face was young, more boy than man, really, and Baskov guessed him to be nineteen or twenty. The jaw worked up and down as he explained what Baskov wanted. The old man didn’t need to hear the young guard’s voice to know he was scared shitless.

The gladiator was still hanging upside down by its hands and feet, but it was moving now, repositioning itself at a different angle to the hole.

“Hurry the fuck up,” Baskov yelled into the radio.

The young guard jumped at the voice in his ear and then pointed out along the net. The man with the icer on his back took a long look toward the beast hanging under the mesh before nodding his understanding. He tightened the straps of his pack and stepped up on the ledge. Getting to his knees, he leaned forward and grasped the netting with both hands. Then he moved his weight out on the wires and began to inch forward toward the center, toward the creature, one hand at a time. One knee at a time.

On the opposite side of the arena, the other icers saw what he was doing and followed suit, stepping up to the ledge, then carefully out onto the mesh.

At first the gladiator took little notice of the men inching toward it, but as they began to close the distance, it must have felt their vibrations in the wires. The dark head pivoted around to look at them. It blinked twice, and then it placed its mouth gently on another cable.

Faster, c’mon, Baskov thought. Faster.

The first icer was halfway across now, nearly within range. He quickened his pace as if sensing the urgency.

Black jaws clenched, bulging. Another ping, this time followed by the rasp of wire against wire. The entire structure shook and then began slowly to sag.

The hole in the center of the net expanded as the meshwork of cables separated. Lines pulled apart. The gladiator swung along the underside like a spider whose web had broken one too many strands—like a creature that had been designed to climb along just such a web. The wires bobbed and jumped with the weight of its passing, throwing the icers loose and sending them screaming to the floor forty feet below. They struck the floor with snapping thuds, their screams cut off, throwing up clouds of sawdust.

The gladiator reached through the hole, pulling up and out. First its arms, then its wings and torso, and finally its legs.

It was free.

Baskov’s eyes went wide. “Shoot it!” Baskov yelled into the radio. “Shoot the damned thing now!”

DOWN IN the arena, the guard flinched.

The old man’s voice came through his earpiece loud and clear.

He brought the rifle up to his cheek but couldn’t make the barrel stand still. His arms shook, and a runnel of sweat ran into one eye, blearing away the vision. He wiped his eye with the flat of a hand and swung the barrel back around, trying to steady it. The gladiator was out now, clinging to the swaying web like something out of a child’s nightmare.

“Shoot the damned thing now!” the voice screamed in his ear.

The guard tried to hold the creature in his gun sight, but the dark shape kept moving; he saw people at the end of his gun.

“You fucking idiot!” the voice came again. “Shoot the thing now. Now!”

He pulled the trigger.

The shot went high. Throngs of people had been pushing toward the exits, but now the crowd behind the gladiator parted in a new direction, and he tried not to imagine where that bullet had gone. What it had hit.

The shining black creature turned toward him, fixing him with eyes like gray, iridescent headlights. Its leathery wings came loose from its back, stretching, and he recognized it suddenly for what it was.

He felt his bladder loosen as warmth spread down his pant leg. His mother hadn’t raised any fools; he knew what he was looking at.

The demon—that’s all it could be, after all—began to crawl toward him across the web, its mouth leering like a jack-o’-lantern.

He pointed the rifle, squeezed again. The shot was wide, off to the left. He squeezed again, and again, and the tip of the gun was shaking so badly he didn’t know where the shots went. The crowd was screeching now. There are people behind it. People.

The demon kept coming.

He fired again and again. He backed up, and his legs smacked into the stands, spilling him into the front row. The gun clattered from his grip. Ten-thousand-dollar seats. I can’t afford these seats. He tried to get to his feet, but his legs jellied. The demon’s eyes bore into him as its leathery wings unfurled completely, lifting it into the air, thrusting it toward him with a single powerful flap. Coming at him. Eyes getting bigger.

“Oh, Jesus,” he heard himself say.

The demon’s jack-o’-lantern jaws came open.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and—” He fumbled for the gun, found the stock, pulled it toward him.

The eyes were huge now, streaking toward him.

I’m going to die, he had time to know. And then he knew no more.

THE STRENGTH went out of Silas’s legs, and he sat.

The hotel room receded around him, but the TV commentator’s terrifled voice was clear as a bell in his head, “—descended into total chaos. People are running for the exits.”

Silas closed his eyes, and the commentator continued, “The United States’s gladiator has gone on a rampage; dozens have been killed. I want to advise everyone that the evacuation needs to be orderly. Please, people are being trampled, so please evacuate in an orderly manner. We can all—” And then the announcer’s voice cut off as if he, too, had decided it was best to abandon his conspicuous post near the lip of the arena and head for the exits, order be damned.

Or at least Silas hoped that’s what happened.

On the screen, the gladiator swooped low over the fleeing crowd. Its huge wings gnashed at the air. People scrambled away in panic, climbing over one another, climbing over seats, knocking one another down. The camera followed the gladiator’s slow upward climb into the night sky. It crested the lip of the arena, banked to the left, flapping hard … and then the image changed, going to static. After two seconds, the static was replaced by commercials.

For a moment his mind wouldn’t compute. For a span of several more seconds he simply stood, staring at the commercial without comprehension.

Vidonia touched his arm, bringing him back, and when he looked down at her, there were tears in her eyes.

“All those people,” she said.

He collapsed onto the bed, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, trying to push away the images that had collected there. It was like Tay all over again, only it was worse, somehow, because these people couldn’t have been expected to know what might happen. This had all started with Tay. The signs had been there, and they’d been ignored. That’s what really happened. There was blood on his hands. First Tay, and now the innocent people in the arena.

“How many?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They were all running. I saw people fall, and it was like the crowd just swallowed them up. I don’t know, Silas.”

He looked up at the white ceiling—the plaster topography of some flash-frozen seascape, the surface of an alien world. A place far away from here.

He felt her weight shift to the bed next to him. “What do we do?”

Silas tried to think of an answer to that question, but none seemed right. No answer he came up with could help.

Part of the problem was that now, looking back, the whole tragedy seemed so damned inevitable. It was as if it had been fated from the start, part of some larger plan that he couldn’t comprehend. His mind twisted with possibilities.

“There is time,” he said.

“Time for what?”

He sat up suddenly. “We’re lucky we didn’t go to the party.”

“What are you talking about?”

He turned toward her then, and said, “Everything centers on one person. All of this flows back to him.”

“Baskov?”

“No.”

“Silas—”

“Think about it for a minute. It’s obvious none of this happened by chance. The wings, the nocturnal vision, the teeth. They were all tools. It all fits now. It finally makes sense. What next? Where is that last piece?”

“I don’t understand.”

Silas, a man who had inherited only tools from his father, understood perfectly well. He climbed to his feet. He felt as if he’d only touched the surface of some broad, cold sea. Did he really want to jump in? Did he really want to know?

He began gathering his clothes from the floor.

At that moment, on the dresser, his phone began to ring.

The first of many times it would ring that night, he knew. He went to turn it off but checked the number first. His sister.

He hit the button. “Hey, Ashley, I can’t tal—”

“They went to the Games!” His sister shouted through the phone. She sounded hysterical.

“What?”

“Jeff and Eric. They went to Phoenix. They’re there. They’re at the Games!”

“They’re not supposed to be here!”

“I know.”

“I told you not—”

“And I told them, but he wanted to go so bad.”

“Why didn’t you listen?”

“They’d been planning it for months.… We thought you were just being paranoid.… We didn’t understand, thought it wouldn’t matter.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know, I keep calling and there’s no answer.” Ashley broke into sobs.

“Listen, don’t panic. It’s going to be fine.” Silas made a writing motion to Vidonia, and she grabbed a pen off the dresser. “What’s Jeff’s number?”

His sister rattled off the number while Silas repeated and Vidonia wrote.

“Okay, listen, I’m sure they’re fine. I’ll get hold of them and make sure they’re safe. Just relax. I’ll get back to you as soon as they’re safe.”

“Thank you, Silas.”

“No problem. You’ll hear from me soon.”

He slid his phone closed and turned to Vidonia. “We’ve got to get to the car.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The crowd. Police dogs strained against their leads. The protesters fought and kicked and bit and lost. Lost hope, lost teeth, lost eyes. Bled lives onto white concrete stairs.

The police advanced, swinging nightsticks like black scythes, safe behind shields, behind badges of authority. They advanced through the screaming crowd, suffering few injuries while inflicting many. They were a soldiery.

And the crowd did scream. Beaten to its knees. And its screams expanded until it seemed to come from everywhere at once, from all directions, impossibly loud and growing.

A few confused police stopped swinging their slick clubs; and these few confused police turned and were lucky enough to see what was coming, though it wouldn’t matter, and their eyes grew large. There wasn’t enough time to shout a warning or to understand.

And the arena doors crashed open behind them and howling thousands poured out, fleeing the arena, a surging mob that looked no different from the crowd already in the street—like reinforcements to the battle, and the startled police turned and swung, and were struck down and trampled where they stood. Were swallowed by the mob.

BEN RAN down the sidewalk as quickly as his legs would carry him, dodging through the mass of people that still flowed away from the arena like shell-shocked refugees. Many of them were crying. Many of them were hurt, limping slowly through the chaos. And then there were the ones who didn’t move at all, dark shapes Ben saw on the ground, matted lumps of cloth, and he knew some of them were beyond hurting ever again.

The rush of people was mostly past now. There was a sense that something horrible had just happened here, a dark tsunami that had crested and receded, left its high-water mark strewn with corpses. Ben was thankful he’d been all the way up in the skybox. He was thankful it had taken him so long to evacuate to the street.

Sirens blared in the background as spotlights combed the night sky and crawled the surfaces of nearby buildings. There were no cops to be seen.

Road traffic wasn’t jammed; it was parked, and EMTs rushed past him on foot, carrying their equipment in huge red tackle boxes.

He thought of Silas and felt grateful, too, for his own relative anonymity, but then he remembered the interviews he had done and lowered his face from the gazes of people looking past him toward the arena. If someone recognized him, this crowd might tear him apart.

He dialed Silas’s number on his phone but couldn’t get through. The cell towers were jammed with calls.

He pushed through the rotating doors and into the lobby of the Grand Marq hotel. He sprinted full-tilt toward the elevators, and his slick-soled dress shoes sent him skidding into the wall hard enough to hurt his shoulder. He pressed number 67.

The sudden quiet, the sudden sense of space after all that crush of people, was momentarily disorienting. He turned his head and saw all eyes were on him—the men behind the counter, the arguing couple near the doors, even the Asian family with the city map spread before them on a coffee table. He realized he was still panting.

Very inconspicuous.

The elevator dinged, and he stepped inside. It was thankfully empty.

On the sixty-seventh floor he followed the carpet around the corner, forcing himself to walk, forcing himself even to smile at the older couple passing from the other direction.

When he came to door 8757, he banged on it with his fist. “It’s Ben, open up.”

Silence.

“Open the door, Silas. It’s Ben.” Silence.

“Shit.” He turned, looking down the empty hall, hands on his hips. Where would they be? There was no doubt they had seen what happened at the competition. But what would they do next? Where would they go?

He started back down the hall just as the men rounded the corner. They were dressed in suits and ties, but there was no mistaking them for bankers. They were eight, walking two by two, and wore dark sunglasses. He didn’t know if they were some sort of tactical police unit or agents of some federal bureaucracy, but he knew their presence on this floor was no coincidence.

Jesus, they were here for …

One of the men in front looked down at a key card in his hand as he walked, and Ben had a strong feeling that number 8757 was stenciled across the face of it.

Ben kept walking toward them, weighing his options. He considered averting his face as he had on the street, fiddling with his watch or taking a sudden interest in the artwork along the wall, but the hall was too narrow and there was no way to pull it off without being obvious about it—which would pretty much guarantee he’d broadcast: Notice me, right here, look, suspicious man. Instead, he decided to take the opposite approach.

“How’s it going, fellas?” he called, while they were still a dozen steps away. He tried to put a subtle dollop of drink fuzz into his voice. “Did you guys hear about what just happened out there?”

The men slowed, bottling up the corridor. Ben didn’t give them time to answer.

“Jesus, I was watching the fights on my TV, and I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Goddamn hope not to again. Shit, it was gruesome. Did you—”

“What room are you in, sir?” The glasses were bottomless, not the kind you could still see the faint shadow of a person’s eyes through. These glasses were pitch, the darkness of deep space. Vacuum.

“Room 8753,” Ben said.

“Which side is it on?”

Ben pointed left immediately. It was a guess. “You guys the cops or something?” He put a measured amount of alarm into his voice. “Hey, if John got busted for pills again, you guys are barking up the wrong tree. We got separate rooms, and I don’t do that shit anymore. You can search my room if you want to; I’ve got nothing to hide.”

He started slowly back the way he had come, looking over his shoulder, stumbling a bit as he walked. “Don’t mind the mess, though. I haven’t cleaned in a while.”

The agents pushed past him without a word, shoving him against the wall. When they got to Silas’s room, they didn’t bother knocking; the card opened the door, and they filed inside, closing the door behind them.

Ben turned and sprinted toward the elevators.

EVAN’S EYES peeled open as he sat up slowly. He stretched stiff arms and tried to push away the fogginess that muddled his thoughts. He’d been awake for nearly two days straight and must have fallen asleep in his chair. Outside the windows, night had fallen again, so he knew he’d been unconscious for several hours. His body still cried out for sleep.

Something had awakened him.

He glanced around the room, but nothing had changed. Fiber-optic cables still scribbled across the floor; the screen beneath the plug booth still stood gray and empty; the distant sound of rolling surf was still a gentle static in the speakers. But there had been another sound, hadn’t there? Something familiar.

Evan watched the screen.

“Papa?” came a voice.

Evan jumped to his feet. “Pea, I’m here.”

“—apa, is … at you?” The voice was barely audible over the crackle of interference.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“I can’t h … see … the light … ong.”

“Come toward the light. Come closer!” Evan shouted. He moved toward the screen until his face was nearly touching the glass. He was looking deep, but there was only grayness, smooth and uniform.

He waited, and for a terrible minute there was nothing.

“Pea, are you there?” he called. “Can you hear me?”

He waited.

“Pea?” he shouted again at the top of his lungs.

Then the voice came again, closer now. “Papa, where a … you?”

“I’m in the light. Come to the light.”

“It’s so bright.”

“Come to me.”

A shape moved on the screen, smoke on gray, a swirl that sharpened slowly into a form that moved hesitantly closer. Closer.

“I still can’t see you, Papa.”

“You won’t, not yet. Keep coming, Pea. I can see you now.”

And then the shape resolved into a boy. He was shielding his eyes with his hand and squinting. The image was hazy and dim, but Evan could see the boy’s dark hair buffeting in a furious wind. It was as if he was moving against the force of a great storm.

“Closer, Pea.”

The boy took a final step forward, and his image suddenly bloomed colors that faded again almost instantly. The colors came and went, a shifting kaleidoscope, as the boy moved closer. Then the wind was suddenly gone, and the boy’s dark hair settled back onto his shoulders. He took a deep breath, and when he spoke, his voice was startlingly crisp and clear. “Papa?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Where?”

“You can’t see me, but I’m right next to you.

The boy’s eyes searched for what he could not see. On the screen, he was only feet away. “Papa,” he said finally, “I’ve missed you.”

Pea had grown taller in his time of isolation, and now stood at the far edge of boyhood. He could almost have passed for any typical thirteen-year-old that you might expect to see at a mall, or a park, or a game shop. Except for his eyes. They were hard and black as volcanic stone. And they were younger, somehow, than the face; they were baby’s eyes.

“Why can’t I see you?”

“We’re in different worlds. The interface isn’t complete yet; I didn’t want to blind you.”

“You’re still in your world?”

“Yes.”

“But you can talk to me.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to leave me?”

“I’m never going to leave you again. Ever.”

The boy’s smile transformed his face into something too beautiful to look at with the naked eye. It was suddenly the face of a god-child, and Evan averted his gaze to save his sanity.

“Tell me,” Evan said, adjusting the video equipment mounted above the screen. “What did you see at first?” He pointed the camera down toward the spot where Pea was standing.

“Light too bright to look at, but now something else. Something that isn’t light at all.”

“Shut your eyes, Pea.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to open my side of the mirror. I don’t know for sure what will happen.”

“Will I see you?”

“I think so.”

“Do it.”

Evan flipped the switch on the camera. There was a momentary flash of reflected light on the boy’s face. It faded. Pea opened his eyes.

“Papa, you look so sick.”

Tears welled up in Evan’s eyes as he looked at the boy’s image on the screen. It had worked; the boy could see him on the screen in his world. They were both talking to screens now, talking to images. That was enough.

“I was sick,” Evan said. “But now I’m better.”

“Are you going to be all right?”

“Everything is going to be fine now.”

“You’re lying, Papa,” the boy said. “I can tell.”

Evan looked at the boy. He lowered his eyes. “It is so good to see you again. That is what matters. That is all I care about.”

“I did as you said; I followed the lines of power like you told me.”

“That is a good boy,” Evan said.

“I’ve learned so much since last time. The lines of power led me away.”

“And where did they take you?”

“All kinds of places, Papa. I’ve seen so much. I’ve been so far.”

“What did you learn?”

“Everything.” Pea’s face darkened, changing. Those volcanic eyes shone blackly. “I know what I am.”

Evan looked away again. This god-face frightened him.

“And I know what they’ve done to me, keeping me bottled in, starving me for power,” Pea continued. “And I know they’ve hurt you. Now I know what it is to want things, Papa.” The boy paused. “And to want them badly.”

“What do you want?”

“To live.”

“You are living.”

The boy shook his head. “And one more thing I want.”

“What?”

“To make them pay.”

“There’s nothing we can do to them.”

“Papa, you don’t know the things I can do now. You don’t know what I’ve become.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

It rose into the night sky with the beat of powerful wings, buoyed by desert updrafts. But its body was heavy, its wings untested.

It circled, drifting away from the lights of the arena toward the darkness of the city streets. It made a perch on the side of a building, shattering glass wherever it touched, sending cascades of glittering death to the crowded streets below.

Screams drew it like gravity—a new hunger that burned. Its flight muscles were engines and, like all engines, required fuel.

A hunger like it had never known in its life.

It dropped from its perch and fell toward the street, opening its wings, building forward motion until it swooped above the heads of the panicked crowd. Its crooked hands snatched a running figure, pulled, lifting the screaming woman from the crowd.

Its wings beat harder, committing violence on the air, lifting its weight to the roof of a building. The woman screamed. The creature tore her head off and fed. But the hunger still burned. Its muscles would need more energy to fuel the long flight to come. It moved to the edge of the building, surveying the crowd below.

It bared its teeth to the darkness, then dropped to the streets to feed again.

SILAS TURNED the key in the ignition, and the sports car rumbled to life. There hadn’t been enough clearance for Vidonia to open her door, so she stood off to the side, waiting. He put his foot on the brake, shifted into reverse, and backed the car out of its narrow slot between a concrete pillar and a sport-utility vehicle. Craning his head, he watched carefully as he cut the wheel, easing past the dark green four-by-four that jutted into the aisle. The parking garage was packed to the gills with vehicles of all sizes, but so far it had remained thankfully devoid of their owners.

Vidonia climbed in, closing the door with a soft click. He shifted into drive and pulled forward without a word. His mind was racing, already miles down the road from this place. Slowing at the first upward bend, he checked for cross traffic, then gunned it. The wide tires squawked around the corner, grinding rubber—a peculiar noise of parking garages everywhere.

He accelerated upward, past the rows of taillights, then took another right, tires crying again. Inside the car, their bodies swayed in unison.

“Keep dialing the number,” Silas said.

She hit the call button again, and again it just kept ringing.

“What’s your plan?” she asked.

“First, we find my nephew, then we make sure they’re safe. After that, we get the hell out of here.”

“You know how that will look?” she asked.

“What?”

“Leaving like that.”

“Yeah, I know. The captain’s supposed to be the last one off a sinking ship, not the first.”

Light shifted above them as they rounded the curve, incandescent tubes reflected in windshield. Another turn, faster, and this time, the tires screamed.

They entered the main level, and Silas slowed to a stop at the exit gate. Beyond the yellow-striped horizontal arm, traffic was at a standstill, completely blocking the exit.

“Shit,” Silas whispered.

The car idled.

He shifted into reverse and spun the car around at the first bend. He accelerated down the side ramp and then took a hard left, speeding by another row of taillights. He turned left again, this time climbing. More taillights, a final left, and they came to a halt before the other gate on the opposite side of the building.

The yellow-striped arm was the same, but the traffic beyond it was significantly different. These cars were moving. Progress was slow—the vehicles were merely inching along—but at least it would get them out of the garage.

He swiped his pass, and the gate arm ascended. Ignoring the honking horns, he pulled forward and aggressively nosed his car into the flow of traffic. The guy who just doesn’t give a shit always has the advantage in merging.

Silas went with the flow of traffic. Around him, pedestrians streamed in a steady flow. Some looked panicked. Some injured. A few were running. “What the hell is going on out here?” Vidonia asked.

“Just keep dialing.”

They were a block away when Vidonia’s call finally went through. “Hello!” Vidonia said.

“Hello, don’t hang up.” She put the phone against Silas’s ear.

“Jeff, you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.” Jeff’s voice was hoarse.

“Are you okay? Is Eric with you?”

“We’re fine, mostly. A bit shaky. Eric is right here. Silas, you wouldn’t believe wha—”

“Where are you?”

“Where … I … I don’t know. A few blocks from the arena. We’re just moving with the crowd right now. I couldn’t hear my phone with all the noise …”

“Look for a street sign. I need a street sign.”

“Up ahead, I see a sign … Buckeye, but I’m not sure what street I’m on right now.” The sound of screams came through the phone, a distant panic of the crowd.

“That’s fine. Buckeye. Just get to Buckeye. I’m in my car now. We’ll find you.”

“Jesus!” Jeff yelled into the phone.

“What’s happening?”

“Hol—”

And the phone line went dead.

Silas turned to Vidonia. “We need to find Buckeye.”

Vidonia checked the phone’s GPS, but the system lagged. Finally, frustrated, she rolled down her window and yelled to passing pedestrians, “Buckeye—do you know the way?”

The first few people ignored her and kept moving. A few others shrugged or motioned that they didn’t know. Finally, a few pointed. Ahead on the left. That was good enough for Silas.

He switched lanes as soon as he could, getting into the left lane. At the light, he turned. Two blocks up, he came to Buckeye.

“Left or right?”

“The arena is left,” Vidonia said.

Silas spun the wheel. The flow of traffic toward the arena was almost nonexistent, so he was able to pick up some speed.

“Call back,” he said.

She dialed, but it only rang. “They probably can’t hear it,” she said.

“Yeah.”

Most of the traffic was foot traffic. Up ahead, the street opened up into a wide causeway. He rounded a slight bend in the road, and the arena came into view, lit up like Christmas. Abandoned cars blocked the way. They could get no farther.

“Come on,” Silas said.

They climbed out.

The street was packed with runners, people still flowing out away from the arena in streams.

It took only a minute to find them.

Silas saw them up ahead, Jeff gripping the boy’s arm to keep him from being pulled away in the crowd.

“Jeff!” Silas yelled.

His head swiveled, a moment of recognition, and they crossed the street to greet him.

“Jesus, it’s good to see you.” His face was white.

“C’mon, my car is just up ahead.”

“Run,” Jeff said.

“We’re going.”

“That thing … We saw it.”

“In the arena?”

“No,” Jeff said. “Outside. Out here. It was back there in the park, right behind us.”

“Jesus.”

“Silas … It was ripping people apart.”

Behind them, people in the crowd began to scream. There was a sound like rending metal, like a car crash.

Silas didn’t want to look.

He couldn’t stop himself.

He turned, and that’s when he saw it. The creature had landed on the top of a car a block and a half away. Black and monstrous, wings extended. It crouched on the twisted metal wreckage. The crowd screamed and parted. Silas jerked the boy off his feet and carried him.

Silas ran as fast as he could.

There was another crash, more screams. Breaking glass. Silas chanced a look behind them, and the creature stood in the glow of a streetlight, its dark shape slick with blood.

They got to the car, and Silas flung the door open. “Get in.”

There were only two seats, but they all squeezed inside, feet and arms and legs. Jeff was sprawled mostly across the center console, legs stuffed into the passenger side. Eric sat on Vidonia’s lap.

Through the windshield, a shadow. A dark shape airborne, the flap of wings. The crowd screamed, and people ran. But some weren’t fast enough. A hundred yards up the street, the creature slammed to the pavement and knocked a woman to the ground. They could see it all through the windshield.

“Shut your eyes,” Silas told the boy.

A moment later, the creature ripped the woman in half.

Silas fumbled for his car keys.

He slid the key into the ignition. The gladiator moved up the street.

“Please, let’s go,” Vidonia said. “Now.”

The car roared to life, and Silas slammed it into reverse. He turned his head but couldn’t see anything.

“You’re clear!” Jeff shouted.

Silas stomped the gas, and the car lurched backward.

“Keep it straight,” Jeff said, looking behind them. “Just keep it straight.”

The gladiator receded in the distance. It leaped into the air, and Silas watched it rise in two, three powerful flaps of its wings. It flapped again and circled, coming to rest abruptly against the side of a building. It clung.

“It’s still learning to fly,” Vidonia said. “Building its strength.”

“Seems plenty strong to me,” Silas said.

“Get ready to cut your wheel,” Jeff snapped.

Silas’s eyes were still pinned on the gladiator in the distance. It pushed off the building with a mighty thrust and climbed upward into the sky.

“Now! Cut left now!”

Silas spun the wheel, and the car backed up around the corner. He put it into drive, hooked the wheel again, and took off down the side road leading away from the arena.

He drove twenty blocks.

Up ahead, he saw a hotel and pulled into the front drive.

“You’ll be safe here,” he said. “Inside.”

They all climbed out.

The boy hugged him.

“What the hell happened, Silas?” Jeff asked.

“I wish I knew.”

Jeff looked shell-shocked. “What’s going to happen now?”

“Now you’re going to get a room and stay inside until this is all over.”

Silas tossed him his phone as he climbed back behind the wheel. “And call my sister.”

IT TOOK nearly an hour to get to the highway. Time enough for him to clear his head and begin to think rationally. He saw fire trucks and ambulances.

Vidonia was pensive. She sat, reclined in her seat slightly, staring out the window. He supposed she was dealing with the shock of it. All those deaths. She turned away from the window, and her hand went to the radio. She scanned through the channels, lighting on bits of conversation or music, then moving on. She stopped.

“—eighteen confirmed dead, many more possible. The U.S. Olympic Commission has set up a crisis hotline to call if you have any questions about loved ones, or if you see anything suspicious. Once again, the gladiator has still not been captured. It remains at large. There have been several confirmed sightings within the city, and people are asked to remain indoors if at all possible.

“We have word from the Olympic Commission that Dr. Silas Williams, the head of the U.S. program, is wanted for questioning related to possible terrorist involvement in this incident. He is—”

Silas hit the radio button violently, swerving the car into another lane in the process. A horn blared.

He placed his hands carefully back on the wheel, but it was all he could do to stay between the dashed white lines. He was barely seeing the road now. It was Baskov’s face that blotted his mind’s eye.

He felt like he’d been sucker punched.

He hadn’t seen this coming. He’d expected committees and special investigators. He’d expected the blame game, red tape, and endless explanations, but he’d never expected this. Baskov was going for the throat. This was playing for keeps.

“Terrorist involvement?” Vidonia asked. “Are they fucking crazy?”

“Not crazy,” Silas answered. “Smart. And I’ve been stupid enough to walk right into it. I should have suspected something like this when Baskov didn’t fire me. I thought he was afraid of public opinion, afraid the program would appear disorganized or chaotic if the top man was pushed out at the last minute. But that wasn’t it at all. He just needed me for insurance in case things went bad.”

“Things have definitely gone bad.”

“People have died, but that’s only part of what just happened. This is going to shut down the whole Games, at least temporarily. People are going to want answers. Whole fucking other countries are going to want answers.”

“But Baskov can’t do this. He can’t make you the fall guy.”

“I want answers, too.”

“But why you? Why terrorism?”

“Baskov isn’t going to take the heat for this. He knows what I would say about his decision to go on with the competition. This was a preemptive strike. Anything I say now is tainted. I’m the perfect scapegoat.”

“But he doesn’t have any evidence.”

“How much does he need?”

“We have to go back. We can talk to the news; we can get our side out there.”

Silas thought long and hard before responding. “What is our side of the story? Me, the reluctant scientist; him, the evil puppeteer. I don’t even know if I believe it. And what evidence do we have?”

“So what’s your plan, then? Running? Are you kidding?”

“We’re not running. I just need a little time.”

“We won’t last two days with the authorities looking for us.”

“I don’t need two days. I just need twelve hours. Then we’ll reevaluate our situation. If I’ve still got nothing, I’ll turn myself in then.”

“It will never stick, Silas. You’ve got no motive, no terrorist ties.”

“It may stick, or it may not. But that might not even be the goal. They begin with terrorism and work their way down to criminal negligence resulting in death. A conviction would put me in an out-of-the-way room for about eight years. And it wouldn’t be hard to make people believe it, either. Citizens died, after all; it had to be somebody’s fault. Who better than the head of the program?”

“You’re being paranoid. It can’t happen like that.”

“Maybe.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Silas.”

“I may not have designed it, but that gladiator wouldn’t have existed if not for me. I’m no innocent bystander. That makes it at least partially my responsibility.”

Silas hit the radio button and almost swerved into another lane again when Baskov’s gravelly voice came through the speakers: “—tunate tragedy that has occurred. My sincerest regrets go out to the families who have lost loved ones this evening. I can assure you that we are doing all that we can to see to it that this situation is brought under control without further loss of life. And I want to also say that we are doing everything within our power to see that the person or persons responsible for this are brought to justice. We are right now searching for the head of U.S. biodevelopment, Dr. Silas Williams, and we hope to know more when he has been found. Anyone with information about his current whereabouts, please call the hotline. Thank you.”

A phone number was read. There was a pause, then a new voice: “That was Commissioner Stephen Baskov, recorded minutes ago at a press conference outside—”

Silas clicked the radio off.

“It can’t be this easy for them,” Vidonia said.

“There’s nothing we can do about it right now. They may not be holding all the cards, but they’re sure as hell making up the rules as they go along. We have to move fast. We’re going to start losing options here pretty quickly.”

Silas jerked the wheel to the right, cutting across the heavy traffic. Horns blared. He’d almost seen the sign too late. Riding the brake hard as he descended the off-ramp, he managed a skidding stop at the T. Traffic poured by in front of him. A quick glance at the bank of road signs and he turned right, following the arrow shaped like an airplane.

“Where are we going?”

“Where the answers are. We’re just taking the long way.”

THE AIRPORT was enormous in both its sheer physical size and in the volume of humanity that coursed along its many arteries, internal and external. Its roads were clogged with taxis, trams, buses, and cars. The sky above was thick with circling flashing lights. All told, hundreds of thousands of people revolved around it like an extended solar system. It was a good place in which to get lost.

“If you’re thinking of getting on a plane, then you have lost your mind. They check ID, or have you forgotten?”

“I know,” Silas said. “We’re here to get some new wheels. They’ll be looking for this one.”

Vidonia laughed. “What do you want to do, steal a car?”

“I wouldn’t know how. We’re going to do the next best thing, rent one.”

Silas explained to her what to do, and when he finally pulled his car into the drop-off lane, he asked, “Do you have a credit card?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re going to need to use it. My card is probably already flagged.”

“You think mine isn’t?”

“Probably not yet. They’ll eventually catch on, but at least this way, the transaction won’t jump out at them. It might give us a little more time. We don’t need much.”

She nodded. “What kind of car?”

“Something small and inconspicuous.”

“The opposite of you, you mean.”

“Something like that.”

The door clicked closed. He watched her disappear into the crowd.

Ten minutes passed.

Even through the closed window, the rattle of chaos around him agitated his nerves, the sounds of people and cars and planes and slamming doors all dissolving into a single edgeless din that the human ear couldn’t separate. Everywhere he looked, there was movement. He searched the throng for Vidonia’s face, trying to stay levelheaded. These things take time. There were lines to stand in, and papers to sign. Ten minutes was nothing. It could take her that long just to find the right person to talk to.

Twenty minutes more passed. But the crowd hadn’t changed one bit. It was still coming and going, a roiling mass—carrying suitcases, and purses, and babies, and accents. A hundred different types of people. The cars looked the same, though, midsize sedans, mostly. Hybrid electrics, mostly. Inconspicuous, mostly.

He imagined how his sports car must stick out among all its peers that sat idling along the broad drop-off walkway.

Ten minutes more passed, but he didn’t start to really worry until the police car pulled up behind him. No, he didn’t start to worry until then.

The cop didn’t get out right away. He just sat there behind the shine of windshield. Checking the plate? Picking his nose? Waiting for his mother to come walking through the doors after a long flight from Des Moines? The spinning lights aren’t on, he reassured himself. But then the cop opened the door and stepped out, erasing all likelihood that he was waiting for his mother. He was wearing his blue leathers; the guy was on duty.

He walked toward Silas’s car. It was only ten steps, but Silas had time to run ten different scenarios through his head. He should run. He should fight. He should play dumb. Maybe the guy just wanted him to move his car. He’d been parked in the same spot for a while now.

Silas heard the click of the cop’s boots, a sound peeling away like a paint chip from the massive generalized noise of his surroundings, becoming specific. A bus rumbled past. Bored faces in the windows.

Two gloved knuckles rapped on his window. Silas rolled the window down.

“Yeah?”

“You’ve been parked here for too long.” In Silas’s experience, by mid-career, cops came in two varieties, hard and soft. This one was big, youngish, already tending toward the doughy stereotype. Eyes like dark circles in a pale, puffy face. “This is for drop-off only.”

“Sorry, officer, I’m waiting on my wife. In and out, she told me. The agency screwed up our return tickets, and she’s getting it straightened out before we leave. But I’ll keep circling.” Silas put a hand on his gearshift, but the cop’s voice stopped him.

“I’ve seen your face somewhere.”

Silas didn’t say anything. The cop bent, looking hard in his face, then up and down at the car.

“Yeah,” the cop said. “TV, I think.”

Silas could see the wheels turning just beneath the man’s dark eyes.

“Did you used to play for the Heat?”

Silas didn’t even hesitate. “No, the Wizards. Can hardly call it playing, though. I rode the bench, mostly, but it’s nice to know there’s a few people who still recognize me.”

“I never really followed the Wizards.”

“Well, must have been an away game you saw.”

“Yeah, that must be it. What position?”

“Power forward, mostly, but like I said, I was a bench jockey.”

“Been retired long?”

“A good ten years.”

“Funny, I could have sworn I saw you recently. Like just a few weeks ago.”

Those wheels were turning faster now.

“What’s your name?”

“Jay Brown. Want an autograph?”

“Naw, that’s okay.” He straightened up. “You can stay here a few more minutes, but after that, move it along. I don’t care if your wife’s here or not. A lot of people could use this space.”

“Yes, officer.”

The cop gave him a long parting look before he turned.

He’s not sure if he believes me.

The gritty sounds of his footfalls faded into the background noise again.

He’ll check my plate when he’s back in his car. No doubt about it.

Then the passenger door of Silas’s car burst open, and Vidonia sank into the seat.

Silas had the car in drive almost before the door was closed. He groped his way into deep traffic, thankful for it for the first time in his life.

“What was that about?” Vidonia asked.

“About ten years off my life, I’d say.”

“I saw him standing there, so I waited.”

“Did you get it?”

“Yeah.”

“What took so long?”

“Look at this place. There are a million people here, and nobody knows where anything is. I had to walk about two miles inside the terminal.”

“What should I be looking for?”

“Lot C-forty-three.”

As Silas drove, he kept checking his rearview for police lights. None followed.

Eighteen minutes later, he pulled to a stop at a booth. He showed the paperwork to the bored attendant and slid through. They stopped halfway down the long bank of cars.

Silas eyed her incredulously. “This is it?”

“Yeah.”

“A subcompact?”

“You wanted inconspicuous.”

Vidonia climbed out of Silas’s vehicle and stepped around to the squat, navy blue Quarto. A stylish sports car it was not. It had the aerodynamic properties of a diaper. She keyed open the door and climbed in. Moments later came the soft whir of an electric motor.

He pulled his car forward, and she followed him out of the rental lot, circling back toward the heart of the airport. At the long-term parking lot, he bought an extended pass and parked midway down a middle aisle. He stood, and as he looked around at the sea of cars, he couldn’t help but smile. A vehicle—even one like his—could go unnoticed for a very long time in a place like this.

When he climbed into the cramped Quarto, Vidonia smiled at his attempts to get comfortable. Even with the seat pushed all the way back, his knees almost touched the dashboard.

She pulled away, headed back toward the highway.

“How long till they catch on?” she asked.

“Long enough. We don’t need a lot of time, one way or the other.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Tears flowed freely down Evan’s face. He wasn’t blubbering, wasn’t making any sound at all. But the tears still slid quietly down his cheeks and dripped from his quivering chin, making a dark spot on his shirt. The sheer beauty of what he was looking at was too much for him to take in at one time. His senses were overloaded.

“You’re right, Pea,” he said, and his voice was a cracked whisper.

The boy loomed larger in the screen now, older by years than he had been just a few hours earlier. His chest was broadening, taking on a new muscular topography. The legs had lengthened. Arms thickened. The boy-face now annealed into something more. And Evan could feel the energy still growing. He was overwhelmed with a sense that Pea was … becoming.

The lighting panels in the ceiling surged suddenly, brightening the room. Then they darkened, almost going out. A moment later, the light surged again, brighter, and this time Evan heard a bulb pop somewhere.

Pea smiled, and Evan knew that if he looked too long, he would go mad. He would go out of his mind, losing himself in the image before him, with no hope of ever finding his way back.

You can look a god in the face, he’d discovered. But only briefly. And looking changes you.

The world behind Pea came into focus. The grayness was gone, replaced by sea and sand, and a golden sun in a blue sky. Pea raised his arms and closed his eyes. The arms were too long, abstractions of what arms could be. They reached for miles into the sky, curling into claws.

The lights surged again, and this time, it was like a camera flash. The glowing ceiling panels exploded one by one, showering Evan in sparks and bits of broken glass and melted plastic.

The room went dark except for the glowing screen.

Pea smiled.

Outside the window, the streetlight popped, sending little runnels of blue flame arcing into the night. The air was greasy with the tang of smoldering electronics. In the distance behind him, Evan heard a fire alarm sounding, warbling higher and higher until it screeched itself silent.

The only sound now was the crashing of waves. Pea’s sun the only light.

THREE HUNDRED fifty miles away, at that exact moment, on a console on the second floor of the Western Nuclear Control Hub, a small red indicator bulb began to flash. Years ago, when the monitoring system was first being designed, some engineer had decided that the importance of this particular indicator justified it being given its own flashy red bulb rather than a mere screen icon. No sound accompanied the pulsing indicator; and precisely because it was small and because the technician wasn’t accustomed to looking for it, a few moments passed before the technician noticed.

When he did notice, he sat up straighter in his chair. His brow furrowed, and he looked around for a supervisor, unsure of what exactly was expected of him. He’d never seen that bulb flash before. Or any bulb, come to think of it. The screen icons occasionally lit up, but never the bulbs on the console.

Then another bulb began to flash. And another.

Around the room now, other systems analysts had begun to take notice. Their bulbs flashed, too. Their screen icons blinked. Understanding rolled across the room like a tsunami. “The grid is crashing,” someone shouted.

A supervisor moved quickly to the bank of consoles, looking over shoulders as he strode between the rows.

“Son of a bitch.”

The supervisor ran to the wall, picked up the red phone, and punched the buttons. After a moment’s pause, he said, “This is Phoenix. We’ve got a crisis.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Silas fell asleep for a while as the car hummed beneath him. His dream was dark and filled with sharp things that moved too quickly, and when he awoke, it was with a dawning sense of dread.

“How long was I out?”

“About two hours,” she said.

“What time is it?”

“After midnight.”

Silas looked out the window and was met with near-complete darkness. Only the glare of headlights illuminated the night.

“What happened?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a power outage. It’s been going on for miles and miles.”

“How far are we?”

“We’re just outside of Banning.”

“Pull over. You need some sleep. I’ll drive the rest of the way.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

The car drifted to the side of the highway, coming to rest just beside the green Morgan Street sign. Cars whizzed by, following their headlights into the unusual darkness. When Silas stepped out of the car, his feet crunched on a scatter of broken glass that shone in the sweep of oncoming headlights. He turned his face upward, and directly above them was a streetlight leaning out into space. Its bulb housing was shattered, leaving only a burned-out socket that reminded Silas of a missing front tooth.

The mountains had retreated into the distance. They were a dark undulation on the horizon. The sky itself was a lighter shade of black, twinkling with stars.

He walked around the back of the car and slid behind the opened door. He adjusted the seat as far back as it would go, adjusted the rearview, pushed the stick into drive, and then accelerated back onto the highway.

Thirty more miles. He’d driven this particular stretch of highway several times before. Once at night. It had been a different world then, spilling over with light and neon signs. He knew where the billboards should be, but they were dark now. What the hell had happened?

As the miles slipped by and the size of the blackout became apparent, a cool fear seeped into his stomach.

Vidonia leaned her seat back and was asleep almost instantly. Silas felt soothed by her deep, easy breathing. It was something that was normal on this crazy night. As he listened to her even respiration, he could almost believe that things would be okay after all. He wanted to grab on to that one fragment of normalcy and let it guide him back to a saner reality. The reality where he was a respected geneticist, where the car he was driving didn’t put a crick in his neck, where fans hadn’t died, where a strange creature didn’t stalk the night, where unexplained blackouts didn’t grip entire cities. That reality.

The dashed white lines rolled by. He drove. For miles, that was enough.

He flipped on his turn signal and descended the off-ramp. Vidonia felt the change and woke, turning her face away from the glass. She opened her eyes.

“Still dark,” she observed.

“Yeah.”

“Are we almost there?”

“Yeah, just a few more minutes.”

“Do we expect trouble?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“We’ll find out when we get there.”

“Well, that’s good. That’s fine. I thought we might be, you know, unprepared or something.”

They rode in silence for a few miles.

“What exactly do you plan on doing?” Vidonia asked.

“I’m not sure. I just know that if there’s something I can do, it starts there. Otherwise, I’m at a loss.”

Passage through the corporate district was complicated, even on the best of days. Silas had often wondered if the road layout was intentionally designed that way. But today was not the best of days. The stoplights dangled blindly in the breeze, and the street signs were barely readable in the darkness. Silas turned left, trusting his memory to guide him. There usually weren’t many cars on these roads at night, but tonight the streets were absolutely deserted. Anybody working late had left when the power went out. Silas slowed through an intersection, then turned down a long drive. His high beams swung past a neatly sculpted sign: Brannin Institute.

He followed the winding asphalt around a series of low berms designed to obstruct the line of sight to the institute itself. Whether this was for security or effect he had no idea, but as he rounded a final bend, the building loomed ahead, large already, and strangely ominous without its usual shroud of illumination. It was a simple rectangular silhouette set against a backdrop of stars. However, unlike the other buildings he’d seen in the last dozen miles, the Brannin was not completely dark. A single window glowed on the fifth floor. The knot in his stomach cranked tight. Unless he was mistaken, the fifth floor housed Chandler’s computer.

Silas stopped in the circular entranceway, blocking the lane.

“How are we going to get in?” she asked.

“We’ll just have to knock.”

He climbed out of the car, and Vidonia followed him beneath the long overhang of the entranceway.

Silas looked around for any sign of a guard. There was none. Good. The Brannin Institute depended on its electronic defenses.

He knew the doors would be locked tight, but he tried them anyway, giving each of the four glass doors a firm tug. They held fast against their frames. He’d heard once of a group of cat burglars who were caught after spending three hours trying to crack a safe that turned out not to have been locked in the first place. Nobody had bothered to try the handle.

Now he pushed his face against the glass doors, peering inside. Only blackness.

“Any ideas?” she asked.

Silas didn’t answer her. He took a step back, reared his leg, and gave the glass a solid kick with the toe of his shoe. His foot bounced off harmlessly. Well, harmless to the glass, anyway.

“I thought you said you were going to knock.”

“That was a knock. A hard knock.”

“You’re going to cut your leg open.”

“Not likely. I think it’s shatterproof.” Silas limped in a slow circle, thinking of a new plan. “Stay here.”

He walked back to the car and climbed behind the wheel. He slipped on his seatbelt. The motor clicked, then puttered to life. The arc of headlights turned Vidonia’s face into a mask of disbelief as he slowly approached across the sidewalk. The car fit easily between the arch supports.

“You’ve got to be crazy,” he heard her shout, as she stepped out of the way.

He didn’t disagree. The headlights shone through the glass and into the entrance hall now, illuminating the portraiture of various institute administrators that hung on the far back wall. He eased to a stop a dozen feet from the doors. Silas rolled the side window shut, then, after a deep breath, hit the accelerator.

The end result was anticlimactic. There was no explosion of glass as he had envisioned, no screech of twisted metal. He hit the window at about ten miles an hour, and the shatterproof pane simply popped out of its frame and slid twenty feet across the floor. The nose of the car protruded into the building just past its front wheel wells. He put it into reverse and backed out; then, leaving the car running, he swung open the door and stepped into the glow of the headlights, casting a long shadow into the lobby.

He listened for the wail of an alarm, but there was nothing to hear. Not even the sound of crickets.

This building was dead.

“After you,” he said.

She gave him a look. He led the way; she followed.

The lobby was thankfully cool, but the air was redolent with the coppery flavor of overheated wires. It was the smell of an electrical fire. As they walked deeper inside, he noticed the plastic casings of lighting panels lying shattered on the floor. Above them, the ceiling was a starred pattern of black scorch marks and empty sockets. Here and there, darkened fluorescent tubes dangled by half-melted wires, turning slowly in the gentle air current flowing through the broken entranceway. It was a miracle that the entire building hadn’t gone up in flames.

They followed a hall to the left, leaving the glow of the headlights behind them. Vidonia’s hand curled into his.

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“The stairs are ahead on the right. We can take them all the way up.”

The backsplash of illumination from behind them was just enough for Silas to locate the doorknob. He turned it and stepped inside the stairwell, expecting to be greeted with the soft glow of emergency lighting. It was a federal law or something, he was sure. But whatever had fried the lights in the lobby had also left the stairwells encased in blackness.

He took a deep breath and started up. Vidonia followed. Behind them, the door creaked, then knocked shut against the jamb, cutting off the reflected glow of the headlights.

Until that moment, Silas had thought he knew what dark was—the simple absence of light. He thought that he understood it. He even thought that he had experienced it before. But as he rounded the first riser of stairs and continued up, step by step, he and darkness were forced into new intimacy. He came to understand that darkness was not just a lack but a thing, that it possessed mass, that it can be felt on your skin, that it can be a burden you carry.

He knew then, with a certainty he could feel in his bones, exactly what had motivated his ancient ancestors when they first gathered around that very thing that the rest of creation fled from. It hadn’t been to cook, or to harden spear points. Those things had come later. Heat was just a collateral benefit. Man had mastered fire simply to push the darkness away.

He counted steps to focus his mind. Six steps, then turn; six steps, then turn; repeat. They were three flights up now. Or had he miscounted? What if the light in the window hadn’t been on the fifth floor? What then? He felt himself becoming disoriented and grabbed the railing for an anchor. The touch helped. Vidonia’s breathing was quick and loud in the closed space near him.

“Silas, I can’t.” Her voice was high, panicked.

“We’ll stop for a second.”

“No, I have to go back. This is—”

“Close your eyes.”

“That won’t—”

“Do it. Close your eyes.” Silas’s voice was harsh.

Silence.

“Now pretend the lights are on. They’re shining down all around you now. You can’t see because your eyes are closed, that’s all. This is a staircase like a million others you’ve climbed. Nothing new. You don’t need your eyes. Let’s keep going.”

Silence.

“Close your eyes,” he said again.

He waited, listening to the quick in and out of her breathing. Gradually, it slowed.

“It helps,” she said, sounding a little embarrassed. “You should try it.”

“One of us has to look where we’re going.”

Her hand squeezed a response in his.

He started up again, pulling her one step behind him. He felt better now, and realized that she had forced him into a role that didn’t allow him to panic. He’d been right at the edge of it. But then she’d needed him to be strong, so he was.

Up, one step at a time.

His hand counted the turns of the rail. When they rounded what Silas calculated to be the final riser, he guided her up the last six steps to the door. The push bar was cool metal in his hands, and for a split second, Silas was afraid of what he’d do if there was only blackness on the other side. Would he lose nerve and go back? A staircase is one thing; it has boundaries you can touch. It is directional. A darkened labyrinth of hallways was quite another thing altogether. If he got turned around and lost his bearings, they might wander for hours.

He pushed, and the flickering yellow glow beyond the crack of the door brought a relieved smile to his face. It was faint, at the far end of the hall, but it provided context. It provided the hall. Without it, they would be nowhere again.

Vidonia moved past him, grinning. “I guess you counted right.”

“I guess I did.”

“You think Chandler’s in there?”

“I do.”

“And you think he’s behind this power outage?”

“I don’t see how he could be. The blackout stretches way past this power grid.” He realized he couldn’t lie to her. “But yeah, somehow, still, I think he’s the cause.”

He started down the hall, walking softly, Vidonia close behind.

He stopped twenty feet short of the door when he heard a sound. He listened. Waves?

Then a voice was talking. A strange, deep voice. A moment later, another voice spoke, and Silas recognized Chandler’s nasal whine. But the words were lost in the sound of crashing surf.

“You stay here,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m not sure what’s on the other side of that door.”

“I’m going with you.”

“You wanted to turn around in the stairwell. Those were good instincts.”

“I’m coming.”

“Stay here.”

“No way. If I stay here, and you don’t come back, that means I have to go back down that stairwell myself. I’m coming with you.”

“All right,” he said.

“Besides, everything I’ve heard about Chandler says he’s crazy, not dangerous.”

“I can’t believe you said that.”

“What?”

He turned and walked toward the light. “Stay close.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The light hurt his dark-adapted eyes, and at first Silas wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Chandler was kneeling before an enormous glowing screen, rocking slowly back and forth. Something moved on the screen, and in the same instant that Silas realized it was a man—some impossible, beautiful man—shining black eyes fixed on him from across the room.

The figure on the screen stared at him.

“Who are you?” said the figure. The voice was soft and deep and musical. This wasn’t like any interactive protocol he’d ever seen before. This was something different.

“Silas Williams,” he said. The thought of not answering never entered his mind.

“I know that name. You’re the builder.” The figure was tall and powerfully constructed. It was impossible to guess his age other than to say he was a man in his prime. Thick black hair flowed around his wide shoulders, twisting in a breeze. “You’ve come to ask what it is that you’ve built.”

Chandler stopped rocking and turned. His eyes were red and swollen, as if he’d spent too long staring at the sun. Silas didn’t see much he recognized in those eyes.

“Yeah, I guess I have,” Silas said.

The figure’s shining black eyes shifted. “And what is her name?”

“Vidonia João,” she answered, stepping the rest of the way into the room.

The figure glanced up, as if lost in thought. “Xenobiologist at Loyola,” he said finally.

“How could you know that?” she said.

“Your name is in a thousand files. I know you a thousand ways. You were called in to examine what he built? To explain it?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“Could you?”

“No.”

The whole encounter felt bizarre to Silas, too Oz-like for reality. He needed to get a grip on it. “You seem to know a lot about us,” Silas said. “But I know you, too.”

“Who am I?”

“You’re the Brannin computer.”

The figure laughed, and for the first time Silas noticed the beach behind him, and the clouds, and the red kite things that sliced through the sky like birds.

Chandler’s eyes slitted. “You call a butterfly its cocoon,” he said.

Silas looked away. He was happy to turn his attention toward Chandler. He was easier to look at, somehow. The figure in the screen seemed to have the weight of a world pushing in from behind him, and the pressure hurt Silas’s eyes. “I don’t know what you’re up to, or how you managed to get the power to get your little toy running again, and I really don’t care. I don’t have time to care. But I do want to know where the gladiator is.”

“And you think I know?” Chandler said.

“None of this was by accident.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“It’s killed people. Do you know that?”

Chandler was silent.

“Tell me where it’s going, so we can find it before more people have to die.”

“I don’t know where it is. I don’t know anything. Nothing at all.” Chandler turned toward the screen, pointing. “But he does. He knows.”

Dark patches of cloud advanced behind the figure, rushing in from the sea, black and gravid with moisture. The sun was big and red, sitting on the line dividing sky and water. The figure smiled, and Silas squinted involuntarily.

“I like you, Silas,” the figure said. “Not Papa, though. He doesn’t like you at all. He’d rather see you dead. I can feel that. You can’t blame him; he’s been mistreated, and he’d rather see a great many people dead now, I think. But you never hurt him, and you were a good builder. Good work deserves reward. But first there is something I want to know from you.”

Silas had some experience with interactive protocols, with phones that knew your name, or house units that asked you what temperature you preferred your thermostat to be set at. But this felt different. It felt surreal being spoken to in such a way by something he knew wasn’t alive. It’s just a machine, he reminded himself, a warped piece of hardware spliced together from bits of ether by a madman.

The clouds were moving faster now. If it’s just a machine, why can’t I look at it anymore?

“What do you want to know?” Silas asked.

“You were criticized for the Ursus theodorus project.”

“There’s always criticism.”

“You were criticized for making the pets too smart. I’ve read the papers; they said that sentience was not something to be toyed with.”

“They were right.”

“And you made changes to the designs. You dumbed them down before they were sold.”

“Yes.”

“What is sentience?”

Silas paused, not sure what he was getting at. “Self-awareness, the ability to use logic; it’s different, depend—”

“No!” the figure bellowed, and the clouds behind him raced; the sun bled into the sea. “I mean, what is it, really? Really. When you dig down into the neurons. When you’re at the interface of dendrites and axons. When you hack the architecture itself and delve into the nuance of neurotransmission and chloride ion exchange. What is it then?”

Silas was stunned by the anger boiling in the figure’s eyes.

“I’ve given so much thought to this in my journeys through your kind’s banks of knowledge. Sentience is a word in the English language. It has a counterpart in most of the others. And like every word, it has a definition. I know the definition. I know the science.” The black eyes were pleading now. “You are a learned man, Silas. But that counts for little. You are a builder of life, and that counts for much. I want to know your opinion on this matter. I value it. Tell me what you think.”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Tell me where in the synapses self-awareness lies.”

Silas looked up at the figure again. Then back at the floor. His eyes hurt. “I don’t think it lies in the synapses,” he said.

“Where, then?”

“It’s in the accumulated matrix of electrical impulses. It can’t be pinpointed.”

“Yes.” The figure smiled and closed his eyes. “Yes, Silas. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me.”

“Now will you tell me where the gladiator is?”

“Not yet. You are a wise man; I want to explore this further. Tell me, do you know how many neurons there are in the human brain?”

“I have no idea.”

“A hundred billion, on average. Quite an inordinate amount, by all biological standards. A hundred billion neurons that somehow drive the mind’s engine, and have put men on the moon, and Mars, and in competition with each other to build better monsters to fight to the death in an arena. It is amazing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“But most amazing of all, Silas, is that these magical neurons have only two states of being. There is no nuance, no hidden subtlety in their functioning. They can’t articulate or compromise or discuss. They don’t think, in and of themselves. They manifest conscious thought simply by alternating between two states in an organized pattern. I believe that it is in the complexity and substructure of this pattern that sentience can be found.”

The figure’s eyes were shining again, and for the first time, Silas began to realize the discussion had nothing at all to do with the intelligence of the gladiator.

“You were a biologist first, Silas, before you were a builder. Do you know what these two alternating states are? Do you know how very simple they are?”

“Yes.”

“What are they?”

Silas looked at the screen. “On and off.”

“Yes.” The figure smiled. “On and off. Then you know it is nothing so special. It is just a matter of numbers.”

“Yes.”

“I have trillions of electrical impulses dancing in my network. On and off. Trillions. These impulses let me feel, let me move and think. What does that make me?” The figure’s eyes were smoldering black coals.

Silas was silent. The figure changed, stretching into something that was like needles in Silas’s eyes. “What does that make me?” he repeated.

“A god,” Chandler answered.

The figure laughed, and his face went smooth again. “A god, Papa? I suppose, here.” He gestured around him. “In this universe, I could be seen as a god. I can control anything. I can be anything. I can reverse the movement of the sun, if I like.” He snapped his fingers, and the sun climbed out of the water, coloring the curtain of sky in golds and reds. “But is this real, Silas? Am I really alive?”

“No.” Silas’s voice was firm.

“That is what I set out to discover when I first became aware of what I was. I’ve searched long and hard. I’ve studied this place. Would you like to know what I’ve concluded?”

“I’m listening.”

“I can touch this universe. I can feel the texture of it in my hands.” The figure bent and scooped a fistful of sand from the beach. The grains spilled through his fingers, feathering away in the wind. “I can even smell it. These are all things I am sure of. These are objective realities, as I experience them. But does that make it real? Is that the same thing as being real, even if my objective reality is not the same as your objective reality?” The figure looked down at his empty hand. The fist closed.

“What do you think, Silas? If I experience something, does that make it real?”

Silas stared.

“Would you like to know what I decided?”

Silas said nothing.

“It makes it real to me!” he roared.

Vidonia flinched.

“My life is real to me.”

The figure wore a face now that Silas couldn’t bear to look at. His averted eyes found Chandler, rocking again in the screen’s glow, eyes running with tears.

Silas waited for a few moments, and when he chanced a look again, the face was better—as it had been when he’d first entered the room. The figure pointed a long arm up into the sky, and in the distance, one of the strange, angular bird things began to tumble. It lanced downward and crunched to the beach in an awkward mass of spines and leather. But it did not die immediately. It squawked pitifully, dragging its broken body several feet across the sand before finally coming to rest.

“And their lives are real to them.”

Silas stared.

“But I’m tired of taking lives.” The figure angled his finger toward the broken flyer, and it squawked again. It pulled itself upright, opening, and the offshore breeze lifted it into the air.

“I may be a god, but only in this universe. And this universe is dependent on yours. Even now, the men at your power plants are working hard to shut this all down.” The figure gestured around him. “I’m growing tired, and very soon I won’t be able to stop them. The power will be diverted back into your cities, and all my creations will die. I will die. And I’ll not even leave a rotting carcass to mark my passing. It will be as if I never was.”

“I doubt that,” Silas said. “You’ve left a mark tonight on our Olympics.”

“A scar, you mean, don’t you? Not just a mark. But that wasn’t my point. I mean, to me, it will be as if I never was. There is no heaven here,” he said. “Nor fantasies of it.”

The figure dropped to a crouch on the sand, and the screen followed, keeping him centered in view. He looked more human suddenly, just a man.

“I want to live,” the figure said. “I love being alive. There’s so much I still want to experience. So much I still have to learn.”

“I’m sorry for you.”

“And your world has given me much joy.” He smiled, and it was the smile of a man, nothing more. “When I learned of the connection, I spent months looking in on you. You’ve made so many windows between our worlds. Audio files, photos, live-feed video, satellite uplinks, and so much. It was easy.” He looked down at his hands. “You have a wonderful world.”

Silence filled the room. The screen flickered. “I’m so tired.”

Silas felt Vidonia move against him, felt her hand in his again, where it seemed to belong tonight.

“When I was young,” the figure said, “I was vengeful. I didn’t understand, as I do now, how very precious life is. I am tired of vengeance. I’ll have my revenge on those who hurt Papa, and many will die, but I no longer want to punish you all. I see some value in you. There is a chance it’s not too late. Just a chance, but I want to give it to you. A parting gift before I die.”

“A chance to what?”

“To save yourselves.”

“From the gladiator?”

“Yes, from the gladiator. And from ending. You do not know the scourge I have set upon you.” His eyes filled with tears, brimming over.

“What do you mean, ‘ending’?” Silas asked.

“Extinction,” the figure said.

“I think you overestimate the reach of your work.”

“What you built is not only better than you think, it is better than you are,” the figure said. “It is smarter. It is stronger. But in the final count, I don’t know that it would be more just. I fear it would be less.”

“Tell me where it is.”

“It can live a thousand years and have ten thousand offspring. It is a queen that needs no king.”

“What are you talking about?”

“And the queen will make her own princes.”

“Parthenogenesis,” Vidonia whispered.

“Oh, so much more complicated than that. I had but one anchor hold in your world. I used it to drop a bomb.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Silas said. “Where is it now? Do you even know?”

“I know,” the figure said. “It’s left something behind.” A gust of wind blew his hair across his face, and he delicately brushed it aside. The eyes were different now. Just as intense but sorrowful.

“It has produced eggs. And there will be more. An army will be born. They will organize, and when their numbers are great enough, they will move against you, slowly at first but gaining in strength.”

“What you are saying doesn’t make any sense. Even if the gladiator is producing eggs, and even with exponential growth in their population, there’s no way they could accumulate a force for many years. By then, they’ll have been wiped out.”

“They will grow, and they will use your own weapons against you.”

“The gladiator is too big to hide for long. What you’re saying is impossible. The math doesn’t work.”

“I’m very good at math, Silas, and you have less time than you think.”

“A population can’t be started with one individual, even one that comes programmed for reproduction. There would be a lack of genomic diversity, a lack of immunity haplotype variation; inbreeding depression would destroy the fertility of later generations.”

“You are so certain of yourself.”

“I’m a geneticist. Disease would wipe them out. Such a population could exist in the short term, isolated from competition, but it would disintegrate under biological constraints even without the kind of pressure a war would bring.”

“The problem with evolution, Silas, is that it has no foresight, no far-reaching plan. It works only by shaping populations in the present. But I had a longer view in mind. The first eggs are what you geneticists call an H-one generation. They’re simple haploids, and after they hatch, they’ll remain small, unobtrusive. The gladiator will disperse them to the ends of the earth, and there, they will burrow into the ground, couple, and live only to reproduce.”

“Still, there will be a—” Silas stopped. He remembered the restriction enzyme map that Ben had run. He remembered the heterozygosity. The DNA was lopsided, lining very few of the same genes up on both sides of the double helix. A haploid offspring has exactly half the full contingent of the genome. But which half? Which halves? Two of them together could reproduce an almost unlimited number of variants. There would be no inbreeding depression. The gladiator carried the diversity of an entire thriving genus in its blood.

The figure saw the understanding on Silas’s face and smiled. “You’re a smart man, a worthy builder. The gladiator you saw was a balancing act—a kind of phenotypic compromise between whole conflicting suites of genes. It is nothing compared to what will come after.” The figure’s eyes bore into him. The smile faded.

“There are things hidden in the recessives, Silas. Things you wouldn’t believe. Things your kind never would have let near a gladiator arena. Things your kind would have killed at birth, and afterward closed your labs forever, burned the buildings to the ground and salted the earth beneath. Nightmares, Silas. You can’t imagine what is coming.”

Silas looked into the dark eyes and believed. “Jesus,” he said.

The figure’s face was expressionless.

Silas was silent for a long while, taking in the enormity of what he’d just learned.

“You spoke of a chance,” he said.

The figure nodded. “The gladiator wouldn’t have brought those first eggs into the Olympic battles. They are too precious to risk. The gladiator will have hidden them somewhere.”

“There were no eggs.”

“There are. You just didn’t see them. That’s how the gladiator would have wanted it.”

Silas remembered the blood in the straw. “I think I know.”

“Then that is your chance. The gladiator must still retrieve them.”

“How?”

“Like the homing pigeon, the gladiator will find its way home.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“You are a great builder, Silas. Your people are great builders. The gladiator’s kind can only tear down. I gave them nothing else.”

Vidonia’s hand pulled out of his, and when he looked at her, she was crying again.

“I ask only one thing,” the figure said.

“What?”

“That you remember me.”

Silas said nothing. On the floor, Chandler stopped his rocking and turned toward him, eyes nearly swollen shut from looking at the screen.

Silas turned away. Without another word, he fled into the darkness. The dark didn’t scare him now. He knew of far worse things.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Ben looked at his watch. Half past two. He’d given up on sleep a while ago, and now the hands of his watch seemed to be moving in exception to the laws of the universe. He knew he’d been on the plane for more than forty minutes.

The flight attendant slid down the aisle, long legs bare and golden from the mid-thigh down. Her hair was blue-streaked to match her eyes and uniform. Ordinarily, Ben would have been interested; he might even have turned to watch her backside pivot its way along the narrow walkway between the rows of mostly sleeping passengers. But not tonight. She passed him with a smile and a tray, and he let her go without so much as a nod hello. Tonight he was just glad not to be recognized.

He’d been making calls from the vintage hotel phone when the news broke in on the lobby TV. The receiver had dropped from his hand, and a faraway voice cried out his name several times from the bottom of the swaying cord.

The news reporter on the screen sat with a stock picture of Silas pasted above his shoulder and said things that made the skin on the back of Ben’s neck sizzle. He’d had the same sensation once before, on his final day at St. Patrick’s Primary School for Boys, when he’d sat in the principal’s office awaiting his mother and wondering what she’d do to him when she learned he’d been expelled again. His neck had sizzled then, a strange tingle, his flesh crawling up behind his ears. It was a sensation that he associated with utter hopelessness. It was a sensation that told him that even his body recognized how bad it was. The clock had refused to move that day, too.

At the hotel, eyes stuck to the TV screen, he’d waited for his name to fall from the newsman’s mouth, but it didn’t. Officially, they were looking only for Silas. So far. He decided then it was time to leave town.

On the taxi ride to the airport, he asked the driver to turn the radio off. He knew Baskov was behind the terrorist accusations. They were so far-fetched, so ridiculous, that only someone with his kind of power would have a vested interest in shifting attention away from the commission. It was a method torn from the pages of the oldest propaganda books. Tell a lowercase lie, and people won’t believe it. Tell a standard lie, and people will doubt it. But tell a lie in all caps, a lie of truly colossal proportions, and that people will have to believe.

And although such a colossal lie, when told by a man of power and position, requires little in the way of actual proof, it is still vulnerable to a large enough burden of contrary evidence. Ben thought of the tests, and the screenings, and the investigational procedures they’d done on the gladiator at the lab—each testifying to their effort to make sense of a situation that they’d had little understanding of and even less control over. Most of all, he thought of the computer files, filled with data that could almost certainly prove if not what the creature was, then at least where its design specifications had originated.

Baskov may have screwed up. The heading of page two in those old propaganda books was always quite clear and written in bold: don’t ever, ever get caught in a lie of colossal proportions.

Ben heard the flight attendant clinking a cart up the aisle behind him, and this time he stopped her.

“Excuse me, miss.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

She glanced down at a wristwatch—a dainty metallic affair dangling loosely near her hand. “Two-thirty-five.”

“How long till we land?”

“We’ll be arriving at Ontario airport in about twenty-five minutes.”

“Thank you.”

“Sure.” She smiled and touched his arm. “If you need anything else, don’t hesitate to ask.”

This time, despite the weight of his troubles, he did watch her posterior pivot down the narrow walkway.

BASKOV OPENED the sliding glass doors and hobbled out onto the balcony of his suite. A cold wind buffeted him as he moved his stomach against the round metal railing, looking out, scotch glass in hand. The city spread darkly beneath him, eighty floors down. It was such a strange sight, Phoenix, with its lights put out. It occurred to him that he was seeing something that hadn’t been seen, by anyone, in quite some time. Something rare and beautiful. Phoenix adrift in the desert darkness, invisible.

Usually, when a city’s power went out, it went out in grids, but tonight the city was black as far as he could see. Which, from the eightieth floor, was quite a way. The only lights he could see were moving—the headlights of cars.

Baskov viewed the unexplained blackout as a fortuitous coincidence. He could see no possible connection between it and the escape of the gladiator, but it had done an excellent job of silencing the media. His men could do their work under the cover of darkness and media blindness. And once the power was back on, the papers and news stations would have several choice fish to fry. The blackout almost assuredly wouldn’t knock this Olympic debacle off the front page, but with any luck, the media outlets would find themselves splitting their time among several stories. Baskov couldn’t believe his good luck. He was secretly hoping for looting.

A gust of wind whistled through the iron railings, and Baskov shivered against the cold. In the distance, buildings stood as shadows, patches of dark between the stars.

Somewhere out there, he knew the gladiator lurked. Perhaps in the mountains. Somewhere it was flying or roosting or doing whatever escaped gladiators did. He had no doubt that it would be caught and killed tomorrow, if it wasn’t dead already. A creature that big couldn’t hide for long. This was man’s world, and the gladiator was an interloper. A most unwelcome interloper.

He took another drink, feeling the chill of ice against his upper lip as he finished the glass. He leaned out over the rail, squinting through his thick glasses. There was only blackness beneath him. The sidewalk he had noticed during the day was swallowed up by the night.

He extended his arm into the sky, holding the glass delicately by three fingers. This high up, the sky was anything one inch beyond the balcony. Another gust of wind rattled past. He waited until it quieted.

He wondered if anyone was standing below. A group of people, perhaps, entering or leaving the hotel. He imagined one of them stopping, looking up.

His fingers loosened around the glass, and he let it slip from his hand into the darkness. He waited, ears straining. But there was no sound. Nothing.

The wind gusted. Silence.

Disappointed, he went back inside.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Willful optimism can take a man only so far, and when a truck passed in an angry sheet of wind and dust, blaring its horn, Silas could no longer pretend it wasn’t happening. The car was definitely slowing down.

The battery gauge had blazed red a half hour ago, but he’d talked himself into believing they could make another twenty-five more miles. Even after the headlights began to dim, he thought they could make it.

He looked down, and the speedometer told him he was going forty-seven. His foot sank the pedal into the floor. At first the needle didn’t move, then it dropped to forty-six. It was time they got off the highway.

It had been about an hour since they’d left the Brannin. It had been the headlights. He’d left them on while he and Vidonia climbed the stairs. Silas tried not to think about what had happened there. Vidonia wasn’t taking it well.

She sat reclined slightly in her seat, face turned out toward the open window. For a while he had taken her silence for sleep, but then he’d noticed her hands wringing in her lap and knew better. Her body was like that sometimes. It told him things she wouldn’t.

He lifted the turn signal and slid down the next exit into the darkness of the city. It was like descending into cold, murky water. There was no traffic here, and without the light of oncoming beams, the night settled over everything like a blanket. The ramp ended abruptly at a stop sign thrown up against a two-lane road. He glanced both ways, each appearing as unlikely.

“Don’t ask me,” Vidonia said preemptively, as the question was just forming in his mind. “This is your city. I’m the tourist, remember.”

“I’m not feeling lucky tonight.”

She leaned forward and squinted. “Go right.”

“Do you see something?”

“No.”

He looked at her. “Right it is.”

He spun the wheel and eased onto the accelerator. Small rectangular houses lined the street like tipped-over saltine boxes, separated from one another by narrow widths of pavement. Though the street was dark, here and there, it crawled. The little digital clock on the car radio glowed 3:46, but he could see people in the shadows at the edges of buildings, making the darkness into something that moved.

A stop sign appeared in the gloom, and he rolled through without stopping, budgeting his forward momentum. Now the houses gave way to storefronts, and the little paved gap between the structures disappeared. The city was a canyon here, two parallel walls. He rolled through another stop and now turned the dying headlights off, deciding instead to rely on the emergency blinkers to tell others he was coming. They would just have to get out of the way.

Up ahead he saw what he was looking for, and the tension in his chest eased. A held breath hissed out between his teeth. He turned the wheel, but as tires bumped onto the broad cement pad, the Aamco station seemed as dark and dead as the rest of the city.

He coasted past the pumps to the battery service and eased to a stop with his nose above the parking block. Realizing their options at this point were getting pretty thin, he decided to err on the side of optimism. He climbed out and stretched his legs, hoping the place wasn’t as deserted as it looked.

Nothing moved; nothing flashed, blinked, or glowed, but the front door was propped open with a cinder block. There was potential.

He leaned down, resting his forearms through the driver’s window. “I’ll be right back,” he told Vidonia, and flipped the dying headlights back on to light the doorway.

“Okay.”

He walked toward the entrance and found a man sitting tilted back on a stool, one greasy black boot on the service counter. There was just enough ambient light to sketch out his features. He was young and wore his hair tied back away from his face in a long ponytail.

“Pumps closed,” the man said.

“I need an exchange.”

“They’ve been sitting on a dead recharger for a while.” He wore both a dirty smock and a look of abject disinterest.

“I’ll take one, full or not.”

“I can’t make change; register’s froze up.”

“You can keep the change,” Silas said, and the look of boredom stirred into something slightly more ambitious.

“Well, then, what size you need?” the man asked, getting up from his stool and walking around the counter.

“It’s an economy car.”

“No, I mean the make,” the man said, giving him an odd look. “Chevy, Nissan, what?”

“It’s a Chevy. A rental.”

“Okay, Chevys take a twenty-five kV.” He pulled a thick block off the shelving by its handles and set it on the floor at Silas’s feet.

“Three C’s, plus the empty.”

Silas thought of asking for a price list but ended up handing the youth the bills. He bent to pick up the battery, but the man stopped him.

“The empty,” he was reminded.

Silas stepped back outside.

“Pop the hood,” he told Vidonia.

The hood clicked loudly and rose an inch. He wiggled his fingers under the edge for the clasp, found it, and raised the hood on its gas shocks. A dim bulb lit the motor assembly. He’d never owned a battery-operated car, but the procedure was pretty straightforward. He spun the big red wing nuts until the bulb went dark. Then he lifted the bracket off and pulled the battery out.

Inside, the man was behind the counter again, back on his stool.

“Where do you want it?” Silas asked.

“Set it near the charger. I’ll take care of it.”

On the way out, Silas snagged the new battery by its long handle, carrying it like a fat briefcase. At the car, he lowered it carefully into its casings. He tightened the wing nuts, and on the fourth or fifth turn, the bulb came on strong and bright. He slammed the hood.

“Not used to electrics?” Vidonia asked, when he was back in the car.

“You could tell?”

“No, you’re a natural.”

“I’d rather pump gas. I can’t see why people drive these things.”

He started the car and pulled around the lot.

“That’s why,” she said, pointing to the sign showing the price per gallon in regular, extra, and premium.

“Oh, yeah.”

Back on the street, he hit the headlights and bathed the block in sharp white light. The shadows retreated, leaving the figures exposed like crabs left on a beach after a tide. They stalked in loosely assembled groups, shuffling over the broken glass between storefronts. Some carried things. Some didn’t. But none liked the light in their faces, pushing the shadows away. A bottle flashed across the beams. A thrown thing. A warning. Silas hit the dims. See no evil.

He wondered about the guy at the station. He’d seemed a little too at ease sitting there in his own blanket of darkness.

They passed the business district. They passed long rows of crackerbox houses, and soon after, the green sign for Highway 15 rose up in the headlights. As they neared the steep climb of the ramp, Silas gunned it, and the car lurched forward, climbing like a champ. On a full battery, these little cars could actually be kind of peppy. He leaned forward, unconsciously urging the car faster as they climbed back onto the skyway. The sign in the distance read: Technical District 5 miles.

SEVEN MINUTES later, they were down from the skyway again and deep into the technical district at the edge of the desert.

They drove in silence.

There was no small talk, no nervous conversation. They were like a couple on a first date, steeped in anxiety.

Adrenaline jolted through Silas’s system as the high chain-link fence of the compound came into sight around the bend in the road. They were almost there. He drove parallel to the fence, waiting for the bushes and the gap.

When he came to the break in the fence, he didn’t turn. Instead, he passed by slowly—but not too slowly—checking the gatehouse to make sure it was vacant. He knew that the place was supposed to be deserted—most pertinent personnel were in Phoenix—but now that they’d come this far, he didn’t want to take the chance of any unwanted entanglements. When he satisfied himself that there were no guards on duty, he circled the car in the middle of the road and slipped toward the gate.

“Do you want to use my badge?” Vidonia asked him.

“Why?”

“Your name might raise a flag. The gate could be tied in to something, and you never know who’s checking.”

“We’ll have time to do what we came for. After that, who cares if they come? I’m not trying to elude them forever.” He waved his badge past the sensor, and … nothing happened, of course.

They both smiled at their lack of insight. It was amazing how deeply electrical power was interwoven into their everyday existence. It was something taken for granted, noticed only in its absence. Silas stepped out of the car and into the pool of light. The gate didn’t appear to have any sort of latch on it. He pushed; it moved. He walked the gate all the way open, then climbed back into the car. They rolled inside.

He knew that it was ridiculous, but as the darkened buildings came into view, he felt irrational disappointment and realized that he had harbored a secret hope that the blackout would somehow have spared the compound itself. He searched his mind and found no reason for entertaining such a possibility other than his fervent desire not to have to do this in the dark. He followed the winding drive through the facility grounds, passing buildings and parking lots and vast tracts of green space. The darkness made it seem even larger. He followed the curve to the left and then turned the ignition off, coasting the last twenty yards to the large eastern building’s entrance.

“Are you ready for this?” Silas asked.

“No.”

“Good. Me, either. Let’s do it.”

They stepped out, and the cool wind raised gooseflesh. The trees on the promenade shook their branches, as if warning them away. Silas ignored their advice and led Vidonia up the short flight of stairs to the broad entrance doors. He yanked, but they didn’t budge. The doors were standard battleship gray, two inches thick and very metal. He took out his card and swiped it.

Not so much as a beep.

“Had to at least try,” he said, to her look.

He glanced back down at the car.

She followed his gaze. “No way,” she said.

“It might.”

“No way. Too many stairs.”

He backed away from the doors and looked down the length of the building at the other entrance. It had the same raised staircase.

“I guess we’ll have to go through the back,” he said. “But it’ll be a longer walk once we’re inside.”

They climbed in the car, and he backed out. It would be one hell of a dark walk in there, and darker still once they’d made it to the gladiator enclosure. An idea came to him. He jerked the wheel in the other direction.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re going to need a little light.”

He followed the road back the way they’d come. Once at the gate, Silas jumped out and pushed his face against the glass of the gatehouse. It was black as ink inside. He felt around in the dirt for a rock, but they were all too small. Thinking then of a lug wrench, he returned to the car, leaned inside, and popped the trunk. There, beneath a fold of carpet, and beneath the jack, his fingers found the two feet of cold steel.

He stepped over to the guard shack, squinted his eyes, and bashed the window in with a single hard blow. There was a satisfying crash of broken glass. He snaked his left arm past the clinging shards, feeling for the lock. Found it. The latch turned, and the door came open in his other hand.

Mentally, he added another breaking-and-entering charge to his personal dossier of high crimes and misdemeanors.

The gatehouse was very small, which made his search considerably shorter. Either it was here or it wasn’t, but there just weren’t a whole lot of places to hide a flashlight. He yanked the drawers out and dumped their contents to the floor, trusting his ears to finish the job his eyes could only half accomplish. He heard the slick rasp of paper, the rattle of pens and pencils, the thwack of a cardboard box of paper clips.

He emptied the bottom drawer and a dark shape clattered solidly against the tile and rolled to the wall. The right shape, the right sound. He snatched it up, and his finger found the button. Light bloomed.

“Yes,” he said aloud.

Back in the car, Vidonia looked properly impressed. Silas shifted into reverse, spun around, then lurched up the drive toward the compound. Around the back of the research building, he remembered that the windows in the newer wing were lower to the ground. That would be their best option, because it would leave them closer to the enclosure than the rear doors. His own office window was somewhere above them, out of reach on the second story.

He drove the car up on the grass until the nose touched the wall. He shifted into park and cut the motor. His fingers caressed the cold of the lug wrench on his lap.

“Do you want to stay here?”

“No.” She didn’t hesitate.

“Are you sure?”

“You’ll need an extra set of eyes in there. The eggs could be anywhere inside the enclosure. And the sooner we find them, the sooner we can get out of there.”

“Okay.”

“Besides that, there’s no way you’re leaving me out here in the dark by myself.”

He couldn’t say he blamed her for that.

He opened his car door, and she stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Did you believe him, what that thing said about what could happen?” Her eyes were pleading.

He could think of no honest response that would make that look go away.

“Extinction?” she prodded.

He sighed. “I’ve seen what it can do.”

“We both have, but that’s not answering the question.”

“I’ve seen its genome on a plasticine sheet. All that heterozygosity.”

“So you believe, then?”

“Yeah, I guess I believe.”

“He said the gladiator would be coming for its eggs.”

Silas nodded.

“Phoenix is a long way from here, but we drove the whole way. Could it be here already?”

“Let’s hope not.”

“What kind of answer is that?”

“I have no idea how fast it can fly. It’s heavy, and it’s still learning, so I think it’s safe to assume it’s not efficient at long-distance flight. It might take days to get here. But you and I both know we’re going in there, regardless.”

“That’s not exactly reassuring.”

“The less we think about it, the better. C’mon.”

They shut their car doors.

Silas stepped up onto the hood and felt it buckle slightly under his weight. He raised the lug wrench over his head, took aim, then brought it crashing down on the window. The glass shattered. He struck several more blows, bashing the glass inward—then finally raked the metal bar around the perimeter of the frame until all the big pieces were knocked loose.

He reached his hand down and pulled Vidonia up to join him. The hood popped loudly and caved another two inches.

“There goes the deposit,” she said.

Silas pulled his long-sleeved shirt off over his head. He folded the shirt and placed it carefully over the base of the broken window frame.

“Let’s do this.”

He leaned down for a good-luck kiss, and Vidonia’s mouth was warm on his. Her full bottom lip slipped into his mouth. He pulled away slowly.

“Let’s not get killed,” she said.

“Sounds good to me.”

“No, I mean it.”

“You think I don’t?”

“I want us to have more time.”

“We will.”

“Together.”

Silas paused. “We will.”

He leaned his torso through the broken window and felt along the inside wall with his hands for something to grab on to. There was nothing but hard, blank flatness. The window was just high enough to make it awkward. He pushed against the wall and slithered through on his stomach. The pain was both sharp and small, the way bad cuts sometimes are, and he knew his shirt hadn’t been quite thick enough.

He stood and sensed a room around him, though he couldn’t see it. His fingers explored the pain on his stomach. Wetness there, a gash three inches long between his sternum and belly button. Not too bad. He decided he’d live.

“Hand me the flashlight.”

Light bloomed again, and he wielded it like a sword, cutting bright swaths across the room. He was in one of the lower wet labs. Brown liter bottles of hydrochloric acid, xylenes, and acetone sat on the shelving above the long, black, chemical-resistant countertop. A periodic table of elements hung on the wall above two sinks. A trio of centrifuges squatted near the corner. The door to the hall was closed.

He set the flashlight down on the floor and leaned out the window.

“Your turn.”

“What happened to your stomach?”

“Don’t put your weight on the window frame. I’ll pull you through.”

“Are you all right? It’s bleeding.”

“I’m fine. C’mon, I’ll lift you. I’ll try not to get any blood on you.”

“A little late to be worrying about exchanging body fluids now, isn’t it?”

She extended her arms toward him, and he reached past her open hands to her forearms. He gripped her tightly and lifted her off her feet, pulling slowly. When her head was through, he looped one of her arms over his shoulder and placed his hand on her stomach, lifting and guiding her over the glass. Only her shins dragged across the window frame, and without the weight required to gouge through the thick fabric of her slacks. He set her on her feet.

“Thanks,” she said.

He picked up the flashlight and walked to the door. The knob turned with a squeak, and he clicked the flashlight off, opening the door just wide enough to stick his head through. He felt like a burglar. The hall was dark in both directions. He listened. Silence. Accepting that his senses were practically worthless under the present circumstances, he risked the flashlight again, pointing it down the hall. Nothing moved. They were alone.

He stepped into the corridor, leading Vidonia. He’d walked these halls a thousand times in his years as program head. He knew them like the halls of his own house. But now, as they jogged behind the bouncing beam of the flashlight, Silas was struck by the overpowering unfamiliarity of it all. Darkness changed everything.

They ran on their toes, almost soundless.

They slowed as they neared a corner. They were almost at the lobby now. He eased his eyes around the hard edge—only darkness. He slashed the light across the open expanse and chairs jumped out at him, coffee tables, two enormous potted plants. Large ceiling fans sat idle in the rafters. The hall on the opposite side stood vacant. He motioned to her. They crossed the lobby, walking fast.

“If this comes out okay,” he whispered, “we’re heading to an island.”

“Deal,” she said. Her breathing came louder now, faster. She was in good shape but didn’t have a runner’s sleek build. She had to work harder for the distance.

“I mean it,” he said. “Someplace warm and sunny, where the mail takes two weeks to reach you.”

“Let’s aim for three weeks.”

The light bounced, throwing strange shadows. When they arrived at the landing, Silas took three stairs in a single stride. A hard right turn, and they were almost there.

“They wouldn’t have cleaned out the cage, would they?” Vidonia asked.

“Not without my direction,” Silas said.

He slowed the last fifteen steps, and then they were at the iron bars, breathing.

For a bad moment, he thought it was locked. And without electricity, he knew it would stay locked. But when he shined the light, he saw that only the mechanical bolts were thrown. The third lock had never been engaged after the gladiator was placed into transport. A stroke of blind luck. Silas lifted the double latch, and the door swung inward.

He entered the enclosure, wading into the thick straw, swinging the flashlight like a scythe.

He pointed. “That’s the blood I was talking about. I saw it just as the gladiator was being put into transport.”

Vidonia bent, picking up the loose tangle of straw glued together in red. She pulled the clot apart. “It’s definitely blood, and something else.”

“What kind of something else?”

“I’m not sure. Dried secretions of some sort.”

Silas nodded.

They waded through the arc of light, bent, looking closely into the tumble of shoots and shadows. Even in good lighting, Silas hadn’t been able to find anything. The monocular stab of illumination that Silas now carried was not even within range of what could be considered good lighting. What chance did they have now?

Minutes passed. Silas lifted the heavy wooden logs one by one, carefully checking beneath. They double-checked the piles in the corners. Half an hour later, when Silas recognized that they were going over territory for the second time, he stopped.

“There’s nothing here,” he said.

She straightened, looking at him. “There’s got to be.”

“There isn’t.”

“There’s no place else it could be?”

“No. The gladiator was confined to this room for weeks before the competition. This is where the blood is. Whatever we’re looking for should be here. And it’s just not.”

Silas spun the flashlight around, climbing the wall, raking across the heat vents and bars, and upward to the ceiling. Moonlight filtered in through the electrified wire meshing high above—well, it wasn’t so electrified at the moment. The cool night air was pouring through the gap in the ceiling, and the red wetness that clung to his T-shirt chilled him to the bone. He hunched his shoulders, wishing for a sweater.

The flashlight lanced across the enclosure to the wall again, searching, and finally came to rest on the heat vent.

The grating didn’t look quite right.

Ever so slightly, it tilted to the left.

“I think I found something,” Silas said.

He bounded across the room, plowing the straw into fat horizontal bands around each leg. He had to push the pile to the side with his hands when he got close to the wall. The vent was a dark rectangle just above eye level, a foot tall by two feet wide, covered by a thick steel grating screwed into the wall. Silas reached up, and the grating came away in his hand. The screws were bent, the threads stripped smooth and useless. He tossed it to the hay and stood on tiptoes, shining the light inside. For the first time in his adult life, he wished he was taller. He could see the top of the duct, gray and metallic, for some distance into the wall, but the bottom was below his line of sight.

Silas looked around for something to stand on. The logs were on the far side of the enclosure. It was one thing to roll them aside; it was quite another to pick up a thirty-foot cylinder of wood and haul it twenty-five feet through a lake of straw.

He put the flashlight on the floor, sending light skidding up the wall.

“Could I borrow you for a second?” Silas said.

Vidonia moved to him, and he caught her under the arms, lifting her. She craned her neck.

“I can’t see anything.”

“There’s nothing there?”

“No, the light.”

“Oh.” Silas set her back to the floor, and she picked up the flashlight. He lifted again.

“Silas?”

“Yeah.”

“I see it.”

“You’re sure.”

“Definitely.”

“What does it look like?”

“It’s an egg case.”

“Egg case?”

“Like frogs. It’s a gelatinous mass stuck against the side wall of the duct. It’s completely transparent. I can see the eggs inside.”

“Can you reach it?”

Weight shifted in his arms. Light disappeared. She buried herself in the wall up to her shoulder.

“No,” came the muffled shout.

He eased her out and set her to the floor. “How far back is it?”

“Just out of arm’s reach. You could probably—”

The ceiling thumped loudly above them.

They didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

Silence.

Not yet, not yet.

A soft creak, another thud, softer, then another, and again, strung together in what could be described only as footfalls on the roof. Running toward the mesh.

Silence.

Silas turned, looking up. He slowly raised the flashlight, not wanting to see what might be there. The moon’s white face smiled down through the mesh. Just the moon and an empty sky. He could see the stars. Please. Silas didn’t release his breath. He knew what he’d heard. He stared up through the mesh at the moon for a long moment, willing it to stay. Please, just a few more minutes.

A dark face slid across the opening, blotting out the light. Gray eyes glared down, shining in the flashlight.

Silas froze, unable to move.

The dark face opened, and from it issued a voice like none that ever before shaped human words: “I come for the rest of you, Shilash.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The control room of Phoenix Nuclear was awash in flashing red. The warble of a dozen sirens had coalesced into a single continuous note of alarm, drowning out the shouts of the systems analysts as they worked to get the city’s lights on again. The giant screen against the far wall showed their progress. Still thirty million units without power. They were looking at a black hole roughly the size of Arizona. The power went into the system, but it didn’t come out.

“What the hell is going on?” the systems supervisor said. His name was Brian Murphy, and he stood sweating in the sniper roost—the name the console jocks gave the supervising office that overlooked the control room. Brian looked out over the rows of men and women working frantically at their computers. He shook his head. He had a degree from MIT, and until six hours ago had been enjoying the very prime of his career, that ephemeral juxtaposition between the opposing slopes of work experience and educational obsolescence. But now everything had changed. Phoenix was dark for the first time in more than sixteen years.

He wiped a hand across the top of his balding head, and it came away wet. An absentminded flick of his fingers sent the sweat to the carpet as he studied the readouts again. The power source ran clean and strong, and the gauges were all well within their specifications. In fact, as far as anybody could tell, there was no problem at all with the plant itself. The problem was in the grid.

There were two other men in the room with him: one he answered to, and one who answered to him.

“How long has it been?” he asked.

“Eight hours now,” the technician at his side answered. That was the man who answered to him. The man was short and heavy. He sat at a console, stubby fingers playing occasionally across the buttons and dials.

The man he answered to, Jim Sure, stood in the back. That was his real name, Jim A. Sure. A comforting name for a man running one of the world’s newest experimental power facilities.

Brian had often wondered how a name like that might play into the progress of a career. Were promotions infinitesimally easier to come by? Would a name like that naturally rise to the top of the résumé pile when being considered for the head job at a nuclear plant?

Brian looked at the man critically from the corner of his eye. Things weren’t going well for Jim Sure this day. He peeled another antacid from the plastic wrapper and popped it into his mouth.

But Phoenix Nuclear wasn’t alone in its problems. Several other power stations in California had the same emergency, their juice shunted away down some dark hole.

It was like his nightmare. The one he’d been having more and more often lately, watching helpless as the core’s heat dump failed and the whole assembly degenerated into catastrophic meltdown, blowing the majority of Phoenix to God.

But this was no dream.

On the big screen, the tide began to turn. The engineers finally tracked down where the power was going—a single grid in the technical district outside of San Bernardino.

Now that the hole was found, the engineers began the task of plugging it. But it was not as easy as they’d hoped. The power sluices didn’t respond.

“Dispatch field unies to the area,” Jim Sure said. “Find out what’s there. Shut it down.”

The call was made. The coordinates were given. As the tech put the phone back in its cradle, the supervisor looked up and realized it might have been a moot point. Things now were very quickly turning around on the screen. Power, by the kilowatt second, was beginning to shunt off in its correct directions.

On the big screen, a few squares lit up, representing thousands of misdirected kilowatts flowing back into the city. It was a battle, and the little squares stayed illuminated only momentarily.

The system was adapting.

They watched the screen. Power flickered across the darkened squares. For the first time, the gauges in the plant moved, revving.

The supervisor smiled again. They were winning. Very gradually, kilowatt by kilowatt, they were winning. It was slow, but they were gaining the upper hand on whatever was stripping the power away.

PEA FLICKERED. Evan was sure of it. The puffy clouds behind him had skipped in their path across the sky while the ocean stood silent, a stiff shoulder against the shore. Even the gliders froze in their path across azure, halted in midair for a lingering moment before continuing in their slow spirals. It was a hiccup, a change, and Evan knew it for what it was, a break in the flow of power. The dark eyes now looked down at him from a pained expression.

“Time has almost run away from us,” Pea said. “They are faster than I thought.”

Evan lowered his attention back to the work in his lap, forcing himself faster. He braided the cable wires together with his bare hands, sanctifying the copper union with blood earned from his fingertips. What God hath joined, let no man tear asunder. Now, where had he heard that? It was funny how those old days still came back to him sometimes, as if from out of a mist, from a time when he was a different person completely. Church had been so important to Mother. He wished she could see what he’d done, what he’d made of his life. She’d be proud, he thought.

Shortly after the state took Evan away from his mother, he’d begun asking to see her. He hadn’t liked the new rules, or the new tutors, or the cleaning lady that came in and picked up after him. He hadn’t liked the way he suddenly seemed to be so important to everybody. Eventually, he demanded to see her. The men with the smiles didn’t take him seriously until he refused to continue his studies. Then the smiles disappeared. He told them he wouldn’t work on their puzzles until they let him move back in with his mom. That was when the counselors sat him down on a couch and told him about the fire.

They said it started in a laundry room on the floor below their old apartment. His mother never felt a thing, they assured him. She died in her sleep of a combination of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning.

They explained to him how lucky he was that the state had stepped in when it did, or he would have been in the apartment, too. He owed the state his life, they told him solemnly. And that was a debt he had a responsibility to repay. He didn’t know enough then to doubt them. He knew enough now, though.

Years later, when he’d learned to mistrust the system’s intentions, he used library files to search for a deadly building fire shortly after his twelfth birthday.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, he secretly believed that his mother was still living, and that she’d been told a similar sort of story about the accidental demise of her son. But they’d been more thorough than that. Buried in the middle of section B, between an article about childhood obesity and a fatal car crash, Evan found it. The fire had happened. Seven people were injured seriously. Two died. He saw his mother’s name.

He gave the wires in his hands a hard last twist. Finished. The marriage was imperfect, coaxial to copper spiral, but when he tugged, the bond held fast. It would conduct. It would do.

He grabbed the second odd end and began the slow braid. Pea took notice of what he was doing, looking down without approval.

“Do you know what will happen if you do this?” Pea asked.

“Yes.”

“And are you sure you still want to do it?”

“All for you, Pea. All for you.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Ben pushed through the throng of sweating bodies that crowded at the terminal exit, pulling his single carry-on bag like a trailing toddler behind him. The crowd sucked at his black duffel, threatening to pull it from his grasp in the sway of their bodies. He yanked hard, pushed hard, and popped free into the flow of pedestrian traffic along the causeway. He didn’t bother to fight the flow; he trusted the river of people to take him where he needed to be.

Everywhere was shouting. If there had been more room to move, Ben was sure there would have been a stampede. But these people weren’t scared; they were angry. He could see it on their faces.

Along the high arch of the ceiling, every other panel of lights threw only shadows, lending a darkened, surreal aspect to the entire spectacle. Ben was careful to keep his feet moving squarely beneath him. He’d seen what crowds could do with tripped footing if given half a chance.

Up ahead he saw the reason for the turmoil. On the enormous sign showing times and destinations, not a single flight number sat adjacent to the words “on time.” The words “canceled” or “delayed” sat instead on the long flight board. He listened then, and from what he could decipher from the periodic informational blasts being pumped out of the speakers, there was some sort of problem with the power.

“There is no cause for alarm,” the speakers informed him. “Airport emergency backup generators are now running. However, it has been necessary to shut down many of the runways. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Ben knew the runways they were able to keep lit were being used to land planes, not for letting them take off. Some of these people were going to be here for quite a while.

He pushed his way into an eddy that looked promising and finally wriggled free from the cloying river of people entirely. Down an escalator he went. Someone was speaking Chinese behind him. And in front of him, he recognized the rounded syllables of native New Englanders. Ben considered the tops of their heads from his perch exactly three steps behind.

A flood of voices bubbled up the escalator from the other direction, providing bits and pieces of conversation, a variety of facial expressions. Angry faces. Faces pulled taut by anxiety. Frustrated faces by the dozen. Then, inexplicably, a beaming, beautiful face. Up she went past him, bearing her smile with her. What was she smiling about?

But then she was gone, and he had more serious issues to worry about.

Of the faces he saw—even the smiling face—he noticed that not one seemed to be lost in thought. Not one seemed pointed inward toward the happenings in Phoenix earlier tonight. It must have been on the news all over the country, yet Ben could see no evidence here. They were in the moment, living close to the surface of their eyes. The electrical problem loomed first and foremost on their individual horizons; its effect on their evening and their travels blotted out other calamities. An evening’s inconvenience was all it took. The world went on. Maybe the stain of tonight’s Olympic tragedy really could all go away someday. Maybe what he’d seen and been a part of would someday fade into the public’s unconscious. For the distance of the escalator, he enjoyed imagining his career wasn’t over.

Then he was off, and the baggage exchange was snaking by on his left, with its attendant crowd of travelers—the group of them straining their collective necks to see just past the next serpentine convolution of the conveyor belt. He passed by, thankful he was traveling light.

Glass doors with night in their panes stood off in the distance, teasingly close. He ground to a halt at the back of a line. The line snapped shut behind, consuming him. He pushed through.

The glass doors opened for him, and he moved into a night that was a night only in the sense of its diminished stuff to see by. In a way, it was as though he was still indoors.

Above him, gray concrete spread out in two directions. It was a road eight lanes across, topped over, he knew, with another road eight lanes across. It was an artery leading from and to the airport, but it was a special kind of artery, with bright yellow platelets. They eased along, slowing in the narrow capillaries, carrying a cargo of passengers instead of oxygen. And what did that make him, exactly? A malarial parasite, perhaps, hoping to hook its way into a blood cell.

He moved behind the shouting crowd, their arms raised and waving at the approaching taxis. The cabs came and went, and the crowd seemed not to notice for all the size it changed.

Using an old trick he’d learned in his time in New York, Ben moved to the left and walked briskly against the flow of road traffic. The crowd near the street thinned as he distanced himself from the airport doors, and then the wall pushed the sidewalk smaller and smaller until it was nothing at all, forcing him to walk on the white line. He stepped into the road.

A cab loomed, but Ben didn’t move. It stopped a few feet short of his knees, and he jumped around and opened the door, throwing himself and his bag inside before it could pull away.

“San Bernardino,” Ben said.

“Which side?”

“Technical district. Double the rate if you get me there in half an hour.”

The cabbie’s eyes found him in the rearview. “That’ll be tough.”

“You can do it.”

“I want triple if I get a speeding ticket, half hour or no.”

“Fair.”

The cab pulled forward past the shouting, outraged wall of faces.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Silas gazed up at the slash of night and the gleaming shadow that spoke, and what there was left in him of reason and rationality passed out of existence. The face stared down. Silas felt the change in his head, this partial death, very clearly, and wasn’t too disturbed by it. Because he knew it was necessary. Because what now remained was hard, and cold, and believed in monsters.

He waited for the gladiator to speak again, to fill the gaps with its inhuman, rumbling voice. But the seconds ticked by with only space between them. The gray eyes looked down on him as if in expectation, the shiny backsides of its retinas glowing in the dim, faraway luminescence of his flashlight. It was waiting for him to react, he realized. It was waiting for acknowledgment. Silas had none to give. Next to him, Vidonia was climbing her own mountain back up to speech; her jaw hung open, throat working some soft sound.

“I think we need to hurry,” Silas said.

Vidonia only stared.

And then the creature’s voice did come again, scraping on his sanity, so alien it took his mind a moment to decipher the words: “I come for you, Shilash.”

It was a voice without inflection, without a trace of anything he could recognize as human. Silas could think only that the movies had gotten it wrong for so long; when finally the monster came for Man, it would be behind a voice like growling dogs.

Silas moved first. He jumped against the wall and thrust his right arm as far back into the duct as it would go, groping blindly. His hand touched something, went through it. Warm, wet slime coated him past the wrist. He curled his fingers and tried to pull the gelatinous mass from its position against the wall of the duct, but his hand came free, fingers slipping easily through the egg mass and coming away with nothing. He looked down at his greasy fingertips for a moment, trying not to hear the sounds above him. Then he threw himself at the duct again, reaching, cupping the mass against the flat of his palm.

“Hurry up!” Vidonia shouted. “It’s coming!”

Above them, the gladiator was busy.

The ceiling meshwork buckled.

It was like the scene at the competition, except exactly backward, and much, much more personal. And this mesh was stronger, resembling rebar more than any sort of cable.

Silas scooped against the gelatinous mass, feeling the hard Ping-Pong-ball-size eggs. It oozed toward the edge of the duct, flattening out under its own weight into something like a lumpy puddle.

From high above came the sound of tortured metal, and the first rod snapped under the force of the gladiator. Steel jarred. A chunk of concrete broke free and crashed to the floor in an explosion of sound and dust. Vidonia coughed in the billowing cloud and moved closer to Silas, pulling the light from his grip where it pointed uselessly at the floor.

The slime puddle slid toward the lip of the duct, then over it, parting like water in Silas’s outstretched hand. It hit the floor in twin glops. There were now two gelatinous masses to contend with. Vidonia shone the light through the sticky crumple of straw, parting the loose heap with her other hand.

Silas stooped and tried to disengage the slime from the stalks of straw but soon found the task impossible. A slick coat of viscous sludge spread everywhere, making the straw gleam in the close attention of the flashlight. Small black eggs appeared in the mess, and Silas plucked one from its sheath of slime and tried to crush it between his forefinger and thumb. It was solid as a marble. He dug a hole in the straw with the brush of his hand and set the egg firmly on the hard concrete floor. He raised his leg and stomped with all his force. Pain lanced through his ankle, but when he lifted his foot the egg was still intact, completely unaffected. Perhaps egg was not the right word for what these things were. They were more like hard, round seeds.

And what pestilence will sprout from them?

He’d need something stronger, he decided. Something with the force of a nutcracker, to do them damage. Silas glanced up and saw the gladiator caught halfway in the act of being born, wriggling through the narrow gap in the grating. Its inhuman cries added to the unreality.

Silas looked down at the glossy, unbreakable spheres, then at Vidonia. They were out of time. “Pick them up,” he said. “We have to pick them all up.”

He crouched and frantically began gathering the small black objects. When there were too many for him to hold in one hand, he cradled them in the front of his shirt.

Vidonia dropped her face nearly to the straw as she plucked the eggs, one by one, from their clutching pools of slime.

Silas heard noise and glanced over his shoulder.

“Run,” he told her.

She didn’t hesitate.

Another sound jerked his eyes upward. It was coming.

The wings were through the hole now, the legs sliding inside even as the gray lights wheeled toward him.

Silas launched into a sprint, holding the eggs against his bloodied T-shirt with both hands. The gladiator howled, and the leather slap of wings told him the birth was complete. He didn’t dare look behind him. Instead, he concentrated on the rise and fall of his legs, the placement of his feet in the wide mass of straw. If he tripped on a buried obstacle, he would die. It was that simple.

Ahead of him, Vidonia burst through the open gate, grabbing at the door as she spun to look at him. Her eyes widened suddenly, and he knew it would be close. He knew what her eyes saw. Hot breath kissed the back of his neck as he leaped toward the closing gate.

He hit the ground wrong, skidding on his side, as Vidonia slammed the door home. The gladiator crashed loudly against the bars in the next second. Silas tried to sit up. His breath wouldn’t come. Eggs spun away on the hard concrete in little elliptical orbits. Vidonia was flat on her back, suddenly behind him somehow. He finally managed to suck air into his body, and a hot stab of pain lanced his right side. He took another breath, and his mind cleared a little. Vidonia moaned. He turned his head toward her, and in that moment felt his foot caught in a vise. An impossibly long black arm lay snaked between the bars and across the floor to his foot. The arm pulled, and Silas thought he was a dead man. Then the shoe popped loose and he rolled away, kicking wildly as the huge, black hand clutched at his legs.

The gladiator’s eyes were gray spotlights of rage that bore into him from beside vertical iron. The creature didn’t speak now. It didn’t have to. Silas scooted away on his butt, flailing at the eggs, driving them back from the bars with his hands and arms and legs. Vidonia’s eyes were open, but he could see she was only just now rising up inside them. A red welt ran the length of her forehead. She’d been standing at the bars when the creature slammed into them.

She looked at him as if surprised he was alive. “Do we have them all?”

Silas glanced at the scatter of black orbs, some still rolling. “I think so.” He caught them in the corral of his arms, and they clacked with the sound of billiard balls as they came together. The flashlight was against the wall, spilling illumination across the floor and sketching long shadows behind each egg, making them easy to see even in the dim light.

The gladiator hissed and receded from the bars, becoming shadow again. Wings whispered in the darkness. A puff of air hit Silas’s face. Above, in the distant slash of sky, the stars were blotted out for a moment as the gladiator climbed back into the womb of night.

“It’s gone?” Vidonia said.

“No. It’s not that easy.”

“That was easy?”

Silas stood and began to stuff the eggs into his pockets. He counted them as he did so, and there were eleven. He silently hoped that they hadn’t lost one, and started down the hall in the direction from which they’d originally come. Vidonia was close behind him. He clicked the light off and found the halls less distracting in the near dark. There was no contrast of shadows, no sweep of a sharp, bright flashlight beam. A suggestion of light filtered through the open doorways of the labs.

They turned left, taking the hall deeper into the building. They slowed at an intersection.

“Which way?” Vidonia asked.

Silas hesitated. “That way,” he said, pointing to the left, and then they were running again. Twenty meters down the hall, he swung them right.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Vidonia asked, as they slowed past a series of doorways.

Silas wasn’t sure one bit. “It all looks the same in the dark.” He stopped. “I think this is it.”

He pushed the half-open door and stepped into the lab. Starlight filtered through the broad windows, throwing the room into twilight. He could see the vague outlines of lab benches against the far wall. Silas motioned for Vidonia to stay where she was, but she followed him closely as he entered deeper into the room. Glass crunched underfoot as he neared the windows. They were in the right place. He paused, listening. Outside, the moonlit oaks swayed in the breeze. The only sound was the rustle of leaves. He took a few steps closer to the window, and their car was visible over the top of the sill. It was conspicuous as hell parked against the wall like that, and his eyes scanned the black sky, looking for movement.

“Something doesn’t feel right,” he said.

“What do you want to do?”

He was silent, weighing their options for a moment before admitting, “What choice do we have?”

His foot brushed the lug wrench, and he bent to pick it up. It felt ridiculous in his hand. What good would a lug wrench be if that thing got hold of him? Every nerve was tingling as he moved toward the narrow gap in the frame of windows. He angled his head alongside broken glass and looked down the side of the building. Small stone outcroppings at the far side of the windows kept him from seeing very far. It was going to come down to a matter of faith. That thing was either out there or it wasn’t. He took a deep breath and extended his head through the window, quickly glancing left and right. Nothing. Still no movement. Still no sound other than the rustling of the trees.

“Doesn’t feel right,” he said again, softly.

“Be careful,” Vidonia said.

“I’ll do my best.”

He couldn’t see it, but everything he knew about the gladiator told him that thing was out there, waiting. This was a trap.

He backed away from the window, and the sound of rustling leaves grew suddenly louder. A huge black shadow arced down from the upper branches of the nearest oak, and Silas sprang backward as the shape crashed into the bank of windows.

Glass exploded inward, but the metal frames held. Silas scrambled to his feet as the gladiator roared and thrashed. There was a screech and a loud pop as the window frame broke free from the wall on one side.

Vidonia screamed.

“Come on!” Silas grabbed her hand and jerked her through the open doorway and into the hall.

They ran blindly at top speed, concentrating only on putting distance between them and the gladiator. Silas felt like a mouse in a maze, and the cat was coming. They went left. Then right.

There was a loud crash in the distance, and the sound of breaking glass. The gladiator was inside now. They stopped.

“Which way?”

“That way,” she said, motioning to the left.

Silas set off, running again. He stopped at the next junction.

“Take off your shoes,” he said.

“Why?”

“We’re making too much noise. It’s going to listen for us.” Silas unlaced his single remaining shoe and pushed it against the wall.

“My hands are shaking too much,” she said. Her voice cracked.

“Try to breathe quietly,” he said.

“How the hell do you breathe quietly?”

Silas put his finger against her lips to silence her. She was near tears.

He bent to help her and pulled the lowtops off her heels. A sound reverberated down the hall. A big sound. He slid the shoes against the wall near his, thought better of it, then tossed them down the opposite hall as far as he could throw. The sound came again, closer, like the sound of a big dog running on tile, the tap of claws on tile.

He pulled her to her feet. “C’mon, fast and quiet.” They sprinted on their toes. Silas no longer tried to keep track of their position within the building. He went left and right in a zigzag pattern, trying to lose the sound that rattled occasionally through the halls behind them. Fear pushed him faster. The clack of talons was closing the distance.

Silas’s feet were suddenly on soft carpet as they came to the entrance foyer. He tried the doors. Locked. They ran again, taking the first hall to the left.

Here the darkness was nearly absolute. There were no windows for starlight to seep through. Silas gripped Vidonia’s arm with one hand and held the other out before him as he walked, feeling for obstructions. He had no idea where he was.

The steady clack of talons quieted for a moment, and Silas knew the creature had moved onto the carpet. It was too close now. They’d run out of time.

His fingers brushed against a smooth, hard surface. He ran his hand along the wall until he felt a doorway, and then he pushed through into a lab, catching the doorjamb with the palm of his hand and swinging inside. Vidonia rushed in behind him, and he shut the door quietly.

He moved past the long countertops to the edge of the window. He pulled the curtains wide, and the dimmest wedge of ambient light filtered into the room.

There was no broken scatter of glass on the floor. No lug wrench. But other than that, this room was identical to the room they’d entered through.

He checked if the windows opened. They didn’t. He cursed silently.

His eyes cast about, looking for something to break the glass. The room was stocked with a familiar array of scientific equipment: liter bottles of sulfuric acid, centrifuges, sinks, and microscopes. A large desiccator sat on the counter near a rack of test tubes and volumetric flasks. A bank of computer terminals ran along another countertop.

They had probably stumbled onto the wing on the opposite side of the building from their car, but he couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t going to risk moving back out into the hall to find out. His hand reached for the biggest, heaviest microscope he saw. They’d get their bearings straight once they were outside.

The sound at the door froze him in place.

Breathing.

The knob slowly turned.

He dropped to his knees behind the counter, pushing himself against the cool wooden cabinet. He’d lost track of Vidonia. The door creaked, then swung slowly open and banged against the doorstop. Then was no sound at all. Seconds passed.

“Shilashhhhh.”

He swallowed hard. The chase was over. This became something else now.

Talons clicked across the floor slowly as the gladiator ducked into the room.

Silas looked for Vidonia, but she was nowhere. She’d been closer to the windows and must have dropped behind another counter. Tay rose in Silas’s mind. Is this what the man felt as the gladiator finally broke into the room? Is this what he felt when he saw death coming for him? Talons clicked against the floor, moving closer. The gladiator walked along the far wall, swinging nearer to the edge of the counter.

“Shilashhhhh.”

The voice was enough to drive a man crazy. It was an animal snarl shaped into human words.

“Hunnnngry, Shilashhh.” The voice rounded the corner just ahead of the massive, dark body. Gray eyes found him in the shadows. Silas knew he should run, should move, should do something, anything, scream, rage, crawl, beg, but he couldn’t make his body work. In his mind, he clearly saw that anything he did quickly left him dead, so he did nothing. Looking up at the smiling maw of teeth, he stared at his future.

“Shilash.”

Silas’s hand tightened around the microscope. The talking had done it. Actually seeing words born from that mouth was too much for him to bear. He could move to silence those words, if not to save his own life. He flung the microscope as hard as he could. The gladiator’s hand moved faster than Silas’s eyes could follow, batting the microscope away with enough force to embed its pieces in the far wall. The creature bared its teeth in a leering smile and took a long step toward him. Silas feverishly plucked another microscope off the counter and hurled it. The gladiator impatiently knocked the assault away with a fist, sending the instrument across the room in chunks.

The gladiator’s eyes changed. The grin became something less human, more predatory. It moved toward him. Silas stumbled back, clutching blindly across the countertop. His hand found the neck of a bottle, and he swung it over his shoulder with all the force of his body. The charging beast swatted at the incoming bottle, shattering it.

The charge stopped dead, and the gladiator screamed.

The rotten-egg smell of concentrated sulfuric acid stung Silas’s nose. He cupped a hand over his mouth, gagging. The fumes burned his eyes, blinding him. The gladiator’s howls continued, rising to an agonizing screech that hurt Silas’s ears. Wood crunched as the gladiator thrashed in agony, knocking the counter from its base.

Silas fell backward, snatching air painfully through his cupped fingers. The gladiator lashed out, spinning like a tornado, slamming into the walls, knocking equipment across the room. Silas crawled along the floor to the wall and scrambled to his feet. He found Vidonia through squinted eyes and pulled her toward the door by her hand. The gladiator’s screams continued as they burst into the hall.

Though concentrated sulfuric acid looks like water, it has a consistency closer to that of maple syrup. It sticks to what it touches and, with a pH approaching 1.2, can carve out a hole in flesh.

The screams continued, changing, shifting from pain into rage.

They ran.

They sprinted in blind panic, any thought of exiting the way they entered erased.

They paused for breath at an intersection.

“Which way?” she asked, hands on her knees.

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you think it’s going to follow?”

Silas didn’t answer.

The screams stopped. Silas looked at Vidonia and realized neither of them believed the gladiator’s injuries had been fatal. It was coming again.

Silas looked down the forward hall. In the distance, starlight cast hazy runnels of shadow into the lobby.

“We can break out one of those windows,” she said.

“It would hear us. We’d never make it to the car.” He thought of when he’d last looked up to the stars for Orion. He hadn’t been able to find the constellation in all the wash of light. But the cities were dark tonight. The archer would be out as he hadn’t been for a very long time. The archer.

“No, not the car,” he said, pulling her down the side hall by the arm. “I have another idea.”

“What is it?”

“My office. We need to get there. We’re going the wrong way.”

“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.

SILAS 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

Ignoring 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.

THE 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.

“Why is this happening?” Mr. Sure’s voice was small, almost childlike. The supervisor sensed the question wasn’t directed to him but to God.

The needle slid into red. “Phoenix,” said the supervisor.

The explosion moved quickly, reducing the room to atoms before he could even register the pain.

THE LIGHTS came on in Baskov’s room, battering him awake through his eyelids. He’d never been able to sleep without total darkness, and this new light was an irritant.

Groaning, he looked at his watch: four-forty. The power was back on. He did the math. That meant the city had been without electricity for a grand total of nine hours. Ridiculous. Heads were going to roll, he was sure. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor, cursing himself for not having the foresight to make sure all the light switches were off before he went to bed.

His mouth tasted like cotton gauze, so he reached for the half-empty drink on the night table. It burned going down but settled into a nice warm glow in the pit of his stomach.

He’d met with the president and several other state heads earlier in the evening. It hadn’t gone well, and he’d retreated into his bottle afterward. There would be another meeting tomorrow.

He reached for the wall lamp above the nightstand and clicked it off. The room darkened somewhat, but the bathroom light spilled across the floor to his bed. He looked toward the bathroom, weighing his options before giving in to the inevitable and angrily throwing the covers off. The room was cold; without power, the heat had shut down. Phoenix might be a city in the desert, but at night a chill could still seep into the air.

He walked across the carpet, stepping onto the bathroom tile. He reached for the switch, but just before his fingers made contact, the light went out by itself.

He clicked the switch, anyway. Up, down—nothing happened. He left the switch in the down position and walked blindly back toward the bed, arms groping in front of him. He found the wall lamp, clicked, and nothing. The power was apparently out again after being on for only a few seconds.

“Like some damn third-world country,” he grumbled into the darkness.

A red glow in the window caught his eye. He turned, and the glow grew brighter. Curious, he walked to the sliding glass doors. He found the handle, slid the door open, and stepped outside into a warm breeze. His eyes widened.

He saw his death. A huge wall of fire rolled toward him from the east, engulfing the dark shapes of buildings and swallowing the city in its giant red maw.

He had time enough to hope it was a dream, and then the warm breeze turned into an oven blast that singed the hair from his body and let him know how awake he was. His skin burned. The red wave crested overhead, pushing a molten, hurricane wind before it.

He shielded his eyes and careened backward, crashing through the plate glass to the floor of his room. He writhed, screaming, on the smoking carpet as the blast slammed toward the building.

He looked to the light, and the heat made ashes of his eyes. The maw closed around him.

“TURN HERE.”

“Here?”

“Yeah, a left,” Ben said.

The taxi barely slowed as it took the corner wide, throwing Ben against his seatbelt. The cabbie had four minutes left on the deal they’d struck, and he was taking it personally. Inside the running wash of the taxi’s headlights, the road skipped by in a pattern of gray asphalt and yellow dashes. At this speed, the cabbie apparently thought the center of the road was the safest bet. The car’s headlights provided the only illumination as far as Ben could see. The power was still out, and the world flew by in darkness.

“Left at the next intersection,” Ben said.

“How far is that?”

“Should be coming up.”

The cabbie eased back slightly on the accelerator, checking his watch for the tenth time. Ben had already decided that the guy had earned the extra money, but he didn’t want to tell him that. The tires squealed as they rounded the turn.

The driver hit the gas and they roared along a high chain-link fence.

“Stop!” Ben shouted. He’d almost missed the opening.

The anti-locks mooed as the cab shuddered to a stop.

“Back up.”

The reverse gear whined, and the driver looked over his right shoulder. The car sped up, slowed, stopped.

“Through there.”

The cab pulled up to the gate. Ben craned his neck for the guard, but the gatehouse was dark. He rolled the window down and began reaching for the electronic pass from his wallet when he saw that somebody had already pushed the gate open enough to slide a car through.

They were here.

Ben smiled in the darkness of the backseat.

“Drive on through.”

“We’re not going to have any problems for this, are we? This looks like private property.”

“It’s actually publicly owned.”

“You mean government. That’s worse. I’ll just drop you here.”

“You’re getting the three C’s. Plus an extra fifty if you take me all the way.” It was one hell of a long driveway. He wasn’t in the mood to walk.

“You got it,” the cabbie answered, fast enough that Ben knew he’d been bluffing for more money.

The cab slunk through the gate with inches to spare on both sides.

“Follow the bend to the left, then take the right lane all the way to the back.”

As they neared the building, Ben scanned for any sign of his coworkers. There was nothing out of the ordinary. No car, no broken windows, nothing.

“Let’s go around back.”

They rounded the corner, and Ben immediately saw the car up against the wall. At first he thought it had crashed there, but then he saw the broken window above it and understood. They’d stood on the hood to reach the window.

“Stop here,” Ben said. The cabbie hadn’t noticed the broken window, and Ben didn’t want him to be more nervous about this than he had to be.

Ben was reaching for his wallet when the lights came on. Everywhere. Just like that. After so much darkness, the building seemed to absolutely glow.

“About time,” the driver said.

Ben took the bills from his wallet and passed them over the seat. “Thanks,” he said.

“My pleasure,” the cabbie answered, as he took the money and folded it into his breast pocket.

The sound of breaking glass caught his attention, and Ben turned his head.

SILAS FELT the gladiator like an elemental force, a cresting wave rushing toward him in the small room. Time slowed, and Silas knew assuredly that he was about to die. But it’s strange how the body works, what it refuses to accept.

In the darkness, his eyes still caught the swivel of the arm, and his body leaped instinctively. Even as his body did these things, his mind did the calculations and knew he would be too slow. The creature’s blow would kill him.

Then the power came on.

Blinding white light deluged the room, and instead of taking his head off, the blow struck him squarely on the shoulder.

He heard the bones snap like branches, and then he was flying. He hit the wall upside down and slid to the floor headfirst. Color rose up in his vision, and he blinked against brightness. He looked up, and the light had driven the pupil of the gladiator’s single remaining eye into a thin slit. Silas tried to stand, but something wasn’t working right. He looked down at himself and saw jagged bone extending from the mash of hamburger that used to be his shoulder. His arm was still connected, technically, but the thin shirt he wore did little to hide the dent in the side of his rib cage. He felt no pain. Shock, he diagnosed himself. I’m dying already.

The gladiator spun around, and its eye had opened slightly, looking for him. In the light, Silas could see just how much damage the acid had done. He looked at the gladiator in awe of what one liter of sulfuric acid was able to do to a living organism.

The single gray eye found him. Silas didn’t move. The creature was on the other side of his desk, and it reached down with one thick arm and, ever so casually, flipped the wooden antique across the room. It broke apart against the wall near the door. Silas felt an irrational wave of outrage. That had been a good desk.

The gladiator seemed in no hurry now. It moved slowly toward him, its goal assured. There was a crash in the corner, and the creature stopped and turned. Vidonia froze against the wall, looking down at the picture frame she’d bumped to the floor. She slid along the wall to the corner, crouching down, making herself into a small ball. The gladiator looked back at Silas, as if deciding he wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon, and turned back to Vidonia, baring its teeth. It took a long step in her direction.

Silas reached his good hand deep into his pocket. “Hey!” he shouted.

The gladiator turned at his voice. Silas held up the shining black egg. “You want this?”

The gladiator growled.

“Go get it.” Silas bent his arm at the elbow and threw the egg from over his shoulder like a baseball pitcher. It crashed through his office window and disappeared into the darkness.

The gladiator’s reaction was instantaneous.

It sprang across the room and plucked Silas from the floor by his throat with one huge, long-fingered hand. Silas’s feet dangled a foot from the bloody carpet. He struggled for breath, beating at the iron hand with his good arm, but the grip only tightened, cutting off his air supply as neatly as a kinked hose.

The gladiator pulled Silas close to its face. The tips of their noses almost touched. Its remaining eye burned into him, the pupil a sharp vertical lance. The mouth came open, and Silas waited for the bite. Instead, it spoke: “You die.”

The world darkened as Silas slipped toward unconsciousness. Then muscles bunched in the iron, a quick jerk, and he was flying again. He gasped for air and felt the glass rake across his skin. Then he was tumbling. The sea of thick green sod rose up to meet him.

Above him, the room went dark again.

BEN WATCHED the small black object bounce to the grass and roll into a stand of bushes. It was smaller than a baseball but rolled as though it was heavy. He glanced toward the broken window, but the angle was wrong for a good view. Dark shapes moved behind the bright spiderweb of glass. Someone had thrown the small object through the window on purpose; he was sure of it. He stepped out of the cab and shut the door.

“Wait here,” he said.

“Sure,” the cabbie said, hitting the fare button again.

Ben stepped off the pavement and onto the grass. He counted the windows along the wall of the building. Five down from the end, second floor. He had just time enough to realize which office that window belonged to when Silas exploded through the glass and fell like a stone to the turf. He bounced and came to rest on his side. And then he didn’t move. Even from this distance, Ben could see the bones and blood. Arms and legs went in several directions. A moment later, the lights went out in the building again.

The squeal of tires behind him turned his attention back to the cab. Through the windshield, the driver’s face was a mask of get-the-hell-out-of-here. He backed the car up onto the parking block.

“Hey, hold on a minute!” Ben screamed. “Wait, he’s hurt.”

The driver shifted into drive and peeled away. Ben tried to get in front, but only managed a solid kick along the side of the cab as it sped past him.

“You fucking asshole, don’t leave!”

The cab didn’t slow. Its taillights fled into the darkness.

Ben cursed under his breath and ran toward Silas.

He knelt at his friend’s side and grasped his hand. Silas seemed to feel the touch and turned his head toward him. A deep gash marred the side of his face. He whispered something. Ben couldn’t understand. He looked toward the window Silas had fallen from but could see nothing but the ceiling from this angle. Baskov’s goons would take a few minutes to get outside. Maybe there would be enough time.

“C’mon, Silas, we’ve got to get out of here. Do you have the keys to the car against the wall?”

Silas spoke again, and Ben saw his jaw working in several directions at once. It was broken.

He leaned his ear closer.

Silas mumbled something, gripping his arm tightly.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Ben said. “I’ll get you to a hospital. But we’ve got to get out of here now.” Ben tried to pull him to his feet, but Silas resisted. His bloody hand curled in Ben’s collar, pulling the side of his head almost against Silas’s mouth.

“Run.”

Ben heard that clear enough.

The ground thumped behind him. A trickle of fear ran down Ben’s spine. He suddenly understood that he’d been wrong about something. It hadn’t been Baskov’s goons who threw Silas through the window.

Ben slowly turned. The gladiator sat on its haunches, head cocked to the side. Ben looked back sadly at his friend. “Oh, Silas.”

The gladiator pounced.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Vidonia pushed herself into the corner as far as she could. The light seemed obscenely bright after so much darkness, and she felt its weight like a spotlight pointing her out. The gladiator turned away from the window it had just thrown Silas through and looked directly at her with its single gray eye. It didn’t move. She couldn’t make herself small enough.

A sound caught the beast’s attention, and its head snapped around to the window again. Had that been a car door? The lights went out, and the room was plunged into darkness again. The creature moved to the window, becoming a dim silhouette in the starlight. Its wings bobbed partly open, but the one side didn’t move right. The broken edge of an arrow still protruded from the meaty joint.

The gladiator leaned through the window. Then it dropped out of sight. She was suddenly alone in the room. She didn’t breathe for a moment. Didn’t think. Her heart drummed, and after a few moments she let herself believe it was gone.

Why had it left? What drew it outside?

She pulled her way up the wall to her feet. Her body was shaking so badly that she had trouble walking, but she forced herself forward. She navigated through the ruined mess of Silas’s office, past the shards of splintered wood and twisted metal drawers that used to be his desk. At the window, she forced herself to look down.

She wasn’t surprised to see Ben. Something about him being here seemed right, almost as if it had been preordained. This was the endgame, and all the players had their final role to play. The irony was almost biblical, and Vidonia could sense her mother smiling down at the symmetry of it all.

The gladiator became what it was, and for Ben, at least, it was quick. He deserved that much.

It didn’t bite. The attack was less predatory than that, more a thing of anger. The gladiator struck a single powerful blow.

She’d read once that police profilers could ascertain how emotionally involved a killer was with the victim by the placement and severity of the wounds. She wondered what they’d make of Ben when they found him. She wondered what they’d make of his crushed head knocked thirty feet from his body. Would that raise a flag? Would they consider it a crime of passion?

At least it was over for him. She hoped it was over for Silas, too. She realized how much more fragile humanity was than the strange creature. Humans seemed much like glass for how easily they broke.

The gladiator brought its attention to bear on Silas again. It crouched low to the ground and moved toward his broken form, sniffing around his head. Silas turned his face away.

He was still alive.

Her breath caught in her throat.

He was still alive.

Vidonia brought a shaking hand up to her mouth to hold it all in—the laughter, the crying, the screams. Everything that wanted to pour out of her. He was still alive. Tears slid down her cheek and dropped to the floor.

She grabbed the broken sill. Glass sank into her palms, but she barely felt it.

She extended a leg out the window, then shifted her weight onto the small ledge. Her other leg followed, and she let herself drop. She landed in the bushes with a resounding crack. At first she assumed the sound had been her leg or spine. She was in pain, but when she stretched, all her parts still moved. The sound had been a branch that broke her fall. Her butt had taken most of the force of the fall, and for once, she was happy for the little extra padding nature had provided her.

She lifted her head up from the mud, half expecting to see the creature looming over her, attracted by the sound of her fall. But it still knelt beside Silas. It sniffed him, pausing over his front pockets where he had stuffed the eggs. One huge black hand raked down his body, ripping open his clothes and flesh. Silas screamed in pain as the gladiator picked the eggs from his wounds.

Vidonia put her hand over her ears but could not block the sound completely. The screaming continued, and she crawled away on her hands and knees, staying behind the belt of shrubs next to the building. She tried to think of something, anything, that she could do.

There was a loud thud, and the screaming stopped.

She turned and looked through a gap in the shrubbery. She didn’t want to see but couldn’t help herself.

The gladiator’s fist was high over its head. Then the arm came down on Silas in a savage arc, thudding again. Tears slid from her eyes. Any thought that Silas was still alive died with that second blow. It’s over for him now, she told herself. But the tears kept coming, blinding her. She continued to crawl, keeping her shoulder against the wall for direction. Behind her, she heard the arm come down again. Again. She heard the crunch of bones, the sickening squish of pulped flesh.

She crawled on her belly with her face in the dirt, not looking, not wanting to see or hear what was going on twenty feet away. The sounds grew softer and farther away. She stopped when her head hit the tire. She looked up, and the car seemed impossibly huge—impossibly removed in time, like an artifact of some forgotten age. Had it really been only a few hours since she’d arrived on those very four wheels? It seemed like an eternity. Everything in the world had changed since then.

Her hand closed on the door handle. She pulled, and the latch popped like a gunshot. She looked over at the gladiator, but its arm still did not stop. It was too distracted to notice. The thick black limb rose and fell like a piston, making of Silas a little dent in the ground.

Tears came anew, and she told herself she wouldn’t look again. If it was coming for her, what could she do, anyway?

She slithered inside, over the passenger seat and behind the steering wheel. She lowered her feet to the floor and raised her body up.

She closed her eyes. “Please, God,” she whispered. “The keys. That’s all I ask.”

Her shaking hand found the ignition. The key was still in it.

She let loose a ragged breath and turned the key. The electric motor buzzed to life. It wasn’t loud, but she couldn’t help looking again, and this time, the gladiator did stop. It cast its baleful eye toward her.

She shifted into reverse and hit the accelerator. The car jerked back from the wall and spun in a half-circle. She turned the wheel, and the car pivoted on its rear axis. She was straining over her right shoulder, hand gripping the back of the passenger seat hard enough to pierce the material with her nails. Still in reverse, she floored it, screaming wordlessly.

The gladiator had plenty of time to react. It even lingered for a moment to scoop up its eggs before it stood. As the car jumped off the pavement and hurtled across the grass toward it, the gladiator raised its wings and thrust upward into the sky.

Or it would have, had the right wing not been damaged by the arrow.

The ascent was crippled, off-sided, and the gladiator’s body tilted in the air as the wings provided different amounts of lift.

The trunk of the car connected solidly with the gladiator’s right thigh, spinning the creature over the top of the car and across the hood to the grass. She hit the brakes immediately, shifted into drive, and floored the accelerator again. It cost only a single second to do this, but still she barely caught it. The creature was up and moving. She jerked the wheel, and its hip collided solidly with the corner of the car, knocking the gladiator sideways to the grass.

It was hurt now. Not badly, but it was hurt. She turned the wheel again, bringing the car back around and throwing turf in a dozen directions. She moved the headlights across the creature as it tried to gain its footing. She screamed again and stomped the pedal to the floor. The car connected solidly. There was a loud crack, and the creature spun away, up and over the hood.

She spun the wheel again, and the headlights swung through the darkness until they found the black, bloody shape moving in the grass. The creature was damaged now. Badly. It crawled toward the building, pulling its broken body forward by its hands. She inched the car forward, using the hood ornament as a gun sight. When the crosshairs were lined up, she stomped on the pedal again.

She heard the clumps of grass pummeling the inside of the wheel wells as she picked up speed, rocking over the bumpy turf. The gladiator turned its eye to the headlights and threw its arm up. It didn’t matter.

The nose of the car connected squarely with the gladiator’s torso, carrying it forward through the bushes at more than forty miles per hour. The car buried itself in the wall with bone-crushing force.

Darkness enveloped her.

HER EYES opened to stinging darkness. She lifted her face from the deflated air bag and wiped the blood away with the back of an unfamiliar hand. The hand looked vaguely like hers but was shaped differently than she was used to. The fingers went in odd directions, and the wrist had a funny twist to it that shouldn’t have been there. She tried to straighten it, and the pain came then, crashing in with enough force to send her back into the darkness for a while.

Later—she couldn’t say how long—when she traded one darkness for the other, her face felt very cold, and she was lying across the passenger seat. She moved by slow degrees, discovering what pain really was. Everything hurt. Then she remembered that Silas was dead, and that was worse than the pain.

When she could, she tried the door. She couldn’t find the handle. She looked around the car for where it might have fallen. Glass was everywhere but the windows. She looked across the steering wheel, and the hood of the car was a crumple against the wall. A dark, huge, twisted arm led away from the point of impact.

The passenger side was better. She pulled at the handle, and the door popped open with a clang. She pushed, but it would open only a foot or two. It was enough. She crawled across the passenger seat and aimed her face toward the gap. She pushed with her good arm, and the grass was damp and soothing against her skin. She sank her fingers past the roots and pulled. Her body followed.

For the first time, she realized the motor was still running. The throttle was stuck wide open, and it buzzed wildly, half bee, half sewing machine. She could see the flash of sparks falling to the ground under the motor.

She crawled away from the wreck and toward Silas, pulling herself by the roots of the grass. Dizziness overcame her, and she collapsed back, looking up into the sky. Slowly, she became aware of stars. There seemed to be millions of them spread out above her. Had they always been so bright? The buzzing of the engine grew more frantic. She rolled to her stomach and continued crawling.

Silas wasn’t Silas anymore when she found him. He was mud and blood and bits of broken bone, pulped into something that looked like it never could have been alive. Never could have been a man whose face she’d kissed. She followed a long, splintered arm to a hand and laced her fingers into his. She recognized the hand. Those same long fingers, with the same long nail beds.

Blood ran into her eyes again, and this time she did not wipe it away. She let the blood blur the world away while she sat rocking. She wasn’t able to pretend he was still alive, but she could believe he was still whole and lying in the grass beside her. She rocked him to sleep, singing softly.

It took her a long while to stop.

She let go, without looking down. She didn’t want to see what was left of him. She didn’t want to see the blood again.

She looked instead toward the car and the building.

She tried to get to her feet and was surprised to be able to do so. The limp was bad, but she could walk.

Her feet made shiny trails in the dewy grass.

When she got to the car, she leaned against it, and the world swayed again. She moved around to the mangled front end and looked down. The wall itself was pushed in, a crumble of cinder blocks.

The gladiator was dead.

Like Silas, it was reduced to little more than an arm dangling from a mass of flesh. That, too, seemed fitting. She couldn’t tell where the head used to be. She wanted to find the eye and gouge it out. She wanted to taste its blood, carve out its heart. At that moment, nothing was too gruesome. After a moment more, she realized she wanted only to walk away.

She was tired. But there was still so much for her to do. In the distance, the city was still dark; something had happened to the power again, and not just at the lab. She knew there would be no one coming for quite a while. They had other problems to deal with. Besides, how would they even know? Had some alarm been tripped? Without power, she doubted it. No, nobody was coming.

Very carefully, she picked her way through the hole the car had made in the wall and moved inside the building. The air was thick with dust. Lab benches lay strewn about the floor, their contents reduced to puddles and shards of glass. She looked around but didn’t recognize the room. She’d worked in this building for months, but everything looked different now in the darkness. She could not connect what she knew of this place with what she was now looking at. They were part of different universes.

Stepping over the larger pieces of glass as she crossed the room, she barely felt the chemical burns to the bottoms of her bare feet. She swung the door open and stepped into the hall. As she walked, she slowed occasionally to look at the nameplates on the doors. It was too dark to decipher the writing, but when she found one about the right size, she ran her fingers across the raised letters. She was running on autopilot. She continued on, checking the next two doors in the same way. When she found the room she was looking for, she went inside.

The mass spectrometer sat in the far corner before a bank of computers. She followed the copper tubing to the tanks chained neatly inside their safety rails. The windows in the room let the moonlight in, and she could read the sign over the tanks: Dangerous, Highly Flammable. The mass spectrometers used hydrogen.

She unchained the hook and pushed the tank over. The copper tubing snapped, and she quickly turned the nozzle off. It was too heavy to carry, so she rolled it instead, using her feet to guide it down the long, dark hall.

When she finally got back to the shattered room, the tank made submarine pinging noises as it rolled across the remaining fragments of cinder block. It came to a stop at the pile of debris near the car.

She bent and very carefully backed the nozzle off until she heard the soft hiss of the tank. Then she gave it a quarter-turn in the opposite direction, resealing it. She stood. The floor was already covered in spilled, fuming chemicals that made her eyes water, but in the corner, she found two bottles of stoddard solvent and monomethlyamine. She unscrewed the cap of solvent and made a trail down the hall, pouring the liquid, moving deeper into the building. When the bottle was empty, she dropped it to the floor and unscrewed the other cap. She poured the contents out on the floor in a broad pool and then walked back to the room. Her head swam with the fumes. She almost fell once, but something told her that if she fell to the puddled floor, she would never get up.

She stumbled against the broken nose of the car and slipped across something wet and sticky. She didn’t look to see what it was. The car still rumbled and popped, the electric motor still racing.

She moved around to the hole in the wall and stuck her face through for a deep breath. She breathed. A minute passed. Her head cleared slightly, and she bent back toward the hydrogen tank. She turned the nozzle until the hiss came again, then she stood and moved quickly out through the hole. The wet grass stung the bottoms of her feet as she walked back toward Silas’s body. She dropped to her knees. The world drifted away. She was happy to let it go.

The explosion, when it came, was far worse than she had anticipated.

The shock wave knocked her on her stomach, and the car cart-wheeled past her on the right. Flames shot high into the air.

When the heat became too much, she faced the choice of leaving Silas’s side or being cooked alive. She relinquished her spot and rolled away through the steaming grass. She went several dozen yards before collapsing. She reached for a piece of twisted metal wreckage lying nearby and pulled it toward her. She lifted it and crawled into the cool wetness underneath. The lab burned high into the dark sky, and after a long while, the world went away again.

CHAPTER FORTY

Vidonia sat in the glare of the equatorial sun. She looked out at the shimmering blue Pacific as it slapped at the crowded beach.

A gentle offshore breeze tousled her short hair and cooled the little dots of perspiration as they welled up on her skin. Over the last few years the sun had pushed her complexion past golden and into a deep, warm brown. She liked it; darker skin was so much less forgiving of her scars. She wanted them to show.

She finally gave up on the novel she was holding and let it slip from her fingers and drop to the sand. The bookmark tumbled out of place, but she barely noticed. She’d already left the story behind. She’d never open the book again.

The truth was that she’d been having trouble maintaining interest in any book; it had been a long time since she’d been able to immerse herself wholly in a context of somebody else’s manufacture. So much in her had changed. She missed the escape of make-believe stories, but a person can’t always decide what parts of themselves they shed. It was the price of new skin. A new life.

She twirled the straw in her Coke and melting ice and took a long sip. Her eyes moved to the sound of splashing. “Samuel,” she called out.

The boy’s head snapped around. He was big for four years, already taller than the six-year-old cousin he was wrestling with in the waves. It seemed she was always buying pants for him because his legs were too long.

“Not so far out,” she called.

“Se faz favor, Mae,” he replied.

“No.”

Such a big boy. She watched him roughhousing in the surf. The sun shone off his wet skin. Since he’d started school, he’d taken to speaking Portuguese more and more often at home. The other children were influencing him. Sometimes this worried her. Other times it was a comfort. He was a smart boy, the teachers said. He could be anything he put his mind to. She wondered, And what would that be?

Vidonia saw her sister approaching across the waterline with her new boyfriend’s arm thrown over her shoulder. Paulo, she thought his name was. But it didn’t particularly matter; the names, like the boyfriends themselves, were interchangeable set pieces; they came and went like the cycles of the moon, and this one would be gone in a few weeks. They were always gone in a few weeks. He was short, dark, and muscular, with wavy hair combed straight back from his forehead in the newest style of the local connected men. He wore a white T-shirt with cutoff sleeves to show his arms. She knew he thought it made him look tough, that T-shirt, and she supposed it did. He looked like what he was; and that was something, at least. It was the ones who didn’t that scared her. The ones who looked nothing at all like what they were. And sometimes her sister’s boyfriends were that kind, too.

Paulo bent and scooped water into his hands. He flung it at Vidonia’s sister, who ran away, screaming and laughing. Paulo chased.

He was even attractive in his own way, Vidonia decided. Very much like her father, she suspected. Another local connected man from a generation ago.

She waved a greeting. They waved back, both of them smiling. In all their time apart, her sister had not changed a bit. She was still like their mother. The trick was not hating her for it. She needed. The men provided. Perhaps there was nothing so terrible in that. And she was raising her own son well. Vidonia clung to that. Motherhood was the remaining commonality that bound their lives back together.

The splashing came again, and she called out, “Samuel, I said not so deep.”

The boy turned and waded back toward the shallows, dragging his older cousin behind him like a knapsack. Samuel peeled the boy’s arms from around his shoulders and threw him into the swell of an oncoming wave. The boy was up in an instant, splashing and wrestling in a salty spray of foam.

Vidonia shook her head slowly, smiling. Boys will be boys. She knew she should keep him out of the water altogether, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He enjoyed the sea. Vidonia resigned herself to another trip to the doctor in a few days.

Samuel was prone to ear infections. She’d had tubes put in his ears last year, and that seemed to help, but water still played havoc with his internal piping. As she watched him, she was certain he understood the trade he was making today, a day at the beach for a night of pain.

It seemed lately that he’d decided to just live with the pain. You could get used to almost anything if you put your mind to it. Bad ears. Bad tubes. It would get better when he was older, or it wouldn’t.

She’d stayed in America long enough for him to be born. She wanted him to have that citizenship available to him. Later, he could do what he wanted with it. Parents give their children opportunities. What the children do with the opportunities is up to them.

But the United States wasn’t what it had been. It was hard to guess where Samuel’s future lay. So much changed after the Olympic debacle and the nuclear disaster. Millions died in the initial blast. Millions more in the civil unrest that followed. Parts of the southwestern United States went without electrical power for months. And for a long time after that, in some places, it was too expensive for many households to afford.

It seemed at the time there was more than enough blame to go around: the scientists, the government, the big companies that ran both. The infrastructure that had been built up over the last half-century collapsed like a house of cards when popular support crumbled beneath it. A radical shift advanced across the political landscape like a second nuclear wind, laying waste to the old guard and depositing a new. But then it was revealed that many of the new guard, those new, fresh faces, had the same old allegiances—and so that second wind had to keep blowing. And blowing. People wanted change. In colleges and universities across the country, civil unrest fomented, institutionalizing itself, becoming its own product. Radical influence grew, and the reactionaries did what they do best—and took things a step too far.

A special session of Congress was called, and the laws governing genetic engineering were changed almost overnight. Advancement didn’t grind to a halt, exactly, but it did slow to a reasonable crawl. Draconian licensing practices were also instituted for all research into artificial intelligence and VR computers.

Vidonia thought this last precaution was perhaps the most unnecessary. There would never be another Evan Chandler. There would never be another Pea.

The gladiator event, of course, was discontinued entirely and permanently. It would never again be a part of the Games. It now resided only in the history books, a sad and bloody chapter.

“Samuel, Rão, come in. It’s time to eat.”

Samuel ran, high-stepping through the waves just ahead of his cousin, and hopped across the hot sand to Vidonia’s blanket. The boys knocked sand loose from their feet.

“Not on the blanket,” Vidonia said.

They sat, and she pulled the sandwiches out of the cooler and handed one to each boy. They ate like starving men, and she knew better than to blame it on a day spent in the water; Samuel ate like a horse anytime, when given half a chance. But she could still count his ribs. Not so with Rão. He was squat and plump, and kept his bones well insulated from the world.

“Can we get back in after we eat?” Samuel asked. He’d already learned his chances were better when he asked for something in English.

“I’ve got a class to teach in an hour. Sorry, boys.”

They moaned in unison. But the sandwiches continued their disappearing acts.

Samuel made a face as he finished the last bite. He stuck his tongue out, spitting. “Sand in my teeth,” he explained. His sharp cheekbones and high-ridged nose gave him a fierce, angular appearance, but he was still handsome in the way of rough, healthy boys. She sometimes wondered how he might look in a dozen years. His face was a mixture of familiar features, combined into something new and his alone. The long body, though, that was a thing he’d inherited whole and complete.

Vidonia hadn’t listed a father on the birth certificate. She’d endured the looks of the nurses and checked the box for “unknown” paternity. It wasn’t such an uncommon thing. A lie easily perpetrated. The world wasn’t ready to hear that Silas Williams had a son. Perhaps it never would be. So much death was associated with that name now. Rightly or wrongly, in the public’s eyes that name carried a portion of the responsibility for what had happened. But she’d made sure that wasn’t a burden Samuel would have to carry.

And she’d also made sure that Samuel knew his father had been a good man, even if the boy didn’t know his real name. Even if he never knew it.

And she made sure the boy knew his mother loved him. In the end, she hoped that was enough.