Written in Fire

CHAPTER 34

“Yes, we know, but they are still outside the perimeter defenses . . .”

“Floodlights. Of course they’ll shoot them out. That’s why . . .”

“We’ve got more people than guns, and not enough ammunition, so get a network of runners going to keep it . . .”

“They don’t have vehicles. Horses.”

The room was a cross between a meeting space and an amphitheater, and packed with people jabbering into phones, staring at terminals, bouncing data back and forth. Until recently it had served for corporate meetings and product demos, and in one of those little ironies Cooper was growing tired of, the plaque on the outside of the door labeled it the War Room. A cutesy touch that would have fit in a tech start-up—which, he supposed, the NCH was.

“How should I know when they’ll attack? Sometime after the big bright spot in the sky goes away, and before it comes back . . .”

“Casualty projections are all over the board . . .”

“No, horses . . .”

Cooper imagined bulling through the room, fighting his way to Jakob at the head of the table, offering help. The prospect tired him in every way. This was already a too-many-cooks situation, and while in theory his tactical experience would be valuable, without being plugged into the Holdfast bureaucracy, what was the point?

He glanced over at Shannon. She had one arm crossed to support her elbow, the other hand at her face, the tip of her thumb just between her teeth. Her eyes drank the room. Funny—he’d seen her naked, seen her kill, seen her make herself invisible, but he couldn’t recall if he’d ever seen her just stand somewhere. It struck him as oddly intimate.

She sensed him looking—her gift, he supposed—and glanced over.

He said, “Let’s get out of here.”

The location was her idea.

When Erik had activated his Proteus virus, the first casualties had been three state-of-the-art fighter jets that were buzzing Tesla. Two of the Wyverns had collided midair, the debris raining down. The pilot had ejected from the third, and her bird had done a backflip into the side of the central building, tearing a hole four floors high and forty yards across, the jet fuel starting a fire that had consumed most of the furnishings before the auto-suppression system got it under control. The bodies had been removed and the gaping rip in the building had been sealed with plastic sheeting that billowed and popped in the wind, but little else had been done to repair the damage.

They looked at each other, then at the torched interior, the blackened remnants of desks and chairs. Shattered solar glass sparkled amidst the ash. Shannon stepped gingerly through a pile of debris, bent to pick up a metal picture frame. The glass was cracked, the image burned away. “Can you imagine sitting at a desk, just doing your job, all of a sudden an airplane comes through the window?”

“Kind of.”

“Yeah,” she said, threw him a glance not easily parsed. “Me too.”

Cooper picked his way across the ruined floor. The stink of scorched plastic hung in the air even now. Translucent sheeting reduced the world outside to blurry shapes backlit by the setting sun. “A couple of miles away, an army is waiting for darkness to fall.” He shook his head. “How did we get here?”

“Gradually, I guess.” Shannon’s voice was soft. “One lie at a time.”

“You and your whole truth fetish,” Cooper said. “Ever since the first time we talked, in that shitty hotel after the El platform. I had been very heroic, saving your life—”

“Funny, I remember that differently.”

“And you said something like, ‘Maybe there wouldn’t be a war if people didn’t keep going on television and saying there was one.’” He shook his head. “And now here we are.”

“Yeah.” She tossed the picture frame. The remaining glass tinkled. “Here we are.”

Gunfire sounded in the distance, steady and slow. Going to hear a lot more of it tonight. He sighed, rubbed at his face. “My kids are in a bunker right now. They must be so scared.”

Somehow Shannon was beside him, then. One hand on his arm. “Hey,” she said. “We’ve saved them before. We’ll do it again.”

Before he could reply, his phone vibrated. He glanced at the display. “It’s Ethan.”

She straightened. “You should answer.”

Cooper nodded, hit a button. “Hey, Doc, you’re on speaker.”

“I . . . is it . . .”

“Just me and Shannon. Have you found the missing canisters?”

“What? No. I haven’t been looking for them.”

“Doc, come on, I need you to focus—”

“You’re the detective,” Ethan said. “What do you want me to do, go door to door? I’ve been working the epidemiology of the virus instead. It’s a sonuvabitch, man, a real monster. A modification of the flu, airborne, long-lived, but with R-naught estimates in the twenties. That means each case could result in twenty or more secondary cases. And since there’s no dependable influenza vaccine, if this gets out, pretty much everyone is going to catch it.”

Cooper winced. “How bad is the illness?”

“It’s not. Pretty much the sniffles. The flu isn’t the problem. I’ve been reviewing the research notes, analyzing blood and tissue samples, trying to figure out why Abe died.” Ethan’s voice caught on that. “Cooper, it was the serum. Our work. Becoming brilliant killed him.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Abe vanished before we could do proper trials. And then he injected himself, which was crazy, you just don’t do that, but he was so paranoid, so sure he was right . . . anyway, you saw how effective it was.”

“And that killed him?”

“Not the serum itself, but his mind’s reaction to it.” Ethan took a breath. “You’re tier one, right? And so is Shannon and Epstein and that Soren asshole. But you’ve had your gifts from the beginning. They were part of you as a child. Now imagine that suddenly you also saw the world the way Shannon does. And the way Epstein does. And the way Soren does. That it all happened at the same time, in a span of a couple of days.”

“It would be confusing, but—”

“It wouldn’t be confusing,” Ethan said. “It would be shattering.” He paused. “Okay, look. Imagine you were born underground. A pitch-black cave. You grew up there, connecting with the world by touch and sound and smell. Completely unaware of vision. That was your normal for sixty years.

“Then there was a rockslide, and light flooded in. You wouldn’t have the first idea what was happening. I mean that literally—your brain wouldn’t have developed neural pathways for processing vision. You’d have no concept of scale, motion, even color. No way of knowing if a shape was your wife or a boulder about to squash you flat.”

“I get you, but—”

“Now imagine it’s not just sight, it’s also sound, and touch, and taste, all at once,” Ethan said. “Christ, man, Soren perceives time differently.”

Cooper opened his mouth. Closed it. Said, “Okay. So you’re saying this could be fatal?”

“I’m saying Abe clawed his own eyes out to stop his vision and scratched at his cage until his fingers were bone. And this was a man with a first-rate intellect who knew what was happening to him. The human mind cannot survive that level of change. There just isn’t the neurological flexibility. Not once we’re fully developed.”

“Which is when?”

“The frontal lobe stops forming around age twenty-five.” Ethan paused. “Best guess? It wouldn’t be easy on anyone, but kids’d be fine, teenagers would be okay, people in their twenties would have a shot. Much past that . . . I don’t know. I think you’d be looking at survival percentages in the single digits. And along the way you’ve got confusion, panic, delirium, uncontrollable rage, homicidal impulses—”

“All in the most powerful gifted ever born,” Shannon said. “Jesus Christ.”

A gust of wind shook the plastic sheeting. Beyond it, the world was losing focus. In December, in Wyoming, the sun went down fast, and in the time they’d been talking things had darkened considerably.

Ethan said, “You have to stop this. Somehow. Please. My daughter—”

Cooper hung up the phone. Thought about hurling it right through the fucking wall.

“He’s right,” Shannon said. “We have to stop this.”

“I know.”

“We got distracted. The militia, saving the kids, preparing for war. We took our eyes off the ball.”

“That’s what John Smith does.” Cooper had that feeling, almost a tingle, that he’d learned to identify as his gift patterning furiously, nearing an answer. “This isn’t an accident, a glitch of timing. He planned all of this to happen at the same time.”

“Sweetie,” Shannon said, “that’s paranoia.”

“It’s true. He even told us, remember? ‘Killing me isn’t the same as beating me.’ I’ve been chasing Smith forever.” Cooper shook his head. “I should have known that was too easy. He may be dead, but he’s still trying to win.”

“But how could he have predicted the attack?”

“He didn’t.” A lattice of connections was starting to fall into place. Cooper could feel the truth bobbing just out of reach, like stretching for a beach ball in a swimming pool. Press too hard and you’ll only push it away. Just follow the logic, let the currents draw you in. “He didn’t predict it. He provoked it.”

“That’s crazy. The assassinations, bombings, the organization, the stock exchange, the Children of Darwin—are you saying that was all so the Holdfast was under attack at just the right moment to distract us?”

“Not specifically to distract us. But yes, this was his will.”

Shannon started to argue, but he could see that she was considering it, reevaluating her past in light of new information. “The last time I saw John, before today I mean, I accused him of wanting war. And he told me I was right. That the normal world would attack, and that they would doom themselves. He said he didn’t care how much blood was spilled, so long as it was their blood, not ours.”

“Which fits his virus perfectly,” Cooper said. “It only affects normals. It kills everyone over twenty-five, which means pretty much the whole power structure. And everyone who survives is left gifted.”

“Elegant,” she said, “but tricky. There are a lot of fail-safes against biological attacks.”

“Yeah.” Another node of the pattern revealed itself. “But remember, this is just the flu. Every year the flu affects millions, and no one panics. And superficially, this is a mild one. It’s only Ethan’s serum that makes it dangerous, and no one knows to look for that. Hell, no one knows it exists. Plus, those fail-safes depend on a functional world. We’re on our third president in a year, there are lynchings in Manhattan, a civil war. The government already played the quarantine card with the Children of Darwin, badly. I think Cleveland is still burning. All of that orchestrated or at least nudged by John Smith. Not to mention today’s attacks—” He froze. “Oh shit. Today’s attacks.”

She thought for a moment. When it hit, the blood drained from her face. “The CDC, in Atlanta. If there was a place equipped to realize what this flu really is, it was the Centers for Disease Control. So he burned it down. That was the real target. All the rest was a smoke screen.”

“Even the bomb at the DAR that killed my best friends and about a thousand other people.”

“Everything we’ve done the last years, all the stuff he claimed was for equality. It was just John pushing the world far enough into darkness that defenses are down.” Shannon paused. “Even so. Even if he releases it in a city, in a couple of cities. Even if millions die. That won’t spread it far enough, fast enough.”

That was it. Suddenly, the whole pattern came clear to Cooper. Like a curtain had been yanked away.

The perfect, crystalline clarity he must have had.

The detail involved. Years of working toward the most complex series of dominos in history.

The horrifying, relentless discipline.

“It’s not going to be released in just any city,” he said slowly.

Shannon stared at him. He let her ponder, wanted her to check his math. Finally, she said, “You’re thinking it’s going to be released here. Against the New Sons. Because they’re all normals, all vulnerable. But he couldn’t count on them winning.”

“It doesn’t matter who wins. If the militia burns Tesla to the ground, their war is over. They’ll scatter back to every corner of the country, as will refugees from Tesla, plenty of them normal. And if the militia loses—”

“The same thing happens,” she says. “Thousands of survivors will run back home. My God. John provoked the attack—the war—for this. To infect the whole country.”

“The whole world,” Cooper said. “Maybe not as completely, but still, if this is as contagious as Ethan thinks, how many people are going to die? Hundreds of millions? Billions?”

“We have to call the president.”

“And tell her what?” Cooper shrugged. “I mean, imagine we somehow convince her, and she sends in the marines. That’s just more normals, more vectors. It plays into Smith’s hands. The only way to stop this is to keep the virus from being released.”

“How? We don’t have any idea where it is. And the militia could attack any minute.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and took her hand. “But we have to figure it out. Fast.”

“This isn’t what I do, Nick.”

“It is now. It’s all on us. Like it or not.”

She pulled away, wound up, and kicked a blackened desk. The legs gave way, the whole thing collapsing in a cloud of ash. “Okay.” She gritted her teeth. “If he’s infecting the New Sons, the canisters have to be here, in Tesla.”

“Plus, Smith is dead. We’ve got that going for us.”

“Right,” she said. “Right. So it would have to be something that would work without his involvement. Something he could trust.”

“Not something,” he said. “He wouldn’t have planned all of this and then left it to a timer. It’s going to be a person. Someone he could rely on completely, even in death. His last contingency.”

“Someone who would do it. Who wouldn’t be troubled by the catastrophe they were about to cause, the deaths of millions or billions.”

“You know these people better than I do,” Cooper said. “Who would that describe?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Soren, but he’s . . .”

For a moment they stared at each other.

Then Cooper was running full tilt for the stairwell, Shannon right behind, her steps lighter but just as quick. He took flights in jumps, the floor numbers falling away, his hand trailing the railing as the impacts rang up his ankles and knees, his head spinning and heart racing and soul praying, thinking, Please, please, just one piece of good luck, that’s not too much to ask, is it?

They hit the second basement, yanked open the door.

A body sprawled at their feet.

Another down the hall.

In the prison control room, Rickard, the programmer who’d played the virtual torturer, sat in a chair. A pool of crimson surrounded him, the overhead light reflecting off his blood like the moon in a pond. His throat had been ripped open, his tongue yanked through the wound.

Soren’s cell was open.