It was dark as they approached the California border. Ian was driving. Through the excitement, Wink had somehow managed to escape with a giant bag of snacks, as if she’d emptied a vending machine. Ian gave in on the boy bands. He figured he owed her. It was brutal.
The little girl had been silent for most of the drive. Ian didn’t want to interrupt. When she did speak, she caught Ian by surprise.
“How come she stopped loving you?”
“Excuse me?” It was an awkward question, and doubly so for coming in a child’s voice. “Where’d that come from?”
“I was working on our next move. And I realized I don’t have all the variables.”
“My life is not a chess game.”
She opened a bag of Cheetos. “I don’t think you realize it, moron, but you’re in an emotional shitstorm right now.”
“You know, I’ve told you like five times now, you need to stop the cursing and the insults. It doesn’t make you sound older. Or cool.”
“You’re unstable. I can’t guarantee an optimal solution. There’s a slight chance you could die.”
“No shit. Really?” Apparently the genius was just waking up to the truth. Death hadn’t left Ian’s mind for two days. “What does that have to do with Emli?”
Wink thought. “It just seems silly to me. I’m surprised adults are doing it all the time.”
“Doing what?” Ian noticed Wink holding her Cheetos in exactly the same triplet configuration every time she brought them to her mouth.
“Love.” It was matter-of-fact.
“Are you serious?” It seemed like she was.
“What’s it like?”
It was an innocent question, but Ian’s heart sank all the same. Was it possible this little girl didn’t have anyone to love her? That thought knocked impending death out of his mind. He hit the blinker and pulled to the side of the road, stopped the ambulance on the shoulder, and turned on the hazard lights. They blinked in the dark.
The little girl gave an exasperated sigh. “Don’t be so dramatic. Jeez. It’s just a question.”
Ian opened his mouth but realized he had no answer. “Surely you’ve loved someone. Stepmom? Crazy uncle? Dog named Rover?”
Wink thought. “I had a cat once.”
“Oh? That’s cool. Where is it?”
“I’m not sure. Answering that question would violate the Uncertainty Principle. I think it must be in a higher dimension of space.”
She had experimented on her cat. Ian could appreciate how the animal must have felt.
He thought again. “Okay, how about this . . . Imagine the most perfect, logical code ever written.”
“I don’t have to imagine. All my code is perfect.”
Ian rolled his eyes. “Good, then this should be easy. Now imagine the exact opposite of that.”
Wink let out a frustrated gasp. “You can’t do that. That’s cheating.”
“What? No, it’s not.”
“The negation of a proposition is not the same as an alternate proposition. It’s total bullshit.”
“Well, it’s the best I got. You’re the genius. What do you think love is?”
Wink stared ahead and munched on her snack. “Silly.”
Without an adult’s experience to provide context and meaning, Ian realized, the girl puzzled out everyone’s behavior like an algorithm. He pulled back onto the road. “So are you finally ready to tell me what’s in the box?”
“I told you. I can’t say.”
“How can you still say that? After everything.”
“It’s just better if you don’t know. Stuff has to happen after this. Stuff you’re not a part of.”
“You’re going after them. Aren’t you? You and these friends of yours.”
Wink didn’t answer.
Ian suspected there was a great deal more she wasn’t telling him, which bothered him less than it had before. It was unlikely he would live long enough for any of it to matter anyway. But then neither did it seem possible for death to be so near. It was the pointlessness. It made it all seem fake. Ian never wanted to invite death, but he could accept it, he supposed, if there were a reason, if some good came of it. But there was nothing. He didn’t even know why they had picked him. He wanted to hate someone for it.
“Who are they? Can you at least tell me that?”
Wink grabbed a bag of chips. “They don’t have a name. If they give themselves a name, then they’re real.”
“That’s smart.” He said it softly. “But what do they want? I mean, why go through all this? What’s the endgame?”
“Nobody knows.”
“What do you mean nobody knows? Don’t they have a list of demands or an evil plot or something?”
“The Faction breaks into their darknet every now and then, but the encryption is dynamic, so it never lasts long. They only catch glimpses of things. Like, there are these countdowns. Every time one reaches zero, something horrible happens, something that changes the world. You know that reactor meltdown in China?”
“They caused that?”
“The last countdown ended the night before.”
It was the worst nuclear disaster in history, orders of magnitude worse than Chernobyl. A few thousand people had already died. It was estimated that tens to hundreds of thousands more would as well from the resulting famine as the radiation cloud poisoned the rice crop. Martial law had been declared preemptively in several cities.
“Why would someone want to melt a reactor in rural China?”
Wink shrugged. She yawned as she spoke. “That’s what’s so scary. If they were rigging elections or cornering the stock market or something, I could get that. I mean, it’s stupid, but that’s what adults do, right? They want to get rich and control everything. But it’s never like that. It’s all meta-level stuff. Social engineering. Economic manipulation. Stuff that’s too big for anyone to see.”
“Is that what the cube’s for?”
The little girl was silent.
“You can’t just keep igno—” Ian turned his eyes from the road. The little girl was asleep. The bag of chips was still in her hand.
Two police officers, a man and a woman, waited in the hall outside the professor’s hospital room. Ian had changed into scrubs and pushed a stretcher nonchalantly. He turned the corner and stopped.
After a moment, there was a burst of static and a frantic voice came over the officer’s radios. There was a problem in the lobby. The officers looked at each other. The man sighed and walked to the elevator.
Wink was right on schedule.
Ian walked back around the corner, pushing the stretcher. He pulled back the sheet and picked up the heavy magnetometer.
“Here, hold this for a sec.” He tossed it to the cop.
“What?” the officer caught it on reflex.
Ian reached under the pillow and popped the woman in the arm with Wink’s bright green dart gun. It was loaded with sedative, and she slumped to the ground. Ian pushed open the heavy wood door and looked up and down the hallway. The whole floor had been cleared. He pulled the limp officer into the room.
“Who are you? What are you doing?” It was a woman’s voice, but foreign.
Ian stood. “Whoa!” He jumped back. A round elderly woman was about to pummel him with the base of an IV stand. “My name is Ian Tendo. I’m here to see the professor.”
“It’s all right, Madelaine.” A very old man was hunched in a bed, covered in off-white blankets. An oxygen tube ran under his nose. Blinking equipment clustered around him like whispering mourners.
The woman stepped back, unsure.
“Please. I’ve been expecting this. I need to talk to this young man.”
She looked at the police officer on the ground.
Ian saw it. “It’s okay. I promise. She’s just unconscious.”
The woman turned. She was confused. “Oleg, are you sure?”
The professor was taking it in stride. “Please, give us a moment. It will be okay. Maybe you could get me some ice cream.”
His English was polished, but he still had a Russian accent. Ian didn’t dare sit. He watched the woman leave.
She eyed him cautiously from the hall. “I will be right back.” Then she was gone.
“Please forgive my wife. She is understandably jumpy, what with me being accused of treason.” He smiled. “She hasn’t left this room in days. She takes good care of me.”
The professor coughed and wiped his mouth. He was white-haired, wrinkled, and unkempt, dressed only in a hospital gown. He looked like a man at the end of time.
“Ian Tendo . . . I will never forget this name. I thought one of you might come.”
“Have we met?”
The old man shook his head. “Never. But you will want to know about the cube, I think.”
Ian nodded.
“I am not supposed to speak of it. But you deserve the truth. Although, you will not like end.” He pointed to the seat by the bed. “It’s better if you should sit down.”
Ian did as he was asked. The seat was still warm.
“Are you in much trouble?”
That was an understatement. “Please, sir. I don’t know how long we have. I just want to know what’s going on.”
“Of course.” The old man nodded. “Forgive me. My memory, they say, is not so good. But the cube I remember. That I will always remember.”
“What is it?”
“A couple years ago, Finnish scientists found some statuary in a cave on a high fjord near the top of the world. It was revealed by a retreating glacier. Inside the central cavern there was evidence of Bronze Age habitation. The statues were simple stone carvings, god-like figures in a chiseled alcove—not particularly notable except for the tall one in the center, which was more heavier than the others.” He raised a finger. “And highly magnetized. When they put it in a CT machine, they saw a jagged rock buried in the chest. Isotope analysis showed it was full of rare heavy metals.”
“A meteorite.”
The old man made a face like he wasn’t sure. “To the people who found it, there was no such thing. It would have been the hammer of their god, smiting the sky as it fell to earth, indestructible.
“It was sent to a lab in Texas where an unusual formation was discovered at the edge of a spherical central cavity, like one might find in an egg at the periphery of the yolk. The researchers cut it with a laser, washed it, and put it under an electron microscope. When they went back the next day, they noticed the strange formation had more than tripled in size. And it had become soft, like it was demineralizing. They guessed the exposure to water and bombardment with electrons had catalyzed some kind of dormant reaction, but they had no idea what it was.
“Everything was immediately shut down on fears that the sample might harbor an extinct pathogen, although none was ever found. It was sealed in a hermetic chamber and transferred under armed guard to a secure facility in Silicon Valley, where I was consultant. We were working for NASA on a new kind of extrapolative algorithm for mapping structures at the extremes of the physical scale—the very, very small and the very, very large. By the time I saw it, it had reached the size of a golf ball and was luminescent, a little swirling mass of ionized particles unaffected by anything: heat, cold, vacuum, lasers, radiation. Until then, it had been ever-changing, ever-growing. But now the little ball kept repeating the same pattern, over and over, like it had reached a terminal condition and was waiting for something.
“We tried mapping it with our algorithm, but it was too complex.” He shook his head. “Like a tiny universe.”
“What is it?”
“A highly ordered, self-sustaining matrix. Essentially . . . living information. It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen in all my life. I felt an immediate kinship with those Bronze Age men and their cave cathedral. We all stand awed by what has fallen from the heavens. I can no more explain that little glowing sphere than they could the rock that fell from the sky.” He coughed and sat back. Then he coughed more and took a drink of water. “My apologies.” His voice was coarse.
“What happened to it?”
He swallowed and drank again. “Disappeared.” He shook his head gravely. “We kept it in a vault, inside a special box I helped design. A cube. One day, it was just gone. But the vault was completely untouched. It was as if someone had walked through the walls and taken it.
“At first, I thought it was the government. There is not as much difference between American and Russian governments as people here like to believe. It would be just like them to steal one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century, bury it somewhere. Or turn it into a weapon. The police came, then the FBI. There was an investigation, but they turned up nothing. Later, we were told to drop it, talk to no one, that it was a biohazard. But we knew better.
“I was angry at first, angry that something so miraculous could just be swept under a rug like that. It was an affront to science. I became tense, moody. Not myself. So, I put it out of my mind. I moved on. For my family. I had other things to worry about anyway.” He coughed again, then wiped his mouth. “Like death.” He smiled.
“I thought that would be it. But I don’t remember things so well these days, so maybe I was an easy target.”
“Target?”
“A few weeks ago, I was contacted. They knew everything about me: my passwords, my security codes, my bank accounts, things I hadn’t yet told my children about my illness, things only my wife and I knew. They threatened my granddaughter. They said all I had to do for it to go away was implicate others in the theft, to say this and this thing about such and such persons. I didn’t even know if they were real people. I just wanted her to be safe.” He paused. “Then on the news the other day I hear one of the names, an American reporter found dead in South America, and I knew I had done a terrible thing.”
Ian didn’t know what to say.
The professor wouldn’t look him in the eye. “I won’t ask for your forgiveness, young man. I don’t deserve it. But perhaps it will be some solace to you that I will be dead soon anyway.”
“But why me? I’m nobody.”
“I’m sorry. I do not know. I was only given the names.”
Ian stared at the floor. He didn’t know what to think. None of that helped. He took a deep breath. He had genuinely expected answers.
Fuck.
The old man coughed. “I tried to take it back. But now, no one will listen.”
Ian knew how that went. “Why would someone want it? What does it do?”
Professor Korsakoff wiped his mouth again. “Oh, I’m sure I have no idea.”
It wasn’t a firm answer.
Ian pressed. “But if you had to guess. I mean, you spent more time with it than anyone.”
The old man thought. He brought his hands together. “When I was a boy in Russia, my grandmother told me stories of the witch Babushka, who would leave things for men to find. Or sometimes they would seek her out and ask for their heart’s desire. And she would give it to them. But always with these things it was a test.”
He took two deep breaths. His hands shook. “I think maybe it is too great a thing to be an accident. I think maybe we were meant to find it. Like the trinkets from Babushka. I think it is a test. To see if we can unlock its secrets. And if so, whether we deserve to wield them.” He looked grave. “Most of the times, in the old stories, the people who found these things did not fare well. We do poorly, it seems, with temptation.”
Ian had a sudden, terrible thought. “Wait . . . You said they knew everything about you, the people who contacted you: your codes and passwords and everything.”
“Yes.” He shook his head again. “So strange. I did not know how it could be so. I do not even remember them myself!” He laughed at the absurdity, then coughed again.
Ian shut his eyes. The professor was snagged. That meant they’d seen Ian the moment he walked in the room. That meant they were looking right at him. Right then.
“Professor, please understand, this is intended for someone else, not you.”
The old man scowled. “What is?”
Ian stood and flipped the man off.
The hospital power went out. Emergency alarms sounded. The professor’s equipment started beeping continuously. He began having trouble breathing. His wife rushed into the room, dropping the ice cream on the floor.
“Oleg? Oleg!” She ran to the bed.
A generator kicked in. The professor coughed. His breath was labored. Slowly his wife calmed his breathing.
“Shh . . . It’s okay. Just breathe.”
Wink had given Ian a transmitter, like a hearing aid. He heard her in his ear. “Moron! We got company.”
“I see that. Did you make the call?”
“Yup.”
“Okay. I’ll meet you downstairs.” Ian made for the door.
“Young man.” The old man held his wife’s hand and breathed through a tube in his nose. “If you find it, please . . . don’t let it be perverted.”
Ian looked at the magnetometer on the floor. The light was on.
Ian stood in front of the hospital and watched the clouds and the dark man approach from the south. This was it. In a few minutes, Ian would either be free or dead. He took a deep breath. His hands were shaking.
Deadbolt strode forward relentlessly but without hurry. He was confident. He stopped as soon as he heard the sirens.
“You shouldn’t have killed Officer Mendez,” Ian called. “They take that shit seriously.”
The police had received an anonymous tip about a suspect in a cop killing in Washington State. Four patrol cars appeared and screeched to a halt in the drive. The police stepped from their cars with weapons drawn. Four men and two women. They yelled at the man in black to drop the sword.
“Get down! Get down!” The police pointed their weapons.
Deadbolt stood motionless and watched. The silver dragon on his chest flickered. The cops yelled. The killer raised his hands slowly. He pulled a snap on his right sleeve, then on his left. He kept his arms high. The police officers moved around him for the takedown, weapons raised.
Ian looked at the man’s exposed arms. There was metal where skin was supposed to be. He wasn’t normal. He’d been altered somehow.
As the officers crept closer, they repeated their order. Deadbolt tensed his entire body. Then he complied. He contracted into a ball around his knees as if forcing the air from his entire body.
There was a crack of thunder.
The air shimmered and a shock wave radiated outward. Every light bulb within fifteen meters arced and exploded in sparks: sirens, headlights, fluorescent bulbs, the hospital’s welcome sign. Glass shattered. Several tires burst. The police officers were lifted and knocked back as if shoved hard in the chest. Everything electronic went dark—including the cameras mounted on the police cruisers.
Deadbolt was leaving no trace.
Ian stepped back. “Oh, no . . .”
The officers were down. Two were writhing in pain. The others weren’t moving at all. It looked like they were dead.
The killer pulled his sword and with one deft move stabbed the nearest moving cop. There was no hesitation.
“Shit!” Ian jumped back. “Shitshitshit!” He ran back through the lobby and down a long hall. It was nearly empty. All nonessential personnel had been asked to leave when the power went out. Wink had seen to that. Ian made it to the parking garage at the back of the facility. Orange level. By the stairs. That was the rendezvous. She would be there waiting. There was still time to get away.
Ian trotted to a stop, panting. He looked up and down. No ambulance.
“Wink! It didn’t work. He killed them,” Ian panted. “Jesus, there was a blast a—and then he killed them. Fuck, they’re all dead.”
No response.
Ian looked behind him, then all around. He pressed the little transmitter deeper into his ear. “Wink!”
Silence.
“Where are you?”
Ian was knocked to the ground in the middle of the driveway. His back tensed. He recognized the sensation. He’d been shocked. He heard heavy boots approach, then the raspy sound of murder.
“This move was predictable.”
Deadbolt stood over him, sword in hand. He cocked his head at Ian’s leg. Then he broke his right ankle with a stomp. The snap was audible.
Ian’s mouth opened in a silent shriek. It hurt. It hurt so bad.
The killer leaned over. “Try moving fast now.”
Ian wanted to call for his friend again, but his vocal cords had frozen. He couldn’t speak. His back spasmed. His entire leg throbbed and burned. He couldn’t move.
Deadbolt kicked him hard in the gut, and Ian rolled. His diaphragm seized. His mouth gasped but he couldn’t draw breath. The killer raised his blade. It came down over Ian’s knee.
And struck concrete.
The dark man stood confused. The blade had moved through Ian’s leg like he was a ghost. Ian stared at his phantom body, wide-eyed and breathless, as he sank into the floor. When he passed through, his diaphragm recovered, his lungs opened, and breath returned. With it came his solid form. Ian thudded to the ground.
His scream echoed. He landed on his ankle.
He felt his heaving chest. At least he was breathing. He looked up. He was on the red level, one floor below his pursuer. “What the hell is happening to me?” His heart raced. He was panicking. “Wink! I need you.”
Nothing.
“I’m on the red level!”
Ian struggled to his feet. Deadbolt would come down the steps at any moment. “Please don’t leave me . . .” Like Emli.
Like his mom.
He had to get away. He hobbled forward, but it hurt too much. He was sweating and shaking from the pain. Every step was a stab through his entire body. He collapsed sideways against a wall.
“Wink . . .”
Nothing.
“Please . . .” Ian shut his eyes. He slid down the wall to the floor. Everything hurt. “What’s happening to me?” He couldn’t run anymore. He was done.
Deadbolt appeared. They had him.