The wraiths ignored him.
They asked Jackie a question.
She said nothing, her expression stone.
Felix imagined the thoughts running through her head. About their friends and coworkers who were inside the facility. About the terrible things locked in the vaults at the lowest levels. About the people who were dying this very moment because of something that had escaped those vaults.
A gust of wind tore past and Jackie began to shake uncontrollably.
Felix could feel his rifle pinned underneath him. He tightened a fist around the strap and pulled. The barrel of the rifle scratched against the frozen ground as he dragged the weapon around his body and into his hands. He tried the grip but he was still wearing mittens. His arm shook as he tried to pull off the mitten with his other hand.
One of the wraiths stepped over to him and Felix felt something hard and cold slide through his ear. With his last second of consciousness he looked up into his killer's face, through her goggles, and saw a single eye, cold and emotionless. The other eye was missing, the skin stitched together with an X-shaped scar.
CHAPTER 42
Eliza wiped the blade on the sleeve of the dead man's parka.
The girl had no reaction to her companion's execution. Her eyes were snow blind. Her brain activity would be slowed in response to a plummeting body temperature. She was beyond the point of violent shivering, death fast approaching.
Eliza pushed the girl over with a boot, into the snow, and the girl had no reaction to this either.
"Search their clothes, their packs," Eliza said, and they went to work, digging through every pocket, looking for anything that resembled a key.
She knew the location of the facility. She knew the layout of every floor. She knew a half-dozen different ways inside. All information fed directly into her thoughts by the secondmind. She knew there would be a set of large doors, big enough for an armored vehicle to pass through. She knew that these doors were opened with a key, and going in this way would allow her and Adam to remain undetected, to take Logan and the others by surprise.
But she did not know what type of key or what the key looked like. That information was not available.
Their search of the bodies and packs turned up nothing.
Eliza cursed in frustration.
"We'll cut our way in."
She clipped into her snowshoes. Adam followed. They moved through the foothills, erasing the tracks left by the man and girl.
***
Six hours earlier, Eliza had awoken inside an insulated tent. In the final moments of her dreams, she had been back on the island, her body knocked to the dirt, the air knocked from her lungs, her skin stinging from where the flames had burned through her suit. Daniel was meters away, his chest a giant exit wound where the heavy rounds had blown out his heart and lungs, shot in the back by Logan.
She was alone inside her own head. Her link with the secondmind was broken for the first time in weeks. She hadn't disconnected since she'd called Adam from the parking lot of that fast food restaurant, as she'd examined her ruined face in the rearview mirror of the car she'd stolen from her captors. Weeks on end, her brain linked with the agglomeration of the world's networked data through a router made of flesh and blood and cybernetic implants.
Logan had been easy to locate. His name appeared in dozens of emails and reports sent back and forth through private intelligence agencies. The agencies knew he had turned on his former employers and was now working for Paradime. They knew his former employers had been wiped out with an antimatter bomb, and that Logan had parachuted into a valley in Antarctica and taken control of a CDC facility. They speculated he was there to acquire a treatment for the plague in San Francisco. All of this information was locked behind firewalls and encryption, but these measures were small challenges to the secondmind.
Once Logan's location was known, the secondmind went to task, arranging Eliza's own arrival at the facility. Money. Flights. Documentation. Equipment. Supplies. Weapons. Blueprints.
She and Adam departed a shipyard in South America inside a boat that resembled a hybrid between a submarine and an amphibious landing craft. It was fully submersible, designed to break through or pilot beneath ice and rough chop, two things they encountered for mile after mile as they made their final approach to the white continent.
Then: five days on foot, across the endless expanse of snow and ice and cold sunlight.
The secondmind with her the entire time. Even inside that metal lung of a boat. But not now. Something had happened. A solar flare had interfered with the satellite connection. The secondmind's body had succumbed to a bacterial infection and was floating dead inside its coffin-sized aquarium. Or a squad of people with body armor and guns had raided the storage facility where the secondmind had been left.
Eliza told herself it didn't matter. She knew where Logan was. She knew how to get to him. And she was almost there.
***
Out of the foothills, into the valley. Eliza could see the facility, or at least the small part of it that was aboveground, still far off in the distance. She and Adam had comm units tucked inside their hoods, but trudged forward in silence, saying nothing. Earlier, in the dark tent, he had reached over and cupped her breasts. They'd had sex a few times in the past weeks. It was different than it had been with Daniel, though she couldn't understand why. The two men had the same body with the same dimensions, had nearly the same face, had been made by the same technology. It had been clumsy, like it had been with Daniel. But for all these similarities it was not the same.
She thought she might be able to learn to enjoy it, but knew that wouldn't be today. Not with the empty ache in her eye socket. Not with the dream-image of Daniel's death still fresh in her mind. Not with the man responsible for that death so close.
Closer now, as they moved across the white valley. Snowshoes off, rifles in their hands, ready to move and shoot. There would be no interrogation this time, they'd simply kill anyone they encountered and keep moving. At this point it was important to maintain momentum.
She had seen the valley from above and from a distance, had seen how a large section of it was rough, like it was littered with rocks, or building materials leftover from construction, or a campsite that had been leveled by a storm. Up close, details emerged. Severed limbs. Discarded weapons. Bodies that had been torn apart. Tanks and armored transports that had been burned into twisted crags of blackened metal.
She stopped walking and stood still. The gaze of her remaining eye moved in a widening circle, taking it in, measuring the dimensions of the mayhem.
"Eliza," Adam said. He stood a few feet away.
She didn't respond. She took four steps forward and knelt next to a body that was mostly intact. One arm was missing. There were fist-size gunshot wounds through the torso. But the head was attached and undamaged.
Eliza scraped frost from the body's face with the palm of her glove.
She already knew what she was about to learn, she already felt it with a part of her that was half instinct, half dread.
She cleared away frost and the face underneath was nearly identical to her own.
"They're the same as us," Adam said.
CHAPTER 43
"You know, I can cut your hair. I mean, none of my degrees are from beauty school, but I'm pretty confident I'm up to the task."
"You're the second person to say that to me today."
Samantha gave him a curious look.
"Zoe," Logan said. "I talked to her earlier. Though it wasn't an offer to cut my hair. She said, 'I'm cutting that bun off the top of your head as soon as you get back.' Or something to that effect."
Sam's expression changed at the mention of Zoe. For a half-second, her demeanor became cold and distant, like a breeze passed behind her eyes. Then she smirked. "You were wearing it in a man-bun again?"
"What's a 'man-bun?'"
"That thing you do with your hair
."
"I thought it looked like a samurai ponytail."
Sam laughed at him and shook her head.
They were in the lounge on the second floor, alone, waiting for a kettle of water to heat up so they could make coffee.
He thought about how her expression had changed when he mentioned Zoe's name. That cold distance that had passed through her eyes.
"Zoe and Holden are an item now," he said.
"You upset?" she said, not making eye contact, the corner of her mouth stopping short of a smile.
He shook his head. "No. She's my friend, I think he's a good fit for her. And I like the guy. I guess he's also my friend."
"Are you going to keep working for him, after this is done?"
"I don't know. When all this started, I was looking to get out. But I like Holden, I like how he does things, I like his vision for the world."
"What is that vision?"
"He wants to make the world a better place."
"This is important to you?"
"Ever since I got the job at Paradime," Logan grinned.
Sam laughed. "Weren't you there to steal something from him?"
"Opportunity is what you make of it."
Sam shook her head, smiling. Logan liked her smile. He'd spent a lot of time with Sam over the past month, more time than he'd spent with any of the other people on the staff. They talked daily, usually over coffee, sometimes over a beer in whatever hours passed for evening on a given day. Even his first night here, they'd talked, when she'd visited his room and told him he was among people he could trust.
Sam had her glasses on and her hair in a messy braid, and she wore one of the bulky sweaters she always wore when she wasn't wearing a lab coat. Not a drop of makeup on, which was normal. Her lips were pale and soft and had a natural cupid's bow. He was attracted to her. He liked her lips, liked her messy hair, liked the way she always appeared to have just rolled out of bed. He liked how she looked in the bulky sweater. He liked how she looked in a t-shirt, the few times he'd seen her in a t-shirt. She was less frumpy and more athletic than her bulky sweaters suggested, all muscle and creamy skin.
He thought the attraction was mutual. She had always walled up at any mention of Zoe. And a few minutes ago, when he'd mentioned Zoe and Holden, she'd started to smile but stopped herself. Or at least that's how it had looked.
Most of the staff had paired off for the short term—"locationships" was the word everyone used to describe these pairings, which were not discreet—but Sam had remained unattached throughout her rotation. She had a sense of loneliness about her, and Logan liked that too. He could relate to it.
The water in the kettle reached a rolling boil. They made coffee. There was no milk or cream because all the food in stock needed to be shelf stable. There was powdered milk, but that did nothing to cool coffee to a drinkable temperature the way cold milk would have. So Logan had taken to using butter in his coffee. It had a different taste than milk or cream, which would have been his first choice, but it cooled the coffee, and it also added fat and calories, which he needed since he was trying to pack on added weight.
Sam watched him scoop a tablespoon of butter from a tub and stir it into his coffee.
"I don't know if anyone has ever told you this," she said. "But you're kind of a hipster."
He was trying to think of something clever to say in return, but then an alert sounded on his phone. He pulled the phone from his pocket and thumbed a button to light up the screen.
"Text message?" Sam asked.
"No," Logan said. "Someone just cut through one of our fire exits."
Sam stared at him with wide eyes. "What?"
He stared at the phone screen, which showed a secure site almost identical to the one he used to monitor his apartment. He'd set it up during his first days here. It would post an alert anytime someone used an entrance they shouldn't be using.
"Maybe it's Felix and Jackie," Sam said. "Maybe they lost their chips and had to come in a different way."
Logan opened his laptop and brought up the feeds from the facility's security cameras. He clicked on the feeds for the first floor, one level above where he and Sam sat. On screen, two figures moved out of a corridor and into the staging area. A male and a female. They were still wearing coats and snow pants. They were carrying rifles. The female was missing an eye. He recognized her instantly.
Sam was next to him, looking at the screen, her face pale and grim.
Logan said, "Get everyone together and seal yourselves in the lab. I have a box of weapons stashed down there. You know where it is?"
"Yes," Sam said and her voice was confident. The voice of someone who'd been through med school and earned two degrees after that. The voice of someone who had volunteered to study the worst diseases known to man in the most inhospitable and desolate location on earth. A voice that reassured him.
He thought of his secret ally, the person who had pulled him out of the ice and killed half a dozen sentries. He still didn't know who it was, but that didn't matter. What mattered was there was at least one other person here who was trained for combat.
Logan said, "Anyone who asks for a gun, give them one."
CHAPTER 44
They'd come in through a fire exit, a hatch in the floor of one of the topside storage buildings. Eliza cut the hinges with a chemtorch and Adam lifted the hatch out of its frame and tossed it aside. Beneath the hatch was a ladder, leading down through a narrow shaft. They'd lowered themselves carefully past the still-glowing hinges, down the rungs into a corridor. Crates were stacked against the walls. The floor was a metal grate with pipes running underneath it, carrying water, filtered air, electricity.
Eliza was already sweating underneath her parka and the layers of clothing she wore. She lifted her goggles, peeled off her mask, tugged off her gloves, stuffed everything into a coat pocket.
She walked in the lead, Adam followed.
They moved slowly and quietly. The grates gave way to a solid floor. The corridor opened into a large room where lockers had been installed in uneven rows. Most of the lockers were empty, or mostly empty, the only items left behind random articles of gear and clothing.
Eliza kept one hand on the grip of her rifle, the other on the handle of her knife. If there was anyone in this room, she would prefer to kill them quietly. The weapons were ice cold against her bare hands.
They searched the room. They were alone.
Adam let his rifle lean against an empty locker and shrugged out of his parka. Eliza did the same. Underneath the heavy coats they wore thin fleece jackets and tactical vests loaded with ammo mags and grenades. Their parkas had zippers down the right and left sides that allowed an easy way to reach inside their outer layers and retrieve ammunition, had they needed to.
But extra ammunition hadn't been necessary. They'd walked right in. Their guns were still fully loaded, aside from the single bullet Eliza had used to put down one of the skiers.
They removed the rest of their cold weather gear—boots, snow pants, the fleece jackets. Outside, this clothing had kept them alive. Indoors, it would cause them to overheat and encumber their ability to move quickly and quietly.
A minute later they were dressed for close quarters battle. Form-fitting black, body armor, rubber-soled shoes. Straps holding ammunition, explosives, and blades in place.
Eliza was tightening the straps on her tactical vest when a voice spoke from the walls.
"What do you want?"
Eliza froze. Adam looked at her, wide-eyed, like he didn't believe his own ears, like he was asking, Did I just imagine that?
Then the doubt faded from Adam's face as the voice repeated the question:
"What do you want?"
Eliza reached for her rifle.
"Stop," the voice commanded. "Leave your guns where they are for now. I want to talk this out."
The words were wrapped in a thin layer of white noise. Eliza looked across the ro
om, over the tops of the lockers. Mounted high on the walls were objects that looked like plastic beehives. Speakers.
And on the ceiling above: gleaming orbs, like black bubble lights. Cameras.
She'd missed these details on her initial pass of the room, too focused on searching for warm bodies, forgetting that the room itself might have eyes and ears.
Her arm was still outstretched, paused mid-reach, her rifle inches away. She lowered her arm to her side.
The voice said: "You can talk. There are microphones in the room."
"You can hear us?" Eliza asked.
"Yes. I can hear you. Why are you here?"
"Is this Logan?"
Canned silence from the speakers. Then, an answer. "Yes. This is Logan. What do you want?"
Eliza said, "I came here to kill you, Logan."
More canned silence.
"And the rest of the people here?" Logan asked. "What about them?"
"They don't matter."
Logan asked, "Why travel all this way to kill me?"
Eliza answered without hesitation. "Because you killed Daniel."
Logan asked, "Who was Daniel?"
"The one you shot in the back. On the island, when we first met."
"If this is about me, then why infect Barnes with that disease? Why expose tens of thousands of people to a plague?"
Eliza said, "Why did you kill all those people outside, all those bodies shot to pieces and left out in the snow? Why kill all those people that were like me?"
"It was a fight. It was a battle. It was war."
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