While his eyes never shut off, he was asleep, dreaming. He was ten, hunting in the woods of Kentucky. The fall leaves crunched beneath his boots and he adjusted his step to be quieter. His bow was cheap—his dad had picked it up at a garage sale—but his father had given him one arrow with a new three-blade broad head. He had been tracking his prey for over an hour, but even at that age, he moved like he was meant for the forest. He rose over the crest of the hill and he saw a doe by the stream. It drank, unaware of the danger. Thirty yards away, he drew the bow and the young deer turned toward him, exposing its shoulder. Its spotted fur looked like down. Its eyes had the ignorant love of a pet. He let the arrow fly and it shot past the deer, into a bush that howled and shook in agony.
“Water, please.”
Glass woke. Four men and two women sat around him, six of the greatest minds of the twenty-first century. A Russian economist who’d revolutionized the online economy. The President of Italy, who’d halted a military coup by uniting dozens of political parties at the eleventh hour. A Belgian physicist whose work on energy, mass, and binding forces had won him the Nobel Prize. A French psychiatrist who’d used the Mindlink technology to combat Alzheimer’s and other mental illness. A Chinese biotech CEO who’d engineered photosynthetic cellular organisms to produce an organic polymer. A MindCorp founder who was an expert on multi-threading and MIME/host integration. They were shrouded, bound to their drop chairs.
Already, they were missed. National manhunts, intelligences services, police Sleepers, global news reports—the world had been galvanized by the loss of such high-profile wunderkinds.
Glass pressed his side with a towel. The Italian President had been well guarded.
“Please, water,” one of the women begged through her canvas veil. “I’m so thirsty.” She had apparently spit out her gag. Glass took a bottle of water to her and pulled the bag off her head. She was in her fifties, and running mascara had turned her into a raccoon. Glass had found her at her home. He put the bottle to her lips and she guzzled it down.
“Is my family safe?” she asked. Her eyes pleaded with Glass.
“Yes,” he lied. Her husband was dead. The kids weren’t in the house.
“Why are you doing this?”
He was ordered not to respond.
“What did we do?”
He sat back in the seat and his body went rigid, a sign of him going back to sleep.
“Dammit! How can you do this?” she screamed. Others sobbed and choked on their gags. Glass’s body relaxed. He went back over and began tightening the woman’s gag. She struggled, thrashing her neck, trying to remain free. “We’ve got families!” she cried. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I want to see my boys.”
Glass paused. “You’re the psychiatrist,” he said.
She paused, then—“Yes?”
His eyes were a foot from her, churning green, never blinking. Up close, his skin was clearly manufactured. She had never seen such a monster. “People talk to you.”
“Yes.” Her horror was laced with uncertainty. She didn’t know where this was leading.
“I can’t discuss the mission,” he said.
“But . . . you want to talk?” she asked, disbelieving. Before this, he hadn’t said one word to her. She had woken up in the airplane, at first refusing to believe what had happened was real. The only time he had spoken was when the Italian President—she recognized him—had been warned to quit struggling or the green-eyed man would break his fingers. The green-eyed man had said that “he was allowed to.” The Italian President didn’t listen, and three snapped fingers drove him into submission.
“Are you in love with your husband?” Glass asked.
Just the thought of him got her crying. “Yes, very.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?” She got angry. “Why do you care?”
“Why him and not someone else?” Glass persisted.
“He took care of me. He loved me even when I was shit.”
“How were you shit?”
“I’m an alcoholic. He didn’t leave.”
“Is that enough to love someone?”
“Loyalty? Yes. Love is conditional, no matter what people say. Loyalty, true loyalty, is one of the strongest loves.”
“You don’t sound like a psychiatrist,” Glass said. He offered her an MRE and unbound her hands. He raised a finger in warning toward the Italian President.
“I won’t do anything.”
He nodded. The smell of food had made the others more alert. Hooded heads turned in their direction. Glass didn’t appear to notice.
“I have dreams now,” he said.
“Aspirations?” the woman asked. Glass let out a laugh that was as cold as frost.
“Dreams, when I sleep,” he clarified.
“You didn’t used to?”
“Not before her.”
“You have a girlfriend?”
Glass nodded.
“What is the dream?”
“I’m a kid, hunting. It confuses me.”
“Why?”
“The dream’s a lie.”
“Dreams don’t ‘lie.’ They’re the subconscious trying to sort out problems in our lives. Why do you say that?”
“It’s a memory from when I was a kid. I would hunt for food, and the first big game I ever killed was a doe. I gut shot it, and over the next hour I chased after it, wearing it down while it cried and scrambled away, looking back at me in disbelief.”
The psychiatrist didn’t know what to say at first. Finally, “How is the dream different?”
“I’m trying to save it. It’s being stalked by something dark, and I’m afraid for it. When I see the doe by the brook, the dark is right there in the bushes, and I’m almost too late. But this time, my aim is steady and I fire true. I save the doe.”
“What do you think is in the bushes?”
“I don’t know. I never see it.”
“But what do you think it is?”
“It’s nothing. It’s in a dream.”
The psychiatrist chewed on her bottom lip, unsure how to proceed. She had never spoken to someone so devoid of imagination, to not even surmise. And it made her situation all the more real. This is what it felt like to be prey. But they had a dialogue. She had to continue on. She knew it was her only chance to survive.
“Do you love your girlfriend?”
Glass’s unmoving stare broke, and he looked at the floor for an answer. “I want her to live. I want her to be happy, and like me.”
“Why do you say ‘live’? Is she in danger?”
“I care that she lives,” he said. His voice had a strange tone, like he was saying words he had just learned.
“You don’t care that other people live?” The truth dawned on the psychiatrist.
“I don’t think about it.”
She could feel that she was losing him. This soldier had opened up to her, and she had seen enough patients’ withdrawal to feel the bridge drawing back. She scrambled.
“You’re protecting it! The doe represents the innocence of the weak,” she said. “It could be your girlfriend. It could be . . . us. It could be your subconscious telling you that you can change!”
“The dream’s a lie.”
“You know you’re doing something bad. The dream shows you that you can change. You can do the right thing.”
The gag hung in a ring around her neck. He drew it up to her mouth. “No, no. You can be good! You don’t have to do this! You can be—”
The salty, twisted fabric muffled the rest.
Glass held her head in his hands and looked her in the eyes. “When I caught the doe, I beat it to death with a rock,” he said. She sobbed when he reached for the canvas sack. “I can’t help you.”
= = =
Two hours later, tires on tarmac woke Glass. The prisoners stirred, their balaclavas rotating back and forth as if through force of will they might be able to see. A display read 15:23 hours. They were thirty-seve
n miles southwest of Washington, D.C., at what was formerly called Marine Corps Base Quantico. Budget cuts and the Great Migration had shuttered the base twenty years before, but over the last three years—under the guise of removing battlefield ordnance—it had been more active than ever.
The plane taxied to a stop and the engines wound down.
After a brief blat of an alarm, the cargo door opened and a transport truck backed toward the plane’s open bowels. Two Tank Minors jumped out of the truck and greeted Glass.
“I’ll get them,” Glass said. They stood down and waited as Glass escorted each Piece into the back of the truck, then constrained them once more with zip ties. They no longer protested or even moaned. By the slump of their heads, they were defeated.
Glass rode shotgun with the other two crammed in beside him. Quantico was a former training ground for Marines and the FBI. There were residences along the Potomac River, sprawling forests, and—the majority of it—live fire ranges. Most of it had gone back to nature. A few buildings appeared to be occupied, but most of the homes Glass passed looked as if they had been stopped mid-construction. In truth, they were in mid-destruction: entropy had taken hold, pulling them apart rusted nail by rusted nail.
They headed west to a reservoir deep in the forest. Warning signs were posted along the way: “DANGER! Unexploded Ordnance!” they read, beside a picture of a man dealing with the aftermath of his negligence. Glass thought the signs were funny. The man’s eyes were X’s, but he was still standing. And above the simple explosion, his severed leg floated free as a bird.
Twenty minutes later, they reached an outer checkpoint through a twenty-foot fence trimmed with razor wire. They were still a half-mile from the Lunga Reservoir and already the sweet smell of rot filled the air. The four Minors at the gate waved them through when they saw Glass.
Along the reservoir, the sun bounced off what looked like a million white cobblestones. They were dead fish, pushed to the shores and a hundred yards deep, circling the man-made lake like a water stain in a toilet bowl.
“I got my nose turned down, and I’m still not used to it,” the driver said. “It’s weird how when I was a softy, smells like this would go away. As a Minor, they don’t.”
“They’ll rot off,” the other Minor said.
Glass had nothing to offer. He saw the intense steam rising out of the center of the lake. It was temporarily being used for cooling; the final system would use the aquifer. Ten minutes later and past the boiling reservoir, the forest disappeared, and in its place was the most advanced bunker ever built.
It was nondescript and recessed forty yards into the ground. The amount of steel and cement needed to build the outer shell could have made up more than four skyscrapers, and the excavated earth formed berms tall enough to make the bottom a valley. Bulldozers and graders worked a fraction of the dirt crown to cover the top of the bunker.
The truck stopped two hundred feet from vault doors so large a jumbo jet could taxi through them. Dozens of feet of a black ceramic coated this only exposed point, designed to withstand the tremendous heat of a direct nuclear strike. Bulldozers were pushing earth up against it.
Glass walked the rest of the way. Only he and a few others had access to the inner realm. The men and women up top—even the Minors that accompanied Glass with the prisoners—weren’t privy to the full details. They were soldiers, and soldiers followed orders. Chain of command and need to know were respected.
On a small call button screen—a dot on the face of this large structure—Dr. Ryle, the lead scientist under Dr. Lindo, appeared.
“You’re here,” he said.
Glass didn’t respond to the obvious.
“Step back, I’ll open the gate.”
Glass went back to the truck. “It’s just going to be me,” he said. He climbed into the truck as the Minors got out.
An alarm filled the air and the blast doors slowly opened. Glass drove the truck through and onto a lift as wide as a football field. Forty minutes later, he was two miles underground. Dr. Ryle, small, bald, and pink, waited for him.
“You’re shot,” Dr. Ryle said.
“It’s not critical.”
Dr. Ryle went to open the back door.
“I wouldn’t—” Glass started. The door blew open and one of the captives tackled Dr. Ryle and spun him around toward Glass, one arm around the doctor’s neck. With his other hand he searched the doctor’s pockets and found a multi-tool. He pressed the pliers into the doctor’s throat.
It was the MindCorp founder, Brad Zienkiewicz. “I’ll kill him!” He looked around, wild-eyed. “I’ll rip his throat out!”
“How did you get out?” Glass asked.
“He’s dead if you don’t let me go.”
A new presence joined them. Glass felt him before he spoke. This was no longer a bunker, it was a temple, one where the god—even if weak—resided.
RELEASE HIM.
Zienkiewicz did just that. Confusion washed over his face. The voice had come from within.
“What’s going—”
DROP THE TOOL.
It clanged to the floor. Glass grabbed Zienkiewicz.
DR. RYLE, THIS ONE’S FIRST. NEXT TIME, LET GLASS BE THE MUSCLE.
Dr. Ryle brushed himself off, shaking. “Yes, Dr. Lindo.”
Glass took the other captives from the truck and locked them away. They looked out of their Plexiglas prisons like frogs in a science experiment. Hazy. Listless. Drugged. One slapped his hand against the glass, the only protest he could muster.
Forced Autism required one candidate at a time. Dr. Ryle prepped Zienkiewicz. First he removed all of his hair and burned away the follicles. Then mount points for the Impetus machine were attached to the limbs, and electrodes were placed on the muscle groups.
“Ready,” Dr. Ryle said when he was finished, spinning the pneumatic gun he had just used on the groaning man, nearly dropping it.
Glass followed Dr. Ryle with Zienkiewicz in his arms. Ahead, the hall crackled with lightning, and at the end of the hall was a vast cavern, too high to see the ceiling, as wide as four city blocks. At its center was a Mega Core, a Data Core five times larger than anything MindCorp had ever built. In a horseshoe around the Mega Core were eleven smaller Cores feeding into it. Mounted high on each was a pod.
THE TWINS ARE NEARLY READY. YOU NEED TO GO TO CHICAGO.
Of course, Glass said. He could see Evan’s silhouette against the pulsing blue tube. The doctor’s pod was on a platform in front of the Mega Core. Glass filtered out the nuisance light. He could see Evan clearly, mounted to the arms of the Impetus Machine that moved his body to prevent atrophy, buoyed by an oxygenated amnio-gel that preserved the body. He had been there for the last two months. The fat man was gone, and in his place was skin and bones. His skullcap had been removed, replaced with an electrode halo that covered his face. A dozen glowing fiber lines wormed through the gel into it.
Beneath his platform was another pod. Glass hadn’t seen that before.
“Who is that for?” Glass asked.
“The Consciousness Module,” Dr. Ryle said, absently.
Evan had never told Glass about the Consciousness Module. That person wasn’t accounted for. “Do I get him next?” Glass asked.
THAT IS PART OF THE TWINS’ FIRST MISSION, Evan replied.
Glass didn’t inquire anymore. He looked up at the five Pieces already mounted. He had abducted them over the last six months: brilliant derelicts, poor or imprisoned, easy to find, and quickly forgotten. They were exceptional in mind, but not vocation, a winning lottery number scratched onto a napkin. Unlike the six Glass had just retrieved, they could be taken early without consequence.
Their eyes were cataracted, their mouths in rictus. They, too, jogged and twisted in a constant workout. Whatever each had been—a family man, a lover, a crime lord, a poor tipper—was gone. They were now a part of Evan, and whatever aptitude they brought to the table—whatever gift had made them ideal candidates—was now reinf
orced with the processing power of a million Cores.
Dr. Ryle lowered an empty pod to the ground. Glass placed Zienkiewicz into the pod and locked his limbs to the corresponding Impetus arms, then stepped out of the way. Dr. Ryle installed the catheter and a waste removal sleeve. He checked the heartbeat, checked some dials outside the pod, then hit a button, and the pod closed. The amnio-gel sputtered and filled the capsule. Guided by a rail, the pod rose above its darkened Core and fired into life.
NEXT, their boss demanded. In one week, it would be time.
Chapter 3
Razal had stayed with the pilots and crew during the flight. It was too depressing to stay down below. He had checked in on John a few times, but the giant was staring off into space as if addressing an invisible crowd.
They were five minutes until the drop. Razal climbed down with two soldiers and got ready. He attached his parachute and re-checked his rifle case.
The soldiers fitted Raimey’s helmet to his body. It gasped when it locked. Then they attached a massive block of fabric to four anchor points on his back. The plane shuddered from chop as it descended.
“It’s time,” one of the soldiers said. The two soldiers led with the massive chute. Raimey walked backward, taking their direction. Razal trailed behind.
An intercom crackled. “We got two minutes, fellas. Raimey—Boen’s on.” The intercom went quiet and then, “John?”
Raimey looked confused. “What’s going on, Earl?”
“The pilot told me you’re about to deploy, so I’ll be quick: when you get back, Vanessa wants to talk to you.”
Razal had never seen John’s expression change. His eyes were always vacant, his face scrunched like an old man who had lost his teeth. But in that instant, the wrinkles cleared and the stress around his jaw opened up. Razal knew Raimey was fifty, and for the first time since they worked together, he looked it.
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