by James Frey
“You could’ve just said that from the start,” Aisling says.
“Nah. We wanted to meet you, get a measure of our star,” McCloskey replies, grinning. “Aisling, baby, you crazy-terrifying La Tène Player, we’re your number one fans.”
MACCABEE ADLAI, EKATERINA ADLAI
Arendsweg 11, Basement Clean Room, Lichtenberg, Berlin, Germany
“It’ll take a little time before it works perfectly,” Ekaterina Adlai says in the nearly forgotten language of the Nabataean line. A flowing language, interspersed with phlegmy, Arabic-sounding clucks and monosyllables. A language both she and Maccabee are proud to speak. The room is bright and cool, and the faint hum of the HVAC vents can be heard overhead. The first movement of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor plays quietly over a Sonos sound system tucked in the corner.
Ekaterina is in full scrubs, a clear visor pulled over her face, a pair of surgical loupes flipped over her eyes. Machines whir and chime intermittently. Tubes, liquid, a bag of blood. She leans over a spread of blue sterile cloth, where the boy’s arm rests, the skin caked in blood and iodine. Attached to the wrist is a black anodized mechanical hand, complete with fiber-optic wiring and titanium cabling and an ultrathin prototype lithium battery that is good for 10,000 hours. She’s finished with the surgical tools that fused the warm flesh to the cold metal and has moved on to diagnostics with a voltmeter and soldering iron.
Maccabee is also in scrubs. He’s been assisting Ekaterina.
She prods the fingers with the soldering iron, not to complete any circuits, but to give the fingers a pain stimulus to react to. She touches the pinkie, it twitches. The ring finger, it recoils. She touches the middle digit—a little thicker than a regular middle finger—and it flinches too, a small servo sound emanating from a gearbox in the hand’s palm.
“And when it does work,” she says, “it’ll take your friend some getting used to.”
“He’s not my friend.”
Ekaterina gives Maccabee a knowing look. Her eyes are gargantuan through the lenses of her loupes, all black pupils, like those of an owl on a cloudy night as they search the forest for the slightest movement. She has a beauty mark above her upper lip.
“I gathered as much. . . . The thing we discussed is in there.”
She touches the soldering iron to the index finger, but it doesn’t move at all. She holds the hot tip there for two seconds, three. Nothing. She places the iron in its cradle and turns to a computer terminal. Pounds away at the keys, rewriting code, reconnecting nerves to wires.
“I’ll give you a fob to activate it,” she says. “Only do it when you’re ready, my dear. It’s to your specifications, and I have to say, I don’t understand them. A poison nodule or an explosive would be so much more . . . straightforward.”
“Both of those could be detected, Ekaterina.”
“By this little savage?”
“He is savvier than he lets on. It has to be this way.”
She stops typing, grips the iron, returns it to the index finger. It yanks back quickly.
Ekaterina watches the new measurements scroll up the monitor: 3-0-7-0-0. She nods in satisfaction.
“Good work, Ekaterina. Excellent.”
“Thank you.” She touches the hot iron, all 418 degrees Celsius of it, to the thumb.
Flinch.
The palm.
Flinch.
The heel.
Flinch.
She puts down the iron and pulls off the visor and flips up the loupes. She snaps off her surgical gloves. She takes a folded square of gray cotton and dabs sweat from her face. She extinguishes a bright overhead lamp. She rubs her hands together, kneading out the strain of hours of concentrated work. “All the same, my dear, I wouldn’t be too close to him when you activate this fail-safe.”
“I won’t. What’s the range of the fob?”
Ekaterina crosses the room to a shelf, her stomach rumbling audibly. “Not more than seven meters.” She opens a small box and takes something out of it. “I’m starved.”
“Me too. I have a surprise for you.”
Ekaterina spins, a smile on her face. “Yes?”
“I have the best table at Fischers Fritz.” He smiles broadly, looks at his watch. “A car is coming for us in an hour.”
Ekaterina—who is a little pudgier than she was when she was younger, and more earthbound—jumps several inches in the air, clapping an open hand onto her closed fist. “Fischers Fritz? How did you on such short notice? Do we have a line member there I don’t know about?”
Maccabee rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb. “No, Ekaterina. I got the table the old-fashioned way.”
“Well . . .” she says, obviously overjoyed, already thinking of the food. “Here’s the fob.” She drops a short metal tube into Maccabee’s hand. He turns it over, flips open the top. A red button. “Click it three times quickly.” She taps her foot on the floor to demonstrate the rhythm.
“And that’s it?”
“And that’s it. There’s no abort. No going back.”
“Fine.”
Ekaterina inspects the room, looking to see if she’s forgotten anything. She hasn’t. The machines whir and beep. Maccabee and Ekaterina hear Baitsakhan’s steady and regulated breath.
“Fischers Fritz,” she says dreamily. “A wonderful surprise.”
Maccabee beams. He rests his hand on her shoulder. Squeezes. “Yes, Ekaterina. Just you and me and a bottle of 1928 Krug. A meal fit for the end.”
FROM: wm.s.wallace58@ gmail.com
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Hi—PLEASE READ NOW!
PRIORITY: URGENT
Hey Cass,
It’s Will. Obviously. How are you? How’re Petey and Gwen and that little mutt Crabapple? Did Joachim finally get that gig at the hospital?
Anyway, I’m writing from my never-used Gmail account because what I’m about to tell you can’t come from my NASA address. It’s classified. Really, really classified. But it’s EXTREMELY EXTREMELY EXTREMELY important. I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but it’s mortal, even. For you and the kids and, well, everyone near you. Not even near you—it’s mortal for everyone who lives within a hundred miles of the Atlantic Ocean. It might be mortal for every single living thing on Earth.
As you know, for the last five years I’ve been working in the NEO program, on a team that scours the sky for any and all rocks that come within 1.3 AUs of the sun. Most people would find the work boring, but you know me—I love my job. Numbers and the call of space have always been my thing. Always.
At least, until now.
We’ve discovered something huge, Cass. Something we literally didn’t see coming. It’s so close, and it just appeared, as if it popped out of a wormhole or got folded out of some crease in the space-time continuum. Really, it is so, so close. It’s a monster, and we should have seen it years ago, and if we had, we would have been able to plan and redirect it. But now, there’s probably nothing for it. The government’s trying to figure out what to do, but they’re scrambling—and VERY scared. The scientists at JPL are at a loss. No model they create is sufficient to stop or nudge this thing. The appearance of it—it’s been nicknamed Abaddon, which is Hebrew and loosely means “the Destroyer”—has been such a blow that it’s caused many of us to question science on its most fundamental and foundational terms. A lot of the others have just stopped coming into the office.
Seriously, Cass—if the calculations are right, it will impact Earth in the next 82 to 91 days. Right now I can say with 95% certainty that it will impact in the northern hemisphere, probably in the central Atlantic, maybe a shade closer to the U.S. than Europe. I can’t begin to convey the destruction this thing will cause. It would be like piling up the world’s entire nuclear arsenal, multiplying it by 10, and lighting a fuse—and the explosion would happen in a matter of seconds. It will be the end of . . .
It will be the end of everything, Cass. Everything.
You need to plan and prepare. Sooner than later this info will either leak or be released and, once it is, the world will change. I can’t predict what will happen, but staying in Brookline is not an option. You need to get in the car—or better yet, rent a giant RV, fill it with food and, I hate to say this, guns—and meet me and Sally in the middle of the country. We can come up with where exactly over the next few days, but I was thinking somewhere remote, and near the Canadian border (there are going to be far too many armed nutsos in this country once this thing plays out). Maybe Montana, or North Dakota.
Please take this seriously. I am of sound mind. Start to prepare now, before the world at large is scrambling and fearful. Abaddon is coming, and it will end the world as we know it.
Call me, and we can talk.
Call me.
XXOOXXOOXXOO, your big bro, Will.
SARAH ALOPAY
London Underground Tunnel near High Street Kensington Station
Sarah runs as fast as she can. She runs and she doesn’t think about his death.
Another death.
Jago’s.
Was he there? Did he really die? Yes. Yes, he must have.
Yes.
And if he didn’t, then the soldiers will have finished him by now.
Another death.
She runs, reaches the fork in the tracks, takes the southern one, the one Jago said led to the service tunnel.
Jago who is gone.
Jago who she loves.
Who she loved.
Past tense. Like Christopher before him.
She runs, her feet splashing in puddles, the ribbons of steel reflecting the weak light of her headlamp. She runs. Small details come to her in the form of Jago’s voice. Details she didn’t pay attention to when he was saying them in the hotel room, but that her trained mind stored away reflexively, automatically.
There is a door. A sewer access point. We can go down it, into a cistern. We’ll head through the northern flow for a click until we reach a ladder labeled “Norland Transfer and Electrical.” Up and out. We’ll steal a car. Sarah, are you listening?
Yes.
Okay. We’ll steal a car and drive north. Avoid the highways. We’ll meet Renzo at an old airstrip. RAF Folkingham in Lincolnshire. Say it.
RAF Folkingham in Lincolnshire.
“RAF Folkingham in Lincolnshire,” she says as she comes upon the door to the sewer. It’s chained shut. She blasts the lock off the door with her FN F2000, the clattering report echoing through the tunnels. That certainly gave away her position. The men are coming. She hasn’t seen or heard them yet, but she knows.
Sarah plows through the door to the southeast, descends a set of iron rungs into a low passageway with rank, ankle-deep water. She moves as quickly as she can northeast to the cistern. When she reaches it, she takes a guess and picks a tunnel labeled E15OUTFLOW, hoping the E stands for east. Before leaving the cistern she tears a piece of cloth from her shirt and snags it on an exposed tip of rebar on the tunnel labeled W46INFLOW. Maybe that will send some of the men chasing her down a blind alley. Just as she leaves the cistern, a large explosion comes from above. A few bits of loose concrete and dust fall from the ceiling.
What happened up there? She doesn’t have time to find out. She has to keep moving. Could it have been Jago?
No. It can’t be. Hope is too dangerous a thing in this moment. It could slow her, it could cost her the game, her life.
Earth Key!
She pats her pocket. It’s still there. Thank the gods, it’s still there.
After a kilometer of treading through the snaking tube, water flowing in from spillways at waist and shoulder level, she reaches a circular room. Rungs go up. The words NRLND XFER AND ELEC are stenciled on the concrete above a large “7” in red paint. She slings the rifle over her shoulder and, before taking the rungs, cups both hands over her ears and listens. She can hear faint splashing from the direction she came from. Feet.
Again she wonders: Jago?
Or a team of executioners? How many could she kill before they subdued her? Is that what she wants? A brief revenge followed by death?
Or could it be Jago?
No. It can’t be. You can’t hope. Hope is a killer. It is death.
Move.
She moves.
Up, up, up.
She pushes her shoulder into a manhole lid, places her hands on the side of the tube, bunches her strong legs on one of the higher rungs. She pushes with her thighs and knees and lifts the iron disk, gets her fingers around its edge, carefully now, carefully, and works it to the side. It scrapes along the floor. She emerges into a small, dark room. Cold, damp. She listens again for the feet and hears nothing. Perhaps she was hearing things. Yes, that’s it. She was hearing things. Hope can do that. She crouches and quietly slides the manhole lid back into place. She looks around. A workbench, a collection of tools, a paper map of the sewer taped to the wall. Two pegs with canvas jumpsuits hanging on them, hard hats.
A door.
She stashes the rifle behind a trio of shovels and pulls down one of the jumpsuits. It’s too baggy, but she doesn’t care. She pulls it on over her clothes, ties her hair in a bun, and sticks a pencil from the worktable through it to hold it in place. She rolls the cuffs of the pants. She breathes. Faces the door. Breathes.
And that’s when she realizes she’s crying.
She touches her cheeks, her eyes.
She’s been crying, for how long she doesn’t know.
She slaps herself.
Again.
“Get it together, Sarah. Get it together.”
Again.
“RAF Folkingham in Lincolnshire. RAF Folkingham. You’re going to steal a car, drive north, stop for a road map”—she can’t risk using her smartphone, or any phone for that matter—“and meet Renzo. You’re going to leave England. RAF Folkingham in Lincolnshire.”
She wipes her eyes, blows out her cheeks, and tries the door. It’s unlocked. She cracks it open and peeks outside. No men waiting for her, no antiterrorism units, no APCs, no SAS kill teams.
She steps outside.
Breathes.
She walks briskly, but not too briskly, along a pleasant and quiet residential street. Goes two blocks, doesn’t see another person. There are sycamores on one side at regular intervals, the gray bark peeling in irregular chunks that look like the outlines of countries or lakes. Birds chirp overhead. She hears a siren on a far-off street, hears BBC news from an open window. She turns a corner. Walks another block, passes a woman dragging a puffy Pomeranian, its tongue hanging out of its black-lipped mouth, the woman encouraging: “Come along, Gracie. Come along.”
The woman barely looks at Sarah.
On the 4th block Sarah tries the handle of every car she passes.
The 6th opens.
It is a Fiat Panda, bland and inconspicuous, a two-door hatchback with a dent in the hood. A perfect getaway car. She gets in and has it running in 18 seconds. Not as fast as Jago hot-wired the car back in China, but respectable.
Jago.
Jago who is gone.
Or is he?
Were those his footsteps?
No, they couldn’t have been his. He wasn’t as fast as her. He’s dead.
But maybe he isn’t?
She shakes her head. This kind of thinking will slow her down and get her killed.
Why is she acting like this? Why didn’t she look for his body? She abandoned him so quickly.
Too quickly.
She is abandoning lots of things, lots of people too quickly. Tate, Reena, her mother and father, Christopher, Jago.
Herself. The Sarah she knew. The Sarah she loved.
All in the name of Endgame.
What is happening to her? To her heart?
Shut up. Get it together. Don’t hope. Move.
She leans across the car, opens the glove compartment. Pulls out a crumpled baseball cap and a pair of cheap sunglasses. Stuffs her hair into the cap as she pulls it on. Slides t
he sunglasses on too, realizes that the sky is white, covered by a carpet of clouds, and yanks the glasses off.
As she puts the car in gear, she catches her reflection in the mirror. She is still crying.
Don’t fall apart, Sarah. Drive. Don’t fall.
She ignores the broken-looking girl in the rearview mirror and pulls out of the tight parking spot and goes. She just goes. After two hours and 23 minutes of driving five miles above the speed limit, she’s on the A15, passing out of Bourne, Lincolnshire.
She’s almost there.
The car buzzes past an elderly cyclist on the narrow country road. He wears a tweed sport jacket and wellies; there’s an umbrella in the basket, a green woolen newsboy cap on his head.
The sky is still gray, but it hasn’t rained.
She grips the wheel with both hands, wringing it, her knuckles white. She’s almost there.
RAF Folkingham.
She’s been crying intermittently throughout the drive. The whole time it’s been as if it’s one person crying and another person driving. Is that Sarah Alopay sobbing behind the wheel? Or is that Sarah Alopay gripping the wheel, coldly turning her back on the trail of death behind her? The two Sarahs, they don’t like each other; they disgust each other.
She has enough sense to realize that something has happened to her. Something messed up. Maybe something profound. Did she hit her head in the fight with the commandos? No. It doesn’t hurt at all. Has she been like this since Christopher, since she got Earth Key? Maybe, but this is more intense.
She tells herself that she’s just Playing. That’s all. She’s empty inside and she’s just Playing, and now Jago isn’t there to help her.
But there’s something else that’s wrong. It’s not just her head. Her chest is tight, and her throat feels dry and rough, and her jaw hurts.
She pulls to the side of the road and cuts the engine and looks in the mirror again.
She is screaming.
At the top of her lungs, screaming.
She brings both hands to her face and rubs rubs rubs. Jams a fist into her open mouth.
The screaming stops.