beneath. I should have worked it out long before.
'You were working for him all along,' I said.
'Yes,' Ash said. 'He was.'
CHAPTER NINE
They didn't blindfold me during the trip. Why would they? The whole town belonged to Ash. They drove me deeper into the city on one of the buses, wedged between two of Ash's female guards, semi-automatics held away from their pregnant bellies and pressed into mine. Ash himself wasn't with us. He'd barely stayed a minute after he'd checked that it was really me, Ingo was still his and Haru wasn't going to be a threat.
The bus stopped at one end of the Strip. The road was pockmarked and badly maintained but the neon signs still glowed bright against the blue-grey twilit sky. At one end, the model of a cowboy waved, twinkling at us. The volcano outside The Mirage exploded on cue and, far above us, I could see the roller coaster thundering around the Stratosphere Tower. Only the human beings were missing, leaving the whole place with the feel of a model town, working but unpopulated.
They took me to the Luxor, a monstrous pyramid squatting in the heart of the Strip. Inside, plastic mummies stared impassively at Egyptian-themed fruit machines that no one was using – row after row of them, unlit and silent. We walked past roulette wheels, backgammon tables, long abandoned games of craps. My escorts and I were the only people inside and the silence was more sinister for its contrast with the Disneyland tackiness of it all.
Dim, emergency lighting led us through the vast gambling floor. There were no windows and no clocks; this hadn't been a place where they wanted you to tell time – and I guess Ash didn't much care about it either. The lift took us right to the top, where the high rollers had once lived. He was waiting for me in the penthouse suite, leaning on the railing of a balcony that gave him a view over all of Vegas. This, I thought, was why he'd left the lights of the Strip burning, a crazy extravagance just to make him feel even more like a king.
'Come up in the world, I see,' I said when he turned to face me.
He shrugged and smiled, looking so much like the friend I'd once known that it was painful. But I could see the light of madness shining in his dark eyes, and I knew that that was all the explanation I needed for what he'd done.
'You know,' he said, 'when Ingo told me you were alive, I couldn't believe it. I was sure you'd died in the explosion. If I'd known, I would have returned for you – I hope you realise that.'
I looked away. A part of me remembered the five years of terrible solitude and wished that he had come for me. 'Don't beat yourself up about it.'
He laughed at little, but there was something studied about it, as if normal human responses were something he now had to fake. 'Still you're here now, that's what matters.'
'Thanks to Ingo. Tell me, if you thought I was dead, how did he manage to find me?'
'He wasn't looking. Ingo's job was to watch Queen M, when we were no longer neighbours. I wanted to know what she made of my Cuban… subjects. You were just a very unexpected bonus. A coincidence I suppose, though in time one of my agents was bound to have found you.'
He leaned over the balcony, staring across his kingdom. After a second I joined him. Las Vegas was a spider's web of light in the darkness of the desert. 'You sent the Infected against her deliberately,' I said, seeing it all suddenly. 'You wanted her scientists to investigate them, and then for Ingo to report back what they found.'
He was still looking out over the city. It felt almost comfortable, a distant echo of the companionship we'd once enjoyed. I remembered with sudden clarity the one time he'd come on to me, after we'd been in the bunker three weeks and it was all starting to seem hopeless. He'd pushed me up against a bench in the lab at three in the morning and kissed me with a sort of desperation.
I'd pushed him away and tried to laugh it off.
He hadn't let me, though. 'I know you've got a husband,' he'd said. 'But you're never going to see him again. Can't I be the last man you ever fuck?'
I'd just shaken my head and gone back to work and he hadn't tried it again. I wondered if he remembered that too, or if the Voice took away all memories of failure, if you let it.
'Why would I want to do that?' he asked now.
I shrugged, not very interested in playing his games. 'Because you needed all the help you could get. I'd thought – I don't know why, I guess I just assumed – that you'd taken the Cure with you when you left. But of course, you didn't plan the explosion and what wasn't buried beneath it was trapped with me.' I looked at him, a slight frown on his handsome dark-skinned face, and I knew that I was right. 'You recreated it, I suppose, from its remnants in your own blood. But you got it wrong. The Infected of Cuba weren't at all what you intended, and you were hoping Queen M would be able to tell you why.'
There was a long silence and I thought that he was angry. He must be unused to challenges to his authority after all this time surrounded by his worshippers, people who gave themselves to the Voice that spoke through his mouth. 'Yes,' he said finally. 'That's true. But here, at least, I've got it right.'
'I don't believe you. If you had, why would you need me?'
'Who says I do?'
'Ingo, and the trouble you went to get me here. Tell me just one thing, Ash. Was this planned all along – the Cull and the Cure?'
For the first time, I saw just a flicker of uncertainty in his face. 'I don't remember. I've let go of that part of my life. But Jasmine, I want you to be a part of the new life I'm making here.'
'If you think I'm going to help you spread the Cure, you've forgotten who I am.'
'I could never forget you. And I don't need your help – not in the way you think.'
'I'm not giving you any help.'
He shrugged, dismissing my objections. 'The thing is, I spent all that time, wasted it, trying to recreate the Cure – when I should have realised all along that it was unnecessary. The Cure's already inside me, perfect. The answer isn't to spread it, I know that now.'
'A little too late for the people of Cuba,' I said bitterly.
'They wanted what I gave them – I didn't force it on them. And I wasn't the one who burnt them to death.'
A helpless shudder passed through me at the memory. 'You left me no choice, Ash. Better a quick death than rotting away, piece by piece.'
'Did you ask them that?' He waved a hand to silence me when I would have objected. 'It doesn't matter. I realised that if I wanted to spread the Cure, I didn't need to infect people with it. There's a simpler and older method than that.' He turned to face me fully, arms crossed over his chest. The moon was only a sliver of light above us and his face was in darkness.
But I didn't need to read his expression to know what he meant. I looked over at the two silent guards standing just inside the doors to the balcony. I looked at the round swells of their stomachs, pulling the material of their t-shirts tight. 'Children. No wonder you wanted all the men castrated. Will every single child born in this city be yours?'
He nodded. 'The Cure was an extreme form of gene therapy, you know that. It changed us. It rewrote our DNA and turned it into something more… eloquent.'
'And that change will be passed along to your children,' I said flatly, forcing the words out past the sudden nauseous tightness in my throat.
'Like all genes, the Cure only cares about reproducing itself. Given the biological raw materials, it can build the meat machines to carry itself, to propagate itself further.'
'And they say romance is dead.'
He didn't even smile. 'Procreation has nothing to do with love. It's more basic than that, the replication of something older and greater than us. Genes are immortal, you know that. They're the only part of us we can truly send into the future.'
