The nose of the car connected squarely with the gladiator’s torso, carrying it forward through the bushes at more than forty miles per hour. The car buried itself in the wall with bone-crushing force.
Darkness enveloped her.
HER EYES opened to stinging darkness. She lifted her face from the deflated air bag and wiped the blood away with the back of an unfamiliar hand. The hand looked vaguely like hers but was shaped differently than she was used to. The fingers went in odd directions, and the wrist had a funny twist to it that shouldn’t have been there. She tried to straighten it, and the pain came then, crashing in with enough force to send her back into the darkness for a while.
Later—she couldn’t say how long—when she traded one darkness for the other, her face felt very cold, and she was lying across the passenger seat. She moved by slow degrees, discovering what pain really was. Everything hurt. Then she remembered that Silas was dead, and that was worse than the pain.
When she could, she tried the door. She couldn’t find the handle. She looked around the car for where it might have fallen. Glass was everywhere but the windows. She looked across the steering wheel, and the hood of the car was a crumple against the wall. A dark, huge, twisted arm led away from the point of impact.
The passenger side was better. She pulled at the handle, and the door popped open with a clang. She pushed, but it would open only a foot or two. It was enough. She crawled across the passenger seat and aimed her face toward the gap. She pushed with her good arm, and the grass was damp and soothing against her skin. She sank her fingers past the roots and pulled. Her body followed.
For the first time, she realized the motor was still running. The throttle was stuck wide open, and it buzzed wildly, half bee, half sewing machine. She could see the flash of sparks falling to the ground under the motor.
She crawled away from the wreck and toward Silas, pulling herself by the roots of the grass. Dizziness overcame her, and she collapsed back, looking up into the sky. Slowly, she became aware of stars. There seemed to be millions of them spread out above her.
Silas wasn’t Silas anymore when she found him. He was mud and blood and bits of broken bone, pulped into something that looked like it never could have been alive. Never could have been a man whose face she’d kissed. She followed a long, splintered arm to a hand and laced her fingers into his. She recognized the hand. Those same long fingers, with the same long nail beds.
Blood ran into her eyes again, and this time she did not wipe it away. She let the blood blur the world away while she sat rocking. She wasn’t able to pretend he was still alive, but she could believe he was still whole and lying in the grass beside her. She rocked him to sleep, singing softly.
It took her a long while to stop.
She let go, without looking down. She didn’t want to see what was left of him. She didn’t want to see the blood again.
She looked instead toward the car and the building.
She tried to get to her feet and was surprised to be able to do so. The limp was bad, but she could walk.
Her feet made shiny trails in the dewy grass.
When she got to the car, she leaned against it, and the world swayed again. She moved around to the mangled front end and looked down. The wall itself was pushed in, a crumble of cinder blocks.
The gladiator was dead.
Like Silas, it was reduced to little more than an arm dangling from a mass of flesh. That, too, seemed fitting. She couldn’t tell where the head used to be. She wanted to find the eye and gouge it out. She wanted to taste its blood, carve out its heart. At that moment, nothing was too gruesome. After a moment more, she realized she wanted only to walk away.
She was tired. But there was still so much for her to do. In the distance, the city was still dark; something had happened to the power again, and not just at the lab. She knew there would be no one coming for quite a while. They had other problems to deal with. Besides, how would they even know? Had some alarm been tripped? Without power, she doubted it. No, nobody was coming.
Very carefully, she picked her way through the hole the car had made in the wall and moved inside the building. The air was thick with dust. Lab benches lay strewn about the floor, their contents reduced to puddles and shards of glass. She looked around but didn’t recognize the room. She’d worked in this building for months, but everything looked different now in the darkness. She could not connect what she knew of this place with what she was now looking at. They were part of different universes.
Stepping over the larger pieces of glass as she crossed the room, she barely felt the chemical burns to the bottoms of her bare feet. She swung the door open and stepped into the hall. As she walked, she slowed occasionally to look at the nameplates on the doors. It was too dark to decipher the writing, but when she found one about the right size, she ran her fingers across the raised letters. She was running on autopilot. She continued on, checking the next two doors in the same way. When she found the room she was looking for, she went inside.
The mass spectrometer sat in the far corner before a bank of computers. She followed the copper tubing to the tanks chained neatly inside their safety rails. The windows in the room let the moonlight in, and she could read the sign over the tanks:
She unchained the hook and pushed the tank over. The copper tubing snapped, and she quickly turned the nozzle off. It was too heavy to carry, so she rolled it instead, using her feet to guide it down the long, dark hall.
When she finally got back to the shattered room, the tank made submarine pinging noises as it rolled across the remaining fragments of cinder block. It came to a stop at the pile of debris near the car.
She bent and very carefully backed the nozzle off until she heard the soft hiss of the tank. Then she gave it a quarter-turn in the opposite direction, resealing it. She stood. The floor was already covered in spilled, fuming chemicals that made her eyes water, but in the corner, she found two bottles of stoddard solvent and monomethlyamine. She unscrewed the cap of solvent and made a trail down the hall, pouring the liquid, moving deeper into the building. When the bottle was empty, she dropped it to the floor and unscrewed the other cap. She poured the contents out on the floor in a broad pool and then walked back to the room. Her head swam with the fumes. She almost fell once, but something told her that if she fell to the puddled floor, she would never get up.
She stumbled against the broken nose of the car and slipped across something wet and sticky. She didn’t look to see what it was. The car still rumbled and popped, the electric motor still racing.
She moved around to the hole in the wall and stuck her face through for a deep breath. She breathed. A minute passed. Her head cleared slightly, and she bent back toward the hydrogen tank. She turned the nozzle until the hiss came again, then she stood and moved quickly out through the hole. The wet grass stung the bottoms of her feet as she walked back toward Silas’s body. She dropped to her knees. The world drifted away. She was happy to let it go.
The explosion, when it came, was far worse than she had anticipated.
The shock wave knocked her on her stomach, and the car cart-wheeled past her on the right. Flames shot high into the air.
When the heat became too much, she faced the choice of leaving Silas’s side or being cooked alive. She relinquished her spot and rolled away through the steaming grass. She went several dozen yards before collapsing. She reached for a piece of twisted metal wreckage lying nearby and pulled it toward her. She lifted it and crawled into the cool wetness underneath. The lab burned high into the dark sky, and after a long while, the world went away again.
CHAPTER FORTY
Vidonia sat in the glare of the equatorial sun. She looked out at the shimmering blue Pacific as it slapped at
