Extinction

back to where Wen and Zhang were grappling. Although the Module was at least ten years older than Wen, he was in good shape. Keeping his grip on the gun with one hand, Zhang bent his other arm and drove his elbow toward Wen’s jaw. Wen managed to deflect the blow and hold on to Zhang’s gun hand, but then the Module slammed his knee into Wen’s stomach. Shit, Layla thought, the bastard knows how to fight. But she shouldn’t have been surprised. The goddamn network could access the skills of all the soldiers and agents it had incorporated.

She raised the pistol and tried to aim at Zhang’s head, but he and Wen were close together and in constant motion, furiously trading blows. She couldn’t get a clear shot. When she tried to move closer, Zhang twisted away, putting Wen’s body between himself and the pistol. Wen’s head drooped as he wrestled with the Module. He was losing strength. He wouldn’t last much longer.

And then, all at once, Layla realized her mistake. She turned away from the grappling men and fired at the surveillance cameras, first obliterating the one behind her and then the one hanging from the opposite corner of the ceiling. Then she ducked behind Wen so Zhang couldn’t see her. Now the network didn’t know where she was and couldn’t predict her next move. Charging forward, she remembered what Supreme Harmony had told her: Dr. Zhang Jintao no longer exists. His emotions no longer exist. So she didn’t hesitate after she popped up beside the Module and pressed the muzzle of her gun to his forehead. She just pulled the trigger.

But afterward—after the gun went off and Zhang’s head jerked to the side and his blood and brains sprayed across the floor—Layla felt sick. He still looks human, she thought as the Module dropped to the floor. He still looks human.

Her ears rang from the gunshot. Wen was calling her name, but she could barely hear him. Finally, he stepped in front of her and looked her in the eye. “Layla!” he shouted. “We have to go. To the computer room. Remember?”

The boys from Lijiang stood beside him, their fingers gripping his belt. They swayed on the balls of their feet, dazed. Layla looked at them for a moment, then nodded. Then Wen took her arm and pulled her toward the door.

FIFTY-THREE

Kirsten was immersed in a half-dream, shallow and vaporous. Boulders rolled inside her skull, following the contours of her cranium. One of them rolled behind her eyes and she felt a sharp, familiar pain. She’d felt it once before, in the embassy in Nairobi, in the moments after the bomb exploded. And now, after fifteen years, she felt it again. She clutched the memory as if it were a lifeline. Although the pain was almost unbearable, it pulled her out of the half-dream and into the clear air of consciousness.

But when she opened her eyes she saw only darkness. She was blind again. They’d taken her glasses! Panicking, she thought of the image she’d seen on Arvin’s flash drive, the room full of lobotomized men lying faceup on their gurneys. Now she was also in that room, she was sure of it. She was lying beside the others, another twitching body ready to be connected to Supreme Harmony. Terrified and enraged, she yelled, “No!” into the darkness and bolted upright, kicking and thrashing. But a moment later she heard Jim say, “Whoa! Settle down!” and felt the unmistakable weight of his prosthetic hand on her shoulder.

“What the hell?” Kirsten sputtered. “Where are we? Where are my glasses?”

“Hold your horses!” To her surprise, Jim sounded cheerful, almost jaunty. “I’ll get the glasses for you. I turned off the cameras to save the battery charge.”

While Kirsten waited, she heard the rumble of an engine. She was in a moving vehicle. Her seat was hard, and it jolted up and down with every bump in the road. No wonder she’d dreamed about boulders.

“Here you go,” Jim said, handing her the glasses.

She turned on the cameras and sat through the usual recalibration process, which took six and a half seconds. When she finally got her sight back, she saw Jim in the driver’s seat of a small three-wheeled truck. It was a relic of the old China, built decades ago, ramshackle and rusty but still chugging along on its noisy two- stroke engine. The truck’s cab was only four feet wide, barely big enough for two people. It was propped on a single, undersized tire, and behind the cab was a wooden truck bed resting on the two rear wheels. Inside the truck bed was a bale of hay, which wobbled and bounced as they drove down a poorly paved country lane.

Jim wore an olive-green Mao cap and wraparound sunglasses. They covered up his Caucasian features, but they also made him look ridiculous. “Oh shit.” She laughed. “Nice disguise, Pierce.”

He smiled back at her, amused. “Yeah, I thought so, too. I got the hat and sunglasses from the same guy who sold me the truck. He threw them in for free, actually.”

“I should hope so. So when and where did you make this purchase?”

“It was about an hour after you got your bug bite. How does it feel, by the way?”

He pointed to the underside of her chin. Kirsten raised her hand and touched a piece of cloth taped to the soft skin there. Oddly, she didn’t feel any pain when she touched it. “Doesn’t hurt,” she said. “Just tingles a bit.”

“There might be some nerve damage. The drone’s paralyzing agent is a nerve toxin. Similar to cobra venom.”

Kirsten remembered the last moments before she lost consciousness. “So one of the flies got me after I climbed out of the crawl space?”

Jim nodded. “I had to cut out the drone’s dart before it delivered more toxin to your body. Luckily, I had some antibiotic to clean off my knife. But it made a mess.”

Kirsten looked down at her shirt, the wrinkled blouse she’d worn to look like a frumpy Beijinger. There was a large red stain below the collar. For a moment she pictured Jim kneeling beside her on the ground floor of that open-air pagoda. Her throat tightened. Once again he’d saved her.

She waited a moment to get her emotions under control. “So what happened next? You carried me to the nearest truck dealership?”

“Well, the pagoda was in a rural part of the Fangshan District, so there weren’t any retail outlets nearby. But after lugging you through the forest for a while, I saw a farmhouse with a truck parked outside. And the farmer, as it turned out, was willing to make a deal.”

“How much did it cost you?”

“He wanted dollars, not yuan. I gave him five thousand.”

Kirsten looked again at the truck’s battered chassis. She could actually see the road through the holes in the floorboard. “It’s a good thing you’re a defense contractor, Jim. In the world of real commerce, you wouldn’t last a minute.”

“Hey, this old jalopy still has some life in her.” He gave the steering wheel an affectionate pat. “We were making pretty good time until a couple of hours ago. Around midnight I found a provincial road that ran straight south. Believe it or not, we were doing a hundred and ten kilometers per hour. Going downhill, anyway.”

She looked out the truck’s window. The countryside was rugged, with tree-covered hills all around and small farms tucked into every corner. The slopes were terraced and planted with sunflowers and corn. The farmhouses and barns were simple and old, and on some of the barns Kirsten could see traces of Revolutionary symbols, painted stars and hammer-and-sickles that had faded from red to gray. They passed an elderly woman in a shabby black tunic, walking along the road with a basketful of kindling on her back. Then they passed a shoeless boy throwing cornmeal to a flock of ducks. It was a completely different country from the China of Beijing, Kirsten thought. There were no women in designer clothes here and no BMWs on the roads. This was still a country of bicycles and wheelbarrows and farm trucks, and Jim’s three-wheeler fit right in.

“So where are we, exactly?” Kirsten asked.

“The number of this road is S223. But I haven’t seen any signs for a while.” Jim pursed his lips and thought for a moment. “We passed Nanyang a couple of hours ago, so I guess we’re in Hubei Province. The next big challenge will be crossing the Yangtze. There aren’t that many bridges over the river. I’m hoping the police haven’t set up any checkpoints yet.”

“You really think Supreme Harmony is giving orders to the police here? We’re hundreds of miles from