Roll, pitch, flip, somersault, flashes of gray and black and sparkling white. I’m hanging on to the handle as the chopper rolls pilot side up and the door slams closed on my wrist, snapping the bone and tearing my fingers from the handle. My body bounces and twists along the length of the Black Hawk until it whacks into the rear wheel, rocketing straight up, and when the tail rotates skyward, I’m shot toward the horizon like a rock from a slingshot.
I have no sensation of falling. I’m suspended on the updraft of warmer air pressing against the colder, a hawk sailing in the night sky on outstretched wings, behind and below me the tumbling helicopter prisoner to the gravity that I deny. I don’t hear the explosion when it crashes. Just the wind and the blood roaring in my ears, and there is no pain from the beating inside the chopper. I am deliriously, exhilaratingly empty. I am nothing. The wind is more substantial than my bones.
The Earth rushes toward me. I am not afraid. I’ve kept my promises. I’ve redeemed the time.
I stretch out my arms. I spread my fingers wide. I lift my face toward the line where the sky meets the Earth.
My home. My charge.
75
I AM FALLING at terminal velocity toward a featureless landscape of white, a vast nothingness that gobbles up everything in its path, exploding toward the horizon in all directions.
It’s a lake. A very big lake.
A frozen-over very big lake.
Going in feet-first is my only option. If the ice is more than a foot thick, I’m done. No amount of alien enhancement will protect me. The bones in my legs will shatter. My spleen will rupture. My lungs will collapse.
I have faith in you, Marika. You did not come through fire and blood only to fall now.
Actually, Commander, I did.
The white world beneath me shines like pearls, a blank canvas, an alabaster abyss. A screaming wall of wind pushes against my legs as I draw my knees to my chest to execute the rotation. I have to go in at ninety degrees. Straighten too soon and the wind will knock me off-kilter. Too late and I’ll hit with my ass or my chest.
I close my eyes; I don’t need them. The hub’s performed perfectly so far; time for me to give it all my trust.
My mind empties: blank canvas, alabaster abyss. I am the vessel, the hub the pilot.
What is the answer?
And I said, Nothing. Nothing is the answer.
Both legs kick out hard. My body swivels upright. My arms come up, fold themselves over my chest. My head falls back, my face to the sky. My mouth opens. Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath, hold.
Vertical now, released by the wind, I fall faster. I hit the ice straight on, feet-first, at a hundred miles an hour.
I don’t feel the impact.
Or the cold water closing over me.
Or the pressure of that water as I plummet into inky darkness.
I feel nothing. My nerves have been shut down or the pain receptors in my brain turned off.
Hundreds of feet above me, a tiny point of light, a pinprick, faint as the farthest star: the entry point. Also the exit point. I kick toward the star. My body is numb. My mind is empty. I’ve completely surrendered to the 12th System. It isn’t part of me anymore. The 12th System is me. We are one.
I am human. And I am not. Rising toward the star that shines in the ice-encrusted vault, a protogod ascending from the primordial deep, fully human, wholly alien, and I understand now; I know the answer to the impossible riddle of Evan Walker.
I shoot into the heart of the star and hurl myself over the edge onto the icecap. A couple of broken ribs, a fractured wrist, a deep gash in my forehead from the pilot’s harness, totally numb, completely out of breath, empty, whole, aware.
Alive.
76
I REACH THE SMOLDERING wreckage of the chopper by dawn. The crash site wasn’t hard to find: The Black Hawk went down in the middle of an open field covered in a fresh fall of snow. You could see the fire’s glow for miles.
I approach slowly from the south. To my right, the sun breaks the horizon and light shoots across the winterscape, setting ablaze a crystalline inferno, as if a billion diamonds had fallen from the sky.
My water-soaked clothes are frozen, crackling like kindling when I move, and sensation has been returned to me. The 12th System perpetuates my existence to perpetuate its own. It’s calling for rest, food, help with the healing process; that’s the purpose of giving me back my pain.
No. No rest until I find them.
The sky is empty. There is no wind. Smoke curls from the mangled remains of the chopper, black and gray, like the smoke that rose over Camp Haven carrying the incinerated remains of the slaughtered.
Where are you, Razor?
The sun climbs and the glare coming off the snow becomes blinding. The visual array adjusts my eyes: A dark filter with no discernable difference from sunglasses drops over my vision, and then I see a blot in the perfection of white about a mile to the west. I lie flat on my stomach, using a br**ststroke motion to dig myself a small trench. At it draws closer, the dark imperfection takes on a human shape. Tall and thin, wearing a heavy parka and carrying a rifle, moving slowly against the ankle-gripping snow. Thirty minutes crawl by. When he’s a hundred yards away, I rise. He drops as if shot. I call his name, not loudly, though; sound carries farther in winter air.
His voice floats back to me, high pitched with anxiety. “Holy shit!”
He slogs for a few steps, then takes off running, lifting his knees high and pumping his arms like a determined cardio fiend on a treadmill. He stops an arm’s length from me, warm breath exploding from his open mouth.
“You’re alive,” he whispers. I see it in his eyes: Impossible.
“Where’s Teacup?”