The Infinite Sea

He slogs for a few steps, then takes off ru

“You’re alive,” he whispers. I see it in his eyes: Impossible.

“Where’s Teacup?”

He jerks his head behind him. “She’s okay. Well, I think her leg might be broken . . .”

I step around him and start walking the way he came. He trudges after me, fussing for me to slow down.

“I was about to give up on you,” he puffs. “No chute! What, you can fly now? What happened to your head?”

“I hit it.”

“Oh. Well, you look like an Apache. You know, war paint.”

“That’s the other quarter: Apache.”

“Seriously?”

“What do you mean, you think she broke her leg?”

“Well, what I mean is I think her leg might be broken. With the help of your x-ray vision, maybe you can definitively diagnose—”

“This is strange.” I’m studying the sky as we walk. “Where’s the pursuit? They would have marked the location.”

“I’ve seen nothing. Like they just gave up.”

I shake my head. “They don’t give up. How much farther, Razor?”

“Another mile? Don’t worry, I got her tucked away nice and safe.”

“Why’d you leave her?”

He looks at me sharply, dumbstruck for a second. But only for a second. Razor doesn’t stay speechless for long. “To look for you. You told me to meet you by the fire. Sort of generic directions. You could have said, ‘Meet me at the crash site where I put this chopper down. That fire.’”

We walk for a few minutes in silence. Razor is out of breath. I’m not. The arrays will sustain me until I reach her, but I have a feeling that when I crash, I’ll crash hard.

“So what now?” he asks.

“Rest up a few days—or as long as we can.”

“Then?”

“South.”

“South. That’s the plan? South. A little elaborate, isn’t it?”

“We have to get back to Ohio.”

He stops as if he’d run into an invisible wall. I trudge on for a few steps, then turn. Razor is shaking his head at me.

“Ringer, do you have any idea where you are?”

I nod. “About twenty miles north of one of the Great Lakes. I’m guessing Erie.”

“What are you— How are we— You do realize Ohio is over a hundred miles from here,” he sputters.

“Where we’re going, more like two hundred. As the crow flies.”

“‘As the . . .’ Well, too fucking bad, we aren’t crows! What’s in Ohio?”

“My friends.”

I continue walking, following the imprint of his boots in the snow.

“Ringer, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but—”

“You don’t want to burst my bubble butt?”

“That sounded suspiciously like a joke.”

“I know they’re probably dead. And I know I’ll probably die long before I reach them, even if they’re not. But I made a promise, Razor. I didn’t think it was a promise at the time. I told myself it wasn’t. Told him it wasn’t. But there’re the things we tell ourselves about the truth, and there’re the things the truth tells about us.”

“What you just said makes no sense. You know that, right? Must be the head injury. You usually make a lot.”

“Head injuries?”

“Now, that definitely was a joke!” He frowns. “Made a promise to who?”

“A naïve, thick-headed, stereotypical jock who thinks he’s God’s gift to the world when he isn’t thinking the world is God’s gift to him.”

“Oh. Okay.” He doesn’t say anything for a few shuffling steps, then: “So how long has Mr. Naïve Thick-headed Stereotypical Jock been your boyfriend?”

I stop. I turn. I grab his face with both hands and kiss him hard on the mouth. His eyes are wide and filled with something that closely resembles fear.

“What was that for?”

I kiss him again. Our bodies pressed close. His cold face cradled in my colder hands. I can smell the bubble gum on his breath. The Earth is my charge. We are two pillars rising from an undulating sea of dazzling white. Limitless. Without borders, without boundaries.

He brought me from the tomb. He raised me from the dead. He risked his life so I might have mine. Easier to turn aside. Easier to let me go. Easier to believe the beautiful lie than the hideous truth. After my father died, I built a fortress safe and strong to last a thousand years. A mighty stronghold that crumbles with a kiss.

“Now we’re even,” I whisper.

“Not exactly,” he says hoarsely. “I only kissed you once.”

77

AS WE APPROACH, the complex seems to rise from the snow like a leviathan from the deep. Silos, conveyors, bins, mixers, storage and office buildings, an enormous warehouse twice the size of an airplane hangar, all surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence. It seems creepily symbolic, fitting somehow, for this to end at a concrete plant. Concrete is the omnipresent human signature, our principal artistic medium on the world’s blank canvas: Wherever we went, the Earth slowly disappeared beneath it.

Razor pulls aside a section of the rotting fence for me to duck through. Color high in his cheeks, nose bright red from the cold, soft, soulful eyes darting about. Maybe he feels as exposed as I do in the open, dwarfed by the towering silos and massive equipment, beneath the bright, cloudless sky.

Maybe, though I doubt it.

“Give me your rifle,” I tell him.

“Huh?” He’s clutching the weapon against his chest, trigger finger nervously tapping.

“I’m a better shot.”

“Ringer, I’ve checked it all out. There’s nobody here. It’s perfectly—”

“Safe,” I finish for him. “Right.” I hold out my hand.

“Come on, she’s right over there in the warehouse . . .”

I don’t move. He rolls his eyes, tips his head back to consider the empty sky, looks back at me.

“If they were here, you know we’d already be dead.”

“The rifle.”

“Fine.” He shoves it at me. I pull the rifle from his hands and smash the stock against the side of his head. He drops to his knees, eyes on my face, but there’s nothing in those eyes, nothing at all.

“Fall,” I tell him. He pitches forward and lies still.

I don’t think she’s in the warehouse. There’s a reason he wanted me to go in there, but I don’t believe that reason had anything to do with Teacup. I doubt she’s within a hundred miles of this place. I have no choice, though. A slight advantage with the rifle and Razor neutralized, and that’s all.

He opened up to me when I kissed him. I don’t know how the enhancement opens an empathetic pathway into another human being. Maybe it turns the carrier into a kind of human lie detector, gathering and collating data from a myriad of sensory inputs and fu

Lies within lies within lies. Feints and counterfeints. Like a desert mirage, no matter how hard you ran toward it, it stayed forever in the distance. Finding the truth was like chasing the horizon.

As I enter the shadow of the building, something loosens inside. My knees begin to shake. My chest aches like I’ve been hit with a battering ram. I can’t catch my breath. The 12th System can sustain and strengthen me, supercharge my reflexes, enhance my senses tenfold, heal me, and protect me against every physical hazard, but there’s nothing my forty thousand uninvited guests can do about a broken heart.

Can’t, can’t. Can’t go soft now. What happens when we go soft? What happens?