Burning Paradise

Leo shrugged. “Somebody was looking for something, obviously.”

“You think they found it?”

“Couldn’t say. But I know a place they probably didn’t look.”

Downstairs to the small living room, which Werner Beck had furnished in a spare, almost offhand style: a plain sofa, a simple coffee table, no TV set or radio. Leo shoved the coffee table against the wall and pulled up the cloth rug, exposing the planked flooring. He examined the bare floor for a moment, then put his finger in a knothole and yanked.

A square chunk of flooring three planks wide came up in his hand. It had been set so finely that the seams hadn’t shown. Underneath, in the space between the floorboards and the concrete foundation, was a small steel safe, the dial of its combination lock facing upward. “He told me he put this here,” Leo said. “In case something happened to him.”

“So what’s inside?” Beth asked.

“What I would need. That’s all he ever said. He told me where to look for it and he told me to memorize the combination. Nothing else.”

He turned the dial, muttering the numbers to himself. Cassie crouched behind him next to Beth, peering over his shoulder as he opened the door on its oiled hinges. He reached inside and pulled out a fat manila envelope.

Leo emptied the contents of the envelope onto the coffee table. Not much there, Cassie thought wonderingly:

A map.

A handwritten list of what appeared to be town or cities.

A few typed pages, stapled at the corner.

And a key.

10

ETHAN TOOK NERISSA TO THE FARM HOUSE attic and checked his surveillance feeds. Two sims were approaching from the direction of the main road. The afternoon light was fading but he could clearly see the automatic rifles the creatures held at a ready angle. Only members of the armed forces were legally permitted to carry such weapons, but these two men, roughly the same apparent age as the creature in the cellar, seemed not to be soldiers. One wore a business suit, the other wore blue jeans and corduroy shirt. They moved in parallel on opposite sides of the access road, keeping to the shadows of the trees.

That was the front of the house. Out back, the surveillance cameras had apparently shut down, leaving Ethan entirely blind in that direction. But he could only address one problem at a time. He took one of the three hunting rifles he kept in a rack on the wall and carried it to the west-facing window. He had replaced the original window and frame with a sheet of double-thick birchwood ply into which he had cut an embrasure large enough to allow him to sight along the barrel of the rifle.

The first target would be the easiest. He waited until the sim in the business suit reached the clearing in front of the house. There was no way to approach the house without crossing that empty space. The sim left the cover of the trees, ru

The next shot wouldn’t be as easy. The second sim, the one in blue jeans, broke from the woods before his companion had finished falling. He veered away from the front of the house, attempting to get out of Ethan’s range. The narrow embrasure in the plywood afforded Ethan some protection, but it also restricted his field of fire. He brought the rifle hard up against the wood and squeezed the trigger.

He hit the target, but he hit it low. Ethan guessed he had clipped the simulacrum’s spine, because the creature fell and couldn’t stand up again. After a moment it abandoned the struggle and used its arms to drag itself toward the house. Ethan managed to put a second bullet in the sim’s neck. Gouts of blood and green matter spewed from the wound and the creature stopped moving.

But Ethan still didn’t know what was happening out back, where the cameras had been destroyed or deactivated. He ran to the east-facing window and leveled his rifle, pulling away in time to avoid a hail of bullets from a third sim’s automatic weapon. Plywood splinters peppered his face and a flurry of dust and debris showered down from the attic ceiling. He glanced back to make sure Nerissa hadn’t been hit. She was still standing, unhurt but obviously terrified. He told her to get down on the floor.

The sim who fired on him had been crossing the open space in back of the house and was out of sight now, but Ethan didn’t have to wonder where it had gone: he heard the sound of the back door being kicked in. The creature had entered the house.

Everything Ethan knew about the anatomy of the simulacra he had learned from Werner Beck. Werner Beck had not only survived the attempt on his life in 2007, he had managed to wound and disarm both of his attackers. And in the days that followed Werner Beck had taken his captive sims apart—piece by piece, making notes.

He had distributed a monograph on the subject to all the survivors loyal or reckless enough to stay in touch with him. Ethan had a copy in his files. Anatomical Details of the Artificial Human Beings, with diagrams and photographs. The photographs had been particularly disturbing: two sims, still alive, mounted on dissection boards and opened from the chest down. The skin of their torsos had been peeled back and pi

The green material was complex but amorphous, the same no matter where in the body it was located. That meant the sims were less vulnerable to some kinds of physical damage than human beings were. Attacking one with a knife would be nearly suicidal. A bullet through the soft parts would only slow it down, while a bullet through the spine would drop it in its tracks without killing it. A shot to the head was the best bet, Werner Beck had written, since the skein of nervous tissue under the skull was an essential interface, allowing the simulacrum to control its body.

Even then, death might not be instantaneous. Beck’s captive sims had survived for days as he systematically cut and flayed them—they had pretended pain at first, and when the pretense failed they lapsed into an observant silence. Loss of blood eventually killed one of them: its small heart simply stopped beating; the other sim died when Beck experimentally fired a bullet into its skull.

Ethan traded his rifle for a pistol, then took a second one from its rack and offered it to Nerissa. “You know how to use that?” She nodded: like many other survivors she had taken a course after the 2007 massacre. Her hands shook, but she checked the pistol to ensure that it was loaded, then clicked off the safety.

“Stay here. Wait for me.” And shoot anything that comes up in my place, he didn’t have to add. Then he opened the attic door and moved down the narrow stairs to the farm house’s second story, a hallway with more stairs at the far end. Daylight was fading and the hall was dim. Ethan paused every few paces, listening for sounds from below but hearing little more than the pounding of his own pulse.