Burning Paradise

Without taking her eyes off him she felt for the fabric of the belt. She held it away from her hips and sawed at it. It parted, strand by strand, under the pressure of the blade.

“Remember what I told you,” the Leo-thing said.

As soon as he said it his mouth went slack. His head drooped toward his chest. He slumped against the driver’s-side door as she severed the last strands of the seat belt.

She scooted as far from him as she could get, angling the blade at Leo’s inert body. Was this a trick? His eyes were open but they didn’t move. He seemed to be staring with rapt attention at the ceiling of the van.

She spared a glance for the road. A few yards ahead of the van, the approaching sims had also fallen. They lay motionless in the harsh rake of the headlights.

She turned back to Leo. Was he breathing? She watched his chest. His stained blue work shirt moved in a slow but perceptible rhythm. He was unconscious but still alive.

It’s past time for me to die, he had said.

She opened the door so she could escape if she needed to. A gust of wind washed over her. She gulped cold air into her lungs.

She leaned into Leo’s unconscious body and stared into his unseeing eyes. Pupils like black pe

She put the knife to his neck where it sloped from his Adam’s apple to the V-shape of his collarbone. She could see a faint pulse beating there. The point of the knife pricked his pale skin and one perfect red pearl of blood welled up.

Sleep well.

She put both hands on the handle of the knife and leaned forward.

She pushed Leo’s body out of the van and took his place in the driver’s seat. The puddle of blood on the vinyl upholstery stained her jeans and added its coppery stink to the redolent air. She put the vehicle in gear and drove slowly forward. She steered around the inert sims on the road. The human ones looked like people who had fainted or fallen asleep. The six-limbed ones—some with sharp claws at the end of their forearms, some with small, delicately-fingered hands—looked like sideshow monstrosities cobbled together from wax and animal fur.

At the top of the berm—she could see the installation below, the bunkers and smokestacks and the strange steel structure poised at the center of it like a gigantic flower—her courage nearly failed. Even with the explosives in the van, how could she possibly damage something so huge? Leo had told her how to fuse the dynamite and where to put it, but her memory was stuttering and imperfect and she distrusted everything he had said. She couldn’t go on.

All she had was momentum, and that was what carried the vehicle downhill into the sim town while she worked the brake sporadically. The grid of roads was linear and precise, every intersection burning with artificial light. Sims were everywhere, lying where they had fallen—not dead, she reminded herself, merely asleep, and not forever. They might wake at any moment. She drove over some of the bodies. They popped like rotten fruit.

She aimed the van at the metallic flower at the center of the facility. Under it, Leo had said, was an entire underground city: a city she could not imagine herself entering.

She was approaching an unmarked archway and a descending ramp when she saw something move in the sweep of her headlights. Cassie stood on the brakes. The suspension bottomed out and the rear of the vehicle skidded to starboard. She stared ahead. The distant motion became a comprehensible shape, a shadow puppet flailing its arms; it came still closer and turned into a human silhouette. A sim… but no. Not a sim.

She recognized him from the photo she stared at every time she read The Fisherman and the Spider. It was her uncle Ethan.

He didn’t seem surprised to see her and she was too dazed to be startled by his presence. She opened the passenger-side door and he climbed into the van. If the stink of blood and green matter offended him, he didn’t show it. She wanted to hug him but her clothes were sticky with blood. In her relief and astonishment Cassie began stammering out the story of the attack in Antofagasta.

She expected her uncle to interrupt her, to ask questions or offer an explanation of his own. He did neither, and the look on his face finally frightened her into silence. That owl-eyed emptiness: was it pity or dread or something worse? It occurred to her to wonder what had happened to him down in the undercity of the simulacra.

He seemed to be struggling to speak. “Cassie,” he said at last. “How did you get here?”

All she could say was, “Leo brought me.” She held up the palm of one bloody hand, as if that were an explanation.

“You know what this place is?”

“Yes!”

“What do you want to do here?”

“I want to burn it down! Isn’t that what you want?”

Strangely, he was a long time answering.

“Everything has a price,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“What we do here doesn’t end here. What we destroy here isn’t all we destroy.”

Was this even addressed to her? Her joy at finding him began to shrivel into something like dread. She took her left hand from the wheel and put it on the handle of the knife, still slick with Leo’s blood. Could she be sure her uncle Ethan was even a human being? “I have this truck full of dynamite and Leo said it was important to use it the right way—he told me the places I should put it but I don’t really remember—it’s hard to remember—and I don’t know if he was telling the truth—”

“I can show you the places. Where the fuel is, where they generate power, where they grow what they grow. We can burn it all. All of it that matters.”

“Will you really help me?”

He looked past the blood-spattered window of the van as if at something far away. “We’ll help each other.”

31

NERISSA FORCED THOMAS UP THE STAIRS of the safe house. She held tight to him as he tried to pull away from her and join the fighting below, either to protect his sister or to prove he wasn’t afraid—endangering himself, in either case; but she was strong enough to clasp him in her arms and wrestle him to the second-story landing. She turned back just once, at the sound of a gunshot, in time to see Beth Vance tumble onto the risers with blood gushing from her open skull. She hoped Thomas hadn’t seen that, but maybe he had: he was suddenly more tractable as she pushed him into a bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

There was a bathroom attached the bedroom and she huddled there with Thomas, listening to the noise of the invasion. What ever heroic instinct had possessed Thomas, it abandoned him now. He crawled into the narrow space between the toilet and the tub and sat there, hugging his knees. Nerissa pressed her body against the door, sickly aware that their hiding place was no hiding place at all, that it was a cul-de-sac and would become a coffin if the sims succeeded in storming the house.

But the gunfire reached a crescendo and stopped. She looked at her watch. She tried to steady her breathing. She told Thomas to keep as quiet as he could, quiet as a mouse. She watched the minute hand circle the dial. Five minutes passed and there was nothing to hear but the creaking of beams and rafters as the afternoon heat subsided. Seven minutes. Ten. She detected the keening of distant police sirens.

She risked opening the bathroom door. Daylight was waning and the bedroom had filled with shadows. “Stay here,” she told Thomas, but he followed her into the hall.