Burning Paradise

There was no sound from downstairs. She took the enormous risk of calling out Cassie’s name. Had there been any answer—even the weakest response—she would have braved the gore-splattered stairs. But no answer came. If Cassie had survived she must already have fled. Fleeing was the only sane thing to do. The sound of the police sirens had grown noticeably louder.

The front of the house had been breached and the gunfire would surely have attracted a crowd in the street; it would be impossible to leave by the front door. A French door in the bedroom opened onto a tiny balcony overlooking the alley, and Nerissa put her head out to reco

She explained the plan to Thomas. His face was as pale as parchment and he looked dazed, but he nodded as if he understood.

She made sure she had her wallet, which contained identification both real and fake and a stash of U.S. dollars and Chilean pesos. The alleyway was empty but probably wouldn’t be for long. She clambered over the railing and dangled from the ornamental iron pickets. When she dropped to the pavement she turned her ankle. Pain spiked from her calf to her hip, but she forced herself to stand. “Now you,” she called to Thomas.

He peered down from the balcony, his face a contortion of doubt and dread.

“I’ll catch you if you fall. You trust me?”

The boy nodded.

“All right, then. Come on—we have to hurry.”

He dropped into her arms; her ankle turned again; they sprawled on the grimy pavement but were safe.

“Take my hand,” she said, standing.

Thomas put his feverishly hot hand in hers. As she hobbled away, a busboy from the restaurant three doors south stepped into the alley and called after her: “¿Estás bien? ¿Necesita ayuda?”

“Estamos bien,” she shouted back, “gracias,” and turned a corner.

They boarded a city bus into Antofagasta’s business district and got out when Nerissa spotted a Holiday I

In their room she washed Thomas’s face—he looked at her impassively around the daubing of the washcloth—and encouraged him to lie down. He stretched out on the bed without complaint or comment.

She switched on the television, lowered the volume and pulled a chair close to the set. As much as she distrusted TV and radio, they were the only accessible source of news. The local TVN station opened its evening broadcast with an account of the attack, pitched as a multiple murder, possibly drug-related. Police were being cagey about the number of deaths, no doubt because of the problematic nature of the corpses the sims had left behind. There had been, the newscast said, “three confirmed deaths, two males and one female.” If the female was Beth Vance, the two males were probably Eugene Dowd and either Leo or Werner Beck.

Which meant Cassie had escaped. At least, that was a hope to which Nerissa could cling. Though even if it was true, she might never see Cassie again. Cassie might try to make her way back to the States, perhaps to the survivor circle in Buffalo, but possibly not. And it might be better if she didn’t.

She left the chair to feed Thomas and herself on what she could find in the bar fridge (chocolate, crackers, orange juice), to console him with soft words and finally to tuck him under the covers. Then back to the television, on the chance that it might yield new information. None was forthcoming. After midnight the newscast gave way to a dubbed Hollywood movie, decades old.

Nerissa’s thoughts began to fracture and veer strangely. She was exhausted, but this was more than fatigue, more even than despair: it felt like an expanding emptiness at the center of herself. She told herself she ought to go to bed, but standing up seemed like too much trouble. Instead she slouched more deeply into the chair and let her eyes drift shut. The sound of dubbed voices speaking hurried and awkward Spanish faded into noise. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is as shallow as time. Who had said that? Samuel Johnson, she thought. Or no, Thomas Carlyle. She couldn’t remember.

32

CASSIE STOOD BACK AS HER UNCLE inspected the contents of the van. She tried not to think about the sims lying all around her, unconscious but drawing breath. The launch tower loomed above her like a night-blooming flower. A cold wind guttered through the compound, stirring up miniature whirlwinds in the dusty streets. She shivered.

Ethan pulled Werner Beck’s radio-interference device—a useless piece of wishful thinking, he called it—out of the truck and set it aside. Over his shoulder Cassie saw stacked blocks of what looked like lead-ingots in red waxed paper. “Enough to do damage,” he said. “But we only have three sets of timers and batteries.”

“Is that bad?”

“We can plant charges in the breeding rooms, the generator rooms, and under the launch mechanism.”

“Will that be enough?”

“I hope so.”

He got in the van—behind the wheel, ignoring the mess of blood and green matter there—and beckoned her after. No, Cassie thought. Crawl back into the stinking space where the Leo-thing had bled out? Impossible. But her feet carried her there. Some dumb instinct that could not possibly be courage forced her inside. She resisted the urge to cover her ears as Uncle Ethan started the motor. She was careful not to look back as the night sky disappeared behind her.

What Uncle Ethan called “the breeding room” was at the end of a long down-sloping ramp in a maze of such ramps and corridors. In several places the passage was blocked by stationary vehicles or mounded bodies. Her uncle became adept at putting these vehicles into gear and rolling them out of the way; twice, she helped by dragging aside the inert bodies of sims. Human sims mostly, but the other kind, too. The strange ones. The fur on their limbs was dense and moist, and they had a chemical smell, like turpentine. The ones with small six-fingered hands were unpleasant to look at; the ones with claws like box cutters were worse.

The breeding room when they reached it looked to Cassie like an oversized, cruelly impersonal hospital ward. There were long rows of beds, many still occupied by the bodies of obviously pregnant female sims, alongside ranks of what were probably mechanized incubators. The glass walls of the incubators were glazed with moisture, but Cassie could make out distorted images of the infants inside. Some apparently human, some not. All breathing. Worse, all breathing in unison.

Uncle Ethan mounded up roughly a third of the incendiary blocks next to the bank of incubators. He crimped and inserted blasting caps and ran wires back to the igniter, but hesitated over the timer.

“The timer’s jury-rigged to the electric initiator,” Cassie said. “The Leo-thing told me how to work it.”

Uncle Ethan gave her a sharp look. “Leo told you that?”

“He said this is what he wanted. He said he wanted to die. I mean it wanted to die. The hypercolony. Or what ever was left of it—his part of it.”

She repeated what little she remembered of what Leo had told her to memorize about the explosives in the truck. “He said he wanted us to destroy this place because it’s been taken over by a kind of parasite. Is that true?”

“It might be.”

“But that means Leo—the Leo-thing—was part of the original hypercolony.”