The Infinite Sea(114)

            And then he’s gone.

            Later, I hear the chopper come to take him away. After that, Razor appears, looking as if someone shoved an apple under the skin that covered his cheek. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. He washes my face with warm, soapy water. He bandages my wounds. He binds my fractured ribs. He splints my broken wrist. He doesn’t bother to offer me water, though he must know I’m thirsty. He jabs an IV into my arm and hooks up a saline drip. Then he leaves me and sits in a folding chair by the open door, cocooned in the heavy parka, rifle across his lap. When the sun sets, he lights a kerosene lamp and places it on the floor beside him. Light flows up and bathes his face, but his eyes are hidden from me.

            “Where’s Teacup?” My voice echoes in the vast space.

            He doesn’t answer.

            “I have a theory,” I tell him. “It’s about rats. Do you want to hear it?”

            Silence.

            “To kill one rat is easy. All you need is a piece of old cheese and a spring-loaded trap. But to kill a thousand rats, a million rats, a billion—or seven billion—that’s a little bit harder. For that you need bait. Poison. You don’t have to poison all seven billion of them, just a certain percentage that will carry the poison back to the colony.”

            He doesn’t move. I have no idea if he’s listening or even awake.

            “We’re the rats. The program downloaded into human fetuses—that’s the bait. What’s the difference between a human who carries an alien consciousness and a human who believes that he does? There is no difference except one. Risk. Risk is the difference. Not our risk. Theirs. Why would they risk themselves like that? The answer is they didn’t. They aren’t here, Razor. They never were. It’s just us. It’s always been just us.”

            He bends forward very slowly and deliberately and extinguishes the light.

            I sigh. “But like all theories, there are holes. You can’t reconcile it with the big rock question. Why bother with any of it when all they had to do was throw a very big rock?”

            Very quietly now, so quietly I wouldn’t hear him without the enhancement array: “Shut up.”

            “Why did you do it, Alex?” If Alex is really his name. His entire history could be a lie designed by Vosch to manipulate me. The odds are it is.

            “I’m a soldier.”

            “You were just following orders.”

            “I’m a soldier.”

            “It’s not yours to reason why.”

            “I. Am. A. SOLDIER!”

            I close my eyes. “Chaseball. Was that Vosch’s, too? Sorry. Stupid question.”

            Silence.

            “It’s Walker,” I say, my eyes snapping open. “It has to be. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s Evan, isn’t it, Razor? He wants Evan and I’m the only path to him.”

            Silence.

            The implosion of Camp Haven and the disabled drones raining from the sky: Why did they need drones? The question always bothered me. How hard could it be to find pockets of survivors when there were so few survivors left and you had plenty of human technology in your possession to find them? Survivors clustered. They crowded together like bees in a hive. The drones weren’t being used to keep track of us. They were being used to keep track of them, the humans like Evan Walker, solitary and dangerously enhanced, scattered over every continent, armed with knowledge that could bring the whole edifice crashing down if the program downloaded into them malfunctioned—as it clearly did in his case.