“Okay,” Dowd said. “You, you, you and you,” cocking his finger at Beth, Thomas, Cassie and Aunt Ris, “upstairs, now. I’ll signal if it’s safe to come down. Go!”
Beth stared blankly. Aunt Ris stood and took Thomas’s hand. At the foot of the stairs she turned back and said, “Cassie—come on!”
“No.” Cassie was already moving toward the room where Leo and his father were conducting their test.
“Cassie, please,” Aunt Ris said, but she didn’t wait, hurrying up the staircase and yanking a bewildered and frightened Thomas behind her.
“I’m from the Port Authority,” a male voice with a Chilean accent said from beyond the door. “I need to speak to Werner Beck on an urgent matter.” Followed by more furious knocking.
Dowd opened the door a crack and peered out, his had still grazing the grip of his revolver. “Show me some ID,” he said.
The door burst inward, knocking him to the floor.
Beck realized he was imperfectly prepared for this impasse with his son. Leo sat angrily immobile, and for the moment Beck could do nothing but stare back. “You need to do this,” he said, startled by the grief that groaned out of the hinge of his own voice, “or—” Or what?
He was distracted by sounds from the adjoining room: a knock at the door, muted voices. Then the crash of a forced entry, more shouting. Beck dropped the syringe and reached for the pistol on the desk. But Leo acted first—vaulted from his chair and grabbed the gun.
There was a gunshot from the front room, then a much closer crash as the door that connected this room to the alley behind the house was forced open and rebounded from its jambs. Beck saw Leo swing the pistol to confront the intruder from the alley, a man in civilian clothes carrying what looked like an automatic weapon. Leo fired before the intruder could pick a target. The intruder fell back, and Beck smelled the familiar fertilizer reek of sim fluids. He watched as Leo put a second killing shot into the sim’s head, which stilled the squirming thing. No hesitation, Beck found himself thinking. He admired Leo’s cool-headedness. It was a more satisfying vindication than any needle test could have been.
Another gunshot came from the front room, followed by a third. “Give me the pistol,” Beck said.
Leo faced him with the weapon in his hand. It seemed to Beck that Leo was almost eerily calm, neither angry nor afraid. Beck put his hand out. Leo didn’t lower the barrel.
Beck felt the first bullet as a blow to his ribs, driving him backward. Then he was on the floor, breathless and bewildered. Leo stood over him, his face still utterly expressionless. Beck’s hand fell on the syringe he had dropped. He surprised himself by flailing it at Leo’s leg, burying the needle in Leo’s thigh.
Leo’s second shot drove all thought to extinction.
Cassie’s fear had filled her to brimming. It roared in her ears like the screech of a power saw. She kept moving, but mindlessly, as if a clumsy puppeteer had taken control of her arms and legs. Events became a series of still frames projected behind her eyelids.
Dowd on the floor, blocking the front door with his legs as a stranger struggles to push through…
Cassie took a step toward the room where Leo was.
Aunt Ris screaming Cassie’s name even as she vanished beyond the upstairs landing, tugging Thomas behind her, Thomas looking back with his mouth a shocked O and eyes wide…
Another step.
Dowd raising his pistol and firing it: splintered wood and a noise like a blow to the head, but the stranger still ramming through as Dowd struggled to his feet and leveled the pistol again…
Step.
Beth forcing herself to her feet and staggering toward the stairs, her face a terrorized mask, all tooth and eye….
Step.
A different noise from the room where Leo was, thumping and a gunshot….
Which meant the house was being attacked from the alley as well as the street, but she didn’t stop: her feet, her legs, her invisible puppeteer all wanted to carry her to Leo.
Dowd firing again, the stranger tumbling into the room leaking red and green matter, but that only served to force the door wide open. Dowd shouting at Cassie and Beth: “Get down!”
Cassie did not get down.
Dowd peering around the door: “Shit, there’s another one!”
Two more steps, which put Cassie within reach of the room.
Dowd firing his pistol at some target Cassie couldn’t see, then stumbling backward as a bullet from outside penetrated the door and his body. Another stranger stepping over the body of the fallen sim, some ordinary-looking man not even angry but just going about his lethal business…
Beth taken by a bullet as she clung to the stairway banister, tumbling onto the risers with her head opened like a melon and its redness gushing out…
Dowd, enraged and dying on the blood-drenched carpet, firing a final shot that struck the sim and doubled it over…
…as Cassie entered the room to which Leo and Werner Beck had retreated for their blood test, which had become a blood test of a different kind. Cassie’s vision was clouded and somehow noisy, but she saw Leo standing (still alive!) over the body of his father and the reeking corpse of a sim. His expression was shocked and his eyes glittered with fear or grief, but he reached for Cassie with his free left hand, gesturing frantically with his pistol toward the alley. Though she was nearly deafened by the gunshots still echoing in her head she saw him mouth the words, Come with me.
She took his hand, and he pulled her into the alley behind the house.
27
THE ATACAMA
MAYBE BECAUSE HE EXPECTED TO DIE AT any moment, Ethan felt a deadening blankness wash over him. All the endless precautions he had taken, all the demented and paranoid protocols he had followed so assiduously for so many years, had in the end won him nothing. He was helplessly under the control of the entity that governed the world. He had lost even the ability to properly think.
They put him in one of the trucks next to the female sim who had cuffed him. He could see the creature more clearly by the glow from the dashboard. Its hair was short and dark, its skin coffee-brown. It gave him a contrite, solicitous look as it steered the truck in a half circle and joined the convoy of vehicles, all now headed away from San Pedro de Atacama and toward the breeding facility deep in the desert. Its expression—like its words, like its gestures—was of course a calculated lie.
He wondered what it wanted from him. Why he had been kept alive.
“We just want to talk,” it said again.
Ethan’s mouth was as dry as the salt flats they were driving through, but he managed to ask, “Why bother?”
“I understand the objection you’re making. You’re right. You have no reason to believe anything we say. But we’re offering you more than words, Dr. Iverson. We can show you what we are. We have a demonstrable claim to make. As a scientist, perhaps you can appreciate that.”
He didn’t answer. He turned his face to the window. To the moonlit desert, the ghostly salar, his own bitter reflection.
“It wouldn’t have worked,” the sim said. “Werner Beck’s weapon. It’s true that he can suppress cellular signaling in isolated cultures of green matter. But our bodies are more robust than that. We can function for prolonged periods of time without contact with the orbital hypercolony. His so-called war would have been little more than a futile gesture. I think you know that, Dr. Iverson, on some level.”