Ian didn’t mind being alone.
In the camp, he had fought all the time. He had never been at peace in the company of his brothers. He had never had a friend in the humans there, not even Miss P. He saw that now. It had not mattered. His biggest fights, his greatest war, had always been with himself. He had worked so hard, struggled daily, to make himself like the humans. To control his rages, to overcome his emotions. To be worthy of being free. In the end it turned out all that work had meant nothing.
Ian didn’t mind that. The futility. Not too much, anyway.
He skidded down a steep hillside, grabbing at tree branches to check his fall. Powdery snow flicked down across his shoulders, danced off his scalp. At the bottom of the slope was a trickling stream. He thought of Samuel and how his fingers had turned black, how they’d died on his hands and had to be taken off. Ian leaped over the stream, not wanting to get his feet wet in that cold, cold water. Even he had limitations.
On the far side of the stream the ground rose again, toward a narrow ridgeline high above. From the trees up there he would be able to see for miles. He would be able to see where he had to go next.
Except…
That was the one thing that burned inside him. The question. Dr. Taggart had given him so many answers. He’d explained almost everything. Why Ian had been created. Why he had then been spurned. It made sense. It all made such perfect, crystalline sense in his mind, a graph with clear data points forming a straight line headed… headed toward somewhere. Somewhere he couldn’t yet see.
He climbed the slope on all fours, grabbing at anything his hands could seize to help him gain more ground. He moved faster than any human could. Any bear. He was so strong. They’d given him that. They had made him strong, and fast. They had made sure the sun glaring on the ice would not hurt his eyes.
They were going to give him a world. A whole world where he would be king.
The last question was like a spiky thing, a worm with sharp-edged armor burrowing through his brain. There had to be an answer. There had to be a final point on the graph, a place where the line came to its end.
But how could he find it now, without Dr. Taggart? Who could tell him what came next? He had worked and fought and bled all his life for freedom. What was he to do with it now?
That was the one thing he minded. And it was tearing him apart.
Just before he reached the ridgeline he stopped. He was about to stand up, to make himself visible on that high ground. But his instincts, the instincts of some predator who had given him some small portion of his DNA, made him stop. He crouched low, cutting down his profile. Making himself invisible against the dark trees.
Perhaps he had heard something in the distance. Something so quiet his conscious mind did not register it. He lowered his third eyelids. He held his breath.
And then he saw it. Movement, very far away. Just now becoming visible. Something — several somethings — moving across the white land.
Others. Other humans, coming this way.
DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:16
Another concussion, Chapel thought.
But no. This didn’t feel the same. He’d had chimeras hit him before, and it had been enough to lay him out. This felt like he’d gotten the bad end of a fight in a bar. It felt like he’d fallen off a bicycle and did a face-plant. It did not feel like he’d been hit by a truck, or a jackhammer.
Ian had pulled his punch. He had been trying not to kill Chapel, just stun him a little and buy himself time to get away.
Thank heaven for small favors, Chapel thought and slowly, very slowly, he sat up. He’d been lying in the snow long enough for the flakes to gather on his legs and start to build up a thin blanket there. He shook himself to clear the snow away.
He touched his face, and his fingers came away bloody. He definitely had a broken nose. Well, that was survivable. He used his arm to get up to his feet. He felt shaky, still weak from losing all that blood back in Colorado. He felt like all his joints had been loosened by all the hits and injuries he’d taken over the last few days.
“Damn it!” he shouted, and his voice echoed around the snowscape, knocking small cascades of white off the nearby trees and rocks.
Ian was going to get away.
It took a while for the echoes of his voice to die down. For silence to return to the rocky woods. Except, it wasn’t quite silence. There was a sound in the distance, a rumbling, droning sound.
Chapel thought Ian must have left a trap for him. The chimera must have rigged an avalanche, or maybe he’d just set it off himself by shouting like that. He looked up, all around him, looking for where the waterfall of snow and ice and rocks would come from. But as he listened he realized he wasn’t hearing an avalanche at all. Instead the sound he heard was more like a swarm of bees, coming closer.
Snowmachines. More than one. Moving toward him at high speed.
He spun around, looking for the lab buildings. They were invisible in the snow, too far away to see. He would never make it back to them in time.
Cursing again, under his breath this time, he threw himself into the snow and used his one arm to cover himself, bury himself in its soft whiteness.
DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:21
“You did it for me?” Julia repeated.
Even to her own ears her voice sounded like a tiny squeak.
“We — your mother and I — did it all for you. Our daughter,” Taggart said.
He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at his hands, which lay folded in his lap. She knew him well enough to understand what that meant. Her dad was an excitable, boisterous man who talked with his hands, gesturing for emphasis because words wouldn’t come fast enough to keep up with all the ideas in his head. If his hands weren’t moving, it could only mean that what he had to say was breaking his heart.
“It was 1979. The year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan,” he told her.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It was the end of the world. Everybody thought so back then; I mean, everybody in our circle. Fellow scientists. Intellectuals. The military people who asked us to help them only confirmed it. The Soviets were going to take over the Middle East and then India and the president would have no choice but to retaliate with nukes.”
“Dad, that has nothing to do with me,” Julia pointed out.
“Oh, you’re wrong. Because you’re not thinking about what else was going on in 1979. That was the year Helen got pregnant. We were so excited when we found out — we knew you would have red hair, we talked about it all the time. We argued about whether you would have my eyes, or her nose. You’ve never had kids.”
“No,” Julia said.
“Maybe you can’t understand, then. You can’t know what that’s like. When you start thinking about the future, not just in terms of your own life, of how many years you have left, but in terms of what your child’s life is going to be like. What kind of world she’s going to live in. What kind of world her grandchildren will have, and what their grandchildren will inherit. And there we were, looking at the future based on the best possible projections. And what we saw was the apocalypse. Civilization, gone. Agriculture, gone. No clean water, no food at all, people in chaos everywhere. That was the world you were going to grow up in.”
“That’s nonsense. None of that happened.”
“Because Gorbachev was actually sane, maybe. Or maybe because Reagan took a hard line with him. Who can say? We couldn’t know that at the time.”
Julia put a hand over her mouth. She couldn’t believe this. “No,” she said. “No, that doesn’t get you off the hook. What you did was unforgivable.”