“Well, that settles that,” she murmured.
“Nice of you to drop by,” Osnat told her. “We could have used you ten minutes ago.”
And just like that, the courtyard was not a battlefield any longer, but merely a cleanup operation. Everyone was stowing away their ordnance and collecting their gear, and the Palestinian Enders were shepherding Arkady toward the door, and Ash was taking Arkasha in hand and talking about chains of custody and secure transport.
“Let go of him, Ash!”
Cohen knew Li’s voice instantly, despite the ravages of thirst and fever. Everyone in the courtyard froze at the sound of it. Then they began surreptitiously glancing around, trying to figure out where she was hidden. Ash, meanwhile, was scanning the many doors of the second story, looking for the one the voice came from.
“Catherine? Where are you? You must be in bad shape. Let me send someone up to help you.”
“So you can finish what Turner started?” Li rasped. “You were just supposed to come in and clean up the bodies, isn’t that right? How are you going to deal with the inconvenient fact that we still seem to be alive?”
Finally Cohen’s deperate scans found the faint echo of Li’s internals. At first the images that flowed across the link made no sense to him. The memory of Ash in an Interfaither’s chadoor. The memory of Ash mingled with a pain beyond all human endurance…and then in a sickening rush he understood the full horror of what Li was remembering.
He glanced around the courtyard. Arkady was staring at the ground, lost in some private hell. Osnat was watching Gavi. And even Gavi seemed not quite to have caught up with the facts on the ground. Certainly none of them had grasped what was starkly clear to Cohen: that the cleanup had just turned back into a killing field.
This was it, then. With an odd sense of relief Cohen dropped the firewall between his networks and EMET. He reached out to the Yad Vashem databanks with their million-fold tales of despair and horror. He reached out to the Enders and lifted their minds out of EMET’s murderous delusion and into the cold light of reality.
Real space slowed to a flickering crawl. Centuries passed that were mere seconds for the faint figures ranged around the courtyard. Cohen felt his core programs unravelling like frayed rope. Out of their tatters arose a new being as terrible as death and as cold as truth. And Cohen stood toe to toe with the creature and breathed the breath of his soul into it until he doubted he would have a soul when the breath was over.
The Enders flicked the safeties off their guns in a long cascading ripple that flowed and echoed through the courtyard.
Moshe was the first one to understand what had happened. “Ash,” he murmured. “Look.”
The faces of the Enders were still impassive and barely conscious, their minds locked into the flow of EMET’s Emergent networks. But their weapons were trained on Ash and her men.
And not only the Israeli weapons.
Ash’s eyes slid toward Gavi in a silent question.
Gavi looked at Cohen, who stood wavering and blinking while a dusting of snow accumulated on Roland’s shoulders.
“Go home,” Cohen said in a voice that was neither his nor Roland’s. “All of you. We need to think. Maybe you can still have your war. But not today.”
The Enders took Ash and Moshe in hand with something so like their usual cold efficiency that Arkady would have thought they were still being controlled from the IDF bunkers if he hadn’t seen the Israeli and Palestinian units acting as a single, smoothly coordinated organism.
Still, there was one thing the Enders hadn’t reckoned with: Osnat.
“Moshe!” she called, so harshly that every conscious person in the courtyard instinctively spun around to face her. She was white-faced and trembling. And she still had her rifle in her hands.
“It was you all along,” she said in a voice that trembled dangerously.
“You and Ash, working with Turner. Not Gavi. Not Absalom.”
“Oh, it was Absalom, all right,” Moshe said, casting a furious glance in Gavi’s direction. “Didi and Gavi were turning the Office inside out looking for their damn mole. We couldn’t take one step without setting off their trip-wires and trap commands. They would have blown our operation sky high if we hadn’t pulled the wool over their eyes in Tel Aviv.”
Osnat had grown suddenly, desperately still. “Oh, no,” she whispered. “Not Tel Aviv. Not Gur.”
“What do you want from me, Osnat? Excuses? Apologies? He was my friend too. You think I enjoyed it?”
The rifle trembled in Osnat’s hands. She raised the barrel toward Moshe’s chest, and out of the corner of his eye Arkady saw the Enders begin to train their sights on her.
“Osnat!”
Gavi had come up behind her and now he stepped into her line of vision, keeping his hands carefully visible.
“Let it go,” he said. “You can’t bring Gur back that way.”
“Get out of my way!”
“Let it go, Osnat.”
“I can’t let it go,”she said. But she let Gavi take the gun from her.
The Enders closed in on Arkady, moving him toward the gate with the smooth efficiency of ants passing booty down a foraging trail.
He looked back just once as they stepped through the door in the gate. Moshe was slumped on the ground. Ash was still standing. Osnat was weeping, her head buried in Gavi’s chest, and Cohen and Li had vanished beneath a flock of ministering Enders.
Arkasha stood alone in the trampled snow, looking so utterly lost and desolate that Arkady wondered if a man could die of freedom.
INCONCEIVABLE BEINGS
Let us place our hope in those inconceivable beings who will arise from man, just as man arose from the beasts.
They caught a long march rocket out of Shiuquan Spaceport.
The ancient spaceport sprawled across the glacier-fed floodplains of what had once been the Gobi Desert, weathered by storms of dust the color of sunset, brutal in its simplicity.
Korchow and Arkady were suited and strapped in by Uigur tribeswomen whose stolid gazes and flat-planed faces reminded Arkady briefly and faintly of Catherine Li. The women prepped and dressed the two Syndicate constructs with the impersonal disinterest of stevedores hauling cargo dockside.
The preparations were archaic and alarming; Arkady had boosted off-planet before, but never off such a heavy planet or riding on such antiquated hardware. Still, Korchow didn’t seem worried, or even very interested in the proceedings, so Arkady hoped there wasn’t much to worry about. They would boost into orbit and meet with their jump-ship offshore of the String of Pearls Arc. The trajectory had been carefully planned to avoid all unnecessary human contact.
Neither construct spoke during liftoff, or when the secondaries kicked in.
Rendezvous in seventeen hours and counting,the shipboard computer announced in what must have been intended to be a soothing contralto.
“How long until we reach Gilead?” Arkady asked Korchow.
“What?” Korchow turned away from the window, his face a shadowed landscape haloed by the black void beyond the porthole. “What did you say about Gilead?”
He seemed dazed by the contrast between the darkness outside and the brightly lit cabin. He had been like this ever since the Palestinians brought Arkady to him. It was as if Korchow had been used up, and was now a mere husk of the man who had so terrified Arkady.
“I said when do we get home?”
“How can you be so blind, Arkady?”
Understanding seeped through Arkady’s mind a moment before Korchow’s next words, and in a way that made him see he’d known and yet refused to know.
“We’re not bound for Gilead. There isno Gilead, Arkady. Not for either of us.”
“You,”Arkady breathed. “You interrogated me for months, and you never got sick. You’re a carrier as well.”