Sandra considered this. “We need a relay.”
Angel raised a questioning eyebrow.
“The place is shielded, and we can’t trust the copters to act entirely on their own. So we use them as waypoints. The copters search the prison, and then we can teleport to the location of any one of them.”
“But they won’t be able to signal out to us.”
“That’s why at least one needs to be left near the entrance. As a conduit to the outside.”
Angel nodded. “That could work. But there’s one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The varcolac is still out there, planning to attack. For all we know, it could be the same kind of attack that destroyed the stadium. Complete devastation.”
“That’s why we have to be fast. We need to be able to teleport her out before that happens.”
“But what about everyone else in the prison? The other prisoners, the guards? They’ll all die.”
Sandra raised her hands helplessly. “We can’t rescue all of them. Maybe if we get Alex out of there, it won’t attack the prison at all.”
Angel sucked on a lip, thinking. “I think we need to be prepared to fight it.”
“Prepared? You haven’t seen this thing. There’s no being prepared.”
“As much as we can.”
“There’s maybe one thing,” Sandra said. “It’ll add to the confusion at any rate, and that could be a good thing.”
“What are you thinking?”
“We need to call the Muncy State Prison ahead of time,” she said, “And tell them we’ve planted a bomb.”
By nightfall, running on almost thirty-six hours without sleep, Ryan had his equation. This new pattern would give them another week, or a few days at minimum, to judge by the time it had taken the varcolac to solve the patterns in the past. In that time, he could develop a suite of backup equations to have in reserve. There might be no hope for the world, but at least he could delay Armageddon for as long as possible.
He loaded the new equation into the wormhole pattern regulator and sat back to watch the new configuration form in his photoionization display. He was so tired. His eyes stung, and his muscles ached, and he felt jittery from all the caffeine he’d drunk. This had to work. It had to.
But the moment the pattern started to form, it flew apart like dandelion seeds in the wind. The full dataset hadn’t even finished loading before it unraveled.
Dismayed, Ryan paged through the logs, trying to understand. Had he loaded an old pattern by mistake? But no. Not only had the varcolac cut through his new equation like a scalpel through dry skin, it had started to do so before he had even fully loaded it. It was impossible.
But it had happened, so of course it was possible. It meant that the varcolac had known what equation he was going to use before he had even set it in place. It wasn’t just out-thinking him. It was living inside his mind.
And suddenly, it was there. The moment he realized that it must be, Ryan could sense its presence. In fact, now that he thought of it, the new equation he had just devised was beyond even his capability. He was thinking on a higher level than ever before, picturing higher-dimensional shapes in his mind like no human could. It was communicating with him, but not through words or pictures or codes. It had infiltrated his own sense of self.
Chills went down his spine. He didn’t feel tired anymore. There was something inside him, something he couldn’t get out. Normally, Ryan hated the idea of anything foreign inside his body. He found body piercing disturbing, and he hated getting splinters. The idea of having pins in a broken bone or undergoing something like cardiac catheterization was intolerable. But this was different. The varcolac wasn’t physical. It wasn’t in his body, not in the same way. There had been theories for years that the human brain was too capable for the space it inhabited, that its processing capacity might in fact reach through electrical fields into other dimensions. It was in this domain—in Ryan’s mind—that the varcolac was interacting.
How long had it been there? He remembered the duplicate Ryan, the one that had pushed the button releasing the varcolac when he, Ryan, had not intended to. He recognized that now for what it had been: a standing probability wave, quickly resolved, in which both possibilities occurred. The sort of probability wave that had previously been experienced only when encountering the varcolac. It seemed circular: encountering the varcolac had caused him to split into versions of himself that both did not and did release the varcolac, the second of which caused him to encounter the varcolac, which caused the split in the first place. But that was exactly the sort of behavior that occurred among particles on the quantum scale.
Regardless of the cause, the varcolac was there in his mind. It was subtly influencing him, reading his thoughts, increasing his capabilities. It was like taking off a veil to see that the world was a lot brighter and clearer than he had realized. Only it wasn’t his eyes that had been veiled, but his mind. He could imagine anything, solve anything, keep any amount of information at the front of his consciousness. It was taking him over in ways he didn’t understand, making him into something newer and better and more powerful. And he loved it.
CHAPTER 20
Sandra and Angel stood on a hillside behind the prison, the quadcopters hovering over their heads like a swarm of large, well-trained insects. It was not yet light. Sandra had hardly slept, but she felt wired, partly from the coffee she’d been drinking, and partly from sheer terror.
The fence blocked their view of most of what was inside. “Once we start this, it’ll be hard to back out,” she said. “You’re sure you want to do this? You’ve never even met Alex.”
“But if we don’t rescue her, who’s going to tell me the embarrassing truths about your childhood?” Angel said. “You’re hardly a trustworthy source.”
“It was her childhood, too.”
“Ah, good point. Let’s leave her in there, then.” Angel cocked his head at her and smiled. “Ready?”
Sandra sighed. “What if we hurt someone?”
“We’re rescuing them, remember? If we do nothing, then the varcolac kills them all.”
“They might not see it that way.”
“Alas, no.” Angel put a solemn palm on his chest. “It is our lot in life to be misunderstood.”
“Okay, joker,” Sandra said. “Let’s do this.”
They had phoned the prison at midnight and told them a bomb had been hidden in the prison and set to go off at 5:46 the next morning. She didn’t know what the prison administration had done in response, but it wasn’t what they had hoped. At least, Sandra and Angel hadn’t observed any activity that looked like large-scale prisoner evacuation.
“Here we go,” Angel said. On the south side of the prison was a field of rocks that had been excavated from the ground when the new prison was built. Angel stretched out his hand (a little overdramatically, Sandra thought), and teleported a large rock into the middle of the prison’s perimeter wall. The wall exploded, shattered concrete flying everywhere in a fountaining cloud of dust. A klaxon began wailing. Sandra was ready with the next rock, and teleported it into the wall of the prison itself. Before the dust had even cleared, a dozen quadcopters were racing across the field and in through the gap.