“Bring them to me! Bring me one and then another! Bring them that we should live … ”
A wall of sound, ascending in fierce unison: “ … in this way and no other!”
A pair of figures appeared in the gap. They stumbled forward, pushed by men who quickly stepped away. The flames rose again behind them, a door of fire, sealing them inside for the taking.
The crowd roared.
“Ring! Ring! Ring!”
A stampede of feet. The air shuddering, hammering.
“Ring! Ring! Ring!”
And that was when he felt her. In a bright and terrible burst, Babcock felt her. The shadow behind the shadow, the tear in the fabric of night. The one who carried the seed of forever but was not of his blood, was not of the Twelve or the Zero.
The one called Amy.
Peter heard it all from the ventilation shaft. The chanting, the panicked cries of the cattle, and then the silence—of bated breath, of some terrible spectacle about to unfold—and then the explosion of cheers. Heat was rising in waves to his belly and, with it, the choking fumes of diesel smoke. The shaft was just wide enough for a single person crawling on his elbows. Somewhere below him, gathering in the tunnel that connected the ring to the prison’s main entrance, were Olson’s men. There was no way to coordinate their arrivals, nor to communicate with the others stationed in the crowd. They would simply have to guess.
Peter saw an opening ahead: a metal grate in the floor of the duct. He pressed his face against it, gazing downward. Below the grate he could see the slats of the catwalk and farther still, another twenty meters, the floor of the ring, wrapped by a trench of burning fuel.
The floor was covered in blood.
On the balconies, the crowd had taken up its chanting again. Ring! Ring! Ring! Ring! Peter guessed he and the others were positioned over the east end of the room now. They would have to cross the catwalk in full view of the crowd to reach the stairs to the floor below. He glanced back to Hollis, who nodded, and lifted the grate free, pushing it to the side. Then he freed the safety on his pistol and crawled forward so that his feet straddled the vent.
Amy, Peter thought, it’s nothing good, what’s down there. Do what you do or we’re all dead.
He pushed himself off, dropping feet first through the opening.
He fell and fell, long enough to wonder: Why am I always falling? The distance to the catwalk was more than he’d expected—not two meters but four or even five—and he hit the metal with a bone-rattling bang. He rolled. The pistol was gone, squirted from his grasp. And it was as he rolled that he glimpsed, from the corner of his eye, a figure below: wrists bound, body slack with submission, wearing a sleeveless shirt that Peter recognized. His mind grabbed hold of this image, which was also a memory—of the smell of pyre smoke on the day they’d burned the body of Zander Phillips, standing in the sunshine outside the power station, and the name stitched over the pocket. Armando.
Theo.
The man in the ring was Theo.
His brother wasn’t alone. There was someone else beside him, a man on his knees. He was stripped to the waist, slumped forward on the ground so that his face was obscured. And as Peter’s vision widened he realized that what he was seeing on the floor of the ring was the cattle, or what had once been the cattle—they were strewn in pieces everywhere, as if they had been situated at the heart of an explosion—and crouched at the center of this heaping mass of blood and flesh and bone, its face bent to bury itself in the remains, its body twitching with a darting motion as it drank, was a viral—but not like any viral Peter knew. It was the largest he had ever seen, that anyone had ever seen, its curled bulk so immense that it was like some new being entirely.
“Peter! You’re in time to watch the show!”
He had come to rest on his back, useless as a turtle. Jude, standing above him, wearing a look that Peter had no name for, a dark pleasure beyond words, was aiming a shotgun at his head. Peter felt the shudder of footsteps coming toward them—more orange-suited men racing down the catwalks from every direction.
Jude was standing directly below the vent.
“Go ahead,” Peter said.
Jude smiled. “How noble.”
“Not you,” Peter said, and flicked his eyes upward. “Hollis.”
Jude lifted his face in time for the bullet from Hollis’s rifle to strike him just above the right ear. A misty bloom of pink: Peter felt the air dampen with it. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the shotgun released from Jude’s hands, clattering to the catwalk. A large-butted pistol was tucked at his waist; Peter saw Jude’s hand grope for it, blindly searching. Then something released inside him, blood began to pour from his eyes, a pitiful weeping of blood, and he dropped to his knees, flopping forward, his face frozen in an expression of eternal wonderment, as if to say: I can’t believe I’m dead.
It was Mausami who killed the operator manning the fuel pump.
She and Amy had entered from the main tunnel just before the crowd arrived and had hidden under the stairs that connected the floor of the courtyard to the balconies. For many minutes they had waited, huddled together, emerging only when they heard the sound of the cattle being driven in, the wild cheers exploding above. The air was broiling, choked with smoke and fumes.
There was something terrible behind the flames.
As the viral tore into the cattle, the crowd seemed to detonate, everyone pumping their fists, chanting and stomping their feet, like a single being caught in some great and terrible ecstasy. Some were holding children on their shoulders so they could see. The cattle were screaming now, bucking and tearing around the ring, racing toward the flames and backing away in confusion, a mad dance between two poles of death. While Mausami watched, the viral sprang forward and snatched one by its hind legs, lifting upward with a deep cracking sound, twisting until the legs came free, then flinging them through the air to slap against the cages in a spray of blood. The creature left that one where it was—its front legs twitching at the dirt, struggling to pull its ruined body forward—and seized another by the horns, applying the same twisting motion to break its neck, then shoved its face into the stilled flesh at the base of the animal’s throat, the viral’s whole torso seeming to inflate as it drank, the steer’s body contracting with each of the viral’s muscular inhalations, shriveling before Mausami’s eyes as the blood was pulled from its body.
She did not see the rest; she’d turned her face away.
“Bring them to me!” a voice was calling. “Bring me one and then another! Bring them that we should live … ”
“ … in this way and no other!”
That was when she saw Theo.
In that instant, Mausami experienced a collision of joy and terror so violent it was as if she were stepping from her own body. Her breath seized up inside her; she felt dizzy and sick. Two men in jumpsuits were pushing Theo forward, driving him through a gap in the flames. His eyes had an empty, almost bovine look; he seemed to have no idea what was happening around him. He lifted his face to the crowd, blinking vacantly.
She tried to call out to him, but her voice was drowned in the foam of voices. She looked for Amy, hoping the girl would know what to do, but couldn’t see her anywhere. Above and around her the voices were chanting again:
“Ring! Ring! Ring!”
And then the second man was brought in, held at the elbows by two guards. His head was bowed, his feet seemed barely to touch the floor as the men, supporting his weight, dragged him forward and pitched him onto the ground and darted away. The cheers of the crowd were deafening now, a wash of sound. Theo staggered onward, scanning the crowd, as if someone there might be bringing help. The second man had brought himself upright on his knees.
The second man was Finn Darrell.
Suddenly a woman was standing before her: a familiar face, with a long pink scar stitched to the cheekbone like a seam. Her jumpsuit bulged with the belly of her pregnancy.
“I know you,” the woman said.
Mausami backed away, but the woman gripped her by the arm, her eyes locking on Mausami’s face with a fierce intensity. “I know you, I know you!”
“Let me go!”
She pulled away. Behind her, the woman was frantically pointing, shouting, “I know her, I know her!”
Mausami ran. All thoughts had left her but one: she had to get to Theo. But there was no way past the flames. The viral was almost done with the cattle; the last lay twitching under its jaws. In another few seconds it would rise and see the two men—see Theo—and that would be the end.
Then Mausami saw the pump. A huge greasy bulk, connected by long trailing hoses to a pair of bulging fuel tanks, weeping with rust. The operator was cradling a shotgun across his chest; a blade hung on his belt in a leather sheath. He was facing away, his eyes, like everyone’s, trained on the spectacle unfolding beyond the fluttering wall of flame.
She felt a flicker of doubt—she’d never killed a man before—but it was not enough to stop her; in a single motion she stepped behind the guard and drew the blade and shoved it with all her strength into his lower back. She felt a stiffening, the muscles of his frame drawing tight, like a bow; from deep inside his throat came an exhalation of surprise.
She felt him die.
Punching through the din, a voice from high above: Peter’s? “Theo, run!”
The pump was a throbbing confusion of levers and knobs. Where were Michael and Caleb when you needed them? Mausami picked the largest one—a wild guess, a lever as long as her forearm—and wrapped it in her fist and pulled.
“Stop her!” someone yelled. “Stop that woman!”
As Mausami felt the shot entering her upper thigh—a strangely trivial pain, like the sting of a bee—she realized she’d done it. The flames were dying, guttering around the ring. The crowd was suddenly backing away from the wires, everyone yelling, chaos erupting. The viral had broken away from the last of the cattle, drawing itself erect—all throbbing light and eyes and claws and teeth, its smooth face and long neck and massive chest bibbed in blood. Its body looked swollen, like a tick’s. It stood at least three meters, maybe more. With a flick of its head it found Finn with its eyes, head cocking to the side, body tensing as it took aim, preparing to spring, and then it did; it seemed to cross the air between them at the speed of thought, invisible as a bullet was invisible, arriving all at once where Finn lay helpless. What happened next Mausami did not see clearly and was glad that she did not, it was so fast and terrible, like the cattle but vastly worse, because it was a man. A splash of blood like something bursting, and part of Finn went one way, and part of him another.
Theo, she thought, as the pain in her leg abruptly deepened—a wave of heat and light that bent her double. The leg folded beneath her, sending her pitching forward. Theo, I’m here. I’ve come to save you. We have a baby, Theo. Our baby is a boy.
As she fell she saw a figure sprinting across the ring. It was Amy. Her hair was pulling a trail of smoke; darting tongues of fire were licking at her clothing. The viral had shifted his attention toward Theo now. Amy charged between them, protecting Theo like a shield. Faced with the creature’s immense, bloated form, she seemed tiny, like a child.
And in that instant, which felt suspended—the whole world brought to a halt while the viral regarded the small figure before him—Mausami thought: that girl wants to say something. That girl is going to open her mouth and speak.
Twenty meters overhead, Hollis had dropped through the vent with his rifle, followed by Alicia, holding the RPG. She swung it toward the floor, pointing its barrel at the place where Amy and Babcock stood.
“I don’t have a shot!”
Caleb and Sara dropped through behind them. Peter snatched Jude’s shotgun from the floor of the catwalk and fired in the direction of the two men racing down the catwalk toward them. One man uttered a strangled cry and fell away, tumbling headfirst to the floor below.
“Shoot the viral!” he called to Alicia.
Hollis fired and the second man dropped, face-down, onto the catwalk.
“She’s too close!” Alicia said.
“Amy,” Peter yelled, “get out of there!”
The girl stood her ground. How long could she hold him that way? And where was Olson? The last of the fires had gone out; people were streaming down the stairs, an avalanche of orange jumpsuits. Theo, on his hands and knees, was backing away from the viral, but his heart was nowhere in this; he had accepted his fate, he had no strength to resist. Caleb and Sara had made it across the catwalk to the stairs now, descending into the melee on the balconies. Peter heard women screaming, children crying, a voice that sounded like Olson’s, rising over the din: “The tunnel! Everyone run to the tunnel!”
Mausami lurched into the ring.
“Over here!” She stumbled, catching herself with her hands as she fell to the floor. Her pants were soaked in blood. On all fours, she tried to rise. She was waving, screaming: “Look over here!”
Maus, Peter thought, keep back.
Too late. The spell was broken.
The viral rocked its face toward the ceiling and drew down into a crouch, its body gathering energy like a coiled spring, and then it was flying, lofting through the air. It rose toward them with a pitiless inevitability, arcing over their heads and seizing one of the ceiling struts, body rotating like child swinging on a tree limb—an oddly exhilarating, even joyful image—and landed on the catwalk with a shuddering clang.
I am Babcock.
We are Babcock.
“Lish—”
Peter felt the RPG sailing past his face, the scald of hot gas on his cheek; he knew what was going to happen before it did.
The grenade exploded. A punch of noise and heat and Peter was shoved backward into Alicia, the two of them tumbling onto the catwalk, but the catwalk wasn’t there. The catwalk was falling. Something caught and held and they banged down hard, and for a hopeful moment everything stopped. But then the structure lurched again, and with a pop of rivets and a groan of bending metal the end of the catwalk broke away from the ceiling, tilting toward the floor like the head of a hammer, falling.
Leon in the alley, face-down in the dirt. Goddamn, he thought. Where did that girl go?
Some kind of gag was in his mouth; his wrists were bound behind him. He tried to wriggle his feet, but they were tied, too. It was the big one, Hollis; Leon remembered now. Hollis had risen out of the shadows, swinging something, and the next thing Leon knew he was all alone in the dark and couldn’t move.
His nose was thick with snot and blood. Probably the son of a bitch had broken it. That was all he needed, a broken nose. He thought he’d cracked a couple of teeth, too, but with the gag in his mouth, his tongue stuffed behind it, he had no way to check.
