Written in Fire (The Brilliance Trilogy Book 3) (12 page)

Cooper took a breath, let it out. “I’ll pass.”

“You could go to my game room. Erik had it designed. It’s the same resolution, but the characters are controlled by a predictive network. You move and the system makes the holos react. He’ll fall, bleed, scream. You won’t actually feel the chair hit, though.”

“Haven’t figured out how to do that yet, huh?”

“They have,” she said. “But it takes a brain implant. You run a cable into it, and it makes you see and feel everything like it’s real. It’s pretty cool, but I don’t like the idea of something in my brain.”

“Me either.”
And I
s
houldn’t have let Soren into mine.
Cooper set down the chair, dropped into it, and rubbed his eyes. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I liked it.”

He looked up, surprised. Superficially, she looked like an average eleven-year-old girl. Four and a half feet tall, baby cheeks, rounded shoulders, coltish legs with knees together. The purple hair was unusual, but it was clearly a distraction—look at my hair, not at me—and the bangs gave her cover to retreat behind.

Her eyes, though, were something else. Something older. It was in the way she examined things. There was none of the self-conscious diffidence of a little girl.

And that’s a tragedy,
Cooper thought.
Because no matter what she’s seen, no matter that her insights help the world’s richest man shape the future, she is still a little girl who should be playing with toys, not diagnosing monsters.
He saw a flicker of a smile on her lips, and got the sense she was picking up on his thoughts. To change the subject, he said, “You liked it?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand, why would you—”

“Because you’re pure.”

He laughed before he could stop himself. “Sorry, Mills, but pure is about the last thing I am.”

She sat down on the opposite chair, pulled her knees up, and wrapped her arms around them. A little girl’s posture, but like her eyes, the smile she gave him belonged to an older woman. It was a look that said,
Aww, aren’t you adorable. I’m going to bat you around for a while.
“Why did you hit him?”

“I lost control.”

“No, then you would have killed him.”

“I almost did. Until I realized he was trying to goad me into it.”

“Of course he was,” she said, “but you still want to. It wasn’t just anger. I could see it. You want to kill him because he hurt your son. Because he’s hurt a lot of people. But also because you feel sorry for him.”

“You were here to read him,” Cooper said drily, “not me.”

“I can’t. The way he sees the world, I don’t . . . it’s like looking at someone through a kaleidoscope. What I see isn’t right. It’s warped and blurry and just wrong.” She shrugged. “So I read you instead.”

That was a sobering thought. A reader of Millie’s ability observing him in an emotionally charged scene like that one, well, she’d have all of his true secrets: the impulses he knew he should hate himself for having, the urges that dwelt in the dark places, even the part of him that relished the role he’d just inhabited.

The thought, a voice from his subconscious, shocked him.
Is that true? Are you comfortable with being a torturer?

Because you shouldn’t kid yourself. That’s what happens next. Soren knows something that will help you find John Smith. You’re as certain of it as you are of the fact that he won’t willingly tell you.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“Is it?” He shook his head. “I didn’t enjoy being the person I was in there. Most of me didn’t, anyway. I know why it’s important, and I’ll do worse if I have to. But I don’t know that it’s okay.”

“Why?”

Her question didn’t sound entirely sincere; it had a leading tone, like it was meant to instruct. Coming from an eleven-year-old, that should have been irritating, but Millie wasn’t just any kid, and he decided to answer honestly.

“Because it’s not his fault. He didn’t chose to be born a freak. He never really had a chance. Everything he is, it’s because of his gift. It put him outside the rest of us, forever.”

As he said it, he realized that the same thing applied to her.

And then he saw her reading him thinking that. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“It’s not. I hate this for you. You deserve a normal life.”

For a long moment, neither said anything, then Millie ran a hand through her bangs, let a purple curtain fall between them. From behind it, she said, “I come here sometimes. To watch him.”

“Soren? Why?”

“Because I can’t read him. Sometimes the voices from everyone else, even the people who care about me . . .” She blew a breath. “It’s quiet here. Quiet, but I’m not alone.”

He let that lie amidst the hum of computer fans and the motion of holograms. Finally, he checked the time. “I’m sorry, Millie. I have to go.”

“Oh?” She looked at him. “Going to see Shannon, huh?”

He nodded.

“Are you going to tell her you had sex with Natalie?”

Cooper opened his mouth, closed it. Screened a dozen responses. “You think that’s a mistake?”

“How would I know? I’m eleven.”

He laughed, stood up. Put a hand out as if to touch her, a tentative move, not sure she’d welcome it. When she didn’t flinch, he gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Don’t stay too long, okay?”

“Sure.”

“By the way, you were right. I do feel sorry for Soren.”

“Even though he hurt your son.”

“Yes.” He shrugged. “It won’t stop me. But it doesn’t make what I have to do okay.”

“You see?” she said. “Pure.”

CHAPTER 14

The New Sons of Liberty made it nearly five miles before they heard the voice of God.

Those five miles took seven hours. “There’s a reason,” Ronnie Delgado had said, “Epstein was able to buy half of Wyoming, and it boils down to, ‘It’s a shit heap.’”

Luke Hammond couldn’t disagree, at least not about the part they were walking through. He knew there was purple mountain majesty somewhere, but the landscape here was ugly, rugged, and cold. The uneven ground was easily enough navigated by men on foot, but eighteen-wheelers were built for interstates. It seemed like every couple of hundred yards a truck got stuck, lost a tire to a sinkhole, snapped an axle.

What few roads had existed before New Canaan was built generally cut straight across the state, with hard-pack paths branching off to ranches and mines. Since then Epstein had laid a system of smooth highways, but they all tapered to fortified entrance points. Nothing that the Sons couldn’t have swept aside, but General Miller believed, and Luke concurred, that a direct attack risked unnecessary consequences. There would be plenty of fighting later. Better to make what distance they could bloodlessly, jam the knifepoint of the militia into the body of the Holdfast before they had to fight for every step.

When they heard the voice of God, Luke was walking beside Delgado and dictating a mental e-mail to Josh and Zack. An old habit from when he was overseas frequently. Being career special operations meant he couldn’t be the kind of father who never missed a ball game. But he compensated for it as best he could by spending time with them, speaking honestly and directly, and sharing his experience of the world as if the three of them were adventuring in it together. Through his e-mails to them, the three of them had together reconnoitered a Moroccan bazaar, rare silks sold beside Chinese radios, body odor layered beneath wafts of cumin and sandalwood. Via e-mail, together they’d been stricken dumb by the night sounds of the Salvadoran jungle, a symphony of insects, the mating calls of writhing things, the endless dance of predator and prey lit green by night vision goggles.

How can I describe for you, my fine sons, what it is to march into Wyoming? With rhetoric and speeches? With our grim sense of duty and righteousness?

Better to tell you about aching feet and the hot burn of developing blisters.

About the cacophony that is twenty thousand men picking their way across this crusted moonscape. Conversation, footsteps, and rock skitter, laughter. The steady tap of a rifle stock against a man’s belt. The rumble-chutter of semis crawling at a mile an hour punctuated by the hiss of air brakes. Crisp air, and the smells of dirt and coffee and fart.

My image of the Holdfast was formed by the media, most of which focused on the cities, especially Tesla. You’ve no doubt seen the same documentaries: how a plan and $300 billion turned a desert plain into an abnorm Disneyland, filled with broad avenues and public squares, electric cars and genetically engineered trees, water condensers and solar fields, all radiating out from the mirrored castle of Epstein Industries. Even though I knew better, some part of me imagined that not far past the fence line, we would march into this bizarre world.

Instead, I’ve spent most of the morning putting my back to a truck, along with thirty other men, intent on pushing it over a rut—

Which was as far as he’d gotten when they heard the voice of God.

It was sourceless, coming from every direction at once; in front, behind, above, it seemed even to vibrate up through his boots, booming so loud men covered their ears. A crisp female voice reciting a short message that made his bones ache with each reverberating syllable.

A
TTENTION
.

Y
OU ARE ON PRIVATE LAND.

Y
OU ARE NOT LIBERATORS.
Y
OU HAVE NOT BEEN INVITED.
Y
OU HAVE BROKEN INTO OUR HOME TO DO US HARM.

W
E WILL DEFEND OURSELVES.

L
EAVE THE
N
EW
C
ANAAN
H
OLDFAST IMMEDIATELY.

T
HIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING.

As abruptly as it had started, the voice was gone, leaving no trace but the last word echoing across the plain to the distant mountains.

Everything stopped. The carnival atmosphere evaporated. Men looked at one another, uncertainty in darting eyes. Sheepishly, they took hands from their ears; those who had dropped rose to their feet.

For a moment, Luke found himself wondering how the abnorms had done it. Whether there was some sort of buried audio system that they’d crossed, or planes high above them, or if the Holdfast had found a way to simply beam sound. Then he realized that all of the nearby men were looking at him. A hundred or more, and beyond them, thousands, all waiting to be inspired.

He didn’t have Miller’s gift for speeches. So he did the only thing he could think of. He started walking again.

Ronnie Delgado quickly fell into step, and then others beside him, and then there was a ragged cheer, and someone started yelling, “This! Ends! Now!” They were all picking it up, him included, and the words meant something, one voice shared by a hundred throats, and then a thousand, and then all. They stomped forward, everyone’s step quickening. Vehicles jammed on their horns, blowing a raspberry to Erik Epstein and the abnorms and the new world that had usurped their old one. Luke felt a swelling in his chest and a howl in his heart, and Shakespeare’s words bounced around his brain,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,
all of it backed by the howl of a thousand truck horns—

—which stopped.

All at once. As if a switch had been flipped.

Luke paused. Looked at his watch. The face was blank.

Something caught his eye, a bright spot falling from above. A sort of bird, only it was made of metal and plastic. It was tumbling end over end, and on it he caught the letters CNN just before it collided with the ground.

A newsdrone just fell out of the sky. Which means an EMP
.
Just like Miller predicted. Which will be followed by—

The world exploded.

Something spattered him, hard and cold, dirt, the sound of the missile strike hitting just after the debris and a wave of heat that tossed him sideways. Luke smacked the ground, the impact ringing through his knees and skinning his palms. He scrambled to stand, reflex taking over, shouting to take cover, to get away from the trucks, not that anyone could hear him, not that there was any cover to take. He couldn’t even hear himself over the screaming whistle-and-boom of finger missiles raining into the earth, each bomb tossing bodies silhouetted against ragged fireballs, and then a missile caught the nearest eighteen-wheeler, the gas tank bursting with a shocking violence that threw him down again, backward this time, the heat blistering his skin, sound fading to a ringing hum underlying the whistles-and-booms and whistles-and-booms, earth showering upward in clouds against the greasy black smoke of gasoline fires, the trucks going one at a time, bucking and jumping like rodeo bulls with broken backs, supplies bursting from them, a rain of canned food and blanket scraps and burning paper. He made it to his feet only to have something heavy hit him and drive him down again, smashing the wind from his lungs, the thing heavy and wet, and he went to shove it off and found one of his hands inside Ronnie Delgado’s remaining half of a head, what he could see of the man’s expression a strange sort of surprise, like he finally got the big joke that had been out there all along, and then Luke was crawling, someone’s boot trampling his back, another on his hand, the faint pop of gunfire all around. Men were aiming at the sky, trying to take down the drones, a ridiculous waste of ammunition given the altitude and speed they’d be flying, not to mention the fact that they’d been shielded against the EMP and so were unlikely to be damaged by bullets, and then smoke and swirling dust hid the world, and he squinted and closed his mouth and shoved out from underneath what was left of Delgado, the former national guardsman and ranch hand and comedian whose brother had been the first in their family to go to college, and he was on his feet, cough-choking, waiting for more whistle-screams and the deep ground shake that followed them, the fire and blood and smoke.

None came.

None came.

None came.

He straightened, look around. His head throbbed and vision pulsed, his hand was torn and bleeding, his back clenched, and standing took effort. In the sudden absence of explosions, mostly what he heard was the ringing in his ears, and past that, the crackle of flames from the trucks and the screams of men torn apart.

And then the voice of God, booming again across the desert:

F
IRING WILL RECOMMENCE SHORTLY.

W
ALK AWAY.

B
ETTER STILL: RUN.

Luke broke into a smile.
Goddamn, but Miller was right.

Something ran into his eye, and he wiped the blood away. He had to find the general. If Miller had died in the bombardment, everything would fall apart. The whole plan. Luke had proposed a hundred strategies to protect him: keeping him in the rearguard, choosing men as decoys, a team of bodyguards to throw themselves atop him. Miller had refused them all.

“When it comes,” the general had said, “I’ll take my chances like everyone else. We’ll just have to ride it out.”

“And then what?” Luke had replied.

“Then we’ll show that the emperor is naked.”

Luke pushed through men scattered and rising, past smoldering craters and burning trucks. He had to find Miller, had to, because otherwise the abnorms’ bluff would win the day—

“EPSTEIN!”

The voice wasn’t nearly so loud as God’s. But the bullhorn, backed by the full force of General Sam Miller’s lungs, still punched right through the ringing in his ears.

Luke turned, saw his old friend. The crazy sonuvabitch had climbed on top of a semi, one of those that wasn’t burning, though the trailer had taken a hit, the
S
UPPLIES
part gone, leaving just
F
INEST
, and a gaping hole with packaged food spilling out.

“I’M RIGHT HERE, EPSTEIN!”

Move,
Luke told his legs, and they did. First a stagger-walk, then a trot, and finally a run that took him to the semi’s front bumper.

“YOU WANT A TARGET? WANT TO END THIS?”

Luke scrabbled up the hood, gripped a chrome exhaust pipe that singed his fingers, held on long enough to pull himself atop the shipping container. Miller saw him, flashed him a grim smile.

It was the same look he’d worn two days ago, when they’d made the plan. Sitting in Miller’s tent, the never-ending wind tugging at the canvas, the general had said, “Okay, strategic analysis. You command a technologically superior force with significant defensive capabilities. However, your
offensive
matériel is limited. You’re attacked by a large and determined enemy, and you don’t have the armaments to wear them down slowly. Simply put, you’ve only got so many bombs, because you weren’t supposed to have any at all. What do you do?”

“Simple,” Luke had replied. “You throw it all at them at once. Everything you’ve got. You hit as hard as you can as fast as you can, and count on fear to do the rest. Same reason we nuked both Hiroshima
and
Nagasaki, using our entire atomic arsenal.” Luke had paused. “We’re going to take a hell of a beating.”

“Once you factor in wounded and fled, probably 20 percent. But those who remain will become an army, instead of a militia.”

“Of course, if we’re wrong, it will be over.”

“If we’re wrong, it’s over already.”

Time to test that logic.
Atop the shipping container, Luke felt naked, every instinct screaming to find cover, but he thought of his burning boys, and stood at attention.

“WE ARE THE LEADERS OF THE NEW SONS OF LIBERTY,” Miller shouted. “YOU WANT TO END THIS RIGHT NOW? GO AHEAD AND RECOMMENCE FIRING.”

Then he lowered the bullhorn, tilted his head back, and spread his arms cruciform. There was blood on his cheek and dirt on his uniform, and against the smoke and rising fire he looked like some primitive war god.

Standing beside him, Luke did the same. He kept his eyes open, staring at the cold and swirling skies, where somewhere above them drones circled invisibly.

Flames crackled. Men groaned. Somewhere, a bird shrieked.

Then he heard the first voice.

“This ends now!”

And a second, and a third, and a thousandth, drowning out the screams and the fire and whatever might have held them back.