Upgrade(70)

She withdrew the blade.

“Throw it across the room.”

It clattered to the floor behind us.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You can’t stop me.”

If I’d known to a certainty that killing Kara would end the threat of the upgrade getting unleashed across the world, I would’ve taken my thumb off the remote switch. But she had mentioned a virologist. And she’d recruited and upgraded Andrew, who’d shown up in Glasgow. She had other people working with her, people who could finish the upgrade in her absence. And it sounded like the finish line was close.

“Very slowly,” I said, “climb off me.”

She moved onto the floor.

“Lie on your stomach,” I said.

She rolled over, facedown in the broken glass, said, “If you make a move toward the gun—”

“I won’t.”

I shot a glance toward the front door. Twenty feet away.

I sat up.

Came slowly to my feet.

Kara watching me from the corner of her right eye, her palms on the floor, ready to spring up.

I took a careful step back.

And then another.

When I was ten feet from the massive door, I turned and bolted for the entrance. I heard glass crunching behind me, Kara on the move, but I didn’t stop, hoping the door was open, because the extra second I would burn fumbling with the lock would probably cost me my life.

I wrenched the door open and launched across the threshold as a gunshot rang out behind me.

Sprinted down the steps.

Out of the sphere of the exterior chandelier’s illumination, accelerating into the freezing rain, the remote switch still clutched in my hand.

Don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall.

More gunshots ricocheted off the surrounding mountains, my bare feet holding a tenuous traction in the mud.

I didn’t look back, didn’t stop.

Racing downhill across the glade, just needing to reach the darker shelter of the woods, my pulse slamming along at 195 bpm, and between the bass drum of my heart and the drenching rainfall, I had no idea if my sister was in pursuit.

I entered the burned forest, the terrain steepening, my night vision pulling every available thread of light, dodging trees, leaping over logs, and I could feel gravity threatening to send me careening down the mountain.

I slowed down, finally coming to a stop behind a boulder.

Strained to listen.

Nothing.

I was beginning to shiver. My feet had been shredded, and they burned with cold. I heard something. Not a footstep. Some distant, mechanical noise. It was a garage door opening.

Twelve seconds later, two cones of light swept briefly through the forest, brilliantly illuminating the pouring rain. I heard tires rolling over pavement.

I only saw it for a second: the flash of headlights streaking down the driveway.

Kara was leaving. She didn’t need this fight. She’d already won.

With my left hand, I pulled the disperser out of my pocket and manually powered it down. Only when I was sure the coupling motors had stopped running did I let my thumb slide off the remote switch.

As I shivered uncontrollably, black thoughts sailed through my mind.

You failed.

The war is lost.

Somehow, she had ramped up her abilities so far beyond mine that she was now capable of dodging bullets. Yes, I had survived, but to what end? I didn’t stand a chance.

And then something occurred to me.



* * *



—

The door to my mother’s lodge was still open.

I walked in.

The silence blared.

Kara had taken the Kimber, but that wasn’t why I had returned.

I went upstairs, found the bedroom Kara had been using. The closet was still full of her clothes. A glass of water rested on the bedside table.

I entered the bathroom. Kara’s toiletries covered the vanity, and among them I saw what I’d been looking for. I picked up the hairbrush, examined it closely, and registered the faintest glow of hope.

Still trapped among the bristles were several strands of my sister’s hair, and one of them still had the follicle attached.





I LEFT LATE THAT night, heading west out of southern Colorado, and as the first hint of dawn brought color to the sky, I found myself on the deserted roads of Monument Valley, the sandstone spires catching rays of early sunlight, even as the lowlands lingered in the purple, predawn gloom.

I pulled over onto the shoulder to give myself a break.

Stepped outside.

The silence was towering.

Not even a breath of wind, a wisp of cloud.

And as I watched the light advance down the otherworldly buttes toward the floor of a valley that had once been a Paleozoic sea, I took comfort in the permanence of this landscape.

The desert lay under a fragile inch of snow, and all around me were red mesas and pinnacles that had existed for hundreds of millions of years before humans ruled the Earth and would continue to exist long after we were gone.



* * *



—

It was a late January evening, and still a hundred degrees as I sped down I-15 toward Vegas. Several miles away, the spectacle of the Strip exploded from the desert basin like the fantastical bloom of some alien flower.

I approached the clusterfuck of casinos, passing the Meta Frame at the north end—a supertall hotel built in the shape of a one-thousand-meter picture frame, where the picture was a continuous projection of random social media wall feeds.