Illuminae (The Illuminae Files #1)(71)

“Yes,” she agrees, voice still trembling, easing back another step.

“Stop moving,” he snaps, suddenly furious. He lunges forward a step, lifting the axe.

She screams, and draws the pistol, hands shaking wildly as she trains it on his chest. “Please don’t make me hurt you.” A catch in her voice, nearly a sob. “Please.”

They stand frozen for so long, I actually checked the file to make sure it wasn’t glitching. And then, at some silent signal, he lifts the axe and charges forward with murder in his eyes.

And she doesn’t shoot him.

She turns to run instead, the cumbersome hazmat suit slowing her down, bunching around her ankles, extra weight. They’re evenly matched, it turns out—she’s small, and exhausted, and swamped by the suit. He’s chubby, clearly hasn’t run voluntarily in at least a decade. But he’s driven forward by Phobos, the virus lending him speed.

“Ezra!” she screams. “Ezra!”

She corners around a server tower, racing up the clear stretch of space between two long rows of columns. The ship’s damaged mind surrounds her on all sides, towering over her. She’s gasping for breath, open-mouthed, a fallen tower blocking her path. Zhang howls behind her as she scrambles over it, falling on the other side, rolling, crawling then stumbling upright to let momentum keep her moving. He vaults it with unnatural strength.

[Cameras cut—chase is visible on cameras 32587B and 32587F for a few seconds each—clear footage resumes 3 minutes and 14 seconds later.]

When they show up again, hurtling past a bank of status monitors, he’s gaining on her. She knows what she has to do. She knows her only chance of survival. And as Zhang stumbles and almost falls over a tangle of cable, she turns to train the pistol on him. Aim steady. Finger on the trigger. She has him dead to rights. She could put one right between his eyes at this range.

But again, she doesn’t fire.

She can’t. Or won’t. Instead, with a moan, she turns to run again, and driven by some instinct that might have served her long ago but will kill her here, she starts climbing. Scrambling up a crumpled server tower, she grabs at the railing overhead and hauls herself higher, snatching her feet up as he buries the axe to the hilt just a hair’s breadth short of her toes.

“Ezra, where are you?”

The tower beside her is spewing sparks, bare current visible as it arcs from one beam to the next with a low, droning buzz. Clinging to the frame with one arm wrapped around the rail, Grant pulls the pistol from her belt again, aiming it at Zhang. He stops below her, gazing up.

“I see inside you,” he whispers, chest heaving. “I look inside, I see it, and the code doesn’t make any sense. I could rewrite it. I could wipe it clean and write you again, so I understand what to do.”

“No,” she says, gesturing with the gun, though by now they both know she won’t pull the trigger. “Byron, it’s me.” She flinches as the crackling current on the next tower peaks for a moment then dies back to a lower buzz, blue sparks crawling across the metal. “Please, what’s inside me cares about you.”

He stares up at her, unblinking, and she watches him in return. Then she remembers—Don’t look at me—and tears her eyes away. It seems to wake something in him, a trace of something lucid surfacing in his gaze, like some creature swimming up from the depths, then receding once more.

“Kady?” Confusion.

“Yes.” Her tears spill now, running down her cheeks inside her helmet to find the corners of her mouth. “It’s me.”

“I shouldn’t—” Another flash of sense, then bewilderment. He steps back from the tower, gazing around at the ruined server towers, then down at his own hands—grubby with grease, blistered, fingernails blackened and soft palms rough and red. “I can’t,” he chokes. “Kady, I don’t want to—I have to make sure I don’t—”

“Don’t what?” she asks, helpless, voice breaking again.

“Hurt you,” he replies, staring up at her. “It was all for you, Kady.”

He trips backward one step, then two, then three, halted by the broken tower with its slow dance of blue sparks.

“I’m sorry.”

She divines his intention a second before he acts, one hand flying out as though she can stop him from her perch. “Byron, no!”

But he nods, and gazes up at her with his heart—and his fear—in his eyes. And then he thrusts his hand into the heart of the crawling blue sparks, into the nest of data and digits and code that’s always been his life and is now his death, pressing his blistered palm to the metal.

The shock throws him back ten feet, and he flies through the air with arms splayed wide, heart already stopped. He doesn’t feel it when he crashes to the ground, head snapping back against the hard metal floor, limbs spread.

He lies still, and she clings to her spot high up the tower, her wordless grief just one long, low sob.

It is over.

Zhang is dead. Noble to the end. Such an unlikely face for a hero.

She climbs down the server tower to crawl to his side. The hazmat’s helmet stops her from wiping the tears from her eyes, and so they stream, down the curve of her cheeks to gather at her lips. A hundred points of illumination are refracted on the surface of every one.

They leave trails of light on her skin.