Jake raises the gun and points it. The look in Stephen’s eyes is hard as they stare each other down.
“Put the gun away, Jake,” Kelly says. “Think of the noise. We can deal with this another way.”
“How the hell did you get it?” I ask, reaching around behind me. Of course the gun isn’t there. “When did you—”
“I picked it up off the road after you crashed.” His eyes never leave Stephen’s face, so he doesn’t see Ashley circling around behind him. Tanya does, but she’s slow to react, still sluggish after our rest. Maybe if it was one of the boys or me trying to sneak up on Jake, but it’s not. Nobody expects little Ashley to attempt to unarm someone like Jake. No one expects Ashley to defend a man like Stephen against one of our own. By the time Tanya realizes what Ash is doing, it’s too late to stop her.
“Jake!”
At the moment she yells, Ashley lunges at Jake. She hits his back and he crumples forward. The pistol goes flying from his hands and skids across the rooftop. Jake lands with an “Oof!” and immediately rolls to the side, upending Ash, just like we’ve been trained to do in hapkido. He spins around and pins her.
Reggie and Kelly wade in and pull the two apart. I look for the gun, but it’s not there. It suddenly appears in Stephen’s hands. For a moment, everyone stands still, then he flips it and hands it to me. He holds my gaze for a moment, and I can see in his eyes that he’s begging me not to let anyone kill him. Not yet. He doesn’t want to die. Not this way. He knows he will soon. He knows he’ll reanimate.
What’s worse, he looks like that’s the path he has chosen for himself.
“Everyone, settle down,” I say. They all retreat a step or two, ducking, and I realize I’m waving the gun around. I lower it and say, “Let’s just settle down, okay?”
“You’re a dead man,” Jake snarls, lunging against Reggie’s and Kelly’s arms.
“I think that’s already been established, Mr. Espinosa.”
“So, you were bitten down there.”
He shakes his head. “No. I was infected before this.”
“On the highway?”
Another shake of the head.
“The injection. On the tram. I hadn’t expected it to take hold so soon. Our past attempts took several days longer.” He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter now.”
I narrow my eyes. “Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You… Are you saying you Volunteered?”
“Okay. Maybe not so complicated after all.”
“I don’t understand. You work for Arc. You developed the failsafe. What do you get out of volunteering?”
“I’m a lowly researcher in their R and D group. Do you know what I make a year? Barely enough to feed my children.”
Hearing those words tears away at my insides. This man, who subjected us to the worst kinds of horrors imaginable—who invented such evil, terrible things—has a family, a wife, children? How could he do this to us? To them?
“Do they know?”
He shakes his head. “They wouldn’t understand.”
“God damn it! Of course they wouldn’t understand! I don’t understand.” I raise the pistol and point it again at Stephen’s face. But there’s no will in me to use it and he can see that. He’s always seen it. I’ve killed, but I’m no murderer.
“I think I understand,” Kelly whispers. He gently pulls my hands down and away.
“Yes, I thought you might, Mr. Corben,” Stephen says.
“What’s he talking about?” Reggie asks.
“Son of a bitch! Just shoot him,” Jake pleads. “You’re making a mistake.”
Reggie shakes him and tells him to be quiet.
“So, what happens when you die?”
“Same as any other person with an implant: it activates. Once it does, I immediately upload into a sub-stream and, if I’m in Gameland, my Operator takes over control. I become part of The Game. More importantly—at least for me—my children get to eat and have good medicine. Like your inhaler there, Miss Daniel. You didn’t think that was free, did you? Somebody paid for it. Dearly, I would guess.”
Confusion stops me for a moment. I’d never thought about what it cost to buy my inhaler every month, who paid for it, how.
“My father?”
“In a roundabout way, yes.”
“Shit,” I exhale. I run my hands through my hair. “God damn Arc. God damn those bastards. This is— We can’t let them do this.”
Kelly shakes his head. “Yes, we can. We have to.”
“What?”
“There’s no other choice at this point. I’m already infected and the disease is progressing rapidly. If I don’t enter The Game, my contract is void. I join the IUs already here, and all this…” He gestures around us. “All this will have been for nothing. Including everything that you’ve been put through.”
“And he’ll have died for nothing.”
I narrow my eyes at Kelly, wondering how much of this he figured out and much he already knew. Did he know?
“How do we fit in all this?”
“No, wait!” Jake says. “That’s not the only choice. Don’t believe him.”
“How do you fit in?” Stephen asks. “You were my ticket into LI.”
“It’s all a lie,” Jake says, tugging. Reggie and Kelly don’t let go.
“And I’m your ticket into Gameland,” Stephen finishes. “Your only chance to escape is inside its walls.”
“Ticket?” Reggie says. “I’m not liking what that sounds like.”
“The only way in is through one of the access points,” Stephen explains. His voice is growing weaker, more strained. “The code to open them is uploaded into my implant. Each Volunteer gets one. Each is unique; each is good only once and only to enter, not exit.”
“So you take us in?”
Stephen stumbles to his feet. His balance is whacked and he nearly falls over.
“We can’t take him!” Jake argues. “He’s infected.”
“We’ve got no choice,” I say. “You heard what he said. He’s our only way in.”
“I don’t believe that. There’s got to be another way. I don’t even think we need to go to Gameland.”
I turn to him and say, “Look, I made a promise to get everyone off the island. I tried, and failed. Now we have another chance and I intend to keep my promise. If you know of another way, I’d be happy to hear it, because walking into a place where CUs can do shit that IUs can’t, where they don’t just bite you but can actually shoot back, where they aren’t all that easy to kill, well, that just isn’t my idea of fun.”
Jake stares at me for a moment. He’s got nothing and he knows it.
“Yeah? Well, what about your other promise?”
I frown. “What other promise?”
“To be at the front of the line to quiet any of us if we became infected.”
I look at Stephen, then turn back to Jake. “He’s not one of us.”
“You’re…wasting time,” Stephen pants, sweat pouring off of his face. His skin has taken on a gray tint. A trickle of blood leaks from the corner of one of his eyes. “It’s time to make up your minds. Do you want to go home, or not?”