Matt remained in the hallway, watching BALDUR.
“If I’m still here,” he said, “in my projected form, it means my physical body is still alive, right?”
Laura was beside him, attention also on the berserker at the end of the corridor. “I’m not the one to ask.”
Matt understood what she meant, but she was wrong. “You are. You understand this. The fact that we’re both here is good, right? You take your energy from me; I take my energy from my physical body. Everything’s entangled.”
“Until everything decoheres,” Laura said. “And all the waves collapse and we become separate again, and alone.”
Matt wouldn’t be distracted. “I’m still alive … but I can’t go back … so, I’m still unconscious.” He had it. “Someone moved my body.”
“Who would do that?”
“Lomax!” In his excitement, Matt grabbed her by her shoulders. “I know who helped and where I am!”
Laura’s face and body suddenly decayed into the blood-covered corpse of the night of her death. Her voice was a liquid rasp. “But if you know that…” She pointed a skeletal talon down the corridor in time for Matt to see BALDUR twist into coiled smoke and drop through the floor.
Matt understood. Entanglement. If he knew something, so did BALDUR.
He took Laura’s hand and—
* * *
Lomax eased Caidin’s unconscious, battered body off his shoulder and onto the chair. “Now what?” he asked.
Sam Arlo rooted determinedly through the mess of electronics spread out across the bed, searching for something that Lomax half expected could be a crystal ball or magic wand. That was how incredibly off-the-map this week and this night had become.
Lomax was unsettled being away from his post. He kept telling himself the evacuation plan was working, that Caparelli was going after the damned containment units, that whatever was going on here that was on the wrong side of the rational divide, it was something he had to understand and Matt Caidin was the key.
“Here!” Arlo said. It wasn’t a magic wand. Lomax recognized it from battlefield medic kits. An auto-injector hypodermic.
“Adrenalin?”
“No. Ritalin.” Arlo looked at Lomax. “It’s like adrenaline for the brain. Increases dopamine, wakes up the cortex.”
Lomax supposed that sounded like a good idea. “Go for it.”
Arlo placed the tip of the auto-injector against Caidin’s neck. Hesitated. “How’d he get so beat up?”
The room suddenly felt cooler.
Arlo stopped, held out his hand as if checking the temperature. “That’s not good.”
Lomax didn’t understand. “If the air-conditioning’s back on, that means power’s being restored.”
“It’s not air-conditioning.” Arlo was transfixed by something behind Lomax.
Lomax turned.
It was the same thing Ames had faced in the clearing. Now it was here.
Lomax drew his gun.
“That’s not going to do it,” Arlo said.
Then there were two more figures in the room. Apparitions.
Lomax felt his mouth open in surprise. One of them was … Caidin? He looked back at the chair. Caidin was there, unconscious. He looked at the thing that had appeared just inside the door. Caidin was flanking it on one side. On the other side was a woman. He recognized her from photographs. It was Laura Hart.
The dead woman.
* * *
The berserker moved to meet Caparelli, and Caparelli pivoted like a linebacker, dove to the side, and emptied Williams’s M16 on full automatic into the containment units directly across from him.
He felt a sudden burst of pain in his left foot and twisted to see the berserker had stomped on it with a booted foot, and that booted foot had entered his.
The berserker sneered, rotated his boot, and ground the flesh and bones and nerves and tendons of Caparelli’s foot until they were compressed, combined.
Caparelli released his agony with a battle cry and turned away from the berserker to fire his own M16 with a fresh clip and—
—a gout of flame shot up from the containment unit to the left of him, and sparks crackled across its surface.
The berserker vanished.
Caparelli’s pain was indescribable. But his new plan was working. Destroy the units, destroy the berserkers. With gritted teeth, he fumbled through his equipment harness, searching for new clips for the rifles.
Three more units to go.
* * *
Matt gripped BALDUR by one arm; Laura held him by the other. Matt knew they couldn’t defeat the berserker in their projected state, but they could keep it from harming Matt’s physical body.
As they dragged the berserker back, trying to pull it from the room, Matt had a moment of surreal disconnection as he saw his own body in the chair, face bruised and swollen from the damage done to his projected form. Arlo was beside him, holding some new device to his neck. He saw Lomax, standing, speechless, gun at his side.
Matt nodded at Lomax, mouthed the word “Thanks.”
Lomax held up his hand as if to wave, but then seemed to think better of it. He continued to look overwhelmed.
Then BALDUR changed in some way. Felt heavier? Lighter?
“Hold on,” Laura said. And then they fell with him and—
* * *
Borodin stood in the North Lobby, surrounded by death. Two dozen bodies, none intact, civilians and soldiers, all the same, in pieces.
LOKI appeared before him.
“Well done, soldier. Call the others.”
ODIN appeared.
“Well done.”
As expected, TYR did not answer the call. But neither did HEIMDAL.
Then BALDUR appeared, and he wasn’t alone.
Borodin was shocked to see the shadow warrior being held by what could only be two CROSSWIND wraiths. One was the entity he had seen fighting BALDUR in the casino. Had that fight been going on all this time? And the second wraith … a woman? There was something familiar about her. Something …
And then he knew.
He clapped his hands in recognition.
“My perceiver!” he said. “The woman in the window! At the campground! In the kitchen!”
BALDUR stopped struggling. He was waiting for orders, as were LOKI and ODIN.
Borodin knew his three shadow warriors could deal with the wraiths. Unlike VEKTOR, CROSSWIND didn’t have the einstone technology to support projected forms. That meant the two wraiths holding BALDUR must have living bodies somewhere, bodies that a berserker could easily find through back-tracing.
His plan made, Borodin chose the warrior who would be freed. “LOKI, the man and woman holding your brother. Follow them home. Kill them.”
LOKI snapped his head around to stare at the wraiths.
Borodin could tell they had no understanding of what he had ordered, and what was to happen to them.
LOKI began to change, to become the frenzied champion of legend. He moved toward BALDUR’s captors, began to smear, and then abruptly stopped, doubled over, began to flutter back and forth like fabric blown by the wind and—
He was gone.
Borodin instantly knew what had happened. Shouted new orders.
“Return to the tunnel—your units are in danger!”
ODIN began to twist into a coil of dark mist. BALDUR struggled to do the same. Then the female wraith suddenly released BALDUR, and he and ODIN and the wraiths vanished at once, together.
* * *
Caparelli used the stock of his rifle to batter the interior of the second containment unit in the alcove because he had no more ammunition. He had to do it from a kneeling position. It was impossible to stand. His foot felt as if he had stepped in lava. Each impact of the rifle butt sent a new shudder of pain through his swollen leg. He could barely think. But the containment units had to be destroyed.
There was a gout of flame and a spray of sparks and Caparelli fell back, knowing another berserker had been … what? How could something already dead be killed? Deactivated, he decided. They were weaponized ghosts, Burton Hirst had said. The word fit.
Now he only had to crawl twenty feet to the end of the tunnel to batter the last two units. Then it would be over.
That’s when two other berserkers appeared before him.
He tried and failed to stand to face them. He didn’t want to die helpless on his knees. But his crushed foot wouldn’t support him and he fell, racked with pain, burning with frustrated rage, waiting to feel the berserkers tear into him again.
They didn’t.
He looked up.
One berserker was fighting the other.
Then he realized, only one of the spectral forms was dressed as a soldier in black battle dress. The other was—
Laura.
Caparelli froze, pain forgotten in the shock of recognition. Laura and the berserker battled in silence, but in his mind he heard her voice on his phone, her final message. Daniel, pick up!
And he hadn’t.
A single, split-second decision that could never be taken back. A decision that had changed everything—except his need to make up for abandoning her.
At the sight of Laura, that one pure thought flooded through him, freed him from his paralysis. Caparelli knew he could still have a chance to help her, to undo what he had done, and there was only one way he could. As the two entities battled, he began to crawl the final twenty feet to the tunnel’s end.
Flames from the burning debris sent the shadows of Laura and the berserker flickering against the tunnel walls and ceiling. Smoke filled the enclosed space with acrid haze. Caparelli coughed, eyes stinging, kept crawling forward, wincing each time he had to drag his crushed foot along the broken concrete of the tunnel floor.
He looked back once to see Laura slam the berserker against the wall, then rush at it swinging, connecting again and again. Yet eerily, there was still no sound from the impacts, no sound from either fighter, as if their combat took place only in a dream.
He reached the containment units. Each had only one green status light remaining. All the rest were red.
He pushed himself up on his knees, glanced back one more time to see—
The berserker rushing directly for him, Laura sprawled in the alcove, too far away.
Caparelli twisted to swing his rifle like a club, knew how useless that would be. And then the berserker was blocked by Laura!
In an instant, she had vanished from the alcove and appeared between Caparelli and his attacker.
Laura shouldered the berserker away, turned to Caparelli, pointed urgently to the containment unit on the right. The berserker hit her from behind, and the fight was on again.
Caparelli struggled to edge closer to the unit Laura had indicated. He lifted his rifle, brought it down on the control panel, ignored the pain that lanced through his leg, through his body.
The berserker was on the offensive, knocking Laura back farther and farther. Caparelli could see what it was planning: to delay Laura just for the few seconds it would take to rip Caparelli in half.
Laura fell back. Caparelli lifted his rifle, brought it down again and again.
The berserker broke off his attack. Streaked for Caparelli—
—as the rifle came down a final time and the containment unit sparked and the berserker reached out to Caparelli and—
—stopped. Held back by Laura gripping it from behind.
The berserker’s arm blurred out of focus, stretching into a tendril of smoke.
Then the battery in the containment unit finally shorted out and exploded in a flash of sparks, and the berserker fluttered and was—
—gone.
Caparelli sank back against the concrete barricade.
In the smoky haze, he saw Laura, or whatever Laura had become, look down at him, her expression one of puzzlement and concern.
Caparelli reached out his hand to her.
She hesitated, seemed to blur, then snapped into sharp focus. She reached out.
Their hands met.
In that moment, Laura was real again. Alive. He had answered the phone on Sunday night, taken her call, heard her report. All was as it had been, as it should have been—
No, Uncle Dan …
He heard her voice. Didn’t know how. Her lips hadn’t moved. Her impossible hand squeezed his harder.
The berserker that back-traced me would have killed us both.
Caparelli shook his head, didn’t want to believe that because it was true.
Then no one would have known about the general.
“No,” Caparelli whispered.
This is the only way it could be.
“Please no…”
Laura smiled.
It’s okay.
Laura abruptly turned to scan the tunnel, turned back, then—
She was gone, and his hand was empty.
Caparelli reached deep within himself, past the pain, past the sorrow and regret and exhaustion, to find the strength for what had to be done. What Laura needed him to do.
There was one more containment unit.
His arms trembled as he struggled to lift his rifle.
He didn’t know if he could do it.