Liv recoiled and toppled off the side of her chair. The carpet was dank and crusty, and she bounded up, her spine striking metal shelving. Carbajal lurched to the side to match her distance, his face mercifully sliding from lamplight.
“The good looks are just the start, really,” he said. “The teeth on that side are soft as chalk. Once a week I have to flush my left ear of yellow gunk so rancid it stains the sink. I throw up half my food. You know how I said I was sterile? Truth is, I’m as impotent as a sock, not that anyone’s interested. And the lung cancer? Little girl, I haven’t smoked a day in my life.”
Liv wanted to run. She could be in the hall in seconds. But she had no place in the world until she could make things right, or as close as possible. She held her ground even as Carbajal halved the distance, capering close enough that she could again see his knobby, gouged face. He held both hands upward as if to get her opinion of a new outfit. His left hand looked like a hoof, a thick, wedge-shaped club.
“Wh-where was it?” she stammered.
“Oh, no, you can’t go there. It’s not safe. You know what might be in the soil there? In the water? Strontium 90, plutonium 239/240, all sorts of bad shit. You think I’d send a defenseless doe anywhere like that?”
She lifted the wrist compass. “It—he—he had this; it was my dad’s.”
Carbajal choked and sneered. “You think you know what’s best, do you?”
“If my dad was there, if there’s any record of him, I have to—”
Carbajal pressed in, his face inches from Liv’s. She squeezed her eyes shut but could feel the swampy billow from his half mouth and smell the spoil of his row of rotted teeth.
“This is your record. This face is your record.”
Liv forced open her eyes. His face was all that she should see; it occluded the whole world. She straightened her back and bit down, imagining her own teeth grinding to powder. She widened her eyes as much as she could and took it all in, because she’d seen worse, participated in worse, was worse. Though Major Dawkins had never actually said it, that didn’t mean it wasn’t good advice: Liv had to be the tallest she could, for just a little bit longer.
“Tell me where it was.” This time she said it gently.
The anger vibrating through Carbajal, some due to her, she knew, but much of it due to the unstoppable slippages of an unfair world, shook out through his extremities: the long, gray whips of his hair, his hand and hoof, the broken, once-proud shoulders. He seemed to sink a foot into the floor. His breathing, once slowed, sounded as if it came from a mouth that was whole. He looked at her, his huge, directionless left eye as sky blue as A’s, the other a sober, weary, saddened brown.
“If you were my daughter,” he said, “goddamn, I would be so proud.”
29.
With twitchy fingers she typed Carbajal’s directions into her phone. They were absurdly simple, involving none of the sorcery of Lee Fleming’s blind plunges into the forest. Take this county road to that state highway, turn right at that crossroads, hang a left down this dirt road. She didn’t wait to make the trip. She couldn’t. She’d inferred from Doug that he’d intended to euthanize A, but when she thought back on what he’d said while carrying A away, she couldn’t recall one solid piece of evidence. She’d only wanted it to be true. If she could find physical evidence of Carbajal’s story, she could find Doug and shove it in his face. He wouldn’t torture a human being, no matter how far gone he was.
Liv couldn’t forget that, in addition to A, Doug had nearly every weapon in Lee’s armory.
She steered as if through wet cement. Every car in her rearview mirror was a plainclothes cop ready to arrest her for what she knew and what she’d done. Every pedestrian in her peripheral vision pointed an accusatory finger. Her station wagon exhaust pipe leaked blood, and the engine emitted not asthmatic thwacks but A’s high-pitched, pleading cheeps.
It was only because she arrived at the site from a new direction that Liv didn’t recognize it sooner. She parked the station wagon in the dirt driveway, a cloud of road dust erasing the real world behind her. Here was where the Biatalik Program had been centered. Of course it was. How could it have been anywhere else? She exited the car and stared up at the house.
It was like any century-old two-story country abode except that the roof was scraped of shingle and sagging, the windows broken, the paint peeled from wood. No one had lived here in ages, but it wasn’t the house that was important. Liv drifted to the left, beneath the cracking knuckles of a leafless oak, and traced fossilized wheelbarrow ruts as they wound past stooped barns, weed-strangled grain bins, a collapsed chicken house, and twin rusted silos. Beyond all that, rippling along the horizon, were the thunderbird wings of Black Glade.
This was the farm where her father had forced her to take Resurrection Update before hopping the electric fence with Lizardpoint. Before running, he’d glanced at the sky and said to her, Anything can happen under a sky like this. He’d been right: She had returned to the last place she’d ever wanted to see again, not creeping from the woods this time but pulling up like she wasn’t afraid of anything. Sweat began dripping down her face. She’d never been more scared in her life.
Liv opened the car’s rear door and took out Mist.
This is where Carbajal’s instructions got specific. Liv wobbled across lumpy terrain. Weeds swayed as critters dashed. She passed a pen that might have once housed slobbering cows but was now a mud pit cordoned off by slouching wire. She passed an outhouse in the process of being sucked into the earth. Above the outhouse, the skies darkened. Black Glade snagged hold of the sun like Hangman’s Noose. Turn back, she begged herself. Drive away.
The silos were behemoths as inscrutable as Giza pyramids. Liv felt woozy and had to look down; she walked to the base of the second silo as Carbajal had directed. A treacherous ladder clotted by vines was bolted onto the exterior, and just thinking of such a suicidal climb sickened Liv. But she wasn’t headed up. She ducked beneath some sort of chute and skirted the concrete base until she found a small access hatch. It was fringed in yellow decay, its handle so corroded Liv thought it might crumble in her hand.
The hatch stuck when she tried to open it. Good, she thought. Get out of here. Instead, she decided to kick it open, then changed her mind. All that noise in these swaths of silence? It might rip the screams from her tensed body. She propped a running shoe up against the silo. With leverage now, she pulled the handle. Metal squealed, the sound of her fraying nerves. On the fourth tug, the hatch popped. Liv dodged clear of it. It was as if she’d cut a neat rectangle through reality. Beyond the hatch, nothing, an absolute void.
Liv climbed through it, straight into unknowable horror. Inside, the hot air was stiff straw against her exposed skin. There was a light source ninety feet straight up, gray daylight pinholing through ventilation slats. Light smeared down the inside of the silo like drool. Liv stared back at the ground, where Carbajal had told her to look. The fear of blundering into a bladed farm instrument limited her to small steps, but she stomped those steps, listening for a hollow thud, praying not to hear one. But there was a sound. She cocked her head. The hatch squeaked in the breeze. Wind rattled the siding of melting sheds. Liv reached out, pulled the hatch shut. It was darker now, but quieter. She closed her eyes, held her breath.