Wells’s face darkened further as he turned to Stan. “Who are you?”
Stan looked around, nervously. “I’m…I’m Stanley Grainger, sir.”
Wells’s distended brow wrinkled and furrowed, his eyes all but disappearing in the shadow. “You killed Dymphna Corcoran?”
“Um…yes, sir, but—”
“Why did we not know this?”
Stan reached a trembling hand to his forehead. “My, um, my Wellplant. I think it’s malfunctioning.”
Wells grabbed Stan by the throat, pulling him closer so he could examine the Wellplant. “You broke it,” Wells said, his voice indignant, his breath rapid and loud.
“I guess so, sir,” Stan said, his voice muffled by Wells’s grip. “But I didn’t—”
“Enough!” Wells snapped at him. “This miracle is wasted on you. You’re unworthy of it.”
Before I even knew what was happening, Wells, still holding Stan’s throat with one hand, grasped Stan’s Wellplant between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand and twisted and pulled at the same time. Stan made a sound like he was stifling a sneeze, then the Wellplant came free with a wrenching, tearing sound, trailing wires and blood and bits of flesh.
I screamed. Claudia did, too.
Stan’s eyes rolled back into his head as Wells dropped him to the floor, disgusted, then Wells shook off the Wellplant and put it in his breast pocket. Blood dribbled down his jacket. He looked up at me and said, “There. We have avenged Dymphna’s murder.”
He seemed like he was waiting for a response from me, like he was expecting praise or thanks. But I was speechless, unable to respond at all.
“The planet can’t continue on as it is,” he said, with a false sparkle in his eye and a poor imitation of earnestness in his voice. “We all know it. But this thing you’re trying to stop, it can change that. We recovered data from a gel phase drive left at the vertical farm in Camden. We know what Dymphna was up to, with her little virus that makes all your mixie friends immune. And that’s fine. Whatever. It’s a big planet, there will be lots of resources for everyone who’s left. I’m saving the world for both of us, for those with splices and those with Wellplants.”
“What, so you can enslave more chimeras?” I said. “Hunt them? Work them to death in mines?”
Before he could reply, a trio of black helicopters roared past the window, close. Everyone looked over at them for a moment, then they were gone, the sound of the motors fading but not disappearing.
The sparkle in Wells’s eyes disappeared, replaced by anger before they went dull and emotionless. “I don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish here,” he said flatly. “You can’t simply blow up a single node and bring down the network. It isn’t built that way. It doesn’t work like that.”
I glanced back at Claudia, at the computer screen. It said EXECUTION COMPLETE. PROPAGATING.
I looked back at Wells. “You’re insane,” I said.
He laughed, a big, genuine belly laugh, like he really thought that was funny. “Well, it’s an insane world.”
“You’re a murderer.”
He shook his head and sighed, like he was disappointed in me. “Everyone’s a murderer. You, your friends. Everyone who takes a breath on this Earth. Anyone who eats food and drinks water is taking air and food and water from someone else. Everybody is a murderer. We’re just being practical about it. Systematic. Logical. Smart. But make no mistake: Life is murder.”
He laughed again. “But that’s okay. Everybody dies, too. People say ‘murder’ like it’s a bad word, a tragedy, like the people being murdered weren’t going to die before long anyway. But everybody dies. Or at least everybody has so far. I have some ideas that could change that in the next few years, but I digress. You think you’re being merciful, but what good is saving billions of lives that will end before long anyway, at the expense of the entire planet, the cost of the trillions of lives that could one day be lived if we stop destroying the Earth right now?”
“And it’s up to you to decide who lives or dies?” I said, my voice bitter with sarcasm.
“You could do a lot worse.” He tapped his Wellplant once again. “We’re very, very smart.” He laughed again, then stopped abruptly. “Look, child, we don’t want to kill you. You really do remind us of Dymphna, before she ruined herself. We don’t even want to kill your friends, here, not if you don’t want us to. But the world can’t keep going the way it’s going. And as we’ve just explained, you’re not doing anyone any favors saving a few billion now if it means the sacrifice of the trillions of lives yet to come, if it means the end of humanity. What a crime that would be. Especially when, really, we’re just getting started.”
His eye twitched and he looked concerned for a moment, like he’d heard a noise that shouldn’t be there, or caught a whiff of smoke.
Outside the cube, one of the guards on the floor groaned and stirred. Then another one did, too. Suddenly, they were all stirring.
Wells smiled. He bent down and pulled Stan’s rifle from his dead shoulder, then took another one from one of his still-unconscious guards. “Well, we’d love to chat some more, but we have a feeling we’re not going to change your mind and we have an important matter to attend to in”—he looked at his watch—“one minute.”
I glanced back at Claudia and she shook her head. The screen still said PROPAGATING.…
I jumped as a sound tore through the air, like a jackhammer crossed with a buzz saw. Wells fired both guns on automatic, one in each hand, concentrating the two streams of bullets onto the same dime-sized spot on the glass. The sound was horrendous, and it got worse as the cube began to resonate, much louder than before. I covered my ears against the noise, as the glass started to groan. The whole time he was firing, neither stream of bullets wavered the slightest bit, both of them grinding and chipping away at that one spot, dropping a thin cascade of glass chips and dust.
I dragged Rex away from the glass walls, toward the center of the cube.
Mercifully, one of Wells’s guns ran out of ammunition, then the other one did, too. But not before a crack formed, arcing from the bullet hole almost to the corner of the wall. Another crack appeared on the other side of the hole, and two more splintered from that one.
Wells laughed, standing there in a cloud of gun smoke as he replaced the magazines. More of his guards were starting to wake up.
I put the second hedgehog in my pocket and grabbed Rex’s rifle, the dart gun still in my other hand. I turned to Claudia. “Anything?”
She was similarly armed, her face grim. “Not if they’re still coming at us.”
I looked past her at the screen. Still propagating.
Wells fired again, a single bullet, and this time the glass shattered, all four sides of the cube disintegrating simultaneously and falling to the floor in a shower of crystals. Luckily, the ceiling stayed up, swaying erratically on the cables it hung from.
Wells grinned as his men got to their feet and brushed themselves off, raised their rifles, and began marching toward us.
Claudia and I stepped back, into the center of what used to be the cube and was now a square-shaped outline of glass shards. I held the hedgehog behind my back, my thumb resting on the red button guard. Without the glass walls, there would be nothing to protect us from the darts, but if the hedgehog stopped them, too, then hopefully by the time we all woke up, Ogden’s malware would have done its thing. Hopefully, we’d wake up in a world where the Wellplant network had been crashed.