She thinks of the dome. Her prison. Her home. By now, with dusk coming to a close, the dome has risen out of the desert ground. She imagines what it must look like now, with onyx dusk rays beaming off its glassy, globular surface. She thinks of the pond inside the dome, its surface flat and still as a mirror, of the mud huts that sit empty and uninhabited, as they will for centuries and millennia to come—
And in that last second of existence, she closes her eyes. She feels so terribly, terribly alone.
Forty-five
I RUN INTO the elevator lobby. Slam up against the glass door. Peer down the atrium. At first, I can’t quite comprehend what I’m seeing. The elevator, stripped of walls and roof and reduced to a platform, is rising toward me, about twenty floors below. White-pale blobs swirling on the platform. And for just a millisecond, there is a part in the bodies and I catch a glimpse of Sissy. Her face oddly placid.
The gun fires in my hand before I’m even aware of aiming or pulling the trigger. The bullet punctures a hole into the soft, pale mass, a meter from Sissy. The bodies ripple like a flag in the wind; one body keels over and falls off the platform, down into the atrium, splattering when it hits the marble floor of the lobby. But the other bodies seem unaffected as ever.
I pull the trigger again. Click. The chamber is empty.
The elevator, still ascending, is now about fifteen floors below. Too far below to leap—from this height, I’ll likely bounce right off the platform and down the atrium to my death. But there’s no time to spare. I bend my knees, leap out. Wind gushes through my clothes; my lungs ram up my throat. I plummet, arms pirouetting, toward the ascending platform.
Forty-six
SISSY
THE DUSKERS CAVE in on Sissy. They hiss loudly, their rank breath whistling between their exposed teeth and fangs.
So dark under them, so cold.
Everything happens so quickly, afterward she will barely be able to recall what happened.
A gunshot. Then a falling blur. The shape of something smacking into the duskers from above. A sickening splat. Someone crashing to the floor. With such force, it causes the whole platform to gong and hum.
The duskers domino into one another, plummet down the atrium. Leaving only one dusker on the platform, dizzy and concussed, temporarily out of commission.
Whoever just crashed down is now bouncing toward the edge, about to fall off.
Afterward, she will not know what possessed her to reach out. But still curled on the elevator floor, she snaps out her arm at the hazy shape skidding away.
Fingers wrap around her wrist. The shape falls over the edge, still gripping her.
And now she is being pulled across the platform. To avoid sliding any farther, she hooks her feet around the ankles of the disoriented—but quickly reviving—dusker.
Her face is pulled over the precipice, and she stares down the vertigo-inducing drop of the atrium. Fallen duskers lie far below, splattered on the lobby floor. Glass shards scattered everywhere.
And Gene, his face directly below hers, his sweaty hand clasped in hers. Slipping out.
The dusker shakes its head, hissing. Its eyes turn to Sissy.
Sissy and Gene stare at each other desperately. “Help me,” they both utter at the same time.
Forty-seven
HELP ME,” I whisper through clenched teeth.
“Gene,” Sissy says. Her eyes do the rest of the speaking. They are pleading with me. Because she can’t hold me much longer.
A dark shape looms above her. It’s a dusker.
“Sissy!” I shout. “Let go of me.”
Still she holds on. Its shadow falls over her.
I let go of her hand. In that same moment, she flips over to face the dusker.
For a moment, I’m suspended in air, touching nothing but the emptiness of a vacuum. I begin to fall. With a shout, I grasp for something—anything—and my hand catches a thick outcropping at the bottom of the elevator floor. I scrabble for purchase until my hands meet the metal framework of the elevator and I’m able to pull my whole body up and over onto the elevator floor. Gravity presses down on me as the elevator continues to rise.
Sissy is holding the dusker by the cuff of its neck. She’s the weaker creature, but not now, not after what the dusker’s been through. Its skin and joints and muscles and bones have softened under the burn of sun rays, and it is now more soft putty than hard bone and muscles. Digging into some hidden reserve of energy, Sissy slams its head into the wall that’s still rushing down past us. And she holds it there, the skull that’s been softened by the sun into the consistency of an unshelled boiled egg. And even though the dusker fights back, flailing its arms and trying to kick, Sissy doesn’t ease up one bit. She holds its head pressed against the passing wall, and like cheese being grated, its head is shredded into oblivion.
The elevator reaches the top floor.
Ping.
Forty-eight
UTTERLY EXHAUSTED, WE crawl out of the elevator. To keep the elevator from descending and picking up more duskers from the lower floors, we pull the headless dusker across the precipice. The body will prevent the doors from fully closing. For a while, anyway. Like persistent toothless jaws, the doors will open and close on it, open and close, gnawing the gelatinous body. Eventually, they’ll ground the dusker to into a soppy mush, enabling them to fully close.
I look at Sissy. Her clothes are splattered with a white-yellow creamy substance. Dusker fluid. She is staring out the window, at the disappearing sunlight, her hair bejeweled with glistening shards of glass. She looks ten years older than the day we first met at the pond. All the innocence beneath her skin has cauterized into hardness.
“Epap?” she asks.
I shake my head.
Her eyes well up, but no tears fall.
I take off my splattered shirt. Using the less filthy underside, I wipe clean the sticky fluid from her lips, cheekbones, nose. I dab her tears, gently wipe her eyelashes to remove the gooey droplets before they can dry and glue her eyes shut. The last few dying rays of dusk light fade from the sky. In the streets below, a sea of black creeps up the façades of nearby buildings, floor by floor.
We should be moving, thinking of a way to escape. But for now, all I can do is pick out the glass beads from her hair, one piece at a time.
“We were idiots,” she says, her voice whittled to a whisper. “Walked right into a trap.” She looks at me. “Did you get scratched anywhere? Cut, bitten?”
I don’t answer, only stare outside.
“No?” she asks.
“Does it matter anymore?” I say.
“What are you saying?” She gazes at me quizzically.
“Nothing,” I whisper. I wipe the gooey mess off her arms, dislodging something tucked into her pocket. It clatters to the ground.
“I found it on the fifty-ninth floor,” she says when I pick it up. It’s a pair of shades.
Just then, a chorus of screams and howls breaks out from all corners of the Domain Building. Even the floor starts trembling, like a quickening. Ashley June was right. There must be thousands in this building alone. And millions more in the adjacent buildings stirring awake.
“Let’s move away,” says Sissy. Her hand slips into mine, and our fingers interlace as we walk to the other end of the floor.
Sissy leads us to the conference room, the farthest point from the elevator. The dark interior of the Panic Room is empty now. Ashley June gone. The bottom of the Panic Room has given way to a dark chute that tunnels down to floors below.
“Gene,” Sissy says. “We break this glass, slide down the chute. Maybe that’ll buy us some time.”
But I shake my head. “Then we’ll have, what, fifty more floors to get through before we reach the lobby? With each floor crowded with who knows how many duskers? We’re outnumbered. We’re out of weapons. We won’t get past one floor, much less fifty.”
Across the street, a window of a facing skyscraper smashes outward. A dusker scuttles down the face of that building, over the ledges of each floor. It is joined by many more duskers, pouring through the same smashed window, three, four, a dozen duskers. They’ve heard the screams and wails coming from this building, have recognized the pitched heper excitement in the cries. They know we’re here. They all know. Another window, a few panes down, smashes outward. And another, another, until glass is falling like rain from a few dozen different spots on that side of the building. And just like that, in another nearby skyscraper, another windowpane explodes outward. Duskers slide out, like teardrops gliding down.
“There’s got to be a way out,” Sissy says. “Some way to get to ground level.”
“And then what?” I lay my hand on the side of her face. “We have a few minutes. Maybe five, tops. Let’s just . . . let’s just stop running. Go out on our terms. Pretend it’s just you and me and none of them. For just these last few moments. Can we do that, Sissy?”
“We fight this, Gene. We keep going.”
“Sissy—”
“No, there’s always some way out. Some way to fight for another minute, another second—”
“—Sissy—”
“—we’ll find a horse on the street, we can at least try—”
“—Sissy—”
“—that’s what we’ve always done, Gene! Survive. Then we get back to the Palace, we get David—”
“Sissy.” My voice soft, tender. And one last time, I whisper her name. “Sissy.”
I don’t need to say any more. I feel something inside her bend, then break. For the first time in her life, for the only and last time, she knows surrender. She gasps, eyes widening. This is a new emotion, an unwanted one. It is a gale of ice wind to her hot, fervent, beating heart.
Outside, duskers are now pouring down the sides of every skyscraper and sprinting along the streets toward the Domain Building. The race is on; the Hunt has begun. The spoils go to the few, the swift, the risk takers, those willing to endure the piercing-sharp effects of the last rays of dusk. The sight of so many jumping the gun convinces even the more cautious to leap out as well. The dominos are falling now. Every dusker in a ten-block radius is pushing out of skyscrapers, sweat out of pores, pus out of pimples.