Kriegspiel [Sequel to The Turing Test]

15. Decompiled

Waking is like an earthquake: For a moment, I'm still with Sven as everything starts to shake and crumble. The ceiling falls in chunks around us, but still he doesn't let me go.

And then as suddenly as it all started, it stops. I lay in eerie silence and blackness, until I realize the dark is just my eyelids. They snap open, and I find myself alone in a new room I've never seen before.

"Hello?" I call.

Only the echo of my voice answers.

Then, out of the darkness: "Hello, Ronnie."

"Carlos?" I sit up; this time, instead of a table, I rest on a hospital-style bed, and I wonder what else happened in this lab. Did they experiment on subjects who cared about comfort? Humans?

I bring a hand to my head and immediately pull it away with a hiss. The flap of skin still hangs off my temple, fused parts exposed and all.

"Carlos, where is everyone?"

"In the hospital."

I shoot off the bed, my bare feet skidding on the floor. "Hospital?! What happened?"

Hospital implies a human emergency. Is Davis okay?

"It's down the hall to your right when you exit," Carlos offers.

I'm out the door before he finishes.

"Three rooms down!" he calls after me.

I scramble down the hall, clawing at doors even though I know they're not the right one. All I feel is that urgent itch under my skin, the rising lump in my throat, the inability to breathe making me dizzy.

"Davis!" I call, smashing open the door that Carlos indicated. "Dav—!"

I stop at the scene that greets me. Blood, everywhere. Puddled on the floor, streaked on the faces of white cabinets. Smear marks lead straight to a bed in the center of the room, and I barge through the semicircle of androids clustered around it.

Ayo, her forehead glistening with sweat, lays asleep under a thin sheet. As I watch, she mumbles something incoherent, and her head lolls toward me, revealing bloodied nostrils. A thin strip of white flashes between her eyelids.

I swing around, scanning for Davis, then Darwin, Maven, anyone. "What happened?" When no one answers, I raise my voice. "Where is Davis?"

My blurry eyes finally make out Darwin, a head taller than the rest. I make for him like a tornado, shoving him so hard in the chest that he actually has to take a step back.

"Where is he?" I growl, hating how watery it comes out. "What did you do to her? To him? Tell me where he is!"

I can't see. The room spins uncontrollably. I pound on Darwin's chest until Maven rips me away by the shoulder, and I stumble backward, panting. She narrows her eyes at me, stepping in front of Darwin and squaring off.

But I glare over her shoulder at him, and he stares back, something missing from his eyes as he regards me. For the first time, I see him as a machine and not a monster, calculating as his gaze flicks up, down, right, left, assessing the lines of my face and the tear tracks glistening in them.

"Stop." He holds out a hand, and Maven falls away, giving him a look that clearly asks why.

"She collapsed," he says, his voice surprisingly quiet. "Hit her nose on the desk on the way down. Hasn't woken since."

I glance back at the bed, at Ayo's restless sleep.

"Fever. Chills. She has some kind of bug."

"Davis?" I repeat, turning back to him.