Extinction Game (20 page)

I watched him think it over, the wind catching his grey ponytail. ‘I talked to the others,’ he said at last. ‘None of us are going to say how you found out, or who told you.
Fact is, one way or the other, we’d have had to tell you the truth
eventually
. And we did warn Bramnik and the rest of them about that.’ He smiled slightly. ‘Nadia was
especially vocal regarding how idiotic the whole thing was.’

Nadia
. I saw her again in my mind’s eye, sinking into the dark and freezing waters, as hands reached up to drag her down.

I looked up at him. ‘Say I went marching up to Mort Bramnik and demanded I be allowed to go and live in some safe alternate without waiting ten years. What would happen?’

‘It wouldn’t be allowed,’ he said.

‘Then we’re no better than prisoners, or indentured slaves at best.’

Yuichi looked pained. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You know it’s not that simple. Or even anywhere near that bad.’

I wondered what it must have been like for Yuichi and all the rest of them to see their friend – the first Jerry Beche – as good as come back to life, but with no memories of his
time among them. I remembered the way Tony Nuyakpuk had looked at me the first time he saw me, and the time Nadia had said it was good to have me back, before quickly correcting herself. I
especially remembered the numerous times I had walked into the Hotel du Mauna Loa and immediately felt as if I had been the subject of conversation until just a moment before.

‘So, just to be clear,’ I said, ‘I’m from some alternate like the one the first Jerry Beche came from?’

‘That’s right.’ Yuichi nodded.

‘I have a lot of questions,’ I said.

Yuichi nodded again. ‘Of course you do. And we’ll all try and answer them as best we can.’

‘So what about Nadia?’ I asked, my throat tight. ‘Are they going to go retrieve some other version of her, from some other alternate, like they did me?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Yuichi. ‘I guess that’s up to Bramnik and the rest of the Authority types to decide.’

I wondered what Rozalia might have to say about that.

‘Back there,’ I said, ‘we couldn’t even radio for help. All those drones flying over that city might as well not even have been there.’ I took a long swig of
Yuichi’s whisky. ‘All of it’s an unmitigated, stinking, fucking mess – run, so far as I can tell, by idiots.’

‘Yeah,’ said Yuichi. He scuffed at the dirt underfoot with a boot. ‘Still. Better than being stuck alone on some empty world, surrounded by death, with nothing to live for
while you get older and nuttier. Right?’

I put my face in my hands and mumbled something.

‘What you say?’ asked Yuichi.

‘I said you’re a shithead,’ I repeated, louder this time.

‘For what?’

I looked back up, leaning my head against the cool ancient stone. ‘For being right.’

He laughed.

I looked at him. ‘At least tell me how he died.’

‘The first Jerry? It was just a stupid accident. He was up high in the ruins of some building on an unexplored alternate when he lost his footing and fell.’ He shrugged. ‘It
was just one of those cosmically stupid accidents.’

Yuichi reached a hand down to me. ‘C’mon, man. I think it’s time we got headed back into town, don’t you?’ His nose wrinkled. ‘Seriously, dude. You need a
shower.’

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you just go find some other guy who could do this job, instead of me?’

‘Why bother?’ Yuichi replied. ‘They’d have to go hunting that other guy down, figure out if he was crazy or not, whether or not he’d fit in with us or be able to
work with other people, or if he might be psycho or paranoid or think he was being followed by black helicopters or any one of a dozen damn things. But another version of the same guy we know and
trust, so similar you can’t tell the difference? Someone like that’s a whole lot more quantifiable – and a whole lot cheaper to retrieve and train if you know just where to find
him, too.’

It started to rain. I shivered, feeling cold, and let him pull me upright before following him back down to the vehicles.

I woke the next morning, with a pounding hangover, to the sound of someone walking around inside my house. I listened through a haze of pain to the clatter of pans in the
kitchen, the inside of my mouth feeling as rough and dry as a lizard’s scales.

I started to remember what had happened after I followed Yuichi back into town. I had kept hold of his home-brewed whisky, draining the rest of it as I followed behind his motorbike in my jeep.
How the hell I ever made it back into town without smashing it beyond repair was beyond me. Mostly I remembered tumbling out of it before making my way inside the Hotel du Mauna Loa, where Wallace
Deans sat alone, his table crammed with empty glasses. I recalled how he had watched in silence while I got behind the deserted bar and poked around for something else to drink.

I had stopped on my way back out, a half-bottle of some brown liquid cradled in my arms like a baby, looked over at Wallace and said, ‘Fuck you.’

Wallace had just raised a glass in my direction. ‘And fuck you too,’ he responded with apparent relish, as I stumbled back out.

I came downstairs to find Rozalia sitting on a kitchen stool, about to work the plunger on my cafetière. From the look on her face when she turned to see me, I sensed I
was not the only one who had drunk themselves to sleep.

‘So,’ she said, nodding around the room with a flick of her head. ‘How are you settling into the new place?’

‘It’s okay. Still need to do a little more redecorating.’

‘Previous owner’s taste in home decor an issue?’

‘Fake tigerskin rugs. Miniature Grecian statues on plinths. I hid it all in the back of a shed where I couldn’t see it.’ I stepped towards her. ‘Rozalia . . .’

‘Sit down,’ she ordered, pushing the plunger on the cafetière all the way down. Her voice sounded raw and strained. ‘You want eggs?’

I stared at her, unsure what to say or do.

‘I said,’ she repeated, anger edging into her voice, ‘Do. You. Want. Eggs?’

I reached for a glass of water already sitting on the countertop and drained it. ‘Sure,’ I said, wiping my mouth before refilling the glass.

Rozalia nodded and pulled a pan from a hook, slamming it onto the hob with undue force before switching on the gas bottle beneath the hob. She broke six eggs against the side of the pan with the
air of an executioner dispatching victims, then swirled them around the pan, staring at them as they sizzled. I got hold of a mug and filled it with coffee, shivering and coughing at the first sip
as I took a seat. Clearly she liked it a lot stronger than I did.

Two minutes later, Rozalia dumped a plate of eggs in front of me. I was impressed. She’d managed to both undercook
and
burn them.

‘You know,’ I said, choosing my words as carefully as possible, ‘I remember exactly what it’s like to go through something like this. I mean, lose someone.’

Rozalia nodded. ‘Your wife, Alice. I know what you’re trying to do, Jerry. Don’t. That’s not why I’m here.’

‘I know words don’t help much, but—’

‘I do
not want
your fucking sympathy!’ she yelled.

I put both hands up in surrender.

The wild look faded from her eyes and she shovelled the remaining half-crisped, half-liquid eggs onto a second plate and sat down across from me, scooping the gooey mess into her mouth. I tried
eating mine and quickly came to the conclusion I’d be better off sticking with the coffee. At least it was helping to burn away a little of the previous night’s excess.

She finished her eggs, then pushed away the plate, and stared over at me. ‘I don’t think what happened last night was an accident.’

I tried to process the words, unsure if I’d heard her correctly. ‘I got the impression there was some kind of equipment failure. Maybe—’

Her knuckles whitened where she gripped the edge of the counter top. I could see how hard she was fighting to hold herself together. ‘No,’ she said tightly. ‘There are things
you don’t know, Jerry. Things no one else knows.’

‘Maybe you didn’t hear about it, but Oskar told me a few things about myself you’d all been keeping from me. If that’s what you’re—’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Not that. Nadia had . . . suspicions.’

‘About what?’

Her shoulders rose and fell and her eyes met mine for the first time. ‘About some of the circumstances around your predecessor’s death.’

I put down my mug. ‘You’re talking about the other Jerry, right?’ I realized my hands were trembling slightly, and not just because of the hangover. ‘The one who was here
before me.’

‘It’s important that everything I say stays between us.’

‘Go on.’

She leaned forward, her expression intent. ‘I want you to
swear
, Jerry. On your life.’

‘Fine. I swear. Nothing goes beyond this kitchen.’

She nodded, apparently satisfied. ‘That other you had been looking into something, just before he died. It’s true that there have been accidents, equipment failures and software
problems of all kinds, since before they brought you here. A few of them were nearly as bad as what happened to you last night, but rarely fatal.’

‘What exactly do you mean, “looking into something”?’

‘He had an idea that maybe some of those accidents weren’t really accidents.’

I fought for understanding through the haze of hangover pain. ‘Go on.’

‘He had reasons,’ she said carefully, ‘to believe certain missions may have been deliberately sabotaged.’

‘How could you know this? And what possible reason could anyone have to do something like that?’

‘Good question. Anyway, a while back, he came to talk to Nadia about a specific incident that nearly got a lot of people killed.’

I licked my lips. ‘What happened, exactly?’

‘At the time, it had been arranged that Mort Bramnik was going to join some of us on an expedition to a recently opened alternate. Bramnik was intending to show some people from the
Authority’s own alternate around, and we were expected to talk to them as if we were nothing more than inter-dimensional fucking tourist guides. I don’t know who these people were, but
from the way Bramnik was acting towards them, not to mention the fact that they were getting the grand tour, it wasn’t hard to guess they were important.’

She leaned back, turning her coffee mug in her hands. ‘Something went wrong not long after we crossed over into the alternate, along with all the Authority tourists. We ran into something
big and nasty that’d make you shit your pants in a second flat. Mort Bramnik himself nearly got killed as a result. Until that moment, we’d had every reason to believe we would be
entirely safe, but the whole thing turned into a fuck-up of truly epic proportions.’ She looked up at me. ‘And until last night, that was the worst incident of all – even
including the whole debacle in those vaults you saved me from. The only reason nobody got killed on that outing with the tourists was because Casey just about single-handedly saved our collective
asses.’

‘So what happened after that?’ I asked.

‘The Patriot agents started showing up, snooping around the island and generally getting in everyone’s face. I think Bramnik’s been under a lot of pressure because of that
first bad incident. Over the past year, he’s been away from the island with such frequency we started wondering if he’d ever come back, or who his replacement might be.’

‘If he’s screwing up so badly, maybe a replacement for him isn’t such a bad idea,’ I ventured.

‘Except that Agent Greenbrooke would most likely be his replacement, the way things have been going around here. And if Greenbrooke wound up running things, there isn’t one of us
who’d be able to so much as take a shit without half a dozen Patriot agents taking photographs and writing extensive reports on the subversive nature of our bowel movements. Believe me,
nobody
wants Greenbrooke in charge.’

Having met the man, I could only agree. ‘So Nadia had suspicions about my predecessor’s death.’ It still felt strange, saying the words.

She nodded. ‘He had some reason for believing the mission with Bramnik might have been sabotaged, but he wanted to find proof before he started throwing accusations around. Except he went
and got killed himself, not long after. Nadia figured that, in itself, was also more than a little suspicious, so she decided to see what else she could find out on her own.’ She shrugged,
her expression bleak. ‘And now she’s gone, too.’

I put my hands up in a stalling motion. ‘Wait a minute. Why are you even telling me all of this?’

She frowned. ‘Jerry – I mean the first Jerry – was a good friend of ours.’ She looked down, and I saw she was trying hard to suppress tears. ‘
You
were.
Seeing you alive like that, when you and Nadia both turned up in that EV, when I thought me and the others were goners for sure . . .’ She hugged the coffee close to her. ‘It was a
shock, I’ll tell you that, even though I already knew they’d retrieved you from your alternate, and that I’d have to meet you eventually.’ Her eyes met mine.
‘I’m also telling you all this because you saved my life, and you deserve to have someone tell you the truth for once.’

I thought for a moment. ‘So did everyone else know Nadia was asking questions?’

Rozalia shook her head. ‘She didn’t announce it publicly, if that’s what you mean. She just made a few careful, casual enquiries so as not to arouse suspicion.’

‘But not careful enough, you think?’

Rozalia gave me a hopeless shrug. ‘She also visited the alternate where the other Jerry died, I know that much. To be honest, I’m not clear on exactly who she might or might not have
talked to.’

I got up and scraped my uneaten eggs into the bin before dropping both our dishes in the sink, just to give myself time to mull over everything I had just been told.

‘I’m sorry about your loss,’ I said, turning back to her, ‘truly sorry. I liked Nadia a great deal. I’m not in the least surprised she and my predecessor were good
friends, because you’re clearly both good people. She made a real effort to make me feel welcome, even though it must have been like seeing a ghost. If there’s
any
reason to
think foul play was involved then, believe me, I’ll be the first to want to know who’s responsible.’