Extinction Game (21 page)

I drained the last of my coffee and dropped the mug in the sink along with the dishes before continuing. ‘But none of this means anything unless you can prove there really was foul play
involved. Just for a start, what possible motive could anyone have for wanting to sabotage any of the missions in the first place?’

‘Well,’ said Rozalia, a touch defensively, ‘that’s the reason your predecessor went looking to see if he could find any evidence.’

‘Did he talk to you or Nadia? Is that how you know all this?’

Rozalia nodded. ‘He spoke to Nadia, but not me. Unfortunately, she refused to share the full details of their conversation with me.’

‘Why?’

‘She was trying to protect me,’ she replied, with undisguised bitterness.

‘What from?’

‘Everything,’ she said. ‘I loved that woman to bits, but at times she was like a damn mother hen.’ She reached into a pocket and pulled out a crumpled packet of
cigarettes. ‘You mind?’

I shook my head – I wasn’t a smoker, but the kitchen window was open next to where she sat. I waited as she lit up with a battered lighter, her breath faltering slightly as she let
out the first rush of smoke.

‘Like there was this one time I got sick,’ she continued, waving away some of the smoke. ‘This is before we were retrieved by the Authority, mind.’

‘You survived together, the two of you, didn’t you?’

Rozalia nodded. ‘Nadia spent a lot of time and energy looking after me and keeping me alive back before our retrieval. Sometimes, if things got really bad, she’d keep it from me.
She’d just . . . clam up rather than say anything. Maybe it’s because I’m more than ten years younger than her; I don’t know. But any time we had bad arguments then or
since, it’s because she’d kept something back from me. I didn’t even know she’d
spoken
to Jerry until I came home and found them sitting there in our living
room.’ She laughed. ‘I actually got worried they were having an affair or something, the way they were acting so secretively. But I made her tell me the truth in the end, and
that’s when I knew she was doing it again . . . protecting me, when I didn’t need protecting.’

I reached up to touch a pendant that was no longer there, imagining what it might have been like if Alice had survived to stay by my side through the post-extinction years. Had she fallen ill,
or been in danger of any kind, I might easily have been guilty of the same well-intentioned but overbearing care.

Rozalia got up and held the smoked butt of her cigarette under the tap before dropping it in the trash.

‘You’ve been here for years,’ I said, ‘and I’ve barely arrived. You don’t have any idea why either of them were so intent on keeping their concerns under
their hats?’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe they were afraid of the Patriots finding out. Everyone’s scared to death of them, even the other Authority types. If they ever found out what your predecessor
was up to, things might get worse for us.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ I asked her.

‘Greenbrooke hates us,’ she said, her voice low and venomous. ‘He tortured Wallace.
He’s
the reason all our missions have been getting longer, and also a lot
more dangerous.’ She met my eyes. ‘And he
especially
hates me and Nadia. If I walked into Government House and tried to talk to Bramnik, I don’t know what might happen.
For all I know, the Patriots might be put in charge of an investigation, and then we’d
really
be fucked.’

‘All right, so what now?’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m grateful you told me all this, but you’re acting as if you think I’m going to pick up where the first Jerry
left off.’

Her nostrils flared. ‘Would that be so bad?’

I shook my head and chuckled. My comment hadn’t been serious, but clearly she didn’t see it that way. ‘Rozalia . . . I think you’re forgetting just how new here I am. I
only just had my first real mission, and it was a complete disaster. And now . . . all this,’ I said, waving my hand. ‘I’m supposed to do what, exactly? Because I really
don’t have any idea.’

There was a wild look in her eyes. ‘So you don’t want to know. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘It’s not that. It’s just . . .’ I sighed, collecting my thoughts. ‘I’m not a detective. I honestly don’t know what you expect me to actually
do
.’

Rozalia stood. ‘You need,’ she said, ‘to talk to Chloe Wicks. She knows more about the other Jerry than anyone else on this island.’

‘Chloe Wicks?’ I repeated. ‘I’ve barely even spoken to her, except the one time. How . . . ?’

Then I remembered the way she had kissed me so unexpectedly outside the entrance of the Hotel du Mauna Loa. Given what I now knew, the incident took on an entirely new and unexpected
perspective.

‘You were together for some time,’ said Rozalia. ‘Nadia told me she saw what happened between you and her when Casey was putting on his show.’

‘It didn’t make any sense,’ I said. ‘I guess it does now.’

I followed Rozalia to the front door, where she stood on the threshold. ‘Does Chloe know anything about all this stuff you just told me?’ I asked.

‘Probably. Yes. I think so. Certainly Nadia spoke to her,’ she said, ‘after the first Jerry died. So? Are you going to talk to her?’

‘I guess. But maybe you should come with me,’ I said. ‘It might be better if you were—’

Rozalia shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘But don’t wait too long.’ Her hand brushed my arm as she turned away, and then she was
gone, walking out through the gate and down the empty street.

I closed the door and leaned my forehead against it, feeling like the fragile foundations of my new life were about to slip out from under me.

Four hours later, after I had drunk enough coffee and water to take the edge off the lingering hangover, I was standing outside Chloe Wicks’ home. It was a two-storey
affair on the northern edge of town, its front yard filled with rusting chicken cages and overgrown grass and clearly untouched since the day its original owners vanished.

I knocked on the door several times, but got no response. I called out her name and waited, but nothing. Hell, for all I knew, she wasn’t even on the island – away, perhaps, on some
expedition to another alternate.

I tried the front door and found it was unlocked. I pushed it open slightly and called her name again, but still got no reply. I stepped inside anyway, finding myself within a small, cramped
vestibule, a narrow staircase to one side leading to the upper floor. Through a door on my right I saw a kitchen, and the remains of vegetables on a chopping board, suggesting that perhaps she
wasn’t too far away. On my left I saw a living room, one wall lined with shelf after shelf of mouldering paperbacks. A framed photograph on a shelf drew my eye and when I stepped closer, I
saw it was a picture of myself with my arm around Chloe.

The
other
Jerry, I corrected myself. Not me. I felt suddenly disoriented, and pressed my back against a wall until I could steady my breathing.

In truth, I had been expecting to find something like this, after what Rozalia had told me. Even so, the sight of this picture – it looked to have been taken in the bar of the Hotel du
Mauna Loa – sent a thrill of shock through my nerves. The two of them were laughing in the photograph, and now I looked closer, I could see other faces in the background – Casey, Nadia
and Oskar.

Then I turned my attention to the books on the shelves, where I saw a dozen thick-bound notebooks placed close to the floor. I sank down onto a dusty couch, feeling all the strength go out of
me. I clutched at my belly, feeling suddenly nauseous.

My diaries.

In my first years of solitude, when my primary concern had been survival, the idea of keeping a diary had seemed a deeply foolish one. And yet that simple act of writing entries as if I were
describing events to Alice had somehow kept me sane – or relatively sane, at any rate. The routine of putting the words down, of describing the daily struggle to survive, kept me from cutting
my own wrists. Later, when I wandered my alternate in a hopeless search for other survivors, I had managed to fill two thick books with crabbed writing and sketches. They had become so precious to
me that I had, at times, risked my life in order to protect them.

And now I found myself staring at a dozen notebooks identical in appearance in every way to the ones that now sat in my own house, on the other side of town.

I reached down and pulled out the last of the notebooks on the right, assuming they were arranged, as my own were, in chronological order. I expected to find mostly blank pages, since this was
the last notebook in which I had written immediately prior to my own retrieval.

At that time, my entries had grown increasingly sporadic as the Alice in my thoughts took on a kind of reality of her own. Each day was becoming too much like every other, and the less I wrote,
the more I struggled to find reasons to keep on living.

I had thought that I might start writing again, about the new life the Authority had gifted me with. But, in a way, a spell had been broken. I had barely written anything since a few short days
after emerging from quarantine.

I opened my other self’s last diary, but instead of finding the blank pages I had expected, I found them to be filled with tight, cramped handwriting identical to my own.

I flipped back to the beginning with shaking hands, finding the same sparse, barely descriptive passages I remembered making in the days immediately before my retrieval: a few brief words about
necessary repairs to my home and observations about the weather.

I moved on to the newer, unfamiliar entries. I began to read, my heart racing in my chest.

It’s been nearly a year since I first came here
, I read,
and maybe it’s time I started writing in this thing again.

I slammed the notebook shut and threw it on the floor. That
other
Jerry had sat on this couch, slept under this roof, eaten in the kitchen I had seen through the door on the other side
of the hallway.

I felt my skin crawl, literally
crawl
, the hairs on the backs of my arms bristling with terror.

‘We lived here together,’ said a voice from behind me. ‘I guess you figured that out by now.’

I whirled around, to see Chloe Wicks standing at the entrance to her living room. She held a paper bag full of groceries from the commissary. I had not even heard her come in.

She put the bag down on the floor, then walked past me, dropping into a chair opposite the couch. ‘I’ve been meaning to do something about them,’ she said, nodding towards the
notebooks. ‘Stick them in the attic, maybe burn them. I hadn’t really decided.’

‘It must have been hard,’ I managed to say, ‘seeing me walking around the island, like . . .’

The words faltered in my mouth, and I let myself sink onto the couch. Despite everything, my mind at that moment was filled with the memory of that one, fleeting kiss before I knew anything
about her.

‘Like a ghost,’ she said. ‘I heard about what Oskar said to you. Winnie told me just now, down at the commissary.’

There was a moment’s awkward silence. ‘It’s been hell, actually,’ she said finally. ‘You look like him, talk like him . . . but you’re not him.’ A
perplexed look came over her face. ‘I–I don’t know. It’s confusing.’

‘There must be some differences,’ I said.

I saw the flicker of a smile. ‘Well, you’re a couple of years younger than him, for a start. You’re the same age he was when they retrieved him.’

‘You almost make it sound like time travel,’ I said.

‘Weird physics, more like,’ she said. ‘It’s how they can sometimes visit alternates before, as well as after, an extinction event. That’s how Casey got that footage
he was showing everyone that night we . . .’

I nodded. She didn’t need to say which night. ‘So I’m the same age he was, when he first arrived here?’

‘Pretty much.’

I cleared my throat. ‘I spoke to Rozalia this morning.’

Chloe stared at me, alarmed. ‘Oh God. How is she doing?’

‘Pretty much as you’d expect. She told me you might know a few things about the . . . the other Jerry.’ I looked around again, at the diaries, the photograph. ‘But I
think I’ve got it pretty much figured out.’

‘So you came here,’ she said, ‘to see if it was true.’

‘There’s another reason.’ She looked at me, waiting. ‘Rozalia came to see me because she thinks Nadia’s death . . . well, she seems to think it might not have been
an accident. That it might somehow have been connected to what happened to your Jerry.’ I shrugged. ‘She talked about him carrying out some kind of, I guess, investigation, for want of
a better word. Does any of this mean anything to you?’

Instead of laughing at me or telling me I was crazy, she merely asked, ‘Was that all she said?’

‘Pretty much.’

Chloe’s hands twisted together in her lap. ‘I guess there’s no reason not to tell you. Back when he was still alive, me and . . . and the other Jerry had a bad argument because
he’d been disappearing for hours or even days at a time. I knew he must be taking trips to other alternates, because he was nowhere on the island. But if he was, they were clearly off the
record, and that got me worried. Why would he be going on secret trips? And who was responsible for sending him on them?’ She looked past me and out of the window. ‘In the end, I was
only able to get him to talk by threatening to tell the other Pathfinders he was up to something behind their backs.’

‘And?’

‘He confessed he’d been trying to find out about what was causing all the equipment failures and accidents.’ Her eyes briefly met mine. ‘He swore me to secrecy, said I
couldn’t tell anyone. Not even if something bad happened to him.
Especially
not then.’ She shook her head. ‘I could tell something had frightened him, and then . . . then
he was gone.’

‘And that’s when Nadia came to talk to you?’

‘Rozalia told you that?’

I nodded.

She sighed heavily. ‘Goddam him. The other Jerry, I mean. I understand why he turned to Nadia – you know she used to be a cop?’