I can help you. Put that down and I'll help you. You don't have to die. I know how to fix you. I'm-I'm not like you. I'm definitely not as brave and strong as you, that's for sure. I can't believe you're still standing like that.

She was going to wait. She would wait until he passed out or fell over dead. All she had to do was keep talking and smiling and pretending she liked him.

He unzipped the bag.

The tall girl wasn't smiling now. She was running toward him, faster than he'd seen anyone run in his life. The gray veil shimmered as she came on. When she was close, her feet left the ground and she javelined into the spot where the first bullet hit him, hurling him backward and smashing him into the metal door frame. The baggie flew from his numb fingers and slid like a hockey puck across the tile. The gray veil turned black for a second. The tall girl pivoted as gracefully as a ballerina toward the bag. He hooked her ankle with his leg and sent her sprawling.

She was too quick and he was too hurt. She'd get there before him. So he picked up the gun that he had dropped and shot her in the back.

Then he got up for the last time. He tossed the gun away. He stepped over her writhing body, and that's as far as he got before falling for the last time.

He crawled toward the bag. She crawled after him. She couldn't stand up. The bullet had shattered her spinal cord. She was paralyzed from the waist down. But she was stronger than him and hadn't lost as much blood.

He scooped the plastic bag from the floor. Her hand fell on his arm and yanked him toward her as if he weighed nothing at all. She would finish him with a single punch to his dying heart.

But all he had to do was breathe.

He slapped the opening of the bag over his mouth.

And breathed.

BOOK TWO.

50.

I'M SITTING ALONE in a windowless classroom. Blue carpet, white walls, long white tables. White computer monitors with white keyboards. I'm wearing the white jumpsuit of new recruits. Different camp, same drill, down to the implant in my neck and a trip to Wonderland. I'm still paying for that trip. You don't feel empty after they drain your memories. You're sore as hell all over. Muscles retain memory, too. That's why they have to strap you down for the ride.

The door opens and Commander Alexander Vosch steps into the room. He carries a wooden box that he sets down on the table in front of me.

"You're looking well, Marika," he says. "Much better than I expected."

"My name is Ringer."

He nods. He understands exactly what I mean. More than once I've wondered if the information gathered by Wonderland flows both ways. If you can download human experience, why couldn't you upload it? It's possible the person who is smiling at me now contains the memories of every single human being who's been through the program. He may not be human-and I have my doubts about that-but he may also be the sum of all humans who have passed through Wonderland's gates.

"Yes. Marika is dead." He sits down across from me. "And now here you are, rising phoenixlike from her ashes."

He knows what I'm going to say. I can tell by the twinkling in his baby-blue eyes. Why can't he just tell me? Why do I have to ask?

"Is Teacup alive?"

"Which answer are you more likely to trust? Yes or no?"

Think before you respond. Chess teaches that. "No."

"Why?"

"Yes could be a lie to manipulate me."

He's nodding appreciatively. "To give you false hope."

"To gain leverage."

He cocked his head and looked down his narrow nose at me. "Why would someone like me need leverage over someone like you?"

"I don't know. There must be something you want."

"Otherwise . . . ?"

"Otherwise I'd be dead."

He doesn't say anything for a long moment. His stare pierces down to my bones. He gestures at the wooden box.

"I brought you something. Open it."

I look at the box. Look back at him. "I'm not going to do it."

"It's just a box."

"Whatever you want me to do, I won't. You're wasting your time."

"And time is the only currency we have left, isn't it? Time-and promises." Tapping the lid of the box. "I spent a great deal of that first precious commodity to find one of these." He nudges the box toward me. "Open it."

I open it. He goes on. "Ben wouldn't play with you. Or little Allison-I mean Teacup; Allison is dead, too. You haven't played a game of chess since your father died."

I shake my head. Not in answer to his question. I shake my head because I don't get it. The chief architect of the genocide wants to play chess with me?

I'm shivering in the paper-thin jumpsuit. The room is very cold. Smiling, Vosch is watching me. No. Not just watching. This isn't like Wonderland. It isn't just your memories he knows. He knows what you're thinking, too. Wonderland is a device. It records, but Vosch reads.

"They're gone," I blurt out. "They're not at the hotel. And you don't know where they are." That has to be it. I can think of no other reason why he hasn't killed me.

A crappy reason, though. In this weather and with his resources, how hard could it be to find them? I clamp my cold hands between my knees and force myself to breathe slowly and deeply.

He opens the lid, removes the board, and takes out the white queen. "White? You prefer white."

Long, nimble fingers set up the board. The fingers of a musician, a sculptor, a painter. He rests his elbows on the table and laces those fingers to make a shelf for his chin, like my father did every time he played.

"What do you want?" I ask.

He raises an eyebrow. "I want to play a game of chess."

Staring at me silently. Five seconds becomes ten. Ten becomes twenty. After thirty seconds, an eternity has passed. I think I know what he's doing: playing a game within a game. I just don't understand why.

I open with the Ruy Lopez. Not the most original opening in the history of the game; I'm a little stressed. As we play, he hums softly, tunelessly, and now I know he's deliberately mocking my father. My stomach rolls with revulsion. To survive I built walls, an emotional fortress that protected me and kept me sane in a world gone dangerously insane, but even the most open person has a private, sacred place where no one else may go.

I understand the game within the game now: There is nothing private, nothing sacred. There is no part of me hidden from him. My stomach churns with revulsion. He's violated more than my memories. He's molesting my soul.

The mouse and keyboard to my right are wireless. But the monitor beside him isn't. A lunge across the table, a wallop upside his head, and a wrap of the cord around his neck. Executed in four seconds, over in four minutes. Unless we're being watched, and we probably are. Vosch will live, Teacup and I will die. And even if I manage to take him out first, the victory will be Pyrrhic, assuming Evan Walker's claim is true. At the hotel, I pointed this out to Sullivan when she said Evan had sacrificed himself to blow up the base: If they can download themselves into human bodies, they can also make copies of themselves. The set of "Evans" and "Voschs" would be infinite. Evan could kill himself. I could kill Vosch. Wouldn't matter. By definition, the entities inside them are immortal.

You need to pay close attention to what I'm telling you, Sullivan said with exaggerated patience. There's a human Evan who merged with the alien consciousness. He's not one or the other; he's both. So he can die.

Not the important part.

Right, she snapped. Just the insignificant human part.

Vosch is leaning over the board. His breath smells like apples. I press my hands into my lap. He raises an eyebrow. Problem?

"I'm going to lose," I tell him.

He feigns surprise. "What makes you think so?"

"You know my moves before I make them."

"You're referring to the Wonderland program. But you're forgetting that we are more than the sum of our experiences. Human beings can be marvelously unpredictable. Your rescue of Ben Parish during the fall of Camp Haven, for example, defied logic and ignored the first prerogative of all living things: to continue living. Or your decision yesterday to give yourself up when you realized capture was the little girl's only chance to survive."

"Did she?"

"You already know the answer to that question." Impatiently, like a harsh teacher to a promising student. He gestures at the board: Play.

I wrap a hand around my fist and squeeze as hard as I can. Imagining my fist is his neck. Four minutes to choke the life out of him. Just four minutes.

"Teacup's alive," I tell him. "You know the threat to fry my brain won't make me do what you want me to do. But you know I'll do it for her."

"You belong to each other now, yes? Connected as if by a silver cord?" Smiling. "Anyway, besides the serious injuries from which she may not recover, you've given her the priceless gift of time. There is a saying in Latin. Vincit qui patitur. Do you know what it means?"

I'm beyond cold. I've reached absolute zero. "You know I don't."

"'He conquers who endures.' Remember poor Teacup's rats. What can they teach us? I told you when you first came to me; it isn't so much about crushing your capacity to fight as it is your will to fight."

The rats again. "A hopeless rat is a dead rat."

"Rats do not know hope. Or faith. Or love. You were right about those things, Private Ringer. They will not deliver humanity through the storm. You were wrong, however, about rage. Rage isn't the answer, either."

"What's the answer?" I don't want to ask, don't want to give him the satisfaction, but I can't help it.

"You're close to it," he says. "I think you might be surprised how close you are."

"Close to what?" My voice sounds as small as a rat's.

He shakes his head, impatient again. "Play."

"It's pointless."

"A world in which chess does not matter is not a world in which I wish to live."

"Stop doing that. Stop mocking my father."

"Your father was a good man in thrall to a terrible disease. You shouldn't judge him harshly. Nor yourself for abandoning him."

Please don't go. Don't leave me, Marika.

Long, nimble fingers clawing at my shirt, the fingers of an artist. Face sculpted by the merciless knife of hunger, the infuriated artist with the helpless clay, and red eyes rimmed in black.

I'll come back. I promise. You're going to die without it. I promise. I'll come back.

Vosch is smiling soullessly, a shark's smile or a skull's sneer, and if rage is not the answer, what is? I'm squeezing my fist hard enough to force my nails into my palm. Here's how Evan described it, Sullivan said, wrapping her fist in her hand. This is Evan. This is the being inside. My hand is the rage, but what is my fist? What is the thing wrapped up in rage?

"One move from mate," Vosch says softly. "Why won't you make it?"

My lips barely move. "I don't like to lose."

He pulls a silver device the size of a cell phone from his breast pocket. I've seen one before. I know what it does. The skin around the tiny patch of adhesive sealing the insertion point on my neck begins to itch.

"We're a little beyond that stage," he says.

Blood inside the fist that's within the hand clenching the fist. "Push the button. I don't give a shit."

He nods approvingly. "Now you're very close to the answer. But it is not your implant linked to this transmitter. Do you still want me to push it?"

Teacup. I look down at the board. One move from mate. The match was over before it began. When the game is fixed, how do you avoid losing?

A seven-year-old knew the answer to that question. I slide my hand beneath the board and hurl it toward his head. I guess that's checkmate, bitch!

He sees it coming and ducks easily out of the way. Pieces clatter on the table, roll lazily on the tabletop before falling off the edge. He shouldn't have told me that the device is linked to Teacup: If he pushes the button, he loses his leverage over me.

Vosch pushes the button.

51.