“But maybe they just wanted to take us into custody,” Cooper said.
“Look, guys, contrary to popular belief, I’m not an idiot.” I pulled the hem of my shirt out over the top of my pants and started to put my boots back on. “I got a peek inside the mind of the Virtus I killed. They want me dead, period, end of sentence. And to be on the safe side, they want you guys dead, too. They are probably the least random beings in the universe; everything they do is carefully planned and measured against a thousand possible outcomes. The Virtus probably didn’t have to miss when it took a swing at us, so they wanted us to go through this particular portal. So it was a setup from the beginning. And we just have to deal.”
“But why here?” the Warlock asked. “I mean, if they want you dead … well, this hay pile doesn’t fit in with that, you know? Whoever is running the show here wants people to survive the fall. So are we looking at some kind of fate worse than death out here, like prolonged torture or something?”
“They’re not sadists.” I shook the dust off the opera gloves and stowed them in the pack. Trying to explain to the others what I’d seen and felt when I’d touched the Virtus’ mind was pretty difficult. I just didn’t have the words for all of it.
“I killed one of them,” I continued. “That means I’m dangerous to them in a physical sense, sure. But I’m also dangerous to them on a prophecy level, and to them, that’s even worse. Clearly the Virtus I took out the other day hadn’t planned on dying, right? I upset their carefully-laid plans, and they just can’t stand that. Their wanting me dead isn’t vengeance or something—it’s simply to fix a bug in their program, I guess is the best way to put it.”
I tucked my pants cuffs into my boots. “And that probably means they expect I’ll die here without their having to risk any more of their own people to do it. Obviously, that’s not good. But there’s also the possibility that they herded us out here because their calculations say I’m likely to end up fixing some other problem they don’t want to deal with directly.”
I stood up and faced them. “And that means we might get out of this alive.”
chapter
thirteen
Texas Hold ’Em
“What kind of problem could you solve for them?” the Warlock asked.
“Jeez, I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s not like they e-mailed a memo. If certain people had bothered to share basic information with me, none of this would have happened in the first place.”
I frowned, getting angry at Benedict Jordan and my father all over again.
The Warlock tugged at the crotch of his tuxedo pants, looking unhappy. “So what now?”
“Well.” I picked up my backpack and shrugged into it. “We could get some shade under one of those planes, but I think we should look for civilization. I’ve got only one bottle of water, and out here that won’t last the four of us even until sundown. It also won’t last us much of a hike in this sun, so does anyone see anything nearby?”
Cooper squinted off into the horizon. “I think there’s a gas station or something over that way.”
I followed the direction of his gaze, and saw the sun glinting off a red-and-white sign a mile or two away, the logo and lettering unreadable at our distance. Near it was what looked like a low building, and beyond it, a gray water tower that was barely visible against the sky.
Cooper loosened his tie and slipped off his tux jacket; his dress shirt was already drenched in sweat, clinging to his tight ab muscles. The Warlock followed suit, and I stowed their jackets in my backpack.
“I think before we wander off toward the Great Unknown, we should check the planes for supplies,” Cooper said, rolling up his sleeves. “Just in case the survivors left behind some water or food or something. And I don’t know about you guys, but I could use a hat.”
We checked out the nearest, mostly-wrecked planes first, and found more corpses that none of us felt like moving in order to search the aircraft. As we moved farther through the airplane graveyard, we spotted an American Airlines regional jet that had plowed deep furrows in the rocky earth during its touchdown, snapping off at least one of the wheels.