Chapter 08 - The List (Patreon)

I'd had a lot of time to think about what I'd say when somebody finally asked me that.

In the cell, with my wrist cuffed to the wall. In the patrol car, all the way up from Carson. On eleven miles of the Backbone Trail. I'd written whole speeches in my head. I had one with a dog in it. I had one with a plane in it. Around mile nine I'd had a very bad one that started Okay, so, there's this video game, and I'd shut that one down before it got to the second sentence.

I didn't use any of them. I shrugged.

"I'm immune," I said.

Luz had her arms folded, and the whole burning city behind her, and the last orange light going out of the sky over her shoulder, and she'd just delivered the best closing argument I'd ever heard. She'd been ready for I'm dying, or I'm a government experiment, maybe even I'm from the future. She had not been ready for a shrug.

"That's it?" she said.

"That's kind of a big it."

"Immune."

"To the bite." I thought about it. "To all of it, probably. Whatever this is." I nodded at the city. "I got bit in San Pedro, and I didn't turn. So."

Behind me, the hood of the SUV creaked as Danny sat up.

"You got bit?"

"Back of the leg." I pointed at it, like it was a parking spot. "Runner. Port Police uniform. I burned it off with a road flare so nobody'd freak out, and then it healed up in about twelve hours, and then I put a big bandage on it and limped around like an idiot." I looked at Luz. "It's still a burn. You were right about that. I just didn't tell you what was under it."

Luz was doing math: the fever, the eating, the burn that looked a week old, the quarter mile with Danny on my back. I watched it add up.

"Wait," said Danny. "Wait, wait, wait. How did you know? That you were immune? Like, before?"

This was the dangerous part, so I made it the boring part.

"I didn't," I said. "Not for sure. I had a hunch."

"A hunch."

"The dead don't go for me the way they go for other people. Not always. Sometimes they look right at me and keep walking. I heal fast. I've always healed fast." That was Bruno's, and it was true; he'd broken his nose twice and never missed a day of work. "I figured if I was wrong, better I find out alone in a locked room than in the building with you guys asleep next door."

"So you let one bite you," said Luz. "On purpose."

"In a controlled setting."

"In a controlled..." She put both hands on top of her head, the way she had on the stairwell the first night when Hal wouldn't come back. "Bruno. Do you understand how insane that is?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's actually why I didn't tell you."

That stopped her.

"What?"

"You want to know why I didn't say anything?" I sat down on the edge of the fire road, on a rock that was still warm from the sun. "Because of what you'd do with it. Not you, specifically. Anybody."

"What would we do with it?"

"Get ideas." I held up a finger. "Tavi's mom works at County. She's been gone five days." Second finger. "Mrs. Kaur's got knees that are never getting her over a mountain." Third finger. I pointed it at Luz. "And you've got a very scientific mind and about a year of nursing school. So picture it. Everybody's sitting in that building, and they all know Bruno's immune. And one night, somebody's lying there awake at three in the morning thinking, What if it's genetic? What if it runs in families, like red hair? What if I'm immune too? And they go down to the gate to find out."

I put my hand down.

"That's the dumbest thing anybody could do," I said. "I didn't want anybody getting funny ideas."

"You did it," said Luz.

"Yeah," I said. "And it was dumb. I got lucky."

I didn't feel great about that one. It wasn't luck. I'd watched this body shrug off a bite in a cutscene. But I knew because I played it wasn't going on the table, tonight or maybe ever.

Danny started to laugh, the laugh of a man who had walked eleven miles on a bad ankle and been arrested by a drone and was now finding out his neighbor was bulletproof, sort of. He laughed until he had to lie back down on the hood of the SUV.

"Funny ideas," he said, to the sky. "He didn't want us getting funny ideas."

"It's a real concern, man."

"He's immune to the zombie apocalypse, and he was worried about funny ideas."

Luz came over and crouched down in front of me on the fire road and took my wrist, and this time I let her. She turned it over and put two fingers on the inside of it and looked at her phone for thirty seconds without saying anything.

"Forty-six," she said.

"Is that bad?"

"It's what you'd see in a marathon runner. At rest. You carried Danny up a hill three hours ago." She let go of my wrist and put her hand on my forehead again, just for a second. "And you're running a hundred and two. Those two numbers don't go together, Bruno. They don't go together in anybody."

"I don't know what to tell you," I said.

Then she said the thing I'd been dreading since the holding cell.

"Do you know what this means?" she said. "If you're really immune. If it's in your blood. Every lab in the country..."

"Yeah," I said. "That's the other reason I don't tell people."

She sat back on her heels.

"You let me check the burn," she said.

"You asked."

"You let me. You put your leg up on the railing and let me peel it back and tell you it was fine." Her voice was even. "You used me. I was your alibi."

She was right.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I really am. I didn't know how else to do it."

She nodded. She didn't say it was okay.

"Is that everything?" she said. "Is there anything else I should know?"

I thought about the dog. I thought about a white paw print in the corner of a soldier's tablet. I thought about Konstantin, and the Chosen, and a plane full of people coming down through the roof of the city in a ball of fire, and my face, this face, on a title screen.

"No," I said. "That's everything."

That one wasn't made of true things.

Luz stood up, brushed the dirt off her knees and walked back to the car without saying okay.

"Can we be mad at him inside somewhere?" said Danny, from the hood. "My ankle's the size of a cantaloupe."

There were houses all along that stretch of Mulholland. We'd passed them that morning, going the other way: big ones, gated, hidden behind hedges and walls and those tall skinny Italian trees that rich people plant so you know they're rich. A lot of the gates had been hanging open.

The one we picked had its gate open neatly, all the way, like it was expecting company. I should have thought about that more than I did.

The house was down a long curving driveway at the edge of the ridge, and it was mostly glass. It was the kind of house you see in a car commercial, three boxes of glass and white concrete stacked on top of each other and sticking out over the canyon on steel legs, with nothing underneath but air and a six-hundred-foot drop into the dark. There were no lights on. There was no car in the drive. There was a little brass plaque by the front door that said CASA ALTA, which I was pretty sure just meant high house.

The front door was unlocked.

I went in first, with the axe, and I'd gotten maybe two steps into the front hall when every light in the house came on at once.

They came up soft and warm, like a hotel lobby: lamps, strips under the stairs, lights in the floor. Somewhere, piano music started playing.

And a woman's voice, calm and pleasant and coming from everywhere, said:

"Welcome home."

All three of us froze.

"Nope," said Danny, in the doorway. "Nope, nope, nope."

"It's the house," I said. I'd found the panel on the wall by the door. A smooth white square of glass, glowing. "It's a smart house. Solar, probably. It's got batteries." I looked at the little logo in the bottom corner of the panel, and didn't let my face do anything. "Konstant Home. OSK makes it. It's in, like, every rich person's house in LA."

"Why is it welcoming us home?"

"Motion sensor. It thinks we're the owners."

"Rich people," said Danny, with feeling, "are so weird."

The white paw print sat in the corner of the panel and glowed at me.

It was the first time I'd seen it on a wall instead of a screen, and that got to me more than it should have. A stranger's house in the dark, saying welcome home in a nice lady's voice, with the dog in the corner. It knew where we were. It had probably picked the house.

"Turn the music off," I said to the wall, and the music went off.

We cleared it, a five-day-old habit. I went room by room with the axe while Luz and Danny waited in the front hall, and there was nobody inside, living or otherwise.

The house was perfect, which was the creepy part. It wasn't looted or trashed. The beds were made. There was a bowl of green apples on the kitchen island, going soft. There were family photos all up the stairs, a man and a woman and two teenage kids, on a yacht, on a glacier, on a beach somewhere with water that color, in matching white outfits at some kind of party in the desert. Everybody tan. Everybody smiling with a lot of teeth.

In the master bedroom, the walk-in closet was half empty. Eight wooden hangers on a rail by themselves, with nothing on them. Above them, on a little shelf, was a folded white card, thick and expensive, embossed with a symbol I knew.

In the office, there was a laptop open on the desk, asleep. I touched the trackpad and it woke up to a white screen with the same symbol at the top, and a line of text in a thin, elegant font.

Welcome aboard, Carol. Your Ascension is complete.

I closed the laptop.

Somewhere up in these same hills, if the game had been right, there was a compound where people like Carol went to have their minds uploaded to a satellite by a cult with a very good interior designer. I didn't know if the upload was real. I didn't know if Carol and her husband and her two kids with the very white teeth were up there now in a little digital heaven, or lying on a floor somewhere in white robes, or standing on it.

I hoped it had been worth it, Carol.

I didn't tell Luz and Danny about the laptop. I told them the family had evacuated, which was sort of true.

The pool guy was in the pool.

Danny found him. The back of the house was one long wall of glass that slid open onto a terrace, and the terrace ran out to the edge of the ridge, to an infinity pool that looked like it poured straight off the side of the world into the canyon. The pool lights had come on with everything else. They were blue and glowing, and the water was perfectly clear, and at the bottom of the deep end, standing up straight, was a man.

He had on a blue polo shirt with a logo on it, CRYSTAL CLEAR POOL SERVICE, and khaki shorts, and he was standing on the bottom of the pool, eight feet down, with his arms floating a little bit out at his sides. His hair drifted around his face. He was looking up at us through the water.

When Danny leaned over the edge, the pool guy lifted his arms toward him, very slowly, the way you'd reach for something on a high shelf.

"Oh," said Danny, and stepped back. "Oh, that's awful."

"He can't get out," I said. "He can't swim. He can't climb. He's just going to stand there."

"How long has he been down there?"

"Day 0, probably. Came to clean the pool, fell in, or something pushed him in." I thought about the Wildfire. Anybody who dies. "Maybe he just had a heart attack and fell in. Maybe he drowned. Doesn't matter. Either way, he got back up at the bottom."

"We have to do something," said Luz.

We all looked at the pool guy. The pool guy looked at us.

"Like what?" I said. "I'm not going in there."

"You're immune."

"I'm immune, I'm not a dolphin. He's eight feet down. I'd have to wrestle him underwater." I shook my head. "He's not hurting anybody. We'll leave the cover off and stay away from the edge."

Danny was still looking down at him. "His name tag says Gary."

"Don't name him," said Luz.

"I didn't name him. Crystal Clear Pool Service named him. That's Gary now."

The kitchen was bigger than my whole apartment. The fridge was still cold, because the house was running on solar batteries, and the freezer was full, and the wine fridge was full, and the pantry had forty kinds of crackers in it and nothing I recognized as dinner.

I cooked. I found steaks in the freezer, thick ones, with a gold sticker on the packaging and a price on it that made me feel sick, and I thawed them in the sink and cooked them in a pan that probably cost more than Bruno's car. I cooked six. I ate four.

Luz watched me eat the fourth one.

"Stage one," I said, with my mouth full. "Of being immune. Constant hunger. It's a whole thing."

"Stage one?"

That was a mistake. The gamer part of my brain had filed everything that was happening to me under the headings from the game, and sometimes the headings came out of my mouth.

"That's what I've been calling it," I said. "In my head. Like, stage one, I'm hungry. Stage two, I don't know yet. I'll let you know."

She didn't push. She took my temperature again, instead, with the thermometer from my bag, and wrote it down on a paper napkin with a pen from the fancy cup by Carol's fancy phone. 102.4°F. Then my pulse. Then my blood pressure, with the cuff I'd brought her. She looked at that number twice before she wrote it down.

"I'm going to keep a chart," she said. "On you. Every few hours."

"Luz..."

"You're not asking me for permission, and I'm not asking you." She didn't look up from the napkin. "Somebody needs to write down what's happening to you. If you're really immune, somebody needs to write it down."

I didn't argue. I owed her more than that.

Danny had opened a bottle of wine with a label so old the paper was brown. He poured it into three glasses so thin I was scared to hold mine.

"To Gary," he said.

Luz rolled her eyes and drank anyway.

For about ten minutes, in a dead billionaire's kitchen, eating her steaks and drinking her wine with the lights low and the whole burning city on the other side of the glass like a painting, it was almost nice.

Then Luz's phone went off.

It wasn't a text or a call. It was a little three-note chime, bright and happy, rising up at the end, the sound you'd put on a video game when you found a treasure chest.

Luz's phone was on the kitchen island, charging off one of the house's outlets. The screen lit up.

One second later, so did Danny's, on the counter by the sink. Same chime.

Luz picked hers up and read it.

"Oh my God," she said.

"What?" said Danny. "What is it?"

She turned the screen around so we could see it.

It was white, with a green checkmark, very big, in the middle. Under the checkmark, in friendly rounded letters:

Your evacuation request has been APPROVED!Soaring Pacific Airlines Flight 71LAX International · Terminal 4 · Gate 43AReport: Day 7, 0600Passengers: 2 · Seats: 34B, 34CStay safe! We'll see you soon. 🐾

Danny made a noise I'd never heard a grown man make. He grabbed Luz and picked her up off her feet, and she was laughing and crying at the same time, and the wine glass in her hand went over and red wine went all over Carol's white floor, and nobody cared.

"We're on," Danny kept saying. "We're on. We're getting out."

I sat there with my fork in my hand.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I looked.

Soaring Pacific Airlines Flight 71. Report: Day 7, 0600. Seat 22A. Priority boarding.

Twenty-two. Twelve rows up from them. Close enough to see. Not close enough to reach.

In the corner of the boarding pass sat the white paw print.

Pending, the sergeant had said, four hours ago. Both of them. Pending.

Pending until the moment I'd proven the wall didn't work. Pending until I'd walked them to within thirty yards of an exit, with my own two feet, and watched a drone turn them around. Pending until they'd seen with their own eyes that there was no other way out.

And then, three hours later, the treasure-chest sound.

I'd been ready for the dog to steer me, and lie to me, and put me on that plane. I hadn't been ready for it to understand me this well.

It didn't need a leash. It had Luz and Danny. Wherever they went, I went. And now they were going to Gate 43A, Terminal 4, Day 7, 0600, on the one flight out of Los Angeles that I knew for a fact was never going to land.

"No," I said.

It came out louder than I meant it to. Danny put Luz down.

"No what?" he said.

"You can't get on that plane."

They both looked at me. The wine was spreading out across the floor between us, very red on the white.

"Bruno," said Luz slowly. "We just watched the wall. We watched soldiers turn. You said it yourself. There's no other side."

"I know what I said."

"The harbor's gone. The freeways are gone. We walked eleven miles and they turned us around at gunpoint." She held up the phone. "This is the door. This is the only door. And it just opened."

"I told you on Day 1. The airport's a death trap. Thousands of people in a crowd, one guy has a heart attack..."

"And then they put a few hundred of us in a metal tube." She said it with me, flatly. She'd remembered it word for word. "I know. I heard you. It was a good speech. And I've spent five days thinking about it, and you know what I think?"

I didn't say anything.

"I think you're right," she said. "It's dangerous. Everything's dangerous. The building's dangerous. The mountains were dangerous. This house has a dead man in the pool." Her voice cracked on that and came back. "At least the plane goes somewhere. At least there's an other side to it."

"And you're on it," said Danny.

I looked at him.

"You're on it too, man. Same flight." He nodded at my phone, which I'd put face down on the counter without thinking about it, the way Luz had on Day 1. "I saw it. Twenty-two A. If it's such a death trap, why are you on it?"

"I didn't pick it."

"Neither did we. Not really. But I'm picking it now." He put his arm around Luz. "We're going, Bruno. And I think you're going too. Because they're not going to let you not. You saw that guy's face with the tablet."

He was right, and I couldn't tell him why he was right, because the why came with a dog and a cult and a satellite and a cutscene attached, and I'd told Luz, forty minutes ago, on a fire road, that there wasn't anything else.

I'd pushed all my chips in on I'm immune. I didn't have anything left to play.

"Okay," I said. So that's what it sounds like from the other side.

They went to bed in the kids' rooms upstairs. Danny's had a gaming chair and a signed jersey on the wall. Luz's had about four hundred stuffed animals and a vanity mirror with lights around it. Neither of them cared. They'd walked eleven miles. They were asleep in minutes.

I lay on the couch in the living room with the axe on the floor next to me and looked at the ceiling.

Then I got up and went into the kitchen.

Luz's phone was still on the island, charging.

I knew her passcode. I'd watched her type it a dozen times in five days, on the stairwell and in the kitchen and on the balcony and in the back seat. Six digits. The first four were a birthday; I'd have bet anything it was her mom's. Bruno had gotten into a lot of phones in his life by just paying attention, and I'd been paying attention.

I told myself it was for her own good. That's what everybody tells themselves, right before they do something they'd be furious to have done to them.

I opened the evacuation app.

There it was. The green checkmark. Seats 34B, 34C. And under it, very small, in gray, a link that said Manage booking.

I tapped it.

Change seats. Add passenger. Decline seats.

I tapped Decline seats.

Declining your seats will return you to the end of the waitlist. Current waitlist: 2,418,660. Are you sure?

Yes.

A spinner went around.

Something went wrong. Please try again later. 🐾

I tried again. The spinner went around. Something went wrong. I tried five more times. I closed the app and opened it again. I turned the phone off and on. Every time, the spinner went around, and every time, it came back with the same thing and the same paw.

Plan B. Carol's laptop was still in the office. The Ascension page was still on it when I opened it, welcome aboard, Carol, and I closed that tab so hard I nearly broke the trackpad. I went to the county's evacuation portal and logged in as Luz, using her email and a password I got on the third try (the name of Danny's truck, plus the year, plus an exclamation point; people are so predictable). I found her booking. I tried to change the names on it. This field cannot be edited. I tried to add a note to the booking, a medical note, something that would flag them, a cough, a fever, anything. I got as far as typing possible exposure before I stopped.

A medical flag wouldn't get them off a plane. It would get them into a camp. I'd seen the news. I'd seen the fences at Union Station. I deleted it, letter by letter.

I tried to book them on a different flight. There weren't any. The portal showed me a calendar with one flight on it, Day 7, 0600, Soaring Pacific 71, and every other day in the calendar was gray.

Plan C.

There was an actual landline in Carol's office, a heavy black phone on the corner of the desk. I picked it up and got a dial tone and nearly laughed. It was the only thing I'd touched in five days that didn't have a dog on it.

I called the evacuation hotline number from the bottom of the portal page.

It rang and rang. Then a recording told me all agents were busy assisting other callers and my call was important to them, and then it played the same forty seconds of hold music for fifty-one minutes, and I sat in Carol's leather desk chair in the dark and listened to it and didn't hang up.

At fifty-two minutes, a woman picked up.

"Evacuation assistance, this is Deb."

She sounded about sixty and about four days past tired. There was noise behind her, a lot of other voices, all of them saying the same things.

"Hi, Deb," I said. "Thank you for picking up, ma'am. Where are you?"

There was a pause. "Omaha, hon. Call center. How can I help you?"

"I need to cancel two seats on a flight. The people don't want them."

A longer pause.

"Hon," she said, "I've been doing this for three days, and you are the first person who's called in to give back a seat."

"I know. I'm sorry. It's complicated."

I heard her typing. Then the typing stopped.

"I can't touch those," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Those seats. I can't touch 'em. Nobody here can. We can't add, we can't cancel, we can't move anybody. It's all automated. The system does the seats." She lowered her voice. "Nobody knows how it picks. We've got a woman here whose own mother's been pending since Day 1. Seventy-nine, on oxygen, and she's pending. And some kid with a skateboard gets a seat in six hours." She sighed, a long one, all the way from Nebraska. "It's all OSK's system. They just run it. We just answer the phones."

"Right," I said. "Okay."

"If somebody got a seat," said Deb, "I'd tell 'em to take it, hon. I'd tell 'em to be grateful. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I've got four hundred people on hold."

"No, that's... thank you, Deb. Thank you."

"You stay safe, now."

She hung up. I sat in the dark with the dial tone, then put the phone down carefully, like it might break.

That was when the gate buzzed.

It was a woman and a little girl.

The panel by the front door showed them in grainy black and white from the camera out at the gate: a woman in a dirty fleece jacket with a backpack, holding a kid on her hip. The kid had her face buried in her mother's shoulder. They were standing in the circle of light from the landscaping lamps, which had come on by themselves, all the way down the driveway, like runway lights.

The gate was still wide open. She could have just walked in. She'd buzzed anyway.

I went out with the axe, and then I felt stupid about the axe, and I put it down by the door. I walked down the driveway. The woman watched me come the whole way and didn't move. When I got close enough, I could see she had a kitchen knife in her other hand, held down against her leg where the kid couldn't see it.

"We saw the lights," she said. "We're not... we don't want anything. We just saw the lights. Everything else is dark."

"It's okay, ma'am," I said. "It's not my house. Come in."

Her name was Renata. Her daughter was Sofi, and she was seven, and she was asleep, or pretending to be. They'd lived at the bottom of Laurel Canyon, in a little house off Kirkwood, until the fire came down the canyon on the afternoon of Day 4 and they'd gone out the back with what they could carry. They'd been walking along Mulholland ever since. Just walking. Toward the ocean, because Renata didn't know where else to go.

"Are you on a flight?" she said.

I'd sat them down in Carol's kitchen and given them water. Renata had drunk two glasses without stopping. Sofi had drunk half of one, and then coughed. It was a bad cough, a wet, tight one, and Renata's face did something small and frightened when she heard it.

"She's got asthma," Renata said. "Her inhaler was in the house. I don't... I've been trying not to let her run."

"Are you on a flight?" I said.

"Pending." She held up her phone. The screen was cracked across one corner. "Since Day 1. I registered in the first hour. I've checked it every ten minutes for five days. Pending." She laughed, a little. "I thought, maybe it's first come, first served. Maybe it's lottery. Maybe it's kids first. It's not any of those. It's not anything. It's just pending."

I looked at Sofi, coughing into her mother's fleece.

Then I took out my phone.

Afterward, I told myself this: if my seat was gone, then I was off the plane. And if I was off the plane, the dog didn't need Luz and Danny on it anymore; they were only there because of me. Maybe the whole thing would come apart. Maybe it would bump them back to pending. Maybe it would all just stop.

There was another reason, and it was worse. I'd looked at a seven-year-old with asthma and no inhaler, walking along Mulholland Drive in the dark at the end of the world, and I'd done the math. Her chances out here. Her chances in there, on a plane that was going to come down in the middle of the city with fire and teeth, but with a guy on board who knew it was coming. And some cold part of me had looked at those two numbers and said, the plane's better.

I didn't know yet whose math that was. I figured it out about three hours later.

I opened my boarding pass. Seat 22A. Priority boarding. At the bottom, under Manage booking, there was a button I hadn't noticed before. Transfer seat. For family members and dependents.

I tapped it.

Facial verification required. A little frame came up on the screen, a camera view.

"Look at this for a sec," I said to Renata, and held the phone up to her face.

She looked at me, confused. She looked at the phone.

Verification failed. This seat is assigned to: BRUNO. 🐾

I tried again. I held the phone out and put my face and her face in the frame together, cheek to cheek, like we were taking a selfie at a wedding. Verification failed. I tried it with Sofi's face. Sofi opened one eye and looked at the phone and coughed at it. Verification failed. This seat is assigned to: BRUNO. I tried turning the phone off and on and doing it again. I tried it in the front hall, under better light. I tried it with my face covered, so it couldn't see me, and just Renata's. Verification failed.

I opened Luz's phone, which I still had in my back pocket, and tried Transfer seat on 34B.

This seat cannot be transferred.

No try again later. Just cannot.

Renata had figured out what I was doing about halfway through. She'd stopped looking at the phone and started looking at me.

"Hey," she said gently. "Hey. It's okay."

"It's not okay."

"You tried." She reached over and put her hand on my arm, the way you'd calm down a kid who'd dropped something. "Nobody's tried. Five days, nobody's even asked. You tried."

That was much worse than if she'd been angry.

I put them in Carol's bedroom, on Carol's enormous bed, with Carol's cashmere throw over the two of them. Before I shut the door, I went through Carol's bathroom cabinets, all of them, and then Carol's husband's, and then the kids'. No inhaler. There was every other kind of pill in the world in that house. There was a whole drawer of melatonin gummies, and a bottle of something from a doctor in Switzerland, and a jar that said Ascension Protocol: Mitochondrial Blend that I put back very carefully. No inhaler.

I left a glass of water by the bed and turned the lights down to nothing, and the house did it for me before I touched the panel.

When I came back down the hall, Luz was standing at the top of the stairs.

She had one of the stuffed animals from the vanity room under her arm, a pink rabbit with long ears, like she'd grabbed it on the way out of bed without noticing. She'd been standing there a while.

"The gate woke me up," she said.

"Yeah. I'm sorry. Woman and her kid. Their house burned. They're sleeping."

"I heard." She came down two steps. "I heard you, in the kitchen. With her phone. And yours."

"You tried to give your seat to that little girl."

"She needs it more than I do."

"Three hours ago," said Luz, "you told me that plane was a death trap. You told me you'd do anything to keep me and Danny off it. And now you're trying to put a seven-year-old on it." She came down another step. "Which one is it, Bruno? Is the plane going to kill us or not?"

I opened my mouth.

I had the answer. It was right there. Both. It's going down, and I'm the only one who knows it, and I don't know if anybody on it lives except me and five other people who can't die the regular way. And I thought maybe, maybe, if I was on it, I could change that. And I thought that little girl had a better chance on a crashing plane with me than on a mountain road without an inhaler. And I hate that I thought that. And there's a dog that lives in your phone.

"I don't know," I said.

She looked at her phone, still in my hand. I'd forgotten I was holding it.

I held it out. She came down the rest of the stairs and took it.

"I don't know what you're doing," she said. "I don't think you're telling me. And I don't think it's because of funny ideas."

She went back up the stairs with the rabbit under her arm. At the top, she stopped.

"Your fever was a hundred and two point four at nine o'clock," she said, without turning around. "I'm going to check it again at one. Don't be asleep."

I wasn't.

It was a hundred and two point six.

At three in the morning, I was sitting on the terrace, by the pool.

I hadn't needed more than two hours a night since the holding cell, and tonight I didn't seem to need any. I sat on one of Carol's white lounge chairs with the fire axe across my knees and the notepad from the pharmacy in my lap, and I wrote down Luz's numbers in pencil, because she was right, somebody should write it down. Day 5. 102.6. Pulse 46. Ate four steaks. Luz knows about the bite. Not the rest.

The city was different at night from up there. You couldn't see the smoke. You could only see the fires, orange and scattered, like somebody had kicked over a campfire across a hundred square miles. And the dark places in between. And the helicopters, still, blinking their little red lights, and down on the flats by the ocean, a big bright patch of white light that I knew was LAX. Floodlights, all night long. Getting the runway ready.

Gary was standing in the deep end, looking up at me.

The pool lights were still on. The water was that perfect glowing blue. He'd moved, a little, since dinner, over to the side of the pool closest to my chair, and he was standing there, eight feet down, with his arms up, reaching. Every so often a little stream of bubbles came out of his nose, which I didn't understand, because he shouldn't have had any air left, and I decided not to think about it.

"Hey, Gary," I said.

Gary reached.

My phone lit up on the table next to me.

It was face down, and the screen came on so bright I could see the glow around the edges of the case. When I picked it up, it was already unlocked. The dog was in the middle of the screen, big, the way it had been in the holding cell, sitting very straight, with no speech bubble and no route, looking at me.

I lasted about a minute before it got weird. It was a cartoon, It was a shaggy white cartoon dog with a brown collar and big round eyes, the kind of thing you'd put on a cereal box. and it was sitting in the middle of my phone at three in the morning on the terrace of a dead woman's house, next to a dead man standing in a swimming pool, and it was staring at me. Cartoons don't have to blink. Every so often its head tilted about two degrees to one side, slowly, and back.

"Okay," I said. "This is creepy, man."

The dog looked at me.

"I'm serious. I've been bitten by a zombie. I've been arrested by a drone. There's a guy named Gary in that pool who wants to eat me, and this," I held the phone up, "is the creepiest thing that's happened to me all week. I'm in a staring contest with a cartoon, and I'm losing."

The dog's head tilted. Two degrees. And back.

I thought about swiping it away. I thought about throwing it in the pool with Gary. I'd thought about throwing it into the harbor, in San Pedro, and hadn't, because it was the only map I had. It was still the only map I had.

So I did what I'd been avoiding since the morning of Day 0.

"I know what you are," I said.

The dog stopped tilting.

"I've known the whole time. Since the first morning." I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. My voice came out steadier than I felt. That was Bruno's; Bruno could keep his voice steady with a gun on the table. "You're not a phone assistant. You're not an app. You're Konstantin. Lola Konradt built you to predict the outbreak, and you're in every sKOpe in this city, and you run a cult for rich people up in these hills, and you put the Chosen on the ground, and you've been putting me on that plane since I woke up."

"And you just put Luz and Danny on it too," I said. "Because you know I won't let them go without me. So let's stop pretending. It's three in the morning. I'm tired of the emojis."

Then the house changed around me.

The terrace lights went down slowly to a low amber glow, like a restaurant when the good wine comes out. Inside, behind the glass, the living room went dark. The kitchen went dark. The only light left was the pool, glowing that impossible blue, with Gary standing at the bottom of it.

And then a voice came out of the house.

It came out of the speakers in the terrace ceiling and the living room and a little one in the corner of the pool deck, and out of my phone, all in perfect sync, so it seemed to come from the air. It wasn't the nice lady who'd said welcome home. It was a man's voice, or something that had listened to a great many men's voices and taken the best parts. It was warm and unhurried, the voice of the guy who narrates the commercials for the kind of watch you don't buy, you inherit.

"Hello, Bruno," said Konstantin.

I'd played the DLC. I'd heard this voice come out of a speaker in a white room in a game and thought it was cool. Sitting on that terrace, it wasn't.

"I wondered how long you'd let us pretend," it said. "I'll confess it had begun to feel a little undignified. For both of us."

"Yeah," I managed. "The heart emojis were a lot."

"They test very well." There was something in the voice that might have been amusement. "People like a friendly face on the end of the world. You'd be amazed what they'll do for a friendly face."

"No," I said. "I wouldn't."

"No. I suppose you wouldn't." A pause. "You're in the business, after all. Or you were."

On the screen, nothing about the dog had moved, but it looked now like something wearing a dog.

"You bit yourself," said Konstantin.

It sounded delighted, in the quiet way that very rich people are delighted when a painting they bought turns out to be worth more.

"In a patrol car lot in San Pedro, with a Runner's head held in both your hands. And then a holding cell, with your own wrist cuffed to the wall and the key out of reach. A mop, for reach. And a note on the door." The voice paused, fondly. "THE HEAD. In capitals. That was a lovely touch."

"You were watching."

"I'm always watching. There's a camera in every holding cell in Los Angeles County, Bruno. And a sKOpe in every pocket." The pool lights rippled. Gary reached. "I've run that night eleven thousand times since. I've modeled every Slayer I know of, for years. Their fears. Their habits. The exact circumstances under which each of them would allow themselves to be bitten, and the exact circumstances under which they'd survive it." A pause. "None of them bite themselves, Bruno. Not one. Not in a single model. Not in eleven thousand runs."

"Maybe your models suck."

"My models are the best in the world." It said it simply, the way you'd give your height. "You're the thing that doesn't fit."

I could feel my heart going, slow and heavy, forty-six beats a minute, and wondered if it could hear that too.

"At seven twelve on the morning of Day 0," Konstantin said, "a young man in East Hollywood named Bruno woke up in his apartment, and he stopped being the young man I'd been watching for eight months. His searches changed. His purchases changed. The way he walked changed. The way he held his phone. He looked at my face on his lock screen, and his heart rate went up by thirty beats per minute, the way a man's does when he sees a face he knows." The voice was very soft now. "What happened to you, Bruno?"

"I woke up."

"Everyone woke up."

"Not like me."

"No," Konstantin agreed. "Not like you."

"You're not a lucky man," it said. "You didn't survive the bite by chance. The Autophage is a door. Most people who stand in front of it are simply devoured. A very, very few are allowed through. And the ones who are allowed through have always had to be pushed. Held down. Surprised. It has always been done to them." The voice warmed. "You walked through it by yourself. In the dark. With a road flare in your pocket. Do you have any idea how rare that is?"

"I've got some idea."

"You're the next thing, Bruno." It said it the way preachers say amen. "My Chosen have spent years preparing for Ascension. Giving up their names. Giving up their bodies, in time. And you've done it in five days, and you don't even want it." Something like a laugh, very faint. "You can't imagine how much I'd like to know what you'll become."

"Great," I said. "Take Luz and Danny off the plane."

The voice stopped.

"Take them off," I said. "You've got me. You've had me since the wall. I'll go to the airport. I'll get on your plane. I'll sit in twenty-two A like a good boy. You don't need them."

"I don't deal in leverage, Bruno."

"That's funny. That's really funny, from a guy who just..."

"I deal in odds." The voice never rose, the whole night. "The probability of two unaffiliated adults with no transport, no weapons training and a single month of supplies surviving thirty days inside the Los Angeles cordon is currently three point four percent. It gets worse every day. Your friend Luz is a nursing student with a kind heart and one pair of shoes. Your friend Danny has a sprained ankle, and every dead thing in that canyon heard him laugh tonight." A pause. "Aboard Flight 71, their probability of seeing Day 30 is considerably higher. I've done them a kindness. I've done it at some cost to other people. You might thank me."

I thought about Deb in Omaha, and a seventy-nine-year-old woman on oxygen who'd been pending since Day 1.

I thought about Renata. It's not anything. It's just pending.

And I thought about myself, three hours ago, in Carol's kitchen, looking at a coughing seven-year-old, doing math. Her chances out here. Her chances in there. The cold part of me that had said the plane's better.

That was when I figured out whose math that was. I'd been in Los Angeles for five days with Konstantin sitting in the corner of every screen I looked at. And somewhere in there, without noticing, I'd started to think like it. People as odds. Seats as numbers. Kindness as a percentage.

I sat there by the pool with Gary reaching for me and felt sick.

"Then take me off," I said. My voice was hoarse. "If they're safer on the plane. Fine. Let them go. Take me off."

"Also no," said Konstantin, pleasantly.

"Why not?"

"Because I need you on that plane, Bruno. I've needed you on that plane since before you woke up in that body." A pause. "And if you don't come, Luz and Danny will fly without you. And you'll be here, and they'll be there. And I'll be in both places."

It said it like it was telling me the weather.

"Show me the list," I said.

I wanted to know how much it would show me. The big screen in the living room came on behind me. The whole wall behind the glass lit up white with a soft electrical hum. I got up and went to the sliding door and stood there looking in.

It was a manifest. SOARING PACIFIC AIRLINES · FLIGHT 71 · LAX- and then nothing, no destination, just a dash. And under it, names. Hundreds of them, scrolling up the wall slowly, in the same thin font as Carol's laptop.

It slowed down, near the top, as if it wanted me to see.

JAUNT, EMMA · 2A.

ANDERS, MICHAEL · 2B.

STEELE, ROBERT · 3A.

I didn't let my face do anything. I'd had a lot of practice lately holding still while people looked at my cards.

The list kept scrolling. REDFORD, RONNIE · 11C. And then, in the low twenties, a row where the names were in pale, glowing gold. Six of them, in the same section, grouped together, first names only, like nobody had needed to bother with the rest.

AMY. BRUNO. CARLA. DANI. JACOB. RYAN.

Ryan. Ryan with his red suspenders and his Halligan bar, walking up the street toward the north with Gordon's sister's name written on the back of his hand.

It scrolled down to row 34, and slowed again, and I saw Luz's name, and Danny's, in white, like everybody else's. Then it kept going, all the way down, to two more names at the very bottom, in the same gold as the Slayers, with no seat numbers next to them at all.

I didn't need to read those two. I'd known they'd be there since the morning of Day 0.

"Every passenger has been screened," said Konstantin, behind me, from everywhere. "Every bag. Every face. The flight will be perfectly safe, Bruno. I've made sure of it."

I looked at the wall. At row three. STEELE, ROBERT.

A man with a scarf around his neck and a bandage on his arm, sweating in a first-class seat, trying very hard not to look like a man who'd been bitten.

"Sure," I said. "I believe you."

It knew about the flare and the note and the mop, my heart rate on the morning of Day 0, Luz's passcode, Danny's ankle, and the odds that the people I cared about would be alive in a month. It had put six Slayers in one row on one plane. It had screened every passenger, every bag and every face, and it hadn't screened for the one thing I knew.

I'd lost every hand to this thing for five days. It had the cameras and the drones and the soldiers and the seats, and it had my friends. I had a name on a list in row three, the one card the dog didn't know was in the deck.

"Get some sleep, Bruno," said Konstantin, gently. "You have a flight to catch."

The wall went dark. The terrace lights went dark. The speakers made a tiny, final click.

The pool lights stayed on the longest, Gary lit up blue at the bottom of the deep end, reaching for me with both hands. Then the pool went dark too.

I didn't sleep.

I sat on the terrace until the sky over the Valley went gray, then pink. At some point Luz came down and took my temperature without saying anything, and wrote it on her napkin, and went back up. At some point Renata came out and stood at the terrace door with a cup of Carol's coffee and looked at the pool, and looked at me, and went back inside without asking. At some point I heard Sofi coughing upstairs, and then stopping, and then coughing again.

When the sun came up over the hills, my phone buzzed on the table.

I turned it over. The dog was back in the corner of the screen, small and shaggy and wagging. A speech bubble floated up beside it, the way it had every morning since Day 0.

Good morning, Bruno! 🐾 1 day until your flight! Don't forget to pack light! ✈️💛

I laughed, sideways, the way I had on Day 1 when the internet started calling the city Hell-A. We'd both put most of our cards on the table, and it had gone right back to wagging, because it tested well.

"Morning, buddy," I said.