THE LAST SIGNAL: I Hold the Reset

The Yard

The yard was forty feet of gravel and dead grass, and Ryker crossed it like a man walking toward a mirror.

Behind him, the farmhouse shook. Through the shattered window he could hear Nora's voice rising and falling, half hers and half something else, and Mara's voice under it, steady as a rope. Stay with me. Stay with me, Nora. Stay.

Okafor's rifle spoke twice from the back porch. Two creatures dropped over the fence. More were coming. He could hear them in the trees, in the ditches, in the long grass beyond the road. Hundreds, now.

Doyle watched him come. The general had set the red beacon gently on the gate post, the way a man sets down a lantern, and he stood with his hands folded, as if waiting for a bus.

"You've remembered," Doyle said. "I can see it. You walk differently."

"Take it back," Ryker said.

"The signal? I can't. It's a door, Captain. Once opened, it opens from both sides."

"Then close it."

"Close it?" Doyle laughed, a dry, rustling sound. "You've been awake for two days and you think you can negotiate with the thing that has outlived ten of you? You're not even angry yet. You're only afraid."

"I'm not afraid."

"You are. You're afraid because you know what I know." Doyle's smile returned, softer now. "That the exit you have been looking for for eleven lives was never a place. It was a person. And the only way out is to choose which sister dies."

The words went through Ryker like cold iron.

Which sister.

Doyle wasn't talking about Mara. He was talking about the one in the house. The one whose scream still hung in the air.

"There are two Anchors," Doyle said. "The old lock, and the new door. The loop needs only one. Kill your wife and the signal passes to Nora. Kill Nora and it stays with Mara. You may choose, Captain. We're generous like that."

Ryker said nothing.

"Or," Doyle continued, "you may refuse, and we will take both."

The blade came up in Ryker's right hand. The carbine in his left. Forty-one weapons burned in the back of his mind, every one of them a memory of a war he had lost.

No more losing.

[Memory Arsenal: 41 of 41. Select.]

He did not pick the carbine. He did not pick the blade.

He picked the one weapon in the whole arsenal he had never fired, the one he had held only once, on the last night of the last war, in a white room with no windows.

[Weapon 41: THE SILENCE. Effect: severs signal between host and Anchor in a 40-meter radius. Duration: 60 seconds. Cost: Host memory.]

Cost: host memory.

He read it twice. Then a third time.

"What does it cost?" he said aloud.

The system answered in the cold, even voice he had listened to for eleven lives.

[Cost: all memories of the Reset. Including the identity of the Anchor. You will not remember why you fought.]

Doyle's smile widened. "Ah. So you found the trap."

"It's not a trap," Ryker said slowly. "It's the exit. The Silence doesn't kill the Anchor. It makes me forget who it is."

"Which makes you incapable of finishing the loop."

"Which makes you incapable of using me to finish it."

For the first time, Doyle's face slipped. Just for an instant. Beneath the mask, something shifted, as if a long-held calculation had finally been shown to be wrong.

"You'll lose everything," it said. "Your sister. Your wife. Pike. Every life you fought for. You will walk out of this yard a stranger."

"Yes."

"You'll forget them."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Ryker lifted the weapon. It was small, a black cylinder the length of his hand, humming against his skin. He thought of Mara's forehead against his. Of Nora on the apartment steps. Of a boy in a forest, looking up at a blue sky.

"Because I've spent eleven lives trying to save the people I love by remembering them," he said quietly. "Maybe the only way to save them is to let them go."

He pressed the cylinder to the ground.

[Weapon 41: THE SILENCE. Activating.]

Light went out of the world.

Not darkness. Silence. A vast, perfect, wordless stillness that rolled across the yard, the farmhouse, the trees, the road. The shrieking stopped. The creatures froze mid-leap, mouths open, claws bared. Doyle's face went slack with horror.

"No," the general whispered. "You can't. We built this. We built this."

"I know," Ryker said. "That's why I'm the only one who can end it."

Inside the farmhouse, a girl stopped screaming.

Inside Ryker's mind, a long river of memory began to drain away.

He felt it go. The tower, the bridge, the hallway, the white room. Pike's freckles. Okafor's quiet voice on a porch. The warmth of his wife's cheek. One by one, as gently as leaves falling off a tree.

Mara.

Nora.

Danny.

Don't let me forget.

But the cylinder only hummed, and the names slid away.

The last thing he saw, before the white came, was Doyle falling to his knees on the gravel, clutching his head, the creature's true face tearing through the mask as the signal severed and the loop began, at last, to unravel.