“Leisha?” I heard myself croak. My voice sounded as alien as everything else. Only it wasn’t alien at all. I recognized the heaviness of the muggy air, the whine of insects, the scummy pools and waxy-white ghost orchids. And over everything, the gray dripping beards of Spanish moss. I had been raised in upcountry Louisiana. This was — had to be — Georgia, but much of the swampy country is the same. It was I who had become the alien.
“Ms. Camden will be all right in a moment,” an agent answered. “Probably just a concussion. There’s help on the way. We’re GSEA, Mr. Arlen. Lie still — your leg is broken.”
Again. But this time I felt no pain. There were no nerves left to feel pain. I raised my chin slightly, feeling the pull in my stomach muscles. My left leg lay bent at a sharp, unnatural angle. I lowered my chin.
The shapes slithering through my mind were gray and indistinct on the outside, spiked within. They had a voice. Can’t do anything right, can you, boy? Who d’you think you are — some goddamn donkey?
I said aloud, like a little boy, “A snake bit my cheek.”
A second man bent to squint at my face. It was covered with mud. He said, not harshly, “There’s a doctor on the way. We’re not going to move you until she gets here. Just lie still and don’t think.”
Don’t think. Don’t dream. But I was the Lucid Dreamer. I was. I had to be.
Leisha’s voice said thickly behind me, “Are we under arrest? On what charges?”
“No, of course not, Ms. Camden. We’re happy to be able to assist you,” said the man who had squinted at my cheek. The other two agents stood blank-faced, although I saw one of them blink. You can convey contempt with a blink. Leisha and I consorted ” with, assisted, Huevos Verdes. Gene manipulators. Destroyers of the human genome.
I saw Carmela Clemente-Rice standing beside the lattice in my mind, a clean cool shape, vibrating softly.
“You are Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency,” Leisha said. It wasn’t a question. But she was a lawyer: she waited for an answer.
“Yes, ma’am. Agent Thackeray.”
“Mr. Arlen and I are grateful for your assistance. But by what right—”
I never found out what legal point Leisha had been going to make.
Men dressed in rags burst from behind trees, through tangled vines, from the mucky ground itself. One moment they weren’t there, the next they were — that’s how it felt. They hollered and shrieked and whooped. Agent Thackeray and his two comtemp-tuous deputies didn’t even have time to draw their guns. Lying flat on my back, I saw the ragged men foreshortened as they raised pistols and fired at what seemed like, but couldn’t have been, point-blank range. Thackeray and the two agents went down, the bodies twitching. I heard somebody say, “Hail, yes, she’s an abomination, that there’s Leisha Camden,” and a gun fired again: once, twice. The first time, Leisha screamed.
I jerked my head toward her. She still sat with her back against the custard-apple tree, but now her upper body leaned forward, gracefully, as if she had fallen asleep. There were two red spots on her forehead, one below the other, the higher spot matting a strand of bright blonde hair that had somehow escaped the mud. I heard a long low moan and I thought “She’s alive!” — the thought a desperate bright bubble — until I realized the moan was mine.
The man who had said “Hail, yes” leaned over me. His breath blew in my face; it smelled of mint and tobacco. “Don’t you worry none, Mr. Arlen. We know you ain’t no abomination against nature. You’re safe as houses.”
“Jimmy,” a woman’s voice said sharply, “Here they come!”
“Well, Abigail, y’all are ready for ’em, ain’t you?” Jimmy said in a reasonable voice. I tried to crawl toward Leisha. She was dead.
Leisha was dead.
A plane droned overhead. The medical team. They could help Leisha. But Leisha was dead. But Leisha was a Sleepless. Sleepless didn’t die. They lived, on and on, Kevin Baker was 110. Leisha couldn’t be dead—
The woman called Abigail stepped off the high ground into the swamp. She wore hip-high waders and tattered pants and shirt, and she carried a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, ancient in design but gleaming with spit and polish. The medical plane folded its wings for a grav-powered landing. Abigail aimed, fired, and blew it into a second torch in the swamp.
“Okay,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “That’s it. Come on y’all, make tracks, they’ll be all over here in no time. Mr. Arlen, I’m sorry this is going to be a rough ride for y’all, sir.”
“No! I can’t leave Leisha!” I didn’t know what I was saying. I didn’t know—
“Sure you can,” Jimmy said. “She ain’t going to get no deader. And you ain’t none of her kind anyways. You’re with James Francis Marion Hubbley now. Campbell? Where you at? Carry him.”
“No! Leisha! Leisha!”
“Have a little dignity, son. You ain’t no child bawlin’ after its mama.”
A huge man, fully seven feet high, picked me up and swung me over his shoulder. There was no pain in my leg but as soon as my body struck his, red fire darted up my spine to my neck and I screamed. The fire filled my mind, and the last view I ever had of Leisha Camden was of her slumped gracefully against the custard-apple tree, enveloped in the red fire of my mind, looking as if she had just fallen quietly asleep.
I woke in a small, windowless room with smooth walls. Too smooth — not a nanodeviance from the smooth, the perpendicular, the unblemished. I didn’t realize at the time that I noticed this.
My mind filled with grief, welling up in spurts, geysers, rivers of hot lava the color of the two spots on Leisha’s forehead.
She really was dead. She really was.
I closed my eyes. The hot lava was still there. I beat on the ground with my fists, and cursed my useless body. If I could have moved to shield her, to put myself between her and the ragged gunmen…
Not even trained GSEA agents had been able to shield her. Or themselves.
I couldn’t hold back my tears, which embarrassed me. The lava had swamped the furled lattice in my mind, buried it, as it was burying me. Leisha…
“Now, y’all stop that, son. Keep a little dignity. Ain’t no woman sired by man worth that kind of carry in’ on.”
The voice was kind. I opened my eyes, and hatred replaced the hot lava. I was glad. Hatred was a better shape: sharp, and cold, and very compact. That shape would not bury me. I looked at the concerned face of James Francis Marion Hubbley looming over me, and I let the cold compact shapes slide through me, and I knew that I was going to stay alive, and stay alert, and stay in control of myself, because otherwise I might not be able to kill him. And I knew I was going to kill him. Even if that meant his was the last face I ever saw.
“That’s better,” Hubbley said genially, and sat down on a tree stump, hands on his knees, nodding encouragingly.
It really was a tree stump. The walls snapped into sharp focus, then, and I knew what kind of place I was in. I had seen the same kind of walls with Carmela Clemente-Rice, and at Huevos Verdes. This was an underground bunker, dug out of the earth by the tiny precise machines of nanotechnology, plastered over with alloy by other tiny precise machines. Eating dirt and laying down a thin layer of alloy were not hard, Miri had told me once. Any competent nanoscientist could create nonorganic mechanisms to do that. Corporations did it all the time, despite government regulations. It was only organic-based replicating nanotechnology that was hard. Anyone could dig a hole, but only Huevos Verdes could build an island.