“What do you want, Alien?” She licked her lips, watching the blood pour out of Joncey’s groin. He’d fainted, and I shifted him to free my other hand.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you? The ones of you left alive. Did you kill Hubbley?”
She nodded. Her eyes never moved from Joncey. He was still on my lap. The almost forgotten shapes of childhood prayer whipped through my mind: Please don’t let him die yet. I saw the same shapes in Abigail’s eyes.
“Leave me here,” I said. “Just that. Here, and alive. Somebody will come eventually.”
“He’ll call, him, for help,” the other man said.
“Shut up,” Abby said. “You know nobody can’t use them terminals but Hubbley and Carlos and O’Dealian, and they’re all dead, them.”
“But, Abby—”
“Shut up, you!” She was thinking hard. I couldn’t feel Joncey’s heart.
A woman raced into the corridor. “Abby, what’s the matter, you? The submarine’s off the coast—” She stopped dead.
The submarine. All of a sudden I saw how the underground revolution had evaded the GSEA for so long. A sub meant military help. There were agencies inside the government involved, or at least people within agencies. PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT. CLASSIFIED. DANGER.
For a long moment I thought I was dead.
“All right!” Abby said. “Give him to me and lock yourself in that there storage room, you!”
“Don’t come close,” I said. I backed into the room with the canisters, still carrying Joncey. At the last minute I dumped him onto the floor and slammed the door. It could be locked from the inside, but I had no doubt she could override it. I held onto the urgency in the second woman’s voice, the panic: Abby, the submarine’s off the coast! Let the sub be ready to go. Let Abby want Joncey alive, safely tucked inside a medunit, more than she wanted me dead. Let the canisters all around me not contain deadly viruses, and let them not be able to be released by remote…
I sat, heart pounding. The shapes in my mind were red and black and spiky, painful as cactuses.
Nothing happened.
Minutes dragged by.
Finally a small section of the wall beside me brightened. It was a holoscreen, and I hadn’t even realized it. A dumb terminal. Abby’s face filled it. It was smeared with blood, twisted with hate.
“Listen, Arlen, you. You’re going to die there, underground. I done sealed it off. And the terminals are frozen, them, all of them. In another hour the life support will cut out automatically. I could kill you now, me, but I want you to think about it first. . . You hear me? You’re dead, you — dead dead DEAD.” With each word her voice rose, until it was a shriek. She whipped her head from side to side, her hair seething and foaming, caked with blood. I knew Joncey was dead.
Someone pulled her away from the screen, and it went blank.
I edged open the door of the storage room. My wheelchair was so bent I could hardly wheel it along the corridors. My vision kept fading in and out, until I wasn’t sure what shapes were in front of me and what were in my head, except for the dark lattice. That was in my head. It stirred, and for the first time began to open, and every inch of its opening pushed against my mind like pain.
I found Jimmy Hubbley. They had killed him clean, as near as I could tell. A bullet through the head. Francis Marion, I remembered, had died quietly in bed, of an infection.
Campbell must have fought. His huge body blocked a corridor, bloody and torn, as if by repeated blows. He lay sprawled across the captured doctor. The doctor’s face looked both terrified and indignant; this was not supposed to be his war. His blood slid down the nanosmooth walls, which had been designed to shed stains.
Two bodies lay on the terminal room floor, when I had finally opened enough doors to find it. A woman named Junie, and a man I’d never heard called anything but “Alligator.” They, too, had died clean, of bullets through the forehead. Abigail’s bid for power hadn’t been sadistic. She just wanted to control things. To be in charge. To know what was best for 175 million Americans, give or take a few million donkeys.
I sat in front of the main terminal and said, “Terminal on.” It answered, “YES, SIR!”
Francis Marion had believed in military discipline.
It took me fifteen minutes to try everything Jonathan Mar-kowitz had taught me. I spoke each step, or coded it in manually, not understanding what any of them meant. Even if Jonathan had explained, I wouldn’t have understood. And he had not explained. The shapes in my mind darted quickly, palpitating, sharp as talons.
“READY FOR OUTSIDE TRANSMISSION, SIR!”
I didn’t move.
If Abigail had been telling the truth, I had thirty-seven minutes of life support left in the underground bunker.
Huevos Verdes, off the Mexican coast, could be here in fifteen. But would they be? Miranda had not come for me before now.
“SIR? READY FOR OUTSIDE TRANSMISSION, SIR!”
The dark lattice in my mind was, finally, opening.
It started to unfurl like an umbrella, or a rosebud. They have rosebuds now, genemod, that will unfurl completely in five minutes, with the right stimuli, for use in various ceremonies. They’re pretty to watch. The opaque diamond-shaped panes on the lattice lightened and widened, both at the same time. The lattice itself expanded, larger and larger, until it had opened completely.
Inside was a ten-year-old boy, dirty and confident, his eyes bright.
I hadn’t seen him, me, in decades. Not his sureness about what he wanted, his straight-line going after it. That boy had been his own man. He made his own decisions, undaunted by what the rest of the world said he should do. I hadn’t seen him since the day he arrived at Leisha Camden’s compound in New Mexico, and met his first Sleepless, and gave his mind to their superior ones. Not since I’d become the Lucid Dreamer. Not since I’d met Miranda.
And here he was again, that solitary grinning boy, released from the stone lattice that had encased him. A bright glowing shape in my mind.
“SIR? DO YOU WISH TO CANCEL TRANSMISSION, SIR?” There were thirty-one minutes left.
“No,” I said, and spoke the emergency override code, the one I’d been urged to memorize carefully and not forget, as Drew Arlen common Liver might easily forget, in case of emergency. She herself answered. “Drew? Where are you?” I gave her the exact longitude and lattitude, obtained from the terminal, and told her how to get the rescue force through the mucky pool. My voice was completely steady. “It’s an illegal un-derground lab. Part of the revolution that already released the duragem dissemblers. But you know all about that, don’t you?” Her eyes didn’t nicker. “Yes. I’m sorry we couldn’t tell you.”
“I understand.” And I did. I hadn’t understood before, but I did now. Since Jimmy Hubbley. Since Abigail. Since Jontcey. I said, “There’s a lot I have to tell you”
She said, “We’ll be there in twenty minutes. There are people already close by … just wait twenty minutes, Drew.”
I nodded, watching her face on the screen. She didn’t smile at me; this was too important. I liked that. The shapes in my mind left no room for smiles. The crying boy, the people — all the people in the world — inside the dark lattice. Inside my mind, inside my unwilling responsibility.
“Just twenty minutes,” Carmela Clemente-Rice said in her warm voice. “Meanwhile, tell us how the—” and then the screen went dead as Huevos Verdes picked up the signal, overrode it, and cut off my communication with the GSEA.
Fourteen
The morning the President declared martial law, him, was the same morning I found the dead genemod rabbit by the river. It was a week after we walked to Coganville and the government people came, them, to East Oleanta to blow up Eden. Only when Annie finally let me out of bed, I listened hard, me, to what everybody in the cafe said about the place that got blown up. Some people even hiked out, them, to look at it. And soon as they described it, I knew, me, that the government didn’t blow up the place my big-headed girl went underground. Not my Eden.