She opened a passage through the shield for their aircar. His laser signal lit up the bioelectronic receiver high on the factory facade. The car landed on the ground in front of the main doors.
“Locked,” Cazie said, with relish. “There’s an off-line security redundancy. Evidently our young dippers aren’t that good.”
“Ummmmmm,” Jackson said, noncommittally.
She reached inside her shirt, a nonconsumable synthetic, and drew out two pistols. Grinning, she handed one to Jackson, who took it with what he hoped was lofty indifference. He didn’t like guns. Did Cazie remember that? Of course she did. Her IQ was genemod. She seldom forgot anything.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s reclaim the Alamo.”
“You shoot anybody and I’ll bring charges against you myself. I swear it, Cazie.”
“Good old Jackson. Champion of the underdog. Even when the underdog is overprivileged kids guilty of criminal trespass. Come on, let’s go.”
She unlocked the doors and strode down the corridor. Jackson hurried to catch up with her, so it wouldn’t look as if he was cowering behind. At the factory floor he stopped. The whole place had gone crazy. Robots malfunctioning, debris all over the floor… how long had this been going on? Why hadn’t the chief tech picked it up?
Cazie laughed. “Jesus Christ, look at it! Just look at it!”
“It’s not—”
“Funny? Of course it is. Wait… look over there.”
A man raced toward them. Jackson’s grip tightened on his gun, until he saw the man wasn’t armed. Then he saw it wasn’t even a man, but a woman or boy dressed in a head-to-toe holosuit of a man dressed in a brown business suit. The figure spotted them and stopped running.
Cazie raised her gun. “Come here. Slowly, and with your hands high in the air. Now.”
The figure put his hands over his head and walked slowly forward.
“Now turn off the holosuit,” Cazie said. “One hand only, moving slowly.”
The button was at his waist. The holosuit vanished and Jackson saw not the college kid he’d expected but a woman in her thirties, genemod, dressed in a skimpy homespun eaten into fresh-looking holes. Tall, violet eyes, small nose… Jackson was good with faces.
“I know you! We met years ago someplace… at some party… Diana Something.”
“Not anymore,” the woman said sourly. “Look, Jackson, this is all lovely and social, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a crisis on my hands just now.”
Cazie laughed. Her dark eyes shone with malicious pleasure. “You certainly do. Criminal trespass. How’d you pull it off? You don’t look like a dipper.”
“I’m not. But my friend is, and she’s lost someplace in here… she’s just a kid.”
“Ah, a kid after all,” Cazie said. “Well, let’s find her.” She did something with her mobile and all activity in the factory ceased. Robots froze in midmotion. The noise cut off. In the silence, Cazie yelled, “Yoo hoo, Diana’s young friend! Come out, come out, wherever you are! Allee allee oxen free!”
Diana smiled; Jackson had the impression it was in spite of herself. No one answered.
Cazie said casually, “Is your friend armed?”
“Only with hubris,” Diana said, and for half a minute Jackson wasn’t sure which of them had spoken. It was something Cazie might have said. Then Diana called, “Lizzie! Where are you? It’s all right, Lizzie, come on out. We’re not going to gain anything by postponing the inevitable. Lizzie?”
No answer.
“Lizzie!” Diana called again, and this time Jackson heard the note of fear. “This is Vicki! Come on out, honey!”
Behind them, something clattered to the floor. Jackson turned. Eight feet up the wall, a hole had appeared, framing a scared brown face and crouching body. The girl had wiry black hair sticking out in all directions. She looked about fifteen. And she wasn’t the donkey college dipper he’d expected; she was a Liver.
“Good God,” Cazie muttered.
Diana/Vicki—what the hell was her name?—called, “Lizzie? How did you get up there?”
“Programmed the forklift,” the girl said. Her voice was less scared than her face. Bravado? She glared at the three below her. “Send it back over.”
Nobody moved. Jackson saw that none of them knew how to do that—even Cazie could only manipulate the commands she knew, not reprogram on the spot. How come this girl could? A Liver?
Cazie put her mobile and gun in her pocket, walked over to the closest motionless forklift, and pushed it. Her face turned red; the machinery barely budged. Diana/Vicki and Jackson joined her. Together they hauled the cumbersome thing to under the hole in the wall. Nobody spoke. Through his annoyance Jackson suddenly felt weird—the three donkeys performing manual labor in the silent factory to rescue a criminal Liver. The whole situation was surreal.
He suddenly thought of something Theresa had once said to him: I never feel anyplace is really normal.
“Okay,” Diana/Vicki said when the forklift was against the wall, “come on down, Lizzie. And for God’s sake be careful.”
The girl was facing outward. Carefully, she turned herself in the narrow cubbyhole. As her bottom came into view, Jackson saw that she was mostly naked. Of course Livers didn’t seem to care that their bodies consumed their clothes, at least not the Livers who’d grown up since the Change. When they didn’t wear pre-Change synthetic jacks, they went half-naked in their wandering “tribes.” Sometimes it seemed to Jackson that Miranda Sharifi had reversed evolution, turning a stationary industrial population back into hunter-gatherer nomads. Who neither hunted nor gathered—at least, not food.
The girl in the wall stretched out her legs, feeling with her feet for the forklift behind her. She extended her body full-length, unrolling from the cubbyhole like a printout, and Jackson saw that she was heavily pregnant.
“Careful,” Diana/Vicki repeated.
As the girl’s toes touched the forklift, it began to roll away from the wall. No other machinery in the factory resumed operations.
Cazie grabbed for the forklift and tried to shove it back against the wall. After a moment of shock the other two sprang forward to help. It was too late. The forklift rolled back to its pointless duties as if the humans weren’t there. The girl screamed and tumbled eight feet to the foamcast floor.
She landed on her right arm. Jackson dropped beside her and restrained her from moving. His voice was level and calm. “Cazie, get my bag from the car. Now.”
She went immediately. Jackson said, “Don’t move. I’m a doctor.”
“My arm,” the girl said, and started to cry.
Jackson checked her pupil reaction: both pupils round, the same size, equally reactive to light. He didn’t think she’d hit her head. The arm was a compound radial fracture, the bone sticking whitely through the skin.
“It hurts, me…”
“Just lie still, you’ll be fine,” Jackson said, more confidently than he felt. He put a hand on her abdomen. The fetus kicked back, and he breathed out in relief.
Cazie returned with his bag. Jackson slapped a pain patch on the girl’s neck and almost instantly her face relaxed. The patch was a potent mixture of pain-nerve blockers, endorphins, and the highest legally allowable dose of pleasure-center stimulators. Lizzie began to grin idiotically.
He palpated her arm and asked her to shift her shoulders through a range of motion. She could. Her other limbs were undamaged. He bioscanned her neck, spine, and internal organs: no damage. The portable trauma unit imaged the fracture, guided the two pieces into alignment, and sprayed instacast from elbow to wrist and between two fingers for anchor. Jackson rocked back on his heels.