Something tugged on his line. Billy pulled it out of the creek, but the line was empty and the bait gone. He stuck another worm on his hook. “You got a baby now, Lizzie. You got no business, you, going off someplace dangerous when you got Dirk to take care of.”
“How can I get to Manhattan East?”
“You can’t, you.”
Even before the neuropharm, Billy had been stubborn.
When Lizzie said nothing, the old man finally said, “You got to talk to Dr. Aranow, you, then call him.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Because anything that went out over her terminal would be overheard by Sanctuary. She couldn’t say that. Billy, the neuropharmed Billy, would have heart failure. “I just can’t, Billy. Don’t ask me questions.”
Again he looked alarmed. Billy jerked up his line, even though there had been no tug, and looked at his worm. He put the line back in the water.
“Billy, I know that you know. How can I get to Manhattan East?”
“You got no business even—”
“How?”
Light sweat filmed Billy’s cheeks. Lizzie fought down her impatience. By now Annie would have been in full-blown panic. So would Shockey, that once-swaggering braggart. Individual chemical differences.
Finally Billy said, “A man, he told me last fall, him, that the gravrail tracks east of the river go directly into Manhattan East. But you can’t get through the enclave shield, Lizzie. You know that, you!”
“What river? Where?”
“What river? We only got but one, us. The one this here creek flows into.”
Only got but one. What didn’t exist in Billy’s world since the neuropharm just didn’t exist. And yet, once, he’d probably been the only one in camp to explore any larger geography.
“How many days’ walk?” Lizzie said.
Now he did start to panic. He put a trembling hand on her arm. “Lizzie, you can’t go, you! It’s too dangerous, a young girl alone, and besides you got Dirk…”
His breathing accelerated. Suddenly Lizzie remembered how Billy had been when Lizzie was a child, before the Change, when Billy’s heart had been clogged and weak. He’d gotten gasping and dizzy, just like this. Love flooded her, and compassion, and exasperation. “Okay, Billy, okay.”
“Promise me, you… promise me you won’t… go alone!”
“I promise,” Lizzie said. Well, she wouldn’t go alone. She’d take her terminal, plus the personal shield Vicki had left with her.
“Okay,” Billy said. His breathing eased. He’d always trusted her word. In a few more minutes, he was absorbed again in his fishing.
Lizzie watched him. His dark eyes, alert in their sunken face, watched the water. He’d taken off his hat so his nearly bald head, fringed with gray curls above his ears, could absorb the soft sunlight. The hat hung on a tree branch. Every day at this time he must make the decision to leave the hat on or take it off. Every day he must place the plastic bucket for fish in the same place on the grass. Every day he must dig the same number of worms, methodically baiting the hook in the same way until the worms were gone. Every day.
What was Jennifer Sharifi doing?
Lizzie didn’t know. She could datadip as well as anybody in the country, but Jennifer Sharifi was a Sleepless. Not a Super like Miranda, but still a Sleepless. And she had all the money in the world. She was changing the people Lizzie loved, tacking them down to one place and one routine, like they were so many programmed ’bots. Lizzie wasn’t going to be fool enough to think she knew why, or what to do about it. Jennifer Sharifi had once tried to force the United States to let Sanctuary secede, and had held five cities hostage to a terrorist virus that could kill everyone in those cities, and had gone to jail for longer than Lizzie’s whole life. Lizzie knew when she was out of her depth. She needed help.
It was almost a relief to finally admit it. Almost.
She left that night, skirting the hidden transmitter by walking in a wide circle down the mountain. She stayed away from the old broken roads—that was where Sanctuary would expect people to walk, wasn’t it, and so would logically set their monitors? Walking through the woods in the dark, keeping the creek in sight, wasn’t easy. Terminal in her backpack, she made slow progress. She couldn’t have done it at all if a full moon hadn’t shone brightly, aided by what looked like millions of stars. Struggling through the brush, Lizzie tried to stay under trees, in case Sanctuary was using high-resolution space imaging.
Later on, she would wear Vicki’s personal shield, and let herself be wrapped in a clear protective energy field that would keep her from being scratched by brambles, stung by insects, frightened of every noise in the brush. But not now. Not until she was farther away from camp. Personal shields set up a detectable field.
Sanctuary couldn’t monitor the entire state, could they?
By morning she’d reached the place where the creek joined the river. She was exhausted. She crawled under a windfall of brush that shielded her from sight from above but still let the bright morning sun slant in. Taking off her clothes, Lizzie fed. Then she gratefully turned on the personal shield and slept all day.
When she awoke toward dusk, she wasn’t alone. It was summer; tribes of Livers that had spent the winter in the warm south were now roaming back. This tribe sounded small and familiaclass="underline" Lizzie heard several babies crying. Changed or unChanged? She didn’t emerge from her hiding place to look. Her biggest danger was not starvation, nor sickness, nor accident. It was others of her own kind. Not all tribes were small, or familial.
At night she started off again. It was much easier wearing the personal shield. Billy had taught her a lot about hiding in the woods—or out of them—and that would help, too.
She’d worry about Manhattan East when she got there.
Interlude
TRANSMISSION DATE: April 20, 2121
TO: Selene Base, Moon
VIA: Mall Enclave Ground Station, GEO Satellite C-1494 (U.S.)
MESSAGE TYPE: Encrypted
MESSAGE CLASS: Class A, Federal Transmission
ORIGINATING GROUP: Internal Revenue Service
MESSAGE:
Dear Ms. Sharifi:
The Internal Revenue Service is in receipt of your personal federal tax return for 2020, which was filed electronically from Selene Base, Moon. However, the return is unsigned. For electronic returns, a manual signature rendered by digital pen or equivalent technology is required by federal law. Therefore, I am attaching electronic Form 1987A for your signature.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Madeleine E. Miller
Madeleine Elizabeth Miller
District Commissioner, Internal Revenue Service
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: None received
Seventeen
Jennifer Sharifi followed Chad Manning into the conference room of Sharifi Labs on Sanctuary. A large U-shaped table arched around three walls, backed by eighteen chairs. In the center of the U, a clear plastic panel, unshatterable by anything short of nuclear detonation, was set into the orbital floor. As Sanctuary orbited, the view beneath the floor changed from black space brilliant with stars to the huge blue-and-white eyeball of the Earth. The panel opaqued automatically whenever the sun flashed into too bright view. Around the edges of the panel curled a decorative border of Arabic design, intricate interlocking geometrics copied from ancient weavings at Kasmir. The border was programmed to change colors to complement the view. It turned the solar system into a rug under Sanctuary’s feet.