The other girl screamed.
Lizzie closed her eyes. But she could still see the girl inside her eyelids. She could see all of it: the girl tied naked on the ground, the four men, the rest of the tribe a little way off. Other women, ignoring what was happening because the girl had been stolen from another tribe, wasn’t one of their own. And children, glancing at the four men, curious…
How could they? How could they?
“You got enough,” one of the men said. “Come on, we gotta move out, us.”
“Give him a minute, Ed. Old guys need time, them.”
A bark of laughter.
What if one of those curious children came around the edge of the building and saw Lizzie? She could grab him and knock him out before he called to the others.
No, she couldn’t. A little boy, like Dirk would be in a few years… she couldn’t. How impenetrable was a personal shield, anyway? She’d been wearing Vicki’s for two weeks now, and she didn’t really know. It kept out insects and raccoons and rain and brambles. Those were the only tests she’d given it.
“Come on, Cal!” one of the men shouted. “We’re moving out, us!”
Slowly the tribe straggled past Lizzie’s building. Seventeen, twenty, twenty-five. They wore ragged jacks and carried tarps and water jugs. No Y-cones, no terminals that she could see. Four filthy, Changed small children, but no babies. When they were all out of sight and sound, Lizzie ventured around the corner of the building.
The girl was dead. Blood from her cut throat drained into the ground. Her eyes were wide open, her face contorted into terror and pleading. She looked about Lizzie’s age, but smaller, with lighter hair. In one ear was a small tin earring in the shape of a heart.
I can’t bury her, Lizzie thought. The ground was hard; it hadn’t rained in a week. Lizzie had nothing to dig with. And if she stayed here much longer, she’d lose her nerve for the bridge. Oh, God, what if those people were going over the bridge? If they caught her on it?
No. She wouldn’t let that happen. She wasn’t as helpless as this poor girl had been. And it wouldn’t be a good idea to bury her even if Lizzie could. The girl’s own tribe might come looking for her, and it would be better if they knew what happened to her than if they had to wonder forever if she was still alive. That would be intolerable. If it were Dirk…
She thrust the obscene thought away, knelt on the bloody ground, and untied the girl’s hands and feet from the crude wooden stakes. She pulled the stakes from the ground; she could spare the girl’s people that much. Grateful for the shield protecting her from contact with the streaming blood, Lizzie lifted the girl’s body and staggered with it to the shadow of the building. She rolled the body against the Y-dome and covered the torso with a shirt from her backpack, knotted loosely around the girl’s waist to keep it from blowing away.
Then she set out for the bridge, before it got too dark, or she got too scared.
She knew exactly where she was. Although she didn’t dare use her terminal to open a link of any kind that could be traced, she could use it to access information in the crystal library, including detailed atlases. This was the New Jersey tech yard of the Senator Thomas James Corbett Gravrail. Of course, the gravrail had stopped running during the Change Wars. But the shielded buildings were still here, probably with the trains inside, and nothing could destroy the maglev lines themselves. Shining twin lines of some material Lizzie couldn’t identify, they’d run all the way here from Willoughby County. They ran across the bridge spanning the Hudson River into Manhattan; they would run, according to her atlas, north to Central Park and straight to a ground gate of Manhattan East Enclave.
And then what?
First, just get there.
Lizzie stared at the bridge, and then at the sky. About three hours until sunset. She could cross under cover of dusk, hide on the other side. The trestle bridge itself provided little cover. It was narrow, no more than ten feet across, with no visible protrusions or supports. How did it stay up? Probably the same way the gravrails had stayed up. Neither physics nor engineering much interested Lizzie—only computers. Still, she should gather all the information she could before the crossing.
The Hudson shimmered bright in the sunshine. By the river, half-hidden by an embankment, Lizzie found a patch of weedy ground. She drank from the Hudson, turned off her shield, and stripped. As she lay on the ground to feed, she raised her head every few seconds to be sure no one approached. The sun felt good on her bare skin, but she couldn’t let herself enjoy it. As soon as her Changed biochemistry signaled satiety, she jumped up, dressed, and turned on the personal shield. Then she settled into work with her computer. By sunset, she knew as much as was in her crystal library about the Governor Samantha Deborah Velez Memorial Gravrail Trestle.
At the eastern end of the trestle, in the deep shadow of a building, Lizzie listened as hard as she could. An hour ago she’d heard people start across the bridge. But now there was no one in sight, and all she heard was the cry of wheeling gulls and the lapping of the river against the shore. She dropped to her hands and knees and started to crawl across the bridge, presenting as inconspicuous a silhouette as possible.
The bridge was 2.369 kilometers long.
Darkness set in more quickly than Lizzie had counted on. Darkness was a cover, of course, but she was afraid of crawling across the unlighted bridge. Not of falling off, but of… what? She was just afraid. Of everything.
No, she wasn’t. She was Lizzie Francy, the best datadipper in the country, the only Liver to even try to reclaim political power from the donkeys. She would not be afraid. Only people like her mother were afraid of everything—even before the neuropharm.
Stay home, child, where you belong, you. Annie’s voice again. God, she’d be glad when she was too old to hear her mother’s voice in her head. How old was that? Maybe as much as thirty?
Then she heard something else. People, crossing the bridge from the Manhattan side.
Lizzie crawled forward even faster. Now she could see their light, a bright Y-energy torch, bobbing in the distance. How far? The wind must be blowing toward her; it carried their laughter. Men’s laughter.
It should be here soon, soon, it had been a while since the last one…
She felt it in the darkness, the small dark bump at the edge of the bridge, meant to be used in making repairs. The techs attached their floaters here, then activated the energy shield that temporarily augmented the width of the bridge for easy maneuverability. The shields could hold several tons of equipment, if they had to. They could also bend at any needed angle. Lizzie had read everything about them in the crystal library—which did not include the activation codes. And she hadn’t dared open a satlink to try to dip the information from the gravrail corporation’s deebees.
Now, she didn’t have any choice.
“System on,” she whispered. “Oh, God—system on. Minimal volume.”
“Terminal on,” the computer whispered.
She worked as quickly as she could, muttering feverishly to the terminal, eyeing the torchlight ahead. It seemed to have stopped. Occasional wordless voices blew toward her on the wind. Raised voices—an argument. Good. Let them argue, let them fight, let them all throw each other off the bridge… What if they threw her off the bridge? She didn’t know how to swim.
Stay home, child, where you belong, you.