Lizzie waited, her heart starting a slow hammering in her chest.
“Please leave the dome now,” a stern ’bot voice said. “Today’s giveaway is over. Please leave the dome now.”
Lizzie stayed where she was, fingering her personal shield.
“Please leave the dome now. Today’s giveaway is over. Please leave the dome now.”
Outside, someone screamed something unintelligible. The Livers froze for a horrified moment, then started running.
“Please leave the dome now. Today’s giveaway is over. Please leave the dome now.” And then, just like that, she was outside. The rear energy wall had unceremoniously pushed her forward, closing itself, so quickly that Lizzie tumbled on her face in the dirt.
The Livers still screamed and ran, disappearing into their dens and holes. Some weren’t quick enough. The band of raiders, mostly men but a few women too, burst on them and started grabbing the donkey discards, knocking people down, shouting and hollering as they stomped with heavy, stolen boots on bodies and faces.
Lizzie rolled back toward the dome that had just ejected her. She understood now why the shacks had been repeatedly destroyed, repeatedly rebuilt. The price for living near the enclave’s used bounty was that others would take it away from you, with varying degrees of viciousness.
She scrambled to her feet and started sidling along the dome. Useless—she was the most visible, best-equipped target in sight. Two men converged on her.
“Backpack! Grab it, Tish!”
It wasn’t two men but a man and a woman, a woman as tall and broad-shouldered as a man. With deep purple eyes under thick, thick lashes. Genemod.
The beautiful donkey eyes leered at Lizzie, grabbed for her, encountered the personal shield. “Fuck! She’s shielded, her!” The voice was pure Liver.
Tish outweighed Lizzie by at least thirty pounds. She knocked Lizzie sideways, and Lizzie felt herself fall against the energy dome and slide down it. She cowered and whimpered, groping inside her boot. Tish dropped to her knees beside her, the purple eyes bright with the joy of torture, and began to shake Lizzie by the neck like a dog with a bone.
“So I can’t get inside there, me… I can still shake you till your neck breaks, it, right inside your safe little shield…”
Lizzie pulled Billy’s rabbit-skinning knife from her boot and shoved it up and under the woman’s breastbone.
She’d sharpened the knife every day, during the long daylight hours of hiding. Even so, she was surprised how hard it was to drive the blade through muscle and flesh. She pushed until the long blade was buried to its handle.
Tish’s beautiful eyes widened. She slumped forward on top of Lizzie, her arms settling around Lizzie like an embrace.
Lizzie shoved her off and looked wildly around. The man who’d told Tish to grab Lizzie’s backpack was across the clearing, fighting with one of the few men left alive near the enclave. Tish’s partner seemed to be winning. And there were other raiders around, in a minute another one would attack… Lizzie had only a few moments.
She didn’t hesitate. If she thought, she’d never be able to do it. But Tish was too heavy for Lizzie to lift, she couldn’t carry that muscular body… but she didn’t need the whole body.
Shaking, Lizzie knelt beside Tish and pulled out the silver teaspoon she’d stolen from Dr. Aranow’s dining room. She’d had some weird idea that once inside Manhattan East, she could show it to the house system, convince “Jones” that she belonged there… not likely. But now she grasped Tish’s right eyelid with her right thumb and index finger, pried the eyelid wide open, and slid the spoon under the eyeball. Gasping, she scooped the eyeball out of its socket. She pulled her knife from Tish’s body; immediately blood spurted over her in jets, running down the outside of the energy shield. Lizzie sliced through the nerves and muscles tethering the eyeball to its empty socket.
She turned, groping for the black outline of the enclave gate. Blood smeared between the outside surfaces of the dome’s Y-shield and hers. Embedded in the gate outline was a standard retina scanner, set to admit any genemod configuration. An emergency measure: a tech could get caught outside, an adventurous adolescent could be stranded. Lizzie knew about it from datadipping.
She pushed Tish’s eyeball against the scanner, and the outer dome gate opened. It closed behind her, just ahead of the raiders screaming for her death.
Lizzie collapsed to the floor and heaved. She couldn’t vomit; she’d had no mouth food in weeks. But there was no time. How long did a dead eyeball stay fresh enough to fool a scanner? Such information wasn’t in the deebees.
Staggering to her feet, she held Tish’s purple genemod eye to the second scanner. The inner gate opened, and Lizzie lurched through.
She was inside Manhattan East.
Specifically, she was inside a warehouse of some kind, with heavy-machinery ’bots standing motionless around the walls. Good. No cop ’bots until she left the building, which would be heavily shielded and locked. That could wait. Lizzie lay on the floor until she could breathe normally.
When she could stand, she turned off her personal shield. Tish’s blood slid off onto the floor. Lizzie turned the shield back on, then realized she was still holding the eyeball. It wasn’t bloody; all the blood had come from withdrawing the knife from Tish’s body.
Tish had never used her genemod eyes to enter the enclave. Why not? She must have known what she was. But when she tried to shake the life out of Lizzie, Lizzie had felt the reason for Tish’s exile. Tish’s hands had circled Lizzie’s neck; Tish’s body had pressed hard against Lizzie’s. And through Tish’s clothing, Lizzie had felt the hard lumps in the wrong places, the misshapen breastbone, the asymmetrical ribs. Tish’s skeleton must have gone wrong in the womb. Naked, she would look grotesque. Lizzie thought of how donkeys insisted on physical perfection, and how long Tish must have dwelled with Livers to have that accent. Vicki always said that hating yourself was the worst kind of hatred. Lizzie had never understood what Vicki meant.
She shuddered and dropped the purple eyeball. Her gorge rose. But still, she couldn’t leave the thing here, for a maintenance ’bot to find. She forced herself to pick the eyeball back up and put it in her pocket.
Then Lizzie started patiently to dip the inside security locks on the warehouse.
It took her almost half an hour. When she was finished, she stepped out into Manhattan East Enclave. She stood on an immaculate street bordered with genemod flowers, long slinky blue shapes that yearned toward her. Lizzie jumped back, but the flowers were soft, flaccid, harmless. The air smelled of wonderful things: woodsmoke and newly mown grass and spices she couldn’t identify. The towers of Manhattan gleamed in sunset, the programming on their outer walls subtly keyed to the colors in the sky. From somewhere came the low (artificial?) hooting of mourning doves.
People actually lived in this beauty and order. All the time. They really did. Lizzie, terrified and exhausted and enchanted, suddenly felt that she might cry.
There was no time. A cop ’bot zoomed toward her.
Frantically she dug in her pocket for Tish’s eyeball. It had grown softer, slightly squishy. Lizzie’s gorge rose. She held the disgusting thing in front of her right eye, squeezing shut the left, but the ’bot didn’t even try for a retina scan on the decaying purple eye. Somehow, it already knew she didn’t belong in Manhattan East. Lizzie saw the mist squirt into her face, screamed, and slumped backward onto the genemod flowers, which wrapped their soft petals lovingly around her paralyzed limbs.