Taka Ouellette had proposed a southern course towards whatever was left of Portland; and even if there was no way into the datapipe from there, Boston would be that much closer. Besides, Ouellette was an official person in these parts, someone with recognized credentials and identity. Almost an authority figure, by local standards. She might even be able to walk them in through the front door.
"Authority figures don't drive around handing out derms from the back of a truck," Lubin said.
"Yeah? And what have your efforts netted us lately? You still think you can hack into the global nervous system when all the back-door nerves have been burned away?"
In the end he agreed, with conditions. They would go along with Ouellette's plan so long as it took them in the right direction. They would make use of her MI after every counterintrusion device had been ripped out of the cab; he would ensure her cooperation while she advised Clarke on the necessary monkeywork.
The MI's cab was a marvel of spatial economy. Twin cots folded down in the space behind the seats, and a little shower/head cubicle squeezed into the rear wall between a Calvin cycler and the forward medical interface. But what really amazed Clarke was the number of booby traps infesting the place. There were gas canisters hooked into the ventilation system. There were taser needles sheathed in the seat cushions, ready to shoot through flesh and insulative clothing at a word or a touch. There was a photic driver under the dash, a directional infrared strobe that could penetrate closed eyelids and induce seizures. Taka Ouellette itemized them all, Lubin standing at her back, while Clarke scrambled about with a toolkit and pulled the plugs. Clarke had no way of knowing if the list was comprehensive—for all she knew, Ouellette was leaving an ace up her sleeve against future necessity—but Lubin was a lot less trusting than she was, and Lubin seemed satisfied.
It took them an hour to disarm the cab. After Ouellette asked if they wanted to disable external security as well, she actually seemed disappointed when Lubin shook his head.
They split up. Lubin would pilot Phocoena down the coast and try to access Portland independently; Clarke, keeping a copy of the ß-max sequence close to her chest, would accompany Ouellette towards a rendezvous near one of her regular waypoints.
"Don't tell her about ß-max before you have to," Lubin warned, safely out of Ouellete's earshot.
"Why not?"
"Because it defeats the only defense anyone's ever been able to muster against ßehemoth. The moment she realizes something like that exists, her priorities are going to turn upside down."
Clarke was initially surprised that Lubin would let either of them out of his sight; he wasn't fond of potential security breaches even without his kill reflex engaged, and he knew Clarke was chafing against his mission priorities. He wasn't a trusting soul at the best of times; how did he know that the two women wouldn't simply turn inland and abandon him altogether?
It was only when they'd gone their separate ways that the obvious answer occurred to her. Of course, he'd been hoping for that very thing.
They drove through a land blasted and scoured clean of any live thing. The MI, built for rough terrain, climbed over fallen tree trunks that crumbled beneath its wheels. It navigated potholes filled with ash and soot, drove straightaways where swirls and gusts of gray powder swept across the refrozen asphalt like tiny Antarctic blizzards, centimeters high. Twice they passed deranged billboards half-melted against the rock, their lattices warped and defiantly semifunctional, advertising nothing now but the flickering multicolored contours of their own heat stress.
After a while it began to rain. The ash congealed like paste on the ground, stuck to the hood like blobs of papier maché. Some of those blobs were almost heavy enough to thwart the windshield, leaving light smudges on the glass before the static field bounced them away.
They didn't exchange a word during that whole time. Unfamiliar music filled the silence between them, archaic compositions full of clonking pianos and nervous strings. Ouellette seemed to like the stuff, anyway. She focused on driving while Clarke stared out the window, reflecting on the allocation of damage. How much of this devastation could be laid at her door? How much at the doors of demons who'd adopted her name?
Eventually they left the scorched zone behind. Now there was real grass at the side of the road, occasional shrubs pocking the ditches further back, real evergreens looming like ranks of ragged, starving stickmen on the other side. Mostly brown, of course, or turning brown, as though in the grip of a great endless drought.
This rain wouldn't help them. They were hanging on—some even flew flags of hardy, defiant green from their limbs—but ßehemoth was everywhere, and it was implacable, and it had all the time in the world. Sometimes it massed so abundantly that it was visible to the naked eye: patches of ochre mould smothering the grass, or spreading across the trunks of trees. And yet, the sight of all this vegetation—not truly alive, perhaps, but at least physically intact—seemed cause for some small celebration after the charnel house they'd just escaped.
"So, do you ever take those out?" Ouellette wondered.
"Sorry?" Clarke brought herself back to the moment. The doctor had gone to autopilot—a simple follow-the-road mode, with no dangerous navigational forays into GPS.
"Those caps on your eyes. Do you ever…?"
"Oh. No. Not usually."
"Nightshades? Let you see in the dark?"
"Sort of."
Ouellette pursed her lips. "I remember seeing those, years ago. All over the place, just before everything went bad. They were really popular for about twenty minutes."
"They still are, where I come from." Clarke looked out the rain-spattered side window. "With my tribe, anyway."
"Tribe? You're not all the way from Africa?"
Clarke snorted softly. "Fuck no." Only about half the way, actually…
"Didn't think so. You don't have the melanin, not that that means much these days of course. And the Tutsis wouldn't be over here anyway, except maybe to gloat."
"Gloat?"
"Not that you can blame them, mind you. There's barely anyone left over there more than forty years old. Firewitch is pure poetic justice as far as they're concerned."
Clarke shrugged.
"So if not Africa," Ouellette said, pushing it, "maybe you're from Mars."
"Why would you say that?"
"You're definitely not from around here. You thought Miri was an ambulance." She patted the dashboard affectionately. "You don't know about the Lenies—"
Clarke clenched her teeth, suddenly angry. "I know about them. Nasty evolving code that lives in the Maelstrom and raises shit. Vengeance icon for a bunch of countries that hate your guts. And while we're on the subject, maybe you could explain how you came to be blundering around handing out derms and mercy-kills while the whole eastern hemisphere is trying to lob a cure for ßehemoth onto your head? Not being from Mars doesn't seem to have kept you all that up-to-speed on current events."
Ouellette watched her curiously for a moment. "There you go again."
"What?"
"Maelstrom. It's been years since I heard anyone use that word."
"So what? What difference does it make?"
"Come on, Laurie. You show up in the middle of nowhere, you hijack my van, neither of you is normal by any stretch of the imagination—I mean, of course I want to know where you came from."
Clarke's anger faded as suddenly as it had flared. "Sorry."