"Don't be silly." Taka waved downhill into the darkness, where the peak they occupied emerged from threadbare woodlands. "It's only a few meters. I can find my way."
Two starlit silhouettes turned and regarded her without a word. Taka swallowed and took a step downhill.
Ken and Laurie didn't move.
Another step. Another. Her foot came down on a rock; she wobbled momentarily.
Her captors turned back to their tactics and machinery. Taka moved carefully downhill. Starlight limned the bare outlines of obstacles in her path. A moon would have been nice, though; she tripped twice before the tree-line rose before her, a ragged black band engulfing the stars.
As it engulfed Taka herself, a few moments later.
She looked back up the hill through a black mesh of scrub and tree trunks; Ken and Laurie still stood at the top of the hill, motionless black cutouts against the sky. Taka couldn't tell whether they could see her, or even whether they were looking in her direction. She'd be plainly visible to them if she were standing in the open. Fortunately, not even their night-creature eyes could penetrate tree trunks.
She had a few minutes at most before they realized she was gone.
She moved as quickly as she could without raising a racket. Thankfully there wasn't much undergrowth; in better days the sunlight filtering through the canopy had been too sparse, and more recently—more recently, sunlight was hardly the limiting factor. Taka felt her way blindly through a maze of vertical shafts and leaf litter and thin soil rotten with ßehemoth. Low branches clawed at her face. Gnarled old tree trunks resolved from the darkness barely a meter ahead; young spindly ones jumped out at her with even less warning.
A root caught her foot; she toppled, biting back a cry. One outstretched hand came down hard on a fallen branch. The sound it made, snapping, echoed like a gunshot. She lay twisted on the ground, nursing her scraped palm, straining to hear any sounds from up the slope.
Nothing.
She kept going. The slope was steeper now, more treacherous. The trees that sprang up in her path were only skeletons, dry and brittle and eager to betray her with the firecracker report of every snapped twig and broken branch. One of them caught her just below the knee; she pitched forward, hit the ground, and couldn't stop. She tumbled down the slope, rocks and treefall stabbing her in passing.
The ground disappeared. Suddenly she could almost see. A broad dim swathe of gray rushed towards her; she recognized it in the instant before it struck her, peeling skin from her forearm.
The road. It ran around this side of the hill like a hemline. Miri was parked somewhere along its length.
Taka got to her feet and looked around. She'd had no way to plot her course down the hill, no way of knowing exactly where on the road she'd landed. She guessed, and turned right, and ran.
The road was clear, thank God, its dim gravel albedo just enough to keep her oriented and on track. It unspooled gently around the shoulder of the hill, shattered stone crunching beneath her feet, and suddenly something glinted in the darkness ahead, something straight-edged and shiny under the stars…
Oh thank God. Yes. Yes!
She yanked open the driver's-side door and piled inside, panting.
And hesitated.
What are you going to do, Tak? Run out on everything you've been trying to do for the past two weeks? Just drive away and let the witch take over, even though there may be a way to stop it? Sooner or later someone's going to strike gold, and this is where you've told them to bring it. What happens when they show up and you've run off with your tail between your legs?
Are you going to call for help? You think it would come before Ken and Laurie had their way with you, or just hopped into that submarine of theirs and disappeared back into the Mariana Trench? Do you think it would come at all, these days? And what about tipping off the enemy, Tak? What about whoever or whatever is trying to stopthe very thing you're trying to help along? Are you going to risk all that, just because of something two borderline personalities with funny eyes mightdo if you got them angry?
Taka shook her head. This was insane. She had a few precious moments before Ken and Laurie tracked her down. What she decided in that interval might decide the fate of New England—of North America, even. She couldn't afford to be hasty, but there was no time—.
I need time. I just need to get away for a while. I need to work this out. She reached out and thumbed the ignition pad.
Miri stayed dark.
She tried again. Nothing. Nothing but the memory of Ken lurking in this very cab, eyes aglitter, surrounded by all that circuitry he seemed to know so much about.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, he was staring in at her.
Ken opened her door. "Anything wrong?" he asked.
Taka sighed. Her abrasions oozed and stung in the silence.
Laurie opened the passenger door and climbed in. "Let's head back," she said, almost gently.
"I—why are—"
"Go on," Ken said, gesturing at the dashboard.
Taka put her thumb on the pad. Miri hummed instantly to life.
She stepped out of the cab to let Lubin enter. Overhead, the heavens were crammed with stars.
Oh, David, she thought. How I wish you were here.
Sleeper
Everything changed at ten-thirty the next morning.
The bike skidded into view just past Bow and promptly got into an argument with its rider over how best to deal with a pothole the size of Arkansas. It was a late-model Kawasaki from just before the witch, and it had ground-effect stabilizers that made it virtually untippable; otherwise, both man and machine would have gone end-over-end into a solar-powered billboard that (even after all these years) flickered with dead-celebrity endorsements for Johnson & Johnson immune boosters. Instead, the Kawasaki leaned sideways at some impossibly acute angle, righted itself en route, and slewed to a stop between Miri and a handful of feral children looking for freebies.
Ken's white eyes appeared in the shadowy darkness of the gap in The Gap, behind the newcomer.
The rider was all limbs and scraps, topped by a ragged thatch of butchered brown hair. Barely visible against a backdrop of grimy skin, a sparse moustache said maybe sixteen. "You the doctor with the missiles?"
"I'm the doctor who's interested in the missiles," Taka told him.
"I'm Ricketts. Here." He reached under a threadbare thermochrome jacket and hauled out a ziplock bag with some very dirty laundry wadded up inside.
Taka took the bag between thumb and forefinger. "What's this?"
Ricketts ticked off a list on his fingers: "Gauchies, a shirt, and one sock. They had to, you know, improvise. I had the only bag, and I was way over on another run."
Laurie climbed out of the cab. "Tak?"
"Hullo," Ricketts said. His mouth split in an appreciative grin; one tooth chipped, two missing, the rest in four shades of yellow. His eyes ran down Lenie like a bar coder. Not that Taka could blame him; out here, anyone with clear skin and all their teeth qualified as a sex symbol almost by default.
She snapped her fingers to get him back to the real world. "What is this, exactly?"
"Right." Ricketts came back to point. "Weg and Moricon found one of those canister thingies you put the word out about. It was leaking this shit all over. Not like, rivers of the stuff, you know, just like sweating it almost. So they soaked it up in that" — a gesture at the bag—"and handed it off to me. I've been driving all night."
"Where's this from?" Taka asked.
"You mean, where we found it? Burlington."
It was almost too good to be true.
"That's in Vermont," he added helpfully.
Ken was suddenly at Rickett's shoulder. "There was a missile drop on Vermont?" he said.