A simulacrum, unarmed and asking for a conversation… “Still, Ris. You shouldn’t have come here.”
“I’m not finished. The thing is, Leo idolizes his father. They’ve stayed in close contact. Everyone who knows Leo figures he’s on the way to join Werner, maybe help Werner conduct what ever paranoid project he has in mind.”
“Maybe so, but—”
“Just listen. Apart from his son, Werner Beck keeps his distance from survivor families. He writes occasionally, he sends money, he supplies us with fake ID on a regular basis, but none of that comes with a return address. But you’re a full-fledged Society insider and you were always one of his favorites—you must know how to contact him. And if you do know, you have to tell me where he is, because we have to go there. We have to go there, Ethan. We have to go there and get Cassie and take her home.”
She sat back in her chair and swiped her hair away from her eyes with a flick of her left hand, a gesture he had forgotten but which was instantly familiar.
“Ris… the situation is more complicated than you might think.”
She looked at him impatiently.
“I had a visitor, too,” he said.
It was the survivors of ’07 who had coined the word “simulacrum” to describe their attackers. In his monographs Werner Beck sometimes called them “myrmidons.” The reference was to Ovid’s Metamorphosis, a passage in which Zeus turns ants into human beings in order to repopulate the country of Aegina. Ethan appreciated the insect reference, and as a literary scholar Nerissa would have recognized the allusion—but no one else did; simulacrum (or sim) had become the accepted word.
He told Nerissa as concisely as possible about the sim in the cellar, how it had shown up on his doorstep and what it had asked for and what it had offered him in return. She listened with careful attention and seemed surprised but not shocked until he got to the part about shooting it in the leg: “You really did that?”
“I had to be sure it wasn’t human. Is that hard to understand?”
“No, it’s just—I remember how you always hated guns.”
He still did. To Ethan, holding a firearm felt like assuming a responsibility no sane human being should want to accept. But after moving into the farm house he had signed up for a target and safety course at a shooting range outside of Jacobstown, where he discovered he had a modest talent for marksmanship. He had grown accustomed to the heft of the pistol in his hand in the same way he had grown inured to the shooting-range stink of raw plywood and scorched steel. Hunting deer with a long gun had been a more difficult act to stomach. The act of killing sickened him. But he had hardened himself to that, too. “It’s been a few years. I learned some things.”
“I’m sorry. Go on. What did the sim say?”
“It mentioned Cassie—”
“What—it knew her name? My God, why didn’t you tell me this?”
“I am telling you.”
“Jesus, Ethan!” She stood up, nearly knocking over her chair. “And the thing is still alive?”
“Yeah, but—”
“I need to talk to it.”
“Ris, it can’t tell the truth—it can’t distinguish between truth and lies. You know that. It uses words to manipulate people.”
“Yes, that was your theory, wasn’t it? Yours and Werner Beck’s.”
“It’s how the hypercolony works.”
“But it might be telling the truth.”
“If we try to interrogate it, we’re only giving it an opportunity to manipulate us.”
“So why haven’t you killed it?”
Good question. Because it has a human-seeming face? Because I’m as easy to manipulate as anyone else? “I was about to do that when you drove up.”
“I still want to talk to it.”
“Ris—”
“Now! We can’t afford to waste time.”
Of course they could not. He led her to the windowless cellar.
7
ON THE ROAD
THAT FIRST NIGHT, LEO DICTATED WHERE everyone would sleep. He insisted that Cassie and Beth share the double bed, which they did, though Beth was ungracious about it. The cheap sofa pushed against the wall of the motel room was big enough for Thomas, who curled up with a spare sweater for a pillow and Cassie’s winter coat for a blanket. He fell asleep instantly. Leo insisted on sleeping on the floor. It was a silly gallantry—there was room in the bed for three—but Cassie guessed it was a well-intended gesture.
The next two days were slow repetitions of their first day on the road. Leo bought a Rand-McNally road map and calculated a route he called “indirect,” a drunkard’s walk on two-lane blacktop, meant to confuse anyone who might have followed them from Buffalo. And it was Leo who did most of the driving, though Cassie took the wheel for an hour or two each day and Beth did the same. They ate at roadside diners or small-town restaurants. It seemed to Cassie that they passed through dozens of identical towns, a town where every river met a creek, and in each one she was tempted to get out of the car, take Thomas to the nearest bus station and buy a ticket for some destination she could barely envision—Terra Haute, Cincinnati, Wheeling: a place where she could be nobody in particular, a place where she would never have to think of the Correspondence Society.
But that was a fantasy, and Cassie was quick to dismiss it. After a day on the road, and a second, and a third, bitter reality set in. Beth and Leo were both dealing with the possibility that they had been orphaned: Beth had seen the stretcher being carried from her father’s building, and Leo was driving toward what might well turn out to be a murder scene. Cassie was already an orphan (a word she despised), but now she might have lost Aunt Ris and should probably assume she had. On the second day of their road trip Leo stopped at a diner that sold newspapers from across the country, The New York Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Buffalo News. Cassie picked up the News and scanned it, but there was nothing about any murders; the Liberty Street accident had gone unreported and she found no familiar names in the obituary columns. But that proved nothing. Nothing at all.
All we have, she thought, is each other. Leo and Beth, Cassie and Thomas. What bound them together was uncertainty and dread. And guilt—especially after the third day, the day they bloodied their hands.
It started with Leo’s paranoia and a confession from Beth.
Cassie failed to notice anything amiss until they pulled out of the parking lot of the motel where they had spent the night. She had slept badly and so had Thomas. During her wakeful moments, which seemed to arrive every half hour or so, she had seen her little brother tossing restlessly or lying passively awake, his eyes scanning the moonlit borders of the room. So far Thomas had been almost inhumanly patient, seldom complaining even when he was hungry or tired. But maybe that wasn’t a good thing. It might be a symptom of emotional shock. This morning his eyes were red and bruised-looking, and he refused breakfast—a granola bar and a bottle of orange juice—when she offered it to him. Today would be different, she told him. Today, Leo had said, they were going to get back on the Interstate and head directly for the place where Werner Beck lived. No more meandering back roads. But Thomas only shrugged.
Leo was almost as quiet as he drove from the motel lot onto the two-lane county road. From where she sat all Cassie could see of Leo him was the back of his head and his reflection in the rearview mirror. He kept glancing at the mirror and at Beth beside him as the road unreeled under trees with branches like outstretched fingers and a sky as flat as tinted glass.