“When the Styths raid again,” An Chu said, “we can try to get in.”
Paula rammed her hands into her pockets. Every time her left foot hit the ground her whole left side ached. She had to remember that and compensate for it. The fence curved away from them and she bent her course to follow.
“Hey! Stop where you are!”
The shout struck her like a bullet. She sprinted dead away from the fence, toward the darkness. The lawn spread out before her. An Chu passed her ten feet to one side, her arms pumping.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!”
Paula’s hip threatened to give way. She could not run. She dropped down flat on her face on the ground. An Chu kept running. A gun fired a burst of shots. An Chu fell to her knees. Other people were hurrying after them across the grass. An Chu struggled onto her feet. The gun rattled again and the woman fell and lay still.
A man with a gun ran by Paula, and she got up. People crowded toward An Chu where she lay on the grass. Paula went in among them. The anarchist was dead; the spray of bullets had cut her like an ax. A tall man behind Paula said, “Weren’t there two of them?”
Her hands in her pockets, she walked away from the clot of people. Behind her voices rose, and the gun went off again in a sudden burst. There was no place to hide. She kept herself from running, which would surely give her away, and tried not to limp. The gun rattled again, far back there. Shooting at Martians. Something huge and vague loomed up ahead of her. She put her hands out and touched cold net.
The fence. She leaned on it, her face against it, damp on her cheek. She had no strength left to climb it. Her fingers crooked into the mesh. Up. Her left leg refused to move. She flung one arm up over her head and took hold of the fence. Up. The air sang with the shrill yell of a siren. Like krines only louder. She dragged herself up the fence, her toes jammed into the meshwork. Throwing her arms over the top, she hung there, out of strength. The sirens screeched behind her. Her left leg dangled uselessly. She squirmed up and across the top of the fence. The barrage began. The lights seemed to burst inside her head, exploding in her eyes. Blinded and deafened, she struggled her body over the fence and let go and fell. It did not hurt when she fell. The ground quaked under her. She gained her feet and shuffled away into the wasteland.
She came back to the Nikoles Building in the daylight and stayed out in the park until night rolled over the dome. Her face was hot and her mouth parched and she could barely walk on her bad leg. After sunset she crept into the tunnel and slid down to the hatch into the secret room.
Willie answered her knock. “Paula!” He helped her out of the hatch. “Where have you been? Where’s Ana?”
“She’s dead.” Paula lay on the cot. Her lips were cracked with thirst and fever.
“Dead,” Willie said.
She rolled her arms around her head. Her whole body hurt. He gripped her forearms and shook her. “What happened?”
“Let me alone.”
He shook her harder, back and forth, until she moaned. “What happened? Where did you go?” She was getting sick to her stomach. Her head was spinning off her neck. She slumped into a thick dark exhaustion.
When she came back to waking, she was lying on the floor, thickly wrapped in blankets. The only light in the room was the greasy dip-lamp burning in a chink in the dirt wall. She moved, untangling herself from the blanket, and knocked over a cup of water beside her. There was a patch of tape stuck to the inside of her elbow.
“Dick?” she said.
At the end of the room, something stirred in the dark. Bunker came down toward her, past the cot where Willie was asleep. “What happened?” He picked up the overturned cup.
“Jennie’s in the entry port. You were right. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Then why did you try?”
“The debt owed to common humanity.”
“You keep saying that. What does it mean?”
“Ask Saba. It’s one of his dicta.”
“Then it’s meaningless. Give me your arm.”
She held her arm out toward him, and he ripped the tape patch away. On the pale field of skin at the crease of her elbow were several small pinpricks of blood. He took another patch out of its paper folder and stuck it to her arm.
“No,” she said. “It means something to him. To An Chu, maybe even to me. We couldn’t let Jennie go without trying.”
“It doesn’t mean much to An Chu any more.”
That was so. And what they had tried to do certainly meant nothing to Jennie Morrison. He smoothed the patch with his thumb.
“What’s on this tape? Where did you get it?”
“Antibiotic. While you were out playing cowboy with An Chu I broke into an apartment building. During a raid.”
“I’m thirsty,” she said.
“The water is where it always is.”
She went the length of the room, limping hard to show him how hurt she was, although her hip felt much stronger. The water was cold. She drank two cupfuls and went back. Willie slept like a child, the blanket snug over his neck. The dip-lamp flickered in the draft of her passing. An Chu’s blanket-coat was slung over the foot of the cot. Paula sat down with her back to the wall, beside Bunker, and folded her knees up to her chest.
The glossy mud of the lake was cracked and dry. Paula swiped at the stinging insects buzzing around her head. She was moving at a fast walk toward the ruins on the lake shore, three shells of houses half-buried in thorn bushes. There had been no rain in the dome since the coup. With the trees and animals gone and so many more people living here, the whole environment had changed. She climbed up a steep slope and went in among the walls of the ruins.
Here it was hot, even hotter than outside, and the bloodsippers and no-see-ems attacked her in clouds. She looked quickly over the snares she had set. A half-dead bird was tangled in the net trap; she killed it. Something bigger had sprung the other snares and eaten the baits and she reset them.
East of the lake the land flattened out. The grass here was full of snakes. She ran toward the north, holding the binoculars with one hand to keep them from banging her chest. The flats broke into a rising hillside. She walked up to the height, sat down on a tree stump, and focused the binoculars on the nearest of the Martian settlements, about a mile away.
The eighteen buildings of the complex were surrounded by a mesh fence over twenty feet high. The grass was jewel green. Dick, who went there all the time, said it was plastic turf. The glasses showed her children playing kickball, a woman in a sun-chair with a pad over her eyes, a dog sleeping in the shade. She looked in the windows of the building. The man on the third floor had almost finished his water color. She watched the Martians for nearly an hour. When dark fell she went back across the lake to her building.
Outside the tunnel hatch she pulled out most of the bird’s feathers, gutted it, and put the innards in her bait-jar. When she went down into the hidden room Bunker was there with three people she had never seen before. She put the bird on a spit.
“This is all of you?” Bunker said to his guests. “Just you three?”
“How many more do you want?” the strange woman said.
Paula took the bird out to Jennie Morrison’s empty flat, where she had dug out a fire pit, and lit the fire. Through the open door she could see the people in the hidden room. She pretended not to be watching. She had eaten nothing but meal for two days and had no interest in sharing the meat.
“Give me ten days to steal the car,” Bunker said. He stood. He wore no shirt and sweat glittered on his washboard chest. The other people rose.
“If there’s anything we can do,” the woman said. “Any way we can pay you for your help—”