“Kemp’s people mean to hold off the soldiers until the Mirror is shut down. But I’m guessing you’ll see soldiers inside by nightfall.”
She smiled wanly. “I liked it here, Jesse. Oh, I know it was all pretend. The amity, the smiles. Past and future clasping hands in friendship. But it was a pretty dream, wasn’t it?”
Jesse felt a surge of affection for this solemn woman who had served him coffee on countless winter mornings. “For some of us it was. Best of luck to you, Dorothy.”
“And to you, Jesse Cullum, wherever you’re hurrying off to. Have someone see to that arm!”
* * *
He found Doris Vanderkamp in her cubicle in the dormitory wing, just as Dorothy had said. The door to her room was half ajar, but he knocked so as not to alarm her. It didn’t work. She saw his face and emitted a small shriek. “Jesse!”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s me.”
She came to him and took his arm—his uninjured left arm, luckily—and steered him inside. He sat on her bed and let a wave of dizziness wash over him. “Lord,” she said, “you’re bleeding like a butchered hog!”
A coin-sized drop of blood stained the bedsheet. He gazed at it dully. “I’m sorry…”
“You need a bandage.”
“I already have one.”
“Then you need a fresh one, or a tourniquet.”
“It’s a kind thought. But what I really need, Doris, is a uniform.”
“What? I thought you said ‘uniform.’”
“I did. A City security uniform.”
“Are you drunk? That’s the last thing you need. All of us here already traded our uniforms for civilian clothes. The army will be inside sooner or later, and you don’t want to get caught wearing City colors. It would only make a target of you. Lie down and let me look at that wound.”
“Did you take medical training in my absence?”
“No, but I can tie a cloth.”
He was tempted to take her advice, at least the part about lying down. But if he closed his eyes he might not open them again for hours. “My case is different. I’m serious—I need a uniform that fits me.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What business are you caught up in now?”
“It’s a long story, Doris, I’m sorry. A City uniform—can you get me one?”
“The lockers are full of them.” She sighed. “If you’re willing to wait here, I’ll bring you one. I guess anything would serve you better than that bloody rag of a shirt.”
“One more thing. Do you have paper and a pen?”
She waved at her desk, the kind with which every dormitory cubicle was equipped. “Top drawer.”
“I thank you,” he said. But she had already left the room. Time was slipping away from him. He located a pad of paper embossed with the City logo and a City pen with a rolling point. Paper in his lap, pen in his left hand, he gathered his unruly thoughts and began to write.
* * *
He had filled two pages by the time Doris returned with a uniform that looked as if it might fit him. He set aside the pages and let her help him trade his civilian pants for City trousers. That was easy enough. The shirt was more difficult. He took Dekker’s pass card and Talbot’s phone from his pocket and put them on Doris’s desk.
“That’s an iPhone,” she said.
“How do you know about such things?”
“I was courted by a Tower One man last winter, when you were off chasing runners or whatever you were doing. He had a pass card like that. He used it to sneak me into his quarters. And he had an iPhone, too. He liked to take pictures with it. Moving pictures,” she said, waggling her eyebrows suggestively.
Jesse understood that Doris liked to think she possessed the power to make him jealous. “What kind of moving pictures?”
“The intimate kind.”
“The cad,” he said, to please her.
Doris grinned triumphantly. “I didn’t mind! He said there are women who do it for a living, where he comes from, and they’re perfectly respectable, and I’m as good at it as any of them.”
“Seems like you were born too soon.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Far from it.” He clenched his teeth and pulled off his shirt. The shirt and the bandage beneath it and the flesh of his arm had been glued together with blood. Peeling it all apart caused black spots to cloud his vision. Doris sucked in her breath when she saw the exposed wound. “Jesse … I think I can see bone.”
He wished she hadn’t spoken. “Bind it,” he said. “Any old cloth. Tear a strip from my shirttail if you have to. Bind it for me, Doris—I can’t do it myself.”
She looked queasy but followed his instructions. The bleeding wasn’t stanched, but it slowed. He used his old shirt to wipe some of the spilled blood from his arm, and he covered up the rest with the fresh City shirt and the blue City blazer with the City of Futurity insignia on it.
“And I got these for you,” Doris said.
A pair of Oakley sunglasses. The kind he had once considered supremely desirable. Tinted plastic and a thimble’s-worth of aluminum. He put them on and regarded himself in Doris’s mirror.
“You look as City as they come,” she said.
He pocketed the pass card and was pocketing Talbot’s iPhone when an idea occurred to him. “Doris, have you really used one of these devices?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“To make moving pictures?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going up to the observation deck to find out what’s happening. Will you come with me?”
“Those elevators don’t open to us anymore.”
“They’ll open for me. It’ll only take a few minutes. Will you come?”
She seemed flattered and curious in equal parts. “Yeah, all right,” she said.
* * *
The observation deck of Tower Two, like the rest of Tower Two, had been designed to impress guests who had never seen a building taller than three stories. Jesse had been up here occasionally during his tenure at the City, and for him, as for most guests, the effect was an amalgam of fascination and dread. The floor was not divided by interior walls, and the outer walls were made of thick transparent glass. It was like standing on an open platform suspended from a cloud.
Not everyone enjoyed the experience. Every week a few visitors, by no means exclusively women, fainted at the sight. Others begged to be taken back to solid ground. And even Doris’s pleasure was not unalloyed, it seemed to Jesse. Or maybe it was the risk of a stray artillery round that made her uneasy.
He went to the north side of the deck, where he could see the wall and the army arrayed beyond it. From this angle it was clear what the City’s strategy had been. The army was separated from the wall by a broad swath of empty prairie, a sort of no-man’s-land, marking out the effective range of a twenty-first-century rifle. The City’s soldiers were posted atop the wall itself, which was more than broad enough to accommodate them, and they were all armed with automatic weapons. Any infantryman who ventured into the no-go zone would be rewarded with a bullet. And City rifles were accurate at distances that made even the finest Winchester seem like a farmer’s musket.
The gate itself was a smaller steel barrier set into the wall, and the soldiers had trained their artillery on that target, perhaps hoping to eventually blow it open and enable a massed charge. Or maybe they were simply restraining themselves in hope of a negotiated surrender: They could have shelled the towers at any time, as a few stray shots had demonstrated.
The steel gate was sturdy, but it wasn’t as massive as the wall itself, and there was enough accumulated rubble at the base of it to suggest a breach was possible. As Jesse watched, another artillery round burst against it. The City’s defenders responded with rounds of automatic-rifle fire.