She just wanted to nap. Let them listen to her breathing. But she was desperate for answers and didn’t know when she’d have a chance to be alone with him again. “Okay. Yeah.”
He left. To get permission? Wasn’t the whole point to sneak out together and find a quiet corner? Ruth patted the duffel bag in her lap, a few personal effects retrieved from the Endeavour and someone else’s reasonably clean clothes. The comfort she needed wasn’t there.
James returned with another wheelchair, not as padded as her new one. It wasn’t the room that he suspected was bugged, or not just the room. The chair, too. She nearly shouted. She nearly gave them an earful. But James saw it in her expression. His eyes widened and he spread his hands as if to catch her.
Ruth kept quiet, exactly as she had done with Ulinov.
The courtyard seemed like a dangerous place to talk, packed with idle soldiers. Too many heads turned to watch as James rolled her along the concrete path, hunched close to her ear. “I don’t know if a directional mike could pick our voices out of all this,” he said, “or if they’re even equipped with anything like that, but let’s make this quick.”
“You don’t trust Hernandez.”
“I think he’d give his life to protect us.”
“But then…You switched chairs.”
“We don’t know where he got it or who had it before him. And there are too many unemployed intelligence people trying to make themselves useful.”
They passed a Winnebago, a bare-chested soldier mending his sleeve, a young lieutenant scowling at a clipboard.
“I trust him,” James said. “I do. But it’s not realistic to expect him to withhold information from his superiors or not cooperate with them.”
By that logic I shouldn’t even trust you.
“You need to be careful how you act and what you say. I know you like to push buttons. Don’t do that here.”
Ruth was bitter. “You sound like Kendricks.”
“He came to see you? He was talking about it. I thought maybe I’d convinced him that I had you on a short leash, but shit, Ruth, you were nothing but trouble up there, mouthing off, always arguing. And the last month or so you just got worse and worse.”
“Keeping me up there was a waste.”
“It’s not always about you.”
Four soldiers jogged toward them down the walkway. James stopped her chair and a miserable frustration squeezed down on Ruth’s thoughts like a cramp. She felt helpless on so many levels, physically, mentally.
The men dodged around her wheelchair and kept going.
James began pushing her again. Ruth wished she could see his face but it was like old times, just his voice at her ear. He said, “Kendricks isn’t somebody you want to fight.”
“No, I don’t. I barely even knew who he was until he came and put his foot up my butt.”
“This winter there was cannibalism in some of the mines.”
He said this without changing his mild, scolding tone, and Ruth grabbed the wheel beneath her good hand, a beltlike sting of pain. James stumbled. Ruth craned her neck around.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s not just rumors. There’s proof that it happened on a wide scale.”
She tried to anticipate where he was heading. The habit of analysis was, as always, more comforting than dealing with her own emotional reaction.
The military and FEMA stocks, the thousands of cattle herded to elevation, the subbarrier-scavenging efforts — all of this should have been enough, even now, to sustain two-thirds of a million people.
“They held back most of the food from the start,” she said.
James began rolling her forward again. “You can understand the decision. The council wanted to make sure that somebody, at least, would still be here in the long run.”
Ruth shook her head. It was a very human phenomenon, making a fear real by taking action intended to be preventative. They had created a problem that otherwise might not have arisen for years, if ever. There had never been much living up here — short grasses and shrubs, rodents, birds, some elk — and by cutting off the supplies they had made a rebellion inevitable. No doubt it had started slow, with sneak thieves and hoarders.
“When did the opposition get organized?” she asked.
“Ruth, just listen to me.”
The rebuke, his tired, paternal patience, made her wonder at herself. She didn’t need to prove anything to James.
“The council had been doling out some food,” he said. “It was a starvation diet but enough to keep people waiting, keep them dependent, even though almost none of it got too far up the canyons.”
Some of the larger mines were more than five miles east of Leadville, she knew, deep in the snarl of gullies and peaks.
James sighed, an mm-mah sound she recognized as the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “I don’t know that there was anything else they could have done, really, short of using choppers to fly supplies in that far. It’s a lousy situation.”
It was criminal. It was murder. But she said nothing. He was right — and it had been done in part to protect the labs.
The path forked and James chose to angle back toward the main building, squeezing past a pickup truck with a tall camper shell. “There have always been raiders,” he said, “guys with hunting rifles, nothing that stood up to army troops, especially since the army was getting fed every day.”
Words came out of her in a hush. “What did they do?”
“We’re under martial law. We have been since the beginning, for whatever it was worth. Not every place had a solid military presence.” He made his shrugging noise again, mmm. “Last fall that changed. They sent out a third of the troops here, and moved other groups around to establish garrisons in key spots.”
They had wanted control. They had wanted order. And they had simultaneously eased the local situation by ridding themselves of thousands of hungry bellies.
“It backfired,” James said. “The first snow came early and a lot of those units got caught before they were ready. Scavenging efforts stopped. The chain of command was already a mess, with different groups from all over the country, different branches of the military… The first breakaway was the White River Plateau, in December, and Loveland Pass went over in February. They declared independence and then they declared possession of the nearest towns and cities below the barrier.”
Ruth closed her eyes, a useless denial, and opened them immediately. The emotions inside her were like that dream of tornados and falling.
He stopped her chair beside two aluminum garden sheds, the nearest stamped with fake, curlicue ivy. Opposite them stood a wide tent. Half a dozen soldiers sat outside, doing nothing, not playing cards or tossing a ball, just resting right there on the ground. One man mumbled something and the others turned to look.
James knelt and pointed at the top floor of the college, as if they were discussing the labs inside. This was his life now. This was their life. She would always be onstage.
“It’s not much of a war,” he said. “Nobody has the resources, and we’re too far apart.”
The high region that Ruth thought of as Colorado actually stretched over what had been seven Western states, along the spine of the Continental Divide. It was separated from the Canadian Rockies by wide gaps in Montana, and humped as far south as Arizona and New Mexico before falling into desert. Much of this far-flung line of small continents and islands were set apart from each other by shallow channels or valleys that plunged away for tens of miles — but Leadville sat roughly in the center of the main bulk of the habitable zone.
The White River Plateau was a freestanding body between Leadville and the heights of Utah. Ruth didn’t see how anything had truly changed if they chose to be their own small kingdom. Loveland Pass, on the other hand, lay only forty miles north.