“Yes.”
Deborah didn’t say anything, staring at Cam, but then Alekseev nodded.
“Okay, let’s go,” Cam said to Freedman. “You have my word. We’ll find the lab.”
He would have done it to save Ruth if nothing else.
Alekseev bodysearched Freedman with a pistol in his hand, relieving her of four plastic vials that Cam was sure contained nanotech. They also took off her knapsack. Deborah sorted through it gingerly. “There’s nothing in here but canteens,” she said as Medrano and Alekseev pestered Freedman for more information. “What are we looking for?” Medrano said, but Freedman only cried on Cam’s lap once they were aboard, cramming all six of them into the chopper. She turned into his chest and neck and cried like a broken girl, weeping against his ash-black fatigues as she formed words inside her breathless sobs.
“It was Dutchess,” she whispered. “Not me. It was Dutchess.”
Cam strained to hear. Maybe she needed that secrecy. She’d obviously learned to hide herself during her imprisonment, both from her captors and her own conscience.
“She doesn’t know where we’re going,” Deborah said. “One thing I can tell you, there won’t be aircraft or trucks. The Chinese wouldn’t have risked constant flights or traffic between the labs. Our satellites would have seen the pattern. That means it’s close by.”
“There are five thousand buildings close by,” Medrano said.
“Look for another hospital,” Cam said, “maybe an office complex or a school. They’d need space — clean rooms for labs, storage, barracks. Go south. She was heading south.”
“She’s out of her mind,” Medrano said.
“She’s smarter than the rest of us put together. I think she noticed something. There were clues. Kendra?” Cam lowered his voice. “Kendra, where is their other lab?”
“I found the police,” she said. “I told them. Nine thousand five hundred and seventy feet. I told them.”
She was babbling. She was sick — physically sick. The round face and double chins from Rezac’s photos were shrunken down to something more like a living skull. Her cheekbones pressed tightly through her skin, which was why her eyes seemed too large, squeezed out of her face.
She couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds.
25
Kendra Lelei Freedman survived the plague year only by the strangest karma. As the nanotech ravaged northern California, spreading swiftly, somehow she reached the governor’s office in Sacramento. Kendra was still wearing her lab coat, which must have helped. She was also louder than the other people in the crowd outside the capital buildings, using her weight to shove to the front. She convinced a National Guardsman she knew what was behind the confused reports. An officer escorted her through their barricades.
State police put her and the governor aboard a CHP helicopter only to be overwhelmed themselves by the mob, and the pilot’s frantic radio calls went unnoticed in the chaos. It didn’t help that the March rain turned to snow as they hurried east. Then they were infected, flying beneath ten thousand feet. Their pilot managed to lift the chopper to safe altitude through the storm, but he was bleeding from one eye and semiconscious when they smashed into a mountainside.
Other people reached the same small peak. Too many. They only lasted until summer before they played their first round of Stones. It was a contest Kendra invented herself, a bait-and-switch guessing game that she controlled. The losers were killed and eaten. Kendra knew she would never fail, not with her memory. She talked the majority into supporting it because their first victims were the most traumatized, the less aware, the least helpful. They believed it was fair. They winnowed themselves down with Kendra manipulating the group the whole time.
It split her mind. She wasn’t brave enough to commit suicide, so she died in other ways. Nevertheless, Kendra was still alive when the plague war began. The Russians found her. Kendra told them who she was to escape being shot, and they traded her to the Chinese.
The MSS went to work on her brittle soul. They said America had been eradicated by a full-scale nuclear attack and offered proof in satellite photos, some of which must have been real. They took her aboard a plane and flew for nearly a day, then said they’d landed in the Himalayas, where they were desperately fending off India’s tanks and infantry.
They gave her a chance to redeem herself: to create new nanotech. Their own people had been working on the mind plague. Kendra was the catalyst in making it operational. They said the new contagion was intended to be a bloodless method of ending the war. They said they only wanted to unite both countries under a single government before another nuclear exchange wiped out these last few safe islands above the machine plague. They didn’t tell her Ruth’s vaccine was widespread by then, permitting everyone to reclaim the world below ten thousand feet. Nor did Kendra ask to go outside to verify her location. She’d seen enough of snow and wind and desolate rock. She loved her warm prison. The women who tended to her were soft-voiced and kind, completely unlike anything on her mountaintop. She wanted to believe them.
Kendra began to work again. She escaped into the pristine logic of her microscopes, and, when she occasionally stalled on the mind plague, she turned her skills to other projects, daring to reexamine the archos tech for weaknesses. There must be some way to destroy it.
Her handlers let her play with different lines of research because it kept her happy. She also came to understand that they hoped her efforts would jump-start new possibilities in their weapons programs. Too late, she discovered Ruth’s vaccine in her own blood along with the booster nanotech. Too late, she learned she’d repeated her unholy mistake, providing them with the power to tear the world apart again.
She went on strike. It didn’t last. The MSS used sleep deprivation, drugs, and cold to compel her. She quit eating, but they inserted a gastric feeding tube and IVs to sustain her — and when she failed to rouse herself, the pain began. Electricity. Knives. She swore to help again just to make it stop.
She’d become erratic. She knew that. Sometimes she exaggerated her behavior when she was actually in control of herself, creating opportunities to conceal and deceive. It also helped that she’d picked up a good deal of their language by then. She pretended she wanted to be one of them, which she hoped was comforting to her overseers. She refused to speak in anything except Mandarin, deliberately confusing her words and mixing her written notes.
Kendra knew they hoped to improve the mind plague to introduce thoughts to infected people, not only disrupting their capacity to think but shaping and encouraging cooperative moods. They were years away from this magic. Merely teaching the nanotech to interrupt higher brain function was impressive enough — but, showing ambition, she convinced them to increase the nano’s AMU to allow the space necessary to eventually house those programs. The Chinese didn’t realize the extra bulk she built into it also held a coded message.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t be sure anyone would ever find her cry for help. Worse, she didn’t make the mental leap to using the new self-governing markers to reverse who the mind plague infected until after they’d taken both kinds of nanotech away from her.
Her best chance to stop them was her continued work with the archos tech. She crafted a new machine plague, first paring down its size for increased speed. She also replaced its heat engine with a simple protein-based reaction. That was easy. The archos tech was nothing if not efficient in disintegrating organic tissue, which she taught it to burn for energy. It would be enough to destroy everyone in their nanotech programs, including herself.