There was one recent exception to the stay-put rule—the Brotherhood of Man had begun sending buses to area corp-towns, offering residents a field trip to the newly completed Temple of Man. I wondered how many of the hostile faces surrounding me had witnessed Auden’s little martyr show live and in person. How many looked at me and were afraid.
Twenty minutes passed, and Jude’s mystery man didn’t show. Another twenty, and still nothing.
I glanced up at Riley. He was resolutely ignoring the giggling girls—who were now taking turns boldly flashing their net-linked lingerie at him.
“Is he usually this late?” I VM’d.
“Never,” came the answer. “Stay put. I’ll voice Jude.”
Of course, I thought in disgust. Jude always knows what to do. The all-knowing, all-powerful Jude had all the answers.
Then the sun went out.
Darkness, and then the world blazed red. I stood up as the alarm sang out, a single scream at the top of the octave. The crowds froze, faces tipped up toward the vidscreens, which all flashed the same useless message: Alert. Biohazard. Alert.
The red strobe flashed on, off, on. Glowing faces burst from the darkness, then dropped into shadow. The fountain bled pink, the rippling pool of water at its base a bottomless red.
I was staring at the fountain when I realized the noise had stopped. Not the alarm, which was still singing, but the sounds beneath it, the rustling, mumbling, shrieking, crying chaos of the crowd. Gone.
Ring around the rosie, a pocketful of posies.
The inane rhyme whispered through my head as they began to drop. They fell silent and still, their eyes bulging and mouths convulsing, fishlike, open shut open. Soundless. The two men with their dirt-beards, the old woman. The giggle twins, their giggles silenced, their skirts askew. Down, hard and ugly, heads cracking against plastic stone, arms jutting at odd angles. Down went the little kid, fingers clawing at her pink shirt. And her mother, down without a fight, her back to the kid.
Ashes, ashes.
Someone told me once that the nursery rhyme was about the Black Plague. That the ring of roses referred to the disease’s trademark red rash; the ashes to the burning bodies of the dead. But that was a lie: I looked it up. The words were nonsense; they meant nothing.
The red light pulsed rhythmically. I tried not to count the faces, hundreds of faces. Some of them twitched, chests heaving, sucking in air and whatever poison hid inside of it, whatever biohazard had touched off a useless, too late alert alert alert.
Some of them—one of the men, the girl, three women with chunky ankles and identical rings on their stubby fingers—prostrate, frozen. Askew. Their eyes open, their chests still.
Faces red, then pale, shadowy, non, then red again.
“We have to get out of here!” Riley’s voice in my ear. Riley’s shirt absurdly pulled over his face as if he had anything to fear from the poisoned air. Riley’s hands on my shoulders. Riley, there, but seeming very far away. Riley alive and in motion, seeming wrong in the still, empty room. Empty until you looked down.
“Lia!” Riley grabbing me. Dragging me out of the plaza.
Running, stumbling over something lumpy and large that didn’t make a sound as our feet sank into its chest.
Running without looking down, just step over them like stones, just go, Riley said, don’t stop don’t look just go.
Running and standing still, leaving a piece of myself in the empty atrium, still watching the red light pool in the whites of their eyes.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
5.TOGETHER ALONE
The red light turned to tears, trickled down pale, still faces.
Their eyes were bleeding.
Alert! Biohazard! Alert! screamed the vidscreens, although there was no one left to warn.
“Get it together!” Riley’s hands were rough on my arm and back, pushing me forward. “We have to get out.”
What’s the hurry? I thought, a mad giggle rising in me. No bio equals no hazard. Safe and sound.
But I shook him off and I ran with him, down the dead, empty hall, the corp-town in lockdown, its residents hiding or evacuated. Or neither. Steel shutters had dropped to shield the glass walls, trapping us inside, in the dark. The biohazard protocol had locked even the glowing emergency exits, sealing the corp-town tight—no nasty microorganisms would escape to the outside world. And no mechs.
Riley went straight for the control panel to the right of the nearest exit and ripped off the cover. He began messing with the wires, stripping two of them with his teeth and winding them together, then touching them to a third, and before I could ask what the hell he was doing, the steel slid up toward the ceiling, and he pushed through the door. His hand gripped mine, tugged hard, and I followed.
We cut across the matted astroturf surrounding the residential cubes, ignoring the solar-powered cart that had carried us here—even if it wasn’t on lockdown with the rest of the compound, it was too slow and too easily tracked by the secops. Alarms were blaring across the campus, and steel shutters had dropped across all the residence cubes, turning them into bunkers, a fitting accessory to the corp-cum–war zone. The air split with distant sirens. Thunder shook the sky. Except it wasn’t thunder; it was a squadron of helicopters dropping toward the glass cube as the emergency vehicles, the fire trucks and ambulances, appeared on the horizon. Next would come the secops looking for someone to blame. I suspected we’d do.
“We didn’t have to run,” I said, my brain finally starting to work again, though I was still running, because he seemed so sure and I was so not. We passed the wastewater ponds and trampled through deserted soy fields. The workers had presumably all been hustled away to the underground safe houses dotting the perimeter, and only the reaping and spraying machines remained to witness us tearing through the knee-high fronds of sallow green. “We could have stayed—maybe we could have helped.”
Riley sped up. “We’re helping ourselves.”
We ran for miles, quickly crossing the boundaries of the corp-town into open country. Security at the borders was light—in most spots nonexistent—and it would probably take at least an hour before the secops had a chance to cover the grounds. In the meantime, the more distance we could put between us and them, the better. Mech bodies didn’t tire, so we just kept going. Through industrial wastelands and past smokestacks puffing purified clouds into foggy sky, beyond the boundaries of the corp-town, away from the sirens, through flat fields and more fields, staying off the road, feet tramping through the high grass, another mile and another stretching between us and the corp-town. I’d been a runner, before, and I knew my stride. Counting paces was easier than thinking, so I focused on the wet thump of our shoes on the soggy ground, marking off five miles, then ten, then twenty. Until a cloud of green mushroomed on the horizon, resolving itself, as we drew nearer and nearer, into a wide, dense grove of trees. We’d reached the border of a Sanctuary, twenty square miles of unspoiled wilderness, off-limits to orgs. Which meant, except for the birds and squirrels and deer, we were alone.