None of them were aces as far as she knew, though the jokers were obvious enough, the ones that the PPA and Leopard Men of Ngobe had evidently decided to evaluate for possible uses before disposing of them as they had the rest. Since she’d left Rusty behind, she’d been shepherding the group steadily eastward-she’d made sure that Wally had the GPS unit, hoping that a compass would be sufficient for her needs.
All she needed to do was find a telephone and call Babs: the Committee could get her out. Jayewardene could send a fleet of UN helicopters, or meet them at the shore of Lake Tanganyika with boats, or… well, they would have a way. She only needed to head east. Head toward the lake and Tanzania.
And avoid being caught.
Simple.
A good half dozen of the children could not walk on their own, or barely so. Eason had to have his fish tail constantly moistened or he’d cry out in pain as the scales dried and cracked. Jerusha and the older children took turns carrying those who could not walk. Some of the older ones wielded machetes to cut down the worst of the brush. They spread out in a ragged hundred-yard line through the jungle, a line that without her constant attention would have grown so long that the children at the end would have been lost. She had to constantly urge the youngest and weakest to keep moving, had to constantly switch out those carrying the infirm, had to stop those at the front just as frequently so the stragglers could catch up.
She tried counting them frequently to make certain they were all there, but most of the time lost track of the count. Eventually, she abandoned that entirely, hoping that the kids would let her know if one of their own was missing. When they stopped to rest, the children would huddle around her as if they all wanted to press next to her, as if they craved the reassurance of her touch or her voice. For many years, Jerusha had wondered whether she’d ever be in a relationship stable enough that she would feel safe having her own children. Now she’d acquired over fifty of them-and she was alone.
Occasionally on those frequent rest breaks, Jerusha would use her wild card ability to restore the jungle growth along their trail in hopes that it would make them more difficult to follow. Hopefully, they weren’t being followed; hopefully, Rusty’s tactic would work and the Leopard Men would follow him instead.
It was the blind joker Waikili who made Jerusha wonder. He came up to her hours after they’d begun their march, tugging on her safari jacket. “They coming, Bibbi Jerusha,” he said to her in imperfect French, seeming almost to stare at her with the blank, dark skin of his face. “They coming after us.”
She could see the fear radiating out into the group at his words, all of them whispering to each other, a few breaking out into terrified wails and tears. “Shh…” she told them. “Cesar, tell them they must be quiet. Waikili, how can you know this?”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t have eyes, but I feel them here.” He tapped his forehead. “They find the camp. They following the steel man, but some of them follow us, too.”
“You’re just guessing, Waikili,” Jerusha said desperately. “You can’t know. It’s not possible.” Even as she said it, she worried that she was wrong, that the joker Waikili might have also been a hidden ace.
Waikili shook his head into her denial. “I know,” he repeated. “I am not wrong.”
Jerusha bit at her lower lip. They were all staring at her now. “All right,” she said. “If they’re following us, then we just need to move faster than they do. They won’t catch us. Come on, we’ve rested enough. Let’s go.”
The Santa Cruz Islands
Solomon Islands
“What’s that?” sprout asked.
They had come to a high point: a dinosaur-back hump of volcanic ash bedded on sandstone that showed through down by the beach. The island was forested and densely undergrown. Its nearest neighbor lay over sixty miles away and, key, it was uninhabited except for monkeys, tropical birds that were equally loud to ears and eyes, and a colony of wiry skittish goats. Nobody ever came here.
That was a vaguely cruciform mound grown over with tough native grass. Only the double-vaned tail betrayed its real nature. “A B-25 bomber, honey,” Tom said. The son of a successful, hard-charging Air Force general, his… predecessor… had been an avid warplane buff as a kid. And Tom had access to some of his memories, though not all. Especially the early ones.
“What’s that?” his daughter asked him.
My daughter, he thought, defying his tormentor of the night before. “A warplane for dropping bombs. They fought a lot of battles around here during World War II. This plane was probably based at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, a few hundred miles from here. Must’ve been shot down.”
He hadn’t come here just to give the lie to the old hippie’s reproach. Sending those kids after the aces who had smashed Nyunzu had given him a pang. They were aces themselves, sure, and some of them were scary as shit, but they were still kids.
He needed to hear Sprout’s voice, feel her hand in his, see the pure and innocent love in her clear blue eyes.
“Will they bomb us?”
He laughed and led her away. “I don’t think so, sweetie. They better not, or Daddy’ll teach ’em better!”
“Which Daddy?” she asked, her eyes huge and solemn beneath the sun hat Mrs. Clark insisted she wear.
It took him a moment to register the question. Then it hit him like a punch in the nuts. “What do you mean, honey? I’m your daddy.”
Mulishly she shook her head, making her ponytail flap from shoulder to shoulder of her blue-and-white sundress. “My real daddy. I miss him. Why can’t I see him?”
“I’m your real daddy. The only daddy you got.”
“I want my real daddy! You made him go away! You’re mean. Ow-you’re hurting me!”
From orbit the island was invisible amid the ocean’s endless blue. The Radical screamed. No one could hear. He launched a sunbeam at a random angle into the atmosphere, saw it flare briefly as air turned incandescent.
Feeling the prickle of capillaries bursting under the skin and a tickle in his eyeballs he flashed down, drew a deep breath, and back. Then west, against the Earth’s rotation, crossing the terminator into darkness.
Hanging above North Africa he found the pale green blotch of the Sudd. He flashed to twenty thousand feet, scanning the Earth like a hungry eagle.
He found a Caliphate Multiple Launch Rocket System battery isolated from its main force. Bad move. Like Judgment he appeared among them, spread screams and fire and death and left fireworks lighting the sky behind him.
He felt much better then.
Somewhere in the Jungle
Vietnam
Aliyah lay beside him in the bed, tracing Ellen’s fingers across his bare chest. They were both naked, apart from the earring. The sun was pressing in at the window. Her body was warm and soft and comforting, curled against him. Ellen’s right breast lay exposed by the folds of blanket, the nipple reacting to the cold now instead of their play. He popped a wasp free, sent it looping through the still air, and then back down onto his belly and into the flesh. Up, loop, back. Up, loop, back.
“What are you thinking?” Aliyah asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just grooving on the postcoital bliss.”
“Did you have a fight?”
“You mean ever in my life?”