"What did you mean about keeping a rabbit in the hat?"
"Planning for contingencies. It doesn't matter. Anyway, I really admire your father. Sheh." She gave a breathy whistle. "I had a holo of him in my room when I was younger. You'll be free to go in an hour or so."
"What's going on?" This request, Rose knew, would be followed by the Bad Guy telling all, because Bad Guys always told all. They could never resist the urge to reveal their diabolical plans.
Eleanor slammed the door shut-not because of anger but because the door wasn't hung true and was besides swollen from moisture and heat and that was the only way to get it to shut. Left alone in the room, Rose tested the door at once, but it didn't budge. She stuck her ear to the keyhole but heard nothing, not even footsteps. At least the itching had begun to subside. Finally, she turned and surveyed her prison.
It was an ugly room with concrete rebar walls, a molding ceiling sheltering two timid tarantulas in one corner, and a floor made up of peeling rectangles of some mottled beige substance. The tarantulas made her leery, but she didn't fear them; she knew quite a bit about their behavior after living on the set of Curse of the Tarantula. The rest of the room disquieted her more. The floor wasn't level, and the tiles hadn't been well laid, leaving gaps limned with a powdery white dust. Two old cots made up of splintery wood supports with sun-faded, coarse burlap stretched between stood side by side.
Ugly puppies.
She winced, remembering the businesswoman's casual words. In one corner someone had set up a shrine on an old plastic table, one of whose legs had been repaired with duct tape. Two weedy-looking bouquets of tiny yellow-and-white flowers resting crookedly in tin pots sat one on either side of a plastic baby doll with brown hair, brown eyes, and painted red lips. The doll was dressed in a lacy robe, frayed at the hem and dirty along the right sleeve, as though it had been dragged through dirt. A framed picture of the same doll, or one just like it, lay at its feet, showing the doll sitting on a similar surface but almost smothered by offerings of flowers and faded photographs of real children, some smiling, some obviously ill, one apparently dead. Someone had written at the bottom of the picture, in black marker in crude block letters, El Nino Doctor. Doctor Baby Jesus.
Rose knew something about the Kristie-Anne religion. Jesus was the god-person-man they prayed to, although she had never quite understood how you could be both a god and a mortal human being, more or less, at the same time. "The gods are everywhere," her mother used to say. "They are what surrounds us, Mother Sun and Father Wind, Aunt Cloud and Uncle Moon, Sister Tent and Brother Sky, Daughter Earth and Son River, Cousin Grass and Cousin Rain. Gods are not people."
Yet some people thought they could be. Rose sniffled. She wanted to cry, but because crying made her eyes red and puffy, unattractive, she had learned to choke down tears. But she was still frightened and alone.
She tongued the emergency transponder implanted in her jaw, but it was dead, killed by the crude blast of the pulse gun. Everything else she had left on the Ra.
"I want my daddy," she whispered.
A flash of light winked in the staring eyes of the baby doll. It began to talk in a creaky, squeaky, distorted voice, stretched, tenuous, and broken with skips and jerks.
"Si habla Espaсol diga, 'si.' Nahuatocatzitzinй, amehuantzitzin in anquimocaquilia, in anquimomatilia inin tlatolli, ximotlatolti-can. If you speak English, say 'yes.' "
Startled, she took a step back just as she said, scarcely meaning to, "yes."
"Please wait while I connect you. A medical technician will be with you in a moment. Catholic Medical Services provides sponsored medical advice free of charge to you, at any hour of the day or night. Help will be given whatever your circumstance. Please wait. When the doctor comes on line, state your location and your-"
A fluttering whir scattered the words. After a pause, a barely audible squeal cut at her hearing. The doll spoke again, channeling a real person's voice.
"Please state your location and need. I am M. de Roepstorff, a medical technician. I am here to help you. Are you there?"
She was so stunned she forgot how to speak.
Patiently, the voice repeated itself. "Are you there?"
"I am. I am! I'm a prisoner-"
"Stay calm. Please state your location and we'll send a team out-"
Static broke the connection.
There was silence, stillness; one of the tarantulas shifted, moving a few centimeters before halting, suspended, to crowd beside its fellow.
"Are you still there?" Rose whispered. "Are you there? Yes. Yes, I speak English."
"Please wait while I connect you. The medical technician will be with you in a moment. Catholic Medical Services…"
The doll's recorded voice squealed to a bruising pitch, ratcheted like gears stripping, and failed.
A grinding, grating noise startled her just as the kiss of cooler air brushed her face. The table rocked, tilted to the right, teetered, and crashed sideways to the ground, spilling pots, flowers, picture, and doll onto the concrete floor. Nothing broke, except the floor. One of the rectangular tiles wobbled, juddered, and jumped straight up. Rose leaped back, stumbled against a cot, and sat down hard as a man dressed in dark coveralls with a crude burlap mask concealing most of his face emerged from a hole in the floor, climbing as if going up a steep staircase. All she could see was his mouth, undistinguished, and his eyes, the iris dark and the white bloodshot with fatigue or, maybe, some barbaric drug intoxication.
"Quien eres?" he demanded. He carried a scatter gun. With it trained on her, he called down into the hole. "Esperabas un prisi-onero? Es una muchacha."
Be cool and collected. That's what her father always did in the acties.
"Eleanor put me here," she said aloud as calmly as she could, hoping Eleanor was on their side. She was so scared her knees actually knocked together. "I don't know what's going on. Please don't hurt me. I'm only fifteen. I can't identify you because you're wearing that mask, so I'm no threat to you."
The man climbed out of the hole, crossed to the door, and tested it.
"It's locked," she said helpfully. "I'm a prisoner. I'm not a threat to you."
He cursed, trying the handle a second time. A nasty looking knife was thrust between belt and coveralls, blade gleaming.
A second figure-head and shoulders-popped up in the hole. This one wore an old corn-cap, with a brim, the kind of thing people wore before implants and sim-screens rendered such bulky equipment unnecessary. She was also holding an even more ancient rifle, the kind of thing you only saw in museums next to bazookas, halberds, and atlatls under the label Primitive But Deadly.
Had the pulse gun killed her implant? She didn't think so; it was technologically far more sophisticated than plain jane location/communication transponders and phones. She blinked to trigger it, caught a sigh of relief as the screen wavered on. Sotto voce, she whispered, "Spanish translator, text only. Cue to voice."
The one with the rifle, dark eyes unwinking as she studied her captive, lifted her chin dismissively.
"Termina ya." A woman's voice, hard and impatient. Words scrolled across the sim-screen as Rose pretended she couldn't understand them. "No podemos dejarla aqui…cannot leave her here. She will go and tell of our hiding place."
Adrenaline made her babble, that and her father's maxim: keep them talking. How successfully he'd used that ploy in Evil Em-pirel "Is that an AK-47? I've seen one in nesh but never in the flesh before. Is that a thirty round magazine?"
"No puedo hacerlo… I cannot do it," said the first terrorist. She is too young. She is too innocent."