“Interest isn’t the same as a threat.”
“Suppose they figured out what Jenny intends to do. How do they respond? They can’t take control of the video—it’s already been copied to remote servers, and they would have to assume Tau already has access to it. The only real leverage they can exercise is over Jenny herself, by making the price of releasing the video too high to bear.”
“How would they do that?”
“The usual tools are threats and intimidation.”
“What kind of threats and intimidation?”
“No way to predict. Plus there’s the communication shutdown. Hets are strongly hierarchical, which means the people they sent to Schuyler might be unwilling to act without authorization. Or maybe they have contingency orders—there’s no way of knowing.”
“You have any evidence they actually have hostile intentions?”
Solid evidence: a bunch of Tau security guys in the local hospital. But that was news Rebecca didn’t need to hear. “Better to assume the worst.”
“So your plan is to sit by the window and worry?”
“Until we can get Jenny out of town.”
“I see. Okay.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
She gave me another of her conflicted smiles, one part sincere, one part cynical. “I’m not sure I do. But I guess I understand.”
Trevor came down to relieve me in the chill hours of the morning, looming out of the darkness like a candlelit Goliath. “Hey, Trev,” I said. “Quiet so far.”
“Hope it stays that way,” he said, small-voiced and careful not to wake anyone, settling into the chair I had just left.
So I went to bed and got a useful few hours of sleep. When I opened my eyes it was morning, the house beginning to warm up in a bath of late-May sunlight. Downstairs, Mama Laura fixed breakfast for those of us who were awake (Rebecca was still sleeping). The electric stove wasn’t working, but she had fired up the gas grill in the backyard and used it to scramble eggs in an iron pan, standing in the dewy grass in her bedroom slippers with a goosedown jacket over her nightdress. She delivered the eggs to the table with a satisfied flourish: triumph over adversity. Plus coffee, boiled in a pan over the grill.
Trev ate heartily even as my father sat in sulky silence, glaring at the gigantic Maori who had somehow invaded his home. Geddy had been keeping an ear on the radio in the living room, and he brought us up to date on the latest news: phone and data services had been partially restored to parts of the west coast but were operating sporadically and unreliably. New York City and Washington, DC, also had intermittent telecom coverage, but the rest of the country, and most of Europe, and all of the Indian subcontinent, were still down. A few unconfirmed reports hinted that Mumbai was burning. All this information was being relayed through private broadcasters running on self-generated power, whispers passed from one ear to the next.
As soon as possible, I took Trevor and Jenny aside—once again, Jenny’s tobacco habit gave us an excuse to segregate ourselves in the backyard. I said we should leave for Buffalo as soon as possible. Trev was clearly uneasy about undertaking the trip without an escort, but he didn’t want to alarm Jenny by raising the possibility of a Het attack. Jenny herself was fine with leaving this afternoon. “I’ll pack,” she said, “and we can leave as soon as Geddy gets back.”
I said, “Geddy left?” Trev, simultaneously: “Back from where?”
“My mom’s. I need to know how she’s doing. She really does need to move out of that house and into a care facility, sooner rather than later. I can arrange that through Tau, though, right? Even when I’m in Canada living under an assumed name?”
I managed to nod.
“So Geddy offered to go check on her. She’s always been nice to Geddy, even at her worst.”
“When did he leave?”
“Just now. Said he’d be about an hour.”
But an hour passed. Then two. And Geddy didn’t come back.
Chapter 19
I borrowed the keys to Mama Laura’s Hyundai while Trev stood guard at the house. My plan was to check in at the Symanski house and see whether Geddy had been there. I was also prepared to check the local hospital and police station, and Trevor had supplied me with the names and addresses of some local Taus in case I needed help.
The car was well maintained but very old: it had always been hard to convince Mama Laura to trade in a vehicle that was “still perfectly good,” and she had never felt comfortable at the wheel of my father’s Cadillac. Which was actually helpful, because the car’s radio was an analog relic, which meant it brought in the local station, itself an analog relic. The announcer’s voice periodically gnarled into incomprehensibility, but the gist of the news came through. Such as it was.
And it seemed almost preternaturally strange, these rumors of apocalypse whispered against the morning calm of Schuyler, lawns just days shy of needing their first mowing of the season, a few cars on the road, a few pedestrians on the sidewalks, nobody hurrying, as if the blackout had created not panic but a sort of unpremeditated vacation. The most sinister thing I saw on the way to the Symanski house was a Great Dane lifting its leg over a maniacally grinning garden gnome.
It was clear that something dreadful had happened in Mumbai and elsewhere on the Indian subcontinent, though it wasn’t at all clear who was benefiting by it. Our own continent-wide blackout was an echo of that conflict, a reminder that we weren’t exempt from it. Before I left the house we had had a brief visit from our neighbor on the left, Toby Sanderval, who owned the Olive Garden franchise off the highway; he advised us to keep the doors and windows shut “so the fallout don’t get in.” Which terrified Mama Laura, until Rebecca and I assured her that any fallout from a nuclear exchange in India—had there been one—would have to travel across the equator and through nearly a dozen time zones before it presented any danger to the good citizens of Schuyler, New York.
But it was not all bad news that crackled through the car speakers. Municipal power had been restored to parts of Washington, DC. A presidential statement calling for calm and patience had been released to all extant media. There was even a report of intermittent cell phone service in New York State, though not locally—I tried.
As I drove, I kept my eyes open. I had biked and driven from my house to Jenny’s house so often that the route was familiar, even all these years later. I looked for Geddy’s car, an eye-poppingly yellow Nissan Elysium; I saws no sign of it, and it wasn’t in the driveway of the Symanski house when I pulled up.
The house where Jenny’s mother lived had not been well maintained. From the curling shingles to the faded siding, it announced neglect. Jenny’s dad had left enough money for upkeep, Jenny said, but her mom was too far in the bottle to hire a contractor or even a handyman. I parked and went up the three wooden stairs of her front porch and knocked at the door, wondering if she would recognize me.
A couple of minutes passed before she answered. As the door opened, the house exhaled a sour effluvium of tobacco smoke and body odor. Mrs. Symanski stood in that invisible wind, oblivious to it, wearing a stained gray nightdress, a nasty caricature of Jenny’s mom as I had once known her. She gazed at me and said, “Have you come to fix the electricity?”
“No. Mrs. Symanski? It’s me, Adam. Adam Fisk.”