Then the voice was in her ears again, much louder. Too loud. Sophie turned her volume down. The young man spoke strangely, as if he was inhaling a shuddering breath at the same time. He said, “Rogue? Rogue, are you there? Can you identify yourself on white?”
On white? She didn’t know what that meant. She transmitted. “I don’t think I can.”
“I, ah. I understand.” The young man did not seem to know what to say. “Take… take your time.”
Sophie said nothing. She waited.
Some seconds later, the man sent, “Rogue, listen. I’m being recorded. Okay?”
His voice broke open. Sophie was not certain she could fathom the implications of this exceedingly strange thing to say. The man sounded more than exhausted, he sounded hurt and terrified. Was he dying?
Regarding her silence as something unsurprising, the young man rustled his papers. He cleared his throat and asked her in that odd, dead tone she had first heard from him: “Are there any, any other female survivors with you, Rogue?”
What?
Blinking away her confusion, she replied, “I’ll answer that if you answer me first.”
Silence. She could almost feel the doubt coming down the line, the electric uncertainty. But when the young man spoke again, he sounded relieved. “All…” Static took the rest. He tried again. “All right.”
“Good.”
All right, Sophie. She rubbed her left eye, she bit the inside of one of her cheeks. This may be your only chance to get some answers.
Sophie made her voice gentle, serene. It was almost as if she were talking to Lacie in deep of night, trying to coax her back into sleep. “What is your name?”
The man responded at once, but he stammered and then tried again. “I don’t… I don’t think I’m authorized to —”
Sophie spoke gently over him. “I see.” She let ice creep into her voice. It was one of the talents she despised in herself, but her tone was perfect to lure the young man into speaking in a different timbre, his own, something closer to the truth. “In that case, I cannot answer any of your questions. Godspeed. Signing off.”
She muted the line and made a click with the Morse key.
“Wait!” The young man sounded frantic.
Sophie waited.
“It’s Chris,” he whispered. “Just Chris, okay?”
“Who are you, Chris? Where are you?”
“Off white, I’m not giving our exact location any longer.” That told her nothing, but the fact that he replied immediately with his tone echoing her own let Sophie know that he was off his guard. For the moment. “I’m a NOAA intern,” he said. “I’m nineteen.”
Nineteen. Christ. Sophie closed her eyes.
“Chris? Where is your supervisor?”
The silence again. Sophie wondered if she should ask in a gentler way, or come at it after words of reassurance, or if she had simply gone too far.
How close are you to my Lacie? What is Fort Morgan like? The world? Were you hit? How many of you are left? Are you all dying? Her thoughts blurred, too many questions leaping out in front of themselves. How many other people are alive out there? There’s people on the roads? Or are they walking? I know you’re under orders not to tell me. But I know that you can.
“He’s… he’s down in medical,” Chris responded at last. “He’s de-suiting. He’s coming up.”
Up where? Above ground, inside?
“What can you tell me, Chris?” Sophie waited a moment, forced herself to keep her voice level and melodious. “What is going on out there?”
He did not answer.
“Oh, no,” she muttered to herself after she had ended her transmittal. She had said “out there.” Whoever would soon be listening to her, they would start to wonder if she was in a secure building of some kind, a place with no view of the outside, a place with resources.
She sat there shivering, standing half-off the stool, wondering if she should disconnect. But a haunting voice — a real voice — stopped her, its emotionless beat layered with a nuance of authority and laced with sugared venom. It was the same young man, she realized, but perhaps someone was standing behind him now. Or several someones.
“I need you to answer my question, ma’am.”
Sophie. Stop. Disconnect now.
But she wanted to learn more about the outside, anything that might help her to plan a route to Kersey and her daughter. She needed as much foreknowledge as she could gather. She needed to know.
“I am alone,” she said, very slowly. “No others. No other survivors.”
Five seconds of silence. When the young man’s voice came back on, it was still authoritarian but it was higher, more brittle. Sophie caught a moment of some other man talking near to Chris, perhaps behind him.
“And where?” Chris asked her. “Where are you, ma’am? Colorado? Wyoming? Kansas?”
Stop. Now.
Sophie put her left hand around the radio’s power cord and closed it tightly. Her right hand went to the Grundig’s back panel, ready to pop the lithium batteries. She spoke again. “I’m not going to say.”
“Hang on.” Chris’s line went dead.
Sophie kept the line active, the voices inside of her rising to war with one another. Tell them where you are, her father was saying. They’re your fathers now. You’re too weak to do this all alone, Sophie. Too weak. And Tom, Tom so silent until then, was whispering, No, love. Never. And Patrice, Kill it. Kill the line now. They’ll kill you.
Chris came on again. “Citizen, please wait.”
Citizen? And not, “Hang on.” Please wait.
Sophie gripped the power cord a little tighter.
Kill it, Patrice was singing, we’ll find Lacie, we’ll find her on our own. We don’t need them, we can’t need them. They’re men. We —
Something clicked on the line. Had she pressed anything? No. Had Chris turned something on or off at his end?
Seven seconds after, when Chris came back on, he was speaking quickly in a breaking whisper. He sounded like a little boy. “Ah, no time. Lady get me out of here, if you can, call. Call me in, in five or six hours, you don’t know. You don’t know. We’re dumping bodies out the windows. Pieces. Babies. First sub-basement is infected, too much blood and fluids and… and body matter, we had to…”
He began to sob.
Sophie, not knowing if Chris could hear her, began talking over him and just as rapidly. “Listen to me, I heard you. Before. I heard you after, just after the… it happened. I just want to let you know, it’s okay. You did all you could. You tried. You tried to save them.”
Halfway through this, Chris asked her a question. “Rogue, do you believe in God?”
When Sophie had spoken, she took in a breath. She didn’t know what to say. In her heart of hearts, she believed that she did not. She never had, had sometimes wanted to. Sometimes, even with all her heart. But it wasn’t in her. The crystal, however beautiful, was hollow. After the rape, the stillbirth, after all the fights and sorrows and even through the pain and joy of Lacie’s advent and her growing, aging, becoming so like Sophie but graced by Tom’s lopsided and mischievous smile, she never had believed.