Frannie repacked her supplies, and made sure to conceal all of her weapons. Just as she finished, a deep voice spoke behind her.
“How did you get in here?”
As she whirled around to face him her translator told her that the man spoke almost unaccented French, but was not a native speaker, and suggested she reply in the English of the era.
She opened her mouth to answer as she faced him, but ended up staring for a moment. “You’re the one who stopped the battle!” At least the words that burst out of her were the suggested language.
He looked past her shoulder out the window. “Hardly a battle.”
She noted that he had remarkably blue eyes. A long scar marked his left cheek, but it didn’t mar his striking good looks.
“But how’d you do it? Why didn’t they kill you?”
“If they kill me who will they have to read for them? Who’d write their letters for them, and make sure they get delivered?”
“You’re a mailman?”
He nodded. “Archivist. Librarian. Living memory. Who the hell are you?” he added.
But before she could answer he was across the room. This reminded her that the mailmen had started their lives as a military genetic-engineering experiment. They’d been enhanced super-soldiers who had rebelled against their creators. And won. They were too damn smart to sacrifice their super-bodies and intellects in the endless conflicts of this time. As civilization and communication broke down they found a peaceful and profitable purpose for their exceptional skills.
He grabbed her right arm and pushed up the sleeve of her sweatshirt to examine the inside of her wrist.
“Elect,” he said. His tone was scornful, but his touch was surprisingly stimulating as he ran his thumb across the skin surrounding the small implant plug.
“Elite,” she blurted out. “That old Elect term is so—”
“Evil? Selfish? Morally repugnant?” His blue eyes glittered with anger.
She didn’t scare easily, no matter how big and hostile he was.
“I was going to say old-fashioned. We saved civilization,” she added.
“It’s taking you long enough.”
At least he hadn’t picked up on her use of the wrong tense. Even as she justified her ancestors’ actions a sane part of her that was not viscerally reacting to this stranger’s touch was swearing at her for completely forgetting years of training and behavior. Speaking the truth to a downtimer could be more dangerous than killing one.
But this wasn’t any ordinary local, was it?
Frannie calculated her options and came to a decision that wasn’t going to be easy to explain on her report, justifiable though she judged it to be. “I need to get to New York,” she told the mailman. “I want to hire you to get me there.”
“I don’t deliver people,” he answered.
She sensed that this wasn’t an outright refusal, but the opening of a negotiation.
“I’m not interested in working for anyone who broke into my place to get my help,” he went on. “What are you doing out of your hole, anyway?”
“Observing,” she answered.
“You people have your own routes and roads.”
“I don’t. I’m lost.”
She wondered if her controller had dumped her here for that exact reason. Maybe there hadn’t been a glitch in the machinery, but roundabout was the only way to get her to her assignment. Another possibility was that this was somehow part of another Starshiner plot. And maybe she was being paranoid, because why would anyone get her involved in an operation that it would be her duty to stop?
She showed him her implant plug. “You deal in information exchange. I have lots of information to trade.”
His expression remained stony. “Why do you need help to travel?”
She laughed and gestured toward the window. “It’s not like there’s any public transportation available.
There are no scheduled flights, no trains running, not a lot of gas for cars.”
“And there are scavengers and wolfsheads every step of the way,” he added. Even a sneer didn’t look bad on his handsome face. “There are guides you can hire. Armed guards are available for rent.”
She laughed again. “You know the safe routes. You’re left alone.” She knew the history of this period as well as anyone could. “Most mercs sell out their clients the second things get dicey on the road.
Coyotes treat the refugees they move through borders like animals. Those who try to travel on their own get killed or trafficked. I have no intention of getting killed, squashed into a cargo container without food or water with a thousand other people, or dead. I’m going with you.”
“We’re not dating,” he answered. He sat down cross-legged on the floor and pretended she wasn’t there.
“Oh, yes we are.” She sat down in front of him and thrust her wrist under his nose. “You know you want it.”
He looked at her with deep, dark hunger in his eyes. They held each other’s gaze for a long time. He finally shrugged. “You have a name?”
She was hopeful at the sign of softening. “Francine. You?”
“Rakesh.” He stroked the skin around her implant. “I’m on my way to New York anyway. You can plug in and download when we get there.”
Yes, she could. The jacks from this era were the prototype that every generation of data-transfer tech had been built on.
“And until then?” she asked, because she wasn’t silly enough to think there wouldn’t have to be a down payment on his help.
He pulled a worn brown leather bag to him, flipped it open and took out a painted wooden box. He took out a shallow bowl, a container of dark liquid and a short stick with what looked like a row of viciously sharp teeth attached to one end.
“Are those needles?” Frannie asked, trying to hide any sign of dread.
“Yes.”
Just what sort of payment did this mailman have in mind?
Rakesh peeled off his leather coat, then rolled up his left sleeve. Rows of numbers and letters in various colors marched up the skin of his arm. Tattoos.
She gestured toward the markings. “What’s that all about?”
“Mnemonic,” he said. “It’s how I remember and retrieve data.” He dipped the tattoo needles into the ink, and poised the device over a bare space on his skin. “You’ve got a head full of information, Elect.
Give me some of it.”
He was certainly correct about the vast amount of info stored on microscopic chips connected to her brain. Some of that information was fictional. Fiction from this time from the vast library her ancestors had saved and hidden away in underground lifeboats along with themselves. There was no harm to the future in sharing a story that was already part of this time. Maybe it even existed somewhere out there in a library that had escaped burning.
She called up a book from her cache, and started to read it out loud. “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times . . .”
She kept her eyes averted from the mailman’s gruesome aid to memorization while she continued to talk.
The first part of the journey turned out to be in the back of a coyote’s truck after all. They boarded the truck in an alley behind the shell of an abandoned cafe. Who had time for a baguette and cup of coffee anyway?
“He’s a friend,” Rakesh said when she protested about dealing with a human trafficker. Which meant Rakesh got to sit up in the cab with the driver.
Of course it wasn’t pleasant in the back. She hated being packed in body to body with more people and their raggedy belongings than the back of the trunk could hold. It wasn’t so much that she minded the stench of fear, desperation and outright dirt of the gaunt refugees piled in closely around her. She’d spent time in a walled city besieged by Mongols. She hated the sense of futility and frustration that memory called up. Not to mention guilt. Guilt because that had been the first time she’d broken the rules of observation. Guilt because her nursing and feeding those people hadn’t stopped them all from being massacred when the Mongols had broken through the city walls.