Merrit Li’s face.
Whereupon Warren’s returned.
“We think there were two other incidents, but this is the first we’ve had surveillance.”
“Fran took one of the attackers down.”
“Cleanly.”
“The second attacker followed her.”
“In the tunnel they’re off lens. We lost them. Nothing topside, nothing on connected platforms.”
“Any luck flagging her follower?”
“Check your drops. The bundle I sent should help with that.”
“We fought together at Kingston,” Merrit Li said. “Deep penetration. She had the squad.”
Doing what Rangers do.
“Not many walked away, either side.” He thumbed the sound on the room’s screen up a notch. “With the years, details have taken on a life of their own. You know the song?”
Two of them, actually. The official version, Kingston as a triumph of patriotism and the human spirit; the other underscoring the battle’s death toll, social cost, and ultimate pointlessness.
“Three of us came out of the fire. Two walking, one on Molly’s shoulder.”
Onscreen discussion of city economy had given way to the latest stats on immigration. Full-color graphs rolled across the screen. Authorities revoiced the stats and graphs: a marked uptick in Citizen Provisionals from rural regions far south, this fueled by border disputes among neighboring city-states. Graphics and voice-over were out of synch. Technician error, I thought. Then for a moment before getting shut down, voice and content changed drastically. Revisionist overdubs. Official news reestablished itself.
Li pointed to the screen, one of the southern borders. Drones from a couple generations back floated above scattered groups of ragged troops and rioters.
“I’m supposed to be there. Just about now, my CO is discovering I’m not.”
Even those you never see cast shadows. What I’d had were forests of filters and firewalls, limited access to public records, and no idea at all to whom his allegiance belonged, or if he might be off the grid entirely. But I also had Li’s face, by extrapolation his body volumes, and the way his body moved. It had taken me the best part of the two days since Warren dialed in with the clips, and a sum of chancy data diving, to find him.
“I assume your story varies little from my own,” Li said.
“Little enough.”
He waited a moment, then went on.
“One of my links stays on free scan, reach-and-grab for anything that hints of undisclosed military activity. Tagged one that felt half solid. Then another came through ringing like bells. Not much to doubt there. A takedown, and good—but it didn’t work. And seeing how it unrolled, I knew why. Molly. That first time too, I figured, so now they’d come at her twice and she put them down. They’d be getting ready to kick it into overdrive.”
“You have any idea why she was targeted?”
“It’s not like we were sending Union Day cards to one another, with a nice write-up about our year.”
“Right. Time to time, I’d hear things. She married and had a family up in Minnesota or Vancouver. She was consulting for or riding herd on private companies. She’d taken up teaching. Until last week, as far as I knew, she was dead.”
“While on assignment.”
“What we all heard. Turns out we weren’t the only ones.”
Li didn’t react, didn’t ask where that came from. The pieces were falling together in his mind. “A crawler,” he said.
“Followed by full-frontal assault. Once that closed down, Fran elected to stay off chart.”
“The moves on her could be flashback from that.”
“Could be.”
“And we don’t know who the crawler found.”
“What we know between us doesn’t take up much space in the world.”
Li glanced back at the screen. Forsaken drones. Ragtag troops and rioters. “Everything’s like paper folded so many times you can’t tell what it is anymore.”
I remembered Warren’s rhetorical How did we come to live in a world where everything is something else?
“Molly called out to you,” Li said.
“Relayed a message with a trigger word.” I told him much of the rest as well.
“Wanted you at her back.”
“As you said, they’ll be stepping it up.”
“And you came to me.”
Yes.
“So now she has us both.”
“Or will have.”
Li pulled his duffel from a shelf by the door. “Not much here I can’t leave behind. Give me ten minutes. Molly, you, me. Damn near have the makings of a volunteer army here, don’t we? A militia—just like that hoary old piece of 1787 paper said.”
What I remember is questions, questions that should have been easy enough but weren’t, and I had no idea why. What is today’s date? Do you know where you are? It took time before I realized the voices were speaking to me. They were voices beamed in from some far-off world that had nothing to do with me, grotesque half-faces hovering over me, random collections of features that changed and changed again.
Do you know where you are?
No—but at some point I began looking about for clues. Hospital, I said early on, but that wasn’t good enough.
Gradually I came to understand that at the end of each night shift someone wrote the new day’s date on a whiteboard at one side of the room along with the physician, RN and NA assigned that shift, so pretty soon (with no idea what soon in this circumstance might encompass) I had that much covered.
Progress.
Good boy.
They were so pleased.
Over time, too, I learned to fake recognition of staff members, and to look for the hospital’s name, which I never could keep hold of in my mind, on nametags.
Yep, I know where I am all right.
And it’s the 21st. (Though if they pushed for day of the week I foundered. That wasn’t on the whiteboard.)
Seizures? I answered. Stroke?
Then the questions got harder. After which they said let’s go for a walk why don’t we, an absurd goal given my inability to turn unassisted in bed or move my legs, the physical therapist’s verbal commands meeting with no greater success in converting directive to action than those coursing along my nervous system.
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But I needed ambulation to qualify for further rehab. So therapist Abraham sandbagged me into sitting position, hauled me to our feet and, with mine dragging and scraping at the floor, carried me the required half dozen steps, the unlikeliest dance partners ever.
We were on our fifth, maybe sixth provisional government by then. Some were ill-advised, rapidly imploding coalitions, so… five, six, seven, who can be sure? This one had begun to look as though it might stick, like the stray cat that follows you home and, once fed, stays.
I learned that later, of course.
Three worlds, Abraham said, coexist. There was the old world of things as they are—of acceptance, of discipline, where we take what pleasure exists in what we have and expect no more. There was the new world, in which everything, country, selves, the world’s very face, becomes endlessly reinvented, remade, refurbished. And now this third world struggling to be born, where old world and new will learn to live with one another.
Like Abraham and myself scuttling across the hospital’s tiled floors.
I’m not supposed to be talking like this, Abraham said.
We were on a break, and he’d pushed me outside, to a patio bordered by scrubby bushes and smelling of rosemary, where with minimal help I’d successfully tottered from the wheelchair and stumbled five terrifying steps to a bench. Applause would have been in order.