“Not long,” Nadie said. “There were long arguments, thankfully. Gave me time to get here. But now they’ve decided, they’re moving.”
“Why won’t they shoot down your helicopter?” Gretyl asked. Her heart thundered.
“Because it’s my helicopter,” Nadie said. She tilted her head. “Zotta.”
“Right.”
Iceweasel’s hands were fists. There came the welcome sound of boys’ voices and the stamp of machinery. Gretyl didn’t bother with the door. She kicked through the photo-reactive film wall, splintering the cool dark of the interior with a spray of sunlight.
The boys were each piloting mechas. Limpopo, Seth and Tam were riding on them, standing on the robots’ shoulders, clinging to the handles on their heads. The boys whooped as they pushed the machines as fast as they’d go, apparently under orders not to worry about what they trashed. The mechas’ arms flailed ahead of them, smashing tents and yurts out of the way.
Iceweasel and Nadie joined her, coming through the door. Gretyl saw Nadie assess the group, minutely shake her head.
“We won’t all fit in your helicopter, will we?”
She’d spoken to Nadie. Iceweasel looked at her sharply. “Gretyl, don’t be an asshole—” Gretyl knew that one. It went like this: I fucked up, now everything you say will remind me of that and make me furious. She knew it. Didn’t have time for it. She ignored her.
“Not enough,” Nadie said.
“How many?”
“I came to bring you four.”
Gretyl recognized evasion. “How many do you have room for, though?”
Limpopo dismounted, helped the boys while the rest climbed down. Gretyl spared them a glance, made sure they were dressed, had sun-hats. “Get water,” she said to Iceweasel. Air, clothes, water, food. Walkaway triage. “Food.” To Nadie: “How many?”
“I came for four.”
Motherhood had made a coward of her. She was ashamed, because she couldn’t say, If our friends don’t go, we don’t go. It wasn’t her life on the line anymore.
“Take us all.” She tried to mean it.
Iceweasel was back, yanking compression straps on their biggest backpack, misshapen with whatever she’d thrown into it.
“How many?”
Nadie gave her a perfectly unreadable look, looked back to Gretyl. “Could you choose?”
“I’d rather explain choosing to my kids than explain why there were empty seats next to them when people started dying.”
“Would it make a difference if I told you they were coming in nonlethal?”
“Like Akron?”
“Not like Akron.” They had an audience crowded around. Whatever they saw in their body-language kept them quiet. “Exactly not like Akron. Akron made martyrs. It hurt them all over the world. They’re coming in nonlethal, as police, to restore order, to investigate murders.”
“What murders?” Limpopo said. She was stooped, had a tremor, but asserted herself with a tone that stood two meters fifty and cut hard.
Nadie shook her head. “No time.” She looked at them. “I can take, uh, one more.”
They looked at each other. Gretyl said, “She has a helicopter.”
They looked at each other again.
“I’ll stay,” Gretyl said. Iceweasel shot her a look of shock and sorrow. Gretyl gave her a look that said she would not entertain argument. It didn’t get much use in their relationship. It meant something.
Limpopo said, “This is my home. I’ll bear witness. Die, if it comes to that.”
Etcetera said something soft from her collarbones, pitched for her hearing. A small smile touched her lips. She caressed the speaker.
“You can’t stay,” Iceweasel said. Stan started to cry, such a rarity that Jake bawled too. Gretyl hefted him onto one hip and let him bury his face in her throat. Gretyl looked at Limpopo’s face. She was struck by how different it was, how much the years in prison hadn’t just aged her, but changed her. Before, Gretyl had been struck by the pains Limpopo took not to appear to give orders or hint at having authority. Now, she was pure alpha, radiating unquestionable dominance.
“I’m not leaving,” Limpopo said with unshakable self-assurance.
It was Seth and Tam’s turn. They looked from Iceweasel to Gretyl. “Gretyl,” Seth said. “You’re a mother, you can’t—”
“I can.” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I will. There’s some things you can’t run from.” She thought of her grad student and what they’d gone through. “I want my kids safe, but our family has no more right to be intact than anyone’s.” She wasn’t making sense, not even to herself. “I’ve done a lot of walking away.” She shrugged. “I’m going to stay.”
It might have gone on, except for Nadie. She cocked her head, listened to something in her cochlea, discreetly wiggled her fingers, narrowed her eyes. “We’re going.” She held out her hands to take Stan from Gretyl. Gretyl held him and kissed him and blinked hard to keep the tears back. She did the same to Jake. She consciously committed the boys’ smell to her memory, telling herself that she would never forget the smell and faces and voices of her beloved sons. Then she took her wife into her arms and held Iceweasel with an embrace that stretched back through the ages to their first rough, furtive groping, through the years of love and companionship, the hardships and absences, the reunions and the fights and reconciliations. It took everything she had and everything she didn’t even know she had not to cry, especially as she felt Iceweasel’s tears on her own cheeks, salty and as familiar as her own.
Nadie made an urgent sound. “Take-off in seven minutes. We’ll have to run.” She ran, Stan on her hip. Iceweasel scooped their other son and ran after her and Seth and Tam gave her a helpless look and ran too.
Then it was her and Limpopo.
“Do you want to see if there’s anything in the shelter you want to save?”
Gretyl, moving in a numb dream, went back into the shelter, prodded their bedding and scattered possessions. There were three blankets, two small and one large. The small ones smelled like the boys, the big one like Iceweasel. She took them in her arms. Jake’s stuffed mouse, Mousey, fell out of his blanket. She picked him up by his worn, chewed paw. He stared at her with beady eyes as she tucked him back into the blankets.
“You can put them with my stuff,” Limpopo said.
They walked at a fast clip to the prison. Limpopo was distracted, stumbling as she walked and talked into her interface and texted at the same time. Sometimes, she’d ask Etcetera to send a message. By the time they reached the sprawling camp at the prison gates, it was semi-panic as people raced inside the gates or away from the prisons altogether, carrying bundles on their backs. Children cried, but apart from that, it was very quiet. Clipped, tight voices, many in that odd pitch intended for interface mics, not human ears.
“Inside,” Limpopo said. Gretyl heard a helicopter rotor, far off, brought on the breeze, getting quieter as it flew away. She stopped in her tracks and brought her hands to her face. She really sobbed. Limpopo led her by the elbow, whispering it was okay, her family was safe. They had to move.
Gretyl let herself be led. Her mind had split, one fraction was overwhelmed with sorrow and self-recrimination. The other part – the part that made that decision – racing through strategy and tactics for whatever was coming. Nadie said the coming forces wouldn’t make martyrs of them, they were coming to show this was fighting crime, not fighting war. Not fighting for the existence of a society whose end was coming.
Walkaways had something the default side didn’t have: except for a few children, every walkaway had been default, once. Almost no one in default – and no one whom anyone listened to, period – had ever walked away. Gretyl found it easy to superimpose the default view on situations.