Cassica was bewildered. “What’s the point of building a car and racing it if you don’t want to win? What’s the point in doing anything if you don’t wanna make the best you can of it? If I thought I’d settle for racing dirt tracks in the boonies my whole life, I’d never have started racing at all!”
Shiara looked wounded at that, sad and wounded, like Cassica’s mom had looked that time when she baked a cake for Cassica’s fifth birthday and Cassica had spat it out because she’d recently decided she hated raisins, even though they cost more than a single mom from Coppermouth could easily afford.
Shiara sagged against the fender of the Interceptor. “You ever thought what Olympus will be like?” she said wearily. “The glamour, the parties, the perfect people all on camera, all the time? The most amazin’ fishbowl of all, with the whole world on the outside all crowdin’ to look in. That might be your dream, but it sure ain’t mine.”
Truth be told, Cassica hadn’t thought much about what would happen after they won the Widowmaker. Going to Olympus seemed reward enough; it was beyond her to imagine the details.
“So what’s your dream?” Cassica asked. “Wanna spend the rest of your life in Coppermouth? Workin’ for Creek, gettin’ treated like dirt, all ’cause your customers are so dumb they don’t trust a woman with a wrench? Lookin’ forward to the day when some raider from the Rust Bowl robs you and shoots you ’cause our town is such a dirt-poor dump we can’t even hire a Justice or two?”
“I dream of livin’ a decent life!” Shiara cried. “Doin’ somethin’ with my hands, somethin’ actual, somethin’ that means somethin’! Not bein’ a performin’ monkey for people to gawk at! Not bein’ part of this whole damned deceit where they groom you like this and make you wear that, all so a buncha kids too young to know better will copy you instead of bein’ themselves! It’s a cheat, Cassica! They’re sellin’ a lie and you want to help ’em!”
“I am not gonna die like Momma!” Cassica shouted, and the sound of her own voice stopped her short. The sound came not only from her mouth but also from the car. From the screen in the car. She looked up at the hovercam, watching her with a steady eye, and she knew that they’d been live, and millions had been listening to their argument. Shiara looked up and knew it too.
The world had heard her. All her friends and family in Coppermouth had heard her. What damage might she have done to herself and others by insulting her town and Blane’s customers? She felt betrayed, violated, ashamed. Those words were meant for Shiara alone, but someone, somewhere, had made them into drama.
It must have made for great television, she thought bitterly.
I am not gonna die like Momma. She hadn’t meant to say it. She didn’t know where it had come from. But it was there now. It had been said. She could taste the dust in her mouth.
“Well,” said Shiara, looking under the hood again. Normal service was resumed, and the argument had been shelved for another time. “Whoever designed this car don’t know jack about engines. Bunch of fiddly electronic crap instead of anythin’ straightforward. I can fix it, but I don’t got the parts.”
Cassica’s heart sank; she felt some looming void yawn wide beneath her. “So that’s it?”
“No, that ain’t it,” Shiara said. “All I need is a few bits.” She jerked her thumb toward the building. “Might be there’s somethin’ in there I can use.”
“Like what?” said Cassica.
“Air-con. Old computer. ’Most anything with a circuit board and a few wires’ll do. That and ten minutes and I can route round the problem.”
“You’re gonna fix the car with an air-con?”
Shiara shrugged. “Ain’t hardly the first time I’ve scavved up somethin’ from junk. Built my first engine with the fan out the back of Mom’s old oven.”
She tossed a monkey wrench to Cassica and took a second long wrench for herself out of her toolkit. “In case,” she said. In case there’s somethin’ in that building we don’t wanna meet. “Comin’?”
“Yeah,” said Cassica, looking hatefully over her shoulder at the hovercam. “Yeah, I’m with you.”
The porch steps creaked under their boots as they approached the entrance to the building. The doors had fallen from their hinges and split beneath the tread of years. They stepped over them, their makeshift weapons raised.
Inside, the hot gloom thickened. They found themselves in a spacious foyer, its stone floor covered in vines and rotted scraps of carpet. Dominating the room, spattered in bird droppings and greened with verdigris, was a bronze statue on a pedestal. It was a handsome smiling man in a suit, hair and jacket blowing as if in a breeze, hand raised in greeting. A carefree, happy man. The kind of man you’d want to meet in the street.
Cassica clutched the monkey wrench in both hands, listening. The foyer seemed reassuringly dead. She relaxed a little.
“Watch out for snakes,” said Shiara, setting her right back on edge again.
Shiara went to investigate the reception desk, which was scattered with pieces of the ceiling. Cassica wiped the dirt from the plaque beneath the statue with a gloved hand.
“ ‘Wexley Buff,’ ” she read. “ ‘President of the United States of America. Democracy’s Greatest Champion. Hero of the West. Supreme Leader of the Free World.’ ” She stood up and regarded the man on the pedestal. “Never heard of him.”
“Merrica’s last president,” said Shiara from behind the desk.
“It says A-merica here. United States of A-merica.”
“Reckon the A is silent.”
“Oh.”
Shiara emerged, having found nothing, and moved on. Three wide steps flanked by pillars led up from the foyer to a hall beyond. Shiara went and Cassica followed her in, casting nervous glances. The hovercam droned in behind them, shining its stark light on their backs.
The hall was darker than the foyer. Vines had choked the light from the windows, but some sifted weakly through a hole in the roof where the upper story had fallen in. Shadows clung to the low places, and rising above them were dozens of dark figures, standing in eerie poses. Waxwork dummies, raised on platforms throughout the hall, playing out scenes from the past.
“Ah!” said Shiara, and she scampered over to a control console set against the wall. “Reckon this was for the lights and temperature and what-all.” She put down her toolkit and took out a screwdriver. “Let’s see if we can’t get this panel off.”
Cassica left her to her work and wandered over to the nearest diorama. The dummies were even more unsettling close up, faces blackened in patches and sagging so that they seemed to have suffered terrible wounds, skulls caved in and jaws detached but grinning madly on regardless. The scene showed a child standing protectively over a fallen friend, fists raised against a group of bullies with thuggish faces. The plaque read: WEXLEY STANDS UP FOR HIS BUDDY NATE.
Next was a scene in which an adolescent Wexley Buff was posed among a smiling, perfect family, surrounded by television cameras filming them. A sitcom, Cassica realized. Farther in, she found him as a young man, a microphone in his hand, addressing a painted audience with enthusiasm. This time, all the cameras were on him. His clothes and hair were gaudy and weird to Cassica’s eye.
“So what’d he do anyway?” she asked.
“Don’t you know nothin’ about history?” Shiara asked. There was a clang as the panel came free.
“Always been more interested in the future, myself,” Cassica muttered.
“Gramma used to go on about him all the time,” Shiara said, peering inside the exposed panel. “He was the one who started the Omniwar. Or leastways he was president when it started. Guess nobody’s sure who shot first.”
“I heard it started ’cause the weather went screwy and we started running out of food.”
“Yeah, that and ten other reasons. Maybe all of ’em are true, maybe none.”
Cassica moved on between the dioramas, her boots crunching on broken glass. The hovercam tracked her from above. Time was pressing
on her, and every second lost was precious, yet she couldn’t do a thing to speed up their return to the race. She wasn’t particularly interested in Wexley Buff, but she’d go crazy if she didn’t distract herself.
“So why’d they build a museum to him if he started a war?” she asked.
Shiara was hidden from sight now, her voice drifting up from the front of the hall. “It ain’t a museum. They built this while he was still alive. He hadn’t started it then. Used to be hundreds of places like this all over Merrica, so Gramma said. Most of ’em torn down now.”
“Hundreds? What was he, the most popular guy in the world?”
“Most popular in Merrica anyway,” Shiara replied. “The way Gramma told it—and she heard it from her great-gramma—is he was like their equivalent of a Celestial. He was in some show as a kid and it was really big; then he was a television presenter and in movies and stuff. Then he went into politics, and everyone voted for him. They felt they’d known him all their lives, y’know. Grown up with him or something. And the other guys were these boring gray guys in suits. In the end he ran for president, won by a landslide.”
A tinkle of glass near the back of the hall made Cassica turn her head sharply. Her blood ran cold.
“Now, back in the day, there were all these big corporations who bought up all the small companies, and there was this one guy and he owned all the zines and the television channels and everything. Or enough of ’em that he might as well have owned ’em all. Kinda like Dunbery Hasp does now.”
Cassica was hardly listening. She was searching for danger, eyes roving the aisles between the dioramas. It could have just been shifting rubble. Probably that was all it was.
“Hoy! You there?” Shiara’s voice was uncomfortably loud in the silence.
“Yeah. Like Dunbery Hasp,” Cassica said absently. She watched for a few seconds more, but nothing moved. Slowly she let out her breath. It was only a noise. She was just spooked and jumpy.
“Yeah.” Shiara resumed her story as she worked. “So Buff, he makes good friends with this guy and pretty soon you never hear a bad word about him. Not on television or in the zines, nowhere. And people start thinkin’, like, wow, he really is this great leader. But off in the East … Hang on a minute …” She grunted as she levered something out of the console with her screwdriver. “Off in the East, there was this other guy, Kerensky, playin’ the same game. He controlled the media too, and everyone over there thought he was the greatest leader they’d ever had.”
“Bald guy, brown beard, big black mole on his cheek?” Cassica asked.
“Dunno. Why?”
Cassica studied the action scene in front of her. Buff was surging out of his chair, delivering a punch to the jaw of another seated man, while astonished cameramen and politicians looked on.
“Did he really punch that guy out?” she asked in wonder.
“Oh yeah. Kerensky came to Merrica on this big diplomatic visit and started shooting his mouth off. Buff decked him live on air.”
“That’s some fancy diplomacy,” Cassica deadpanned.
“I know, right? But here’s the thing. Before, he was popular. After … hell, it was like a cult. That’s when they built places like this. People had pictures of him in their houses. You even spoke bad about him, you got beat up, or you went to jail and then you got beat up.”
“This Kerensky’s a pretty ugly guy,” said Cassica, looking closer.
“Well, he’s the villain,” Shiara replied. “Anyhow, understandably relations weren’t so great with the other guys after Buff did that. Couple years later, Omniwar.”
Cassica blew out her cheeks. “People, huh?”
“Yuh. That’s why they changed everything after we got back on our feet. That’s why you can’t have no politicians on television, why you gotta buy special zines if you want to read about it. Used to be anyone could vote, even if they didn’t know jack about it; now you gotta take a test to show you know what you’re talkin’ about, and keep takin’ it every few years. Now they kick out and ban them politicians who promise to do stuff before the election and don’t do it once they’re elected, to make ’em stick to their guns and tell the truth, instead of just tellin’ the people what they wanna hear. ’Cause politics ain’t meant to be entertainment, and the fate of the world’s too damn important to be decided on who gives the best sound bite.”
Cassica heard a crunch and a snort of satisfaction. “There,” Shiara said. “I’m done.”
Cassica turned to head back, eager to be out of there. Behind her, a figure in one of the dioramas moved.
She spun as she heard the rush of running feet, saw a black flapping shadow racing at her. She only had time to scream before it charged into her, knocking her down among the rubble and glass. She was crushed by a body atop her, the stink of mold and rank sweat in her nose. Hands spidered for her throat. A face came into view: a terrible misshapen lump of a face, swollen and cancerous, one tiny eye glaring out from beneath an enormous brow. She screamed again at the sight of it, and then the hands clamped round her neck and she couldn’t scream anymore.
She tried to throw him off, to no avail. Belatedly she remembered the monkey wrench, but it was gone from her hand and she didn’t know where. Her eyes bulged as she fought for breath. The swamp man’s warped features filled her sight, drool sliding from his drooping mouth, a few lonely teeth brown in black gums. Behind his head, she saw a white light shining bright. She thought it must be the light that dying people spoke of, and felt a despair so great it dampened her panic.
But that wasn’t the light that lured the dying, she realized, as the last of her strength slipped away. It was the light of the hovercam, zooming in on her face, showing her final moments to the world.
Then the light went out, blocked by Shiara, her wrench raised high. She brought it down on the swamp man’s head. His hands went loose on Cassica’s throat and air rushed in to ease her pain-scorched lungs.
She rolled onto her front, gasping, head light and vision sparkling. Glass cut her hands. The swamp man flailed his arms as he tried to get up from his knees, wailing an idiot wail, limned by the hovercam’s light. Shiara raised her wrench again and brought it down on his head with a wet thud. He keeled over sideways and lay still.
Panting breaths, stillness in the hall, the whir of the hovercams’ rotors.
“You alright?” Shiara said, watching the swamp man in case he should get up again.
Cassica lifted herself, felt her throat, nodded. “You kill him?” she said. It came out as a whisper.
“Not sure,” said Shiara. Then she crouched and started rifling through his pockets.
“The hell you doing?” Cassica croaked. She leaned on a diorama platform and got to her knees. Her muscles had turned to water. She was afraid the swamp man would spring to life at any moment. “We gotta get out of here.”
But Shiara’s scavenging instinct was too strong. “Hold your horses, huh? Could be something we can use.” She pulled out bone trinkets, a length of string, an old plastic mobile phone from the old times. “Could sell this,” she said, dropping it in her own pocket.
“We got a race to win!” Cassica said, but the effort of it made her cough. She could smell blood. A glittering dark pool was creeping out from under the swamp man’s head.
Shiara ignored her. She patted along his ribs, then threw open his trenchcoat and drew out something rectangular from his inside pocket. She opened it out, and it unfolded until it was as wide as the span of her arms. A smile grew on her face as she studied it.
A map.
She hurried over to Cassica, the map fluttering and crinkling in her arms, and showed it to her. “Look at this!” she said, alight with excitement. “Look!”
Cassica, still dizzy, was slow on the uptake. It was an old-time map of the bayou, printed on thin plastic. Shiara pointed. “Logging routes! Roads! This is what it was like before the Omniwar, see? They’re overgrown now, but those trails are still there!” She pulled the map awa
y, put a hand on Cassica’s arm, eyes gleaming. “It’s the way through the swamp!”
Now Cassica understood, like the drawing of a curtain to let in the morning. Strength surged back into her on a tide of new hope. Shiara lifted her, and she got to her feet.
“Let’s move,” she said.
Shiara had the car running again in ten minutes, good as her word. The swamp man, if he lived, never showed himself again. They raced off into the bayou, fired with new purpose.
Using the map, Shiara chose the widest trails, the most direct, those on high ground that were most likely to have survived. Shortcuts presented themselves. An hour passed, then two, and finally Shiara announced the news. According to her screen, they were in first place. Way out in first place.
Other racers ran into dead ends, lost themselves in winding back routes, fell victim to the dangers of the swamp. Shiara saw more swamp-folk ambushes, cars stuck in bogs, an armored vehicle falling into a river when it proved too heavy for the bridge. The Carnasaur caught Babby Kay and Ronson Bleen square with a rocket and blew them sky-high. Jam Totsey took a leak against a tree, got bitten by a spider, and died before the officials could respond to his rescue alarm.
But it seemed Cassica and Shiara had already endured their share of troubles, and fortune was with them. They had to backtrack once when a road proved to be flooded, but that was the worst they faced.
Their disbelief grew as the day wore on, and they drew farther ahead. Suddenly the coverage was all about them. Commentators dissected Cassica’s driving style and Shiara’s tactics. Speculation ran wild as footage of their argument was played over and over. Personal details. Finally, when Card appeared on the screen to talk about his relationship with Cassica, Shiara turned it off in disgust.
They escaped the bayou in the late afternoon, with the sun still burning in a sky banded with greens and purples. The finish line was flanked with stands and surrounded by scaffold, and behind it was a huge paddock like a miniature town, similar to the one they’d set off from. They drove toward it on a clear road, and the cheers of the crowd got louder and louder until it seemed they could hear nothing else.