We did as we were told. Obeying the orders of the woman who had just gotten us out of a would-be warlord’s private compound was only common sense, no matter how annoyed we might be at her methods. Opening the back of the vehicle revealed our laptops, and two cardboard boxes full of our personal possessions, wedged into the back of the storage space, alongside two more boxes full of what looked like our trade goods.
Audrey flashed me a quick, pleased smile. “We’ve been prepping for this for days. We got as much as we could. I’m sorry we couldn’t recover more.”
Mat’s makeup box was there. Hot tears rose to my eyes, forcing me to blink them back before I said, in a voice that was a bit too thick to be normal, “You did perfectly, love. You did more than perfectly. This is… this is the world.”
“Get in,” said Jill. She already had the driver’s side door open, and one hand on the wheel, making it clear who our driver was going to be. That was fine by me. Stepping outside seemed to have exhausted me on a level I could never have predicted, draining the fight out of my bones. We were free, we were out, and yet we still had so far left to go before we would even approach safety, much less reach it. This all seemed like too much trouble. That was the post-adrenaline fatigue speaking: I’d experienced it before, and I knew the signs well enough to know that I shouldn’t listen. It didn’t matter. My legs were shaking, and I wanted nothing more than to put my arms around Audrey, lie down on the muddy ground, and sleep until the tremors went away.
Ben could see my exhaustion in my eyes. He got into the front passenger seat without commenting, taking the gun Jill offered him and fixing a weather eye on the window, ready to react to any dangers. Audrey and I climbed into the back, and I closed my eyes, put my head against her shoulder, and slept.
When I woke, the light had changed, going from watery predawn to bright noontime sunlight. That wasn’t all that had changed: The trees were different, dense coastal forest replaced by scrubby, overgrown ornamentals. We were driving down the center of what looked like it had once been a residential street. Houses stood to either side of us, although some of them were barely deserving of the name: They were burnt-out husks or collapsed from mold and weather damage. One appeared to have become the host of the largest wasps’ nest I had ever seen, so big that it bulged out through the broken windows, buzzing with swift insect activity. I shuddered, wiping the sleep from my eyes, and turned to look at Audrey.
She was awake, her tablet propped on her knees and her fingers dancing across the screen, opening and closing programs and windows with an expert’s speed. She smiled at me. “You’ve been out for a while,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
“Stiff,” I said, sitting up. “Where are we?”
“Almost there,” said Jill. “I shook a tail about fifty miles back, so we’re on a detour right now, to make sure we don’t lead any unwanted company back to base. If you’re hungry, there’s salmon jerky and dried blueberries in the bag by your feet.”
“Does anyone who isn’t me not find the phrase ‘I shook a tail’ deeply disturbing?” I asked, bending to rummage through the bag she’d indicated. “It seems to me that being tailed is something to be concerned about.”
“They were from the Forestry Service, based on the logos on their hood, and they weren’t doing a very good job of following us,” said Audrey. Her voice was softer than usual, pitched low, like she was trying to keep it from shaking. “It didn’t take much to lose them.”
“Forestry Service is mean,” I said. Poaching animals isn’t a big business anymore: Few people keep pets, even the kind that can’t transmit Kellis-Amberlee, and decorating a home in skulls and pelts is no longer considered exotic or exciting. It’s morbid, and unforgivable. Animal-rights activists had been trying to eliminate poaching for decades. All it took was one little zombie apocalypse, and suddenly no one was interested in tasting tiger kidneys anymore. It was a fight to keep people from gunning down anything of amplification weight or above that got too close to a human habitation, but at least people weren’t hunting them down and killing them for fun anymore.
No, the real money now is in plant poaching. Rare water lilies and exotic wildflowers are the jewels in the crowns of every private gardener from California to Cancún, and there are people who’ll pay virtually anything to have a genuine, wild-harvested exemplar of the species. Concerns about invasive plants and killing the local wildlife by planting things that grew poisonous berries are no longer that important: Many people view killing the local wildlife as just shy of a public service. The Forestry Service has stepped up as much as a limited budget and the ongoing threat of the infected allows, cracking down on black-market garden supply shops and fighting to keep the natural world where it belongs: the wild. Some sheltered suburbanite’s back garden just isn’t the same thing.
Ben was still quiet. I frowned as I munched on a piece of salmon jerky, trying to figure out what was wrong. Finally, I swallowed, and asked, “You all right up there?”
“I’ve been going through my news readers,” he said. “No transmissions, just downloads. I wanted to know what we’d missed. Whether the news of our deaths had broken, whether anyone was looking for our bodies. I guess it was egotistical of me, but I wanted to know whether anyone had told our families. I hate to think about my sister out there, wondering what happened to us.”
“I know,” I said quietly.
Ben twisted in his seat and glared at me. I managed, barely, not to shy away from the venom in his gaze. “No, you don’t. You don’t have any idea what’s happened, because you were asleep when we found out, and Audrey didn’t want to wake you. The whole time we were locked up with that madman, you were getting pampered and treated like a future concubine, while I was working my fingers to the bone, and then when we get out, you’re the one who gets to fold up like a house of cards, while I’m the one that has to keep going. You could have kept your damn eyes open for another fifteen minutes. Maybe then we wouldn’t have had to cry so quietly.”
“You’re not being fair,” said Jill. “Aislinn was dealing with an adrenaline rush, and those can cause physical symptoms that can’t be shrugged off and ignored.” She sounded sympathetic toward both of us, and less upset than Ben—or Audrey, who was still refusing to meet my eyes. Jill had already known whatever it was that the two of them had just learned.
I looked from Audrey to Ben, steeling myself. “Well, I’m awake now. What is it? What have I missed?”
“Georgia Mason is dead.” There was something small, childlike, and wounded in Ben’s voice. He sounded like he’d heard that Christmas was canceled, not just this year, but forevermore. “There was an outbreak at a political event in Sacramento, and she was shot with a dart like the one John tried to use on us. She managed to get a blog post out before she amplified, and her brother put a bullet through her head to prevent her from hurting anyone else.”
Georgia Mason, dead? The idea was preposterous. Sure, she was a spoiled, overly rigid princess of the news, but that didn’t mean she was going to wind up dead. She and Shaun had the best of everything. The best equipment, the best positioning, the best leads. She was never going to die. She was going to grow old on the circuit, and wind up with her own television show on a mainstream network, presiding over her own media empire. Shaun might die—he was an Irwin, we don’t have the best life expectancy going—but Georgia? That couldn’t happen.
And it didn’t explain why Ben was so upset over someone who had been an acquaintance at best, and a rival at worst.
I didn’t have to wait long for my explanation.
“Listen,” said Ben. He cleared his throat, and read, “‘My name is Georgia Mason. For the past several years, I’ve been providing one of the world’s many windows onto the news…’”
We all sat in silence, and listened, unmoving, as Ben read us one last postcard from the Wall, entreating us not to be afraid, begging us to rise up while we could.
Dear Rosie;
It’s not safe for
me to send this now, so I’m going to leave it with the woman we’re staying with when we head off to our next destination. Maybe someday you’ll get it, and you’ll feel a little better. You’ll probably also want to track me down and slap me until my ears bleed for making you think that I was dead. I can’t blame you for that. I’d want to do the same, in your position.
We got involved in some bad stuff, Rosie. Not bad as in “criminal”—we didn’t do anything wrong, I swear—but bad as in we learned things we were never supposed to know, and there are people who would do anything to keep them from getting out. If you don’t believe me, look at what happened to Georgia Mason. They killed her, Rosie. They killed her because she got too close and learned too much, and when I read her last blog post, I realized she didn’t even know everything we do. There are these pits everywhere, filled with things people will kill to keep secret, and you can’t even know that you’re walking toward one until you’re already falling.
I love you so much, Rosie. More than anything. You were the best sister I could have wished for, and I am going to miss you every day of my life. But I think that what has happened proves I can’t come home. It wouldn’t be safe, and it wouldn’t be fair.
Take care of the house for me. I always wanted to restore it properly. Take care of yourself. I love you.
I remain, and will always be, your brother.
—Letter from Benjamin Ross to Rosalind Ross,
July 12, 2040 (unsent)
Twenty-two
Jill pulled into an old pre-Rising business park just before sunset, driving around the edges a few times to make absolutely sure we hadn’t been followed before turning into an old parking garage. The first five yards were dark, filled with debris and ominous shadows. It was the perfect place to be ambushed by the dead. I stiffened, putting a hand on my gun, and waited for the other shoe to drop as we pulled up to a closed gate.
Then the lights came on, activated by the movement of our vehicle. Jill rolled down her window, leaned out, and slapped her palm against a blood testing unit. The seconds ticked by, and then there was a beep, and the gate began rolling upward, revealing the bright, clean garage on the other side. There was a woman there, short, curvy, and scowling. Her hair was brown, cropped short and streaked with gray, and her skin was surprisingly freckled, implying that she’d spent a more than average time outdoors. All of this paled when set against her electric orange “QUEEN OF TRAFFIC CONELANDIA” T-shirt, which was only blunted, not obscured, by her white lab coat.
Really, the shotgun in her hands was almost reassuringly normal.
Jill stopped the ATV and hopped out, grimacing as her prosthetic foot hit the ground. Driving all day must not have been good for her. “Dr. Abbey!” she said, beaming. “Oh my God you have no idea how much I missed your angry little face.”
The woman raised an eyebrow. “That is no way to speak to your employer, Dr. Benson. And I do not have an ‘angry little face.’” She had a Canadian accent, thick enough to be noticeable, but mild enough not to distort her words too much for American ears. I was grateful for that. Americans sounded funny enough; dealing with them dealing with a Newfoundlander might have been more than my nerves could handle.
“You’re smaller than I am, it’s an angry little face,” said Jill. She beckoned the rest of us forward before switching her attention back to the woman I assumed was her boss. “These are the visitors I told you about. Benjamin Ross, Internet journalist, Aislinn North, Internet thrill-seeker, and Audrey Wen, formerly Dr. Margaret Sung of the EIS.”
“Please, call me Audrey,” said Audrey.
“I take offense at being termed a ‘thrill-seeker,’” I said. “I’m a journalist too. Just a slightly messier one.”
“Look, Irish, be glad you didn’t wind up termed a statistic,” said Dr. Abbey. “I didn’t want to let Jill bring home strays. She insisted. I try to be an understanding employer, so I finally gave in, but you were the one I had the most concerns about.”
All three of us looked at her blankly. It was a relief to be unified once again, even if I had no faith that the moment would last—or that there’d be many moments like this in the future. Losing Mat had broken the thread that had bound us as a functional whole. I didn’t think there was going to be any coming back from that, not now, maybe not ever.
“Foreign national, no strong ties to anyone in this country who isn’t also in this room, green card marriage to a reporter, long-term romance with someone who might be able to feed you information about the EIS… this looks like espionage to anyone suspicious enough, and believe me, I have suspicious for days,” said Dr. Abbey. “But Tessa vouched for you when I had her run your backgrounds. She says you used to work with a close friend of hers. Mat Newson. Sorry to hear that they’ve died, by the by. I never met Mat personally, but from all reports, they were a nice person.”
She used Mat’s pronouns with deliberate care, something that used to frustrate me endlessly, but only ever made Mat laugh. “Education is awkward sometimes, and people are learning,” they would say, like that made everything better. Maybe for them, it had.
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “I’m not an Irish spy. In case you were still concerned.”
“I’m not,” said Dr. Abbey. “Tessa provided me with a full background. If you’re a spy, they did such an excellent job of hiding your training between arrests, lectures from your priest, and minor injuries that I suppose you deserve the chance to dig through my servers.” She reached behind herself, picking up a sealed silver bag, and lobbed it underhand onto the ground between us. “I’m going to need to see clean blood tests from all of you before we go any further.”
“Now this is starting to feel like home,” said Jill. She picked up the bag, wrestled it open, and turned to offer it to the rest of us. We each reached inside and pulled out an individual blood testing unit. Once we were outfitted, Jill did the same, setting the bag back on the ground to be used as a biohazard disposal unit.
“They won’t transmit,” said Dr. Abbey. “All the tests here at my lab have been modified.”
I gave her a blank look. “What?”
“Normal blood testing units transmit their data straight to the CDC,” said Ben. “It’s supposed to be randomized and filed without your name on it, but people have suspected for years that the CDC could identify who’d given any specific sample.”
“They have computer banks dedicated to just that,” said Dr. Abbey. “There was talk at one point of jamming RFID chips in every American citizen, to make it possible to track people after amplification. It got shut down due to privacy concerns—maybe the last time the American people chose privacy over government oversight—but the people who really killed it were at the CDC. They can already trace every living human through the way they ping on their blood tests. That’s power. Nobody gives up power when they have a choice in the matter. Now prove that you’re clean. My feet are getting cold.”
One by one, we popped open our blood tests and slipped our fingers into the testing panels. This was a three-point test, sampling thumb, index finger, and pinkie. It stretched my hand into a starfish of flesh, making the bones ache. It was a good sensation. My body was waking up from the forced lethargy of the adrenaline crash, remembering that it had a purpose and a place. I was in the world again. I was moving. This test—this need to confirm that I was clean, because I could have been exposed to things that would make me unclean—proved that I still had work to do.
One by one, we checked out clean and held up our tests for Dr. Abbey to see. She nodded, looking satisfied.
“Put them in the bag and follow me,” she said, and started for the door. Leaving an unattended biohazard in her garage didn’t appear to be a concern for her. She probably had staff who’d take care of it. Whatever her reasons, we hurried back to the ATV long enough to grab the things that were most important to us, and then followed her. Jill brought up the rear, sedate, smiling, and carrying the two crates of trade goods.
I barely h
ad time to wonder what those were for before the door was opening and we were stepping into something out of a pre-Rising science-fiction movie. The building had originally been intended for corporate use: that was clear from the gutted remains of the cubicle maze that had been incorporated into what looked like a medical lab crossed with an amoeba. Half the equipment was outdated enough that it might have been pre-Rising. The rest was clamped together with office supplies, held in place with twist ties, and generally assembled on a wish, a prayer, and a whole bunch of gaff tape.
“Welcome to my lab, don’t touch anything,” said Dr. Abbey. She led us through the maze, past people both in and out of lab coats—although even the ones who weren’t wearing lab coats somehow managed to project the idea of lab coats, like it was just unthinkable that anyone could be working here without a certain amount of mad science in their bloodstreams. When we reached a small blue-tiled kitchenette she stopped, turned, and said, “All right, why am I letting you live?”
“Was that supposed to be ‘why am I letting you leave’?” asked Ben.
Dr. Abbey leveled a flat look on him. “No.”
“You’re letting them live because they brought you nice things,” said Jill, dropping our boxes of trade goods on the table. “And because they helped me get out of the Maze, and because it’s the right thing to do.”
“And because it’ll really piss off the CDC,” added Audrey. “I’m pretty sure they want us dead more than they want Oregon to be not on fire, which is why it’s important that we get to Canada as quickly as possible.”
Dr. Abbey raised an eyebrow. “How much do you know?”
“Not enough. I was never inner echelon. I had too much of a sense of morality to go beyond fieldwork, and I never learned anything about the structure of the virus or why we couldn’t cure the damn thing. But I know plenty about the funding structure, and where we’ve been channeling all our money for the past decade or so. I know about the secret testing facilities in Kentucky and Ohio. I know where they’re keeping the dead, and I know about the serotype studies they conducted up until I went on leave from the EIS. I’m not a big leak. They’d never have let me leave. But I think I know enough to be valuable, don’t you?”