Nohar felt his anger fade somewhat. They were both in the same boat, and in the same position Nohar might have done exactly as this kid had. . . .
In fact he had done just that to Oxford.
Nohar lowered the gun. “The Necron Avenger, I presume.”
The kid stared at him, and his eyes darted toward the comm. One of Necron’s articles was playing the national anthem while panning across burned-out Moreytowns.
“The guys who took your father were looking for you.”
Necron turned to face him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shook his head and stopped when his gaze landed on Maria. He stared at her for a long time, as if he recognized her.
“You know my son, don’t you?” Maria asked.
It was in Necron’s eyes. He knew all right. He saw the same familiarity that Nohar had only gotten from a bad picture. The coloring was different, but Manuel had Maria’s face.
It should have hit me. I should have known the second I saw that picture.
Nohar crouched so he could look the kid in the eyes. “I found your house because I traced your posts. The name I came up with was Oswald.” He reached over and grabbed the kid’s shoulder, pulling him forward to look at him. Necron was now completely limp, near panic. “You used your dad’s account, didn’t you?”
He nodded slowly. “What’s happening?”
“Manuel Limón, they want something he has.” Nohar leaned forward. He knew just being close to a predatory moreau like him was intimidating to most humans. He was hoping to make Necron as cooperative as possible.
“Christ—”
“They’ve killed at least one person already.”
Necron stared at him with a hollow look. Nohar was cruel enough to let him think the worst for a few seconds.
“Not your father. We have to get to Manuel before they do.”
Henderson came in the door, and Beverly drew her aside, away from the drama on the couch. The kid jumped when the door opened. Nohar could tell that The Necron Avenger was close to breaking. He eased back and let go of the kid’s shoulder.
Maria leaned forward in her chair, reaching a cupped hand as if she was begging. In a way, she was. “Where is my son?”
“We were hiding him.” The kid’s voice came out in a breathless rush. “I promised—”
“We’re his parents,” Nohar said.
The kid was left speechless.
Nohar holstered his Vind and shook his head. “Helping us may be the only chance you have of seeing your father again.”
There were a few more moments of silence, then it all came pouring out.
• • •
The kid’s name was John Samson. His dad, Oswald, was involved in nonhuman immigration. When John was five or six, he’d been orphaned during a Pacific crossing in a cargo ship packed with too many franks and moreaus escaping Greater China. The mortality rate on that ship was close to sixty percent—and would have been higher if it hadn’t been intercepted by the Coast Guard.
Oswald Samson had come across the orphan while processing the refugees and had decided to adopt him. The story came across in only a few terse sentences, but it was clear that John Samson remembered every bit of it.
He didn’t even have a choice. His species had been engineered by Japan before the Chinese invasion, and one of the traits they’d been bred for was a photographic memory.
He and Manuel had met over the net. Some of his compositions seemed to echo Manuel’s own world-view. That didn’t surprise Nohar that much. Both kids had to feel similarly isolated, and had to have similar views on society as a whole.
Manuel was lost, as The Necron Avenger was lost. Manuel, like John Samson, watched the world pass by him with a fatalism that seemed truly frightening. The world was a burning building, a car wreck, an autopsy that had no emotional content because there was no connection between the watcher and the victims.
According to John, Manuel had no other close friends. He had tried at school, at work, but no one seemed to relate to the mule. He had even searched out other mules, but most mules had bodies broken, and brains damaged, and were too complete in their own isolation. Manuel’s curse was he did not want to be alone.
John, the frank living in Moreytown, was the first person Manuel had ever met who seemed to relate to him.
The two of them had been talking over the comm for two or three years. And, lately, they’d actually been meeting in person. The data-trafficking had only begun in the last few months, when John had let slip that The Necron Avenger had some deep contacts in the data underground that could move that kind of merchandise.
They had moved about half a dozen pieces of such merchandise, making a total of about thirteen grand between them, when Manuel had showed up with the last package—the one that was not supposed to reach Compton.
“Everything was just like normal, until I hacked what was on the card.” John Samson shook his head.
“What was it?” Nohar asked. “What happened?”
John looked up at him, his eyes blank and dead. “Fear is a natural thing, you know. Any rational person in this world has to be paranoid. There’s no choice.” John shook a little, and screwed his eyes shut. Nohar could sense the tension in John’s posture. “No paranoid hopes he’s right.”
“What was it?”
“Imagine your worst fears about the world confirmed. Imagine the vilest betrayal.”
Nohar wanted to lean across and shake him. “What?”
“The Clinics—” His voice caught. John took a few deep breaths before he continued. “The Bensheim Clinics are intentionally infecting people with the Drips.”
Chapter 17
John Samson’s revelation was like accusing the Red Cross of spiking their blood cultures with hepatitis. It didn’t make any sense. The Bensheim Clinics were an international charity that had been around almost as long as moreaus themselves—and they certainly didn’t have a paramilitary force to cover up this kind of discovery.
At least, Nohar didn’t think they did.
He spent over an hour grilling the kid about what was on that ramcard. Nohar got the information in minute detail. The kid remembered everything, he rattled off the data as if he was sitting in front of a comm screen reading it.
The ramcard was, at the very least, an explosive set of case studies on the spread of Herpes Rangoon in the United States. John Samson had read several charts listing the spread of the virus from one person through several other partners. In each case study the original vector for the disease was a female moreau impregnated at a Bensheim Clinic. In about half of the cases the fetus spontaneously aborted due to the virus, and in half of the remaining cases the fetus was born infected.
What made the files all the more damaging was the way the data was slanted to highlight those moreaus that infected the widest segment of the population, over the widest area.
What John couldn’t give him was any explicit statement from the data that the Bensheim Clinics were intentionally responsible for the initial infections. It still could be accidental. As the bear in the waiting room told him, it was probably a logistical impossibility to test all of their stock. Though even if that was made public, and the ramcard was just tracking the problem, it was bad enough to probably spell the end of the Clinics.
But John Samson hadn’t read all the data. There were several gigabytes on that card, too much to go through in the one sitting he had with the data. He had just read enough to set the natural paranoia going, and to believe that his and Manuel’s lives had been in danger for being anywhere close to something like it.
That paranoia probably saved both of them.
“Where did you take Manuel?” Nohar asked.
“Safe hiding place,” John said. “An old INS detention center on the border. I have my dad’s access codes.”
“That’s safe?
” Maria asked.
“The place has been abandoned for years.” John looked up at Maria. “Sometimes, I think I’m the only one who remembers it.”
• • •
Nohar freed the kid to take them all down to his vehicle. John Samson wasn’t supposed to be old enough to drive, but he had followed Nohar in a decade-old van that made Nohar think of government institutions.
“There’s a whole graveyard of trucks, vans, and cars abandoned by the Fed,” John told him, as the four of them left Beverly’s apartment building. Nohar believed what the kid said. Years of wind and weather had worn the van to a bone-gray. A thin layer of dust coated every window evenly, except where he had wiped clear the driver’s side. The van still had government ID tags, and Nohar could still see the ghost of the word “Immigration” on the side of the van.
Henderson wheeled Maria out next to the van and stared at the vehicle. “It still runs?”
“That’s why it took me over two weeks to get back here. Couldn’t drive Manuel’s car—they’re probably looking for it. I had to work on getting this thing mobile.”
Nohar nodded and walked to the rear and opened the back. The rear of the van was flanked by benches, separated from the driver’s compartment by a wire mesh screen. It had obviously been used for hauling detainees around.
“Sorry you have to ride in back,” Nohar told Maria. “Only place there’s room.”
“That’s all right,” Maria said. She grunted a few times as Nohar lifted her out of the chair and set her down on one of the benches. She felt way too light. All the muscle tone was gone. The sense of loss struck him again, the long path of years that could have gone in another direction.
Once Maria was settled, Nohar lifted the chair into the back. There were a few old elastic cords on the floor of the van, mixed with rats’ nests and other debris. Nohar took one and secured the chair to the wire mesh separating the driver’s compartment.
Once he had done that, John Samson started walking toward the front of the van. Nohar stepped out and shook his head. “No.”
“What?” The kid turned around.
“You ride in back.”
“Look we’re on the same side—”
“You were waving a gun around, I don’t trust you.”
The kid looked at him and seemed to be gauging the probability of winning an argument with Nohar, or failing that, outrunning him. The kid had brains enough not to argue. He stepped in back with Maria, and sat down quietly.
When he did, Nohar grabbed another elastic cord and secured his arms behind him to a metal rod that was welded to the side of the van, seemingly just for that purpose.
He objected. “Hey, what’re you doing?”
“You better hope,” Nohar said, “that you gave accurate directions to this place, and my son is all right.”
“What about my father?”
“That’s my problem now.” Nohar shut the rear door and walked Henderson up to the driver’s side of the van. Henderson looked at him and said, “You’re not driving?”
“I need to keep an eye on our boy back there.”
Nohar opened the door for her, and after she stepped in, he handed her the.45 that John had been waving around. She stared at the gun.
“I’m going to have to come back to town.” He needed to know for sure who the Bad Guys were. Until then, none of them were safe. “You’ll need to keep an eye on him too. If he gives you any trouble, shoot him in the knee.” Nohar shut the driver’s door and got in on the other side of the van.
Nohar watched the abandoned red Python as the decrepit INS van pulled away. Changing vehicles was probably a good thing. He didn’t want to get caught in a car someone else might’ve IDed. And who knew what warrants were out on that Oxford guy.
Once they headed out onto the highway, Nohar was lost in his thoughts, and he felt his gut twist.
There was nothing he wanted more right now than to see his son.
There was also nothing that frightened him more.
• • •
The ride took a few hours over the freeways of LA. Eventually, the traffic peeled away as they headed due east, toward Arizona. Buildings seemed to disappear into the desert as they left the fringes of civilization. The sun sank, and soon the old van drove along a tiny strip of the world carved out by its one working headlamp.
Nohar had the time to think of his son.
Seventeen.
At that age, Nohar had just stopped running with a local street gang and had started working for himself. He had started looking for people, a lot of folks got lost in Moreytown, and other folks would pay to find them. It eventually got to be a regular job. . . .
Nohar tried to reconstruct what it was like for him at seventeen. He had been physically adult for nearly ten years by then, and his brain was just growing into the body. He remembered his own isolation, a bequest from his father. He lived in an era that saw Datia as a hero, and he could never reconcile his own image of him with what the rest of the morey world saw. In the end, he was as surely isolated as Manuel was.
He hoped to God that he wasn’t about to do to his son what Datia did to him. Though, in retrospect, it was hard to picture what Datia could have said to the young Nohar that would have fulfilled Nohar’s expectations. How could anyone surmount the space of years that separated them?
Christ, it was probably too late for both of them.
• • •
The camp was unlit, so it was a complete surprise to Nohar when the gate sprang up in front of the van, caught in its headlight. It came at the end of a dirt track they’d followed off of the main road.
This was it.
The van stopped and Nohar got out, twisting the kinks out of his neck which he’d been straining, looking back at the Necron Avenger every few minutes during the ride here. Henderson walked up next to him, staring through the sliding chain-link fence, into the darkness beyond.
“Like a prison,” she said, her breath fogging in the cold night air.
The headlamp threw their shadows through the gate and across an empty field. At the other end of the field, Nohar could see the abstract shadows of a guard tower blocking out the stars. At its base was another fence, which seemed more substantial than the chain-link in front of him.
“Let’s get Necron,” Nohar said, walking back to the rear of the INS van.
He pulled open the doors and John Samson looked at him. “Thanks for remembering me. I can’t feel my hands anymore.”
Nohar shook his head and stepped in. He looked at Maria and asked, “How’re you doing?”
“Fine,” she said, but her posture showed differently. The ride hadn’t been easy on her, and the pain showed on her face.
Nohar turned and untied John, feeling the same undirected anger he’d been feeling every time he realized how deeply Maria’s genetics had betrayed her.
“Hey, watch it,” John said, pulling his hands away when he was finally untied. He began rubbing his overlong fingers together. “They’re sensitive.”
Nohar growled slightly, and John jumped out.
Nohar followed, “You have the access codes for here?”
Necron nodded and walked up to one side of the gate. He looked at Henderson and said, “You should get back in the van, and drive it through to the main gate.”
Henderson looked at Nohar as if looking for confirmation. Nohar nodded. She got in the van and closed the door.
John walked up to the side of the gate, the light from the van’s headlamp exaggerating his frank features. With the shadows cast by the light, his head looked grotesquely swollen, and his fingers seemed to stretch impossibly toward the ground.
He stopped by a small metal box mounted on a pole. It had a recessed cover that swung open when he pressed it. Beneath it, an alphanumeric keypad lit up.
He looked across at Nohar. “T
he access code, ‘01082034.’” He spoke the numbers as he typed them on the keypad. “Remember it, it gets you through the perimeter.” He grinned and shook his head as the gate started rolling aside. “Someone in the INS must be from Frisco.”
Nohar didn’t know exactly what John meant. He followed the van through the gate, and it didn’t strike him until he, Necron, and the van were all through and the gate was closing behind them.
“01082034,” January 8, 2034—the date of the Frisco Quake. It was 9.5 and did a lot of damage to LA even though it was centered around San Francisco.
Nohar grabbed Necron, and they followed the van, on foot, down to the main gate.
• • •
The complex was a mass of dull cinder-block buildings surrounding an even bleaker central section enclosed by barbed wire. Nohar only saw glimpses of what had been the holding facility, barracks lined up with less than two meters between buildings. Even with the barracks, in the flashes of light Nohar could see the remnants of plastic sheets that had sheltered people who hadn’t fit inside the buildings. The plastic was torn and fluttered weakly in the wind.
Nohar and John had boarded the rear of the van, and Henderson followed the Necron Avenger’s directions, driving to the north end of the complex, where the main administration building was.
The van’s headlight swept across the front of the building, and Nohar saw that the door was opening.
Nohar’s breath caught in his throat.
A tall feline stepped out of the door, blinking in the light. His coloring was mostly black, with hints of russet stripes that faded to near-invisibility.
Nohar forgot Necron, opened the rear door, and jumped out. Looking at Manuel, his words were frozen in his mouth. Somehow, he had thought he’d know what to say. Now, every rehearsed opening seemed to fail him.
It was Manuel who spoke first.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Chapter 18
The headlight shut off, and his son squinted at the van. “Sara? What’s going on here? You shouldn’t be here, it’s dangerous.” He had the same husky voice as his mother.