“She inhaled smoke,” Amy said, “and she has cancer!”
He looked at her for the first time, and recognition moved in his eyes. “You’re a kid from that—”
“Yes. And so is Rafael Torres! I think he has a concussion!”
The doctor turned his attention to Rafe, peeled back his eyelids and shone a light, asked him some questions. Then he stood. “Neither of them is critical. Keep Rafael awake, preferably walking, for at least twelve hours. You’d actually do better to take them both home, there are so many badly off here that no one will see either of them for hours.”
“I can’t go—” Amy began, but the doctor was already gone. She and Gran were in nightclothes, but Rafe was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. “Rafe?”
“Perfectly coherent,” he said, the words only slightly slurred. “You’re holding up sixteen fingers.”
“Does your head hurt?”
“President is Lady Gaga.”
“Do you have your cell phone?”
“Two plus two is infinity. Yes, I do.”
He produced the phone, a complicated piece of tech that Amy wasn’t familiar with. She did discover that it was set to Vibrate and that he had eight missed calls from Myra. Kaylie wasn’t on his speed dial and Amy couldn’t remember her number, but Cai was there. Someone was wheeled past on a gurney. Someone else moaned. Someone screamed, “Those fuckers!”
“Indeed,” Rafe said. “God, my head hurts.”
Cai picked up on the first ring. “Rafe?”
“It’s Amy. Is Kaylie—”
“Amy! Where are you? Are you safe?”
Before Amy could answer, Kaylie seized the phone. “Amy! Are you OK?”
“Yes, I’m in the hospital with Gran and Rafe and—”
“With Gran! How did you get out of the hotel? Violet said—”
“It’s too long a story for now. Are you all OK?”
“Yes. We’re at a new hotel. Myra got us there. Look, we’ll come get you. Is Gran all right?”
Amy looked at Gran. She looked very fragile, very weak, and her breathing seemed hoarser. All at once her face spasmed and her eyes rolled back in her head. Amy leapt up from the floor and screamed, “Doctor! Nurse! Heart attack here! Oh, somebody come!”
A nurse rushed over, took one look at Gran, and yelled, “Code Blue. Code Blue. Get a crash cart over here!”
“Amy!” Kaylie screamed into the phone. “What’s happening?”
Amy dropped the phone and seized Gran’s hand. “Don’t go, don’t go, not yet!”
The next few minutes were a blur. The crash cart did not arrive. But a doctor gave Gran a shot of something, she was heaved onto a gurney, and an IV was attached to her. When the blur of fear eased, Gran lay breathing regularly, eyes closed, and Rafe stood beside Amy, holding her free hand. His head was still bloody. Chaos still raged around them in the ER.
“Admit her,” a doctor shot at a harried nurse, and then raced off to the next patient.
Amy heard Rafe say into his phone, “She’s all right.” Oh—Kaylie was still on Rafe’s cell. It didn’t seem important, not even when Rafe said gently to Amy, “They’re on their way.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“No,” Rafe said, “I didn’t expect you would.”
* * *
Gran rallied. “She’s a fighter,” a nurse told Amy several hours later. “She’s sleeping really peacefully now, probably until tomorrow morning. After that she’ll most likely be moved out of the ICU. Some of these old people just have remarkable staying power. You should go home, clean up, get some rest.”
Except that Amy didn’t have a home. The old apartment’s lease had been terminated and the few bits of furniture worth saving put into storage. The Fairwood Hotel was burned, or was a crime scene, or was still held by protestors: Amy had no idea which. There were no TVs in the Intensive Care Unit.
Cai and Kaylie arrived at the hospital, saw Gran, and brought Amy some clothes from somewhere. Now Kaylie sat outside in the waiting room since only one person at a time was permitted in the ICU. But when Amy dragged herself out there, only Rafe occupied the stiff, poison-green sofa. A bandage wound around his head and dipped near one eye.
“Jaunty,” Amy said. She was almost too tired to stand.
“I’m aiming for that wounded-but-brave-soldier look. How is she doing?”
“Amazingly well, according to everybody. One doctor called her ‘a tough old bird.’ How are you?”
“Nothing to worry about. The staff has no time to worry about me, anyway. A slight concussion is small potatoes today.”
She dropped onto the other end of the sofa. “Tell me.”
Rafe didn’t sugarcoat. “Six dead, at least fifty injured. A SWAT team retook the hotel. Criminal charges are being filed against the anti-Pylon group, and the other group, the looser Times Be Tough Man organization, have publicly dissociated themselves from the anti-Pylons. The president gave a press conference, with both stick and carrot. The stick is to send in the National Guard if the riots spread more—”
“Are they spreading?”
“Atlanta, L.A., and Detroit are on fire. Well, parts of them, anyway. The carrot is promised legislation of incredible scope. Something like the New Deal, to aid everybody at the bottom of the economic ladder, which is pretty much everyone. The rich are howling.”
“So nothing will get passed.”
“I think it will, Amy, this time. Even billionaires recognize that real revolution is a possibility, and revolution would bring down everything. The legislation will have to include some tariff protectionism and—”
“Stop, Rafe.” She put a hand on his arm. “I don’t have your grasp of politics, and anyway I’m too tired right now. Tell me later. For now—where are Kaylie and Cai?”
“They left. Myra summoned them.”
Exhausted anger washed feebly through Amy. Kaylie preferred to go where Myra summoned—Kaylie, who wasn’t even on the show!—rather than wait to see Gran again.
Rafe said, “A doctor told Kaylie to go home.”
“Where’s ‘home’? Where are we supposed to go now?”
“Another hotel. The Carillon, on Portman Island.”
That got Amy’s attention. Portman Island, in the bay, was a beautiful, expensive resort. She’d seen pictures. “Well, I suppose there won’t be any protestors there.”
“Not unless the cleaning staff and kitchen help riot. But they won’t. The security is massive. Since the Collapse, Portman practically has its own army.”
“And you know this how?”
He held up his cell and grinned. “I’ve been waiting here to take you home. You can do a lot of research in all those hours.”
Waiting to take her home. And Waverly had said that Rafe had been climbing the Fairwood Hotel stairwell to reach Amy. But she was too weary to deal with this now, or with the look in Rafe’s eyes. She said, “Where’s Waverly?”
“At the hotel. How come she came through for you?”
“It’s complicated. But she did. Are Violet and Tommy OK?”
“Sure. They were outside with Cai and Kaylie, remember? One more thing: Myra gave a press conference. She said that TLN is looking into the possibility that the protestors attacked that particular hotel because of us. That we were targeted.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Amy said. “Those riots were bigger than some stupid TV show!”
“Of course. Myra misstepped badly. Now it looks like she’s piggybacking on everybody else’s anger and desperation just to get free publicity. Come on, I’m getting you somewhere you can sleep.”
“How? Portman isn’t close . . . and how are we going to get to the studio every day?”
“I don’t know about that. But I do know how to get you to the Carillon.”
He stood and held out his hand. Amy took it reluctantly and dropped it as soon as she could. The look was still in his eyes, and she was too grateful to him, and liked him too much, to tell him she couldn’t resp
ond to that look. He was a good friend, but no more.
They took an elevator to the roof. Rafe, grinning mysteriously, made a call on his cell. A few minutes later a helicopter landed on the huge yellow cross that marked the helipad. The side of the helicopter blazed in red and orange TLN NEWS.
Rafe said, “That’s probably the only time in my life I’ll ever be able to summon an aircraft. I hope you’re suitably impressed.”
“I am!”
“Good.” They climbed in and Rafe said, “Home, James.” The pilot twisted to give him a sour look. Rafe grinned again, and they lifted into the sky. For a nauseating moment the view of everything far below—tiny cars, tiny people—reminded Amy of looking down at the riots from the burning hotel. Ants. She shuddered and closed her eyes until they were away from the city, over the blue waters of the bay, sparkling in the morning light.
* * *
“No,” Alex said. “We can’t.”
Midnight of the night before, and the conference room at TLN was lit like an operating room. Surgical removal, Myra thought—but not of her. She would do anything to keep that from happening.
She said calmly, “Let me make my case before you interrupt, Alex. Just grant me that courtesy.”
“This is not a case anyone should make!”
Myra twisted her body so that her left shoulder was turned to Alex, her face toward James Taunton. He sat at the head of the mahogany table, his face inscrutable. Myra wasn’t fooled by the lack of expression. She had erred badly with that press conference, and he was deeply unhappy with her. She was fighting for her life—for the one chance to regain the life she’d once had and had lost. And it was her only chance; Myra was under no illusions about that. Television had always been a sharks-in-the-water field and if she was fired now, in this economy, she would be so much bleeding meat.
“Mr. Taunton, we didn’t cause the riots or the fire. No one could possibly say that—and no one is. This is not a scenario. But it is an opportunity. At least three other stations are preparing quickie ‘special news reports’ on the hotel protest. That’s because it’s big news. Those reports will replay footage of the attack, the occupation of the premises, the counterattack, and then analysts will attempt to explain the behavior of everyone involved. Well, behavior is what our show is about! We can turn these news reports to the personal with the behavior of six individuals, three of which are pretty spectacular. We don’t even have to include the voting, and we can explain why we’re not including it—so as not to capitalize on tragedy. That ought to cover any objections from the bleeding-heart liberal crowd. What we can offer is a close-up, inside view of what happened, to complement and round out the outside view everyone else will have. Our show will almost be a historical document, focusing on teenage heroism.”
Alex said, “You can’t possibly believe that crap, Myra!”
“Alex—”
“Six people died, and we run it as entertainment?”
Myra opened her mouth, then closed it again. Taunton had shifted on his chair: a subtle shift, but she’d caught it and Alex had not. The best thing she could do now was shut up and let him come by himself to her idea. Under the table she laced her hands together so tightly that the rings on her right hand cut into the flesh of her left.
Taunton said, “We don’t have footage of those three kids in the tunnel. Or the elevator, which we didn’t even know existed.”
“And neither did the protestors, which will be dramatic,” Myra said. “We can re-create that part, with actors shot in soft focus and with towels over their heads against any heat, which is what Waverly told me they actually did. And—”
“Falsify footage?” Alex said.
“No, of course not—we say frankly that this part is a re-creation—a faithful re-creation. And we have footage of the girls loading the grandmother onto the service cart in Amy’s suite. Visual and audio. Only visual in the hallway and stairwell, but it’s dramatic. And we have spectacular shots of Rafe fighting free of the protestor who tried to eject him from the building, of the blow to his head, of him staggering up fourteen flights and then collapsing. He was trying to get to Amy! Now you tell me, what plays better than young love, unless it’s young love in wartime?”
“Oh, Christ,” Alex said, “give me a break.”
Taunton said, “But the other three kids—”
“Not as dramatic, I admit. Cai, Tommy, and Violet were on the first floor and they were hustled out by the first wave of protestors, those nonviolent Times Be Tough people. But we still have close-ups, and Tommy especially looks terrified. An intimate reaction.”
Taunton mused, “Too bad none of them was involved with that holdout group in Room 654. That was dramatic.”
Myra kept her face blank. “But not as dramatic as the tunnel escape. And if—I’m just saying ‘if’—we do decide to include voting, no one will predict heroics from Waverly. I was stunned myself.”
“That’s because you see the kids as one-dimensional dolls,” Alex said. “And disposable dolls, at that.”
Myra turned on him. “You produced a porn show, Alex! The people on that weren’t dolls?”
“They were professional actors. These are kids who were in danger of their lives. Mr. Taunton, we can’t do this.”
Myra hid her sudden glee. James Taunton did not like to be told what he could or could not do. He said, “Do we have footage of the three emerging from the tunnel near Fenton Street?”
“Yes! Everyone up there had cell phones, and we’ve purchased some of the shots. Then I rushed in one of ours with a hand-held, in time to see the medics bring up the grandmother.”
“She didn’t die, did she? We can’t use it if she died.”
“She’s in stable condition at Memorial Hospital. Out of the ICU already.” This wasn’t strictly true, but Mrs. Whitcomb might be moved to a ward in the morning.
Taunton said nothing. Myra held her breath. Into the prolonged silence Alex said quietly, “Mr. Taunton, if you do this episode, I will quit.”
Taunton appeared to not even hear him. More silence. Finally Taunton said, “Put together a rough cut and let me see it tomorrow afternoon. We’ll have to run it right away, to keep it timely, and shorten the rest of the show so both segments fit into the hour. The PR people will need time for advance spots, and Programming will have to dump something else. You’ll need to bring in your staff right away, Myra.”
“I can do that!”
Alex said, “Mr. Taunton—”
“I know, you’re quitting. Best of luck to you, Alex. Not everybody has the guts necessary to work in television.” He rose and walked out.
Alex said to Myra, “You exploitative bitch.”
You don’t know the half of it. But all she said to him was, “I’ll miss working with you.” And, to her own surprise, she found she meant it, although she couldn’t have said why.
Twenty-six
THURSDAY
THE CARILLON HOTEL on Portman Island was set beside an expensive office park whose low buildings were nearly hidden by trees. The whole area, bright with flowers and surrounded by open fields on one side and big estates on the other, looked like something from a children’s picture book. No protestors here, no risk of attack, no city messiness. Not, Amy noticed, so much as a discarded gum wrapper.
Nonetheless, the hotel had formidable security. Amy had never seen lobby guards who were actually armed. More armed men, some with exotic headgear, moved watchfully alongside various hotel guests. “Bodyguards,” Jillian explained. “The hotel hosts many foreign businessman involved in deals at the corporate offices in the Park.”
Amy smiled faintly. Jillian was their new liaison/chaperone/jailer from Taunton Life Network. Myra, Jillian explained, was very busy with the editing side of the show. Jillian looked about twenty-five, fresh-faced without being beautiful, well-dressed without Myra’s style. She wore her hair in a bouncy ponytail. “Forty if she’s a day,” Violet breathed in Amy’s ear, “and already had face work don
e.”
Amy didn’t see that, but since this was the first thing Violet had said to her since they arrived, she laughed obligingly. Violet stood with arms crossed over her chest, stony-faced. The six Lab Rats and Kaylie were getting a tour of the hotel.
“And your rooms are on the top floor,” Jillian said as she pressed the elevator button for 3. “No suite this time, Amy, since your grandmother will probably be going to a nursing facility anyway. The—”
“I don’t think she’ll do that,” Amy said.
“Beg pardon?”
“My grandmother. She’ll want to stay with me.”
“But Myra said—”
“I’m telling you what my grandmother will want.” Amy heard herself sounding too shrill, and toned it down. “She’s not a person who lets herself be shuttled around to where she doesn’t want to be. And I want to be with her.”
Kaylie did not say Me too.
Jillian frowned. “I’ll check with Myra. Meanwhile, here we are.”
The top floor of the hotel was a sprawl of thickly carpeted hallways, open sitting rooms, and at the far end, a glassed solarium in which three veiled Arab women sat at a table playing some sort of board game. In the corridor the Lab Rats passed a man in a turban accompanied by two bodyguards and a woman in Armani carrying a briefcase. Both looked curiously at the group.
Jillian unlocked the first of six doors in a cul-de-sac at the end of a hall, facing one of the pretty sitting areas. “This is your room, Amy and Kaylie. Kaylie, Serena had to guess at your size. Violet, you’re in three seventeen, Waverly—”
Kaylie let out a whoop. Both of the double beds were piled with packages marked with their names. The room itself was nice but ordinary for a hotel room, at least from what Amy had seen in magazines and movies. She opened her packages. The contents were exact duplicates of the clothes Serena had chosen for her before, plus a small box from the hotel with toothbrush, comb, and other toiletries.
“Huh,” Kaylie said sourly, and Amy turned.
Kaylie’s clothes were nowhere near as expensive. Levi’s, not jeans from 7 For All Mankind. Tops and a skirt that might have come from Macy’s, not Prada. The colors, deep jewel tones, were good for Kaylie’s dusky beauty, but Kaylie didn’t care.