When the Dust Fell, page 16
Charlotte lay on her side with her knees pulled up and a hand on her face where Sarah had hit her. “Where am I supposed to go?” she sobbed. “I got nowhere to go.”
“Try Hell.” Sarah slammed the door shut.
She ran back to Gabi, who lay on the bed quiet but shaking. The sheet below her was soaked in blood.
“You’re going to be okay, Gabi. Hear me?”
“It hurts.”
“Hang on, I can help.” She turned around to grab her pack.
Gabi looked at the knife. “Oh, mon Dieu. A doctor. I need a doctor.”
“I know. But we don’t have time to run around the ship looking for one.”
“The man on the horse. He’ll know.”
“We don’t have time to look for him either. You’re bleeding badly. I have to stop it.” Sarah pulled a slim blue box from her pack and placed it on the bed next to Gabi. She quickly pressed a code onto its top and the box expanded in height and opened like a book. Where the pages would be were thin panes of glass in six shades of blue. An earpiece was nestled into the inside cover, and Sarah quickly placed it in her right ear.
“How?” Gabi’s chest was heaving now, her breathing speeding up. Sarah worried she was going into shock. “What is that?”
“This is going to tell me how to help you.” She took the lightest hue of glass from the box and aligned it with the wound on Gabi’s chest. Seconds later a beam of light burst from the glass and projected a star pattern that surrounded the wound.
“What’s happening?” said Gabi.
“Shhhh. It’s going to be okay.”
Instructions began to flow from the earpiece. Sarah took a deep breath. Her face flushed and went hot with fear. “Gabi, I want you to count to ten. Okay?”
“What?”
“Can you do that for me? When you get to the number ten, I’m going to pull the knife.”
Gabi’s tears picked up their flow and developed into full-on panicked sobs. “Non, non, non…”
“Come on, Gabi. You can do it.”
“Mais tu n’es pas medecin.”
“One…”
“Non. S’il vous plait, non!”
“Two…”
“Three.”
“Good girl. Keep going. All the way to ten.”
“Four…five…six…sev—”
Sarah pulled the knife. Gabi screamed, “Aiiieeee!”
The blood gushed, and Sarah quickly applied pressure to the wound, which got another scream out of Gabi. With her other hand she retrieved the next shade of blue glass and slid it under the puncture site on Gabi’s back. She pulled another pane and placed it on the entry wound and reapplied pressure. Blood pooled out from under the glass and ran down Gabi’s side in thin streams. Sarah tapped the code instructed by the voice in her ear on the top edge of the glass and held the pressure steady until she was told to lift off. Both panes of glass began to glow. Within the luminescent blue of the pane beneath her palm, intermittent tendrils of pinks, yellows, and whites streaked through the glass like electric capillaries turning on and off in time to an inaudible music score. Seconds later, Gabi’s breathing slowed down, her face released the anguish it held, and she sighed so fully and contentedly it was if a torture no less than a demon’s possession had been exorcised.
“It feels better,” Gabi said, her eyes slits, her mouth turned up softly in relief.
The rivulets of blood slowed and soon stopped. The instructions in Sarah’s ear told her to remove her hand and she watched as the wound beneath the glass began to dry, like the evaporation of rainwater in a desert captured in time-lapse.
“It’s amazing,” said Gabi. “One moment I was burning from the inside. I felt it everywhere, like every nerve in my body was on fire. I was sure I was going to die. Now there is no pain, only a cool sensation. It feels…” she paused, and her face relaxed another degree. “I don’t know the word for it, so I will say beautiful. It feels beautiful.”
“I’m so glad,” Sarah said, her own heart rate finally calming down. She sat on the bed and held Gabi’s hand. “I think you’re going to be okay.”
“How?”
Sarah waited to answer, hoping maybe Gabi would fall asleep and she would have more time to think of what to say. Gabi’s eyes opened fully instead, and she looked at the glass on her chest, the blood on the sheets, and the blue box with its softly pulsating glow in communication with the panes. “What is this machine, Sarah?”
“It’s part of a first-aid kit,” she said lamely.
Gabi knit her brows. “A first-aid kit is a bandage and some alcohol wipes.” She moved her right arm, like she was testing the wound for pain and her muscles for limits. “Sarah, a minute ago a knife was inside me, I could not move my arm. Now, je n’en reviens pas, if it weren’t for the sheets soaked in my own blood, I would not even know it had happened. How is this possible?”
Sarah took the earpiece from her ear and began to gather up the panes of glass and return them to the blue box. She smiled sweetly at Gabi. “You should rest. We can talk later.”
Gabi sat up in the bed. “I want to talk now.”
Sarah closed the blue box and slipped it back in her pack and turned once again to Gabi. “The truth is, I don’t know how it works.”
“But you knew how to use it.”
“It taught me as I went.”
Sarah could see Gabi wasn’t buying it. She knew if the shoe was on the other foot, if it had been Gabi who pulled some techno magic Jesus out of her pack, Sarah would sure as shit want to know what was going on.
“How frightened should I be, Sarah?” Gabi asked tentatively.
Sarah stalled again. “We’re in the middle of the ocean on a ship with hardly any crew. Our food is junk, literally. You just got stabbed, and we don’t really know what awaits us when we get to whatever’s left of America. So I’d say pretty fucking frightened.”
“I know very well how scared to be of those things. You’ve seen my thumbs. What I want to know is how frightened should I be of you?”
Shit.
Sarah was completely unprepared for this kind of confrontation. With criminals like the Russians, she knew a show of force would be enough for them. Actions, like always, spoke louder than words. With Gabi, a civilian, a frightened refugee, a friend maybe, what kind of words could make sense of what the med kit had done? Sarah threw her pack down on the floor where she’d been trying to sleep before Charlotte came in and screwed everything up.
“You’re alive, okay? You could have bled out. I didn’t let you. What does that tell you? Now get some sleep, because tomorrow night I get the bed.” With that, she lay on the floor with her pack as a pillow and said, “Good night.”
Gabi sighed and pushed herself as far away from the still-wet blood as the bed allowed. Sarah put her hand on her tummy and closed her eyes.
She tried not to feel like a monster. Nothing worked.
23
Sarah was awoken by a thin blade of sunlight slicing its way through the tiny porthole. She blinked from the brightness and turned her face toward the shadows. Gabi was still, her face at peaceful rest and her breathing as heavy as it was the last night, rousing in Sarah another wave of sleep envy. She dressed quietly, rinsed her mouth in the miniature sink, grabbed her pack, and slipped out the stateroom door without Gabi stirring.
She needed the deck. She needed the space and the air and the water to think. Although the Empire had a small elevator, she took the stairs instead, the faster way out. Once outside she began to feel better. On the Kalelah, there’d been sim skies, a lake and parks, and manufactured sunlight to distract Sarah from the true degree of her confinement. After again feeling breezes not generated from machines and tasting rain that fell not from misting tanks and tubes but from actual clouds, she found herself physically aching for the outdoors. She ran to the stern of the ship where she could stand at the railing and watch the frothy white of the churn from the ship’s props and the long line of wake that eventually faded to nothing.
It was cool and she could see her breath in the morning air, but she wasn’t cold. The sun was warm on her face. It was open waters now. It had been three days since she could see any hint of the European continent. She tried to picture Trin, what he might be doing at this moment, what he might be thinking about her. For all he knew, she had run. Which, of course, she had. This was different than her other runs; the other times she’d turned her back on her life she wasn’t leaving someone behind. Not someone like Trin anyway. Someone who made her feel wanted, loved. And she wasn’t carrying with her another life. A life only partly hers. The gall of it, the wrong of it, washed over her. Yet it wasn’t more wrong now than it was on the ship when she could have made a different decision. It was the same thing over and over with her. Knowing better didn’t manage to stop her. Somehow, she always wound up lost at sea.
“Don’t jump.”
Sarah turned to see the Aussie approaching, all in black like a cowboy Johnny Cash in a Paul Revere hat. For the violence his image carried, he didn’t frighten her. She was happy to see him.
“I won’t jump in after ya,” he said in a voice like gravel under heavy boots. He had a cup of what smelled like hot coffee and tequila.
“So this shit bucket does have coffee,” she said.
“In name only.” He took a sip, gave her a grandfatherly wink, and turned to face the water. They stood in silence for a minute as the sun rose higher and the air warmed.
“I saw your roommate this morning. She was sprawled out on my deck crying like a baby. Says you kicked her out.”
“She’s a dangerous drunk.”
“Have a little pity. She’s scared and stupid. It’s a hard way to live.”
“Or an easy way to die.”
He ground out a short rasp of a laugh and hoisted his cup in toast. He let another minute go by, and they watched the wake continue its endless journey to nowhere from behind the boat. “You’re a different one,” he finally said. It didn’t sound to her like criticism.
“Says the man in the Revolutionary War hat.”
“I’ll have ya know this hat has a story.”
“I’ll bet it’s fascinating.”
“If you like horror movies,” he said, with what sounded to Sarah like regret.
“We’ve all got scary stories now.”
“You’ve got something else, I think. Something bigger. I’ve been on this ship for long enough to forget what it’s like to be off it. I carry two hundred or so people on each leg. New York to Amsterdam. Amsterdam to New York. It doesn’t make a difference which way we’re going or what time of year it is, everyone who gets on this overgrown tinny has the same look in their eyes. A kind of permanent terror. Even when someone is smilin’ I can see it. Just a little too much white.” He took a sip from his cup. “I’ve seen that look all my life. It’s the look a cow has, a heifer in particular. It’s a striking thing. We’d drive ’em from this part of the station to that part of the station. They don’t have to be in any particular danger at any particular moment, but they always seem to think somethin’s not right. Like when one of those drives is done, somethin’ awful could happen. It’s like they’re born knowin’ it.”
She turned to him and in his weathered face and pale eyes, she saw again a kindness that defied the outer shell he created for himself of a man in black, a man with a gun, a man at war.
“You were a cowboy?”
“Stockman, thank you.”
“What are you saying you see in my eyes, stockman?”
“That’s just it, sweetheart. I don’t see any fright in ya at all.”
“Maybe I’m just a good liar.”
He chewed on that for a bit. “What ya said about the gold was true. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
She smiled. “So we can stay?”
He took a final sip from his cup and emptied the last of the coffee and whatever else was in it over the railing and into the water. “When we reach port, where do ya go from there?”
“Like I said, I have to meet someone. She’s in Ohio. I think. I don’t even know. It’s crazy to try and find her. I only know I have to try.”
“East or west Ohio?”
“East.”
“That sounds good. Don’t go too far west. Stay clear of Chicago. Radiation there is hotter than Hell. When ya come back east, stay out of New York.”
“There’s no radiation in New York.”
“No. But maybe somethin’ worse.”
“And yet you run this boat.”
He took his time thinking about that too. Maybe that was simply how he was about things—the thoughtful hooligan. Or maybe he just liked to stretch things out. To slow down time. A breeze came in from the starboard side of the ship and carried with it a reminder of the morning’s chill. Sarah put her hands in her pockets and did not rush the man.
At last, the rider spoke. “There were men I worked with who had no feelings for the stock at all. Their approach to the animals was either extreme indifference or wanton cruelty. There was nothin’ for those men in between. Now me, I couldn’t understand that. A cow breathed and birthed. She hated drivin’ in a cold rain nearly as much as we did, and I know she could hurt. On the other hand, I understood the forces of inevitability at play. The hidden strings of the world that compel different creatures to walk certain paths even when those paths have proven to be dead ends.”
“Destiny, you mean.”
“Destiny, fate, God, whatever you want to call it. I knew that was somethin’ not worth fightin’.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m sayin’, honey, I ate steak with the rest of ’em.”
24
Trin watched while the team carefully dismantled 18. The millions of mirrors that formed the skin of the transport, the mechanism by which the craft achieved its invisibility to the naked eye, lay in neatly organized sheets of hundreds of thousands on the pristine floor of Tech Room Five. The little transport’s frame and electronics harness were entirely exposed, giving the techs the full and easy access they needed for their forensics.
The lead engineer, a tall rail of a man close to Trin’s age, leaned over the stern section of the stealth band, a series of frequency emitters and noise cancelers that ran in a continuous loop around the entire craft. Its skin cloaked it to humans, while the band cloaked it to machines. As much as it pained Trin to see his little ship torn down to the bolts, he understood the logic behind Wildei’s order that the band be checked. The band, after all, was a jury-rigged solution to a problem no one at the time of the transport’s original manufacture could have imagined. Yorn Darnol, the man leaning over the band, had designed the retrofit himself. And he was not happy.
“You know me, boss. I don’t get insulted easily,” he said, looking at the band, his lips drawn tight.
“Yes, you do.”
“Well, this is especially egregious. Because, you know…look at it.”
“I know, you’ve told me. It’s elegant.”
“That’s exactly the word for it. Elegant.”
“It’s your word.”
“That’s right. It’s the perfect description. This design is completely harmonious with the native engineering. If you never saw the original plans, and you saw this, you’d think it was there all along. Right from the start. It’s a thing of absolute beauty.”
Trin sighed. He’d heard this story months before, when the band was first installed. But Darnol was on a roll. There was no stopping him.
“You have to understand,” he went on, “the idea that 18 would have radar jamming capabilities was, you know, never even a consideration back in the day. What would be the point? We were supposed to be long gone by the time the population would advance to the level of possessing technology even remotely like radar. Let alone full spectrum jamming. Yet look at this thing…it’s like 18 was created for the sole purpose of radar fucking.”
“So, did it? On that last run, was I fully cloaked or not?”
“Everything worked as designed. I said this to the captain at least a dozen times. Did she listen to me? No. I had to tear the whole ship apart just to prove what I already knew. It’s insulting. I mean, that’s the only word for it.”
“Don’t take it personally. Captain doesn’t listen to me either.”
“Whatever. She’s the captain, I’m me. Who am I to fight it, right?”
“Right.”
“That said—”
“Shit.”
“Hear me out. We could turn this insult around. Seize the opportunity.”
“For what?”
“Another leap forward.”
“Fuck me. Just put it back together, okay?”
“Boss, these are dangerous times we live in. When you’re out there, you need protection.”
“I have protection. I have the cloak. You said so yourself, it worked.”
“Yes, it did everything it was supposed to do. Perfectly. Except, and I hate to say this, perfect wasn’t enough. Because someone out there can see past it. I don’t know how, but that’s the awful truth. We need to adapt.”
“You’re talking about guns again?”
“I’m talking about giving you a fighting chance. You were faster than the missiles on that last run. But everyone knows it wasn’t speed on your side, it was luck. Next time, luck might not be enough.
“You know the rule. Weapons don’t leave the ship. The Guide Service doesn’t go to war.”
“Tell that to the population. You don’t think the Correction seemed like war to this planet?”
“It wasn’t a normal Correction. It was a mistake. We don’t need to add to it by building warships.”
“Boss, we’re at war whether you want to be or not.”
This was sounding a lot like the conversation Trin had had with Wildei at the lake. Trin sat on the floor. “I swore I was done dusting.”
