When the Dust Fell, page 25
“Welcome to the Kingdom,” the kidnapper said dryly.
Sarah stopped the car before she reached Canal Street and looked about the scene before her, blinking from the bright of the sky like a creature of the dirt emerging from its hole. She’d come nearly five thousand miles since leaving the alien city ship and witnessed in the flesh and unforgiving reality what the Kalelah had wrought. Yet what had become of New York City was something altogether different.
She’d been to Manhattan as a child. Her mother had taken her and her sister. They had stayed in a cheap hotel and shared a damp, lumpy bed. During the days they walked the city, window shopping and gawking and eating in cheap restaurants. Once they had simply bought hotdogs and pretzels from carts on the sidewalk and ate in a tiny park ringed by grand apartment houses and blaring streets. It had been like a trip to a magic land. The sheer abundance of it was overwhelming, the math of it impossible to grasp. All of it was exhilarating…like nothing she’d ever experienced.
The Manhattan she saw from behind the wheel of the perforated and creaking Cadillac resembled that city of her memory in a general, archetypal sense. Buildings proudly thrusting to the sky from every direction, the New York rose-colored light of the morning sun pushing its way between the towers and cheering the black asphalt of the streets with geometric designs of tinted white. People were walking the streets, some with dogs, some with makeshift wagons piled with overstuffed plastic bags. There were places open for business. A greengrocer, a coffee shop, and several restaurants. Compared to Amsterdam or New Jersey, which had both looked emptied and aimless, like discarded things awaiting their eventual decomposition, Manhattan looked to be a functioning place. It looked more than that. It looked supremely managed.
It was the most frightening thing she’d seen yet.
She was ten years old on that trip with her mother and sister, and the thing even she had understood, sensed in the way that maybe only children can, was that the wild, unstructured, cacophony of New York, with its throngs of people of every hue and shape and size, with its sidewalks jammed with stolen and counterfeit goods for sale, with its hundreds of languages all shouting at once, with its thousands of smells, its millions of agendas competing to seize each and every moment, if only for the moment, with its horns honking and its taxis speeding—the absolute unmanageableness of the city—was, in fact, the splendor of the city. The entire point of it.
It was all she could do on that trip not to skip and twirl in the glorious mayhem like a character in a cheesy musical. She never once tired of the city’s crowding, the constant pressure pushing at its seams, its energy and marvels always spilling out into the open, too much and too exuberant to be contained indoors. She’d adored how everyone she encountered or merely observed from a distance, rich or poor, looked in on the game. The game of being New York. A game played by anyone’s rules at any time. New York City had felt to her like freedom itself.
Now it had fallen through the looking glass, been turned upside down and painted over in garish hues of red, black, and gunmetal blue. An old news reel recreated in a fever dream.
The Kingdom’s symbol, the Empire State Building within an oval burst of bullets, the one she’d seen painted along the base of Lady Liberty, was everywhere. It moved with the breeze from flagpoles and it hung in long vertical banners from the tall, two-story entranceways of once prosperous buildings, and it decorated the big storefront windows of shuttered businesses which, despite the few places actually open, still looked to be most businesses, cynically festooning the streets in bruises and blood.
Guns were nearly as ubiquitous. Armed men and women stood at corners on every third block. A garbage truck painted red and black crossed Broadway in front of the Cadillac at Franklin Street. A man with a machine gun rode the fender of the big cab-over’s front wheel, his free hand around a grab rail on the container, while two more men occupied the riding steps flanking the hopper. They held their guns loosely at their sides with an air of conquering confidence. They regarded the shot-up Cadillac missing its windshield, its side mirrors, half its paint, and one of its headlamps with solemn disinterest.
It took all of five minutes to see that New York had not simply collapsed in the aftermath of the Correction and the Russian bombs that split America and broke the back of its government like other places had. No, New York had been captured. Sadder still, it had been collared. If this could happen to New York, Sarah could only wonder with increasing dread what was going to happen to her and Margaret. To everyone. She leaned out the side window and looked for a glimpse of the camera bot. She thought she saw a small black dot in the sky above her, though it was also possible the dot was merely a trick of the eye. A tear warping her vision.
•
They followed Broadway until they came to a small park with a large porticoed building at the center. It had the unmistakable look of officialdom, a tall, sweeping set of stairs, and the dome of a rotunda topping the stately second story.
“End of the line,” the kidnapper said.
“What is this place?” asked Sarah.
“It used to be City Hall. Now it’s something else.”
They left the car on the street and followed a wide stone path to the steps, the captor holding Margaret by the elbow, Sarah’s bag slung over his shoulder. Margaret hadn’t said a word since the roadblock in Pennsylvania. She gave the large man no resistance or even a glance as they walked.
“Raise your hands. Both of you,” he said when they reached the top of the stairs and the metal-clad door. “Make sure they can see all your fingers.” He pushed a dirty button on the wall near the big door. With a mechanical whirr a camera swiveled in their direction.
“Lonny!” the kidnapper said to the camera.
A moment later came the sounds of lock bolts turning and the big door slowly swung open. An incredibly dark Indian man stood in the large threshold, the white of his teeth in a Cheshire grin, a roll of duct tape in one hand.
“The prodigal son,” said the Indian.
“I need the bomb team right now. My hand’s got nothing left.”
The Indian pulled a long strip of tape from the roll, bit the edge with his teeth, tore it free, and gave it to the kidnapper.
“To be honest, Kino, we never thought we’d see you again.” The Indian man looked Sarah and Margaret over. “I’m happy not to have to hunt you down.”
“Well, you know how much I care about your happiness,” the kidnapper said, winding the tape around his thumb and the detonator. When the tape was secure, he sighed with relief. “You have no fucking idea how much pain I’m in.”
The Indian grinned wider. Two men with small machine guns walked up behind him. “This is her?” the Indian asked with a nod toward Sarah.
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” he said brightly. “She and her things come with me. You and the other one can go with the boys here to, um, unpack.”
“Why can’t we stay together?” asked Sarah.
“Such a happy family. You’re separating because you need to stay alive, and Kino, who never fails to confirm my overestimation of his intelligence, has chosen to wrap the young lady in actual explosives. We’ll do our best.”
“I don’t give a shit about him. She’s my sister. I won’t cooperate if anything happens to her.”
The Indian pulled a gun from the waist at the back of his pants and prodded her toward the large foyer beneath the rotunda. “Young lady,” he said as they walked, “a little advice. Your biggest worry now should be focused on what will happen to you.”
They said nothing to each other the rest of the way through the quiet marbled building. The only sounds Sarah heard were the thumping of her heart and a metallic jingling that rang in time to the Indian’s steps, like coins.
38
A collection of thirty-one people from throughout the ship’s departments had squeezed themselves into the captain’s private conference room adjacent to the CC. They were analysts, flight control managers, research scientists, people from across the spectrum of services and disciplines of the Kalelah. They were men, women, old, young, and somewhere in between. Together they represented seventeen different home worlds that stretched across the galaxy that spawned the mother world of Origen. Yet this diverse group had some important things in common. Language, of course, and religion. All peoples that could trace their identity to Origen shared those traits, which was all peoples of the universe, as far as Origen was concerned. The one notable exception being the people of Earth. This hand-picked assembly, however, shared one additional and distinctive characteristic. A special kind of relationship with the Code. This ad hoc group was known as The Divers. And this was their first meeting.
Trin had placed a small metal box, barely big enough to stand on, in a corner of the room. He stepped atop it once everyone he invited had arrived.
“My thanks to everyone for coming on short notice. Why we’re packed into this box together, the one place on ship we can speak without cameras and mics, will make sense in a moment. Perhaps some of you have started to figure it out already. We all know who we are, what links us. I’ve reached out to you because I need your help in finding Sarah. So let me make sure you know who she is.
“Three years ago, I took Sarah from one world and dropped her into another without even the slightest shred of preparation. A world so foreign she didn’t know up from down. She didn’t understand us, and we sure as shit didn’t understand her and the billions she represented. Until she got here, until we met her, until we heard her speak, we denied she was even human. We couldn’t even use the word people for Sarah and her kind. The population. That was our word. To Laird, to most of us on ship, to the Plan, they were literally just a number, like a counting of species of trees. She knew some of this, some of what she’d be up against when I asked her to join us. Captain Argen had told her. She came anyway. She could have believed her own people when they told her Argen was lying. She could have believed her own people when they thought they could simply fight us and win. Sarah believed Argen instead. Even though we didn’t believe in her, she believed in us.
“She put her life on the line to stop the Correction, more than once. Not only to save her own people, but to save us as well. To save us from where we are right now. When the pilot ripped the gloves from the ship, she fell with us, she was standing right outside these doors when we went down. Actually, she was already on the concourse floor, because Laird had beaten her half to death by then. While we didn’t succeed in stopping the Correction before it started, we needed her help to save the lives we did. To save the billions we did.
“Now she’s out there somewhere, off ship. I don’t know where, but I know how we can begin to find out.”
Trin paused and let what he’d said sink in. The looks he saw on several faces told him at least some in the crowd were tracking. A woman from Flight was the first to respond.
“May I ask, sir, if you’ve already tried what I think you’re ordering us to do?”
“I’m not ordering, I’m asking. And yes, I’ve tried. The captain has tried too. We’ve found nothing.”
“XO, you and the captain are the best Divers on ship,” the woman followed up. “If you can’t find anything, maybe there’s nothing to find.”
There were several nods of agreement to that.
“That’s possible,” Trin conceded. “But both the captain and I think the Code has information that will help us find Sarah. For whatever reason,” he paused here to search for the right words, “she’s not making it easily available.”
A nervous buzz went through the crowd.
Fuck. Wrong words.
“Permission to speak freely!” a research scientist shouted.
“Please.” Trin addressed the crowd. “We’re talking among shipmates, that’s it. For the purposes of this discussion, forget rank.”
“Okay. Then I say the minute we start doubting the Code, thinking she’s hiding something, is the minute we start doubting everything. In fact, having this conversation here in this room, the one room that won’t record it, we’re the ones hiding something.”
Wildei pushed her way toward Trin’s corner. “I get where that comment comes from, Doctor Tenit. The relationships we each have with the Code are incredibly useful and often quite meaningful. The XO isn’t saying we shouldn’t trust the Code. What we both want to say is that something is happening with her we don’t yet understand. Over time we’ll figure it out, or she’ll tell us. We need the Code and she needs us. We’re her purpose, and I don’t believe she’d knowingly abandon that. In the meantime, though, we need to find Sarah.”
“If we all went at this together, in a coordinated way, I think we could break through,” said Trin.
Silence.
After a beat, a young analyst with a tired look on his face and a premature shock of gray going through his dark hair spoke. Although his words were simple and concise without flourish or hyperbole, like storm clouds swiftly gathering on a red horizon, they got everyone’s attention. Trin knew he had no good response to the young man other than the truth.
“You want to stage an attack on the Code?” the analyst asked.
39
In her imagination, the man she expected to meet, the king who called himself Mayor, looked the part of the villain, scarred and menacing. The kind of man who would send another to beat a woman and tie her to a bomb in order to capture her sister would have to look that way. Repulsive and obvious. The mobsters and cruel men of history had been all those things. Their mug shots and news clipping photos always gave them away. Their strange hair, facial markings, and their dark-ringed eyes always proclaimed, you’ve got the right guy.
Instead, Tom Nader was a strikingly handsome man with a generous smile. Beautiful, she thought at first glance. He was fit and well dressed, standing in the center of the room. Sarah thought there might be something about his eyes that were off. But the room was large, and from where she stood, the first impression he gave was that of a prosperous CEO. Only the man next to her with a gun told the truth of the scene.
“Hello, Sarah,” he said graciously. “I’m Tom Nader.” He walked over to shake her hand, as if this were a regular business meeting. He was tall, so he bent a bit when he offered his hand, bringing his eyes more in line with hers. She was right, they were off. Camera one and camera two. Mismatched. Still, overall, the handsomeness was winning out over the villainy. He pointed to a seating area behind him—two sofas facing each other with two club chairs at the wings, and a large glass table in the middle.
“Please have a seat…anywhere you like.”
Sarah took the center cushion of the sofa that faced the door to the room. She wanted to have a view of what else might come through it. The Indian set her bag on the carpets and looked ready to leave.
“Lonny,” said Nader, “a word before you go.” The two walked over to the bag on the floor and talked quietly.
Sarah looked around the room for the first time. It was like she imagined a mayor’s office of a big city would look. The only glitch in the picture was the large red and black flag furled in the corner behind the desk. It put a shiver down her spine.
Nader came back, took a seat facing Sarah, and threw an arm over the back of the sofa. He sat there and looked at her for a long moment, silent. It was like a therapy session she’d seen in the movies. The shrink’s stubborn silence versus the patient’s anxious desire for permission to spill. Except she was a prisoner, not a patient. All she wanted to talk about was her sister. She debated which eye to focus on. Before all this, when she’d encountered someone with a lazy eye, she’d make an effort not to favor one over the other, but to focus on the bridge of the nose. She’d always thought that was the polite thing to do. Now she didn’t care if her pick of the green eye—the one angled off to some space to her right—was the eye to aim for or not, or if her choice of it made him self-conscious in some way.
“I find it impossible not to think about your name,” he said at last.
She wanted to scream, where’s my sister? Except everything about the situation told her things, whatever they were, were not going to go according to her timeline. She glanced at the door, closed now, perhaps even locked.
“It’s just a name,” she said.
“No,” he said evenly. “Jane is just a name. Sally is just a name. Sarah is something much more, isn’t it? I’ve always thought her story, the story of Sarah, Abraham’s wife, to be a cautionary tale.” He paused to flash a smile like a preacher on TV. “Her destiny, which God relayed to Abraham who then relayed to her, was to be a mother of nations. Sarah didn’t believe her future, and her lack of faith caused all kinds of problems.”
“It wasn’t only lack of faith. She thought she couldn’t have children,” Sarah said. “I know the story.”
“Of course you do.” The smile again. “Then you know that Sarah’s real problem wasn’t fertility at all. Her problem was that she only saw the world with her eyes. From that perspective, the world was a place where women gave birth in their teens, were old by their early thirties, and died before their mid-forties. Sarah, blinded by her own eyes, couldn’t imagine living long enough to be ninety, let alone giving birth to her first child at that age. She was so convinced she’d never give Abraham a child, she gave him her maidservant, Hagar, to bear one for them. Think about everything that happened next.”
