Nayima jabbed in her passcode on the console, pressed the power button when it glowed blue. Like her chip, like her, the bike was an old model in need of upgrades. But it could still hit sixty miles per hour and hover a steady foot high. She’d clocked and measured the bike just two days before. As soon as Raul mentioned he’d seen the bike advertised at the bazaar, Nayima had insisted he buy it for her.
The bike pitched forward, Nayima’s hand a bit too heavy on the accelerator before she braked abruptly, as she tested her reflexes and the bike’s mood. Lottie tightened her arms around Nayima and pressed herself into her back as it bobbed. Hugs did not come easily to them, so Nayima noticed Lottie’s grip and weight and warmth in a way that made her too sad to think.
You’ve got this, pumpkin. Go on, now, Gram said. Sure enough, Gram was still standing at the gate, waving her on like they were at a racing track. The back of her hospital gown billowed, showing her bare, sagging buttocks, which Nayima’s were looking more and more like.
“Thanks for not shooting me, Mama,” Lottie said.
Lottie had not called her Mama in nearly a year. At first, Nayima had forbidden it. The word Mama cut through her bones. Mamas left you. That’s what mamas did. Gram was standing at the gate to remind her.
“Don’t thank me yet.”
Nayima squeezed the accelerator. The hoverbike flew.
* * *
—
The day Nayima’s mother packed and moved away, she’d told Nayima her sad story: how she’d married her Spelman English professor at twenty-two; he’d been twenty years older and divorced and she worried he would be in his sixties when she was only in her forties, but she told herself she would worry when the time came. Then he’d died of a heart attack only five years later, when Nayima was four.
“And, sweetheart,” Mama had told Nayima that day as she packed her powder-blue suitcase, so matter-of-fact, “I wasn’t ready.”
Wasn’t ready to be a widow. Wasn’t ready to be a mother. Wasn’t ready.
Nayima dreamed about her mother more often since the memo from Sacramento had come two weeks ago. Gram hadn’t expected to be raising a child again, and Nayima had resented Mama mostly for Gram’s sake. It wasn’t fair to drop a child in someone’s lap out of the blue. Just like with Lottie. And like Mama, Nayima wasn’t ready.
Nayima used to tell herself, She’s not from my body, as if that would make it easier if—no, when—she and Lottie were separated. But Lottie was Priscilla Houston’s granddaughter, and Lottie Powell Houston’s great-granddaughter, and she was Nayima’s offspring with Raul, even if Lottie had been mixed in a tube and gestated in an artificial womb. Even if she and Raul hadn’t known she existed until she was four.
Lottie was the only living offspring of two Carriers, dreamed into creation in a lab. And Lottie had tested clean of the antibodies since birth, so the lab-coats had no reason to prick and prod her. After four years, the bureaucrats in Sacramento had let her go—to her biological parents.
Nayima had always known it was too good to be true. All of it.
From the time she’d first learned of Reconciliation, she’d known it couldn’t be the freedom promised: two hundred acres, a private home, and no more medical experiments. Then, the caveats: The cranial trackers and HealthHost chips and rationed water were a different kind of cage. And they had sent Lottie seven years ago—yet another means of control. The memo from Sacramento had not surprised her. She was just surprised that it had taken so long.
Although you are of course lawfully entitled to your property under Reconciliation, we are alarmed at the growing number of extremist organizations with an agenda to harm you, primarily a group that calls itself Cleaners. The perimeters have faced constant skirmishes in the past two years, with daily protests and increasing casualties.
Additionally, a growing number of citizens, many of whom are first-generation survivors, now believe it is too great a public-safety hazard to allow Carriers to remain unsupervised, for fear that the virus might mutate and grow impervious to the vaccine we have manufactured based on your service to our research. Although it is well documented that there is no longer scientific basis for this fear, it is nonetheless driving extremist activity. For this reason, we have created a living area for Carriers that will give you much greater access to the amenities available in the city and increased security to protect you from those who wrongfully blame you for the Doomsday Virus.
We believe that once you see the scope of the vision—a neighborhood modeled on the world of your youth—you will find the proposed living quarters much more comfortable to you, especially as your age advances. Please see the photos on the next page.
Fuck the photos.
Was it better to die free? Or to keep on living, even if living would mean going back to the zookeepers in Sacramento? Lottie would have to decide for herself. Lottie could die free with her or be a prisoner with Raul. Lottie wasn’t a Carrier; she might have a chance for a life in Sacramento.
Nayima would let Lottie decide at El Nuevo Mundo.
* * *
—
She could make it in an hour if she took the abandoned highway and cut across the prairie for the last five miles, her typical route, but Nayima decided to avoid open spaces. Instead, she went fifteen minutes out of her way to the untended almond groves that gave cover and didn’t make her such an obvious target for drones. You’re still wearing a tracker, dumb-ass, she reminded herself, but the Cleaners wouldn’t have access to Sacramento’s tracking data. Probably. Unless there was a breach. Or burning the ranch had been a change of tactics.
Nayima was fairly good on the bike, considering she’d only had it for a few months, but the speed taxed her reflexes around boulders and broken trees, and her joints ached as she held on to her grips. The grips were pressure-sensitive, which made the bike’s movement herky-jerky, sometimes shifting Lottie’s weight behind her, forcing Lottie to tighten her arms, vise-like.
A tree trunk appeared from nowhere, almost a hallucination, taller than a foot. Nayima steered around the trunk so violently that Lottie gasped when the rear panel nicked it. The bike swayed right with their weight, like a horse trying to throw them. Nayima was sure they would both fall. Then the bike was upright, lurching forward, and they were both still on board.
You’re going too fast, Gram said.
Sonia joined in: “Your heart rate is dangerously accelerated. This rate has not been recorded in—seven—years. Please rest immediately until your heart rate returns to normal.”
Nayima had disabled her chip’s regular updates long ago through her HealthHost account, but apparently her preferences were glitchy now too.
Lottie whimpered.
“It’s okay, Lottie.” The lie stuck in Nayima’s throat and burned her face. But Lottie wasn’t yet strong enough to pilot the bike herself, and Nayima would do neither of them any good if she panicked. It’s okay, Gram echoed to her.
For a long while, forty minutes, then an hour, it was okay. She found her speed at a brisk fifty-two miles per hour on a deer trail through the rows, and the engine ran as smooth as glass. The gaps widened between the trees, fewer obstacles. She caught herself thinking how pretty it was, how she wished her land were greener. (Right. Her land.) She was admiring the beauty when she saw the man-made red color in the corner of her eye, and she made a wide circle with the bike to double back and see what it was.
“What?” Lottie said.
“Shhhh.” Nayima’s voice whispered barely above the bike’s hiss.
Nayima leaned to peer down, Lottie still tugging on her. “Let me loose,” Nayima said, and when she was free she bent low enough to see it: a shiny red aluminum wrapper of some kind, maybe for food, maybe for something else. But shiny. New.
“What is it?” Lottie said.
“I don’t know yet.”
Nayima set her hololens to TELEPHOTO and sc
anned the grove ahead. She looked a long time, lingering on gray twigs and brown bark, pulling out, zooming closer. A dark rabbit hopped behind a log. The colors seemed right.
But, no. Blue. Someone, a large man wearing navy-blue pants and tan hiking boots, sat with his knee propped up from behind a tree, mostly hidden, not even thirty yards ahead of them. Two legs in gray sweatpants strode across her vision before she could pull back to see his fuller figure, but that meant there were at least two. Behind the trees just ahead of them, only fifteen minutes from El Nuevo Mundo.
No one was allowed in Carrier Territories except marshals, who would be bad enough, but these men weren’t in uniform. They were not marshals.
“Your heart rate is increasing,” Sonia said. “Please rest to reduce your heart rate.”
It’s okay, pumpkin, Gram said.
“Someone’s there,” Nayima said quietly.
“It’s not—”
“No one we know.” Raul was the youngest Carrier at fifty-nine. Nayima was younger than most at sixty-six. No one at El Mundo Nuevo walked with that young man’s stride.
The bike sputtered a little too loudly, dipping an inch and then rising. Hoverbikes always wanted to be moving forward. Nayima steered left another thirty yards, back the way they’d come, then rounded toward two fallen pines crossed to provide the most shelter, big enough to stash the bike behind them and Lottie in the gap between them.
The bike dropped and rolled to a stop as its wheels descended, a racket over the almond hulls and pine needles. They both exhaled, relieved. For a moment, they only breathed together.
“Let’s go home,” Lottie finally whispered.
Nayima raised her hand: Hush. She wanted to call Raul so he could warn the others, but these men might have signal trackers. Maybe their earlier call already had been intercepted. Maybe that was why the men were here. She was lucky the men hadn’t heard the hoverbike’s approach.
Lottie scowled at Nayima from the shelter, realizing that Nayima meant to leave her. She was a lovely child. That had been hard from the start: the fresh prettiness of her ancestral face. Harder with Lottie’s new tears.
“I have to see who’s there,” Nayima whispered.
“Let’s just go back.”
Nayima shook her head. She couldn’t wait anymore. She probably had been planning to leave since her HealthHost chip tried to lure her to the lab. Since Sacramento’s lies about a safer haven. Her days of running were over.
“I have to deal with this.” Nayima handed Lottie her hololens, although she hated to part with it as much as she hated to leave the bike. “Check the time: If I’m not back in an hour—”
“An hour?”
“—or if someone comes, you hear more engines, call Raul. But only if I don’t come back. Only if someone comes. Our calls aren’t private, hear? Calling is a last resort.”
Lottie nodded, her eyes so wide and frightened that Nayima was sure she would call Raul as soon as she was gone. She wasn’t even sure Lottie shouldn’t. She would have to find those men without the hololens.
“Are they gonna kill you?” Lottie said, tears in her voice.
“They might. Or I might kill them first.”
Lottie’s face and eyes became stone. Nayima had bequeathed stone to her daughter if nothing else. Her daughter. Her daughter. Nayima almost changed her mind. Maybe Lottie was right: Maybe they should return to their house. To the smoke and the butter churn.
“I’ll be back,” she said instead. They both knew it was a ridiculous promise, and Nayima knew it was a temporary promise at best.
Lottie’s stone face softened to skin and tears again. “I love you, Mama,” Lottie said.
Nayima wanted to say, Don’t. “Me too.” Pumpkin. “Now, stay hidden.”
Nayima took a few steps away, turned to survey Lottie’s hiding place: You had to look closely to see her brown face against the dead bark, in the shadows. Lottie still clasped her doll to her chest like a breathing thing, and Nayima was glad she’d brought company. The bike’s black tail wasn’t as well hidden as she’d hoped, but it was still hard to see at ten yards.
If she had to, she would shoot the men, or die trying.
Then she would come back to Lottie.
* * *
—
Nayima’s right hip seemed to scrape its socket with each step, and before long she was limping. Her knees and ankles popped, angry. She stepped into a rabbit hole covered in pine needles and nearly lost her balance, falling against a spindly tree. Pain shot up from her toes to her neck. Damn. She searched for a sturdy walking stick, stripping a fallen twig.
Better. Much better. Gram had walked with a cane. Nothing to it. She moved purposefully, raised her feet high to avoid rustling, stepped gently as rainfall. But the woods were disorienting, especially woods as regimented as these: every tree trunk identical to the ones she’d just passed. She had spent so many years surrounded by concrete or scrub brush that she did not know the language of trees. She had a compass, but she didn’t want to veer even a few steps astray of where she’d seen the men or they might surprise her. She needed to walk a straight line.
“Your blood pressure is rising dramatically,” Sonia said. “Please take your medication.”
Slow down, pumpkin, Gram said. Slow and steady. This is the way.
Ahead, Gram was waving as she had at the house’s front gate. She was in her nurse’s uniform now, her hair salt and pepper instead of the silver she’d worn on her deathbed. Gram had retired from Pomona Valley Hospital only two years before she got sick. No matter how many steps Nayima took, she got no closer to Gram. But although Gram vanished from time to time, she mostly stayed in sight, pointing out the path.
“Gram, they fucked up my head,” Nayima huffed. “They fucked up my everything.”
I know, baby. But they didn’t break you.
Then Gram was gone, and Nayima wavered in her footsteps, unsure. She confused the trees again. Oh! Gram was standing on top of a tall boulder, wearing her purple Sunday best with her ostrich-feather hat. Overdressed as usual. Her white pumps glowed, a beacon. Gram waved and pointed: The red wrapper she’d seen was still there, gleaming in its shaft of sunlight.
“You are experiencing hallucinations,” Sonia said. “Please have your HealthHost chip serviced immediately to avoid further neural interference.”
Nayima had hardly taken ten steps away from the wrapper when she noticed a man’s voice ahead, unconcerned about being heard. She stood as straight and still as a pine to try to make out the words, but her ears were foam.
Breathe, Nayima, Gram said.
Nayima took a deep breath, held it—felt her heart’s thudding and icy-hot blood rushing in her veins—and exhaled through her mouth the way she had in the days of her yoga class at the strip mall in the land of the dead. The sky wheeled overhead, but it righted itself as she breathed. She hadn’t been this afraid in a long time.
She plunged her walking stick into the hard soil, a silent spear, and walked forward in the trees’ shadows, correcting her course to the burr of the stranger’s voice.
“—those horses. There’s herds all over out there, but they could only torch the ones inside the gate….”
Nayima’s anger made lightning seem to split the sky, sharpening her senses. The man still sounded muffled, although he might be only five yards from her. She hadn’t understood him sooner because his mouth was covered with some kind of mask. Only a fanatic or a fool would be wearing a mask on a day this hot, with no one in sight, still two miles out from El Nuevo Mundo. No marshals or soldiers wore masks in Carrier Territories. Not anymore. The Carriers’ blood had wiped out the virus as mightily as it had spread it.
Only fanatics would wear masks. Only fanatics would slaughter horses.
Nayima’s index finger felt numb from hugging the trigger guard. She walked like a
cat from tree to tree, one step to the next. She could smell tobacco vapor in the air. Close.
“…Well, tell them to hurry the fuck up,” the voice said, as if it were in her ear like Gram’s. But it wasn’t. She was sure of that. This voice was real.
Nayima peeked past a thick tree trunk, and there he was: his back to her in a black jacket, gray sweatpants, the hunting rifle slung across his shoulder. He was on a hololens, poking absently at his backpack on the ground with a twig. He had been waiting a long time. He was impatient. He had forgotten never to stop watching.
An easy shot. Too easy. But where was the other one?
There he is, baby, Gram said.
At an angle ahead, two o’clock, ten yards, the man in the navy-blue pants was pissing against a tree in a steady stream. He was wearing his backpack. His rifle was at arm’s length, standing just clear of his stream.
“Your respiration is increasing,” Sonia said. “To avoid hyperventilation, take deep, even breaths. Rest or seek a medical professional.”
She was a good shot. Shooting had been her hobby since Reconciliation, no matter how expensive the bullets were. Cans. Bottles. Old tires. Rabbits and squirrels, sometimes, like Gram used to hunt when she was a girl in Gadsden County, Florida. Nayima had a split second to choose: Which man could reach his rifle sooner?
She almost spent too much time pondering it. The pissing man was shaking off.
Her excitement made her crack a twig, and Hololens was about to turn when she fired into the back of his head. He fell forward. The gunshot echoes exploded in the woods, hunching the pissing man’s shoulders. He didn’t have time to zip up before he reached for his rifle, and he couldn’t raise his weapon before Nayima’s first shot grazed his shoulder and backed him up a step and her second and third shots riddled his chest. He gasped a long breath inside his plastic contagion mask—the way Gram had gasped when her pain stole her breath—and dropped to his knees while he stared with bewilderment. Nayima imagined what he saw: an old gray-haired black woman with a walking stick, face brittle, eyes bright. This was not the person he had expected to kill him today, if he’d even bothered to imagine that he might die.
A People's Future of the United States Page 13