by Jon McGoran
The car salesman watched him fall, squinting at the little piece of gray fluff on his shoulder, ruffling slightly in the breeze.
“What the fff…” he said, then his eyes rolled up and he pitched over, too.
Claudia and I shared a brief, incredulous laugh, no idea what the hell was going on.
We stepped around the car and the two guys on the ground, and peeked around the corner of the building, but there was no sign of anyone who might have fired the darts.
We were still looking when we heard a zzzzip sound behind us. Spinning around, we saw a large woman dressed in tactical black. She looked like she was spliced with some kind of bear, with a black nose and coarse brown hair stark against the white skin of face. Her feet were just hitting the ground. One hand held a clip attached to the rope she had just descended. The other one held a dart gun. “Jimi and Claudia, right?” she said.
Claudia’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Yeah, who are you?”
“My name’s Roberta.”
Before she could continue, another chimera, half her size, came down a second rope. His landing was a little rougher, but I was still infinitely more delighted by it. I dove past Roberta and wrapped my arms around him. As I squeezed him tight, I heard his strangled voice telling Claudia over my shoulder, “You can call me Sly.”
I let him go and stepped back.
“You two know each other?” Claudia said.
“Hell yeah,” Sly said, pulling me in for a second hug.
I was surprised Claudia didn’t recognize him, but then I remembered their paths had missed crossing by five minutes.
“Sly’s a really good friend, and a good friend of Doc and Rex and the others,” I told her. “He was with us throughout the whole thing at Pitman.”
Claudia introduced herself, and they each said hi. Before I could ask Sly what he was doing there, Roberta cleared her throat, interrupting the pleasantries. “We’re here to get you out of here,” she said. “We’re from Chimerica.”
CHAPTER 36
Chimerica?” I said, turning to Sly. “What’s she talking about?”
“I’ll explain later. Right now, she’s right—we’ve got to move. Wells’s people are all around here. Looking for you.”
Roberta was peering around the edge of the building, just like we had done.
“Howard Wells?” Claudia said, her voice edged with a faint serration of fear.
“Looking for me?” I said, somehow having a hard time mustering the disbelief.
Roberta looked back at Sly and gave him a thumbs-up.
He put an arm around my waist and looked up at me. “Hold on. Tight.” His tone told me there wasn’t time to argue, so I held him as tightly as I could.
Across from us, Roberta still had one arm wound with the black rope. She wrapped the other arm around Claudia, who didn’t look entirely comfortable about it.
The alley darkened and the ambient buzz rose to a roar as a quadcopter drifted out from above the roof of the Dairy Queen and into the air above us. Apparently it had been hovering up there, just out of sight. The ropes jerked, and suddenly all four of us rose through the air and into the belly of the quadcopter.
The inside was sparse, like an old cargo plane or maybe military surplus. Instead of the car-like interior of a regular quadcopter, this one had a large empty cabin with a short passage to the cockpit, where the pilot and copilot sat. It smelled of metal, ozone, and old-fashioned lubricant, more like a truck than an aircraft. As soon as we were safely inside, the hatch slid shut and the copter surged forward.
“We can’t leave yet,” I shouted, bending my head close to Sly’s so he could hear me above the din from the rotors. “Rex is in jail down there, or at least I think he is. We have to find out for sure and get him out of there!”
Sly shook his head. “He’s down there, all right, but he’s safe and secure and E4E is working on getting him out. Right now, we need to focus on getting you to safety, too!”
We were rising steadily and picking up speed when the police station—and the jail—came into view below. I pressed my forehead against the window.
“He’ll be okay,” Sly shouted over the motor. “They’ll have him out of there in no time, and meanwhile, don’t you worry.” He grinned. “Big Dog can take care of himself.”
Claudia turned to him and said, “But…what about my car?” Sly didn’t seem like he had an answer for that, but then the copter began to bank, and for a moment the SmartPike came into view, a ribbon of stalled cars stretching from one horizon to the other, with a slow trickle coming off the exit ramps. The air above it swarmed with police drones and copters. But as we continued to bank and pick up speed, that all disappeared, too.
Two other chimeras were piloting the quad. I didn’t get their names. Nobody talked at all, though my thoughts were churning, wondering what Roberta meant when she said they were from Chimerica. After half an hour, the engines dropped from a whine to a throatier roar. I looked out the window and saw the trees rising to meet us, but ahead of us, they abruptly stopped. There was a tiny sliver of ice-covered beach, and beyond that water, as far as the eye could see.
Claudia joined me at the window. “What the…”
I thought we were coming in for a landing, but I realized that we were just descending, not slowing down. In a flash, the beach disappeared beneath us and we were out over the cold, gray water. Right over the cold, gray water. Low enough that the downdraft from the rotors was kicking up spray.
Sly was avoiding my gaze, but I decided to take advantage of the change in the engines’ pitch and try again. I grabbed his collar to bring him close enough to hear, and maybe for a little emphasis as well.
He looked at my hand, then up at my face.
“Where are we?” I shouted into his ear.
He pointed down and shouted back, “Lake Erie.”
“What? Where the hell are we going?”
He shook his head. “I’m not supposed to tell you till we get there.”
Claudia came up next to us and shouted, “Did you say Lake Erie? Are we going to Canada?”
He glanced at Roberta, then gave us a slight nod.
“How?” I asked. “It’s a closed border.”
I knew that what I’d been doing, what I was trying to do, for Doc, for Rex, for the miners, was all important, for real. But leaving the country illegally, without a passport, without telling my mom, that was a different order of magnitude. And we were still flying.
“This thing’s a bucket of bolts,” he said, twirling his finger at the copter, then pointing it at the cockpit. “But Dara’s a magician. When we get close to the shore, she’ll find a Canadian to track.” He paused as the copter banked sharply to the right. Then he smiled. “I guess we’re close to the shore.”
Outside the window, another copter came into view, startlingly close. It looked nice and new, with white paint and red trim. We were close enough that I could see the pilot, his hands gesturing at us to back off. In the rear window, two little kids were waving at us. Our copter dipped its wing, presumably to the kids.
“What the hell is she doing?” Claudia shouted, alarmed at how close we were.
Roberta was giving Sly a cold stare, like she didn’t approve of him telling us anything.
“We get close enough that our radar signatures merge, then Dara clones their beacon. As far as Canadian air traffic is concerned, we’re a Canadian craft that flew out over the water to see the sights, then came back ashore.”
Claudia paused, suddenly more impressed than alarmed. “That’ll work?”
Sly shrugged. “Worked every time so far.”
“What about when we get to the other side?” she asked.
“We’re just another quadcopter coming and going.”
“And where are we going?” I said again, casually.
He opened his mouth, but caught himself. “You’ll see soon.”
Moments later we banked again, peeling away from the other copter. Minutes after that
, we were over land again, in Canada.
We flew northeast along the shoreline for a few minutes, then veered left and headed northwest.
Once I got over my shock at having left the US and entered Canada—and stopped wondering how I was going to tell my mother that, in addition to everything else, I had done so without permission from her or either government—I stuck by the window to take it all in.
Ever since we hit land, we’d been flying over grids of farmland and suburbs. There were still suburbs in Canada. I knew that from school. They hadn’t been so hard hit by the flu epidemics, so there hadn’t been the same depopulation as in the States. Plus, people had been moving northward for decades as things got warmer, so Canada’s population had actually been growing. While most American suburbs had become the zurbs, in Canada they were still just…suburbs.
It was weird looking down on them, thinking about how different they were, probably still kids playing in the streets, just like when my parents were young.
Then they were gone, and once again we were skimming over water, this time flecked with ice.
“Where are we this time?” I asked.
“Lake Huron,” Sly said.
Roberta sat up and looked out the window for a moment. “Georgian Bay, technically.”
Sly rolled his eyes and leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Lake Huron.”
“Okay, Sly, enough is enough,” I said. “Where are you taking us?”
As if in reply, the copter started to bank, tipping so the window on one side showed only sky, the other side only sea. We circled as we descended, over and over. At first sky and sea were all that we saw. Then an island appeared beneath us, a squarish patch of white and green in the middle of lots and lots of cold, gray ice and water. The island grew as we descended, enough that I could make out a dozen wind turbines spinning madly, painted green to match the trees around them on a ridge overlooking the water. But by the time we landed, the island still hadn’t grown by much.
The engines slowed and quieted, and Sly opened the side door. As frigid air filled the copter, he grinned and said, “Welcome to Lonely Island.”
CHAPTER 37
Lonely Island?” Claudia said, smirking at me like I was a coconspirator. “Are you serious?”
But as we stepped off the copter, her smirk faltered. We weren’t alone at all. The place was bustling with dozens of people, all dressed in gray-and-white camo fatigues, all chimeras as far as I could tell. But the place still seemed so desolate that the name made perfect sense.
We had set down at one end of a large, snow-covered field surrounded by thick woods that whistled with a steady, cutting wind. The top of a lighthouse peered over the treetops.
The far end of the field was carpeted with more white-and-gray camouflage—tents, maybe fifty of them. The place had the feel of an army camp from the Civil War, and I felt a chill deeper than the cold as I wondered if that was where things were heading.
The pilot and copilot came out of the copter after us, and for the first time I saw they had names written on their headsets. Amos, the copilot, was spliced with something feline. Dara, the pilot, was spliced with a hawk or falcon. She looked vaguely like Ruth and Pell, in some ways. But whereas they were graceful and almost delicate, Dara seemed absolutely fierce.
“Thanks,” Sly called over to them. They both gave a thumbs-up, then they each grabbed a corner of a large, heavy-duty gray tarp that was anchored to the ground on one side.
“Thanks,” I said, not sure how grateful I should be. Amos didn’t seem to hear me, but Dara replied with a curt nod and a clipped smile.
As soon as the copter’s rotors stopped, they shook the snow off the tarp and lifted it over the copter, clipping the loose corners to hooks sunk into the ground. I then realized that some of the larger tents in the camp were actually quadcopters under similar cover.
A tall, slender, strikingly handsome chimera walked up to us. I couldn’t tell what he was spliced with, but the deep brown skin on his face and neck was covered with silky fur, a lighter brown, that blended into the close-cropped black hair on his head and his beard. His heavy green army jacket was open at the neck, revealing a patch of gold fur at his throat. He smiled and held out his hand, but his smile faltered as someone behind him muttered, “Who’s the nonk?”
Nonk was a slur for nonchimera. Looking around, it hit me that I was, in all likelihood, the only one there who wasn’t spliced. I’d never been called a nonk before. None of the chimeras I knew were the type to use the term, but they’d told me what it meant. Made sense, I guess. The nonks sure had slurs for chimeras.
The tall chimera seemed to be fighting the urge to glare or snap at whoever had said it. Then the smile was back, and he said, “You’ll be Jimi and Claudia. I’m Martin.”
“I’m Jimi,” I said, “…but you know that already. Right.” I turned toward Claudia and said, “And this is…” But he already knew that, too.
“Hi,” Claudia said, shaking his hand as well.
I was about to ask him where we were when Claudia said, “So…this is Chimerica?” She looked around as she said it, making it plain that if it was, she’d be disappointed.
Martin’s smile faltered again. “Not exactly,” he said. “But it’s part of Chimerica.”
“So where are we?” I asked.
“Lonely Island,” he said. “Canada. Ontario. Between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay.”
“And why are we here?”
“Wells’s people have been after you. They’ve been following you. They were closing in.”
I laughed, but it sounded fake even to me. “Why would they be spying on me?”
“Because of Pitman, we’re guessing.”
“How do you know they were following her?” Claudia asked.
I looked at her, then back at Martin. She had a point. “Were you spying on me?”
His eyes rolled a little—annoyed, exasperated, but a little bit busted, too. “We’ve been keeping an eye on you, that’s all. For your safety. But we lost you when your car broke down. Seems like we found you again just in time.”
I looked at Sly. “Who’s ‘we’?”
Martin spread his arms out wide. “Chimerica.”
“So, where is Chimerica?” Claudia asked. “The rest of it, I mean.”
“And more important, what is Chimerica? What is it really?” I added. I looked around at the tents and the snow. It sure didn’t look like the utopia people built it up to be.
“Chimerica is all over,” Martin said, his eyes shining. “Wherever chimeras are being oppressed, somewhere nearby there’s a bit of Chimerica, or there will be. There’s probably a dozen camps like this, some a lot bigger, all around the world.”
“Okay…” I tried not to sound as dubious as I felt.
“What do you do?” Claudia asked.
“We step in and do what we can to protect chimeras from persecution, or other threats.”
“Are you part of E4E?”
“No.” Martin smiled. “We value E4E’s contributions and share many of their objectives, but…well, they do their thing and we do ours.”
“Who’s in charge of it?” I asked.
He gave me a look I couldn’t read. “In this camp, I’m in charge.”
Claudia rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but who’s in charge of you?”
Martin’s eyes flickered at me again, so quick I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. “There’s a council,” he said. “We try to keep its existence quiet. For security purposes.”
I pointed south. “Well, if you’re supposed to be protecting chimeras, we need to go back where we just came from. There are a lot of chimeras in danger.” I turned to Sly. “And Rex is one of them.”
“We know about Rex,” Martin said. “E4E has lawyers on the way to help him.”
“They’ll have him bailed out in no time,” Sly added.
“It’s not just Rex,” I said. “There’s lots of other chimeras back at OmniCare, and they’re all in danger. We need to g
o back and help them. Or send someone else if you’ve got someone closer.”
“No,” Martin said gravely. “We’re the closest.” He glanced at Sly and Roberta, then lowered his voice. “Let’s go for a walk.”
He turned and headed for the trees. Claudia and I looked at each other, then at Sly. Then the three of us started walking, too, over snow that had been packed into solid ice.
Roberta hung back by the shrouded copter for a minute, watching us, then she followed, too, twenty paces back.
Once we entered the woods, Martin stepped aside and waited for us to walk alongside him. Roberta maintained her distance.
“We’ve been wondering about OmniCare ever since they announced they were going to start treating chimeras,” Martin said. “Funding from Howard Wells is a pretty big red flag, even if it’s intended to take people’s minds off his other misdeeds. And that Dr. Charlesford is hard to figure out.” He shook his head. “Put those two together and I can’t imagine there isn’t something else going on. But we haven’t had the resources to look too closely. Tell me what you know.”
I glanced at Claudia and she nodded, so I explained what we’d seen inside the hospital, and in the mines below it. About what they were doing to the chimeras in the CCUs. I told them about Rex being arrested, and then about Centre Hollow, about the chimeras living there and about Henry and what Devon had told me about what happens after three months.
“And they’re doing it all to obtain yttrium,” Claudia said. “So they can make more Wellplants.”
Martin whipped his head around. “So it is Wells? You know that for certain?”
“We can’t prove it,” I said.
Sly looked horrified. Martin must have been, too, but he didn’t show it. He ground his jaw and looked down at his feet.
“So we need to get back there,” I said for what felt like the millionth time. “Now. We’ve got to shut that place down. Save those chimeras down there. We have to help them.”
“I’ll contact E4E,” Martin said. “I’ll get them to send investigators to check it out.”