by Jon McGoran
I figured I’d count to five and if he still hadn’t looked up, I’d leave. While I was counting, I looked around the tent. There was a cot instead of a sleeping bag, an electric lantern instead of a chemlight, and a satellite phone. On the floor next to the desk was a metal bowl, and inside it, a little mini-Hotblock.
I realized as I was looking at it that Martin had finished whatever he was doing, and was now waiting for me.
“Oh hi,” I said casually. I’m not sure if he got my point.
“Sorry about that out there,” he said. “Roberta’s been through a lot. She has a lot of anger. She and Dara seem to bring out the worst in each other.”
I nodded but didn’t reply. Frankly, I hadn’t seen anything too terrible in Dara’s behavior.
“I apologize also for insisting that you stay here for the time being. As I explained, those are my orders and they are for your own good, but I certainly understand if you find the situation less than ideal.”
That didn’t even get a nod.
He paused a few seconds until he realized no response would be forthcoming. Then he took a deep breath and continued.
“I’ve heard again from E4E. There seems to be some confusion about Rex.”
“What kind of confusion?” I said, keeping calm until I knew more. “Is he okay?”
“Well, it turns out they didn’t post his bail after all.”
“He’s still in jail?”
“No, no, he’s not. That’s just it. Someone did post his bail. We’re just not sure who.”
“Well, where is he?”
“I’m sure it’s just a miscommunication. E4E has been growing rapidly and they’ve never been particularly well organized. Plus they have a lot on their plate right now, so—”
“Where is he?”
He took another deep breath and shook his head. “We don’t know.”
“What? What if OmniCare has him?”
He held up his hands, as if that would calm me down. “There’s nothing to indicate that’s the case.”
“And has E4E looked into OmniCare yet?”
“In the past hour? I doubt it very much. Look, Jimi, everything is under control. I’m sure we’ll locate Rex in no time.”
“That’s easy for you to say! He’s not your friend.”
“You don’t know that.”
That stopped me. Of course, Rex had been there. For the first time, I noticed the worry in Martin’s eyes, and that scared me more than anything else. Maybe he and Rex were close friends. I had no way of knowing. I wondered if Martin knew about Rex and me, if Rex had talked about me. Or if, instead, he’d kept me a secret from Martin and the others here—just like he’d kept them a secret from me.
“Then I’m sure you agree we need to go and find him,” I said.
The worry in Martin’s eyes disappeared, replaced by a flat, disciplined lack of emotion, like a mask had descended over his face. “I have my orders,” he said. “Rex would understand. He’d be disappointed in me if I disobeyed them.”
I don’t think he meant it as a dig, but it sure felt like one, like maybe he knew Rex better than I did. I left the tent without another word, marching through the darkness, torn between hot emotions and cold determination.
Everyone had left the circle except for Sly, Claudia, and Dara. They looked up as I stepped over a log and sat down.
I met Claudia’s eye and gave her a tiny nod.
She did a bad job of hiding her smile as she nodded back.
“What?” Sly said, looking back and forth between us.
“Nothing,” Claudia said.
“They’ve lost Rex,” I said.
“What?” Dara exclaimed, taking me by surprise. I hadn’t expected a reaction from her at all, and I felt a momentary petty jealously that she, too, had been part of this secret segment of Rex’s life.
“He’ll be okay,” Sly said.
“What happened?” Claudia asked.
I sat down, feeling suddenly cold and achy. “Someone bailed him out, but now it turns out it wasn’t E4E. They don’t know who it was or where he is.”
Sly snorted. “Just because E4E’s left hand has no idea where he is, doesn’t mean their right hand isn’t holding him. You know how it goes. Someone at E4E probably got sick of waiting for the brass to take action and went and bailed him out.”
I hoped he was right, but I didn’t share his confidence. “Yeah, maybe.”
The temperature had dropped and the last light in the sky had disappeared while I was in Martin’s tent. Around us, the circle of dark earth thawed by the Hotblock was shrinking inside an advancing line of frost. Inside my jacket I was still comfortably warm, but below it and above it, the cold was biting.
Claudia looked at me in the darkness, then squinted as a gust of wind sprayed us with ice crystals. When the wind died down again, she said, “We’d better get some rest, huh?”
I nodded.
“Yeah,” Sly said. “I guess it’s that time.”
“Yeah for some of us,” Dara said. “I have to take first watch, thanks to Roberta.”
“Thanks, Dara,” I said. “For sticking up for us.”
She smiled and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I gave Sly a hug, squeezing tight as I told him how good it was to see him.
“You too, Jimi,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning, and it’ll all work out. You’ll see.”
When Claudia unzipped our tent flaps, a thin coating of ice came off the fabric in flakes. We shook them out, then climbed inside and zipped the flaps behind us.
I found the chemlight at the top of tent pole and the tent filled with a pale glow.
Claudia was already grinning at me. “You ready for this?”
I nodded. “You sure you can do it?”
She gave me a smug look. “Piece of cake.”
I hoped she was at least half joking. I was glad she was confident, but I didn’t for a second believe it was going to be easy. “Okay,” I said. “What’s the plan?”
CHAPTER 41
Claudia held up four fingers and ticked them off as she spoke. “We need to disconnect the charger under the copter, get the tarp off, get inside, and then lift off. I figure we should be able to do the first three before anyone has the slightest inkling. And even if the entire camp wakes up when I start the motor, we’ll be in the air before they can get to us.”
“And you’re sure you can fly these?”
“My dad had one. He taught me how.”
I cocked my head at her. “I mean can you really fly one? Not ‘My dad took me to practice three times’ or ‘I watched a Holovid once,’ ” I said, throwing her words back at her. “Can. You. Fly it?”
She smirked and gave me a withering stare that frankly wasn’t as confident as I would have liked. “Okay, look, the one I flew wasn’t as big as these, but they’re all pretty much the same. We’ll take the one we came in on. I can definitely fly that one.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking, I guess that will have to do. “You’re sure it’ll be charged up?”
She looked at her watch. “If we wait a few hours.”
“What if they come after us? In another copter.”
“We’ll have a pretty good head start. And I doubt they’re going to shoot us down.”
I nodded, although I wouldn’t have put it past Roberta. “If we wait until after three a.m., the battery will be charged and Roberta will be on watch,” I said. “I’d hate it if she caught us, but she seems like a dim bulb. I think our chances would be better against her than against Dara.”
“Agreed.”
“But still, at least one person isn’t going to be asleep. We have to be quick.”
“Yeah, it sure would suck to get caught by Roberta. What do we do about her?”
“She’ll be walking the perimeter, right?” I said. “If we wait until she’s at the far end of the camp, would that give us enough time to lift off?”
“Yeah, it should only take a few seconds.”
She thought for a moment. “Unless she starts shooting.”
“That’s a pleasant thought.”
“Could happen. But that copter’s pretty heavy duty. We’ll be okay even if she does.”
I nodded, only mildly reassured. “I should let Sly know we’re going.”
“Are you crazy? Absolutely not. I know you two are friends, but he’s taking his orders seriously. We can’t risk it.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “I still feel bad, though.”
“He’ll understand. Plus, you’ll see him again soon enough, and you can explain, tell him you’re sorry.”
I nodded. “We should talk about what we’re going to do when we get there.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, actually,” she said, flashing a mischievous smile. “I have a few ideas.”
“Yeah,” I said, with a strange mixture of hope and trepidation. “Me, too.”
We pieced together the outline of a plan, then a backup plan, too, and went over them both several times. We synchronized our watches—which was not as easy as it sounds—and put our alarms on vibrate, set for 3:20.
Then we tried to get some sleep.
It wasn’t easy. My head was spinning with worry and fear: about Rex, about the chimeras in the mine and in Centre Hollow, about Doc, and about whether either of our plans would work. I even wondered how much trouble I was getting myself into at home, and whether the excuse that I’d been kidnapped/rescued and taken out of the country against my will would make things better or worse.
I slept fitfully, and I was awake before my watch quietly buzzed at 3:20.
“You awake?” Claudia whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Do you hear anybody outside?”
I listened for a few seconds, then said, “No. But let’s give it a minute to be sure.”
We stayed silent and I counted to sixty in my head, but there was no sound other than the wind rustling the sides of our tent.
“Shall we?” I said.
“Yeah, okay. Slow and quiet, right? Stay in the shadows, and let’s not make a move until we know where Roberta is.”
In the darkness, I saw the outline of Claudia’s hand reaching out, but just before it closed on the zipper, I heard a sound outside and I grabbed her wrist.
She turned to look at me, and I shook my head, finger to my lips.
We held perfectly still, and as the seconds dragged out, I wondered if my nerves had been playing tricks on me, but then I heard it again, barely there, the faint crunch…crunch of footsteps on the ice.
They grew slowly louder and louder, steadily closer and closer, until I began to suspect they were coming straight toward us.
I was still holding Claudia’s hand when a silhouette appeared on the tent wall, cast by the moonlight outside.
It was clearly Roberta and she was clearly holding a gun. She stopped right outside our tent and stood there, listening. I suppressed a vague shudder, wondering how many times she had stood outside our tent as we slept.
Finally she moved away, the crunch…crunch…crunching of her footsteps slowly receding into the distance. She’d be headed toward the copters, on the opposite side of the camp, but it was impossible to tell if she was moving clockwise or counterclockwise, to our right or to our left.
After another minute, Claudia pulled her hand from mine, leaned in close, and said, “Now?”
“Yeah. Now.”
As Claudia eased up the zipper and we climbed out, ice flaked off the fabric and wind whipped at the flaps.
The sky was clear and the moon was startlingly bright, casting an electric blue glow across the snow. It was way colder than before. I pulled my hands up into my sleeves, but the air bit into the skin on my neck and face, and clawed at my legs through my jeans.
We crept between the tents, keeping to the shadows. As we approached the clearing between the tents and the copters we paused, scanning the trees along the perimeter. There was no sign of Roberta.
We needed to know where she was before we moved to the copters, but we hadn’t counted on this kind of cold, or this kind of delay. We were only standing there for a couple of minutes, but it felt like forever.
Finally we spotted her against the trees, slowly walking the perimeter in the darkness, still headed toward the copters. That meant we had to wait for her to get to the copters, inspect them or whatever she was going to do, and then move far enough past them so we could do what we needed to do.
“Damn, she’s slow,” I whispered.
Claudia replied with a shivery nod.
I thought about how embarrassing it would be to freeze to death out there and be found the next morning, frozen solid behind a tent. I almost suggested we go back to the tent to warm up for a minute. But finally Roberta got to the copters. She looked them over and moved on, slowly but deliberately. As soon as she disappeared behind the tents to our right, we took off, running as fast as we could while keeping low and trying not to crunch too loud.
I quickly outpaced Claudia, but with the copters all covered with tarps, I couldn’t tell which was the one we’d flown in on. I looked over my shoulder at her, and she pointed at one to my left, the one with the least ice buildup. I slid to my knees and grabbed one of the clips holding the tarp down. The metal was so cold it burned my skin. By the time I had it unclipped, Claudia had wriggled under the copter to disconnect the charging cable.
As I worked my way around the tarp, my fingers felt dead, clumsy and useless. The wind whipped the tarp out of my grasp and I clawed at it frantically. When I finally managed to wrap my fingers around it, I heard a strange sound, sort of like laughter, but stupid, vindictive, and cruel.
Looking up, I found the source of it.
Roberta.
CHAPTER 42
She was wearing a thick parka, snow pants, and gloves. I hated her for that alone. Then she opened her mouth.
“Oh, this is too good.”
I stood up straight, or as straight as I could—my back and shoulders wouldn’t unhunch in the cold, and my hands were frozen into claws. I couldn’t tell if Claudia was watching from the shadows under the copter, and I didn’t know if my hands were capable of signaling anything comprehensible, but I did my best to wave them behind me, telling her to stay back.
I didn’t know if I could even speak at this point, either—but before I could try to say anything, another voice said, “What’s going on?”
Sly came around the copter, hands thrust into his pants pockets, eyes squinting against the cold.
“Your friend here is sneaking around, messing with the copters. I’m going to have to have her restrained.”
Sly looked at me. “Jimi, is that true?”
“I—”
“Do you even know how to fly these things?”
“I—”
He glanced at the ground behind my legs, then back up at me. He knew what was going on. He knew Claudia was down there. I gave him a frozen half smile, both fessing up and begging for his help.
“She’s just out for a walk,” Sly said, turning to Roberta.
“At three thirty in the morning?”
He shrugged, but it became a shudder. “Why not? I am.”
“The only legit excuse for anyone being up right now is if you’ve got to pee, so you’d better go do that, then get straight back to your tent before I have to restrain you, too.”
Sly cocked an eye at her and tilted his head. “I’m sorry, what?”
She stepped closer to him. “You heard me.”
She had a rifle over her shoulder and a dart gun in her holster. She was twice our size—combined—and I could barely move. But I wondered, if it came down to it, whether Sly and Claudia and I could take her.
“What’s going on out here?” said yet another voice, and Dara stepped around the copter as well. It appeared Claudia and I had awakened the whole camp. “What’s everybody doing up?” she asked.
She was dressed and armed just like Roberta, but her hood was down. Her eye
s gleamed in the moonlight, and I wondered if it was from the cold or something else.
“What are you doing up?” Roberta replied, saying it like a challenge.
“Just wanted to make sure you were okay out here.”
“Yeah, right. Well, I have everything under control. And your watch is over, so you can go back to bed.”
“What exactly do you have under control?” Dara said.
“Look, Dara,” I cut in, before Roberta could answer, “I know Martin has his orders, but Rex could be in danger, and there are dozens of other chimeras dying in those mines. More will be coming through OmniCare to replace them. One of them could be Rex.”
“So, what, you were thinking you were just going to fly away?” She frowned. “Do you even know how to fly a quadcopter like this?”
“No,” I admitted.
“But I c-c-can,” said a voice, and Claudia crawled out from under the copter. “We’ll bring it b-back.” Her teeth were chattering and her face looked blue—I hoped it was at least partly from the moonlight.
Roberta laughed. “Oh my God, you are both in so much trouble.”
“Well, here’s the way I see it,” Dara said.
Roberta cocked her head. “How’s that? I’d love to know.”
There was a faint spitting sound, like someone trying to get a speck of paper or something off of their tongue. A tiny piece of gray fluff appeared on Roberta’s shoulder.
For a second we all stood there: Roberta with that smug, belligerent look on her face, everybody else looking at the dart embedded in her shoulder.
Finally she seemed to sense something wasn’t quite right. She looked down at the dart, then back up at Dara. As her hand reached toward the dart, she said, “You little shhhh…” Then her eyes rolled up and she started falling.
Her face was headed straight for the rock-hard ice, but Dara’s arm flashed out and she grabbed a wad of Roberta’s hair, halting her fall with her face just inches from the ground.
Dara took a deep breath and let it out in an icy cloud. She eased Roberta to the ground and rolled her onto her back, then looked up at the rest of us.