by C. J. Hill
Taylor gaped at him in disbelief. “You thought we were shorthanded, so you decided to go out and interview militant combatants in your free time?”
She’d spoken too loudly. The other council members were all staring at her now. Some drifted farther away as though she might turn her anger on them. The rest regarded her with the sort of strained patience they usually had when dealing with her. She’s one of those temperamental geniuses. Humor her.
Ren stepped closer to Xavier, surveying him. “How can we trust this man when we know nothing about him?” Addressing Xavier, Ren asked, “What sector are you from?”
Xavier returned his gaze coldly. “That doesn’t matter.”
Ren let out a scoffing grunt. “You haven’t lived here long if you think that.”
See, Taylor wanted to say to the still-staring council members, I’m not the only one who has a problem with this. Even the untemperamental ungeniuses are ticked off.
Shaking his head, Lee walked over to President Mason. “This isn’t what we agreed on.”
President Mason calmly tucked his comlink into his belt. His casual stance said that he was used to dealing with quarreling children, and he expected them to play nicely regardless. “Plans always change,” he said. “They’re just changing earlier on in this mission than we expected. Your job remains the same: protect those under your care.” His gaze swept over Ren, Lee, and Xavier. “Do I have your promise on that?”
“Yes,” Xavier said.
A moment passed. Then Ren and Lee also gave a yes, although theirs sounded considerably more forced.
“Joseph,” Sheridan said quietly. She stood next to Taylor but was watching him, waiting for an explanation. “Why are you suddenly keeping secrets?”
Suddenly? Taylor doubted that. Joseph had kept secrets from them back when they were in Traventon, and apparently the move here hadn’t changed that habit.
Joseph looked at Sheridan, and the lines of tense defiance on his face softened. He walked over to her, took her hand, and led her away from the others.
Taylor watched them for a few seconds, then stormed over to join them. If Joseph was explaining things to Sheridan, he could explain them to her too. As she strode up behind Joseph, he said, “I can’t tell you some things right now.” He squeezed Sheridan’s hand. “You’ll just have to believe that I have a good reason.”
Sheridan’s face was upturned, trying to read more from his expression. “I believe you, but—”
“Why should we trust you,” Taylor interrupted, “when you don’t trust us enough to let us know why you’re bringing Xavier along? Trust begets trust.”
Joseph let out a breath of frustration. He didn’t turn to face Taylor. “Well, those are words we can carve somewhere. We’ll put them right next to your last quote about the subject: ‘I don’t trust anyone.’”
Taylor walked around Joseph so that he had to look at her. “Yeah, but I’m not the one who showed up here with an entourage.”
Sheridan stepped between them, her hands raised and pleading. “Don’t fight. Come on—you guys have to work together or this mission will fail before you even get to Traventon.”
“It won’t fail,” Joseph said. “Despite Taylor’s dramatics.”
Dramatics? Oh, she would show him dramatics. The next time she hacked into his computer, she would add an irremovable tagline that went out with all of his messages. It would read, Big sale today! Discount everything I say! With me, the truth is always half off!
“Maybe,” Taylor said slowly, “I should insist on bringing someone along too.” She waved a hand in Sheridan’s direction. “Maybe I’ll demand to take my sister with me.”
Sheridan brightened. “Really?”
“No,” Joseph said, keeping his gaze on Taylor. “You won’t put her in danger that way.” It was as much a command as a statement.
Sheridan cocked her head at Joseph. “Why do you think I can’t handle danger? I’m not a weakling, you know. I can face danger as well as either of you.”
Taylor inwardly groaned. She never should have gotten her sister started on that subject again. Taylor gave Joseph one last angry glare, turned on her heel, and stalked back toward the airbikes. She didn’t have any leverage to use against Joseph, and he knew it. Because the last thing Taylor wanted was to put Sheridan in danger.
Chapter 7
Taylor rode on the airbike behind Lee, straps across both shoulders keeping her secured to her seat. Joseph rode with Ren. Xavier flew on an airbike between the two. Taylor supposed that was so Ren could keep an eye on him. The group skimmed over a forest of oaks. Leaves and branches ran together in a green blur. Every once in a while they passed patches of land where nothing grew—not trees, not bushes, not grass. The earth there spread out in unusual brownish-red spots. Something toxic had penetrated the dirt.
The wind pushed against Taylor’s ears noisily, and looking down made her dizzy. She shut her eyes and concentrated on the rank virus. Or at least tried to. Her lack of sleep and the dipping and swaying of the airbike soon put her to sleep.
When she woke up, they had landed on the ground and she was leaning limply against Lee’s back. She hoped she hadn’t done anything embarrassing like drool on his pack. Pine trees surrounded the group, spreading out their welcoming boughs. The air smelled like Christmas. If she looked at the trees, just focused on them, she could pretend she was back in the twenty-first century. She could imagine that over the hill, shopping malls, fast food restaurants, and her family all waited for her—beautiful, ordinary life.
That was the sort of bandage that hurt when you ripped it off. She stumbled off the airbike, still sleepy, and crunched her way through the pine needles to the spot where the others were gathering. The sun hung midway through the sky, letting her know the day was half gone. “How much longer until we get to the outpost?” she asked.
“Five hours,” Lee said. “This will be our only break.”
Ren and Lee both had their comlinks out, checking the scanners for city scouts. After a few moments Lee said, “No one is near.”
Ren kept checking his scanner, then said, “We’re clear.”
Lee raised an eyebrow. “I already told everyone that.”
Ren slipped his pack from his shoulders. “And this time you were right.”
Both sat down, keeping their packs close, as though they were worried someone would run off with them.
Great. This whole mission was going to be like a convention of the paranoid. Taylor slipped her pack from her shoulders, sat down on the ground, and pulled her meal square from her backpack. It looked like a brownie. Unfortunately the similarity ended there. Meal squares were dense and had an aftertaste like chewable vitamins. Square meals, she thought, weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
As she ate, she noticed there were other trees mixed in with the pines, trees whose leaves were yellowing for fall. Grass and wildflowers tangled on the ground around large pieces of rock. No, on closer examination, what she had assumed were gray rocks were actually chunks of weathered pavement. This place had been a road once.
Had it been one of the plagues or one of the wars that had depopulated the area? Both had happened so frequently over the last four hundred years that the world’s population had fallen to a fourth of what it had been in her time. The trees and flowers here were probably descendants of ones someone had planted in their yard.
Taylor reached out and ran her hand along a rough piece of pavement. “America was the most powerful nation on earth. How could it have been destroyed like this?”
Joseph calmly took a sip from his drink pouch. “It was also the world’s biggest debtor. Eventually, other countries wanted to be paid.”
“So they attacked?”
“They asked for payment in food, and they sent in armies to oversee the process. At the time, a fungus was attacking the world’s corn and wheat crops. The bee population had already plummeted, so food was scarce anyway.”
Bits of pavement came loose un
der Taylor’s touch, dusting her fingers with black sand. “A fungus took down the country?”
“The fungus just caused people to starve,” Joseph clarified. “The wars took down the country.”
When Taylor had first arrived in the future, she’d read through information about the wars. They all ran together in her mind though. The regional conflicts seemed to involve almost as many countries as the Third, Fourth, and Fifth World Wars. And then there were the Second and Third Civil Uprisings.
“But America finally ousted the armies by pushing them into Canada,” Taylor said, trying to remember.
Joseph shook his head. “The plague stopped the Third World War. It killed off so many people that no one had the resources left to fight anymore.”
“The plague,” Taylor said bleakly. “Nature’s peacemaker.”
Joseph bit into his meal square. “When you have famine, you’re bound to get disease. Weakened bodies can’t fight off microbes.”
Lee let out a sigh as he ate. The camouflage dye on his face looked like mismatched puzzle pieces. The whole group looked that way, actually—like puzzles that had been put together wrong. “Plague and fungus,” Lee said. “You two are great lunch conversationalists.”
Ren was sitting beside Xavier. He motioned to Xavier’s oversized pack. “What do you have in there?”
“Equipment,” Xavier said.
Ren let out a bark of laughter. “Don’t give us that freeze. We’re out of the city. You can tell us why you came.”
Joseph shifted and pine needles crunched underneath him. “He came to help. Just like you two.”
Lee took a drink. His voice was light but had an edge to it. “Someone has made a secret addendum to our mission. What is it, who ordered it, and how is Joseph involved in all of it?”
“Xavier could be an assassin,” Ren offered without any hint of humor. “Hired by one of the delegations to delete Reilly.”
“No,” Lee said. “That would be redundant. We’ve got you for that.”
Ren smiled, the white of his teeth flashing against the browns and greens on his face. “Then Xavier must be sent to stop the assassination. But no, that’s why you’re here.”
Lee stretched his legs out along the ground. “I follow orders, same as you.”
Taylor took a drink of water from her pouch and eyed her bodyguards more closely. “So which sectors are you guys from?”
“We were instructed not to tell you,” Lee said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because everyone knows,” Lee said with a smirk, “that Christians favor other Christians—at least when they’re not arguing with each other.”
Ren waved his hand in a motion of agreement. “And they try to convert everyone else.”
Taylor couldn’t tell whether they were poking fun at each other, at themselves, or just at her. Probably it was just at her.
“Fine,” she said. “Whatever. I don’t care what you believe so long as you can shoot straight.”
Now Lee’s tone was even, serious. Maybe with a bit of warning thrown in. “It’s dangerous to ignore people’s beliefs. Actions are rooted in belief.”
Joseph sat silently finishing his square. He was always silent when it came to discussions of religion, although Taylor couldn’t help reading more into his silence this time. He was keeping his secret from her too, and it ticked her off.
A breeze ran through the trees, making branches swing and shadows dart through pine needles and leaves alike. The movement kept drawing her eye—all the shifting shadows.
Ren turned to Xavier, his gaze calculating. “Does your mission have something to do with the new cities?”
Xavier shrugged vaguely. “Does yours?”
Ren scoffed and looked at the data on his scanner. “I’m here to make sure this mission is successful.”
“What new cities?” Taylor asked.
The three men shared a glance, checking, she supposed, whether it was okay to answer her. At last Ren said, “Santa Fe is too crowded, so the city elders are building two smaller cities nearby, each with room for growth. The council is deciding whether to populate them with a mixture of religions as we’ve done in Santa Fe, or whether to move separate religions into each one so that eventually each group will have its own city.”
A fly buzzed around Xavier’s food and he swished it away. “It’s the council’s most-debated issue.”
Taylor considered the matter as she nibbled off a bite of her square. “People don’t want to stay together? What about the value of diversity and learning about one another’s cultures?”
Ren leaned toward Lee. “You can tell she’s a Christian. They’re all for staying together. Just wait—next she’ll try to convert us.”
Lee checked his scanner before taking another drink from his pouch. “The problem with having so many different groups in one city is that the council can’t make the simplest decisions without days of deliberation. Every request is bogged down. It’s impossible to get anything done.”
Ren finished off the last bite of his square and wiped the crumbs from his hands. “That’s not true. Your people have been finding their way around the council for years. You just do whatever you want to, secretly.”
“Consider your tongue carefully,” Lee said, “or you may lose it.”
Xavier leaned forward. “Perhaps the council sent me because it knew the two of you couldn’t make it to Traventon without laser fire.” His gaze went back and forth between Lee and Ren. “Just because you don’t know who I am, don’t assume I don’t know who you are, Brother Lee and Brother Ren.”
It was only when Taylor heard the names emphasized like this that she realized they were fake names. Brotherly and Brethren.
They hadn’t even bothered coming up with something believable. She had been way too tired if she hadn’t caught that before. “Okay,” she said. “Enough with the secrets. Who are you all really?”
None of them answered. Not even Xavier, who had just admitted to knowing who the other two were.
“This is wonderful,” Taylor said. “I’m on a mission with two guys who hate each other, some mystery man, and . . .” She waved her hand in Joseph’s direction. “And the one guy I know won’t tell me why he’s brought the mystery man along.” She stood up, brushing dirt and twigs off her pants. “If this mission goes wrong and I’m captured by the Traventon government, the first people I zap with my QGP are going to be all of you.”
She grabbed her pack and stomped off toward the bushes—the only restroom available. Behind her she heard Ren say, “Idle threats. Christians never kill anyone.”
Joseph spoke then. “You’ve obviously never studied the Crusades. And,” he added in the same confidential tone, “you don’t know Taylor.”
TAYLOR DIDN’T QUESTION HER bodyguards anymore after that. There wasn’t a point to it, and besides she needed to concentrate on her rank virus. That night when they reached the outpost, she still didn’t have a solution. No matter what algorithms she came up with, it would take her virus a couple of hours before it infected the rank system. Anything that worked faster would be detected and blocked by filters.
Well, it didn’t matter. She would still run the slower version. It was about time the citizens of Traventon stopped ranking each other.
The food at the outpost was good and the gel beds were soft. Taylor could have used a nice hot soak, but they didn’t have baths. The people of the twenty-fifth century used a cream called sparkle that kept a person clean for nearly three weeks at a stretch. It would have been a charming invention except Taylor couldn’t quite forget that sparkle was comprised of bacteria that ate dirt, sweat, and dead skin cells. She pictured them writhing on her skin, masses of furry, sausage-shaped microorganisms. It made being clean sort of creepy.
Ren, Lee, and Xavier kept tight control of their packs. They were never out of their sight, never even out of reach. They probably slept on them.
The next day proceeded about the same way the first had.
None of the group talked much, and Taylor stewed about the rank program. It was ironic, really. She could build a machine that changed time, but the popularity program had stumped her. Well, maybe it was more symbolic than ironic actually.
The group spent the night in the med clinic and woke up before dawn to get ready for the walk to Traventon. While everyone ate breakfast, Mendez came in. He belonged to the Santa Fe underground that lived in Traventon, a group called the DW. He was a hulking man, six and a half feet tall, with enough muscle that Taylor suspected he might bend steel rods for amusement. He looked considerably friendlier now than he had when he’d been her guide out of Traventon. He smiled as he sat down at the table across from Taylor and Joseph. “Ete sen,” he said.
It was a common greeting at Santa Fe. At first Taylor had wondered if Thomas Edison had been memorialized in salutation form, which in some ways would have been cool. The phrase actually came from Ghana, though. It meant, “How is your soul perceiving the world?”
Without waiting for a reply, Mendez added, “Do you like Santa Fe?”
“I’m not sure,” Taylor said, taking a bite of a muffin. “I’ve only been there six weeks, and the council is already trying to kill me.”
“We’re both fine,” Joseph said.
Mendez nodded approvingly at Taylor. “You speak much better than you used to. I couldn’t understand you before.”
She finished chewing. “Does that mean you’ll answer my questions this time?”
He smiled again. “Probably not.”
After breakfast, the group set off on foot. They all had laser boxes in case they ran into any vikers. Even Taylor had one, and she was a lousy shot. Between working on the rank virus and going through the rest of her training, she hadn’t practiced much.
Laser-box pulses came in two settings. The kill setting sent a pulse that tunneled through a person’s body, ripping up any nearby organs. It damaged only organic matter: people, animals, and plants. Everything else remained unaffected.
Taylor couldn’t decide if society’s switch from guns to lasers was practical or just chilling. People wanted to protect cars and buildings while they killed one another.