“We can’t leave yet,” said Clair. “We have to check on the others.”
“The dome blew,” said Jesse. “They must be dead.”
“We don’t know for sure. Q, can you take us to the top of this thing so we can check? Is there time?”
“I will make time.”
“Do it. We have to try.”
48
THE PROPELLERS ROARED, and the airship tore away from the tube connecting it to the Skylifter. Bright white light hit the airship as it came out from under the shadow of the larger craft. Clair clipped herself tightly into the seat next to Jesse.
“That laser or whatever it is—it’s not coming from another airship,” she said, peering through narrowed eyelids out the automatically darkened windshield. “It’s coming from above.”
“It’s a satellite power beam,” said Q.
“Here?” said Jesse, wide-eyed. “We’re miles away from the nearest receiver!”
“The beam’s been deliberately moved.”
“Someone’s trying to make this look like an accident,” said Clair, thinking of Jesse’s mom. “Funny how things like this happen around people in WHOLE.”
“Yeah, real hilarious,” Jesse said.
The airship flew upward past the tapering tip of the Skylifter’s teardrop and out around its fat middle. The dirigible was listing drunkenly and rotating once every ten seconds or so. The window Clair had fallen against came into view. She saw nothing but cushions and spreading frost. No people.
“Higher.” Clair leaned forward as they neared the uppermost deck. The dome had shattered, and the space below lay open to the sky. It was hard to see through the light, and at first she saw no one, but then, around a central spar that had once held the graceful curve of plastic safely over the heads of the Skylifter’s inhabitants . . .
“There!” She pointed at a small huddle of people in the scant shade provided by the spar, waving desperately to attract the airship’s attention. “Take us closer!”
“I see them,” said Q through a new wash of static. The airship rocked on its roaring fan engines through the full effect of the powersat beam—all the power a living city needed, sent down from space in one broad, powerful stream.
Clair stayed by the instruments, the better to see what was going on through the front window. To Jesse, she said, “Get ready with the door. Be careful.”
He moved back to stand over it, braced on either side by one hand and one foot.
The air was turbulent and hot above the observation deck. Shards of plastic dome stabbed at the airship’s vulnerable underbelly. Twice, Q caught the tip of a propeller on something she shouldn’t have, provoking outraged shrieks of metal and carbon fiber.
“This is as close as we get,” Q finally said. “I can’t hold this position long.”
Jesse opened the door and shouted something into the wind that Clair couldn’t make out. Through the windshield she saw people emerging from their meager hiding place, lurching across the windswept surface in a series of staggering steps. There was nothing for them to hang on to but each other.
The Skylifter steadied. They ran forward. There was a flurry of shouting and movement—bodies falling en masse through the open hatch, propellers screaming, white-flaring wreckage suddenly rising up to meet them—and then the airship was rising, pulling away from the doomed Skylifter, out of the beam from the powersat, and the light was fading, and the door was shut.
Jesse lay on the floor of the airship with the others. Clair went back to help them. Everyone was talking at once, gasping for breath or crying with mingled relief and shock. There were just four survivors, their skin red and blistered where exposed to the beam.
“Where’s Turner?” called the woman with mismatched eyes, pushing out from under the huddle. “Where is he?”
“I’m here.” He was helping Gemma to a seat.
“Thank God.”
“For small mercies, yes.” When Gemma was buckled in, Turner turned to Clair and Jesse. “We owe the two of you our lives.”
“Q did the flying,” said Clair. “We couldn’t have done anything without her.”
“The three of you, then,” said Turner gravely. “We are in your debt.”
Through the cockpit window, the bright column of the power beam was visible now that they were out of it—not the beam itself but its glittery effect on the atmosphere, like dust sparking in a shaft of sunlight. The Skylifter was dropping away below them and to one side, trailing debris as it went. Clair saw smoke. The Skylifter was burning, breaking up.
Her mind was still reeling from the nearness of their escape.
“Where on earth do we go now?” she asked.
Gemma came forward to take the controls, and Turner followed her. Clair made room for them but stayed to watch over their shoulders.
“There,” said Turner, pointing at a map on a screen. “Take us in that direction.”
Clair didn’t recognize any of the names on the map.
“Shall I surrender control?” Q asked her.
“Yes, you’d better.”
“Is there anyone we can call for help?” asked Gemma.
“No,” said Turner. “Don’t want to draw any more attention to us than you have to. We’re radar silent, I presume.”
“Yes.”
Brightness hit the airship anyway. Clair flung herself away from the windshield with an arm over her eyes. The beam was searing her skin. Static flared in her ears. Her feed to Q went dead.
“Take us down,” Turner cried. “Get us under the clouds!”
The floor fell out from beneath her and they dropped like a stone. She couldn’t tell if Gemma was flying or had lost control. Clair could only struggle to find an empty seat to strap herself in.
Something went bang above them. The airship lurched.
“We lost an airbag,” she heard Gemma say. “The good news is that will make us go faster.”
“I wonder what the bad news is,” said Jesse, pulling Clair into the seat next to him and slipping the harness over her shoulders.
Clair held his hand tightly. Her insides felt weightless in a highly unpleasant way. “It’ll make us harder to stop, I guess.”
The clouds were coming up at them. There was a second bang, another lurch.
Then a shutter fell between the airship and the power beam, and all Clair could see were brilliant purple afterimages. The propellers roared. They were below the cloud layer but still falling, rocking from side to side as Gemma fought to find some kind of stability.
“Come on,” Gemma was saying. “Stop fighting me. Come on!”
There was a moment of relative stillness, almost of calm, and then a huge force struck the airship like a bat hitting a ball, and they were bouncing, spinning, shaking, tearing—coming down hard.
49
CLAIR REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS upside down, locked into her harness, and choking for breath. There was fluid in her nose, filling her sinuses, and bubbling up the back of her throat, making her feel as though she were drowning.
She jerked explosively forward and sprayed blood across the cockpit of the airship. That cleared her nose, but it didn’t make the view any prettier.
The airship was ruined, its cabin filled with broken glass, destroyed electronics, and broken branches. Clair reached out for Jesse, but the seat next to her wasn’t just empty. It was gone. One whole side of the compartment had been torn away. When she twisted wildly to look down, she saw him lying on his side on what had been the crew compartment’s roof. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing.
Clair twisted farther. All she could see were branches. No other bodies. She forced herself to breathe deeply and not to give in to panic. Imagining the worst wasn’t going to help anyone, starting with herself.
“Jesse? Q?”
Her voice sounded nasal and thin. No reply from either the Air or the boy below her.
With one forearm, she braced herself against the armrest of the seat. She hit the harness release with h
er free hand and dropped like a sack of stones, too heavy to hold herself up. But she slowed her fall with the arm that had been bearing her weight and landed next to Jesse rather than on him. She bent down to check his pulse and make sure his airways were clear, as she had been taught in first aid. That lesson had been a long time ago. She had never needed it more.
After a moment, she sagged back onto her heels, dizzy with relief.
Jesse was alive.
When she brushed the hair back from his face, though, he didn’t react. She pressed her hand against his forehead, wondering if he felt hot or cold, or if that even mattered after an accident like this. She ran her hand over his skull, looking for bumps or wet patches. There were none, but that didn’t reassure her.
“Jesse? Wake up, please. . . .”
She wished she could talk to Q, but she had no access to the Air at all even though she was out in the open. She had no one to turn to for advice. She was on her own.
Clair straightened, blew more blood out her nose until she was able to breathe freely, and warily approached the open side of the airship. Her chunk of the crew compartment had been snagged by trees. They weren’t huge trees, maybe four or five yards high, and they were spaced in rows like an orchard. Bright-red autumn apples dotted the lush green leafscape like dollops of paint. The sun was either rising or setting, but she couldn’t see the sun itself, only the long shadows stretching away from her under the warm tones of a melting sky. Pink light mottled the underside of the solid cloud bank above. To her right, black smoke rose in a column, whipped into feathers by the wind. There was no sign of the power beam or the rest of the airship.
Through the trees, she saw lights flashing, long white beams darting like the antennae of insects. Questing, searching the thickening dusk. Coming closer, she thought.
The dupes had hunted her all the way from Manteca to the edge of the Sierra Nevada, and their power beam had blasted the Skylifter out of the sky like a laser might zap a mosquito. The implacable momentum of their pursuit made her feel like lying down and closing her eyes. They would never give up.
“Jesse,” she said, hurrying to his side. “Jesse, can you hear me? You have to wake up.”
Jesse didn’t stir. Clair wanted to shake him, but she didn’t, afraid of spinal injuries. Instead, she clapped her hands in front of Jesse’s face and shouted, “Jesse! We have to go—now!”
Still no response.
Still no word from Q.
Still no sign of the others.
And the lights were closer, leaving no doubt in her mind that the crash had been seen.
Clair was more alone than she had been at the Tuvalu monument. But she wasn’t helpless. The remains of the crew compartment still contained one of the small arms cases she had seen earlier, and inside it was a pistol. There was no ammunition, but she wouldn’t have known how to load it anyway. All she needed was a prop to back up the only strategy she had left, which was to bluff. A bluff could be enough, if she put everything into it.
You can handle yourself, Zep had said in the safe house. Remembering his confidence in her only made her feel sad again.
You’re good at this. You’ve missed your true calling.
Those were Jesse’s words. She bent over him to check his breathing again, touched his cheek gently for luck, then stood in the open end of the compartment with an empty gun in one hand, waiting for what came next.
The lights came closer, resolving not into people holding flashlights, but vehicles. Two-, three-, and four-wheeled, they bounced on oversized tires over ruts between the trees, spreading out to surround the airship and filling the air with the snarl of their engines. These motors were chemical rather than electric, leaving smoke trails behind them. Clair squeezed her nose between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand to stop herself from sneezing blood again.
Two vehicles came to a halt near her tree. One was a jeep with a flatbed at the rear and two men in the cab at the front. The third was a three-wheeler. The driver of the three-wheeler dismounted and jogged to stand directly below her. He was heavyset and bearded, wearing a checked shirt and overalls. He looked like a cartoon lumberjack. So did his friends. She stared down at him with her pulse beating high and fast in her throat.
“You with Turner?” he called, red-faced and belligerent.
“Why do you want to know?”
“This is a piece of his airship. We’re looking for survivors. Is he up there with you?”
“No.”
“He could be anywhere, then. Pieces of this thing fell all over.” He indicated the gun. “Are you going to shoot me with that or put it away?”
“Tell me who you are,” she countered, not moving an inch. He looked nothing like Dylan Linwood, but that didn’t mean she should automatically trust him.
“I’m a farmer, of course. Don’t you know where you are?”
She shook her head.
“So you weren’t headed here specifically?”
Clair remembered the frantic moments after their escape from the Skylifter. Turner had given Gemma a destination, but then the powersat beam had hit them, and they had gone down. Not knowing whether they had made it to their destination or not, she decided to continue stalling until she knew who she was talking to.
“We were heading for Buffalo,” she said, recalling the Skylifter’s official flight plan.
“Buffalo, huh? Well, that’s not here.”
“Are you going to tell me where ‘here’ is?”
The big man put his hands in his pocket and glanced down at the ground for a moment. When he looked back up again, he seemed to have reached some kind of decision.
“My name is Arcady. Turner trusts me, so you can trust me too. Or you can stay up there on your own. Your decision.”
My friend’s friend, thought Clair, or my enemy’s enemy. She wasn’t sure if this Arcady fit into either category, and she wasn’t really in a position to be fussy.
She knelt down and placed the useless pistol on the floor.
“All right,” she said. “I need a hand, though. There’s someone hurt up here.”
Arcady whistled and waved both arms above his head. Two more vehicles converged on the scene. The rest spread out through the orchard, looking for the other half of the airship.
Clair went back into the blood-spattered cockpit and kept an anxious vigil next to Jesse as the farmers climbed up from below.
50
THE DRIVER OF the four-wheeler took them along the rutted orchard rows rather than across them, to spare Clair’s injured friend. At the end of the first row they hit a service road, just dirt and gravel but level and straight, aiming for the patch of sky where the sun had been. The clouds were deep red to the west, fading to black to the east. The smoke from the fallen airship was almost invisible now.
Clair sat on the flatbed with Jesse and Arcady, feeling sick. Perhaps it was from blood she’d swallowed, or maybe it was the deep uncertainty of her present position. Out of the power beam and into the . . . what now? She didn’t know where she was, who she was with, or where they were taking her. She had flat-out refused to be separated from Jesse and now sat with his head in her lap, wishing with every fiber of her being that he would wake up.
Clair had already asked Arcady where they were going, and this time he had answered simply, The Farmhouse. She took the hint, although she was both curious and skeptical. A farm, honestly? As the orchard passed by, row after row of branching trees, apparently stretching for miles, she wondered how there could be nearly enough Abstainers in the world to eat so many apples. Then she did the math and realized that if one percent of people were Abstainers, even one tenth of one percent, that still left a huge potential market—but how would the apples get to them without d-mat? There were no trucks anymore, no planes for airfreight. The fruit would rot on the ground.
Every minute or so, Clair checked for the Air and for Q. Still nothing. She bit her lip, trying to protect Jesse from each bump and shudder of the vehicle beneath
them. As far as she knew, they were the only survivors of the crash. She didn’t want to think about what it would mean if he died and left her alone. All she knew about farmers was from old movies, and although Arcady and his friends might not look like inbred cannibals, she could imagine any number of terrible fates awaiting a girl on her own in the middle of nowhere.
Her face was crusted with blood, and her nose hurt. It didn’t feel broken, which was a small comfort among a cavalcade of miseries.
They crested a low hill and drove down into a depression that didn’t really constitute a valley. Lights at the bottom of the depression issued from a close cluster of buildings. Clair could make out very few details in the thickening gloom. Sheds of some kind, containing angular agricultural machinery. The Farmhouse, she presumed.
They passed fences and through open gates. The four-wheeler bounced lightly over a packed-earth courtyard and came to a halt in front of a long, gabled building. One wall was entirely windows. She could see people moving within. Strong, stern men with beards and work clothes. Hardly any women. No one she recognized.
Farmers issued from a wide double door and converged on the flatbed. They took Jesse from her and carried him carefully inside. Clair followed closely, blinking in the light. Arcady’s hand was tight on her upper arm, guiding her and keeping her close through a central hall with trestle tables below and naked wooden beams above. Voices came at her from everywhere. Her blocked nostrils twitched—was that a wood fire she smelled?
Somehow she was separated from Jesse. Before she could protest, Arcady ushered her into an office. There was a desk and two chairs and a series of cabinets that might have held actual paper files.
“Take a seat, Clair.”
“How do you know my name?” She stayed standing.
“You were in the video with Dylan Linwood,” he said. “I didn’t think it was real until you practically landed on our heads. We heard reports via shortwave radio of an airship damaged in a power-beam accident. That said two things to us: one, WHOLE was involved, because no one else flies airships so far from the coast; and two, because WHOLE was involved, it was unlikely to be an accident. We immediately mobilized to search for survivors.”
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