Wilders

by Brenda Cooper

  “Yes. She’s been mine since I was small.”

  He stared at her. “You’re still small. You’ll have to hold onto her pretty hard out there. Are you sure you don’t want to leave her here for safekeeping?”

  She couldn’t tell if he was teasing, trying to scam her out of Paula, or really meant to be helpful. That was the biggest problem with the city—you never could tell. Your best friend might turn on you, your parents might up and kill themselves, anything could turn from golden to black in no time at all. “I won’t leave her.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  Why did he care? “At least until I find my sister.”

  “Is your sister expecting you?”

  She pursed her lips. What answer did he want? “I’m surprising her.” She hadn’t told Lou. What if Lou told her no? Then what? Besides, it seemed like a good thing to keep as a surprise. That way she wouldn’t distract Lou, and if she just showed up, she might learn more about what was actually going on, things Lou hadn’t been willing to say in letters.

  That was another choice Paula didn’t like.

  The guard wasn’t done with his questions. “Do you have a job on the farm?”

  “No.”

  “Do you intend to get a job out here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does anyone know you are leaving?”

  Did he have any idea how irritating he sounded? She smiled. “No.”

  “Then I will mark you a feral exit. You will lose your stipend until you return. If you don’t return in thirty days you will have to petition for reentry.”

  “I know that.”

  He kept reading whatever was on his screen for a very long time, not looking at her but nevertheless holding her rooted. Dawn had bloomed into hard light.

  Just hurry up. She bounced on her toes.

  Paula stood silently behind her. Coryn felt her quiet wish that Coryn relent and turn around.

  The border guard seemed to be waiting for her to do something.

  “I’m going,” she said.

  He sipped at his coffee, looked down at the desk, and then back at his screen. When he finally looked up at her, his face had a quizzical look on it. “I see you have a difficult family history. You’re not going out to commit suicide, are you?”

  She’d stopped being worried now and gone all the way to being angry. Still, he could stop her. So she enunciated as slowly and clearly as she could, as if she were talking to a ten-year-old. “I am going to find my sister.”

  He raised an eyebrow but gave her a hard smile. “Good luck.” She could almost hear him calling her a fool. Paula too.

  For just a second she froze.

  Everyone waited.

  She took a step, and then another.

  The actual border—the edge of the dome—was invisible. The air felt ever so slightly fuzzy. A message flashed across her wrist. “You are leaving Seacouver. Tap to acknowledge.”

  She slapped it yes.

  She took twelve more steps and then stopped to look back. The guard still sat in his booth, sipping his coffee. He watched her curiously.

  She turned her back on him, searching the lightening sky to see if it looked any different. Maybe it was a tad brighter. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to really tell until the stars came out tonight.

  She yelled out, “Goodbye!” at the guard, and turned and walked down the road as fast as she could, not looking back. Paula kept up with her easily, not speaking.

  “Lou,” Coryn whispered. “You don’t know it, but I’m coming. I’ll see you soon.”

  She checked the map she’d created months before on her wristlet. Paula had a copy too, just in case.

  They were silent for the first mile. Coryn stared at everything, looking for differences, for change. The neighborhood looked almost urban, almost as if they were still in the city. The streets had some holes in them. Sidewalks were askew and crumbly. Maybe there was more grass, a few more trees, and things looked a little less groomed. Not as planned. It was hard to tell, though.

  They passed a few houses, most of them occupied and cared for. One electric truck passed them, and three men on bicycles, all middle-aged and in a hurry. Birds darted and sang in the trees. Here and there, tiny yellow crocus or bigger purplish-blue primrose competed with weeds in flowerbeds. They passed three well-kept houses and then a sagging rambler with peeling white paint and glassless windows.

  A string of five big trucks passed her, silent except for the spinning of their wheels, surely headed into the city.

  “You should eat,” Paula said.

  She hadn’t seen a bench since she passed through the dome-wall. She picked her way over to a rock and sat on it, accepting the bread that Paula handed her and munching quietly on it. Cinnamon.

  Something scratched at the ground and rustled the bushes near her.

  She stopped. Stilled.

  Paula stared at the spot.

  A dog nosed through the bushes and gave a soft yip. At least she suspected it was a dog—she’d never seen anything quite so shaggy and unkempt. Hair flopped over its eyes and it favored its back rear leg. She tossed the last bit of her bread at it and the dog took it and backed away.

  “Here,” she called.

  Nothing.

  “Hand me some more bread,” she asked Paula. “Please.”

  Paula dug the loaf out. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to spend your food this way.”

  “It looks hungry.”

  “I don’t want you to be hungry.”

  Coryn stiffened. “Stop playing mom.”

  “There are far fewer stores out here.”

  “And I won’t get any more basic. I know that.”

  Paula’s face looked like stone and her eyes had narrowed, but nevertheless she handed Coryn the bread.

  Coryn took another bite to make up for the one she’d given away and then called, “Here,” again. The little dog pushed back through, taking a piece of the bread from her.

  She stood and held out her hand with another piece, taking a few slow steps.

  The dog followed, and she rewarded it with a bite of the bread.

  She did this two more times before she ran out of bread. She took a few more steps, looking over her shoulder and calling to the dog.

  It stared at her for a moment and then turned and raced away.

  Coryn looked at Paula, who shook her head. She could demand another slice, but what was the point if all the creature wanted from her was bread?

  She had owned a dog once, when she was small, before her parents died. Whisper. She had loved snuggling the dog before bed. Whisper had disappeared long before her parents killed themselves, and Coryn had never known what happened to her. She had simply gone missing in one of the moves. Coryn had begged her father for information, and then for another dog, but he had shaken his head and looked sad but determined.

  After they killed each other, she had still wanted another dog, but the orphanage didn’t allow pets. A few kids had snuck in hamsters, and one had a fish in the closet, but no one had managed a dog.

  She was hardly in any condition to feed another mouth now. She’d saved all of her salary—well almost all—from the last two summers, and it still might not be enough to find Lou. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “That wasn’t a complete breakfast,” Paula remarked.

  “I’m too excited to eat.”

  Even though she tried not to do it, she looked back twice for the dog, both relieved and disappointed when it didn’t show up.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Coryn had planned thirty days for the trip. It was around sixteen marathons of distance to the farm, which was near the Washington/Idaho border, and she’d run over twenty marathons and biked five; she knew the distance like a beat inside of her. She ought to be able to walk one marathon a day, but she’d halved her expectations to be safe.

  Her map suggested that this first day would be pretty easy. Shortly after leaving the dog behind, the
y headed downhill on a wide road, the roadbed sturdy in spite of crumbled edges and grass that grew between cracks here and there. It would get them, eventually, to Interstate 90, which would take them over the Cascade Mountains. Then she’d have a long walk on I-90, and after that a trip up and down some smaller roads to the ranch.

  She could do this.

  Paula walked quietly just behind her, looking around so often that Coryn finally exclaimed, “What are you so worried about?”

  “I’m used to getting much more data.”

  Coryn fiddled with her wristlet. It worked just fine, but she took in a hundredth or so of the data that Paula was used to. Maybe less. “You’re still connected, right?”

  “To the net? Sure. But the systems out here aren’t very powerful, and they don’t talk to each other. For example, if I needed to find a water fountain or a bathroom, I couldn’t do it.”

  She meant for Coryn, of course. “I should be able to do that.” She stopped by the side of the road. “Want me to test?”

  “Sure.”

  Coryn spoke to her wristlet, and it told her there was a park in two miles with both water and a bathroom.

  “See?” she said. “I can do this.”

  “I can do that,” Paula said wryly. “But it’s still not real-time. What if the park is broken?”

  Coryn shrugged. “It’s only a little out of the way. We’ll find out.”

  “Will you eat more breakfast there?”

  Coryn faced her, back to the road. She used her most insidious let’s-upset-Paula voice. “Are you my mother?”

  Paula didn’t answer. She stared straight ahead and whispered, “Turn around.”

  Reflex kicked in; she turned.

  Steady movement caught her eye. She identified it instantly. An ecobot. Coming up the hill toward her.

  It was real.

  She’d never seen one. Well, in the news, in movies, and in virtgames. In the wild, in its own habitat, the sheer size of the ecobot surprised her. Maybe there were many models and this was the biggest. It was easily broad enough for people to ride on, and twenty or maybe more feet long. In spite of its bulk it moved fast and smooth, all six of its legs pulled up beside it as it rolled past them on a set of low wheels that lined its undercarriage. Its forest camouflage color shimmered against the background of trees and unkempt bushes that lined the road. “Could I see it if it weren’t moving?” Coryn whispered.

  “Not if it didn’t want you to,” Paula replied.

  It didn’t seem to be paying them any attention at all. Still, Coryn stepped off of the road and pulled Paula beside her. “Don’t they usually travel in packs?”

  Paula watched the machine closely. “I didn’t know they came this close to the city. They don’t seem to be needed here, not really.”

  “I suppose. Everything looks peaceful here.” To be fair, the forest did look ragged. “But nothing in the city is this messy.”

  Paula’s eyes fluttered, a sign that she was busy accessing databases. She might not have as much real-time data out here, but she carried an impressive amount of information inside her. “They don’t have wide police powers. They can only act against people in rare circumstances. I wouldn’t cut a tree down around one, for example. Or kill a wolf.”

  “But I could rob a person.”

  “Probably. But you wouldn’t.”

  “That was rhetorical.” Coryn drew her arms close around herself to ward off the damp cold. “What else did you learn?”

  “They operate inside a narrow band of laws. They were designed to be unhackable.”

  It was so big. “I hope it’s unhackable,” Coryn said. But then almost nothing was really safe. Streetlights and entertainment system and ad delivery–bots got broken into regularly, although they never took long to fix. “What if a machine this size got reprogrammed?”

  Paula kept staring at the huge robot. “I presume that’s a rhetorical question, too.”

  “Silly robot.”

  Paula smiled. “They get used in rewilding a lot. There are some on Lou’s farm.”

  “So we’ll see more of them?”

  “Probably.”

  The ecobot’s primary head rested in a bowl-shaped depression on the top of the machine’s body. The head could rise up on a long neck and give the ecobot a camera view to everything. “I like it,” Coryn whispered.

  Paula only smiled, and for a moment Coryn wondered if she and the machine could communicate on some level Coryn wouldn’t see.

  She remembered some of the videos she’d seen in her research, “Where’s its drone swarm?”

  “Inside of it, or parked in the top deck. There might be a few flying so far away we can’t see them. They take energy.”

  “I thought it was solar!”

  “It is, and it also generates power by moving. But that doesn’t mean it wastes power. It’s an ecobot.”

  “You’re always right,” Coryn commented.

  “Remember that.”

  They watched the robot pass. It didn’t seem to notice them at all, although Coryn had the distinct impression it knew they were there. After it was gone they stared after it for a while before Paula said, “Let’s go.”

  They followed the original plan for the next mile and a half, and then made a turn onto a small side road. She wouldn’t have recognized the park except for the sign that said “Russell P. Cooper Park.” The grass hadn’t been mowed for a while; walking through it soaked her shoes. Crocuses and a few early daffodils bloomed in weed-infested beds.

  The bathroom stood near the road, a square black building with moss in the grooves between bricks, and old spider webs in the corners of the roof. Dirt and dried leaves from last autumn had piled in the corners, and the doors needed to be repainted. She cringed, but used it anyway. The sinks and toilets were almost clean, and stocked with paper.

  What had she expected? Did she think leaving the city would be like living in the city? If this was as bad as it got, she’d be okay.

  In the middle of the park, in the most open spot possible, an older woman sat at a picnic table throwing balls for three dogs. Two were golden retrievers and one was a brown speckled dog that her wristlet couldn’t identify, even with a picture. The woman called her dogs back to her before Coryn and Paula reached the table.

  Coryn sat down. “Good morning.”

  The woman looked like she must be seventy or so, with thin gray hair that surrounded a wrinkled face and slightly suspicious gray-green eyes. She wore old jeans with patched knees and a baggy blue work-out shirt. She kept one hand on the brown dog’s collar. “You must have just come Out.”

  Coryn laughed. “Is it that obvious?”

  “Yes.”

  Paula spoke from behind her. “Will you tell us why?”

  The woman ticked things off on her fingers, starting with her index finger. “One, your clothes couldn’t be bought here, not unless you got them on the black market.” Middle finger. “Two, you still have your pet robot.” Ring finger, which was two thirds as long as it should be, with the skin sewn shut over the second knuckle. “Three, you walked right up to me as if I couldn’t hurt you.”

  She stared into Coryn’s eyes for a long moment, and Coryn saw sadness and a note of warning in her eyes. “You don’t look like you want to hurt me,” she said.

  The woman blinked and looked away. “I don’t. But you’re a young woman traveling on her own, and if you don’t get more careful, you won’t get wherever it is you want to go.”

  “I’m looking for my sister. She’s out in the Palouse, near the Snake River, on the RiversEnd Ranch eco-recovery farm.”

  The woman’s lips thinned. “That’s a long trip.” She held her hand up and touched her pinky finger. “Four. You don’t understand weather.”

  Paula asked, “What should we know?”

  Paula had chosen her mom voice again, which made Coryn grimace. She held her tongue and watched the woman, who answered Paula. “What’s the barometric pressure doing?”

/>   Paula blinked, and then shook her head. Anything so simple would have been instantly available to her in the city.

  The woman offered, “There’s weather information from sensors near here.”

  Enough time passed for Coryn to pet one of the goldens before Paula answered. “It’s falling. And the temperature has stopped rising.”

  The woman let go of the brown dog’s collar and gave it a signal. It lay down at her feet, watching Coryn and Paula with a languid, but very attentive, gaze. “What will the wind do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dig deeper.” She looked over at Coryn. “You should be looking for this, too.” She pointed at Paula. “You may not have her forever.”

  Coryn stiffened but obeyed. It took three or four tries to get an accurate forecast, something that would have been easy in the city. “There’s a wind advisory.”

  “Which means?”

  Coryn found the right button to push. “Winds up to sixty miles an hour. From the north.”

  “Are those sustained or is that the highest gust?”

  Coryn had to look again. “Sustained. Gusts up to 80.”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  “It’s fast.”

  “It’s hard. The city won’t block wind from the north. It blocks an east wind. Where are you going to shelter?”

  Coryn decided she didn’t like this woman. Fast and hard weren’t that different. “It’s not until this afternoon. We’ll find a place.”

  All three dogs looked to the right, and the goldens each gave out soft yips. Two men walked toward them, one the age of the woman and one younger. They’d come from the trees rather than the road. Coryn felt fidgety.

  Paula inclined her head. “We should go.”

  The woman smiled. “Yes, you should go. But first you should pay for my help.”

  Coryn stood, confused and alert. Should they run? The brown dog growled at her, showing the teeth on one side of its mouth. She tried to be polite. “I appreciate your help very much.”

  “Show me.”

  Coryn exchanged a glance with Paula, who had changed her stance to guarding. Artificial muscles coiled under her skin, tense with readiness; she stepped closer to Coryn, weight shifted to the balls of her feet as if she could take off in any direction and any moment.