“He’s dying?” she asked.
“He should have died days ago,” Garrett whispered. “He wanted to see his daughter. He made himself stay on his feet.”
Her throat tightened. “From radiation,” she made herself say. She continued to scrub his skin, using more handfuls of the mud. He was covered in the stuff now and looked like a gray zombie.
Garret nodded.
“Where did he get exposed to radiation?” Carmen whispered. Even the thought of the toxic stuff on her island made her deeply uneasy. It made the silver mine slag she had once thought to be the epitome of environmental irresponsibility look like a Greenpeace project.
“He didn’t know. He couldn’t tell me…” Garrett swallowed. “His vocal chords were nearly gone,” he added. “All he could say was ‘dark and cold’.”
Carmen held back her horror with steel determination. “I’m nearly done, then you can wash off.” She kept her voice even.
He nodded. “My hands. Do them again,” he said, holding them out.
She covered them in the last of the mud from the tin, as Daniel clattered his way down the unstable stairs up to the roof. He had the cellphone to his ear again. He’d left the broom up there.
As he listened on the phone, he pushed open the door to the front room where Garrett treated the patients and leaned in to look. Then he shut the door again. “He’s gone,” he said. He looked at Garrett. “I’m guessing Garrett told him to get himself lost somewhere no one would find him.”
Garrett nodded.
“Yes, he did,” Daniel added. He listened, frowning, then nodded. “We can bug out inside the hour. Directions, sir?”
The ‘sir’ told Carmen he wasn’t talking to Olivia. Someone on the Big Rock then. Probably his brother, Duardo. The two of them were formally correct with each other when discussing business.
“Yes, sir. It could take a while, though. I don’t know what lies between us and you and this could stir up traffic.” He listened.
Carmen held up the jug of water she had filled. Garrett nodded. She poured it over his head as he worked to wash the degreaser from his skin. She didn’t care about the floor. If she had interpreted Daniel correctly, they wouldn’t be in the house long enough to care about flooding.
Daniel ended the call and leaned against the door once more, letting out a deep breath.
“That scared them,” Garrett observed.
“It’s scaring the shit out of me,” Daniel said. “There are no nuclear reactors on Vistaria. There are no radioactive materials at all, not even in the hospitals. The stuff is banned from the islands under Amendment Thirty-seven of the Vistarian Constitution.”
Garrett’s gaze shifted to Carmen.
“Prohibition of materials of terror and extortion,” Carmen murmured and poured another jugful of water over him.
“So where did it come from?” Garrett finished.
“Exactly,” Daniel said. “Although that isn’t our immediate problem. Your patient right now is sending out signals that certain spy satellites will see as a neon sign yelling ‘look at me!’” He pointed upward. “They’re powerful enough that someone who has had a PET scan or radiation treatment will light up their dials. You can imagine what your patient looks like to them.”
“Someone will come running,” Carmen said.
“Let’s hope it isn’t the Insurrectos,” Daniel finished. “If they are the ones with the isotopes, they won’t want word to get out. So we’re getting the hell out of Dodge.”
“We need to burn this place down before we go,” Garrett said and spluttered under another jug of water. “We can’t leave the traces for some innocent neighbor to pick up.”
“I’ll kick the fire across the roof before we go,” Daniel said. “You about done there?”
“Nearly,” Garrett said. “This stuff stings like crazy,” he added.
“Your skin is all pink,” Daniel added. “None of the scars show against it. I will pack. Twenty minutes or less, okay?”
He didn’t wait for an answer.
* * * * *
Two hours later, they paused on the first hill south of the city and turned to look at the suburbs spread below, hitching their heavy backpacks into place. It was fully dark now. The city spread like diamonds scattered on inky black velvet.
“Any sign of panic?” Garrett asked Daniel, who was peering through field glasses toward the inner suburb where the squat house was located.
“Nothing. The blaze is nearly out. No fire engines, no alarm.” He dropped the glasses and grimaced. “Inner city. Man…” He shook his head.
“Inner city in war time. Big difference,” Carmen said. She frowned as something caught her eye, far to the north of the city. “What’s that?” she said, pointing. “It looks like a shooting star.”
A patch of high ground where she was pointing lit up with the brightness of day. A billowing cloud of fire shot upward, lighting up trees.
Then the sound reached them. The deep boom rattled Carmen’s bones and throbbed in her ears.
“Oh my dear God…!” Garrett breathed.
Daniel looked through the glasses once more, then thumbed them to turn down the light gain and looked again. “There’s no one else there. Just trees,” he said. He didn’t sound happy about it, though.
“No one else? Carmen repeated. Then she put it together. “You mean someone did that? It was a…bomb?”
“Rocket,” Daniel said, his voice low. “Fired from a drone.” He looked at her. “You said shooting star—so the track was flat?”
“Yes.” Her insides trembled.
“Low altitude drone,” Daniel said and pulled out his cellphone. He thumbed it. “Damn, damn, damn, it’s dead. Garrett…?”
Garrett shrugged. “Sorry.”
Carmen dug the phone they had brought from Hernandez Garcia out of her back pocket and handed it to him. “Who would do that?” she whispered to Garrett as Daniel thumbed out a number and hit dial.
“It’s a short list,” Garrett said, “and Mexico isn’t on it.”
Vistaria didn’t have drone technology. “America?” she breathed. “They were tracking your patient?”
“Someone was,” Garrett said, his voice low. “Someone who doesn’t want a lot of people knowing radioactive material is on Vistaria.”
Daniel pushed his hand through his hair. “Duardo—General Peña…you will not believe what just happened.” He turned away, speaking low and fast.
Carmen’s trembling reached her limbs. “But we know…”
Garrett nodded. “And the house we were living in just burned down without an alarm going up, or a single fire engine coming to put it out and check for survivors.”
She stared at him. In the starlight, his face was smooth, none of the scars showing. His eyes gleamed.
“Insurrectos,” she whispered. “They’re playing for keeps.”
“They always were. Now, they’re stepping up the stakes,” Garrett told her. “This is the beginning of the end play.”
* * * * *
Calli decided Ibarra was flat out, batshit crazy. As in straight-jacket certifiable.
The man with the albino white hair was otherwise a typical Vistarian except for his eyes. They were what told her he was crazy.
About an hour ago, Ibarra had stepped into the stripped-down room where they had been keeping Calli and Roldán. Unlike most Insurrectos, his uniform fit well and he had buttoned every button and tucked everything in. He was neat and tidy and the oddly white hair was brushed straight back from his high forehead.
He smiled at them. “My name is Ibarra. President Serrano has asked me to give you a tour of the palace. Please come with me.”
Roldán didn’t seem to react to the summons. She had said little to Calli since they were pushed into the room. They had laid upon the single beds, staring at the ceiling, until a woman in national dress had stepped into the room and held a kidney tray out to Roldán.
The tray held a syringe and a small glass bo
ttle.
Roldán looked at the woman as she pulled up her shirt and pushed down her jogging pants to reveal the flesh over her belly. “I will need food, too. Something with protein. Tell them, hmm?”
“They don’t listen to me,” the woman said.
“Oh, they’re listening,” Roldán said dryly.
Then Calli understood. The room was being bugged. Roldán’s silence made sense now.
Roldán injected herself and dropped the syringe onto the tray. “The insulin must be refrigerated, otherwise it will be useless. I need a clean syringe next time. The insulin breaks down the rubber in the stopper. Six o’clock tomorrow morning. Tell them.”
The woman sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. It was her only answer. She left, carrying the tray.
For the following thirty-six hours, the woman was the only one to step into the room. She would bring food or hold out the tray and wait with lethargic lack of interest while Roldán injected herself, then leave again.
The woman’s clothes did not change. It did not look as if she had brushed her hair, either. It hung in lackluster strands down her back. The white off-the-shoulder top was grubby and the silk of her skirt crumpled.
The only other event to break the monotony was an explosion on the north of the city, not long after sunset last night. The sound wave had made the windows of the room shimmy and the curtains flap out.
Roldán took one window and Calli peered through the other. She saw the fireball in the north. It was a long way from here yet she could still see the skeletons of trees on fire. There were no regular shapes. No buildings.
“Lightning?” Roldán murmured, her gaze sliding to Calli.
“I don’t know.” Calli said nothing else aloud, while in her heart, hope stirred. Was Nick and the army already at the outskirts of the city? Was that the first overture of their final offensive? Only, it was far too soon, even for a wildly successful foray up from the Big Rock. They would not approach from the north, either.
As the night wound on without another explosion, her hope petered and died. It had been an anomaly, after all.
And now, this morning, Ibarra had arrived to tour them as if they were dignitaries, not prisoners. The guard who walked behind them with an AK47 over his shoulder made Ibarra’s tour a farce.
She studied Ibarra as he bounced ahead of them, full of energy and excitement. She recognized Ibarra’s name. It had appeared in Daniel’s debriefing after the Whitesands mess. Ibarra had tortured Olivia.
Calli could not figure out why Serrano was insisting upon this play acting, until they reached the first stop on Ibarra’s tour. Ibarra thrust open the door to what appeared to be an office with a gesture that made Calli think of the ring master in a circus pulling aside a curtain.
She and Roldán stood at the door and looked in.
A curved desk sat in the corner, with a high dashboard of controls in front of it that made her think of a radio station studio. Above the desk, hanging from the ceiling, was a wide grid of monitors. Their wiring and leads ran across the back of them to the wall and down to the desk.
“My office,” Ibarra said, with pride in his voice.
Another door behind the desk stood open. Through it, Calli glimpsed curtained windows letting in early morning sunlight, which spilled upon the end of a bed with a high rail at the foot.
Something stirred in Calli’s memory. Something Minnie had mentioned…
“Your office?” she said, her voice flat. “This is Zalaya’s office.”
Ibarra’ face worked. His smile faded. “Zalaya is dead.” Then the smile jerked back into place, as if he had remembered he was supposed to maintain that sunny expression. He waved toward the screens. “From here, I can see every room in the palace. I see everything that happens, everywhere.”
Was that what had made him mad?
Roldán stirred. “Then you’re a voyeur?” she asked, her tone disinterested.
Ibarra was staring at the screens and didn’t react. Calli wondered if he had even heard Roldán. Calli and Roldán were standing by the door and could not see what had caught his attention.
“I see everything…” Ibarra whispered. All the animation left his face. Even his shoulders slumped, as if someone had pulled the plug on a robot.
Calli shivered.
Abruptly, he straightened again and clapped his hands. “Come, come! There’s much more to see!”
He hurried along the wide hallway, back to the rotunda where the white stone steps wound up and down. There were more soldiers using the steps. They glanced, startled, at Calli and Roldán as they followed Ibarra down the curving staircase to the first floor, then down to a basement level.
The stone and marble stairs halted there, between four columns of pillars marching the length of the basement, turning it into a cavern of lines. The floor was smooth polished stone, too. There were pictures hanging on the walls between the pillars. The nearest one was a landscape. The frame was skewed as if someone had brushed it and not straightened it again.
Calli twitched to ease the frame back to the horizontal. She clenched her fists.
Ibarra didn’t pause to wave at any of the pictures, even though some of them looked to be the work of major artists. Apparently his tour did not include the true highlights of the palace.
He marched up the length of the basement, between the second and third rows of pillars.
“Too few people here,” Roldán whispered as they followed behind him. “I don’t like it.”
“No windows, either.”
“And he controls the cameras.”
They looked at each other.
“I’m not leverage anymore,” Calli said. “Nick stepped down, so Serrano can’t use me. You’re still useful.”
Roldán shook her head. “Serrano has misjudged my president, if he thinks extortion will work. It will just piss Miguel off and make him even more determined to stomp on the man.”
“Serrano has a habit of misjudging people,” Calli said.
“So I’ve heard.”
“Quietly, quietly!” Ibarra told them. He turned to face them and put his finger to his lips. His manner was that of a man approaching something with hushed reverence. “Elbows in, trays up, belts fastened. Ready?”
Calli just looked at him. She didn’t want to play his game. It was too creepy.
Their lack of response didn’t seem to bother Ibarra. He spun around with his arms spread. “Welcome to the palace of fun!” he cried. He turned to the right and strode through the pillars there.
Calli and Roldán followed him around the pillar. A set of plain concrete stairs broke up the wall there. The stairs led down to what had to be a sub-basement beneath this one. They were unpainted. No art or decorations adorned the stairwell. There was just an iron handrail, also unpainted.
Ibarra kept his arms up and his fingers spread as he almost skipped down the steps to the landing. He still reminded Calli of a ring master, in charge of a black circus. As he turned at the landing to climb down the other half of the staircase, he laughed up at them. “Hurry!”
He skipped down the stairs and disappeared.
The guard with the machine gun nudged the back of Calli’s shoulder.
Reluctantly, she took the steps one at a time, down to the landing. Roldán kept up with her.
They turned the landing and Calli realized she was holding her breath, waiting to see some terrible sight.
There were a set of brocade curtains at the bottom of the steps, pulled back on either side and tied with gold cords with tassels.
Calli let out her breath. It looked ordinary.
She could see nothing in the space behind the curtains, except for the edge of a patterned rug. Warm, dim orange light pervaded the space.
Ibarra moved back into view and beckoned. “Come, come!”
They climbed down the steps and moved through the curtains to where Ibarra was standing and came to a halt, looking around.
Calli’s first impre
ssion was that they were standing in the foyer of a grand hotel, a throw-back to another century. There was flocked wallpaper, Persian carpets and lots of red velvet upholstery. Tiffany lamps glowed on round tables with potted palms and satin tablecloths that fell to the floor.
On all three sides of the room Calli could see from where she stood, there were doors leading into what had to be other, smaller rooms.
The impression of elegance didn’t last, for there were people in the “foyer” who dispelled the olde worlde charm. Details registered, stealing Calli’s breath. The women in the room were all barely dressed, or naked. The men all wore the gray Insurrecto uniforms, with jackets or pants open for better access. On the big circular seat in the middle, a man sprawled on his back while a woman wearing only a see-through chiffon robe rode his hips with slow movements. Her face was expressionless.
At one of the round tables, farther away, a naked woman was bent over the edge. Her upper body was squashed against the tablecloth, her face turned to the side so she could breathe. The officer standing behind her had a hand planted against the middle of her back.
He was fully clothed. His fly was open and he thrust into her with heavy grinding motions. In his other hand, he held a big glass of beer, that he drank from as he worked.
There were women on their knees in front of men who sat or stood. More women on their backs.
Many of the women wore collars and leather gear, with their nipples clipped. One woman wore rubber from the tip of her feet to the top of her head, with only her genitals visible. There were small round cut outs for her eyes, nose and mouth.
Calli squashed the disgust and horror rising in her. To show any reaction at all would be to show weakness. Despite her heavily beating heart and the sickness swirling in her gut, Calli kept her face still. She didn’t shift on her feet although she wanted to. She resisted even curling her hands into fists, because it would expose her unease, too.
She turned her head as if she was taking in the whole room, while she kept her gaze unfocused so no details registered for a second time. Then she looked at Ibarra and lifted her brow enquiringly.
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