by Eliot Peper
As Dag was so fond of pointing out, history was doomed to repeat itself. Just as her grandmother had resisted until resistance left no option but flight, in rescuing Dag, Diana had doomed them both to live out their lives as fugitives. She grimaced. At least she was practiced at it. Old habits died hard. She rested a palm on Dag’s chest, feeling it rise and fall, rise and fall. He would learn. He could handle it. Dag had survived foster home after foster home to make his own way in the world and ended up pulling strings that changed it. She smiled sadly. They would still be able to get their hands on art supplies in whatever backwater they ended up in. He could pursue his passion without the anxiety of her irregular absences. And she could . . . do something. She would cross that bridge when she came to it. For now she needed to get everything in order to make their escape possible.
She dipped into her feed, immersing herself in the vast flow of information like a sea turtle catching a transoceanic current. Messages and notifications vied for her attention alongside headlines decrying a civil war over Congo River water rights, another public appeal for Commonwealth accountability from Javier, and record turnouts for Comic-Con’s annual extravaganza in Kuala Lumpur. She snuffed out these streams like unwanted candles, called up encrypted correspondence with the various contacts she was pressing for all the bits and pieces necessary to establish the false identities they would need to start fresh.
Dag stirred next to her, and Diana dialed back her feed’s opacity to look down at him again. If only they could stay here forever, thirty thousand feet above the ground, safe from the depredations of a world gone mad. Was that too much to ask?
Blinking away sleep’s cobwebs, Dag opened his eyes.
“I’m sorry, babe,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
CHAPTER 26
It took an hour for Diana to bring Dag up to speed, an hour during which they hurtled through the rarefied air above Canadian Arctic tundra, its melting permafrost stoking the runaway process of climate change that the carbon tax had only just begun to mitigate. If only there was time to indulge the bleary viscosity endowed by Dag’s medicated oversleep. Diana wanted nothing more than to massage his aching limbs, offer him gentle, constant, loving affection that did not flinch when the ghosts of his trial haunted, and promise him that everything was going to be okay, that all bad things had come to an end, that the future was bright and friendly and theirs.
Instead she explained how Haruki had asked her to stalk Rachel, how Diana’s suspicions had escalated, how she had burrowed through Leviathan, Sean, and Lowell to find Helen at the conspiracy’s rotten core. Then Diana laid out the coup Helen was plotting, why Commonwealth was the key to a new political empire, and why she had kidnapped Dag to ensure Diana’s loyalty. Disclosing so many hard-won secrets was a strange feeling, like a mountaineer prying stiff fingers from a trusted ice ax after surviving a harrowing climb. Diana was so used to sealing off her work from her relationship with Dag that her delivery was as halting and awkward as a parent explaining sex to their child for the first time. For his part, Dag listened in silence, his lips pressed into a thin line, his eyes unreadable.
Finally she caught up to the present, telling him about the extraction and presenting the immediate next steps that she was halfway through improvising. They would be stopping off in Vancouver to visit a sake bar whose proprietor doubled as a purveyor of black market identification materials, shuttling resources around to minimize traceability and calling in favors from fixers who could set them up in Chile or Laos. But even as she pitched it, she began to question her assumptions, to recognize that in the rush to rescue Dag, she’d skimped on the follow-through.
Dag raised a hand. “Hold on, what exactly are you proposing we do?”
Diana forced a smile. “It’s just like you said to me over breakfast. We’ll find a new place, go off-grid, start over. As long as we’re smart and we keep our heads down, we should be fine.” She reached out to touch Dag’s knee, but he flinched and she snatched back her hand.
“No, we won’t,” he said. “If Helen nationalizes Commonwealth, she’ll weaponize the entire feed. There won’t be anywhere to hide. We’re not talking about fleeing a government by running to a new country. Jurisdiction won’t matter. Nothing will matter except that we know too much about what’s happening to be left alive.”
“I’ve got people who can keep us hidden. Some of them are even feedless.” It sounded weak, even to her. She was walking out onto a frozen lake and only just now seeing the cracks forming beneath her feet. “I’ve started over before. I can do it again.”
“Oh yeah? Were you the high-value target of a megalomaniacal dictator? You’re saying that Helen wants to be Alexander the fucking Great and that we’ll just sidestep into the wings?”
Just like that Diana’s plan evaporated. She wanted to come back with a firm rebuttal, explain how she’d thought through every contingency. But the fact was, she hadn’t. Helen wanted Diana to create an excuse for her to take over Commonwealth, but the absence of that excuse wouldn’t stop Helen. She would create another one or simply throw due process out the window and call in the troops. Easier to ask the public’s forgiveness than its permission, particularly when so much was at stake. With Commonwealth firmly in hand, Helen would set her sights on Diana and Dag.
Even if they went feedless, generated a maze of false data leading to dead ends, and lived out their lives in the middle of a forest, they still wouldn’t be safe. With unlimited access to the entire feed, all Helen would need was for a random hiker to stumble on their encampment or a single satellite to recognize the underlying facial structure that even plastic surgery couldn’t hide. They would be running not just from Helen but from the feed itself. That was just another way of saying they would be running from the entire world. There was no refuge from civilization.
Diana had been replaying an old pattern in her head. There was a tragic symmetry to following in her grandmother’s footsteps that had given the plan false plausibility. But time was inexorable, a cruel vanguard that advanced only forward while its denizens could look only back. This wasn’t the dissolution of the European Union. They weren’t a family fleeing a battlefield into a friendlier nation’s open arms. There was no escape. Not for Diana, not for Dag, not for any of Helen’s enemies once she had the feed in hand.
It was over before it had even begun.
“And even if it were possible,” said Dag with a sad shake of his head, “what makes you think that I’d want to go with you?”
“Dag,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. She reached out to touch him again.
“Don’t,” he snapped, and her hand jerked back again. “What? You think that I’m some damsel in distress? That you’re winning me over with a dramatic rescue? You’re hoping we’ll join the mile-high club and jet off into the sunset? Maybe you’re about to make one of your cute little jokes, all loaded up with innuendo? Is that it?” Suddenly his fury disappeared, leaving only exhaustion. “Diana, nothing’s changed. We’re still as trapped as I was in that godforsaken place. You’re still living a life in which I’m just a prop, and it turns out even being a prop might be fatal. Fuck.” He rubbed his face with his palms. “I could have told you Lowell was planning to turn governments against Commonwealth. He explained it to me the last time I saw him.”
“Wait, what do you mean Lowell told you?”
Dag sighed, as if unloading a burden. “Three years ago, the morning after I . . . spent that first night at the cottage, I walked down to the market to get groceries to make you breakfast.”
I can make pancakes. She had been so overwhelmed in that moment on Indian Rock, accepting the portrait he’d sketched of her, reevaluating this man whose very sense of identity had been stolen from him yet who had found something deeper, figured out a way forward. If that’s your version of a pickup line, then you’re the man for me.
That was when she had broken protocol and brought Dag back to her cottage. The sex had an intensity she’d neve
r felt before. It wasn’t technique or endurance or anything like that. They had simply both been there in that room and nowhere else. Thoughts hadn’t strayed, attention hadn’t wavered, and every sense, every nerve, had been set alight as if for the first time. The next morning, she’d slept in, waking up to sunlight streaming in through the window and Dag calling her downstairs to eat.
“Lowell was at the market? What was he doing there, picking up milk?”
“He was waiting for me,” said Dag. “He had me under surveillance, guessed I was behind Rachel forcing the carbon tax, even though he didn’t know how. He had some goon force me into a back room at gunpoint, told me he was excited about Rachel’s move, that it gave him an opening to pursue a new opportunity, convincing governments to fight off Commonwealth.” Dag let out a humorless chuckle. “He thanked me, even offered me a job helping him do it.”
“He had you under surveillance, that’s how they knew about the cottage.” Diana said this more to herself than to Dag. It fit, and it meant that Helen had had an eye on Diana long enough to actually plan this. She stood and began pacing up and down the cabin. She had seen Dag’s entire feed archive, shuffled through his most intimate personal history, assumed she knew all there was to know about him, and yet he still had secrets. “You should have told me.”
Dag stared at her in disbelief. “I should have told you? You spied on Rachel, met Javier, invaded Sean’s home, and confronted Lowell. I understand every single one of those people better than you or anyone you know. I’ve worked with all of them, seen inside their lives. I know what drives them. And you didn’t even bother to mention it to me, even though we were theoretically in a relationship, even though we lived together.” He squeezed the edge of the couch, fingers digging into the fabric. “I could have told you a million things. I could have helped. Instead”—he spread his arms—“we have this. It’s unreal. You’re unreal.”
“I was protecting you,” said Diana, unable to stop the guilt his words inspired from mutating into righteous anger. “Emily and Javier tore your life apart. You gave up everything to end their exploit. You even managed to trade it to Rachel for something the world needed, a political solution to climate change that governments had failed to achieve for decades. You sacrificed enough, too much. I love you, Dag. I couldn’t let you get dragged back into this. You were drawing, building a new life for yourself.”
“And how has that worked out? When they came for me, put a bag over my head, drugged me, and took me to that place, you know what they were asking me about? They were asking about you. What you’ve been working on, who your contacts are, what your plans are. You think ignorance protected me then?” A tremor ran through him. “Skulking around in the shadows, pretending that I’m some kind of lamb you’re guarding from the big bad wolf, that’s not about defense or compassion, it’s about you wanting to believe that you’re some kind of savior, that you’re special, that only you can face what this world is really made of.”
“I was protecting you.” Her whisper was barely audible.
“I never asked for your protection,” he said, slumping back against the couch and closing his eyes. “All I’ve ever asked for is your trust.”
Silence rippled through the cabin.
Fuck who you like as long as it doesn’t endanger the mission. Love if you can’t help it. But trust? Never. Helen had lowered her voice to a confidential growl and held up a french fry as she delivered that advice at Mauricio’s. Diana could almost smell sizzling bacon and see the greasy burger drippings pooled on the wax paper covering the red plastic baskets that served as plates. As if to underscore her point, Helen had dipped the fry into the ketchup as swiftly and precisely as a surgical strike, maintaining eye contact while she chewed, breaking it only when she swallowed, satisfied that Diana understood the gravity of this injunction. Helen needn’t have been concerned. Diana’s experiences as a refugee had long since convinced her of the existential danger of trust.
Diana felt like an overinflated balloon, pressure expanding inside her, forcing its way out from her gut, her mind, her heart. The Dag whom she was protecting, whom she loved, who drove her mad, was nothing more than a figment of her imagination, a manifestation of the purely theoretical innocent public she tasked herself with protecting, a shadow of the flesh-and-blood human collapsed on the couch in front of her. True love meant loving a person for who they actually were, not an imperfect mental construct, just as true protection required empowering people to defend themselves, not pretending that the dark side of human nature didn’t exist.
“I’ve spent my entire life learning to not trust anyone,” said Diana, voice cracking with the intensity of the energy built up inside her. Dag had grown up in and out of abusive foster homes. Lowell had used him as a pawn. Hackers had turned his life inside out. How could he trust anyone? How could anyone trust anyone? “I . . . I honestly don’t know if I can.”
He sighed, eyes still closed, head leaned back against the cabin wall. “We all have to start somewhere. Otherwise what’s the point?”
“The point of what?”
“Anything, really.”
Diana looked through the long window running down the side of the cabin opposite the couch. Her breath fogged up the Plexiglas. Thousands of feet below, the crags, fjords, and channels of Canada’s Northwest Passage slipped past. Countless explorers had lost themselves in the maze of inlets, assaulted by cold and weather, demoralized by dwindling supplies, and driven to mutiny by the bitter anticipation of dreams left unfulfilled. Now pleasure cruisers plied the waters alongside trade vessels, technology and global warming making the impossible accessible. Scientists had declared them extinct long ago, but might there still be a lone polar bear wandering one of these barren islets, ribs visible through uneven patches of yellowing fur, the final thoughts of the last member of a once-proud species consumed only with the pangs of starvation? She could readily visualize Lowell’s epitaph: For a while there, we generated a lot of value for shareholders.
Helen lived in a world drained of its color by the harsh filter of game theory. When the world was a prize to be won, life became an exercise in tactics. And if someone could find meaning only in victory, then they would stoop to any means necessary to achieve it. By not trusting anyone, Helen endured a spiritual poverty that deserved not hatred but pity. That made Diana pitiable as well, a label that further stoked her self-reproach.
She had lived in Helen’s world long enough. It was time to see if other worlds were possible. But if Helen succeeded in conquering the feed, her world would become the world. Dag was right, retreat was not an option.
The mounting tension within her was not unlike the ascent to orgasm. She remembered the hot, wet closeness of that last time in the cottage bedroom, the climactic instant when distance, time, and selfhood collapsed into each other, revealing themselves to be nothing but convenient falsehoods, expressions of some deeper, unified truth. But that heightened perception was so fleeting, giving way easily as the onslaught of thought throttled up again, reconstructing the illusions with which it swaddled our waking lives.
Diana pressed her palm against the Plexiglas, the only barrier between the comfort of the cabin and the frigid, howling gales of the upper atmosphere. She imagined the window popping out of its frame, the winds sucking all pressure and warmth from the cabin, throwing off the feed algorithms that piloted them, the plane corkscrewing out of the sky, she and Dag hanging for a transcendent moment in weightless free fall before disintegrating upon impact, their remains to be scraped out of twisted wreckage whose black box would be a rare case study of catastrophe for a generation of aerospace engineers made complacent by years of perfect safety records. But the Plexiglas held firm. Its surface was cool and smooth against her skin.
Sometimes the only way to meet power was with power.
“Dag.”
He stirred, perhaps moved by a subtle change in her voice or maybe just responding to the inscrutable touch of providence.
&nb
sp; “What is it?”
“I need you to make some calls.”
CHAPTER 27
“Hey, girl.” Sofia was in the middle of wrapping her hair up in a towel as she accepted Diana’s call. Through the feed, her luminous dark eyes were wells of intelligence, and her pale cheeks were flushed from what must have been a scorching-hot shower. “What’s cracking?”
“Oh, you know,” said Diana, “just jet-setting around the world causing all kinds of mayhem. You know the drill.”
Dialing down her feed’s opacity, Diana surveyed the Canadian lake country spread out below the charter plane. Innumerable pockets of blue speckled the rugged wilderness, sunlight glittering off them like stars twinkling in the night sky.
“What is it this time?” Sofia held up a slender hand. “Wait, no. I don’t want to know.”
“Finally you’re starting to learn some sense. Dangerous questions have dangerous answers.”
“Uh-huh, trouble always seems to stick to you like a magnet.”
“How’s the training coming along?”
“Just finished a thirty-miler,” said Sofia, the American lingo galvanized by her Italian accent.
“You are out of your damned mind,” Diana said with feeling.
“You know how sometimes you get in the zone and running feels really good, like you’re flying and could go on forever?”
“My experience running with you typically feels like my body is being eaten away by hydrochloric acid while my heart teeters on the verge of cardiac arrest and my soul questions my obvious and pathetic personal and athletic deficiencies.”
Sofia tossed her head in a way that made Diana think of a prized mare in an ancient caliph’s stable. “And I revel in superiority,” said Sofia. “There is no feeling more precious. Why do you think I enjoy running with you?” She winked. “Seriously though, this one was brutal. No fun at all. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Just an exercise in raw willpower. The worst. But I’ve only got a few weeks before that BC ultra. The elevation chart on it looks like someone gave a toddler an espresso and let them draw it with a crayon.”