“Yeah, there’s that,” Moses concurred.
Dex’s face was red with humiliation. The worst part was that the Archers were clearly not as wealthy as he thought they might have been, based on what they had spent on his behalf over the past four days.
As much money as the chip replacement required, neither man for a moment appeared in favor of leaving Dex to fend for himself. Moses used the hotel’s com to transfer money from their “untouchable” retirement savings account. Gratitude and love pierced Dex’s heart as he watched the transaction, and what accompanied it was fleeting but unmistakable: a sudden awareness that hope was a living, breathing, constant facet of humanity. As long as human beings existed, so would goodness, despite all evils.
You’ve gotten me this far, Dex said to the voice from the train. Now, watch over these men. They deserve to have my luck when all this is through.
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, Sam and Moses accompanied him to the intersection of West Tenth Street and Baltimore Avenue. The streets were neither empty nor particularly bustling with nightlife, but Dex and Sam were inconspicuous in their drag queen apparel. As the convention center was only a few short blocks away, those visiting for Queens of the Midwest had congregated in the neighborhood for the week. It was a Monday night, and most of the people walking the streets seemed to be out for fun. Moses was the person who stuck out most, as his hands were buried deep in his pockets, and he walked with the nervous and stiff stature of a man emasculated by his surroundings.
True to her word, Flevin was standing on the southwest corner of the intersection, kitty-corner from the one they were waiting at. She stood against an antique stone building with one high-heeled boot pressed against the wall. She was tiny, with sharp black hair and narrow eyes. Her black jacket was made of expensive leather that glimmered under the street light but was unzipped to expose a startling red party dress beneath it. Dex waved, and Flevin waved back, as if they were old friends. There were no approaching cars, so Dex, Sam, and Moses crossed diagonally through the intersection.
Up close, Flevin almost passed for a transvestite, if not a drag queen. The makeup on her face was one step past gaudy, and her legs were wide set, so she walked toward them with a slightly masculine gait.
“Hey, how are you?” she said enthusiastically, hugging Dex. Then, she whispered. “Follow me. Act as if we’re all drag friends. We don’t have far to walk.” Then, she leaned back and looked at Sam and Moses, adopting once again her socialite persona.
“Are these your friends?”
“Yes. They’re buying everything tonight,” Dex said, turning to them, trying to smile. “Aren’t you, boys?”
Sam leaned in to kiss Flevin’s cheek. “Honey, you can bet on that. If I have one too many drinks, my husband here will show you where to scan.”
Moses was still angry at Flevin for the cost of helping them, but he shook her hand nonetheless with a crisp nod. From there, they walked east six blocks to a retail center on the first floor of a high-rise condominium complex. They entered a bustling shop called Sex Me Sideways. Sexual paraphernalia of all types lined the shelves, but Dex barely had time to look, because Flevin was leading them straight to the back, toward an aisle of live males, who were all standing over hefty price tags on podiums upholstered in plush red fabric. Just like every other sex shop Dex had ever been in, the models smiled and tried to entice the customers who walked past. One in particular, a thin blonde teenager, was in the process of wooing a man who looked no younger than seventy.
“No no no, Bruce,” he chirped to the old man, who was trying to grab his legs. “A hundred dollars, and you get me for an entire hour, just like last week. But you have to pay Flevin first!”
Flevin grinned at the young blonde as they passed. “Send him to Aiden. He’ll scan the guy’s chip.”
“Sounds good, boss,” the boy said, smiling. His gaze intersected with Dex’s for a second, and Dex saw in it a flicker of desperation. Even for a young homosexual male, being a sex worker was not particularly glamorous, even if there was good money in it. It was doubtful the boy was happy having to service wrinkled old men. Dex smiled at him before the podium disappeared behind another aisle of merchandise.
At the rear of the store were six doors lining the wall, all of which were closed. Sitting at a nearby desk and reading something on his com was a muscular black man wearing a tight orange tank top. He looked up as Flevin approached with the man and two drag queens in tow.
“This one with the bobbed hair is here for a private show with Chaos,” she said in her sharp business voice, and then she pointed to Moses. “This one’s paying.”
The man gestured with his finger for Moses to come closer. With a lackadaisical lift of his arm, he brought up a credit reader, set the price, and held it out to Moses’s wrist. Moses took a deep breath as the reader scanned the chip, and he pursed his lips at Sam with raised eyebrows.
Flevin nodded at Moses, then turned to the man at the desk. “Thanks, Bart. If anyone calls for me, I think Chaos should be done with him in about two hours.” She turned to Sam and Moses. “Feel free to wander the store while your friend is getting his private show. All items are half off for people who buy shows with Chaos.”
She said it with such a straight face that Dex wondered whether the man at the desk had any clue what was going on here. He had already turned back to his com and was flipping through the digital pages of what looked like a fitness magazine.
Flevin snapped at Dex. “Chaos has a busy schedule tonight. Come on.”
She led him to the closed door that was farthest to the right, then scanned her wrist against the lock reader. After pulling the door open and ushering Dex through, Flevin followed and shut the door. They were in a small room containing a round bed, red velvet draperies hanging from purple walls, and a mirrored ceiling. The small woman led Dex straight through it and knocked on the far wall. After a moment of silence, it opened to reveal a hidden chamber replete with medical supplies, desk coms, and even what appeared to be living quarters consisting of a bed, shower, and small kitchen.
“This is Chaos,” she said, pointing into the room.
There sat a man so fat that Dex blinked twice to make sure there were not two. Chaos looked more like a triangular mound than a human being, by typical social standards. He was sitting in what had to be an office chair, but only the chair’s wheels were visible; his midriff, thighs, and rear had all sagged to hide the seat. The man’s chin drooped in a five-inch wattle that shook when he turned around to greet them with a dreary smile.
“Hello,” he said.
Dex wondered how the man was able to move, but he did; he lifted an arm and gestured for Dex to sit in a chair opposite his own, across a small stainless steel table. Not only was Chaos frightfully obese, but he was also paler than any human being Dex had ever seen, as if he had not left this windowless room in years.
That might explain why he looks so sad, Dex thought, feeling sorry for the man. When he spoke, however, the pity dwindled.
“Another fucking failsafe?”
Flevin nodded. “You saw the record Mauer sent over. He paid, so switch him up.”
Chaos seemed already to have prepared Dex’s new chip, which lay in a covered Petri dish in what Dex hoped was a sterilizing solution. The man was wiping an alcohol swab along the shaft of a long needle connected to a full syringe.
“Hold out your hand,” he told Dex, and Dex complied. “Local anesthetic. Your chip is farther into your skin than it was when you were a baby, but a quick ultrasound will show me exactly where it is, so it won’t be difficult to make a slit on the side of your wrist and retrieve it. That is, unless for some reason it’s deeper than usual.”
Chaos inserted the needle into three different points on Dex’s wrist, then opened the Petri dish to make the new chip accessible. He scanned the chip with a reader that was connected to a desk com at the end of the table. A database identical to Kal Mauer’s mirror of the TruthChip database was already open
, and a new record popped up.
“When we’re done inserting the empty chip, we’ll finish building your new record with a new identification photo, a new financial account with our affiliated bank, and a random sampling of data typical for a man your age, and we’ll make the database software think you were born thirty-something years ago. Easy enough. You will be able to close your new bank account and transfer to a bank of your choice at any time, just as you would if you were legal. Would you like to make any changes to your appearance? Say, a head shave, at the very least?”
“Is that included in the cost?”
Chaos glared at him, then turned to Flevin. “Is he serious?”
“He’ll go for the head shave,” Flevin said.
Dex did not object. Hair grew back, and it could only help him on his return to Minneapolis to look different. He was already much thinner than he was three weeks ago. But he had another question. “What’s my new name going to be?”
“Based on the decade of your birth and popular names of the time, I came up with Marcus Hepburn Flint. Do you object?”
“I guess not.”
“Then stop asking questions. Let me get this done. If you’re this twitchy when I do the micro-electroshock, you’re going to have a shitty-looking insertion line, and it’ll give you away to any smart cop. You dig?”
Go eat a sailor, Dex wanted to tell Chaos, but he resisted. He sat back and let the gargantuan man do his work.
CHAPTER 47 (HER)
GRACE WAS DARING TO HOPE.
The mechanics of Mount Tasman astounded her: the amount of work that had been necessary to blow out the mountain’s interior, the construction inside of a shell large enough to house a small city’s worth of buildings, the ventilation made possible by carefully mined tunnels—it all left Grace feeling tiny, insignificant. She had heard of facilities built within mountains before, but erecting a headquarters for the Opposition in a place as remote, as beautiful, and as conspicuously close to Antarctica as this had been ingenious. Frederik Carnevale’s family had laid the foundation for humankind’s salvation—no easy task—and it seemed to be thriving.
Grace’s party had entered the mountain through a gray blast door at least three stories high. Their “refugee liaison,” a kind-looking man with a black mohawk, drove them through the massive tunnel that followed, explaining during the ride that any working members of the Opposition not yet inside Mount Tasman would hopefully arrive by May, before winter really kicked in and blocked the access point. Ice and snow could be unpredictable between June and September, and due to the Opposition’s plans for the future—the counterstrike, Grace knew but did not say aloud—they would not be reopening the mountain.
It took five minutes to reach a loading dock preceding a second steel blast door. The mohawk man parked the transport next to three others along the far right wall, where a fifth one was just pulling out. Its driver waved at them.
Going to pick up more people, Grace thought, pulling her suitcase—everything she had left of her life—off the carriage. The blast door opened, and ten people, seven men and three women, entered the chamber. They welcomed the new arrivals with gracious smiles and gathered their bags. The failsafes carried what they had, but pregnant women were exempt from labor here; the refugee liaisons insisted on carting their luggage. Grace did not object. The last twenty-four hours had sapped all her energy, and it was almost impossible to fathom that just a day ago, she had been anticipating the explosion of Lieutenant Helio’s bomb in those empty, isolated ruins of Los Angeles. When she considered the last five months in their entirety, who she was before and who she was now, it was like looking in a broken mirror. Her life had cracked in so many ways that only the bits seen through the shards were recognizable.
“Now that we can all hear each other over the vents, welcome,” the mohawked carriage driver said as they crossed from the loading dock into a hallway with dull metal walls. It stretched almost as far as Grace could see, but doors interrupted it on either side about a hundred feet down. “We are nearly a kilometer into the mountain, and our four-hundred-thousand-square-meter facility is spread throughout an excavated space surrounded by an ungodly amount of mostly greywacke rock. The main spine of the Southern Alps is made up mostly of greywacke, which is a kind of super-hard sandstone. Anyway, I’m doubting any of you care about geology as much as I do. I’m pretty much the only one here who thinks it’s amazing.” He smiled, and so did Grace. Their eyes met momentarily. For a moment, the mohawk man seemed to look at her as if she were familiar, and his gleeful expression flickered with melancholy.
Did I just imagine that? Grace wondered, suddenly feeling self-conscious. But none of the other women seemed to have noticed. Ruth was walking along beside her, yawning but still trying to maintain an authoritative, attentive gait.
“In any case, we are going to check you in based on our communications from Frederik Carnevale’s Cliff House in the American Territory. I myself used to work there, and I’ve been the one organizing your transportation, along with Albert Redmond.”
That would explain his American accent, Grace thought. Suddenly, something else felt familiar about the man, but she could not immediately place it. It was not his soft blue eyes, which were reminiscent of Dex Wheelock, nor his thin body, which reminded Grace of her father. As it turned out, she did not have to pick her brain very far to make the connection; he did it for her while registering the new recruits in a large receiving lobby through one of the hallway’s left doors. Grace was third to last in line. Most of the women had already disappeared down a hallway decorated with holopanels showing sky views of New Zealand’s Southern Alps.
“Claire Austen, or Grace Emilia Jarvis?”
“I guess we can use our real names again, right?” Grace said with a tired grin.
But the man was looking at her with a pensive gaze.
“I thought it might be you, for some reason. It says here you were recruited by Sheila Willy. The only one out of this bunch. That true?”
Grace’s heart leapt with excitement. “Yes! I was. Do you know Sheila?”
The man nodded. Suddenly, Grace remembered: Marvel had mentioned spying on Sheila in the Cliff House communications room. She had been discussing the counterstrike with a man who had a mohawk.
“Yeah, I know Sheila well. Very well. She’s . . .” The man’s words trailed off, but a smile lingered on his lips.
This is the man she fell in love with, Grace thought. The realization made her forget all sense of propriety, and a rush of questions poured out before she could control herself.
“Are you still in touch with her? Do you know what happened? She just left the Cliff House one day and didn’t come back! She was supposed to contact my dad—”
The man nodded, then looked around the lobby with a surreptitious expression.
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “I’ll find you. We need to get everyone checked in and scheduled for medical examinations—”
But Grace was barely registering the woman and failsafe still waiting behind her. This was it, her one chance to salvage a shard of her old life. The urge to grab hold of it was overpowering. If Sheila had survived the attacks, she might even be able to put Grace in touch with her dad. “Is Sheila coming here, like she planned? Can you tell her to call my dad? The coms they gave us at the Cliff House can only receive calls, so I can’t tell him where I am!”
“Grace, I—”
“Please? I just . . .” Her words drifted into the wake of reality. Excitement was futile. The chances of this man being able or willing to contact her dad were remote at best.
As if to confirm this, he grimaced, then sighed. “I’ll find you later. Okay? I really have to get everyone checked in.”
Grace regained her posture, but adrenaline left her feeling electric, untamed. “I’m sorry,” she sputtered. “I just . . . I liked Sheila. It was confusing when she left. I was all alone.”
“I’ll do what I can to relay your message,”
the man said. “Now, if you could follow the rest of the women into that corridor, you’ll be escorted to the maternity dorm, where we’ll set up your appointment with Dr. Thrace.”
Maternity dorm? Dr. Thrace? There were too many damned doctors.
“Yes. Okay. Thank you. . . .”
He extended a hand. “I’m Orion Skelby. Sheila mentioned you, and I really will see to it she gets your message, if I can. We’ll talk later. I promise.”
Grace shook Orion’s hand. She offered him a weak grin as he turned away to continue his work.
In the days that followed, however, Grace saw Orion only in passing, and it appeared as though he meant to keep it that way. As a refugee liaison, he was always on the run, dealing with the inevitable day-to-day problems involved with integrating forty-three new people into a dorm already housing over three hundred. The rooms were indeed dorm-like—small, three women apiece—and there were no artificial windows, as there had been at the Cliff House. The rooms, common areas, and cafeterias were equipped with the bare essentials: things to eat, places to sit, and ceilings with exposed ventilation and piping. Holopanels were sparsely placed and failed to lend the cave a sense of openness. It was downright industrial, a gritty center of operations for an intercontinental resistance effort much larger than any one person living there. Most mountain staff members had separate living quarters in another part of the mountain, so when they were not helping the new recruits, they were busy with their own lives. The depressing truth was that Grace and her intent to contact Sheila Willy were not Orion’s first priority, nor could they be.
Four days passed without so much as a head nod from Orion, and she found herself falling into a self-constructed psychological cloister, devoid of any human spirit but her own. During the night before her first appointment with the obstetrician Dr. Thrace, however, the baby inside her was dancing in summersaults, as if to remind her that no, she was not alone, that she had been accompanied through this upheaval of her life all along, lest she forget. It was true. Grace had almost forgotten. Save for the back aches, the kicks, and the growing levels of exhaustion, the fact she was pregnant—truly and humanly pregnant—had become a neglected truth juxtaposed with her effort to avert the Bio Police. Now, she was in a safe place until the baby came.
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