Lars shuddered, and his gaze fell to the slushy sidewalk. The snow had begun to pick up, and the flakes were sticking to his black hair like specks of dust.
“You’ll have to make some adult choices now. You’ll have to choose whether you think your aunt Grace deserved to die, just like those men up on the platform, or whether she deserved to live. How come you never turned her into the Bio Police after you saw her bleed? You knew she was pregnant, didn’t you?”
There it was, a slight nod. Dex pitied the boy for the paranoid life he was bound to lead from here on out.
He leaned closer and whispered.
“Don’t you realize they’ll kill you if they find out you kept the truth from the Bio Police? You’re just as guilty as those men being executed.”
The boy’s nod was more prominent now. The bottoms of his eyes glistened with tears. The soldiers, thumping with their heavy boots, were getting closer. Dex looked up. It was the soldier from the train, the volunteer who was really an accountant, walking with another man toward Seventh Street. Grinning, he checked out Dex again and extended a hand. Dex took his own from Lars’s shoulder and shook it.
“So, we meet again!” the soldier said. “I thought I saw you head off this way. We’re stopping at my hotel room for a while before heading out.” He exchanged a sexually charged glance with his friend, and then both of them eyed Dex. It was an invitation.
Lars jerked his head toward the soldier’s feet. If he was going to turn Dex in, it would happen now. Dex took him by the shoulder again and grinned at both men, then gestured at Lars.
“I’d love to join you guys, but I’m in the process of trying to tell this one he’s too young to be flirting with me. I’m a friend of his dad’s, and he always used to check me out after my showers at their house. Saw me here today and came after me, but I told him to wait until he’s fifteen. Then I’d consider.”
The soldiers laughed and patted Lars on the back. The boy just stood there like a mannequin waiting to be moved.
“A few more years, kid,” the soldier from the train said. “You’ll make a cute fuck.”
“If I can get to Rapture tonight, I’ll try to find you,” Dex said. “Otherwise, another time.”
Both of the soldiers began walking again. The accountant waved. “Another time, man.”
Lars remained motionless as the two men disappeared up Seventh Street. Relief rang through Dex.
“Support the Colors, wipe out the Others!”
The mantra was fading up Sixth Avenue now. The parade had passed.
“Better get back to your crowd, Lars,” Dex said. “Think about what you’re doing. The future depends on boys like you. On if you’ll have courage to make the right choices.” He pivoted to follow the soldiers up Seventh Street.
“Wait,” Grace’s nephew said. He raised his pale face into the street light once again.
The snow was getting aggressive now, and a wind had kicked up.
Dex turned. “Yeah, kid?”
“Is my aunt Grace alive?”
“She is,” Dex said. “Remember her before you decide to stay loyal to the NRO.” Lars stood in silence as a cluster of snowflakes snuffed out his candle. Dex shook his head at the boy, then turned and walked up Seventh Avenue. He did not look back.
CHAPTER 49 (HER)
DIANA KRING HAD DISAPPEARED, and here was her name and a short message, scribbled on what residents of Mount Tasman called the Wall of the Future:
Diana and Michael Kring—Love to all we
left behind, January 16, 2385.
The new women from the Cliff House and the 306 others residing in the maternity dorms lived in awe of the wall. It was on the side of the underground dormitory complex opposite the entrance Orion Skelby had checked them in through. Modeled to look like smooth rock, the wall lay on the dormitory’s top floor in a long, empty hallway, at the end of which was yet another steel blast door. There were hundreds and hundreds of names scribbled and scratched on it, and Grace found Diana’s name on her eleventh day inside the mountain. Her reticence had left her oblivious to the wall, but when she finally made the effort to join the other women for dinner one night, the table was abuzz with discussion and speculation.
Diana’s name was written near the end of the tunnel three feet from the floor. The only reason it stood out to Grace was because it was written in a soft orange, different from the reds, blues, and blacks of most other names.
Here’s the answer to your mystery, Dex, Grace thought. And it looks like you had another child. A son. Michael.
It was Dex’s middle name. A good name. Grace longed to meet Diana here, face to face, to befriend somebody and become common links for one another, but the regulations were strict. Only those who had given birth were allowed down the tunnel and through the door. That was when the biological refugees wrote their names on the Wall of the Future. Right before they took that last step.
So, why did they keep the pregnant women separate? Why wait until they gave birth to move them again? Lieutenant Helio’s confusion about the hushed government panic over the closed Sanctuary weighed on Grace, but she purposefully avoided contributing to the rumor mill that churned with new ingredients every day.
“I heard it’s because the living conditions are horrible, even worse than the liaisons are telling us,” some of the women were saying, contradicting the optimism Ruth had displayed on their drive to Franz Josef. “I mean, five thousand people living in a mountain? It’s going to be a rats’ nest!” But there were whispers from others that were more sinister. “Some people think it’s all a joke. That people just go through there to a bunch of gas chambers, to their deaths.”
Nobody who worked in Mount Tasman—not doctors, not maintenance crew, not refugee liaisons like Orion Skelby—gave credence to the rumors, and they maintained constant assurance that the door led to the part of the mountain where the refugees who had already given birth lived, and it was slightly more cramped than the maternity dorm, which they reserved to keep the pregnant ones comfortable during their confusing and possibly frightening life transition. Yet Orion avoided Grace for nearly two weeks, until she cornered him one morning in the cafeteria. Thirteen days had passed. Not only was Grace growing restless, but she was also rabid for any news from Sheila Willy or her father, which Orion had promised to help her get. Trying to find patience and solace inside the mountain had been difficult.
When Grace cornered Orion that Tuesday morning, he was grabbing an apple from the food line. She approached him with confidence, but it fractured into bits of desperation as the words came out.
“You never came to find me.”
Orion recognized Grace and sank back. He threw the apple into the air, then caught it, as if trying to hide his guilt over having ignored her. “You got me.”
Grace’s anticipation sank. “Do you really know Sheila Willy? Is she really okay?”
“I do.” Orion seemed perfectly aware that his answer did not help Grace at all, and he conceded with a shrug. “Okay, I know I’m not much help. But to be honest, I haven’t had the chance to talk with Sheila. She hasn’t answered her com in almost a month now. But I did leave her a message after I met you.”
“Were you the one she knew from the Cliff House in Minnesota? The one she fell in love with?”
Orion nodded. “Sheila and I were close. But then I took the opportunity to get to New Zealand. We hadn’t yet received intelligence about when the NRO was going to stage their attack, and I wanted to get down here before it happened. Sheila didn’t. At the time, Carnevale thought the attack might be coming within a week, but it turned out to be almost a year later. I’ve been stuck here since then.”
“What do you mean, ‘stuck’?” Grace asked.
“Stuck. Meaning, once you get here, you’re stuck. You have only one option.”
“Which is?”
“To stay with the Opposition. Until everything is over. It might not even be in our lifetimes.”
“‘Everything
’ meaning the counterstrike.”
“To restart the world.”
Grace swallowed the urge to let loose her tears. “So you mean you’re here until you go through that door upstairs? Why don’t they just let everyone through at once?”
Orion was avoiding Grace’s eyes now. “Because once you go through, you don’t come back. That part of the mountain is depressing, to say the least. But it’s the only option humanity has. The mothers, failsafes, and babies who’ve gone through there . . . you’ve seen their names on the wall . . . they make a commitment to that part of the mountain. We want to keep people here until after their babies are born, because it doesn’t help our women to finish out their pregnancies in a place that’s less than comfortable. We like to keep you as relaxed as possible. Have you been to the deck yet?”
Deck?
Grace’s silence made her confusion obvious.
“So, none of you newbies have figured it out yet, huh? Well. I’m going to show you.”
She allowed the change of subject, because it was pointless to continue theorizing about the rest of the mountain, especially when the staff’s answers never changed. The deck, however, was a section Grace wished she had known about from the beginning. She had not even noticed a glass door at the far left side of the first floor’s cavernous common room, having been there only twice for icebreaking games during her first week in the mountain. Yet it became obvious once Orion pointed it out.
“I find it helps to bring something to read,” he said. “Helps sell the illusion.”
The door slid open as might one onto any ordinary house deck, but beyond it was a ten-foot passage leading to another door, which was solid. Orion opened the door, and Grace gasped.
She was outside, on the ridge of the mountain, overlooking the stunning vista of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. It was cool but not cold, breezy but not windy, and even humid but not damp: an impossibly perfect day in the middle of the most stunning view she had ever seen.
“I should have kept my eyes open on the hover jet,” were her first words.
Grace did not even see Orion close the door, which seemed to have vanished into the clean, invigorating air. He walked her forward, over an open, rocky platform.
“Look over there,” he said, pointing toward a mountain peak that looked even more colossal than Mount Tasman. “That’s Mount Cook, the tallest mountain in the territory. A bit taller than Tasman. They make a nice pair, don’t you think?” He pointed slightly left of Mount Cook to where a valley led out of the mountains, toward a long strip of light blue. “Lake Pukaki. You can see it from here, but barely. An unnerving color blue, isn’t it? Funny to think how old all this is, what it’s been through. The world, I mean. Not this holosphere.”
Grace nodded, and her face scrunched against an onslaught of tears. Damn these pregnancy hormones, she thought.
Yet all this was incredibly sad: the room was not real, she was still stuck inside a mountain, and she might never again breathe fresh air. On top of everything, she was alone.
“But this really helps,” she whispered aloud, surrendering her consciousness to the near-perfect illusion.
“Excuse me?” Orion said.
Grace blushed and smiled with embarrassment. “Nothing. I mean . . . I’m totally alone here. I have nobody. Being stuck inside a mountain is the most depressing thing to ever come my way, and this deck . . . this will make it a lot more tolerable. I hope.”
“Virtual reality of the most advanced sort,” he said. “Of course, it’s almost thirty years old, so I’m sure they’ve actually learned to create new realities by now. But for what they’re worth, holospheres like this get the job done.”
For a moment, Orion stood with her in silence.
Then, Grace said, “You can’t help me, can you?”
“By talking to Sheila, you mean?”
“By getting her to bring my dad down here.”
“I’m not sure. I’m just a refugee liaison. They’re strict about letting homosexuals in. Did you have a failsafe?”
“He’s gone. Arrested, but he might have escaped. I saw his face on WorldCom. We were both at Sterile Me Susan’s in Minneapolis when the Bio Police came. I think we might have led them there, actually.”
Orion dug his boot heel into a small pile of loose rock. “The only reason I think I can get Sheila here is because she had a spot reserved before. And she could still work for us, even though the NRO stole her uterus. Did she tell you that?” Tears had formed in Orion’s eyes. He turned away and gazed over the mountains. “She had a chance to come here, but she didn’t,” he continued. “It could still work out, though, and if she gets my messages and contacts your father, I might be able to pull some strings and get him in too. But he’d have to commit to leaving society forever.”
“The NRO is going to wipe out humanity anyway,” Grace said. “That’s their whole plan. To save the world by getting rid of its most destructive species.”
When the words didn’t quite sink in with Orion, she told him about her discussion with Lieutenant Helio in Los Angeles. He took the news first with an incredulous expression, then an uneasy one.
“I’ll keep calling Sheila,” he said. “She has a new com that Albert Redmond gave her at the Cliff House. Unless she’s somehow dead, I know she’s checking it.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “Oh, just so you know, the door out of here is through the holosphere, right where the kea bird is sitting.” He pointed to a craggy rock behind Grace. Sure enough, somewhere just past the platform of mountain rock that served as the deck, a landed kea bird—an illusion, of course—was bobbing in circles.
Grace still had so many questions, but Orion left her in this holosphere of make-believe magnificence. She sat for hours, staring into the crisp blue sky, basking in the artificial mountain breeze. Sometimes, she saw a kea bird flying in the distance, over the ridge of Mount Cook. If she no longer had freedom, this was the next best thing. The homosexuals had succeeded only so far in their fight against heterosexuality, and her very presence here was one step closer toward delivering them a memo of futility: Sorry, but your efforts have failed. Humanity will go on.
In the two weeks since leaving Los Angeles, her belly had grown so much that it would have been impossible to hide the pregnancy, even from fags who would otherwise pay women little attention. Her body shape had changed steadily over three months in mild weight gains, but since she crossed the four month mark, the changes had increased with exponential fervor. Her hips were wider, her rear end was now more cushioned, and the bump on her stomach was rolling outward with the unmistakable mark of a carrier.
This is what we’re fighting for, little girl, she thought, gazing over the mountains. If we don’t help keep people around, who’s going to appreciate the world? Who’s going to look at these mountains and love them for their beauty?
Grace and the rest of humanity—they were all just animals, of course, like every other species in nature. They could create life from nothing; they did not need engineering labs. Controlling human proliferation had its place, but to do so by force and, worse, by murder, was what separated the human species from the others. Murder was a moral conflict, and morality was a human trait, a glimpse through the keyhole separating light and dark. It had existed since the dawn of mankind, that keyhole, and every person on earth found it sooner or later. As she soaked in the beauty around her, knowing these mountains existed in reality somewhere above this frightful cave she now called home, Grace realized she was on the side of light.
This is where I’m supposed to be. And I’m not alone.
Inside the mountain were hundreds of other women just like her. Some were in the maternity dorms, and the others, Diana Kring included, had passed through that final door, into the part of the mountain nobody would come out of until the end, that holding zone for humanity’s future.
I can be content with this, if I let myself.
Grace looked inward and saw her lonesomeness for what it really was: self
-pity. She had lost her family, her friends, and the failsafe who had helped pave this road to begin with, only to lose focus on the opportunities for life, love, and the happiness still surrounding her. Marvel, dear annoying Marvel, had seen an opportunity and seized it. Lieutenant Helio had done the same in his own small way, reaching out to her that night on the beach. Grace could follow suit with what she still had, here and now, if she truly wanted to. Perhaps with some resolve, it could happen without her having to forget everyone she had ever loved.
CHAPTER 50 (HIM)
DEX COULD BARELY LOOK Stuart Jarvis in the eyes, yet the man wrapped him in a hug and held him as if he were his own son, despite their being near strangers bound solely by circumstance. Dex found himself crying into the embrace, letting the flush of shame sink out of his heart. Flickers from the past rained out of his eyes: Grace looking up at winter’s first snowflakes the night she found him at the bar, the smile she had worn as he fed her strawberries in the bathtub, her fallen expression underneath Sterile Me Susan’s when his cowardice had finally crawled between them—all these things had turned Dex from an impassive man into a feeling one. In his old life, he would have been embarrassed.
“I don’t blame you,” Stuart whispered. “You let her go, and she survived. And so did you.”
“I almost didn’t,” Dex said.
“You’ll tell me all about it,” Stuart assured him. “From now on, you stay with me.”
They were standing next to a frozen lake, under light from the moon, far west enough of Minneapolis to be secluded. Linda Glass was watching them, crying herself. Despite putting herself and her family at risk, she had arranged the meeting.
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