At the table, an opossum sat in a wooden chair, dressed in faded blue overalls, his wrists handcuffed. A nasty scar drew a line from his cheekbone to his neck, so thick that the fur would never grow over it again. He watched them file in, almost relieved at the diversion. But the relief drained away once the door slammed shut, and Wawa stood before him with her arms folded.
“You go by the name Teyu?” Wawa asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“You are the Director of Tranquility.”
“That’s right. This is my assistant Grissom. And this is Daiyu Fang, head of Special Operations. You’ve met Major Jackson. So if we’re all here, this must be important. Right?”
“Yes.”
Wawa motioned for the files. Grissom handed them over. She opened the first folder to find a report on Teyu’s arrest earlier that day, at the sanitation truck depot where he worked.
“My understanding is that a few weeks ago, two of our agents paid you a visit,” Wawa said. “They were looking for your brother Yatsi. He is now presumed killed in the flood. I’m very sorry.”
The opossum rested his chin on his chest.
“Grissom has been going through all the pending cases since the attack,” she said. “Most of them can’t be salvaged. But on a hunch, he cross-referenced the agents’ report with your medical history. You were in the hospital because of an infection in your mouth, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And how did your mouth get infected?”
“I do not know.”
“We do.”
Jackson spit a fragrant rope of tobacco juice into his cup.
“You had a fake tooth put in,” Wawa said. She placed both manila folders on the table and opened them. One showed the medical records for Teyu. The other for Yatsi. Each had an illustration of the jaw in the upper right corner, with every tooth numbered.
“Where did you get that scar?” she asked.
“At work.”
“And you lost some fingers in the war.”
“Yes.”
“Yes. But it says here you made it through with all your teeth. Your brother Yatsi is the one who lost that incisor. The very same one you tried to replace. On the cheap, I’m guessing.”
The opossum said nothing. Which was perfect.
“Here’s what I think,” Wawa said. “Yatsi, for some reason, needed to become Teyu. Probably wanted to hide the fact that he used the translator. So he cut his face, and even sliced off a few of his fingers. The last part was fixing the tooth, and he almost got away with it. But Grissom just couldn’t help himself. He kept digging. Very stubborn, that one.”
Grissom nodded.
The opossum seemed more annoyed than scared. He stretched forward as far as he could and examined the two reports. His nub of a nose sniffed the paper, causing the ugly scar to wrinkle and then stretch taut again. The uneven teeth grinded in his jaw.
“I request a trial,” he said. “I can do that. It says so in the Hosanna Charter.”
He phrased it almost like a question. Wawa suppressed a laugh. She glanced at the guard standing like a statue in the corner. “You. Get out.”
Jackson and Fang moved out of the way as the man exited the room. Wawa could sense the fear building in the prisoner as the door clicked shut.
“The Hosanna Charter,” Wawa said. She swore an oath on the original copy, which washed away in the flood.
“Yes. I have rights. They say, ‘The Charter gives rights.’”
Wawa rested her palms on the table and leaned in until she could make out the contents of his breath, rancid with partially digested garbage. A yellowish stain tinged the fur around the opossum’s obscene mouth.
Her whole life, Wawa tried to do the right thing, which for her meant serving some master in the best way she could. First her human owner, then Culdesac and the Queen, then the Prophet and the city he blessed. All of them had slipped out of this world. She was the only one who remained. There were no masters anymore. Only her and God. And he decided long ago to dump her in this city and leave her to guess at right and wrong.
“Do you know what’s going on here?” Wawa asked. “The creatures who attacked us were looking for people who have used the translator. And those same people have been dying. And I’m going to find out why. I’m going to find out if the two are connected. And you’re not going to stop me.”
Teyu gazed out a window that wasn’t there.
“Look around,” she said. “No one knows you’re here. No one knows I’m here. This is as far as you go. This might be the end of your life. You might die in this little box. And you sit there telling me that you have rights according to the laws of Hosanna?”
Wawa got close enough so that her snout brushed his ear. “I’m Hosanna,” she whispered.
It felt good to talk like this. She regretted waiting so long to try it.
“Did the creatures . . . find someone?” he asked.
Wawa walked around the table so the opossum would face her. “What if they did?”
Teyu’s eyes widened into large black marbles. “Tell me what happened.”
“Tell me what you did first.”
The opossum looked at the two humans. Neither of them budged. Frustrated, he slouched in his chair, weighing his options. And then, as if possessed by some spirit, he lifted his head and stared at Wawa. And she knew then that Teyu was gone. Someone else watched her with those shiny obsidian eyes.
“You win, Chief Wawa,” he said in a deeper tone. “I congratulate you and your intrepid team. I am in fact Yatsi of the Quiet River Nest.”
Jackson halted mid-spit. Fang began to smile, then pursed her lips to hide it. Grissom, as usual, remained expressionless.
“I will confess to everything,” Yatsi said. “I will put it all in writing. But you need to tell me right now. Do the Sarcops have a user?”
“Not yet. He’s on his way to meet them.”
“To do what?”
“To operate the Rama satellite. The user has the knowledge. The Sarcops believe they can extract it from him somehow.”
“And you let him go?”
“It’s a peace offering. The Sarcops tell us they have people trapped in the ice near the North Pole. They think the satellite can break open a section so they can escape. But they’re wrong. The Rama doesn’t even work. And we have a little surprise waiting for them.”
Yatsi pondered this for a moment. He began to rock nervously in his chair.
“What is it?” Wawa asked.
“I know what those fish-heads are going through. Because I can still hear her. I still hear the Queen, like they can. She speaks to me in my mother’s voice, from before the Change. It’s not even words. It’s all squeaks and whistles, but I understand it.”
He kept rambling about how he could smell the Queen, about how he closed his eyes and appeared in the Colony as one of her handmaids, licking debris from her abdomen, speaking in their chemical language. His arms pulled taut against the handcuffs. Wawa could hear the tendons straining, the bolts twisting. Fang and Jackson backed away, unsure if this animal possessed the strength to break the chains and come bounding over the table.
“What are you trying to tell us?” Wawa asked.
“This knowledge that we were given. It’s everything. It’s all that she ever learned. We’re not just talking about how to build a plane or drive a car. We’re talking nuclear launch codes. Locations of old weapons depots. Dangerous things.”
“That’s why you killed them.”
“No one can be trusted with that power. Even if they don’t know they have it.”
“But the satellite isn’t a weapon.”
“It is if they use it to melt the entire ice cap. That would be a lot worse than the dam breaking, don’t you think?”
W
awa pictured it—the glaciers collapsing and crumbling into a black sea. Her throat suddenly went dry.
“Chief,” Fang said. “We have been over this. Even if the Rama worked, it cannot generate that kind of power.”
“Not by itself,” Yatsi said. “But there are other satellites that can reflect the sunlight. Correct?”
Fang swallowed. “The Chinese built two prototypes. But they are inactive. Their orbits have decayed.”
Yatsi laughed. “You thought you could outwit an omniscient being. If the Sarcops can triangulate the devices, it would generate enough heat to melt the ice cap and flood the planet.”
“The people who designed the Rama would have known that this was a danger,” Wawa said. “They would have . . .” She imagined herself in the fighting pit with Cyrus, her master at her side, and hordes of angry human faces, their teeth flashing under the fluorescent lights.
“Oh, they knew exactly what it could do,” Yatsi said. “They were humans after all.”
Oh, God, Wawa thought. It’s my fault. The air in the room grew thick. When she glanced at Fang, the woman meekly nodded her head.
“Carl, can we reach the Vesuvius?” Wawa said.
“No, Chief. She’s out of range.”
“What about the Upheaval? Can she tell Falkirk to abort?”
“Upheaval is patrolling the mouth of the river. In the opposite direction. Even if we ordered her to pursue, it might be too late.”
The opossum laughed bitterly.
“What’s so funny?” Wawa asked.
“I’m watching you try to plot out your next move. Weighing your options. Pros and cons. So inadequate. For the Queen, there is no cause and effect. There is no past and present. Like drops of rain falling into a river—it all flows in one direction.”
“You talk about her like she’s still alive.”
“She is. As a matter of fact, she can never die.”
Perhaps later, Wawa would have the time to sit by the window and think about what she did wrong. But that would have to wait. She needed to figure out how to contact the Vesuvius. Getting to the bunker by land was out of the question, given the distance. And bird patrols were notoriously unreliable.
“Chief Wawa,” Yatsi said. “Promise you’ll kill me. After you come to your senses.”
Wawa answered by turning away from him and pounding on the door until the guard opened it. Wawa motioned for Grissom, Fang, and Jackson to follow her outside.
“Chief!” Yatsi said. “You have to kill me! You have to kill all the users!”
As he screamed, Wawa hurried down the hallway, with the others trailing behind. “Daiyu, I need someone to do a quick analysis of those satellites. See if he’s telling the truth.”
“Yes, Chief.”
Behind her, the guard told the opossum to keep quiet. It did not work.
“The Queen told me all about you, Chief! I know who you are!”
“Carl, send word to Upheaval—”
“You’re Jenna the house slave!” Yatsi continued. Hearing her true name from the mouth of this lunatic made Wawa stop. Grissom almost crashed into her.
“You killed for your human master,” Yatsi said. “Jenna the house slave! You killed your own people for sport! You should be in this cage, not me!”
The guard slammed the metal door and slid the rusty bolt into place. The echo of it brushed past Wawa’s ears. For a moment that lasted far too long, Grissom, Jackson, and Fang looked at her, possibly imagining her as some kind of attack animal.
Let them believe it, she thought. She continued walking. It took a few seconds for the others to catch up with her.
CHAPTER 23
Wolf Country
By midday, the sky became a polished blue slate in the window of the bridge, with the verdant forest rolling underneath. Falkirk sat in the captain’s chair, his hands folded in his lap. Somewhere in the room, a computer made a pinging sound. The gondola shuddered amid some turbulence, producing a noise like an old man clearing his throat. Behind him, O’Neill mumbled something about coordinates, either to herself or to one of the crew members. To appear busy, Falkirk tapped the screen on his tablet for what must have been the tenth time in the past five minutes. The display came alive, showing the time in the lower right corner, 10:53 a.m. Over fifty-six minutes since the Vesuvius had left communication range.
Falkirk tapped a dropdown menu and selected “Crew.” He cycled through the personnel files until he found Church’s security team. At the bottom of the list appeared the name “UNKNOWN” with the species marked as “CANINE.” The computer yielded no further information about what D’Arc was doing at that moment. Falkirk tried to think of some reason to bring her to the bridge. Maybe he could request a security detail. There was no guarantee that Church would pick her for the job. Unless Falkirk asked him to.
“Captain,” Bulan called out. “We’re receiving a signal from the Upheaval.”
Falkirk swiveled his chair to face her. “Upheaval?” That wasn’t right. The sister ship should not have been anywhere near the Vesuvius. Falkirk went over to Bulan’s station. Her monitor displayed a message, repeated over and over in green text: SU 002. “Upheaval’s call sign,” Bulan said.
Ruiz stood behind Falkirk. “Is that a distress call?”
“Maybe. It’s the default signal when regular communications go silent.”
“Have they responded to us?” Falkirk said.
“No, sir.”
“O’Neill, can you give me their itinerary?”
“Opening it up right now. Upheaval was ordered to patrol an area south of Hosanna. She is . . . approximately . . . fifty-three miles off course. And counting.”
“Ruiz, is this normal?”
“Orders change. But we can’t be sure without an update from Liberty One.”
“Right. O’Neill, what’s their heading?”
“North, fourteen degrees. They are running almost parallel with us. Not a direct intercept course. But at their current speed, they’ll be within visual range about eighteen miles southwest of our destination.”
“Is it possible something happened to the crew?” Falkirk asked.
“If their speed and heading doesn’t change, maybe it means they’re on autopilot.”
Falkirk imagined the ship dropping too low, low enough for the fish-heads to leap from the water and grab hold of the gondola. Perhaps the ship would arrive with some creature in the cockpit working the controls with its tentacles.
“We could head back to communication range and ask Tranquility what’s going on,” he said. One by one, his officers stopped what they were doing and watched him, waiting to see if he would follow through on this suggestion.
“Under normal circumstances, we would do that,” Ruiz said. “But if we go back, we may not complete the mission on time.”
Falkirk waited for him to say something else. If only one of them quoted some obscure rule requiring them to return to base, he would have shoved Unoka out of the pilot’s chair and steered the ship himself. “Monitor the Upheaval’s progress,” he said at last. “I want to know the moment anything changes.”
“Aye aye, sir,” O’Neill said.
“Bulan, keep trying to reach them.”
“Yes, sir.”
As the crew went about their work, Falkirk pulled Ruiz aside. “I want you to inform Church of the situation. Quietly. Ask him to have a plan ready in case we need his people.”
“What are you expecting exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
The lieutenant gave a nervous laugh before exiting the bridge. Falkirk returned to his chair only to spring from it immediately. He couldn’t sit still, and didn’t want anyone to see him fidget. He rested one arm on the podium and stared out the window.
In the armory, D’Arc shoved bullets into a magazine until her thumb bec
ame stiff. When she finished, she placed the magazine on a stack of five, then slid the stack over to the corner of the table. Across from her, a teenage private named Josh Lasky tried to match her pace, but fell far behind. The boy had skin so white it was almost translucent, with blue veins, and his baggy fatigues barely hung onto his thin shoulders. A sad little mole pocked his cheek, while another showed through his freshly buzzed hair.
Lasky insisted on playing his music on a small stereo. It was some heavy metal band, with fast drums and a singer barking like a dog. Despite the racket, the familiar routine of loading the ammunition put D’Arc’s mind at ease, as did the oily smell of the guns. When Falkirk assigned her to Church’s team, the German shepherd listed a few tasks that needed to get done before the Vesuvius reached the bunker. She jumped at the chance to sequester herself here. To hide.
The Old Man had introduced her to all of these weapons as they scavenged them from abandoned houses, police stations, and sporting-goods stores. He showed her the quirks of each one—how they malfunctioned, how to maintain them. This armory offered even more options for dismembering an enemy, including claymores, a flamethrower, and three enormous canisters that reached from floor to ceiling. “Loaded those yesterday,” Lasky told her. “Bunker busters. Russian made. Fifteen hundred pounds each. If the fish-heads try any funny business, they’ll regret it.” Mort(e) often complimented the engineering skill that went into building the tools of war. “What if the humans put that know-how to better use?” he would ask. D’Arc wondered how there could still be so many of these weapons lying around. So many other achievements of the human age had crumbled away in a mere decade, and yet their killing devices lived on.
The song on the stereo ended, followed by another that sounded identical. Lasky bobbed his head while mouthing the lyrics. D’Arc picked out the words “death,” “bitch,” and “fucker.” The human loaded the magazines only one bullet at a time. D’Arc considered showing him a trick for inserting two rounds at once, but decided against it. No point in going faster when she was here to pass the hours.
“Did you see the new captain?” he asked.
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