“What did he see, Carter?”
I shrug again. “It’s just an office.”
“It’s more than that,” he snaps, “and you know it. You better know it.” Pop leans forward, and his eyes are actually glittering like a crow’s—it’s unsettling as hell, and I’m recoiling before I can even stop myself.
“The actual fuck, Pop?”
“Don’t you talk to me like that. You tell me right now, Carter, what you saw in that place, and what you think the major saw. This is important.”
This time I’m honest with him. “All I saw was a waiting room. Bunch of women waiting to see the same Nurse Completionist I was there to see, the one who worked with Gard until she disappeared. When I got called back into an exam room I had an . . . uh. Attack, I guess. I was out cold for a while. When I came to, the nurse had already found Rafiq’s information in my pocket and reached out to him.”
“And he came?”
“Like he was riding on a fucking rocket. I couldn’t have been out for that long, and by the time I came to, he was at the door.”
“He met . . . who did you say you were there to see?”
I don’t feel like giving Pop Natalie’s name, just like that. “The Nurse Completionist on duty. She was a coworker of Gard’s. A friend of hers. The major met her. Had a few questions for her,” I add carelessly, then drink half my beer. My heart is pounding.
“What questions?”
“Whether or not they performed Insemina . . . how many people they saw in a week, that kind of thing. I don’t know. Seemed like professional curiosity to me.”
Pop puts his hands on the table. He seems to be debating something with himself. Finally he asks, “Did you see any women there who seemed like they were hurt? Hurt physically, I mean. Think carefully now.”
I don’t have to think about it. But I put on a show. I sit back, roll my eyes up to the ceiling, look uncomfortable with the question. “I might have,” I answer.
“Did Major Rafiq see—anything like that? Were there any procedures happening while you were there? While he was there?” Pop’s intensity is something to see. Fearsome. I’m just the worm reflected in the eye of the crow as it’s about to strike downward with its beak, with force enough to puncture me through. But I know what I’m doing. I think. I hope. It’s worth it, having him look at me like that, just to be able to ask this question and hope he’ll answer it with whatever truth he actually knows:
“Pop. What do they do there?”
He blinks at me, clearly surprised. “I thought you would have figured that out, Carter.”
This again. Everyone assuming I know more than I do. I shake my head.
“They’re butchers.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said.” Pop picks up his beer, looks at it like it’s trying to tell him something in a foreign language, then takes a long drink.
I’m afraid to ask it, but I’ve got to. It feels strange even as my mouth shapes the words. “They . . . hurt women there?”
“Mothers,” Pop corrects me. He’s not looking at me now. He’s just a tired old guy in a baggy T-shirt sitting at a table thinking about his daughters. “They hurt mothers.”
Even though some part of my brain has been grasping at this same conclusion all day, there’s another, greater part that keeps insisting it can’t be. It can’t be. “Are you sure? Pop, there were women lined up practically out the door at this place. Why would they all show up at a place that would hurt them?”
“The women need the points,” Pop answers bleakly. “What do you call them . . . the Care Hours. A fractured wrist gets you credited a few hours back every day, for six to eight weeks—while you heal, you know. You can go back to work the same day. You can still function; you’re not in too much pain. A broken metatarsal gets you credited about the same. Those are mostly the procedures they do there, but there are ways you can get . . . more done, if you need it.” Pop raises his eyes to mine, that same inscrutable laser beam. “That’s how Gardner explained it. When I found out what she’d been doing. I’m just telling you what she told me.”
As Pop is talking I’m trying to identify what this feels like, hearing all this. If I had to compare the sensation to something else I’d experienced, I’d have to say it feels like the first couple of times you know, or are about 90 percent sure, you’re in the process of killing somebody.
In my last few months in the Wars, I had a hard time on active patrols because I kept getting these attacks in the middle of attacks—it’s hard to aim, to control your trigger, when you’re trying to see through a gray pinhole and can’t breathe for the white beautiful choking scent of flowers in your throat. In the meantime, I had a hard time explaining what was happening to my superior officers, and even though the guys on walks with me knew what was going on, to my skipper I just looked like a colossal fuckup. Other people kept me alive then, I’m convinced. Wash. Horrocks. Chalke. Wash is dead now. Who knows about the other guys, they may be dead, too, or they may have found themselves on the wrong end of a boom and they’re now in the same situation I was in, staggering around in the dust unable to breathe or see or fight, relying on their friends to cover for them.
The understanding that I myself orchestrated this particular attack is as bitter in my throat as the blood and flowers that are backing up in it. At least I know what to do. Fall back. Fall back. I close my eyes and put my head down on the table and Fred’s message on my retina glows green-blue in the darkness. Go to Gard’s house to read these. Don’t try to open this file unless you’re using her portal, at her place. You’ll see why. Fred, if this is what you were trying to tell me, in your way, Pop beat you to it, and I’m sorry he did.
“I know this is hard for you to hear. Now you know why I don’t want to talk about it.” I hear Pop’s chair scrape back against the floor. “You should go to bed, Carter. Get some rest.”
I don’t lift my head. I just hear him pausing there, feel his hand on the back of my skull, slight, like a dried-out leaf landing.
“Carter. I hope you understand. This is why I can’t have you and Fred out looking for her. For Gardner there’s no coming back.” His voice is thick. “I wish it was different.”
My eyes are stinging. I sit up, and his hand falls away.
“There’s got to be more to it than that,” I insist.
Pop clears his throat and says, in a patient tone that has about as placating an effect on me as his punching me in the face might have had, “I know it probably helps you to think you can find her, or help her somehow—”
“Pop. If she left the New Cities, if she took off to find some fugitive colony outside the rehabbed zone, she could be in real danger.” I push back and stand up, too quickly, and have to work to get my balance. “Right now.” My head is still spinning, but I’m conscious of Pop standing near enough to grab my elbow and not doing it. “Right now, she could need us.”
When I can see again, Pop is close, fixing me with a look that combines a truly enraging balance of skepticism and concern and condescension, and fuck him. He doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t have to.
“You don’t even care, do you? You’ve judged her and that’s it.”
“That’s it?” Pop snorts. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Carter. Believe me. You don’t know what I tried. You don’t know what I did, trying to keep her out of trouble. Trying to keep that whole—outfit—from coming into the light. I kept their secret a lot longer than Major Rafiq will, I can tell you that much.”
“Rafiq? What’s he going to do?” My first thought is not just Gard, it’s Natalie B. It’s the woman in the sling.
“What do you think?” Pop barks back at me. “More to the point, what should he think? He’s no idiot. If it were a Completion clinic that did the work it was supposed to and nothing more, it wouldn’t need to be so well hidden, don’t you think? You’ve got to understand something, Carter. Gardner and her colleagues are operating well outside the conventions of modern medicine, t
o say nothing of the law. Rafiq’s bound by the same code of ethics I am—was—as a doctor, and an officer. I can’t understand why they took the risk of letting him in there.”
“They didn’t know who he was when they called him,” I say dully, the realization that it was all my own fault striking with horrible force. “That piece of paper you gave me. It doesn’t say VA. It doesn’t say anything. It just has his name and his contact number.” I feel in my pocket for it, but it’s gone, of course. Natalie B. has it, wherever she is. She’d had no idea what she was setting herself up for when she contacted him—she just had a big, dumb, bloody unconscious asshole on her hands who she needed help getting rid of.
“Carter. The women who work there—they think they’re doing what’s necessary. God knows we’re all just trying to do that. But it’s a crime. It’s a crime under about a dozen different statutes, in addition to being a serious ethical breach. What do you think a career military medical man who’s risked his own life to save guys in the field again and again—what do you think he’s going to do when he encounters something like that?”
“You and your old war buddy have a chronic fucking case of nobility,” I snarl.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. And you don’t know what you’ve done.” Pop rubs his eyes wearily.
“Me? Pop, I’m not the one who’s giving out his number to people!”
“Aren’t you? I’m not the one who brought him in there!” Pop shoots back. “Jesus, Carter. Ever since you’ve been home, you’ve been telling me you’re on this mission—I’m gonna find Gardner; I’m gonna find Gardner. But when I see what you actually do all day—walking around her neighborhood, and, and . . . riding the bus, for hours, from her place to the edge of the rehab zone and back. Maybe you messaged a few of her old friends . . . I don’t know—you never seem to talk to anybody. I was trying to go along with it. I thought, maybe this gives you some sense of purpose; a lot of guys need that when they come back. But do you really think what you’re doing is an investigation? You think you’re going to find Gardner by harassing her former colleagues and leading the damn army right to their door? Because if you do, you are lying to yourself. And you’re lying to Fred. And you’re lying to me.”
The next thing I know, he’s on the floor. I don’t even know where I am, where my body parts are. I can hardly see for the gray, can hardly hear for the static, can hardly breathe for the flowers, and I’m shaking all over.
Pop’s hand, trembling, comes to the side of his head, then swipes across his mouth, leaving a bloody streak across his wrist.
“I can’t tell whether I deserved that or not,” he says, then absurdly, amazingly, manages a short cough that I realize is a laugh. One unit of laugh.
My nose is bleeding now, too, and not because someone’s just clocked me in the face. I don’t know why it’s happening, why any of this is happening. I seem to have lost control of my body, maybe other things, too. I kneel to wipe up a fallen drop of blood with my forefinger, but only succeed in smearing it around on the tile. While I’m down here on his level, I force myself to meet my father’s eyes. The utter lack of surprise or fear on his face tells me all I need to know.
I stand suddenly and my head keeps swimming, swirling; it’s nothing new; there’s nothing new in this whole damn world. “I’m sorry,” I blurt. “I’ll leave. I’m on my way to Gard’s anyway.” I shove a hand into my pocket, deep, and feel that it’s still there: the key. “I’m not giving up. I’m still looking for her.”
“Jesus, Carter.” Pop’s expression is disgusted. “What makes you think she even wants to be found?”
If there’s any answer to that question it’s not here, not with him. So I make my way to the door, open it quietly, stagger down to the hot night street. I just leave my father there on his kitchen floor, right there where I’ve knocked him down.
I never said I was good.
GARDNER QUINN
2556 ASHLAND NORTH, APT. B
NEW CHICAGO 0606030301
NEW STATES
PFC C. P. QUINN 2276766
MCC 167 1ST MAW
FPO NEW CHICAGO 06040309
June 3, 6:45 a.m.
Hi, CQ.
This is going to sound weird. But I just found out something I kind of can’t believe. And I’m so happy right now I could sort of almost die of it. You ever feel that way?
I feel like life is coming together around something unexpected. I didn’t think anything really unexpected could ever happen to us, to our family, not being who we are and living in the world we do, but it is, it’s happening, something miraculous is happening. Is going to happen. Is happening now. Now!
I am getting waaaaay ahead of myself. I’m sorry I can’t explain what I mean, or why I’m so excited and happy right now, but I am, and I guess the first person I wanted to tell was you. YOU. You know why? Because you’re my little brother and I love you, you nut. How do you like that? Ha!
But being so happy you could die of it. Let’s unpack that. Shall we? Because what I’m learning is that it’s real; it’s a real feeling; like I’m so happy, I could accidentally step in front of a driverless because I’m not— Oh, that is not the right way to put it, not at all, oh my God. Only you and Fred would understand why I am laughing so hard right now. And it’s not funny! It’s not. It’s sad, what I just started to say—oh my God. [laughter, laughter, laughter]
I’m sorry. Okay. I got it. I got this. [hee-hee-hee, gasping]
Listen. Okay? Good things are happening. Good things are going to happen again. I want you to know that. I hope you will be kept going by that thought. It’s keeping me going right now, it’s like the sun rising and rising and rising all over again. It’s almost making me feel like all this—the collapse, the crisis, the Wars—it could end. We could come back from this! Humanity! Isn’t that a crazy thought? I admit it, I wrote us off. The whole species! The world! All of it! But now . . .
I wrote us off when our mom died, CQ. I decided the whole world was a pile of . . . of crap, and the only thing to do was to work on saving the pieces of it that I could, and I live my whole life by that idea, I do, but I never, I never, I never really believed in myself, or believed that anything could really get better. I don’t know if I ever told you this. I don’t know if I ever said this to anybody, not even Fred. But I’ve been a fraud, honey. I’ve been working on helping people as best I could, I guess, and I go to protests and try to be a right-thinking activist and whatever, forgive me, I hope you can, but I—it never seemed like I could really change anything, it was just better than doing nothing. I can’t abide doing nothing. None of us can, I think that’s what me and you and Fred have the most in common, actually. That’s why I’m here, in the clinic, and you’re there, at the Wars, and Fred’s where she is, way up there in the heights.
Fredlet. God love her! God bless her! Oh, Carter. I wish you were here. I’m sure you would feel it, too, I wish I could tell you.
Remember when we were kids? You know, Fred, little Fred, she was as good a mother to us as you and I were ever going to get. You know that, right? Even as a little girl she was so determined, so right. She fought so hard to make sure we were okay.
Do you remember the time she scared that guy away who’d broken into our building and was lurking on the stairs? She was ten.
She’s always been our real mother. And that’s the truth. And I love her so much for it. And I love you for listening to me go on like this. But believe it: Good things are happening. To us. To our family. You’ve got to take care of yourself. Now more than ever.
Stay safe, honey.
Gard
NINE
Walking feels like dragging a body. Mine, I guess.
A warm wind knocks garbage against the buildings.
The night is hot and empty. The sidewalks in Pop’s neighborhood are all open to the skies, right now black and crowded with stars and satellites, sailing like lit cigarette tips through the dark. A driverless car shines past i
n the road, someone coming home from a long night. It’s only about a fifteen-minute walk to Gard’s place from Pop’s house, but I stopped in at the old guys’ bar down the street and drank and watched ads on the portal hung in the corner until the place closed. Now I’m the last man on earth, making my way through a dark black night, everything in it hard and glowing. Pale brick buildings, pale sidewalk, pale street, pale tree stumps. In rehabbed neighborhoods like Pop and Gard’s, the dead trees and bushes have mostly been chopped down, dug up, and carted away, not left in place to point their cutting dead stick fingers.
Fred’s message is still glowing blue in a corner of my eye. I pat my pocket, make sure Gard’s key is still there.
Fred, what are you up to? Gard, what have you done?
I’m not just the last man on earth. I’m also the last man on earth to know anything. But now that I’ve had a little more to drink, I’ve had some time to reassess things. Put some pieces together.
Whatever was going on with her, I still don’t believe Gard would just go off and leave us. Even after these weeks of following cold trails, and harassing her coworkers, and calling her old friends who’d decided they weren’t her friends after all—even after all that, I don’t believe it. Gard is still alive, somewhere. Natalie B. as good as guaranteed it.
But the thing is. If Gardner’s alive and she knows we’re looking for her and she’s not getting in touch or responding to anyone’s messages—maybe it’s really true, and Gard is just gone, and wants to stay gone.
Why can’t I let her go?
Because she’s my sister. Because we need her. Because she loves us. Because she and Fred both love me, when no one else does, or can. I know this. I know them, my sisters.
And if Gard’s not just gone, that means something took her, or sent her. That means she’s in danger.
Fred, what are you up to? Gard, what have you done?
I’ve got to help them somehow. They’re in trouble. They need me to man up. But I’m too stupid, too lost, too tired.
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