With just a few nibbles of anxiety gnawing at the edges of his concern, he headed over to Dave and Donie’s place. They were working on getting a Wi-Fi setup for the building with a bunch of salvaged hardware, with the help of a feed to a disused satellite dish on the roof of the Masonic. With this hodgepodge of gear, they thought they might be able to rig an uplink to the satellite they’d used to map their journey to Detroit.
They hadn’t seen Syd, either, which meant that Nathan had three choices.
Most obviously, he could go back to his apartment and try to speak to Syd in the morning. But that was a nix from the start as he remembered back to a conversation he’d overheard between Syd and Tony in the cab of his old Dodge on the road to Detroit. Syd had told him that, if they ran across the people who were looking for her, she’d have to leave immediately, and she’d want Saber to stay with Tony since she could move faster without a dog to care for. The image of Saber with her head on Tony’s sleeping form a few minutes ago flashed across his mind, along with a flood of unwelcome worry.
This couldn’t wait.
So, the other two choices.
Go down? Or go up?
The glimpse he’d caught of Syd’s room in Stryker’s apartment had shown him that all of her stuff was still there, including her rucksack and gun. If those were there, then going down to see if she’d already lit out seemed the less likely option.
So, he went up.
The sentry lookouts on the floor beneath the roof hadn’t seen Syd, they said, but then, Syd could move fast and quiet when she wanted to, and if she wanted to be alone, then there was no reason she would make her presence known to the sentries.
Nathan took himself up to the roof and emerged from one of the turrets into the night. There was a welcome lull in the breeze, but it was still bitter up here. He zipped his jacket up to the neck because the air temperature was still touching zero and his breath steamed around him in a cloud as he walked out onto the roof. He knew that Syd often came up here because she’d told him that, when things got to be too much with Stryker and Freeson’s “testosterone-offs” that she liked to come up here to reset and recuperate with the help of the view. Even the derelict city across the water, Detroit’s Canadian twin, Windsor, had a beauty all its own. The black silhouettes of the ruined buildings, the smudges of rising smoke from the still burning fires, all set against the dying embers of the day, looked like something from an impressionist’s sketchbook, and Nathan could feel the pull of the view on occasions himself. Living cheek by jowl in everyone’s pocket wasn’t the easiest of situations to put up with, and he’d spent a lot of time with these people cooped up in an old, aluminum-skinned Airstream trailer. The Masonic was a lot bigger than that had been, of course, but they all lived on the same corridor, and were in and out of each other’s lives all day, like shuttles skittering through the threads on a loom. Sometimes, even in the apocalypse, you needed to be away from people, if only for a little while.
The roof was dotted with wind turbines thrumming in the breeze, their vibration on the air sounding like distant trucks, or a prop-engine plane crop dusting on a hot summer’s day.
The roof itself, though, was thick with ice and snow, which crunched under Nathan’s feet as he moved away from the turret. The munch, munch, munch of his feet on the surface sounded like someone eating corn, and a couple of times he slithered on the rake of the panels holding up the snow.
When he saw Syd, however, he stopped dead in his tracks. She was standing on the very edge of the low wall that surrounded the roof. The very edge. She wasn’t holding on to anything, and her hands were just by her side, hanging limply. Wind ruffled through her hair, and her jacket collar flapped with it. Her body swayed forward, and Nathan’s heart leapt into his throat. There was no way he was near enough to stop her if she fell, or jumped, and he was terrified to open his mouth in case the shock of knowing she was being watched made her lose her balance.
Frozen to the spot, unable to move forward or back, he heard Syd speak; her voice was soft, controlled but clear. “I guess that’s you, Nate. I thought if anyone followed me up here, it would be you. You’re probably the only one who noticed I was gone.”
Nathan still couldn’t find any words.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to speak, but I’ll tell you one thing, Nathan. If you come any closer…” she leaned forward again, and involuntarily, Nathan raised his arm, causing the sharp pain to jump in his chest again from the broken rib. “If you do come any closer, I will jump. I will jump.”
5
Nathan stood rooted to the spot as the girl wavered again, knowing that even moving his feet to get a better purchase on the roof panels might spook her. “Syd, come on, please; whatever you saw at the Greenhouse, we can work it out.”
“No, we can’t.”
“So that means you have to throw yourself off the roof.”
“It’s a possibility, yeah,” she answered stiffly, but there were tears in her voice, and she’d begun to sob gently. “Why did you have to be so freaking smart and find me Nathan?”
“I’m not smart, Syd, I’m just trying to hold the little that I still have together. And that includes you.”
“And yet you saw how I reacted when those people turned up, and you still went into the Greenhouse and dealt with Brant! How can I trust you?”
“You didn’t tell me what you saw!”
“It was as much as I could tell you that I needed to get out of there! But no, Nathan’s on a mission and Nathan has his focus. I needed you to look out for me. And you didn’t.”
“And that’s a reason to kill yourself?”
“I’m tired of surviving, Nate. I’m tired. I’m sixteen years old and I feel like a thousand. I’ve seen things, bad things. I’ve done bad things. They’ve turned me into a person I hate. And just when I think that, yeah, maybe I’ve found a place and some people I can get back to being me with—this!”
Nathan’s foot slipped on the snow, but the crunch of him steadying his foot sounded like a step.
“Don’t move! I warned you, Nate. I warned you!”
“It’s just my boot on the snow. It slipped. Look at me; I haven’t moved.”
The girl, swaying on the ledge, risked a look over her shoulder and he opened his palms outwards. “See? I haven’t moved.”
“Okay. You haven’t moved. Whoop-de-doo.”
Syd turned back to the sky, the city, the river, and Windsor beyond the ice. She spread her arms wide as if she was readying her wings for flight.
Nathan was too far away to reach for her, and if he started to crunch across the snow, the girl would begin her silent and terminal fall before he had gotten three steps. If he was going to stop her jumping—and right now he was convinced she was going to—he needed to think fast, and decisively.
“I’m leaving Detroit,” he said.
Syd dropped her hands. “What?”
That had done part of the trick. He had a hook in her.
“As soon as Brandon is able to travel, we’re leaving. Me, Cyndi, the baby, and Tony. I’m not staying in this place. There’s too much wrong with it. Too much badness here. We were brought here under false pretenses and that’s never gonna sit well with me.”
“You’ve just sent your wife and kids into the Greenhouse! That doesn’t look like leaving to me!”
“What will happen in there, Syd? My kids will be warm, well-fed, and they’ll grow stronger. Brandon will be in an environment where he’ll thrive, and when he’s strong enough for the journey, then we’re going. Stryker or not, committee and their Greenhouse and Brant or not. I swear to you, Syd, that’s my plan. Come with us. Don’t waste your life here. Don’t be foolish. You’ve got this far, and we can go further. I promise.”
“Where will we go?”
This was a great advance. Syd was considering what he’d said. Offering hope to the hopeless, that’s what leadership is about, Cyndi had told him once. To become a leader, it’s not about forcing people to d
o what you want, but about being able to offer a vision of hope. That’s what people responded to… genuine expressions about a future better than the now. He hoped Cyndi would be proud of him in this moment – but that would only happen if he managed to talk Syd the whole way down.
“I don’t know the destination yet. Perhaps you could help me work that out, but there have to be places better than here. Have to be. Texas? Mexico? Brazil? Who knows? But you’ll never find out if you jump now, will you?”
“I guess.”
“Want to tell me about who it was you saw in that line of stragglers at the Greenhouse today?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Baby steps, then. Baby steps, but the hooks were there. “You gonna come down?”
Syd raised a foot so that she was now balanced on one leg on the lip of the ledge—one good gust of wind to her back and she’d be plummeting down like an arrow. She opened her arms to give herself balance, with her face fixed ahead, seemingly bolted to the line on the horizon where the last dregs of the light of day were sitting golden below the heavy cloud cover. The sky there was all distant purple and deep blue.
Syd raised her knee even further, and outstretched her arms, palms flat.
“Forward or back, Nathan? Forward or back?”
“Come back, please. Syd, please.”
The moment lasted another age, where the world turned a thousand times and mountains rose and civilizations fell within it; it lasted that long. But eventually, with a deft jump and a lightness of landing, the girl came off the ledge. She leant forward, put her gloves on the edge, and looked over. “But by God, I would have made a pretty corpse.”
Nathan took Syd back down to Dave and Donie’s apartment.
It was quieter there, and they were nearer Syd’s age. It seemed more appropriate somehow. He didn’t speak to them about what had happened on the roof—that would be down to Syd, to relay that information if she wanted to.
He only told them he was there on the pretense of finding out how they were doing with their network and satellite uplink. Dave had, at one point, had a satellite-enabled laptop, but it had been one of the casualties in the methane still explosion when they’d first come into the building. That uplink had been their only way of maintaining some connection with the wider world, and he totally understood why Dave and Donie were so keen to lash up something at the Masonic Temple. It wouldn’t be portable, but it would be a start. The chances of them going out into the city now and looting a satellite laptop would be astronomically low, after all.
Syd was quiet as she sat and watched the three others talk. That wasn’t unusual for Syd, but Nathan couldn’t help flicking his eyes across to her from time to time.
Keeping an eye on her, Nathan boiled a kettle and made coffee while Dave soldered wires and Donie wrote code on her laptop. “How far are you guys away from getting this to work?”
“How long is string this week?” Donie asked moodily. “We’re doing our best. Maybe if you weren’t about to take us away from this on a duck hunt for a gangster, we might be able to say.”
“Okay, point taken. But, genuine question, how is it going?”
Dave put down the soldering iron and rubbed his tired eyes. “This is a fritzed actuator for the dish on the roof. Needs some more work, but I’m nearly there. Once that’s on, we’ll be able to control the direction on the dish and that might give us a range of satellites to try. Donie’s working on the code we need to handshake and get in. The NSA hack tools will come in handy, and we haven’t found any system yet we can’t get into.”
“You have NSA stuff? How the hell… no, wait, don’t answer; I don’t want to know.”
“You really don’t,” Donie said with a wry smile, not lifting her head from the screen in front of her or pausing in her tapping on the keyboard. “Like laws and sausages, you don’t want to know how hacking is made. Just leave it that we got access to this stuff a long while ago, and that might have been why people were shooting at us just before you found us.”
“Why does everyone have to be a freaking mystery all of a sudden?” Nathan breathed out ruefully. “I’m an average guy, average life, average family, and, you know… I’m average… everyone else around me wants to be extraordinary. What’s wrong with being average?”
“Nothing,” Dave answered.
Donie shrugged her shoulders. “Not for me, man; just not my style.”
Dave snorted and smiled. “Anyway, once the code is completed and we have a new wind turbine set up, one dedicated to the system, I guess we’ll be ready. We’ll need to go out and source a server and some Wi-Fi kits, but we should pretty soon be able to give you coverage for most of the building. Everyone gets internet here. Well, what’s left of it anyway. There are at least servers working all around the world, and some deep stuff still accessible here in the States—God Bless Bill Gates—so we’ll have information and be able to communicate with any groups in the outside world who have the same skills as us.”
“That’s if the floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis haven’t killed them all.” It was the first thing Syd had said, other than grunting to accept her cup of coffee, since they’d come down to Dave and Donie’s apartment.
“Well, that’s what we’ll be trying to find out,” Dave said, ignoring the sarcasm in Syd’s voice.
Syd had never looked so small and vulnerable to Nathan as she did now. Legs tucked under her on the sofa, her hands clutching at her mug, birdlike, sitting there and taking baby sips. And her eyes bulged as if she was replaying horrific stuff in her head. His experience of Syd was that she would tell him what was eating at her in time—all he had to do was make sure she didn’t see him as a threat or believe that he had lied to her. Syd was a person for whom trust was everything. She had that with Tony and Saber, and to a lesser extent, she’d had that with Nathan until today, when he’d gone to deal with Brant instead of making sure she was okay.
“Well, as soon as you have it up and running, I need you to find something for me.”
That made Donie look up. “Oh?”
“Yes,” Nathan said. “Somewhere else other than Detroit for us to live.”
As arranged, Brant sent two Humvees two mornings later to pick up Cyndi, Tony, and Brandon and take them back to the Greenhouse. The day was a rare clear one, with the sky still pale blue from the ash cloud, but there was enough harsh light to make the snow on the ground hurt the eyes and drain everything else of color.
Cyndi had packed already, and hadn’t wanted Nathan to help. He’d trolled around the Masonic like he was one of two bears sharing the same sore head, wishing that he didn’t feel so bad about pushing for Cyndi to make this deal with Brant. Logically, he knew it was the right thing to do for the short-term, but the long-term problems it might throw up down the line would be incalculable.
Cyndi had accepted the idea and she’d told him so, but the idea of being separated from Nathan filled her with dread—even knowing that, with education for Tony and better access to the Greenhousers’ stocks of asthma medication, he’d be better off, and the same would go for Brandon; she hadn’t been away from Nathan for any significant amount of time since they’d married, and it was going to take getting used to.
“I’ll visit when I can,” he’d said.
Her half-smile had told him she knew that survival outside the Greenhouse was a full-time job, and that it was hard work, tiring and dirty, especially when it came to keeping the wheezing old heating system going in the Masonic, and not least of all with them going on a manhunt. “Concentrate on staying alive. Everything else will work out,” she’d told him.
Cyndi had slept both of the last two nights with Brandon in the nursery. There’d been no reason to, though, other than to start to acclimatize herself to their being apart. Nathan had had to fight his demons alongside his better angels to not complain to her. The bed had been cold and the space next to him had felt deep and wide and empty. He’d found himself rolling over several times in the night,
expecting the warm curves of her body, and then waking up confused, this to be followed by the sinking feeling of remembering what they’d decided. During the day, they’d passed like ghosts of each other in the apartment, nothing that reached the heady heights of conversation passing between them—just the niceties needed by two people sharing the same space. At least Brandon had seemed to be taking the bottle better, and had more color to his cheeks.
Tony, however, was a different matter. The last thing he wanted to do was leave his dad, even if it was to go into the relative warmth and safety of the Greenhouse.
“But I want to stay with you, Dad. Don’t make me go with Mom.”
“Tony, it’s not up for discussion. You have to go. It’ll be okay. There’ll be school and other kids.”
“I don’t want other kids.” His face had begun morphing in the past months, shifting from little boy to pre-teen. Perhaps it was all the time he was spending around Syd and her sullen teenage ways. If he didn’t have the influence of kids his own age, he was going to chameleon off of those around him. “I want Saber and I want Syd. I don’t want stupid friends and stupid school!”
Cyndi had vacated the room to go see to Brandon’s bath and diaper change, but Nathan had suspected she’d been leaving him to deal with Tony alone—she might have accepted the move into the Greenhouse, but she didn’t have to like it, after all. That was a whole other ball game.
Nathan had considered playing the bad guy with Tony, telling him that this move was happening and that he’d have to get with the program whether he wanted to or not, but even though his son had been stomping about like a hormone-turbocharged teen, Nathan had caught the glistening of tears in the boy’s eyes. It was easy to forget everything Tony had been through in the last few months and not cut him the slack that he needed.
“Come here.” Nathan’s voice had been soft and level, coaxing his son to accept what was happening. “Come on, buddy, come here and let me tell you something that I haven’t even told Mom.”
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 30