“You’re talking about the Washington?”
“So you know about that?” He smiled. “Interesting.”
“I was there when we ran that disk for the first time,” Lila said and then instantly wondered at the reasons for her disclosure – and regretted it, especially the way it made the computer expert’s eyes light up.
“Interesting,” Abe Ben-Gurion said again. “Let me show you something.”
He moved back towards one of the monitors with a distasteful lack of any effort to protect himself from behind, though Lilianna wasn’t about to attack him and Ben-Gurion knew that, and so she wondered at her own reasons for the scowling assessment as well as the thought of it as she faked demureness to follow after him. He sat with relief on a swivel chair and invited her to do the same, tapping some keys so the sleeping screen blinked awake.
Lilianna was surprised to see the laptop from the downed Raptor neglected on the bench-top beside it, and Ben-Gurion quickly kenned that look.
“You might’ve heard Councilor Deschain is no longer a Councilor,” he said.
He motioned at the shutdown laptop.
“Anything more you can tell me about this?” Ben-Gurion asked. “I think our hopes of decrypting the hard drive itself vanished along with Carlotta.”
“She’s . . . gone?”
“No, but she’s not taking my calls, if you know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
Ben-Guiron shrugged and moved on, commenting almost absent-mindedly. “I don’t know why I’m still here, except these lovely toys only come with my access to the Enclave.”
“We call it the Bastion now.”
“Hmm,” the man replied. “And you’ve been here how long?”
Lilianna dropped her eyes, defeated.
“This is my first night.”
“Cheer up,” Ben-Gurion smirked. “You could be out there with all the Meat, right?”
“We shouldn’t call them that,” Lila said weakly.
The remark only made the errant Councilor smirk more, but he distracted from it by rattling the computer mouse and calling up a weird little black box on the screen. The ex-software genius hit a bunch of keystrokes like an expert typist and more boxes appeared. The scrolling numbers and hexadecimal code looked like nonsense to Lilianna.
“What are you doing?”
“This is what I was going to show you,” he replied with eyes fixed on the screen. “You’re going for a job in Communications?”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
“I hear there’s a vacancy.”
“Yeah.”
“Sad,” the older man said. “Did Tom – I mean, your father – tell you much about that fighter plane he found?”
“Not really,” Lilianna said. “The newspaper said it must’ve been recent?”
“Within the last year, at least,” Ben-Gurion said. “And probably more recent than that. Do you understand what that means?”
“I’m not stupid . . . Councilor.”
“Ha, I didn’t say you were,” Ben-Gurion replied. “From the info on that disk, though, we know months have elapsed since the USS Washington made landfall and initiated contact with this . . . colony, or whatever we’re calling it.”
“Greenland?”
“Yes,” the Councilor said, studying Lila now and ignoring the code which kept tumbling down the screen and refreshing. “Communications is running the contact now with the Washington, trying to undo the damage caused by the Lefthanders. You might find it all a little strange. . . .”
“Why?”
“Let me explain it another way,” he said. “Can you keep a secret?”
Lilianna returned him a stern look, not because she had something to prove, but out of skepticism the seriously clever computer nerd was actually trusting her with a real secret. He was too smart for that. But if he did have a weakness – if he underestimated her because of her age, still thinking in old-world terms what it meant to be a naïve teen – then Lila was happy to avail herself of that. She dropped her armor long enough to fake something like a bashful smile to encourage him.
“Sure,” she said.
“I’m running a back channel conversation with the group who call themselves the Inner Circle,” Ben-Gurion said.
“Why?” she asked at once. “Inner Circle? Are they the ones in charge?”
“Definitely not,” he replied. “But I’m still figuring the rest out. See how you go with Miss Stacey, and if you get the gig . . . we might chat again, OK?”
Lilianna’s inner protest that he must think her some kind of idiot almost proved her undoing as she opened her mouth to challenge the obvious ploy. She closed her lips firmly instead, adopting something akin to what she hoped was a flattered look.
“Sure,” she said again.
Abraham smiled tightly.
“Not everyone is as sure about the City’s mission anymore,” he said. His eyes drifted far away. “So it’s always good to have a little insurance. But it’s just between you and me, OK?”
“OK.”
Lilianna nodded – and at the same time, her father’s words again in her thoughts, determined not to become anyone’s pawn. She was far too good at chess for that.
*
GWEN STACEY’S OFFICE door was open when Lilianna found her way to the Communications bullpen. The sound of another ringing phone threw her off. A gaunt-looking older woman on a stool glanced Lila’s way as she worked some kind of switchboard, connecting the call to somewhere within the Bastion. The other two women standing at counters shuffling paperwork barely glanced Lila’s way, but when her eyes stayed with them, the older of the pair motioned brusquely with only the faintest of smiles.
“She’s in there,” the woman said. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks, sorry,” Lila said and cursed her own apology. “I’m new.”
She cursed herself again, the unnecessary tidbit enough to garner snickers from the two veteran Admin officers, though they left her to walk with her ears burning across the wood floor to the handsome door, the smell of dust, books, pine resin and kerosene cloying her other senses.
There was no need to knock. Lila hesitated a moment at the doorframe, a tentative hand raised, instead meeting the Texan woman’s warm yet businesslike smile of acknowledgement.
“Good timing,” Miss Stacey said. “Come in and grab a seat.”
“OK.”
“And shut the door.”
“O . . . K.”
Lilianna did as asked, suspicion and curiosity dispelled almost at once by the furtive look the older woman shot through the doorway before it shut.
“I’ve just taken over running this section,” the older woman said without preamble. “You’re Tom Vanicek’s daughter. He’s staunch. What about you?”
Fresh from regrets at saying stupid things she’d regret, Lilianna’s mouth puzzled a reply as she sifted the implications of what the other woman was telling her, why she was doing it, and why so abruptly soon.
“Why did they transfer you to this section?” she asked instead.
Miss Stacey eyed her coolly, but there was a clear appreciation to the look she also failed to guard as she eased back in the tall-backed chair she occupied across the far side of a broad desk piled with folders and half-disassembled radio gear, cables, spray cans, jars and old coffee cups stuffed with pens, tools, screws, and other knickknacks probably also inherited with the job.
“Why do you think they’d transfer me to this section, sweetheart?”
Miss Stacey’s wry tone was softened by the accent. Lilianna relaxed a notch.
“I don’t know anyone in Communications,” Lila said. “So I’m fresh, and I guess you like my pedigree. They put you in here because there’s people they don’t trust . . . whoever ‘they’ is.”
“I answer direct to Councilor Wilhelm,” Miss Stacey said.
“That’s what it’s come to, has it?” Lila asked. “We have to work out who’s in with which faction? Like I said,
I’m new. I don’t know many people here. The friends I have are mostly in the Councilors’ staff offices. I think you know already I was approved by Councilor Wilhelm.”
“You’re hooked up with his assistant, right?”
Lila swallowed.
“Beau?” she asked. “It’s. . . .”
Miss Stacey laughed.
“Isn’t everything,” she said. “Have you ever handled radio equipment?”
“No.”
“Think you could learn?”
“Definitely.”
“Good,” the supervisor said. She gave Lilianna such a long look that it was no longer apparent she planned to add anything else, though eventually Miss Stacey gave a slight sigh, reluctant almost, and leaned into the desk with her elbows, hands clasped, framing one of her cheeks. Tawny blonde hair was tied back, but loose strands of it still fell around her face. “We think the Head of Communications was one of Ortega’s men. Derek Roblofsky. Do you know him?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“No one’s saying anything right now, and neither can you,” Miss Stacey said. “He’s been moved to other duties, but there’s eyes on him. He didn’t show up in all that shit fight a week ago, but someone helped source and maybe even train the radio operators Ortega had. We cleared most of that gear out of there, the day after St Mary’s.”
Lila nodded sagely and the other woman barked a laugh.
“I probably don’t have to tell you that, since that’s where you’re family’s living now, huh?”
“You know a lot about us,” Lilianna replied. “But I live in the Bastion now. As of now.”
“It’s funny how quick some of you young ones make the switch,” Miss Stacey said. “Old hands like me, it’s the Enclave still. Funny.”
The woman gave a snort and looked away as if it were anything but. She dropped her hands to the flat of the desk and returned to Lilianna with a serious look.
“There’s a good chance Roblofsky made sure no one in Admin made contact with the USS Washington,” Miss Stacey said. “I’m assuming if you’re Tom Vanicek’s daughter, you know as much about all that business as I do.”
“I don’t know about that.”
Lilianna felt compelled to relate her conversation with Councilor Ben-Gurion, but thought the better of it. Apart from him entrusting her with a so-called secret, more than a little of her father’s paranoia had rubbed off on her. There was no good to be served by vomiting up everything she knew like a good little lapdog. If Ben-Gurion was still in cahoots with Wilhelm, and Miss Stacey answered to them, there was more to be gained by demonstrating her discretion than telling the older woman something she already knew.
“I’m saying I need a few people around me I can trust,” Miss Stacey said. “Can I trust you, hun?”
Lila nodded. Miss Stacey deflated, relaxed, taking the deal as done.
“OK, good,” she said. “You can report here again tomorrow morning and we’ll get started on your training.”
“Great.”
Lila stood, shaking off the urge to thank her new boss like she was stage-acting something seen in an old movie once, though the niceties of whatever was required of her might as well be in a foreign tongue.
“We’re in contact with the Washington, then?”
Miss Stacey nodded.
“Plenty to talk about tomorrow,” she said. “Movie night tonight. I might see you there?”
“OK.”
Lila took the signal to depart, cautiously re-opening the door as if afraid of what she might find. Instead, the outer office now featured a completely different woman clattering away at an old manual typewriter, barely giving the young blonde a second look as Lila emerged from the supervisor’s office, waved curtly once, and bustled about her business like walking out into a powerful storm.
*
THEY RIGGED THE cinema in the main cafeteria after dark, three nights per week. An obsessive-compulsive type named Warren lauded it over everyone, curating movies from an immense collection retrieved during Forager outings, and like all good film nerds, overthinking the selection half the time and then getting frustrated when the thirty or forty regular attendees broke into quiet conversations, giggling and laughing during the show. Tonight, he’d selected an old thriller – they were all old, Lilianna had to remind herself – called Michael Clayton, even though half the younger Administration staff just wanted something so they could kick back and relax.
Lila sat preternaturally alert on one of the uncomfortable kitchen chairs with Aurora and Montana on her right, the left seat on the loosely-structured aisle conspicuously unoccupied.
“Where is he?” Montana asked.
“I don’t know,” Lilianna whispered back. “I thought he’d be here after work?”
Aurora leaned her fringed face into the confab.
“I wouldn’t wait up for lover boy,” she said and grinned to take the edge from her remark. “Didn’t he tell you he’s got evening shift this week? All the personal staff do.”
Lila aborted her reply out of embarrassment, racking her memory of the conversation with Beau in the gymnasium earlier in the day and trying to remember whether he’d cut out on her because of work or if that was just her presumption. And if so, what it meant that Beau seemed in a hurry to be anywhere else other than with her.
She tried to focus on the movie, but the sophisticated images unspooling from the projector to paint the far white wall were almost incomprehensible. Until the week before, she hadn’t watched a DVD since the early days in the mountains, before the generator failed them, and it was one of the many creature comforts she and her brother reminisced about during their years moving from one sanctuary to another during life in the wild.
She was only a child back then, and her taste in movies reflected that – leftovers from a world that spawned fairytales and make-believe in one vast incessant cultural ramble that never saw an end to it all coming. More than anything else, Lila longed for the escapism those forgotten DVDs had offered like a warm blanket, consoling her to the horrors unfolding in the world outside as her father protected them and law and order collapsed. But those Disney images got banished for good with the rise of the Furies. And now Lilianna was a refugee, unable to go back to that simplicity – ashamed to even yearn for it when her new life was only half-made, her adulthood with it – yet too young to really understand the stylish thriller playing before her, the implicit knowledge of the audience from that time not something she’d acquired, lost in the transition from child to teenager, from ingénue to apocalypse survivor, so that the narrative as it unfolded became increasingly self-referential and almost meaningless to her with its world of cell phones and gasoline cars and paperwork and jobs and corporate responsibilities and the luxurious age of lies in which people had lived, their worst fears to be made uncomfortable, rather than fighting daily for their very lives.
Lila wasn’t the only one unimpressed by the film choice. Apart from a few old hands, it was mostly the nineteen-year-olds and twentysomethings from Administration gathered for the regular ritual, some of them wrapped in blankets and laid out in bedding down the front near the improvised screen. Lila’s eyes quested around hopelessly for Beau yet again, and watched instead with muted curiosity as two armed troopers entered from a side door, cutting through the back of the cinema on their way to some important task. It made the hairs on the back of her neck rise, but there was no sounding of the Bastion alarm to suggest anything worse than ordinary business. It was fair to say the grim-set demeanor of the guards was a necessary caution in the terse climate after the recent Uprising. Reflecting again on her conversation with her new supervisor Miss Stacey earlier in the day, if there were still potential Ortega loyalists within the Bastion, no one could afford to slacken their alert.
It gave her the downright silly fear that something might’ve happened to explain Beau’s absence, but Lilianna told herself that was just the habitual panic which underscored her life during the past five-plus
years – and life in the City hadn’t yet taught her that hypervigilance could be abandoned. A far more mundane yet unsettling conviction settled in instead.
Beau wasn’t there because he didn’t want to be.
*
THE THREE FRIENDS skipped out on the movie halfway through, led by Aurora’s burning desire to dig more forcibly through the details of Montana’s love life.
Although she didn’t know her place between them yet, Lilianna tagged along as the other two clambered up the stairs towards their dorm room with Montana giggling and faking the odd swipe at Aurora’s arm in a way the tattooed woman clearly liked. Lila smirked at Aurora’s obvious attraction to their dark-featured friend, with the other young woman seemingly clueless.
“But he’s so old!” Aurora groaned.
“Stop it,” Montana laughed.
“What do you think, Lilly?”
Lilianna fretted at her own scowl, bewildered at the mixed signals since Aurora’s eyes shone with nothing but friendly amusement at the ongoing tease between the friends.
“It’s Lilianna, remember?” Lila replied. “I don’t know Terry, so I can’t really comment.”
“You don’t know Gunderson?”
Aurora turned at the landing to shoot Lilianna a bemused frown, fists on her hips like a playful caricature of her normal snarky demeanor.
“He’s always hanging around the gates, hitting on the Admin workers,” she said with clear disapproval. “He works deliveries from the ethanol plant.”
“I still don’t know him,” Lila said.
They drifted into the dorm room and lowered their voices with Grizelda and Slako curled up already asleep.
“You should be more like her, anyway,” Aurora whispered to Montana while cocking her thumb towards Lila who blushed and then flushed with annoyance for beaming at the older girl’s acknowledgement. “Seriously Monty, why can’t you just find a guy your own age?”
“Terry’s OK,” Montana replied. “I love that accent.”
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 8