The packet climbed up a long ramp. The clack of the rails grew very loud. They drowned out the Ursulas’ reply.
Martin squeezed through the crowd of bots. “Come on, Chip, we’re going,” he called. Behind him, he heard the Secretary rage, and the crash of more broken furniture.
“Count yourselves, you idiots! You’re the twelve Ursulas. There can’t be thirteen of you!”
Martin flung open the door at the back of the packet. They were on a long bridge at least fifteen feet in the air, and a rush of wind whistled by the open railing. The platform was nothing but a few square feet of metal mesh. He could see straight through it, and through the open slats of the railway bridge beneath. Metal fencing zigzagged underneath the car, jagged posts, broken glass.
Chip dashed past him out onto the platform and crouched down close to the mesh. The wind turned his black fur over in waves, revealing his creamy undercoat. Martin grabbed the rail, pulled himself out, and slammed the door shut behind him. Then he froze, clinging to it as the wind buffeted him, watching the ground rush by under his feet.
“Chip,” he cried, “we can’t get down from here!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When Martin was eight, David had dared him to put his hands in the air while they rode home on Dad’s scooter. As soon as he had tried, the street had banged into him with swift and impersonal force. Martin still remembered the close-up view of the asphalt as he rolled to the curb. The street had sanded patches off his shirt and jeans. Off his hands and face as well.
But now, the Secretary of State would soon be at the door, with a new plan for dealing with his prisoners. Martin gulped. “We gotta do it. We gotta jump.”
Balancing precariously, he knelt down next to his dog. Chip put his big ears back and licked Martin’s face.
“Listen,” Martin said, “remember William and Sim? Remember the typewriter? I need you to think like a bot and get us off of here. Not like a dog. Like a bot!”
The German shepherd snuggled close to Martin. Then he turned his shaggy head away. Handles jutted out of his neck.
“Okay, I get it.” Martin scrambled astride the furry form and gripped the handles. “Just like riding a bike,” he whispered, and he closed his eyes as tightly as he could.
They launched out into space.
Martin felt the exact second when they stopped moving entirely, hanging in the air like birds. Then they dropped so fast that Martin’s stomach stayed behind. Now the pavement in my face, he thought, now the scrapes and scratches all over my body. He buried his face in Chip’s tickly fur.
He felt them hit the ground, but they hit it in slow motion, the moment of impact elongating like a rubber band. Martin’s knees touched dirt with a gentle tap. What’s going on? he wondered.
Then they shot back into the air.
Martin opened his eyes. They were rising above a wide, flat space covered with faded steel hulks half-buried in cheerful yellow sunflowers. Then came the instant when they hung in the air and the stomach flop of the drop. Then they came down into the waist-high sunflowers. Then they sprang up again.
Chip hopped across row after row of the hulks like a giant pogo stick. Then he bounced in place a few times, and Martin slid off into the sunflowers’ stiff green stems and fuzzy, itchy leaves.
The packet bridge that bounded one edge of the sunflower field was empty. The Secretary’s car was out of sight. Martin thought he could still make out the clack of its progress in the distance, but soon the breeze sighing through the sunflowers was all he heard.
He sat right where he was, shaking all over, and put his arms around his knees and rocked. When he had been very small, rocking like this had calmed him down. Things had happened too quickly in the packet car for him to feel the danger he was in. Now that he could look back on it, he thought he might pass out.
“He was gonna have them break me up,” he groaned to Chip. His fingers hurt at the thought, and then the skin on his arms and legs began to crawl. He rubbed them to cancel out the prickling sensation. The sunflowers hid him from view, and he wanted to stay hidden. He would have liked to dig a hole and crawl inside.
“The Ursulas were nice,” he muttered. “You could tell they didn’t wanna be mean. But that guy! That—that guy—” Martin couldn’t think of a word evil enough to describe him. “He didn’t just wanna kill, he acted like it didn’t matter. He made out like it was a business or something!”
Chip didn’t seem to share Martin’s fear, or perhaps he was celebrating his emancipation from the ranks of the twelve Ursulas. He cavorted through the yellow flowers, then pounced. Seconds later, he came prancing up to Martin with a stick.
“You sure saved the day,” Martin told him, “being an Ursula and all. And that jump! Wow! My legs are like jelly. That might be fun to try again sometime.”
Chip sidled into Martin, knocking him off balance, and whipped his bushy tail back and forth. Yellow petals went flying like confetti.
Martin climbed to his feet and tossed the stick. Chip sped after it, muscles rippling beneath his magnificent coat. “You’re a good boy,” Martin told him when he returned. “You’re a great dog.” He tossed the stick again, and Chip sped away. “We better get going. We need to find Cassie and get help for Mom. And what if that guy comes back? Maybe he’s figured out a way to make the Ursulas not listen to you.”
About a mile from them, a cluster of thin buildings reached improbable heights, as if some giant hand had come down from the sky and pulled them toward the heavens. Some were faced with polished stone, still stylish and dignified. Others were faced with panels of mirrored glass. These had shattered and left dark squares here and there, so that their sides looked like surreal chessboards. Flocks of birds swooped in and out of them and gave their solid lines the illusion of movement.
“We were closer to those tall places when we saw the red packet car,” Martin said. “Let’s go that way.”
They started toward the high buildings. Martin walked through the rows of short metal hulks, stepped over a low spot in the sagging chain-link fence that bordered them, and headed down a crumbling street. Chip snagged his stick in the rusted fence and had to leave it behind.
The sun rose higher and changed color from bright orange to white. The air heated up. Slowly, carefully, Martin and his dog threaded their way among the gigantic buildings, which towered over him, ominous and silent. Surely humans hadn’t lived in such unnatural places. He couldn’t imagine having the courage to go inside them, much less climb to their top floors.
The narrow streets between them were clogged with debris, some of it several feet deep. Jagged sheets of window glass sparkled in the sun like diamonds. In the shade, they turned all but invisible. A piece of glass sliced through the bottom of Martin’s sneaker and barely missed drawing blood.
“Maybe this wasn’t the way to come,” Martin worried. “Little kids couldn’t make it through all this trash. Maybe that wasn’t Rudy’s packet car after all. We need to find it and make sure.”
But Martin was accustomed to seeing a horizon. He wasn’t prepared for city streets. The collection of buildings around him seemed to shift and change as he passed them. He couldn’t recognize which buildings he had walked by or which streets he had just crossed. He couldn’t find his way back to the packet line.
And all the time, as he wiped the sweat that trickled into his eyes, he thought about water. He tried not to think about how thirsty he was, but he couldn’t help himself. Before long, it was the only thing he could think of.
“My head hurts,” he said as they plowed their way through a dim alley between two towering ruins. In spite of the hot day, the air in the alley felt clammy. Rotting, moldy trash squelched underfoot. “I don’t know where the Wonder Babies have gotten to. This place is way bigger than I thought.”
They turned a corner and came back out into the sunshine. Martin kicked hardened debris off a step and sat down. “My head hurts, Chip,” he said again. “I’m dizzy. It’s so bright out
here. I don’t know where we’re going anymore.”
They walked for hours, turning down one street after another, but they never seemed to get anywhere. The same buildings turned up in front of them again and again. We’re going in circles, Martin thought, but he was too dazed to decide what to do about it. He didn’t know where the Wonder Babies were, so it didn’t seem to matter which way he went.
As the morning turned into afternoon, the downtown streets turned into a furnace. Shifting waves of heat radiated off the concrete and glass, and the hot, muggy breeze seemed to smother him. Martin stumbled blindly. It occurred to him that he might die.
“I don’t think we’re gonna find anybody,” he muttered.
Chip pointed his muzzle skyward and emitted an eloquent, pitiful howl. It went on and on, the cry of a lost dog in desperate need of help. Martin joined it, yelling as loud as his roughened throat could manage. “Theo! Rudy! Help! Where are you guys?”
As the white sun crept across the concrete-colored sky, Martin staggered along the city streets, yelling for his friends. The heat deepened and took possession of everything until it seemed to Martin that he was drowning under boiling water. His hoarse voice echoed inside his aching head. He wasn’t sure the yell had words, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore.
A figure detached itself from the shadow of a nearby building. Chip burst into a joyful chorus and bounced ahead. Martin stumbled after him, trying to make out what it was, but his eyes had given up focusing.
It was Theo. She caught him by his sunburned arms. “We thought we heard someone calling my name,” she said. “Martin, you found us again.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Theo led him across packed dirt, over broken bricks, and into the dark interior of a building. She turned on a flashlight and took him to a set of concrete stairs. Martin’s eyes couldn’t follow the flashlight’s beam. He stumbled and went sprawling. He felt her pull him to his feet, drape his arm around her neck, and more or less drag him along. She was talking, but the words went by too fast for him to catch much of their meaning. “You’re hot,” she said at one point. “Like fire.”
The next thing Martin knew, he was lying on something soft. Flashlights came and shone down on him, and a sopping sheet dropped onto him with a slapping sound. Ice tumbled down on him in a roar like thunder, and he moaned against the cold. A whimper answered him, and Chip licked his face.
For the longest time, Martin was convinced that he had fallen into the fridge and been taken prisoner by its inhabitants. Lurid dreams gripped him, in which a ketchup bottle had morphed into the evil Red Queen. She held him down and poured water into his mouth to try to drown him. He sputtered and hacked and shoved her away.
“Don’t spit it all over me,” Theo’s voice complained. “If you weren’t ready to drink it, why did you yell for it?”
“Theo!” Martin opened his eyes. “Is that you? I thought you were the ketchup!”
“That’s nice. What did you get to be, the jar of pickles?”
Martin closed his eyes again and plucked at the wet sheet. “You were squeezable,” he whispered.
“So I’ve been told.”
Some time later, he woke up. The ice was gone. He was on a pallet in a small, shadowy room crammed with boxes and supplies. A flashlight lying nearby illuminated the sleeping form of Theo pillowed against a mound of blankets.
Chip was resting a few feet away. When he saw Martin move, he lifted his head and wagged. Theo opened her eyes and leaned over to feel Martin’s arm.
“Your temperature’s down,” she muttered. “About time!”
“I’m cold,” he complained, running his hand across the thin sheet that covered him. “Can I have a blanket?”
“You’ve got a blanket,” she said as she checked the contents of a plastic bag dangling above his head. “That’s a medical blanket there. It knows exactly what you need. Right now, you need thin and light, so it’s thin and light.”
“But that’s not what I want,” Martin protested, plucking at it. He squinted through the gloom at the plastic bag she was looking at and discovered that it connected to him via a tube in his arm. “Ugh! There’s a line in me. Take it out!”
Theo smiled. “When this bag is empty,” she said. “Be glad it’s there. It probably saved your life.”
“Can’t I just drink it?”
“Judging from the stuff you spit up on me—no.”
Martin went back to sleep.
When he woke up again, Theo was gone, and Chip lay curled up across his legs. A slender person was rummaging through a cardboard box across the room from him. She set it aside with an irritated sigh and swung her flashlight in search of another, and the white beam illuminated her face.
“William!” Martin said. He scrambled to sit up, acutely aware of his lack of clothes. The medical blanket, sensing the spike in his blood pressure, promptly shredded into a panel of mesh. “More fluff! More fluff!” he whispered frantically, and, to his relief, it obeyed.
He needn’t have worried. William continued her search without turning around. “Hello,” she said. “Feeling better, I see.”
She must have eyes in the back of her head, Martin thought.
“I had a plastic tube in my arm,” he told her. It was gone now, he noticed as he poked the bandage. How had he not woken up for that?
“Intravenous cannula,” she said. “Theo used two of our bags of saline on you, not to mention the ice that was supposed to keep the milk from going bad.”
William slammed the second box aside, picked up her flashlight, and started digging through another box.
“What are you looking for?” Martin asked.
“Antiemesis drugs,” she said. “Here they are.” She pulled out several foil packets. “My three-year-olds are vomiting. They threw up all over me.”
Now that she mentioned it, Martin could tell even in that dim light that she wasn’t at her best. Her hair fell in untidy strings around her face, and her tense silhouette spoke of frustration and lack of sleep.
“I think I threw up on Theo,” Martin said. In retrospect, this didn’t sound like the sort of comment likely to produce a bond, but he couldn’t think of anything that would.
William shoved the boxes back into place and held her flashlight close so she could read the directions on the foil packet.
“Sorry about the milk going bad,” Martin said.
“It doesn’t matter,” she murmured. “It isn’t as if there was a lot to begin with. Of milk, or of anything else.”
Martin pondered this. “Why don’t you steal some more?”
“We can’t,” William snapped. “They’re watching the big shipments to catch us stealing again. They were watching them before; we found out that’s how they were zeroing in on us. If Central gets a hint of which direction we’ve gone, they’ll be crawling all over this city inch by inch.”
“Okay, I get it. You don’t have to yell. And if that’s how things are, you might want to hide the red packet car a little better. I spotted it right off.”
He was almost sorry he’d said this. William looked more exhausted than before. “That’s just great,” she muttered. “I’ll get word to Rudy.” And she collected her foil packets and walked out.
The next time Martin woke up, Theo was there again.
“For breakfast, you can have juice and pudding, or pudding and juice,” she said. Anticipating his reply, she peeled back the foil top on a pudding cup.
Martin remembered what William had told him. “Maybe I better just skip it.”
Theo frowned and handed him the cup. “Eat your breakfast!” So Martin went to work on the vanilla pudding.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Kind of awful. But I have to talk to you and Rudy,” he said. “My mom’s in trouble. We need help.”
“Rudy wants to talk to you, too,” she said. “When you’re done, you can put your clothes on, and we’ll go find him.” She handed him a juice pack.
“You
don’t have much food left,” Martin protested.
“What does that have to do with you needing juice?” So Martin took the juice, too.
Once his meal was over, she gave him his clothes. It was just as well she’d waited. His jeans and T-shirt hadn’t been washed since he’d left Suburb HM1, and a robust odor emanated from them, not unlike the smell of the mattress full of mice he and Dad had expelled from their new home. Theo tried to shake the clothes out, but that only seemed to encourage the aroma.
“I’ll be outside,” she said as she handed them over. “Hey, they could be worse.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve seen William.”
Martin stood up to pull on his jeans. The medical blanket came with him. He gave it a quick tug, but it clung to him.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t need you now. I’m all fine again. Maybe you think I’ll get cold, but it’s okay, I’ve got clothes.” He pulled on his jeans. “See? Let go.”
But the blanket didn’t let go.
He tried to loosen its fleecy grip. He grabbed one side and pulled hard, but the blanket stretched like chewing gum. Then it brought two corners together below his chin and tied them in a square knot.
“What the hey—”
Martin pulled his T-shirt over the top of the blanket, but it shrank, wriggled through the neck hole, and settled around his shoulders like a superhero cape.
“Chip, do you think you can talk sense into this thing?”
Chip tried. He came up close and vibrated. Then he sat back and wagged apologetically. The blanket refused to budge. Martin held out his arms and surveyed his new accessory. All these years, he’d been irrationally attached to his clothing, but he’d never imagined that a piece of clothing might become irrationally attached to him.
“Never mind, Chip,” he said. “I don’t think it’s gonna change its mind.”
Theo was waiting for him outside the door. Chip lit his eyebeams, and the three of them made their way through a dark labyrinth of passages. Martin couldn’t make sense of his surroundings. The space was as gloomy as the underworld of HM1, but it was broken up into wide hallways and big rooms. It couldn’t be a house, Martin thought. No family could have lived in a building like this.
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