by Sue Burke
She waited, staring at the clock.
At 8:45, the woman returned, carrying what looked sort of like a wire cutter with tiny blades at the end of yard-long handles, a ridiculous-looking tool. It clipped through the link between the cuffs like cardboard, then, with a little difficulty to clip only the metal and avoid her flesh, through the cuffs themselves.
“There you are,” the deputy said. “And this should be your phone.” She held out the envelope. “Sorry we can’t do more. Stay safe. Exit’s that way.”
“Why did you let me go?”
“White House had no right to order your arrest. That’s what I’m told.”
“What about the woman who brought me here? Ruby Hobbard?”
“She’s downstairs. Not going to get out. I guess she’s wanted for attempted mass murder, trying to gas people at one of those political prisons. That’s all I know. Sorry for all the confusion. You take care.” The woman turned away.
Irene followed some signs on the walls to the front entrance. No one, not even a guard, was in the lobby, although a red light said that automatic surveillance was activated. A box of face masks sat on a table alongside a box of gloves for anyone to take. She didn’t need them. She stepped outside into chilly winds. The clouds to the west looked gray-blue, ready to rain, and no nearby store seemed to be open where she might be able to buy an umbrella or poncho or warm jacket.
She sat on the stairs and turned on her phone. A little battery power was left. Berenike had left a message the night before:
“I found the fourth sister. Lillian, say hello.”
A young voice said, tentatively, “Hello. I’m Lillian. I’m eleven years old. Um, Berenike is taking care of me. I’d like to meet you.”
Berenike added, “It’s been a very hard day for her. We’re on our way to City Hall to be safe. I guess the White House wants us all arrested, and some so-called patriots are trying to do it. Be careful. I’ll send more information.” She had sent the same list of suspects that Irene had already seen on the screens of her kidnappers. They weren’t the only set of clones.
Avril had left a message last night, too: “To let you guys know, I’m okay. Are you?”
Berenike messaged again, an hour ago: “Good morning. You know, I woke up every two hours last night to see if the lights were on. And they were. That means the rebels are winning. Lillian and I are going to spend the day delivering supplies. She’s pretty tough, all things considered. She lost her mom yesterday.”
Irene thought about how to reply. “I’m out of jail now. I was arrested by the patriots. I can’t get a car, so I guess I have to walk home. I’ll keep checking in.” It was too hard to pronounce the words that Mamá was dead, that Nimkii might be out of his pen, might be gone, might be dead, too.
She began walking. She knew the route, five miles, and it had never seemed so long. She saw only one car drive past and no other signs of life. She passed a field where cows were lowing desperately, and they came to the fence when she passed as if she could help them. At one farm, hundreds of chickens were running free. A few of them followed her for a while, apparently thinking she’d feed them. If she had any food, she’d have eaten it herself.
It began to drizzle. About a mile later, when she was damp and shivering, the rain stopped and the clouds broke up. The sky was sunny when she walked up the driveway of the farm, calling Nimkii’s name.
No sign of him, though, not for the rest of the morning, not all day.
* * *
I was free to leave … but.…
Leave but … I was shown how the White House had targeted me as well as some of SongLab’s progeny as Chinese spies—my children! I could only hope with a trembling heart and hands that they had found safety. Worse, yesterday’s chaos had given way to more careful thought, and both sides had taken a step toward organization, which meant new, more systematic confrontations. Disease alone could not achieve sufficient destruction.
Leave but … the virus and its mutations still might yield life-giving secrets, and now that I had slept (although not well) and was refreshed (under the influence of stimulants), I could continue with my research, which might work miracles.
In the meanwhile, I was told, please avoid standing near windows. Snipers. The building’s guards had been rearranged … but some still patrolled the interior of the building against the known existence of an enemy within. The Prez had died, sensationally of both illness and a bullet, but his supporters would die harder.
Under those extenuating circumstances, I paused to have lunch—or dinner, time having lost some of its importance—and Vita joined me in the little self-service cafeteria. Two days ago I would have been flattered. Today I welcomed her only because I had unfinished business.
“Why recruit me?”
“We thought it might be you,” she said.
“Me?”
“The one who could have released the second virus.”
My heart crashed to be subjected to such an obvious lie. She knew how to evoke a sympathetic tone of voice, but her words were transparent. If something went wrong, I would be set up as the scapegoat. In fact, I would already be in custody. She had known that all along and had willingly taken part in the plan. Her beautiful, brilliant mind had failed her in the most basic ways.
Perhaps she read the disappointment I tried to hide. “You had the motive and the means,” she said.
I looked down at my meal, an egg-salad sandwich, probably ersatz eggs, which would be a kindness to chickens, but imitation eggs amounted to one more way in which the world had long ago begun turning falsely on its axis.
“Or rather,” she continued, “they thought it could be you. I thought you would help in ways we couldn’t predict, and I was right.” She added a tiny ersatz smile.
“I’m glad I proved you right.” To protect my heart, I changed the subject. “We can reconsider ways to slow viral replication within cells, and with luck we can find something relatively common and ready to use.”
“Maybe garlic soup?” she said sarcastically. “That’s what they’re saying, garlic soup.”
Her little joke struck me sour, more revelry in falsehood. “Maybe fresh garlic extract applied directly to lung tissue would be effective. But about having a motive, I was misjudged.”
“You’ve been badly misjudged before and might have a vendetta.”
“I was saddened, not vengeful. I love people. That’s why I made them.”
She took a sip of tea. “You never had children of your own, though.”
“After three ectopic pregnancies and other troubles, I could take a hint.”
“I’m sure something could have been done.”
I was sure I didn’t need advice about my reproductive life, knowing what the next assumption would be. By the time I’d given up on motherhood, I’d already founded SongLab: it did not serve as a substitute for a personal lack of fecundity. It stood on its own as a dream fulfilled. I changed the subject again. “What’s happening out there?” I’d found some news and decided that sorting through the contradictions wasn’t the best use of my time or emotions.
“I suppose it depends on where you are. The mutiny didn’t have much of a chance to succeed, and then the surprise epidemic hit, and that changed everything.”
“How was it supposed to play out?” The question might catch her with her guard down.
“The official story? The mutiny planted it and was going to blame it on the Prez. False flag.” She shrugged, detached—cynical, in fact. Her brilliance shone, but something had extinguished her empathy. “I think it was hatched by his extreme supporters and not him. There’s always a lot of infighting and factions, and people who are hard to control.”
I wondered how she could sound so sure, and after a moment’s thought, I had an answer. Her verb tense—the present with all its immediacy—had placed her within the loop.
“And it might not have worked,” I said. “The surprise epidemic virus that was released by whomever might have
interacted poorly with the attenuated virus and created a worldwide disaster.”
She nodded, her eyes searching for a place to avoid encountering a future she had once hoped would never happen, and that we had avoided as much by accident as by planning.
“And,” I said, now cynical myself, “someone with the means and motive could be blamed.”
“We always have enemies.”
I remembered her shouting in dismay when she thought that the vaccine had been released everywhere: infighting and factions among people who were hard to control and who had done the wrong thing—in her judgment. Someday, if I could, I’d find out what the supposed right thing in her judgment would have accomplished in the world.
“Why do it?” I asked, knowing that any answer she gave would leave me disgusted.
“Why try to stop the mutiny?” That spin on the question hid the murderous intent of the act. “They don’t even know what they want. Just disobey. Old-fashioned freedom. What’s that?”
(They, not we.) “Freedom,” I murmured. “What for?”
“Exactly. I mean, refugees have to be resettled carefully, for example. We don’t have enough capacity to just hand out free stuff to everyone. We’d all wind up living three to a room and eating fake steak.”
“For some people, that would be an improvement.” Confucius had once said he would find joy in living on water and coarse rice rather than unrighteous wealth.
“But not an improvement for me,” she said. “Don’t get self-righteous. You played god, and look where that got you.”
“I was a benign god.”
She laughed. “It’s always good to talk to you, Peng. You have such a unique attitude. I’ve got to get back to work.” She walked out, and I knew to my unmeasurable disappointment that I’d be happy never to see her again. In only a matter of time, she would likely be arrested. I’d supplied enough evidence for any careful investigator, and more was available if needed.
I’d also asked too many questions for my peace of mind. And I’d displayed a unique attitude compared with her circles, where I would be full of laughable, old-fashioned ideas about compassion and responsibility. It would take a while to round up the guilty, and in the meantime, patience would be my most fitting friend and sorrow my most constant companion.
I had work to do, too, and perhaps I could find treatments to propose that would be needed in desperate circumstances before proper testing. I could imagine a doctor somewhere facing a dying patient with an unproven medication sitting on a nearby shelf. Use at your own risk—or rather, the patient’s risk, which would deepen the quandary.
Ethics extracted an expense, which made them a luxury. We had been living in a kind of poverty. Shakespeare wrote as a joke about someone who could be poor but honest, knowing how privation brutalized us. Even imagined privation could turn us into brutes. I had struggled to remain benign despite where it got me. It was the most joyous thing I could do.
CHAPTER
11
Irene ran to the truck. With help from a friend in Madison, she’d finally broken into Ruby’s computer to check in with Nimkii’s tracker service. The radio ankle bracelet placed him about twenty miles north, in Lincoln County, a little west of Merrill. He was the only reason she hadn’t left yet.
For two days now she’d waited, even though she hated everything about Prairie Orchid Farm and about a cascade of bad memories that fell on her head and shoulders every time she walked into the farmhouse. She hated the three fresh graves in the rear of the property that Ruby must have dug—two for people, a small one for the dog. A splash of blood on the ground next to the kennel explained what had happened to the dog. The graves lay right next to the little stream: groundwater contamination for sure.
Should she mention that when she was called to be a witness against Ruby? Because she’d been informed she would be. When? No one had any idea.
Besides that, the Prez’s supporters were still fighting back, in a few places, like some suburbs near Detroit, with shootouts despite the ongoing terror of the virus, since a few people felt sure that they were immune. Someone was bound to decide to go after supposed Chinese spies again. She remained alert during every waking moment and slept hiding in the shed near the barn.
Now that she’d located Nimkii, when she found him, what would she do with him? Well … this was no time to look for a new home. She had no good ideas.
She entered the location of the radio bracelet, and the truck drove off.
Hers was about the only vehicle on the two-lane road. Occasionally another car drove past the other way. No one seemed to be outside in the yards and fields. Her nose told her about death a few times, a lot of death, probably livestock in the hulking barns like the one she’d been imprisoned in. Individual farmers felt a commitment to their animals and fields, but corporate farmworkers—why should they risk their lives by leaving their homes for a miserably small paycheck so that someone else could profit? But if crops weren’t harvested and chickens weren’t brought to processors, what would people eat? The mutiny might need to reach deeper, and she wasn’t the one who could make it happen.
The truck stopped alongside an alfalfa field where something big had feasted. Nimkii! But she didn’t see him. The tracker on her phone took her into the field, signaling something close, and she knew what she’d find even before she saw it. She sat in the truck and considered not even bothering. No, this was going to hurt, but she needed to do it. She got out and walked what seemed like uncountable steps, and there lay the radio bracelet on the ground. It must have fallen off.
She picked it up. It smelled a little like him. He had to be nearby.
“Nimkii!” she called. “Nimkii! I’m here.” Pachyderms had great hearing, a range of miles. She followed his tracks into a woods alongside the river and lost the trail. She called in every direction. Her voice grew hoarse.
Her phone rang. It was Avril, looking washed and rested. “How are you?”
“I can’t find Nimkii.”
“Oh, no. What happened?”
She told her, and even a shortened version of the story seemed sadder when it was explained out loud. Avril let her talk about Nimkii, her hopes for him and how futile it all seemed now—how empty central Wisconsin felt. She didn’t say how she blamed herself for dithering instead of leaving a long time ago. Nothing she had done had made much difference.
Avril said she was volunteering at a clinic set up in the sports center near her dormitory on campus. “I can’t do much, but I’m immune, and I can follow orders.”
I can hold someone as they die and whisper kind words. She had already proven that she knew how to do it well.
“I don’t know what else I can do,” Avril said. “There’s still fighting, but I’ll leave that to the people who know how. Um, are you safe there?”
Irene tried to be reassuring. “Right now I think everyone’s too scared to do anything.” Right now, I’m sleeping in a shed behind a pile of old paint cans.
Avril had to go to training. Irene ordered the truck to drive alongside the river, stopping from time to time to call his name. She phoned the sheriff’s office, which didn’t seem to take her question seriously but promised to let her know if there was a sighting. She ate one of the apples she’d brought to use to tempt him. The shadows pointed due north for noon, and then began to shift with the afternoon light.
How could an animal the size of a mountain slip through the countryside as if invisible?
But she knew. Everyone had self-quarantined, staying indoors, glued to whatever passed for news or entertainment. And then?
She’d stay one more day, hoping for news.
Hope. Thin gruel.
* * *
Avril gently took the phone from the young man’s hand.
“He’s fallen asleep,” she murmured to his parents.
“Do you think…” His mother didn’t know how to ask the question. Avril had learned how to answer it. His vital signs had been steady since morning. She wa
s his pal, and she probably wouldn’t be his last pal, but she wasn’t a doctor, either.
“He’s stable. We’re making sure he’s comfortable. You should have seen him smile when I said I could call you for him.” She took a few steps away so she could talk louder. “How are you?… Your daughter?… Here are some things you can do for her that we’ve found can help. They’re surprisingly simple.…”
Oxygen therapy helped most of all, and the gas had become America’s scarcest resource, the doctors joked. Medical staff joked a lot when patients and family weren’t around. The rest of the time, they rained kindness like a deluge. She was learning a lot. In just two days, the Prez’s cold, as they were now calling it, had been evolving into something bad but nowhere near as bad as it was at first because illnesses evolved. That was one more thing she’d learned.
She looked around the room with its wide-spaced beds for other patients who seemed lucid and in need of a pal. Or who had died. She was learning how to spot that.
Maybe she should think about premed. This wasn’t the end of the world, the doctors assured everyone, just another epidemic, sort of a medical earthquake at magnitude eight: disruption, death, and destruction with additional fatalities due to panic—another doctor joke.
The emergency clinic had been set up in a sports center, with patients scattered throughout its rooms and hallways. The city’s hospitals had no room and not enough medical staff for off-site locations, so even though she had no real experience, immunity had earned her a spot as sort of an orderly, cleaning, chatting, and lugging water or food or bedding as needed. The name “Peng” had worked magic in earning a job, especially when she said she could call him. She was superpowered—but they asked her to wear a face mask and gloves and protective clothing to reassure other people rather than to keep herself safe.
The first thing she did when her shift started was to look in on Shinta in another part of the building. She was dozing, breathing rough and coughing, but not coughing up blood. No rash on her cheeks. An oxygen mask on her face. Her condition was “critical but stable.”
