by Rob Boffard
The kid with the stutter bends down, and with a grunt, hoists a sack of soil. Prakesh does the same, trying hard not to look at the body, trying not to think about what he just saw. The thoughts come anyway. How long before you end up like that? How long before they work you to death? A month? A week?
He and the kid trudge back to the empty troughs in silence. It’s only when they’re halfway there, when no guards are nearby, that that kid speaks.
“J-J-J-” he says, scrunching up his face, trying to get the word out without raising his voice. “Jojo. My n-n-n-name’s J-J-Jojo.”
“Prakesh.”
They reach the second pile of soil bags, and heave their loads onto it. A puff of dirt shoots up from the pile, the motes floating in the air in front of them. As Prakesh looks up, he sees that the two nearby guards are turned away, muttering to each other.
Prakesh speaks as quietly as possible, keeping his head down, aware of the guards. The water is having an effect, and his head is starting to clear. “How many guards?”
“Wh-what?”
Prakesh gestures to the nearest one, then raises a questioning eyebrow.
Jojo bows his head, hunches his shoulders. He starts walking a little faster, and Prakesh has to up his pace to stay level. Jojo shakes his head–a quick, almost imperceptible movement–then his mouth forms a single word.
Later.
39
Okwembu
Prophet leads Okwembu down through the vessel, through endless corridors and T-junctions, walking for so long that she’s given up trying to keep track.
They’re below the waterline now. They must be close to the outer hull–she can hear the ocean lapping at the walls, the echoing sound of the metal creaking in the cold water. Okwembu’s clothes are still damp, and she shivers as they walk, rubbing her arms. Prophet hasn’t said a word since they left his quarters, hasn’t even looked at her.
Eventually, they come to what looks like a dead end in the corridor. No–not a dead end. The lights in the ceiling have burned out, and as they get closer Okwembu can see a massive set of double doors. A track runs down the centre of the corridor, with a single wide rail set into it. Chunks of the rail have rusted away–when this ship was still in service it must have been used to transport heavy equipment.
There are three guards outside the door. Two leaning against it, and one sitting up against the corridor wall, spooning food into his mouth from a can. All three are heavily built, camouflage tight across their shoulders, and all three carry rifles. The two standing men stiffen as Prophet and Okwembu approach, fingers just touching their trigger guards.
The man on the floor stops eating, his spoon halfway to his mouth, eyes tracking between them. He gets to his feet, dusting himself off.
“Brothers,” Prophet says, spreading his arms wide. He sees where the men are looking. “She is under my purview, for now.” He gestures to the door. “Open her up.”
The other men keep looking at Okwembu, not moving. She meets their eyes, her face expressionless.
“I said, open it.” Prophet’s voice has become very soft.
The two guards by the door look at each other. The one on the left nods almost imperceptibly, and his partner fishes a key out of his uniform. The key isn’t like anything Okwembu has seen before: it’s long and flat, the metal scored with a line of precise circles.
There’s a slot in the left door, at ground level, and the guard has to crouch down to insert the key. He grunts as he turns it, and within the door a locking mechanism clicks back.
Prophet watches, his arms folded, as the two men haul the doors apart. Metal screeches on metal, and a shiver of rust falls from the top of the doors, flakes drifting to the ground. Okwembu peers into the space beyond, but there’s nothing but darkness. What little light there is from the corridor reveals a grated metal surface.
“Thank you, brothers,” says Prophet, walking past them. As he does so, one of the men mutters to himself.
Prophet whirls, getting in the man’s face. “You say something?”
Okwembu expects the man to quail, to protest. He doesn’t. Above his trim black beard, his eyes are cold.
After a moment, he shakes his head. “No, Prophet.”
“You got anything to say to me, you can say it to my face. Or I’ll see you taken to the stern, Engine’s my witness.”
The man breaks his gaze, looking away. “Nothing, Prophet.”
She expects Prophet to persist, but he just turns and strides past the doors. “Kyle. Vladimir,” he says over his shoulder. “Lock it behind us.”
“Yes, Prophet.”
“Yes, sir.”
Curious, Okwembu thinks, as she falls in behind him. Perhaps Prophet’s control isn’t as iron-clad as she thought. That’s good. It could make things easier.
Prophet turns the lights on. Okwembu’s mouth falls open.
They’re standing on a platform above a hangar, as wide as one of the galleries on Outer Earth. Banks of high-power lights are clicking on in the ceiling, one after the other. On the floor of the hangar are several massive containers–Okwembu counts twelve, stretching to the back wall. They remind her of the vats in the Recycler Plants on Outer Earth, the ones that treated human waste. It’s as if an entire plant’s worth of vats have been laid on their side, placed end to end.
She leans on the platform’s railing, looking closely at the nearest container. It’s been made in the past few years–there’s very little rust. The seals have been badly done, as if each one was put together from spare parts. There’s a hole cut in the top of each container, as wide as three men. Okwembu glances up: there are half a dozen thick pipes hanging down from the roof, their ribbed surfaces crinkling as they gently sway in place. The pipes disappear into the mess of girders in the ceiling.
And there’s the smell of fuel. It fills the air, thick and oily.
“Why are you showing me this?” she says.
“We came to this ship ten years ago,” Prophet says, and there’s something in his voice that wasn’t there before. The bright tone he had while taking about the Engine has disappeared. There’s a set of metal stairs leading to the floor, and he marches down them, his hands clasped behind his back. “We were tired. Tired of living underground. The elders told us that the whole world was dust, but we decided to see for ourselves.”
They reach the floor, and Prophet idly trails a hand along the vertical pleats of a giant container. “We thought if we went east, the land would be different. So we got as many air filters and supplies as we could, and made the crossing. The journey was… well. We were tested.”
He pauses, as if gathering himself. “We were hugging the coast, and found this ship out in the bay. There’d been some sort of battle. We don’t know who they were or what they were fighting over, but none of them survived. There was a fusion reactor, broken, beyond our capability to repair. And they had this fuel stored down here. Enough to last us a while.”
He taps a container, and a boom echoes off the walls. It’s the sound of an empty vessel.
Okwembu waits for the echoes to vanish. “But not long enough,” she says.
“We could always use more fuel, hence the radio message,” says Prophet. “Survivors provide that, and more. They provide their hands, their labour. This is a big ship, and we can only do so much.”
He smiles. “Do you have faith, Janice Okwembu?”
She knows enough to stay silent, letting him fill in the gap. He obliges. “We all do. Even in the worst of the Alaskan winter, where the wind would take your mind if you let it, we had faith. Even when we had to burrow down into the dirt, wait out the dust storms, we had faith. We would be provided for. And we were.”
He raises his hands to the ceiling. “Not just with the Ramona. Not just with the fuel. But with the Engine.”
He shakes his head. “It took us a little while to get it working. We had to figure out how to run it on the fuel we had. But once it did, it smiled down on us. It changed the air, allo
wed us to go outside without masks. It raised the temperature, brought the trees back. It gave us the land, and we used it. No more hiding under the dirt, scared of the world above.”
“Wait,” Okwembu says, shaking her head. “I don’t understand. The Engine… you’re using gasoline to run a fusion reactor? That isn’t possible.”
Prophet ignores her. “We are running low on fuel, Janice Okwembu. I am a man of faith, but even I know that miracles are most often based in reality. There are fewer and fewer survivors coming in, and when they do, they bring less and less fuel. We have barely enough to last one more winter. If we run out of fuel, this ship will die. And the Engine will die with it.”
He raises his eyes to the ceiling. “Some of my men think we should let it. That we should stop feeding the Engine with fuel, and let the land starve. The climate here is so fragile–even a year without the Engine’s influence would destroy it.”
Abruptly, Prophet turns and stalks away, striding down a line of containers bigger than he is. Okwembu follows, her mind reeling. “Prophet, wait,” she says.
“You asked why I’m showing you this. It’s to illustrate the consequences of lying to me.” He doesn’t turn to look at her, but Okwembu can hear the razor edge in his voice. “We need that reactor. We need it to keep the Engine alive, and to free us from our dependence on this.”
He taps the container again. There’s a thin line of fuel running down from one of the containers, dripping out of a microfracture in the metal. Prophet runs his finger along it, the liquid coating his skin.
“You’re right,” he says. “I’m not going to torture you into retrieving that data. I’m going to torture you if you can’t retrieve it. And once it starts, there’ll be nothing you can do to make it stop.”
Okwembu makes herself speak. “Prophet, I don’t understand this at all. What is the Engine? If it’s not the fusion reactor…”
Prophet’s smile grows wider.
And he tells Janice Okwembu what the Engine really is.
40
Riley
When I awake, I’m still lying face up on the bed, and my thigh is bandaged tight. Finkler is in a chair, leaning against the wall, fast sleep. His mouth is open, with a thin slick of drool on his chin, and he’s snoring gently, snuffling through his nose. His arms hang by his side, and I see that he still has his gloves on.
I try to sit up, but something pulls at my right arm. A drip, the needle buried in the vein. The fluid bag is suspended on a slightly rusty pole, and it’s almost empty, with only a half-inch of yellow liquid remaining. Wincing, I slowly pull the drip out. There’s a tiny spurt of blood, but that’s all.
The events of the night before come back to me. When I look around the room, I see an enormous patch of blood on the floor, parts of it still liquid. I’m still a little fuzzy, and it takes me a minute to remember what happened. The Nomad bursting through the door, Harlan fighting him off, Finkler stabbing him through the neck.
I give my leg an experimental flex. It hurts like hell, but it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. I swing my legs off the bed, take a deep breath, and stand up, moving even more slowly than when I pulled the needle out. My thigh groans, but it can handle the weight. I take one step, and then another. The floor is freezing cold, but I don’t mind. I can walk.
I think about waking Finkler to ask him if he has some painkillers, but I don’t. He saved my life. He even treated the wolf bite on my leg–it’s bandaged, too, with yellow disinfectant leaking through. The least I can do is let him sleep.
I pull my pants back on, slipping them over cold skin, taking it very gently. There’s a bottle of water balanced on top of one of the shelves, almost full. I drain half the bottle before I realise that it might not have been for me, and I put it back, feeling a little guilty.
The water wakes my stomach up. There are still some plants in the pocket of my jacket, and I chew on one as I walk down the hospital corridor. It’s cattail, I think–Harlan showed which parts I could eat, the white centres at the base of the leaves. The taste is fresh and sharp. I follow it up with the last of the meat strips, savouring them.
The hospital looks different in the daylight. There’s no telling what time it is, but the parts of sky I can see through the shattered ceiling make me think that it’s early morning; the clouds are lightening, their dark grey fading away. I make it to the entrance, seeing things I didn’t see the night before. Plants have grown across the floor, as well as the desk at the back of the room. The old signs are still up on the wall, still legible after all this time: OBSTETRICS, GYNECOLOGY, OUT-PATIENTS.
And there are bodies, stacked in the corner.
They’re all Nomads, from what I can tell. Maybe six of them. A mess of limbs and ugly paint. I don’t see any of Eric’s people, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t hurt, or that they don’t keep the bodies somewhere else. For a horrible moment, I could swear that I see Syria among them, but it’s just my mind playing tricks.
The bodies are being tended by a man and a woman, who are dragging another one across. Neither of them glance at me as I walk past them. I think about talking to them, saying something, but realise I don’t want to. Not now.
Every atom in me wants to go, to head right out of the front door, keep going, and not stop until I get to Anchorage. But it’s not hard to picture Carver, picture him shaking his head, telling me that I need a plan first.
He’s right.
There are stairs on the other side of the entrance hall. I climb them slowly, knowing that my leg can take the pressure but not wanting to push it too hard just yet. The pain has settled down to a low throb. I’ll have to wait until Finkler is awake to know if there’s any lasting damage, but from the feel of things, I should be OK.
I don’t really know where I’m going. Right now, just moving is enough.
The stairs take a ninety-degree turn to the left, leading out onto a corridor on the second floor. It’s a mess. There are a couple of upturned stretchers, and the floor is covered in dead leaves and plant roots. The only light comes from an open door a little way down. As I get closer, I hear voices.
It’s Harlan. “… suffered enough,” he’s saying. “I’m out there, by myself, with nobody to help me. I survived for over a year in those mountains.”
“Oh, don’t make out like you’re some kind of hero.” Eric’s voice is sharp and hard. “After what you did? You think you have any right to come back here?”
“Eric—”
“And bringing her… what, did you think we’d just open our arms? It’s a cheap trick, Harlan. You know it, I know it.”
“I saved her. I did. You can’t take that away from me. She told you herself. That has to mean something, whatever you say about it.”
“Fuck you, Harlan. You need to leave. Not tomorrow. Not later today. Now.”
The space outside the doorway is a balcony–a wide rooftop space, empty except for a single plastic chair by the waist-high railing. Puddles of foul water dot the gravelly surface. I can see out across the river, across the low buildings of Whitehorse to the mountains beyond. There’s a gap in the clouds, just a tiny one, and the rising sun has turned it to a gorgeous, burning orange slash. It reflects off the surface of the river. The space before the bridge is clogged with debris, but the water runs clear downstream of it, the river growing larger as it filters into a lake.
For the first time, I find I can look at the sky without my vision going weird. Maybe Harlan was right–up until yesterday, the largest space I’d been in was outside the station, and that was only for a few minutes. My body’s slowly adjusting to having a horizon, getting used to not being enclosed in a tiny metal ring.
Harlan and Eric haven’t noticed me. They’re standing over by the balcony, facing each other, close enough to touch. They’re wearing the same clothes they were the night before. Eric’s airforce jacket is dark in places, crusted with dried blood, and Harlan’s ankle is wrapped in a bulky bandage.
“You think I�
��m kidding?” Eric says, jabbing a finger in Harlan’s chest. “You play games with me on this, and I’ll shoot you myself.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Then you wouldn’t have to think about me.”
I shouldn’t be here. I’m intruding on something very private. I try to remember why I came up here in the first place, and find that I can’t. I turn to go, automatically shifting onto the balls of my feet, and that’s when Harlan says, “Oh, hey–you’re up.”
I close my eyes briefly, then turn. They’re both looking at me, silhouetted slightly by the burning sky. Harlan is smiling, relieved, but the look on Eric’s face is thunderous.
May as well make the most of it. I look up at Eric. “I wanted to say thank you,” I say, stumbling over the words a little. “I don’t know how I can pay you back, but…“
Eric crosses the space between us in three long strides, and slaps me across the face.
It’s a backhand hit, not as hard as a punch but still strong. I raise my hand to block it, but I’m not fast enough. It takes me across the mouth, and my teeth cut into my top lip. I taste blood, harsh and salty.
“Eric!” Harlan says.
My first instinct is to hit back, to take a swing at him, but I don’t. I just stand there, watching his shoulders heaving.
“I don’t know what happened to you,” Eric says, “and I don’t care. I want you gone.”
The slap has brought the anger back, instantly, like it was waiting to happen. And that awful voice again, bitter and strident: You hit me again, I’ll break your arm.
With an effort of will, I bring myself under control. Eric must see something on my face, because he takes a step back.
