Helena with the sun on her forehead nodded in agreement.
Imke had said nothing about who was doing this, only what was happening. Coryn was willing to trust the mayor, but curious. No one clapped as Imke went to sit down, but Coryn wanted to.
She expected the next speaker to be from another city, since there were four topics and four cities, but Mayor Broadbridge called another of his staff up, an older slender man with a goatee and a bald head named Clifford Smith. “This will not seem connected, but you will understand. Please pay close attention.”
Clifford spoke of concepts she decided she should have grasped long ago, but hadn’t really, not until he said them. His voice was so soft that they all leaned in to hear as he built a case that suggested that the people in the cities were no longer in touch with nature. “The taking severed city-dwellers from wilderness, and many see the Wilders as mere gardeners.”
He delivered his news with a storyteller’s cadence, and at the end he summed up his information by saying, “Many of the people who live inside domes cannot see out of them. They know that forests exist because they see pictures. But they do not know what a cedar tree smells like.” His voice grew sarcastic. “They ask If we can manage things as great and wondrous as the cities, why can’t we also manage everything about the earth?” He stopped and looked at his audience, as if accusing them of the same beliefs.
Susannah’s cheeks looked pink. Jake and Julianna simply looked sad. Helena’s back was to Coryn, stiff and a little affronted. Mayor Broadbridge let the moment stretch for a few minutes, and then said, “Thank you, Clifford.”
Susannah startled as if she suddenly remembered she had a role. She stood. “I’d like to introduce Ty Loomis. He’ll talk about gathering forces.”
Ty was almost a visual twin of Adam’s, tall and athletic except with darker hair and eyes, and skin that had been lightly brushed with sepia. Adam leaned in, paying more attention to the reaction of the middle table than to Ty or his slides, which were sparse. No wonder: it was all numbers and graphs, easy for Adam. He seemed to have seen the material before anyway.
Coryn took the slate and slid her AR rig out of her purse, watching closely as three-dimensional graph and graphic after three-dimensional graph and graphic slowly built a case for many enemies working together. Returners, who wanted their old land back and the rise of the cities stopped. Moneyed members of the old federal government, building power. These funded people in the cities who preached the things Clifford had talked about, and encouraged peaceful protests. They also paid for operatives planted in the cities to do far worse, seen more by the signs of their communication trails than anything else.
Russians, for one. Russia was still a strong centralized state, with the strongest cities in Russia beholden to national interests, and far less powerful than the Western megacities.
Helena nodded at this, and whispered, “I know,” loud enough for Coryn to hear.
Mayor Broadbridge nodded at her.
Maybe that was why Helena was here. Calgary was smaller than the other cities, and she hadn’t contributed an analyst to any of the four problems, at least so far.
As Ty kept talking, Coryn watched him carefully. He fascinated her. They all had. They spoke well, clearly, cleanly. Words were crisp. Cadences perfect. They had all worried her; Ty frightened her so she caught herself breathing fast and forced her body to calm.
All of the groups Ty mentioned were growing. They weren’t large, not yet. Not as far as anyone could tell. But in a connected city, ideas could rage and flame overnight.
Again, Mayor Broadbridge allowed for a moment of quiet. Coryn kept hold of Adam’s slate as he went to the front. He talked of what he had been telling her about weapons across the last few weeks. It had frightened her as he fed it to her in dribs and drabs, mostly because she had been able to see how he took it. Here, in this context and presented with the other information, it sounded worse.
As soon as Adam sat down, the table erupted with conversation and chatter as Mayor Broadbridge called for a break. She handed Adam back his slate and leaned toward him. “It really is scary, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
She gazed through the glass at the tops of the city’s most beautiful buildings and at the bridge she loved. “It will be all right. It has to be.”
“It doesn’t.” He stood, looked down at her. “We’ve only got the winter to prepare.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Coryn still dreamed of attacks and weapons and Lou five days after the meeting. But at least she had slept as long as she wanted to. So long that it was early afternoon. A day off of running. A holiday.
Thanksgiving.
Not something she’d ever celebrated much. Not really. But there had been days of ads and decorations, of free food to taste in hopes you would buy some, of the city being orange and pale red and deep brown.
Except where the Christmas colors overran the Thanksgiving colors.
Still in her pajamas, she made her way to the god-awful green chair closest to the window and stared out. A Northwest-gray sky hung low over a dark gray sea, but in spite of that the city looked warm and she felt good.
Namina brought her a cup of coffee.
“Thanks. Happy Thanksgiving.”
“To you as well.”
“Thanks.” She went outside on the balcony. The wind was cool, but not cold. The green wall just across from her was straggled by fall, but a few yellow marigolds thrived here and there, and bright purple cabbage grew from one corner.
Namina came outside and stood beside her. “What are you looking at?”
“The city. Thinking about how it all works together. Tell me what you can talk to.”
Namina smiled, a vacuous robotic smile with little nuance. Paula had showed far more range in the emotions she mimicked for Coryn. But then, Coryn and Paula had been together for all of Coryn’s remembered life, and she and Namina had known each other maybe two weeks. She cocked her head and asked “Everything?”
Coryn nodded.
“All of your house systems. The refrigerator, the thermostat, the water filter, and the meters that go to the sewer and power systems. I can talk to the elevators and to the buildings safety systems and the weathervane on top of the building. I am prohibited from talking to the building systems other than through your interfaces to it, but if I were not prohibited, I would be able to talk to things like the HVAC and the building’s energy monitoring systems.”
“I expected nothing less. Can you talk to the front door?”
“Yes.”
A seabird flew between buildings, startling Coryn for a moment. Namina didn’t react at all. “Did you know that bird would fly by?”
“Only three seconds before it did. There are cameras that notify us of interesting events.”
“Why did you need to know about a bird?”
“What if it was a security drone?”
Fair enough. Coryn took a deep breath and a sip of coffee. “What of mine can you talk with?”
“Nothing you have not enabled.”
Stupid robot. “What have I enabled?”
“Your A/R rig, your alarm system, your wristlet, your tablet, your coffee machine.”
“Please disable your access to everything except the coffee machine.”
“Done.”
Coryn raised an eyebrow. “So what city systems can you talk to?”
“Transportation, water, sewer.”
“How do you see them? Are they data?”
Namina frowned and hesitated, her expression switching to puzzlement. “I don’t know if I could explain. Everything is data. Vision. Hearing. All of our senses. You might say we live inside of a permanent augmented reality. We know what’s real in the physical world, but we have other worlds layered inside of us as well.”
Coryn stared at the shifting ocean. “Is there a network of robots?”
“Of course there is. But we can only touch the outer surface of each other—temperatu
re, movement, etc. I would know if there is another robot in your bedroom, but not what she could do or who she worked for.”
Coryn nodded. It was about what she had thought. She and Julianna had exchanged words about robots a few times right after Paula died. She really should go put on clothes, but it felt good to be out here on the balcony, even if she was alone except for a robot she couldn’t let herself trust.
‡ ‡ ‡
Thanksgiving dinner started at noon on the farm. Coffee and pumpkin pastries made with real bread flour that Coryn had sent out from Wenatchee for them as a surprise. The table was decorated with leftover dried allium globes from the front yard, cut short and poked into glasses. Alondra had gathered fall leaves all the previous day, and scattered them artfully in the middle of the big table.
It was sunny and cold, and they all went outside and played silly games like three-legged races. Lou brought the ecobots up for the children to climb on, and left only two people on guard at a time, on shortened two-hour shifts.
For dinner, she let them all come up. She kept her wristlet on. Coryn watched from Seacouver, using the satellite shots and her voice for security so that everyone could eat together.
There was no turkey, but Felipe had sacrificed six chickens and Matchiko, Cheryl, and Astrid had baked them into root vegetable pies with the other half of the same fabulous, fine-ground flour.
Lou, Matchiko, and Shuska took the first shift after dinner, leaving all of the men to join in with the after-dinner music. They took care of the horses and then stood watch together, watching the sun set over the lake. “It’s going okay,” Lou said.
“Yes,” Matchiko agreed, taking her hand and squeezing.
“It’s entirely too quiet,” Shuska said.
Lou laughed, and far away and behind them, a pack of coyotes howled as the moon came out and made a streak of white on the nearly black lake.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Lou woke early. Matchiko had slept beside her the night before, and still lay stretched out on the bed with her dark hair tousled from sleep and her back rising and falling in a sweet rhythm. Her damaged ankle stuck out from under the covers, still slightly swollen and deeply scarred.
Lou found Shuska in the living room, drinking coffee and staring out of the window. Morning light bathed her face, illuminating thin wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. She was rarely beautiful, but in this light and in this moment, a stateliness settled on her, a beauty born of strength and loyalty and steadfastness.
Lou stepped near Shuska and slipped her coffee cup from her wide hand, stealing a sip while looking down on the garden. Already, Sofia, Astrid, and Diego moved between the beds, using dented water cans to get water only where it was needed. The soft sounds of their morning conversation were barely audible, sounding more like bees than words. They sounded happy.
Shuska took the cup back and curled an arm around Lou’s waist in greeting. “They never stop, do they?”
“No. And I’ve never beaten them awake. I’m going to their bar tonight. Would you like to come?”
Shuska shook her head. “I think you should go without us. Valeria talks more openly with you than with us.”
That was true, although it galled Lou a little. “We should try to fix that.”
“I’m getting along with the -o boys.”
They had started calling them that. Diego, Ignacio, and Santino. Middle children. Felipe and Astrid were ahead of them, Angel and Sofia behind. They moved in a group, doing the family’s business but not the foundation’s work. She seldom saw one without the other. “What are they like? I haven’t talked with any of them.”
Shuska fell silent a moment. “They are quiet, but they have anger in them. I see it in the way they carry themselves, in the way they glance at me sometimes. All of the others here seem to have become used to us, or to accept that they need us or at least that they cannot escape us. But these three? I think they wish they had never seen us.”
“They work hard. I never see them stop, in fact. They’re always moving.” Lou watched a red-tailed hawk circle high up above the fields, looking for breakfast. “One of them is married. Ignacio?”
“To Ana. He is the quietest of them all. I have no idea how he managed to ask anyone to marry him.”
Lou smiled at that. “So how are you getting along with them? Where do you see them?”
“They’re often in the main barn. Staring at the horses, helping with the horses, whispering to them. I think they’d like horses of their own. It might be a way to tie them to us.”
“Do we need more horses?”
Shuska turned toward her. “Is that a question?”
“All right. Sure we do.” Lou took the cup from Shuska’s hand and stole another sip of the coffee. It was getting cold but still more tempting than making her own cup. “I’m going to Wenatchee in a few weeks if the weather holds.”
Matchiko stirred, and Lou called out, “Coffee for you, too! We need to finish and file the plan for the month.”
Five minutes later, the three of them sat around the large kitchen table, which had a hidden erasable surface under the wooden top. She’d been surprised to find it here, but pleased. Maybe it had been used to plan parties during the farm’s incarnation as a bed and breakfast inn.
Shuska projected a map from her tablet, the lake a long fat line of blue bisecting the center. The eastern edge had an irregular figure drawn around it to indicate the area they’d decided to consider as occupied, a near-oval that included the building they sat in. Shuska pointed to a spot north of them, on their side of the lake. “We’ll survey here this morning. I’ve already marked some places we can begin to take down. If we block them, normal vehicles won’t be able to pass, and we’ll have an easier time reclaiming these wineries.” She circled two complexes of farms with large houses, the buildings wrecked by wind and rain and neglect. “No water. We sent some drones out yesterday to take a look. Neither appears to be occupied.”
Lou nodded. “I’m still pondering how wise it is to destroy them.”
“The ecobots are demanding it. Apparently, Julianna didn’t think it would be a big deal if we helped them reach their goals. Something about trading human oversight of the destruction of Chelan for robotic protection of the destroyers.”
How could Julianna be so utterly naive? “Damn all rigid programming and clueless leaders to hell,” Lou muttered, completely unsurprised when no one bothered to respond.
“What about the survey?” Matchiko asked. “I’d like to take one of the bots today. We want to go west.” She pointed to a spot closer to the mountains than the one Shuska had claimed. “I want to ride to here”—she tapped a finger on the map—“and do a walking survey along that stream.” She zoomed in. “It’s dry now, but there are a lot of living trees beside it. I’m pretty sure it runs with water most of the year.”
Lou remembered her last conversation with Coryn. “Storm in a few days.”
“Bad?”
Matchiko pondered the map. “Might be the first real cold one of the year.”
Lou nodded. “Let’s finish. If we file the plan today, we can take tomorrow off.”
In spite of the dark circles under her eyes, Matchiko nodded. Shuska zoomed in on a different part of the map and started talking.
How lucky was she to be with these women?
‡ ‡ ‡
As had become her habit, Lou made a sandwich from fresh bread and eggs and took it and a second cup of coffee outside to one of the tables on the front lawn, sitting by herself to call Coryn.
Coryn answered right away, her face a small round oval on Lou’s wrist. She was in the same office she always took the calls from, a sterile place that made Lou shudder inside. After a few light greetings, Coryn began as she always did, launching straight into business. “There’s no significant new activity in Chelan this morning. A small caravan may get to town tonight. We think it’s twelve horses and ten people. A storm is coming in da
y after tomorrow and may linger a few days. That’s Monday. Pablo is two days out of Wenatchee, four out of Chelan.”
Lou stuffed her own words into the stream of data. “How are you?”
The Coryn-figure on her wrist watched her in silence for a few heartbeats before she said, “I’m fine.”
“You sound different. Are they working you too hard?”
A slight smile crossed Coryn’s lips, and as usual Lou wished for a bigger view of her little sister’s face.
Coryn said, “I don’t think I can work too hard right now. None of us can. It’s no different from you anyway.”
Coryn had never seemed like the workaholic type. Lou nodded, exaggerating the movement to be sure Coryn would catch it. “True enough. But you need your sleep to run.”
“I’ve a race Monday. Wish me luck!” She smiled again, looking more upbeat.
“Sure. Good luck. I’m going to find a wolf next week.”
“You always were sure of yourself.”
That made Lou smile. Nothing Coryn had said so far had stopped her worrying. “Tell me what’s happening in your life.”
“You never care about the city.”
“I care about you.”
Coryn’s face lost its smile. She leaned in and said, “I know. I love you too.”
“You’ve been like this for four days. Tired-looking and not talking about anything you don’t have to.” A small flash of insight touched Lou. “Are you keeping secrets?”
Coryn went quiet for a moment and then spoke softly. “I’m worried. The nukes. The planned attacks. I can’t even tell you everything I know.”
Lou sighed again. “Is there anything I should know about the caravan that’s coming?”
“We’d like to know anything you learn. They’ll be coming from the north.”
“Okay. I’ve got to go. I have a barn to finish before a storm comes in.”
“It looks like you don’t have much time. I love you.”
“I love you, too.” She hung up and then whispered to herself, “But I wish I knew what you’re going through.”
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