by Rajan Khanna
I get to my feet and cross the distance to the tent. Inside I see many familiar faces—dirty and stained, thin and bedraggled—but people I know. “Is everyone okay?” I ask.
Several people say yes; there are a lot of nods. I notice they had almost all dropped to the ground. Smart. Physics is something they understand, the trajectory of the bullet. And they know, possibly more than anyone, how the virus spreads. That had been my fear, that even if they stayed out of the way of the bullet, that someone would get splattered with blood. Because who knows if that guard was clean.
“Stay here for a moment,” I say, then move off toward the gate. I see two dead guards there. “Diego?” I call out.
“I’m here,” he calls back. “Get that door open.”
I exhale heavily in relief and then move toward the gates, opening the first and then the second. Diego comes in, breathing hard. “Did they get you?” I ask.
“No,” he says. He smiles. “I told you I could do it.”
“Yeah, well let’s not do it again.”
As we move back toward the large tent, the bulk of the Osprey appears overhead.
“Time to get Miranda’s people home,” I say.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I fly back to Tamoanchan alone. Rosie insists on Diego coming back with her. To help with the boffins, she says. She suddenly has thirteen additional people on board and she has to fly the ship. Only eleven of the prisoners are Miranda’s people, though. That leaves nine of her colleagues unaccounted for. The other two boffins we rescued were apparently taken from a different facility east of the Rockies. It’s nice to know there are others out there looking for a cure.
For the first time in a long time I feel, well, satisfied. We managed to rescue the boffins without any casualties. Diego ended up okay. We’re headed back to Tamoanchan, where Miranda and her reunited friends will work on a cure and at the very least are likely to come up with a detection system for the virus. Sure, Valhalla and the Cabal are still out there, but we have a place to go. And for the first time in a while, we have hope.
I’m still feeling that lightness, that sense of buoyancy, as I hit the ground on Tamoanchan—and I’m even smiling when Rosie strides up to me and punches me in the mouth.
I hit the ground, my head still spinning as she stands over me. “Get up,” she says. “Go on, get up.”
“What the fuck, Rosie,” I manage to say. Blood smears across my hand as I wipe my face.
“You let my brother down on the ground without backup? Out in the open? He’s injured, you dogfucker. Get up!”
“It was his idea,” I say, though now it sounds a little weak to me. I don’t get up, though. Because if I do either she’s going to knock me back down to the ground or I’m going to have to fight her, and neither of those options appeal to me.
“Get. Up. Now.”
“No. If you want to hit me again, you have to do it while I’m on the ground.”
“Don’t think I won’t.”
“Rosie!” It’s Diego, running up and pulling her back. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Leave me alone,” she says, slipping free of his good arm. “This is between me and Ben.”
He stares at her. “It was my decision.”
She grimaces and shakes her head.
“If you have an issue with that, take it up with me.”
She leans forward, putting her face right up in his. “You’re both fucking idiots.” She shakes her head again. “You should know better. But by all means, if you want to die or worse, keep hanging around with Ben. You’ll get each other killed. I’m sure.”
“Rosie . . .”
She shrugs off his questing hand. “No. Just . . . leave me alone.” She points at me. “This isn’t over. Stay clear of me or else this is back on.”
I nod.
After she walks away, Diego helps me to my feet. “She really doesn’t like me,” I say.
“To be fair,” Diego says. “Not many people do.”
I wipe my lip and dust myself off. Too much blood lately. I’d had Diego check me over back at the prison camp to make sure I didn’t get any of the one guard’s blood on me. Looked like it only got on my clothes. Which I need to wash right away.
Thing is, we’re not on Tamoanchan proper. That wasn’t the agreement with Lewis. We were bringing back the boffins, and there were too many for the quarantine cells, so we came straight to the island that they set aside for Miranda’s research. What they’ve taken to calling the Orchard. It’s not very big—mostly a hilltop with some trees, some sandy, rocky ground nearby. Room enough for us but little else. The bright spot is that we can do our quarantine here and not have to worry about sweating it out in some cell somewhere. Of course they’re corralling us. We’re in a fenced-off area with several hastily-erected tents. On the ground again. I can’t help feeling apprehensive as the Dumah and the Osprey move away, piloted by two peacekeepers from the big island.
I’m starting to feel like this is what the rest of my life is going to be—an endless series of quarantines with the occasional interruption.
I stick close to Diego while trying to steer clear of Rosie. This is easier than I think since she doesn’t seem to want anything to do with either of us. “I wish we had something to drink,” I say.
Diego pulls open his black jacket and removes a tarnished metal flask. “That whiskey we had back at my place.”
“You sneaky bastard.”
He smiles. “What are you going to drink?”
“Emphasis on the bastard.”
He shrugs and his smile widens. He reaches into another pocket and pulls out a pack of playing cards, holding it out in an invitation. Now, I’ve played Diego in cards before—he’s good. Too good. But there’s not a lot else to do. I shrug. “I’ll play you for a pull of that flask.”
“What are you going to bet?”
“A drink at the Frothy Brew,” I say. “As soon as we get out of here and back to the main island.”
“And if you don’t make it out of quarantine?”
I flash him a wounded look. “Then Miranda will cover it.”
He shakes his head. “Ben, you are such a hustler.”
“Are we going to play or not?”
He shakes his head again, but then pulls the cards out and starts to shuffle.
Let’s just say that when he gives me a sip, it’s because he feels sorry for me.
Damn, Diego’s good at cards.
Miranda finds me as I move up the hill after my release from quarantine. She runs to me and wraps her arms around me. Tight. And I feel this rush of warmth in my chest. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been looking forward to seeing her.
“Thank you for bringing my people back to me.”
I flash her a smile. “I have to use my boffin-wrangling skills somehow.”
Her face gets serious. “You did good.” As I feel my face flush, her eyes scan my face. “Seems you didn’t escape unscathed.”
I wince. “I ran into one of the guards. She got in a few good shots.”
She reaches out, touching my lip. “This one’s opened.”
I flinch from her touch, my naked blood, but of course I just went through quarantine. “That . . . was Rosie.”
“Rosie?”
I wince and rub a hand across the back of my head. “To get the boffins out we needed a distraction. Diego was that distraction, but it meant dangling him out in the open.”
“What?”
“He wanted to go. He said he needed to go.”
She shakes her head. “And you went along with that?”
I shrug. “He . . . convinced me. I wanted him to be able to prove himself.”
She continues to shake her head. “Ben . . .”
“It worked out okay. We got the boffins back.”
She meets my eyes. “And if you hadn’t? If Diego had ended up shot, or worse?”
“It didn’t happen.”
“But it could have.”
“I know,” I say. “It was a risk. I made a call. We got your people out.”
She looks away from me. The moment stretches into silence.
“I need to go see them,” she says at last.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Why don’t you go see Sergei,” she says, still looking away. “He was asking about you.”
I nod and move up the hill as she moves down.
Sergei is one of Miranda’s closest friends. Hell, he’s more of a father to her—took over after her father died, back when she was in her teens. They’ve been searching for a cure together. He’s a good guy, Sergei is. A little stiff, but good. I head to the makeshift lab that they assembled.
Truth is, I haven’t seen Sergei, or Clay, another of Miranda’s scientists, since we first came to Tamoanchan. Clay is a little shit I couldn’t care less about, but I’m looking forward to seeing Sergei. He’s not like a father to me, only my actual father was ever that, but the way I feel about him is the way I imagine someone might feel about an uncle. Not that I had one or ever really knew one, but it’s what I imagine.
I can’t resist cracking a grin as he looks up from his pile of papers and smiles at me. “Ben!” he calls. Then he’s walking over to me and clapping me in an awkward but heartfelt hug. He’s still wearing that strange nautical hat he always wears, white with an anchor on the front. I notice that he looks older. His beard and hair were always grey, but the lines in his face seem deeper, especially those around his mouth.
“You made it back,” he says.
“I did. I told you I would.”
“You did,” he says. “And you brought Miranda with you. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” I say. “She kept me alive. Hell, she stole our ride back here. I don’t even think she needs me anymore.”
“I don’t think she needs any of us,” he says. He smiles. “Maybe I should give up science, take up farming instead.”
I raise my eyebrows. “I don’t know that Miranda will let that happen. But maybe I can help you set up a secret garden somewhere.”
He laughs. “You?”
I laugh back. “Good point.”
He smiles. “I think we’ll be too busy with Miranda’s virus-detection project.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I figured you’d be all hands on that.”
Clay appears from a back room, wiping his hands on a cloth. He sees me and gives me the tiniest of nods. “Ben.”
“Clay.”
“Manage to blow up any ships today?” he asks, not able to resist taking a shot.
I know he’s doing it to rile me up—he thinks I’m slow and stupid—and I tell myself to ignore it, but he’s talking about my ship. The one I lost. The one I loved. The one I sacrificed so that people like him could—
I realize that I’ve taken a few steps toward him. I force myself to stop. “No,” I say. “I brought you some of your friends back.”
Sergei looks questioningly at me. “You’re out of quarantine . . .”
I nod. “So they are, too.”
Sergei’s smile is a kilometer wide. “C’mon, Clay,” he says. “Let us go welcome them.”
Clay glares at me as he leaves but does leave. And then I’m alone.
This is going to be fun, just me and the boffins, alone on this island. Just like old times.
Then I remember that Diego is still here, too, and I go try to find him and see if we can dig up a bottle of booze.
That night, there’s a big celebration. Turns out Sergei has been distilling some of his own hooch using the island’s crops, and a jug of it has already been passed around several times. Lewis, our new patron, even sent over some extra food for us. Which is a good thing because the boffins are ravenous. Turns out they didn’t get fed very well out in that prison camp.
Me, I’m all for drinking, and for celebrating, especially when there’s something to celebrate, but I’m also interested in what was going on in the camp. And the more we know about what’s going on with Valhalla and the Cabal, the more we can do to prepare for a possible assault.
I end up talking to Crazy Osaka as he jams some fish in his mouth and washes it down liberally with some of Sergei’s hooch. I remember asking Miranda once how he got his name. I figured he was known for doing, well, crazy things. Miranda explained that it was because he had such outlandish scientific theories. I was disappointed. But that’s the boffins.
“So they had you doing what? Experiments?”
“Mostly reviewing data,” he says, his mouth full.
“Stuff about the virus?”
He nods. “Yeah, mostly.” He looks at me, onion hanging out of his mouth. “You know what the weird thing is, though?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“The weird thing . . .” He leans in. “The weird thing is? It was our data in the first place.”
“What?”
“I think it’s what they took from Apple Pi. Our notes, our experiments. They were having us deconstruct it for them.”
“Hold on,” I say. “You were explaining it for those guards?”
“No,” he says, screwing his face up. “Not them. They had these other people. Trained people. They’d come to us every few days. In between, we were expected to review what had been assigned to us and prepare notes.”
“Why dump you out in the open like that, though?”
He shrugs. “I have no idea. After they first took us from Apple Pi, they put us in a school. We’d sit in the classrooms all day and work, like we were students, ya know, from before Maenad. But . . . I heard one of the guards say that it was too hard to keep a close watch on us there. The story went around that someone—I don’t know who—had gotten free and hid away from them.”
“So they moved you somewhere that couldn’t happen.”
He shrugs again. “They moved us.”
“Did they . . .” I pause. “Did they hurt you?”
He pauses, mid-chew, and looks down. “Sometimes.” He shrugs. “We tried to figure out how to avoid it. What to say.” He looks back up at me. “I even made a chart.”
“A chart?”
“Yes,” he says. “Of what set them off. What led to their punishments, each time it happened.” He looks down again. “It didn’t help.” His voice is low and strangled.
I reach for another question, something to divert him away from the current topic of conversation. “What about the new boffins?” I ask. “They okay?”
He shrugs. “They seem just fine. We were all in there together. All tormented together.” His eyes seem haunted, looking off in the middle distance. Then they snap back and he returns to his food. “Yeah, Hector and Maya. They seem smart.”
I remember both of them from when we rescued them from the prison camp. Hector is tall and thin, with a receding hairline and grey at his temples. Maya is short and slight, with a long, dark ponytail and, oddly, silver hoops in her ears. Large ones. It’s not something I see very often.
I decide to seek out the new boffins and introduce myself to them. “Thank you so much for getting us out,” Hector says. “You didn’t have to. You don’t know us.”
“I wasn’t going to leave you behind,” I say. “And the other boffins vouch for you.”
“‘Boffins’?” Maya asks.
“Sorry. It’s a word I use for Miranda’s people.”
“Miranda,” Maya says. “We heard a lot about her in the camp.”
“Yeah,” I say. “She’s like the unofficial leader of this group. She’s the one who brought them all together to work on a cure. You haven’t met her yet?”
“No,” Hector says. “She seems busy.”
“C’mon,” I say. “Let me introduce you.”
So I bring them over to Miranda, who has been smiling all night. Which causes this swelling and warmth inside my chest. That I could help bring her people back makes me feel good. That it makes her happy makes me feel better. But I still don’t know what those feelings mean—to her, to me, to anyone.
&nbs
p; “Hi, Ben,” Miranda says. Her skin is slightly flushed from the hooch.
“Miranda,” I say, “I wanted to introduce you to Hector and Maya.”
Miranda smiles and puts out her hand. “Oh, yes. I’ve heard a lot about you.” Maya shakes it first, then Hector. “I’m so glad to meet you. I’m happy that Ben was able to get you out.”
“We’re grateful to be out,” Maya says. “We wanted to ask . . . I mean . . . we’re not sure what you want to do with us. Do you need us to leave?”
“Do you want to leave?” Miranda asks.
“Actually,” Hector says, “we’ve been talking about it and we thought . . . I mean if you didn’t mind . . . we were thinking—”
“We’d love to stay if we could,” Maya interrupts.
Miranda smiles at her. “The way I hear it, you two would fit in nicely around here.” The smile fades. “And we’re still short some people. Besides, I don’t even know if they would let you off the island at this point. They’re pretty protective about the location.”
“That’s okay with me,” Maya says. “It looks like you have access to food and shelter. And places to bathe.”
Miranda’s smile returns. “That won’t be a problem at all.”
“Great,” Hector says. “The others . . . they told us about your work on a cure. I’d . . . I’d like to help.”
“Good,” Miranda says. “Then it’s settled. We’ll start in the morning.”
Maya and Hector move off, and Miranda looks over to me. Her eyes are shining. Or maybe glassy. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you for getting them out.”
I nod. “I needed to do it.”
She puts a hand on my cheek. Then she leans in and kisses me. It’s the first time we’ve done this in front of other people. I kiss her back.
As we pull apart, I catch Clay at the other end of the room, scowling at me. Then another boffin comes up to Miranda and she turns to talk to her.
