Wilders

by Brenda Cooper

  “Also true,” Day said. “Or we’re just on a pretty night ride over a spectacular bridge.”

  Paula smiled at her. “You like bridges.”

  “Crazy robot.” But she smiled back and tried to think like Blessing and Day. If only she knew Lou was safe. Lou had led her here, but she had stupidly followed. She could have stayed back, refused to go. Maybe if she’d refused to come here, Lou would have thought twice.

  As they approached the state border, a small sign turned on. “Welcome to Oregon.”

  If she had an AR set, there would be a lot more data. She was enveloped by silence and also blind.

  Two large metal gates had been pulled shut across the bridge. She could see where they usually rested open, and how the tall arched and filigreed metals would create a work of art when it stood in the open position. Now it made an effective barrier. The top of the arch of the bridge had a flat space just between two gates. Two small covered buildings filled the space on each side of the road.

  The ecobot stopped in front of the gate. To her surprise, the arm that had been holding her released a bit, and then a bit more. Aspen barked at it, as if surprised it could move. Drones scuttled away from the metal appendage, and it moved further, so that she had all of the freedom she needed. Her stiffened legs refused her command to stand; she had to push herself forward onto her knees and use her hands to push from there to her feet. Blessing and Day stood, too. They did not look nearly as mystified as she felt. She looked up at Day, her voice shaking. “What do you know?”

  “Look at your wrist.”

  She touched it to turn on the light. A message. Lou? How had Day known she had a message?

  Go with my Blessing and do as he says. Julianna.

  Her heartbeat sped up. She had dreamed of seeing Julianna again, of running with her and asking her questions. But this felt—bad. “How? Where is she?”

  Blessing whispered, “I don’t know.”

  “But you know her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though you’re not from the city?”

  “I wasn’t born here.”

  “You’re a Listener?”

  “Not quite. But how do you know her?”

  She wasn’t about to tell him anything. Besides, Julianna was her secret.

  If Blessing had just betrayed Lou, Lou might very well think Coryn had been in on it the whole time.

  Dammit. What should she do? She had to go, didn’t she?

  Aspen tugged on his leash, drawing her attention. He tugged harder, and she sat to counterbalance him, falling on her butt with her legs wide, giggling at the fall and then at the fact that she was giggling when nothing was funny.

  Blessing laughed with her. He reached a hand down for her and she took it. He pulled her up and briefly in close to him, saying, “It will be all right.”

  She couldn’t agree, not now, so she pulled away from him and climbed down the ecobot’s arm, already lying at an angle she could walk down carefully with Aspen in her arms. The end of the ecobot’s flat appendage rested right at the edge of the gate. She stepped onto the hard surface of the bridge and waited for the others.

  The gate slid far enough open for them to enter. Blessing led her through, followed by Paula, then her and Aspen, and lastly Day.

  Once inside, Blessing stopped and stood, looking as lost as she felt. She had no idea whether or not to believe his body language, or anything else about him for that matter.

  To think she’d wanted to kiss him.

  The gate gave a soft clink as it shut behind them.

  Aspen lunged to the right, and Julianna stepped through the door of the little hut on that side of the bridge. She looked older and more resolute than when Coryn had last seen her. Sadder. Dark circles stained the skin under her eyes, and her hair had grown longer and grayer. Coryn would be willing to place bets neither of them was in the running shape they had been the last time they saw each other.

  Blessing walked right over to Julianna and gave her a hug, which was returned unreservedly by this woman who had always kept some distance from Coryn. She took a step back.

  Day smiled at Julianna, and got a return smile.

  It took her a moment, but Coryn said, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  Julianna pulled free of Blessing. “I’ve been protecting you.”

  “I don’t think so!” she said. “I almost died three times.”

  Julianna glanced at Blessing. “Later. We’ll talk later. For now, we need to get you away. All the gates are under attack. That’s the only reason I was able to guide you all up here.”

  “With the drones?” Coryn asked.

  “Yes. They’re mine.” She glanced up at the sky, where the long drones flew low circles over the ecobots just on the far side of the fence.

  “Why’d you take us to the top of a bridge?”

  “I need you on the Oregon side. As soon as you step though that gate, you’ll be there. I only closed it so you’d have to stop.”

  “Are we supposed to get back on the ecobots?”

  “No. We need to disappear. First, we have enough time to get some food and water into you all. You’ll need it.”

  Coryn gestured at the busy sky. “How are we going to disappear with all those news-bots?”

  Julianna smiled at her. “That’s my problem.”

  Day licked his fingers and scrubbed at his cheek again, even though it was mostly clean. Then he ran his fingers through his unruly black hair. As usual, Blessing spoke for both of them. “Are you coming with us?”

  “Lou.” Coryn spread her feet and crossed her arms. “What happened to Lou?” Did Julianna even know who Lou was? “My sister. They took my sister. Soldiers.”

  The older woman put a hand up as if to forestall questions, crossed to the building she had come from, and brought out a bright blue plastic bag. She pulled four water bottles from it, keeping one for herself and handing the others out. Next, food bars. The first bite seemed impossible, but the second tasted good and the rest of the bar disappeared quickly. Coryn washed the bar down with water and felt hungrier than before she’d started it. Julianna handed her another one, and she ate that, too. “What next?”

  Julianna glanced at Paula. “She can’t come with us.”

  Coryn went cold. Julianna couldn’t mean that. “She stays with me.”

  Julianna stepped toward Coryn and put a hand on her shoulder. “She can’t come with us,” she repeated. “Send her to the other side of the gate.”

  “I can’t. That’s not fair.”

  “Your robot just attacked two policemen. When she gets caught, they’ll decommission her. You need distance from that.”

  Coryn struggled to find words, to think quickly. “But . . . but won’t she be hurt over there? Can’t we take her with us?”

  Julianna didn’t reply, nor did she soften. She just watched Coryn.

  Coryn felt pinned. She had nowhere to go. She had never seen this side of Julianna, the woman who led cities to merge and took on a federal government. But Coryn couldn’t give up. “She just saved us. Without her, we wouldn’t have gotten here.”

  “I’ll get you another one.”

  It took two breaths for Coryn to even parse that. It hit her in the middle of her stomach. “Another one wouldn’t be Paula.”

  “I can send you both out there.” Julianna nodded toward the ecobot and the circling drones on the Vancouver side of the gate.

  Coryn’s mouth hung open. She clamped it shut and held onto Aspen. She’d been warned of this choice, but this wasn’t how she had imagined it. Robot for dog. She rejected the choice. “Will you take Aspen? Keep him safe and find him a home?”

  Julianna blinked at her, as if trying to understand what she meant.

  “I’m responsible for him. If I keep him with me and Paula, he might die. I’ll lose him, anyway.” She glanced at Paula, who watched her closely. Paula winked at her, a small gesture, probably seen by the others, but familiar and soothing.

&
nbsp; Paula took a few steps closer to Julianna. She was taller by a head, but the expression the robot had chosen to wear was gentle. “If Coryn doesn’t go with you, if she goes back through that gate by herself, what happens to her?”

  “She’ll be locked up. Or they’ll kill her.” Julianna stared out at the city, her face bathed in the sickening and uneven lights of her drone army. “Probably they will only lock her up. That’s if she walks out by herself. The more people she has with her, the worse her chances become.”

  “And if she walks out with me?”

  “The police or—other powers—may kill you both. They have reason now. You hurt one of them.”

  Paula nodded. “You knew all of that when you directed our steed to trap all three of them and bring them up onto a bridge, a place with no options but up or down.”

  Julianna glanced to both sides, and Coryn almost expected her to say, “Down or down, from here.” She didn’t. She merely waited. Had Paula gotten her motives right? Julianna was here, on the top of this bridge. It was completely improbable. And was one side of the bridge really that different from the other?

  Paula continued. “And if I walk out by myself, that will make me a target. But I might be able to keep their attention.”

  Julianna nodded. She took a step back and gestured toward the other building with a come-hither gesture.

  Coryn’s head snapped around. Four people came out of the building, each with two bicycles. LeeAnne, two of the others that Coryn recognized from their encounter on the road, and someone she hadn’t seen before, a tall man with a long, graying ponytail.

  Paula stepped close to Coryn. She leaned down. “You must go.”

  “I can’t leave you!”

  “You must.”

  Coryn shook her head, wanting to bury it in Paula’s breasts, to hold her and be held by her.

  “You made me promise to protect Aspen. You didn’t mean I should leave him with strangers while you die with me.”

  Coryn blinked at her, shocked.

  Paula reached a hand out and touched her shoulder, and then leaped up and over the closed gate. She climbed on top of the ecobot that had brought them here, and sat, cross-legged, almost exactly where Coryn had been sitting on the ride up.

  The ecobot didn’t move or acknowledge its returned rider in any way.

  Drones did not rain bullets down on her.

  Nothing happened. Paula sat with her back to Coryn, looking out at the city, unwilling to allow Coryn any hope at all.

  A sob broke in Coryn’s throat. She let it out and then clamped down, turning to Julianna in rage.

  Julianna’s hands were already up. “Don’t hate me. Paula is of the city. All of its robots are of it, and they are all unsafe. This is necessary.”

  Coryn swallowed.

  “You are no longer a child.”

  They stood there, she and the old woman and the others. Wind whipped their hair. The lights of two cities shone at the feet of the bridge.

  Blessing and Day said nothing.

  Aspen licked her face.

  LeeAnne brought her one of the extra bikes. It looked like LeeAnne’s, thin and strong and fast. There was a good-sized pannier on the side, and LeeAnne held it open while Coryn slipped Aspen into it and clipped his collar to a chain. LeeAnne showed her how to zip it so his little head stuck out but his body was reasonably well contained. “There,” she said. “He’ll probably be safe enough.” She held a helmet out to Coryn.

  So Julianna had known about Aspen and planned for him, but she had planned to murder Paula?

  Numb, Coryn took the bike, glancing back at Paula. The moment seemed completely unreal, like she should be able to move and talk normally, but everything insisted on being slower than usual. Her breath. Her tears. Everyone else’s movements. The slightly pitying look on Julianna’s face and her own boiling anger. The movement of her hand and elbow as she pushed the helmet on her head and felt it clamp around her perfectly. She leaned down and tucked her pants into her boots, hating herself for it, but unable to stop moving forward.

  She could only go forward.

  Julianna nodded at her.

  She glanced at the gate and at the ecobot and Paula, who still looked away from her. She looked back at Julianna. “Where’s my sister?”

  Julianna merely shook her head.

  The other gate had already swung partway open.

  Suddenly, she had to move. She could no longer be here. Time shifted from slow to fast. She threw her right leg over the bike, pushed off with her left, and raced down the bridge. Lights and wind whipped at her. Aspen yipped. The bridge angled more steeply as they came away from the top, and the bike picked up speed. Coryn screamed into the wind of her passage, her breath burning in her empty chest.

  She didn’t even look to see if the others followed her. She couldn’t give a shit.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The PV bridge was so long and so smooth that the bicycle reached thirty-five miles an hour before Coryn noticed a faint—frightening—wobble. The bike transformed from a stable gyro to an unstable one, and she struggled not to tense and lose her balance.

  She reached for the expected lever and found it missing. The bike sped faster as she tried two or three other places carefully and quickly. At forty, she could only move a little without de-stabilizing the bike. LeeAnne told me the brakes were wireless. She gripped the ends of the handlebars. The bike started slowing. Stability returned, but she kept the brakes on for a while more. No one caught up with her.

  She realized she didn’t want them to.

  She let go at twenty-five, gaining speed again, whooping into the wind until she reached thirty-five once more, and repeated that three more times down the long hill.

  Near the bottom, the PV Bridge crossed over another bridge, and another, and then plummeted down through a set of tall buildings, leveling a little as it crossed above a park. Near the bottom, the bridge split out for walkers and riders. She had no idea what to do, but it wasn’t possible to hesitate at this speed, so she took the first bike off-ramp and spiraled down onto a busy street, finding herself inside of a crowd of people instead of alone.

  Julianna came next, then Blessing, two of the other riders, Day, one more rider, and, true to her title of sweep, LeeAnne came in last, a wide grin pasted across her face. She pulled up next to Coryn. “You’re crazy.” But it sounded like jealousy, and maybe welcome.

  “Nice bike,” Coryn responded.

  LeeAnne reached for her water bottle. “You almost lost it.”

  Coryn’s cheeks grew hot, but she grinned. “You have no idea how good it felt to be on a bike instead of a horse.”

  “I might.”

  People had gathered on the street across from them, staring.

  Julianna glanced around, her lips thin, her movements smooth. She nodded at the man with “Lead” scrawled on his shirt. His bike bulked a third again as big as Coryn’s, and his legs seemed to come to Coryn’s chest: a classic bicycle build that contrasted with her slighter form and LeeAnne’s stocky one. He might even be bike-modded, with extra muscle in longer legs.

  He touched his wrister, which was easily three times the screen size of Coryn’s smaller wristlet, glanced forward, glanced back at Julianna and waited for her nod, and then took off. He went from a dead stop to fast, like water falling from a roof.

  Coryn glanced down to check on Aspen, and in that one short moment Blessing passed her. She cursed under her breath and took off after him.

  Ten minutes later, she stopped worrying about catching Blessing and simply tried to hold on and keep the lead in sight. In a normal ride, the lead would pick a pace and stick to it, the other bicyclists following him or her in a long, steady line. This man dodged between people and cars, barely smooth enough not to upset the transportation system. Coryn had to use every bike skill she knew to keep up with the varied pace and the dodgy, fast turns. A few times she lost sight of the lead entirely and followed Blessing as best as she could. Then she lost
them all and slowed, searching.

  She must have missed a turn. LeeAnne came up beside her and drove her left.

  Her inner thighs and her arms chafed against her regular clothes.

  Portland flew by. Her impression was of old houses mixed with new, busy gardens stuffed full of pink and purple azaleas and red rhododendrons, and the scent of lilacs. The street illumination was bright, and the bars and dance halls and coffee shops and lecture halls lit and filled with people. The streets themselves were less crowded than Seacouver’s, and the people she saw were mostly of a type: casual, slightly unkempt, and almost all smiling. Many bicyclists. More people on bikes than in cars or on scooters, although walkers outnumbered them all. Twice, Aspen barked at dogs.

  She kept expecting drones or news-bots, but if they were following the group they did it from too high up for her to see. Maybe the police were using street cameras. Someone had to be watching.

  She stayed straight again when she should have turned. LeeAnne caught her again, breathing hard. “In your fork pack!” she yelled. “Glasses!”

  Coryn fumbled the pack open and grabbed a pair of dark brown lenses with bright orange frames. As soon as she put them on, her helmet grabbed the ends, pulling them against her face. The world took on a brighter glow, everything slightly amber. Living things like trees showed brighter than dead things like streets. A green course-line glowed in front of her nose, close in, and a directional arrow for her next turn blinked just above it. Right. 300 yards.