The women began to walk along the sidewalk, trying to keep up with us, but clearly taking every care not to step out into the road. It was like they didn’t dare to actually approach us.
“I don’t think we should go into the woods,” Sera said.
I ignored her and threaded the car awkwardly between the trees, backing up to reposition us. I could feel Sera’s frustration. The town was deadly still, save for the women now staring at us and the Meiboch™ rapidly approaching the charging station. I didn’t see how I could get us out in time.
Then the women suddenly dispersed, walking away as if they’d never seen us.
“Speth, please, not the woods,” Sera said, like they scared her.
“What is in the woods?” Mira asked, infected by Sera’s fear.
The other Meiboch™’s lights blazed through the darkness.
“They aren’t listening to me,” Sera said to Norflo, her voice high.
“S’fine,” Norflo said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. Sera seemed to relax a little.
I pulled the car against a tree, scraping along, turned and finally got us onto the broken pavement. The women behind us suddenly stepped out into the road, holding hands, their heads bowing with a pain I knew well. Their eyes were being shocked—not for talking, but for walking beyond the boundaries they were allowed. They were on an electronic leash. The elderly woman dropped to her knees from the pain, but she stayed in the road, blocking the way to protect us. All of them did. I wanted to scream back at them not to do this.
“Go!” Margot said.
“But those women!” I cried out.
“They will be okay,” Margot said. “They are protected.”
“By what?” I demanded, my foot hovering over the accelerator.
“OiO™!” Margot yelled back at me. “They are the property of OiO™. OiO™ will sue.”
It was a sick idea, but it was the only hope I could hold on to. I pressed my foot down and sent us forward, lights out, onto a dark, broken road I could barely see.
I couldn’t look back. I didn’t want to. I had to just believe.
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As we drove farther into the forest, Sera clutched Norflo’s arm. Mira leaned against Henri, trying to find a way back to sleep. The WiFi stuttered out, and the dashboard went blank. The road and forest grew too dark for me to keep up to speed. When the car bounced over a fallen branch none of us had seen, I slowed us as much as I dared. Fortunately, there was no sign of the other car behind us.
“’Twas up with those women? How’d they recognize you?” Norflo asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably the news?”
“Wouldn’t think they’d get news out there,” Norflo said.
“My parents do,” I said. Sera looked at me like I was lying. “They do.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“They saw me,” I said. “Saw what happened on my Last Day, when I went silent.” I thought back to my mother making the sign of the zippered lips. It was a gesture she’d once hated, but she’d made it because she was proud of me.
“Maybe everyone saw,” Norflo suggested.
“That’s awesome,” Henri said.
Was it? I felt sick with guilt, leaving those women back there. Even if they hadn’t been run down, I couldn’t imagine what came next would be pleasant for them.
“Who do you think it was chasing us?” Henri asked.
“Oh, Henri,” Margot said.
“What?” he asked her.
“It was those Lawyers,” Sera said. “Right? It had to be those Lawyers.”
“Or Lucretia Rog herself,” I said.
“I do not think so,” Margot said.
“Why’s she want you so bad?” Sera asked. “Even before you took out the WiFi, they really went after you. There was that reward to get you to talk.”
“That was the news stations,” I shot back. “Not the Rogs.”
“There is not much difference in Portland,” Margot pointed out. “The Rogs own most of them. Sera is essentially correct. Perhaps they miscalculated, showing footage of your defiance on your Last Day, Speth. Perhaps Henri is right—maybe everyone saw.”
“Can I ask something? And will you promise not to get mad?” Sera asked.
“No,” I answered.
Sera went on, anyway. I didn’t think she really cared if I got angry or not. “Why didn’t Rog just kill you? If they made a mistake, the Rogs could have done it a bunch of times. Why’d he go after Sam and leave you on that bridge?”
My whole body felt like the underside of a volcano. I answered through gritted teeth. “He tried,” I said. “He tried to shoot me.”
“Yeah, I know, after you blew up the WiFi,” Sera replied. “But why not before that?”
“How the fuck would I know?” I asked. Margot covered Mira’s ears, but held back from chastising me about my language.
“Profanity surcharge,” Norflo joked, trying to lighten the mood. He put a hand on my shoulder, but I shook it off.
“I’m driving,” I said.
“She’s so prickly,” Sera commented to him.
“Go easy,” Norflo said to her, and then to me, “S’worth thinking about, tho. ’Cretia Rog coulda killed us in Portland when she had us down in the bubble.”
“She probably wanted to save her husband.”
“I do not think Silas Rog is her husband,” Margot said.
“He’s her brother,” Henri said.
I don’t know why that idea made me even more uneasy about the Rogs.
“Silas Rog said he didn’t want to kill me—he wanted to defeat me,” I told them. “He said it was about his reputation, but he’s a liar. Almost everything he said was a trick or a lie.”
Though I didn’t want to say so aloud, Sera had a point. Rog could have had me killed any number of times, including that day on the bridge. He could have had his goons do it. He could have done it himself in the library. He’d trained that gun on me when it was working. In the end, after I’d destroyed his WiFi hub and Central Data, he was enraged enough to try. But it was too late by then.
“Why wouldn’t they just kill me?” I wondered aloud.
“They must want something,” Margot said. “What do you have?”
“Nothing!” I said. “I have nothing left. They took everything from me.”
“Didn’t take us,” Norflo said. “Still got friends.”
My eyes blurred. “Stop it,” I said, wiping them. “I have to drive.”
“You still have your sister,” Sera added, her voice barely a whisper.
I nodded. I didn’t really know if that was true. Not in the way I wanted it to be.
“I think I know what they wanted,” Sera went on, straining to find a stronger volume.
“What?” I asked, working to take the edge out of my voice. She was sincerely trying to help.
“Your silence,” she said.
“I was already silent.”
“No. I mean, they wanted to take it from you. They wanted you to talk. They wanted you to break. I know I did. It was making me crazy.”
“Why would they care? Why did you care?”
“It was so annoying,” Sera said. I could hear her frustration, even now, and I had to laugh at how she put it.
“You think I annoyed them into all this?” I asked, waving a hand around the car like it was the world.
“I think Sera may be onto something,” Margot said more gravely. “Maybe they feared the movement you created. The Silents.”
“Must have,” Norflo said.
“I didn’t create them. They must realize that. I never even imagined people would copy me,” I protested. “Do you remember that girl, Bridgette Pell, who zipped her lips and jumped to her death on her Las
t Day? I still don’t understand why someone would take it to that extreme, especially someone so rich. I never intended for anyone to go silent after me.”
“Don’t tell Nancee that,” Sera said.
“Whether you intended it or not, what else could they want from you but to end it?” Margot asked.
“I wouldn’t even know how,” I said. “Rog threatened to create a digital version of me to do it, though. Why didn’t he?”
“Those never look right,” Norflo said. “Even that fake Carol Amanda Harving never quite looked like your sister, right?”
That was true.
Ahead of us, a small decrepit road branched off to our right. Beyond that was another, and then a third. I slowed us to a crawl. The only light was a weak, diffuse glow from domes or factories like OiO™ nearby. I brought the car to a stop at one of the roads, peering up at what appeared to be a house.
“People lived out here,” I marveled, shaking my head. “What happened?”
“The sun,” Sera said.
“The sun is not so dangerous,” Margot said. “There is more to this than they tell.”
“How do you know?” Sera asked.
“Logic,” Margot answered, which annoyed Sera. “They would not give up this space just because the sun burned skin. Think about it. People owned these things, these houses and what was in them. Then they gave them up?”
“Story never made sense,” Norflo agreed, and that seemed to mollify Sera.
“Do you think they left their things behind?” I asked. Were these ruins filled with treasures?
“I am sure they have been picked clean,” Margot said.
I turned carefully onto the small road and turned the headlights on briefly. They hit a house that looked like it had been smashed by a giant. Two walls had collapsed, and what remained of the shell was covered in the greenish fur of some plant I remembered seeing in a film once.
I turned the lights off again. “Moss,” I said very quietly. The plant might have been the only thing holding the remains together.
“Should we rest here?” Henri asked.
We’d seen no sign of lights behind us, but if we were being pursued, they could have turned theirs off as easily as we had. I pulled the car back out onto the road.
“Not good enough for you?” Margot asked.
“Something that doesn’t look like it will collapse if we breathe on it would be good,” I said. “And I’d like to put as much distance between us and OiO™ as I can.”
“What do you think happened?” Henri asked.
“These homes are very old, Henri,” Margot answered. “They are not printed plastic. They are mostly wood, and wood decays.”
I could see that she was right. “So why use it?”
“I do not believe they had other choices,” Margot answered.
“What about bricks?” I asked. “And stone, and whatever metal the Eiffel™ Tower is made out of.”
“I do not know, Speth,” Margot said.
“’Spect wood’s just cheap,” Norflo answered. “We’ve been looking at dead trees for hours.”
“I wonder who lived out here,” I said.
“What do you mean, who?” Sera asked with an edge in her voice. “People.”
“Were they rich? They had so much space.” The homes around us were huge, and I saw no sign that they were Ad-subsidized.
“Prolly,” Norflo said.
“But there are so many of them,” I said.
We traveled several miles, passing dozens more driveways and crumbled homes beyond. Each of us kept looking back periodically to see if we were being followed, but if they’d put out their lights like we had, we wouldn’t stand a chance of seeing them.
The road came to an end at a T-shaped intersection, which gave me some hope—left would bring us south. This road was also in better shape and appeared to have been cleared of downed trees. As we continued on, the darkness around us grew. We were far from the glow of any dome or the OiO™ factory. I was both glad and frightened to be so far from civilization.
The darkness also meant I had to turn on the headlights. With the lights on, a hot, angry red glowed from the back of Rog’s Meiboch™—the rear lights, announcing us. I knew it would mark our location from far, far away.
“I think we should take the side roads,” I said. “We’ll be harder to follow, and maybe we can find someplace to rest.” I could see the exhaustion on everyone’s faces, and my very bones felt weary. I knew I’d need to take a break soon or risk falling asleep at the wheel.
I threaded our way through old, decrepit neighborhoods, awed by the way they just kept going without any boundaries. I quietly worried that we wouldn’t find our way back, but what choice was there?
Eventually, Henri yelled for us to stop. He’d seen a house made of brick. I don’t know how he saw this in the darkness, but Henri was apparently a tremendous spotter. I hadn’t noticed this about him before we’d left Portland.
I pulled in and let the headlights illuminate the home. One side had a tree growing out of it, peeling the roof off what I guessed was a garage. Even like this, it appeared in better shape than any of the other houses I’d seen so far.
I stopped the car and turned it off. When the lights went out, we were plunged into darkness. The distant light of some far-off dome made a pallid band near the horizon, blotted by the trees. Between anemic leaves and clouds, the sky was spotted with faint pinpricks of light—stars—and a pale, ominous trail that I took to be some factory’s cloud.
“Can you turn the lights back on?” Sera whispered. Her voice was so small and petrified, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her.
Margot hesitated. “That will make us vulnerable.”
“We aren’t going to be able to look inside without them,” I offered, and clicked them back to shining.
As we all got out, Mira yawned and stirred in the back seat. “Do you think there are bears?” she asked, looking into the blackness beyond the trees.
“No,” I said, putting on an optimistic smile.
Mira stared at me. “I do not see how you know.”
I scooted back into the car to sit beside her for a moment. “I know because bears don’t live in this area. And...if they did, you would smell them.”
“You would?” Mira asked. Margot cocked an eyebrow at me. “What do they smell like?”
“Bad,” I said. “Like dumpster Wheatlock™. I’ve never smelled one myself, but I’ve watched a lot of animal shows.” That part was true. Despite how uncommon it was to see actual animals, there were plenty of shows about them, some from long ago. They never said anything about where animals lived, though. I’d made that part up. I’d also made up the part about the smell. The only bears I had seen were trained for TV shows and supposed to be funny. I still found them terrifying, and I hoped Mira’s fears were unfounded.
“They’re huge, so they’re also very loud,” I added, which was as close to a fact as I could get. “You would definitely hear them coming.”
The front door of the house was metal, made to look like wood, and it was locked. Henri tried it more times than he should have, turning the knob like actors did in old movies.
“I’ve got it,” Henri said, pulling out his magnetic lock pick. He ran it over the door, and it stuck. Henri plucked it back. “The metal must interfere.”
Norflo leaned down. “Looks mechanical.”
“Kick it in,” Sera said, like someone should have already thought of this.
Norflo and Henri exchanged a look and Henri gave the door a hard kick, expecting it to give easily. Instead, he propelled himself backward and landed on his butt. Sera furrowed her brow at him, but Margot did something I had never seen.
She started belly laughing. It wasn’t the little Margot giggle I’d heard on occasion, or her soft, sarcastic snort. Act
ual tears came to her eyes, and she went practically hysterical at the sight of Henri on the ground.
“Oh, Henri!” she managed to say, extending him a hand and helping him to his feet.
“That door is strong,” Henri said, shaking off the fall.
“I got it,” Norflo said from a short distance away. He’d threaded his arm through a long-broken window nearby and found the window’s latch. He raised it up. “One a’ you nimble Placers want to climb in and open the door?”
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The house had a dank smell that reminded me of a SippyBox™ of mushroom-flavored soup I once had for lunch. There was dusty furniture inside that I could barely make out in the scattered glare of the Meiboch™’s headlights.
“I wish we could see better,” I said.
“When the sun comes up, we will have more light,” Margot said.
“The sun?” Mira said, rubbing her eyes. She looked around, her mouth a frightened little O. “We are going to stay here?”
“Only for a bit,” Margot assured her. I shared Mira’s skepticism. A layer of dust coated everything. Now that we were walking around, kicking it up, each of us, in turn, sneezed.
I touched a small frame that hung off the wall at an odd angle. The thing dislodged and clattered to the ground.
“Don’t touch anything!” Sera chastised me.
“Y’okay?” Norflo asked.
“Yes,” I said, picking the frame up. I held it into the stark light streaming in from the car through the tattered, molding curtains. The picture was of a dog on a patch of grass in the sunshine. Everything was tinged gold. “They were definitely rich,” I said. You couldn’t own a dog—or any pet—if you didn’t have loads of money. You had to put a special pet Lawyer on retainer for the life of the animal. That was part of the Terms of Service.
“What are you hoping to find?” I asked Margot, who was staring at a recessed area, framed by bricks and blackened in the center, like there had been a small fire. She put her hand on a set of empty, dusty shelves. It probably once held books. Did the people who lived here take them? Or was the house picked clean in the long interval since?
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