by Sam A. Patel
And keep moving.
26
“Your lips are turning blue,” Red Tail says when she returns with more wood to throw on the fire.
Most of what she finds scattered around the abandoned construction site are rotted old pieces covered with demolition dust. Good enough to keep the tiny fire going, even if they do create more smoke than heat.
As she is so fond of pointing out, Red Tail has saved my ass on several occasions. But saving someone’s ass is not the same thing as saving someone’s life, and this time she really did save my life. If I had been alone, I would have climbed out of the river and collapsed right there. I would have curled into a ball with my arms hugging my legs, letting the teeth-chattering shivers of hypothermia set in, all the way in, until the numbing bliss took even that away. I would have died just as I was born—scared and surrounded by dark with only my own fetal position for comfort. The only reason that didn’t happen was Red Tail. She was the one who got me to my feet, threw my arm around her shoulder and pulled me up the riverbank. She was the one who found the gap in the fence and peeled away the mesh to let us through. She was the one who rummaged through the site and came back with a blanket and a piece of tarp. She got the wood. She built the fire. And when the fire got low, she went out for more wood. She was just as cold as I was, but between the two of us she was the one who was able to keep moving. She even gave me the blanket and got by with just the tarp for herself.
“C-c-can’t f-f-feel m-m-my hands.”
I watch her drop a few more pieces of wood onto the fire. A puff of dark smoke rises, dry and suffocating. Red Tail goes through my backpack and comes up with an energy bar. She tries to hand it to me but my hands are locked inside the dingy blanket.
“N-n-not hungry.”
“After that swim you have to be.”
“Too c-c-cold to eat.”
Red Tail sits down next to me and wraps the tarp around the outside of the blanket, then pries the corner out of my fist and wraps it around herself so the two of us are huddled together under both layers. Her skin is surprisingly warm. Alive, from all the movement. She takes my arm and rubs it up and down to create warmth.
“You’re hypothermic. We can’t let your body temperature drop any further.”
I’m so cold I’ve nearly forgotten. The cortex chip. It has temperature restrictions. 95 on the downside. I can’t let my core temperature drop below 95 degrees, although right now it feels like it’s already in the seventies.
Red tails finds my SQUID interface and attaches it to my arm, then uses my thin screen to get check it. “Hmm.”
“W-w-what?”
“I’m not getting a reading is all.”
“Is that b-b-bad?”
“No, it just means that your cortex chip has gone into hibernation to consume as little power as possible. It’s a safety mechanism that triggers automatically when your core temperature falls below ninety-eight. It just means that we have to get you warmed up again before we can access the chip.”
Red Tail wraps my arm around her midsection so the chip is pressed up against her, warmed by her heat.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “Just tell your girlfriend that your life depended on it.”
“D-d-does that ever w-w-work?”
She smiles, nearly laughs. “If you have to ask that then you really don’t know too much about us, do you?”
“I d-d-don’t have a g-g-girlfriend.”
“Can’t be tied down to just one, huh?”
“N-n-no.” I avoid eye contact even though I can feel her looking at me, but I can tell she understands where I’m coming from.
“Yeah, I guess running the sneakernet on top of going to school doesn’t leave much time for anything else.”
“I’m not in school. N-n-not r-r-really. I’m just g-g-going t-t-technically.”
“Relax Carrion, I’m just t-t-teasing.”
She huddles in closer, pressing us together, establishing even more points of contact to share our body heat. Although at this point it’s really more Red Tail sharing her body heat with me. Unless the laws of thermodynamics don’t apply, all the energy flows in my direction. The only thing I can’t figure out is how this petite little girl can generate so much of it. “Hey Red?”
“Yeah.”
“C-c-can I ask you s-s-something?”
“You can ask.”
“W-w-what’s your name? Your r-r-real n-n-name?”
She leans away and cocks her head to the side. “Why should I tell you that?”
“If y-y-you tell me y-y-yours then I’ll t-t-tell you m-m-mine.”
She smiles.
“What?”
“Nice try, Kemosabe. I already know your name, J-J-Jack B-B-Baxter.”
Dexter called me by name, that was how she knew Jack. The rest she just assumed from when I mentioned Martin Baxter at the construction site.
“N-n-not B-B-Baxter. It’s N-N-Nill. J-J-Jack Nill. From my mother’s side.”
Or maybe it was Bonillia. The file from the basement is still in my backpack, in the hidden compartment. But if Red Tail came across it when she was digging for other stuff, she didn’t mention it. Anyway, there’s no point getting into any of that since I don’t even know myself.
“It’s Cassandra,” she says suddenly. “Cassandra Evers. Cassie or Cass, whatever suits your tongue best. I really don’t care.”
“Cass. I l-l-like that.”
I’ve been looking at her sidelong the entire time. Not avoiding eye contact, just not sure enough to make it. Out there, on the run, contact is easy. This is different. It isn’t just the closest I’ve ever been to her, it’s the closest I’ve ever been to anyone. The closest anyone has ever been to me. There’s something about learning her name that seems to change things between us. Now we’re no longer just two Aves flying for Arcadian. Now we have names.
I turn and look into her big blue eyes. Her face is so close to mine that the tips of our noses are already brushing. A bit closer and it could be our eyelashes. Something stirs in my gut. Excitement. Not the kind that comes from leaping buildings and dodging trains, this is a whole different kind of excitement than that.
Cass puts her hand on my cheek. “We really do have to keep your heart rate up.”
It’s already beating a mile a minute. She must feel it. She has to because I can feel hers as she pulls me closer and guides her lips to mine. And we kiss. Softly. Delicately. The tip of her tongue meets mine. She tastes like the river. I’m sure we both do.
We kiss for the first time and keep going. Keep kissing. And isn’t a first kiss supposed to end at some point? I know it should but I don’t want it to, so I keep going. And so does she.
27
Dexter clears his throat.
I don’t know how much time has passed, just that Cass and I have dozed off in each other’s arms huddled under the blanket and tarp. The fire is down to embers now, but it worked. Everything we did worked. We’re still cold but at least the shivers are gone.
Cass lifts her head off my shoulder and palms the corner of her eye. “Where’s Snake?”
Dexter lowers the kit bag hanging off his shoulder. “We’ll rendezvous with him shortly.”
“Are they still on him?” she asks. The concern in her eyes is genuine. Snake obviously means a lot to her.
“I think we lost them,” he says. “But just to be sure, he’s going to circle around while we take the tunnels.” Dex kind of grins a little. And is it my imagination or does it seem to be directed more at Cass than at me? “Everything you need is in the bag,” he says, and leaves us to get dressed.
I’m not sure how our clothes have been picked out, but Red Tail’s black leather pants and form-fitting sweater make her look smashing. Meanwhile, I’m back in cargos and flannel, and a crazy mess of hair that makes me look like I just took a dip in the river. “Was this your idea?” I ask Dexter, holding up a loose corner of my shirt.
Dexter and I walk side by side with Red Tail leading the way. “Martin’s,” he replies.
“Say what?”
“Your father, Martin Baxter…he was waiting for us on the other side.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, but it looked prearranged. Him and Snake, I think.” Dexter’s voice drops to a whisper even though we’re in a tunnel and everyone can hear everything. “I know you work with these guys, but how well do you really know these people?”
“I trust them,” I tell Dexter.
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“I know it isn’t. I know that Red Tail and Snake are Outliers. I know that my cargo was stolen from Blackburn and that I was loaded up with it to deliver to one of their contacts. Apart from that, I know as much about my cargo as you do about yours.”
“My cargo’s been cracked.”
“What?”
“That was the first thing Martin did when we picked him up. He paired my load with the load in the other chip and unlocked it.”
“He did?” says Red Tail from ten feet up. Like I said, tunnel.
“Yeah.”
“So what was it?” I ask.
“You’re never going to believe it.”
“I don’t think anything could surprise me at this point.”
“This will. This one is personal. That cargo I was carrying…it doesn’t just hit close to home…it is our home.”
“What are you talking about?”
Dexter pulls out his thin screen and puts it in hologram mode so we can all see. “It’s surveys,” he says. “Geological surveys taken by the Blackburn Corps of Engineers.”
The kind of data we’re looking at would look much better on a larger trans screen, but when you’re down in the tunnels you have to take what you can get. Each survey is a three-dimensional image covering every subterranean stratum from the surface all the way down to the natural gas reservoir. “These are hydrofracking surveys,” I say. “When were these taken?”
“After the disaster.”
The basic idea behind hydrofracking is simple. You put a giant spike into the ground that goes straight through your water table and into the bedrock layer. Then you inject a high-pressure stream of highly toxic and flammable chemicals called slurry down into the well. This high-pressure stream shatters the bedrock and releases the natural gas, which then gets pumped back up the well to the surface. If all goes well, the slurry and gas never touch your water supply, which is what happens about 91% of the time. If you live in Brentwood, you know exactly what happens the other 9% of the time. We’ve seen the result when a failed casing causes a massive blowout that dumps so much slurry and methane into your drinking water you can set your taps on fire.
Dexter rapidly scrolls through a dozen of these surveys, one after another, each a different town located somewhere in the Northeast district. I suddenly remember all the old charts scattered across Mr. Chupick’s desk. “Wait, are these the same surveys Mr. Chupick was trying to get his hands on?”
“The same.” Dexter scrolls through the remaining towns until he gets to Brentwood, rotates it around the center axis and zooms in on Mr. Chupick’s farm. Raises it up so we can see the ground beneath. The first layer beneath the surface is a narrow stratum that looks like mud but flows like water in the animated graphic. That layer is labeled Shallow Aquifer and is conspicuously marked with a skull and crossbones—the international symbol for hazardous material. Beneath that is a stratum of stone labeled Aquiclude (impermeable layer). And beneath that…a glacial-blue layer confined on all sides by impermeable rock labeled Deep Aquifer.
“That can’t be,” I say.
“It gets better,” says Dexter. He taps the deep aquifer, rotates the map to an overhead view and pushes out to show me that it covers almost seventy percent of the town. Seventy percent of the town, including both our houses, is sitting on top of an untouched, untainted reserve of crystal clear water.
I’m so focused on what this means for Brentwood that I nearly forget the bigger picture. There are more than a dozen of these surveys. “Do all these towns have water under them?”
“All of them. For one reason or another, all of these towns are on the TerraAqua teat. They’re all being forced to purchase their water from the water collective even though there’s water right beneath their feet.”
Water. Something about this strikes a chord. The way Mr. Chupick is so adamant about sharing the water from his well with the rest of the community, even though it’s no longer his community, at least not the one he knew before the disaster. But it could be again. Mr. Chupick has never lost faith in that. He knows that the only thing holding Brentwood back, the only roadblock stopping the town’s rejuvenation, is water. After all, every dollar that goes to TerraAqua is a dollar not going into the town. Water. “It’s all about the water.”
“Yeah, that’s what we figured when we saw these surveys. That’s the secret Blackburn has been hiding.”
“But if that’s the secret…” Something just doesn’t make sense. “I thought the information in that cargo was supposed to be big enough to bring them down. That was the rumor, right? Somebody stole something that was big enough to bring down an entire megacorporation. We know that mega is Blackburn. But this isn’t all that damning. It’d be a PR nightmare if people ever found out they were sitting on this information, but it is their information. They were the ones who did the surveys, so they’re the ones who own it.”
“That’s almost exactly what Martin said.”
“And?” The one thing I know better than anyone is Martin. If he raised the question, he already had the answer.
“He looked at the digital watermarks and figured out that this is only part of the information stolen from Blackburn. These surveys are a piece of the real package, but they’re not the critical piece that everyone is after. It was just enough to create a decoy.”
“A red-herring.” I know the rest of the story before Dexter even tells it. It’s another decoy run, only this time I’m on the other side of it. This time I’ve got the real load.
“Yeah. They floated this part of it around the sneakernet to distract all the interceptors while they made plans to transport the real goods, the stuff that really can bring down Blackburn. I guess they had to wait a while until the heat died down before they could move it. In the meantime, they just kept passing the decoy load from one set of runners to another. Keeping it alive on the sneakernet.”
“That’s why they broke it up into a parity load…” says Red Tail.
“More runners, more decoys,” I finish.
“And even if a runner gets pinched, the ruse keeps going.”
Dexter grins. “You two should do this for a living.”
“So if your load is the decoy…” I pull up my sleeve to reveal the carrion crow on my forearm. “The critical load must be here.”
Dexter nods. “The other cargo.”
All at once, my wing begins to feel heavy. Heavy with responsibility.
Until now, the longest I’d ever carried a cargo was five, six hours tops. I was just a messenger, picking up here and dropping off there. I was good at running and that gave me the ability to do the job, but it was still just a job. There was nothing invested in the people I was running for. If something went wrong and Wexler missed a patent deadline, what did I care? But this is different. This isn’t just a bunch of megacorporations playing ping-pong with little bits of zeroes and ones; this is real. This affects me personally and thousands more just like me all across the Northeast district. This other cargo isn’t just data, it’s libation for the people who need it the most. I have peoples’ lives in my hands. As sure as I am of my ability to run data, I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind of responsibility. But I guess I have to be since it’s already in me.
A hollow metallic sound echoes through the tunnel. It’s probably just a pipe, but we have to assume it’s something more.
“We bett
er get moving,” says Red Tail.
“Yeah,” Dexter agrees. “Yeah, I think that’s probably a good idea.”
28
The roadside eatery where we pull over to regroup is a rundown joint. Dexter is on lookout, keeping his eyes open for any Humvees or vortex choppers that might be heading in our direction. Meanwhile, Red Tail and Snake work on figuring out how we can still make the rendezvous with the Outliers, just in case Martin can’t crack the encryption. Apparently the cargo is time sensitive. If we can’t crack it ourselves then we’ll have no choice but to get it to the people who have the retrieval key so they can unlock it. And we have to get it to them by the designated time, or this will all be for naught. Unfortunately, the original plans didn’t take into account that we would have Blackburn on our tail, so now we have to be extra careful that we don’t lead Blackburn straight back to Red Tail and Snake’s contact.
“Just let it all burn,” repeats Martin.
“That’s what he said.”
While all that is happening outside, Martin and I sit at a table inside the empty eatery. The only other person in the place is the old woman running the counter, and her attention is divided between the Greek soap opera streaming on her trans screen and the meatballs she’s rolling between her palms back in the kitchen. She doesn’t even notice the SQUID interface attached to my arm as I shovel a second bowl of pasta into my face. Pasta with plain marinara sauce. The old woman tried to convince me that her meat was Grade A Bovine, but living in Brentwood, I knew better than to trust those certifications.
The SQUID is connected to Martin’s thin screen, which lies flat on the table in hologram mode so he can work on decrypting the data matrix as we eat. Or should I say, as I eat. Martin lost his appetite at the site of raw meatballs, but I ran out of energy bars back in the tunnel and this is the first chance I’ve had to refuel. One thing is for sure. This is by far the most ravenous data I’ve ever had loaded into my cortex chip.
