A woman from Research slipped a pair of lensed goggles over Jeffrey’s head and Jeffrey looked around the room, testing them. Natasha noticed how the muscles in his shoulders and back stood out in the bright overhead light. Judging from his body alone, one would never guess that Jeffrey was a Gamma; in fact, he appeared in better physical shape than most of the Delta men in the settlement.
Jeffrey’s gaze caught Natasha’s and he smiled. She blushed but did not look away. It was not supposed to be such a big deal to see someone naked; bodies were bodies, cells were cells. Plenty of medworkers had seen Natasha without her clothes and she had never cared. But then again, the rules were different where Jeffrey was concerned.
An engineer approached Jeffrey with a biosuit, and the private moment between Natasha and Jeffrey ended. At least, Natasha thought—while the engineers tested her own medreaders—at least Jeffrey’s mood had changed since last night. He had not said anything more about leaving Natasha and Eric behind. Probably he felt reassured (as they all did, if by varying degrees) by the elapse of so many hours with no further sign of danger. Last night, the Office of Mercy had drafted twenty people for the nightshift. The teams had watched every sensor, searching for any sign of human movement. But the night had passed as an unbroken calm, and the Tribe had remained tucked behind the mountains, beyond the perimeter and out of sight. They could not say for sure, of course, but it was possible that the Tribe had continued traveling at the same speed with which they had fled their camp. If so, then the Pines were far away by now, twenty miles north of the perimeter’s end.
“Ready for your biosuit?” asked Lewis Matsuki, who was supervising the outfitting of the team.
“All set,” Natasha answered.
Two engineers brought Natasha’s biosuit over from the rack. It looked identical to the others, except for the modifications in size and her two initials NW stamped onto the upper arm. Just as in the training sessions, the suit was gray with red stitching and made of a stretchy but very impenetrable-seeming material.
“It’s perfect,” said Natasha, reaching out to touch one of the arms.
The engineers were pleased, and they helped Natasha step carefully into the legs, then pushed her hands through the armholes. The biosuit enclosed her entire body up to the neck. She bent her arms, testing its movement, and was glad to discover that the fabric flexed easily.
“I doubt you’ll experience any damage to the suit,” Lewis said. “But if a rip does occur, just pinch the fabric together and hold for sixty seconds. The fibers will regenerate.”
“I know,” Natasha assured him. “We practiced it lots of times in the Pretends.”
Veronica strapped an airfilter to Natasha’s back and a small tracking device to her wrist.
“Ready for the helmet?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Natasha tried her best to breathe evenly as the engineers screwed the helmet into the thin metal ring of the biosuit collar. For a moment she experienced a suffocating feeling, but then the air began to blow in from the filter tube. The air had a sharp, cool taste, with just a tinge of plastic.
“Okay?” Lewis asked, his voice muffled in Natasha’s ears.
Natasha gave a thumbs-up.
They were all ready now, the members of the team; and they converged at the doors of the airlock. The engineers made a flurry of final adjustments to the six biosuits. They were nervous too, Natasha realized. If the biosuits did not perform as expected, it would be their years of work on the line.
“We’ll be watching every sensor we’ve got,” Arthur said. “If the Pines double back over the perimeter, we’ll give an emergency call for return. If that happens, you drop everything and come home as quickly as possible. Leave any tools if you have to. The most important thing is your safety.”
“We’ll be fine,” Douglas said. “You worry too much.”
Eric smiled in nervous agreement, but Jeffrey was nodding.
“Good luck,” Arthur said. “I’ll see you in seventeen hours.”
They stepped into the airlock. Natasha took one last, long look at the room: Arthur’s heavy countenance, Lewis’s anxious expression, and the exhilarated faces of the engineers lined up in front of the metal racks of extra airfilters, clothing, radios, and imaging devices. Then, as Veronica raised one hand in farewell, the doors closed on the Inside.
It was very quiet. The team was alone.
“We’ll just walk through the airlock on this end,” Jeffrey said. “The acid bath and UV lamps are only necessary coming the other way.”
They passed into a second, white cube-shaped room, and then Jeffrey hit the control for the last set of doors.
“Here we go,” Jeffrey said. “Take your last breath of settlement air.”
They exited the airlock into a large but low-ceilinged storehouse lined with overstuffed shelves. On the walls hung at least fifty guns, all LUV-3s, and four electron saws that appeared untouched for decades. Boxes on the floor held everything from ammunition to plastic tubing, screwdrivers and metal parts for sensors. The space most closely resembled one of the storagerooms on level eight, except for one important fact: everything here was filthy. A fine coat of dust gave the entire room, even the floor, a monochromatic brown color. Natasha took a deep breath. The air tasted different, its plasticky coolness now seeming to mask a musky, thicker air beneath, and a scent like what one might experience in a fallow pasture room in the Farms.
Eric went to the nearest shelf and ran one gloved hand over the surface. He held up the circle of dirt on his finger for show.
“This is gross,” he said.
“We’re technically in the Outside now, Eric,” Jeffrey said. “The environment rules here. Dirt, leaf, microbes, mammals. Our control ended at the airlock.”
Jeffrey took a gun off the rack, loaded it, and handed it to Natasha; the dust had settled in the grooves along the barrel and in the curve of the trigger.
“Don’t worry,” Douglas said. “We tested them pretty recently, they’re clean where it matters.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Natasha said.
She holstered the gun at her waist and waited while the others did the same. They had gone through this process in the Pretends, but the reality of it was different. Her body felt clumsier, and her fingers thicker, in a way she could not blame on the biosuit.
They were ready now. They gathered at the far end of the storehouse. Sunlight leaked in from beyond the door, interrupted by two rusty hinges. A spider with white markings scuttled above the knob and disappeared into the shadows. There was no genetic code reader here, only a series of deadbolts. Douglas opened the door.
Four sun-drenched steps led up to a verdant shock of grass. The trees towered in a ring beyond, ancient, intricate, and majestic, their sharp tops pointing to the bright blue infinity of the sky, the white puffs of cloud and the too-powerful, blinding sun: the universe. They climbed the steps. Natasha ran her hand along the sunken, moss-covered stone wall at her side. She felt slightly dizzy, as if the first strong gust of air might scoop her up and carry her off the curve of the planet. Was gravity really enough to secure one’s feet to the earth? No walls, she thought. No walls to hold them in. She climbed the last step, following Jeffrey, Douglas, and Alejandra onto the circle of short grass that surrounded the settlement. She squinted against the light; it was too bright, it hurt her head. Colors exploded before her eyes: not only the blue but the deep green of the pine needles and the rippling green-yellow-white of the leaves, the textured browns of bark and the outlines of the dark, inscrutable shadows pocketing the woods before them.
“Team out,” said Douglas, over the comm-link.
“What do you think?” Jeffrey asked.
Instead of looking around at the forest and sky like the rest of the team, his squinting, smiling eyes were on her, as if he cared more about Natasha’s reaction to the Outside
than about the whole Outside itself. Though of course, Natasha thought, this wasn’t his first mission.
“It’s—” she started to say.
Before she could finish, she caught sight of them: black and soaring from above. Novas, she thought, adrenaline rushing through her body. But then she heard them caw.
Jeffrey was laughing. “Crows,” he said. “It’s only crows. Eric?”
Eric removed his arms slowly from over his head, looking abashed.
The birds swooped up, changing direction, but gracefully, as if without effort. Their black wings shone in the sun. They cawed.
“It’s amazing,” Natasha said, laughing with Jeffrey, watching the birds disappear to specks.
Truly, the Pretends did not do the Outside justice. Now that Natasha was seeing it with her own eyes, the simulations became in retrospect like block-color outlines of the real objects they aimed to represent. In the Pretends, the grass was green, yes, but it had no definition, the blades did not distinguish themselves as they did in real life; the simulations had not captured the variation, the scattered patches of yellow, or the matted spots where, as Alejandra said, either deer or wild pigs had rested. Natasha leaned down and ran her gloved hand over the grass, feeling its soft resistance; she picked up a leaf and looked at it closely. The pale skeleton on its underside was blemished by disease, and yet it was beautiful in its imperfection. She looked again at the random growth of the woods. She thought it was wonderful. She could have stared at the same spot for hours and not comprehended the whole of it—so detailed and intricate and unique was every square inch of the Outside.
But their time for enjoying the green was soon over; they had to get moving. One by one, the team passed into the trees.
“Abandon all hope,” Jeffrey said, as he stooped below a pine branch, “ye who enter here.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eric asked, hesitating at the edge of the lawn.
“It’s just an old quote from the Archives,” Alejandra assured him, nudging Eric’s shoulder. “He’s joking.”
Natasha looked back at the settlement. The sunken metal, joined boxes of the wings were such dull, lifeless objects. It felt impossible to believe they contained well-stocked, cheerful rooms full of busy citizens. Above the wings peaked the Dome, as still and faceless as its adjacent structures. The Dome was the bud of the flower and the wings were its petals, Natasha thought. Though the analogy did not seem so apt from this perspective—except for how it cast America-Five as a tiny thing glued to the Earth. Three stories the honeycomb windows rose over the grass, and yet, compared with the sky, it was nothing. In fact, even taking into account the column of nine underground levels, it seemed suddenly absurd to Natasha that they kept all that life squeezed into so small a space, when the rest of the land was so empty.
The way through the forest was rough and slow, and they were forced to move single file: first, Douglas, who held the title of navigator, though they all knew the way, then Alejandra, Eric, Natasha, Nolan, and finally Jeffrey. Natasha’s energy was largely spent keeping her footing, pushing the small springy twigs out of her way and releasing them gently, so they did not snap back against Nolan’s visor. They saw animals, creatures so alert and perfect it seemed bizarre that they had come into existence without any help: a brown tuft-tailed rabbit, pretty little birds with iridescent wings, a squirrel, spread-limbed, climbing a tree, and little flying specks called gnats that would have nibbled their flesh, if not for the biosuits.
Of course, not all of it was pleasant. A few hours into their hike, Eric stuck his foot into what turned out to be the open and maggot-infested carcass of a raccoon. The rancid pink and white inside was enough to make Natasha gag. And she could hardly pay attention while Eric wiped his boot against a tree and Jeffrey explained that the death was probably the work of another male of that species.
“See the gash here?” he asked them. “Right across its middle? It probably took him a long time to die. Nature at its finest . . .”
The bright spots of sun grew brighter and the woods took on the glow of a full-fledged mid-August day. Soon, through her helmet, Natasha could hear a new sound: like water gushing from a sink but magnified by a thousand. Eventually, the trees thinned and the land curved downward, sloping into a bank of rock and mud, identical to the one opposite. A fast path of dark water ran in between. A river.
“Amazing,” rang Alejandra’s voice in her ear. “It’s like it has its own life.”
“I wish we had one of these in the settlement,” Eric added. “Do the Tribes actually drink from this?”
“Of course they do,” Nolan answered. “And so did a lot of other people too, before the Storm.”
“Didn’t work out well for them, though,” Jeffrey said. “That water may look pretty, but it sickened thousands. In Pre-Storm times, it was flowing with toxins. People would drink and then their stomachs would puff out like balloons.”
“And worse things that we won’t mention,” Douglas added.
“But it’s clean now?” Natasha asked. The water was so clear and bright, she could not imagine it making anyone sick.
“Clean enough for the animals, and for the Tribes,” Jeffrey said. “But not for us.”
They veered off from the river, toward the northern mountain ridge, approaching the place of the first downed sensor. They were in a deadzone now. The Office of Mercy could not see them, and would not be able to catch sight of a bear approaching or a dead branch swaying dangerously in the wind. The team reached the ridge and began to climb. The ground became loose and dry. They ascended higher than the sprawling tops of trees, keeping to a natural pathway along the mountain edge. The cliffs bordered them on one side, and their other side was wide open to the valley beneath. The sun beat down, making Natasha sweat.
“Don’t look right at it,” Jeffrey kept reminding them. “Unless you want a very unpleasant few hours in the Office of Bioreplacement.”
At a place where the path momentarily widened and flattened, Douglas and Nolan broke off from the group to find sensor RN22, while Jeffrey, Alejandra, Eric, and Natasha continued on to the Pine camp. They followed a declivity into a low, isolated area of thick trees, before climbing a second mountain path, this one a little less steep than the first. They had not walked long before they entered onto a rocky plateau that was bordered by pocketed cliffs.
Initially the place did not strike Natasha as familiar, but then she saw: the gaping mouth of the cave where the Pines had kept disappearing, and the black smudge at its entrance where their fire had burned. Scattered on the dry ground were the jagged shards of a clay pot, and at the opposite end of the plateau lay the rotting and discarded bones of animal carcasses, buzzing with flies. The brush that grew along the cliff sides had been trampled and ravaged for kindling; and the loose ground had been scuffed smooth by milling life.
“The camp,” Eric said, seeing it too. They had arrived at last.
They found the silver and white ruins of sensor RN59 by a group of tall birch trees. Jeffrey took a collapsible ladder from his pack and extended it against the trunk of the tree where the sensor had been.
“They unscrewed the bolts,” Jeffrey called down, once he had reached the top. “Except for a couple of scratches, the base is completely unscathed.”
A chill ran through Natasha, despite the glare of the afternoon sun.
“How did they?” she asked. “It’s not like they have tools.”
“Maybe they do, maybe they stole stuff from America-Six,” Eric said. “What if they don’t lock their storehouse like we do?”
Alejandra glanced behind them, suddenly jumpy.
Jeffrey descended the ladder. “It’s possible they used a spearhead. They’re not bad at crafting tools. They’re just as ingenious as we are, only with different starting materials. The good news is that it won’t take long to repair.”
While Alejand
ra began photographing the shattered sensor, Jeffrey moved to examine the trash heap, and Eric and Natasha returned to the circle of charred wood outside the cave. They sifted through it with their hands. The blackened wood splintered at a touch and the soft ash billowed up with every disturbance. Natasha knew it was safe. The fire had been out for nearly a day and could not spontaneously ignite, but she still recoiled from the puffs of ash, imagining that it would.
They moved into the cave, passing through the arched opening that Natasha had spent hours observing from the settlement. The roof of the cave was low, and they put their hands up to keep from bumping their heads. Jeffrey followed them in with a flashlight and swept the beam across the interior: a dank-looking fur, a pile of stones, a stack of dry twigs and leaves, two pieces of a snapped bow, still connected by sinew, and a lump of leaves that must have served as a bed.
“It’s so much smaller than I thought it would be,” Natasha said. “They must’ve really squeezed in here.”
“Didn’t leave much behind either, did they?” Alejandra said.
“They’re pretty thorough that way,” Eric agreed. He sounded disappointed. “I’m going back outside.” But as Eric turned to go, he stopped just before the archway. “Hey Alejandra, take a photo of this.”
They all looked. Jeffrey moved the flashlight. Within the circle of light to the right of the cave’s opening blazed the brown-red imprint of a human hand. Blood, Natasha thought, and shuddered.
“That’s creepy,” Alejandra said.
The circle of light wavered and Natasha looked over at Jeffrey.
“Have you seen anything like this before?” she asked.
“No,” he said, then adding, as if to temper his quick response, “But it’s not all that strange. Most Tribes decorate their habitats in some way. It’s art.”
Office of Mercy (9781101606100) Page 8
