“My mother has been dead for over twenty years,” she said. Her voice was low, as if she were talking to herself.
“You were, four, then?” asked Lydia.
“Just turned four. Our birthday is in April, when the rains are heaviest.”
“That’s what I remember hearing,” said Lydia. “A flash flood while she was on a training ride?”
“Not training,” said Maggie. “She only kept up her training for a year or so after we were born. She rode everywhere though. She was coming back with the mail. There’d been a heavy ordinance delivery. Books for my father.”
“The apostle. I met him once at a race in Philadelphia.”
Maggie shook her head. “Churched people don’t call themselves apostles. Not where we’re from, anyway. I never knew he’d been so far from home as Philadelphia.”
“It was many years ago. The Voluntary State was just beginning to move outside its borders. There was more travel in those days.”
Maggie looked at the letter again. “I was told recently . . . I was just told others may have received letters like this.”
“But you haven’t had any word from her yourself?”
Maggie hesitated. She didn’t know this woman, didn’t know her politics or her sense of the world. There were some people, she knew, who would consider the dreams she’d been having a sign that she’d been infected by some viral spirit out of Tennessee. And maybe I have been, she thought.
So instead of answering right away, Maggie looked at the letter again. “What does this mean—are we really here because of this?”
Lydia shook her head. “I’ve shown the letter to no one but you. You, who are trying to avoid my question.”
“No,” said Maggie. “No, we haven’t received any letters.”
Sometimes, she thought she remembered her mother telling her something when she was very small. We have to take risks. You can’t be afraid of falling. You will fall.
“But there have been calls,” she added, dropping her voice almost to a whisper. “They’ve been coming more frequently.”
“Calls?” said Lydia. “From those phone things the Governor of Tennessee sends out?”
“Yes,” said Maggie. “But we’ve never answered them. Our father told us that they were, well, he used the word demonic.”
“It’s a crime, a federal crime, to have anything to do with the Voluntary State,” said Lydia, standing and pacing. “The two of you haven’t told anyone? No authorities? Not even your friends or relatives?”
Maggie shook her head. “We don’t even talk about it to each other. And we don’t have any relatives.” She elected to not tell Lydia about her midnight conversation with Japheth Sapp. She hadn’t even told Michael about it.
“I don’t have any explanation, then,” said Lydia. “My position with the national federation is . . . tenuous. People think Nicholas has his position on the team because of me, but it’s really the other way around. I can’t afford to be mixed up with anything to do with enemies of the state.”
“My mother is not an enemy of the state!” said Maggie.
“So you think these messages are from Maria?” challenged Lydia. “You think twenty years after she was swept away by a polluted river she’s placing calls and mailing letters from Nashville?”
Maggie considered the postmark again. “The phones slip over the Girding Wall,” she said. “It’s not unheard of in the Commonwealth. But the federal postal service delivered a letter from there? They’d break the embargo?”
It was Lydia’s turn to hesitate. “It didn’t come in the mail. I found it beneath my pillow at the training center in Colorado Springs. And no, I have no idea how it got there, or who might have delivered it. Believe me, that was the first thing I tried to find out.”
Maggie stood and awkwardly avoided Lydia’s pacing, moving to the bus exit. She needed to think. That meant she needed to ride.
“I have to train, still,” she said. “Whatever else happens, there’s still the race tomorrow.”
Lydia chuckled humorously. “I should be the one telling you that.”
Maggie started down the steps, but Lydia called after her. “You should know something. You and Michael. You’d be here even if I hadn’t received this letter. Five of the six team selectors put your names forward.”
So which one didn’t? wondered Maggie, and went to find her bike.
Onto the roads of western Kentucky.
These flatlands could hardly be more different from the hills of the Pennyroyal region, where she and Michael lived and trained. This was a land that had been scoured by rivers for millennia, when rivers were merely conventionally threatening.
Maggie decided to scout the first part of the next day’s course. She headed north along a remnant of asphalt called Bryant Ford Road, away from Clarks River and the shallow crossing that gave the byway its name. When she reached 68, the race route, she had the choice of continuing on into Paducah or turning southeast, away from the city.
It’s a neutral roll out this far out, anyway, she thought to herself. Highway 68 began not far north of the intersection where she made her choice, and when the race began the next day the riders would not begin attacking one another immediately. For the first few miles, the bunch, the peleton, would ride in a group, easing into the race, working out kinks in legs, adjustments in equipment, last-minute nerves.
Almost immediately after she turned right, she passed an old road sign. Marshall County. The Commonwealth had a plethora of counties, over one hundred, and the race would travel through dozens of them. Signs like this would mark border crossings for the next five days, and crossing borders in Kentucky often meant crossing creeks and streams where they didn’t mark drainage divides.
Everywhere we look, there’s water, water . . .
In these river flats, though, the borders were straighter than she was used to in the hills. They’d been drawn by rules, rationalized on maps rather than following some natural contour of the land. So she didn’t have to worry about any significant crossings unless she rode all the way to the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and crossed the heavily guarded pontoon bridges the federal Corps of Engineers maintained.
She didn’t plan to go that far, though. She was just getting some miles in her legs, just finding the rhythm and peace of the road.
Suddenly, a blurred shape passed her on the left, then another, then another. The growling sound of a motorbike approached from behind as well, and she saw that it was Michael’s sprint train, moving.
When David passed her on the motorcycle she slipped in behind him, riding the slipstream and looking up ahead to see how well the others were working together.
Not too shabby, she thought. She and Michael had always been a team of two, but now they were part of a real professional squad. Now they had teammates to rely on, not just each other.
This must have been the second or third time they’d ramped up, hitting speeds of forty miles per hour and more in the windless flat, because all four of the riders were still riding in a line, one after the other. As Maggie watched, she saw Jordan peel off and slow as Telly took the lead of the train, cranking the speed up even higher.
This was the way of lead-out trains. One rider after another exhausted themselves in the wind at the front, peeling away when they couldn’t maintain the pace any longer. Then the next one came, with the responsibility not only of maintaining that pace, but of raising it even higher. When Samantha took the lead, she would be the pilot, the final rider pulling Michael along at extraordinary speeds, but also picking and weaving her way through all the other trains that would be trying for the sprint as well. When she pulled off, then Michael would go alone, rising out of the saddle, ducking low across the handlebars to maintain an aerodynamic profile, pushing a huge gear. The timing of each step had to be perfect, and it looked to Maggie as if David had already coached them into excellent form.
“Hey! Maggie!” said Jordan, pulling alongside her. “Your brother can spr
int!”
Maggie smiled and nodded. She knew. She knew.
That night, Michael came to the tent later than Maggie, having availed himself of a massage in the team bus. He was restless despite the hard workout of the day, and wanted to talk.
“I can win tomorrow,” he said. “I know I can. Any of the sprint finishes or intermediaries are up for grabs, and my form is strong. This race couldn’t have come at a better time.”
The intermediary sprints were places on the road where points were awarded to the first rider who crossed. Those points were added to those taken by the stage winner, and whoever accumulated the most wore a special jersey in the race. It was a prize for being the most consistent rider, something to keep the sprinters interested despite the fact that they weren’t expected to contend for the overall general classification. Sprinters did poorly when the roads turned up, and usually weren’t good time trialists either. Which made Maggie think . . .
“What do you think of this addition of a time trial at Lexington?” she asked from her bunk, leaning up on one elbow.
“I think if it’s as hilly as it looks in the race bible then you’re in with a chance,” he said. “We’re going to dominate this race!”
“No, I mean, don’t you think it’s odd that a whole day’s racing was added after the route had already been set? I was going to ask one of the race directors or referees about it, but I still haven’t met any of them. Did you see any officials today?”
Michael shook his head, and was shaking off the subject at the same time. He wasn’t as interested in whys as Maggie was. “It’s an extra day of world-class support is all I care about,” he said, then crossed over and sat on the canvas floor beside her cot. He took her hand, and Maggie tried to remember the last time they’d sat like this.
“Maggie, this is it. If we ride well—and I know we will—this is our introduction to the national scene. To the international scene. We could be riding at this level the whole season. We might even get asked out to Colorado for off-season training!”
She smiled at his enthusiasm, but her thoughts were suddenly on the house above the Green River. She hoped the neighbors were keeping their promise to feed her chickens. Then she thought of Lydia’s letter.
“Michael,” she said, trying to figure out how to broach the subject. She still hadn’t told him about what Japheth Sapp had said, or her dreams, and now here was another secret. She didn’t like keeping things from him, but neither was she sure how he would react. And he was so excited.
He grinned at her. “Don’t worry. Everything’s working out perfectly. Now let’s rest! Race tomorrow!”
She decided she would do the worrying for the both of them. So she let go of his hand and he crossed the tent, extinguished the lamp, and climbed into his own cot. In no time, he was breathing the deep, steady breaths that ensured Maggie that he was asleep.
“Sweet dreams,” she whispered.
Chapter Six
The twins knew from their father’s recounting of their mother’s stories—and from the collection of books and magazines she had left on the shelves with their father’s heavy tomes of theology, neuroscience, and history—that the starts of major bicycle races had once resembled carnivals, festivals, parades. The biggest races sent fleets of motorized vehicles along the route before the racers, with sponsors throwing out gifts, politicians bellowing slogans, people dancing in truck beds.
That was in the days when the roads were lined with spectators the whole route, of course, long before the world changed, before the Voluntary State threatened the individuality of everyone in the east, before so many people the world over made the choice to become Viewers at Home. The roadsides on this clear July day would be empty, of course, especially close to the river crossings. The woken population of the Commonwealth would be in their fields and workshops, hearing about the race secondhand unless they happened to live right on 68.
“There will be a few people out, the race directors say,” Lydia had told them at the morning meeting. “Engineers at the Tennessee and the Cumberland. Townsfolk in Cadiz and Hopkinsville, where we’ll pass the grounds of some sort of hospital for Viewers who’ve rejected cable and can’t be brought back around. And we’ve word from the finish that there is an encampment of Reenactors there, but they’re keeping quiet about their intentions.”
The usual way of these races would be for an early breakaway to roll off the peloton in the first miles of the race, hoping against hope to stay away for the whole day and stealing a win from the sprinters and general classification riders. But today wasn’t like a normal day. This was not a normal bicycle race.
“Everyone will stay together, we think,” David had said. “Until the crossing of the Tennessee. All the teams have worked out their own strategies of how to deal with the river, and they’ll want their squads to cross together.”
“We’re good there, right?” asked Lydia. “You two can get us across?”
Maggie had simply nodded, while Michael said, “Of course.”
So the peloton rolled southeast from the start on the outskirts of Paducah. The red car of the race director led them out, with referees and judges and neutral service mechanics surrounding the sixty riders on motorcycles, and the team cars with their spare bicycles mounted rooftop following behind.
And everywhere, there were camerastats.
These were the cameras, hovering and humming, that would broadcast the race to the Viewers at Home. They were alien-looking things, crosses between ancient insects and mechanical toys, with lenses for eyes and whirling blades keeping them afloat in the air. Some were under the direction of the race referees, who could monitor their feeds in their cars or via heads-up displays in the visors of their motorcycle helmets. But most followed the mysterious commands of the cable company, zooming in to follow a single rider now, then flying up to look down on the whole peloton from above.
Maggie and her teammates were riding near the front, flanked by Californians in gold jerseys depicting bears and Quebecois in blue with the white Fleurdelisé emblazoned across their backs. The peloton was nervous during the opening miles of the uncontested rollout, none of the riders wishing to be the one who touched another’s wheel and caused a foolish crash.
The roof window of the red car in front of them opened and a figure stood up from inside. It was impossible to say whether the race director, for this was surely who this person must be, was a man or a woman. The wind from their 20-mile-per-hour pace caused the director’s jacket to billow up like a balloon, and an enclosed helmet painted with the features of an owl concealed the face.
Someone handed the director a triangular red flag from the interior of the car, and this was held up in outstretched arms, then waved back and forth. At that, the car sped ahead, leaving open road before the peloton. The Race Across Kentucky had officially begun.
To little apparent effect.
“It’s like Lydia said,” Michael called over the wind. “No attacks from the gun.”
Maggie eyed the odometer the team mechanics had installed on her handlebars, seeing that the speed of the bunch had gone up only slightly with the official opening of hostilities. To confirm their plan, a crackling came over the headpiece all the riders wore in their left ears, and the Americans heard David’s voice. “Steady, steady. We’ll be at the river in a little less than an hour at this pace. Just stretch out your legs and stay out of trouble.”
Maggie caught herself nodding. She’d never raced with a radio onboard before. She wasn’t sure whether she should acknowledge what David had said by touching the transmit button hidden under her jersey at her collarbone, but saw that none of the more experienced riders on the team were doing so. In fact, her teammates didn’t act as if they had heard.
Nicholas was exactly where he was supposed to be, tucked in on her wheel, his expression unreadable behind his sunglasses. Michael and Telly were talking to one another about the intermediate sprint at Cadiz and who among the other teams were likely to con
test it. Jordan was laughing and speaking French to one of the Quebecois riders, and Samantha was already tearing open one of the packages of processed foodstuffs they’d all been given to carry in their jersey pockets.
Maggie didn’t know how she could eat. They’d all had an enormous breakfast of cereal and rice and saltwater fish brought in from the Atlantic, and it wasn’t settling well in her nervous stomach. Despite Michael’s bravado about the river crossing, Maggie was worried.
For the first time in Maggie’s experience as a racing cyclist, the peloton she was riding in began to slow as it approached its first objective instead of speeding up. She caught the scent of river water in the air and knew why.
“Michael and Maggie, move on up,” came the crackling voice in her ear, this time Lydia’s. “None of the other directors are talking about their plans for the crossing, but we’ve decided as a group to go one at a time and keep the race neutral through the twelve miles between the two rivers.”
Makes sense, thought Maggie, just as Michael said aloud, “They’re afraid to race! This is ridiculous.”
The peloton crossed a bridge over a scrub flat, the bridge running parallel to an earthworks dam that diverted some nameless stream to the south. The crossing they were facing was challenge enough without stopping to spend time negotiating with a creek.
And then the road broadened and swept due east, and helmeted women and men were seen along the roadside, some next to parked armored vehicles, others walking toward the pontoon bridge that now stretched out before the race.
Brakes hissing, the peloton came to a stop.
The red car of the race director was parked to one side, its tinted windows impenetrable. No one from the race organization was visible, and the motorcycles and team cars were all behind them now. A woman about Lydia’s age, wearing khaki with stripes at her jacket shoulder, walked out into the middle of the road.
Telling the Map Page 20
