Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  “But you said our father talks to this thing? They’re intelligent?” asked Maggie.

  “Yes. Well, for some definition of intelligence. This one, at least, speaks, though whether it developed that capacity before or after it was captured I cannot say. It’s been there for years, much longer than your father has, and has had other tenders before him, though none lasted even half so long as he has at the job.”

  “They were transferred out?” asked Maggie.

  Japheth shook his head. “From what we’ve been told by the other people who’ve been interred there, the tenders eventually, well, go mad. They either leap into the pit and are killed by the acidic mucous that coats the coal mole or they’re shot attempting to climb the walls.”

  “It drives them crazy?” asked Michael.

  “Any sustained contact with the creatures of the Voluntary State is dangerous, as you well know, Michael,” said Japheth. “It’s a tribute to your father’s strength of mind that he’s lasted this long. It’s probably another reason the Federals are taking him away. To figure out how he’s managed that.”

  “Wait,” said Maggie. “You said they’re taking him tomorrow. Why are you sitting here? Why don’t you go and rescue him?”

  “We tried, this week. He won’t come with us. I’m sitting here, Maggie, because I think the only chance we have of rescuing him is if you and your brother go into the encampment and coax him out. I think you’re the only people in the world who he still has any loyalty to.”

  Maggie didn’t realize she was crying until Michael reached over and wiped tears from her cheeks with his thumb. Sometimes she wondered if he knew her better than she knew herself too.

  “So he’s not . . . he’s not himself anymore?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Japheth. “Not yet. I’d say he’s lost. And I think you two can help him find his way back. I think that’s what your mother has been trying to get you to do.”

  “You think our mother—whatever she’s become—wants us to be killed?” Michael said, surprisingly quietly.

  “What? No, of course not—” Japheth began to say, but Michael spoke on and over him.

  “But that’s what you’re asking of us, isn’t it? You want to set up some kind of raid or something with God only knows what kind of commando squad you’ve put together and have Maggie and me, what? Sneak in during the confusion and bring Dad out? Bring out a crazy man guarded by some kind of giant slug from the Voluntary State? Not to mention all the Federal guards and whatever other kind of monsters out of Tennessee are roaming the grounds?”

  Japheth opened his mouth, closed it, rubbed his hand over his chin, and looked down at the floor. “Well, that’s a perhaps uncharitable but remarkably cogent description of what I’m asking of you, actually. But I wouldn’t ask it if I thought you would be killed or captured. If your father will respond to you, then I think it will work.”

  “‘If,’” said Maggie, and stood up. She walked over to the window and looked out on the square of central Lexington, filled with the buses and team cars and support vehicles for the great bicycle race that she’d completely forgotten about in the last few moments. “Our mother, the river woman, she said he won’t listen to her either. That’s why she’s come to us.”

  “There’s risk,” said Japheth. “But I swear to you I wouldn’t ask this if I didn’t think you could get him out of there.”

  “How do you see this working?” asked Michael, and Maggie threw him a sharp look.

  “More or less just like you said,” said Japheth, turning to face him. “We’ll launch a raid in force along the eastern and southern approaches to the prison camp. I’ll give you the equipment you need to get over the walls from the west. You make your way to the pit and your father’s tent while the guards and, probably, most of the prisoners are making for the walls, and you talk him out.”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  Japheth shook his head. “Shortly after noon, midway through a guard shift and before the prisoner-transport boat docks outside the north wall. That usually happens around sunset this time of year.”

  Maggie was startled to see her brother nodding, turning the plan over in his head, coming around to being in agreement.

  “What about the race?” she asked.

  Both men looked at her in confusion for the barest moment, before Michael said, “That’s a good point. Are the Federals maintaining watch on all this? With this many people on the move, so many of them foreigners, coming so close to their prison . . .”

  “I must admit I hadn’t thought of that,” said Japheth. “My plan was for you two to leave with me here tonight. But maybe it makes more sense for you to take the start tomorrow, and then join us at a rendezvous point along the route. Wait, let’s look at a map.” He pulled one out of his voluminous coat and unrolled it across the bed where Maggie had been sitting.

  “Yes,” he said, pointing at a juncture forty miles south of the finish line on the Ohio. “If you turn right here while the race keeps going, you can join us . . . here,” and he jabbed his finger down at another place. “How much trouble will it be for you to get away?”

  Michael pursed his lips, considering. “If one of us fakes a mechanical and the other hangs back, maybe.”

  “‘How much trouble?’” Maggie quoted Japheth. “It will only cost us everything. Everything we’ve worked for over most of our lives and that both of our parents would want for us.”

  “Maggie,” said Michael, but then trailed off. This was a reversal of what either of them would have predicted of the other only days, only hours, before.

  “We’re talking about saving your father’s life,” said Japheth. “Surely that’s more important than a bicycle race.”

  “You’re talking about us risking our lives to save a man who may already be gone for all intents and purposes, even if he is sane,” countered Maggie.

  “You’re right,” said Michael. “You’re right. We shouldn’t do this. We shouldn’t. I’ll go alone.”

  It was the worst thing he could have said. It hurt.

  Maggie walked over to the door. “When have you ever done anything alone?” she asked, and left.

  Chapter Twelve

  They were back on the roads of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, racing hard.

  For Maggie, the last half day had passed like a fever dream, as a series of images and conversations and actions that didn’t stick. A night’s sleep, breakfast and the morning meeting, the roll-out, none of it seemed to matter now that she was where she was, in the saddle, climbing a long low hill, piloting her team’s general classification leader through the peloton.

  Michael was tucked in at the rear of the peloton, keeping to himself except when the race moved through a feed zone and he happened to be the one who picked up the musettes filled with sandwiches and energy drinks for distribution to the rest of the team. When he rode up alongside her to hand over her lunch, he gave Maggie an unreadable look, then drifted backward again. They were a dozen hilly miles, less than a half hour of riding, from the point Japheth Sapp had told them to split off from the race.

  To abandon.

  Maggie had often thought that word had a peculiar weight, even independent of its particular meaning in the world of bicycle racing. She remembered looking it up quite recently in the big multi-volume dictionary in her father’s study at home. A verb and a noun both, abandon, though the meanings were quite different depending on the part of speech. To give up as an action, the act of giving in as a noun. He will abandon the race with wild abandon, she thought.

  But when he did leave, Michael went quietly.

  “Where is your brother?”

  Lydia’s voice crackled over the team radio, not addressing Maggie directly as she had no need to since nobody else on the team, or indeed, in the race, had a sibling present.

  Not that I do either, now, thought Maggie. What if he didn’t make it back? He hadn’t even told her good-bye.

  “Maggie?” Nicholas sa
id. “Lydia is calling for you.”

  Maggie glanced over at her team leader, dressed in yellow from head to toe today, even down to the earpieces on his sunglasses.

  “I heard her,” she said. “I’m just trying to figure out how to answer her.”

  Nicholas stopped pedaling, raising a curse from the rider behind him. The whole peloton slowed, adjusting, maneuvering, in response to the GC leader’s sitting up.

  “What do you mean? What’s happened?”

  Maggie responded to Nicholas and to his aunt at the same time, reaching up to hold in the transmitter taped under her jersey. “Michael abandoned,” she said.

  She expected a stream of questions at the least and possibly even of invective. But the only thing that came over the radio was the crackling noise of a transmitter being thumbed on, then off.

  After a moment, she heard Lydia’s voice again. “Maggie, I’ve turned off the team broadcast. You are the only one who can hear me now. I need you to tell me, are you going to go after him?”

  Maggie reminded herself of how much Lydia knew, and of how much she didn’t. The woman had obviously intuited that something was up, probably something dangerous, and she was putting the facts of the twins’ situation ahead of the race.

  “I hadn’t planned on it,” she answered after a moment.

  “Well,” said Lydia, “make your decision soon. I still want to win this race whatever the hell your crow friend is planning on unleashing on the Federals, and if you leave, I need to adjust where the others are riding.”

  Maggie felt a brief surge of anger. She’s concerned about a bicycle race when so much is on the line? Then she laughed softly to herself. Just like I was, she thought.

  She was about to fail her team. She might be about to fail her family.

  She remembered her mother’s long-ago words: We have to take risks. You can’t be afraid of falling. You will fall.

  “You’d better signal Telly to come take my place,” she said.

  “Acknowledged,” was the one-word response.

  Maggie started to ease up her pace, moved her hands into the drops where she could reach the brakes. Nicholas was still right beside her.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

  She looked over at him. He’d taken off his sunglasses and threaded them through the airvents on his helmet. His expression was unexpectedly serene, as if he’d reached a difficult decision and made peace with it.

  Maggie doubted the expression was mirrored on her own face.

  “I want you to win the Race Across Kentucky,” she said, and began the delicate process of negotiating her way to the edge of the fast-moving peloton. The road was still rising.

  Maggie coasted to a stop and watched the race leave her behind.

  Then she turned, clipped back into her pedals, and rode the other way.

  There was an abandoned windblown barn at the crossroads Japheth Sapp had marked as their rendezvous, and as there was no one in sight outside it, Maggie pushed her way through the hanging curtain of dead vines that covered its open door. Inside, she found Michael’s bicycle leaning against one of the support posts.

  The dirt floor of the barn was much disturbed, with the footprints of many boot-shod people all around, and also the distinctive crosshatched tread of one pair of cycling shoes. Shoes which Maggie found in a stall beside Michael’s neatly folded cycling kit.

  She wondered if her brother was now dressed as a soldier, or as one of Japheth’s brother Crows. For the first time she could remember, she had no idea how Michael was doing.

  There was nothing for her to change into, so when she left, riding north toward the internment camp, Maggie was still dressed as a bicycle racer.

  The Ohio River was the largest body of water Maggie had ever seen. It dwarfed the Green and the Kentucky and all the other Commonwealth waterways she had helped the race negotiate over the past few days. Looking down into its floodplain from a forested hilltop, Maggie could see another state of the Union on its far shore, something else she’d never seen.

  But she had little time or attention for those new things, because something else new, something terrible, took up a great swath of the territory between her and the river. A square complex, completely fenced in with high cement walls topped with barbed wire, was spread out before her.

  The camp was all grays, cinder-block towers at the four corners guarding cinder-block buildings in regular rows on the inside. There was no sign of green within, not a tree or even a blade of grass visible from where she stood. Gravel covered the alleys between the buildings, except for a rectangular patch near the center, where bare earth dotted with mounds of coal gave way to an enormous pit. A pit with a tent pitched to one side. At this distance, it was impossible to make out the features of the man who stood beside the tent, but it was not impossible for Maggie to recognize his stance. It was impossible for her to not recognize her father.

  He was standing with his back to the pit, looking toward the inland gate, which hung half off its hinges and was swarming with men dressed in black, battling desperately with other men dressed in gray.

  Japheth Sapp’s “distraction” had begun.

  Where is Michael? Maggie thought desperately.

  Then she realized that even if she spotted him from this distance, there would be nothing she could do to help him. So she rode on, down the hill, toward the battle at the gates.

  And curved away, realizing there was no way through.

  She flew along a perimeter road, taking sharp turns at high speed, the wall of the prison at her right and a tangle of underbrush at her left. She was headed north, looking for a way, any way, inside, when the road suddenly angled down, ending in a ramp leading into the swirling brown waters of the Ohio.

  She hesitated for a moment, considered pulling both break levers, hard. But then she sped up, riding forward, faster and faster, until she plunged headlong into the water.

  Everywhere we look, there’s water, water.

  Maggie laughed, blowing some of the soap bubbles piled high in her chubby hands into her mother’s face. “Bath!” she shouted.

  “Yes, bath!” said her mother, laughing too. “Or, bañera. Say that, little one?”

  “Bañera!” shouted Maggie, and splashed her fists down into the warm water, causing little waves to roll out and over the lip of the cast-iron tub set beneath the poplar tree outside the kitchen door. A hen had been pecking in the dirt beside the tub and let out an indignant squawk. Maggie laughed even more when the bird flapped away.

  “Time to wash your hair, now, little one. Ready to go under? Can you hold your breath?”

  “Yes!” said Maggie, and ducked down even as her mother gently put one hand atop her head and guided her down beneath the surface.

  And held her there.

  “What’s happening?”

  “You are drowning. But I am going to save you.”

  “I’m in the river?”

  “You are within me. Where you began.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “To save you. So you can save him.”

  “Why haven’t you saved him?”

  “I tried and failed. Only you can save us all.”

  Maggie rose up out of the Ohio on a fountain of roiling water. It carried her upstream and onto a concrete dock extending from another gate. Tendrils of water darted out and pushed the gate open.

  She looked behind to see if the river woman, her mother, was visible, but the fountain subsided as she watched, leaving her only with the echo of those last words in her mind. Save us all?

  There was a tremendous crashing noise from the south, from the inland gate, Maggie guessed. It reminded her to hurry.

  Inside the walls, concrete-block buildings—Maggie supposed they were barracks of some kind—were laid out in neat rows. Despite the calamitous noise from across the complex, there was no one in sight. Japheth’s plan seemed to be working as a diversion, at least.

  She thought back to
her view of the complex from the hilltop, remembering the open pit near the center. It should be just ahead.

  “Notification has been sent.”

  The words came in an overwhelming chorus as Maggie rounded a corner, coming face-to-face with a building different than the rest. This one was nothing but a cage with a low roof, packed with dozens and dozens of dull-plumed telephones. They were jammed in so tightly that the ones on the edge were forced against the iron bars. Their glassy eyes all fixed on Maggie as they repeated their warning, losing the unison of it though, until it became an incoherent babble.

  She hurried on.

  And heard other words she had heard before.

  Her father’s voice was raised, and pitched in the sing-song cadence it always took on when he was quoting.

  “‘And it came to pass, that, as I made my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me.’”

  A deep, mellifluous voice rose up from the pit her father was facing.

  “At noontime, at the latitude of Damascus, would that not be the sun? Perhaps it was coming out from behind a cloud, thus accounting for the suddenness.”

  “Hush mole, I’m teaching.”

  “Daddy,” Maggie said.

  He turned, and took a sudden step backward, taking him dangerously close to the edge of the pit.

  If she didn’t know the way he stood and moved so well, if she hadn’t heard his voice, she might not have recognized him. His short red beard was now a long shock of pure white. His eyes . . . His blue eyes were the green of river water.

  “Maggie!”

  The shout did not come from her father, but from Michael, who was running down the gravel lane toward them, black-feathered cloak flying behind him.