I continued to listen, kept trying to connect with them, to no avail. The effort made my temples throb. I put my head back on the seat to rest. Instead of resting, though, that moment—the instant Greaves had fired the Taser—replayed on the screen in my mind.
I relived it: The excruciating jolt. The fall to the floor. The involuntary spasming. The screams of the nanomites.
How had a Taser generated such devastation and chaos? Had the nanomites—unwittingly—been a conduit for the Taser’s pulse? Had the nanocloud amplified the charge that ran through my body? Is that why the charge had devastated them? Had fried my phone?
I called again to the mites . . . and received no answer.
I drifted and slept.
***
Dr. Bickel’s voice roused me. “Gemma? I have a cell signal. Will you call your FBI friend?”
Mere minutes had passed. Why was I so weary?
“Don’t have his number . . . Waiting on nano . . .”
I glanced up. The glowing dash was the only light in the truck’s cab, but I caught Dr. Bickel studying me in the rear-view mirror. When he realized that I’d noticed his scrutiny, he flicked his eyes back to the highway.
Do you know how many times a day a person checks their reflection? It had been ten weeks since I had last seen my own face. The disquiet in Dr. Bickel’s expression frightened me. What had he seen?
I couldn’t worry about that now; we had more pressing concerns. If I couldn’t reach Gamble, he wouldn’t know when and where to send the helicopter. And without a helicopter, we had but two alternatives: hide or attempt the 223-mile drive to Albuquerque. The most direct route from Las Cruces to Albuquerque was up the I-25 corridor—a lengthy, exposed gauntlet.
I shook my head. How long would it take for Cushing to muster her forces, to set up road blocks, and pull us off the road? In my weakened state, we presented an easy, defenseless target.
We were leaving the range’s reservation, beginning our climb through San Augustin Pass, before I tried to speak again.
“Dr. Bickel . . . th-the . . .”
“The Taser, Gemma?”
“Yeah . . .”
Without taking his eyes from the road, he placed his hand on my arm. “I’m afraid the nanomites absorbed the Taser’s current and, well, they are sensitive electromechanical devices, vulnerable to electrical discharge. Many, if not all, are likely destroyed. That’s why they are no longer hiding you.”
Tell me something I don’t know, Dr. Nanophysicist.
I was acutely aware that the pulse had devastated the nanocloud, that the ranks of the nanomites were decimated beyond their abilities to cope.
As was I.
It was the truth I’d been avoiding: My body should have recovered within minutes of the Taser’s impact. It hadn’t. Something was wrong, something in my own body. My speech had improved a bit, but I couldn’t quite think in a straight line . . . and I was weak.
I had the sense that my life force was slowly seeping away.
“I’m worried about you, Gemma.”
I shrugged. Yeah, I was concerned. Still—and this might sound odd—I was more anxious for the nanocloud. Fragments of sound from a few mites reached me, but the cloud and all its strength and power, was missing. Just . . . gone.
I listened as a small number of active mites found each other, began to join, began to work together. They were in full-out emergency mode, bent on locating their missing comrades, assessing damage, fixing what could be fixed. They were putting out a valiant effort to restore the tribes’ five basic functions. When they didn’t respond to my frantic appeals, I stopped calling out. I was afraid I would distract them from their most essential work: Survival.
I wondered, in that moment, how much of an impediment to their survival I might be, given my impaired condition. I didn’t want the mites expending precious time or resources to fix me!
“Dr. Bickel, a remnant of the nanocloud is alive but damaged. I can hear them! Perhaps they can hear you? Could you . . . could you tell the mites to get out of me? That it is all right for them to leave me? They are struggling! I don’t want them to waste their efforts . . . on me. You aren’t damaged. Couldn’t they leave me and go to you?”
Surely, if they got out of me and went into Dr. Bickel, he would be a better, stronger host for them?
My friend stared ahead and did not answer.
“Dr. Bickel? The mites respect you. They will listen to you. Please tell them to get out and save themselves.”
His head swung back and forth like a slow pendulum, and he muttered, “I could try, Gemma, but I don’t think it would work.”
“What? Why not?”
He sighed and kept his face toward the road. “I think, on a cellular level . . .” His voice petered out.
“You think, on a cellular level, what? What?”
He delivered the news I’d been dreading, what I feared and did not want to hear. “Gemma, did you, uh, experience illness after the mites, er, attached themselves to you? Any adverse physical symptoms?”
I nodded, thinking back. “Yeah. A day of nausea. Wicked headache. A nose bleed. It wasn’t too bad—the first time.”
“The first time? What does that mean?”
I tilted my head back on the seat and focused on what I should say, how I should explain. In slow, studied phrases, I managed, “It was hard, living with the mites. Adjusting to their presence. Basic subsistence and day-to-day tasks were . . . difficult. The invisible part made everything—like getting food and moving around without being noticed—complicated and tedious, even dangerous—particularly after Cushing raided my house and I was forced to relocate to your safe house.
“We were at odds from the get-go, the nanomites and I, continually knocking heads and working at cross-purposes, so to speak. One evening, when I was feeling particularly down, I asked them, asked the mites . . . if we couldn’t work together better. Find an easier way to communicate . . . to cooperate.”
“You asked the nanomites if there was a better way for you and them to cooperate?”
“Yeah. Silly me, huh?”
“What happened?”
I tried to laugh, but I was too weary. I just wanted to let the fatigue take me down to peaceful oblivion. “What happened? The merge happened.”
Dr. Bickel blurted a phrase I didn’t catch. “Merge? What the devil is that?”
“Took a while to figure it out, but it started with an unmistakable bang. I woke up in the middle of the night sick—really, really sick. Vomiting. Horrible nose bleed. Fever. Couldn’t keep my balance. More vomiting. Fun stuff.”
In slow, halting sentences, I explained how the mites “spoke” an apology in my ear and freaked me out. I told him how the mites insisted that I return to bed and how they knocked me out, kept me asleep for more than fourteen hours.
“When I woke up, I felt loads better—that’s when they told me they’d alleviated a lot of the unwelcome symptoms and had ‘assisted’ in my body’s healing. I felt pretty good, actually.
“It was over the next days and weeks that the merge’s other effects became evident. We no longer needed to verbally communicate—the mites and I could talk to each other in this place in my head I call ‘the warehouse.’ Later, I started memorizing everything I saw—like I was a savant or something.
“I could list other effects, but the bottom line? The mites misinterpreted my request. They thought, when I asked about us cooperating, that I was asking to join them, to become part of the nanocloud. So, guess what, Dr. Bickel? I’m a nanotribe now. You know, Alpha Tribe? Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Omega Tribes? Meet Gemma Tribe.”
“Astounding!”
“You have no idea.”
I’d given him the highlights of the last few weeks when our highway merged onto I-25. As we passed alongside Las Cruces, our nerves were too on edge to talk. Dr. Bickel kept his driving careful and conservative. On the west outskirts of town, he turned our conversation back to his concerns.
�
��The way I see it, Gemma, this merge complicates things. For the mites to accomplish such a feat, I theorize that they needed to, um, ‘invade’ certain areas of your brain and endocrine system.”
“Right. I studied up and figured out how they were chemically creating new synapses in my brain. I call it nano brain surgery. However, the ‘adverse symptoms,’ as you deem them, lasted less than two days. The mites told me they had cauterized the bleeding, anesthetized my nerve endings, and provoked my body’s production of serotonin and endorphins—all to help me heal.
“Not only did I heal; in addition, my energy levels shot through the roof. My endurance and physical stamina grew. That’s when and why I decided that the merge wasn’t a risk to me, long-term. I’m more fit now than I’ve ever been in my life—or at least I was before that Taser took me down.”
Dr. Bickel slanted that look toward me, that wary, guarded look. I didn’t know what it meant, but I didn’t like it.
“Perhaps . . . perhaps you are right—and I certainly hope you are, Gemma, but the mental and physical changes you’ve described? I’m not convinced that they aren’t more invasive than you think. It occurs to me that the mites needed to relieve the symptoms of the merge, that they needed to suppress your immune system’s normal responses—for reasons other than easing your discomfort.”
“What other reasons?” I demanded.
“Well . . . how else could the nanomites trick your body into accepting their, er, activities? Yes, they required a hospitable environment as a place to live and also for . . . what they were doing.”
“What is it you think they were doing?” I was growing angry. And scared.
“I refer to the, er, modifications they made. I believe the nanomites have made, um, certain alterations to your anatomy, Gemma. As I said a while back. Changes at the . . . cellular level.”
They required a hospitable environment.
The nanomites have made certain alterations . . . at the cellular level.
My frantic thoughts pieced together his point. “Are you s-saying they can’t leave?”
“Well, no, not precisely. I’m saying that they could leave, Gemma . . .” he paused a long time before he framed the second half of his response. “I’m saying that they could leave, but if they did, I fear that you . . . would not survive.”
I would not survive if the nanomites exited my body.
My gorge rose. I swallowed it down, forced it down. Swiped at the cold sweat beading around my hairline, starting to drip down my face.
“Gemma, you said the swarm—the nanocloud—was disrupted, that many nanomites are dead.”
I was so tired, my muscles weak and painful. “Yeah. I hear the remnant . . . struggling, fighting to find and connect to each other, to fix their damaged members, to rebuild the nanocloud.”
And their efforts were draining me.
“Then we need to go back to my laboratory,” Dr. Bickel whispered.
“Your lab? At Sandia? They blew it up. Burned it, remember?”
Tired.
“No, of course not my lab at Sandia. My lab inside the mountain.”
“But . . . but Cushing trashed it, too. There’s nothing left. I went there. Saw it.”
He snorted a tiny snort. Even that little noise was infused with derision so typical of Dr. Bickel. “Cushing. What does she know? Nothing. We need to get to Albuquerque, Gemma. Not to the FBI office, but to my lab inside the mountain. I don’t think sufficient numbers of nanomites have survived to restore the nanocloud.”
He patted my arm and I could feel the distraction through his fingertips as he delivered the coup de grâce, the final blow.
“And I’m afraid that if the swarm dies, Gemma, you die. I cannot allow that to happen.”
Yeah. It made sense—so many things did now: “We are six, Gemma Keyes.” My life was bound up in the nanomites’ continued existence. The nanomites were failing—and if they failed, so would I.
A weak stutter interrupted.
Gem Gem Gem ma Gemmmmmma
My heart thumped with relief. The mites! They were talking to me!
“Yes, Nano. I’m here.”
Have . . . number.
I turned on Colonel Greaves’ phone and prepared to press the keypad as they called out the digits.
505
4
00
33
75
“Thank you, Nano.”
I pressed send. The number rang and rang. No answer. I left a one-word message: “Call.”
Gem Gem Gemma Keyes . . .
“Yes, Nano?” Poor Nano!
Assess . . . ing . . .damage.
“I know. What can I do?”
Connect to . . . power
They could not even form their own conduit to the auxiliary jacks? Their situation was worse than I feared. I fumbled with a phone cable and inserted it into the charger jack. Held it in my hand.
Long seconds later, the mites began drawing power through the cable. Not much. A trickle. Then a bit more.
I sighed, and my eyes drooped.
***
Dr. Bickel drove on. We reached the outskirts of Las Cruces, and Gamble had not called back. It was decision time: Make the turn as I-25 curved north and risk Cushing’s net? Or head in another direction and hope to elude her?
“We must get you to my lab, Gemma.”
“No. Not if—”
The phone buzzed.
I pressed the speaker button to answer the call but said nothing. We listened for the caller to speak.
“Hello?”
It was Gamble.
“Oh, Gamble! I’m—”
He talked over me a rush. “The news is out, Gemma. Cushing has called on the state police and national guard to find you. Homeland is deploying strike teams in response to ‘an imminent terrorist attack.’ Cushing is even mobilizing the FBI! The entire state is in an uproar. Do you have Dr. Bickel? Are you all right? Where are you?”
“I’m . . . w-we’re . . . on the road.”
“Get off the road—right now. You need to hide, Gemma.”
I struggled to answer him. “Gotta save . . . Dr. Bickel. Need . . .” I was “plugged in,” the remnant of nanomites sucking at the truck’s auxiliary jacks for all they were worth, but it wasn’t enough.
There weren’t enough survivors.
“Gemma! What’s wrong with you?”
Dr. Bickel grabbed the phone from my slack fingers and turned off the speaker function. “Agent Gamble? This is Daniel Bickel. Is there any way you can rendezvous with us and smuggle us into Albuquerque? It is imperative that I get Gemma there.”
They talked for a few minutes, but I was too tired to pay much attention.
The nanomites couldn’t draw enough power to maintain themselves, let alone me. There were too few of them—even if they left me. In either scenario, whether they stayed or left, we would die.
Were dying.
I understood that now.
Something had happened to the helicopter; Dr. Bickel raised his voice until he was shouting, insisting that Gamble find a way to get us to Albuquerque and into the mountain.
I didn’t know what Dr. Bickel hoped to find in his old laboratory under the mountain. I had seen it with my own eyes. Nothing remained, and Dr. Bickel could not magically print more nanomites—so why bother? Why risk it?
Mentally, I shrugged my acquiescence. If, by some great good fortune—or by the grace of the God Zander followed—we managed to get into the tunnels unseen, Dr. Bickel’s old lab was a fitting place for us to die.
I smiled inside. So many happy memories. Cushing would hardly think to look for us there, would she? We might, for a time, be safe from her.
Safe to die in peace.
~~**~~
Chapter 28
I don’t remember much after that until the rough ride, the truck bumping over a dirt road, woke me. The whooshing roar of tractor trailers wasn’t far away, though, like we were running parallel to the freeway. Then
we veered left, and the ride roughened. The impact of every rock and hole became too much for my tortured muscles to bear, and I slipped away again.
The next time I woke, the half-moon glowed high in the night sky. I was still belted into the truck’s passenger seat, but Dr. Bickel was not with me. The back end of the truck was buried in a thick hedge of scrub piñon trees. Other desert shrubs screened the cab’s outline.
Where was Dr. Bickel? I searched through the darkness, trying not to panic. I could no longer hear the whoosh of cars racing by. Maybe we were too far from the interstate?
A glimpse of movement off the driver’s side caught my eye, and I made out Dr. Bickel’s shape. He was talking to someone hidden by the shadows.
Who?
My heart pounded.
The shadowed stranger turned, and I gasped in relief. Zander? Zander! A second shadow shifted, detached from the darkness, and turned in my direction. It was Gamble. Zander joined him, and they walked toward me.
Zander, his arm still in a cast but no longer held by a sling, opened my door. “Gemma? Let me help you out.”
In slow motion, I pivoted toward the door. He reached a hand to help me—and when the moonlight hit my face, he gasped.
“Th-that bad?”
“Uh, um, uh, no, not bad . . . not exactly, but . . . wow.” He shook his head in wonder. “Gemma . . . you look really different.”
What did he mean?
I fell back in the seat and pulled the lighted visor mirror down. The hard-planed features of a stranger stared at me. With shaking fingers, I touched my jaw. It was lean. Chiseled. Gone were my familiar, softly curved cheeks—replaced by the angular lines . . . of an athlete?
I gaped. The months without sunlight on my skin, day after day of being hidden by the nanomites, had taken their toll, too. In the moonlight, my skin gleamed like pale, ghost-like marble. Even my expression was unfamiliar: The woman staring back from the mirror was fierce. Fearless.
I could only gawk. Who are you? From what cocooned state have you emerged and into what creature have you been transformed?
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