Toweling off, she was racked with a now-familiar churning in her gut, and she dropped to her knees in front of the toilet, lifting the lid just in time to expel the meager contents of her stomach.
Recovered, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, stiffening with shock at the sight of her bald head. David would be horrified—he would make her get a wig until her hair had grown back in to a respectable length. And even Marta had to admit that this was not the best look for a woman of her age, that she, unlike the frankly stunning young woman with the ridiculous pop-singing boyfriend—mixed race, she must have been, with all of the gifts (luminous, vaguely Asiatic eyes, clear, nearly poreless light brown skin) such an ancestry might bestow—could no longer accentuate her beauty by radicalizing it (not that Marta had ever dared to radicalize her beauty, even in the bloom of youth). No, Marta’s face was drawn, hollow-eyed; her eyebrows had thinned and lightened so much that there was nothing to temper the shock of her hairless dome, so that, if she blurred her eyes, the image was not of a woman but of a skull. Trembling, she uncapped a pot of Retylastic face cream—a fifty-gram container cost as much as a replacement Stamp—and applied dabs to her face and neck using the soft pad of her ring finger. Then sunblock (what a strange, almost lovely sensation, working the cold lotion into the skin of her scalp). Then she squeezed a tiny bit of antiseptic Scar-Rid into her Stamp wound, which she had opted to have branded in the meaty flesh of her upper arm, where a long-ago generation had been scarred by polio vaccinations. The disfigurement scared her the most—more than her uncertainty about how well she would be able to keep up with the other, mostly younger travelers; more than her anticipation of David’s reaction upon her return; more, even, than the fear of death, though she would rather not meet her end in some slow, horrible way. Her only capital had ever been her looks, and later, her status as wife to David Perrone and mother to David Perrone’s twin sons (“heir and a spare,” David had joked—at least, she took it then as a joke—upon their birth). Age had taken away much of that capital, but she was still a handsome woman, a woman who was respectable on the arm of a man like David (no matter whom he kept out of sight and on the side), and she was loath to compromise that. Though there was a part of her that wondered what it would be like to come back to her husband visibly battle-marked. Could you have done this? her scars would say to him. Could you have risked yourself this way?
She packed quickly. All of her personal effects, excepting her microsuit and Stamp, had to fit into a small knapsack with a total weight of no more than thirty-five hundred grams; the knapsack also had to pass a security inspection, including X-rays and hand searches, to rule out the presence of forbidden items. Hanging her pack on a luggage scale, she started dropping in objects in descending order of importance: three changes of underwear, three changes of socks; a tube of sunblock; her Retylastic cream and Scar-Rid. That was just over two thousand grams. A canister of ibuprofen, which was permitted on the Outer Limits Excursions Rules and Regulations for Travelers. Three manufacturer-sealed pouches of antibiotic ointment, also permitted. These items were sold at the Canteen, as was the small spray bottle of Critter-Rid, which was useless against the miner ticks but handy for the nonfatal but still annoying (and prevalent) chiggers and mosquitoes. She was now up to twenty-seven hundred grams.
The Outer Limits Excursions statement on weapons read as follows:
Section 3.2: OLE Inc. is a firm supporter of our constitutional right to bear arms. However, for the safety of our travelers, personal weapons—including but not limited to firearms, blade weapons, explosive devices, projectile weapons, chemical or pepper sprays, and any other instruments or devices designed to inflict harm on another living being—are prohibited. OLE staff members will carry only small utility blades and have thumbprint and password-controlled access to locked weapons vaults at various points on the excursion. These vaults store bows, shotguns, and rifles suitable for the hunting of game and accessible only for the purposes of controlled hunting parties as described in the relevant Excursion Package (if applicable).
Travelers attempting to bring in weapons of any kind, or who use OLE weaponry in any manner other than that for which it has been designated, including hunting of out-of-season game, will be banished from the Excursion and issued a 25,000-credit fine. Criminal cases will be turned over to the proper authorities.
The statement on Drugs, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Prescription Medication was equally restrictive:
Section 3.5: Because the safety of a Traveler requires first and foremost an alert mind, possession of alcohol and most controlled substances is prohibited on OLE Tours. The exceptions are certain prescription medications (prior approval must be sought through the OLE physician-in-residence), allowable only in quantities necessary for the duration of the Excursion, and over-the-counter anti-inflammatory and allergy medications that can be purchased through the Canteen. Leaf tobacco is not allowed; however, Smokeless and replacement NicoClean cells are also purchasable through the OLE Canteen in unrestricted quantities. Canteen purchases have an identifying bar code—any over-the-counter medications or Smokeless not bearing that bar code are forbidden.
And so Marta paused, stomach knotted, over the last items on her dresser top.
The first was a Smokeless, still sealed in its box—a box, her husband assured her, that was printed with the invisible bar code identifying it as an OLE Canteen purchase. The item inside the box looked exactly like a Smokeless, and it weighed, within a tenth of a gram, the same as a Smokeless, but it was not a Smokeless. It contained an illegal chemical called Quicksilver, which, if sprayed into an attacker’s face at close range—a sprayer was built cleverly into the fake Smokeless, the valve only visible upon close scrutiny—caused unconsciousness within seconds. The length of that unconsciousness was highly variable: a few minutes, at least, but often much longer, and there were cases of brain damage and even death reported. “Don’t smoke it by accident,” David had said, barking harsh laughter, when he gave it to her.
The other item, packaged to look like a NicoClean replacement cell (complete, too, with Canteen bar code), was a fifteen-gram vial of Salt. “A little pick-me-up,” David had said, and Marta accepted it with effusive thanks, knowing that these two going-away gifts had probably cost him a small fortune, and that the point for him was as much the extravagance as the usefulness of the presents themselves. He liked knowing he could cheat the system, that he had the money and the connections to make it easy. He also liked knowing that Marta had thirsts only he could quench, thirsts that kept her occupied and compliant, thin, dependent. The second-hardest thing she had ever done was quit Salt cold turkey; the hardest was hiding the fact she had quit from her husband and pretending, for six weeks now, that nothing had changed. She still accepted his “gifts,” still emerged from the bathroom pretending to feel that clean, radiant calm way down deep into the whorls of her fingerprints, when she was actually so depressed, so tired, that simply coming to a stand felt like a chore. And her stomach was still so riotous, even now after six weeks, that getting most of a meal down was a misery, the aftermath often agony.
She had purchased an actual Smokeless and NicoClean replacement cell at the Canteen, thinking that she would need to get the purchase on record, and she thought now about putting those into her bag instead. She had been smoking since getting here—partly to establish a precedent for bringing the Smokeless past the checkpoint, partly to take some of the edge off her sudden break with not just the Salt but also booze—and she wouldn’t mind having the option once they were out in the woods. A way to calm her nerves. She could lock the Quicksilver and vial of Salt in her room safe, along with her jewelry and her zonecard, and no one would be the wiser. But she hesitated.
She would feel safer with the Quicksilver. As for the Salt, perhaps she shouldn’t tempt herself. But her gut told her to bring it, that it could never hurt to have something valuable on hand. A carrot as well as a stick. She’d learned, as the
wife of David Perrone, that there was a time for both.
—
“I’m going to need you to go out of town for a while,” David had told her. This was in September.
“Out of town?” she said vaguely. It was six o’clock, an hour before their dinner reservation, and they were both in the living room, sipping vodka tonics, each tuned to their feeds and not speaking much to the other. Scrolling with her thumb pad, then tapping the screen gently with a nail, she checked on the boys, Sal and Enzo, who were both in Wilmington, attending classes (they claimed) at the university. Sal was at the Sand Dollar Tavern, where he had already spent, she saw, a hundred credits on happy hour longnecks and appetizers. Sweet lord. And Enzo wasn’t showing up on her feed at all, which only meant that he wasn’t currently spending money—or maybe he was with Sal, and Sal was putting it all on his tab. His tab—well, his father’s. I hate how you watch every single little thing I do, Sal had complained his freshman year, when Marta had called to express concern about the fact that he was at a gaming parlor when she knew he was supposed to be attending his Psych 100, and Marta had said, Well, when you have your own Deep Pocketz, you can have all the freedom you want.
“Not immediately,” said David. “It’ll take time for certain things to go into motion. A month or two. And not for long, just until things quiet down some.”
Marta blinked and paused her feed. “Wait. What?”
“I’m just being overly cautious.”
“Overly cautious about what?”
He exhaled, bull-like, through his nose. “Can you unplug for thirty seconds here? I’m trying to tell you that something has come up. We need to get you somewhere safe until my business is settled.”
Marta swallowed the rest of her drink so fast that an ice cube went down her throat and slivered like a stone through her esophagus. “Wait. What about the boys?”
“I’ve been looking into it. Enzo’s been hounding me about some semester abroad thing. Italy or England, but I’m leaning toward England. It’s going to cost a fortune, but security’s tight there, real tight, and the quarantines are stricter. And they have the Edu-Passes already, so we could have them there by the end of the month.”
For a split second Marta felt a burst of hopefulness and joy—a break in the dark clouds that had been hanging over her since the boys left home for college three years ago. “I haven’t been to England since I was a girl. There’s so much in London I could show them.”
David’s face grew still, and his lip curled in that way she had grown to hate. “Marta.”
“What?”
He shook his head with exasperation. “For one thing, I don’t want everybody I care about in one place. That puts you all at greater risk. For another, I can’t have you all going off to Europe at the same time without me. It would seem suspicious.”
“So you’re separating the boys?” The thought unnerved her.
“Of course not,” David said. “I might as well cut their hearts out.”
What about my heart? she thought of saying. Instead, in a voice edged with a wearisome (even to her) bitterness, she said, “But everyone gets along just fine without me.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ. You know we couldn’t get the paperwork to get you over there with them before November, anyway, and that would be too late to do any good.”
“Never mind. Forget it. So where are you hauling me off to? Casinolake again?” There had been a time, just after the last boss died unexpectedly and David and another capo were each trying to take over the clan, when David had sent her and the twins quickly to Casinolake. It was a bad several weeks, hell with six-year-old boys whose only source for recreation was the hotel swimming pool. Casinolake was an adult vacation destination, a place where middle-aged men gathered in packs to gamble, play golf, drink whiskey, smoke cigars, and contract the services of prostitutes, and Marta could only guess that David had chosen it as a hideout for them because he had the management in a stranglehold, or because it seemed like such an implausible place to put away a wife and children for safe keeping. Whatever the reason, Marta had spent her shapeless days stewing with resentment, then vibrating with it; the minute the boys slipped into sleep each night she started downing liquor, wondering when their imprisonment would end, and how, and if the next knock on the door would be her husband or the hotel staff or someone who had been sent to do away with her. Then, when her legs tired, or the liquor had sedated her, she climbed into bed and played webshows on her tablet all night, one episode after another after another, moving dully between watching and dreaming and not knowing the next day which had been which.
I could kill him, she had thought a thousand times. And, I’ll divorce him. Her anger had solidified by the end into a certainty, a plan; she would never put her sons through this again, she would never put herself through this again, and damn David for thinking he could ask it of them. But when David had finally arrived, victorious, to bring her and the children home, she had known instantly that things had changed irrevocably—that this was a man who would never suffer the indignity of being left, even if a part of him would be secretly glad to rid himself of her; a man who would kill her before he let her turn his sons, the heir and the spare, against him. In a way, she had been stuck at Casinolake ever since. Her prison had only gotten larger, and she was jingling and jangling with the same restless fury, a fury that made her want to walk grooves into the polished wood floors of their six-hundred-square-meter home. When the boys left for college her anxiety grew, and no amount of liquor was able to soothe it, and that was when she started using the drugs.
Now, here she was again. Some danger was on the horizon, and she couldn’t even be with the boys if the worst were to happen. This time, she was alone.
“Not Casinolake,” he said. “I have something else in mind. Something out-of-zone.”
Her heart—it seemed to almost quiver rather than beat. “I thought you said it wasn’t that bad.”
“I said I was being overly cautious.”
“Out-of-zone cautious?”
He rose, crossed the room to the banquette, and poured another finger of vodka into his highball glass. Then he held the glass so that the base sat flat on his palm, a funny affectation of his that stretched back to their earliest days together, when he was the scrawny, gawky young man she had fallen in love with, a man whose streak of cruel entitlement had only yet manifested as improbable confidence, charming then because it seemed so mismatched with his physical self. “It’s good news, mostly. I have a major deal lined up. Something that’s going to make us a lot of money. And it’s legit money. One hundred percent legit.”
Marta frowned. “What’s the ‘mostly’ part?”
“I have to do something kind of bold to clench it. And when I do the thing I have to do, I want us all lying low for a little while.”
“What’s this thing you have to do?”
“Honey,” he said, “you don’t want to know.”
He was right. She didn’t.
Out-of-zone. She uncapped her necklace vial and took a bump—she hadn’t planned on it that night, but Christ—and pondered the possibilities. Slum-ridden Gulf Zone, where even the better hotels were constantly getting shut down for tick infestations, and if the ticks didn’t get you, the street gangs would? Midwest Zone was no better. New England had stricter quarantine sanctions than Atlantic Zone—Marta doubted that even David had the power to get her over there this year—and Pacific Zone, by every report, was still so drought-ridden and poisoned that drinking water sold for a hundred credits a liter. You saw the Pacificans in the feeds wearing micromasks everywhere, even to sit in their own homes, and Marta thought the worst sign of all was that the webshows out of the West Coast, which used to be the best, were in recent years poorly produced and unpredictably transmitted.
The thing was, you hoped like hell to be in a zone as clean and safe as Atlantic, and if by birth
or luck or talent you got in one, you stayed put—because the rules kept changing, the quarantines and security measures kept getting revised, and everyone knew the story of at least one person who traveled interzone and got stuck somewhere for weeks, or months, or even forever. What if David sent her somewhere but couldn’t get her back once the heat was off?
“What did you have in mind for me?” she said quietly.
“You remember that adventure touring company I invested in a few years back? Outer Limits Excursions?”
It took her a few beats to process this. First, just the words: adventure touring company. What that even meant. Then, the implication—
“Good lord, David. You can’t be serious. You don’t mean to—”
“Hear me out,” David said harshly. “This is a completely professional outfit. They know what they’re doing, and their rate getting people back home is nearly perfect.”
“Nearly,” Marta said jeeringly.
“It’s VIP all the way. You wouldn’t believe some of the people going on this trip. Wes Feingold. Wes Feingold’s going on this trip. And if there’s a rich little cocksucker you want to be standing near when the world goes to hell, he’s the one.”
She felt the sharp, strangling fingers of panic at her throat, making it hard to breathe. “I don’t want to do this, David. I can’t do this. I’m in my fifties. I don’t . . . hike. I’m not in any kind of shape for that. I’d rather risk staying here than go on that trip.”
The Salt Line Page 4
