The beacon glowing on our retinal panels is all we want to see, pulsing, leading. Fred and I don’t try to talk anymore. It’s too hot, it’s too quiet and dead all around us, and we’re both tired, and tired of talking. As I walk by Fred’s side, the beacon pulses us toward an old middle school, built late sometime in the last century, back when there were armies of teenagers who needed penning up during the day. We walk around it, following Gard’s signal, until the middle school is at our backs, surrounded by dead tree stumps. Back here behind the school there’s a stripe of dead lawn intersected by a cracked concrete pathway. From there we enter a narrow paved alley, long and empty and lined on both sides by shabby garages and gray wooden fences, just taller than me or Fred in her heels. Over the top of the fence line, just visible, are the shapes of more empty houses, tucked into their dead back lawns. We watch our own beacons approaching Gard’s on our wearables. Dead trees climb up over our heads on all sides, reaching for the dark. Our steps get quieter, slower.
We walk down the alley until Gard’s beacon is just a few yards away—by all appearances right on the other side of the weather-beaten fence that lines the alley. But there’s no sound, no signal, no further sign from Gard. Fred and I glance at each other, and then we stand silent, unable to see anything, for several moments.
“Gard!” I woof out, and Fred jumps.
“Jesus, you fucking asshat!” she explodes.
“Sorry. Gard? Are you here? It’s CQ! I’m with Fred!” My heart is pounding in my ears at the silence. I don’t like this. And for the last few minutes, as I’ve been tiptoeing around in this zombie zone, the injection has noticeably begun to wear off. I know this alley full of overturned trash cans can’t really smell like a garden in high forceful bloom, and a familiar gray cloud has begun to crowd in on the darkness in the corners of my vision.
I don’t like this.
I gesture Fred toward the line of fence opposite Gard’s blinking beacon in the alleyway. To my surprise, without so much as a rolled eye or a lifted eyebrow Fred actually moves in the direction I’m pointing, where a tall leafless oak stands guard over a half-collapsed wooden gateway. Fred slips into a shadow, standing partially behind the sinking door of the wooden gate, ankle-deep in yellow weeds. “Stay there,” I mouth at her. “Stay down.” Two and a half years of combat duty, a year of training before that, and still I walk right into the open mouth of what could be a very nasty surprise, just because I got excited at the thought of my sister and Natalie B. waiting for me in some well-hidden safe house. There’s no excuse other than that I must be the ultimate dumb grunt.
I drop low and find a line of advance in the darkness, inching toward Gard’s beacon along the base of the fence, my very pregnant sister behind me without any real cover or protection of any kind. This could be bad, I’m realizing. This could be the biggest mistake we ever made.
But what else could we have done?
A gate opens in the fence at my two o’clock, and Natalie steps out into the alleyway, carrying a plastic bag.
I shoot to my feet.
She leaps about a foot backward, then recovers, glaring at me. She puts her finger to her lips, walking toward me, gesturing me to follow.
Heart pounding, flowers stinking, gray corona settling, I work on collecting myself enough to follow after her. Natalie is already headed back out of the dead-tree alley, moving swiftly in the direction we just came from, toward the middle school reared back on its haunches in the hot darkness. “Wait,” I whisper hoarsely as Natalie passes Fred’s hiding place.
Hearing my voice, Fred slowly emerges from the shadows and the yellow dead weeds. Natalie acknowledges her with a surprised jut of her chin, and then a small smile she seems unable to prevent, when she catches sight of Fred’s belly in the darkness. Fred rolls her eyes. I catch up to Natalie and stand between the two of them, my sister and my sister’s only friend.
“Natalie. Where’s Gard? We followed her beacon here,” I whisper, not sure why I’m whispering. We’re miles from anywhere or anyone, there’s nothing here and no one to hear us in this abandoned neighborhood. Everyone who once lived here is gone.
Natalie shakes her head and says quietly, “Just follow me—to the school. We’re meeting someone there who will explain.”
“But Gard is here—she’s right here, her beacon is—”
I can’t look at the plastic bag she’s holding. I can’t look at it or I’ll go crazy. All I can do is try to keep sane, through the static’s shriek and the flowers’ chokehold, try not to grab anyone by the throat, try not to hurt anybody, myself included. Be a good man or die trying.
Fred says, in a voice I don’t recognize, “Oh God. Oh no no no. Is that—?”
Natalie looks down at the plastic bag grimly. “Just follow me, please. We shouldn’t do this here.” She starts off again for the school, setting a brisk pace.
Unable to bear the sight—the existence—of that bag, but unwilling to let it out of my sight, I follow, and Fred staggers along beside me. She’s just about completely spent, I can tell. Her shoulders droop, her head droops. I put an arm around her shoulders and a hand under her elbow and try to help her keep up, propel her along. After a second’s stiff resistance during which I half expect an elbow to my bruised ribs, Fred lets me.
We emerge from the alley behind the school, following Natalie’s slight figure and that swaying, horrible plastic bag. She takes us down a cracked pathway, across the school yard that leads to a metal basement door. Natalie waits for us at the door without looking at either of us. Then she reaches down, turns the knob, and eases the door open.
It’s cool down here, dry and dusty and utterly black, until Natalie flicks a switch.
Blue-gray carpeting. White particleboard partition walls. A half square of chairs arranged against the walls. A low table with pamphlets, showing a woman holding her arm like it’s a wounded thing.
“It’s not as nice as the one we had to leave behind, yet. But it will be,” Natalie says approvingly. “Private Quinn, you recognize this setup, I’m sure.” Without waiting for me, she turns to my sister. “Mrs. Walker, you’ve never been to one of our Completionist clinics, but this is a pretty fair facsimile of the one where your sister, Gard, and I worked together.”
“I need to sit down,” Fred says faintly, her eyes hungrily fixed on the waiting room chairs. As if Fred’s need has flicked on a light switch of its own, Natalie springs into Nurse Completionist mode.
“Of course, please, let me help you. What else can I—?”
“Don’t you touch her,” I growl at Natalie, who recoils, startled. I help Fred move toward the nearest chair, keeping my eyes locked on Natalie B.’s, which have gone wide. “Don’t even look at her. You tell us what happened to Gardner. Right now.”
Natalie looks helplessly down at the plastic bag. “I know this looks—like the worst . . . has happened. I’m sorry. I want to explain, but I think we should wait—”
“No. Now. Right now.”
“Please,” Fred says quietly. “Please.” She’s staring at the bag. She holds her hand out for it. “Give it to me.”
Natalie pauses briefly, then without looking at me she reaches past and puts the plastic bag on Fred’s lap. Seeing it there, next to Fred’s belly, I’m not sure I have the strength to keep standing. So I kneel. I’m right next to her. Fred’s hands are shaking so badly she can’t get the bag open. I have to help her. The sound of the plastic crinkling as we peel it back is like skin ripping apart, like the world ripping apart.
Inside the bag on Fred’s lap is a collection of small metal and plastic components: one about the size of a playing card, with hundreds of fiber-optic filaments extending out from every edge like millipede’s legs. These filaments, when new, are clear, but the ones in the bag are reddish-brown. Another piece is a small, shiny beige-pink mound of compound plastics, also cascading a few dozen filaments that are mostly gray. There’s a bone-gray chip with a black center. The smallest piece in the bag is cle
ar pale blue, tiny, shining, a lens, with a corona of its own tiny blue filaments. I recognize what I’m looking at but I wonder if Fred does, until she says it.
“Gard’s wearable.”
The insertion of the wearable elements is simple; all it takes is one outpatient procedure to slip the implants into the ear and the arm, the retinal disc into the eye, and the tracking chip into the anklebone. But once the wearable’s inserted, the filaments discharge and spread to find their connection targets, hooking into arterial pathways, nerve endings, rods and cones and God only knows what else. They’re built to be upgradable, but not removable.
The thought of how this was removed from Gard’s body rears up, impossible, and I know it’s hitting Fred, too. She puts a hand over her mouth; her eyes are watering not with tears but with the very real possibility that she’s going to be sick, and she pulls herself sideways out of her chair and lunges toward the door we came through. Natalie and I both hear her puking over the peeling-black-painted iron railing that separates the door from the school’s rear parking lot.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry about this. I want to explain—everything. But I have to wait.”
“Why? Natalie, why?” I’m still on my knees; I can barely see her even though she’s standing right over me. Her hand comes down on my shoulder, light and cold and trembling.
“I’m not the one who should tell you,” she whispers. “Please forgive me. I promise I’m just trying to help.”
The plastic bag has fallen to the floor, and I can see the reddish-brown filaments scattered across the carpet, and the little lens winking up at me. It takes all I have, it’s all I can do, but gently and with infinite care, remembering whose body this all belonged to, I place the components back into the plastic bag. My sister. Then I sit back on my heels and rub my eyes and try to breathe. Natalie steps closer. She touches my shoulder with one light hand. She’s shaking.
The door to the back parking lot swishes open again.
Pop’s voice enters the room, low and ragged.
“Good. We’re all here.”
My hands drop away from my eyes, which don’t seem to want to process what they’re seeing: Pop and Fred are coming through the doorway, and my father is helping an unnaturally pale and wide-eyed Fred to a chair, while Natalie hurries to get something for her to clean up with. She’s got a thin line of sick down the front of her dress, but otherwise Fred is trying to hold herself up and succeeding pretty well. It’s good one of us is keeping their shit together, because I don’t know how to look or where to look or how to feel right now.
“The fuck are you doing here?”
“Captain Quinn is here because I asked him to come, when I wasn’t sure you were going to make it,” Natalie says, handing Fred a wad of napkins that aren’t going to do much for anything. “I was underground and off-network until just a little while ago tonight, but I set up one coded message to repeat to you. I was hoping against hope that you’d get it. But tonight when I got here, it looked like you hadn’t understood me, and”—she glances at Pop—“and for me the clock is ticking. I didn’t have time to wait. Today we finished setting this place up, at least well enough that it can function for our clients. Tomorrow I’m joining a group of people leaving New Chicago. So I switched on the wearable and sent you and your father a message to meet me here.” She looks at the plastic bag, then at me. “I needed to give someone that. I can’t keep it anymore. Not where I’m going.” She looks back to my father. “The surgeon should be arriving in a few minutes if you’re available to assist again.”
Pop nods his head heavily.
Fred looks from Natalie to Pop, then at the plastic bag in my big weaponized hands. “You helped them remove that?”
Pop is quiet. He’s standing perfectly still, like someone’s encased him in a thin layer of clay that will shatter if he moves. Then he clears his throat and says, “She needed me to.”
Fred says, “I’m sorry, Pop.”
“She didn’t feel anything at the time.” Pop looks at Natalie squarely. “They do clean work here. Whatever else you want to say about it, it’s clean.” Natalie nods. “You know what the recovery is like, though,” he says to her. Natalie nods again, this time less assertively. “Okay. You’re the brave one. When do we start?”
“Wait—you’re having your wearable removed? Here? Tonight?” I stare at Natalie, willing someone in this room to tell me, despite all the evidence that I’m holding in my hands, that something that gruesome would never be attempted, especially not on her, or on my sister.
“I wasn’t at the clinic when Security came,” Natalie tells me. “Which is why I haven’t been picked up. But my colleagues and I are under surveillance now. I need to get out while it’s still safe.”
“Your sister,” Pop begins slowly, “was also under surveillance. Not for . . . her work, necessarily—or at least, not at first. She had a good cover thanks to her daytime job. But she was at a few war protests where people got swept up. And then she started getting followed, as you figured out yourself. Drones first. Then . . . it got past that point.”
“Because the Walkers were having her tailed,” I put in angrily. “That safe family you were so sure Fred should marry herself to, for her own security. They found out where Gard really worked, and they put a drone on her.”
Fred stares at me. I can see it move across her face, the understanding of what’s happened, the moving aside of uncertainties. I can’t tell of course but I must look much the same way, like I’m emerging into a light that’s worse than darkness. Finally Fred says, “But that would have to be because of me. Because someone tracked down what I was doing behind the DOH network safety net, because they found me and Gard’s messages to each other.” She looks down at the plastic bag. “After I—after I doctored my Care Hours. The first time. Carter’s right. He’s right.”
Pop looks pained. “We don’t know any of that for sure. And, Fredericka, it doesn’t change the fact that you need the Walkers’ help now. Without their protection you’re at risk—more risk than you even know.” From the look on Fred’s face, though, she knows all too well. A phrase from one of Fred’s messages to Gard flies through my mind like a poison dart. They can come for my whole family. . . . I assume you know that. “You need to stay safe, and the Walkers can protect you—they’re motivated to protect you, anyway, until the baby comes. But Gardner—” Pop glances at Natalie. “Well, after a while she felt she was risking too much. That’s when she made the decision to . . . to go where Natalie’s going.”
“Outside the New Cities? Where?” I demand.
Pop shakes his head. “I can’t say. Tomorrow morning Natalie will be given to a trafficker her people have been in contact with. She’ll be taken outside the city and delivered to the next safe house, and then the one after that and the one after that. Natalie won’t see any of it; she’ll be unconscious for the trip, recovering from her surgery tonight. But it’s probably not the same trafficker Gardner used. We don’t know where Gardner went. Gardner may not even know where she is.” Pop looks at Natalie again. “The recovery takes a lot out of you, they say.”
Natalie nods, her lips pressed together hard.
“But like my daughter, you’ll be alive. And not in prison,” Pop reminds her. “And that’s all we need to know.”
“Is that supposed to be directed at us? You think that’s all we need to know?” My hands are clutching the plastic bag. I have to remind my fingers to uncurl.
“It’s all we’re going to know,” Pop says tiredly. “So we might as well accept it.”
I stand up, my knees creaking. I move carefully through my gray haze toward Natalie, who I can’t help but see shrinks back a tiny bit. I can’t blame her. I consider taking her hand in my own, but think better of it. I just want to tell her why she shouldn’t hate me: “I didn’t report you. I want you to know that. I didn’t mean to bring any of this down on you. I didn’t mean to expose you, having you call on the major. I didn’t know.” I glanc
e at Pop. “I don’t think either of us knew what the major would do.”
“I know that,” Natalie says tiredly. “I’m not stupid.”
I can’t help it, that makes me like her all over again. “Let us try to help you somehow, Natalie. There’s got to be a better way.”
“Not for me there isn’t.” She shakes her head, once, sharply. “Out there I can do a lot more good than I ever could here. There’s a need for Nurse Completionists outside of the New Cities—beyond the H2.0 distribution lines, they say the birth rate might be rising, not falling. But those women out there, they have nothing. And I need to be where I can help people, do something, about all this. Your sister wanted the same thing.” Natalie gazes at me intently, willing me to understand her on this one point. “That’s all she wanted.”
Fred, who has been utterly quiet, maybe ignoring us, maybe just staring down at the bag with Gard’s wearable, which she’s pulled back into her lap, speaks up suddenly.
“I can do more for you than you know, Natalie.” I watch Fred’s expression shift—we all watch—as she pauses, decides, plunges on: “That’s what I wanted to show Gard, before she disappeared. I think I know how to fix my Care Hours through the back end, and I think I could fix other women’s, too—I can show a balance that’s humane, something you could live with, or close.”
Natalie squints at Fred. “That’s dangerous.”
“No more dangerous than what you’re planning to do,” Fred says, and she looks so tired and hurt it breaks my heart.
Pop says, “Fredericka, you have an obligation to keep yourself safe.”
“Pop, I have more obligations than just to myself and my kid. You of all people know how that works.” Fred fixes her laser stare on Natalie. “You should stay. You should stay long enough to deliver me. I need a Completionist I can trust.”
The Completionist Page 28
