by Karen Healey
Thick drapes were drawn across it, but a ribbon of pale light traced the window’s edges.
“I thought you liked being underground,” Bethari teased. “All that urban exploration you used to do with your best friend, crawling through drains and tunnels.”
“Alex liked the tunnels,” Tegan said. “I went with her, but I was more into abandoned buildings. Better opportunities for trying out free-running tricks.”
“Well, don’t try them here,” Hurfest said, with a tone that was striving hard to be jovial. “We’re trying to keep this place looking abandoned.”
“Good job,” Tegan told him, and I silently agreed. This was another living room, as dusty and crammed as the bedroom I’d woken in. It was filled with tables and glass-fronted cabinets packed with trinkets and photographs. Faded cotton sheets had been draped over most of the furniture, which looked ancient, and was probably riddled with pests. Certainly there were no spine correctors or memory fabric to shift under your weight to the most comfortable position. When I sat in the chair Hurfest nodded to, I feared that I might fall straight through.
Lat appeared in the doorway, Joph behind him. “All clear,” he said. “The flier patrols flew a general pattern over the area, but I think Diane must have taken my bait. She’ll be looking toward the northern routes.”
“Is Marie here?” Tegan asked.
He smiled at her, and I bristled. “Soon. I just got word that her rescue was successful.”
Tegan dropped into the middle of an old couch, which creaked precipitously, and Bethari curled in beside her. Joph took the other side, the three girls sandwiched together there. They all looked so different—Joph’s light brown coloring, Tegan’s sharp contrast of pale skin and dark hair, the richer hues of Bethari’s darker skin. But they all had the same expression of relief and joy.
Dr. Marie Carmen had been captured before we had been, and she was then used as bait to draw Tegan into SADU clutches. I’d never met the woman who’d performed the first successful revival procedure and then taken the subject of that process into her home, but Tegan’s foster mother had been such a strong presence in her story that I felt as if I had.
“That’s great news,” I said, meaning it. Even if Lat had been the one who brought it.
“How many fliers?” Hurfest asked.
“Everyone Diane could requisition, I imagine,” Lat said. “Which will be several hundred.”
Bethari looked as appalled as I felt, but of course it was for a different reason. “All that fuel,” she protested.
Lat’s voice was patient to the point of being patronizing. “They really won’t care about the fuel. The president wants Tegan back.”
“I’m not going back,” she said flatly. “I’d rather die.”
I’d thought the same thing. But it was an unpleasant shock to hear it from Tegan, who had, after all, had it easier with Lat. Perhaps I’d better keep the desperation of my final moments in SADU hands to myself. Or Joph. I could tell Joph. “How did you get us out?” I asked, followed by the more important question: “And why?”
Lat and Hurfest exchanged a look. It was a look that said, as the only two adults in the room, they were privy to information that they might or might not dole out to the children. Tegan saw it, too, her eyes narrowing in response.
“As soon as I was assigned to Tegan, a number of opportunities were made available,” Lat said. “Having chosen to undertake a dual rescue, the mission plan with the greatest chance of success depended on a nighttime public event with sufficient attendants to provide confusion and panic as a cover, and an operator who could both be permitted to approach Abdi and who Abdi would follow when instructed to do so.”
“A triple rescue,” Tegan said.
Lat squinted at her.
“You said dual. You rescued Marie as well.”
“Dr. Carmen’s escape was considered a separate mission,” Lat told her. “It was the dual rescue that required the most planning.”
No doubt it would have been far easier for Lat to get Tegan out alone. He must have had dozens of opportunities on tour. It was me who had been the problem.
“As it was, public events that satisfied the mission parameters were plentiful. It was likely operators that were thin on the ground.” He nodded at Joph.
“I got my mum to take me to the party,” Joph said. “She’s not part of the rescue; she wanted to prove to me that you two were fine. She’s a Victorian MP; just a backbencher, but part of the government. She really wanted to believe that you were mistaken. She wants to believe that government is good.”
“Depends on the government,” I said, thinking of my own mother.
Hurfest snorted.
Joph ignored him and continued. “I had to pester her. Eventually I told her that if she showed me you were both fine, I’d go to whatever chem research program she chose for me. She only told me about that party yesterday, so we had to scramble.”
“Fortunately, contingent on that one point, everything had been planned in tedious detail,” Hurfest added. “It wasn’t all that difficult to make it work. I stayed outside the dead-zone perimeter in the ambulance, waiting for the lights to go out—”
“How did that work?” Tegan asked.
“That was me,” Bethari said. Her voice was very flat, and she’d looked progressively less happy as the story had gone on. Now she raised her head and stared at Hurfest, a challenge in her gaze.
“It was my decision,” he said, sounding oddly kind. “Don’t blame yourself.”
“I don’t,” she said immediately, but I caught the inflection change, the shiver at the edge of her eyelids. That was a lie. Whatever had happened, she did blame herself.
“What did you do?” I asked. I was trying to make my voice gentle, but there was dread curling in my stomach. All the lights had gone out, and we’d driven in the dark for such a long time.
Bethari took a deep breath. “I thought we needed leverage. I thought, if we were going to scare the army into letting you go, we had to have something that was actually scary. So I went looking through various places and hunted on some forums and got in touch with some people.”
Bethari was a hacker. I automatically translated this as “slid into secret databases and stole classified information” and “talked to criminals about their illegal discoveries.”
“Eventually I got my hands on some half-finished plans for a… well, call it an EMP generator. It’s not, actually, but it has the same effect. Flip the switch, and it creates an electronic dead zone. Everything in that zone stops working.”
“Half-finished?” Tegan asked. “I didn’t know you were an engineer, too, Bethi.”
“I’m not. I had a lot of help.” She glanced at Hurfest.
“I put Bethari in touch with some people who I thought could assist,” he said smoothly. “Every time we came across a problem, she was able to crowdsource solutions from her contacts on the tubes—no one person had the complete solution, but by putting together the disparate parts, Bethari got the design for the whole. It was very efficient, really.”
It sounded like a good thing. In one blow, they’d knocked out all the technology Diane and her team used to control and keep track of us. At the same time, it had caused enough confusion to make escape viable.
But I still had that feeling of dread. “How big was the dead zone?” I asked.
Hurfest winced. “Twelve kilometers diameter—centered on the event hall, just beside Parliament House.”
A hundred years ago, Tegan had died on the steps of Parliament House, hit by a sniper who’d been aiming for the Prime Minister. That reminder flickered across her face then vanished. Another legacy of our imprisonment; before we’d been taken, Tegan had been very bad at swallowing or concealing her emotions.
“It wasn’t supposed to be that big,” Bethari said. There were two dark red streaks on her cheekbones, and her eyes were very bright. She kept them fixed on Hurfest. “I wanted to make a smaller, more focused version. The b
ig one was only supposed to be a threat, to show them that we could do it if we wanted to. To make them hand you over peacefully.”
“What am I missing?” Tegan asked. “There was a blackout; we got out…. What’s the problem?”
Bethari bit her lip. “It wasn’t just a blackout,” she said. “An EMP doesn’t just cut power to machines; it overloads them. A lot of things that were in the dead zone just aren’t going to work anymore.”
“Like what?”
“Like…” Bethari pulled her hands apart, conveying with that gesture a vast, empty space. “Like everything. Everything that was powered on when the EMP went just stopped.”
My mouth went dry. Almost everything had at least residual power flow, even in standby mode. If the EMP had truly taken out everything, the consequences would be massive.
No electric motors meant no lights, no air-conditioning, no food storage. The entire transport system inside the dead zone would be in chaos: Cars wouldn’t start, the safe-transport net that warded against accidents would be down, and the city’s trams and trains would have halted, bringing most of the population to a standstill. If the pulse had fried every personal computer in the zone, that meant no digital entertainment or information—not a real problem in itself. But as I knew from my confinement, the loss of a personal computer would be deeply disorienting to people who had used them before they could walk. More important, personal computers used solar batteries. If it had been an ordinary blackout, the computers would have kept going even when the mains went out. But the EMP had fried their circuits. People would have realized that something was very wrong. That explained the panic in the event hall.
That fear and confusion meant that all the people who would ordinarily be trying to find us now had much bigger problems on their hands. The police would have been trying to keep order with only antique equipment like battery-powered flashlights at their disposal. The armed forces would be wondering if this was the preface to an invasion or major attack and be scrambling accordingly, and the state government, based in the central city, would be unable to assist as all their records and communication networks had abruptly disappeared. True, as soon as new equipment could be brought into the dead zone, officials would be able to function again. But while we’d escaped, they’d been in the dark.
My stomach clenched. Enthusiastic, cheerleading Bethari had built the Save Tegan movement a weapon that was tailor-made for targeting a civilian population.
She’d meant it to be a threat only; I had no trouble believing in her intentions. But they’d used it.
Hurfest shifted, his face hard and defensive. “We had to get you out,” he said. “We were running out of time. Lat was worried that if we waited much longer there wouldn’t be much left of you to rescue. Bethari was doing her best to get the more focused version ready in time, but we just couldn’t delay any longer.”
I remembered how very nearly I’d come to suicide by bodyguard, bare seconds before my escape. He was right. But he was wrong, too. “Fires,” I said. “I heard sirens while we drove. Were there fires when the grids overloaded?”
“Probably,” Hurfest said. “That’s what the fire engines are for, though. They would have come from outside.”
“How would they know where to go, with no one able to call? And… how many hospitals were in the dead zone?”
“Two,” Bethari said, squeezing her eyes shut.
Hurfest rubbed the bridge of his nose. “They both have emergency generators; it’s standard equipment.”
“But their medical equipment doesn’t work,” I said. I was so horrified that I had to force the words through my stiff jaw. “The generators would have fired up, but everything that was turned on, everything monitoring patient health or regulating drug administration or keeping them alive won’t work. My brother’s a medical technician; you think I don’t know these things?”
Lat held up his hands for peace. “Maybe in your country that would happen. In Australia, the most vital equipment generally has safeguards and there are a number of backup equipment options—”
“Nobody has backup for every life-support system, even in your country,” I cut in. “When you flicked that switch, Lat, you killed people.”
“Innocent people,” Tegan said, her eyes dark with anger. “I wouldn’t have agreed to that, Lat. You know I wouldn’t!”
Bethari was silent beside her, hands folded tightly against her stomach.
“Now, hold on a second here,” Lat said, striving and failing for calm. “I gave up SADU, my career, my family. Tegan, I gave up everything for you.”
Hurfest’s voice was equally heated. “You have no idea of the risks we’ve taken, of what they’ll do to us if—”
“Oh, I think I do,” I said, my hand going automatically to my neck. “And that all sounds very noble. But what you’re really saying is that you devastated a huge chunk of a city in order to rescue two teenagers. You’re saying that to save Tegan and me, you condemned an unknown number of innocents.”
“Casualty estimates were gauged—”
“Who killed the guard, Lat? Joph and I nearly tripped on a body coming out of the hall.”
Tegan turned on him, her mouth opening.
“A SADU guard, Tegan,” Lat said, before she could speak. “I’m not going to apologize for shooting someone who would have killed all of us if he’d had the chance. And I don’t believe you’d cry for him either, Abdi.”
Well, that was true. I was no longer glad he’d died; that had been the shock and anger. But I wasn’t sorry he was dead.
“You made me a murderer,” Bethari said. There were tears leaking from her tightly closed eyes. “I told you I could make it smaller. I told you twelve kilometers was too much. I didn’t even know what had happened until Joph found me here.”
Lat sighed. “A smaller version wouldn’t have worked, even if there’d been time to make it. We needed sufficient confusion to cover the escape. Bethari, believe me. You saved your friends. Without you, things could never have gone so well.”
Tegan’s eyes were narrow. “Bethari’s right, Lat. Sick people in hospitals aren’t acceptable casualties!”
“Tegan,” he said, and leaned forward to catch both her hands in his. She went still and I had to fight to keep from snarling. “Trust me, Tegan. We had to get you out. People need you. You’re very, very important.”
“I’m not saying Tegan’s not important,” Bethari said shakily, wiping at her face. “I’m just saying—”
“We understand,” Hurfest said. “Believe me, it was a hard decision to make. But there was no other way.” He sounded so certain.
Abruptly, I couldn’t cope any longer. It was so typical. People decided that what they wanted overwhelmed the needs of others, that who they hurt along the way didn’t matter. And then when we told them they were wrong, we were dismissed, patronized, and ignored.
“Explain that to the dead,” I said, and surged to my feet.
Lat got between me and the door, and my prisoner’s training kicked in again. I shied away from him. You couldn’t strike a handler: That was bad; I’d be punished.
Then I remembered where I was, and who I was, and balled my fist.
“Move,” I said.
“It’s not wise to go ou—”
“Is this how it’s going to be?” I asked, directing the question at Hurfest. “You save me from one prison and put me in another?”
Hurfest’s eyes slid from me to Tegan and back again. “Of course not,” he said smoothly, and jerked his head. Lat stepped out of my way, and I checked his shoulder with mine as I went past. He actually staggered, and I felt the impact with a flush of satisfaction that radiated through my belly.
Behind me, Tegan was shouting at Hurfest. It would be almost worth staying in the room just to witness that battle, but I couldn’t stand being trapped anymore. I was moving through a narrow dusty hall, past a tiny kitchen, and out the back door, bursting onto a gravel path that wound through an overgrown garden
.
The sun stood overhead in the pitiless sky.
People died because of you, I thought, and had to swallow back my bile. I wanted to vomit out the horror of that thought, but I couldn’t get rid of the knowledge so easily. It had happened—without my knowledge, without my consent, but it had happened for me. So that Tegan and I could be free.
If they had told me, if I had known that my escape would come at this cost, I wasn’t sure what I would have done. Would I have been able to refuse this plan, tell them to find another or else leave us there?
I think I would have escaped anyway, I realized, and then my stomach gave in, and I really was sick all over a clump of dry weeds.
I felt better afterward, as if I’d purged myself of some poison. It wasn’t as if the situation itself had changed, but I’d confronted the worst about myself and found I could survive it if I had to.
I heard light footsteps crunching on the stones behind me. I turned, expecting Tegan come to argue with me or cry with me or hold me, but it was Joph. She had my discarded blanket in one hand and a computer in the other. Her soft brown eyes were sympathetic.
“How’s your neck?” she asked.
“Fine. Sore, but not too painful.”
She nodded and handed me the blanket. I tucked it around my shoulders to be polite, but it was actually much warmer outside. From here, I could see that the house was constructed out of uneven lumps of stone. The roof was corrugated tin, flaky green in places, rust brown in others.
The garden was dry. There was what could have been a vegetable patch to one side of the gravel path, and a riot of flashy daisies to the other, their colors even brighter in the unforgiving sunlight. The path itself led to a shed, also made of stone and tin. There were vehicles in there, casually covered with old tarpaulins; presumably the one that had brought us here was one of them. There had been living trees encircling the place once, but now they were dead wood, held upright by the tangles of their desiccated roots.
Djibouti didn’t have a lot of greenery. Forests didn’t comfort me the way I knew they did Joph; green growing things made me think of slime, of mold cultures grown in gel solutions in my biological sciences studies. But even I could tell this place wasn’t meant to be so barren. There should have been more flowers than just the daisies, colorful survivors that they were. The trees should be rich with summer growth, not bare as dead bone. But trees needed water, and there just wasn’t enough to go round—for them, or for us.
