And then Jennifer Sharifi and the rest of the Sleepless really would be safe.
Will was pouring champagne. Jennifer never drank—it made her feel in less than perfectly cold control—but this time she couldn’t stay outside the circle of her people. They’d done it. They were safe.
She raised her glass. The room quieted. In her calm, low-pitched voice Jennifer said, “Thanks to the efforts of everyone in this room, we have finally won. The Sleepers have had their own biochemistry turned against them. In the next hour, drones will penetrate the Pentagon, Washington Mall, Kennedy Spaceport, and Manhattan East enclaves. No Sleeper will die. But no one will ever be able to threaten us again, except in those ways we already understand and can counter. We will be in control, if only because there will never again be any unknown devils unleashed against us. Let us therefore drink to the devil we know.”
Laughter. Drained glasses. And then Strukov’s face appeared on the main screen.
“Ms. Sharifi. You and your people, without doubt, now celebrate the successful penetration of the Brookhaven. I, too, am pleased; I was very eager to see if we could accomplish this. But I cannot permit—”
“Oh, my God!” David O’Donnell said from the security console. “Launch. Code sixteen A. Repeat, launch.”
“—you to continue with this project. I, too, am a Sleeper, of course. And although I feel no loyalty to my own kind, I am, naturally, as self-protective as they. Or as you. So—”
Brilliant light exploded under their feet, somewhere between the floor panel and the rotating planet thousands of miles below.
“Sanctuary’s countermissile array destroyed,” said David O’Donnell. “Launching backup.”
“—so no more of the Peruvian drones will fire themselves. And since we both know from the experience of La Solana that only the nuclear can destroy completely, I fear it is the nuclear I myself am forced to use. Do you know La Rochefoucauld on superiority? ‘Le vrai moyen d’être trompé… ’ ”
Safe, Jennifer thought numbly. I thought we were finally safe.
“ ‘… c’est de se croire plus fin que les autres.’ ”
“Countermissile array number two destroyed,” David O’Donnell choked out.
Jennifer took a step forward. She thought for an uncontrolled moment that Strukov’s face on the wall screen had been replaced by Miranda’s.
Sanctuary orbital exploded in a burst of brilliant lethal light.
Twenty-one
Lizzie woke in a small bare room, no more than eight feet by four feet, with windowless foamcast walls. Three walls. She sat up on the bed, which was only a platform jutting from the wall, and looked for the missing wall. A woman sat on a chair, facing her. Behind the woman, who wore a blue uniform, stretched a featureless corridor.
“Hello,” the woman said. She was beautiful like Vicki was beautifuclass="underline" genemod. Black, black hair, brown eyes, skin like clean snow. The fourth wall, Lizzie realized, was a Y-shield.
“You’re in Manhattan East Security Headquarters, Patterson Protect Corporation, legal franchisee. I’m Officer Foster. You’re Elizabeth Francy, and you were picked up for breaking and entering, criminal trespass. Would you like to tell me how you penetrated the enclave?”
Lizzie patted the outside of her pocket. The purple eyeball was gone, which meant Officer Foster already knew how she’d gotten in. Lizzie stared silently.
“Ms. Francy, you don’t seem to understand. Manhattan East is private property. Patterson Protect is fully authorized to deal with intra-enclave police matters. We also can involve the New York Police Department—if we choose to do so. Criminal trespass is a felony charge. And murder is a capital crime.” She held up Tish’s eyeball. “Patterson Protect can—and will—use truth drugs, as authorized under the law.”
“I didn’t murder anyone! And I need, me, to see someone in here. Dr. Jackson Aranow. To tell him something important!”
“Dr. Jackson Aranow,” the cop said, and sat silent. Lizzie guessed a system was speaking information into her ear mike. After a moment, she said, “Why do you—”
The door somewhere in the corridor behind her flung open. Running feet. A boy appeared, no more than fourteen, dressed in the same uniform, “INTERN” blazoned across the collar. His face showed excited shock. “Officer Foster! Come quick, the newsgrid—”
“Daniel,” the cop said tonelessly.
“—says that—”
“Daniel.”
“—somebody blew up Sanctuary with a nuclear bomb!”
Slowly Officer Foster rose. She followed the boy down the corridor, but not before Lizzie had seen her parade of successive expressions: shock, calculation, pleasure.
Blew up Sanctuary.
Lizzie leaped off the sleeping platform. Her legs didn’t falter; whatever neuropharm the security ’bot had used didn’t leave lingering effects. She ran her hands over the Y-shield that formed the fourth wall of the cell. No openings. No machinery on this side of the shield. No way out.
Blew up Sanctuary. Who? Why? With all the Sleepless inside? It might have been Miranda Sharifi, at war with her grandmother… but why now? Could it somehow be connected with the fear neuropharm?
None of it made any sense.
And Lizzie was tired of trying to figure it out. Tired, angry, scared. Of walking to New York to find Vicki and Dr. Aranow. Of being attacked by Livers and donkeys and ’bots. Of being threatened with arrest for murder. Even of datadipping. She was a mother. She belonged home with her baby. And as soon as she found Vicki, or Dr. Aranow, or anybody to turn this mess over to, that’s exactly where she was going.
“Hey!” Lizzie yelled, experimentally. No one answered. Officer Foster didn’t return.
Lizzie started in on the standard spoken codes, to see if she could get any sort of building system to respond to her. Nothing happened.
She settled in to wait.
An hour passed. Wasn’t anybody going to come back to question her? Wasn’t anybody left in New York? What if whoever blew up Sanctuary sent a bomb to Manhattan East… well, then she’d never know about it before she was dead. But what if somebody had set off the fear neuropharm here? Would the cops just go home and stay there, afraid of anything new, leaving Lizzie in her cell just to rot?
Everything in here was synthetic. Nothing was consumable.
But there had to be a ’bot to bring something to feed on. And water. And a place to piss… She spied the hole in the floor.
Another hour dragged by. Lizzie tried to think carefully, to plan. All right, if no one came and nothing happened by the time she counted to a hundred… all right, two hundred.
Time up.
“Uhhhuhhhhuhhh!” Lizzie shrieked. She grabbed a few nose hairs in her right nostril and yanked. It hurt tremendously. Immediately mucus flowed from her nose, her heart began to pound, and she could feel the color rise in her face. She yanked more nose hairs, tears streaming from her eyes and snot from her nose. Then she began to breathe in quick shallow pants, until she started to hyperventilate. She threw herself on the narrow foamcast floor.
“Medical assistance required,” the cell said. “Abnormal respiratory pattern. Blood pressure abruptly elevated by forty points over thirty, heart rate one-thirty, brain scan shows—”