She drove the back roads and checked derelict dwellings looking for business, for people too weak to seek her out. She queried her patients: did they know anyone who had come down with high fever, soreness in the joints, sudden weakness?
Nothing.
She thought of her friend, Achilles Desjardins. She wondered if he was still alive, or if he had died when Spartacus rewired his brain. The circuits that made him who he was had been changed, after all. He had been changed. Maybe he’d been changed so much that he didn’t even exist any more. Maybe he was a whole new being, living in Desjardins’s head, running off his memories.
One thing seemed to have stayed the same, though. Desjardins was still one of the trigger fingers, still entrusted to kill the many to save the multitude. Maybe someday—maybe soon—he’d have to do that here. Lenie Clarke realized as much: she might be wrong. Extreme measures might prove necessary.
Not yet, though. If Seppuku gestated in the ghost town of Freeport, it was laying low. Lenie Clarke did likewise. In the meantime, Ricketts was her little secret.
For as long as he lasted, anyway. It wasn’t looking good.
She stepped dripping from the diver ’lock in Phocoena’s tail. Ricketts was wetter than she was.
His skin was beyond pink; it was so flushed it almost looked sunburned. He’d long since stripped off his rags, and now lay naked on a pallet that could soak up perspiration barely faster than he produced it.
None of his biotelemetry was in the red yet, according to the panel. That was something.
He had the headset on, but he turned his head at the sound of her entrance. The blind, cowled face seemed to look right through her. “Hi.” The smile on his face was an absurd paradox.
“Hi,” she said, stepping to the cycler on the opposite bulkhead. “Hungry?” She was only filling the silence; the drip in his arm kept him fed as well as medicated.
He shook his head. “Thanks. Busy.”
In VR, perhaps. The handpad lay discarded by his knees, but there were other interfaces.
“This is great,” he murmured.
Clarke looked at him. How can you say that? she wondered. How can you just act as though there’s nothing wrong? Don’t you know you’re dying?
But of course he probably didn’t. If Phocoena couldn’t cure him, at least it wasn’t letting him suffer: it kept his fluids up, gagged internal alarms, soothed nerves when they burned with fever or nausea. And it wasn’t just ßehemoth’s ravages that the medbed would have swept under the rug. Ricketts’s whole life must have been an ongoing litany of low-level discomfort, chronic infections, parasite loads, old injuries badly healed. All those baseline aches and pains would be gone too, as far as this boy could tell. He probably felt better than he had in years. He probably thought his weakness would pass, that he was actually getting better.
The only way he’d know otherwise would be if Lenie Clarke told him the truth.
She turned from the cycler and climbed forward into the cockpit. Systems telltales winked and wriggled under the dark crystal of the pilot’s dash. There was something vaguely off about those readouts, something Clarke couldn’t quite—
“It’s so clean in here,” Ricketts said.
He wasn’t in VR. He wasn’t playing games.
He’d hacked into nav.
She straightened so fast her head cracked against the overhead viewport. “What are you doing in there? That’s not—”
“There’s no wildlife at all,” he went on, amazed. “Not even, like, a worm, far as I can tell. And everything’s so, so...” he fell silent, groping for the word.
She was back at his cage. Ricketts lay staring at Phocoena’s pristine datascape, emaciated, anesthetized, lost in wonder.
“Whole,” he said at last.
She reached out. The membrane tugged gently at her fingertips, webbed her fingers, stretched back along her forearm. She briefly touched his shoulder. His head rolled in her direction, not so much an act of will as of gravity.
“How are you doing that?” she asked.
“Doing...? Oh. Saccadal keyboard. You know. Eye movements.” He smiled weakly. “Easier’n the handpad.”
“No, I mean, how did you get into Phocoena?”
“Wasn’t I supposed to?” He pushed the eyephones up on a forehead beaded with sweat and stared, frowning. He seemed to be having trouble focusing on her. “You said I could use the onboard.”
“I meant games.”
“Oh,” Ricketts said. “I don’t really...you know, I didn’t...”
“It’s okay,” she told him.
“I was just looking around. Didn’t rewrite anything. It’s not like there was security or, you know.” Then added, a moment later, “Hardly any.”
Clarke shook her head. Ken would kill me if he knew I’d let this kid in. He’d at least kick my ass for not putting a few passwords in place.
Something scratched at the back of her mind, something Ricketts had just said. You said I could use the onboard. I was just looking around. I didn’t rewrite any—
“Wait a second,” she said, “Are you saying you could rewrite the nav code if you wanted to?”
Ricketts licked his lips. “Prob’ly not. Don’t even really know what it’s for. I mean, I could tweak it all right, but it’d just be like random changes.”
“But you’re saying you can code.”
“Well, yeah. Kinda.”
“Out there in the wilds. Poking around in the ruins. You learned to code.”
“No more’n anyone else.” He seemed honestly confused. “What, you think the claves took all our watches and stuff before they hived up? You think we don’t have electricity or something?”
Of course there’d be power sources. Left-over Ballard Stacks, private windmills, the photoelectric paint that kept those stupid billboards hawking neutriceuts and fashion accessories into the middle of the apocalypse itself. But that hardly meant—
“You can code,” she murmured, incredulous even as she remembered the programming tips she’d seen on public television.
“You can’t grow a little code here and there, you can forget about using your watch ’cept for time and bulls. How’d you think I found you guys, you think GPS fixes itself when worms and Shredders get in there?”
He was breathing fast and shallow, as if the effort of so many words had winded him. But he was proud, too, Clarke could tell. Feral Kid On Last Legs Impresses Exotic Older Woman.
And she was impressed, despite herself.
Ricketts could code.
She showed him her Cohen board. Curled up in his cage he tapped his own headset, arm wobbling with the effort. He frowned, apparently taken aback by his own weakness.
“So pipe it through,” he said after a moment
She shook her head. “No wireless. Too risky. It might get out.”
He looked at her knowingly. “Lenie?”
“I think they call it a—a shredder.”
He nodded. “Shredders, Lenies, Madonnas. Same thing.”
“It keeps crashing.”