“So you could get into Boston.” Even better.
“It is kind of beautiful at night, though,” Ouellette remarked. “For all its carcinogenic properties. Almost like the northern lights.”
Clarke watched her without speaking.
“Don’t you think?”
She decided not to push it. “Night looks pretty much like day to me. Just not as much color.”
“Right. The eyes.” Ouellette gave her a sideways look. “Don’t you ever get tired of daylight all the time?”
“Not really.”
“You should try taking them out now and then, just for a change. Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot.”
Clarke smiled. “You sound like a fortune cookie.”
Ouellette shrugged. “It wouldn’t hurt your bedside manner, either. Patients might relate to you better without the affect, you know?”
“There’s not much I can do for your patients anyway.”
“Oh, that’s not—”
“And if there is,” Clarke continued, her voice conspicuously neutral, “then they can accept my help without dictating my wardrobe.”
“Rrrright,” Ouellette said after a moment. “Sorry.”
They sat in silence for a while. Finally Ouellette threw Miri back into gear and cued her music— an adrenaline discord of saxophone and electric percussion at serious odds with her usual tastes.
“We’re not stopping here?” Clarke asked.
“Goosebumps keep me awake. Probably not all that good for Miri either. I just thought you’d enjoy the view, is all.”
They headed further along the road. The prickling of Clarke’s skin faded in moments.
Ouellette kept driving. The music segued into a spoken interlude with musical accompaniment—some story about a hare who’d lost his spectacles, whatever those were. “What is this?” Clarke asked.
“TwenCen stuff. I can turn it off if you—”
“No. That’s fine.”
Ouellette killed it anyway. Miri drove on in silence.
“We could stop anytime,” Clarke said after a few minutes.
“A little further. It’s dangerous around the cities.”
“I thought we were past the field.”
“Not cancer. People.” Ouellette tripped the autopilot and sat back in the bucket seat. “They tend to hang around just outside the claves and get envious.”
“Miri can’t handle them?”
“Miri can slice and dice them a dozen ways to Sunday. I’d just as soon avoid the confrontation.”
Clarke shook her head. “I can’t believe Augusta wouldn’t have let us in.”
“I told you. The claves keep to themselves.”
“Then why even bother sending you out? If everyone up here is so bloody self-centered, why help out the wildlands in the first place?”
Ouellette snorted softly. “Where’ve you been for the past five years?” She held up her hand: “Stupid question. We’re not out here for altruism, Laurie. The MI fleet, the salt licks—”
“Salt licks?”
“Feeding stations. It’s all just to keep the ferals from storming the barricades. If we bring them a few morsels, maybe they won’t be quite so motivated to bring ßehemoth into our own backyards.”
It made the usual sense, Clarke had to admit. And yet...
“No. They wouldn’t send their best and brightest out for a lousy crowd-control assignment.”
“You got that right.”
“Yeah, but you—”
“Me? I’m the best and the brightest?” Ouellette slapped her forehead. “What in the name of all that’s living gave you that idea?”
“I saw you work”
“You saw me take orders from a machine without screwing up too much. A few day’s training, I could teach you to do as well for most of these cases.”
“That’s not what I meant. I’ve seen doctors in action before, Taka. You’re different. You—” One of Ouellette’s own phrases popped into her head: bedside manner.
“You care,” she finished simply.
“Ah.” Ouellette said. And then, looking straight ahead: “Don’t confuse compassion with competence, Laurie. It’s dangerous.”
Clarke studied her. “Dangerous. That’s a strange word to use.”
“In my profession, competence doesn’t kill people,” Ouellette said. “Compassion can.”
“You killed someone?”
“Hard to tell. That’s the thing about incompetence. It’s not nearly so clear-cut as deliberate malice.”
“How many?” Clarke asked.
Ouellette looked at her. “Are you keeping score?”
“No. Sorry.” Clarke looked away.
But if I was, she thought, I’d blow you out of the water. She knew it wasn’t a fair comparison. One death, she supposed, could be a greater burden than a thousand if it mattered enough to you. If you bothered to get involved.
If you had compassion.
Finally they pulled into a remote clearing further up the slope. Ouellette folded down her pallet and turned in with a few monosyllables. Clarke sat unmoving in her seat, watching the gray-on-gray clarity of the nightscape beyond the windshield: gray meadow grasses, charcoal ranks of spindly conifer, scabby outcroppings of worn bedrock. Overcast, tissue-paper sky.
From behind, faint snores.
She fished behind her seat and snagged her backpack. The eyecap vial had settled to the very bottom, a victim of chronic inattention. She held it in her hand for a long time before popping it open.
Each eyecap covered the entire visible cornea, and then some. Suction tugged at her eyeballs as she pulled them off; they broke free with a soft popping sound.
It was as if her eyes, not just their coverings, had been pulled out. It was like going blind. It was like being in the deep sea, far from any light.
It wasn’t altogether unpleasant.
At first there was nothing, anywhere; irises grow lazy when photocollagen does all their heavy lifting. After a while, though, they remembered to dilate. A swathe of dark gray brightened the void directly ahead: faint nocturnal light, through the windshield.
She felt her way out of the MI and leaned against its flank. She let the door hiss shut as softly as possible. The night air cooled her face and hands.
Diffuse brightness registered at the corner of her eye, fading every time she focused on it. Before long she could tell the sky from the treeline. Dim, roiling gray over serrated shadow; it seemed marginally brighter to the east.
She wandered a few meters and looked back: Miri’s smooth, startling edges almost glimmered against this fractal landscape. To the west, through a break in the cloud, she saw stars.
She walked.
She tripped over roots and holes half a dozen times, for want of illumination. But the color scheme was pretty much the same as that served up by her eyecaps, gray on gray on black. The only difference was that contrast and brightness were cranked way down.
When the sky began brightening to the east she saw that she’d been climbing up a denuded gravelly hillside populated by stumps, an old clear-cut that had never recovered. It must have been like this long before ßehemoth had arrived on the scene.
Everything’s dying, she’d said.
And Ouellette had replied That was happening anyway...
Clarke looked down the way she’d come. Miri sat like a toy on the edge of what must have been an old logging road. Brown trees lined the far side of the road, and the hill she stood on to either side; they’d been razored away down the swath she’d just climbed.