Suddenly she had a shadow. It stretched down the slope like the outline of a murdered giant. She turned: a fluorescent red sun was just cresting the hill. Ribbed clouds above glowed radioactive salmon. They reminded Clarke of wave-sculpted corrugations on a sandy seabed, but she couldn’t ever remember seeing colors so intense.
Losing your sight every night might not be so bad, she reflected, if this is how you get it back in the morning.
The moment passed, of course. The sun had only had a few degrees to work with, a narrow gap of clear distant sky between the land below and the clouds overhead. Within a few minutes it had risen behind a thick bank of stratus, faded to a pale bright patch in an expanse of featureless gray.
Alyx, she thought.
Ouellette would be up soon, steeling herself for another pointless day spent in the service of the greater good. Making a difference that made no difference.
Maybe not the greater good, Clarke thought. Maybe, the greater need.
She started down the hill. Ouellette was climbing into daylight by the time Clarke reached the road. She blinked against the gray morning, and blinked again when she saw the rifter’s naked eyes.
“You said you could teach me,” Clarke said.
Stargazer
She’s okay, Dave, Taka said to her dead husband. She’s a bit scary at first—Crys would take one look at her and run out of the room. Definitely not much of a people person.
But she’s fine, Dave, really. And if you can’t be here with me, at least she pulls her own weight.
Miri drove down old I-95 through the ramshackle remains of a town called Freeport; it had died with the departure of the fish and the tourists, long before ßehemoth had made everything so definitive. South of town they pulled onto a side road that ended at a secluded cove. Taka was relieved to see that the scraggly woodlands above the high-tide line were still mostly green. She cheered them on.
“Why here, exactly?” Laurie wondered as they debarked.
“Electric eel.” Taka unlocked the charge cap on the side of the vehicle and took the socket in one hand. The cable unspooled behind her as she headed down slope. Cobble slipped and clattered beneath her feet.
Laurie paced her to the water’s edge. “What?”
“On the bottom somewhere.” Kneeling, Taka fished the hailer out of her windbreaker and slipped it into the water. “Hopefully the little bastard still comes when you call him.”
A small eruption of bubbles, twenty meters offshore. A moment later the eel surfaced in their wake and squirmed towards them, orange and serpentine. It beached itself at Taka’s feet, a giant fluorescent sperm with a tail trailing off into the depths. It even had fangs: a two-pronged metal mouth disfiguring the surface of the bulb.
She plugged the cable into it. The bulb hummed.
“They stashed these things here and there,” she explained, “so we’re not completely dependent on the lifters.”
Laurie eyed the calm water in the cove. “Ballard stack?”
“CAESAR reactor.”
“You’re kidding.”
Taka shook her head. “Self-contained, self-maintained, disposable. Basically just a big block with a couple of radiator fins. Drop it into any open body of water and it’s good to go. It doesn’t even have any controls—it automatically matches voltage to whatever the line draws.”
Laurie whistled.
Taka scooped up a flat stone and skipped it across the water. “So when’s Ken going to show up?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether he got into Portland.” And then, after a curious hesitation: “And whether he ditched us back at Penobscot.”
“He didn’t,” Ken said.
They turned. He was standing behind them.
“Hi.” Laurie’s face didn’t change, but some subtle tension seemed to ebb from her body. “How’d it go?”
He shook his head.
It was almost as if the past two weeks hadn’t happened. Ken reappeared, as ominous and indecipherable as ever: and just like that, Laurie faded away. It was a subtle transition—some slight hardening of the way she held herself, a small flattening of affect—but to Taka, the change was as clear as a slap in the face. The woman she had come to know as an ally and even a friend submerged before her eyes. In its place stood that humanoid cipher who had first confronted her on the slopes of a guttering wasteland, fourteen days before.
Ken and Laurie conversed a little ways down the beach while Miri recharged. Taka couldn’t hear what they said, but doubtless Ken was reporting on his Portland expedition. Debriefing, Taka thought, watching them. For Ken, that word seemed to fit. And the trip had not gone well, judging by the body language and the look on his face.
Then again, he always looks like that, she reminded herself. She tried to imagine what it might take to wipe away that chronic deadpan expression and replace it with something approaching a real emotion. Maybe you’d have to threaten his life. Maybe a fart in an elevator would do it.
They headed back into town once Miri was sated. Lubin crouched in the space between the bucket seats, the women on either side. Taka got the sense of gigabytes passing between the other two, although they spoke perhaps a half-dozen words each.
Freeport was another regular stop on the trap line; Taka pulled up at a parking lot off Main and Howard, beside the gashed façade of a defunct clothing store called (she always smiled at it) The Gap. The town as a whole, like most of them, was long dead. Individual cells still lingered on in the rotting corpus, though, and some were already waiting when Miri arrived. Taka blared Stravinsky for a few minutes anyway, to spread the word. Others appeared over time, emerging from the shells of buildings and the leaky hulls of old fishing boats kept afloat in some insane hope that the witch might be afraid of water.
She and Laurie got to work. Ken stayed out of sight near the back of the cab; shadows and the dynamic tinting of Miri’s windows rendered him all but invisible from the outside. Taka asked about Portland over an assembly-line of broken arms and rotting flesh. Laurie shrugged, pleasant but distant: “He could’ve got in all right. Just not without getting noticed.”
No surprise there. A scorched zone surrounded Portland’s landside perimeter, a flat, sensor-riddled expanse across which Taka couldn’t imagine anyone crossing undetected. An enervated, membranous skin guarded the seaward approaches. You couldn’t just sneak into the place—into any clave, for that matter—and Ken evidently lacked the resources to break in by force.
Every now and then Taka would glance absently at the windshield as she moved among her patients. Sometimes she caught sight of two faint, glimmering pinpoints looking back, motionless and unblinking behind the dark reflections.
She didn’t know what he might be doing in there. She didn’t ask.
It was as if night were a black film laid over the world, and the stars mere pinpricks through which daylight passed.
“There,” Ken said, pointing.
Fine needles, three or four of them. Their tips etched the film high in the west, left faint scratches across Bootes. They faded in seconds; Taka would never have seen them on her own.