Taka shook her head. This was insane. She had a few precious moments before Ken and Laurie tracked her down. What she decided in that interval might decide the fate of New England—of North America, even. She couldn’t afford to be hasty, but there was no time—.
I need time. I just need to get away for a while. I need to work this out. She reached out and thumbed the ignition pad.
Miri stayed dark.
She tried again. Nothing. Nothing but the memory of Ken lurking in this very cab, eyes aglitter, surrounded by all that circuitry he seemed to know so much about.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, he was staring in at her.
Ken opened her door. “Anything wrong?” he asked.
Taka sighed. Her abrasions oozed and stung in the silence.
Laurie opened the passenger door and climbed in. “Let’s head back,” she said, almost gently.
“I—why are—”
“Go on,” Ken said, gesturing at the dashboard.
Taka put her thumb on the pad. Miri hummed instantly to life.
She stepped out of the cab to let Lubin enter. Overhead, the heavens were crammed with stars.
Oh, David, she thought. How I wish you were here.
Sleeper
Everything changed at ten-thirty the next morning.
The bike skidded into view just past Bow and promptly got into an argument with its rider over how best to deal with a pothole the size of Arkansas. It was a late-model Kawasaki from just before the witch, and it had ground-effect stabilizers that made it virtually untippable; otherwise, both man and machine would have gone end-over-end into a solar-powered billboard that (even after all these years) flickered with dead-celebrity endorsements for Johnson & Johnson immune boosters. Instead, the Kawasaki leaned sideways at some impossibly acute angle, righted itself en route, and slewed to a stop between Miri and a handful of feral children looking for freebies.
Ken’s white eyes appeared in the shadowy darkness of the gap in The Gap, behind the newcomer.
The rider was all limbs and scraps, topped by a ragged thatch of butchered brown hair. Barely visible against a backdrop of grimy skin, a sparse moustache said maybe sixteen. “You the doctor with the missiles?”
“I’m the doctor who’s interested in the missiles,” Taka told him.
“I’m Ricketts. Here.” He reached under a threadbare thermochrome jacket and hauled out a ziplock bag with some very dirty laundry wadded up inside.
Taka took the bag between thumb and forefinger. “What’s this?”
Ricketts ticked off a list on his fingers: “Gauchies, a shirt, and one sock. They had to, you know, improvise. I had the only bag, and I was way over on another run.”
Laurie climbed out of the cab. “Tak?”
“Hullo,” Ricketts said. His mouth split in an appreciative grin; one tooth chipped, two missing, the rest in four shades of yellow. His eyes ran down Lenie like a bar coder. Not that Taka could blame him; out here, anyone with clear skin and all their teeth qualified as a sex symbol almost by default.
She snapped her fingers to get him back to the real world. “What is this, exactly?”
“Right.” Ricketts came back to point. “Weg and Moricon found one of those canister thingies you put the word out about. It was leaking this shit all over. Not like, rivers of the stuff, you know, just like sweating it almost. So they soaked it up in that”—a gesture at the bag—“and handed it off to me. I’ve been driving all night.”
“Where’s this from?” Taka asked.
“You mean, where we found it? Burlington.”
It was almost too good to be true.
“That’s in Vermont,” he added helpfully.
Ken was suddenly at Rickett’s shoulder. “There was a missile drop on Vermont?” he said.
The boy turned, startled. Saw Ken. Saw the eyes.
“Nice caps,” he said approvingly. “I was into rifters myself back before, you know...”
Rifters, Taka remembered. They’d run geothermal stations way off the west coast...
“The missiles,” Ken said. “Do you remember how many there were?”
“Dunno. Like, maybe four or five that I saw, but you know.”
“Were there lifters? Was there a burn?”
“Yeah, someone said there might be. That was why we all scrambled.”
“But was there?”
“I dunno. I didn’t hang around. You guys wanted this stuff fast, right?”
“Yes. Yes.” Taka looked at the fouled, greasy wad in the bag. It was the most beautiful sight she’d ever seen. “Ricketts, thank you. You have no idea how important this could be.”
“Yeah, well if you really wanna be grateful how about a charge off your rig?” He slapped the bike between his thighs. “This thing is like down to the moho, I’ve got maybe another ten klicks and—or hey, is there maybe some kinda reward?”
The reward, Taka thought, unlocking the umbilical for Rickett’s bike, is that all of us might not be dead in ten years.
She fed the treasure into the sample port with tender reverence, let Miri slice away the packaging and squeeze the gold from the dross. And there was gold, evident as much in what wasn’t there as in what was: ßehemoth was far below the usual baseline in this sample. Almost negligible.
Something’s killing the witch. That initial explanation, that validation of a belief already grown from hope to near-certainty over the past weeks, threatened to squash all the scientific caution Taka’s training had instilled in her. She forced caution onto her excitement. She would run the tests. She would do the legwork. But some squealing inner undergrad knew it would only confirm what she already knew, what this first glorious result suggested. Something was killing the witch.
And there it was. Mixed in with the molds and the fungi and the fecal coliform, it glimmered like a string of pearls half-buried in mud: a genetic sequence that Miri’s database didn’t recognize. She brought it up, and blinked. That can’t be right. She whistled through her teeth.
“What?” Laurie asked at her elbow.
“This is going to take longer than I thought,” Taka said.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Maybe we have,” Ken said.
“I don’t think so. Not unless you’ve—” Taka stopped. Miri was flashing an interface alert at her: someone asking for download access.
She looked at Ken. “Is that you?”
He nodded. “It’s the sequence for a new bug we encountered recently.”
“Encountered where?”
“Nowhere local. An isolated area.”
“What, a lab? A mountaintop? The Mariana Trench?”
Ken didn’t answer. His data knocked patiently at Miri’s front door.
Finally, Taka let it in. “You think this is the same thing?” she asked as the system filtered it for nasties.
“It’s possible.”
“You had it all the while, and this is the first time you’ve shown it to me.”