I didn’t move or breathe.
“You pill freak, where are you?” A blast of static came from the screen as if Xavid had huffed at it. “Fucking useless cousin!” he muttered. A second later, it shut off.
While Xavid’s Ültra bombast and complete hatred of me weren’t surprising, what was his obviously incompetent cousin doing driving my car? And why was Father’s hairdresser hiring key personnel?
Grasping the left steering stick, I turned off Full and flipped Cruise. The car didn’t move.
“How do you make this thing go?” I asked. My unconscious driver had no advice. The middle screen came on again. Only this time it wasn’t Xavid, but a diagram. At the bottom was a teardrop, which I guessed represented my car, and at the top was a blinking light. Looking through the windshield, I saw nothing. A moment later, though, I saw the familiar shine of a Loop car on the horizon.
Was it Nora, returning to help? Or was it Father and his orange satin coming to get me? Or was it just some other car? And what would happen when it blasted past me? When I had been on the road, the winds from the passing cars pummeled me. I knew that the vibrating skin on Loop cars had something to do with their stability, but if we weren’t moving, I didn’t think it worked.
Bending my head until I was against the driver’s shins, I saw three more knobs below labeled Tempo, Track, and Mode. I gave Tempo a twist and the car barreled forward into the other lane. Grabbing the left steering stick, I leaned it hard the other way, but not before we slammed into the wall, and a horrible twisting metal sound reverberated all the way down the side.
The center screen blinked the word collision as if I had no idea. The right showed a diagram with several red arrows, presumably where I had just caused damage. I maneuvered the car back into the right lane and just as I did, the on-coming car blasted past us and knocked us against the other wall. The screens lit up again.
Seconds later, I had centered the car and we were moving fast. Soon, I saw an exit sign to America-3 and made the wide turn. I was no longer on the Loop proper, but a tributary heading north.
“Find Walter Kez,” I said to the screens. The center one displayed a map, and it didn’t look far. Less then fifteen minutes later, I switched from Full to Decay and then Off. The car came to an easy stop. I had made it!
Once I had extricated myself from the pilot’s cabin, I turned to get a look at the Kez residence and the surroundings.
The house was just two stories made of a blush-colored brick. The windows on the second story were covered over with red-painted wood. Fifteen feet from me was the matching red front door centered on a dilapidated front porch. For about half browned fields of corn.
The front door opened. Walter stepped out. He wore a silver jacket over an undershirt. His hair was a mess, and he looked sleepy. “Elle’s not here!” he shouted, as if reluctant to come closer.
“My driver’s injured,” I said. “Can you help him?”
He turned and darted back in.
While I waited, I told myself that this was the slubs—not a terrible area obviously, but the slubs anyway. Had Father come to look at their place? Did he have any idea who he was trying to merge with? Sure, they could have some amazing new technology behind those covered-over windows on the second story, something that might even save RiverGroup, but I doubted it.
Walter came back out, pulling on the same light-grey suit jacket as he had worn before, and I figured it was the only one he owned. Behind him was the other nanny.
“Where is the patient?” she asked, with a modicum of medical authority. I motioned to the pilot door and while she stuck her head in, Walter dug a toe into the dirt.
“You probably shouldn’t be here.”
“I know, but do you have any more of that ARU?”
“Oh,” he said, pouting, “sorry. I ate the last one.”
“Can we get more?”
“My sister has the car. She’s in Yooku getting ready for the show.” Peering up, he asked, “Aren’t you going to marry her at midnight?”
Glancing out at the dusty cornfields, I felt far away from everything. I said, “I don’t know.”
His nanny had managed to pull out the injured driver. She held him in her arms as a mother might cradle a baby.
“He’s bloody!” said Walter, stepping back.
I asked, “Will he be all right?”
She nodded once then took him back to the house.
“Do you have someone who can drive my car?”
He said he did and he directed us around the main building to a small slubber shed of a house ten feet square. As he knocked on the black door, he said, “She’s very nice.
A young girl, in loose beige pants and a long, ugly unwoven undershirt, answered the door. She didn’t look especially pleased to see Walter, and her eyes were heavy as though his knock woke her.
“We’re going to buy ARU. We need you to drive Michael Rivers’ Loop car.”
This child could drive a Loop car?
Leaning around Walter, she peered at me as if she were the one unsure. “The Michael Rivers?” she asked, as she wiped her wet nose.
“See!” he said, teasingly. “I told you I know him!”
Curling a lip, she asked, “What are you doing here?”
Once I had a better look, I decided she was probably in her twenties. “Trying,” I said, emphasizing the word because I was beginning to doubt my decision to come here, “to get ARU.”
“For you?” she wanted to know.
She rolled her eyes, as if she didn’t believe. When I showed her my car, the first thing she did was walk all the way around it, dragging her finger over the surface.
“It’s nice, but we’ll probably barely get three point two.” Turning and squinting accusingly at me, she added, “Someone scraped off a bunch of the fast fibers.”
“Fine,” I said, unhappy with her manner, but at least semi-confident she could drive. I asked Walter, “Where do we get the stuff?”
I wanted to collapse. After all I had gone through to get the place was on the other side of the globe, hours and hours away. We would never make it in time.
Wiping her nose again, the girl asked, “What about the Arctic pass?”
“What’s that?”
She turned and spoke toward the north presumably. “Supposed to be part of the new Loop, but they never finished.”
I asked, “Is it safe?”
Starting toward the pilot door, she said, “Nope,” and crawled in.
Walter grunted and stepped on a waterbug almost as big as his foot. Gritting his teeth in disgust, he said, “Come on! She’s good.”
The Artic pass turned out to be a decrepit one-lane, floating metal bridge that stretched across the North Pole. It rose one hundred feet above the blood-red water and the thousands of brown and orange junks that covered the ocean like water birds. The bridge had no walls, no guardrails, and swayed back and forth in the currents. Gripping the upholstery of my seat, as if to hang on and help steer, it was like riding a wild bull, especially since the road wasn’t surfaced, and it felt like we were thumping over railroad ties.
Walter threw up into his handkerchief half a dozen times. Several of the windows cracked, but held together. The main screen snapped and showered the floor with bits of glass and glowing goo. The overhead light blinked out and when the auxiliaries came on, two of them flicked off as well.