“We’re almost there!” shouted Fishy, who wasn’t even breathing hard. Out of all of us, he was the only one who seemed to be benefiting from this run. He looked more alive than I had ever seen him, and the grin on his face was unwavering.
“Why are people shooting at us?” demanded Nathan.
“Fear, panic, protecting their shit, I don’t know!” Fishy actually laughed. That cold sensation raced across my skin again. Dr. Cale had been very clear about the fact that Fishy was not participating in the same version of reality as the rest of us. Until this moment, I hadn’t stopped to think about the fact that I was crossing the city with an armed man who didn’t believe that I—that anyone—was actually real.
This day just kept on getting worse, and I was ready for it to stop anytime now.
Nothing else lunged out at us as we ran down the alley and onto a new street, and there was the water, glimmering calm and deep, deep blue in the sunlight, like a sheet of glass stretching out toward the distant shape of San Francisco, its skyscrapers and bridges rising like ghosts out of the fog. We all stumbled to a halt, even Fishy, briefly shocked out of our headlong flight.
“Here we go,” murmured Nathan, and I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t say anything at all.
-
I received the official “disconnect at your earliest convenience” request from my superiors today. They couched it like they were asking me to turn off a faulty piece of machinery or requesting that I decommission a vehicle no longer capable of performing its function. There was no compassion, no concern for how their request might impact my ability to carry it out. I am career military, after all. When I am given an order, that order is followed, regardless of the consequences.
For more than thirty years, I have done everything that has been asked of me. I have served my country to the best of my ability and at the expense of my own better judgment. I have done everything within my power to be a patriot and a credit to my nation. Even when they asked me to host the occupied body of what had been my eldest daughter, I agreed, because it was my duty.
They are asking me to kill my only surviving child. For the first time, I do not know whether I am capable of what I have been asked to do.
I have sent my biological son and my spiritual daughter away with my worst enemy and a man whose grasp on reality makes mine seem both solid and admirable. I have sent them to do the impossible, and the fact that it was at their own request is cold comfort; I should have been able to stop them, somehow. I should have convinced them that there was another way. But there wasn’t another way. They knew it, and so did I. That’s why I let them go.
The world was supposed to get easier once I was no longer standing in the middle of it. I have what I always said I wanted: a problem too big to be solved in a single lifetime, a lab full of people to help me solve it, and no oversight of any kind.
Why do I feel like I’ve lost?
Chapter 17
NOVEMBER 2027
The ferry landing was abandoned. Private watercraft lined the dock, some of them half submerged, others clearly ransacked for whatever food or medications might have been stored on board. A dead woman lay, naked and fully exposed, on the deck of the nearest sailboat. Her skin was blackened and full of holes, showing the depredations of the crows and seagulls; her eyes were two dark pits in the stripped circle of her skull, staring up into the sky until time or a storm washed her away and left the clouds once again mercifully unobserved.
I paused as we passed the dead woman. Then I stooped down, taking quick, shallow breaths through my mouth as I peered closer at her skeletal visage. There were streaks of withered off-white in the dark where her eyes had been; the looping segments of her implant, dried to fishing line by the sun. “She was a sleepwalker,” I said. “I don’t know what killed her.”
“Hunger, maybe, or thirst,” said Nathan. “This is salt water. If she didn’t have the intelligence to realize that she couldn’t drink it safely, she could have died of dehydration within sight of the sea.”
It was a terrible way to go. I wrinkled my nose as I straightened, and turned to see Dr. Banks and Nathan both looking uncomfortable and upset. Only Fishy still looked calm. To him, this was just so much scene setting, background data that would tell him the severity of the crisis before it was casually dismissed as unimportant to the greater game.
I had never hated someone for being deluded before. I was starting to consider it where Fishy was concerned. “We should keep moving,” I said.
“The ferry landing is just up ahead,” said Fishy. He retook Dr. Banks’s elbow. “Come on, Dr. Frankenstein. Let’s roll.”
“Don’t call me that,” snarled Dr. Banks… but he didn’t resist, and he didn’t pull away. Like the rest of us, he understood that strength was a matter of numbers now—and more, he recognized that maybe arguing with the man who had the assault rifle was a terrible idea.
Beverly’s nose was virtually glued to the ground, inhaling all the scents of the seaside as we walked. I felt a pang of guilt as I realized how much time she’d been forced to spend inside since all this began; a few excursions to the rooftop garden weren’t the same thing as running wild and free the way she used to, back when she lived with a man who liked to jog in a world where people didn’t suddenly go feral and start trying to destroy everything they’d ever loved. It wasn’t just the humans who had had their lives completely turned upside down by the advent of the sleepwalkers. It wasn’t just the people who’d made the problem who were going to be suffering its effects for years to come. Dogs, like Beverly, and cats, like the ones back at the shelter—any domestic animal, anything we’d bred and raised to depend on us—they were going to be paying for it too. Their lives were never going to be what they’d been before the sleepwalkers woke and started demanding their own freedom of movement.
Sure, maybe I should have been worrying about bigger things than my dogs, but my dogs’ lives were something I could, at least superficially, control. How was I supposed to save Tansy if I couldn’t even take care of a dog? “Sorry, Bevvie,” I murmured. Beverly, sniffing raptly at a patch of seagull poop, ignored me.
Nathan glanced my way. I offered him a small, slightly apologetic smile. Explaining my thoughts would have taken too much time and involved too much talking, and neither was a good idea right now.
“Nathan.” Fishy’s voice was low but it carried well, holding an authority that made both of us turn to see what he wanted. He shoved Dr. Banks back toward me. The man who used to represent my greatest fears took a few stuttering steps in my direction before stopping and turning back to Fishy, a scowl on his face.
“Now you see here—” he began.
Fishy raising his rifle and leveling it on his face made Dr. Banks stop midsentence. He took another step backward, toward me, and stepped in Beverly’s much-valued patch of seagull poop. She made an irritated snorting noise. “Sal, you’ve got babysitting duty. Nathan, I know you have a handgun. I need you in the ferry launch with me. We have to check the boats for seaworthiness, and that’s going to be faster if we’re not dealing with the baggage.”