“Can I—” he stopped. “Will you sleep next to me tonight? Promise I’ll keep my hands to myself.”
He sounded like a child asking his mother if he could crawl into her bed during a thunderstorm. She hated that it made her wish for her own mother—on the street, dead, wherever she might be.
Beneath the comforter, in her sweats and tank top, Shane let him put his arms around her and dip his face into her neck where his breath whistled.
Before she fell asleep, he asked her what she was afraid of. “If you get afraid of anything, that is.”
So she told him.
On the highway west over the plains of Missouri, the sky was a color she’d never seen before, a hellfire arterial crimson. According to the radio, this was the soil of the plains, ripped from the roots by a hard wind and borne skyward. She knew the color was the result of the grains in these galaxies of dust performing with the dissipating sunlight. It gave the air texture. The fibrous atmosphere on the approach to Hades. Now her mask was for more than just disrupting FaceRec cameras. When she stopped, she could rub her fingertips and come away with a thin black resin and imagined what this must look like inside people’s lungs. The dust coalesced in pockets that hung in the air like jellyfish. The farther west she drove, the larger the dust piles grew, brown snowdrifts against the sides of homes and strip malls, piled in parking lot dunes, stirred into a miasmic cloak by traffic. She took the highway through Kansas City. Even with the lights of the cars—bright white dyads in the oncoming lane, cheap red in hers—the city had a feeling of abandonment, a shrouded necropolis. The few haunted figures she saw slogging through the streets wore masks and goggles and carried flashlights, the beams of which looked solid when interacting with the dust. Overpass signs warned caution. Reduce speed. Wear a mask or particulate filter even indoors. The lights of police cars and ambulances strobed through the dusk. And this was just the tail end of the storm, the dissipation of the cloud that had torn across the plains. A state of emergency in five states.
At the Merriam Town Center mall, Shane parked in an underground garage and left the key in a magnetic box beneath the passenger door. She grabbed her battered Osprey and made her way to another garage. Her old gray Chevy Cruze waited, the key in another magnetic box beneath the door. She’d had this sad beater for six years, had sunk too much money into repairs, and the very sight of it filled her with melancholy. She threw her gear in the trunk and took off, shedding her clandestine life yet again. Putting the old disguise back on. Her white server’s apron, hopelessly stained, lay on the passenger seat, and she remembered Teddy begging her to either use bleach on it or buy a new one.
She had one last stop outside Tonganoxie. Just south of a state fishing lake there was an unassuming two-bedroom cabin typically rented to area fishermen. Guests were asked to politely leave the mailbox for the owner to clean out. Here, Shane sifted through the junk mail until she found the flyer for cable and internet (Your New Smart HD VR Includes These Fully Integrated Apps). She couldn’t wait. Back in her car, she grabbed the order pad from her apron and found the paperback copy of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower stuffed beneath the seat. It took her ten minutes to decode the message, and after that, she had to sit for a while, flooded with a new dread unrelated to the burning orange sky over the lake and trees.
The porchlight of her rented bungalow on the edge of Lawrence cast an eerie glow into the dust. Before she could put her key in, the deadbolt turned and the door opened. Shane felt a pang of fear even though she knew who would be there.
“I’ve been dusting,” said Kai, and he hugged her as she stepped inside.
“Is she asleep?” she asked him. He wore a dark denim shirt with a pocket on each breast and shiny faux-ivory buttons, the sleeves rolled up on handsome forearms. The shirt matched the shadow of his stubble and hair poofing up like a crown on his scalp and showing a bit of recession.
“I just put her down.”
She made her way back through the clutter of her house: shelves of books, stacks of paper, a piano where she pretended to still be learning Norah Jones from the songbook.
“And we’re not even getting the worst of this. Oklahoma City is shut down,” he said.
She motioned for him to be quiet. She opened the bedroom door softly and crept in. It would be a nightmare to wake her right now, but Shane had to put eyes on her.
Lali slept in the small bed, positioned in that goofy way: Her arms shot straight up over her head like she was about to inbound a soccer ball. She’d kicked off her blanket, which was now spiraled around her footie pajamas, the ones with robots that she currently favored. Her mouth was wide open and her tongue poked out. Her drool collected on her cheek in a thick paste. Shane resisted the urge to pick her up and hold her. It was never worth waking her up once sleeping, not for anything. Yet there was that mix of grief and guilt and a love so terrible it made her stomach roil. When she’d departed on this trip there’d been the pain of leaving her daughter for a week, but also the sheer, unbridled relief of being free of her for a moment. The diametrically opposed impulses to race back home as soon as possible and to keep going, to forget about drop boxes, safe houses, nitromethane, and coded letters, to take whatever ghost vehicle Kai had set up for her and keep driving forever.
KAI Saw Shane begin to reach for Lali and sucked in his breath, ready to beg her Please don’t. Lali had spent the entire week throwing tantrums before bedtime. At some point, he had to just let her go until she exhausted herself. He had a student who, like Shane, was a single mom, and it was disconcerting how quickly sympathy for this tough circumstance could rot away into Please do a better job raising this kid, lady.
As she watched Lali sleep in the toddler bed Teddy had given her, Shane despised herself for daydreaming about such a thing.
She eased the door closed on her four-year-old and picked up the baby monitor.
“We should talk outside,” she told Kai.
“You think that’s okay?”
She held up the monitor. “Only one potential surveillance device that way.”
They walked through the dusty night, an N95 mask cupping her mouth and nose. Shane wanted to walk away from her house but no farther than the monitor’s reach. Every now and then she took a glance at Lali dozing peacefully on the screen. She wondered how much the dust would obscure them in all the cameras they passed.
“Some spooky shit, huh,” said Kai, his voice muffled by his own mask. “I’ve seen the skies from a wildfire before, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Shane hesitated, uncertain what to bring up first. She decided to start with practicalities.
“I need more money.”
Kai looked at her, surprised. His eyes still had that quiet cunning that had first drawn her to him in New Orleans, irises dark and searching. “I’m slipping you what I can. The funds are for our operations, not our personal pleasure.”
“Pleasure? Kai, I’m working a serving gig. I’m driving thousands of miles on county highways and switching vehicles while you do what? Kick back in your condo in Saint Louis and occasionally babysit?”
“It’s your cell, Shane. We have to keep the firewalls in place. That’s protocol.”
“I’m not asking for much. A couple hundred dollars a month maybe.”
“All it takes is one IRS audit. Just one accountant poking into your financial life to see that you’re collecting money from somewhere. Get in touch with Tracy Aamanzaihou if you like, but last time I checked there’s no collective bargaining in an insurgency.” He looked around then lowered his voice. “I mean, no one told you to go and get pregnant, Shane.”