They were barely ashore, putting on their shoes, when they heard Homer's boat pull away. The sound from the outboard dropped off quickly and then puttered for a long while before it finally disappeared out of earshot, leaving behind a silence so profound that it seemed to be the sound of emptiness itself.
"This was Kuta's home," said Skyler, moving about as cautiously as if he were crossing a minefield.
He pushed open the front door and looked inside. The walls were streaked with water marks, and the floor was thick with mud. The bed was soaked and sagging, but the chest of drawers was still standing, with the old radio on top intact.
"I can't tell if he came back here after I saw the Orderly and left. For all I know, he never returned. Maybe — maybe he was killed."
"No reason to think that. This is all hurricane damage. He may have fled. It's hard to tell if he packed up before it struck."
Jude pulled a drawer, which was stuck. He yanked it hard and it flew open — it was filled with clothes, which he showed to Skyler.
"Well, maybe he left in a hurry," he said.
Skyler saw that the pegs for the trumpet were empty. That was a good sign — his instrument was the one thing he would be sure to take.
They went back outside.
"This way," said Skyler, moving through the trees toward the path to the Big House. He tried not to show it, but his heart was thumping against his chest and he felt his extremities tingling.
The path was blocked in half a dozen places by the trunks of downed trees. They had fallen in all directions, sometimes lying upon the ground, sometimes coming to rest in each other's branches, strange-angled protusions that broke the verticality of the forest and turned it into a jungle. The roots had pulled up giant clumps of rich brown earth that rose up eight and ten feet tall, like trapdoors of subterranean caves.
It took them a half hour to reach the Campus.
They moved into the shadows of the trees and waited for several minutes, watching and listening.
"Something's wrong," said Skyler. "This is strange. There are no sounds at all — just the birds and the cicadas."
Nothing moved. No one was around.
"It looks like the whole damn place is deserted," said Jude, whispering despite himself. "If you ask me, it's spooky as hell."
Skyler stepped out of the woods and into the sunlight. He felt it incumbent upon himself to be the leader. Jude followed him.
They walked quietly, following the treeline, until they came to the open meadow and the parade ground where Skyler and the other members of the Age Group had performed their daily calisthenics. Here, too, trees were down; huge slabs of earth and twisted roots tilted here and there like tombstones. The field was packed with a layer of dried mud from the downpour. They crossed it, leaving behind black footprints and several streaks where they slipped and almost fell. On the other side was the path leading to the barracks.
"What do you think?" asked Jude. "You think there's no one here at all? You think the hurricane drove them off?"
"Maybe. But I wouldn't bet on it. That never happened before, and there were big hurricanes when I was growing up. This is strange. I never imagined it could be like this."
A large oak tree had been uprooted and fallen parallel to the path. Instinctively, they moved behind the tree, keeping it between them and the Big House.
Skyler walked around to the door of the barracks, the door that he had entered tens of thousands of times throughout his childhood. He pushed it open, stepped up on the cinder block and walked inside. It was dark, but his eyes adjusted quickly. Instantly, he saw that it was the same and yet different. The beds and furniture were where they had always been, but they were stripped down. Everything that could be carried away was gone. In one corner was a pile of dirty sheets, in another socks, shirts and scraps of other clothing. The evacuation — if that's what it was — had been carried out hastily.
He walked over to a bunk and sat upon a bare mattress, which was damp. He saw that the window above was missing glass. How strange to look around and see the objects he had seen so often that he had stopped noticing them — how different they appeared, how rudimentary and crude. Was the difference in him? In his eyes that had now seen the world "on the other side"?
Jude walked in and looked around.
"I can't say you were raised in the lap of luxury," he said.
He walked to the other side of the room and sat on a bunk, which — by pure chance — happened to have been Skyler's.
"They may have given you the best medical attention science can provide, but they sure as hell didn't care if you were comfortable or not."
It felt strange to Skyler to hear Jude making pronouncements upon his upbringing. He felt an odd need to defend it; it hadn't all been misery and heartlessness. But he remained silent.
Jude stood up and kicked something, sending it scuttling across the floor. He walked over and picked it up, then handed it to Skyler, who looked at it with amazement.
"This was Raisin's," Skyler exclaimed. "This was his toy soldier. He always carried it with him."
He put it in his pocket. Then he walked to the door.
"Let's go to the Big House," he said.
Riding the subway to her apartment on West Eighty-seventh Street, Tizzie was lost in thought. She wasn't especially proud to admit it, but she was turning out to be a good spy — rather, a good double spy, which was twice as hard. You had to be always thinking in two heads at the same time.
Uncle Henry had been impressed by her "report" of their trip to Arizona. She'd included enough true events — like their harrowing visit to the mine, the cave-in and Skyler's illness — to make it credible. But she had not, she hoped, given away anything of importance that could tip their hand. That meant walking a thin line indeed.
For example: should she include the car chase from the roadhouse? It depended upon who she thought had been chasing them. If it turned out to be enforcers from the Lab and she omitted the chase — such a dramatic occurrence — then Uncle Henry would know she was duplicitous and never trust her again. But if the villains were some renegade FBI men — and happily she had talked to Jude since his near encounter with Raymond at the Hoover Building — then including it might be giving Uncle Henry some useful information. Why should he know about the FBI's involvement? Or if he already knows, why should he know that they know? Wheels within wheels.
Finally, she had left the incident out. And Uncle Henry, as far as she could tell, didn't seem the wiser. That, in turn, told her something — namely, that Uncle Henry hadn't in fact known about the car chase, which helped point the finger of suspicion away from the Lab. On such crumbs do double spies build their edifices of knowledge.
Certain things she never wrote about. Where Jude and Skyler were staying, for instance, or what their immediate plans were. They were too afraid of phone taps to talk about such matters, she explained. Another area that she shied away from — despite urging to the contrary from Uncle Henry — was her emotional life. He seemed to want to know a great deal about her feelings for Jude and for Skyler. But this was the last thing she wanted to put on paper. Partly, the reluctance came because she was revolted at the thought of that man poring over her innermost secrets, partly because she knew him well enough to fear what he might do with the information, and partly because she herself was confused about what she was feeling.
Her goal now was to turn active. She needed to move from information collection to operations. Uncle Henry had talked about research. That's what she wanted to do, and she had been pestering him to do it. She needed to find out about her mother's death and about her father's illness. If they were truly working on a vaccination, then she wanted to be part of that effort. He was right — she was good at it. And as any scientist knows, you can't come up with a vaccine unless you know what disease you're fighting. Maybe she could finally get some answers. And maybe those answers would help Skyler and Jude.