“I’ll meet you at the car,” Cam tells her. “My stuff’s still in the dressing room.”
The guards solemnly escort Roberta out of the building, and Cam goes back to the dressing room. He puts on his sports coat and carefully rolls up his tie, putting it in his pocket. Then, when he’s sure Roberta has left the building, he says, “It’s okay, she’s gone.”
The closet door opens, and Risa steps out. “Thank you, Cam.”
Cam shrugs. “She deserved it.” He turns to look at her. She’s breathing rapidly, as if she’s been running, but he knows she’s only been running in her head. “Will they all be unwound? Your AWOL friends?”
“Not right away,” she tells him. “But yes, they will be.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” Although she doesn’t look at him when she says it, like maybe she thinks it somehow is. Like his very existence makes him guilty.
“I can’t help what I am,” he tells her.
“I know . . . but today you showed me you can help what you do.” And then she leans forward and kisses him on the cheek. He feels it like an electric shock in all the seams of his face. She turns to go, but he can’t let her. Not yet. Not without saying—
“I love you, Risa.”
She glances back at him and offers nothing more than an apologetic smile. “Good-bye, Cam.”
And she’s gone.
It’s only after she leaves that the anger begins to rise in him. Not just a spike, but an eruption, and there’s nowhere for it to go. He takes the chair and hurls it against the vanity mirror, smashing it. He hurls everything that’s breakable against the walls and doesn’t stop until the security guards burst in on him. It takes three guards to restrain him, but still he’s stronger. He has the best of the best in him—every muscle group, every synaptic reflex. He tears free from the guards, bolts down the emergency exit stairs, and meets Roberta in the limo.
“What took you so long?”
“Solitude,” he says. “I needed some time alone.”
“It’s all right, Cam,” she tells him as they drive away. “We’ll get past this.”
“Yes, I know we will.”
But he keeps his true thoughts to himself. Cam will never accept Risa’s good-bye. He will not let her disappear from his life. He will do whatever it takes to have her, to hold her, to keep her. He has all of Roberta’s resources at his fingertips to get what he wants, and he’s going to use them.
Roberta smiles at him reassuringly between phone calls, and he smiles back. For now Cam will play the game. He’ll be the good rewound boy Roberta wants him to be, but from this moment on, he has a new agenda. He will make Risa’s dream come true and take down Proactive Citizenry piece by bloody piece.
And then she will have no choice but to love him.
Part Seven
Landings
Our country is challenged at home and abroad . . . it is our will that is being tried and not our strength.
—P
RESIDENT
J
OHNSON
on Vietnam and the school campus war protests, 1968
I have every faith that this devastating national conflict shall be resolved, and that the accord between both sides shall also serve as an ultimate solution to the feral teenage problem. But until that glorious day, I am instituting an eight p.m. curfew for anyone under the age of eighteen.
—P
RESIDENT
M
OSS
on the Heartland War, two weeks prior to his assassination by militant New Jersey separatists
76 • Dreamliner
In Southern California, far south of the glitz of Hollywood and far east of the suburban sprawl of San Diego, lies an inland sea as forgotten and as unloved as a state ward AWOL or a harvest camp stork. Hundreds of thousands of years ago it was the northern reach of the Sea of Cortez, before that sea even had a name. But now it’s little more than a giant landlocked salt lake, slowly drying into desert. Too saline for vertebrate life, its fish have all died. Their bones cover the shores like gravel.
At ten minutes to midnight, a plane once heralded as the dream of aviation before it was replaced by newer dreams descends toward the Salton Sea. It is flown by a young military pilot with far more confidence than experience. Barely clearing the mountains around the lake, the jet comes in for what airlines ridiculously call “a water landing.”
It does not go well.
77 • Starkey
No seatbelts, no seats. No way to brace themselves for a crash landing. “Lock your elbows together! Hook your legs around each other,” Starkey tells them. “We’ll be one another’s seatbelts.”
The storks obey, huddling, locking limbs, turning themselves into a tangled colony of flesh and bone. Sitting on the floorboards, no one can see out the windows to know how close the lake is—but then Trace comes on the intercom. “About twenty seconds,” he says. Then the angle of their descent changes as he pulls up the nose of the jet.
“See you on the other side,” Starkey says, then realizes once more that it’s something you say when you’re about to die.
Starkey counts down the last twenty seconds in his head, but nothing happens. Was he counting too fast? Did Trace misjudge? If this is twenty seconds, then they’re the longest of his life. Then it finally comes—a jarring jolt, followed by calm.
“Was that it?” someone says. “Is it over?”
There’s another jolt, then another and another, each one coming closer together, and Starkey realizes the plane is skimming like a stone. On the fifth skim, a wing dips, acting like a rudder that pivots the plane to a diagonal, and suddenly it’s the end of the world. The Dreamliner begins to flip end over end, turning cartwheels against the unforgiving surface of the lake.
Inside, the mob of kids is launched from the floorboards and pulled apart by centrifugal force, thrown in two separate clusters to either end of the main cabin. The hooking of arms actually saves many of them, as they’re cushioned by the bodies around them, but those on the outside of the tumbling crush of kids—those acting as the cushions—become the sacrifices. Many of them are killed as they’re slammed against the hard surfaces of the Dreamliner.
The cache of weapons, which had been stowed in the overhead compartments, flies free as well, as those compartments tear loose and burst open. Pistols and rifles and machine guns and grenades become ballistic, creating casualties without ever having to go off.
Wrapped in the forward twist of bodies, Starkey feels his head hit something hard, leaving a gash on his forehead, but that’s nothing compared to the exploding pain in his battered hand.
Finally the tumbling jet comes to rest. The cries and wails sound like silence compared to the noise of the crash. Then somewhere toward the back of the cabin there’s an explosion: a grenade that lost its pin. It blows a hole in the side of the jet, and water begins to pour in. That’s when the electrical system fails, and they’re plunged into darkness.
“Over here!” Bam calls. She pulls a huge lever and opens the cabin’s front port-side door. A life raft automatically inflates and detaches, then drops to the water, and with a “Sayonara,” Bam leaps right out after it.
Starkey’s instinct is to get out now . . . but if he’s going to be seen as the protector of the storks, then he must be their protector in action, not just words. He waits, shooing kids out the door, making it clear he is not the first one out—but neither does he plan on being the last.
Farther back in the foundering jet, kids pull open wing exits and a midship hatch—but only on the left side. On the right, a slick of jet fuel has ignited in the water and burns beyond the windows.