Join (29 page)

Now Don hurries them through a heavily reinforced door into a ten-by-ten room. He slides a separate, interior door closed and punches a button on the wall. The room, an elevator, begins to accelerate upward.

After five full minutes, maybe
longer, the elevator stops. Don opens a compartment in one of the walls. He distributes masks of a kind that Leap recognizes from working as an EMT. “Rated for gas,” Leap says. Don tugs each mask in turn to check its fit. He jabs a button, and the thick elevator doors slide open, and then they all step into a damp, bare cement anteroom that's lit by only a low-power glow lamp. When the doors have shut again, Don hits a red button on the wall. The opposite wall slides upward.

Bright sunlight floods underneath the door. It blinds them when the door reaches waist height. They hear the steady high-pitched whistling of wind rushing. As their eyes focus they see an endless landscape of twisted metal over jagged edges, ground carpeted with heaped and tangled metal strips in all directions, a silver-gray coating that rises and falls across a hillocky terrain that blocks their view of the distance. Fast winds whistle loudly through.

They step into early morning light and the long vista of wreckage. “Careful,” Don says, “some of this stuff is sharp.”

They follow a flattened path around a short mound of shattered junk. On the far side of that, a man is standing between a junk buggy and a hovercraft. The man is about Don's height. He's wearing a thick black jacket cinched up to the bulky mask that covers his face. Don steps up to him, and they hug.

“I am glad to see you,” Don says, shouting to be heard over the wind.

“Glad to see you too,” the other man says, his voice muffled by his mask. He hands Don a thumbnail-sized token. “Here's the starter. You guys better get a move on. This place is throwing rads.”

“What about Deepak, Alan, and Raj?” Don asks.

“They got out,” shouts the other man, “just. We think the armadillo's melted. They did a good job. If you guys get clear, we might be okay.”

“Any sign they've got us, that they're tracking us?”

“No, but you've gotta keep going.”

Don steps toward Leap and Chance and yells, “Into the hover.” He waves them toward it.

“Leap,” shouts the other man above the wind. “You're Leap?”

Leap One, Leap Three, and Leap Four turn toward him. “I'm sorry about your drive,” he yells.

Leap Three nods acknowledgment, then Leap's drives turn from him. Leap and Chance pull open the door of the hovercraft. When they're all in and the doors are sealed again, Don turns on the air cyclers and pulls off his mask.

The others remove their masks as they watch the man who'd met them maneuver the junk buggy over the jagged piles of refuse, his driver's cage rocking as the five-foot-high, inflatable tires spin a bit and then bounce him up a hill of garbage and away from them.

Don says, “I wish these things weren't so expensive to run.” He flips a switch, and the hover fans roar to life. The hovercraft rises a foot and a half above the carpet of junk, sending a spray of shrapnel out from beneath its deafening fans.

“It's pretty loud while we're flying,” Don shouts. “But we'll drive when we get outside the junkyard.”

Chance is exhausted. Chance Four needs to sleep, the muscles of her arms and legs twitching with fatigue. Don seems wholly alert. Chance closes her eyes and manages a light doze, despite the noise of the hovercraft.

At Leap's house, Chance puts Chance One down for a long nap, thinking that spare cycles will be useful. Chance Five has been sleeping and needs exercise. Chance gets him out of bed and into the shower. Chance Two is sitting in a coffee shop near the fountain in the Plaça Reial in Barcelona, hair mussed from the knit cap she's just removed. She smooths her fingers through her hair, orders an espresso, and watches the late-morning crowds pass by in the clear and cool winter sunlight.

Chance Four regains consciousness as
the hovercraft's fans are winding down, their roar quieting slowly. Outside, the vistas of twisted metal have been replaced by dirt that is torn, clumped, and piled as far as the eye can see. Here and there, bits of thin ground cover show a hint of green. The hovercraft jerks forward on its wheels as its fans stop turning.

In front of her, Don bangs on the steering column and says fiercely, “That's right, she works!”

Chance Four says, “You weren't sure it would drive?”

Don doesn't respond immediately. He reaches out and hits a switch next to the steering column. A green light pops on in the center of the wheel. He says, loudly to be heard over the road noise, “We don't use this thing much. Too expensive. It was ghosting the truck in case something happened, though, and Raj left a note that it was sounding rough. Well, he actually said he didn't think the drivetrain would engage again. So.”

Chance Four leans forward. Leap Three is bent into the seat beside her; Leap One and Leap Four are sitting on the bench behind. All of Leap's drives are sleeping. Chance stands, steadies herself against the jerky motion of what is now essentially a small bus. She pushes her dark hair behind her ears and then pulls herself forward into the passenger's seat.

Don nods to her.

“Your rig, you . . . melted it?” Chance asks.

“Something like that,” says Don.

“What will that mean for you?”

“I don't know. My family's in Arcadia right now. I guess it could mean we can't go home to Detroit.”

They drive for a while over the unvarying, churned terrain before she says, “Why did you kill them?”

“Leap Two? I told you.”

“No, the others, the two of them, Terry and Jackson.”

Don turns away from her, toward the driver-side window and the sunlight. Then he looks back at the terrain in front of them. “I wish I hadn't,” he says. “It would have been better to hold them, but they do that on purpose. They're trying to find Hamish, and whatever else they can about us.” He shakes his head. “We're usually pretty good at spotting joins, but those two were professionals. Imps. There aren't a lot of joins who can do it that well, pass as solos. If we'd caught one of them alive, we might have traced him to other drives from the same join. That's a lot of training wasted, so they can't be caught. They try to force us to kill them. Bad for our morale. If we don't do it, they'll try to kill themselves. They wear bulletproof mesh so we'll take a head shot. Terry made like he was going for a gun.”

“And Jackson pulled her knife on me.”

“Yeah.”

They bump along for a while without speaking. Don says, “I don't really have anything against joins, per se. They just came around at the wrong time.”

“Jackson and Terry?”

“No, joins.”

“The wrong time?”

“For the planet.”

Chance gazes at the chewed-up plains they're driving over. “You're a planetist.”

“I guess you could call me that. Though I don't agree with most other planetists. But I do agree that the planet comes first. And right now we're navel-gazing while our house burns down around our ears. Join was just bad, bad timing. We're in the middle of it—oceans, the weather, the die-offs—and then this damn tech. Almost, almost helpful. But we stopped paying attention to what was happening.

“What does it mean to be human?” he asks. “Who the fuck cares. That's a question for another time. But Join split us, some for it, some against, right when we needed to be working together. And you joins? Really, most of you are nearly useless. Trying to build mimetic material to coat your spires. Working on ways to get around the twenty-drive limit, or whatever other ridiculous project captures your fancy while the planet's dying. No time for the list of things that would actually make a difference. A bunch of genius retards. Look, I'm sorry. Nothing against you, personally. I don't know you. But look around. You should be helping to fix this.”

They're driving near the rim
of one of the megastorms. As they push forward, gales of wind explode against the front or right side of the vehicle, sometimes rocking it violently so that Leap's exhausted drives wake bleary-eyed, turn fitfully, watch the unvarying terrain as they try to sleep again.

Don is using the danger of proximity to the storm as cover. Within the megastorms, even the most powerful radio signals degrade or fail completely, and the Directorate isn't interested enough to make the large investment required in personnel and equipment to keep eyes on an area that's regularly savaged by smaller storms that spin off from the larger system. Chance and Leap both know how quickly those smaller storms can spawn; how utterly destructive they are when they first split from the megastorm. Driving through this area is like running through a house on fire. At any moment, they might all be killed. They know Don is also aware of the risk. There's little conversation as they jolt as quickly as possible toward their destination.

They reach a very gently sloping hillock, and they drive to the leeward side of it, where a cluster of other piles of bunched dirt extends for thirty yards or so. At the end of the cluster, they see the very edge of what might be a metal shaft. A camouflaged, sloped entrance grinds open slowly, revealing unlit tunnel access that plunges into darkness.

Don says, “No lights in here. The burn can be detected by flybys. We'll be driving in the dark for a few minutes.” He turns to Chance. “Okay, you've been trying to track us. We've been watching your activity on the net. Now I have to ask you to stop. We can't risk you seeing something or hearing something, and then looking it up on the net. I guarantee the Directorate's watching you too. You just can't do any more research, okay?”

“You knew I've been looking for us?”

“Of course.”

“And who are you communicating with?”

“I can't answer any of your questions. You've just got to stop looking, okay?” Don's voice is matter-of-fact. His cool brown eyes are gazing levelly, directly, at Chance Four. Chance has seen how quickly and remorselessly he moves to address emergencies. What if Chance doesn't stop quickly enough?

Chance One and Chance Five both switch their displays off.

“Yeah,” says Chance Four. “Okay, I'll stop looking.”

“Thanks,” Don says, but he doesn't even blink.

He turns back to face the tunnel. “All right, in we go.”

Complete darkness envelopes the hovercraft. Don drives slowly, seeming to feel his way between the gently upturned edges of the tunnel by occasionally driving on them. After a minute in the darkness, Chance says. “Why doesn't the Directorate pick up one of my other drives and use it to find us?”

Don's voice is dry, calm. “You'd tell me if that happened, right?”

Chance says, “Yes.”

In the dark, above the rumble of the vehicle's engine, Don's voice sounds deeper.

“Good,” he says. “I'd need you to do that. You're here because Leap wants you here. Your presence helped Leap make the decision to come with, and we might need you later. But we're taking a big risk, of exactly the kind you just described, by bringing you with us. You don't know where on the continent we are. And everything you do know, they already know. When we're done, you won't be of any use to them. But right now, you could be. And right now, they know that if they grab you, you'll tell us about it. And then we'd kill this drive, so that they can't use one of your other drives to find us.”