Pills and Starships (25 page)

My parents would despise me if they knew. And they would be right to.

I shouldn’t have left without him. I should never have let us be separated.

It turned out we weren’t going to Deep High Station yet, or High Deep Station, whatever it’s called, because we had more tasks to do. Once we got to an opening in the mountainside—it was another lava tube entrance, not one I remembered seeing before—we handed the egg baskets over to some old women waiting there, who Xing said were biologists, in charge of the breeding, and we turned around and headed back the way we’d come.

It was easier to talk on the way back down, without the burden of the eggs. Xing led me along a different path so we wouldn’t get in the way of people coming up the first one. The downward path was wider, though still muddy and interrupted by tree roots, and we didn’t have baskets to protect so we could walk side by side.

By this time, though, the trees around us were starting to move in the wind, and we could hear the rustling of dry fronds and the sweep of leafy branches against each other like a sighing high above. The sky, when I tipped back my head and could see a piece of it through the leaves, was heavy, with dark banks of clouds rolling across. The air felt even wetter than usual, full of warm, moist particles though rain wasn’t actually falling.

“I can’t believe they don’t have an evac plan for the people at the hotel,” I persisted—bugging Xing, I guess. “How can they just leave them? I mean, if they do that and the storm hits and people get drowned—won’t facemedia find out? Won’t they get in major trouble? Bad PR and the law and stuff?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know yet,” said Xing, “about the service corps and their cohorts in other sectors. But these aren’t people who, in a tornado, would worry much about evacuating hotels. They wouldn’t think twice.”

“Sam said something I didn’t understand, something that made even LaTessa look shocked,” I began, after a minute. “The other day, in the healing session, when he was on those meds? The truth drugs or whatever they were? He said something about
quotas
. Right before we faked the sickness and I dosed him with those tranks he gave me. I knew it was something he shouldn’t say, just from how her face looked, but I didn’t get what he meant at all. Do you know what he meant?”

She glanced down at her wristface, which must have been hard to read while she was walking.

It was blinking orange now, I saw, not the green from before. But there was the pond ahead, with its sand mounds and its eggs.

“Less than two hours before we have to be secure,” she murmured, more to herself than me. “We may have to abandon the last load of eggs. I hope not. But we may.”

We started gathering them up and laying them gently in our baskets; we hefted the baskets onto our hips.

I caught her eye as we turned to start up the trail again.

“Xing. Do you know what he meant?” I repeated.

She sighed and shook her head, then ducked past me. I followed at her heels, struggling to balance my basket.

“I’m not sure you’re ready for that,” she said.

“But Sam was? He’s younger than I am, Xing, he’s only fourteen!”

“Well,” she said slowly, “look, Nat, if I had it my way he wouldn’t know either. It’s messed with him a little, frankly. But you can’t do much to stop a gifted hackerkid from learning what he wants to know. Or even what he doesn’t know he
doesn’t
want to know.”

“Uh, you’re kind of losing me,” I said, a bit impatient.

She took a deep breath. “Here goes. The deal is, the service corps are tasked with population reduction. That’s their whole reason for being. Their official mission. So it’s not just that older people in the First are
ready
to go, Nat. That’s propaganda. It’s all prop—pharms and prop. Because they’re
made
ready. They’re prepped with a tailored pharma diet over many months. The old-age ‘vitamins.’ Buying the contract is a part of that; it’s not the first thing that happens. They only buy once they’re already sucked in. By making the system look and function like a service, the corps can meet their reduction quotas
and
collect revenues in the process. That way what private monies still exist are shifting to the corporates. In the First—the gated communities—they take people’s money and their lives at the same time. A neat deal; they get carbon credits when they make their quotas, and they trade those to get even richer. It’s an enormous racket.”

I slacked off in my walking a bit, just processing and kind of dazed. Thinking, my parents were so smart—how could they fall for that? And thinking of all the other people who did.

Basically, everyone.

Or almost.

“But that’s not the worst news,” Xing went on quietly. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

“So tell me what the rest of the iceberg looks like,” I begged. “
Under
the water. You have to tell me,
Xing.”

“The First has it easy, though the targets for contracts are certainly getting younger all the time. It used to be ninety, now they’re moving to eighty-plus. Soon it’ll be seventy-five. Then seventy . . .”

“And?”

“And in the poor parts, which is a carbon nightmare, the corps have much, much higher reduction quotas. The targets are pegged to what particular regions can sustain, carbon-wise. So certain types of forested areas in the poor parts tend to have lower quotas than certain arid ones, for instance, you understand what I’m saying? In areas where poors are more offset by carbon storage, natural or manmade, they’re not being taken out as fast. The corp scientists work up the equations and they’re the ones who determine the quotas, in collusion with corporate management. In the Resist—the resistance, in case you haven’t heard that before—we call it Death Math.”

“Death Math,” I repeated.

“In the poor parts there’s no money to be made off dying people. Because no one has money except the corporates there—regular folks have nothing. So the corps don’t care if the people they take out are young or old. There, they don’t bother to ask for anyone’s permission. There
are
no contracts there, because there don’t have to be.”

I stopped still, dead still, staring at her and gaping. “But that’s—but murder’s illegal.”

“Only for you and me.”

I didn’t say anything—I couldn’t.

“Remember the guys in the boat on the way over?” she asked. “The Indonesian guys in uniform, who didn’t talk to anyone?”

I nodded. I’d had a bad feeling about them.

“There are some of them on every boat, pretty much,” she said. “Those were corp mercenaries. They get transported all over the world to do the corp dirty work at the ground level. They’re like indentured soldiers. And there are many of them—some operate the drones, others do infantry work. But they, and the corporate bosses, have killed more people than the bugs ever did. In fact, the corps greatly exaggerated the bug risks, to keep people under control.”

I don’t know exactly what happened, but I lost my focus in the shock of that and fumbled, and my basket jittered in my arms and tipped. I righted it, panicked, but not before one precious egg fell out and shattered on a rock in the path.

Xing and I stopped and looked down at it, and just then, when I was feeling flabbergasted and sick to my stomach, we heard a loud whirring overhead and looked away from the broken egg and up into the tree canopy. It was a helicopter noise. At first we couldn’t see anything, then a black dragonfly shape passed between the green blurs of the vegetation, hard to follow through the foliage but unmistakable.

And then another one. And one more.

“They’re headed inland to safety,” she said. “Yep. That’ll be them. Probably the first wave. Later they’ll catch a ride on a corp ship, somewhere between here and the mainland. Sorry, but we’ll have to talk more later.”

I was feeling cold suddenly, cold in the sweaty heat of the jungle.

“But
Sam
,” I said. “What can I do to help him, Xing? What can I do?”

“There’s no time to rescue anyone but ourselves. Your brother’s resourceful. And he’s not all alone. Look, Nat. Being scared stiff for him won’t help him and it could hurt you. And those who depend on you. I need you to focus, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, but it was weak. The sound of the choppers was fading away. It was like a wish—out of reach now and gone.

“He’s free now, Nat. I know he wouldn’t have it any other way. And you know too.”

Free?
I thought. It’s a word I don’t really understand, except for in the phrase
free death
. It means unmanaged, I get that, but all I could think of when she said it was the other word in that phrase.
Free death. Free = death
.

I nodded.

“We’ve got to pick up our pace.” Xing patted my arm. “But no running downhill on this path, okay? We can’t afford an injury. Too high a risk of ankle sprain or other slippage, given the incline and the lack of traction in this wet soil. So let’s walk as fast as we can without losing our footing. Grab onto a sturdy branch whenever you need to.”

We did pick up the pace—we rushed. It was hard to talk at all after that. I didn’t think about the quotas or the poors just then, I pushed it all to the back of my mind.

Denial is a highly effective strategy, as my father used to say when he was still himself, and only half-joking.

All I could think was,
Sam, Sam, Sam, my baby brother,
as the trees whipped around overhead and my feet moved over the muddy ground and I stared down at them.

Sam. Forgive me.

By the time we picked up the very last eggs the turtles themselves were all gone. I wondered how the men were managing to push those big carts along the narrow, muddy paths in the jungle, but as we passed through the camp again I was amazed how much had already been moved. By then big drops of warm rain were starting to fall and I was wearing a membrane-thin, clear raincoat Xing pulled out of her gear for me; she must have only had one because she let herself get wet, and she wouldn’t take it back.

The Quonset still stood there, and a couple of other permanent-type structures like the cute little painted shack where the babies had been, but in just a couple of hours most of the tents had already been pulled up, and the solar panel arrays were gone, and the cooking equipment and the chairs and tables and just about everything else that wasn’t sunk into the ground on posts or actually growing there.

I saw that some of the potted trees set up to camouflage the camp had already been knocked over by the rising wind. They were lying across the clearing, forlorn and bedraggled, soil spilled around the bottoms of their trunks, their branches spread out over the ground. And I wondered, if the grove of fruit trees was destroyed, and the vegetable gardens, how would the camp feed itself? Did they get all their food from right here? Did they bring anything in? They had to bring in components for pharma and tech.

I realized I didn’t know how it worked yet, how alone the camp was or what its ties were to other rebel camps in other places across the sea. How many of them were there? Of us?

Kate had said something about Samoans, about twenty camps being destroyed. Were there a handful of others, or were there hundreds?

The rain was coming down harder as we struggled up the hill again with our last baskets, making a steady, almost deafening sound in the trees, and there was no way you could hear anyone talking. The sky had turned almost black. There was a purple hue to some of the clouds, though, a purple tinged with sickly yellow, like giant bruises.

I’d never been anywhere near a Cat Six. The worst storm I’d ever lived near was a Five, and it didn’t hit us directly, only some people on the coast nearby, and afterward we hosted some refugees at our home.

It was before we lived in the complex we live in now—I mean, used to live in before the Final Week—and we had a bigger place back then, with an extra bedroom. The refugees slept there for the months they stayed with us—two whole families, seven people in all. Four parents and three kids, a little older than we were.

I remember them well because of how sad they were, the parents more than the kids, because people they knew had drowned. They tried to put a brave face on it and they tried to find work and pitch in, but after a while, when they couldn’t find work or bring in any money, the condo seemed really full and we didn’t have quite enough food for them and eventually they had to leave. We never heard from them after that except for one message from the boy of the smaller family, which he sent to Sam—a face message on a social site. He said they were in Canada, he and his father, in some reforestation camp where life was hard, almost like slave labor, and that his mother wasn’t with them anymore because she had died of a new disease.