The City of Mirrors (6 page)

For a while they caught up on news of the others: Sara’s job at the hospital and her and Hollis’s long-awaited move out of the refugee camps into permanent housing; Lore’s promotion to crew chief at the refinery; Peter’s resignation from the Expeditionary to stay home with Caleb; Eustace’s decision, which surprised no one, to resign from the Expeditionary and return with Nina to Iowa. A tone of optimistic good cheer glazed the surface of the conversation, but it only went so deep, and Lucius wasn’t fooled; always lurking beneath the surface were the names they weren’t saying.

Lucius had told nobody about Amy—only he knew the truth. On the matter of Alicia’s fate, Lucius had nothing to offer. Nor, apparently, did anybody else; the woman had vanished into the great Iowa emptiness. At the time, Lucius had been unconcerned—Alicia was like a comet, given to long, unannounced absences and blazing, unanticipated returns—but as the days went by with no sign of her, Michael trapped in his bed with his casted leg in a sling, Lucius watched the fact of her disappearance burning in his friend’s eyes like a long fuse looking for a bomb.
You don’t get it,
he told Lucius, practically levitating off his bed with frustration.
This isn’t like the other times.
Lucius didn’t bother to contradict him—the woman needed absolutely nobody—nor did he try to stop Michael when, twelve hours after the cast came off, the man saddled up and rode into a snowstorm to look for her—a highly questionable move, considering how much time had passed, and the fact that the man could barely walk. But Michael was Michael: you didn’t tell the man no, and there was something oddly personal about the whole thing, as if Alicia’s leaving was a message just for him. He returned five days later, half-frozen, having run a one-hundred-mile perimeter, and said no more about it, not that day or all the days after; he’d never even said her name.

They had all loved her, but there existed a kind of person, Lucius knew, whose heart was unknowable, who was born to stand apart. Alicia had stepped into the ether, and with three years gone by, the question in Lucius’s mind wasn’t what had become of her but if she’d really been there in the first place.

It was well past midnight, after the last glasses had been poured and tossed back, when Michael finally raised the subject that, in hindsight, had been plaguing him all night.

“Do you really think they’re gone? The dracs, I mean.”

“Why would you ask that?”

Michael cocked an eyebrow. “Well, do you?”

Lucius framed his answer carefully. “You were there—you saw what happened. Kill the Twelve and you kill the rest. If I’m not mistaken, that was your idea. It’s a little late to change your mind.”

Michael glanced away and said nothing. Had the answer satisfied him?

“You should come sailing with me sometime,” he said finally, brightening somewhat. “You’d really like it. It’s a big wide world out there. Like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

Lucius smiled. Whatever was eating the man, he wasn’t ready to talk about it. “I’ll give it some thought.”

“Consider it a standing invitation.” Michael got to his feet, one hand clutching the edge of the table for balance. “Well, I, for one, am completely hammered. If it’s all right with you, I think it’s time for me to go throw up and pass out in my truck.”

Lucius gestured toward his narrow cot. “The bed’s yours if you want it.”

“That’s sweet of you. Maybe when I get to know you better.”

He stumbled to the door, where he turned to cast his bleary gaze around the tiny room.

“You’re quite the artist, Major. Those are interesting pictures. You’ll have to tell me about them sometime.”

And that was all; when Lucius awoke in the morning, Michael was gone. He thought he might see the man again, but no more visits were forthcoming; he supposed Michael had gotten what he was looking for, or else he’d decided that Lucius didn’t have it.
Do you really think they’re gone … ?
What would his friend have said if Lucius had actually answered his question?

Lucius put these disconcerting thoughts aside. Leaving the jug of boar’s blood in the shade of the hut, he walked down the hillside to the river. The water of the Guadalupe was always cold, but here it was colder; where the river made a bend there was a deep hole—twenty feet to the bottom—fed by a natural spring. Tall banks of white limestone encircled the edge. Lucius stripped off his boots and trousers, grabbed the rope he’d left in place, took a deep breath, and dove in a clean arc into the water. With every foot of his descent the temperature dropped. The satchel, made of heavy canvas, was secured beneath an overhang, protected from the current. Lucius tied the rope to the satchel’s handle, tugged it free of the overhang, blew the air from his lungs, and ascended.

He climbed out on the opposite shore, walked downstream to a shallow spot, crossed the river again, and followed a path to the top of the limestone wall. There he sat at the edge, took the rope in his hands, and hauled up the satchel.

He dressed again and carried the satchel back to the hut. There, at the table, he removed the contents: eight more jugs, for nine gallons total—the same amount of blood, more or less, that coursed through the circulatory systems of half a dozen human adults.

Once it was out of the river, his prize would quickly spoil. He strung the jugs together and gathered his supplies—three days’ worth of food and water, the rifle and ammo, a blade, a lantern, a length of sturdy rope—and carried them out to the paddock. Not even 0700, but already the sun was blazing. He saddled his horse, slid the rifle into its holder, and slung the rest over the horse’s withers. He never bothered with a bedroll; he’d be riding through the night, arriving in Houston on the morning of the sixtieth day.

With a tap of his heels to the horse’s flanks, he was off.

4

Gulf of Mexico

Twenty-two Nautical Miles South-southeast of Galveston Island

0430: Michael Fisher awoke to the pattering of rain on his face.

He drew his back upright against the transom. No stars but, to the east, a narrow transect of ditchwater dawn light hovered between the horizon and the clouds. The air was dead calm, though this wouldn’t last; Michael knew a storm when he smelled one.

He unfastened his shorts, jutted his pelvis over the stern, and released a urine stream of satisfying volume and duration into waters of the Gulf. He wasn’t especially hungry, hunger being something he’d taught his body to ignore, but he took a moment to go below and mix a batch of powdered protein and drink it down in six throat-pumping gulps. Unless he was mistaken, and he almost never was, the morning would bring its share of excitement; best to face it with a full belly..

He was back on deck when the first jag of lightning forked the horizon. Fifteen seconds later, the thunder arrived in a long, rolling peal, like a grumpy god clearing its throat. The air had picked up, too, in the disorganized manner of an approaching squall. Michael unhooked the self-steerer and took the tiller in his fist as the rain arrived in earnest: a hot, needling, tropical rain that soaked him in a second. About the weather, Michael lacked any strong opinion. Like everything else, it was what it was, and if this was to be the storm that finally sent him to the bottom, well, it wasn’t like he hadn’t asked for it.

Really? Alone? In that thing? Are you crazy?
Sometimes the questions were kindly meant, an expression of genuine concern; even total strangers tried to talk him out of it. But more often than not, the speaker was already writing him off. If the sea didn’t kill him, the barrier would—that blockade of floating explosives said to encircle the continent. Who in his right mind would tempt fate like that? And especially now, when not a single viral had been seen for, what, going on thirty-six months? Wasn’t a whole continent sufficient space for a restless soul to roam around in?

Fair enough, but not every choice came down to logic; a lot came from the gut. What Michael’s gut was telling him was that the barrier didn’t exist, that it had never existed. He was raising his middle finger to history, a hundred years of humanity saying,
Not me, no way, you go on ahead without me.
That or playing Russian roulette. Which, given his family history,wasn’t necessarily out of the question.

His parents’ suicide wasn’t something he liked to think about, but of course he did. In some room in his brain, a movie of that morning’s events was constantly running. Their gray, empty faces, and the tautness of the ropes around their necks. The slight creaking sound they made. The elongated shapes of their bodies, the absolute, unoccupied looseness of them. The darkness of their toes, bloated with pooled blood. Michael’s initial reaction had been complete incomprehension: he’d stared at the bodies for a good thirty seconds, trying to parse the data, which came to him in a series of free-floating words he couldn’t stick together (
Mom, Dad, hanging, rope, barn, dead
), before an explosion of white-hot terror in his eleven-year-old brain sent him dashing forward to scoop their legs into his arms to push their bodies upward, all the while screaming Sara’s name so she could come and help him. They’d been dead for many hours; his efforts were pointless. Yet one had to try. A lot of life, Michael had learned, came down to trying to fix things that weren’t fixable.

So, the sea, and his solo wanderings upon it. It had become a home of a kind. His boat was the
Nautilus.
Michael had taken the name from a book he’d read years ago, when he was just a Little in the Sanctuary:
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,
an old yellowed paperback, pages popping loose, and on its cover the image of a curious, armor-plated vehicle that seemed like a cross between a boat and an undersea tank, entwined in the suctioning tentacles of a sea monster with one huge eye. Long after the details of the story had fallen away from his mind, the image had stayed with him, seared into his retinas; when it came time to christen his craft, after two years of planning and execution and plain old guesswork,
Nautilus
had seemed a natural. It was as if he’d been storing the name in his brain for later use.

Thirty-six feet from stern to bowsprit with a six-foot draft, one main and one headsail, masthead-rigged, with a small cabin (though he almost always slept on the deck). He’d found it in a boatyard near San Luis Pass, tucked away in warehouse, still standing on blocks. The hull, made of polyester resin, was sound, but the rest was a mess—deck rotted, sails disintegrated, anything metal fatigued beyond use. It was, in other words, perfect for Michael Fisher, first engineer of Light and Power and oiler first class, and within a month he’d quit the refinery and cashed in five years of unspent paychecks to buy the tools he needed and hire a crew to bring them down to San Luis.
Really? Alone? In that thing?
Yes, Michael told them, unfolding his drawing on the table. Really.

How ironic that after all those years of blowing on the embers of the old world, trying to relight civilization with its leftover machines, in the end it should be the most ancient form of human propulsion that seized him. The wind blew, it back-eddied along the edge of the sail, it created a vacuum that the boat forever tried to fill. With every voyage he took, he went a little longer, a little farther, a little more crazily
out there.
He’d traced the coasts at the start, getting the feel of things. North and east along the coast to oil-mucked New Orleans and its depressing plume of gooey, river-borne, chemical stink. South to Padre Island, with its long, wild stretches of sand as white as a talc. As his confidence grew, his trajectories expanded. From time to time he came across the anachronistic leavings of mankind—clumps of rusted wreckage piled along the shoals, ersatz atolls of bobbing plastic, derelict oil rigs bestriding massive slicks of pumped-out sludge—but soon he left all of these behind, driving his craft deeper into the heart of an oceanic wilderness. The water’s color darkened; it contained incredible depths. He shot the sun with his sextant, plotting his course with a stub of pencil. One day it occurred to him that beneath him lay nearly a mile of water.

The morning of the storm, Michael had been at sea for forty-two days. His plan was to make Freeport by noon, restock, rest for a week or so—he really needed to put on some weight—and set out again. Of course, there would be Lore to contend with, always an uncomfortable business. Would she even speak to him? Just glare at him from a distance? Grab him by the belt and drag him into the barracks for an hour of angry sex that, against his better judgment, he couldn’t make himself refuse? Michael never knew what it would be or which made him feel worse; he was either the asshole who had broken her heart or the hypocrite in her bed. Because the one thing he couldn’t find the words to explain was that she had nothing to do with any of it: not the
Nautilus,
or his need to be alone, or the fact that, although she was in every way deserving, he could not love her in return.

His thoughts went, as they often did, to the last time he’d seen Alicia—the last time anyone had, as far as he knew. Why had she chosen him? She had come to him in the hospital, on the morning before Sara and the others had left the Homeland to return to Kerrville. Michael wasn’t sure what time it was; he was asleep and awoke to see her sitting by his bed. She had this … 
look
on her face. He sensed that she’d been sitting there for some time, watching him as he slept.

—Lish?

She smiled.

—Hey, Michael.

That was it, for at least another thirty seconds. No
How are you feeling?
or
You look kind of ridiculous in that cast, Circuit,
or any of the thousand little barbs that the two of them had fired at each other since they were little kids.

—Can you do something for me? A favor.

—Okay.

But the thought went unfinished. Alicia looked away, then back again.

—We’ve been friends a long time, haven’t we?

—Sure, he said. Absolutely we have.