The Exodus Towers (25 page)

Next Tim offered to find her sleeping tablets from the station’s supply rooms. When she declined, he offered to bring her a bottle of wine, an upgrade from chai, apparently. Drowning
her failures seemed like a feeble move, though, and so she’d declined that, too.

Sleep lay beyond a barrier of horrors. Every time she closed her eyes, Tania saw an imagined version of the carnage that had befallen her so-called rescue team. She’d sat in bleak silence with Zane, Tim, and a few others, listening in total shock as the team was systematically butchered.

There’d been too much noise on the comm to know for sure what happened. Screams and gunfire and shouts of alarm. A horde of subhumans must have swarmed them the moment they stepped out of the aircraft. An aircraft that had cost her an entire farm platform, and now sat abandoned on Water Road northeast of camp.

A soft knock at her door broke the monotony.

“Go away,” she groaned. She knew who it was and found herself in even less of a mood to entertain him.

“It’s me: Tim.”

Tania sighed, stood, and crossed to the door. She opened it a crack, as if she weren’t presentable. Maybe she could pretend to have slept; if anything it would make them worry less about her.

“You look terrible,” he muttered. “Um, I didn’t mean … still can’t sleep, eh?”

“Nice to see you, too.” His concerned expression remained. He seemed to be staring through her. She had not noticed before, but he showed all the symptoms of sleep deprivation, too. Bloodshot eyes set behind dark rings. “What is it, Tim? Has something happened?”

“Would you come with me?” he asked. “I want to show you something.”

“I really should …” Her voice trailed off. His tone suggested the visit had nothing to do with their present predicament, but at this point she’d take any distraction over the war for sleep. “Sure, why not?”

He led her in silence to a section of the station called the quad—a large common room that ran the length of four of the station’s rings. The wide, open space had deep blue carpet contrasted by walls the color of desert sand, its floor dotted with groups of couches facing in on one another, tables for
taking meals, an improvised bar, and two low-quality sensory chambers. Two crewmen sat on as many couches, both quietly reading from well-worn paper books. They barely looked up when Tania and Tim entered. A group of six crowded the small bar, sharing a box of white wine. They motioned for the newcomers to join them, but Tim begged off and continued to the back of the room.

Tucked into one corner was some sporting equipment, all folded up and stowed. Tim rolled out one wheeled piece. It looked like a folding conference table. He fiddled with some latches on it and gave it a shove near the center. The object transformed into a hard green table with perfect white lines and a net dividing the playing surface that dominated the space.

Tim grabbed two paddles and a ball from a small brown bag someone had tacked to the wall, and took the side of the table that faced in on the room, leaving Tania only a view of the walls and Tim himself. He threw one paddle to her.

Tania snatched it out of the air. “I haven’t played in—”

“Good,” he said in a comically shrill voice. “For I shall destroy you.”

She hefted her paddle and took a wide stance at her end of the table, bouncing from foot to foot in what she hoped was a taunting fashion. “Bring it on, tough guy.”

“One rule,” Tim said. “No talking about air, or water, or the colony.”

Tania grinned. “You read me like a book, Tim.”

He responded by striking an exaggerated server’s pose that looked halfway to something out of an old kung fu movie. He gripped his red paddle upside down in his left hand and glared at her. When Tania chuckled he served, bouncing the white ball past her.

The game was on.

By the third point Tania abandoned a sense of guilt for enjoying herself in such a dire situation. The repetition of the game, at once exhilarating and monotonous, cleared her mind of all other thought.

By the tenth point, she’d worked up a sheen of sweat and
found herself wholly engrossed in the friendly battle. It was Tim who halted the game, as he nodded past her shoulder.

Tania turned to see Zane approaching. He looked haggard, as if he’d aged ten years since their meal the previous evening.

His lips formed a thin, grim frown. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Come to the terminal room. Karl is on the line.”

“Karl?” Tania blurted, setting her paddle down.

Zane held up a hand. “It’s not good news, from the way he sounds. The way he looks.”

She nurtured a flicker of hope anyway. The game forgotten, they jogged together to the junction hallway and then toward the room two levels away where the ground-linked comm had been set up. Zane struggled to keep her pace, stopping at one point to steady himself against a wall, his breaths coming in gasps. She slowed for his benefit. “What did he say?”

“Just that he needed to speak with you,
alone
. He wouldn’t say anything else.”

“Should we wait outside?” Tim asked.

Tania glanced over her shoulder at him. “Why?”

Tim spread his hands. “Karl said ‘alone.’ ”

“So stay quiet and off camera,” Tania said, too terse. “I want you both there.”

Zane cleared his throat. “Er, he reiterated the ‘alone’ request a number of times, Tania. I suggest we honor it.”

“Fine,” Tania said. “But I’ll record the conversation so you can review it afterward.”

The two men exchanged a glance and kept to her pace.

At the door Tim and Zane stopped and took places on either side, like guards. Tania gave each of them a reassuring pat on the arm and warmed slightly at the smile this earned from Tim. Then she entered the comm room. She sat in the center chair at the desk and held a finger above the hold icon on the screen. After three long breaths to calm herself, she swept her hair back behind her ears with her left hand.

“Relax,” she whispered. Then she tapped the button.

Karl’s face did not greet her. Someone else stared back, someone she didn’t know. A man, his skin deeply tanned
and smooth. Thick black hair parted to one side and closely shaved around the ears, as if he’d just visited a salon. His eyes caught her attention more than anything; brown flecked with yellow, and bright with cunning and vigor.

The man wore a smile so vulpine and false it made her squirm.

“You must be Tania,” he said, his voice thickly accented.

“Where’s Karl?” she asked. Inwardly she cursed the weakness and confusion in her voice. Tania willed herself to be strong.

“Sent him back to his tent,” the man said. “I’m Gabriel.”

“Are you in charge there?”

Gabriel’s smile broadened, revealing two rows of perfect white teeth. “I suppose so, yeah. Time we talked, I think.”

Tania steadied herself. “I’m listening.”

“Karl tells me you’ve got a lot of people up there. People who are in need of supplies?”

Gabriel had an easy manner about him. His voice and body language all said “Trust me” in a way that made her skin crawl. She hadn’t felt that since last speaking with Russell Blackfield, though for different reasons. Russell’s eyes undressed, but Gabriel’s disarmed. She held his gaze and nodded.

“Let me tell you,” Gabriel said, “how this is going to play out. I’m what you people call an immune, as are the rest of my family. Though we just think of ourselves as human beings.”

Tania couldn’t mask her surprise. “Your whole family is immune?”

It seemed impossible, and in answer his smile broadened. “They’re not blood, just people I’ve met over the last five years. Survivors who have joined me, who follow me.”

“I see.”

“You call us immune, Tania, but our perspective is different. We call you
incerto
, untested. I understand that no one but Karl has taken a breath of air down here, air that hasn’t been … what’s the word you use? Scrubbed? Scrubbed by these alien towers.”

He practically spat the word
alien
.

Tania’s mind raced.
What have they done with Skyler? Do they not know of his immunity?
Maybe no one had given up that detail. “What are you asking, Gabriel? You
are
asking me something, correct?”

Gabriel spread his hands before the camera. Long fingers bearing gold rings, a flashy watch on his wrist. “Not asking, Tania. I’m telling you how this’ll play. Two things are going to happen. First, you and all your friends up there are going to come down here, in groups, and take our test.”

“Test?” she asked. “You mean to force us outside the aura.”

“Karl did that, and he seems okay other than a bad headache. But there’s another option if people fear to breathe the air.”

“Oh?”

Gabriel clasped his hands together. “We have kits, found them in a government laboratory outside Rio. They can test for the immunity from a simple blood sample.”

Nonsense
, Tania thought, but she held her tongue. Anchor Station scientists as well as doctors on the ground sought just such a solution for years after the disease spread, hoping to discover a way to inoculate people, but no such test was ever devised. The engineered disease was simply too alien.

“For those who don’t want to step outside the ‘aura,’ the blood test is their alternative. We’ll take them in groups to a ranch near here, with one of your remarkable towers in tow for their safety, test them, and return them.”

“Return them?” Tania asked. “What happens if someone is found to be immune?”
Skyler
.

“The ‘immunes’ will join my family and help find others like us until we’re all together as one people.”

“You realize there’s a million so-called
incerto
in Darwin? Do you plan to go there next?”

Gabriel’s eyes glimmered at the prospect. “Someday, maybe. It is our goal to bring everyone immune to the disease together. Earth is ours now, and we must work together to begin again.”

He sounded as if he believed it. Tania wondered if what he
really craved was the role of hero in such a scenario. Attention, glory, and all the other perks.

Tania said, “What happens when the tests are done?”
What happens to those of us who don’t fit into your plan?

“When everyone has been tested,” he said, “you can continue as you have been. However, you will confine yourself to the city of Belém. If we find any of your alien towers beyond the city’s edge, we will shoot on sight and keep the towers for ourselves.”

“And anyone found to be immune goes with you, whether they wish to or not?”

“Yes. Exactly right.”

Tania knew that the odds of immunity were fantastically low. She’d be surprised if anyone was found to have the trait. Anyone except Skyler, of course.

Assuming Gabriel could enforce a blockade on the entire city of Belém, which she highly doubted, the city represented years of supplies and plenty of land to expand to. It would be a long, long time before the fledgling colony would have to test the threat.

But time was not a luxury humanity had. If her calculations were correct, and the Builders stuck to the predicted timeline, they would be back in less than two years. What they sent this time was anyone’s guess. “Let’s be ready,” Neil would have said.

We don’t have time for this kind of infighting
, Tania thought. Why did no one else seem to realize that?

Perhaps they could test Gabriel’s threat much sooner. Get it over with, and then move on.

Unless, she realized, he had a
lot
of immunes with him. She tried to picture this man, wandering the South American continent for five years, fighting off subhumans and wooing every immune he came across. How many could there have been? Darwin had fewer than a dozen. Of course, the city was full of people who had never set foot beyond the aura. It stood to reason there might be a few dozen more hidden within the population, unaware of their special trait. If Gabriel really did have a way to test …

The situation might never get that far, she realized. Gabriel
offered a chance to bring people to the ground. She had no idea how big his group was, but it seemed unlikely there were enough immunes on his side to stop a full-blown uprising by her colonists. The prospect of violence chilled her, but not as much as it once had. Submission was worse.

“You said there were two things,” she said, while her mind worked through all the ramifications.

“Yes,” he said, lingering on the s. “I know of one immune among you already. Skyler, I believe he’s called.”

A knot twisted in Tania’s stomach.

“He’s been harassing my people, even murdered a few in cold blood, people who sought only to make contact with him. He must be delivered into my custody and face his crimes. Once he’s paid his dues, he will join us.”

The way he spoke reminded Tania of the stereotypical tough-cop characters in old films. Perhaps this man had been an actor himself, before the fall. “Skyler’s not in the camp?”

She regretted her response as soon she’d voiced the words. From the look on Gabriel’s face, she’d just confirmed something he’d only suspected.

“No,” Gabriel said. “But I’m told you have a strong relationship with him. You will convince him to come back, unarmed. Promise him all is forgiven if he just returns.”

“Except that all is not forgiven, right?”

“He doesn’t need to know that.”

“Skyler will know I’m lying,” she said, unsure if the words themselves were true.

“He’d better not, for your sake. From now on, for every one of my people he so much as wounds, I will take ten of yours and tie them up outside the aura until they go mad or the afflicted come for them. Starting with Karl.”

“I don’t have a way to contact Skyler,” Tania said. “How am I supposed to convince him to come in?”

Gabriel shrugged. “I don’t care if you stand at the edge of your aura and shout his name all day and night: Just make him listen.”

Tania glanced down at the table in front of her and hugged herself below it. “I need some time to think about this,” she said.

“No, no,” Gabriel replied. “Sorry. I said before, these are not requests. I’ve set some of your people down here to work clearing the cable so that you can begin shuttling people down here. Start immediately, and you’d better be among the first arrivals. I want this Skyler fellow in my custody before he can do any more damage to our important work.”