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An airport security
guard walked by, and Chal turned her face away from the screen.

“Come on,”
she said to Alan. “Let’s go.”

“Who is that?”
Alan asked.

“One of the
men from the lab,” Chal said.

“Did you know
him?”

Chal looked back at
the screen once more before handing her boarding pass to the ticket
agent. They walked through the gate.

“Yeah,”
Chal said. “He was the guy in charge.” Alan didn’t
press her with any other questions, and she was grateful. Questions
were swirling in her mind.

In the plane, Chal
pressed her head against the window, looking for anyone in a suit.
Alan was tense alongside her, and Chal thought it was for the same
reason she was nervous. He jumped when the jets began to shudder the
plane along the runway, and then she realized that he was afraid of
flying.

“Harder when
you’re not the pilot?” she said, amused by his apparent
anxiety. Alan nodded, his jaw clenched in a hard smile.

“This is
completely different,” Alan said. “It’s out of my
control.”

“Then there’s
really no need to worry,” Chal said. She put her hand over his.
“It’ll be fine.”

The flight attendant
paused at their aisle, looking at Alan for a moment longer than
necessary before she continued into the back of the plane. Chal’s
mind immediately jumped to high alert. Their pictures might have been
displayed on the television screen, or their descriptions given to
airport staff. They could be caught right there in the airplane. Her
heart raced.

She craned her neck
to see the woman in the back, talking with another attendant. Chal
drew a sharp breath as they looked over towards Alan, and then the
first attendant caught Chal’s eye. To Chal’s surprise,
the woman’s eyes widened and her cheeks flushed faintly. She
turned away quickly, and in her guilty expression Chal understood
what was really going on.

Of course. Alan was
handsome, after all. A perfect model of a man. There was nothing
there, no real danger.

Still, Chal was not
able to relax until the plane lifted off of the ground. Then she
exhaled deeply. Alan was agape at the view out of the window, and
Chal determined that they should switch seats at the first
opportunity.

“Will you miss
it?” Alan asked, looking out of the plane window at the rapidly
shrinking countryside below them. They would pass over the desert in
Arizona, Chal realized.

“America?”
Chal asked.

Alan shrugged, a
strangely human gesture. “Your home. Your friends.”

Chal opened her
mouth to respond but could not come up with a suitable answer.

My home.
She
forced herself to consider what she was doing, what she was leaving.
Until this point, she had been driven by force and circumstance,
unable to think of anything except protecting Alan. Now, sitting
safely en route to Portugal, she had a chance to think about what all
of this meant.

She could still go
back, of course. She could claim that she had been taken hostage. The
airline videos would tell a different story, but she could always
claim Stockholm syndrome. Claim that she had been mentally abused to
the point where she was scared to run, scared to do anything, had
actually begun to feel sympathy toward her captor. When they touched
down in Portugal, she could turn right back around and get on the
next plane and leave –

Leave Alan? The
thought made her stomach turn, and she reached out unconsciously to
take his hand.

“No,”
she said, and knew at that moment it was true. She had spent her
adult life in research, and while she had many colleagues whom she
respected and liked, there was nobody in America who had any hold
over her heart. What she was leaving behind was prestige and power,
nothing else.

Would she miss it?
Perhaps. But she felt now that there was something more to her life,
and she wanted to hang onto that feeling for as long as it lasted.
All of her work had led up to this. Alan was the culmination of all
of her research goals for the past decade; she couldn’t leave
him and start back over again. In Catalonia at least she would have
her mother; she would have Alan.

Alan squeezed her
hand, and Chal looked up at him. He was worried about her, and she
didn’t know how to reassure him. Hell, she wasn’t sure
how to reassure herself. She knew, though, that somehow they would
get through it together.

***

At the Portugal
airport, they disembarked with relief. Chal had slept fitfully after
their brief layover in New York, with the toddler two rows ahead of
them wailing in anguish for most of the overseas flight. She had put
on headphones, but even her favorite music wasn’t a help.
Still, she managed to piece together something of a plan to get them
to Catalonia.

Between Portugal and
Catalonia was the whole of Spain, a digital nation surrounded by its
smaller, non-digital neighbors. Lucia was right – trying to get
across the border by land was near impossible. Although they could
try to sneak through, any city they stayed in would be likely to have
video surveillance. The digital intelligence scanners were constantly
on alert for any fugitive presence, and Chal was certain that she
would be on a “persons of interest” list soon, if she
wasn’t already.

But in Portugal, at
least, they were safe from digital intelligence scanners. Still, Chal
kept her head bent as they walked through the airport, stopping only
briefly to purchase two dictionaries in Portuguese and Spanish. She
wanted a Catalonian one for Alan, but they didn’t have any. It
would just have to wait.

They stopped at a
bank kiosk on their way to the coast and Chal thanked her accountant
for having the foresight to open an overseas savings account for her
in her mother’s name. It had been an easy way for Chal to help
her mom out when she needed it, but now it proved to be a lifesaver.
When they arrived in Catalonia, she would have to be careful about
contacting her mother, since Chal was sure that would be one of the
first places they would look for her to escape to. She took out as
much cash as the bank kiosk allowed–$800 – and prayed
that it would be enough.

They arrived at the
small port town around noon, just as the fishermen were coming back
from the early morning’s work. The docks were redolent with the
smell of seaweed and fish, and Chal walked with Alan alongside the
boatyard to where the sailboats moored just offshore.

If they took a
motorboat, they would be forced to stop for gas along the Spanish
coast, or they would have to carry gallons and gallons of fuel with
them – a suspicious cargo if they were stopped by the coast
guard. They might be able to motor out farther and avoid the coast
guard altogether, but Chal didn’t want to risk being caught in
a storm or strong current off of the northern cape of Spain. She had
been out in the middle of the ocean before, and it was a dangerous
place. Chal wasn’t an expert at navigating and didn’t
want to try her luck just now when it would be impossible to phone
for help.

No. Better to stick
as close to the coast as possible, and as close to reality as
possible. They were American tourists just out sailing for a day or
two. They wouldn’t have to stop to refuel, and they would be
able to sail straight north, hugging the coast until they reached
Catalonia. The Catalan region of Spain had spread its influence north
and west until the final nation-state encompassed the entirety of
what used to be the Franco-Spanish border. There was a sliver of
coastline between the north of Spain and the south of Franch, and
that was what they would have to shoot for.

Chal stopped on the
edge of the dock, looking out toward the people milling around,
working on boats and cleaning fish. Seagulls swept the air overhead,
filling the bay with their cries. She felt overwhelmed until she felt
Alan’s steady hand on her back.

“Ready?”
Alan said. His voice was full of trust.

“Ready,”
Chal said, and she was.

After some
negotiations in her broken Spanish, Chal was able to secure a
sailboat from a small rental shop. It was a decent boat, a little
over twenty feet long and sturdy enough to weather the Atlantic
swells. The man who rented them the boat seemed eager to let them
have it for only a hundred dollars a day, and Chal paid him for four
days with another hundred dollars as a deposit. There was a market on
the side of the docks, and by the time they were done packing the
supplies another hour had passed. They still had some time before
nightfall, enough to get some distance between them and Lisbon.

It would take a
little under four days to reach Catalonia, Chal reasoned, and then
they would not have to worry about being caught in a boat they did
not have papers for. Once she was able to withdraw funds in
Catalonia, she could arrange for the boat’s return. Still, she
felt guilty as she watched Alan sign the receipts under his false
name.

Chal motored the
boat out of the harbor, relying on the engine to take them out past
the rocks before she attempted to put up the sails. One of the
reasons she had chosen a small boat was to avoid suspicion; the other
was simply that she didn’t know how to sail very well.

She had one
boyfriend in the past who was an avid sailor, and now as she knotted
the line to the sail she tried to remember what he had taught her. It
took a few tries and some experimentation, but soon both the main
sail and the jib were up and they were sailing along without the use
of the motor.

The wind was light
but gusty and the first time Chal tried to tack she almost knocked
Alan off of the boat with the boom. He caught it in his hands before
it could hit his head and sat down hard.

“Are you
trying to kill me?” he asked, teasingly.

“I told you to
sit down when we’re turning,” Chal said, too focused on
negotiating the swells to be polite.

“Let me give
it a try,” Alan said, once they had straightened out.

“Can you do
this?” Chal asked. She was surprised – had they built
this capacity into his brain too? Alan read her thoughts and laughed.

“No, but I can
learn,” he said. “After all, it can’t be too hard
if you can do it, right?” Chal cocked her head in an
admonishing scowl, and Alan grinned.
They had implanted sarcasm.
Great.

She showed him the
basics that she knew and let him take the helm. It was strange to be
helping Alan with a task that wasn’t programmed automatically
into his system. He fumbled with the tiller, forgetting which way to
turn and not knowing immediately how to adjust when the wind changed.

“You’re
learning quickly,” she said to encourage him after he turned
too far into the wind and the sail began to flap loosely. He frowned.

“Not quick
enough,” he said. “It’s strange.”

“How is it
different?” Chal asked. “Different from before?”

“It’s
just terrible,” Alan said, grinning despite his words.
“Everything is fuzzy in my brain, like I’m trying to
reach out and grab something. But I just can’t keep ahold of it
for long. Not like when I was flying.”

“When you were
flying...”

“It was like
all of the information was just under the surface of my brain, and it
was easy to tap into. The first time I read the manual, I understood
exactly what I had to do. Like my muscles had already been trained.”

Chal wondered if
Fielding had done anything to Alan’s body before implanting his
brain’s core. Something to strengthen it in certain ways. It
could just be that his brain pathways made it seem like muscle
memory.

“It’s
interesting to see you struggle with something,” Chal said. She
laughed aloud. “I don’t mean that I like to watch you
having a difficult time.”

“Sure you
don’t.”

“Just that
it’s very intriguing to watch you learn in different ways.”

“Well, it is a
little more fun,” Alan said. “I like a challenge.”

“This has
already been challenging enough,” Chal said. “Right now
I’d like a break.”

Once they had
straightened out into an easy course, she let her attention drift to
the coastline. The beach was already far away, a thin line of gold
under the dark trees. The sunlight warmed her skin. She yawned,
covering her mouth with one hand.

“You should go
nap a while,” Alan said. “Take a break.”

“Oh, so you
think you can handle the boat by yourself already?” Chal asked.
She
was
sleepy.

“I’ll
yell if I need you.”

“Here,”
Chal said, handing the Spanish dictionary to him. “You can
start learning if you get bored. Catalan isn’t that different
from Spanish.”

Alan caught her
wrist, enveloping her hand in his. Chal felt a pulse of desire run
through her body.

“Thank you,
Chal,” Alan said. His voice was warm, caring, and Chal felt
herself retreat involuntarily at the display of affection, stamping
down the feeling that was threatening to take her over. She had been
growing closer and closer to Alan, but hadn’t stopped to
realize the implications of her feelings. Now she was faced with the
depth of emotion that he had woken up inside of Chal. It frightened
her.

She nodded, not
trusting herself to speak, and retreated to the side of the boat
where she curled up under a large towel, a large floppy hat resting
loosely atop her head.

Stockholm
syndrome.
In the airplane she had thought about pretending to be
the victim, but as she considered it now she grew more worried that
she might have become an unwitting captor. What right did she have to
take Alan to Catalonia? What right did she have to make these plans,
to lead him off into a strange place, to make him dependent on her?

Her stomach turned
as she realized that his affection for her might simply be a result
of his fear and dependence. There was nothing there between them,
nothing real.