The Very Best of Kate Elliott (36 page)

The firefight streamed across the meadow so like one of her dad’s acties that it was uncanny. Unreal. Shots spat out from the circling jungle, from behind low mounds. A man in technician’s coveralls— not the one controlling the cargo hover—toppled, tumbled, and lay twitching on the ground. She couldn’t tell who was shooting at whom, only that Eun-soo was limping and Zenobia’s shift was torn, revealing her pale, voluptuous body, and Akvir was doubled over as though he had been kicked in the stomach, by force or by fear. She didn’t see Eleanor or the woman in business clothes. A riot cannon boomed. Sparks flashed fitfully in the air, showering down over treetops. It boomed again, closer, and she flattened herself on the ground, shielding her face and ears. Esperanza shouted right behind her, but without her eyes open she couldn’t see the sim-screen. A roaring blast of heat pulsed across her back as, in the distance, people screamed.

Now the cavalry would ride in.

Wouldn’t they?

The screams cut off, leaving a silence that was worse than pain. She could not even hear any birds. The jungle was hushed. A footfall scuffed the ground beside her just before a cold barrel poked her in the back.

“Get up,” said the man.

She staggered as she got to her feet. No hand steadied her, so she stumbled along in front of him as he strode out into the Zona. Esperanza had vanished.

The cargo hover was tilted sideways, nose up, stern rammed into the ground so hard that it had carved a gash in the dirt. Bugs swarmed in the upturned soil. The technician still clutched the remote, but he was quite still. A youth wearing trousers, sneakers, and no shirt stood splay-legged over the dead man. The boy’s mouth and nose were concealed by a bandanna, black hair mostly caught under a knit cap pushed crookedly up on his head. He had the skinny frame of a teenager who hasn’t eaten enough, each rib showing, but his stance was cocky, even arrogant. He stared at Rose as she approached. Her sim-screen had gone down, and his gaze on her was so like the pinprick of a laser sight, targeting its next victim, that she was afraid to blink. He said something to the man, who replied, but she couldn’t understand them.

The Sunseekers lay flat on their stomachs on the ground a short ways away, hands behind their heads. Three more bandanna-wearing men waited with their ancient rifles and one shotgun held ready as six newcomers jogged toward them across the clearing, but the newcomers paid no attention to the prisoners. Like the bugs in moist dirt, they swarmed the hover.

“March,” said the commander, gesturing with his scatter gun.

No one complained as their captors prodded the Sunseekers upright and started them walking, but not back the way they had come.

Akvir sidled up beside Rose.“Where’d you go? What’s going on?”

The boy slammed him upside the head with the butt of the rifle. Akvir screamed, stumbled, and Rose grabbed his arm before he could fall.

“Keep going,” she whispered harshly. “They killed some of those people.”

The youth stepped up, ready to hit her as well, but when she turned to stare at him defiantly, he seemed for the first time really to see the blemish that stained her face. She actually saw him take it in, the widening of the eyes, and heard him murmur a curse, or blessing. She had seen so many people react to her face that she could read their expressions instantly now.

He stepped back, let her help up Akvir, and moved on.

“No talking,” said the commander.“No talking.”

No one talked. Soon enough they passed into such shelter as the jungle afforded, but shade gave little respite. They walked on and on, mostly downhill or into, out of, and along the little ravines, sweating, crying silently, holding hands, those who dared, staggering as the heat drained them dry. After forever, they were shepherded brusquely into a straggle of small houses with sawed plank walls and thatched roofs strung alongside a tributary river brown with silt, banks densely grown with vegetation. An ancient paved road that was losing the battle to cracks and weeds linked the buildings. Someone still drove on it: at least four frogs caught while crossing the road had been flattened by tires and their carcasses desiccated by the blast of the sun into cartoon shapes. Half covered by vines, an antique, rusting pickup truck listed awkwardly, two tires missing. Three of the houses had sprouted satellite dishes on their roofs, curved shadows looming over scratching chickens and the ever present dogs. A few little children stared at them from open doorways, but otherwise the hamlet seemed empty.

A single, squat building constructed of cement rebar anchored the line of habitation. It had a single door, through which they were herded to find themselves in a dimly lit and radically old-fashioned Kristie-Anne church.

A row of warped folding chairs faced the altar and a large cross on which hung a statue of a twisted and agonized man, crowned with a halo of plastic thorns. None of the chairs sat true with all four legs equally on the floor, but she couldn’t tell if the chairs were warped or if the concrete floor was uneven. It was certainly cracked with age, stained with moisture, but swept scrupulously clean. A bent, elderly woman wearing a black dress and black shawl stood by the cross, dusting the statue’s feet, which were, gruesomely, pierced by nails and weeping painted blood.

The old woman hobbled over to them, calling out a hosanna of praise when the commander deposited Doctor Baby Jesus into her arms. As the Sunseekers sank down onto the chairs, dejected, frightened, and exhausted, the caretaker cheerfully placed the baby doll up on the altar and fussed over it, straightening its lacy skirts, positioning the plump arms, dusting each sausagelike finger.

“What kind of place
is
this?” whispered Eun-soo. “I didn’t know anyone lived like this anymore. Why don’t they go to the cities and get a job?”

“Maybe it’s not that easy,” muttered Rose, but no one was listening to her.

The commander was pacing out the perimeter of the church, but at Rose’s words he circled back to stand before them.“You don’t talk.You don’t fight. We don’t kill you.”

Zenobia jumped up from the chair she had commandeered.“Do you know who we are?” Her coiffure had come undone, the careful sculpture of bleached hair all in disarray over her shoulders, strands swinging in front of her pale eyes. “We’re important people! They’ll be looking for us! You can’t just—! You can’t just—!”

He hit her across the face, and she shrieked, as much in outrage and fear as in pain, remembered her torn clothing, and sank to the ground moaning and wailing.

“I know who you are. I know what you are. The great lost, who have nothing to want because you have everything. So you circle the world, most brave of you, I think, while the corporation gets free publicity for their new technology. Very expensive, such technology. Research and development takes years, and years longer to earn back the work put into it. Why would I be here if I didn’t know who you are and what you have with you?”

“What do you want from us?” asked Akvir bravely, dark chin quivering, although he glanced anxiously at the young toughs waiting by the door. For all that he was their leader, he was scarcely older than these teens. Behind, the old woman grabbed Doctor Baby Jesus and vanished with the doll into the shadows to the right of the altar.

The commander smiled.“The solar array, of course. That’s what that other group wanted as well, but I expect they were only criminals.”

“You’ll never get away with this!” cried Zenobia as she clutched her ragged shift against her.

Rose winced.

The commander lifted his chin, indicating Rose. He had seen. “You don’t think so either, muchacha?”

“No,” she whispered, embarrassed. Afraid. But he hadn’t killed her because she had, in his eyes, a kind of immunity. “I mean, yes. You probably won’t get away with it. I don’t know how you can escape surveillance and a corporate investigation. Even if the Constabulary can’t find you, Surbrent-Xia’s agents will hunt you down in the end, I guess.” She finished passionately.“It’s just that I hate that line!”

“That
line?”
He shrugged, not understanding her idiom.

“That line. That phrase. ‘You’ll never get away with this.’ It’s such a cliché.”

“Oh! Oh! Oh! You—you—you—
defect!”
Zenobia raked at her with those lovely, long tricolor fingernails. Rose twisted away as Akvir grabbed Zenobia by the shoulders and dragged her back, but Zenobia was at least his height and certainly as heavy. Chairs tipped over; the Sunseekers screamed and scattered as the toughs took the opening to charge in and beat indiscriminately. Eun-soo ran for the door but was pulled down before he got there. What envy or frustration fueled the anger of their captors? Poverty? Abandonment? Political grievance? She didn’t know, but sliding up against one wall she saw her chance: an open path to the altar.

She sprinted, saw a curtained opening, and tumbled through as shouts rang out behind her, but the ground fell out beneath her feet and she tripped down three weathered, cracked wooden steps and fell hard on her knees in the center of a tiny room whose only light came from a flickering fluorescent fixture so old that it looked positively prehistoric, a relic from the Stone Age.

A cot, a bench, a small table with a single burner gas stove. A discolored chest with a painted lid depicting faded flowers and butterflies, once bright. The startled caretaker, who was standing at the table tinkering with Doctor Baby Jesus, turned around, holding a screwdriver in one hand. A chipped porcelain sink was shoved up against the wall opposite the curtain, flanked by a shelf—a wood plank set across concrete blocks—laden with bright red-and-blue plastic dishes: a stack of plates, bowls, and three cups. There was no other door. It was a blind alley.

The light alternately buzzed and whined as it flickered. It might snap off at any moment, leaving them in darkness as, behind, the sound of screams, sobs, and broken pleas carried in past the woven curtain.

What if the light went out? Rose bit a hand, stifling a scream. She hadn’t been in darkness for months.

This was how the night-bound lived, shrouded in twilight. Or at least that’s what Akvir said. That’s what they were escaping.

Saying nothing, the old woman closed up the back of Doctor Baby Jesus and dropped the screwdriver into a pocket in her faded skirt. She examined Rose as might a clinician. Rose stared back as tears welled in her eyes and spilled because of the pain in her knees, but she didn’t cry out. She kept biting her hand. Maybe, possibly, they hadn’t noticed her run in here. Maybe.

In this drawn-out pause, the shadowy depths of the tiny chamber came slowly clear, walls revealed, holding a few treasures: a photo of Doctor Baby Jesus stuck to one wall next to a larger photo showing a small girl lying in a sick bed clutching the doll itself, or a different doll that looked exactly the same. A cross with a man nailed to it, a far smaller version of the one in the church, was affixed to the wall above the cot. Half the wall between shelf and corner was taken up by a huge, gaudy low-tech publicity poster. Its 3-D and sense-sound properties were obviously long since defunct, but the depth-enhanced color images still dazzled, even in such a dim room.

Especially in such a dim room.

Her father’s face stared at her, bearing the famous ironic, iconic half smile from the role that had made him famous across ten star systems: the ill-fated romantic lead in
Empire of Grass.
He had ripped a hole in the heart of the universe—handsome, commanding, sensitive, strong, driven, passionate. Doomed but never defeated. Glorious. Blazing.

“Daddy,” she whimpered, staring up at him. He would save her, if he knew. She blinked hard. The sim-screen wavered and, after a snowy pause, snapped into clear focus.

The curtain swept aside and the commander clattered down the three wooden steps. One creaked at his weight. He slid the barrel up her spine and allowed it to rest against her right shoulder blade.

“Ya lo veo!” cried the old woman, looking from Rose to the poster and back to Rose. She began to talk rapidly, gesticulating. When the commander said nothing, did not even move his gun from against Rose’s back, she clucked like a hen shooing feckless chicks out of the way and scurried over to take Rose’s hands in hers.

“Su padre? Si, menina?”
Your father? Yes?

Then she turned on him again with a flood of scolding. The rapid-fire lecture continued as the commander slowly backed up the stairs like a man retreating from a rabid dog.

“What kind of fool are you, Marcos, not to recognize this girl as the child of El Sol? Have you no kind of intelligence in your grand organization, that it comes to an imprisoned old woman like me—”
She spoke so quickly that the translation program had trouble keeping up. “. . . que ve las telenovelas y los canales de chismes . . .
who watches the soap operas and the channels of gossip [alternate option] entertainment channels to tell you that you should have known that more people would be on that ship than the children of businessmen?”

The old woman finished with a dignified glare at her compatriot.

“This girl will not be harmed.”

“That one?”
He indicated the actor, then Rose.
“This child? How is it possible?”
He touched his own cheek, as if in echo of the stain on hers.
“The children of the rich do not have these things.”

“God’s will is not ours to question,”
she answered.

He shrugged the strap of his scatter gun to settle it more comfortably on his shoulders.
“Look at her. Even to look past the mark, she is not so handsome as El Sol.”

“No one is as handsome as my father,” retorted Rose fiercely, although it was difficult to focus on the poster since the image blended with the words scrolling across the bottom of her sim-screen.

They both looked at her.

“Ah.” Señora Maria waved a hand in front of Rose’s face. Her seamed and spotted palm cut back and forth through the sim-screen. Swallowing bile, reeling from the disrupted image, Rose blinked off the screen.