When We Wake (14 page)

“You bet.”

I wish I hadn’t said that. I’m sorry I dragged her into it, and I hope that telling this story will make them let her go.

Listen to me, you liars.

By the time I’m done, you won’t have any secrets left that she could reveal.

Instead of pulling up outside our house, Zaneisha went for the driveway of the house across the road, where she and Gregor were quartered. I was dragged out of the car and into the house so fast, I swear my feet didn’t touch the ground. I was surrounded by people in uniforms.

“Are you injured?” someone asked brusquely, shining a light into my pupils.

“No.”

“What’s today’s date?” he persisted, clipping something to my finger.

“It’s the seventh of October. I’m fine,” I said. “Where’s Bethari?”

“Ms. Miyahputri is being escorted to her home. Clench your fist for me.”

And then Marie burst through the crowd and dropped on her knees beside me.

I’d never seen her so unsettled; not when I’d crashed into a press conference barefoot and bleeding from jumping off a roof, not when I’d starved myself, not when I’d opened my mouth to the horrible Carl Hurfest and got myself threatened with reconfinement. Her pupils were huge, nearly taking over the dark brown of her eyes, and her hands were trembling as she reached for my wrist. She checked the finger clip-on thingy, then looked into my face.

“I was worried you’d been hurt,” she said.

“I’m fine,” I repeated, and forced myself to say the lie that might keep me free from suspicion. “I didn’t even see that guy go for his weapon, but Gregor must have. He kept me safe.”

“All right. Do you want to go home?”

I nearly said
How?
Home was a century away. But Marie had one lock of hair sticking up from her normally smooth, thick bob. She looked a bit like a cockatoo, feathers ruffled to scare off a threat.

“Let’s go home,” I agreed, and let her guide me across the street.

We were escorted by armed guards every step of the way.

Once the guards had gone through the house, looking for I-didn’t-ask-what, Marie politely shut them all out and asked me to stay in the kitchen while she went downstairs.

I was shaking, and the cup of tea she’d handed me was warm and smooth in my hands. I sat there holding it, without sipping it, willing the warmth to sink into my bones.

When Marie returned, she was carrying a picture of a woman I’d never seen before.

The woman was short and plump, with skin much darker than Marie’s and eyes turned up at the ends in a permanent smile. She was wearing something light and yellow that glinted and sparkled around her, and the light of humor in her eyes made her seem solid and touchable, not a two-dimensional image pressed onto a lifeless frame.

“This is Chelsea,” Marie said.

“She’s pretty,” I said, for lack of any other comment.

Marie smiled. “Isn’t she? We were married for nearly three years.”

Were?
“Oh.”

“She died,” Marie said. “She was shot and killed six years ago, in our old house. The police said it was a robbery gone wrong. They found him. He went to jail. Afterward, I moved here. I couldn’t live there anymore.”

It hit me like the times I’d judged a landing wrong and knocked all the air out of myself instead of rolling with the impact. Marie smiled at me, but her eyes were glassy with unshed tears. I straightened up from my place leaning against the kitchen wall. This wasn’t a time for slouching.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last, aware that it wasn’t enough. Nothing I said could be enough.

“I know the project’s important to you for personal reasons, Tegan. I wanted to let you know about mine. I was already working on Operation New Beginning when Chelsea was shot. Afterward I kept thinking, if I’d worked faster, if we’d made more breakthroughs… It’s silly, of course. Chelsea had been dead for hours by the time I got home. I could never have saved her.”

“Is that why you invited me to stay with you?” I asked. The words popped out before I could think about them, but when I did, they made sense. Taking in a girl who was revived out of her sorrow for the woman who had been murdered—it was poetic, sort of. And tragic, too. But I wanted to be myself, not a prop in someone else’s poetic, tragic story.

“Perhaps a little. Mostly it was because I liked you, and I thought you should have a better deal than what Colonel Dawson was offering.” Her fingers tightened on the picture. “Chelsea would have liked you, too. She loved music and musicians. And you’d lost so much. I wanted you to be with someone who had lost someone. I thought I might understand, if only a little. I wanted to help. If I could.” Her frightened face said, all too clearly, that she didn’t think she was doing a good job.

I crossed the floor and hugged her, with the picture still cradled in her hands. She was all bone and muscle, strength hidden by her conservative clothes and quiet looks, and she returned the hug with interest, making my ribs creak in protest.

“You do help,” I said, and summoned a cheeky grin. “Even if it’s only a little.”

She gave me a proper smile and stepped back with another shaky laugh. “I didn’t even ask, how was your first day of school?”

I made an executive decision not to mention mistaking Abdi for Dalmar, hiding in the janitor’s closet, or turning the classroom into a spam zone. “It was okay. My basic math and literacy skills are all right, but I have to take lots of remedial classes in
history and science. The remedial physics lessons look interesting. What’s a Salten Duck? Can we really make starships?”

Marie relaxed even further. “Salter’s Duck. It’s an old way of converting wave power to electricity. A fairly inefficient method, not often used.”

“And the starships? Really?”

“Theoretically,” she said, turning Chelsea’s picture in her hands. “It would be a huge resource investment, though, and no one would elect a government willing to throw that much money at something so distant. The closest potentially inhabitable planets we’ve discovered are twenty to thirty light-years away. A ship using our fastest current technology would take several hundred years to reach them, and no crew could survive that long.”

I wasn’t a science nerd like Dalmar, but I’d seen enough movies to know what the solution should be. “Couldn’t you use cryonics for that? Sleeper ships.”

Marie laughed. “We’re a long way from that. It would be hard to find volunteers for such a mission when I haven’t even—” She pressed her lips together.

“Brought anyone else back yet?” I guessed.

She sighed. “Yes. I don’t know why, but none of my other patients are responding nearly as well as you are. There’s something on the neurological side that doesn’t respond properly, and we’re having trouble narrowing it down.”

I thought again of the man in the bed, of his slack, incurious face.

“That’s classified, please, Tegan,” she said. “I shouldn’t have told you even that much, but you deserve to know.”

“The other people, the, um, unsuccessful revivals. Were they all volunteers like me?”

“Of course,” she said, looking slightly shocked. “Anything else would be unethical. They have a great deal of trouble finding me viable subjects, however.”

Which reminded me of the question the Inheritor wanted me to ask.
Why me?

Well, a lack of viable subjects was a good answer. I was right on the verge of asking Marie if she knew anything about an Ark Pro-something, but the question stayed locked behind my teeth.

I really wanted to trust her, after all she’d said and done for me. But when it came right down to it, Marie was working for the army. If the Inheritor’s reference had been to something dodgy, I didn’t want the army to be alerted to my search.

“I’ll get dinner started,” Marie said. “Or, well, a late lunch, I suppose.”

“I should do some assignments,” I said, and made myself smile as I went downstairs, Bethari’s computer a lump in my belt.

Bethari had far more apps than I did, and some of them looked really interesting. If I’d had more time, I would have liked to investigate MindNote or Roadcraft.

But I’d told Marie I was doing homework. If Koko
was
being monitored, I had to spend enough time using my own computer to make the lie plausible. I made sure the antispyware apps were running, put up the privacy shield, and set Bethari’s computer
searching for
Ark Pro*
, cross-referenced with
Operation New Beginning
and
Inheritors of the Earth
.

Then I flipped Koko open and looked for the easiest remedial history assignment. There was one that was a project on world news. Pick five current humanitarian or economic situations, do a brief overview on each, then select something for an in-depth report, which I could ’cast, write, or display in creative form. If I displayed it to the class and invited criticism, the project would gain more credits toward my performance and sociability standards.

Fine. I started that search and looked at my other little project.

Bethari’s computer was asking permission to break into government archives.

What kind of apps did she
have
on there?

I checked that my door was locked, gave permission, and watched Bethari’s computer hunt through locked databases like a snake in a rat’s nest.

Koko started blinking at me, wanting to know if she should go into sleep mode. I wasn’t spending enough time on my homework.

I waved through the results, bringing up what Koko listed as the most urgent disasters facing mankind. I was trying to be quick, but I got dragged in deeper and deeper. Marie hadn’t covered anything like
this
in her current affairs and history lessons. I could see why Bethari thought I needed more education.

A fundamentalist revival was predicted in the Republic of
Texico, which was still reeling after the secession of Austin to the United States. I knew the fundamentalist wars had ripped the old United States apart, but I hadn’t realized there were people who still wanted a Christian state.

New Zealand Green was violently protesting what it called the theft of the nation’s freshwater by Australia’s “strong-arm tactics.” New Zealand and Australia had been allies for hundreds of years. But now the Australian government was demanding preferential water sales under the closer-economic-relations agreement. “We have guarded New Zealand’s shores for decades,” the Australian president was quoted as saying. “We are good neighbors. If they continue to take advantage of our need for water with these robber-baron prices, we may have to reconsider what resources we can continue to commit to their protection.”

The New Zealand Prime Minister condemned what she called the “brutal attacks of terrorists” on Australian targets in New Zealand but argued that without water, New Zealand’s vital agriculture industry would fail. “Do Australians really want to starve us—and themselves, too? Much of the food on their tables comes from our fields.”

There were pandemics in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, and supertornadoes in the American South and Texico, and it looked as if France and Great Britain might soon be going to war.

The Ganges had dried up—well, Marie
had
mentioned that, when she’d briefly gone over the North-South Indian War. But the Nile was drying up, too, and there were massive fire events in the Amazon rain forest.

People were still burning fossil fuels, which came as a shock. The cars in Melbourne ran on batteries, and everything was solar-, wind-, or sea-powered, and no one except the military and the very, very rich were flying anymore.

But not everybody had been able to make the switch from fossil fuels, and countries with plentiful oil supplies had managed to offset the cost of switching to clean power by selling oil cheaply to countries that couldn’t afford to go clean, or didn’t have the infrastructure to manage massive electrical grids.

Wealthy governments had essentially exported their pollution, and now they blamed the polluters, the thirdies they regarded as stupid and backward because they still used their hoarded oil for transportation and electricity generation, because they ate meat instead of raising protein crops (genetically modified, patented,
expensive
crops), because they used coal, wood, and gas to cook their food instead of using clean electricity from their nonexistent solar panels.

The world was too hot, and it was getting hotter. Rising waters were threatening Fiji and Samoa, having, the report mentioned casually, already swallowed Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Maldives and displaced tens of thousands of people worldwide. Crops that had worked fine in temperatures three degrees cooler were impossible to grow now, increased growing areas in Siberia and northern Canada weren’t picking up the slack, and there wasn’t enough water anywhere. Refugees crowded on the borders of nations that either wouldn’t let them in or
threw them into huge detention camps that bred disease, crime, starvation, stress disorders, depression, and despair.

No one talked much about the Australian camps. The media lockout was still in force.

Why the hell was anyone wasting news time on something as pointless as what clothes I wore?