Resi knew as well as I did that this was no idyllic celestial home. The opposite, in fact. In its heyday, it had been Hades, the living death, the birthing place of a million horror stories told by masters to their slaves, slaves to each other, mothers to their children.
What did you expect? Virtually none of our kind ever saw a place like this and lived to tell about it, and in the absence of facts, myths take hold.
In other words, I needed a moment.
Meanwhile, she reached for a keypad on the door. “This is exactly why I wanted you muzzled. Seems you charmed your way right in the door with that bullshit,” she whispered, reaching up to squeeze my chin between her thumb and finger. “But good God, it was beautiful.”
20
HER
It had all happened in one single, terrifying blur.
One minute, the Datsun was jouncing and jolting across an increasingly hostile-looking desert, the engine letting out ever-angrier growls of protest. I was verging on carsick and officially giving up on ever getting comfortable in the hot, cramped back seat, slathering more salve on my burns for the fortieth time and darting my eyes back and forth between my dwindling supply of water bottles to a fuel gauge needle tilting dangerously close to “E.” From the front seat, Max, for the past half-hour having gotten nothing but pained moans from me in response to his never-ending string of witticisms, fiddled with the radio knobs, alternating between static and some kind of weird religious broadcast from a backwater border town, seemingly the only place in New North America where religion was still a thing.
This truly was the end of the world.
The next minute, the engine gave one final, resentful shudder before silence fell, leaving only the desert’s chilly stillness and the call of a lone buzzard circling above.
I peeked out the window, where sand, fine and relentless, had swallowed the road—assuming there had ever been a road—whole, leaving the pathetic old car and three thoroughly fucked people marooned on the waves of a blue-black sea of earth. Even the mesquite seemed to have given up on growing here.
“Get out and see what’s wrong,” Max said, jabbing his gun at the old gardener with as much menace as he could believably muster after three hours of pretending to be just a second away from shooting him.
But I could only watch from the back seat, my breath shallow, as Obadiah threw open the door and emerged into the night, the weak headlights illuminating about half of his form in eerie white phosphorescence. Max followed, gun still aimed at Obadiah’s back.
Obadiah crouched by the front of the car but glanced up again quickly. “Hey, Wallace,” he said, “an extra pair of hands might help. Maybe ya drop that thing and?—”
“Nice try, asshole. Quit trying to be clever because we both know you’re anything but.” Max shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the gun never wavering, stifling a yawn. It had to be late. I hadn’t looked at my phone. No clue what time it was. We’d lost any decent reception hours ago.
Obadiah, muttering his usual under-the-breath curses, made a big show of slowly getting on his knees to peer at the car’s undercarriage, his hands moving quickly to loosen a small, obscured panel, pulling out a fistful of wires. “Might be the problem,” he mumbled to Max. “Heat must’ve fucked it.”
As Max took a half step closer, squinting at the wires, Obadiah sprang up, hurling a handful of sand into Max’s eyes, then darted past him and toward the next rise.
I threw open the door.
“I’m fine,” Max grumbled, swiping at his eyes matter-of-factly.
“Well, then maybe shoot him? Now’s your chance,” I rasped, not pausing to consider the futility of shooting the only person who knew where the hell we were going. Unless Obadiah planned to hang around, lurking in the darkness, waiting to slit our throats. In that case, I supposed the real question was, did we want to be lost and dead now, or lost and dead later?
Evidently, these were the only kinds of choices now available to me.
The gun, reduced to a useless though no doubt expensive piece of metal, dropped to Max’s side. I watched like an idiot as Obadiah’s lumbering form melted into the surrealistic moonlit landscape, soon swallowed whole by the night.
HIM
Weakly, I said, “I knew you were too smart to fall for that story, ma’am,” as we waited for the iron gate to lurch open with a mechanical moan.
Resi laughed. “Flattery now, huh?” My chain clinked as she unlatched the gate, jerking me forward in a way that was not, surprisingly, entirely unkind. “You keep at it. Some tactic’s bound to work.”
Actually, one already had.
She’d been right. The maudlin, meandering tale one half of my fuzzy brain had wovenhadbeen beautiful in a way. Not because it had done anything to win over the woman jerking my chain, but because in the time it took to tell it, it had bought theotherhalf of my brain time to do something else: figure out whyherstory—the one about the chip—didn’t add up.
I’d known—even through the hazy torment of my shattered ribs and limbs and skull—that something was off about it. At the time, it hadn’t really mattered because Louisa’s safety was too precious to risk.
But Resi’s lab notes had contained extensive 3D images of the chips, and I’d examined them long enough to recognize the shape of the one she’d shown me. As I relied on the stars to guide me in fiction, they’d also guided me in fact. To a newer model—a vague star shape—only in use for the past eight years. One that couldn’t be mine.
In fact, it probably belonged to the dead slave girl they’d tossed in the desert. In other words, that was why the serum hadn’t killed me: because it hadn’t worked.
