THIRTY-TWO

The hours passed and night came on.

They’d heard no word yet from Michael. After the three of them had slipped out the back of the Infirmary, the group had separated: Michael to the Lighthouse, Alicia and Peter to the trailer park, to watch over Caleb from one of the empty hulks, in case Sam and Milo returned. Sara was still inside with the girl. For the time being, the only thing to do was wait.

The trailer where they hid was two rows away from the lockup, far enough that they could go undetected but still with a view of the door. It was said the trailers had been left by the Builders, who had used them to house the workers who had built the walls and lights; as far as Peter knew, no one else had ever lived there. Most of the paneling had been stripped away to get at the pipes and wires, and all the fixtures and appliances had been taken out, chopped up and dispersed. There was a space in the back where a mattress had sat on a platform, separated by a flexible, sliding door on a track, and a couple of sleeping cubbies tucked into the walls; a tiny table was situated at the other end with a pair of benches facing each other. These were covered in cracked vinyl, the gaps in the fabric disgorging a brittle foam that crumbled to dust when you touched it.

Alicia had brought a deck of cards to pass the time. Between hands of go-to, she would shift restlessly on the bench, glancing out the window toward the lockup. Dale and Sunny were gone, replaced by Gar Phillips and Hollis Wilson, who evidently had decided not to stand down after all. Sometime in the late afternoon, Kip Darrell had appeared, bearing a tray of food. Otherwise they’d seen no one.

Peter dealt a fresh hand. Alicia turned away from the window, took her cards from off the table, and looked at them quickly, frowning.

“Flyers. Why’d you give me such junk?”

She sorted her cards while Peter did the same, and led with a red jack. Peter matched the suit and countered with the eight of spades.

“Go to.”

He had no more spades; he drew from the deck. Alicia was gazing out the window again.

“Stop it, will you?” he said. “You’re making me nervous.”

Alicia said nothing. It took Peter four draws to match the suit; his hands were now hopelessly full of cards. He played a deuce and watched while Alicia played out the two of hearts, rolling the suit, and ran with four cards in a row, flipping on a queen to bring him back to spades.

He drew again. She was long in spades, he could feel it, but there was nothing he could do. She had him completely boxed. He played a six and watched while she dealt out a sequence of cards, flipping to diamonds on a nine, and emptied the rest of her hand.

“You always do that, you know,” she said, as she was scooping up the cards. “Play out your weakest suit first.”

Peter was still looking at his hand, as if there was something left to play. “I didn’t know that.”

“Always.”

First Bell was moments away. How strange it would be, Peter thought, not to spend this night on the catwalk.

“What will you do if Sam comes back?” Peter asked.

“I really don’t know. Try to talk him out of it, I guess.”

“And what if you can’t?”

She tipped a shoulder, frowning. “Then I’ll deal with it.”

They heard First Bell.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Alicia said.

He wanted to say: Neither do you. But he knew this wasn’t so.

“Trust me,” Alicia said, “nothing’s going to happen after Second Bell. After last night, everybody’s probably hiding in their houses. You should go look in on Sara. The Circuit, too. See if he’s found anything.”

“What do you think she is?”

Alicia shrugged. “As far as I can see, she’s just a frightened kid. That doesn’t explain that thing in her neck, or how she survived out there. Maybe we’ll never figure it out. Let’s see what Michael comes up with.”

“But you believe me? About what she did at the mall.”

“Of course I believe you, Peter.” Alicia was frowning at him. “Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

“It’s a pretty crazy story.”

“If you say that’s what happened, then that’s what happened. I’ve never doubted you before, and I’m not going to start now.” She examined him closely for a moment. “But that’s not what you were asking about, is it?”

He let a silence pass. Then: “When you look at her, what do you see?”

“I don’t know, Peter. What should I see?”

Second Bell began to ring. Alicia was still studying him, waiting for his reply. But he had no words for what he felt, at least none that he trusted.

A blaze from outside: the lights were on. Peter unfolded his legs from under the table and rose to his feet.

“Would you really have stuck Sam with that cross today?” he asked her.

Alicia was below him now, illuminated from behind, her face sunk in shadow. “Honestly? I don’t really know. I might have. I’m sure I’d be sorry if I had.”

He waited, saying nothing. Resting on the floor was Alicia’s pack—food and water and a bedroll, her cross beside it.

“Go on,” she urged, tipping her head toward the door. “Get out of here.”

“You’re sure you’ll be okay?”

“Peter,” she said with a laugh, “when wasn’t I?”

In the Lighthouse, Michael Fisher was having more than his share of problems. But worst of all was the smell.

It had gotten bad, really bad. A sour, armpitty reek of unwashed body and old socks. A moldy-cheese-and-onions sort of smell. The air was so rank that Michael could barely concentrate.

“Flyers, Elton, just get out of here, will you? You’re stinking the whole place up.”

The old man was sitting in his usual spot at the panel to Michael’s right, his hands lying heavily on the arms of his old wheeled chair, face turned slightly to the side, away. After they’d powered up for the night—levels all green as far as that went; the station, whatever might have happened down there, was still sending current up the mountain—Michael had resumed work on the transmitter, which now lay in pieces on the counter, their images bulging through the articulated magnifying glass he’d carried out from the shed. He’d been nervously anticipating a visit from Sanjay, to ask him about the batteries; he was ready at a moment’s notice to scoop the whole thing into a drawer. But the only official visit had come from Jimmy, late in the afternoon. Jimmy didn’t look so hot, sort of flushed and out of it, like maybe he was coming down with something, and he’d asked about the batteries sheepishly, as if he’d forgotten all about them and was almost too embarrassed to bring it up now. He hadn’t gotten farther than a meter from the door, though the smell would keep anyone away, a barricade of human stink, and had appeared to take no notice of the magnifier, sitting out there for anyone with half a brain to see, nor the open slot on the panel with its colored cables and exposed circuitry and the soldering iron resting beside it on the counter.

“I mean it, Elton. If you’re going to sleep, go do it in back.”

The old man twitched to life, fingers tightening on the arms of his chair. He turned his blind, rigid face to Michael.

“Right. Sorry.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Did you solder it?”

“I’m going to. Seriously, Elton. You’re not alone in here. When was the last time you took a bath?”

The old man said nothing. Come to think of it, he didn’t look so great himself, not that the standards where Elton was concerned were all that high to begin with. Sweaty and washed out and somehow not there. While Michael watched, Elton drifted a slow hand toward the surface of the counter, his fingers tapping lightly in a searching way until they alighted on the headphones, though he didn’t pick them up.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m just saying you don’t look so great is all.”

“Are we lights up?”

“That was an hour ago. How asleep were you?”

Elton licked his lips with a heavy tongue. Flyers, what was it? Something in his teeth?

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I will go lie down.”

The old man lumbered to his feet and shuffled down the narrow hallway that connected the work area with the back of the hut. Michael heard the creek of springs as his big body hit the cot.

Well, at least he wasn’t in the room.

Michael turned his attention back to the work that lay before him. He’d been right about the thing in the girl’s neck. The transmitter was connected to a memory chip, but not any kind he’d ever seen, much smaller and without any obvious ports except for a pair of tiny gold brads. One was linked to the transmitter, the other to the filigree of beaded wires. So either the wires were an antenna array and the transmitter ran off the chip, which didn’t seem likely, or the wires themselves were sensors of some kind, the source of the data the chip was recording.

The only way to find out for sure was to read the data on the chip. And the only way to do that was to solder it hard to the mainframe’s memory board.

It was a risk. Michael was hard-soldering a piece of unknown circuitry to the control panel itself. Maybe the system wouldn’t see it. Maybe the system would crash and the lights would all go out. Probably the wisest course would be to wait until morning. But by this point he was moving forward on sheer momentum, his mind clamped onto the problem like a squirrel with a nut in his teeth; he couldn’t have waited if he wanted to.

He’d have to take the mainframe off-line first. This meant shutting down the controllers to run straight off the batteries. You could do this for a while but not for long; without the system to monitor the current, any fluctuation could flip a breaker. So once the mainframe was off-line, he’d have to work fast.

He took a deep breath and called up the system menu.

Shut down?

He clicked on: Y

The hard drive began to spin down. Michael darted from his chair and shot across the room to the breaker box.

None of the breakers moved.

He got quickly to work, pulling the motherboard free, placing it on the counter under the magnifier, taking up the hot iron in one hand and the strip of solder in the other. He touched it to the tip of the iron—a waft of smoke curling in the air above it—and watched as a single drop descended toward the open channel on the motherboard.

Bull’s-eye.

He tweezered the chip; he had one shot to get this right. Gripping his right wrist to keep it steady, he gently lowered the chip’s exposed contacts into the solder, freezing it in place for a count of ten while the bead of liquid solder cooled and stiffened around it.

Only then did he let himself breathe. He slid the board back into the panel, locked it in place, and booted the mainframe back up.

In the long minute that followed as the system came back online, the hard drive clicking and whirring, Michael Fisher closed his eyes and thought: Please.

And there it was. When he opened his eyes he saw it, sitting in the system directory. UNKNOWN DRIVE. He selected the image and watched as the window sprang open. Two partitions, A and B. The first was tiny, just a few kilobytes. But not B.

B was huge.

It contained two files, identical in size; one was probably a backup of the other. Two identical files of such immensity it simply boggled the mind. This chip: it was like the whole world was written inside it. Whoever had made this thing and put it inside the girl, that person was not like anyone he knew; they did not seem to be from a world he was part of. He wondered if he should maybe get Elton, ask him what he thought. But the snores coming from the back of the hut told him this would be a waste of his energy.

When Michael opened the file, as he did in due course, he did it almost furtively, one hand raised before his eyes, which were peeking through his fingers.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 477