Cottonwood (45 page)

Sanford hesitated. “It works,” he said decisively and moved Samaritan aside to access his secret room.

“Fortesque Freeship?” Samaritan echoed. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means we’re leaving. Want to come? Get your clothes, jellybean. You can get dressed in the van. Hurry.”

Samaritan was just looking at her. “You’re really leaving?”

She nodded, then had to put her hand over her mouth, positive she was about to throw up. She didn’t, so she nodded again. “Right now. Tonight. Come with us.”

His stare held a little longer and then he looked down, through the open hatch at the tiny crawlspace where Sanford was moving things briskly around. When he looked up again, he said the one thing Sarah never thought he’d say: “No.”

He sat back down and picked up Sanford’s abandoned beer.

“You can’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean, caseworker. You don’t know the first fucking thing about me.”

He spoke calmly enough, not looking at her. Not caring. She couldn’t convince him. Well, maybe she could, but she didn’t have time. Or room in the van, she thought, and this ugly piece of practicality so horrified her that she reached out and caught his wrist.

“I don’t want to leave you,” she said.

His antennae lowered. He sipped at his beer and pretended he wasn’t attached to the arm she held onto.

She said, “Please.”

He looked at her. Below their feet, Sanford was moving things around. In the back of the house, T’aki was digging frantically through his bedding for his toy ship. A few hundred meters away, Larry the gate-guard was maybe conscious again and trying to get his hands on his paz to dial 99. None of it mattered. He looked at her and said, quietly, “You’re not a hero. You know that, right?”

She knew it. She couldn’t say it, but she knew it.

Samaritan nodded, rubbed the plates over his weirdly human eyes, and said, “Get your hand off me, caseworker. Go on.”

Sanford pulled himself halfway out of the hole in the floor. “Do you know how to shoot?”

“Me?” she asked.

Samaritan snorted loudly and gave her a shove toward the door. “I know how to point and pull a trigger,” he replied. “Why?”

“Lacking a plan…” Sanford bent briefly out of sight and came up again with something that looked like a miniature jet engine with a sword stabbed through it. He plugged his code-bank into the back of the thing; vents along the side lit up with a click and a whine. “…I need a distraction.”

Samaritan caught the gun when Sanford tossed it, coughing out an incredulous laugh. “I don’t remember asking you to make me part of your suicide pact. I could sell this and eat cow for the rest of my damn life. What makes you think I won’t?”

“Every minute IBI is looking here, they won’t be looking for us,” Sanford replied, climbing out of the crawlspace. He had a second, smaller gun slung over his back, his code-bank, and a dirty envelope stuffed to its limits with money.

“So?”

Sanford wordlessly handed the envelope to Sarah.

Samaritan’s antennae slowly flattened. “Fuck you,” he said. “Just…
fuck
you. I’m selling it!”

“No, you won’t. You can do what you want with the rest of them, but you’ll use that one. You’ll give us at least an hour.”

Sarah looked back and forth between them, too anxious to quite care about whatever she was clearly missing. Every second that passed, Larry was waking up and they were just standing here. “We have to go,” she said. “Please. Now.”

“Yeah, go.” Samaritan rather savagely adjusted components of the gun. He looked at the gun, at the hole in the floor, and back at Sanford. “Just how far do you really think you’re going to get?” he demanded.

“All the way to the ocean,” said Sarah, rifling through the money in the envelope.

“All the way to yang’Tak.”

“Are you sure you won’t come with us?” Sarah asked, sweeping up T’aki, his clothes, and his toy ship. “Please.”

“Hell, I’d rather stay and blow shit up than go and die horribly, which you will!” he snapped, directing this last at Sanford. His eyes came back to Sarah and his anger, although it did not abate, at least wavered. “This is stupid,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I’m doing the right thing,” she said, and carried T’aki out to the van.

“We’re going home!” he chirped, bouncing into the back and under the blanket. “Finally! Finally!”

Sanford came next, touching her arm as he climbed in behind his son, and she shut them away. She didn’t allow herself to hesitate. She walked back around to the driver’s side and swung up behind the wheel. She started to close the door; Samaritan caught it.

He looked different with a gun in his hand. Bigger. Meaner. And he was already plenty of both.

“I think you’re crazy,” he said. “And you’re going to be killed. Since I’ll never get another chance, I want to tell you that I think that’s a damn shame. And I just want to add that I think we both know that if I’d had you another five minutes in my house that day, I’d have fucked your brains out and you’d have loved it.”

“I’m going to miss you most of all,” Sarah snapped and slammed the door, half-hoping she caught a few of his fingers in it.

She didn’t. He waggled them at her as she turned around, and then she left him in the rearview mirror with the rest of Cottonwood.

Larry’s pass got her through the Checkpoint again, then through the village gate at IBI’s border. Then she tossed it and drove sensibly and well to Wheaton. At her bank’s ATM, she emptied her account, added the few hundred dollars she got out of it to Sanford’s thousand or so, then threw away her bank card. She threw away her paz as well, since she knew it had been through IBI’s hands for keying. She held it for a little while before she let it go, thinking of all the pictures and videos it still had saved to it…that voice-mail from Mom…that goofy frog cartoon her dad had done up on the animator app clear back when she was ten and it was brand new…even a picture of the house, unburned, and the four of them out front on the lawn, a family. But it had been keyed, she’d seen them do it right in front of her, so in the end, she opened her tight fingers and let it drop into the trash. Last of all, she took off her translator, which had been such a fixture to her head that it made her feel slightly off balance just having it off her ear. It sat in her palm like a spider, its tiny point-light gently blinking.

Ridiculous to think it was anything but a translator. Ridiculous to think that IBI could just punch in this thing’s serial number and home right in on her. They could get that through her paz; why would they need it in her translator too? Life was not James Bond and
Mission
:
Impossible
, and she had two aliens sitting in the car who talked mostly by pushing air out through vibrating mouth-palps.

She dropped it in the garbage next to her paz. Then she got back in the van and gripped the wheel tight. “Say something,” she said. “Please.”

“Then are we leaving?” T’aki asked, not quite whining, but bouncing with excitement, and Sanford said, “Can you still understand us?”

It was actually almost easier without the translator’s distracting echo talking in her ear, although she had to pay closer attention to the clicks. Still, she relaxed, just a little.

“Okay,” said Sarah, and started up her engine.

She drove, and the world kept right on spinning.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He had never had a plan for the escape itself.

In the beginning, on the boats beneath the shadow of the ship, he had hopes of assembling the code-bank, creating some sort of diversion, destroying the humans’ floating city and being away in just a few days. Back then, his fantasies included the whole of his people—every one of them, saved—and himself back on yang’Tak a hero. But M’orr’ak had been killed and the rest of the code-bank thrown into the sea with his body. Then they had all been moved and eventually, all hope—had died. He no longer knew where the ship was or had any way to find it. The dream of escape and home-going had become just that, a dream, something to keep the will to live within him, a pretty story to tell the son he never should have had, a tiny light to hold against the dark reality of the immigration camps. No, he had never had a plan for the escape, but even so, Sanford was stunned that (for the second time) Sarah’s idea of simply throwing them in the back of her van and driving away had worked. Stunned and, honestly, a little offended.

All that night, she drove. At daybreak, she stopped to fuel the vehicle and to buy cold drinks for them to share. Then she drove again. She made only two stops that day—once, in the privacy of a wooded place for her and T’aki to piss, and once more at another fuel stop. She hummed a little in frantic fits, and twice he saw her wiping at her eyes, but she rarely spoke or even seemed to hear T’aki’s bursts of excited chatter.

Adrenaline can move a body only so long.

“You can’t drive, can you?” she asked suddenly, her voice strained.

“I can’t even fit in that chair,” Sanford replied. He’d been expecting the question.

The world rolled by.

“I have to stop,” she said finally, sounding both dismayed and apologetic.

“Of course you do.”

But she drove another two hours at least, looking for ‘a good place.’ She found it off the main road, in a small, spread-out town, at a place she called a ‘campground.’

“They’ve got cabins,” she said. “We need the privacy. We’ll spend the night. Just…Just one night and get a good, early start tomorrow.” She consulted her maps as she spoke. She looked terrified.

He wanted to touch her, to make her stop and see him, to make her move her mouth in a human smile. The sun was still bright and they were not the only vehicle parked in front of the campground offices. He could hear humans moving around them, calling to each other and laughing, some of them very close by. He stayed under the blanket on the floor and eventually she got out.

The place of cabins was very secluded and quiet, surrounded by tall trees and thick bushes. Sarah was gone a long time procuring one. She returned with several packages, some smelling of good cooked meat, looking only slightly calmer.

“Burgers for tonight,” she said. “And breakfast for tomorrow. Mostly doughnuts. I know you hate sweet things, but it’s the best I could do. There’s some bran muffins in there, they’re not as bad. I can…”

And then she just sat, staring out the window. At last she turned on the engines and drove a little further on, away from the road and the offices, to the cabin.

It was a larger building than his home in Cottonwood, but smaller than hers. It had been set well back from the others, and Sarah parked very close to the door and at enough of an angle that the necessary run from van to cabin was not so risky. The insides were comfortable and clean, if well used and sparsely decorated. It had a television, a tiny kitchen, a room with a hot shower, two beds in separate bedrooms, and a large brick alcove for a fire. T’aki, bound up too many hours in the back of the van, ran room to room flying his ship until Sanford made him sit and eat. It was good food, but Sarah only picked at hers. Ultimately, she put it aside and excused herself to a bedroom, claiming fatigue. She took her maps with her to sleep, he noticed. Sometime later, T’aki (who had eaten all his meat, but only half his bread and one vegetable slice) climbed down from the worn sofa and flew his toy ship away.

Sanford sat and watched television. The news mostly, for any report from IBI in general and Cottonwood in particular, switching over on every commercial interruption to run a restless eye over the other programs. There were far fewer channels than had been available at Sarah’s home.

The quiet unnerved him. When had that happened? He remembered enjoying quiet Before, on yang’Tak. It was what made him such a good prospect for lengthy missions in deep space, such as accompanying colonists to a new world and seeing them safely begun. But now it made him nervous. The small rooms seemed too big, too empty, too clean. Through the drawn curtains, the trees towered, moved, whispered. The scents were all wrong. There were no other yang’ti. None. Not for miles.

Sanford clicked despondently and heard his son’s answering rattle in the other room. Good boy. Just as he’d been taught. Stay close and always answer. Sanford switched off the television and went to see him.

The bed was the same size as the bed they’d slept in at Sarah’s house, as large as the rear room in his own at Cottonwood. T’aki sat in the center, swaddled clumsily on every side with sheets and blankets. Sanford neatened the nest, then knelt down on the mattress and watched his son run the toy spaceship back and forth over the same fold of cloth. Usually, this was an exciting game, less play than practice for the real thing, the home-going. Tonight, it was reserved.

“Will we be there tomorrow?” T’aki asked finally. His palps quivered. He was frightened, but trying to hide it.

“Three days, Sarah said. Perhaps longer. She has to be careful how to go.”

“Are they chasing us?”

“I don’t know.”

Back and forth went the ship. An endless flight. For a moment, Sanford could almost feel the hum of the engines under his feet, that comforting subsonic hum that meant the course was true, the universe at rest, and all was right.

T’aki let go of his toy and rolled onto his back with the impossible flexibility of the very young. He looked up at Sanford with arms and legs drawn up, and eyes deeply solemn. “Sarah is coming too,” he said. He tried to say it firmly, tacking it into place with clicks of certitude, but his fear betrayed him—in flat antennae, in too-soft tones, in the unhappy shine of his wide eyes.

“Of course,” said Sanford. He put his hand on his son’s chest and let it be clutched in relief. “She is you and she is me. We all go together.”

“—and she is me,” T’aki chanted, playing with Sanford’s fingers now, wiggling them one after the other all the way down to the inflexible points just before the line of his true spikes began. Sanford could recall doing just that with his own father’s hand when he was T’aki’s age. His heart throbbed a little, but in a good way. He realized he felt for the first time that this was going to work. They had not escaped yet…but they would. They truly would. His heart throbbed again, harder. He got up and took the spaceship out of his son’s nest, to set it on the small table nearby.