Limit of Vision (13 page)

11

Ela kicked hard
for shore, though she hardly cared anymore about her destination. All she could think of was air: The rebreather was not giving her enough air. Not nearly enough. Her chest ached with the effort of sucking against the resistance of the respirator, fighting to force more oxygen from the unit than it was designed to produce. Her lungs burned. She wanted the surface so badly, but she forced herself to stay down. Only the silt, the turbid water, could hide her from the spying eyes of government authority.
But it hurt!

It came as a bitter relief when she finally found the edge of the ocean. She felt the gentle push of a swell lift her from the bottom. When it set her down again the water drained away from her face. She found herself lying in the shallows, on the margin of the mudflat. The shore was deserted: no fisherfolk, no children, no dogs.

No patrolling soldiers.

Ela spit out the respirator and drew in a sweet lungful of real, unlimited air. Behind her she could hear the growl of helicopters over the water, but she did not waste time looking around. She peeled off her fins, and staggered to her feet. Her legs felt wobbly and weak as she set off at a gallop through the shallows, the rebreather pack banging against the small of her back.

A stand of brush had grown up beyond the mudflat. She raced for it, slipping in the steaming mud, going down once, while clouds of tiny flies pinged against her arms, her face. From somewhere up the beach a dog barked. She did not look around. The brush was only five meters away. Then two. Then one.

She ducked under its shelter, scrambling past the slap and jab of unfriendly branches until she reached the dense center of the stand. Then, with a tiny cry, she peeled off the rebreather pack and collapsed on her back, her chest heaving, burning, her heart beating so hard it must surely implode, collapsing into a tiny spot of infinite pain.

She stared wide-eyed at the sky, waiting to die. Amorphous gray spots swam across that blue vault. Sunlight refracted between fanning twigs. A rumble in her ears became the engine noise of a helicopter drawing swiftly nearer. What device did they have to see her through the brush? She couldn’t think. Did infrared work in the heat of the day? She curled up, to make her profile smaller.

Something warm and wet touched her bare foot. She jumped, scrambling back as far as she could before the branches stopped her. A large dog sat where her foot had been. It was leashed, with the leash held by a brawny teenage boy who crouched under the foliage, studying her with a puzzled expression. He wore a faded T-shirt and ragged shorts, with a frayed pack strapped around his waist, but he also had the shiny new farsights and confident demeanor of the
Roi Nuoc
.

Ela did not take her eyes off him as she groped for a rock, a stick. Anything. Her fingers touched a human hand. She gasped, flinching back against the tangled branches. Another farsighted boy crouched beside her. She glanced around, spotting two more farther back in the brush. They all looked to be around sixteen or seventeen years old, well fed and muscular . . . significantly stronger than she.

Ela stifled a little scream. Pulling her bare knees up against her chest, she hugged herself, horribly conscious of her own exposure. She wore only a wet-suit vest and quick-dry running shorts over a swimsuit—which left her legs and arms bare. But shame quickly followed her first rush of panic as the boys made no move against her. Instead they turned their attention toward the ocean, and the black bee-shape of a helicopter cruising toward them.

What were they doing here?

Had they been waiting for something? Watching the activity at sea? Had she given their position away with her sudden, panicked flight from the water?

The helicopter did not waver in its course. Ela crouched, ready to flee on all fours if she had to. It was impossible actually to stand under the jabbing twigs.

The boy beside her touched her shoulder. She jumped, twisting around to face him. He was the largest of them all, with an attractive rounded face, and long black hair, tied in a ponytail behind his neck. With dismay Ela noted that he outweighed her by at least fifty pounds. He withdrew his hand, saying something in a gentle voice that Kathang translated as,
You must wait, please.
Don’t move yet
.

She nodded, settling back against the ground.

The boy with the dog whispered to the animal: sharp, exciting commands that caused it to raise its ears. Its tail wagged, stirring dead leaves.

Ela stole the moment to slip off her farsights. She popped off the eye cups—a move that drew a surprised murmur from the boy at her side. Throwing him a wary glance, she stuffed the pliant cups into the pocket of her shorts. Then she frowned down at her farsights. She had no way to clean the lens.

The boy lifted them from her hand, murmuring something she could not understand without Kathang to translate; but his meaning became clear when he pulled a soft cloth from his waist pack and began to clean them.

The helicopter was almost onshore. The boy with the dog slipped its leash off. Then, with his hand on the animal’s neck, he commanded,
Di!
Di!
The dog took off, running toward the helicopter and barking wildly. Another dog raced down the beach to join it. The helicopter turned in a wide circle over the two cavorting animals, but it was not distracted for long. It swept back toward the brush.

One of the boys behind Ela hissed. The one beside her dropped her farsights and grabbed her instead, his heavy arms locking her against his chest. She fought him for a second. A small cry escaped her throat. But it was a battle with herself as much as with him. Even as panic made her resist, she understood what he was doing. After a second she did what she could to help him, pulling her long legs against her body to make herself as small as possible while he hunched over her, shading her from the sight and sensors of the helicopter crew. Still, she could not stop herself from trembling. She never let herself get this close to any man. It wasn’t worth it. It was a trap.

There was no choice.

The boys did not try to hide themselves. They could not. The helicopter descended over them. They watched it resentfully, shading their eyes against the dust and flying leaves that swirled within the miniature hurricane of its prop wash. A booming voice fell out of its loudspeaker, speaking in Vietnamese so that Ela had no idea what it said.

The boy with the leash looked annoyed. He whistled to the dogs, then turned and picked up her rebreather. The helicopter still hovered directly overhead.

Ela remained huddled in the shadow of the boy with the muscular arms. He picked up her farsights and passed them to her. She slipped them on, careful not to let her elbows show. He murmured instructions, which Kathang translated:
They will go away when we go away, okay?
You must stay close to me until then.

The dogs went past, following their handler inland.

“How?” Ela whispered. She was a tall, ungainly foreigner, but he was strong. He held her against his chest as he turned, and began to crawl after his companions. She did her best to melt against him, moving her legs as he moved his, but it was a position too close to sex, and it shamed her.

There were many kinds of fear.

After they had gone a few meters, the helicopter peeled away, heading up the beach. The boy half stood. He still held her close to his side, but they were able to run together down a narrow trail between head-high foliage, then along the foot of a dike and into a tangled stand of mangrove. When the canopy of leaves grew so thick that only sparks of sunlight made it through, he let her go.

She scrambled away. She couldn’t help it. Her face felt hot; her body so dirty. Silt like fine sandpaper rolled in a layer of sweat beneath her wet suit. For several seconds she fought hard not to cry. Then they were moving again, heading inland as fast as Ela could clamber through a vague path that twisted up and down among the tangled mangrove roots.

The struggle to keep up with the boys left her with no curiosity, and no breath for questions anyway. She did not know why they protected her, and she was too tired to care.

After twenty minutes they headed uphill, emerging into the open on the back of a levee. Ela stumbled to a halt, gasping, her hands on her knees as she struggled to catch her breath. Black shadows crowded the corners of her vision. She had not eaten since last night, nor had anything to drink.

The one who had touched her—that one—he spoke to her in English. He did not look at her, frowning instead at his farsights, pronouncing each word individually and awkwardly as if echoing words he did not understand: “They-know-your-face-they-know-you-were-diving-the-closed-site—”

“Who knows?”

“They-are-looking-for-you-we-must-go.”

“Go where?”

He frowned harder. Then he nodded. “The I-B-C,” he said, pronouncing carefully each syllable. Then he added, “Inland.”

The IBC? She sent Kathang off to uncover what the IBC might be. Then she forced herself to straighten. “Who are you talking to?”

Kathang translated his reply as
Mother Tiger
.

It meant nothing to her. Nothing at all. She stared off into the distance, across a landscape checkered with fishponds and rice fields and farmers’ houses. It all looked very normal, but she did not feel normal. She was breathing too fast, wasn’t she? And the sun stood too high and too hot, as oblivious and enthusiastic as a lone drunk at a funeral.

“Joanie didn’t call me,” she whispered. It hurt to realize it. “She didn’t even send a message.” Her balance slipped. She staggered in the dust on the back of the levee. The ground here was very dry, except where blood from cuts in her feet had formed dark streaks of mud. “I’ve lost it all, haven’t I? Everything.”

Everything but her farsights, her wet suit, and Kathang’s paid-up account.

She laughed softly. There wasn’t even anything left to sell.

Talk about bad luck.
Seriously
bad. What fortune-teller could have warned her?

Kathang whispered in her ears,
Drink some water
. A plastic bottle had appeared in her hand. So Ela drank, until the boy—that one—took the bottle from her lips. He spoke and Kathang translated.
We need to go
.

“Where?” she demanded. “Why are you here?”

He shrugged. Kathang took his words and changed them.
I don’t know
.

Ela considered that. Then she shrugged too, and followed him down the other side of the levee.

The overflights started shortly after that. Before the first one, they had a minute’s warning—time enough to hide in a stand of dense grass. Ela peered between the stalks as a patch of blue sky slipped loose to glide low over the dirt road they had just been walking. The blue disk moved in perfect silence: a drone aerostat, its button cameras glinting in the sunlight. Ela watched it while ants crawled over her ankles; it made her wonder how bad arrest could be. So she took a few minutes to peruse Kathang’s report on the IBC. After that, she decided ant bites probably were the best alternative.

The next warning came only ten minutes after they started walking again. This time two drones passed before the
Roi Nuoc
let her stir. At the third warning, Ela gave up. “No more!” she snapped at the boy—that one who had touched her. He was getting too used to touching her. She pushed his protective hands away.

Grabbing her rebreather from the dog boy, she stomped toward the nearest shrimp pond. The
Roi Nuoc
looked mystified as they watched her go, but uncertainty turned to panic when she waded into the water. That one who had touched her, he started after.

“Stay back!” she shouted, pointing at him with a warning finger. “Stay away. I know a better way to hide.” She fished the eye cups out of her pocket and slipped them onto her farsights; she put the respirator in her mouth. Then she lowered herself into the dirty water. That one, he grinned as he watched her sink beneath the surface.

Water like tea eclipsed the sky, while shrimp bodies scattered beneath her. Daylight faded to the color of heavy smoke as she settled against the bottom. The water was colder than she expected, but she forced herself to lie still, concentrating on her breathing. For a while the light grew brighter as the silt she had stirred settled back to the bottom. Then slowly, slowly, the sparse daylight that penetrated the muddy water began to fade. It felt like going blind. She could see only a brown haze, but she could see it less well all the time until there was only blackness.

Even then she waited until cold and hunger finally drove her to emerge, shivering and exhausted, to find the rusty colors of sunset still streaking the western sky.

The
Roi Nuoc
were gone. She searched the brush with nightvision, surprised to find herself alone. The rebreather was unbearably heavy, so she cached it in some bushes. Then, with wobbly steps, she climbed a small levee between the ponds.

A car waited on the dirt road that ran down the levee’s back. The driver’s door was open. A man sat there, watching her. In the luminous aura of nightvision she could see every detail of his face.

“
Ky Xuan Nguyen
,” she whispered.

He smiled. “Ms. Suvanatat. Ela. You are an intrepid young woman.”

“Why are you here?”

“Because you are here, of course. You found something very valuable at the crash site, didn’t you, Ela? It’s why the IBC pursues you so hard.”

Her eyes widened. For the first time in hours she remembered the plastic packet she had tucked under the strap of her swimsuit.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “Are you cold?”

She nodded, telling herself it was better to deal with Nguyen then with the hard-ass cops of the IBC.

He brought her a blanket, then sat her in the front passenger seat. “I’ll take care of you now, Ela, all right?”

She nodded again, without meaning it. Australia seemed to be receding from her, retreating ever farther away.