Time Salvager (29 page)
Levin gave Kuo a slight bow. “ChronoCom welcomes your active support in our operation.” He emphasized every one of those words.
Kuo’s face finally changed just a bit and the corners of her mouth curled up. Levin wouldn’t quite call it a smirk since there wasn’t much of a smile there. “Happy to be of assistance, Auditor.”
“Very well.” Sourn nodded. The guy seemed like he couldn’t wait to leave this squalor. “I’ll leave you two to your work. I want results, Securitate. See it done.”
“Yes, sir.” Kuo bowed. That was the only sign of deference Levin had seen from her.
The two of them watched Sourn bolt out of the room. Two minutes later, Jerkis sent word that Sourn’s ship had taken off. Levin and Kuo sized each other up, both trying to take control of the situation.
Kuo broke the silence first. “From now on, I will need access to all of your communication channels, not just the ones you deem necessary. Inform your men of the new chain of command.”
“Since you are officially only functioning in a support capacity, I will be happy to relay the requests I approve of to my men,” Levin said.
Kuo didn’t miss a beat. “I had hoped not to trivialize your role to that of a gopher, but you may do as you wish.”
“Thank you for such consideration.”
“Have you investigated the fugitive’s personal relationships?”
“Increased surveillance has been applied to his former handler, yes. However, ChronoCom does not feel it is necessary to cast an invasive net over everyone who has ever interacted with him.”
Kuo looked disapproving as she walked to the map and studied it. She spoke with her back still to him. “Your resources seem to be stretched quite thin.”
“We use what we can, Securitate, and he is only one fugitive, after all.”
“Report to the director that you will require three times your current allocation. If you have insufficient numbers, I will be happy to provide Valta forces.”
Levin kept his face neutral. Like the abyss he was going to let her take over his operations like this. “I’ll see what numbers we can spare.”
She pointed to four of the regions that Levin had circled. “These are the high-probability zones on the continent. I see they are all rural.”
He nodded. “Every remaining major city has a heavy state presence. His best bet to avoid discovery would be in the wastelands and the scattered settlements throughout these areas.”
“The two fugitives, James and the scientist, they have rad bands?”
Levin nodded. “Possibly. He ransacked the armory before he made his escape.”
Kuo made a slow circle around the table. “Good. What if we were to filter all high-population zones with trace grayon gas? Valta uses it to trace pirate ship movements in mining operations regularly.”
Levin frowned. “Grayon gas is highly radioactive. That would kill off every living person for several kilometers. There could be thousands of wastelanders there.”
Kuo turned to him with a perplexed look on her face. “And?”
Sammuia appeared in their tent once again just as the sun was rising. This time, he had company with him. A girl, slightly taller, but with his same face, peeked at Elise over his shoulder while he nudged Elise’s shoulder.
“Elder Elise,” he whispered in her ear. “The sun is up.”
James, sleeping on the far side of the tent, bolted out of bed, his eyes shifting back and forth to the two children in the tent. Sammuia yelped in terror. Whatever hopes Elise had for waking up peacefully were ruined by the cries of not one but two children literally climbing over her to get as far away from James as possible.
She gave him a dirty look and pulled Sammuia in for an embrace. “There, there,” she soothed. “The big bad monster’s only being a jerk.”
James looked at the young boy, and then at the flap through which the girl had run for cover, and yawned. “These people obviously have no concept of privacy.”
“Is there something you need, Sammuia?” Elise said, turning the boy’s head so that he was no longer staring petrified at James. “And who did you bring with you?”
“This is my sister Rima,” Sammuia said, puffing out his chest and pulling her back in the tent. “She wanted to meet you.”
“Hello, Elder,” Rima said, eyes averted and toe digging into the dirt. She held out a single flower.
Elise accepted it and held the girl’s hands. “Thank you, dear.”
Sammuia tapped her on the shoulder. “Elder Elise, Oldest Qawol would like you to gather with the tower workers.”
Sammuia nodded, and then clung to Elise again when James got out of bed. Elise wondered what had happened between the Elfreth and his people for them to be so terrified of him. Even the food he brought them earned him only temporary goodwill. Would they ever learn to trust him?
James scowled. “They’re trying to make you one of them.”
There was a hint of anger in his voice; Elise wondered why. Did the Elfreth do something to upset him? Why was there so much animosity between them? She had to remind herself that she was a visitor here to this world and there was much she didn’t understand. After all, a lot had changed in four hundred years. She looked down at the dust-covered ground, complete with vines and weeds crawling in between what looked like chunks of cracked concrete. Their tent was on what used to be a street.
“Damn straight, a lot changed,” she muttered. She stood up and stretched, rising to her tiptoes and feeling her aching joints pop. She was used to surviving in the wilderness back home; she wasn’t the lab rat sort of biologist, after all, but what she was going through right now was a whole new level of discomfort.
“Come on, James the time-traveling liar,” she said, “we ate their food and slept in their homes. The least we can do is work for it.”
Sammuia and Rima, each one holding one of her hands, led them to where the Elfreth had gathered in the communal field. Franwil, Qawol’s wife, was in charge and split everyone up into smaller groups. James made a small ruckus when Elise was separated from him, but finally relented when she pinched him on the arm and told him to mind his manners.
“I’m only going to be planting crops on that rooftop,” she whispered fiercely in his ear. “If something happens, I’ll think to you through the comm band and you can come all knight-in-shining-armor at me. But for Gaia’s sake, stop being so petulant. You’re scaring people.”
James kept that scowl on his face until the very last moment, when his group led him away to help reinforce a dam that kept the rising tides from overflowing into their camp. Elise watched as he looked back no less than three times as he disappeared over the hill, looking like a little boy being forced to go to school.
“Be safe,” he thought to her.
“I’m hoeing crops. What could go wrong?”
“I’m still not convinced they’re not cannibals.”
Elise’s group started the morning climb up one of the six towers the Elfreth referred to as the Farming Towers. The six buildings formed a ring and were connected at the seventieth floor by a sky bridge. The tribe had planted crops on the flat roofs of the tall buildings above the low-hanging fog clouds that often covered the sun’s rays.
It took half an hour for the entire group to climb the stairwell up to the seventieth floor. At first, Elise feared they would be walking up in pitch darkness. Fortunately, the tribe had taken off the doors on every level and cut direct paths to the outside, so sunlight could illuminate the darkened stairs.
The group passed the tedium of the long walk by singing tribal songs that told the story of their ancestral home in the south along the Delaware River, in a so-called magical alley with tiny houses where the Elfreth received their namesake, and the long journey up through the terrible Manhattan island, finally to this blessed sanctuary here at the Farming Towers.
To Elise, the songs sounded like a combination of old church hymns and yodeling, except everyone was off-key and harmonizing seemed to have become a lost art. Maybe she was being a little critical. After all, these people were all singing while walking up seventy flights of stairs in a stairwell that was basically one gigantic echo chamber. Also, Elise would be the first one to admit she was tone-deaf, so who was she to judge?
As for the climb up the Farming Towers, Elise had always kept herself in good shape—a requirement in her old career—but by the time they had reached the sky bridges, she was grateful for that small moment of rest.
Looking around, she realized how soft she was compared to the people of the Elfreth. They hadn’t even begun work yet and she was exhausted. She was probably one of the youngest and fittest looking here, the rest of the group consisting of the elderly and the women, yet she had the most trouble keeping up.
Next, they split into six even smaller groups as Franwil delegated where each group was to work. Elise was one of the last chosen. She couldn’t help but flash back to her elementary playground days when she was often chosen last due to her diminutive size.
“You stay with me, girl.” Franwil pulled Elise along by the wrist as if she really were a child. They joined a group of six older women, all either short or so stooped over that their hands nearly dragged against the ground, if they just let them hang down.
The small group climbed another four flights of stairs before they reached the roof, where Elise found several neat rows of tall crops that looked not unlike stalks of corn, but with husks of bloodred vegetables buried just under the soil. The stalks of the crops were a pale gray with a strange finish so smooth that they looked unnatural, almost metallic.
“Dig up the husks and put them here,” Franwil instructed, pushing a brown woven basket into Elise’s hands. “Watch for the stem. Rub your fingers against the grain and you might lose one.”
Elise looked over at a pile of the long rod-like stalks, cut up and stacked neatly to the side. “Do I need a machete to cut the stems?”
Franwil shook her head. “One of the other groups will rotate here later in the afternoon to do that. Our job here is to only gather the blood corn.”
They set about their work as Elise and the women methodically worked their way down the neat rows, their short height making it easy for them to pluck the husks out of the dirt while simultaneously protecting them from getting lashed by the foilage above them on the stalks that could cut flesh by mere touch. It was backbreaking work that continued for the better part of the morning.
Just as they were finishing up, another group arrived to take their place. This time, it was a group of taller women and men, with straight backs and armed with machetes and gloves. The two groups nodded and traded positions. Elise’s people rested while the new group went to work, first using their gloved hands to tear off the leaves and then hacking away at the base of the stalks with the machetes, creating several smaller piles.
“What do you use them for?” Elise asked as she watched the stacks of stalks grow.
Franwil gave her a puzzled smiled. “The body of the blood corn, once shorn, can be used to build shelters that keep the insects away, while the leaves are used for filters to clean the impurities out of the rain.” She paused. “This is mother-to-child wisdom. What poisoned life did you and the chronman find us from again?”
Elise pretended not to hear as her small group left their replacements to do their work. James had decided this morning not to tell the Elfreth where she had come from. Even in such a remote place, the wasteland people knew of chronmen and the Time Laws. If the tribe ever found out the truth about her, who knew what they would do? They might end up turning her over to the authorities, drive them away, or maybe even kill her on the spot.
Instead, James had spun a tale of her abuse and how she fled from another tribe, and how he had found her while she wandered the radiated mountains of Appalachia. They had accepted her easily enough, more so than James, whom they avoided and watched at every waking moment.
The group walked down the four flights back to the sky bridge, and continued on to the next building, where they replaced yet another group who had been laying soil and breaking apart the larger chunks of dirt with hoes and pickaxes. There, they planted seeds brought up by even another group, this time younger children who carried the large sacks in twos and fours. Sammuia was in that group. The boy grinned and made a show of holding her hand in front of the other children. Overall, Elise was impressed with this well-tuned operation.
She looked over the edge of the building down at the rest of the Boston Common, where the low-hanging soot clouds swirled, the gray-colored winds dancing around the buildings like wisps. It was a harsh world she lived in now. To survive out here, these people had to work and live efficiently, and rely on one another for things to get done.
The backbreaking work continued until noon, when the scorch of the sun became too much for them to handle. All the crews retreated to safety inside the shells of the skyscrapers to break for lunch. There, children even younger than Sammuia, all under ten years of age, brought up their meals: assorted brown and green mush with salted leaves and small black grubs curled into balls. She was starting to get used to these disgusting meals.
In fact, she was so hungry she didn’t even realize she had inhaled it all until her plate was clean. She looked down in surprise. It was as if her taste buds had turned themselves off in order for her body to digest the nutrients without throwing them up. Elise gazed around the room. This was how these people lived, day in and out.
During the hottest four hours of the day, when it was far too dangerous to work, the crews spaced themselves out on the stairwell of the building and passed containers of water, fresh sacks of untainted soil, seeds, and useful farming tools up from the surface. The old soil, with its nutrients used up, was tossed over the side of the buildings. This work continued until the sun began its descent toward the horizon and the temperature cooled. Then the crews went back to the roof and worked three more hours until it was too dark to continue.
