Valentine's Exile (42 page)

Her eyes grew even larger. “Oh, no. Our children go to special schools. They learn, from their very first weeks, how to lead mankind out of darkness. The Long March to the Future. It would be selfish of me to want to keep my baby from that. That would be a very bad attitude to have.”

“Absolutely,” Valentine said, finishing his cigarette. Post had once told him that he and Gail had their falling out over an abortion. She did not want to bring a child into the world just to be disposed of at some future date by the Kurian Order.

Was there anything left of that woman?

On off days Valentine and Ahn-Kha went out to “the grotto”—a low pond ringed by trees on the southwestern perimeter of Xanadu—and plotted out how an escape might be engineered. They would eat and talk, then throw a football back and forth when they needed to think. At the next break they would talk again. The escape had to buy them enough time to get across the river before an alert was sent out and a pursuit organized.

They developed a plan, but it was like a string of Morse code, a group of dots and dashes with gaps in between. The biggest problem was the security system. Thanks to some postcoital perusals of Fran Paoli's file cabinets—he turned the television on after shutting her door to allow her to sleep in peace—he had learned that Gail was in room 4115 of Grand West, and that she was scheduled for her caesarian in early December. Valentine's ID would get him into his building and onto his assigned floors, plus the common areas for staff, but he couldn't even get access to a floor above or a floor below his levels, let alone a different building. Ahn-Kha could bring laundry into the basements of any of the four Grands, but couldn't access the elevators.

His conversations with Alessa Duvalier grew increasingly anxious. She wanted to know how his head felt.

“Go back home if you like,” Valentine said. “Or are things getting heavy with Lance Corporal Scott Thatcher?”

“Soon to be Sergeant Thatcher. He's talking about getting married, said it makes a big difference in how the officers look at you when promotion time rolls around.”

“That's wonderful,” Valentine said.

“I'm counting the days until he pops the question. I hope your schedule lets you come to an engagement party.”

Cooperation from Gail would make all the difference in the world. During daylight hours the women were free to visit their outdoor patio, or even a strip of park bordering the north tower. But how to get cooperation from a woman who had to think long and hard over whether she'd finished a page in her novel or not, and what action to take about it once she did?

“We need someone who can drive. Drive really well,” Ahn-Kha said as the days began to run out in October. There was frost on the ground most mornings now.

“That might be doable,” Valentine said. “You think we could trust the doc?”

“Your lover? No—”

“I meant Doctor Boothe. I've seen her with pickups and that little ATV. She says she hates people. Maybe she means she hates the system.”

“She is risk-averse,” Ahn-Kha said. “She does her job, wraps herself in it like a cloak, my David.”

“There's one bit of skin showing. That assistant of hers, Pepsa, she's protecting her, hiding her. I wonder if she'd get her out with us.”

“And why are we leaving?” Ahn-Kha said.

“I'll come up with a reason.”

Evenings at the rec center were typically a bore, and that night was no different. The cavernlike garage had a few games of cards going, an almost-unwatched video, a pickup basketball game, and a “reading circle” where a group of nurses took turns reading a novel—a tattered old gothic about some siblings locked in an attic by a cruel grandmother—and performing the different voices. The only things new were several taped-up orange flyers for the Halloween Dance at the NUC hall, and a table where some of the workers were sewing together odds and ends and adding colored feathers or glitter to masks and hairpieces. The result was more Mardi Gras than Halloween. Valentine wasn't planning on attending. Since he had been to the previous dance, and his lover didn't feel the need to go trolling again, he offered to work that evening.

He opened a “coke” and took a swig of the syrupy concoction with its saliva-like texture. Xanadu cokes had never seen a cola nut but they did give one a brief rush of caffeine-charged glycemic energy.

The pickup basketball game had a lot of noisy energy. Valentine watched Ski, the hand who liked to call him “Grogfucker,” sink a three-point shot over the heads of the other hands. An easy man to dislike. Valentine counted heads, nerved himself.

“You've only got five players. Need a sixth?” he asked.

They ignored him.

Valentine set down his bottle and moved around under the basket.

“Clear out, Nursey,” Ski said. “Boys only.” The jumble of arms and legs shifted back to the basket to the beat of the bouncing ball. Ski tipped it in and Valentine reached out and snatched the ball. He gave it an experimental bounce.

“How about a little one-on-one?” Valentine asked, looking at Ski. The others lined up next to Ski.

“How about you fuck off,” Ski said. “Before I bruise up those pretty little eyes.”

Let's get it over with, big boy
.

Valentine bounced the basketball off Ski's forehead, feeling oddly like he was facing Vista again. He caught the ball on the rebound.

“Naaaah”—Ski let loose with a scream, charging at Valentine with fists flailing. He was big, but a sloppy fighter. It would have been so easy for Valentine to slip under his guard, take his elbow, and use the big hand's momentum to tip him over the point of Valentine's hip. Instead Valentine put up a guard as Ski rained blows on him. He put his head down and rammed it into Ski's stomach. Ski gripped him by the waist and they locked.

A couple of the others saw Ski winning and joined in. Valentine felt himself pulled upright, took the better part of a punch on the temple, a grazing blow to his chin, then another in the gut. Air—and a little coke—wheezed out as his diaphragm contracted. He tasted blood from a cut lip—

Then they were pulled apart, Ski by two of his fellow hands, Valentine by a burly blue arm. Valentine realized it was one of the security staff, talking into his radio even as he put him on the ground with a knee across his back.

Xanadu's security arrived faster than he would have given them credit for—perhaps they were better than they appeared—and didn't let the fight go with a simple “shake hands.” Valentine, Ski, and a third hand all made a trip to the long security complex between the hospital and the Grands, where they were put into whitewashed cells to cool down. Valentine gathered from the exchanges at the admissions desk that Ski had caused trouble before, and Valentine had been scooped up in the administrative overkill. Almost as an afterthought they fingerprinted him.

Valentine sat in his cell with a rough brown paper towel, wiping the ink off his hands, wondering—

He'd been printed before in the Kurian Zone. A set of fingerprints existed in the Great Lakes Shipping Security Service, inserted there as part of the long-ago operation that brought him to the Gulf Coast with a good work record that could survive a detailed background check. He imagined the Ordnance had some kind of connection with the GLSSS, and he just might be able to explain away a connection if the old “David Rowan” identity pinged.

But if the connection was made to the renegade officer of the late
Thunderbolt
. . .

Valentine felt a Reaper's presence in the building. Somewhere above.

A warty, one-eyed officer had the three brawlers brought up a level so they stood before his desk. The Reaper lurked somewhere nearby, not in the room. Valentine felt cold sweat on his belly and back, and his eyes searched the desk and file cabinets for something, anything, that could be used as a weapon.

“Brawling, eh?” the officer said from his paper-littered desk. His desk plate read LIEUTENANT STRAND.

“Hot blood, Strand,” Ski said. “Nobody was aiming at murder.”

“Little too much hot blood. You didn't join in the blood drive this fall.”

“I get woozy when they—” Ski said as his companion winced.

“Corporal!” Strand said. “Take them over to the hospital. Liter each, all at once. They won't feel like fighting for a while.”

“I get spells—” Ski's accomplice said. Valentine felt only knee-buckling relief. Anything was better than the hovering Reaper.

They were marched over to the hospital under a single-security-officer escort. The security man had a limp worse than Valentine's. Perhaps a sinecure at Xanadu security was a form of payoff for commendable Ordnance service.

“A nice, big bore. Right in the leg,” the security man told the nurse.

Noonside Passions
was on in the blood center. Valentine concentrated on it as they jabbed the needle into his inner thigh. Ted's evidence against Holly had mysteriously disappeared, and the episode ended with Nichelle's revelation that she'd stolen it—not to protect her sister, but to force her to steal gasoline for Brick's smuggling ring . . . even as Brick started seducing a virginal New Universal Church acolyte named Ardenia behind Nichelle's back.

“That bastard,” the rapt nurse said as she extracted the needle. Valentine didn't know if she was referring to Brick or the guard, who was holding a hand-mirror up to Ski to show him how pale he was getting. “One liter, Ayoob. You're done. You'd better lie for a while until I can get you a biscuit. Coffee?”

“Tea. Lots of sugar.”

“All we have is substitute. How about a coke? That's real syrup.”

“Great,” Valentine said as he passed out.

Footsteps in the hall. A blue-uniformed, mustachioed security man turned a key in Valentine's cell. “Ayoob. You're being released to higher authority.”

Valentine found he could stand up. Just. Walking seemed out of the question at the moment.

"C'mon, Ayoob, I don't have all night.”

Had the fingerprints been processed?

The guard led Valentine out from the catacombs, up some stairs, each step taking him closer to the Reaper, past a ready room, a briefing area, and out to the entryway.

Valentine caught a whiff of familiar perfume.

“Tar-baby,” Fran Paoli said, from across the vastness of the duty desk. “Your face! You need to see a doctor.”

The damage wasn't as bad as it looked.

She took him back up to her apartment, dressed the small cut on his cheek, and gave him a pair of cream-colored pills that left him relaxed, a little numb, and with a much-improved opinion of Kurian Zone psychotropics.

“There's a little halloween party tomorrow night at the top floor of Grand North. You won't need a mask.”

“I might be working.”

“I'll get you off,” she said, snapping the elastic waistband on her scrubs. He liked Fran Paoli better in her plain blue scrubs than in any of her more exotic outfits that were designed to impress.

“Undoubtedly. But I don't know that I should miss any shifts. I think I have to keep my nose clean here for a while. If they even let me keep my job. Otherwise it's back to Kentucky.”

“Let me worry about your reputation. And your job. Besides, it's going to be a fun party. North has this beautiful function space, and even Oriana's going to get dressed up.”

Valentine found it easier to talk with his eyes closed. He felt as though he were drifting down a river on a raft, and opening his eyes might mean he'd have to change course. “I don't have a costume.”

“Yes, you do. That biker getup of yours. I've been working on something to match all those spikes.”

“Easily done.”

“You nap. I have to get back to the wards—I'm missing an operation.” She left.

Valentine didn't nap. He wondered—agonized—about the efficiency of the fingerprinting procedures. Would it go in an envelope, off to some central catalog for a bored clerk to get around to? Or would it be scanned into a Xanadu computer, which would spit out a list of his crimes against the Kurian Order as fast as bits of data could be shuffled and displayed? How long before that long, low building, resting at the center of Xanadu, a crocodile keeping watch on his swamp, woke up and came for him? The Kurian Order, like a great slumbering dragon, could be tip-toed around, even over, by a clever thief. Make too much noise, though, rouse it through an attack, and it would swallow you whole without straining in the slightest.

The sensible thing would be to blow this operation, tonight; take Ahn-Kha, find Ali, and be across the river in Price's bass boat before the next shift change.

Could he face Post, tell him his wife was a drugged-up uterus for the Kurian Order? Better to lie and tell him she was dead.

He wouldn't even be able to bring the news himself. He was an exile, condemned by the fugitive law. Ahn-Kha or Duvalier would have to find him in whatever rest camp was helping him adapt to an artificial leg and a shortened intestine.

Getting her out, hopefully in time to beat the fingerprint check, would mean he'd have to bring more people in on the effort. Could he trust the doctor?

Madness. He was right back where he started.

Doctor Boothe yawned as she came to her surgery door. “Ayoob. What happened?”