It was different than he’d imagined.
Cooper had reviewed hundreds of photos and simulations. From above he’d seen the massive warehouse districts clustered at each entrance, row upon row of hangars that served as way stations for everything from lumber to ethylene dichloride to whiskey, all the products the Holdfast imported. He’d studied the layout of the region, the network of roads that connected the towns and outposts that had grown overnight. He’d read the specs of the solar fields, where miles of black photoelectric panels glittered like the carapaces of insects, all moving in perfect timing as they tracked the sun across the daytime sky and the moon across the night. He knew the populations of Newton, Da Vinci, Leibniz, Tesla, and Archimedes, knew what the specialized role of each town was. He’d sat in lectures about the unique nature of a preplanned society built with near-limitless funding.
What he hadn’t done was ride the streets of Newton with the windows down, smelling dust and the ionized discharge from the moisture condensers. He’d never watched a woman park her electric car at a charging station outside a bar and heard the hum of the generators engaging. And despite having read the figures a thousand times, he’d never realized how young the place was. It was one thing to know that the oldest recognized gifteds were thirty-three, and another to see a world of teenagers hurrying busily about, kids in construction helmets and driving trucks, children building a new world to a ten-year blueprint. There were older people, too, of course; plenty of families with gifted children had moved here, but they looked oddly out of place, outnumbered like faculty on a college campus.
Shannon’s apartment turned out to be on a second floor above a bar. One room with a Murphy bed tucked neatly in, a kitchen that showed no sign of ever having been cooked in, a desk with a plastic plant bathing in sunlight. It reminded him very much of his own abandoned apartment in DC.
She’d ushered him in, then stood looking around for a moment as if trying to recognize the place, as if someone had been there in her absence and moved things around by inches. After a moment she announced she wanted to clean up. Through the wall he could hear the sound of the shower turning on and off in quick cycles—navy showers only, water too precious here to waste. Cooper opened the fridge, saw nothing but condiments and beer, helped himself to one. He paced the room, then stepped out onto the small balcony.
The Holdfast embodied the latest urban design theory, with wide bike lanes and public squares like Italian piazzas. He winced against the sun and slugged his beer and watched a cluster of twenty-year-olds break into a flirty game of tag, boys chasing laughing girls around, all of them lean and leathery and sunburned, flush with health. He wondered which could dance among the genome, or recall every detail of a face glanced a dozen years ago. He wondered which of them worked for John Smith, which of them were terrorists, which of them might have once been targets for him to pattern and track and maybe murder.
Murder?
He took another sip of beer, leaning on the railing. A moment later she joined him, wearing a sundress now, a cotton strappy thing that bared her shoulders. Her hair was still damp, and she brushed it with steady strokes. She looked good, smelled of some tropical shampoo, coconuts maybe.
“So we made it.”
“We made it.”
He turned and leaned against the railing, the metal hot through his T-shirt. He watched her brush her hair and then watched her watch him. “What?” she asked.
“I was just thinking. You’re safe now.”
“And you’re not. It’s uncomfortable, right? Someone in a uniform doesn’t like the way you look and next thing you know, you end up in a brightly lit room.” She cocked her head. “I know that feeling.”
He didn’t respond, just held a level gaze.