“The mills of God…”
Footsteps cross toward me. I take a step back, but not quickly enough. The door flies open. A woman is standing in the doorway. She is probably only a few years older than I am, and punch-bowl pregnant. Startled, she draws back to allow me room to enter.
“Were you coming in?” she asks pleasantly. She betrays no signs of discomfort or embarrassment, even though she must suspect that I’ve overheard her conversation. Her gaze ticks down to the stain on my dress.
Behind her, two women are lined up in front of the mirror, watching me with identical expressions of curiosity and amusement. “No,” I blurt, and spin around and keep going down the hall. I can imagine the women turning to one another, smirking.
I round a corner and plunge blindly down another hallway, this one even quieter and cooler than the last one. I shouldn’t have had the champagne; it has made me dizzy. I steady myself against the wall.
I haven’t thought very much about Cassie O’Donnell, Fred’s first pair. All I know is that they were married for more than seven years. Something terrible must have happened; people don’t get divorced anymore. There’s no need. It’s practically illegal.
Maybe she couldn’t have children. If she were biologically defective, it would be grounds for divorce.
Fred’s words come back to me: I was afraid I’d gotten a defective one. It’s cool in the hall, and I shiver.
A sign indicates the way to additional restrooms down a carpeted flight of stairs. Here it is totally quiet except for a low, electrical hum. I keep my hand on the thick banister to steady myself in my heels.
At the bottom of the stairs I pause. This floor isn’t carpeted, and it’s mostly swallowed in darkness. I’ve been to the Harbor Club only twice before, both times with Fred and his mother. My parents were never members, although my father is thinking of joining now. Fred says that half the country’s business is conducted in golf clubs like this one; there’s a reason, he says, that the Consortium made golf the national sport nearly thirty years ago.
A perfect golf game uses not a single wasted movement: Order, form, and efficiency are its trademarks. All this, I learned from Fred.
I pass several large banquet halls, all dark, that must be used for private functions, and finally recognize the vast clubhouse cafe where Fred and I once had lunch together. I find the women’s bathroom at last: a pink room, like a gigantic perfumed pincushion.
I pull my hair into an updo and blot my face quickly with paper towels. There’s nothing I can do about the stain, so I detach the sash from around my waist and tie it around my shoulders loosely, knotting it between my breasts. It’s not the best I’ve ever looked, but at least I’m semi-presentable.
Now that I’ve oriented myself, I realize I can take a shortcut back to the ballroom by going left instead of right out of the bathroom and heading to the elevator banks. As I move down the hall, I hear the low murmur of voices and a burst of television static.
A half-open door leads into a kitchen prep area. Several waiters—ties loosened, shirts partially unbuttoned, aprons off and balled up on the counter—are gathered around a small TV. One of them has his feet up on the shiny metal counter.
“Turn it up,” one of the kitchen girls says, and he grunts and leans forward, swinging his legs off the counter, to poke at the volume button. As he settles back in his chair, I catch sight of the image on the screen: a swaying mass of green, threaded with wisps of dark smoke. I feel a small, electric thrill, and without meaning to, I freeze.
The Wilds. Has to be.
A newscaster is saying, “In an effort to exterminate the last breeding grounds of the disease, regulators and government troops are penetrating the Wilds….”
Cut to: governmental ground troops, dressed in camouflage, bumping along an interstate highway, waving and grinning at the cameras.
“As the Consortium gathers to debate the future of these uncharacterized areas, the president made an unscheduled speech to the press, in which he vowed to root out the remaining Invalids and see them punished or treated.”
Cut to: President Sobel, doing his infamous lean into the podium, as though he can barely keep himself from toppling it over into the audience of cameras.
“It will take time and troops. It will take fearlessness and patience. But we will win this war….”
Cut back to: The puzzle-piece vision of green and gray, smoke and growth, and tiny, forked tongues of fire. And then another image: more growth, a narrow river winding between the pine trees and willows. And then another, this time in a place where the trees have been burned all the way down to the red soil.