Kate stood in the line, surveying the camp, thinking, trying to figure a way out. The Orchid District lay in ruin, a burned-out wreck that barely resembled the five-star seaside resort it had been before the plague, or even the shelter Martin had shown her yesterday. Fires at the guard towers and motor pool still smoldered, sending thin columns of black smoke into the sky, like a snake crawling up the white hotel towers. The setting sun burned red and orange above the Mediterranean. Kate’s column of people marched silently toward the sea like sheep to the slaughter.
The Immari soldiers were doing what Martin had predicted: sorting everyone. The sick were routed to the closest tower, where guards with guns and cattle prods herded them through the doors. Kate wondered what they would do with them. Leave them there to die? Without Orchid, those people would be dead within three days. Martin was in the group somewhere. Kate hadn’t seen him since they were captured—they had been placed on different trucks. She searched the crowd for him.
“Step forward!” a soldier called.
Maybe they had already taken Martin inside the tower, or perhaps he was behind her, Kate thought. She couldn’t take her eyes off the tower that held the sick. What would they do in a few days, when it was filled with the dead? What about when they evacuated Marbella? In her mind’s eye, Kate saw explosions rocking the bottom of the building and it collapsing to the ground. She had to get Martin out somehow. She—
“Move forward!”
Someone grabbed her arm and dragged her forward. Another man grabbed her neck, feeling her lymph nodes. He tossed her to the left and yet another man—not a soldier, a doctor, perhaps—ran a long swab inside her mouth, along the inside of her cheek. He placed the swab inside a plastic tube with a barcode. The tube was one of many lined up on a conveyor belt that flowed to a larger machine. DNA samples. They were sequencing the survivors’ genomes. Looking for what? Kate’s dyed hair and generally grimy appearance from the tunnels had given her some reassurance that the soldiers wouldn’t recognize her—she looked nothing like she had twenty-four hours ago. But if they had a DNA sample from her and could match it, they would know exactly who she was.
At that moment, a guard on the other side of her grabbed her wrist and slammed it into a small round opening in another machine. A sharp pain erupted at her wrist, but before she could cry out, it was over. The guard shoved her hard in the back, and she was face to face with another guard who took her backpack, set it on a conveyor belt that ran it through a machine, and spun her around to another guard. He ran a wand up and down her, the way an airport security guard might check someone who set the metal detector off.
“Negative,” he said.
The first guard handed Kate the backpack, and she was in a crowd again, on the other side of the technicians and machines. Kate stood there for a moment, wondering what to do. The crowd parted slightly, and she saw two familiar faces: the man and woman who had herded them in the tunnels—the Immari loyalists who had helped capture her and Martin.
Another person in the crowd, a pudgy middle-aged white man without even the hint of a tan stepped closer to her. “It’s okay. It’s over!” he said, his tone somewhere between nervousness and excitement. “You’re a survivor. We’re saved.”
Kate looked back at the technicians, then at her wrist and the burning red welt that surrounded the black bar code.
“How did you know—”
“That you’re a survivor? You didn’t have an Orchid ID—an implant.”
Implant? Martin had said nothing about an implant.
The nervous man seemed to read Kate’s confusion. “You don’t know about the implants?”
“I’ve been… out of the loop.”
“Oh my God. Let me guess, you were here on vacation and went into hiding after the plague? Me too!”
Kate nodded slowly. “Yeah, something like that.”