They did. Marta wasn’t a hiker, maybe, or a twenty-five-year-old woman who could sleep eight hours without waking to relieve her bladder, but she knew a lost cause when she encountered one. She would go on the adventure tour.
She had never craved the great outdoors, never registered the nostalgia others felt for bygone days of national parks and waterfalls and hiking trails. She had spent her life in the cultivated, curated inner-zone landscapes of manicured and carefully monitored trees, flowers, and grasses, all genetically engineered to resist tick infestations, and when she wanted a break from the cement, she spent a weekend at the beach, or she took a walk in one of the several excellent city arboretums. The times she had gone to 3D-LUX theaters with Sal and Enzo so that they could watch films such as The Late, Great Polar Bears (the boys had left sobbing—why, she wondered, was this targeted at children?) or Mountain Majesties: A Tour of Appalachia, she had felt not wonder or longing but oppression and vertigo. So many trees, so much variation in the landscape, whole chunks of sky blotted out by jagged precipices—she didn’t know how people had ever been able to stand it. Even those startling, high-up views, with the landscape rolling away kilometers into the distance: it was too much. Perhaps she lacked imagination. Perhaps, for all her brooding over being a prisoner in her own home, she was too meekly content to be a prisoner of her safe province. So no, camping was not something she had ever in her life felt even the slightest interest in doing.
But on this morning of their journey across the Salt Line, she was strangely stirred—with excitement as well as fear. For the first time in her married life, she was not just out of David’s sight but out from under his veil of influence. This, she thought, sliding into her microsuit and drawing the zipper up to her neck, was as close to freedom as she was ever going to get. She should make the best of it.
It was 5:30. She had time to stop by the Canteen for breakfast—Andy had insisted that they all make sure to eat something before leaving—but her stomach was still roiling and sensitive, and she didn’t want to have to use the bus’s chemical toilet on the three-hour drive to the first checkpoint. She poured a glass of water from the bathroom tap and contemplated the bottle of OLE-brand vitamin capsules she’d been issued and encouraged—even pressured, oddly—to take. They didn’t sit well on her weak stomach, and she usually just threw them right up when her stomach was empty, as it was this morning. She supposed she’d successfully kept only a few down over the course of the three-week training, and she didn’t see the point of stoking her nausea for no good reason. So she left the bottle on the bathroom counter.
From the size of the group already gathered in the gymnasium, and the expressions of queasy resignation on many of the faces, Marta guessed that she wasn’t the only one to bypass the breakfast line. They were an absurd-looking assortment of adventurers, the cream-colored microsuits slim-fitting enough to intimately trace the shape of every body, hoods drawn up over chins and down to just above the eyebrows so that faces became small and saucerlike.
She looked around for her assigned “buddy,” Wes Feingold. It was a ridiculous pairing, necessitated, perhaps, by the dearth of single travelers, though Marta hadn’t ruled out David’s influence here. She was traveling under a fake surname, Severs—for her protection, David had assured her—and presumably anonymous to at least the ground-level OLE crew, but he had his ways, just as he’d managed his trick with the Canteen bar codes. Wes was probably disappointed to be burdened with the company of a woman his own mother’s age, but Marta couldn’t help feeling pleased at the thought of partnering with a strong, able young man, like her sons; a young man who didn’t have the option for the next three weeks of taking off to live on the other end of the zone and never calling to let her know how he was doing. He seemed serious and polite, and he had accomplished in his young life more than the most exceptional men and women of Marta’s own age, much less his contemporaries. While Sal and Enzo were skipping class for the gaming parlors and buying rounds at the Sand Dollar, Wes was running one of the most important companies in the world.
Thinking of Pocketz, she felt the familiar itch to scan her feeds—even in the midst of her nervousness, she felt that itch. Here, too, she wasn’t alone; others were checking their tablets one last time before they were confiscated, tapping out messages with their thumbs, a few of them engaged in energetic mimed discussions with people on their screens, the little bud communicators (which Marta’s sons used often and easily but she couldn’t get the hang of) just visible in the cup of their ears. Marta scrolled past Realstar, Friendz, Mi Familia (which was useless to her now that the boys were over eighteen and had the opt-out option), Soapville, and Almaknack, her right-hand thumb making practiced horizontal sweeps across the screen, until she got to Pocketz. The sight of the familiar interface, with its pleasant, tranquil graphics and the little swirling gold coins at the top of the page indicating new activity since her last log-on, affected her a bit like the Salt did, so that a pleasurable calm suddenly flooded her body. Tapping the coins, she was treated to the following list:
Salvador Perrone spent 47 credits at the Cock and Bull.
Explore Share Dispute Twelve hours ago, near London, UK
Salvador Perrone earned 2 punches toward free pint! at the Cock and Bull.
Explore Share Dispute Twelve hours ago, near London, UK
Lorenzo Perrone spent 30 credits at Cinema 12.
Explore Share Dispute Sixteen hours ago, near London, UK
She tapped Explore under Enzo’s Cinema 12 debit.
Lorenzo Perrone purchased two adult tickets to see Rubber Meets the Road III.
The movie trailer started to play, an opening shot zooming in on the image of a heart-shaped, bikini-clad female bottom, framed by the open driver’s-side window of a bright red CO2 roadster. Sighing, Marta navigated away from the screen.
Finally, having saved it for last, she exited Pocketz and scrolled to her messages feed, heart pounding, hoping that sometime in their evening of movie watching and beer drinking the twins had thought of her, remembered what she was embarking upon this morning, and sent her something—anything—to let her know they cared. And . . . there was a flag up! A message!
It came from Enzo’s account, and there was a video. She hit Play, walking a bit away from the group for privacy.