Her sons’ grinning faces were side by side—above and behind them Marta could make out the gilt letters “nd Bull.” “Hey, Mom!” they said in singsong sync, obviously drunk, but there they were, so handsome, Sal with his hair combed tightly into a ponytail (how long he had spent in front of the mirror as a high schooler, doing his best to smooth out every bump), Enzo, a bit shorter and stouter, hair parted rigidly and combed in a swoop to the side the way his father wore it. “We’re so proud of you,” Sal said, “going out and being a total badass in the woods.”
“Yes,” Enzo said, “so badass.”
“And we love you, and we can’t wait to see you again.”
“Can’t wait to see you, Mom,” Enzo said.
“We’re having the time of our life here.”
“We thought of you at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and we did the whispering dome and went to the cupola like you told us to—”
“—probably Tower of London next week—”
“—the new Buckingham Palace wing.”
Someone called out rudely to them, and there was laughter. Enzo yelled over his shoulder, cheerfully enough, “Fuck you!”
“So anyway,” Sal said, “have fun.”
“Have fun,” said Enzo.
“Love you,” they repeated, blowing her kisses and waving, and then the message ended. Tears were rolling down her face.
“Oh,” someone said from behind her, and she felt a hand, warm even through the glove, on her arm. “Oh, hey there, buddy. It’s OK.”
She quickly wiped her eyes, embarrassed. It was Wes Feingold.
“Sorry,” Marta said. “This is harder than I realized it would be.”
“No reason to be sorry,” Wes said. He was a small man, no taller than Marta, with frizzy dark blond hair (pre-shave), chubby child’s cheeks, and eyes that seemed to be blue, though he had such a squinty smile that she had never gotten a very good look at them. “Those were your sons?”
She nodded. “I—I didn’t know for sure that they’d call. I couldn’t get them to pick up yesterday.”
“Yeah, it reminds me. I ought to call my own mom.”
“For goodness’ sake,” Marta said, “don’t leave her wondering. The only thing worse to me than the thought of making this trip is the thought of my boys doing it, and me not knowing the whole time how they are. Call her.”
“Well,” Wes said, still smiling in his affable, squinty way, “my mom’s not like other moms. But you’re right, got to make the gesture.”
“She probably worries more than you know.”
“Sure,” he said, squinting and nodding. “She must.”
An Outer Limits staff member—Tia, one of Andy’s assistants—entered the gymnasium and clapped her hands briskly. “OK, folks. We’re going to open the screening area, so go ahead and queue up when you’re ready behind the red line”—she pointed—“on the south end of the gym. Please remember that we’ll be collecting tablets and drawing up itemized manifests for everything in your packs, so if there’s something you want back in your room safe, now’s the time.”
Marta dropped her chin against the rising flush in her cheeks. There it was again, the racing heart, and she wondered if she should run back to the room and stow the doctored Smokeless and NicoClean cartridge. If she failed to make it through security today, what would David do with her?
“Well, this is it,” said Wes. “Ready, partner?”
“As I’m going to be,” she said.
They joined the other travelers forming a line, and Marta chewed on the inside of her bottom lip until she tasted blood. “One of the things I’m actually most excited about,” Wes was saying from what seemed like a great distance, “are the parts of the trip when we’re on the road or passing through the old cities. I actually considered the Ghost Towns of the Old Republic excursion, but I decided that this one offered a fuller experience, and the Rate It scores were higher. Plus, that quarantined chalet at the midpoint sounded good.”
“It sure does,” Marta said. Her grip on the pack strap was so tight that her fingers were going numb. What was the stupider risk—taking the Quicksilver or leaving it behind?
“One of my ancestors on my mother’s side was actually a professor of sociology at a private college in Asheville, right as the outbreak started getting really bad. I found an address for him in the old web archives, and I’d love to go and get a look at it.”
She was next in line now. She couldn’t summon the courage to even stammer a reply.
“So wait,” Wes said. “You sounded before like you didn’t much want to do this. Why’s that? Why are you forcing yourself?”
“Please place your tablet and pack on the conveyor belt and walk through the scanner,” an Outer Limits staffer—a campus employee, not a guide—told Marta.
She laid down the requested items and tried to smile pleasantly, though her face felt out of her control, as if it were contorting into some ugly grimace, and she again thought about her shadow face, and she wondered which one the employee was now seeing. After she stepped through the scanner, another staffer waved her over.
“Hey, there,” he said. He was waiting on the other end of the conveyor belt. “Having a good morning?”
“Pretty good,” Marta said. A third employee was scrutinizing a screen, where Marta supposed a digital scan of her pack was displayed. The employee, a middle-aged black woman, pinched her fingers together in front of the screen, then twisted them left and right, frowning. Marta felt a twisting up inside her. Then the woman’s fingers spread apart, as if she were making a hand sign for an explosion, and her features sagged with disinterest. The conveyor belt started to move again.
“OK,” the employee on this end of the line said as Marta’s pack and tablet stopped in front of him. He moved them aside to a table and lifted his gloved hands ceremonially, like a magician getting ready to introduce a trick. “The tablet, as you know, I have to take now, but it will be reissued to you the second you set foot in Quarantine 1 three weeks from today.”
“I understand,” Marta said.
“You don’t have a camera to declare?”
“No, nothing like that.” It hadn’t occurred to Marta to take pictures of this journey, to memorialize it. Why would she? For whom?
He started pulling everything out of her pack and laying it side by side. He turned the pack inside out, gave it a quick shake, and started speaking into a microphone. “Manifest for Traveler Marta Severs,” he said. “Ladies’ microfiber briefs, three pairs,” he said. “Ladies’ microfiber undershirt, three. Tube socks, three pairs.” He started running a scanner over Canteen items, setting off a little green light with the bug spray and the antibiotic ointment before grabbing the NicoClean canister that was actually the fifteen-gram vial of Salt. He passed the wand over it.
The light turned green.
“One canister of NicoClean,” he recited, and she had to put a bracing hand against the edge of the table as every clenched muscle in her body suddenly loosened.
The Smokeless bar code also scanned without incident, and in another few moments, she had signed her name to the generated manifest, and the filled pack was back in her hands. She stared at it wonderingly. She had done it. She had gotten away with it.