—
The idea of walking was as appealing to Edie now as the idea of sitting had been to her mere hours ago. The van and car were parked along the shoulder of a road that, while in significant disrepair, was paved. Wooden poles, reaching a couple stories high, were driven into the earth at semiregular intervals, leaning under the freight of snarled green vines that dripped down, touched the ground, and rolled off in waves across the surrounding hillsides. Kudzu, Edie recalled. The scale of it—how much the green sea of vines had consumed—was beautiful and terrifying.
Andy, who was starting to look as exhausted as Edie felt, had merely waved his gun in a direction: uphill. The incline wasn’t bad yet. The sun had risen above a mountain peak, penetrating the mist, and it was quite beautiful out, actually, almost cheering. The trees that weren’t netted in kudzu, whose crowns penetrated the leafy mass and reached toward the blue sky as if gasping for breath, were red and golden—a version of the world promised on the Outer Limits feeds. People began, tentatively, to murmur to one another; to Edie’s surprise, their captors seemed willing for now to allow it.
Wendy Tanaka had been a problem that led to another unexpected lightening of the tension. She couldn’t walk more than a couple of steps unassisted, and Ken, with his wrists bound, couldn’t do much to help her stay on her feet. A trickle of blood still pulsed from her temple, where Andy had struck her, and the captors—Edie had finally started thinking of them as such—had a fierce whispered conference as the OLE travelers watched warily on, bracing themselves for another matter-of-fact gunshot to the head.
Instead, Andy produced a pocketknife and started cutting zip ties.
“You and you”—he pointed to Ken and Berto—“see to her. If she can’t keep up, carry her, or we’ll leave her where she drops. Got it?”
The men nodded.
“The rest of you,” Andy said. “I’ll let you loose for now. Any trouble and I’ll hog-tie and leave you in the vines over there. You don’t want to test me on this. Got it?”
The rest of the group nodded eagerly.
When Edie’s turn for release came, Andy wielded his knife quickly, grazing the back of her hand, but she could barely feel it—could barely feel anything below both of her elbows. The pop! of her zip tie flooded her with a pleasure so intense that she nearly collapsed. She lifted her arms, stretched, rubbed her wrists briskly, stretched again. Her fingers tingled, and her back cracked luxuriously. She unslung the tent from around her shoulder and shoved it wordlessly into Jesse’s hands as soon as his were free. He grunted, slipping his head through the straps without comment. Now, she guessed, would be the time to run—but no one appeared to be up to it. Not even close. No, what Edie saw were ten slack-faced people, clad pathetically in fitted white bodysuits, each of them gazing gratefully at their unbound hands, their bruised and chafed wrists. When Andy began trudging ahead again, they all followed dutifully.
Wendy had one arm slung around her brother’s neck and the other across the shoulders of the strapping Berto, whose wife, Anastasia, lagged behind the threesome, carrying Wendy’s gear as well as her own. Edie, eager to escape Jesse for a few minutes, took two long steps to match her stride to Anastasia’s.
“Want to pass that off for a little while?” she asked, motioning to the extra pack.
Anastasia looked at it, smiled a tiny smile. She was her husband’s physical counterpart: long, slimly muscled, with the broad shoulders of a weight lifter. “Nah. Not yet, anyway. It isn’t much.”
“It might be down the road,” Edie said. “So holler if you change your mind.”
“Thanks.” Their boots scuffed along the old asphalt with everyone else’s. “I will.”
“I’m embarrassed that we didn’t really talk before,” she said.
Anastasia gave her a confused look. “We talked—” She paused. “Yesterday. Feels like longer ago. But we did talk.”
“At the training center, I mean,” Edie said. “Well, I don’t know what I mean. Just that it seems a shame now.”
“Because they’re going to kill us.” She said this without inflection.
“What? No!” Edie hissed. “No. What do you mean?”
Anastasia crooked an eyebrow. “I guess you missed what happened to Mickey.”
“Of course not,” Edie whispered. “But what would be the point of all this?” She flapped her arms, trying to indicate the group moving in a sluggish mass up the old highway. “Why not shoot Wendy back there? Why untie us?”
Anastasia pointed to a figure a few feet ahead. “Feingold,” she mouthed. Edie could barely hear her.
“Wes?”
“Don’t you follow any of the alt-news feeds?” she whispered. “The Underground? ConspireWire?”
Edie wasn’t even sure what an alt-news feed was, and she certainly hadn’t heard of the feeds Anastasia had mentioned. She didn’t even follow any of the regular news feeds, except occasionally Snark Park, and only that after she’d started dating Jesse. What a panicked thrill she had felt the day her picture appeared below a headline: “Jesse Haggard Steps Out with Bartender Girlfriend.” The thrill had ceded to dismay when she glanced into the comments matrix just long enough to see that the biggest trending threads were “Appearance”—thousands of variations on “She’s not that hot”—and what Snark Park called, charmingly, “Doability,” where Edie had rated a 7 out of 10 on the “I’d FAP to THAT” meter, most of the comments animated with graphic porn snippets.
So she just shrugged. “I guess I don’t read the ones you read,” she said.
“Outer-zone insurgency groups,” Anastasia said. “There’ve been rumors about them going back forever. You remember the plane crash at the Memorial to the Lost Republic, don’t you?”
Barely. It happened before Edie had moved to Atlantic Zone, and there had been an information placard about the incident on her school field trip. Some nutjob in an antique Cessna. The plane came down off target, passing the central monument spire to land in the reflecting pool. Minimal damage to property. No casualties.
She nodded.
“So you know about the manifesto?”
It was like being in high school again. Pretend to have done the reading and fumble forward? Or admit her ignorance? She found she didn’t have the energy to fumble. “I guess I don’t.”
“Wow,” Anastasia said. “I’d like to move to the island you must be living on.”
Edie bit back a sharp retort. “So, the manifesto? What about it?”