Anastasia dug a Smokeless out of her pack, looked to make sure Violet wasn’t paying attention, and sneaked a quick puff. “He had this crude device on his plane. It worked kind of like an old cell phone. Basically, it was set up to send out one small data burst to the nearest networked device. When the plane went down, the phone grabbed a signal and shot its wad just before the crash. And then the thing got forwarded before the NSA could run a confiscation, though they did a pretty good job of discrediting it after the fact.”
“But what was it?”
“Like I said, a manifesto. The guy said he lived in a village in east Tennessee. He said there were hundreds of people just in that one town and hundreds of towns just like his. He said the ticks were a government conspiracy. Cures for Shreve’s had been suppressed. Anyway, he got a plane over the border somehow.”
“Wow,” Edie murmured.
“There are reams of intel about this stuff, all of it authenticated,” Anastasia said. “There’s no doubt people live out here. Probably whole communities of them. People resettled Chernobyl, after all. Whatever this is”—she waved her arms to indicate the pretty landscape surrounding them—“it sure isn’t Chernobyl.”
Edie didn’t dare confess that she had only the foggiest idea of what Anastasia meant by “Chernobyl.” “All right,” she said, “but I’m still not clear on what this has to do with him.” She pointed at Wes.
“The manifesto had a list of strategies for how outer Zoners would revolt. One of them basically amounted to economic terrorism, cutting off supply lines, setting fire to out-of-zone production units, that sort of thing. It happens a lot, actually. More than you’d think. A guy in my practice, he works for a biofuel company with half a dozen farms out here. They have to pay out the nose for security. Even so, there are a couple of incidents a year. Mostly just tick-bit wackadoos hopping the fence and getting promptly laid out, but sometimes they do real damage. Or make off with a big haul of goods.”
“So you’re saying that these people are those people. The terrorists.”
“They have to be,” Anastasia said. “Andy knows who every one of us is. He knows what he’s got in Feingold. He knows what he’s got in some of the others, like the Tanakas. You know they’re the Tanakas from the bioelectronics company, right?”
Edie didn’t.
“She’s the techie. He’s a neurosurgeon. There’s another brother that is a biologist or something, but he’s not here for some reason.”
“They’re brother and sister? I thought they were married,” Edie said.
“They put off a weird vibe, don’t they?” Anastasia said conspiratorially. “But no. They’re siblings.”
“And you think these people are going to use them somehow. The Tanakas and Wes.”
“I don’t know what value they ultimately have as hostages, or whatever we are. The president would probably see us all dead before he opened the gates to the great unwashed, but those three have symbolic value, at the least. They’re proof of a vulnerability. Or a lot of vulnerabilities. And that will scare people, which is probably the best weapon these people have got.”
“They scared me,” Edie admitted.
“You should be scared,” Anastasia said. “Shit is getting very real. Berto and I have been bracing ourselves for this for a long time.”
Edie looked over her shoulder back at Jesse, who caught her gaze, a pleading in his eyes, and lifted his chin in greeting. Something in her softened. He wasn’t perfect. But he was what she had.
“What do you think we’re walking into?” Edie asked.
Anastasia laughed, short and bitter. “You ever watch that show Crater Plain?”
“Never heard of it,” Edie said.
“It’s obscure. Comes out of Australia, and it hasn’t really taken off here, which is kind of surprising because it’s pretty good, smart but not too smart. Berto and I have a little group who comes over for viewing parties when the new episode streams.” A sadness passed across her face. Edie could imagine Anastasia’s house—all low horizontal lines, shiny metal, glass—and her friends, good-looking, successful. They’re drinking red wine, eating little canapés, shouldering in companionably on a big sectional couch. Anastasia says, “OK, quiet! It’s on!”
“The first episode starts after a nuclear war. The people who are left have all of these weird little powers. They can’t make food out of nothing or draw water from a rock. Their powers don’t guarantee their survival. But clumps of people complement each other. Like, the female lead can generate a perimeter of warmth. One of her love interests is resilient to radiation, so he can go foraging where others in their party can’t. The other love interest is a telepath. Which has its down side, you can imagine, but it also means he can hear the thoughts of another group if they get too close, and he can tell if they mean well or not.”
“OK,” Edie said. Asked, almost. She couldn’t tell where Anastasia was going with this.
“There are always two love interests in these things,” Anastasia said. “A bad boy who’s really a good boy, and a good boy with a dangerous streak. That’s what makes the show addictive, and you need something, because it’s just relentlessly awful, actually, people with their faces melted off and rape gangs and cannibals. There’s this assumption that most people, if you strip society and its laws away, are capable of evil. I agree with that.”
“That’s just a webshow,” Edie said.
“Yeah, maybe so.” Anastasia shifted Wendy’s pack to her other shoulder. “But don’t kid yourself. These people shot Mickey. They didn’t give it a second thought. They’re herding us. I don’t know what toward, but I can promise you it isn’t good.”
“You’re so fucking casual about it,” Edie said, fighting tears.
Anastasia was silent for a while. Edie could hear now the churn of arms and legs, the rhythmic rustle of pack straps against microsuits. The air, cool and moist, made her nose start to run. She could pick out a half dozen different whispered conversations. Some light talk: How many kids do you have? Where did you grow up? And heavier: I’m starving. I have the shakes. Where do you think they’re taking us? Randall, who carried his gun in his hands instead of slung across his back, was holding forth to Joe, loudly, about some technical matter concerning the vans. These old Jap cars run forever, but you can’t work on them. I keep telling ’em and they keep saying yeah-yeah and not doing nothing about it. I know where we could—
“I don’t mean to be unkind,” Anastasia said finally, “but I’m a realist. I don’t get any comfort from pretending things aren’t what they are.” She looked at Edie shrewdly. “You’re what. Twenty?”
“Twenty-six,” Edie said.
“Well, close enough. You live in the reality you want to believe in. That’s easier to do at your age than mine, what with the drugs and the fucking and all that fun shit. And hey,” she said, putting her hands up in a warding-off gesture, “no judgment here. I miss the drugs and the fucking. Well, sort of.” She took another secret Smokeless puff.
Edie couldn’t think of a reply. She kept pace with Anastasia, wondering how she could exit the conversation politely, and then she registered the absurdity of that—of worrying about conversational politeness. So she slowed down, falling back into step next to Jesse.
“Making friends?” he asked.