He’d known what to expect, but still, how strange it all was.
It was as if he had stumbled into an abandoned newsroom, or campaign headquarters—some space where clusters of people worked at computers in close proximity and downed cheap coffee by the liter. The living room’s perimeter was lined with couches and desks, scavenged and makeshift, the floor between them a spider’s web of intersecting power cords all leading to the place where a chimney might have been, once, but now sat a large, hulking piece of equipment with its own cords trailing up and through a hole in the ceiling. The solar generator. What was being powered were a handful of computers: four older, out of date by five or eight years, but one absolutely state-of-the-art, even by in-zone standards, with a beautiful two-hundred-centimeter TI Dimension-Tech display that depicted, in rest mode, an eerily realistic small waterfall finishing in a churning foam so detailed that a beam of sunlight slipping through the boarded-over windows picked up droplets of digital mist.
“There’s a porch off the back of the house,” June had told him. “You’ll find what you need there.”
He made his way through the kitchen. It was dusty but tidy, smelled of mothballs. A mousetrap rested unsprung on the tile floor, pellet of food untouched. The door to the back porch had a plastic sheet hanging over it; Andy pushed it to the side, slid three different deadbolts over.
The porch had been screened in once, but most of the screens were missing, or damaged, big rough-edge holes marking the passage of raccoons, rats, nesting birds. Moldy latticework boxed the railing in now, curtained with vines. A camera sat on a tripod, its eye pointing through an opening in the lattice.
Andy hunted for its On button. Pressed it. A red light blinked. Inside, he’d been told, the fancy computer was now recording. He’d need to download the video to a thumb drive and bring it back to June.
He glanced at the camera’s display screen. It showed the time—5:07—and a crisp view of the place where Nick Road intersected with Highway 18 and Atlantic Zone had built its Lenoir substation, a broad, gray cinder-block structure that blocked the old road, angled back with two long wings, and connected to a razor-wire fence eight meters tall and God only knew how many kilometers long. Behind the fence, eight smokestacks rose like turrets, emitting a steady gray trickle of foul-smelling smoke. This was an older section of the Salt Line, the new “waste repurposing ramparts” still creeping up this way from the south, eight years from projected completion. Not even Andy had known about this entry point. Not until yesterday, when June explained the day’s plan to him. The little house on the rise took advantage of a gap in the TerraVibra—the constant vibration had been proven to degrade power-generating facilities (a significant risk when dealing with some unsteady materials, some nuclear)—and so a Ruby City tech crew was able to grab a signal here from Atlantic Zone feeds. What’s more, the house offered a perfect location from which they could, undetected, monitor the comings and goings of Big Sky Fine Meats and V&M Logging, two of David Perrone’s biggest smuggling fronts.
And it was where, in a few minutes’ time, Andy was going to watch what happened when Jesse, Anastasia, Wendy, and Lee approached the Wall.
There was a red plastic outdoor chair propped against the house. Andy moved it over beside the camera, swept some leaves and dirt out of it, and seated himself. Not bad. Comfortable, almost. He couldn’t tip it back—the legs were too flimsy—but he raised his feet and propped them up on the porch railing. He was self-conscious. Aware that he was putting on a performance of some kind—coolness, indifference—which was strange, when he had only himself as audience.
It took another ten minutes. Then they came into view. They walked side by side, in step. They’d linked their arms to form a line, following Andy’s instructions, following the road.
When it happened, it happened in a second. One moment they were walking; the next, they were on their backs. Through the little display screen, it was nothing. The rapid crackle of rifle fire, which traveled loud and clear from the Wall over to where Andy sat on the porch, was the most visceral part of the experience, but even that was muted. Nothing that would haunt him at night. He didn’t think so, at least.
He didn’t move right away. He waited to see them come out, and soon they did. Six people, dressed in gray fatigues, face masks, some kind of sheer micro-netting over their heads. Two stretchers. Two trips.
Through the camera’s little display screen, it all seemed very small, very far away. Very unreal.
He turned the camera off. Inside, he woke up the computer with the beautiful display, entered the username and password June had given him, and pulled the camera recording onto his thumb drive with a little beckoning gesture. The display’s prediction/intention hardware was excellent; he got the right file on his first try.
Part Three
Vimelea
Sixteen
Wes realized that his eyes had passed over the paragraph—again—without processing its content. He went back to the top, shook his head briskly, and widened his eyes.