The woman—her name was Marta, and something about her quiet bearing gave Edie the sense that she must be the wife of a powerful man—blinked and pursed her lips. Andy seemed to take that as assent.
“Of course,” he added with a laugh, “the company tends to turn a blind eye to the two or three bottles of whiskey I’ve got hidden away out there, and we all get a share out of that.” He was being the good buddy again. This was a group of people for whom surrender of personal luxuries was cause for the deepest distrust—even when they had knowingly signed away their rights to those luxuries—and his job, Edie supposed, was to walk the very fine line between treating them as underlings and treating them as customers.
“Any other questions?”
An uneasy silence had fallen. The spell of camaraderie had been broken; Edie could see in the faces around her sudden doubts, regrets, a flash or two of panic. Even Jesse was looking at his hands, picking at a dry triangle of skin beside his thumbnail.
“I have never failed to bring every single one of my travelers back to Quarantine 1 alive and free of serious injury,” Andy said. “In the four-year history of Outer Limits Excursions, only two deaths have occurred on any excursion: One was by heart attack. The other was a single incident of Shreve’s, and though we hate to say this, by all accounts the person was infected because he failed to adhere to recommended best practices, even after repeated corrections from Outer Limits staff. So, one more time: What’s our mantra?”
They were all looking down now, like a classroom full of students who’d failed to do the assigned reading.
“Come on,” Andy said. “Humor me.”
“Stay in suit, stay aware,” Jesse said, raising his voice a bit.
Andy nodded. “What else?”
“Always have your Stamp,” said Wes Feingold, the young man who’d thrown up that first day.
“Always,” said Andy. “I’m not kidding. If you lose your Stamp, you’ll be issued a replacement at a cost of one thousand credits. If you lose a second Stamp, the next one will cost you five thousand credits. The penalty is as harsh as it is not just because these are expensive pieces of equipment but also because for the next three weeks that Stamp is the most precious item in your possession. Always have it close at hand. And what else should you have close at hand?”
“Your buddy,” said Anastasia, an athletic-looking woman in her late thirties or early forties. As if in illustration, she reached out and grasped the forearm of her husband, Berto.
“Bingo.” Andy put his arms over his shoulders, as if he were trying to scratch an itch or give himself a hug. “There are places on the body that you can’t reach on your own. Period. And if you’re not within a dozen paces of a person when you’re bitten in one of those places, you’re screwed. I can’t emphasize this enough: We are all in this together. When the moment comes to administer a Stamp, you can’t flinch. You can’t second-guess yourself. You just do it.”
Edie’s armpits dampened, and she could suddenly smell herself—a ripe, feral odor, a fear-sweat. She wasn’t afraid of giving Jesse the Stamp, or of giving it to herself—but what about Jesse? Would he hesitate? If Edie felt the blossom of intense itching between her shoulder blades, the itching that Andy had assured them all was unmistakable, would Jesse quickly do what had to be done?
“The mantra,” Andy said. “One more time—say it together.”
The group of travelers mumbled through it: Stay in suit, stay aware, keep your buddy close and your Stamp closer.
“Who’s ready for the time of their lives?”
Jesse, who seemed revived and reassured by the recitation of the mantra, cheered and waved his hands in the air. Edie stared at him, throat dry, her own hands still folded in her lap.
“All right then, folks. Nighty-night. Sleep tight.”
He didn’t finish the rhyme, but they all knew how it went.
Two
Marta Perrone was lying awake, eyes trained on a fine crack in the ceiling, long before the speakers started to emit the first soft strains of the “Sunrise Serenade.” It was a cheerful, rousing, but not overly obnoxious instrumental number, heavy on the flute and piccolo, that increased in decibels as the ceiling lights brightened, so that—this according to the Outer Limits brochure—“waking is as stress-free as sliding into a warm bath.” At 4:45 a.m., the automatic thermostat switched from its programmed sixty-eight degrees to seventy-two, and the floor tiles in Marta’s private bathroom started to warm. The rhetoric of this strange, awful place—the way a command, such as the time to rise from bed, was softened with luxuries—was not unfamiliar to Marta. She had lived a life of sumptuous captivity.
She sat up and rubbed her face briskly. Her heart was pounding hard, the way it did the nights when she drank too much and stumbled from the bed to the bathroom, but Marta hadn’t had anything to drink last night—not last night and not for the last three weeks. She put her feet on the floor, retrieved her silk robe from the nearby settee, and crossed the room to an electronic panel. She could silence “Sunrise Serenade” only from here, a bit of electronic bitchiness that made her want to put her fist through something. But her thoughts of violence never extended beyond the want, and so she went on to the bathroom, slid dutifully out of her robe and nightgown, and tried to enjoy what she knew would be her last hot shower for weeks. Despite the heat of the spray—her skin was stinging and pink—she could not stop shaking. She was more terrified than she had ever been in her life, and that was saying something, considering her life. For fifteen years now, she had not driven cars without first running a scan on the doors and ignition for explosives. For fifteen years, she had not been able to step out for lunch with a friend or attend her daily Pilates class without being followed—protected, her husband always insisted—by a 250-pound goon in a dark suit loose enough to hide the pieces strapped to his side and his calf. For fifteen years now, her husband had been the boss of the Atlantic Zone’s organized crime clan, and she had learned all too well the fine print of her marital contract.