Otherland-4-SeaofSilverLight

Jeremiah stacked the last vacuum bag and stood surveying his handiwork. It wasn't quite a kitchen—who was he fooling, it was nothing like a kitchen—but it would have to do. Piles of cans, boxes, and bags of rations, several plastic jugs of water, the single working portable halogen ring he'd salvaged from one of the upstairs common rooms, a kettle, and about three weeks' supply—if they were stingy with it—of perhaps the most precious commodity of all, instant coffee. Trapped in the underground base without any of the real stuff, he had long since taught himself to drink the self-heating swill without gagging, and had even begun to look forward to his morning cup. Now he was even more anxious to preserve a few last rituals of normality.

He squinted at his makeshift larder, which filled most of an upright metal cabinet. All in all, it would serve. And if they were to be trapped down in this lowest level so long the coffee ran out, well, then perhaps the thugs upstairs wouldn't seem such a bad alternative.

He couldn't even make himself smile. He checked the batteries in his flashlight, firmed up the corners of one of his stacks, and stood.

Good Lord, I am a walking stereotype. Under siege, fighting for our lives, and who promptly takes over the kitchen as mother-elect?

He made his way around the circular walkway to the control consoles where Del Ray sat frowning at the screen like a literary critic forced to review cheap genre fiction. Long Joseph lurked sullenly behind him, two squeeze bottles of wine sitting on the table. Jeremiah felt a moment of actual pity for the man. If Jeremiah himself was feeling miserable about having to ration several weeks' worth of coffee, imagine how Joseph must feel about having to make a day's worth or less of his usual poison last for God alone knew how long?

"How is it going?" he asked.

Del Ray shrugged. "I can't get the security monitors to work. They should, but they don't. I warned you, this is not really my area of expertise. How's your end?"

"As good as it's going to get." Jeremiah pulled out one of the swivel chairs and sat down. "I wish we'd had that old fellow Singh get those cameras all running when we had the chance. But who knew we'd need them?"

"Maybe your friend Sellars will call back," said Del Ray, but he didn't sound like he believed it. He pushed one of the buttons on the console, then gave it a frustrated whack. "Maybe he can do something about this disaster."

"My Renie was here, she would have that wired up before you can jump and turn around," Long Joseph said suddenly. "She know all that stuff. Has a degree from the university and all."

Del Ray glowered, but it quirked unexpectedly into a tiny smile. "Yes, she would. And she'd get a lot of pleasure cleaning up the mess I've made with it and telling me about it."

"She would. She is one smart girl. Ought to be, with all that money for her education."

Del Ray's smile widened a bit as he met Jeremiah's gaze. Education she paid for herself, if I remember correctly, Jeremiah thought. He remembered Renie talking about her years of bondage to the university dining hall.

"Hang on a moment," he said, turning to Joseph. "Did I hear correctly? Were you bragging about Renie?"

"What do you mean, bragging?" Joseph asked suspiciously.

"I mean, acting like you're actually proud of her?"

The older man scowled. "Proud of her? 'Course I am proud of her. She is a smart girl, like her mama was."

Jeremiah almost shook his head in wonderment. He wondered if the man had ever said anything like that when Renie was around to hear it, instead of waiting until she was encased in plasmodal gel in the depths of a fibramic casket. Somehow he doubted it.

"Damn." Del Ray pushed his chair back from the console. "I give up. I can't fix it. This waiting is making me crazy. I thought that at least if we could see what they're doing up there, instead of just sitting here. . . ."

"You don't want all those cameras," Joseph growled. "That will do no good against bad men like those. I told you, we should be finding guns to shoot those piglockers with."

Jeremiah grunted in exasperation. "There aren't any guns. You know that already. Nobody's going to decommission a military base and leave the guns lying around."

Joseph hooked a thumb toward Del Ray, who was slumped in his chair, staring up at the ceiling of the vast underground chamber as though trying to do the work of the inactive monitors by himself. "He have a gun. I told you, you should give that gun to me. You didn't see him, waving it around, all in a fright, hand so sweaty I thought he might shoot my head off just by accident."

"Not this again," Jeremiah moaned.

"I'm just telling you! I don't think this mother's boy ever fired a gun at all! I was in the Defense Force, you know."

"Oh, yes," said Del Ray, eyes still closed, "I'm sure you shot a lot of other people's chickens after you and your mates had downed a few." He rubbed at his face. "Even if it wasn't hand-coded for me, you'd be the last person I'd. . . . "

The sudden silence was strange. Jeremiah was just about to ask Del Ray if he was all right when the young man abruptly sat upright in his chair, eyes wide.

"Oh my God," he said. "Oh my God!"

"What is it?" Jeremiah asked.

"The gun!" Del Ray grabbed at his hair as though he would pull it from his scalp. "The gun! It's in my jacket pocket!"

"So?"

"I left it upstairs! When I was stacking water bottles yesterday. I was hot. I took the damn thing off, then when I got downstairs you asked me about the cameras, and . . . shit!" He stood up, his hand still on his head as though he was afraid it might otherwise tumble from his shoulders.

"See. . . ?" Joseph began, unable to disguise his pleased tone, but Jeremiah rounded on him.

"Don't say anything." He turned back to Del Ray. "Where is it? The kitchen?"

Del Ray nodded miserably.

"Do we really need it?" Jeremiah looked around. "I mean, once they are down here, is it any real use to us?"

"Is it any real use?" Del Ray stared at him. "What if they get in here? Are we going to throw bags of flour at them? We need every advantage we have. I have to go get it."

"You can't. We closed off the elevator—shut those armored security doors like Sellars told us to do. There's no other way up. And we are not going to take the chance of opening them again."

Del Ray stood looking at the floor for a moment, then straightened, some of the panic suddenly gone from his face. "Hold on. I don't think I left it in the kitchen after all. I think I just left it outside the elevator on the top floor of our part of the base. I stored most of the water bottles and the extra generator up there, and I think that's where I took my jacket off."

"I will get it," said Long Joseph brightly, but both men turned on him.

"Shut up."

"Yes, shut up, Joseph."

Del Ray started off toward the stairs. "It's too bad we had to seal off the elevator at both ends—it would be nice if we could keep it to use just down here for dragging stuff up and down."

"Too noisy," Jeremiah called after him. "If we are lucky, they won't even know there are more rooms down here." He suddenly realized how loud his voice was.

Too noisy, you say, and listen to you! What if they're up there with stethoscopes or something, listening to the floor, looking for us. . . .

The idea of the faceless mercenaries—Jeremiah alone of the three had not seen them—crawling along the floor, tapping on the concrete like woodpeckers, was deeply disturbing.

We don't even know they're inside, he told himself. Maybe they can't get through that big front door, like a bank's vault. It took Renie and her hacker friends at least this long to get it open.

Still, the vision would not go away. He looked at Joseph, who was sucking a measured amount of Mountain Rose with a face full of wounded dignity, and decided he had better find something with which to keep himself occupied.

Del Ray had levered open the console and its array of security monitors, revealing a mare's nest of cables that looked like something from an ancient telephone switchboard. Jeremiah sat in the chair the younger man had vacated and meditatively flicked switches. The console had power—all the monitor screens had little red lights glowing beneath them—but the screens themselves were blackly empty.

Joseph was right. If Renie was here she'd have this running in a few minutes.

He tugged at the bundle of cables. All but a few were connected. He took one of those that wasn't and tried it in a few of the open slots, but nothing changed. A second provided nothing different, but as he pulled up the third another came tangled with it, and as it brushed something in the board, the screens momentarily hiccuped with light, then went black again.

Excited, Jeremiah pulled the end of the trailing cable free and began to touch it to the open connections in succession. Suddenly the monitors jumped into life again. Jeremiah attached the cable, warm with pride. Now they could see outside their bunker. They were no longer forced to wait blindly.

Before he could tell Long Joseph of his triumph, something caught Jeremiah's attention. One of the monitors displayed a rectangle of trees and scrub brush, framed by blackness. Puzzled, he stared at it for long moments before he realized what he was seeing.

It was the base's massive front gate, seen from a camera just inside. The gate was open.

Three loud cracks came from somewhere above Jeremiah's head. Long Joseph leaped up, swearing, so startled that he dropped his squeeze bottle of wine to the floor. Jeremiah's skin turned cold.

"Del Ray!" he shouted. "Del Ray, is that you?"

For once Joseph kept his mouth shut as they both listened. Nothing came to them but the echo of Jeremiah's own voice.

"Is he shooting that gun?" asked Joseph in a hoarse, nervous whisper. "Or someone shooting at him?"

Jeremiah felt as though his own cry had emptied all the air from his chest: he could only shake his head. For a moment he stood, frightened and confused, trying to decide whether they should shut off the lights and hide. He turned to the console and tried to make sense of the almost monochrome images, seeing what he thought were flickers of movement here or there, but never able to make out anything definitive.

Which one shows upstairs, where Del Ray went?

He recognized the elevator bay at last—not by the elevator itself, which was only a dark shadow along the wall, but because of the old sign posted beside it, a stern warning about the weight the elevator could handle that he had seen so many times he sometimes found himself muttering it under his breath.

He only had time to think, for the very first time in all the weeks he had been immured in the underground base, Seems funny that there is no freight elevator for a place with this much equipment, then he saw the dim outline of a pair of legs stretched on the floor, disappearing offscreen. It was too dark to be absolutely sure, but Jeremiah knew with an indisputable horror whose legs and feet those were, lying so still beside the darkness of the elevator door.

Dear Mr. Ramsey,

The first time you walked into my house, I thought you were a very nice man. I know it may not have seemed that way, that I may have seemed suspicious. Just listening to me without letting your thoughts show on your face was a kind thing to do, because I am sure you must have thought I was a crazy old woman.

When you read what I have to tell you now, you will be very certain that you were right. I don't mind. When I started to get old, I used to feel bad because men didn't look at me the same way any more, that I wasn't a young girl. I was never pretty, but I was young once, and men do look. When if stopped I felt a little bad, but I thought at least they will take me seriously now. Then when all the things happened to me, the headaches and the problems and my ideas about this Tandagore disease, people stopped even looking at me like I had a brain in my head. But you treated me like a real person. You are a nice man, I was right about you.

I am doing something that is hard to explain and if I am wrong I will wind up in a jail somewhere. If I am right, I will probably be killed. It is a long distance to go to prove a point, I bet you are saying.

But this letter is to tell you that if I am crazy, it doesn't feel like it to me, and that I am doing this with the knowledge that it doesn't seem to make sense. But if you heard the voices I hear in my head, or that I used to hear, you would do what I am doing too. I know you would, because I can tell what kind of man you are.

Before I tell you the other things, that reminds me of something I wanted to say to you. I feel very light now, as if I have taken off a heavy coat and am walking through the snow. Later I may freeze, but for now I am just happy to have that heavy weight off my back. The weight is pretending, you see, and instead I am telling the truth. So I will tell you something that I would never have said to you otherwise. You should get married. You are a good man who works too hard, always in your office, never at your home. I know you will say, what is this crazy old Polish-Russian lady talking about, but you need to find someone to share your life with. I don't even know if you like men or women, and you know what? It doesn't matter to me. But find someone to live with you, that you want to go home for. If you can, have children. Somehow children make sense out of life.

Now I will tell you the rest, about the voices and about Obolos Corporation and Felix Jongleur. Then even if you still think I am crazy, you will understand why I am doing what I am doing. I am telling you just so that someone knows it.

Do you know, if my baby had lived, he would have been just about your age? I think about things like that too much.

And when I have finished explaining there will only be one more thing for you to do. I think there is something called a power of attorney? And since you are an attorney, you would know about this. If I disappear, then please will you sell my things? Mostly only small things and not worth the trouble,-but there is Obolos stock and my house. I have no living relatives and that stock now feels to me like something unclean—"treyf," as my mother would have said. Will you sell them both, please, and give the money to the children's hospital in Toronto?

I am sitting here at this desk, looking at this screen, and it is very hard to find a place to begin to explain. The voices had not come to me when you and I first met. If they are just something in my own head, something to do with the headache, then I will have made a fool of myself. But you know what? I don't care. There are children hurting, both those with the terrible coma disease and I think maybe others too—the voices who speak to me. It is for the children I must risk it. If I am wrong it is only one more old woman locked away. If I am right, no one will believe me, not even you, but at least I will have tried to do something.

The voices, and now the black tower. It is like a castle from one of my mother's stories. It frightens me very much. But I will go there and I will get inside and I will try to find the truth. . . .

". . . And it ends, 'Yours very sincerely, Olga Pirofsky,' " Ramsey finished.

Kaylene Sorensen broke the silence. "That poor woman!"

"That poor woman, indeed." Sellars leaned forward, eyes half shut. He had rolled his wheelchair back into the most shadowed corner of the room, but even the small amount of sunlight arrowing in beneath the drapes seemed to make him uncomfortable. "She's brave, though. She is walking into the lion's den."

"You don't think they'll really kill her, do you?" Ramsey's hands were still shaking; Olga's letter had disturbed him deeply. "That wouldn't be very smart of them. Surely if they catch her trespassing on J Corporation property they'll just toss her out, maybe have her arrested?"

Sellars shook his head sadly. "If Jongleur and his associates had nothing to hide, that would certainly be the case. But do you think your client will go quietly if they do catch her? Or will she make loud claims that will attract more attention than a trespasser usually gets?" He sighed. "Here is another question. What can she tell them about you?"

"What?" Ramsey was caught unprepared. "I don't get you."

"If this mess is everything he claims it is," Major Sorensen interjected, "then Sellars is right—they'll question her. And if they're that ugly, they will get information. You don't want to think about that part too much, but trust me—you saw the kind of boys General Yacoubian was running around with. What does she know about you, Ramsey . . . about . . . all this?"

Catur Ramsey suddenly noticed that his heart was racing. He took a step backward and sank into one of the shiny metal chairs. The cheap servo-motors tried to adjust the seat to fit him, but gave up about halfway through the process. "Christ."

"What I don't get, though," Sorensen continued, "is all this crap about 'voices.' Is it like you talking to my daughter and to me, Sellars? Is someone tricking her? Or is she just . . . well, you know . . . nuts?"

"I don't know," the old man said. He looked as troubled as Ramsey felt. "But I suspect it is something stranger and more complicated than either."

"Good Lord, we have to stop her!" Ramsey shoved himself to the edge of the chair, prompting a whine of indignation from the internal mechanism. "We can't just let her walk into that, whether she's a risk to me or not. I didn't have a chance to tell her half the things I'd found out. I don't know about these voices either, but somehow she's stumbled into this thing—completely separate from you, Sellars. all on her own—and she still thinks she might be imagining it." He thought about it and slumped back. "God, the poor woman."

"Did you respond to what she sent you?" Major Sorensen asked.

"Of course I did! I sent her back a message to call me immediately—not to go one step without talking to me first." He saw the look on the military man's face and felt his stomach go sour. It took a couple of seconds for him to understand why. "Shit. I gave her the number for this motel."

To his credit, Sorensen did no more than shake his head once in irritation before standing up. "Right. First thing, we move. Kaylene, why don't you round up the kids and I'll start throwing stuff in the car. Sellars, we're going to have to return the chair, and we may not be able to rent another. I'm afraid you're going back in the wheel-well when we travel, too. The military may not be actively searching for us right now, especially if we really were a private matter of Yacoubian's, but you're still way too easily noticed and remembered."

"Where are we going, Mike?" Kaylene Sorensen, a veteran military spouse, was already tossing things into bags. "Can't we just go home? We can find Mr. Sellars someplace to hide, can't we? Maybe he could stay with Mr. Ramsey for a while. Christabel has to get back to school."

Even Catur Ramsey could see past her husband's carefully maintained expression to the misery in his eyes. "I don't think we're going back there for a while, honey. And at the moment, I don't have any idea where we're heading—just out of here."

"I need to call Olga again before we leave," Ramsey said. "If there's any chance of keeping her from trying to get into that place, I owe it to her."

"On the contrary," Sellars said abruptly. He had been sitting very still, eyes almost closed, like a lizard sunning on a rock. Now he lifted his head to show his strange yellow gaze. "On the contrary, we must not stop her. And I also know where we must go—some of us, anyway."

"What are you talking about?" Sorensen demanded.

"I told you that there have been many odd things going on with the Grail Brotherhood in the last few days. I have been watching carefully, trying to make some sense of the events that are sealed away from me within the network, and have seen evidence of uncertainty within the Brotherhood's various holdings and private domains. Jongleur's little kingdom is no different. There are definite suggestions of a tremor in the routines, of confusion at the top."

"So?" Ramsey was impatient.

"So instead of trying to keep your Ms. Pirofsky away from the J Corporation, I think we should instead help her to get in, Mr. Ramsey. I have been forced to use innocents to help me often enough in this grim task—the Sorensens can testify to that. Olga Pirofsky is at least already determined to take the risk. We will see what we can do to help, and to protect her while she is in there."

"That's . . . that's crazy." Ramsey got up so quickly he almost knocked over the coffee tray. "She doesn't deserve that—she doesn't know what she's getting into!"

For a moment there was a kind of flash in the straw-colored eyes, a sudden glimpse of the aerial predator Sellars had once been. "Nobody deserves this, Mr. Ramsey. But others have dealt the cards—we have no choice but to play the hand." He turned to the Sorensens, who had both stopped to watch, the major with a certain reluctant professional interest, his wife with growing discomfort. "I cannot compel you two, but I know where I am going, and I rather suspect that when he thinks it through, where Mr. Ramsey is going as well."

"And that is. . . ?"

"Mike, don't even talk to him," Kaylene Sorensen said. "I don't want to hear this. It's crazy. . . !"

"To New Orleans, of course," said Sellars. "To the very lair of the Beast. Our plight is so desperate that in retrospect it now seems an obvious endgame move. I wish I had thought of it earlier,"

They were moving again. Christabel wasn't sure why, but that never mattered much when things like this were happening. She wondered if when she was older people would tell her things, explain things, or if being grown-up she would just know.

What almost seemed like the saddest thing of all, sadder even than leaving the new motel just when she had figured out where the candy bar machine was, was that Mister Sellars was going to have to go back into the place in the back of the van where Daddy normally kept the spare tire. It seemed such an awful place, so tiny.

The old man was sitting in the doorway of the van, waiting for her father to finish some other things and help him in, when Christabel found him.

"It's all right, little Christabel," he said when she told him her worries. "I don't mind, really. I don't use my body for much these days, anyway. As long as my mind is free—what is it Hamlet says? 'Were I bounded in a nutshell, still could I count myself a king of infinite space. . . .'—something like that." For a moment he looked very sad. If he was supposed to be making her feel better, Christabel thought, he wasn't doing a very good job.

"Mommy said you have wires inside you," she said at last. "Is that true?"

Sellars laughed quietly. "I suppose I do, my young friend."

"Do they hurt?"

"No. I have pain, but it's more to do with my burns, with . . . with other old injuries. And most of the wires aren't really wires anymore. I've had lots of help changing things inside me. There are plenty of gearmakers hungry for a challenge, more than a few out-of-work nano-engineers in need of a few extra credits."

Christabel wasn't at all sure what he was talking about. "Nano-engineers" made her think of Ophelia Weiner's Nanoo dress. The thought of a lot of train-drivers in party dresses that changed color and shape didn't explain anything, so she let it slide away, another thing a kid just worked around. "You mean you had wires, but you don't anymore?"

"Wires are sort of old-fashioned, especially when there are so many other ways to transmit information. I'm confusing you, aren't I? Well, do you remember when I had you bring me soap to eat?"

She nodded, pleased to be back on familiar ground.

"I sometimes have to eat funny things like that, because my body is making something new for me, or repairing something that's not working very well. I eat little bits of polymer sometimes, too—plastic, you'd call it. Or I have to get more metal. Sometimes there are pills that will help, but usually they don't have enough of what I need. I used to have to eat a couple of copper pennies a week, but that's past now." He nodded at her and smiled. "It doesn't matter, Christabel. I have funny insides, but I'm still me. I don't mind what's in your insides—can you still be my friend, too?"

She nodded her head rapidly. She hadn't meant anything bad at all, certainly not that she wouldn't be his friend. Her mother's passing remark had been worrying her all day—the thought of sharp wires sticking in Mister Sellars' insides had almost made her cry.

"Oh, just a moment, Christabel," Sellars told her, then waved for Mister Ramsey to come over.

Christabel could tell that the dark-skinned man was not happy because he didn't smile at her, and even though she had only known him a while, she could tell he was the kind of man who almost always smiled at kids. "I feel terrible," he told Mister Sellars. "I've been a real idiot. It's just still so hard to take all this stuff seriously! Having to worry about being traced—it's like some bad netflick."

"No one blames you," Sellars told him gently, "But I wanted to ask you something before I descend into my traveling sanctum sanctorum. Have you heard anything back from Olga Pirofsky since we spoke this morning?"

"No. Nothing."

"May I make a suggestion? If you were her, doing something as dangerous and questionable as she is doing, and your attorney sent you a message that said, 'Don't do anything until you talk to me.' what would you assume?" She could see Ramsey trying hard to think, like Christabel herself when she hadn't been listening to the teacher but got asked a question anyway. "I don't know. I guess that my attorney was going to try to talk me out of this crazy thing."

"Exactly. And if you were her, would you bother to reply?"

Now, even though Mister Sellars was talking in his usual quiet, hooty voice, Mister Ramsey looked like Christabel when the teacher yelled at her. "No. No, I guess wouldn't. Not if I'd already made up my mind."

"I think that's probably the case. If I may make a suggestion, you might send her another message saying something along the lines of, "I know what you're doing and believe it or not I think you're right and I want to help you get inside as safely as possible. Please get in touch with me."

"Right. Right." Ramsey turned and walked away fast, back toward his motel room.

"Well, little Christabel," said Mister Sellars, "I see your father coming to help strap me into my pilot's seat. The best captains always lead from behind, you know. Or even beneath." He laughed, but Christabel thought he was less happy than she had almost ever seen him. "I'll be out before you know it. Have a good trip and I'll see you soon."

The boy was already in the car. Christabel was too confused and worried by everything to pay very much attention.

"What your problem, mu'chita?" he asked.

She just ignored him, trying to understand why Mister Sellars had seemed so different than usual—so dark underneath the smile, so quiet and tired.

"Hey, I'm talking to you, weenit!"

"I know," she said. "I'm thinking. Talk to yourself."

He called her names but she ignored him. She knew that if her mother had not been in and out of the car, shoving in bags and cases, he would probably have poked her or pinched her. She wouldn't have cared if he did. Mister Sellars was very sad. Something bad was happening—something even worse than the worst things she had worried about before her parents found out.

"Okay, okay, just tell me what you thinking about, okay?"

She looked up, surprised by the sound of the boy's voice. He didn't look angry, or at least that wasn't all she could see.

"Mister Sellars. I'm thinking about Mister Sellars," she said.

"He one strange viejo."

"He's scared."

"Yeah. Me, too."

For a moment she didn't realize what she had heard. She had to look up to make sure it was the same mean-faced boy with the missing tooth. "You're scared?"

He stared for a moment as though waiting for her to make fun of him. "Not stupid, me. I heard some of what they been talking about. Army men trying to kill them, all that. That's all locked up, seen? The azules, the police and stuff, most times they don't go after people like your mama and papa, they go after kids like me, or maybe big crooks, whatever. And if your dad actually snuck el viejo out of an army base, and brought his family along, even a little gatita like you—well, you know that's trouble major." He looked out the car window. "Think I'm going to get out of here soon." He turned back to her suddenly. "You tell anyone, I'll kill you. No dupping."

A few days before, thinking about the little boy running away would have made Christabel happy enough to dance. Now it just made her even more lonely and frightened than she had been.

Something was very, very wrong, but Christabel had no idea what it was.

Long Joseph carried a huge, red-painted fire ax, and was creeping along the corridor with what he probably believed was the warlike stealth of his Zulu ancestors. Jeremiah Dako still hadn't found any weapon better than the table leg with which he had almost brained Joseph and Del Ray during their unexpected entrance, but he couldn't imagine many situations in which they were going to get a chance to hit anyone anyway.

Jeremiah had not much wanted to bring Joseph with him, but it would have been impossible to convince the man to stay with the equipment and their slumbering charges, Renie and !Xabbu, and since it would be hard to carry Del Ray back by himself, Jeremiah had made only a token argument. To Joseph Sulaweyo's credit, he was at least keeping his mouth shut for once.

Now the man stopped at an intersection of aisles and made a theatrically broad gesture, fingers to his lips, other hand pointing at the right-hand corridor. The silliness of it all—Jeremiah knew perfectly well where they were, and where Del Ray was lying so unmovingly—suddenly brought home to him their terrible danger.

There are men out there who want to kill us. Men with guns and God knows what else. Maybe even the same men who beat Doctor Susan so that she died.

If he stopped to think about it any longer he knew his legs would collapse beneath him, but there was a flame of anger burning now, too. Jeremiah put a hand against Joseph's chest and, returning the older man's wide-eyed stare of outrage with the most purposeful look he could muster, slid past him to the turning of the corridor. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled forward until he could see Del Ray's feet, one of them only wearing a sock, the shoe lying half a meter away. It made Jeremiah feel quietly sick.

Go on, man. Nothing else to be done. Go on.

Certain that any moment someone was going to step out of the shadows—which would somehow be worse, he could not help thinking, than someone simply shooting him—Jeremiah crept toward Del Ray . . . or at least toward his legs. . . .

Oh, my God, what if he has been shot in half by one of those machine guns?

He slid another few meters forward over industrial carpet so old and threadbare he could feel exposed patches of cold concrete pass beneath his belly, until at last he was close enough to reach out and touch Del Ray's unshod foot. It felt warm and alive, but that meant little—everything had happened only a few minutes earlier. Eyes closed, even more frightened now, he let his hand travel up the outside of Del Ray's leg until, to his great relief, he felt the bunched fabric of the man's shirt, then his arm, shoulder, and even the base of his chin. He was in one piece, anyway.

Jeremiah had just lifted up his hand to beckon Joseph forward when someone hissed in his ear. "Where they shoot him? In the belly? Between the eyes?"

When Jeremiah's heart had slid back down from his mouth into its normal spot, he turned and glared. "Just shut up! We have to get him out of here."

"Tell you one problem," Joseph whispered. "There is a big pipe on his arm, over here."

Jeremiah, feeling a little braver now that a minute had gone by out in the open and no one had put a bullet in his spine, rose until he could kneel beside Del Ray. He touched the young man's chest, which seemed to be moving, then found a living pulse at the base of his jaw. His relief suddenly turned sour when he brought back his hand and found it covered with something dark and sticky.

"Oh, Christ! He's bleeding from the head."

"Then he is dead," said Joseph, not unkindly. "Nobody gets a shot in the head, then they go back to work on Monday."

"Shut up and help me move him. We have to get him back where I can have a better look at him."

Joseph had been right—there was indeed a long piece of heavy pipe, about the thickness of a wine bottle, lying across Del Ray's arm. They pushed it off, not without effort, and although Jeremiah flinched when it clanked to the floor, he also began to feel a little relief. Perhaps Del Ray hadn't been shot. Perhaps this thing had fallen on him, clubbing him down in the dark.

Jeremiah looked up and his heart threatened to stop again. A jackstraw clutter of the heavy iron pipes hung down from the ceiling above their heads, all at strange angles, most only connected now at one end, as though some huge hand had reached up and pulled them away from their moorings. The clutter of metal looked as though it might come down at any moment. He gestured urgently to Joseph and they began to drag Del Ray back toward the corridor.

At the last moment Jeremiah remembered the gun. He hesitated, fearful of spending another second out in the open, of letting Del Ray's wounds go untended any longer. What good would a single pistol and a few bullets do them? Joseph made impatient noises. Jeremiah hesitated, then turned and crept back, moving as quietly as he could beneath the Damoclean assortment of broken pipes. Del Ray's jacket was lying almost hidden in shadow. Jeremiah tugged it toward him, patted the pockets until he felt the telltale chunk of smooth, heavy metal, then sprinted away from the treacherous spot.

While Joseph checked the vital signs on the V-tanks, Jeremiah stretched Del Ray full length on a blanket laid out on a conference table in one of the side rooms. He could feel a distinct swelling on the left side of the young man's head, a bump underneath a long but seemingly shallow laceration. His fingers came away slick with blood. Jeremiah would have liked to believe that was the only injury, but much of Del Ray's shirt around the collar and behind his shoulders was dark and damp as well. He hoped it was only that, the young man had been lying in the blood of his own head wound, but he could not be sure.

Might have been shot first, then grabbed at a loose pipe on his way down.

Satisfied that Del Ray was at least breathing, Jeremiah began to cut the shirt away with his pocketknife. Long Joseph came in from the main room and watched, his expression hard to read, but he stepped forward when Jeremiah asked, helping to turn Del Ray's wiry body over so that Jeremiah could investigate his back.

Jeremiah splashed water from a squeeze bottle on a ragged strip of shirt and began wiping away the blood, grateful that they still had the overhead fluorescents—the idea of doing this by flashlight and perhaps missing a vital wound chilled him. He was relieved to find no evidence of another injury. He took a small bottle from the first-aid kit and splashed it on a comparatively clean piece of Del Ray's shirt, then began cleaning the head wound.

"What is that stuff you putting on there?" Joseph asked.

"Alcohol. Not the kind you can drink."

"I know that," said Joseph, disgusted.

Probably from experience, Jeremiah thought, but kept it to himself. The edge of the cut was ragged, but gentle probing with his fingers revealed no deep hole, nothing that might be an entrance wound. Feeling better than he had in the last hour, he made a pad of wet shirt and used one of the severed sleeves to tie it in place, then with Joseph's help turned Del Ray back over.

The younger man's groan was so pitiful that for a moment Jeremiah froze in horror, positive he had done something terribly wrong. Then Del Ray's eyes fluttered open. The pupils wandered for a moment, unfixed, confused by the bright bank of fluorescents.

"Is . . . is that you?" Del Ray said at last. He could have meant anyone, but Jeremiah was not going to split hairs.

"Yes, it's us. We brought you back safe. You seem to have been hit on the head. What happened?"

He groaned again, but this time it was more a sound of frustration than pain. "I'm . . . I'm not sure. I was just coming back from the elevator when something up on the ceiling went boom!" He squinted and tried to turn away from the lights, but the pad kept his head from rolling. Jeremiah leaned forward to shade his eyes. "I think . . . I think maybe they're using some kind of explosives up there. Trying to blast through to our part of the base." He winced and slowly brought a hand up to his head, his eyes widening slightly as he felt the bandages. "What . . . how bad is it?"

"Not bad," Jeremiah said. "A pipe fell down, I think. If they set something off upstairs, that would make sense. I heard loud noises, three of them. I think—bang, hang, bang!"

"What, so they are trying to bomb us out now?" Joseph said. "Foolish. They not going to get me out so easy. They blow a hole, I come out of it and knock in some heads."

Jeremiah rolled his eyes. "He's right about one thing, though," he told Del Ray. "I don't think they'll get through that concrete or that heavy door on the elevator—not right away, anyway."

Del Ray murmured something, then tried to sit up. Jeremiah leaned forward to restrain him but the younger man would not be stopped. His skin had paled and he was shaking, but he seemed otherwise almost normal.

"The question is," Del Ray said at last, "how long do we have to hold them off? A week? We might be able to do it. Forever? That's not going to work."

"Not if you are going to get knocked out, walking into pipes," declared Joseph. "I told you, you should let me go and do that."

Tired and irritated, Jeremiah could not resist. "You know, Del Ray, it's been a real pleasure to see you with your shirt off. Joseph was right—you're a very handsome young man."

"What?" Long Joseph Sulaweyo leaped up, almost spitting with indignation. "What are you talking about? I didn't say nothing like that! What are you talking about?"

Jeremiah was laughing too hard to push it any farther. Even Del Ray managed a wincing smile as the older man stomped off to the other room, presumably to drown the insult to his manliness in a few swallows of his precious wine.

"I shouldn't do it," Jeremiah said when he was gone, but could not restrain a last quiet chuckle. "He's not all bad, and we need to stick together. Help each other."

"You helped me," said Del Ray. "Thanks."

Jeremiah waved it off. "It's nothing. But I was scared. I thought they'd broken in, shooting. They're still out there, though, and we're still safe in here—for the moment. Ah!" Reminded, he bent and picked up Del Ray's jacket off the floor. "And we even have a gun."

Del Ray took the heavy pistol out of his pocket and turned it over, looking at it as though it were some completely new object. "Yes," he said. "One gun, but only two bullets." He wiped a tiny trickle of blood off his ear and gave Jeremiah a mournful look. "When they do manage to get in, that's not even enough to shoot ourselves."

CHAPTER 11Yours Very Sincerely

CHAPTER 11
Yours Very Sincerely