Otherland-4-SeaofSilverLight

It made a very small pile when she looked at it, all the things she had bought, all the things that she would carry with her into this last and strangest country of a life that had seen many countries and many strange things.

The new telematic jack was small, of course, no larger than the standard variety despite its additional range. It had cost a decent fraction of her bank account, but the salesman had sworn that it would keep her in touch with her fancy Dao-Ming pad at a distance of several miles—"even in the middle of a high-usage telecom area during an electrical storm," he had cheerfully promised. Olga didn't know about storms, although she had spent enough days now near the Gulf of Mexico to know that even on a clear day lightning never seemed more than a breath away, but she guessed that an island with its own army and air force would probably qualify as a "high-usage telecom area."

Beside the jack sat a small but extremely powerful LED flashlight, a piece of high-tech paraphernalia usually sold to businessmen with too much money, and despite its dramatic name—something like "SpyLite" or "SpaceLight," she couldn't remember which—seldom used for anything much more dramatic than finding dropped keys in a parking lot, she guessed. She had also bought something called an Omni-Tool from the same store, then changed her mind and exchanged it for a more familiar Swiss Army knife. She had always meant to buy one, had thought dozens of times what a handy object it would be for a woman living on her own, but for some reason had never done it. The fact that she had finally bought one, a top-of-the-line model with all kinds of clever hidden devices and built-in microcircuitry, helped mark the occasion. Things had changed. She was not the same Olga Pirofsky.

What did one bring on an infiltration of one of the world's largest and best-guarded corporations? She supposed there were many more things she could have bought, guns and cutting torches and surveillance devices, but it all smacked too much of boys playing war games. Besides, she was fairly certain she would be arrested at some point, and a pocketful of plastic explosives or wall-climbing pitons would make it hard to pretend she had wandered away from a tour group.

So her pile of tools to take behind enemy lines was a small one: the new jack, the knife, the flashlight, and the one object of sentiment she had not been able to leave behind in Juniper Bay with the rest of her old life. Thee curl of white plastic was certainly not going to arouse anyone's suspicions. Olga's last name and first initial, as written decades ago by some nurse who might very well be dead, had almost faded away. Olga herself had cut the bracelet to remove it, but had never thrown it away, and through all the years in her top drawer it had retained the curve of her wrist. Many times she had come within inches of tossing it in the trash, but the O. Pirofsky who had worn that hospital bracelet was a different person, and the tiny snake of pale plastic was her only tangible connection to that Olga, a girl with her life ahead of her, a young woman with a husband named Aleksandr still alive, so very much alive, a young woman about to give birth. . . .

Something rapped quickly and authoritatively on the motel room door. Startled, Olga dropped the bracelet back onto the small pile of objects in the middle of the bed. After a moment's hesitation, she stepped to the door and looked out through the fish-eye peephole. A black woman and white man stood there, both in dark suits.

For a moment she leaned breathlessly against the door, heart racing for no reason she could say. Missionaries, they must be—this whole region was acrawl with them, people with nothing better to do than walk around in heavy clothing on the hottest day, trying to convince others that there was somewhere hotter yet they might be going if they didn't embrace the doorstepper's faith.

The knock came again; something in its weight drove all thought of ignoring it out of her mind. She tossed her motel bathrobe over the things lying on the bed—irritated, despite her fright, that these people would now think she was the kind of person who normally left things strewn around the room.

It was the black woman who took the lead when the door opened. She smiled at Olga, although it seemed a little perfunctory, and drew a long flat wallet out of her coat pocket. "You're Ms. Pirofsky, is that right, ma'am?"

"How do you know me?"

"Manager gave us your name. Nothing to worry about, ma'am, we just wanted a few words with you." The woman flipped open the wallet, a brief glimpse of something that looked like a hologram of a police badge. "I'm Officer Upshaw and this is my partner, Officer Casaro. We'd like to ask you a couple of questions."

"Are you . . . police?"

"No, ma'am, we're security officers for J Corporation."

"But I. . . ." In her fear and surprise, she had been about to say that she didn't work for J Corporation anymore. She managed to keep her mouth shut, but only at the expense of looking like a slow and stupid old woman. But, she thought, perhaps there could be worse ways to look.

The man Casaro had only briefly made eye contact with her, and unlike his partner, he made no effort to smile. The black pinholes in the center of his pale eyes looked past her into the room itself, as if he were some kind of machine recording everything he saw for future study. Olga suddenly remembered her grandmother describing the old Polish secret police. "They didn't look at you, they looked through you, even when they were talking to you. Like x-rays."

"What . . . what could you possibly want to ask someone like me?"

Officer Upshaw grudgingly used the smile again. "We're just doing our job, ma'am. We heard you were asking some questions in various places about the J Corporation campus."

"The campus?" She could not shake the feeling that they had been following her ever since she had walked out the doors of Obolos Entertainment—that this was only a bit of cruel pretense, and at any moment they would throw her to the floor and handcuff her.

"The buildings, the facilities—that's what we call it, ma'am. Some of the local merchants, well, they let us know when people are asking questions." She shrugged, and for the first time Olga saw how young this woman really was—perhaps just past college age, and with a bit of insecurity in the measured way she spoke. "Now could you please tell us what brings you to the area and what your interest in J Corporation might be?"

Officer Casaro's long inspection of everything behind Olga finally ended. His eyes found hers and locked. She felt her knees go a little weak. "Certainly," she managed to say after a moment. "Why don't you come in—all of the air-conditioning will get out, otherwise."

An almost imperceptible look flicked between the two. "That's fine, ma'am. Thank you."

After Olga gathered up the things on the bed, under the guise of tidying away the bathrobe, and deposited the bundle on the counter in the tiny bathroom, she was able to relax a little. None of the objects that had been lying there were illegal or even particularly suspicious for someone who had made her living in net entertainment, but she didn't really want her possession of a telematic jack that cost as much as a small car to become a topic of conversation.

As her initial terror ebbed a little, she began to believe that things might be no worse than they appeared. She had been asking questions in what was, after all, a company town, and the company itself was famously secretive. Similarly, if they had her name from the credit information at the motel, she couldn't very well pretend to be someone different, could she? Somewhere on that island—perhaps in the black tower itself—were the records of Pirofsky, O., employee.

"You see," she told them, "I worked for a J Corporation subsidiary for years—you've seen Uncle Jingle, haven't you? I worked on that show." Upshaw nodded and smiled politely. Casaro didn't bother. "And since I was in the area—I'm taking a car trip across America now that I'm retired—I just thought I'd come see it. After all, they've been paying my salary for years!"

She answered a few more questions, all from Officer Upshaw, and did her best to pretend she was enjoying the break in routine, the importance of a visit from security officers. She struggled to remember the innocent taxpayer's serenity she had always been able to bring to her encounters with police in Juniper Bay.

You're an actress, aren't you? So act!

It seemed to work. The questions got more perfunctory, and even Casaro's surgical examination of Olga and her room gradually dulled to something like bored routine. She had no urge to rekindle his interest. She started telling a true but circumstantially pointless story about her dog Misha, which finally did the trick.

"We're sorry, but we'll have to get going, Mr. Pirofsky," said Upshaw, rising. "We're sorry to have bothered you." Feeling almost pleased with herself now, she hazarded the tiniest return of serve. "Maybe you can tell me, since I haven't been able to find out for certain. Is there any kind of tour of the . . . the campus, as you called it? I'd hate to come all this way and not get to see it except from a distance."

Casaro snorted, then stepped out the door to wait for his partner in the motel parking lot, under hot gray skies.

Upshaw shook her head. For the first time her smile seemed honest—an amused grin. "No, ma'am. No, I'm afraid there isn't. See, we're not really that kind of corporation."

Jeremiah was up in the sleeping area, changing the dressing on Del Ray's head wound, so Joseph had become the official watcher of the monitor screens. All of the men upstairs were in view on one camera, still in the same place beside the elevator doors. At the moment they were resting and smoking, but dusty chunks of concrete lay piled all around and the man standing in the hole, leaning on the handle of his pick, was a good half meter below his fellows.

Joseph supposed he and his companions should be grateful at least that they were so far out in the middle of nowhere, or the men upstairs would probably have fetched in air hammers and a compressor by now.

"Coward bastards," he said, half-whispering. Just what they were doing that was so cowardly he couldn't quite define, but waiting was difficult, especially when you were probably waiting to be killed.

He looked down to the floor of the lab where the silent V-tanks lay. How strange, to think Renie was so close. And her friend, too—both of them sealed in the dark, like those little oiled fish in cans. He missed her.

The thought was so surprising that he had to stop and try it out for size and feel. Yes, he did, he truly missed her. Not just feared for her, not just wanted to protect her, do the fatherly duty of keeping her safe from bad men—he wished she were here to talk to him.

It was something he hadn't thought about much, and he had trouble holding it together to consider it. It was all wrapped up somehow with Renie's mother, but not with the awful helplessness of watching her die, as his feelings of protectiveness were. He missed having someone around who cared about him. He missed the company of someone who understood his little jokes. Not that Renie liked them very much, and sometimes she pretended they weren't jokes at all, that he was just being stupid or difficult, but there had been times when she was just as amused by him as her mother had been.

Now that he thought of it, though, it had been a long while. Not many jokes in the last few years, at least not the kind you could laugh about.

She was funny herself when she wanted to be, but it seemed to Joseph it had been some time since there had been much of that from her end either. She had got so serious, somehow. Angry, even. Because her mama was dead? Because her father couldn't work, with his bad back? That was no reason to lose your sense of humor. That was when you needed it most of all—Long Joseph knew that for a fact. If he couldn't have gone out and had a drink every now and then with Walter and Dog and found a laugh or two with them, he would have killed himself a long time since.

When she was a little girl, we used to talk. She'd ask me questions, and if I didn't know, I'd make up some foolishness just to see her laugh. He hadn't seen that laugh in a long time, that surprised laugh where her whole face lit up. Such a serious little girl she'd been, he and her mother couldn't help but tease her sometimes.

Come back, baby girl. He stared at the silent tank, then turned back to the monitor. Break time was over: three men were digging now in the hole in the concrete floor, dust billowing up like they were devils in the smokes of hell. Joseph had the strangest feeling, like he was going to cry. He reached out and took a swallow of his last, dwindling bottle of wine. You come back soon and laugh with me. . . .

The ringing of the telephone startled him so badly that he almost dropped the precious squeeze bottle with its cap open. He stared at the device for a moment as he would a black mamba. Jeremiah was upstairs, but he must be able to hear the ring—with the floors all open to the high central ceiling, the underground lab complex was like being in some big train-station waiting room.

Maybe I just leave it alone until he gets down, Joseph thought, but the thought of being frightened of an antique telephone was too much. As it rang again, he stood up and snatched it off its dented metal cradle.

"Who is that?"

There was a pause on the other end. The voice, when it came, was ghostly and distorted. "Is that Joseph?"

Only after the first superstitious chill had raced across his skin did he remember, but he wanted to be sure. "You tell me who's calling, first."

"It's Sellars. Surely Mr. Dako has told you about me."

Joseph didn't want to talk about Jeremiah. Joseph was the one who had answered the phone; he was the one in charge of this emergency. "What do you want?"

"To help, I hope. I take it that they haven't managed to break in yet."

"They are trying. They are surely trying."

In the silence that followed, Joseph found himself suddenly worried that he had done something wrong, driven off their benefactor. "I don't have much time," Sellars finally said. "And, I must confess, not a lot of ideas, either. You managed to get the armored elevator doors closed?"

"Yes. But those men are digging through the floor now—started out with a grenade, I think, but now they using picks, shovels. Coming right down through the cement."

"That's bad. Do you have the monitors working?"

"I am looking at those men right now. They are digging like dogs after a bone." Jeremiah had appeared, a look of worry on his face. Joseph waved him back: everything was being taken care of.

Sellars sighed. "Do you think you can help me connect to your surveillance system? That would give me a better idea of what's going on."

"You mean these cameras and so on?" Joseph felt his competence suddenly under heavy fire. "Hook you up? To those?"

"We should be able to do it, even with that old equipment you have there." There was a strange, wheezing laugh. "I'm pretty old equipment myself, after all. Yes, I think I can talk you through it."

Joseph was disturbed. Every cell in his body told him to take charge, to make something happen, but he knew Jeremiah had spent much more time with the machinery than he had. In fact, he knew he hadn't even bothered to learn anything about the monitors at all. With real regret, he said, "I will let you talk to Jeremiah." But he could not give up without even a show of involvement. "It is that man Sellars," he whispered as he passed the receiver. "He wants to get hooked up with the pictures."

Jeremiah stared at him quizzically, then leaned forward and tapped a button on the instrument panel. "I've put you on the speaker, Mr. Sellars," he said out loud, then hung up the receiver. "That way we can both hear you."

Joseph was caught off-balance. Was Jeremiah being kind to him, like to a child? Or was he treating him as an equal? Joseph wanted to be irritated, but could not help feeling a small glow of pleasure.

"Good." Sellars' voice sounded even more strange now, scratchy on the small speaker. "I'm trying to think of things to do, but first could you patch me in to your monitors?" He gave a list of instructions to Jeremiah that Joseph could not quite follow, which left him feeling annoyed again. Who had been the mechanical one in this group, after all? Not Jeremiah, a kind of glorified lady's maid for a rich old white woman. Not Del Ray, an overgrown schoolboy who wore suits and sat behind a desk.

By the time Joseph had summoned up the meditative calm to shrug off the unintended insult, Jeremiah had apparently done what Sellars wanted.

"I see three working and one with a gun, watching," the tinny voice said. "Is that all of them?"

"I'm not sure," said Jeremiah.

Joseph frowned, thinking. When he and Del Ray had snuck in, they had seen . . . how many? "Five," he said suddenly. "There are five of those men."

"So one's off somewhere," Sellars said. "We shouldn't forget about him. But first we have to deal with the digging. How thick are the floors, any idea? Wait. I should be able to access the plans."

For long seconds the speaker was silent. Joseph's thoughts were just turning sadly to the small bit of wine he had left when the strange voice spoke again. "Roughly two meters deep where they're working, next to the elevator bay. Which means they're probably about a quarter of the way there." He made a strange sound, perhaps a hiss of frustration. "It's heavy concrete, but they'll be through in a day at the most."

"We only have one gun, Mr. Sellars," Jeremiah said. "Two bullets. We're not going to be able to fight with them when they get through."

"Then we have to see what we can do to keep them out," Sellars replied. "I wish this place were a bit older, then maybe I could find a way to banjax the heaters, fill that upper section with carbon monoxide."

Joseph remembered enough from his days in the construction trade to remember something about those carbon what-so-oxides. "Yes, kill the bastards! Poison them. That would be a fine thing."

Jeremiah winced. "Kill them in cold blood?"

"We can't do it," Sellars said, "or at least I can't see a way just now, so it's not worth debating the morality of it. But you must understand that those are not ordinary men, Mr. Dako. They are murderers—perhaps the very men who attacked your friend, the doctor."

"How do you know about that?" asked Jeremiah, startled. "Did Renie tell you?"

"In fact, they have killed someone else that Joseph knows," Sellars said, leaving Jeremiah's question unanswered. "The young technician you visited in Durban."

Joseph had to think for a moment. "The fat boy? Elephant?"

"Oh, God, they didn't!" said Del Ray.

"Yes. Shot him in the head and burned his building." Sellars was speaking briskly now, as though a timer inside him was ticking loudly. "And they will kill you, too, as blithely as swatting a fly, if it suits them . . . and I suspect that it will."

In his mind's eye, Joseph could see the cluttered storage depot burning. His initial horrified fascination began to curdle into something else as he remembered Elephant's cheerfulness, his pride in his top-of-the-line equipment.

Not right. That is not right. He just helped us because Del Ray ask him.

"What will we do, then?" asked Jeremiah. "Wait tor them to break through and murder us?"

"He said about police." Joseph felt anger building, a different kind of anger. "Why don't we just call someone—the army? Tell them some men are trying to kill us right here in their base?"

"Because you are yourselves wanted by the police," Sellars said, his voice flattened by the electronic distortion. "The Brotherhood has seen to that. Do you not remember what happened when Mr. Dako tried to use one of his cards?"

"How do you know about all this?" Jeremiah demanded. "I didn't tell you any of that when we talked before."

"Never mind." Their invisible companion seemed frustrated. "I told you, I have little time and much to do elsewhere. If you call the authorities it will take hours for any suitable force to respond—you are far up in the mountains. Then, even if they drive away or capture Klekker and his thugs, what will happen to you? More importantly, what will happen to Renie and !Xabbu? After you three are arrested, they will either be left alone and untended here, with the place empty and perhaps the power shut off, or, if you tell the authorities, they will be disconnected and dragged away. Still deep in what will appear to be comas, would be my guess. Moving them now might even be fatal."

The idea of the electricity failing and Renie waking in the darkness of the tank, struggling to get out, thrashing in that strange jelly, was even more horrible than imagining her lying in some hospital, as unresponsive as her brother. Joseph slapped his hand down on the table. "It will not happen. I don't leave my girl here."

"Then we have to think of another solution," Sellers said. "And quickly—I have my hands full just now trying to put out fires, and for every one I control, two more seem to flare up." A moment of silence was filled with the looping hum of the mystery man's voice-distortion gear. "Hang on. That may be it."

"What? That may be what?" Jeremiah asked.

"Let me look at the plans," Sellars told him. "If I'm right, we'll have to work fast—you'll all have lots to do. And it's risky."

"Just a small pile at first," Sellars told them. "Concentrate on the things you know will burn—paper, cloth."

Joseph looked down at the huge heap of trash they had spent the last hour and a half collecting under Sellars' guidance. The paper and kitchen rags he could understand, the dusty military-issue sheets from the supply depot they had dragged down in the first days of their occupation, but what on earth were they going to do with the wheels off all the office chairs? Plastic floor mats? Rugs?

"Let me test it one more time before we commit ourselves," Sellars said. "Unlike your enemies, you don't have access to outside air." As if a ghost had flicked a switch, a rattling noise sprang up behind the wall vent. It mounted higher, until it was a high-pitched whine, then eased down again. "Good. Someone please start the fire."

Del Ray, who had dragged himself from his convalescent bed to help, looked first at Jeremiah, then at Joseph. "Start it? How?"

Something like weariness was in Sellars' voice. "Isn't there anything you can use? The base is old—surely someone left behind a lighter, something?"

Joseph and the others looked around, as though such an object might magically appear.

"There's a little petrol in the emergency starter for the generator," Jeremiah said. "Only a spark would do it. We can make a spark, can't we?"

"I suppose you can cut into the wires in the monitor console," Sellars said. "Those are the only ones you can get to easily. . . ."

"Hold on!" Joseph stood up straight. "I know. Long Joseph will fix this problem." He turned and hurried toward the room where he slept.

He had put Renie's clothes in a box, knowing she would want them when she came out of the tank. He felt in the pockets, and to his great joy discovered her cigarettes, but could find no trace of a lighter no matter how he looked. His moment of pride turned sour.

"Shit," he said, letting the clothes fall back into the box. He stared at the cigarettes, wondering dully how Renie was coping without them. Could you smoke in the computer-place she was?

She must be crazy if she can't, he thought. 'Course, I am in the real world and I can't get any wine, so who has got it worse?

"Good thinking!" someone said from the doorway.

Joseph looked up at Del Ray. "No lighter, no matches." The younger man seemed puzzled for a moment, then smiled. "Don't need any of that. Those are self-lighting."

Joseph stared at the packet of cigarettes, relief mixed with a certain angry regret at having to be told something important by someone his daughter's age. He took a breath, then swallowed what he had been about to say. He tossed Del Ray the cigarettes and followed him back to the makeshift bonfire.

The tab pulled, the end of the cigarette smoldered alight. Del Ray dropped it on the knee-high pile of paper and rags. Little tongues of yellow flame scalloped the top of the pile; within half a minute it was burning well. As Joseph and the others heaped more of the most flammable objects on top of it, smoke began to drift upward in a visible cloud. The whine of the air intake deepened and the smoke was drawn toward the wall vent.

"Slowly." Sellars' disembodied voice was hard to hear above the noises the fire was making. "It has to be burning very hot before you can put any of the plastic or rubber on it."

Joseph wandered over to the monitors. The men in the hole beside the elevator well upstairs were working just as hard as ever, nearly waist-deep now. The white one watching their progress had a cigar in the corner of his mouth,

"You will get your smoke, ugly man," Joseph said, then went back to help the others.

Within twenty minutes the flames were as high as Long Joseph himself, the blaze several meters across, and only the air-intake, which now roared like a small plane taking off, kept them from being choked by the clouds of gray smoke.

"Push in the pans of oil," Sellars said. "And start throwing on the rubber mats."

Jeremiah and Joseph used a pair of broom handles to slide the kitchen baking pans full of machine oil into the heart of the blaze. Del Ray threw much of the material they had been saving onto the top of the pile. The smoke, and even the flames themselves, began to change color: the cloud billowing out now and being drawn into the vent was stormy black, and even through the wet rag wrapped around his nose and mouth the smell was making Joseph woozy. His eyes were burning too: the safety goggles they'd found in a cabinet were ancient and fit badly. He stepped away to watch Jeremiah and Del Ray throw the last boxes of plastic and rubber onto the top of the burning pile. The flames beat out so fiercely the three of them were forced back across the wide area they'd cleared on the cement floor, coughing all the way.

Weren't for that getting sucked out, Joseph thought as the inky clouds disappeared into the vent, so thick they almost folded rather than flowed, we all be dead. He suddenly realized what Sellars had meant when he said "risky." If the power failed, if something in the burning, black cloud choked the intake system, that black mass would come flowing back on them. Then their choice would be to suffocate or open the armored elevator doors and stumble out into the gunsights of the killers.

The pall of black was beginning to overcome the intake's capabilities, curling back, widening like a thunderhead. Joseph felt a rising terror.

"Where is that damn man?" he said. Jeremiah and Del Ray were too busy coughing to answer. Joseph, in a moment of unusual clarity, turned to memorize the location of the V-tanks so he could find them and release the prisoners if the power went out. His thoughts, absorbed by the fire-building, were now beginning to grow fragmented and panicky. "Sellars! Whatever your name is, what are you doing, man? We choking to death here!"

"Sorry," the voice hummed. "I had to disable the fire alarms. I'm ready now."

Easy enough for you, Joseph thought. You are not fighting just to breathe.

He and the others gathered around the monitor, wheezing. The full-throated roar of the intake did not change, but there was a succession of distant clanks, as though someone was striking a metal pipe with a hammer. An instant later Joseph felt the pressure of the room change, not enough to make his ears pop, but a definite shift. The plume of black wavered and then bent visibly toward the vent. The rest of the smoke that had escaped the intake began moving back toward the vent, too, as though the mountain itself had just inhaled.

"Watch," said Sellars.

For a moment the scene on the monitor remained unchanged, the picks rising and falling, the white man with the cigar—Klekker, Sellars had called him; Joseph wanted to remember the Boer pig's name—leaning in to say something. Then Klekker lifted his head like an animal hearing a distant gunshot. A moment later the picture darkened. For an instant, Joseph actually thought the monitor was failing.

It all seemed strange and distant on the tiny screen, without sound. Suddenly, in the new, nightdark dimness of the picture, the men came thrashing up out of the pit. One collapsed to his knees, choking and vomiting, but before Joseph could see what happened to him, the monitor screen went almost completely black.

All the screens of that floor were dimming as the smoke rolled out from the vent near the elevator shaft. Joseph could only catch glimpses of the men, stumbling, falling, crawling toward the exit.

"Die, you bastards!" Joseph shouted. "Burn down my house, do you? Shoot up some fat computer boy you don't even know? Choke and choke and die!"

But they did not all die, at least not as far as he could tell. The monitors recorded their escape to the next level up and their frantic attempts to seal the doorway behind them, but Sellars was apparently forcing the fumes and smoke up to that level as well, so the mercenaries were forced to flee again.

Four of them escaped through the base's massive front door. The camera by the armored gate showed the small, silent shapes as they staggered out into the air and fell to the ground like shipwreck survivors who had reached land against all odds.

"Four," said Del Ray, counting. "So one of them didn't make it out. That's something, anyway."

"The rest of them will not be able to enter the level they were digging in, not for a long time," said Sellars. He did not sound particularly pleased, but there was an undertone of grim satisfaction. "They already had the doors blocked open, probably just to make sure we couldn't trap them anywhere, but I've disabled the vents on that level and it will take them a long time to disperse the fumes."

"I wish it had killed them all," Joseph said.

Jeremiah shook his head and turned away. "A terrible way to die."

"What do you think they are planning for us?" Joseph was irritated. "A braai? Cook up some barbecue, open a few beers?"

"I must leave you for now," Sellers announced. "But I will be in touch again. You should have gained a few days' respite."

When the speaker was silent, Joseph took the damp cloth from his mouth, then had to put it back on.

"He better make sure our air gets better in here," he rasped.

"The vent's still working," said Del Ray. "I think it will get better. But we should put out this fire." He lifted one of the fire extinguishers they had set in readiness.

Joseph hurried to join him. "How are Renie and the little man?" he called back to Jeremiah.

Jeremiah Dako raised his goggles for a moment to squint at the readouts on the console. "Everything steady. They're breathing better air than we are."

"So what do we do now?" Joseph asked, heaving a large fire extinguisher off the floor. Smoke curled around his shoe tops, but the largest part of the cloud was still being sucked into the vents, the grille, and the wall around it stained a shiny, sludgy black.

"What we've been doing," said Jeremiah. "We wait."

"Damn," said Joseph. He fired a gooey plume of foam onto the blaze. "That is the thing I am tired of doing. Why is it that Sellars man can turn this mountain upside down, but he can't send me a damn bottle of wine?"

It was a dream, of course—not the sort that had ravished her life, not the children come back to her after their long silence, but a simple, ordinary dream.

It was nighttime, and Aleksandr was outside the door of her Juniper Bay house. He wanted her to let him in because he had left something behind, but even though she could see his outline in the thin light from the streetlamp—in the dream there was a window beside the door—she felt uncertain. Again and again he called to her, not in pain or anger, but in that sort of explosive preoccupation he had always had, that air of having something important to do that was being prevented by a needlessly obstructive world and its petty details.

He couldn't or wouldn't tell her what it was he had left behind. Driven to a kind of fluttering despair by indecision, she had rummaged through drawers and cabinets, trying to find whatever was so important that he would delay whatever journey he was on, but she could find nothing in any of the places she searched that made any sense at all.

She woke up to the wallscreen yammering and darkness in the spaces between the motel drapes. She had fallen asleep sitting on the bed, in midafternoon, and now only the light from the screen remained. Carelessly, she had nodded off with the drapes not completely closed. Anyone could have stood and watched her through the window.

But did anyone care?

She stood up and pulled the drapes shut, then went back to the warm trough of the bed. As she sat, trying to make peace with being awake, she felt something missing. It took a moment before she realized it was Misha, who at home would have been curled up beside her, or more likely in her lap, his entire little body laid trustingly upon her.

Never again. Tears came to her eyes.

The news was still chattering away in the background. stories of sudden instability in financial markets, of strange rumors, of mysterious silences from key movers and shakers. It was so hard to care. Rather, it was too hard to give it true attention, because the caring was too painful. Once she had sat down every night to watch the news, but each evening's iteration had left her feeling that she and the rest of human civilization were poorly balanced on the crest of some huge wave, that any moment the entire thing would crash down with shattering force.

She turned off the screen. It was time to go. The security officers, corporate police, whatever they were, had given her a bad turn, but clearly they were just investigating all possibilities. People had noticed her asking questions.

After all, for all they knew, I might be a terrorist, she thought. It amused her, then her own amusement struck her as even more ironic. But I am a terrorist.

The urge to laugh, all alone in the now-silent room, seemed unhealthy. She was frightened by the thought of what was to come, that was the truth of it. Olga was not the kind of person who lied much to others, and not at all to herself.

She had lied to the security people, of course, if only by omission. And in a way she had lied to Mr. Ramsey—not by anything she had told him, but by doing it in a written message, knowing he could not respond, that she would not have to defend herself. And just as she had feared, his replies had come hastening back, a chorus of protesting voices that she could not bear to access.

It was time to go. She would sleep in her rental car for a few hours in the out-of-the-way spot she had found deep in the bayou, then when her alarm woke her at midnight, she would make her way in through the swamp in the raft she had bought, try to land somewhere in the park that covered one edge of the artificial island. It seemed unlikely there would be no guards, but there would certainly be fewer of them out on the edges of the impenetrable swamp, wouldn't there?

It wasn't much of a plan, she knew, but it was the best she'd been able to come up with.

The pad would stay hidden in the room, of course; with two weeks' stay already paid for, it would likely go unnoticed longer here than in the car, which might be found in a couple of days. And so she would be able to keep sending entries to it for rerouting until . . . until whatever happened. So at least Mr. Ramsey would know what had happened to her. Perhaps that would be useful to him with the other things he was doing, trying to help those poor children.

She knew she should make a last circuit of the room, but the thought of Catur Ramsey would not leave her so easily. She flipped open the pad and looked at his last three messages, all of them blinking, tagged "urgent," practically screaming for attention. She knew that it would only make her feel worse to access them, that all his arguments would make good sense but would change nothing. She was terrible at arguing—Aleksandr had teased her with it, made her agree to ridiculous things, then laughed and refused to take advantage. "You are like water, Olga," he would say. "Always, you give way."

But what if there was something else Ramsey wanted to tell her? What if he needed some other kind of permission from her to sell the house? What if the people who had taken Misha had forgotten the veterinarian's name and couldn't get him his medicine?

She knew she was stalling, fearful of the journey in front of her, but now the worry wouldn't go away. Had that been the meaning of the dream, of dear Aleksandr so fretful outside the door, wanting to leave but unable to go?

She made a last circuit of the room, then picked up the pad. She had decided to leave it in the closet, down at the bottom under the extra blankets. There would be no one in the room, so no reason to put in fresh blankets; the motel's underpaid cleaning crew would be unlikely to go searching for extra work.

Olga slid the pad into the back of the closet, then went to the desk and wrote a note on the quaint, old-fashioned note paper—the one thing about the place that had separated it from the dozen or so others in which she had stayed during this trip. Under the "Bayou Suites" heading, she wrote, "I will be hack for this pad. If it must be taken out of the room, please leave it in the motel office, or contact C. Ramsey, atty.," then added his address and signed her name.

She was all the way back to the closet when the thought of little Misha jumped up at her again. What if something had happened? If he did not get his medicine, he would start having those terrible seizures again. She had told them over and over, his new owners, but who knew how much attention people might be paying?

Poor little thing! I gave him away to strangers. Left him behind.

Her eyes swelling with tears again, Olga swore quietly to herself, then sat down on the bed with the pad across her lap and began opening messages.

CHAPTER 17Breathing Problems

CHAPTER 17
Breathing Problems