After the Red Rain (21 page)

“Yes. I was hoping he’d left a… clipping.”

“A clipping?”

“Perhaps the wrong word. Some part of himself. Hair. Blood. Skin. Anything at all.”

“You have the…”
What was the word? Oh, right
. “Rose hips.”

“They were dried. And they contain only plant matter, without any of the hybrid tissues. All the samples I’ve taken from him are the same—animal or plant, not both. I had samples that contain animal and vegetable tissues working in concert. Blood samples. But they’ve been destroyed in the testing and analysis. I need more of them. As much as possible.”

“Why?”

Dr. Dimbali clasped his hands behind his back and stood fully erect, his bearing proud. “Why? Because once upon a time, we lived like human beings, not slaves. Because once upon a time, the world gave forth bounty, not poison.”

She thought of
This Side of Paradise
.

“I’ve seen things. Vids. Some documents. Evidence of a world that existed long, long before the Red Rain. We killed the world, Ms. Ward. We people, with our machines and our technology and our breeding like damn-fool rabbits. We ate everything that grew until nothing more could grow. We vomited toxins into the air and the water until the air and the water became toxins themselves. We spread out across the planet and paved and covered every last bit of ground to house an
exploding population. And when the world died, we began feasting on its corpse.

“But with what exists in Rose’s DNA… with the commingling of molecules in his veins… I believe I can resuscitate our dead planet.” His eyes gleamed behind the SmartSpex, and his posture straightened even more, which she’d thought impossible. “Ms. Ward,
I can fix the world
.”

Just as quickly as he’d puffed up, he deflated, crumpling in on himself, hands feeling for the SmartBoard to brace himself. “Or, rather,
could
. Could have. If they hadn’t taken Rose away.”

Deedra stared down into her mug again. Little bits floated there. All she had left of him. She thought of the blue rat. Of the poisonous river that divided this Territory from Sendar. She felt Rose’s tendrils wrap around her and lift her into the air, the sudden rush in her chest.

And she thought of another meal of lab-grown turkey and fruit discs. Thought of days trapped inside when the rain was too toxic to go outside, so acidic it could eat through a poncho or umbrella. Thought of wikis that knew everything but nothing at the same time.

“There’s only one thing to do,” she said.

Dr. Dimbali tut-tutted. “There’s nothing to do. There are no options. You were my last hope.”

Deedra drank the rest of the tea in one shot. It warmed and cooled at the same time. She fixed Dr. Dimbali with a hard look as she stood.

She said, “We’re going to break Rose out of jail.”

T
hey’d taken his coat.

Rose didn’t have the word for it, but Dr. Dimbali would have known: The coat was made up of his sepals. They grew from the back of his neck, and he naturally shed them as time went on. He had taken them from himself and fashioned them into a coat. The coat was more than a garment—though no longer connected, it was a part of him, and its loss shocked him.

“You think this is bad?” a guard said. “Just you wait. It gets worse than stripping down.”

They passed the coat among themselves, curious as to its texture and color. He watched them cut and slash at it with knives and then toss it, ragged, into a corner.

They crowded around him. Five of them, then six, then ten. Then more. Their mocking voices overlapped in the confines of the jail’s intake room. Combined with the ever-present buzz of the artificial lights and the stale, metallic tang of the processed air, he could barely focus enough to keep his balance.

In his years-long wander, he’d remained outdoors as much as possible. The excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere made others flee
indoors, where old air scrubbers did their best to “purify” the air, but the CO
₂
didn’t bother Rose. And even the tiniest bit of natural sunlight—a rare commodity—did more for him than all the lightbulbs in an entire Territory.

Now he was penned up inside. Surrounded by DeeCees and local cops, all of whom wanted to be able to say they’d taken a shot at the kid who killed Jaron Ludo. He was shoved from one to the other, hustled back and forth, stumbling from one set of clutching, angry hands to another. Spat on. Tripped to the ground. Hauled back to his feet and hurtled across the room again. They stripped the rest of his clothing from him.

Would he die there?

A part of him hoped it would happen soon, if it was to happen. They threw him into a small concrete room, no more than seven feet to a side. There was a single barred window near the ceiling, coated with grime and dust, a metal toilet pocked with blossoms of rust, and an equally run-down metal sink. On a miserable cot, they tossed a messily folded square of cloth. His inmate clothing. Piss yellow and stained with blackish smudges.

If I die now
, he thought, sprawled on the rough, cold floor,
it may be for the best
.

He thought of the coat. Thought of new sepals growing from his neck. It would happen soon. What would his captors think of that?

The mental image of their disbelieving, gasping faces as they espied him in his cell, sepals folding down from the back of his neck, coaxed a weary smile out of him. He struggled to all fours and crawled to the cot. It was only marginally more comfortable than the floor.

If I die now, I’ll never know. I’ll never know what I am. Who I am. I’ll never know my place in this world.

He lay naked on the cot and stared at the ceiling. He thought not of the nights he’d lain thus, gazing up at the sweating pipes in Dr.
Dimbali’s basement lab, but rather of the single night he’d lain in Deedra’s bed. The netting overhead. The soft weight of her against him.

Cold and shivering, he groaned as he rolled over. It took him long minutes to creep along the floor to the sink. Thrusting his hand into the running tap, he drank, absorbing the water through his flesh. It was polluted and treated with chemicals, but better than nothing.

If I die now, I’ll never see her again.

“So I suppose I’d better not die,” he said aloud.

He suspected a day had passed.

The tiny window had darkened, though not completely, never to full dark. It had dimmed, then—after interminable hours—burnished and glowed for what seemed seconds. He’d managed to rouse himself from the cot and scrabble over to the minuscule patch of sunlight that dribbled into his cell. He lay there, absorbing what he could, trying not to think of the mornings waiting for Deedra, sucking up the sunlight as his roots descended into the mineral-poor earth, deeper each time, seeking the refugee nutrients buried so far down. Farther down each day.

The sun was his first clue. The arrival of meals was the other. He’d been thrown into the cell in the early evening, and he counted three meals, confirming his suspicion that a day had passed. The meals were indistinguishable from one another, united in their sludgy color and consistency. The food—like all food—had been conceived in a laboratory somewhere in the Territory, grown under the watchful eye of scientists attempting to mimic dead Nature’s absent bounty.

It reeked of chemicals, true, but more than that—deeper than that—it reeked of
wrong
. It reeked of
untrue
. There were no compatible words to describe fully the assault on his senses, the way the food repulsed him. He couldn’t have eaten the food if he’d wanted to, and
he worried that before long he
would
want to. Instead, he drank the water they gave him. It was no better than what came from the tap, and he feared the toxins within, but he had no choice. If he was going to stay alive, he had to at least have water.

He spent that first day scrutinizing every last inch of his cell, running his fingers over the rough concrete, stroking the welds on the pipes under the sink and toilet. He tested the heat of the water, its velocity as it spurted or dripped or gushed from the spigot, depending on how he turned the handle. He crawled under the cot, inspecting the bolts that held it in place, the near-rotted straps that held the mattress down, the lumpy, slender insult of padding. The blanket he’d been given was worn almost transparent in places, its ends frayed and gossamer.

The cell measured ten of his footsteps long by nine deep. There was a discreet plastic bubble high in one dark corner. A camera. They were watching him. The bubble was just out of reach, but he knew he could reach it if he had to.

For now, though, he had to be careful. Not let them know what he was capable of.

The door was steel. Its touch sent cold shivers from the pads of his fingers up to his shoulders and around to his spine. It was implacable. A slit at roughly eye level was shut tight from the other side, and another one—where his food had come through—was at waist height. He probed at both and found no way to open them.

He pushed the tray of food into the farthest corner of the cell and curled up on the cot. He closed his eyes.

They wanted to break him.

He would bend, instead.

O
n the second day, he had a visitor.

He paid careful attention to the procedure. First, they ordered him to stand in the center of the room, facing away from the door, his fingers laced together behind his head. He heard the click and rumble of the door unlocking and opening, and then hands harshly shackled his wrists behind his back. A moment later, the door clanged shut.

“You can turn around,” said a voice.

He turned slowly. Before him stood a tall man, his shoulders broad. His ropy arms terminated in long fingers that flexed constantly. He wore a purple robe over a charcoal-gray suit with a pale yellow shirt. With cold gray eyes sunk deep in his face, he glared at Rose, alternately pursing and sucking in his lips. He was the man from the vid. Jaron’s father.

“You’re the dung-drop who killed my boy,” he said, his voice inflectionless.

“Mr. Ludo, I didn’t—”

Max Ludo said nothing. With a surprising swiftness, he crossed the few feet between them and belted Rose with the back of one heavy fist.
The blow rocked Rose and sent him reeling back until he collided with the sink. His vision blurred for a moment.

“First of all,” Ludo said, “it’s
Magistrate
Ludo.
Mister
is for ditchdiggers and dung-pilers.”

Was that a trickle of blood running down Rose’s jawline? Or sweat?

“Second of all, I didn’t tell you to talk. When I want you to talk, I’ll tell you. Got it?”

Rose nodded. He suddenly suffered a dramatic and unexpected surge of empathy for poor dead Jaron Ludo. And for the first time in his life, he was actively afraid. He’d seen fear before; he’d had it explained to him. But he’d never felt it himself. He’d always been aware of his own skills, his unique talents. Few and rare were the threats he could not evade.

But right now, he was shackled and pinned down in a concrete box.

He planted his feet and braced himself against the sink to stay upright.

“Look at you.” Ludo took Rose’s jaw in his hand and twisted his head this way and that. “So goddamn
pretty
. What the hell Territory spawned you? You look like a girl, but my cops tell me you have a dick, so you’re a boy.” He clutched Rose’s jaw harder and pulled, dragging Rose away from the sink, then shoved him full in his face, driving him backward. The backs of Rose’s knees collided with the cot, spilling him onto it; he narrowly avoided cracking his head on the wall.

Ludo towered over him, teetering on the brink of collapse. Rose yearned to lash out, to batter Ludo away from him, to shove back the threat. But he was so weak. And giving away his abilities would only summon the guards. Too many for even him to overcome.

He was keenly aware of the camera in the corner, bulbously concealed, watching everything.

“Is that what happened?” Ludo went on, his cheeks and jowls suffused with crimson outrage. Droplets of sweat fell off him and splashed
onto Rose’s chest. “Did my boy think you were a girl? Make a move you didn’t appreciate? So what? Big deal. You couldn’t just
take it
? You couldn’t just
live with it
?”

Rose still said nothing. He could shift the shape of his hands if he had to. If Ludo commenced a beating, he could slip the shackles and…

And what? Kill Ludo? Invite a swarm of guards to descend on him and beat him to death? Or worse, ship him off to a Territory lab somewhere, to dissect him in ways Dr. Dimbali never would?

“Did you trick him?” Max asked. “How did a pissant like you overpower Jaron?”

Ludo grabbed the front of Rose’s prison-issue shirt, hoisting him out of the bed. Their faces came even—the stench of bad food washed over Rose, along with stray spittle.

“Who sent you? I want to know! I want to know now. It was Dalcord, wasn’t it? He’s been spoiling for war for years. Wanting to expand his territory. Capture my food tech. It was him, wasn’t it?” He shook Rose. “Answer me!”

“I wasn’t sent by anyone.” Rose measured his voice carefully, avoiding stresses and deep inflections. He didn’t want to present even the slightest threat to Max Ludo. “I’ve been roaming for—”

Max Ludo howled, a single note of incoherent rage. He spun around, shoving Rose, who stumbled, fell, and sprawled on the floor. Rose’s vision swam for a moment, and when he recovered, Max Ludo stood over him, fists planted on his hips.

“You know things, pissant. And you’ll tell me. You’ll tell me
everything
. About my boy. About the tech you used to mimic our brand.” He crouched down with great effort and poked Rose in the gut. “I’ll know it all, you hear me? I want to know where those vine things came from. It’s not tooth-weed or any other kind of weed. What has Dalcord been up to? What are his scientists making? What’s going
on
over there?”

There was nothing to say. Rose could keep telling the truth, but to
Max Ludo, the truth was a lie. And there was no lie Rose could conjure that would satisfy a man who was so patently insatiable.

It was not Rose’s first encounter with the irrationality of humanity. Nor was it his inaugural introduction to outright evil. Over the years he’d come across any number of rapacious, greedy, destructive people. Those he could not assuage with words, he’d always been able to escape before violence became inevitable. As with Jaron Ludo, running away was always the most expedient course. Better than hurting someone.

But now there were no words to mollify Max Ludo. And no way to escape.

Huffing and panting, Ludo jabbed an irate and accusatory finger at Rose.

“You’ll tell me. You’ll tell me
all
of it. Trust me on that. I control this Territory and everyone in it. That means you, little spy, little murderer. If I have to reach inside you and pull out the secrets with my own hands, I will.”

“When do I get my day in court?”

“We’ll get around to that. You’ll have a lawyer. That’s the law, even though it’s stupid. But I get to appoint your lawyer. Isn’t that a kick? Isn’t that great? I get to pick your lawyer. Trust me, little girl-boy—you’re not getting the finest legal mind the Territory has to offer.”

He kicked Rose in the side just above the hip, right where it hurt the most. With a shout of “Guard!” he was out the door, still wheezing as he went.

Rose must have passed out, because when he opened his eyes, he was on the cot and his hands were no longer bound.

They’re going to kill me. They’re going to torture me for information, and I don’t have any. Or they’ll learn that I’m not human. Either way, they’re going to take me apart, piece by piece.

He thought about his experiment. The secret one, the one only Dr. Dimbali knew about. He intended to carry that secret with him beyond death, but would they eventually make him tell? What would they do if they saw what he’d done out at the place Deedra called the Broken Bubble? Would they even understand it?

He imagined not. And the thought of how they might react, their violent, fiery instincts…

So much work. So much time. And they’ll destroy it all in moments.

He probed his jaw, his side. The injuries were tender and painful, but not debilitating.

If they’re going to kill me, I won’t make it easy for them.