After the Red Rain (23 page)

C
ognizant of the camera monitoring his every move, Rose feigned continued weakness and depression. In truth, he felt stronger than he had in days. His color had improved, and the mildew along his skin was retreating. He felt the press and burst of new sepals beginning to grow.

This wouldn’t last forever. Soon enough, he would weaken again. He had to act now, while he had any strength at all.

So he planned his escape. He was certain it was the smartest move he could possibly make.

It turned out to be the worst.

Y
ou see, Ms. Ward, they move in patterns.”

Deedra still couldn’t believe that she was out after curfew, brazenly flouting all the curfew laws and all but daring the drones to detect her. The Territory—so bereft by daylight—became something of a magical wonderland by night. In the weeks since she’d first been approached by Dr. Dimbali—since she’d learned the truth about Rose and decided to liberate him—she’d spent more and more nights outside, roaming the streets with Dr. Dimbali. She heard no “This is fundamental! This is truth!” from him when they were alone. That bombastic, preaching part of his persona was a put-on for L-Twelve. When it was just the two of them, he spoke quietly but confidently, his tone utterly self-assured, even when outside after curfew.

By night, the Territory was a haze of shadows and murky light scudding along the undersides of clouds. The cracks on the facades of buildings became art. The scorch marks from some long-ago riots became mere shadows. It was quiet and still and almost something beautiful.

“Once you understand something’s pattern,” Dr. Dimbali went on, “you can exploit it.”

He was droning on—appropriately enough—about the drones.
Once, she had feared them, but now she understood that they were just machines. Highly intelligent machines, yes, but still yoked to their patterns. Dr. Dimbali had pointed out certain dead zones in their coverage, spots on the streets where—at the right moment—no camera spied.

She’d been fearful at first, but he had gone out that first night and returned an hour later, no worse for wear. He walked the streets with impunity. It was easier for him because he’d uploaded the drone patterns to his SmartSpex. But with each day that passed, she became more and more confident, especially once he showed her the new poncho he made for her.

“The drones detect you at night through active infrared,” he lectured, “which looks for differences in temperature and zeros in on your ambient body heat. But what many people don’t realize is that you can disguise your body’s heat signature. This poncho is made of a stretched polyethylene terephthalate—a polyester film, if you will—married to a thin sheet of reflective foil. Made it myself, and don’t think it was easy. It will reflect back on you your own body heat. Somewhat warm in the short term, but it will prevent the drones from seeing you.”

Weeks later, she still wore the poncho, its hood up. As long as she kept it on, she was invisible to the drones.

Invisible. To the drones.

Words she never could have imagined thinking, not in a million years.

She had more to fear than just the drones, though. The systems that monitored her apartment door, for example…

Dr. Dimbali had an answer for that, too.

“Well, yes, of course the doors log your comings and goings, but so what? There are other ways in and out, if you’re clever.” She’d witnessed this firsthand—Dr. Dimbali’s basement lab sprouted a rough-hewn tunnel that led to some sort of old delivery ramp that extended into an alleyway.

“I don’t have a secret door,” she told him.

“No, but you have a window. And no one ever thinks to go out the window because they assume the drones would see them anyway. And since no one goes out, there’s no reason to go out. And so the windows aren’t wired. It really is an amazing ouroboros of cluelessness and fear.”

The next night, she’d opened her window, slipped on her antidrone poncho with the hood up, and scaled the wall down four stories. It had been both more terrifying and easier than she could have imagined. The building had protrusions and ledges, old water pipes, and pocks where riot shells had dented its walls years before her birth. Perfect handholds and footholds.

She was no longer bound by the restrictions of curfew and the confines of her apartment. That first night, she lingered on her way to Dr. Dimbali’s, not caring that he would lecture her on tardiness.

The Territory was hers. Its empty streets, its hollow-eyed facades, its blind drones. She spread her arms and danced down a boulevard, forcing herself not to shout and whoop for joy.

“Why doesn’t everyone do this?” she asked now. They huddled in a building within sight of the Secure Territorial Prison & Justice Facility—SecFac. “Why doesn’t everyone figure out the patterns and come outside at night?”

Dr. Dimbali grunted in something like disgust and annoyance. “Because most people don’t bother looking up. And those who do don’t pay attention to what they see.”

“Is there a way to avoid them during the day, too?”

“My dear Ms. Ward, as the very nature of our mutual friend Rose should make abundantly clear,
anything
is possible.”

Even, perhaps, breaking Rose out of prison.

Weeks ago, she’d been a normal girl. There’d been nothing exceptional about her. Now she was violating curfew regularly and planning to help free an alleged murderer and spy from prison.

From their vantage point on one of the upper floors of the abandoned building, they could make out the entire sprawl of the Magistrate’s Complex, which consisted of three edifices joined together by rough concrete passageways. One building housed the Magistrate’s Office and administrative functions. Another contained offices for the local police and the DCS officers. The last building was the squattest, the ugliest, in a Territory filled with ugly buildings. This was the prison section of the Complex, SecFac, its gray exterior interrupted sporadically by slitted, barred windows. Rose lay beyond one of those windows, and every time they came to “reconnoiter the prison” (that’s how Dr. Dimbali put it), Deedra had to tamp down the urge to run screaming to that building and cry up and out to each window in turn until she found Rose.

The drones were thickest over the Complex, swarming the air like cockroaches on scrap food. “This is new,” Dr. Dimbali told her gravely. “They stepped up the Complex’s surveillance patterns.” He grimaced. “They’re more worried about Rose than they’re letting on in the wikis.”

Since Rose’s arrest, the wikis had maintained a steady stream of reports from deep within the guts of the Complex, averring that Rose had already confessed to the murder of Jaron Ludo, as well as to being a spy from Dalcord Territory. Magistrate Dalcord screamed treachery and massed troops along his border; Ludo responded in kind. The proof seemed unassailable:

Deedra didn’t believe any of it.

“Why so many drones?” she asked.

Dr. Dimbali didn’t turn to look at her; he was busy scanning the sky with his SmartSpex, recording the movements of the drones. “Rampant paranoia, the currency of our realm. They think his confederates will come to break him out.”

“But… we
are
planning on breaking him out.”

With a harrumph, he said, “Well, yes. But they don’t
know
that.”

Curfew had been cut back even further—usually it lasted from sunset to sunrise, but now it preceded the former and extended past the latter. The original reports had focused mostly on Rose murdering Jaron. That was bad enough. But as time went by and the shock of the Magistrate’s son being murdered faded, the accusations of espionage took center stage. What had begun as a killing had morphed into a conspiracy that sprawled from Territory to Territory, sinking its tendrils into every heart and mind.

“If they change the narrative,” Dr. Dimbali pointed out, staring out the window, “they can change your behavior. They can alter our society—such as it is—to meet the new, paranoid reality they are constructing—have
been
constructing—before our very eyes. We live in a world without history. That’s exactly how the powers that be want it. When you cannot imagine a better world, you cannot demand it.
Or fight for it. So they drown you in half-truths and speculation and ignorance.”

Deedra raced her pendant back and forth along its chain. “It can’t be that simple. They can’t just do that.”

He chuckled, still watching the scene outside. “I wish such naïveté weren’t a liability. In another world, in another time, perhaps. It not only is that simple, it
has been
that simple in the past.”

She tucked her pendant away; he turned his attention away from the window and the drones, and she sighed, leaning against a wall. Sometimes, the idea of defying the Magistrate and his government seemed inevitable and righteous. Other times, it seemed foolish and suicidal. Most frustrating of all? There were times when it was all those things at once.

Dr. Dimbali stooped so that their eyes were level and grasped her urgently by the shoulders.

“I want you to understand something. Listen to me carefully and believe me. I do not dissemble easily, and I won’t do it now. What I am about to tell you is the unvarnished truth. To wit: all these people you’re so afraid of, Ms. Ward, these police and the Magistrate and the DeeCees. All of them. They’re much less clever than you are.”

“And you.”

He permitted himself a small smile. “Well, that goes without saying. But all they have on their side is machines and guns. Yes, and numbers. A good brain can think around those things. I’ve been watching you—I know you have such a brain.”

Deedra flushed with the unanticipated praise.

“I’m just not sure.… I know it was my idea, but there’s so
many
of them.…”

“Think of what’s at stake, Deedra.” It was the first time he’d used her first name, and that—even more than the desperate urgency in
his voice—compelled her total focus on him. “The world before—the world from that book Rose left, the one you let me read. That world was real. The book was fiction, but I’ve seen the facts.”

“You lived it?” she asked.

He favored her with an indulgent smile, his thin lips quirking upward for a rare instant. “I’m not quite
that
old. The world we’re discussing existed a long, long time ago. Centuries before the Red Rain.”

“What caused the Red Rain?” she asked. “What was it?”

He stiffened in discomfort. “The fact is: No one knows. It began over a hundred years ago, ended probably before you were born. The world was already in dire straits, of course. The Red Rain was one more insult, one more injury. But the documents I had access to when I worked for the government… they proved what I’d always known. That once, the air was fresh, the world unpaved, the trees abundant, the food not from labs. That is the world we deserve. It’s our birthright. We need to get it back, and Rose is the key!”

She wrenched away from him; his grip had tightened painfully, crushing her shoulders.

He stared at her, as though uncertain as to why she’d pulled back. Then he returned to the window, hands clasped behind his back.

“I went to my superiors. I showed them what I’d learned. ‘We need to go back to this,’ I told them. ‘We need to find a way to restore the world.’ ‘It’s too late,’ they told me. And when I pushed and pushed and pushed, they fired me. Blackballed me. Exiled me here.

“We’ve been plotting and planning and observing for weeks now.” He came back to her, tears in his eyes behind the SmartSpex, his expression forlorn. “And we’re so close.”

“There’s one thing we haven’t talked about,” Deedra reminded him. “One last thing to consider.”

“What’s that?”

She took a deep breath. Reluctant to speak the words, but someone
had to. “What if he did it? What if it’s all true? If he killed Jaron and is spying on us so that Magistrate Dalcord can take over the Territory?”

“You don’t really believe any of that.”

“No. But you told me that a good scientist never discards a possibility based on belief, not facts.”

Dr. Dimbali straightened, pleased. “Yes, well, I did, didn’t I. Still, I can tell you with complete honesty that I don’t
care
if Rose killed Jaron Ludo or not. In fact, Rose could murder half of Ludo Territory, and I still would not care. Because what that boy is—the very biology of him—is so important that it removes him from the petty concerns of individual morality.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that…” He paused and adjusted his SmartSpex. “I’m saying that if my hypothesis is correct, I can change the world. But I need Rose to do it, and that necessity trumps anything as petty as murder. The needs and concerns of fifty billion people far outweigh the death of even the scion of our Magistrate.”

She pondered this for a moment. “You didn’t really answer my question.”

“My dear, your question is irrelevant.”

Maybe it was. She put it out of her mind.

Deedra hadn’t bothered going to work very much in the weeks since Rose had been arrested and Lissa had been shot, but with Dr. Dimbali covering her absences via a little opportune hacking, she feared no loss of rations. Her nights became about reconnaissance and planning, while her days were devoted to catching up on the sleep she missed.