Steal Across the Sky (28 page)

Was that the truth? Immediately Soledad hated herself. She had no reason not to trust James. He commuted two hours each way two or three nights a week; he spent every weekend here; he was moving in. He willingly spent nearly all their time together inside her small house, for her safety, without any signs of restlessness or boredom. She would not let her suspicious nature destroy this relationship, as it had destroyed her affairs with José and Wayne. She would
not
.

She said lightly, “Then I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“Count on it.” He embraced her again and she rested her head on his shoulder.
This, only this, if I can just keep this forever
. . . Outside the kitchen window, the eastern horizon began to pale.

“Listen,” Soledad said, “did you hear that soft hooting? We have an owl living close by.”

“What?”

“Listen . . . that. An owl.”

James laughed. “Sweetheart, that’s not an owl.”

“It’s not?”

“You’re such a city girl. No, it’s not an owl—it’s a mourning dove. Light gray-brown with black spots on their wings, and when they mate, they preen each other’s feathers.” Ostentatiously he stroked her hair, and she laughed.

A dove. Not an owl.

But when he’d gone, still laughing, to the shower, she wondered. Hadn’t James told her that he, like she, had lived his whole life in cities?

AT DAWN THE SUN BROKE
gloriously over the mountains. Soledad decided to take a walk in the woods; maybe she could see the morning dove. Curious that it was called that when most often she heard it at dusk.

A walk in the woods—any woods—was a more foreign activity than the voyage to Kular in an alien spaceship. The voyage had involved cramped quarters, emotional complications, unknown dangers, technology she used without understanding it—all features of life in Manhattan. But a woods was genuinely strange to her.

She made her way gingerly between the first trees, glancing back often. The ground here rose steeply between tall pines. Soledad was surprised to see that the pine branches didn’t start growing from the trunk until five or six feet off the ground, and that the lower ones were sparse and brown needled. This was good because it made it easy to walk among them, and because she could see for a fair distance all around her, including back down to her little rented house. She was proud of herself for figuring out that the lower branches must die when the growing upper ones blocked the sunlight.

And how good the trees smelled! The trees, the air, the rich loamy smell of dead leaves choking the tiny creek in a ravine to her right. Why hadn’t she done this before? She was going to be a country girl now. Maybe she’d get a dog to take on walks in the woods; James said he liked dogs. A Labrador or a golden retriever. It must be over fifty degrees out, a gorgeous spring day, and, yes, that was a chipmunk darting across her path. Much cuter than city squirrels, it raced up a pine trunk as Soledad tipped back her head both to watch it and for the sheer pleasure of sunlight striking her face through a gap in the pines.

Something metallic glinted halfway up the chipmunk’s tree.

She squinted but couldn’t see anything more than a persistent glint. She might have just shrugged—didn’t chipmunks carry shiny trinkets to their nests, or was that some other animal she’d read about?—except that this was one of the few pines with sturdy branches within three feet of the ground. Coincidence?

She hoisted her foot onto the bottom branch, grasped the one above
it, and pulled herself up. Stocky, she was nonetheless strong, and by staying close to the trunk she managed to climb without sending herself crashing to the ground. Panting, she reached her goal. Her house lay in a clear line of sight to the south.

The bark had been stripped partway off the tree and then replaced to hide a dark metal box. But something had chewed part of the flap of bark that was supposed to act as a concealer—were there animals that ate bark? Soledad didn’t know. She pulled the box, a cube no more than three inches on a side, free from the pine and scrubbed resin off the tiny raised writing on the bottom.

EVERKNOW SURVEILLANCE 66387-J-89

Carefully Soledad lowered herself back down the quivering branches, dropping the last three feet to release a cloud of fragrance from the needles below. No one was in sight. She started to run, tripped on a tree root, picked herself up. She had to reach the house, had to call Diane. If this was government surveillance, Soledad sure the hell should have been told about it. If it wasn’t . . .

She ran faster.

THE DREAM ABOUT AVEO CAME AGAIN.
The old man stood bare chested in his rough brown skirt, but the flesh drooped in gobbets from his bones and the bones gleamed like knives, glossy and sharp. Aveo smiled at her with blackened lips over rotted teeth, a smile like Satan himself. He held something out to her, and rasped, “You must play kulith better than that,
ostiu
, or else . . .” She cried out and woke.

Why now? Now, when things were supposed to be getting better? She was going to the moon with Frank, it had all been arranged with J. S. Farrington. She and Frank were going to get the seeing-the-dead genes put right back into human beings. Scientists would add them to people or to embryos or something. . . . Cam wasn’t exactly sure how that might work. But scientists would know, and they would do it, and it would show everyone that the afterlife was real and so they could stop killing each other over that controversy. And then Aveo would stay out of Cam’s dreams.

Three
A.M
. She put her hands up over her face.

This was so much harder than anyone knew, even Angie Bernelli. The constant performing, the e-mail and death threats that Angie tried to keep from her but Cam insisted on seeing anyway, the lunatics out for her blood. Well, she could handle all that. It was the memories and dreams that got her. People thought she was so cheerful and energetic, but when the memories and dreams came and sex failed her—as it had lately, all the time, she’d given up on it—the only thing that helped was talking to someone who understood. Except that nobody really did, except The Six. And most of them, for reasons she didn’t get, avoided Cam.

She wanted to be again the person she’d been before she went to Kular. Which wasn’t possible.
You must play kulith better than that
, ostiu,
or else
. . .

She had to talk to somebody or she really was going to lose it. Hotel phones, Angie had told her over and over, were not secure, and of course a cell or handheld was out of the question. But she had to talk to somebody.
Had to
.

Cam slipped out of bed, pulled a coat over her pajamas and a cap low on her forehead. Angie lay asleep on the sofa and, tonight, Jen in the small bedroom. If either of them woke, that would be it. But neither did, and Cam crept down the stairwell to the phones in the lobby.

Who? Frank was mad about having to take her to the moon, and anyway, Frank was religious and an ex-cop and about as warm as ice. Lucca didn’t believe in the second or third roads, and also it was awkward with him because he wished he hadn’t slept with her. And Soledad was . . . Soledad. Uptight and disapproving of Cam. Still, Soledad was the most likely to understand. Cam suspected that Soledad had demons of her own, although of course Soledad would never say so to
her
.

An avatar of the phone company said that Soledad’s number had been disconnected.

Fear licked at Cam. Had something happened to Soledad that Cam hadn’t yet heard about? She shivered, even though the lobby was warm. Somewhere outside a siren, police or ambulance, rose in pitch and volume and then fell again, racing to somebody else’s disaster.

“Lucca? Cam. I’m sorry to wake you at this hour but I— No, it’s a landline but not—
Listen
, will you? Soledad’s number is disconnected and I got worried, do you know anything about it? . . . Oh, well as long as you spoke to her and she’s all right, you don’t have to tell me any— Yes. . . .”

Lucca called Soledad, apparently, but not Cam. Somehow, it was the final straw. Aveo’s ghost, rotting and leering, shimmered in front of her, beside the door to the ladies’ room. She was so scared and so
lonely
. . . .

“Lucca, listen— No, fuck it all, can’t you just listen?” It came out a muted howl. And then everything else came out after it and she was
sobbing into the phone, the men she’d killed, Escio and all the others, and the child spitted on a sword and the nightmares and what if she
wasn’t
doing the right thing, how could the Atoners not tell her anything to just show her she was doing the right thing, at least fucking
that
. . . . Sometimes the words didn’t even come out right because she was crying so hard. She told Lucca everything, except about Frank’s hair packet on the moon. Something in her held enough to keep that to herself.

Lucca changed. He became sweet, the Lucca she remembered from the first time they slept together, before it all went sour. He said soothing things and called her
cara
and didn’t even argue about Aveo. Cam talked to him until her knees went numb and the words ran out.

Finally she said, “I have to go now, but thank you, Lucca, thank you. . . . When can I see you? Can I come up to Canada to visit? I could maybe rearrange my performance schedule and—”

“No, don’t do that,” he said, and the distance was back. Like a palace gate shutting her out. “But I’ll talk to you again soon.”

“Promise?” she said, hating that she sounded like a child.

“Promise,” he said, and she heard the weariness, and hated him as well as herself.

But at least she had talked it out. At least, now, maybe she could sleep enough to be able to do justice to the Atoners’ message tomorrow.

TWO DAYS LATER
, Cam sat eating breakfast in San Francisco. Outside her hotel window, shining in the spring sunlight, the Golden Gate Bridge soared as if it went straight to Heaven. No wonder one of the Witness planets—Metan?—called the second road the bridge to far.

Bruce, her tour bodyguard, opened the hotel door after checking the retina-scan box. Angie entered, carrying a rolled-up flimsy, which she threw onto the table.

Cam said, “What’s wrong?” But the flimsy had unrolled, flopping over a discarded orange peel. A tabloid, with Cam’s picture taking up half the front page, sobbing into a pay phone.

C
AM
O’K
ANE
G
OES TO
P
IECES
,
D
OUBTS
A
TONERS
’ M
ESSAGE

Shocking Midnight Call to Lucca Maduro!
Revelations by Eyewitness Hotel Clerk!

W
ORST OF
A
LL
—
S
AYS THE
D
EAD
R
EALLY
H
AUNT
D
REAMS
!!!

“What night was this, Cam?” Angie demanded. “How could you be so careless! It’s online, on TV. . . . You actually went down to the lobby and made a call to Maduro in the presence of a clerk?”

“I didn’t see any clerk!”

“Worse fool you! He photographed you and sold this story for God knows how much, and by now he’s undoubtedly on a plane out of the country. Why didn’t you come to me?”

Cam grew still. Her voice came out deadly calm. “Go to you? You mean because the government, unlike that clerk, has no ulterior motives for being around me? Is that what you mean, Angie?”

Angie didn’t answer.

Cam turned and went into the bedroom, leaving the tabloid beside her half-eaten breakfast, under the window with the glorious view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Larry, you’re doing that wrong. I’ve always said you
aren’t mechanically gifted enough to— Larry? Larry?”

DIANE ARRIVED AT SOLEDAD’S PLACE
in less than an hour, on a motorcycle with a man riding behind her. Soledad waited as Diane had told her to do, away from windows and with the door locked. She suspected that these precautions were designed more to reassure her than for any actual effectiveness against anyone who wanted to come in, and she resented the patronization implied. But this was not the time to focus on that.

Soledad heard the bike roar to a stop and cautiously peered outside. Diane was pulling off her helmet and goggles. Both she and the man were dressed in jeans, boots, parkas—just two more crazy kids joy-riding on a warm March afternoon in the Catskills. The man wore a backpack. Soledad let them in.

“Are you all right?” Diane said.

Looking at Diane’s pretty, windblown face, short hair mussed by the helmet, Soledad didn’t know whether to trust her, castigate her, fear her. “How did you get here so fast?”