The Walls Have Eyes (16 page)

“Don't spit it all over me,” Theo's voice complained. “If you weren't ready to drink it, why did you yell for it?”

“Theo!” Martin opened his eyes. “Is that you? I thought you were the ketchup!”

“That's nice. What did you get to be, the jar of pickles?”

Martin closed his eyes again and plucked at the wet sheet. “You were squeezable,” he whispered.

“So I've been told.”

Some time later, he woke up. The ice was gone. He was on a pallet in a small, shadowy room crammed with boxes and supplies. A flashlight lying nearby illuminated the sleeping form of Theo pillowed against a mound of blankets.

Chip was resting a few feet away. When he saw Martin move, he lifted his head and wagged. Theo opened her eyes and leaned over to feel Martin's arm.

“Your temperature's down,” she muttered. “About time!”

“I'm cold,” he complained, running his hand across the thin sheet that covered him. “Can I have a blanket?”

“You've got a blanket,” she said as she checked the contents of a plastic bag dangling above his head. “That's a medical blanket there. It knows exactly what you need. Right now, you need thin and light, so it's thin and light.”

“But that's not what I want,” Martin protested, plucking at it. He squinted through the gloom at the plastic bag she was looking at and discovered that it connected to him via a tube in his arm. “Ugh! There's a line in me. Take it out!”

Theo smiled. “When this bag is empty,” she said. “Be glad it's there. It probably saved your life.”

“Can't I just drink it?”

“Judging from the stuff you spit up on me—no.”

Martin went back to sleep.

When he woke up again, Theo was gone, and Chip lay curled up across his legs. A slender person was rummaging through a cardboard box across the room from him. She set it
aside with an irritated sigh and swung her flashlight in search of another, and the white beam illuminated her face.

“William!” Martin said. He scrambled to sit up, acutely aware of his lack of clothes. The medical blanket, sensing the spike in his blood pressure, promptly shredded into a panel of mesh. “More fluff! More fluff!” he whispered frantically, and, to his relief, it obeyed.

He needn't have worried. William continued her search without turning around. “Hello,” she said. “Feeling better, I see.”

She must have eyes in the back of her head, Martin thought.

“I had a plastic tube in my arm,” he told her. It was gone now, he noticed as he poked the bandage. How had he not woken up for that?

“Intravenous cannula,” she said. “Theo used two of our bags of saline on you, not to mention the ice that was supposed to keep the milk from going bad.”

William slammed the second box aside, picked up her flashlight, and started digging through another box.

“What are you looking for?” Martin asked.

“Antiemesis drugs,” she said. “Here they are.” She pulled out several foil packets. “My three-year-olds are vomiting. They threw up all over me.”

Now that she mentioned it, Martin could tell even in that dim light that she wasn't at her best. Her hair fell in untidy strings around her face, and her tense silhouette spoke of frustration and lack of sleep.

“I think I threw up on Theo,” Martin said. In retrospect, this didn't sound like the sort of comment likely to produce a bond, but he couldn't think of anything that would.

William shoved the boxes back into place and held her flashlight close so she could read the directions on the foil packet.

“Sorry about the milk going bad,” Martin said.

“It doesn't matter,” she murmured. “It isn't as if there was a lot to begin with. Of milk, or of anything else.”

Martin pondered this. “Why don't you steal some more?”

“We can't,” William snapped. “They're watching the big shipments to catch us stealing again. They were watching them before; we found out that's how they were zeroing in on us. If Central gets a hint of which direction we've gone, they'll be crawling all over this city inch by inch.”

“Okay, I get it. You don't have to yell. And if that's how things are, you might want to hide the red packet car a little better. I spotted it right off.”

He was almost sorry he'd said this. William looked more exhausted than before. “That's just great,” she muttered. “I'll get word to Rudy.” And she collected her foil packets and walked out.

The next time Martin woke up, Theo was there again.

“For breakfast, you can have juice and pudding, or pudding and juice,” she said. Anticipating his reply, she peeled back the foil top on a pudding cup.

Martin remembered what William had told him. “Maybe I better just skip it.”

Theo frowned and handed him the cup. “Eat your breakfast!” So Martin went to work on the vanilla pudding.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Kind of awful. But I have to talk to you and Rudy,” he said. “My mom's in trouble. We need help.”

“Rudy wants to talk to you, too,” she said. “When you're done, you can put your clothes on, and we'll go find him.” She handed him a juice pack.

“You don't have much food left,” Martin protested.

“What does that have to do with you needing juice?” So Martin took the juice, too.

Once his meal was over, she gave him his clothes. It was just as well she'd waited. His jeans and T-shirt hadn't been washed since he'd left Suburb HM1, and a robust odor emanated from them, not unlike the smell of the mattress full of mice he and Dad had expelled from their new home. Theo tried to shake the clothes out, but that only seemed to encourage the aroma.

“I'll be outside,” she said as she handed them over. “Hey, they could be worse.”

“Yeah, I know. I've seen William.”

Martin stood up to pull on his jeans. The medical blanket came with him. He gave it a quick tug, but it clung to him.

“Look,” he said, “I don't need you now. I'm all fine again. Maybe you think I'll get cold, but it's okay, I've got clothes.” He pulled on his jeans. “See? Let go.”

But the blanket didn't let go.

He tried to loosen its fleecy grip. He grabbed one side and pulled hard, but the blanket stretched like chewing gum. Then it brought two corners together below his chin and tied them in a square knot.

“What the hey—”

Martin pulled his T-shirt over the top of the blanket, but it shrank, wriggled through the neck hole, and settled around his shoulders like a superhero cape.

“Chip, do you think you can talk sense into this thing?”

Chip tried. He came up close and vibrated. Then he sat back and wagged apologetically. The blanket refused to budge. Martin held out his arms and surveyed his new accessory. All these years, he'd been irrationally attached to his clothing, but he'd never imagined that a piece of clothing might become irrationally attached to him.

“Never mind, Chip,” he said. “I don't think it's gonna change its mind.”

Theo was waiting for him outside the door. Chip lit his eyebeams, and the three of them made their way through a dark labyrinth of passages. Martin couldn't make sense of his surroundings. The space was as gloomy as the underworld of HM1, but it was broken up into wide hallways and big rooms. It couldn't be a house, Martin thought. No family could have lived in a building like this.

Groups of little children huddled in the corners under the supervision of weary teachers. The children's small white faces shimmered in the flashlight beams and reminded Martin of ghosts. He looked for Cassie, but he didn't spot her or her friends.

The place was dank and dirty. Broken metal straps poked out from the walls and threatened to jab Martin in the eye. Dust and insect webbing cocooned ancient plastic chairs and tables, and some corridors they passed were choked with garbage. The smell of mildew permeated everything.

Children shouldn't be in here, Martin thought. It's not safe.

“This place looks like a game of House-to-House,” he said unhappily.

“Let's hope it doesn't come to that,” Theo said. “We're in the bottom of a big general-purpose building. It was the biggest basement we could find, and since the building doesn't go up too high, we're hoping it won't fall down while we're here.”

“How long will that be?” Martin asked.

Theo sighed. “As long as it takes.”

“I can hear kids crying. Is Cassie okay?”

“I think so. As okay as the rest of us.”

They came through a doorway into a room lit to stark brilliance by two big emergency lights. Half a dozen of the prototypes were there, bending over handhelds or tuning machinery. William sat on a folding chair with a cup of coffee in her hand. She looked very tired.

Rudy came over to greet him. The handsome young man who ran the Wonder Baby school still looked dynamic, even in a wrinkled T-shirt. “I'm glad to see you looking so much better,” he said. Martin didn't remember having seen him earlier. He wondered if Rudy had played a part in his ketchup-bottle delirium.

Rudy waved him to a seat, and the prototypes pulled their chairs into a ragged circle around him. He noticed William eying his blanket cape and felt a blush warm his cheeks. The blanket obligingly ventilated itself into a charming panel of lace.

“Thank you for alerting us to the danger of the red packet,” Rudy said. “I knew it was too conspicuous, but we've faced so many problems in the last forty-eight hours that we haven't been able to do anything about it. I'm glad to see you again, but you may be sorry you've joined us. Central is closing in fast, and I'm afraid we're out of options.”

“I'm really sorry about that,” Martin said. “See, I came here to ask for help.” He described Mom's strange illness. “At least can you tell me what's wrong with her?”

“It's an old identity microchip,” Theo said. “She's about thirty-five, isn't she? Maybe a little older.”

“The last of the identity chips,” Rudy agreed. “They started out as standard issue, but no one ever went outside the domes, so they seemed like a waste of money after a while. They were phased out in the seventies, but for a few years, the lab was still putting them in about a quarter of the newborns. Your dad seems to be fine, but I'm afraid your mom had the bad luck to get one.”

“What does it do?”

“It's transmitting. Those chips stay quiet in the suburbs or in the game show complex because they stay in touch with a base transponder. A set number of days after the chip goes out of range, it begins to transmit at an amplified volume. Each time its host moves, it transmits its new location. Your mom is fine as long as she stays still, but when she moves, it transmits, and that interferes with the functioning of her brain.”

Martin felt as if he were suffocating, and the room tilted and spun. “But you can fix her, right? I mean, I broke her by bringing her out there, but it's not forever because someone can fix her—right? Because she can't stay like that, with something wrong in her brain. She can't stay like that!”

“Sure, we can fix her,” Theo said. “Don't worry, Martin. Those chips aren't too hard to knock out. I can go do it, Rudy. I know the town he's talking about.”

“It's risky,” Rudy said.

“Oh, I don't think so. Who bothers to listen to those old frequencies these days? If they did listen in, she'll be gone by the time I get there, and I'll just turn around and come back.”

Martin's heart was pounding. “But you can't leave, Theo. What about Cassie? She's in trouble too! You gotta fix this.”

Rudy paused. Then he gave an encouraging smile. “That's where maybe
you
can help us.”

Martin could see what was coming. It all fell into place. He was caught, trapped, just like Mom and Cassie were trapped. None of them had a choice.

“You wanna mess with my dog.”

Rudy nodded.

“Listen, is this even gonna matter?” Martin asked. “How do you think Chip's gonna help?”

Rudy leaned forward in his folding chair and laid a hand on Chip's ruff. Chip rolled a nervous eye at Martin. “Honestly, I don't know,” Rudy said. “William has some theories. But you've seen the influence Chip has had on bots, even bots with high security clearance. And the fact is, we don't have anything else to try. In another couple of days—Well, never mind. Let's just say that the situation is critical.”

In another couple of days, Martin thought, the Wonder Babies will start dying. They don't have enough to eat or drink, and they're already getting sick. Jimmy, baby Laura . . . Cassie, too. In a week, my little sister might be dead.

He swallowed the lump in his throat. “What do you need to do to Chip?”

“We'll look at his boards,” William said. “And then we'll—”

“No, you won't,” Theo interrupted. “You'll take him to
Malcolm. You know it's the right thing to do. With a little luck, you can get there and back in a day. The school can survive that long.”

William's eyes lit up. She noticed Martin looking at her, and a blush crept across her pale cheeks. She said, “Malcolm Granville knows more about bots than anyone else in the world.”

But Rudy was frowning. He stopped petting Chip and straightened up. “Why Malcolm?” he said. “You think we can't handle this ourselves?”

Theo stared him down. Martin hadn't seen her look so serious before. It was as if the rest of them had vanished, and only she and Rudy were in the room.

“I think you need Malcolm's advice,” she said. “About the bot, and about other things too. Before this is over, you should hear what he has to say.”

“I'm not dragging my oldest friend into this,” Rudy said stubbornly.

“If I know Malcolm, he's already in it,” Theo said. “Do this for me, Rudy, if you won't do it for yourself. And take William with you. See if he'll keep her there.”