The City of Mirrors
Page 179

“Will we clear it?” Lore asked. The door weighed forty tons.
Michael didn’t know. “Rand, get down to engineering. I need you there.”
“I’m sorry, Michael.”
“You did your best. We’ll have to manage.” He hung the microphone back on the panel. “Fuck.”
The lights on the panel went dead.
—
Twenty-eight miles west, the same summer moon had risen over the Chevron Mariner. Its blazing orange light shone down upon the deck; it shimmered over the oily waters of the lagoon like a skin of flame.
With a bang like a small explosion, the hatch detonated skyward. It seemed not so much to fly as to leap, soaring into the nighttime sky of its own volition. Up and up it sailed, spinning on its horizontal axis with a whizzing sound; then, like a man who’s lost his train of thought, it appeared to pause in midflight. For the thinnest moment, it neither rose nor fell; one might easily have been forgiven for thinking it was charged with some magical power, capable of thwarting gravity. But, not so: down it plunged, into the befouled waters.
Then: Carter.
He landed on the foredeck with a clang, absorbing the impact through his legs and simultaneously compressing his body to a squat: hips wide, head erect, one splayed hand touching the deck for balance, like an offensive tackle preparing for the snap. His nostrils flared to taste the air, which was imbued with the freshness of freedom. A breeze licked at his body with a tickling sensation. Sights and sounds bombarded his senses from all directions. He regarded the moon. His vision was such that he could detect the smallest features of its face—the cracks and crevices, craters and canyons—with an almost lurid quality of three dimensions. He felt the moon’s roundness, its great rocky weight, as if he were holding it in his arms.
Time to be on his way.
He ascended to the top of One Allen Center. High above the drowned city, Carter took measure of the buildings: their heights and handholds, the fjordlike gulfs between them. A route materialized in his mind; it had the force, the clarity of a premonition, or something absolutely known. A hundred yards to the first rooftop, perhaps another fifty to the second, a long two hundred to the third but with a drop of fifty feet that would expand his reach…
He backed to the far edge of the platform. The key was, first, to create an accumulation of velocity, then to spring at precisely the right moment. He lowered to a runner’s crouch.
Ten long strides and he was up. He soared through the moonlit heavens like a comet, a star unlocked. He made the first rooftop with room to spare. He landed, tucked, rolled; he came up running and launched again.
He’d been saving up.
—
In the cargo bay of the third vehicle in the convoy, among the other injured, Alicia lay immobilized. Thick rubber cords strapped her to her stretcher at the shoulders, waist, and knees; a fourth lay across her forehead. Her right leg was splinted from ankle to hip; one arm, her right, was pinned across her chest. Various other parts of her were bandaged, stitched, bound.
Inside her body, the rapid cellular repair of her kind was under way. But this was an imperfect process, and complicated by the vastness and complexity of her wounds. This was especially true of the winglike flange of her right hip, which had been pulverized. The viral part of her could accomplish many things, but it could not reassemble a jigsaw puzzle. It might have been said that the only thing keeping Alicia Donadio alive was habit—her predisposition to see things through, just as she had always done. But she no longer had the heart for any of it. As the bone-banging hours passed, that she had failed to die seemed more and more like a punishment, and proof enough of Peter’s words. You traitor. You knew. You killed them. You killed them all.
Sara was sitting on the bench above her. Alicia undestood that the woman hated her; she could see it in her eyes, in the way she looked at her—or, rather, didn’t—as she went about attending to Alicia’s injuries: checking the bandages, measuring her temperature and pulse, dribbling the horrible-tasting elixir into her mouth that kept her in a pain-numbed twilight. Alicia wished she could say something to the woman, whose hatred she deserved. I’m sorry about Kate. Or It’s all right, I hate myself enough as it is. But this would only make things worse. Better Alicia should accept what was offered and say nothing.
Besides, none of this mattered now; Alicia was asleep, and dreaming. In this dream, she was in a boat, and all around was water. The seas were calm, covered in mist, without a visible horizon. She was rowing. The creak of the oars in their locks, the swish of water moving under their blades: these were the only sounds. The water was dense, with a slightly viscous texture. Where was she going? Why had the water ceased to terrify her? Because it didn’t; Alicia felt perfectly at home. Her back and arms were strong, her strokes compact, nothing wasted. Rowing a boat was something she did not recall ever doing, yet it felt completely natural, as if the knowledge had been inscribed into her muscles for later use.
On she rowed, her blades elegantly slicing through the inky murk. She became aware that something was moving in the water—a shadowy bulk gliding just beneath the surface. It appeared to be following her, maintaining a watchful distance. Her mind did not register its presence as menacing; rather, it merely seemed to be a natural feature of the environment, one she might have anticipated if she’d thought about it in advance.
“Your boat is very small,” said Amy.
She was sitting in the stern. Water was running from her face and hair.