Brave New Love (41 page)

We both realize this at the same time and start to laugh. But I don’t let the laughter stop me from driving as fast as I can get away with around the cars.

“Where we go?” Pan shouts at me above the noise of the motorcycle and the other cars. Daringly, he slips his arms around my waist.

“There’s a place!” I scream back at him. “I’ve heard people whispering about it. Way out in the country across the state line. A place where things are different.
More like your village where there aren’t many houses. Or no skyscrapers. A place where the army and the cops aren’t in control. A place where misfits hide. It’s the only place
for us now.”

“But how can we do anything without our ID cards?” Pan yells at me.

“They’re no good any more. Even if we had them they’d give us away. The cops will send our information to every computer in the state and to other states in the Alliance. But
maybe at this place I hope we can find, they might not care so much about ID cards. Maybe we’ll both be happier there.”

Pan tightens his arms around me. Even with our helmets on, he still manages to kiss me on the back of my neck.

•  •  •

Four uncomfortable, hungry, mostly sleepless days later—our route took us far away from official checkpoints and paved roads—we find the woods—woods filled
with living trees, covered with leaves and blossoms! We stop in front of a wooden gate across a dirt road. On either side are lush flower-beds and I can’t drive the bike over the flowers.

Just beyond the gate a small group of people are having a picnic on the grass. Some of them look as if they’re as young as us, and it looks as if they’re eating real fried chicken
and potato salad. A big chocolate cake is waiting on a plate. My mouth waters. Pan and I haven’t had anything to eat for a long time.

When the people see us they jump up and open the gate, no questions asked, big smiles.

Pan meets my eyes. “Home,” he murmurs.

And then the people from the other side of the gate are hugging us.

S
ETH
C
ADIN

Bus time was nothing time. They all just rode together, idly fighting or blankly staring, tired of each other but too bored and jostled to care much about anything. Omika
drifted in the cloud of noise and rattle of bad roads until her stop, where she’d get off and trudge down the block to her shack and then directly on to the moldy sofa. She dropped her
sagging plastic bag of sundries and stupid backpack full of chunky noisebooks wherever they happened to fall from her hands. She’d left her flat-top 3Z turned on that morning, so it was ready
and rolling on through its routines for her, warm, like a fire without heat, from any angle.

Big Balloon Hour
was sparkling around the wall at the moment. On the fancier sets—the ones built from wafer-thin stacks of chips and wires—the image was always pristine and
could fill the room. Still, when the host rezzed in, even a cruddy desktop set would let you make eye contact with each other, or manifestations of each other, at least.

Flickering up in multiple bright dimensions from Omika’s cheap rezzer, everything on the show’s set was a shade of corporate lipstick, some frosted, some matte. The lady host was
arranged on a boysenberry loveseat, herself all in white, with her silvery hair carved back in the shape of an iceberg. Her scarlet toenails flexed inside crimson-dyed leather sandals. The lights
came up rosy pink, and the lady host rezzed out a smile, which on Omika’s old 3Z made the lady’s teeth so distorted by molecular static they looked like the baleen of a whale.

This effect produced a chittery sensation in her elbows and knees, something more than a reflex: a portent, an omen, or perhaps just randomly bouncing rez beams from the universe next door. Who
knew anymore? Reality hadn’t been the same since The Big One. Not that anyone knew what it had been. Except Big. Anything could slip through the sudden sinkholes in the roads, or the
shattered windows done up in duct-taped plastic and despair instead of glass—anything at all, even pieces of other people’s dreams.

Her odd feeling could be coming from anywhere—it could mean everything or nothing.

Whatever it was, it’d been happening to her a lot lately. Little signs, twinges in her joints and skin, and her senses would focus tightly until they zeroed in on the source. It annoyed
her. Just more crap to think about, with time eating away at her pointless life already.

But she felt it, so she hit
MUTE
, and heard . . . a moment or two later . . . an unpleasantly unmysterious sound: a kind of rustling and rattling which was probably made
by an insect so large it was shifting the crusty dishes on the “kitchen table” (splintered up old door resting on ancient tires near the front door) as it walked over them.

This was all total garbage, all of it—a giant bag of bullcrap strapped to her back, an anchored rope dragging her between shifts at school to the rickety bus to the crumbling shack to to
the school again (and it was as much a “school” as her table was a table).

After the last flood, the Last Call of Nibiru, or whatever it was—people said everything, anything, said a whole lot of nothing, but nobody tried to rebuild the world anymore. The adults
messed about trading files around the signal in half-busted-up buildings, shumbling to themselves as they trolley-lined around the cinq routes. They were playing at making work. Meanwhile the walls
just kept crumbling with every aftershock and strike, and half the fires weren’t even out yet, because new ones started every day. Only the Signal Corporation and its production towers were
relatively intact, and only the workers attached to them ever seemed cheerful, or at least manic in a useful kind of way. After all, they worked for the signal, and there wasn’t much left but
the signal.

And the kids—the ones old enough to be ignored, or left helplessly behind when their folks went looking for a less toxic homeland . . . most of the older kids drifted off to places Omika
didn’t want to go, to do stuff she didn’t care about. Though they mostly took over city blocks and little towns, everybody just called their turf the Wilderness, as if the overgrowth
was harmless vegetation instead of the deeply rooting weed of anarchy.

The kids who stayed behind, perpetually stuck on the school-bus loop like she was, hung around and waited for each other to wake up. Weeks became months, and soon they got used to it, until it
became something like normal. They were sleepwalkers in a busted landscape, and they knew it, but it was better than being meat. So they stayed, because they knew meat was what the Wilderness would
end up making them, one way or another.

Omika got up and killed the skittering critter with a careful slash from her rusty bread knife, then butchered it, deftly if not precisely, intending to sell the chitin to a beetle man. But she
kept the eyes in a jar on the mantle above the flat-top. She looked at them a lot. They were iridescent, empty little gems. Sometimes they caught stray beams from the rezcast, which would make them
suddenly blossom in a prismatic flash.

One day, a few months later, she got up and took the jar outside and buried it. She felt better. She made a plan. She’d been trying to keep herself between, but it was time to choose.
Omika would have to become part of the signal. She’d have to be careful, though, because a lot of bad things could happen when people did that, especially if they got on 3Z.

•  •  •

In those parts Nguze was a real gangster. He didn’t shake the ground when he walked. Most guys got up to a lot of noisy business but Nguze had the ways of stepping
lightly, he said, and the ways of holding ferns too—so he could shimmy up with a mouthful on those thick cracked claws, and make Ibo hoot, because Ibo had never been tickled, never been
surprised. Not since another time, and nobody remembered a minute ago, five minutes ago, five years ago, not really—not like Nguze.

It is the place where the picture is alive, like nets full of fish in your belly, or some big moths drifting by—he tried to explain, and his mother never could do it but Nguze could, and
so Ibo brought him around to talk about pictures and life while they ate snails and berries.

It was good to keep their minds busy. It’d be the cold season soon and they’d slow down, until they stopped—on the last thought they had. It could be a long season in there,
without a name or anything, just staring.

“Make the dead picture move,” Nguze urged in Ibo’s ear, wet slappy whispers rumbling down his neck. “Push one into the other.”

But it didn’t make sense. Ibo pushed using his body, with his magnificent shoulders, the strength of his brutal thighs. A picture couldn’t be pushed, one into the other, like a
boulder into a doorway to keep the wind out.

“No,” Nguze said, over and over, but Ibo didn’t know, only began to sense.

“Like a tree pushes a leaf out of a stem?” he guessed hopefully, and the sigh he got back was somewhat less irritable this time.

•  •  •

Having navigated the Signal Corp’s Recruitment & Omissions labyrinth until she finally reached someone with a proper job, Omika was silent, sensing this was a moment
to let Mr. Forms Guy #3 fill the space with whatever sprang into his neatly clipped head.

He waited back at her, but she won, and he spoke first: “You say there was an accident?”

“Technically, I’m, like, a . . .
Device
,” she said. Making the past up was getting easier. The details just formed around a few gritty grains of reality, not so much
lies
as stories that might as well be true, or were true enough for purpose.

Life was like that now, she’d realized, finally. You could be anybody or anything, if you paid attention and figured out the rules. “My engineers were with The Monday Machine. When
the accident—well, their lab—”

“And you say—”

Omika wondered at first why he used that phrase so often, but she got it now. It was how the news guy talked—not the desk one but the outside one whose job was bothering people who were
way too busy to talk.
You say, they say, some say.

Real-time narrative, stapled to the moment, running on cue, that was his deal, Omika decided. So this time
she
interrupted, keeping him off balance:

“I’m sorry, what
did you
say
your
name is?” She looked right at his face and waited, trying not to swing her torn sneakers over the metal bar under her chair, in
the space between her feet and the carpet (or whatever that flat stuff was that corporations put on the floors to keep the dirt off). Technically, at her age, she wasn’t even allowed to be in
the Signal Corp complex, let alone to meet with its agents, but as part of her new insight she’d learned that if you looked serious and busy enough most folks would let you go anywhere, and
believe whatever you wrote on their forms.

“Swift,” Mr. Forms said carefully, as if answering something more complicated. “I hadn’t said, in fact. Mizter Swift is my name, but Miz Omika—and I may have
neglected to express my pleasure to meet you, it’s just—” He gestured at his desk, almost helplessly, as if it were a dragon he had to constantly feed, or else it would eat him
alive.

“Of course,” she said, trying to emulate 3Z hostess-style grace, charitably absolving him of everything unnamed. She hadn’t shook a hand in months, maybe years, but you
didn’t freaking forget, did you? It was a simple procedure. Anyway he didn’t seem alarmed by anything she did. “Mr. Swift.” She smiled as fake a smile as she could remember
how, hiding her teeth. “Nice to meet you, too.”

For the first time he smiled back. Surprisingly, he looked as if he were a toddler on an outing and that someone helpful and friendly had, just that moment, unbuckled his straps and hoisted him
out of a car seat to see the duckies at a pond. (If the duckies hadn’t all been coated in soot and oil.) But now he was all cheer, as if the vexation had dissipated entirely. She’d
helped take care of some of the younger orphans, though, so she knew his mood could change again quickly.

This response gave Omika her next idea: “I thought I saw a courtyard with a little fountain outside—”

“Oh, yes,” her apparently new best friend enthusiastically answered, gathering up his fancy pen and important papers and cradling them in his elbows. “Fresh air, yes, and the
rain from this morning stopped, didn’t it?”

She’d noticed he was the color of old ash, and blinked a lot when his head moved toward the light. It had last rained three days ago, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him.

•  •  •

“It’s an amazing thing to die,” Nguze said.

Ibo thought about it, and about the idea of pictures coming together, and eventually he found the way to hold patterns in his mind for what he started to recognize as a series of moments.

Not too long after, the moments started to flow into a river of pattern-thinking, and so he went to the crack in the world. He took a running leap into it, died for himself, and found that what
Nguze said was true, more or less. You die, the spirits in your eyes tumble like falling leaves or dropping bones, and then you get the score. Everyone likes to know where they stand. Once your
scrim is in your hand, you can just wait, which makes you free, more or less.

He’d still need patience and good behavior, Ibo found, but that is not much challenge to the trained being. Every time the swinging rope stops, you calculate the odds that you’ll hop
off, and you’re so disciplined you won’t let go until it’s one to one.

Ibo’d heard Nguze’s story many times before, though he only now became aware of that, each time having been new before. Yet when it happened to him, all his mortal business fell
away, and he saw the purpose. Something bigger than his own life, or his mother’s life, or anything they had room for back on the land. A convergence. He understood.
More than
planets can sometimes align.

•  •  •

Outside, Miz Omika and Mizter Swift resumed their meeting on a picnic table. She watched him closely for signs of illness. Clearly, he had not been out of his office for so long
that he might have developed an allergy to sunlight, or a phobia of chlorophyll. But he seemed sturdy enough, possibly because he only ever noticed the world in a small Corp-branded sphere around
himself, and everything happening outside of it was a colorful but irrelevant swathe.