Hyperthought (16 page)

As quietly as possible, I set about repairing the helmet. First I soaked it in a tub of bleach in the kitchen for two days to kill the toxins. I hid the bleach tub under a pile of empty protein sacks, but that was just pro forma. Merida and Suradon had to be watching me on surveillance cameras. Next I mended the gash with surgical glue pilfered from Merida’s medical stock. Would a sealant intended to heal body tissue work on a Kevtex helmet? I didn’t know for sure, but it looked all right.

Merida and Suradon probably both had a laugh at the little idiot, Jolie Sauvage, who got so excited about one broken helmet, when she would clearly never find the two full surfsuits she would need to take Jin away. Oh sure, they estimated my intelligence about right. What they underestimated was my resolve.

SEE, I WAS
desperate. I thought Jin would die if I didn’t get him away from Merida soon. I had to try something. I couldn’t just sit on my hands.

Life is a blind run, that’s my idea. You can’t see where you’re going, so every step you take, you have to trust there’ll be a place for your foot to land. The minute you start to worry about potholes and pits, that’s when you stumble. But as long as you keep sprinting ahead in total blind trust, then you move with grace. Bien, I think that’s the meaning of grace.

So I decided to give Jin the helmet and take my chances without one.

What I did was fairly simple. The very night the glue hardened on my helmet, I traded my demure kimono for a more serviceable musketeer uniform—stolen, of course. Then I waited till the wee hours and started a fire in the habitat’s main electrical bus. This created a temporary power blackout, which shut down life support. You can imagine how Merida felt about no life support. While she and her cyberstaff were going loco trying to restore power, I slipped through the dark corridors into Jin’s room.

“Wh—who?” he stammered, waking at once.

No matter how many times I had come to see him in the last few days, Jin never seemed able to remember my face. Each time I entered his room, he treated me as a stranger. His lack of recognition hurt me, but I’d grown used to it by now. So I said what I always said. “It’s me, Jolie. I’ve come to help you, Jin.”

“G-good angel.”

I drew a quick breath. “You know me?”

He said, “Know your—voice.”

I felt like leaping for joy, but there wasn’t time. Grinning like a fool in the dark, I started explaining our situation and feeling for the leads attached to his body. Jin said nothing more. I suppose he was too weak. In the pitch darkness, I disconnected all his monitors and tubes, and sealed the port in his neck to prevent bleeding—a procedure which I had carefully observed and memorized in the past few days. Then I slung him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

He only moaned a little. “Where?”

“Away from here” was all I could think to say.

We proceeded down the dark twisting halls to the kitchen. Under the sink I had hidden a pack of purloined odds and ends that might prove useful, an electric torch, air cylinders, nutrient tubes, a knife, rope, some first aid stuff, a mirror for signaling once we reached the surface, plus a roll of fabriglass and my leftover surgical glue. I tied Jin’s long hair back with a string and gently fitted the helmet onto his head. Then I sealed the neck gasket to his skin with the surgical glue. That should form an airtight seal. Next I plugged a cylinder of hypercompressed air into the helmet’s breathing port and strapped the cylinder to Jin’s chest with a strip of cloth.

“Just breathe normally,” I whispered. He tried to nod, but his head lolled on his shoulders. I had neglected to bring his neck brace. Quickly I wrapped his limp body in fabriglass and sealed him in with more glue. He looked like a cellophane birthday package, but at least the fabriglass would protect him from toxins. For myself, I’d stolen a second cylinder of hypercompressed air, and I’d jury-rigged a lever to open the valve partway so I could suck at it. The air tended to jet out too fast and sting my lips and tongue, but it was better than nothing. As for exposure to toxins, I’d have to risk it. I couldn’t afford to bundle up in fabriglass. That interfered with mobility.

Mes dieux, but I was breaking the cardinal rule of life: Never leave a safe habitat without a surfsuit. Every citizen on the planet had been drilled about the danger of environmental toxins. Yet here I was brazenly exposing myself. Some toxins killed in a matter of hours, but the worst ones, the ones that gave me nightmares, were the slow-acting biochemical molecules that rotted away different parts of your body over many years. If I could just get to the surface in time and find therapy, I’d be okay.

Too late for second thoughts now. I’d made my choice. Whatever was going to happen had already begun. I was sitting on the kitchen floor pondering these things when the lights blinked on. Merida had brought the habitat’s power back up. Time to move. Just as well I didn’t have longer to think—I might have bailed on the whole plan.

Instead, I hastily cranked open the hatch to the power plant, stuffed Jin down into the airlock, then climbed in beside him. It was a tight fit, and I had to twist around and press against him to lock the hatch. He made a noise, but I couldn’t hear him very well through the fabriglass. No time to delay. I pulled the big round ring to start the airlock running through its cycle.

When we tumbled out of the airlock, I felt more naked than ever before in my life. The atmosphere in the power plant was hot, dry and bitingly acrid. It tasted of ozone. I could almost feel my skin crackling, as if invisible poisons were already entering my pores. I had to force myself to concentrate on immediate matters. So I switched on my stolen electric torch and scoped the layout. We’d fallen onto a small steel platform just below the airlock. A deep shaft opened below us, housing two segmented columns of turbines. They were spinning like mad, roaring and throwing off static. An odd ladder of knotted cable hung down between them. I couldn’t see how far down it went.

Just then, Jin sagged against me in his fabriglass wrapper, and I had to prop him against the wall. My torchlight seemed dimmer than before, and I noticed black spots in my vision. It could be I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. To get Jin away from here, I had to keep up my strength, so I took time to pull the air cylinder from my shoulder pack and put my mouth to the valve. I twisted it open slowly. The air jetted out so fast, it cut my lip.

Merida would know exactly where to look for us, so we had to move fast. I sucked a few gulps of oxygen, then stowed the cylinder and wrestled Jin into position over my shoulder. He’d grown so light, any child might have managed him, and yet I found myself panting. Was it my imagination, or did each breath burn all the way down into my lungs?

Clutching Jin’s body, I seized the knotted ladder and clambered down the first few rungs. The ladder swung back and forth under our weight, and my torch kept getting dimmer. Maybe the battery was weak. Plenty soon, it failed entirely, and I could see nothing but the sparks flying from those twin columns of turbines. At least I’d gotten a glimpse of the layout. As we descended farther, hot turbulent breezes told me we were passing close between the spinning turbines.

At that moment, light blazed down the shaft from above. I jerked in surprise, my foot slipped, and I nearly dropped Jin. The airlock was opening. Merida had already found us. She’d activated the overhead lights, and now it became obvious that my sight bad narrowed to tunnel vision from lack of oxygen. But the lights revealed something else. In the slick gray wall surrounding the turbines, I glimpsed a small orifice tapering inward. As I watched, it puffed open, men closed up so tight it virtually disappeared. The gray wall looked wet and fibrous. There might be handholds. If I could leap from the ladder between those two turbine columns and find a purchase on that wall, Jin and I might be able to squeeze through that little orifice.

Above me, Merida was shouting orders at the musketeers, and I felt their weight shuddering the ladder. They were coming down after us. “Give me grace,” I whispered aloud. Then I cradled Jin’s body in my left arm, clung to the ladder with my right, and stretched one leg out between the turbines toward that gray wall. I lost my balance and fell. My shoulder pack slammed against a turbine and burst open, raining out gear. Jin and I pitched forward and bounced into the wall.

Desperately I flung out my free right hand and grabbed for the fibrous surface. Light beams splintered down from above as I clawed for a hold. I heard more shouting. At last, my fingers closed on a rubbery wet tendril, and I gripped with all my might.

We’d fallen a long way. The little orifice I’d seen in the wall was far above us now, but a wet sucking noise drew my attention to another similar one just below us. And there was another off to the side. Two more. Apparently, these pores riddled the wall. I watched this one puff open, then close tight. With agonizing care, I worked down to the little pore and pushed my fist through. It felt moist and fleshy. As if in reflex, the pore yawned away from my fist like a mouth. Before it could close, I jammed my head and shoulder through. Grunting and heaving, I squeezed Jin halfway through the opening with me. All at once, the pore wriggled and writhed and spat us the rest of the way through.

We fell straight down into blank darkness. I locked my arms around Jin’s body in what may have been a death grip. How long does a second last? Not many could have passed, and yet it seemed like an eternity before we landed, with a mighty splash, in a body of cold black fluid. The transition took me by such surprise I inhaled and choked.

The air trapped inside Jin’s fabriglass wrapper saved us. He bobbed to the surface like a balloon and brought me up with him. For several minutes, I could do nothing but hold on to him and cough and spit and throw up fluid from my lungs.

When I came to my senses, I realized we were caught in a boiling current, and in the inky blackness, perception really played tricks with me. The fluid seemed to be surging up like a fountain, with Jin and me balanced at the very top. Fluid swirled around my body and tugged at my musketeer uniform like a rising tide. We must have fallen into an underground spring or artesian well. Anyway, I wanted off, so I pointed my body at an angle to the boil and started kicking, pushing Jin’s buoyant fabriglass bag ahead of me. With much effort, I finally reached a solid wall. Only then did I realize that my lungs no longer burned and that my energy had returned. Whatever else might be in this atmosphere, it seemed to have more oxygen.

In the darkness, my hand located a small flat shelf sticking out from the wall just above the bubbling fluid line. It felt wide enough to hold both of us, so I hoisted Jin up, and pulled myself up dripping wet beside him.

“Jin, ça va?”

He moved, but I couldn’t hear if he said anything. At least he was still conscious.

Fluid streamed down my face and neck and got into my eyes. I had swallowed plenty. Some of it still gurgled in my lungs. It had a funny sweet taste, but there was no way to guess what it contained. One thing for sure, it had entered my bloodstream by now.

The spring or river, whatever, it was definitely rising. In just moments, the fluid level had already welled up several centimeters above the shelf where we were crouching. Soon, we’d be up to our chins again. I sat there shivering and thinking. What next, Jolie? The electric torch was lost. Likewise the air cylinders, the food, the climbing rope. I didn’t have a single piece of communications gear. I didn’t even have a chronometer to tell the time. More than that, I had no clue where we were, except that we were giga-deep in the Earth. Curious place for a sun-loving surfer girl to be.

Wouldn’t you know, Jin picked that moment to collapse against me in a lifeless heap. It was all I could do to keep him from slipping off the shelf. Sacrée Loi, let me speak plainly. I whimpered like a child.

Cowering in the dark, with the fluid rising every moment, I rocked Jin in my arms and begged him to wake up. My first botched rescue had half paralyzed him. What had I done this time? His air cylinder would run empty soon. I had no way to time it. But if I unsealed the fabriglass and removed his helmet, I would condemn him to the same fate I was surely facing—exposure to toxins. Either way, he would die. My doing. My fault. As the fluid level rose to my shoulders, I blubbered away, hopelessly begging him to forgive me. He’d made a bad choice when he picked Jolie Sauvage for his angel.

Every lame move, every preter-inane choice I’d made since leaving Palmertown cycled through my mind like reruns of a bad movie. I used to mink of myself as a thrill-charged surfer girl with nerves of iron and the cheek to match. Then I remembered Luc’s accident. My fault. Mea culpa. All I ever did was rush into things without a plan, without a notion of the risk. Adrienne had been right, I needed a nursemaid. Mes dieux, but I missed my friends!

It was then I began thinking of delivering Jin back to Merida. The rubbery fibers which formed the walls of this place weren’t easy to grip and climb, but I could do it. I could scale back up to that mouth-like opening and find the power plant. Merida and the musketeers would be waiting. So what if they murdered me? Without therapy, my fate had already been ordained by the toxins I’d breathed and swallowed. Better to the quickly. At least, with my last act, I could undo this terrible mistake. Merida might play ungodly games with Jin’s brain, but maybe she would keep him alive. Maybe.

Self-doubt is a horrible thing. It saps your energy and keeps you from making the bold leaps necessary for survival. Lucky for me, I’m not a deep thinker. My mind skips along the surface of things, where facts tend to stand out in bright colors. I didn’t doubt for long. No, Merida would not keep Jin alive. Call it lizard-brain instinct, I knew that sooner or later, her experiments would kill him. I couldn’t give up now. There was no easy way. Somewhere overhead, the open surface waited. I had to get Jin up there and signal for help. Keep focused, Jolie.