Living in Threes (17 page)

That agitation was focused well away from her. She slid a careful glance at the starwing.

It had been waiting for her. It came down and wrapped around her. More than warmth now, she felt a tingle of energy. It was a pleasant sensation, but her skin tightened in case it turned to pain.

The starwing urged her to walk, not too fast, not too slow. An image came to her of a wave rolling toward the shore below the family’s house. She matched that speed exactly, as far as she remembered it, and the starwing purred.

She walked out of the cell with no more sensation than a heightening of the tingle and a slight drag at her feet. Once she had passed the field, the starwing grew denser around her, wrapping her in shadow as she walked downward through the levels.

People
were
agitated. They were running, even raising their voices. Invisible in her cloak of alien wings, Meru caught snatches of the conversation.

The plague was spreading. The old city was fully contained, but this morning a child from one of the families had fallen ill.

It was not one of Meru’s cousins. She stopped long enough to make sure of that, though the starwing stung her with urgency, nearly betraying them both into visibility.

People were arguing in the central hall, shouting at each other.

“Containment doesn’t work! This thing mutates too fast for anything to stop.”

“Containment is not the problem. We waited too long to set up the fields. Someone carried it out while we were still ignoring the reports.”

“We know it’s from offworld—it’s been cropping up everywhere out there. We should have looked at the port first, and not diverted all our resources here.”

“The first deaths were here. There’s been nothing in the port. It’s all in the old city or out in the sector. The port is clean. Somehow it skipped straight from the starways to the heart of Earth.”

“Does it matter how it got here? This thing got through all our defenses, and now it’s spreading. It mutates at an impossible rate; every treatment we find is outdated by the time we finish running the data. Meanwhile, people die.”

“Not all of them. Surely—”

“All of them. Once symptoms appear, death occurs within the day. Nothing so far has had the least effect against it.”

“Now it’s out among the families. We’ll have to lock the whole sector down. No one moves anywhere until we find a way to stop this.”

“We need the source code—the original form, from which the others have mutated. If we have that, and can track the earliest variations from it, we might be able to predict how it will change. Then we can get ahead of it, anticipate it. We can stop it.”

“You haven’t found it yet? The first casualties—”

“It had already mutated when the first victim died, and it’s kept on mutating. We can’t predict what it will do or where it will manifest. There has to have been a carrier, someone who brought it in from offworld.”

“The archaeologist? Where was she digging, and what route did she take to Earth?”

“There’s nothing there. The planet is clean and so is the ship she traveled in. She avoided the infected worlds on her way here, never touched them at all. She can’t have been the carrier. She must have contracted it in the port, or more likely in the old city.”

“Then who brought it in? Is it a true carrier—someone who never fell ill, but infected everyone within reach?”

“We don’t know.”

“We have to know. People are dying!”

Meru dared not stop. She was directly in front of the hall’s entrance. A dozen fields overlapped here, taxing the starwing’s capacity to stay invisible.

The person who had been talking about Jian was Vekaa. He looked exhausted: his eyes were hollow and his cheeks were sunken. He looked terribly and almost unbearably like his sister after the plague had taken her.

No one here was sick. Meru would have expected someone to mention that, but no one did. Maybe they had argued it to a standstill already.

A man strode out of the hall with a fistful of data beads. He stared directly into Meru’s face. She froze.

The starwing hissed. The man turned with no sign of having seen anything and disappeared into one of the cells behind Meru.

She lurched back into motion. For a few precious moments, the way to the outside was clear. People were all in cells or in the center of the sphere, trying to save the world.

The interlocking fields tugged at the starwing. It drew on their energy, darkening around Meru until she could hardly see. All she could think of to do was aim straight ahead.

She dived for the door, squeezed her eyes shut and tumbled through it.

The field burned. The starwing keened in her ear, but it held on. One long, wrenching moment, and then the field was gone.

She stood in the street, wrapped in the starwing. Guards were everywhere, standing in doorways, pacing the street, keeping watch on rooftops.

Out here, there were no warring force fields. Meru kept to the shadows as the persona had in the game when it set out to steal the blue bead.

The persona had called it a scarab. That was a kind of beetle, and also a kind of amulet. Meru slipped her hand into the pocket in which she had been keeping it, and closed her fingers around it.

Fear rose so high she almost lost her will to go on. She was insane to be out here alone, following a rogue data stream and a cryptic scribble. She should go back, slip into the cell again, and let the Deciders find the cure for the plague.

They were doing the best they knew how to do. Meru had Jian’s trust and her last message, and a growing conviction that the answer was inside her somewhere. The web, she hoped with all her heart, would be able to tell her where.

As long as there were force fields to feed on, the starwing could keep on hiding her. Her captors had helped it without meaning to, by cutting her off from the web. She was completely invisible. Nothing could track her.

The old city in daylight was if anything more disturbing than it was in the dark. The streets were deserted, and there was no sign of life in the shuttered windows. Door after door was sealed with a symbol Meru had never seen before: a barbed wheel, black on blood red.

Her stomach tightened. What if there were bodies? But she saw nothing that was alive or ever had been, only brick and stone and steel and plascrete.

She had been walking quickly when she left Containment, but by the time she reached the force field that walled off the sector, she was running. The hiss of her own breath, the pounding of her heart, the ache in her legs and lungs, proved with every stride that she was alive, and that she was doing something.

This field hurt much worse than the one around Containment. The scream she heard might have been the starwing’s, or it might have been her own. She tripped and fell, tumbling down a flight of steps into a deserted plaza.

She lay winded, struggling to breathe. Her whole body hurt. Her knee was cut; it bled.

After a long while she pulled herself painfully to her feet. The starwing was still wrapped around her, and she hoped it was still protecting her. Its wings had a tattered look, rather like Meru’s knee.

It still knew where she had to go. She limped in that direction. As she moved, the pain in her knee eased and the cut began to heal. Even without the web, she still had that protection, part of the implants that had been put in her when she was born.

Guards were moving behind the field. Meru must have triggered an alarm. She limped as fast as she could, ducking into doorways and seeking out shadows.

This sector was as empty as the other. The crowds that she had fought through, the music and laughter she remembered, were gone. Everywhere she went, she was alone; no creature, human or alien, came out to stare at her.

They could not all be dead. They must be hiding, or in Containment.

Meru could not think of so many people gone so quickly, not if she was to go on. She made herself focus on the rest of her escape. There was still the outer field to cross, but the starwing’s knowledge base, wherever it came from, showed her a different way than the one that had brought her here. It led her down a flight of steps, this time toward not a blank wall but a broken door.

There was a tunnel behind it. She must have walked down another part of that from the road to the port: it had the same dim and dusty look, and the same fitful procession of lights. It was equally deserted.

Here the starwing could unfold and settle around her neck and rest. The way was mostly straight; if other tunnels merged with it, she chose the widest and brightest.

Her knee was healed. Hunger gnawed at her—healing was hard on the system—but she had nothing to eat or drink.

She could remedy that in the port if she ever got there. She walked as fast as she dared, and trotted or ran when the light was bright enough. She refused to believe that she might be lost. The tunnels had to end eventually. Then, according to the starwing, her way to the port would be clear.

And then—

She would deal with that when she came to it.

Chapter 17

Meru climbed out of the tunnels into a place so familiar it seemed alien. The cable reared up overhead. Ribbons of roads unrolled around her, connecting the low domes and soaring arches of the port.

She had escaped the old city and its force field altogether. When she touched the web without thinking, to key a search and a map, it was like a dam breaking; a flood of data poured into her head. She stumbled and nearly fell.

Almost too late, she threw up the full firewall, masking her presence and her identity. She had escaped Containment. She did not want to think about the penalty for that.

Even walled off by multiple layers of protection, she was more completely herself than she had been since she went into Containment. A map of the port appeared when she needed it, sparking with links and bits of information. She almost cried, it was so beautiful.

The port was sealed, but the city that surrounded it was as alive as the old city was dead. It was full of people, crowded with travelers who could go nowhere until the ban was lifted.

The whole planet was still on lockdown. She could not take a room without being tagged. She could not buy food or drink, either, or use one of the roads.

Despair dragged at her. She pushed it away. She could do this. Her mother had trusted her.

She needed a place to hide and something to eat, and water to drink.

“Meru.”

The link was still there, but strong now, with the full power of the web behind it.

“Yoshi,” she said. The rush of gladness died as soon as it was born. “I’m out. I’m free. But you have to forget I exist.”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Of course he would say that. She should never have said anything. She reached to break the link, to end the connection.

It refused.
He
refused.

“Stupid,” she said. “I’ve broken Consensus. If you get caught—if they find out you have anything to do with me—”

“Too late for that.”

That was a real voice. A living person, standing in a doorway past the end of the tunnel.

He was not as tall as she was, and considerably wider: short and stocky and solid. He had a truly formidable scowl.

She scowled back. “Are you insane?”

“Probably.” He stepped back through the door.

Meru knew this place. It was a tearoom. She had come here more than once with her mother.

The memory made her throat ache, but it stiffened her spine. She did this for Jian. Nothing could bring her back, but if Meru found the answer to the plague, it would make Jian’s death count for something.

Meru and Yoshi wove themselves in among the customers of the café. They attracted no notice. No one was looking for an escaped criminal here.

Consensus itself was protecting her. They could not send out an alarm without starting a panic. There were searchbots everywhere on the web, and searchcams in the city, too, but Meru could elude those.

A server approached. This was a very fine tearoom: the server was human, and physically present.

“Tea,” Yoshi said before she could stop him, “and do you have cake?”

“We always have cake,” the server said. “Sweet or savory?”

“Both,” he said, “and a privacy shield, please.”

The server did not even blink. “If privacy is desired, we have a garden of seclusion, which is completely shielded. I’ll bring your order there.”

Meru lashed at Yoshi through the weblink that they still shared.
Why did you do that? Are you trying to get us caught?

“I’m hungry,” he said in a normal voice. “So are you. We both need to rest and plan.”

“The only plan we need is for you to go back home and for me to go on with what I was doing.”

“I don’t think so,” Yoshi said.

Oh, he was stubborn. He was already half a dozen steps ahead of her.

She could just let him go. But then what would she do? She was thirsty and hungry and terribly tired.

She would eat. She would find a way to convince him that if he insisted on helping her, he would probably ruin his life. And then she would do what she had to do.