Pills and Starships (24 page)

But at the same time I was stronger. I was somehow
more
.

It’s incredibly hard to collect pieces of time. And yet I can’t help feeling it’s worthwhile—that if I can learn how to do that, I can learn how to do anything.

Before I had time to think or process any more than that—the quick relief of not having that compost stench on me; a few seconds of dappled light in the trees—Xing was calling my name. She was telling me to throw my clothes on and come out, so I dried off in a hurry. We had to be moving on, she said, it was time for us to join in. It was time for me to become part of them.

Well, friend, whatever Plan B was supposed to have been, I will never find out.

Because right after my shower, it turned out we had to move to Plan C.

I was jogging down to Xing on the path from the shower when she looked down at her wristface, and I saw it was blinking a bright green color.

“Oh no,” she said. “Oh
no
. Come on—quickly!”

The blinking green was a silent alarm, I’d learn later. She beckoned for me to follow her and we rushed between the potted trees—where everyone else was rushing too, streaming in the same direction. We happened to have started out pretty near the destination—that big Quonset hut—and so we got a space inside. Xing pulled me through the door into the crowd, which was gathered in front of all their tech.

There was a lot of it; I was surprised. There were whole banks of portable faces, power cells, all that. And on the far wall of the hut, inside, there was a wallscreen. It showed a swirl, a huge, dark-red swirl rotating over a map of the Pacific.

I knew it without needing to have it explained, because I’d seen the image in my tutorial emergency procedure lessons. It was the worst category of storm there is: a Cat Six.

And it was headed for a row of blobs I knew was actually a chain of islands, the bottom one bigger than any of the others—i.e., Hawaii. Us.

The whole place was packed with people, but instead of the noise of nervous whispers or chatter there was a total respectful hush. A woman stood up on a platform at the front—Keahi’s mother, Kate. Two men stood behind her, one of them whispering into a headset.

“We’re in Storm Mode,” she said curtly. “This could be the worst one yet. It has that potential. Word is, most of Samoa’s gone, with one retreat colony surviving on Mt. Silisili. That’s
one colony
out of twenty. The surge is enormous, hundreds of feet, and wind speed is new tornado force. We need everyone headed to Deep High Station at top speed. Task protocol is Total Evac. We pull together, we do what we have to. We’re capable of it and we won’t fail each other.”

I glanced sideways and saw people nodding, their faces trusting her, and I was glad. I was glad of their confidence. Their confidence was almost leaking into me.

Until I thought of my brother again.

“Check your wristfaces every ten minutes,” said Kate, finishing. “Go.”

People were already moving, surging back out of the Quonset, and we moved with them as the crowd flowed out the door, we didn’t have a choice, and I grabbed Xing’s sleeve. Even though she’s a person with calm expressions as a rule, she looked agitated and strained.

“Xing!” I whispered. “What about Sam?”

“Total Evac means we have to drop all nonessential business,” she replied. “All but the tasks we’ve been assigned. You don’t have any tasks yet because you’re new but I’ve been in planning sessions before this, on face, so I do have some. You need to stay with me, Nat. Without your own face you’re not safe anywhere else. You’ll get one soon but not yet. So that’s your job here. Stay close. I have my tasks, and you have me.”

She headed across the clearing, back toward the tent area where I’d slept, and I hurried along beside her.

“But Xing, we’re in between mountains here. We’re not on the beach or anything,” I pestered, trying desperately to understand. “Not like—not like Sam is. I don’t get it, why do we have to move?”

“We don’t ask. They have the scenarios worked out,” said Xing. “That’s number one. My guess is, the size of the tsunami is still a risk to us. We’re not as high here as you’d think. Close to sea level, in parts of the valley. It’s hard to predict the size of the wall of water when it hits. There’s also rainfall flooding even if we’re not swamped. And number two is wind speed. We’re fairly well protected but tornado-grade winds can still get in, they whip up along the lava formations and riverbeds . . . we have to save our charges. We have to be as safe as we can. My task is eggs. You can help me.”

I followed, I didn’t ask anything more right then, and I did what I was told, but the whole time I was thinking of Sam, in the hotel perched right on the edge of the ocean. I wondered how high those cliff walls were—not more than a hundred feet or so, I guessed, maybe a hundred and fifty where we’d walked down to set the tiny balsa boats on the sea with the candles in them.

I thought of the tsunami footage I’d seen from Indonesia and other places, the footage of when the enormous waves hit, before and during and after. First the water fell back from the beaches, almost seemed to be sucked back—the tide went way, way out and the water looked almost gone. I’d seen old footage of kids playing there, kids playing on a beach with the water receded. Just sucked back so the whole beach looked empty.

And then the huge wall of water approaching.

And the kids, a minute later, just gone.

As if they’d never been.

When Xing said eggs, she meant turtle eggs. We had to lift them out of the artificial sand dunes where they were buried and pack them into lined baskets.

The adult turtles themselves paid no attention to us while being loaded onto carts by burly guys who seemed to know what they were doing. It took four of these guys to move each turtle, though, and they were straining and heaving as they lifted them—some of the turtles were as big as tables.

Xing said the turtles didn’t guard their eggs anyway, they just ignored them—unlike some of the nearly extinct birds the camp also tended, which would come screeching and flapping at your face and even attack with beak and claws if you went near their nests.

But the turtles, Xing explained to me as we loaded up eggs as quickly and carefully as we could, were hands-off parents. In golden days, when there were lots of them, they just left their eggs on beaches and swam away again—hundreds and thousands of miles away, in fact—which was one reason they were easy to drive extinct. Hungry people would come collect the eggs after the turtles swam away, to either eat or sell them.

She was telling me this and I was thinking of Sam. I was thinking of the kids playing on the beach, of the turtles that left their eggs, just trusting to the world that nothing bad would happen to them.

But you couldn’t trust the world.

Not anymore.

I thought of Sam, and how I was all he had now.

And I had left him on the beach.

I wouldn’t be here except for him. I’d be in the resort right now, grieving obediently, taking my pharms and saying my affirmations.

I wasn’t sure how that made me feel.

But at the front of my mind was the stark fact that I didn’t know how to get to him. I didn’t have the faintest idea. For all intents and purposes I was lost. I didn’t have my bearings on the island; I didn’t know where I was and I didn’t know where he was in relation to me. Were they evacuating the hotel? Where to? Did they have a safe place for all those hundreds of contracts and other guests, in case of a tsunami?

I had to ask. I knew there was a storm looming and I had to do what I was told, but I couldn’t let it go. So while we carried the baskets out of the camp—walking as carefully as we could but still moving at a pretty good clip, through this path in the jungle that Xing seemed to know better than I thought she would—I started bugging her again with questions I wasn’t supposed to ask.

“Xing, I know what we’re doing is important. I know it’s not in the same—that it’s more than just about one person, like me or Sam or anyone. I do. But he’s my brother and I’m just—I’m so worried. Being right on the beach—when the wave comes—how are they going to save them from the tsunami? The people at the hotel? There are so many! Where will they all go? And how’ll they get there in such a short time?”

She didn’t say anything for a while. She was bustling ahead of me, and there were more people in front of her, carrying metal cases I thought maybe were full of tech, or power equipment, or something. The cases looked heavy.

“My guess,” she finally said softly, and I had to move closer, right up behind her, to hear her better, “is they’re not going anywhere at all.”

“What?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. I had to keep myself from hitting the baskets against the branches sticking in close to us. “What did you say?”

“I’m not a hundred percent certain. But I’m about ninety-nine. Saving lives isn’t what they do at Twilight. Is it?”

“No . . .” I said hesitantly.

“My guess is there’s a pecking order in emergencies. The choppers and the safe zone likely go to the service managers—the higher up, the more likely they are to get a seat. That’d be my guess. Nat, the resort capacity is something like two thousand. That’s two thousand guests and maybe eight hundred staff. And from what I saw on the helipads, I think the place has a total of three choppers.”

“So what—so you mean . . .”

Someone said something behind us, barked out an order though I didn’t hear what it was, and we all stood back to let them pass. It was a line of people carrying babies in carriers strapped to their chests and backs. The babies seemed to be sleeping—just sleeping as they were carried.

Those tiny humanoids were perfectly able to sleep, even as they were marched at top speed along that rugged path.

The last in the line was Aviva, and she smiled at me quickly as she went past, one baby hanging on the front of her and another in back. They looked so funny with their bouncing, froggy little legs drooping out of the packets they were sitting in. The chubby legs, with the limp feet hanging from them, jiggled in the walking rhythm of the grown-ups carrying them.

I was distracted from my worry for a second. Small people are comical. I found myself hoping that I would get to be with them more, get to know them, even. They were a good kind of mystery; there was something about them I’d never seen anywhere else. They looked at you and knew nothing about you, but they seemed to know something.

“What I’m guessing,” said Xing, when the babies and their keepers were vanishing up ahead and we could start walking again, “is most of the employees, the low-down ones like our friend LaTessa for instance, and the regular guests? My guess is they’re sacrifice.”

I walked the rest of the way trying not to freak out or cry, not even able to wipe the tears of confusion from my eyes when they spilled out because my hands were holding the baskets. I’d been so mad at Sam last time I saw him, I’d blamed him for my parents dying—completely unfair, I knew that, and now he was in danger. Not only in danger—he was going to be hit by a tsunami. And it was my fault because I was older, and I was supposed to take care of him, and I hadn’t even succeeded for one goddamn
hour
after my parents died. I’d failed him right away. I’d failed him completely.