Pills and Starships (29 page)

It was LaT.

“The rest of them are just guests. She’s the only corp staff,” said Sam. He was beside me now. I hadn’t even noticed he was there, what with staring at them.

“Hey, I’m surprised you didn’t bring Rory,” I said, making a weird and lame attempt at humor. I must have been nervous, and it was a shock to see her there, since she was what we were escaping from.

I was also thinking how exposed the camp would be to bugs, with these new people here—the more people, the more vectors. That was what they always taught us on healthface. Even before we were old enough to read on face we had to recite it, practically in our cradles:
Hug strangers, bug dangers
. Then I reminded myself of what Xing had said: the bug danger wasn’t as big as they always told us it was.

Still, I wondered if Kate would let them stay.

“At first we didn’t have a choice, we
had
to let LaTessa come,” said Sam. “She clung to us, tagging along. We were just running and soaked and scared and the winds were coming up and it was chaos. And then we hid out in this little hut she knew about, a ways back from the hotel, this little hut made of stone that was really old and built more solidly, into a hillside. Back toward the snorkeltank where we went on the fieldtrip. She helped. She actually led us there.”

“LaT. saved you?”

“She pretty much did. And we talked a little, during the storm. You should hear where she came from. Her whole family was wiped out, she was starving for a while and she had a bad sickness that almost killed her, and when she got better she tried a lot of things before she took the corp job. Things that were way worse, for her. Things that can . . .” He shook his head as though he didn’t know what to say, and then moved on. “But she’s tough and she survived. In the end, you know, she was just making a living the best way she could. She’s not so bad since she dropped that corp act.”

He sounded sad, and I thought again how much older his voice was. He was way past fourteen.

“You did good.” I reached out and squeezed his arm. “You’re here! I’m so proud of you. I’m—I’m so happy. I was really scared.”

“Not as scared as I was,” he said.

“And I’m sorry I was so harsh to you about—what happened. To Mom and Dad. I felt so bad later—”

“No, there’s nothing you should say sorry for. Don’t sweat it, Nat. I just knew we didn’t have time to talk. Or even think. It was life or death for us too.”

We watched as Kate and Xing handed out water and blankets to the refugees and then led them back into the trees to rest. Before long, someone was going around giving them shots.

Apparently they were staying.

For hours after that, as the sun crossed the bright blue sky, we worked on fixing up the camp.

The adults and other experienced people did the most complicated stuff—the work to connect hoses to drain the water out, for instance, or get the frame of the Quonset draped so it was protected, or hook up the face and weather tech again. Sam and I and even some of the refugees, the ones who weren’t still collapsed from fatigue in sleeping bags under the trees, did the grunt work. We went wherever we were told—we carried tent poles from place to place and set up tents, piled soil into planters to try to save some of the potted trees, collected fruit that had fallen in the orchard so that it could be salvaged.

I was psyched—we were getting real things done and the camp was coming back to life. I felt useful. We would jog across the clearing with the stuff we were carrying and yell out questions and comments, me and Xing and Sam and Keahi and Mano—we were getting to know each other as we worked.

I’d never worked with other people in the flesh like this. Not really. We had momentum, like some kind of dance.

All of a sudden I was exhilarated.

This was what life was like, I thought, among the people, outside the complex, apart from my face—in the open air! This was what it would be like to spend my time with actual human beings around me.

But as I was kneeling in the orchard with Sam, the knees of my pants muddy and soaking wet, piling mangoes into a crate and laughing at something he said, I heard that sound again.

It wasn’t a good sound.

It was the
chop-chop-chop
of the black dragonflies.

We gathered under the trees—they regularly held drills to practice for flyovers, so everyone but Sam and me and the storm refugees knew what to do. We copied what they did as best we could.

The problem was, the storm had knocked out a lot of the camo so the camp’s exposure was way worse than it would have been a day before. We shrank back into the trees so we were surrounding a clearing that mostly looked empty, but we probably hadn’t gone fast enough, Keahi said—our usual sentries weren’t posted because they were on cleanup and animal care and various other storm-related duties, and the tech that would normally have warned them of a flyover was still being set up.

And so the choppers went overhead, and the noise of them dopplered away,
chop-chop-chop,
and you could almost be relieved, if you were me.

But just when it seemed to be fading, it whirred closer again. This time, as they came over, I saw things sticking out of the doors of the chopper on both sides, pointing down.

Then the choppers were past, again.

“So what was
that
?” I asked Sam.

Keahi, who had been beside him, dashed off then and was zigzagging through the trees and people toward Kate, who was talking to the guys in headsets that seemed to be her right-hand men, or whatever.

“I think they were zooming in,” said Sam. “They were surveilling, trying to figure out if there are people alive here.”

Off to my right I saw Kate was telling Keahi something, and he nodded, and then I noticed some other guys were splitting off into these positions along the jungle edge, hunkered down beside boulders, one of them right near us. It was Mano kneeling there, at our boulder, and then the boulder itself was being pushed—it must have been hollow or something because otherwise it would have been too heavy to move.

Mano pushed it aside and there beneath it, stuck into a hole in the ground, was what looked like a kind of big telescope to me, a long thing like a pipe on a tripod.

“It’s probably some kind of anti-aircraft gun,” said Sam. “Projectile-firing thing. They’re old-fashioned wartime weapons with terrible footprints. It must only be for severe emergencies.”

The
chop-chop-chop
got louder again and this time the helicopters came in from another direction, swept up the length of the camp instead of flying across it. They were on the other side of the clearing from us, luckily, moving along from the right to the left, and the middle one dropped something into the trees. I saw pink clouds rising, clouds of pink billowing out over the trees.

“Oh no. Shit,
shit
,” said Sam. “That must be a nerve agent. A gas, Nat! Shit! They must be doing a sweep. They want to make sure no one’s left. If they drop it on this side we’re—”

And then we all had to fall onto the ground and cover our heads—that was what people were yelling at us to do, though I couldn’t hear them, actually, I just did what they did. I heard these loud explosions, one-two-three. The noise was so loud I couldn’t hear anything after that because it had been so close to my ears. Everything was quiet and I was afraid I was deaf, but then the deafness passed and sound came back again.

I glanced up and saw one of the helicopters burst into flames. It wavered to and fro and crashed into the trees. And then the second one was turning around and around, out of control, making me a little queasy even to watch it, until it swung out of sight and a few seconds later we heard the crash from that too, though we didn’t see any flames. Right away some of the people from the camp headed over to where it had gone down.

But the third one was too swift or smart, I guess, and it swerved up and away, higher and higher and out toward the sea until it was a dot, and then just like that, incredibly fast, it was gone.

They held a meeting after that—they blocked off the sites of the crashes because those areas were dangerous. Of course no one went near where the pink clouds had been; the gas lingered awhile, Sam found out, and if you came into contact with it the effects were horrifying. Shaking and convulsions, and after that you died. Your throat closed and you couldn’t breathe.

So we stayed in safe places and the elders went into their meeting.

I asked Xing why they just dropped them in the trees, and she said they’d probably thought we were hiding there, and they would have come back and gas-bombed the side where we actually were hiding, next. It was pure luck they hadn’t chosen our side
first
. That gave us time to retaliate. And now the problem was the remaining helicopter, and the report it would take back to the corps.

That report had already been sent in, she said.

And they knew we were organized and even armed, so we’d have to leave and find a new camp. Up till today, Xing told me, they hadn’t known there was Resist here at all. But now they did.

It was probably going to be a high priority for them, dealing with us, because they didn’t like it when their choppers got shot down. They didn’t like it one bit.

So all the work we’d done to restore the camp after the Six was for nothing, because now we had to leave again.

And this time we couldn’t ever come back.

I felt torn up at first, hearing that, because I’d been picturing living in
this
place, this beautiful valley with its fruit trees and greenery. I already felt something for it—I’d already been relying on the idea that it was my home now.

The good news was, they’d planned in case of this, and there was another site already picked out, a backup location. We shouldn’t be too alarmed, said Xing, it wasn’t bad, they’d tended it for a while.

But we’d still have a lot to do. We’d have to race against the clock.

Until the black dragonfly came back.

The elders didn’t take long—everything happened fast here. There’s never been time to waste, at least not since I arrived.

They mapped the way to the backup site and everyone was assigned tasks. Mano gave Sam and me our own wristfaces and a brief tutorial on how to use them—just the basic functions, he said, what the colored alarms meant, and how to send and receive messages.