whirled, but they were steady inside this circle.
'What are the blighters doing, Dan? What are they? What do they want?'
'We don't know. Despite generations of study, we know grot all. They're not easy to study. Until recently they were hard to even find. There've always been people who thought they were an hallucination, or a neurosis brought on by bad air. Or by planetary contamination of our food.'
'Food? We brought in Earth plants.'
'But they feed on Gaian soil. As we do.'
The roundabout slowed and slowed, and neither of them spun it again.
'Blighters can't be imaginary,' Jenny said. 'What about the ashes?'
'That's the rub, isn't it? But apparently there's something called spontaneous combustion. It's been recorded on Earth. People suddenly burst into flames and burn up, leaving acrid ash. It doesn't fit because blighters cause no flames or smoke, but we humans hate something we can't measure and explain.'
'Like magic,' she said, stepping off the still roundabout.
'Like magic,' he agreed, joining her on the grass.
The late night and the chill were getting to her, aching in her bones, shivering over her skin, especially now they were apart. 'How do you zap a blighter?'
'We sense them coming and instinctively
'So the fixers down south are fixing things, but they need help from Hellbane U?'
'There are rather a lot of blighters.'
'Why so many now?'
'No one knows.'
'No one knows much, do they?'
He laughed, but wryly. 'No.'
She was suddenly exhausted, as much by a sense of helplessness as by the late hour — and that helplessness came from Dan.
'I have to get to bed,' she said. 'I have to go to work tomorrow. Music usually invigorates me, but tonight it wiped me out.'
Without protest, he turned to cross the soccer pitch toward the houses beyond the hedge, but he put an arm around her, and she found it too comforting to resist.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I don't need much sleep. I sometimes forget that normal people do.'
Normal. On the street, beneath the lights, she gently moved away from him, trying to ignore a drag, as if two sticky surfaces were pulling apart. Stuck like two toffees…
'You don't sleep much because of your fixer abilities?'
'The energy of it, yes.' He took her hand, rubbing the knuckles with his thumb. 'There are things that help.'
All kinds of interesting muscles contracted, but she knew — perhaps had always known — that her friend Dan Fixer was too strong a drink for her. Spontaneous combustion.
'You should have gone with Yas, then.'
The streetlight two doors down showed his smile. 'I don't think so.' He raised her left hand and kissed the palm — a lover's move, designed to invite without words. 'Anytime you'd like, Jen. Sleep tight.'
She watched him walk away.
Anytime?
She had only to ask?
She turned and pressed the lock, her exhausted mind staggering around perilous possibilities.
She stumbled up the stairs and fell into bed thinking she'd probably dreamed the whole thing. For that and a bundle of other excellent reasons, she couldn't imagine taking him up on the offer.
3
For a few days everyone spent time on the wall watching the stream of refugees, but then they lost interest There was nothing new to see, it was depressing, and Anglians were growing more worried about their own security. The town was overcrowded, but that wasn't the problem. It was worry about whether they, too, would end up on the road north.
An occasional group of refugees had a citizen in the family and had to be let in. Those people told tales of whole families ashed. Angliacom showed charts and maps that tracked the hellbane wave, though the announcers assured everyone that the fixers down south had everything under control and that the refugees should be able to go home any day.
However, part of the screen constantly showed the warning that refugees must slaughter large animals before leaving. It was presented as a kindness — the animals would lack care and possibly be victims of a terrifying death — but it was, of course, to starve the blighters.
Jenny wondered how many people recognized that. She also wondered how many saw how the news was sugaring everything and sensed the darker truth. Was she the only one to feel she could taste bitter ashes on the wind, who sensed the peril in the earth, thrumming stronger and stronger, coming, coming, coming…
If the starve-them-to-death plan was working, why did the pressure grow day by day?
Attempts to contact settlements near the affected areas either failed or found people frightened and planning to move. Gaia Central was having trouble keeping track of who was where. Just possibly the first settlers had made a mistake when they'd rejected Earth's efficient communication system and strong, centralized government.
Paradise didn't need that, they'd said, but Gaia wasn't paradise anymore.
Tension was making her jumpy and queasy. Drops got her through her workday, but she stayed home at night, watching the screen with her family.
Dan came over once. He checked her out, but said there was nothing he could fix. He looked worried, and she knew then that the way she felt was to do with the blighters. He looked fine, however, and she heard that every night at the Merrie was a wild night.
She decided all that energy might help her and went there after work, but it was nothing like the music night. Dan flared with too much energy, edgy energy that screamed down her nerves and twisted up her spine, giving her a crashing headache. No one else seemed bothered, but she fled for her own salvation, and because she thought Dan might burn himself to ash.
There was nothing she could do.
Or nothing she wanted to do.
She'd caught his eyes on her once. He'd held the moment before looking away. There must be a hundred women ready to have sex with Dan Fixer, especially now, and she couldn't. Not now.
Spontaneous combustion.
Then Polly's baby was born sick. Jenny was at the hospital with some of the others, waiting for the exciting news. She caught a glimpse of the baby being rushed from delivery room to intensive care in a red pod incubator. It looked tired of life already. A word came into her mind. Blight.
A tight-faced nurse came out of Polly's room. Jenny stepped in her way. 'Has the fixer been called?'
'It's not a problem that can be fixed.' The nurse walked away, and Jenny turned to the others.
'There must be something Dan can do!'
Yas gave her a look. 'This isn't a broken bone or a gash, Jenny. You think he walks on water.'
The sharpness of it took Jenny back. 'It wouldn't hurt to ask.'
'If you want to chase him down…'
Jenny controlled an angry retort. 'I do.'
She strode to a wall phone and punched in his code. Nothing. She left a message, then tried Ozzy. Dan wasn't at the Merrie. She tried three other possible places. Nothing, nothing, nothing. If only she had his buzzer code, but that was for official business.
