Vortex

“Typical…”

“So—tonight?”

Or we could move to a different table, Sandra thought. Or just keep our voices down. She didn’t suggest it, however, because it was possible Bose was using this as an excuse to see her again. And she wasn’t sure how to interpret that. Was Bose a colleague, a collaborator, a potential friend, maybe even (as Mrs. Wattmore no doubt suspected) a potential lover? The situation was ambiguous. Perhaps exciting for that reason. Sandra hadn’t been involved with a man since she broke up with Andy Beauton, another State physician who had been fired in last year’s downsizing. Since then, her work had eaten her alive. “Okay,” she said. “Tonight.” She was reassured by the smile he gave her. “But I still have an hour on lunch.”

“So let’s talk about something else.”

About each other, as it turned out.

They laid out their life stories for inspection. Bose: Born in Mumbai during his mother’s ill-fated marriage to an Indian wind turbine engineer, raised there until the age of five. (Which explained the ghost of an accent and his manners, just a touch more genteel than the Texas average.) Brought back to Houston for grade school and subsequently imbued with what he called his mother’s “well-honed sense of injustice,” he had eventually qualified for police training at a time when HPD was in a hiring frenzy. He talked about himself with a sense of humor that struck Sandra as unusual in a cop. Or maybe she had been meeting the wrong cops. In return she gave him the pocket version—to be honest, the carefully edited version—of Sandra Cole: her family in Boston, med school, her job at State. When Bose asked about her choice of career she mentioned a desire to help people; she didn’t mention her father’s suicide or what had happened to her brother Kyle.

The conversation evolved toward triviality as they lingered over coffee, and Sandra left the restaurant still unsure whether she ought to treat this as a professional exchange or a boy-girl size-up. Or which she wanted it to be. She found Bose at least superficially attractive. It wasn’t just his blue eyes and teak-colored skin. It was the way he talked, as if he was speaking from some calm and happily reasonable place deep inside himself. And he seemed equally interested in her, unless she was overinterpreting. Still… did she need this in her life?

Not to mention the inevitable gossip that would ensue in the parched social universe of the State Care staff. Nurse Wattmore beat her back to work by half an hour, time enough to spread the word that Sandra had been lunching with a cop. She got a set of knowing glances and half-smiles from the nurses at Reception. Bad luck—but Wattmore was a force of nature, as unstoppable as the tides.

Of course, the tide of gossip flowed both ways. Sandra knew that Mrs. Wattmore, a widow, forty-four years of age, had slept with three of the four former ward supervisors. “That woman lives in a glass house,” one of the nurses confided in Sandra when they crossed paths in the staff commissary. “You know? Lately she’s been taking her breaks with Dr. Congreve.”

Sandra hurried to her office and closed the door. She had two case summaries that needed writing up. She gave the folders a guilty look and pushed them aside. Then she took the envelope Bose had given her from her purse and tugged out the sheaf of closely written pages and began to read.

* * *

She was brimming with fresh questions when she met Bose that evening.

This time he had picked the restaurant, a Northside theme pub, shepherd’s pie and Guinness and green paper napkins embossed with pictures of harps. He was waiting when she arrived. She was surprised to find another woman sitting at the table with him.

The woman wore a blue flower-print dress that was neither fresh nor in good repair. She was skinny to the point of emaciation and she seemed both nervous and angry. When Sandra approached the table the woman looked at her warily.

Bose stood hastily. “Sandra, I’d like you to meet Ariel Mather—Orrin’s sister.”

Chapter Six Turk Findley’s Story

1.

There had been moments during my captivity when I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to live or die. If there was any sense or meaning in the life I had lived—from the unforgivable act that had caused me to leave Houston many years ago to the moment I woke up in the Equatorian desert—I couldn’t see it. But now the mindless urge to live came roaring back. I watched as swarms of Voxish aircraft began the systematic slaughter of the Farmer rebels, and all I wanted was to get to a safe place.

2.

From the cart on its hillside we were able to see the treeless plain surrounding Vox Core as it became the scene of a rolling apocalypse. The Farmer armies had already begun to retreat as soon as the sirens sounded. At the first sight of the approaching aircraft they dropped their makeshift pikes and broke formation, but the Voxish warplanes came on relentlessly, skimming over the ranks of their enemies like hunting birds. The weapon they used was new to me: the aircraft projected fiery wave fronts that rolled across the landscape and then vanished like summer lightning, leaving cone-shaped swathes of smoldering soil and charred bodies in their wake. The sound they made was a seismic exhalation, powerful enough that I felt it in my rib cage. The war sirens went on wailing like mournful giants.

Briefly, it seemed as if we might be safe up here on the hill. Then one of the warplanes banked nearby, as if considering us, and the wind carried up the stench of smoke and burning flesh. Our guard detail evaporated, running for the woods, with the exception of Digger Choi, who seemed immobilized. I caught his eye. He was clearly terrified. I held out my bound hands to him, hoping he could interpret the gesture: Don’t leave us tied up like hogs at a slaughter. Allison added a few pleading words in Voxish, barely audible under the general roar.

Digger Choi turned his back.

I called out, “ Cut us loose, you cowardly fuck! ” And although he surely didn’t understand English he stopped and turned back, glowering through his fear. He dropped the latch on the cart’s gate and cut us free with the knife he carried, two hasty slashes, first Allison, then me. The blade bit my wrist but I didn’t care. I was cravenly grateful.

Allison muttered a Voxish word that might have meant “Thanks.” I couldn’t translate the Farmer’s response, but the go-to-hell tone of it was unmistakeable.

Down on the plain the carnage continued. The stink of frying human flesh became nauseatingly dense. Digger Choi turned to follow his friends in their dash for the treeline, but stopped in his tracks when a shadow eclipsed the distant lights of Vox Core. It was one of the Voxish aircraft, directly overhead, flying slow and low. Suddenly there was light all around us, so bright the air itself seemed whitewashed. An amplified voice called out incomprehensible orders in Voxish. “Stay still,” Allison said, putting her hand on my arm. “Don’t move.”

* * *

It was our clothing that saved us—our greasy, bloodstained, road-worn yellow tunics.

The Network had been restored, and if Allison’s limbic implant had been intact it would have alerted the