Then, one by one, to Carlos’s goggle-eyed stare, Blake tossed the bombs down to Dana.
*
Something had awakened Li, but she couldn’t figure it out. She circled the main corridor of the childcare center. Nothing out of place. She circled the building from outside. Still nothing out of the ordinary.
Until, by moonlight, she encountered one of Carlos’s precious, hand-rolled cigars. All but unsmoked. Lying on the ground. Flattened at one end as though by a broad shoe.
Li whirled about, searching around her for intruders.
*
Long after Eve was finally alone, she stayed in bed. Shivering. Degraded. Ashamed.
“Serve your elders and serve God,” she had been taught.
If God was good, why did serving make her feel so…sinful?
Eve threw off the tangled top sheet. She gargled and brushed and spat, over and over. She showered under scalding hot water, then toweled herself roughly until her skin felt raw.
Still, she felt dirty.
She hated herself—again—for not using the knife she had long hidden under the mattress. Once more she thought about turning the blade on herself. But if she succeeded, the ordeal would only shift to Denise, or Leah, or another girl she had helped to raise. Another friend.
This had to end.
She dressed, sliding the knife into her waistband, her untucked shirt hiding the haft.
*
The disarmed bombs lashed together and sealed inside a black bag, the balloon rig ready to inflate, Blake dared to believe: we’re actually going to pull this off. “Ready when you are,” he said.
Hobbling up the bunker stairs, he had limped worse than Dana. Neither of them wanted to unlace his boot to see how badly he had injured the foot.
While Dana shone her flashlight up at him he flicked off the overhead lamps. By the beam of her flashlight he switched on his own, turned its beam as dim as it would go, and hung the flashlight from his belt. He peeled off the tape between the doors.
“This is it,” he whispered. He turned off his flashlight altogether. Slowly, silently, he opened one of the heavy doors, then stepped outside. He retrieved the balloon rig from where he had set it on the top step, attached the bag with the two disarmed bombs, and took hold of the rig by its hydrogen tank— Failing dismally in his vow not to remember the Hindenburg. To fill even a small balloon with hot air would have taken time they might not have, even if they had been willing to risk the flame giving them away. Helium would have been ideal—if they had had any. What they had was hydrogen, easily split from water.
Quit stalling.
By the ambient light of the compound, he opened the gas valve.
Caught by the wind, the balloon floated off toward the Darwin Sea.
In the darkness, he soon lost sight of the balloon.
*
Handgun at the ready, Li prowled the compound looking for intruders. Since the crushed cigar, she had found nothing. If the ground gave any trace of strangers, she couldn’t tell their footprints apart from hers and Carlos’s. Carlos himself was nowhere to be found.
A hiss!
She spun toward the unexpected noise. Almost at once, the noise stopped.
From behind the childcare center, something large, round, and dark soared into the night sky.
She began firing.
*
Blam! Bla-blam!
“Something’s gone wrong!” Rikki hissed. “We’ve got to help!”
She grabbed her knapsack and jumped onto the bulldozer, priming its engine. Antonio hopped up onto the running board behind her seat. To save seconds, they had left the overhead door open. As she turned from the garage onto Main Street, the shooting continued.
Those weren’t air guns!
With the bulldozer’s blade hoisted as a shield, Rikki couldn’t see straight ahead. Her gaze sweeping from side to side, she struggled to keep the vehicle on the roadway. Crescent Euripides, just rising, seemed to cast more shadows than light. At no more than a walking pace, afraid she would tip them into the ditch and snap a tread—or a neck—the dozer lumbered toward the fence.
“Now,” Antonio yelled into her ear, and she shoved the transmission into idle.
They leapt free just before the bulldozer, coasting forward, rammed the concrete gate. Scrambling to her feet, gritting her teeth, hands pressed to her ears, she dashed from the minefield about to receive the bulldozer’s weight.
But the blast that flung her to the ground came from overhead.
44
The airburst sent Blake tumbling down the bunker stairs and crashing into Dana. Though his ears rang, he sensed a cascade of smaller blasts had followed that huge first one.
Around the floor of the bunker, status lights shone a healthy green. The explosions had been distant enough. The embryo banks and Marvin’s servers remained okay!
Helping Dana to her feet, Blake said, “We have to take out Li.” He couldn’t hear himself speak, but she nodded. Shutting Carlos in the bunker to deal with later, they went looking.
Just within the fence stood the twisted remains of a bulldozer. In silhouette before the dancing flames, holding a gun, stood a woman.
*
Eve clapped her hands to her ears, shrieking in terror. In the childcare center, hundreds of voices joined hers.
She remembered the loud noise when Ms. Rikki was cast out. Liberation Day, Ms. Li called it. But Eve had not been liberated. Quite the contrary.
By the flames at the open gate, she saw Li. And near the bunker, their faces in shadow, two people. Two elders. Neither was tall enough to be Mr. Carlos. Then the strangers began slinking toward Ms. Li.
What horrible thing had the bad people done?
Creeping closer, Eve found something on the ground outside the bunker. Something that did not belong. It went into her waistband, beneath her shirttails, next to the knife.
*
Carlos had all but cut through his restraints when a bone-rattling explosion smashed him into the hard floor. His reflexive spasm snapped
