themselves, now it's our turn.' Whitsett turned to him. 'I stayed on, after the Maze. I used to be a counsellor before, so I helped other people cope with what happened to them down there – to try and slow down the suicide rates, sort of. I first got to know Buddy back then, before he decided to head somewhere south of Mexico with that helicopter of his. And what about you?'
'It was either go one way and try and find my way through a war zone, or head the other way and get on the boat. Then, like yours, my augs turned rogue a little while back, so I had to lie low.'
Whitsett nodded sympathetically.
'If you don't mind my asking,' said Kendrick, 'how did you get here without having to go through the usual checks?'
'Private flight, arranged through a company part-owned by a Labrat. It bypasses the usual channels.'
'Anyone I know?'
'Well – remember Roy? Roy Whitman?'
'Yeah, sure I remember him.'
'You worked together, right?'
'Buddy worked for him,' Kendrick corrected Whitsett, 'back when he was running all kinds of shit across the US border, both ways. I just sort of… tagged along a couple of times, hoping to pick up a good story.'
Whitsett glanced at him quizzically. 'You're still writing?'
Kendrick shook his head. 'Hardly at all. I'm lucky just to have the funds to keep going this long without working, but that won't last for ever.'
'But you can't get the work, because nobody wants Labrats around them. Times are getting hard for all of us.'
Kendrick shrugged. 'I suppose I should take comfort in knowing that I'm far from being the only one with this kind of problem.'
Whitsett smiled. 'Consider yourself lucky. Things are a lot worse in some parts of America than they are here.'
'I wouldn't be so sure of that. But you didn't come all this way just to see me.'
'No, there's other reasons. Mainly, though, Buddy's surprised he hasn't heard from you.'
'I remember, you said that. Maybe the question is why did he feel the need to send you when he could have just asked me himself?'
'Like I said, he's busy. But he needs your help.'
'He could have called me.'
'It took a little time to track you down. You hid yourself pretty well.'
Kendrick allowed himself a small smile. 'Looks like I didn't do a thorough enough job.'
'But Buddy's speaking to you now – through me. Los Muertos know about the visions.'
'Bully for them.'
'Don't underestimate Los Muertos. They're a lot more dangerous now than they were even a few years ago.'
'Come on,' Kendrick protested. 'They're falling apart.'
'Fragmenting, but not getting weaker. They've split in two. One faction considers itself effectively a religion, the other is… a little more proactive. They both see us as a danger.'
'Look, you know I see things? And I'll admit it's quite something, the idea that I'm not alone in this. All that tells me, though, is that our augs are screwing with our heads.' Kendrick chuckled. 'I mean, what's new about that? But what I really don't understand is why anyone would be interested in the specifics.'
'You can't overlook the fact that the more fundamentalist factions of Los Muertos believe that they gain something from the visions they can experience themselves, once they get close enough to the Maze. You witnessed it yourself, didn't you? Buddy told me about your trip into the jungle. What you don't seem to understand is that we're all seeing the same things, all of us – everyone who survived Ward Seventeen, specifically.'
Kendrick laughed and shook his head. 'That's impossible.'
'I can tell you what you saw: a tiny boy with wings like a butterfly. I can tell that just by looking at your face.'
Kendrick felt his face grow hot. 'So what? Even if that was true – and I don't necessarily admit it – what difference would that make to me?'
Whitsett shrugged. 'We were invited. They must have spoken to you too.'
'Who's 'they'?'
'The Bright.'
Kendrick forced himself to calm his breathing. It had been a long time since he had heard that name. 'The Bright aren't real. They're just a product of the imagination of someone who became deranged through US- sanctioned medical procedures.'
'Nevertheless they exist. They are real.'
'And Buddy wants to talk to me about this stuff?'
Whitsett took a different tack. 'There were four of you, right? You, Peter McCowan, Robert Vincenzo and Buddy Juarez. You were isolated in the Maze and something happened. Something passed between the four of you.'
'All right, I can't deny we were kept isolated together,' Kendrick conceded.
'And that's when Robert first started speaking of the Bright?'
Kendrick sighed. 'I told you, Robert was crazy.'
'Was he?'
Kendrick looked away and didn't answer. 'A lot of strange things happened back then. Sometimes it's hard to be sure what was real and what wasn't.' He looked back at Whitsett. 'And Buddy's decided the Bright are real?'
'They are real,' Whitsett replied with surprising fervour. 'The Bright are offering us a way out, a way to escape. But in order to achieve that, we have to get to the Archimedes.'
'The Archimedes? Do you have any idea how nuts this all sounds? How would you even get up there, anyway?'
'Launch company run by a guy called Gerard Sabak, sort of your entrepreneur-industrialist type. He was among the batch that came after us, still stuck in Ward Seventeen when we were dumped in the lower levels. He has a majority partnership in the company, and they specialize in running orbital flights for tourists and industry people, stuff like that. He's putting everything together, but a lot depends on whether or not we can avoid outside interference.'
'Right.' Kendrick was impressed, despite himself.
'Look, don't you ever want to get away from the crap we've had to put up with? Like not to have even the good guys chasing after you because, just walking around in the streets, they're scared you'll turn into a nanotech plague on legs? Of course you would.'
'I'm not denying that,' Kendrick replied, feeling angry now. Perhaps Buddy had lost it, started a cult like Los Muertos out there in the jungle, worshipping the ruins of a military base and the machine intelligences that lurked in every molecule of its lightless corridors. 'But the fact is that we have to find ways to cope and stay alive right here in the real world. And even if you could, what would be the point of going up to the Archimedes? Assuming you actually managed to survive the runaway nanotech infesting that thing, you'd be giving the wrong people an even bigger excuse to blow it – and yourself – out of the sky.'
Whitsett looked out over the water for what started to feel like a long time. Then he turned back to Kendrick. 'Look, maybe I need to talk to Buddy. If you really had shared the same experience as the rest of us, we wouldn't even need to have this conversation. You'd know.'
They had stepped nearer to the water's edge. The hull of a cargo ship loomed nearby, water lapping gently at its rust-corroded hull.
'Look,' Whitsett said suddenly, 'here's an idea. Maybe we-'
By the time Kendrick saw the speedboat it was too late.
He'd been staring out towards the water while the other man spoke. Whitsett had been facing towards him, his back to the water, so that Kendrick was looking over his shoulder at the sea.
The speedboat must have come from around the other side of the cargo ship moored nearby. He had been
