Distress

prospect of a million people pouring out of the city was beginning to fill me with dread. The greatest disasters of the last fifty years had all been among refugees fleeing war zones. Maybe it would be smarter to take my chances playing Russian roulette with the shells.

I knew the last room was a suite, the mirror image of Mosala and De Groot's; the architectural symmetry of the building demanded it. The cloned pass key signature unlocked the door—but there was a chain keeping it from opening more than a crack.

I called out, loudly. No one answered. I tried using my shoulder—and bruised myself badly, to no effect. Swearing, I kicked the door near the chain—which was twice as painful, almost splitting my stitches, but it worked.

Henry Buzzo was sprawled on the floor beneath the window, flat on his back. I approached, dismayed, doubting that there'd be much chance of getting help amid all the chaos. He was wearing a red velvet bathrobe, and his hair was wet, as if he'd just stepped out of the shower. A bioweapon from the extremists, finally taking hold? Or just a heart attack from the shock of the explosions?

Neither. The bathrobe was soaked with blood. A hole had been blasted in his chest. Not by a sniper; the window was intact. I squatted down and pressed two fingers against his carotid artery. He was dead, but still warm.

I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, trying not to scream with frustration. After all it had taken to get Mosala off the island, Buzzo could have saved himself so easily. A few words admitting the flaw in his work, and he'd still be alive.

It wasn't pride that had killed him, though—screw that. He'd had a right to his stubbornness, a right to defend his theory, flawed or not. He was dead for precisely one reason: some psychotic AC had sacrificed him to the mirage of transcendence.

I found two umale security guards in the second bedroom—one fully dressed; one had probably been sleeping. Both looked like they'd been shot in the face. I was in shock now—more dazed than sickened—but I finally had enough presence of mind to start filming. Maybe there'd be a trial, eventually, and if the hotel was about to be reduced to rubble, there'd be no other evidence. I surveyed the bodies in close-up, then walked from room to room, sweeping the camera around indiscriminately, hoping to capture enough detail for a complete reconstruction.

The bathroom door was locked. I felt an idiotic surge of hope; maybe a fourth person had witnessed the crime, but had managed to hide here in safety. I rattled the handle, and I was on the verge of yelling out words of reassurance, when the meaning of the chained front door finally penetrated my stupor.

I stood frozen for several seconds, at first not quite believing it—and then afraid to move.

Because I could hear someone breathing. Soft and shallow—but not soft enough. Struggling for control. Centimeters away.

I couldn't let go of the handle; my fingers were clenched tight. I placed my left hand flat against the cool surface of the door, at the height where the killer's face would be—as if hoping to sense the contours, to gauge the distance from skin to skin by the resonant pitch of every screaming nerve end.

Who was it? Who was the extremists' assassin? Who had had the opportunity to infect me with the engineered cholera? Some stranger I'd passed in the Phnom Penh transit lounge, or the crowded bazaar of Dili airport? The Polynesian businessman who'd sat beside me, on the last leg of the flight? Indrani Lee!

I was shaking with horror, certain that a bullet would pierce my skull in a matter of seconds—but part of me still wanted, badly, to break open the door and see.

I could have broadcast the moment live on the net—and gone out in a blaze of revelation.

Another shell exploded nearby, the shock wave resonating through the building so powerfully that the frame almost flexed itself free of the lock.

I turned and fled.

* * *

The procession out of the city was an ordeal—but perhaps never more than it had to be. From my snail's- eye view of the crowd, everyone looked as terrified, as claustrophobic, as desperate for momentum as I was—but they remained stubbornly, defiantly patient, inching forward like novice tightrope walkers, calculating every movement, sweating from the tension between fear and restraint. Children wailed in the distance, but the adults around me spoke in guarded whispers between the ground-shaking detonations. I kept waiting for an apartment block to collapse in front of us, burying a hundred people and crushing a hundred more in the panic of retreat—but it failed to happen, again and again, and after twenty excruciating minutes we'd left the shelling behind.

The procession kept moving. For a long time, we remained jammed in a herd, shoulder-to-shoulder, with no choice but to keep step—but once we were out of the built-up suburbs and into the industrial areas, where the factories and warehouses were set in wide expanses of bare rock, there was suddenly space to move freely. As the opaque scrum around me melted into near transparency, I could see half a dozen quad-cycles ahead in the distance, and even an electric truck keeping pace.

By then we'd been walking for almost two hours, but the sun was still low, and as the crowd spread out a welcome cool breeze moved in between us. My spirits were lifting, slightly. Despite the scale of the exodus, I'd witnessed no real violence; the worst I'd seen so far was an enraged couple screaming accusations of infidelity at each other as they trudged along, side by side, each holding up one end of a bundle of possessions wrapped in orange tent fabric.

It was clear that the whole evacuation had been rehearsed—or at least widely discussed, in great detail— long before the invasion. Civil defense plan D: head for the coast. And a planned evacuation, with tents, with blankets, with solar-rechargeable stoves, didn't have to be the disaster, here, that it might have been almost anywhere else. We were moving closer to the reefs and the ocean farms—the source of all the island's food. The freshwater arteries in the rock could be tapped with relative ease, as could the sewage treatment conduits. If exposure, starvation, dehydration and disease were the greatest killers of modern warfare, the people of Stateless seemed to be uniquely equipped to resist them all. The only thing that worried me was the certainty that the mercenaries understood all of this, perfectly. If their aim with the shelling had been to drive us out of the city, they must have known how relatively little misery it would cause. Maybe they believed that selective footage of the exodus would still be enough to confirm the political failure of Stateless in most people's eyes—and with or without scenes of dysentery and starvation, there was no doubt that the position of the anti-boycott nations had already been weakened. I had a queasy suspicion, though, that merely evicting a million people into tent villages wouldn't be enough for EnGeneUity.

I'd transmitted the footage from Buzzo's suite, along with a brief deposition putting it in context, to the FBI and to the security firm's head office in Suva. It had seemed the proper way to let the families of the three men hear of their deaths, and to set in motion as much of an investigation as was possible under the circumstances. I hadn't sent a copy to SeeNet—less out of respect for the bereaved relatives, than out of a reluctance to choose between admitting to Lydia that I'd concealed the facts about Mosala and the ACs… and compounding the crime, by pretending that I had no idea why Buzzo had been assassinated. Whatever I did, I was probably screwed in the long run, but I wanted to delay the inevitable for a few more days, if possible.

Some three hours' slow march from the city, I caught sight of a multi-colored blur in the distance, which soon resolved itself into a vast patchwork of vivid green and orange squares, scattered across the rock a few kilometers ahead. We'd just left the central plateau behind, and the ground now sloped gently down all the way to the coast; whether it was that modest gradient, or the end of the march coming into view, the going seemed suddenly easier. Thirty minutes later, the people around me stopped and began to pitch their own tents.

I sat on my suitcase and rested for a while, then dutifully commenced recording. Whether the evacuation had been rehearsed or not, the island itself collaborated with the refugees so fully as they set up camp that the process looked more like the smooth slotting into place of missing components in an elaborate machine—the logical completion of a function the bare rock had always implied—than any kind of desperate attempt to improvise in an emergency. One tear-sized droplet of signaling peptide was enough to start the cascade which instructed the lithophiles to open a shaft to a buried freshwater artery—and by the time I'd seen the third pump installed, I'd learned to recognize the characteristic swirl of green-and-blue trace minerals which marked the sites where wells could be formed. Sewerage took a little longer—the shafts were wider and deeper, and the access points rarer.