An executive? That was an idea. She wasn’t part of the most senior management, but perhaps she could appropriate one of their privileges.
Kiley left her vehicle at the Maracaibo depot and sprinted to the maglev. The region would soon be bloody, but with a little luck she’d be airborne before it all went bad. For the first time in weeks, she began to relax. A long shower topped her list of things she’d do when she was safe. No, make that a bath. Hot water up to her chin. Quiet music, a bottle of wine. Make that two bottles. She would soak till her skin was as wrinkled as a prune.
The maglev decelerated at the airport and Kiley came out of her reverie. She grabbed the pack with her travel papers and clothing and headed for a private terminal where the NMech jet was fueled and ready. Fifteen minutes later she was pressed back in her seat as the aircraft accelerated. The landing gear bumped as it folded into the belly of the craft, and after a steep banking turn into the sun, they were heading north. Within minutes she and the pilot were cruising at 30,000 feet, destination: Toronto. There she would find cool weather, moist air, no water shortages, and no damn bugs.
Nancy Kiley unbuckled her seat belt and stretched. From the plane’s bar she poured vodka into a tumbler of ice and swallowed half, cherishing the cool burn in her throat almost as much as the quiet roar of the jet. She shut down her commlink. Let her staff, no, make that her former staff, let them deal with the desal plant. For the next few hours, Nancy Kiley would enjoy the solitude of the plane’s small but comfortable cabin and its well-stocked bar.
She freshened her drink and took her pack to the lavatory. There was a shower, large enough to lather and rinse. She drained the glass, stripped, and stepped in. The water was tepid.
Nancy lingered, lathered, rinsed, stepped out of the shower and toweled dry. She poured another vodka, her third. Her clothing was stained despite the self-cleaning nanofibers. No matter. She would buy a new wardrobe in Toronto. She shrugged into clean bra and panties from her pack, along with a fresh tee-shirt and slacks. Nothing fancy, but clean.
Her one nod to fashion was the shoes, a pair of Dolce & Gabbana ballet flats, shoes that she’d carried halfway around the world. Nancy handled them with the reverence reserved for a holy relic. They were comfortable, lace print silk and leather with a tiny version of the distinctive D&G logo worked into the print pattern. Kiley smiled in anticipation. There hadn’t been an opportunity to wear D&G in the Paraguanan scrubland.
Had Nancy Kiley been sober, she might have looked inside the shoe before slipping it on, out of habit, or to admire the fine Italian workmanship. She would have seen the bright yellow amphibian, smaller than the tip of her thumb, enjoying the cool darkness in the toe of her shoe. A sober Nancy Kiley might have found her socks. The material’s tough nanofibers would have repelled the frog’s poison. Even after direct contact, Kiley might have survived were it not for the cracked skin on the bottom of her feet.
The stowaway was a female Golden Dart Frog,
At first, Kiley felt a warm, rubbery sensation. Then pain. The Golden Dart’s toxins offer an unpleasant death, mitigated by hallucinations and by the speed of the poison. A few minutes of agony and disorientation for Nancy Kiley, then oblivion.
When the flight landed in Toronto, the pilot taxied to a private terminal. Once the craft’s engines were silent, he went into the passenger compartment, and halted abruptly. He stared, uncomprehending. His passenger, quite dead, was curled in a fetal position, wearing a shoe on her left foot and clutching her right shoe in a rigid fist. The pilot recoiled in panic, then giggled uncontrollably and recited an old nursery rhyme. “Deedle, deedle, dumplin’, my son John. One shoe off and one shoe on.” He shook his head to clear his thoughts. He had just landed an unauthorized flight carrying a dead body into a foreign country. He subvocalized to ready his flight back to Boston and noted that martial law had been imposed in the larger Caribbean islands and that over a thousand civilian casualties had been recorded in the first few hours of the Great Carib Water Riots.
Jagen Cater stumbled out of the train’s lavatory and took hold of the top of each seat he passed to steady himself until he fell back into his own seat. He closed his eyes in resignation. The face he’d seen in the mirror was jaundiced. The task of urinating had become difficult and what he saw had terrified him. His urine was cloudy with waste. Its frothy presence in the toilet told him that his dialysis device had failed.
Now he understood the exhaustion, the disorientation. All of the symptoms of end-stage renal failure were present: fatigue, confusion, swelling of the feet and hands. No wonder his shoes felt too tight. Even bad breath— hadn’t the conductor shied away from him? Next would come the nosebleeds, the bruising, the bloody stools and urine. His hands and feet would become numb. Walking would be difficult. Confusion would peak just before he lapsed into a coma.
With stoic fatalism he reasoned that the IDD had given him five years of life. If it were his karma to leave the material plane today, then so be it.
Before this day was over, Jagen Cater’s thoughts would turn to the Compassionate Buddha. His invocations would be joined by the prayers of some half million other IDD users—invocations to Jesus, to Allah, to Krishna, to the Great Spirit, to a higher power. All would fall on unresponsive ears.
Eva Rozen’s Cerberus program was implacable and denied their appeals for life, turning the murmured pleas into prayers before dying.
Eight thousand, five hundred, seventy-seven miles east of Jagen Cater, one third of the world’s circumference, a disheveled Eva Rozen paced. She was jittery, her movements awkward. Her hair, normally a tight mass, was tousled. She picked repeatedly at her rumpled clothing, pinching nonexistent bits of lint. For the past two hours, Eva’s assistants, public relations in particular, had tried without success to link to her. Proposals to review, contracts to approve and plans to implement, were ignored. Eva’s thoughts were far from NMech operations.
Her focus was internal. Images below the level of her conscious awareness pressed insistently. Unconscious memories vied with immediate needs. The push and pull of the past, set against the demands of the present, was taking a massive toll on her equilibrium. She couldn’t concentrate. Her arms continued to itch. She was speaking to herself—or was it to an unseen audience? The patter was unintelligible.
For the first years of Eva Rozen’s life, Mama and Papa treated her first as an object of pride and then as one that inspired disdain. The child Eva looked into this mirror and found herself both worthy and contemptible. Her self-loathing grew despite the nurturing she received from her sister. Eva developed survival strategies—aggression and an exaggerated sense of entitlement to bolster a fragile ego. Strike first, lest ye be stricken; strike harder if ye are struck.
For four decades, she balanced antagonism with an unrelenting need for acceptance. She found this acceptance in only three people. The first was her sister, Gergana, who loved and sheltered and comforted the infant Eva and the juvenile Eva. The second person who had accepted her without reservation was Jim Ecco, whose marriage to another Eva facilitated. And she found acceptance from Dana. Eva idealized him as the child she could have been, the life she could have lived, the child she could have borne, until Marta ripped Dana out of her orbit.
The weight of memory, the inexorable pull of longing unfulfilled became unbearable, and the structures that supported her rational mind collapsed. The mechanisms that filtered the bewildering din from the Table of Clamorous Voices were swept away, and with them Gergana’s murmurs of comfort and adoration were lost. The
