Anika grinned.
She disappeared under a haze of heat, just focusing on the slap of water against her body ripping away an outer layer of skin.
For fifteen minutes, time stopped.
Roo knocked, and Anika let him in. Kerrie hadn’t returned, but Anika had the bathrobe tied on and a towel wrapped around her hair.
He had a laptop, and balanced on it, a large platter with two plates. “Is mostly bar food up there,” he apologized. “But good bar food.”
Anika’s mouth watered as he set the food on the coffee table. She didn’t wait for permission to start scarfing.
“Sorry to come down,” Roo said. “But I wanted to show you something.”
He opened the laptop with greasy fingers, burger in one hand, and rotated it toward her.
The picture on the screen was fuzzy, but Anika recognized the man’s face anyway. She wasn’t going to forget anytime soon. “I recognize him. The Canadian Coast Guard ship. Gabriel.”
Roo nodded. “Garret Dubuque is his real name, but he had gone by Gabriel in the community for a serious while back then. And the thing about him is, the man been retired a decade.”
Anika looked up from the picture. “What do you mean by retired?”
“That man don’t work for no one anymore. Certainly no Canadians. Everyone I talk to say he’s out.”
“Roo, that is impossible,” Anika protested. “He flew out to that ship. He had us picked up. They imprisoned us for him!”
“He ain’t no state actor. He must have pulled favors and paid people off to make that happen. I also bet no one knows we were picked up. We were never officially on that ship. We never officially got away from it. No one knew.”
Anika put down the remains of her burger, her appetite lost. “Jesus. Roo. Jesus. What would have happened after we docked? What is happening to us?”
“These globes trickling up to the air. U.S., China, Russia, India, Europe, Turkey, all working together to try and find and stop these things.” Roo shook his head in a sort of puzzled wonder. “Gaia launch vehicles getting destroyed. But still these globes are being launched from new places no one knew Gaia owned every few hours, and the globes are gathering in the Arctic air here, over international waters. I’m reading that everyone’s on red alert. Politicians trying to decide whether to launch World War Three up against a company. Today a ‘Friends of the World’ ship rammed a Chinese destroyer trying to board a mist boat, and the Chinese opened fire. Sunk it. And no one knows what to think.”
“And then there’s the nuke,” Anika said. “It was on a Gaia-chartered ship, I assume, as they had those globes inside it. What are they planning with it?”
“Can’t be nothing good,” Roo said. “Nothing good at all.”
They finished dinner in thoughtful silence.
27
Kerrie knocked on the door, and Anika opened it to find that she was standing there with an armful of clothes.
“Thank you.” Anika briefly peeked at the black jeans and plain black tee, oversized wool sweater, socks, and Windbreaker.
“No problem, hon. Sleep well.”
Anika retreated with the clothes back into the bedroom. She put them on top of the dresser and paused to look at the photos. They were in cheap fake-wooden frames, painted black. There was a picture of Vy as a teenager, grinning wildly, on a beach with an American skyline behind her. Chicago? Vy on a boat, beautiful bright blue water sparkling behind her.
Behind those two was a picture of a large gate, snow packed along the bottom. A line of footsteps in the snow led away from a small access door beside the gate. Barbed wire rolled along the top of the gate’s metal spikes, and a grim-looking man in a thick fur hat, rifle slung on his shoulder, stood on the other side of the gate looking blankly toward the camera.
The pixelated quality meant it had probably been snatched from an old camera phone and printed.
Anika looked at the fourth photo and came across Vy kissing a cute girl with green eyes, limp hair, and glossy lips.
Who was this?
She stared at it for a long time, and then finally reached up and faced it down on the dresser, gently.
No. This wasn’t her stuff to meddle with, Anika thought. She was a guest. She set the photo back up.
That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?
Right or not, Anika changed her mind, and faced the photo back down.
Not while she was staying the night, alone.
She turned away, slid the bathrobe off, and crawled into the large bed. She arranged the overstuffed pillows in a circle around herself, as if she were making a nest.
Propped up, the large comforter pulled up to her neck, Anika found a remote to the wall-mounted screen. News programs were now, she saw, covering the “Crisis in the Arctic.”
She’d been hunkered down, away from her phone or any connections. Focused on her own problems. She felt like she was coming up for media air and looking around, now.
This morning the news had broken about the spheres, just as Bish said. Grainy green-hued footage of crates of spheres being packed away as they rolled off assembly lines had leaked to the world at large.
Now came zooming maps of the world, with existing launch points highlighted. And the Arctic Circle bloomed with little red dots.
Navy ships steamed northward at high speed in shaky videos taken by passing ships. And then Anika watched mist boats vomiting spheres, and teams of international peacekeeping forces storming them to put a stop to it.
And then … video of the mist boats blowing up. Anika recognized the jerky movement and perspective right away, and realized this was
Now Lars’s video from the helicopter, jerked around, trying to focus on the destruction.
“This was not an American attack,” a fully uniformed admiral told an interviewer as the screen split. “Our policy for this crisis has been to capture store-holds of Gaia’s devices and prevent further launches.”
Again Anika focused on Lars’s video, and her eyes widened. There she was, for the briefest second, glimpsed out of the corner of the video, leaning against the door and wincing. Green makeup and purple hair and all.
Her own mother wouldn’t have recognized her.
Then Lars was back to the burning ships.
Anika changed to a different news show.
“No one knows what a large mirror could do,” an expert was interviewed as saying. “You can’t just start moving massive amounts of heat around the atmosphere willy-nilly and not expect catastrophic results! What Gaia is doing is dangerous to us all. We can’t have maverick geo-engineering projects.”
Another guest yelled, “Companies have been moving heat around ‘willy-nilly’ for centuries, and when people complained they were told we couldn’t say anything negative about industry or growth. That’s a complete double standard. Dumping heat and carbon is
Anika turned it all off.
She wondered where Vy was, and what she was doing. Then she hoped that Bish had found a place to stay, and wasn’t wandering Pleasure Island alone after all he’d been through.
Halfway through the night she thought she felt someone slide into the bed behind her, breasts pushing softly
