UnWholly

Then the security guard comes up behind Roberta and manhandles her out the door.

•   •   •

Roberta is relegated to the greenroom until the interview is over and they cut to commercial.

The guard, still on “intruder alert” mode, won’t let her pass. “I have orders to keep you out of the studio.”

“I am going to the restroom!”

She pushes past him and bolts for the studio door. Both Risa and Cam are gone, and the next guests are being miked.

Avoiding the guard—who Roberta knows is fully prepared to tranq her—she turns down a side hallway to the dressing rooms. Risa’s dressing room is empty, but Cam is in his. His coat and tie are strewn on the ground like he couldn’t wait to peel out of them. He sits before the vanity with his head in his hands.

“Did you hear what she said about me? Did you hear?”

“Where is she?”

“Head in the sand! Turtle in its shell! Leave me alone!”

“Focus, Cam! She was on the stage with you. Where did she go?”

“She ran. She said it was over, that she was history, and she ran down the emergency stairs.”

“She will be history when I’m through with her.”

Roberta takes the emergency stairs down. They’re on the second floor, and the only place for Risa to go is out into the parking lot, which is mostly empty at this time of night. She can’t have had more than a fifteen-second lead, but she’s nowhere to be seen. The only person around is their driver, who leans against his limo, eating a sandwich.

“Did you see her?” Roberta asks.

“See who?” he answers.

And Roberta’s phone starts ringing like it will never stop.

75 • Cam

Roberta returns from her unsuccessful search for Risa. Cam meets her in the greenroom, where two security guards now wait, eager to escort Roberta out. She’s on the phone, already in the throes of damage control.

“Antarctica,” Cam says. “I should have said something out there, but I froze.”

“What’s done is done,” she says, then growls at a dropped call. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’ll meet you at the car,” Cam tells her. “My stuff’s still in the dressing room.”

The guards solemnly escort Roberta out of the building, and Cam goes back to the dressing room. He puts on his sports coat and carefully rolls up his tie, putting it in his pocket. Then, when he’s sure Roberta has left the building, he says, “It’s okay, she’s gone.”

The closet door opens, and Risa steps out. “Thank you, Cam.”

Cam shrugs. “She deserved it.” He turns to look at her. She’s breathing rapidly, as if she’s been ru

“Not right away,” she tells him. “But yes, they will be.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” Although she doesn’t look at him when she says it, like maybe she thinks it somehow is. Like his very existence makes him guilty.

“I can’t help what I am,” he tells her.

“I know . . . but today you showed me you can help what you do.” And then she leans forward and kisses him on the cheek. He feels it like an electric shock in all the seams of his face. She turns to go, but he can’t let her. Not yet. Not without saying—

“I love you, Risa.”

She glances back at him and offers nothing more than an apologetic smile. “Good-bye, Cam.”

And she’s gone.

It’s only after she leaves that the anger begins to rise in him. Not just a spike, but an eruption, and there’s nowhere for it to go. He takes the chair and hurls it against the vanity mirror, smashing it. He hurls everything that’s breakable against the walls and doesn’t stop until the security guards burst in on him. It takes three guards to restrain him, but still he’s stronger. He has the best of the best in him—every muscle group, every synaptic reflex. He tears free from the guards, bolts down the emergency exit stairs, and meets Roberta in the limo.

“What took you so long?”

“Solitude,” he says. “I needed some time alone.”

“It’s all right, Cam,” she tells him as they drive away. “We’ll get past this.”

“Yes, I know we will.”

But he keeps his true thoughts to himself. Cam will never accept Risa’s good-bye. He will not let her disappear from his life. He will do whatever it takes to have her, to hold her, to keep her. He has all of Roberta’s resources at his fingertips to get what he wants, and he’s going to use them.

Roberta smiles at him reassuringly between phone calls, and he smiles back. For now Cam will play the game. He’ll be the good rewound boy Roberta wants him to be, but from this moment on, he has a new agenda. He will make Risa’s dream come true and take down Proactive Citizenry piece by bloody piece.

And then she will have no choice but to love him.

Part Seven

Landings

Our country is challenged at home and abroad . . . it is our will that is being tried and not our strength.

—P

RESIDENT

J

OHNSON

on Vietnam and the school campus war protests, 1968

I have every faith that this devastating national conflict shall be resolved, and that the accord between both sides shall also serve as an ultimate solution to the feral teenage problem. But until that glorious day, I am instituting an eight p.m. curfew for anyone under the age of eighteen.

—P

RESIDENT

M

OSS

on the Heartland War, two weeks prior to his assassination by militant New Jersey separatists

76 • Dreamliner

In Southern California, far south of the glitz of Hollywood and far east of the suburban sprawl of San Diego, lies an inland sea as forgotten and as unloved as a state ward AWOL or a harvest camp stork. Hundreds of thousands of years ago it was the northern reach of the Sea of Cortez, before that sea even had a name. But now it’s little more than a giant landlocked salt lake, slowly drying into desert. Too saline for vertebrate life, its fish have all died. Their bones cover the shores like gravel.

At ten minutes to midnight, a plane once heralded as the dream of aviation before it was replaced by newer dreams descends toward the Salton Sea. It is flown by a young military pilot with far more confidence than experience. Barely clearing the mountains around the lake, the jet comes in for what airlines ridiculously call “a water landing.”

It does not go well.

77 • Starkey

No seatbelts, no seats. No way to brace themselves for a crash landing. “Lock your elbows together! Hook your legs around each other,” Starkey tells them. “We’ll be one another’s seatbelts.”

The storks obey, huddling, locking limbs, turning themselves into a tangled colony of flesh and bone. Sitting on the floorboards, no one can see out the windows to know how close the lake is—but then Trace comes on the intercom. “About twenty seconds,” he says. Then the angle of their descent changes as he pulls up the nose of the jet.

“See you on the other side,” Starkey says, then realizes once more that it’s something you say when you’re about to die.

Starkey counts down the last twenty seconds in his head, but nothing happens. Was he counting too fast? Did Trace misjudge? If this is twenty seconds, then they’re the longest of his life. Then it finally comes—a jarring jolt, followed by calm.

“Was that it?” someone says. “Is it over?”

There’s another jolt, then another and another, each one coming closer together, and Starkey realizes the plane is skimming like a stone. On the fifth skim, a wing dips, acting like a rudder that pivots the plane to a diagonal, and suddenly it’s the end of the world. The Dreamliner begins to flip end over end, turning cartwheels against the unforgiving surface of the lake.

Inside, the mob of kids is launched from the floorboards and pulled apart by centrifugal force, thrown in two separate clusters to either end of the main cabin. The hooking of arms actually saves many of them, as they’re cushioned by the bodies around them, but those on the outside of the tumbling crush of kids—those acting as the cushions—become the sacrifices. Many of them are killed as they’re slammed against the hard surfaces of the Dreamliner.