Burning Paradise

But she thought of her parents as she had last seen them. Murdered, though they were guilty of no crime but the possession of unauthorized knowledge. Her own life distorted, Thomas’s future in doubt… It wasn’t revenge she wanted (though she wanted that too: yes), it was justice. But justice would come at a price. Inevitably. And persons other than herself might be forced to pay it.

On the radio the local stations were playing villancicos: Christmas carols. Los peces en el río. Hoy en la tierra. Ahead, as the afternoon shadows lengthened, Dowd’s van began to slow. They were close to the border now, and they needed a place to stay for the night.

Back in his Kansas garage, Dowd had thrown open the rear doors of the dusty white van and smiled like an impresario. Cassie, peering into that windowless metallic enclosure, had seen what looked like a piece of hand-wired radio gear about the size of a shipping trunk. Leo said, “That’s it?”

“You don’t know what you’re looking at,” Dowd said. “I don’t understand it myself. But it was your daddy who delivered it to me. Your daddy did a lot for me. Bought this garage for me to work and live in. No charge, as long as I was willing to be a soldier when the time came. He delivered this piece of equipment just last summer. Keep it here, he says, and when you get the cue, take it and yourself down to Antofagasta for a meet-up. You showing up, that was the cue. Time to go.”

“All right,” Leo said dubiously. “What’s it do?”

“By itself it doesn’t do anything. It’s part of something bigger. You’re not the only soldier in the army, your daddy told me. Other folks’ll be coming with other kinds of gear. Pieces of a puzzle. Best if you don’t know anything about that. What you don’t know, you can’t tell. But it’s a weapon—part of a weapon. He was pretty clear about that.”

“Doesn’t look like a weapon.”

“I trust your daddy’s judgment,” Dowd said, smirking. “Don’t you?”

They rented two rooms in a Chula Vista motel where fan palms stood like liveried doormen between the swimming pool and the highway. Dowd and Beth took one room, Cassie and Leo and Thomas the other.

Thomas slept on a roll-out by the door. Cassie and Leo shared the double bed. Thomas was a heavy sleeper, fortunately, and Leo turned on the room’s radio at low volume to disguise any other sounds. Noche de paz…, some choir whispered. Todo duerme en derredor.

It was the first time they kissed. It was the first time Cassie touched Leo, the first time she allowed herself to be touched. An exploration, she thought. The exploration of Leo. His mouth tasted of ci

In the morning they gathered in Dowd’s room for a pla

“I’ve got ID for myself and a commercial permit for transporting radio gear,” Dowd said, “so I’m good for the border. You all have identification you haven’t used yet, so use it today. Beth can ride with me. But it’s too dangerous to cross in a stolen vehicle, even with new plates and a paint job. So we ditch the car and you guys buy yourselves bus tickets, San Diego to Tijuana. We’ll meet up at the depot on Avenida Revolución. Leo, you still have that pistol you shot a guy with?”

Leo gave Eugene Dowd a cold stare. Beth must have told him the story. “Yes.”

“Give it to me.”

Leo didn’t move, though his eyes darted to the green duffel bag he had carried all the way from Buffalo.

“Come on,” Dowd said. “What are you go

“What if I need to protect myself?”

Beth, standing next to Dowd with a proprietary hand on his arm, said, “You should listen to Eugene. He knows about these things.”

Leo scowled but retrieved the gun from his bag and handed it to Dowd, who checked the safety before tucking it into the waistband of his jeans.

“One other thing,” Dowd said. “I know your daddy gave you my Kansas address, and he told me I should watch out for you if you showed up. That’s fine. That’s part of the deal. But he didn’t say anything about her,” Cassie, “or him,” (Thomas). “And I’m not real happy about looking after children on this junket, especially when we have a few thousand miles of the Trans-American Highway ahead of us.”

“They don’t need you to look after them,” Leo said. “They’re with me.”

“Well,” Dowd said, “leaving them behind isn’t safe either, considering they’re wanted criminals. I suppose we could shoot them.” He smiled to show this was meant as a joke. “But once we’re in Mexico you might fix them up with a little hacienda and a cash stake for the duration. Safer for all of us.”

“No!” Thomas said before Leo could answer.

“Didn’t ask your opinion,” Dowd said.

“They’re with me,” Leo repeated, “at least until I can talk to my father.”

“Yeah, well…” Dowd shrugged. “The next mail drop’s in Mazatlán. I guess they can tag along that far. But then this business gets serious. Everyone clear on that?”

They were all clear.

At the San Ysidro crossing a bored customs agent strolled down the aisle of the Greyhound bus asking desultory questions and examining papers. Cassie sat with Thomas, and for the purpose of the crossing they were brother and sister en route to visit their uncle in Rosarito Beach. The guard gave their documents a cursory look—the Common Passport Accord had made this a formality—and moved on. Neither Cassie and Thomas nor Leo a few rows back, appeared to arouse his suspicion.

The bus idled a little longer in a cloud of diesel fumes, then grunted into motion. Cassie listened to nearby passengers chatting in in Spanish as they passed under the Port of Entry gates and crossed the brown Tijuana River. “You going to Rosarito?” a woman asked her as the bus pulled into the station on Avenida Revolución. “I heard you say.”

Cassie stood to shuffle out, taking Thomas by the hand. “Rosarito, yes.”

“Very nice! Feliz navidad!”

Rosarito, no, she thought. No, we’re not bound for Rosarito Beach. We’re bound for Antofagasta, Chile. We’re bound for the Atacama desert. We’re bound for the end of the world.

20

“WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO INTERCEPT THEM in Sinaloa,” Werner Beck said. “Failing that, we’ll meet them in Antofagasta.”

He had explained about Chile, about the facility the hypercolony had supposedly constructed in the Atacama desert, the beams of high-intensity light. He hadn’t seen it himself, but he had talked to an eyewitness, and there was plenty of corroborating evidence: from shipping manifests, from suppliers of industrial parts and rare earths, from inexplicable lacunae in the routes by which commercial aircraft passed from Chile to Bolivia and Brazil. Beck had made a study of it.

The facility in the desert, he insisted, was the hypercolony’s reproductive mechanism. Strike there and you strike at the heart of the beast. Or at least, Nerissa thought, its balls.

Ethan seemed convinced. Nerissa wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. What was important was that she might at last be able to put her arms around Thomas and Cassie and shelter them from Beck’s militant fantasies.

While Ethan was showering she sat in the kitchen with Beck and raised a question that had been troubling her. It was about what the sim Winston Bayliss had said, that there was a parasite at work in the hypercolony, that the hypercolony was divided against itself. Could that be true? If not, why had Bayliss been attacked in Ethan’s farm house by a different party of sims?