Talbot hunched in the midday sun, wrenching on the ramada roof that protected the all-important giant prickly pear cactus plants, kept them from receiving too much rain. A brief wind had torn up one side, lifting the transparency that shed rain into the collectors but still allowed Capella’s hot light through to the great, green cactus pads. Occasionally harvested, the pads were ground up into a slimy mixture called mucilage, through which water was filtered to remove toxins.
More than once Talbot had wondered just who, exactly, had first figured out that cactus goo could be turned into a water filter for heavy metals. Whoever it was must have had a whole lot of empty time on his hands: “Hey, Mom! Guess what I figured out today while I was playing with the heavy metals and cactus pads!”
He smiled at the notion and threaded a fastener through a homemade washer he’d cut from old tin. With a wrench he tightened the fastener to the right torque and checked his work.
Not quite as good as new. The transparency had yellowed, and cracks showed where the plastic was eventually going to fail. Brace the roofing as he would for the moment, wind and weather were eventually going to have their way.
He turned at the sound of the bang.
Muffled, it came from somewhere around the tower, or perhaps from one of the shops. Sort of metallic sounding; he wondered if something had been knocked over. Perhaps a sheet of metal? Some container?
No doubt it would be waiting for him to set right when he got back.
He moved his ladder, climbed up, and began retorquing the next fastener.
Minutes later he heard someone desperately calling, “Mark!” and looked up to see Damien running hell bent down between the rows of pepper plants.
“What’s up?” Talbot called, aware that Damien wasn’t slowing.
“The lift broke! It’s Kylee! She’s hurt. Bad.”
For a long second, Talbot stared, his heart dropping in his chest. Dear God, not Kylee.
He leaped down the ladder, calling, “Where is she? How bad?”
“In the cage!” Damien cried. “At the bottom of the lift. I think the cable broke.”
Talbot threw the wrench toward his tool box, extending, running full-out for the towering base of the dome. Damien, always fit, didn’t have a chance of keeping up.
As he ran, a cold fear drove Talbot to run like he hadn’t in years. Kylee . . . Sweet, smiling, too-old-for-her-years Kylee.
Gasping for breath, he shot past the storage sheds, scattering roos in all directions. To his surprise, Rocket was already at the door, making his worried clicking sounds and scratching to get in.
How could he know?
“Hey, buddy,” Talbot called past heaving lungs. “Let’s see, huh?”
He flung the door open; he and the quetzal crowded through.
At the bottom of the lift Rebecca and Su were frantically trying to lever the cage door open with a pry bar.
“What happened?” Talbot called, hurrying across the duraplast floor. But he could see. The cage had hit hard, cable piled around it where it had fallen from above.
“Door’s wedged!” Rebecca cried, as frantic as Talbot had ever heard her.
He didn’t hesitate, but wrenched the bar from her hands. At first sight, the blood seemed to freeze in his veins. Kylee was down, on her side, her blonde hair in disarray. She lay slightly curled, left leg out straight but at an awkward angle. The image of a broken bird flickered in his imagination.
Fitting the end of the bar in the bent door frame, he took a moment to study where it was warped, got his purchase, and threw his weight behind it.
Metal screeched, and with a bang, the door flipped open.
Then Talbot and Rocket were inside. As he bent down over the girl, Rocket’s tongue was flickering over Kylee’s lips in that weird quetzal way that had once so creep-freaked Talbot.
“Easy,” Talbot told the whimpering girl. “We’re here. You’re going to be all right.”
Kylee answered with a mewing sound, her jaws quivering, eyes closed and tear-streaked. Rocket kept making a purring sound, his colors juddering through yellow, black, and bursts of worried blue.
Kylee reached out with a tenuous hand, her fingers tracing the quetzal’s muzzle.
“Where’s she hurt?” Rebecca demanded.
“Looks like her left leg.” Then, bending close, he said, “Kylee. Focus now. Where does it hurt?”
“Everywhere,” she said weakly. “Left side. Oh . . . please . . . Make it stop.”
Talbot swallowed hard. Waved Rebecca back where she and Su were trying to crowd into the lift. “I need something to use for a stretcher. Go! Find it now.”
“But what if she—”
“I’ve got her. Go!”
As the women hurried away, Talbot began feeling along Kylee’s right leg, finding the bone intact.
“Hey, kid. Look at me.” He lifted her head, checking her pain-wracked eyes, her respiration, and heart rate. “I’m going to press on your stomach and sides. It might hurt.”
To his relief, though she winced, he didn’t find the hardness associated with internal hemorrhage. When he carefully straightened her, the scream that tore from her throat was that of a dying animal.
She screamed again when he palpated her left hip.
Trained in combat EMT, he knew what he was feeling; the extent of her fractured hip and upper femur left him reeling.
Rocket continued to flick his tongue along Kylee’s lips, then focused his three-eyed stare at Talbot.
“Broken hip and upper leg,” he told the quetzal. Took a breath, fought to still his own racing heart, and added, “Not good.”
Rocket’s collar flashed out in a sudden band of cold blue, a clicking sounded deep in the creature’s body, and it blew air from the vents behind its back legs and tail.
Rebecca and Su crowded through the door with a large plastic board they used to transport equipment. Yeah, that would do.
“Find me straps,” Talbot called. “She’s got a fractured hip and upper femur. I’ve got to strap her on to get her up the stairs.”
Tie-down straps solved the problem.
Rocket moved back as Rebecca and Su helped Talbot shift Kylee onto the board—the way she shrieked, gasped, and panted broke his heart. Carefully, they secured her. The girl seemed to be drifting from hazy consciousness to inert. Again Talbot checked her pulse, finding it oddly slow.
“You do that?” he asked Rocket, who flashed an orange yes answer through his collar.
“Don’t know how you did, but thanks,” Talbot told the young quetzal. Then he propped the board over his shoulders and lifted. Carefully, he eased his burden out of the bent cage. Damien stood to one side among the crates, his large brown eyes panicked.
Kylee whimpered, air catching in her throat.
“Damien,” Rebecca called. “Go find Dya. Tell her what’s happened. But just because it’s an emergency, I want you to take extra care out there, hear me?”
Damien nodded, and like a shot he was through the door.
“Rebecca, take the litter’s bottom. Help me on the way up the stairs,” he told the woman. “I don’t want to jar her against the sides or railing on the way up.”
“We’ve got her.” Su told him as Rebecca steadied the back of the board.
Talbot looked up the stairway where it curled its way upward around the dark inside of the tower.
“Just like boot camp,” he told himself, and started up the stairs.
By the time he made the top, Talbot had come to the conclusion he wasn’t the same man he’d been ten years ago. But, stagger and pant as he might, he’d made it.
Legs like fire, he humped his load into the solarium where Su leaped to pull the plants off that same table they’d laid him on that first day.
With tender care, Talbot laid Kylee onto the tabletop, shrugged out of the straps, and once again, waited to catch his breath.
Kylee looked unearthly pale, her eyes flickering behind delicate lids. Rocket, perched high on his back legs, had his claws set in the tabletop, his three eyes fixed with worry.
“We need a CT,” Rebecca told him. “Su, you and Mark, get her pants off.”
As Rebecca hurried off to her lab, Talbot used the scissors to cut away the homespun fabric. The bulge in Kylee’s left hip made him grit his teeth. He could see blood beginning to darken beneath the delicate skin of her buttocks.
Just pray that her colon, intestines, and bladder aren’t ruptured as well.
Then Rebecca was back with the handheld CT. Dialing the resolution down to fine, she extended it. Slapped it hard to get the screen to work, and made a slow survey of Kylee’s left side.
Looking over Rebecca’s shoulder, Talbot bit his lip as the image displayed a dislocated femur, the ball and neck snapped off. Kylee’s hip had broken through the socket leaving the bone in three distinct pieces.
“Oh, dear god,” Su whispered, dropping to one of the chairs and shaking her head.
“That’s . . . bad,” Rebecca said softly, her eyes losing focus.
On the table, Kylee tried to shift and cried out. The agonized sound she made literally made Talbot’s bones ache.
“What have you got for pain?”
Rebecca’s mouth worked. She swallowed. “A potion made from blue nasty.”
“The narcotic?”
She nodded.
“Get it.”
Talbot laid a hand on Rocket’s quivering shoulder, saying, “We’re going to get her something for the pain. It’ll knock her out for a couple of hours. But you’d better know, it’s serious.”
Rocket flashed an orange yes, never taking his eyes from Kylee’s.
Rebecca was back. From a jar, she used a thin rod to take a dab of the paste-like contents. Working it past Kylee’s lips, she placed it on the girl’s tongue, then carefully resealed the jar and washed the rod.
Within moments, Kylee’s breathing deepened and her expression went slack.
“What’s next?” Talbot asked.
Rebecca just stared, eyes seemingly fixed on an impossible distance. “I . . . don’t know.”
“That kind of a break? She’s going to need surgery. This is way beyond stitching up cuts.”
Rebecca’s expression pinched. “I don’t think the injury is fatal.”
“Fatal?” Talbot snapped. “Here. Look at me. Focus.”
He took her head, swiveling it to stare into her stunned brown eyes. “Even if it’s not fatal, Kylee—our Kylee—will never walk again. Do you understand?”
Rebecca, holding his stare, nodded slightly. “But what can we do?”
“There’s a surgeon in Port Authority,” Talbot said. “Dr. Turnienko.”
“We can’t do that.” Su dropped her head into her hands where she sat in the chair. “They’ll know about us. They’ll come here.”
Talbot took a calming breath. “What if we go to them? I mean, what if I go. Take her there. We’d just be another two Wild Ones.”
“How would you get there?” Rebecca asked, a brittleness behind her eyes.
“Take one of the aircars. I heard about the spare power pack in the refrigeration room. I looked the cars over, the Beta unit looks to be in the best shape.”
“You can fly an aircar?” Rebecca asked. “You know how?”
“I’m a marine. Before that I trained on one when I was a teenager.”
Rebecca, expression lined, had her gaze fixed on Kylee. “This is a big decision. We all have to discuss this. It will change everything.”
Talbot pointed. “That’s Kylee! Damn it! If she survives, she’ll never walk again. Spend the rest of her life in horrendous pain. Unless you plan on drugging her.”
“But to take her to Port Authority? To The Corporation?” Su was shaking her head. “They killed my husband! I swore they’d never find me again.”
“Port Authority isn’t The Corporation anymore. Clemenceau is long dead.” Talbot spread his hands, pleading.
Su lifted her tear-filled dark eyes to meet his. “You said Talina Perez is one of the rulers there.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Who do you think executed my Paolo?”
“And won’t they arrest you as a deserter?” Rebecca asked in wooden tones.
Talbot rubbed his forehead. “Hell, they may not even recognize me. And so what? You see that little girl? She’s mine. You all made me part of the family. Made me a husband, right? If I have to sacrifice myself to save Kylee, I’ll do it. Just like I’d do it for Damien, Tuska, Taung, or any of the kids.”
He glared hard into Rebecca’s stony eyes.
“The answer is no,” Su declared. “You talk about sacrifices? Maybe it’s Kylee who has to sacrifice for the rest of us. Rebecca, Kylee knows as well as you do that sometimes one of us has to give up something to keep the rest of us safe.”
“Safe?” Talbot countered. “Mundo Base is falling apart around your ears. Kylee’s here because the lift cable broke. Where the hell was the safety brake?”
“Rondo took it off. Used it to clamp two broken trusses together under the dome floor. The weld broke in a high wind a while back. He was going to weld it, but was killed before he could get to it.” Rebecca winced. “We just sort of forgot about it.”
Talbot nodded. Hell, he spent his days trying to keep the place in repair. “It’s time to face facts. From here on out, everything we eat, study, or work on up here has to be carried up the stairway. That’s a huge inconvenience. Now you tell me that some of the structural framework for the dome is damaged? How long since anyone has inspected it?”
Rebecca shrugged.
The sound of pounding feet preceded Dya’s arrival. Panting, she burst into the room, grabbing up Kylee’s hand, asking, “Baby? Dear God, what happened?”
Talbot stepped over, reading the terror in her eyes. “She’s sedated. It’s bad, Dya. Broken pelvis and femur. Maybe more.”
She glanced at him, tears welling. “Can we cast it? Put her in traction of some sort?”
“She needs surgery. To have the bones pinned.” Rebecca said, walking up to put her arm around Dya’s shoulders.
“Talbot wants to take her to Port Authority,” Su said bitterly. “I say no.”
Dya reached down, running her fingers over Rocket’s head as tears leaked down her cheeks. “Port Authority? Take her to those monsters?”
“They have a surgeon, Dya.”
“You took a CT right? Let me see the image.”
When Rebecca handed it to her, Dya bit off a cry—and her desperate gaze turned to Kylee.
Rebecca said, “Better to kill her now than to let her live like this.”