7

DANIEL DRAGGED HIS JETSKIP OUT OF THE water. It was late afternoon now, the sun nothing but a pale pearl behind a sheet of gray sky. He dragged the skip through the soft mud of the bog, leaving a trail in the mossy grass that pooled with dark brown water swirled with bright yellow-green foam. In the distance he could just make out the silhouette of a building.

Daniel released a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. So far, the old smuggler had not let him down. The gap in the Wall had been where he said it would be. The jetskip had done its job, too, pulling him through the bayou that formed a moat on the Orleans side of the wall. On land, however, the skip was too heavy to carry, but Daniel wasn’t worried. If he hid it well enough in the woods, there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t be safe. Orleans was all but deserted these days, from what he had heard.

A few minutes later, heading southeast, he could see more than just the bulky shadow of the building through the trees. It was odd—one moment, he was thick in the bayou, the next, on a street in the middle of town. He marched through the skinny trees and came out on the edge of a crumbling parking lot. Civilization, he thought, or what passed for it these days.

He switched the definition on his goggles, refocusing on the shape blotting out the rain clouds overhead. The building looked like some sort of storage facility or megastore, with three walls still standing and a chestnut oak growing through the shattered roof. Tide lines marked the brick sides of the building like stone strata in a canyon, showing where the floodwaters rose and left their mark, higher each time, and now streaked with mold so virulent, it left black and green marks like rings around a dirty bathtub. He tromped forward to investigate.

It had been some sort of warehouse after all, with two cavernous rooms inside. The metal doors on the front of the building were still standing, but twisted to the side. The wall itself had tumbled in, a pile of large, dusky bricks, made deeper red by an earlier rain shower. Daniel looked around. The building fronted on a wide street, maybe a highway once, that ran level to the buildings. The pavement was shattered with cracks. Rich mud oozed out between the floes of asphalt, like dark blood on ashen skin.

Daniel went into the room with the tree growing inside. The roof was gone, but otherwise, the space itself was intact. The tree was young by oak standards, but still large enough to take up a good ten feet of the room between its sprawling roots. Daniel scanned the room, but found no sign that anyone had been here in a long time. There was a nook in the tree roots that was large enough to hide the jetskip.

Daniel dropped his duffel and returned to the woods where the skip lay waiting. He took care to carry rather than drag it to the warehouse. His footprints in the carpet of moldering leaves made him nervous enough. A deep groove leading up to the doorway would have raised curiosity in the idlest of passersby, or predators. The city might be dead, but that didn’t mean the woods were.

The last census was taken nearly fifteen years ago, and best estimates put the surviving population in the Delta region at eight thousand, approximately sixty-five hundred in or near the environs of the former city of New Orleans. And that was a generous estimate, given the easy transmission of Delta Fever, the hundreds of other hazards in the damaged city, and the lack of proper medical care. Blood transfusions, a common treatment for the Fever, were notoriously dangerous in the field, where blood could not be spun clean in centrifuges and separated from the plasma. A field transfusion could result in death from fatty deposits, liver damage, and even heart attacks. Daniel doubted the census guesstimates had factored in all of the ways a person could die. Even so, eight thousand people—that was less than a full football stadium, less than the student body of his university, and he had avoided hanging out with most of them rather easily. Navigating the empty streets of Orleans should be simple enough.

The New in New Orleans had been dropped after the second chain of storms, when the Fever was at its worst. It had been before Daniel’s time, but he wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was a publicity ploy or a media joke. There had been attempts to re-create New Orleans in the surviving South. Somewhere near Charleston, a private island was sold to the government with plans to relocate the more historical structures, and many of the city’s people. But Hurricane Lorenzo had dispensed with those plans. The first ground-breaking had been interrupted by a hurricane warning late enough in the season to take people by surprise, and the government had pulled its funding. Daniel knew this because the island, now simply known as Folly Island, had been one of the places he and his team were allowed to collect environmental samples. Not quite the same flora as you would find in the Delta, and certainly not the same mix of toxins in the water, but as close as one could get outside of the quarantine zone. It was like a theme park version of the real place, Daniel thought.

He accessed the datalink strapped to his wrist.

INQUIRY: Entered city at coordinates 56 SW 32 NE. Draw map to Institute of Post-Separation Studies from here.

RESPONSE: Feeding coordinates now. Instructions on screen.

Daniel tweaked his goggles again. A red line appeared on the green overlay of the city. The map was hopelessly out of date, but the main features would be the same. Especially for a landmark that important. Assuming it was still there, a cynical voice said inside his head.

The Institute of Post-Separation Studies had been established shortly before the Wall went up. Staffed with scientists willing to dedicate their lives to the cause, the goal of the Institute was to study the closed environment of Orleans—socially and medically. He knew the official charter was to study intergroup relations after the residents were divided into groups by blood type. They had an interdisciplinary goal of understanding social bias and hate crimes—if people divided along medical lines, would race or gender matter?

In the early days, data flowed freely from the Institute to data banks at universities across the States. But by the time Daniel was in school, the information had all but dried up. He was convinced the Institute still existed, in records if not in people. His goal was to mine their data and solve the riddle of Delta Fever.

Daniel’s excitement flared up again. He dragged some vines over the jetskip and shouldered his duffel, relocating its dangerous payload to an inner pocket of his coat for safekeeping. It was risky, traveling with the vials of his fatal virus, even secured as they were in their casing. But it would have been riskier to leave the vials behind where a supervisor or routine inspection might stumble across them, with the virus still in its weaponizable state. With luck, the Institute would have the equipment he needed to continue working. If not, at least the vials would be safe.

Patting the pockets of the weatherproof oilcloth coat he wore over his suit, he found another length of dirty linen gauze and wrapped it around his neck like a scarf. Feeling more like a dime-store mummy than a local with a skin disease, Daniel headed out into the gray afternoon.