She remembered being brought home to her adoptive parents’ house for the first time and seeing, among so many other new and amazing things, a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelves in the living room. So many large books, identically bound except for the volume numbers printed on their spines, had naturally drawn her attention. Patricia, Richard’s sister and Zula’s new mom, had explained to her that these contained anything that you could ever possibly want to know, on any topic, and had pulled one down to look up the entry on Eritrea. Zula, completely missing the point, had assured Patricia that she would never on any account touch those books. Patricia had let out a shocked laugh and explained that no, on the contrary, all of those books were there specifically for her, Zula; they and the knowledge in them were, in effect, Zula’s property.
Zula had inherited the set and doggedly lugged it around to a succession of dorm rooms, student flophouses, and studio apartments. Her arrival in the United States had coincided pretty nearly with the advent of full-time high-speed Internet, and she had likewise been encouraged to make free use of that, though it had never been quite the same, to her, as the Britannica.
From the age of eight onward, then, Zula had been raised in an environment that had been all about the free and frictionless flow of information into her young mind. She hadn’t fully appreciated this until she had found herself in this predicament where no one saw any point in telling her anything at all. Traveling with Jones’s band of jihadists, she almost felt nostalgic for the good old days of Ivanov and Sokolov, who had at least bothered to supply explanations of what was going on. Those two had bought into a Western mind-set in which it was important for things to make sense; and, needing the services of Zula and Peter and Csongor, they had been forced to keep them briefed.
Csongor. Peter. Yuxia. Even Sokolov. Whenever her mind went back over those events in Xiamen it snagged on those names, those faces. The mere fact of Peter’s death would have prostrated her for a week in normal circumstances. She was now asking herself a hundred times a day what had become of the others. Were any of them alive? If so, were they wondering what had become of Zula?
What had become of Zula: this would have required considerable explanation, much of which Zula was not competent to supply, since they weren’t telling her much. Circumstantial evidence (the key chain flailing from the ignition) made it clear that this strange truck with tank treads had been carjacked, as opposed to hot-wired. It seemed simplest to assume that the person they’d stolen it from was dead; it would have been crazy for them to leave the victim alive to call the Mounties. What kind of person drove such a vehicle around in the mountains of British Columbia during the mud season? It was quite obviously a working, not a recreational, vehicle and so Zula guessed it must be some sort of a caretaker or property manager. Perhaps that mine was not as abandoned as they had supposed; perhaps a number of such properties were spread around those mountains and they hired a local jack-of-all-trades to look in on each one of them from time to time.
The question on Jones’s mind must then be: How long would it take for his victim to go missing? Because this contraption that they were driving around in was about the most conspicuous vehicle imaginable, short of a Zeppelin, and having five jihadists and a black girl crammed into it was not going to make it any easier to blend in with ordinary traffic on the byways of British Columbia.
At about three in the afternoon, according to the dashboard clock, they stopped at a place where they could look for miles down a mostly barren, rock-strewn valley. A broad stream ran down the middle of it, many braided channels finding their way across an expanse of glacier-dropped stones. Running roughly parallel to the watercourse, on its right, was a paved road that, several miles down-valley, hopped over the river on a low bridge. They were still in the forest; for the last two hours they had been traveling at little better than a walking pace, smashing down any foliage that could not stand up to the truck’s inexorable advance, diverting around any trees that were too large to knock over, sometimes traversing slopes so steep that Zula braced her hands against the ceiling, ready for the truck to roll over sideways, sometimes avalanching down slopes so steep that little could grow on them. The front end of the truck looked like the inside of a lawn mower, covered with inches of mulch and mud. They had approached this place by following the course of a tributary, sometimes driving right down the middle of the stream and sometimes nosing up into the surrounding woods. They had now stopped at the edge of the trees. Before them the ground dropped away sharply, the tributary leaping down a succession of rapids and waterfalls to the place where it joined in with the larger river. The truck might have survived the plunge to the bottom, and had it survived, it might have been able to make it to the road and go a few more miles before running out of fuel. But if, as seemed likely, it got stuck in boulders or wrecked itself during the descent, it would have been marooned in a place that was utterly exposed to view from the road and from the air. Best to leave it here. Or this was what Zula surmised must be going on in Jones’s mind. He shifted it into reverse and backed it deeper into the trees, then killed the engine.
Apparently this was not the first time that the jihadists had camouflaged a vehicle in mountains. Leaving Zula inside for the time being, they smeared mud over all of its windows and mirrors and any other parts that were capable of reflecting a gleam of sunlight. They unloaded some of the gear from the back—just what they could carry under their own power. They foraged through the woods for ferns and huckleberry bushes and cedar fronds, which they uprooted or hacked off, dragged over, and leaned and stacked around the truck’s sides. At some point, they remembered that Zula was still in there, so they extracted her through the cab’s sliding rear window and dragged her back straight to the open tailgate, many hands on her arms and ankles, trying to stifle even the mere thought of fighting or running. Ershut bent over and braced both hands against her right leg, and Abdul-Wahaab wrapped a chain around her ankle and then snapped a padlock into place. She was shooed and chivied back off the edge of the tailgate and onto the ground behind the truck. The chain was looped around part of the trailer hitch.
There followed one of those comical interludes in which the jihadists were confused about what to do next and fell to bitter recriminations.
It seemed that they were short one padlock. At some point during their scrounging activities around the mining camp they had found this length of chain, and at some other point they had found this padlock and the key that went with it. So they could lock the chain around her ankle. Fine. But they were now wanting the second padlock that was needed to connect the other end of the chain to the trailer hitch. Some of them shouted at each other, some of them rummaged aimlessly through all the piles of junk that they had scrounged.
Ershut said, “It’s not a problem, we can do it with one padlock. Look, I’ll show you.”
He said it in Arabic.
Zula understood it.
Interesting.
Other men might have gathered round to see Ershut’s cleverness, but these guys were all pursuing their own strategies. In the back of the pickup was a toolbox, secured with another padlock, and Abdallah Jones was going through the key chain, apparently on the reasonable assumption that it might contain the key needed to open this thing.
Ershut looped the long end of the chain through the frame of the trailer hitch and brought it back to Zula’s ankle. Then he held out one hand and asked for the key to the padlock that was already there. Then demanded it. Then screamed for it. Finally someone slapped it into his hand. He undid the padlock on Zula’s ankle, swung the body away from the hasp, brought up the loose end of the chain, pushed a link over the hasp, then snapped it shut again.
At the same moment Jones dropped to one knee right next to him, holding up an open padlock that he had apparently just retrieved from the toolbox. Seeing that Ershut had already found a one-padlock solution, he dropped the lock on the ground and walked away.
Zula was left with an arm’s length of slack in the loop that secured her ankle to the trailer hitch. A scrap of plastic, a sleeping bag, a bottle of water, and a short stack of MREs were provided before they finished surrounding the truck in camouflage.
At any other time in her life she would have offered more resistance to such proceedings and would have been correspondingly heartbroken when the padlock clicked shut. But slowly growing in her mind was a feeling that the situation was shifting to her advantage. Which seemed an idiotic thing to say given her current situation: ankle chained to a trailer hitch in the wilderness of northwestern Canada, keys in the pockets of suicide bombers.
But she had begun to see hints that cooperation was slowly working in her favor. It was a hell of a lot better being here than in China. She had taken arms and killed that one guy. Killed him. Unbelievable. She had made her survival the linchpin of Jones’s plan, whatever it might be. Everything was different. The jihadists seemed oblivious to this shift.
The wall of camo being built around her grew dense enough that she could barely make out the men’s movements on the other side of it, as they occluded the slits of light that still shone through here and there. She had the horrifying thought that maybe they were actually constructing a huge bonfire and that they were about to burn her alive. But after a while she noticed she could not hear them anymore. They had shouldered their packs, tromped away, and left her alone.
The trailer hitch had become the center of her personal universe. Above was the open tailgate, providing a kind of shelter from the weather. The ground beneath her was a bed of blunt nails, the sheared-off stumps of mowed-down foliage. She devoted some time to kicking at the stalks, shearing them off level with the ground, and stomping them into the earth. Once it had become passably level, she spread the plastic out on the ground and arranged the sleeping bag on top of that, then climbed inside it. The temperature was well above freezing, but the damp chill would kill her in hours if she did not keep moving and working.
You seem to have made quite an impression on Mr. Sokolov. Jones had said that to her, apropos of nothing, the first evening at the mining camp. I couldn’t make out why until you did for Khalid. She’d been unable to make any sense at all of these statements and had put them out of her mind until now.
How could Jones possibly know what Sokolov thought of her? Jones and Zula had spent hours going over the events in the apartment building. Most of this had been him extracting information from her. But from the nature of the questions he asked, she had been able to piece together a reasonably coherent picture of how the battle had gone. It was out of the question that Sokolov and Jones could have engaged in any conversation. And if they had, they would not have been chitchatting about Zula; even in the incredibly unlikely event that Sokolov wanted to talk about her in the middle of a crazy running gun battle, Jones didn’t even know that she existed at that point.
Finally, now, she understood. The answer to the riddle had come to her while her conscious mind had been thinking about other things. Perhaps she’d gotten a clue from the way that Jones had kept an ear cocked toward the squawks coming from the CB radio in the truck. She’d seen a similar look on his face before, on the plane, at the FBO in Xiamen. He had received a call on his phone and whipped it open. His face had lit up with delight, which had immediately collapsed into shock and then settled into some kind of intense murderous fascination.
It must have been Sokolov on the other end of that call. Sokolov had killed, or at least overcome, the men Jones had sent out to murder him, and ended up in possession of one of their phones, and hit the redial button. He had made some kind of a little speech to Jones. And he had mentioned Zula. That had to be it; that was the only time that Sokolov could ever have communicated with Jones.
Why would Sokolov mention Zula in that conversation?
(It took a while to work these things out. But Zula had a while.)
Really that was two questions: first, how could Sokolov have known that Zula and Jones were together? And second, given that he knew this, why would he go to the trouble of mentioning her to Jones during their brief phone conversation?
The answer to the first question was already in her head, and she needed only to pull it up from memory. On the boat, a couple of days ago, after the scene on the pier. Jones interrogating Zula. Zula telling him about the safe house, pointing to the skyscraper, calling out the forty-third floor. And wondering whether in doing so she was sending a message to Sokolov, letting him know that she, or some other member of the group, was still alive. Because if Jones’s men went snooping around on the forty-third floor of that building, it would raise the question: How had they learned the location of the safe house?
As to the second question: Jones had answered it, in a way, with his remark You seem to have made quite an impression on Mr. Sokolov.
What the hell did that mean?
Maybe Sokolov had said to Jones: I hope you kill that conniving bitch! But Zula doubted this. Her interactions with Sokolov had been about as courteous and respectful as it was possible to get in an abductor/hostage relationship. She had felt, in a weird way, as though she were partners with him.
Otherwise, she wouldn’t have done it.
She realized this now. Calling out the wrong apartment number, sending them to 505 instead of 405: this was crazy. Suicidal. No wonder Peter had been furious with her. So furious that his next move had been to abandon her to her fate, leaving her handcuffed to a pipe. Csongor had been as shocked as Peter, but he’d taken her side in the matter because of dumb love. Why had Peter and Csongor been so incredulous at this decision that had seemed so easy, so obviously the correct move, to Zula?
Because Peter and Csongor had not been privy to the almost subliminal exchanges of glances and—not even anything as obvious as glances or words, but hidden signals in postures, facial expressions, the way that Zula, getting on an elevator with a group of Russians, had always chosen to stand by Sokolov’s side. Zula and Sokolov were allies. He would protect her from whatever fate Ivanov had in mind for them. And, sensing that she was under his umbrella, she had felt safe enough to send them to 505 when she knew that the Troll was in 405.
And she could do it again. She had been doing it again, this time with Jones. And part of the way you did it was by keeping your emotional shit together, not kicking and screaming, not suffering emotional breakdowns, showing you could handle it, could be trusted. Getting them used to having you around.
That was why she had relaxed and shown no emotion when Abdul-Wahaab had padlocked the chain around her ankle. A little thing. But a little thing that Jones had noticed, even if—especially if—he wasn’t aware that he was noticing it.
Could Jones really be that easily manipulated? He seemed so smart in all other ways.
I couldn’t make out why until you did for Khalid.
That explained it. Jones was at a loss to understand why Sokolov, his personal bête noire, thought enough of Zula to make her a primary topic of their one brief phone exchange. He had not observed the way that Zula and Sokolov had grown accustomed to each other during the days they’d been together; and even if he had, he might not have sussed it out, any more than Peter or Csongor had. Consequently, ever since hearing Sokolov’s voice coming out of that phone, Jones had been chewing on this, trying to figure out what Sokolov saw in her; and when she had killed Khalid, he had reckoned that this was the answer. He believed that Sokolov’s respect for Zula was rooted in an appreciation of Zula’s fighting spirit or her prowess with weapons or some other such quality: the kind of thing that a man like Jones would suppose that a man like Sokolov would hold in esteem.
And this left Jones wide open. Ready to be blindsided by the same tactics Zula had used with Sokolov. The difference being that in the case of Sokolov they hadn’t been tactics, just Zula instinctively trusting the man. The question now was: Could she bring about a similar effect in Jones’s mind by doing similar things in a way that was utterly calculated and insincere?
“ONE DAY, MY son, all of this could be yours,” Egdod intoned, swooping low over the Torgai Foothills. He was addressing an Anthron—a man, basically—whom he was holding by the scruff of the neck. The Anthron was dressed in the most nondescript possible woolen cloak. Between his bare feet (for he had declined to spend virtual money on shoes or even sandals), the mature coniferous forest of the Torgai streamed by, just a few hundred meters below.
“Far be it from me to question your database,” the Anthron replied, “but I still don’t see—”
“There!” Egdod called out, banking into a tight turn and spiraling down toward an outcropping of basalt. “Just at the base of those rocks.”
“I do see a fleck of yellow, but I assumed it was a patch of eälanthassala,” said the Anthron, easily wrapping his tongue around the hexasyllabic name of the sacred flower of the montane branch of the K’Shetriae.
“Look again,” Egdod said, and he shed altitude until they were poised only a few meters above the “fleck.” This was now revealed as a mound of shiny yellow coins. “I’m going to drop you.” He did so.
“Heavens!” exclaimed the Anthron, then landed on his feet and fell awkwardly onto his arse, creating little gold-coin avalanches.
“If your character had better Proprioception—which you could get by spending some of your Attribute credits, or by sending him off to undertake certain types of training, or by drinking the right potion—he would have landed a little more adroitly and rolled out like a paratrooper instead of taking minor damage to his butt, as yours just did,” Egdod said, sounding a little peevish for a creature of nearly godlike status. For this newly created Anthron had been absurdly stingy with his Attribute credits and still had most of them hoarded in reserve where they were doing him absolutely no good.
The burst of gibberish left the Anthron utterly nonplussed.
“Never mind,” Egdod said.
“Who are those creatures coming out of the trees, over yonder?” the Anthron asked, turning his head to the left. Egdod—who was invisible to everyone in T’Rain except for the Anthron—spun in midair to see a pair of Dwinn marauders headed straight for them. One heavily armed and armored cataphract, unslinging a crossbow, and one mage, clad only in robes, but protected by a swirling nebula of colored lights: force field spells that she had thrown up to protect herself from random slings and arrows.
“You could see the answer for yourself if you had spent some of your Attribute credits on Perceptivity,” Egdod groused, and lost altitude until he had positioned himself directly in the path of the incoming crossbow bolt.
“I can’t see!” the Anthron complained.
“Oh yeah—you’re the only person in the world to whom I am opaque,” Egdod said. He turned around to face the Anthron. “Check it out.”
“Oh my word, you’ve been shot!” For Egdod actually did have a crossbow bolt projecting from the general vicinity of his liver. But as the Anthron watched, the bolt was spat out by the wound it had made. It flipped backward for about a meter and stuck in the grass. By the time the Anthron’s eyes had traveled back up to the wound, it had healed, leaving behind a pink scar that was rapidly fading. “A little trick I picked up about a thousand years ago,” Egdod explained. “Hold on a sec while I deal with these guys.”
“Deal with them?”
“I could incinerate them just by looking at them funny,” Egdod said, “but then they’d know that an extremely high-level character was running around the Torgai, and word might get around. So I’m going to do it the way a lower-level character might.” Egdod turned back toward the interlopers, raised his hands, and uttered a phrase in a dead classical language of T’Rain.
Almost. “You used an incorrect declension of turom,” the Anthron complained.
“It doesn’t seem to have reduced the effectiveness of the spell,” Egdod returned. The meadow between them and the two Dwinn was sprouting a crop of spears. Helmeted heads emerged next, and then the armored bodies of turai, which, in Classical T’Rain mythology, were fast-spawning autochthonous warriors analogous to the spartoi of Greek myth. The Dwinn mage was already waving her hands in the air trying to cast a spell that would throw the turai into confusion and possibly even cause them to attack one another, but there were too many of them and it was too late; the Dwinn had no choice but to retreat into the woods, pursued by the dozen or so turai who had proved resistant to the mage’s spell.
“Okay, let’s get this done,” Egdod said, “because this kind of thing is going to happen over and over again as long as this pile of gold is just sitting here for the taking.”
“Get what done, exactly?” the Anthron asked, standing there knee-deep in specie, clueless to a degree that was somewhere between funny and outrageous.
“Pick up the fucking money and put it in your bag,” Egdod said. “Or just shift-option-right-click on the whole pile.”
“Shift … option … is that some sort of computer terminology?”
“Just hold your horses. I’m coming over there.”
“I thought you were here.”
“In the real world, like.”
RICHARD TOSSED HIS laptop aside onto the mattress and swung his legs down off the edge of the Bed That Queen Anne Had Slept In. Its massive frame of pegged timbers gave out a groan almost as if Queen Anne were still in it now. He rose to his feet and gave his blood pressure a moment to equilibrate, then stalked across the room. Which took a bit of stalking. Other bits of England might be cramped, crowded, and cluttered, but only because all the available space had been claimed by this guest suite. It was situated right in Trinity College, and Richard guessed it had been laid out eight hundred years ago so that noble guests could ride their horses directly into the bedchamber and bring all of their squires and wolfhounds with them too. D-squared was standing with his back to Richard about three hundred feet away. The place lacked television and central heating, but it did have a massive stand surmounted by a four-inch-thick Bible signed by the Duke of Wellington. D-squared had set up a laptop of his own atop the Good Book and was hunched over it, peering and pecking.
During the short drive in from the FBO at Cranfield, Richard had ordered the driver of his black taxi to swerve to a halt in front of the first computer store. The sales clerk, eager to be of service and to make sure that Richard ended up with a machine he’d be happy with, had been solicitous to a fault until Richard had finally got it through the man’s head that he had way more money than time and could they please get on with it. Five minutes later, Richard had strode out the door of the place and climbed back into the taxi carrying the new laptop (he had left its empty box sitting on the store’s counter and a trail of plastic packaging material all the way to the exit) and a boxed set of DVD-ROMs containing the Legendary Deluxe Platinum Collector’s Edition T’Rain software with Bonus Materials. The computer had finished crawling through its interminable boot-up as they were skirting Bedford, and he had jammed in the installation disc somewhere around St. Neots. The bemused cabbie had dropped him off at the Porter’s Lodge of Trinity when the installation progress bar was creeping along around the 21 percent mark and so Richard had just carried the machine in on his hip and kept it perched there, whirring and clicking and trying to force thunderous T’Rain sound track music through its tinny little speakers, as the bowler-hatted staff had dryly greeted him and escorted him to his cavernous lodgings. It was ten in the morning or something. Richard had found his way to the suite’s toilet, which was located somewhere in Oxfordshire, and showered and shaved, then fed another disc into the computer, napped for a couple of hours, enjoyed a liquid lunch with D-squared, and then brought him back here to teach him the rudiments of T’Rain.
“Like this,” he said, reaching in over the Don’s arms in a manner that all but forced the poor man to jump out of the way, and seizing control of the keyboard. Then Richard did the thing that always pissed him off when Corvallis did it to him, which was that he manipulated the keys so fast that it was impossible for any normal person to understand what he had just accomplished. But D-squared, used to having people do things for him, was unruffled. He was far more interested in what had happened to all that money.
“The gold!” he exclaimed. “Where did it all get to? Did those Dwinn take it?”
The accusation was laughable. Far more important, though, was the look on the Don’s face, which was just a bit provoked, and his tone of voice, which could only be described as avaricious.
Good.
“No,” Richard said, “you took it, and put it in your poke.”
“But how could I possibly carry so much gold in that wee bag?”
“That’s the whole point of a poke. It’s magic. Enables you to carry a ridiculous amount of VP and thereby enhances our profit margins like you wouldn’t believe.”
The Don nodded. Even he knew that VP stood for Virtual Property.
“But that is not the point,” Richard went on. “The point is as follows.” And he turned away and hiked back over to the bed. This took long enough that a little band of Var’ skirmishers, almost offensively Bright, had time to scuttle out of the trees to investigate the strange phenomenon of a solitary Anthron, newly created and hence of essentially zero powers, unarmed and unequipped—unshod, even—just standing there like an idiot in possibly the most dangerous region of all T’Rain. It was so uncanny that they were approaching him with a kind of superstitious awe.
As well they might, for Richard, after using certain of his powers to verify his suspicion that they were carrying a lot of money, zotted the whole band into pink mushroom clouds.
“Richard, I’m surprised at you; I didn’t think you were going to stoop to such methods!”
“I’m trying to make a point. I blew them away so fast that they didn’t have time to Sequester any of their belongings.”
“What in heaven’s name does that mean?”
“It means we get to steal all of the VP that they were carrying. Go and pick up all the gold that’s lying on the ground. And while you’re at it, why don’t you grab yourself some fucking shoes?”
“Are you suggesting I loot corpses!?”
“I know. What would Queen Anne say?”
“I’ve no idea!”
“You can take your laptop off that Bible first, if it makes you feel any cleaner about it.”
“No need. I gather this sort of thing happens all the time, in T’Rain.”
Richard resisted the temptation to say people make their livings off it.
Once D-squared had at last solved the user-interface problem of how to pick stuff up and put it in his poke, and had caused the Anthron to loot all the gold, plus some Boots of Elemental Mastery and a Diadem of Scrying that he took a fancy to, Egdod grabbed him (the Anthron, that is) by the scruff of the neck again and flew him, with a velocity that the Don described as “faintly sickening,” about halfway around the planet to visit a moneychanger who, being situated almost at the antipode of where all the action was, was offering fast service and good rates.
It was possible to interact with an MC verbally, and thereby remain “in-world,” which was equivalent to an actor remaining “in character,” but the impatient Richard diverted the Don to a user interface window replete with medievally styled buttons and pop-up menus. “You want to make a Potlatch to Argelion. It’s the third checkbox down on the right.”
“The god of mammon and lucre!?”
“You know perfectly well what Argelion is.”
“I should have thought so! But I recall nothing about a Potlatch! Why, that is a concept from Pacific Coast Indian tradition! Such a thing has no place in—”
“It is one of those things that we added to the world so long ago that we forgot it wasn’t your idea,” Richard said. “We can argue about it during dinner, if you like. Half of those guys at High Table are probably playing T’Rain in secret; they’ll enjoy hearing your thoughts on why Potlatches are bad. But for now, if you would just click on the friggin’ box…”
“All right, I have done so. And now new things!” The Don said this in the wondering tone that he always adopted when confronted by unexpected dynamism in a user interface. “‘One-quarter, one-half, three-quarters, all. Or enter an amount.’”
“Giving you options as to how much of your gold is going to Potlatch,” Richard explained. “Click ‘All.’”
This suggestion only triggered the same miserly tendencies that had caused the Anthron, until recently, to spare himself the expense of footwear. “No! All of that gold!? It’s just going to disappear?”
“From the game world,” Richard said. “Just please do it. If you’re unhappy with the results, I’ll get you more.”
The Don, looking scandalized and beleaguered, clicked ‘All’ and then hit the ‘Potlatch’ button. Then he sighed. “Easy come, easy go.”
Richard did not answer for a few moments, as he was busy logging out. “Okay,” he said, closing his laptop, and resuming the journey to the Bible stand. Next time he stayed here, he’d bring roller skates. “I’m going to need your credit card again.”
“Why!?” the Don exclaimed, as if this was exactly what he’d been worrying about.
“The same one you used to set up the account. Please.”
By the time Richard got over there, D-squared had worried the card out of what looked like Queen Anne’s wallet and handed it over. Richard flipped the card onto its face, pulled out his phone, set it on Speaker, and then dialed the customer service number printed on its back.
A lovely British voice came on, introducing them to the root of a branching tree of automated service options. Richard navigated to “Check recent transactions” and then punched in D-squared’s credit card number.
The most recent transaction, according to this disembodied robot on the other end of the line, was a credit in the amount of £842.69, time-stamped about five minutes ago.
“I guess you owe me a drink,” Richard said to the openmouthed and bulging-eyed face of the Don, “because you are now eight hundred quid—you call them ‘quid,’ right?—richer. Thanks to that little escapade.”
“That was the Potlatch?”
“Yes. Money disappears from T’Rain, as a burnt offering to Argelion. It never comes back. But that’s just a cover story that we have set up to enable players to extract hard currency.”
“I see!”
“I believe that you do see, Donald.”
“I had known, of course, that such transactions were possible in principle—”
“But there’s nothing quite like having money in the bank, is there?”
“I believe I just might buy you a drink, Richard.”
“And I would happily accept. But what I would really like to do, while we are hoisting that pint, is to talk to you about what might happen in the next couple of weeks to the other three million dollars’ worth of gold pieces that are just lying there on the ground. Free for the taking.”
ZULA ATE AN MRE, stuffed the empty tray into the tangle of camouflage that had been erected around the truck, burrowed into her sleeping bag, and went to sleep faster than she had thought possible. She dreamed of China: a disconnected and rearranged version of Xiamen that incorporated bits of Seattle and the Schloss and the cave bunkers of Eritrea. It made perfect sense in dream-logic.
She woke up once to a deeply troubling sound that she identified, after a few moments, as the howling of wolves, or perhaps coyotes. Then she was stuck awake for a long time. She ate another MRE, supposing that a full stomach might do her some good. This did not seem to help especially. She was paying, now, for the ease with which she had slipped into sleep earlier. After a while, she gave up any hope of sleeping again and just tried to make herself comfortable. But from the fact that she ended up dreaming later, it followed that she must have drifted away in spite of herself.
The first couple of nights after the thing with Khalid she had not dreamed of it at all, at least that she could remember. But yesterday during the interminable truck ride, she had found herself remembering the moment of those shards being driven into his face by her hands, and the blood, or something, that had been on her fingers after. This night Khalid did come back to her in her dreams, and she devoted some effort to fighting him off. Not physically fighting him but half-consciously trying to erect some kind of psychic defense against ever seeing his image again, sensing that if he appeared in her thoughts during the day and her dreams at night, he would never be gone, she would still be dreaming of him and reliving the moments in the back of that jet in the unlikely event that she lived to the age of ninety.
She was hearing a kind of snuffling, coughing noise and thought that maybe she had begun crying in her sleep and was hearing her own sobs in the disembodied way that sometimes happened around the foggy frontier between sleeping and waking. Something was grabbing her ankle. The chain, of course. Pulling on it urgently. Really it was just her pulling against it as she rolled around in her sleep. But in the dream it was a man pulling on her wrist. Remarkable that, in a dream, a wrist could substitute for an ankle. But she was seeing the face of an old man who had been with them in the caves in Eritrea and who had walked with them on the long barefoot trek to Sudan. The caves were, among other things, a field hospital for casualties from the war against Ethiopia. Young fighters showed up with burns, gunshot wounds, shrapnel. The doctors tried to fix them up. Some of them died. Some of them could not be fixed—they underwent amputations, and hung around until they could find some place to go. But there was this older guy—in retrospect, probably not older than fifty—with a hollow, sucked-in face carpeted with a patchy gray beard, and urgent, avid green-brown eyes, who showed up there, apparently healthy, and never left. They came to understand, in time, that he was a psychological casualty. Any grown-up could see in a few moments that he was not right in the head. Children didn’t have that instinct. The man had things he very much wanted to say, and he seemed to learn, after a time, that adults would veer away from him, pretend not to hear him, even shoo him away. But children unaccompanied by adults—as they quite often were—could give him a few moments’ company, the social balm that all humans, even crazy old war veterans, had to have. His way of getting you to pay attention to him was to grab you by the wrist and tug until you were obliged to look into his crazy eyes.
After which, he didn’t have a lot to say, since he appeared to have suffered a head injury and could not really form words. But he could gesture at things and look you in the eyes and try to get you to understand. And to the extent that young Zula could follow his train of thought at all, he seemed to be trying to warn her, and any other kid whose wrist he was able to grab, about something. Something really big and bad and scary that was out there in the world beyond this valley where they had found refuge in the caves. In this particular dream he was trying to warn her about Khalid and she was trying to explain that she was pretty sure Khalid was dead, but he wouldn’t believe her, wouldn’t let go of her wrist, just kept yanking. The snuffling and coughing: her crying? But she wasn’t crying; the sounds were coming from somewhere else.
The old man insistent. Like she really just weren’t getting it. Had no idea. Needed to wake up.
She was obliged, in fact, to wake up by a crashing noise and a thud, not far away, that traveled through the ground and came up through her ribs.
A few moments’ ridiculous confusion here as her mind, like a passenger caught straddling the gap between a pier and a departing boat, tried to bridge the dream with reality.
Then she was very awake; the Eritrean man was gone and instantly forgotten.
She wanted to call out “Hello?” but her throat had spasmed shut. If it was Jones and his crew, there was no reason to call out to them; they knew where she was and she certainly felt no need to exchange pleasantries with their like. But whatever was out there did not move—did not think—like a human.
It was at least as big as a human, though.
It was circling this strange thicket that had appeared in its hunting grounds, sniffing at it, probing it with swipes of its paws. Discovering that it came apart rather easily.
It was a bear—it could be nothing else—and it was homing in on the back of the truck, where Zula was.
WHEN SHE HAD made the move from Iowa to Seattle, driving a cute little miniature U-Haul loaded with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other things she couldn’t be without, Zula had made a small diversion into northern Idaho to look in on her uncle Jacob and his family: wife Elizabeth, eldest son Aaron, and two other sons whose names she had, embarrassingly, forgotten. She had been warned by most of the family to expect serious weirdness, but she was assured by Uncle Richard that they were perfectly normal people. What she’d found, of course, was somewhere in between; or perhaps those aspects of their life that seemed normal only made the weird stuff seem weirder. Elizabeth going about her housewifely chores and homeschooling the boys with a Glock semiautomatic lodged in a black shoulder holster strapped over the bodice of her ankle-length dress. Or were those culottes?
Anyway, conversing over dinner, they had somehow gotten onto the topic of bears. Uncle Richard had warned Zula, once, that bears were the conversational equivalent of a black hole, in the sense that any conversation that fell into that topic could never escape it. Considering how rare bears and bear attacks were in the real world, Zula, the rational-skeptic college kid, had doubted the veracity of Dodge’s observation. Maybe it just happened to him a lot, she had reasoned, because he had this one bear incident in his past that people never got tired of hearing about. But then she had seen it happen a couple of times, around tables in dormitory cafeterias: nineteen-year-old kids who had never seen bears in their lives somehow straying onto that topic and then sticking with it until everyone got up and left.
Uncle Jacob had been out building log cabins all day and had sawdust in his beard. He was tired and distracted by his energetic boys, who wanted all of his attention, and he looked like he wanted a cold beer: an indulgence forbidden by his variant of Christianity. So it had taken a while for him to slip into avuncular mode with Zula. She had almost begun to wonder whether he didn’t accept her as a real family member. But it slowly became evident over the course of the meal that he was just hungry. So eventually it turned into a real conversation.
The cabin was built three stories high on a small foundation. The cellar was a food storage area giving way to a subterranean bunker that Jake had dug out by hand and lined with reinforced concrete. The ground floor was practical stuff: sort of a garage/workshop with corners dedicated to such practical matters as slaughtering, butchering, canning, and ammo reloading. The floor above that was one big kitchen/living/dining space and the top story was bedrooms. Both the second and third floors had sliding doors and windows giving way to screened-in decks on what Zula thought of as the back side of the house, since it faced away from the driveway; but she soon learned that Jake and Elizabeth thought of it as the front. It looked out over an area of flat ground extending across a couple of acres, sparsely populated by trees, which lapped up against the base of a steep rise, the southern approach of Abandon Mountain. A mountain stream, Prohibition Crick, tumbled down that slope and ran past the cabin, making a beautiful sound, on its way to a beaver pond about half a mile away. Like-minded neighbors had built homesteads around that, forming a sparse community of five families and a couple of dozen souls distributed across two square miles of flattish, semiarable land at the head of a river valley that ran almost all the way to Bourne’s Ford.
During dinner, a storm had come up that valley and washed over them with a few impressive thunder cracks and a sudden gushing of rain from the tin roof. Clear air had blown in behind it, and the sun had come out and made a rainbow that seemed to plunge down into the valley. The scent of rain-washed cedars came in through the screen porch. Jacob spread honey on homemade bread that Elizabeth had pulled from the oven an hour ago. Life was suddenly good. He asked her about how the journey was going and what plans she had for her new life in Seattle and what sorts of things she liked to do in her spare time. She mentioned a number of activities that seemed, since they were sort of urban and high-tech, to go in one of Jacob’s ears and out the other. She also mentioned camping. Not that she was really all that interested in camping. She had done it in Girl Scouts and on family trips. It seemed almost obligatory for a healthy young person moving to Seattle to claim that she was interested in camping. That stirred his interest, anyway, and they talked about that for a little bit, just circling the black hole that was sitting there waiting patiently for them, and then, of course, they were talking about bears. Jacob mentioned that there were very few places left in the Lower Forty-Eight that still harbored grizzly, as opposed to black, bears and that northern Idaho was one of them; they were connected, by the Selkirks and the Purcells, to a vastly larger reservoir of grizzles that ran all the way up the Canadian Rockies into Alaska. Jacob dwelled, a little more than Zula was really comfortable with, on the idea that bears were attracted to menstruating women and that Zula really should not go camping in bear country when she was having her period. The modern feminist college-girl part of her thinking it was all just deeply wrong and inappropriate, the refugee/orphan/Forthrast taking a somewhat more pragmatic view.
It sounded like folklore to her. Not that this would get her anywhere in an argument with Jacob; a lot of what he believed was folklore, and the more folky it was, the more doggedly he believed it. No great insight was needed on Zula’s part to perceive that he had a chip on his shoulder regarding education and science; she’d already been warned not to mention, in his presence, the possibility that the earth might be more than six thousand years old.
All of which was easy for her. She had been dealing with men like this ever since she had come to Iowa. Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology. You simply couldn’t go to a gun range without being cornered by a man who wanted to talk to you for hours about the ballistics of the .308 round or the relative merits of side-by-side versus over-and-under shotguns. If you couldn’t stand that heat, you needed to stay out of that kitchen, and Zula had walked right into it by crossing the threshold of Jacob and Elizabeth’s house. She smiled and nodded and pretended to be interested in Uncle Jacob’s bear lore until Aunt Elizabeth finished putting the boys to bed and came and rescued her.
Anyway, she had looked it up on the Internet (of course) when she had reached Seattle and found much (of course) conflicting information posted by people with varying levels of scientific credibility. She had ended up knowing no more about it, really, than she had before the conversation with Uncle Jacob. And yet the connection to menstrual blood struck heavy psychic resonances (which was, of course, why the myth was so widespread in the first place), and so, that early morning when she was chained to the trailer hitch under the pickup truck and she realized that the thing sniffing and pawing around was a bear, her brain went straight to her uterus and she asked herself whether she might have lost count of the days and started having her period in the middle of the night. Certainly didn’t feel that way. It was funny how the brain worked; she even permitted herself a brief excursion into meta/ironical land wondering if anyone else in the world—in history—had been in danger from gangsters, terrorists, and bears in the space of a single week. When would the pirates and dinosaurs show up?
But finally she saw and understood what it was that the bear was actually questing for and saw that the entire train of thought concerning menstrual blood had been a dangerous exercise in self-absorption. The bear was coming for what bears always came for: garbage. The empty trays of the MREs. Owing to constraints imposed by the ankle chain and the surrounding wall of stacked brush, she had not been able to dispose of these in the Girl Scout–approved manner of bagging them and hanging them from a tree far from camp.
The animal sounded, seemed, as if he were only arm’s length from her, but she told herself that her fear was making the distance seem smaller than it was. She had one more MRE left. She peeled the lid back and shoved it in the direction of that snuffling and panting sound, then withdrew beneath the truck’s undercarriage.
On its tank treads the vehicle was jacked up absurdly high, its running boards at the altitude of Zula’s hip. She couldn’t stand up beneath it but she could easily squat on her haunches with her head projecting into the space between its driveshaft and its frame. The volume beneath it was not empty, but choked with undergrowth, a mixture of shrubs and small coniferous seedlings that had passed safely beneath the truck’s bumper as it eased into this position. These remained upright and undisturbed. So she was both hiding in undergrowth and taking shelter beneath a truck, which she hoped would suffice to keep her out of the bear’s clutches. She had the idea that it was a big one. But of course she would think that. Perhaps it was too bulky to want to cram itself underneath the truck; it would be satisfied with the easier pickings of the MRE that Zula had tossed in its direction. This it certainly seemed to be enjoying. She tried to think of what she would do if it crept under here to get her. Punch it in the nose? No, that was what you were supposed to do to a shark. Might not work on a bear. With bears you were supposed to make yourself look big. Don’t try to run away. The not running away part was taken care of. Making herself look big might be difficult. The chain on her ankle was a good twenty feet long. Less than half of it had been used to connect her ankle to the trailer hitch. The remainder just trailed on the ground. She began gathering it up, wrapping it around her left hand, turning it into a fat steel club. The weight of it threw her off balance, and she threw out her right hand to steady herself against the truck’s frame. She thought it would be all solid and strong, and for the most part it was; but something small and flimsy moved beneath her hand there.
She froze and made herself still. The bear was still making hugely satisfied smacking noises, getting the most out of that MRE. But a few moments later, it too became quiet and still, as though listening, wondering about something. Zula’s first thought was that she must have made some noise or that a shift in the breeze had betrayed her presence.
The bear went into movement, and she cringed, thinking it might be moving toward her; but it wasn’t. The light of the morning was coming in now through the wrecked screen of camouflage, and ducking down, using that hand on the frame to steady herself, Zula peered back between the truck’s rear treads to see its hind legs—only its hind legs—planted on the ground. It was standing up to sniff the air and to listen. It let out a kind of indignant barking sound, then dropped to all fours and sauntered away.
There was definitely something under Zula’s right hand. She explored it with her fingertips and found that she could pry it loose from its lodging against the frame. It was a little plastic box.
She let the chain spiral off her other hand, then crawled out from beneath the truck to where the light was better.
The little box was a hide-a-key, with a magnet on one side. She slid it open and found two keys linked together by a split ring. One of them looked like a spare ignition key for the truck. The other was much smaller and looked like it belonged to a padlock. She tried it on the lock that was holding the chain around her ankle, but it would not even slide into the keyhole; this was made for a different brand.
Her eyes went to the toolbox padlock that Jones had discarded on the ground yesterday.
Voices were approaching from down the slope. This was probably what the bear had been reacting to. Zula pocketed the keys, then retreated beneath the truck again and put the box back in its place against the frame.
It was Abdul-Wahaab and Sharif.
The open padlock had been half trodden into the ground. Zula pulled it out, dusted it off, and looked at it for a few moments. Then she hooked its hasp through the last link on the chain and snapped it shut.
Abdul-Wahaab and Sharif were upon her. She expected them to notice the disturbance to their camouflage, the shredded MRE tray with huge fang holes in it. They didn’t. They were exhausted and they were in a hurry. And they only wanted her. They came in through the gap in the camouflage that the bear had made. Sharif dropped to one knee and undid the padlock that held her captive. He released the loop of chain that passed around the frame of the trailer hitch, then snapped it shut again so that it stayed fixed to her ankle. His eyes snagged for a moment on the other lock, the one from the toolbox, dangling from the end of the chain, but he made nothing of it. He didn’t have the key and had no time or need to trifle with it anyway. Zipping the long end of the chain loose from the frame, he stood up, backed away from the truck, and gave the chain a preliminary tug, like a dog’s leash. “Let’s go,” he said in Arabic.
Zula stood up, then turned and bent down as if to collect her sleeping bag. “I’ll do it! Just go!” said Abdul-Wahaab. So she turned back toward Sharif. He turned his back on her and began walking out of the woods and down the open slope toward the river. On the opposite bank, between the water and the highway, a green Suburban was waiting for them. On its door was a picture of a bear.