Shuqba disposed of the flap of skin in the flames of the camp fire and nano-glued together the edges of the wound where Amud’s clone tattoo had been. The cool numbness of the anaesthetic wipe on the back of her own neck was fading and a dull, thudding pain broke through.
‘It’s done. No one will be able to track us now.’
Amud nodded. He walked away from the fire and sat down under the olive tree that faced the mounded dirt of Ferrassie’s grave.
Graycie skipped among the fruit trees, chasing birds from their feasts. The child was healthy. Her adoptive parents had sent her for multiple gene therapy treatments. Loads and loads of needles, according to Graycie. Fortunately, there hadn’t been time to repair her implant before the malfunction.
They’d been at the rendezvous point – the skeleton of a brown brick house in the wilds – for two days. The floor was a rubble of plaster, glass and dirt. The windows were all smashed, their frames warped and twisted with age, and the doors had long ago dropped from rusted hinges. Everything people had built in the wilds was rotten and crumbling and dulled to a uniform grey. The only colour in this abandoned town came from the grasses and weeds growing through the fissures.
They slept in the van. It was safer and more secure.
Shuqba packed up the first-aid kit and took it to the van, which was hidden in a thicket of blackberry bushes along the side of the house.
The roar of a biofuel engine came from the road. Shuqba’s heart galloped. It could be the free-Neos they’d been waiting for, or it could be an enemy. Someone who’d tracked them by their clone tattoos before they’d thought to cut them out and burn them. She eased Officer Noon’s assault rifle out of the van and quietly slid the door closed. She didn’t have time to warn Amud and Graycie; the vehicle had already turned into the driveway, rattling over the corrugations in the dirt. Shuqba raised the rifle and peered through a gap in the bushes.
A small car coated red with dust pulled up. Two Neos emerged, a male and a female, stretching their arms and cracking their necks. Their coveralls were ragged and faded. They appeared to be unarmed. The female turned away from Shuqba’s hiding place, displaying a puckered scar where her clone tattoo would once have been.
Shuqba put the rifle back in the van and called out, ‘Amud, they’re here.’
Amud trudged over and they picked their way through the bushes to the front of the house.
‘Crazy, crazy times, huh? I’m Gibraltar.’ The male shook both their hands. ‘This is Chapelle.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’ Chapelle took her turn at shaking their hands. ‘You must be Amud and Ferrassie. I was the one communicating with you on the forum.’
Amud reddened and blinked frantically.
‘Actually … I’m Shuqba. Plans were altered and events occurred after the implant malfunction and, uh … Ferrassie couldn’t make it.’ Shuqba put a hand on Amud’s back.
‘Right, right.’ Gibraltar put his fists on his hips. ‘A story for another time.’
Chapelle tilted her head to look behind Shuqba. Her face paled.
‘Shuqba, Shuqba!’ Graycie ran down the hallway through the middle of the house. She grabbed Shuqba by the waist and buried her face in her side.
Gibraltar frowned. ‘Um, who’s this?’
‘This is Graycie. I’m her guardian … for the time being. Her sister’s alive and we plan to reunite them when I make contact with her. For now, though, Graycie goes where I go.’ She hadn’t even considered the reception a Sapien child would receive at the free-Neo camp. If they wouldn’t accept Graycie at the community Amud would have to go on without her. She and Graycie would find ways to survive until they found Alida. Sooner or later Alida would get access to her MindComm and discover the messages Shuqba had left for her.
‘Can you excuse us for a bit?’ Chapelle grabbed Gibraltar by the arm and guided him over to the other side of the car. She pulled an OmniScreen from her pocket and tapped on it.
‘Let’s get in the shade, Gray.’ Shuqba led Graycie onto the covered porch and they sat with their backs against the wall. Amud stood beside them, staring into the distance.
After a short conference with Chapelle, Gibraltar walked around to the cargo compartment of the car and removed buckets and cloth sacks. Chapelle scrunched up the OmniScreen and shoved it in her pocket. They both strode onto the porch.
‘So, we can’t get in touch with any of the leaders. We have a no-communications policy within one hundred kilometres of the camp. I hoped one of them might be out and about, but no such luck,’ Chapelle said.
Gibraltar passed a bucket to Graycie. ‘If you can fill that with blackberries, all the kids at camp will be your best friend.’
Graycie spat the collar of her pyjamas out of her mouth and skipped down the porch towards the blackberry bushes.
‘We take back as much fruit as we can. It’s hard to grow anything where we are, so we rely on supplies from the towns.’
Shuqba took a sack from Gibraltar’s outstretched hand. ‘So will Graycie’s presence be against protocol?’
Chapelle shrugged. ‘We’re not sure, but in light of everything that’s happened there’s been a lot of talk about coming out of hiding and aligning ourselves with sympathetic Sapiens.’
Gibraltar interrupted, ‘And we don’t think excluding a kid would be the right start to whatever this new future’s going to be. Let’s fill up these sacks and we can hit the road.’
They walked through the house to the orchard.
‘So you have children at the camp?’ Shuqba stood beside Chapelle picking dark red plums.
‘A couple. I’d like to go out to the cloning orphanage to see if there are any kids still there. But it’s not like we have the knowledge or the skills to use the cloning equipment. So all us Neos alive right now could be the last of us.’
Shuqba waved away a wasp. Chapelle was right. Neos had been designed to be infertile. They could be as free from Sapiens as they wanted; however, without them they could die out in a single generation.
♦ ♦ ♦
They made their way north through the wilds. Chapelle travelled in the van with them and Gibraltar drove ahead in the car. Buildings crouched behind rusting vehicles and machinery along the disintegrating roads.
After thirty minutes they parked beside a grain silo, its towering concrete columns graffitied all the way up to the low-hanging sky.
‘We’re just outside the one-hundred-k zone now,’ Chapelle said. ‘Time to turn off the van AI and hand over your communications devices.’
Chapelle took Amud’s OmniScreen and opened the van’s dash display.
Shuqba pulled out her own OmniScreen. ‘Give me a moment.’
‘Sure.’ Chapelle’s tongue poked out of the side of her mouth as she scrolled through the van’s AI options.
Shuqba opened the comms panel. Still nothing from Alida. She sent her another message.
Hi Alida. Me again. Graycie is still safe and well. I’ll be out of contact for a while, however, I’ll try to check my messages every few days. Let me know your location. I hope you are all right. Shuqba
She shut down her OmniScreen and gave it to Chapelle. They resumed their journey through land desiccated by years of drought. The remnants of houses were sparser, their outer layers flaking away like sunburnt skin.
‘We’re still travelling north?’ Shuqba asked.
‘Mm-hm. North all the way.’
‘To the deadlands?’
Bushes cowered on reddish-brown plains that stretched all the way to the heat-distorted horizon.
‘Almost. The camp’s about fifty kilometres south of the southern boundary, in an old underground mining town. The radiation levels are low enough there.’
‘Not the most hospitable country to build a community.’
‘No. We haven’t had much choice in the past, but I hope we’ll be able to come out of hiding soon.’
‘What are you waiting for?’ Amud spoke for the first time since they’d left the rendezvous point.
‘Everything we’ve heard says there are militants, transhumanists and Rewilders attacking Neos right now. The leaders have judged it to be too dangerous.’
‘This is the best chance you’ll ever get. If you don’t act now you never will. You’ll be a bunch of cowards hiding in holes in the ground forever,’ Amud said.
Shuqba kept quiet but she agreed. Living in the part of the country most toxic to life was unsustainable and foolish, especially for a species adapted to a cool climate. If there was ever a time to fight it was now, before the remnants of the Sapiens united to eradicate or re-enslave the Neos.
‘Yeah. There are changes coming. Some of our group need convincing though. You two might sway their opinion.’
All those kilometres behind them, City 1’s shining wall grew duller and more distant as they drove into the bright sunlight of the desert.