“Did you find something?” Theo asked after a time, into the headset.
Her reply seemed as if it was coming from inside his head. “I am happy to report that the answer is yes.”
“Yeah?” he said. It felt like surfacing.
“Yeah,” she said. “The old man’s goose is cooked.”
She had discovered Z. Largo’s luck in broad daylight. Sitting on the dunes, barely concealed.
“Incompetence?” asked Suzy.
“Ego,” said her sister. “He thinks his shit doesn’t stink.”
They were assembled in Simone’s room, gathered around her mobile phone. The photos glowed like dreams. No patrols, Simone announced. No guard towers. Five huge chests under five massive tarps.
“Look,” said JF, pointing at the machinery. “He must be building a new vault.”
“He told me it was a swimming pool,” said Theo.
Suzy swiped and zoomed at the images, trying to get a clearer look at the containers. Each had an inscription along one edge — blackened characters burnt into the wood. “Touchwood of Louisiana,” Simone told her, exultant.
“It’s got to be a trap,” said Suzy. “How could it not be a trap? What else could it be?”
“A mistake,” said Theo.
They had not expected this. Sometimes we require high walls, the inventor had written to Daniel. Safeguards are easiest en commun. Perhaps it was just a portion of the man’s luck, the rest still secure. Perhaps the circumstances were temporary – a brief opening, a possibility.
“A swimming pool?” Suzy repeated.
Sebald was still in the city, awaiting word. The four other thieves were arranged across two double beds. A pair of bowls rested on a thin duvet – sand-coloured pistachios and their shells. The Gang studied Simone’s photos, the construction mid-construction: half-finished walls, excavation pits. A future Olympic pool? A secret strongroom? Five lacquered wooden chests, each as big as a stagecoach. Dovetail joints, brass-stamped lids.
When Simone had reached the end of the campus driveway she had threaded among its buildings, throwing her dice as she went. No sign of luck, no sign of anyone. Eventually she circled beyond the campus perimeter, chugging up the dunes and coasting down their sides, growing a little discouraged. Still she kept up the dice tests. Z. Largo would not have been the first to bury his treasure.
She rolled her first sixes as she approached the construction zone. “The site didn’t look like much,” she admitted. The containers’ blue tarps, battened-down against sandstorms, puffed in the wind, their edges trembling like prayer flags. Stacks of drywall and massive iron slabs, copper pipes, mounds of unmixed cement like sandbags for a dam. The place wasn’t fizzing with good fortune – Simone didn’t roll dozens of sixes in a row. But five sixes; then full quorum; and four; and again the full six. Results like this suggested luck was nearby – but shielded, suppressed, mirrored-in. She wasn’t tall enough to reach the top of the chests; she ran her hands along their flanks, recorded their GPS coordinates, snapped shots.
She had been at the site for no more than ten minutes when a silver platter rose out of the sand. It happened when she was perched at a mid-slope vantage point, staring down at the containers. At first the object seemed like something alive: a surfacing turtle, a baby whale. Then Simone saw its tires, its axels. The rover’s brushed steel shone dully in the sun. Simone put down her phone.
The rover merely sat there. A peaceful sentinel; a wordless signal that Simone was surveilled. After waiting a certain time, Simone released her motorcycle’s brake and putted downhill. The rover did not follow but when she arrived at the bottom of the valley she noticed a movement in the distance. Another, second robot had appeared, cresting the dune and approaching.
Simone considered her options. She could stay. She could flee. She could flip the machine with a well-timed kick. Were these things armed? Automated tasers and targeting systems? The swooping landscape, the barren sky: suddenly the afternoon had taken on an extra-terrestrial cast.
“I wondered if you were already snared,” she told Theo.
“ ‘Snared’?”
“Rotting in a sandpit. Seduced by the enemy.”
He snickered at this, shook his head, but there was a moment before she continued when he felt as if she was appraising him, eyebrows raised, pink lips thinly pressed. She hadn’t asked about Lou and he hadn’t volunteered anything. He wanted to keep Lou out of this.
In the end, Simone explained, she didn’t kick any robots. By the time the second rover arrived yet another had appeared, emerging from the construction site. She reached into her bag and opened her little box of luck, spilling its sand into the bottom of the canvas, freeing its forces. Reinforcements.
The second rover chirped at her.
“Hello,” Simone said, as if a cat had brushed against her.
“Salaamu aleykum,” said the machine.
The third robot arrived, stopped, chirped. “Salaamu aleykum!”
“Hello,” she repeated.
“Welcome to the Largo Living Foundation’s Merzouga Clarity Retreat,” said the first rover.
“Thank you.”
“May I help you?”
“I’m…lost,” Simone said.
“May I help you?” it repeated.
“I’m looking for my friend,” she said. “He was looking for his friend.”
“This is private property,” said the second rover.
“Yes, I understand. We’re just here to visit. We separated, because we weren’t sure. We’re looking for Louisa Hval.”
“Please wait.”
Simone pursed her lips.
“Hello?” The rover was speaking with a different voice now – a man’s baritone.
“Salaamu aleykum,” said Simone.
“You are lost?”
“Yes.”
“It’s either that or trespassing,” said Z. Largo.
“I’m here with a man named Theo Potiris. He hoped to visit a friend of his who is here on retreat. Louisa Hval? We got separated.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” Simone said. She wondered if the rover was transmitting an image of her face. She furrowed her brow, attempted to convey dismay.
A long silence followed. It seemed once more that the rover had run out of juice. The second robot also said nothing, rocked back and forth on its wheels.
“Hello?”
“Please follow,” the first rover said, and so she did.
Away from the chests’ rippling tarpaulins, across the dunes, back to the campus and eventually to the raised garage door of the Still Life Room. Simone took her helmet, left her bike, stepped inside.
“That shithead locked the door,” she said. “And left me there for hours. I peed in his ficus.”
“Do you think he was on to you?” Suzy asked.
“No.”
“No?”
“My gut says no,” said Simone.
Suzy cracked a pistachio between her teeth, nodded toward Theo. “What about you? Do you think he smelled a rat?”
Theo stared toward the window. The desert beyond their room was slowly turning silver. He imagined Lou out there, sitting with her lover. He knew he was sad – but not for her, not even for himself. For their story put to bed. Why had he not seen the end sooner? It felt like an indignity that he had needed Zooey Largo to lean his head into the frame.
Simone touched his knee. “Theo?”
“No,” he said. He took a breath, grinned. “No, the guy’s got no idea.”
Over the course of that night, the No Name Gang hatched their plan. Diagrams on hotel stationery, satellite maps on laptops, calls to Sebald in Marrakesh. The group seemed energized by the nearness of their target – or else it was that Theo better understood their goal. A purpose beyond their purpose: to give all of Largo’s luck away. Theo poured himself into the project with utter abandon, pretending to himself that nothing mattered more. He looked from Suzy and Simone to a suitcase on the floor, filled with small containers of luck. We don’t get to choose what we want, he thought. Only what we pursue.
Given limited resources, the five of them privileged speed, simplicity. “Quick and dirty,” Suzy said, turning the phrase to a mantra. They calculated for drag and torque. They had to act fast, before conditions changed, then slip away without scrutiny. Already something was quivering at the edges of the hotel staff’s politesse: the Argo didn’t often receive tourists so uninterested in helicopter trips or dromedary rides or guided tours to Berber villages. For reasons Theo didn’t understand, Simone kept him as their point of contact with the Argo’s personnel. He greeted room service, intercepted maids; he excessively hesitated over tips, mulling whether it was better to tip too much or too little, whether 75 dirham was likelier to safeguard or to doom them. Whenever he spoke with a local, Theo felt ungainly. Surely they could see through this gang of thieves. Had Largo already purchased their loyalty?
Late the next morning, Sebald arrived in a cloud of dust. It washed across the building like dragon’s breath, blurring the trees. They stood together in the lobby, the concierge beside them. “What is coming?” he asked.
“Our friend,” answered Theo.
The cloud of dust had a semi truck at its centre. The vehicle seemed oddly proportioned – flatnosed, trailerless, a drawing half-finished. Flawlessly black, as if swathed in dark velvet. The only signs of wear were the surfaces of the truck’s studded desert tires.
Sebald stopped on the road outside the property. They went to meet him. Swinging down from the cab, the tall Sebald seemed like a rejoinder to Z. Largo, a mirror. He stood shading his eyes, squinting at the hotel’s smudged neon signature. “It’s me,” he said.
Suzy took his bag. “Never any doubt.”
That evening, as dusk fell, Theo and Simone returned to the patio. A pause before the final push. He had a plate of dates; she had the remainder of the raki. A few off-duty porters stood smoking near the driveway, their fezes stacked on a balustrade. They watched the guests through wraparound sunglasses.
Simone nudged him. “Say something.”
“Going for a walk!” he called.
“Let’s amble,” she proposed, steering Theo away from the tables and around the building, under black-handed palms.
“Is this ambling?” he asked.
“Not quite. Ambling’s in the hips.”
“Like this?”
“Now you’re skulking.”
“Skulking!”
“You heard me. Relax your shoulders.”
“I say skulking and ambling are the same thing. Skulking’s just ambling after dark. It’s a butterfly-moth sort of situation.”
“You’re nuts. Look: this is skulking.”
“I see you’ve skulked before.”
“Now relax your shoulders. Lift your head – there.”
“Now I’m ambling?”
“You are.”
They ambled for a little while.
“You know,” he said, “you’re the first person I’ve ever ambled with.”
The path turned, the trees cleared; they emerged into a courtyard with a dribbling concrete fountain. Simone settled on a bench. She sipped from the raki, passed it to Theo.
“This stuff’s better with water,” he said.
She shrugged and took it back.
He took a date, chewed, spitting out the pit. The air smelled like toast. He waited, took another date. And another. Some flowers were growing on the other side of the courtyard, terracotta roses with heavy blooms. Petals were scattered on the pavement. He kept waiting for Simone to take a date but she was just sitting in silence. He took another, chewed. “Date?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
“What’s wrong?” he said at last.
“I’m nervous.”
“Don’t be nervous,” he said. “It’ll go fine.”
She inspected him. “How do you know?”
He shrugged. “How else could it go?”
“Things don’t always turn out.”
“That’s true. But I have a feeling.”
She narrowed her eyes. “A feeling, Theo? Or a hope?”
He drummed his fingers on the bench. The roses looked so heavy, as if they might lower their heads to the ground. “I can’t always tell the difference.”
She drummed her fingers too, a separate reasoned rhythm.
She said, “Don’t be careless with your hope.”
They set off after midnight. The moon was gibbous, a token disappearing into a magician’s palm. This time Theo could see the stars, all of them, as they glided onto Largo’s property, following the driveway through the opening in the fence.
Simone, JF and Suzy were each on motorcycles. Theo rode sidecar. Sebald’s tractor cab drew up behind them, a growling smudge in the night. With the arrival of darkness, each of Suzy’s suspicions had been revived: of Theo, of Z. Largo, of their hasty, jury-rigged plan. “He just led you past the work site?” she asked over their headsets. “He just gave you the grand tour?”
But Theo was certain Largo had not taken him for a thief. They would rob him as he slept.
He sat next to Simone, a bundle of supplies at his feet: tape, water bottle, bandages, flashlight. Theo and Simone both wore black, two shadows clustered together. He nodded at JF as he drew alongside. He looks so serious, Theo thought. He wondered if he was wearing the same stern expression. The interior of his mind felt tugged between bravery and quietude. When he looked at the desert, the road, the steady horizon, the night seemed grave. His sand-smeared knees at his chin, his sand-smeared hands atop the sidecar’s rail. His tender heart. But when he gazed at Simone he felt something different: the quest of it, the adventure, the glitter of the silver-dotted sky.
It was at least a mile from the highway to the dunes, across dusty scrubland. The premise of their operation was Largo’s arrogance: he seemed to believe himself invulnerable and he didn’t like to share. It had not escaped Simone’s notice that Largo was overseeing his own security: the richest man on earth pottering around with an earpiece in, wasting time on petty trespassers. An army of sentries was only as useful as its master, and after sundown their master hit the sack.
“So when’s bedtime?” JF had asked.
“What I can tell you,” Theo said, “is that he dream-catches at half past two.”
Crammed in the sidecar, Theo checked his watch: 12:26. Largo had to be asleep by now. That left them only an hour and a half to smash and grab; two hours tops. Not very long, but long enough.
Their caravan reached the end of the driveway. At the bike rack, where the road forked, they took neither branch. Instead they headed southeast, off-road, toward the stash’s GPS coordinates. He glanced again at Simone, her hands on the handlebars. She wore gloves. They all did. Wise thieves leave no prints.
The work site came into view. Not a mirage – a gathering of structures, pallets of building materials, wind-whipped tarps. Sebald reversed on a patch of level sand, so the back of the truck was facing the darkened hill, the Touchwood chests, the “swimming pool” mid-construction. No sign yet of robots. They’d come soon, Theo knew – these systems seemed automated, inevitable – but the riders were counting on the protection of Largo’s slumber. Worried that circumstances might change, they had decided to forego the prudence they had employed in Taiwan. “Fortune favours the bold,” JF had said, in a tone that was more of a wish than a promise.
Now they parked and left their bikes. Sebald cut the engine, distributed supplies. The group fanned out, each of them hauling a large folded parcel, each heading for a different chest. In their spare hands they carried drills.
Theo’s target sat on a diagonal, near the bottom of a dune. A sea-blue tarp had been nailed along the chest’s seams, protecting the panels from sand and weather. A pile of bricks was stacked along one side, like armour. He stopped near a corner and laid the drill against the wood, where the tarp parted. He disengaged the safety. The heavy bit glinted silver-gold, like a rare coin, before he pulled the trigger.
Their drills punctured the silence of the desert basin. Surely he’ll hear us, Theo thought, his confidence evanescing. Surely he’ll come. The whine seemed savage, unforgiving. It seemed so loud. Theo’s drill bit caught and skipped. He clutched the tool as tightly as he had ever clutched anything – as if that was all it took, holding on.
Still nobody came. He wanted to ask where the rovers were, but he didn’t want to let himself wonder, either.
JF’s drill was the first to pierce the wood. “Woohoo!” he shouted, syllables warbling across their headsets.
“Keep your fucking voice down,” Suzy hissed.
Theo’s drill was shuddering and shrieking in his grip. It bucked once. And died.
Meanwhile, sand was pouring out of the other four chests. The Gang was unfolding the bundles they had pulled with them from the truck: soft shapes that looked like tents or tarps but that were in fact puncture-proof foil totes, similar to the vinyl sack that had become their meteorite. They unfurled their vessels on the slopes, orienting the openings to catch the shushing sand.
Theo cleared his throat. “My drill conked out.”
“ ‘Conked out’?” Simone replied over headset.
“It’s kaput. Something in the wood? Or maybe I fucked up somehow?”
“Great,” said Suzy.
Simone had begun to hike down the hill toward him.
“Leave it,” murmured Sebald. “We do not have time.”
“We’re not going to leave it,” said Simone. She arrived at Theo’s side. “You think there’s something special about this chest? Another layer or something?”
“Maybe.”
“Could be some kind of plating.”
“Tied to an alarm?” asked Suzy.
“Or maybe it’s nothing,” said Theo. “Maybe the drill just went.”
Simone blinked at him.
“Maybe?” he repeated, hopefully as he could.
“Leave it,” repeated Sebald.
But Simone was hefting her drill. She brought up her free hand and closed it over the bit; a palmful of powder caught the light, scattering from her glove. “Second time’s a charm,” she said. She pushed the lucky point against the chest, beside his jagged first attempt. Theo felt a pulse of worry, like fresh heartache.
The tool whirred. It was a cutting sound, a sizzling sound. VRRRRRRRR! and it was through. Simone pulled the drill away. Mirrored splinters fell at Theo’s feet, and sand fell too, spilling from the hole. Simone helped him grab his tote and drag it into position, collecting their fortune. The rest of them watched silently. “Never any doubt,” said Theo, looking around. For an instant he thought he saw the skidding slip of movement at the far edge of his vision – but no, nothing, just sand and sky. The stars sparkled coldly, their message not quite legible. Everything seemed bright and darkened at the same time, and the sounds were strange too: whispering sand, obvious and obscure.
“Did you hear that?” asked JF.
“Hear what?” said Simone.
“Like a voice. Maybe it was a bird.”
“A bird in the night?” said Theo.
“This is taking too long,” growled Suzy. She was scrambling up the side of a dune, to get a better vantage point.
“If they show up now we can leave with what we have,” said Simone.
“Oh sure,” Suzy said. “Meet you back at Le Black Cat.”
“It’s one in the morning,” Theo said, trying to appease her anxiety. “Everyone’s asleep.”
“Robots don’t sleep, they’re insomniacs. Where are they?”
“Maybe Largo’s do. Maybe he’s taught them to dream.”
“Maybe he’s taught them to shoot us,” said Suzy. “To zap intruders and turn them into rocks.”
“It doesn’t have to be either/or,” said Simone.
“Enough,” said Sebald. “Let’s load the truck.”
They worked together to lower the tractor bed’s loading ramp, anchoring the vehicle in the dirt. A massive winch stood at the front of the cargo bed, just behind the cab; each of them threaded out a cable, dragging a tow cord across the sand basin. The lines were like knotted steel tightropes; each one clicked into a ring sewn into the side of a tote. The sand had stopped flowing now – even Theo’s – and once the openings were sealed the totes seemed heavy as houses, immovable. Yet one by one, inch by inch, all the laden bags were wrenched toward the truck. The winch groaned as it heaved them into the cargo bay, where they slouched across each other like grubs.
It was a makeshift solution. But the Gang would have needed a crane to lift the massive Touchwood chests, and a bigger truck wouldn’t have been able to navigate the dunes. Once the totes were secure, they didn’t waste any time. Sebald climbed back in the cab while the others got on their bikes.
“Wait —”
They froze.
“Did you hear that?” JF asked, for the second time that night.
None of them had heard it.
“I think it was a bird…”
Sebald didn’t wait. He brought the truck to life and sent it plunging back toward the road, over rippling terrain. The riders wove trails across his tire tracks, catching up and falling back, rearguards instead of scouts. Even from his sidecar, Theo could hear the truck’s cables squeaking. Its cargo bumped and shifted. He kept imagining birds. Sebald was following his dash-mounted GPS, leading them northwest. Along a dune and down its slope – until at bottom he smashed straight into the bike rack. The sound of the collision was explosive – the bamboo structure bursting apart, crossbars windmilling into space. Something whistled past Suzy’s head and she tacked away, her bike listing as she dropped out of sight.
“Suzy!” called Simone, heading after her.
“I’m okay,” Suzy answered, shaken.
Her motorcycle had steadied. The sisters drew even with each other and exchanged a look, their faces concealed behind dark glass.
Simone and Suzy accelerated, steering back to rejoin the convoy. Peering over the edge of his compartment, Theo pictured crouched shapes, a waiting army. What would it look like if we were surrounded? But nobody was waiting. The desert was still, eerily still, as if the whole place was unguarded. It didn’t make sense, yet Theo didn’t question it: he gripped the handrail, he hoped.
They had returned to the driveway, four black motorbikes and a hurtling truck. Another mile to the gate. The highest of the dunes was behind them now. Theo pushed his hands up under his visor, and rubbed his eyes. Totes sparkled silver in the back of the flatbed. One of them seemed to be expelling air – a ripple of pale steam, like winter breath. Theo watched it for a little while, the luck’s curious exhalation – the way it ebbed and wafted, juddered with the movement of the cab. The plume was gradually growing thicker, like something material, and the tote was shifting with its breath, leaning into it, sloughing into the others beside it. Sand, Theo realized. It’s not breath it’s sand. Luck, pouring from a tear in the fabric. The bag had been punctured when Sebald hit the bike rack: now it stirred with every yaw and bounce, pushed by the weight of the totes around it. He turned and saw that Simone had noticed the puncture too, awe or dread in the way she held her black-helmeted head. The damaged tote was inching toward the edge of the cargo bay. It had dislodged the tote to its left, and a third one that rested on the others; after another buck of the pavement Simone made a hissing sound. All three were teetering now, one overhanging the other and the first overhanging the edge, dangling, not so much exhaling sand as spewing it, creaking on its taut steel cord. It would drag the others after it. “What —?” said Sebald, sensing something. The truck swerved and then came an earsplitting snap. The damaged tote fell free, skittering once, as the broken cable whipped back. The truck swayed and coasted. Simone pulled up hard, veering off-road, circling to stop beside the fallen loot. It splayed in the dirt, like a giant’s foil-wrapped corpse.
Everyone was shouting into their headsets – “We need to go!” “We need to stop!” When Theo got out beside Simone, at first he didn’t know how to help. The gash in the side of the tote was almost a foot wide, rough and tattered. Glitter spilled from the rip. Simone tore off and dropped her helmet; she tugged at the torn edges of the cut to try to close it. She was talking to him; he couldn’t hear; he knelt, setting his own helmet on the sand.
“It’s luck,” she repeated, voice hard. “Anything can happen.”
Sebald had stopped the truck a little ways ahead, idling in the half-light. “Leave it!” he shouted out his window.
“It’s only the one rip,” Simone said.
Suzy pulled up beside them. “One’s too many,” she said.
“We can’t afford to leave it.”
Her sister snapped up her visor. “No, we can’t afford to get caught.”
JF now, from his own bike: “Time, Simone.”
She closed her eyes. “He ran straight into a fucking bike rack.”
“We have to go.”
Sand was running through her hands. “There’s still time. We have the spare cable…”
“We’d need a patch,” said Suzy.
“Tape – we brought tape,” Theo said, bolting to the sidecar. It reminded him of childhood: hurrying, hunting in the dark. “Here –” He raised the roll of duct tape like a torch, tossed it underhand. “Try to seal it, and I’ll get the extra cable.”
He began jogging toward the truck. He could see the cable in his mind’s eye: untouched, undamaged, coiled at the base of the winch. One spare line for all the what-ifs.
JF came up beside him, visor raised. “Tape won’t hold.”
“We might get lucky.”
JF rolled his eyes. Something was humming under the sound of the air and the engines, the pat of Theo’s footfalls. Like a sharp breeze through reeds. Theo hadn’t yet reached the truck when he understood it was a rover; he saw it coalesce out of the shadows like an inkspot gathering shape. The disc was bumping across the sand, moving at a rate that was difficult to assess – until it whizzed past him, shiny as a knife in the starlight.
Simone had glimpsed it too. She was standing with the roll of tape in one hand, its black tongue lolling, her knees slightly bent. Theo looked from her to the truck to the rover, feeling slightly nauseous.
“Get back on your bike,” snapped Suzy.
The machine stopped in front of Simone and the tote. Two strands of tape clung lamely to the container’s side, sand still sluicing through the gash. Everyone was appraising the geometries of their positions – Simone, the rover, the green Ural.
Theo edged toward the tableau. “Don’t worry,” he said carefully, “it’s not dangerous.”
“How do you know it’s not dangerous?”
Theo moved like a man approaching a rattlesnake. “Salaamu aleykum,” he murmured to the machine.
It didn’t have time to answer. Simone lunged forward – he saw her touch the pocket where she carried a little box of luck, before she kicked it. The toe of her boot sent it flying.
She yelled at him to get the cable.
Theo ran. JF and Suzy were both howling at them to get back on their motorbike. He reached the tractor bed and clambered up the side, hauling himself onto one of the still-secured totes. He scrabbled across the treasure and over to the winch; their extra cable was spooled at the base of the machinery, just as he had remembered. With the free end in his hand he wiggled back over the totes to the end of the flatbed, and rose to his feet.
Incredibly, Simone was nearly finished. Her patch was haggard, graceless, but it contained the tear, almost, with strips of matte black tape. For a moment Theo felt buoyed, exultant, until he saw the reason Simone was standing, the sand still seeping, her work incomplete. Two newly surfaced rovers, gyroscopes whirring, had pinned her in position.
Their menace was in their movements: like wolves, like sewing machines. One at a time they started forward, scurried back, spinning like bobbins. Another pair rose up from the ground – five rovers in total now, like eerie pedestals. Simone kicked one again, but this enemy was undeterred: flipped on its back, the four-wheeled platter was still a four-wheeled platter. It rejoined the swarm.
Theo yelled at them from his place on the trailer. “HEY!” – as if the machines were sheepdogs, easily startled. They swivelled to track his voice, then back to Simone, but in their hesitation she danced between them, outside the perimeter. Suzy tore through the area between Theo and the rovers, spraying sand. JF arrived from the other side. Each of them drew their own knot of rovers, yet the mass seemed undiminished. More machines had rolled in or lifted up; Simone was only metres from her bike, but a full column separated them.
“Scatter!” Simone shouted. “Split them up.”
There was a lurch, and the truck began to move. For a moment Theo vacillated. Simone had taken off on foot, into the desert. Sebald was heading in the opposite direction, toward the gate.
When Theo jumped, he felt the end of the cable jerk out of his hand, dancing away.
He followed Simone across the sparkling desert floor.
The rovers duly scattered. Some pursued the runners, others the pair of motorbikes, while another group trailed Sebald and his truck. A chase in four directions, over the plain. Theo joined Simone near the ruined bike rack, where she stooped and picked up one of the bamboo poles. It was light but strong, and taller than Theo – she began to use it as they ran, whirling around to beat back a rover. “Do you think we can outrun them?” she asked, breathless.
“No,” he replied.
But as they reached the dunes – skidding down sandbanks, darting together and apart – their pursuers’ numbers began to dwindle. A few of the robots they simply lost. Simone smacked some with her pole. Theo stomped one with a boot. Running atop a ridge, they could see JF and Suzy on the plain below, zigzagging separately through the scrubland, leading rovers in ever-complicating knots. Sebald’s semi-truck was cannoning toward the exit: it still seemed to be gathering speed as it swerved through the opening in the fence and onto the highway, engine howling.
On the pavement behind it, a chain of rovers stopped dead.
“They won’t leave the property,” Theo breathed.
The machines swivelled in unison, like a creature’s compound eye. For a chilling instant Theo believed they were going to come their way – a dozen silvery coins – but instead the rovers streaked in the direction of the abandoned tote.
They’re receiving orders, Theo thought. A beat later, their own pursuers seemed to receive the same instructions, dipping down the dune toward the remaining luck.
“They’re letting us go,” Theo said.
“Or something else is coming.” Simone scrambled after them, down the hill.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m getting out of here.”
He followed – skidding down the furrows of her footprints, flailing his arms, attempting to catch JF and Suzy’s attention. But the riders didn’t see them, or they decided they couldn’t risk another foray: he watched as they looped around and followed Sebald out.
“We’re just going to leave the luck?” he asked Simone.
“We can’t carry it without the truck.”
After Sebald’s escape – and alone now, the two of them – Theo felt brazen.
“We can pack some on the bike,” he said. “Load up the sidecar.”
She stared back the other way. The tote was a dark hump, dimly visible, with the Ural beside it.
“Well?”
She looked at her watch. “It’s too dangerous.”
“The robots are clumsy. I could distract them —”
“Largo’s awake, Theo.”
He grinned, trying to catch her eye. “So it’s a race.”
“We’re not playing a game!” she answered, suddenly furious. Then she was striding away – through the twisting coils of brush, low thorns. He let out a breath. Maybe the others were waiting for them on the highway, idling under a picture of two closed eyes. Maybe not.
Simone began to jog and he did too, each of them listening for rovers, voices, new threats. Every shadow looked like an enemy. They ran parallel to the driveway, well away from the tote and its guardians. The sky was clouding. More rovers could emerge around them at any time, rising like a cursed circle.
He listened to the rhythm of Simone’s footfalls, her inhale and exhale. Her breathing was steadier than his, her footsteps lighter. Her bamboo staff cast the faintest, skinniest shadow. Dawn was lifting on the horizon, rose and pale sapphire, a blush of colour across the mountains. An early sunrise, he thought. He imagined a thousand rovers, skimming toward them. He imagined Largo – awake now, posture-perfect, seated in lotus in the Still Life Room. Aglow with fury. To my betrayer, he thought. To my black-hearted deceiver.
“He’ll recognize the bike,” Theo said abruptly. A thought out loud into air. “The Ural. He’ll know it was us, Theo and Simone.”
“Theo and Sally,” said Simone.
“Yes,” he said, as lights appeared.
Really they did not appear: they just made themselves more clearly known. What had come up like dawn – pinks and sliding blues – was actually police cars spilling down the highway, racing in from the east. They coiled through the entrance like jewels on an invisible thread. Everywhere the sound of sirens, foggy and keening.
Simone and Theo ran. Away from the sirens, away from the gate, into the no-man’s-land abutting the fence. Sebald and the others had turned left as they departed, heading back toward the Dark Sky billboard. The police were coming from the other direction, klaxons wailing. Simone and Theo ran toward their friends, or where they imagined their friends might be, concealed on the other side of the barrier. They ran as if there were wolves chasing them. One formation of cruisers had unspooled down the driveway, toward the abandoned bag of luck; another bounced onto the grit, in pursuit of the runners. Whirling lights grazed their silhouettes: Theo felt spotlit, caught. The cars’ white beams shone a straight course before them, like an electric path. Whenever the runners feinted, changing course, the police were still behind them, undaunted.
“Should we separate?” Theo shouted, but Simone did not hear him, or pretended not to. The police were too many, too quick. The wind brought with it the taste of the cars’ exhaust, diminishing and grey. Largo’s steel fence loomed beside them, too tall to climb – a line of smooth, slender-gapped metal panels. The landscape on the other side seemed to flicker as he ran, changing by degree, and then it wasn’t changing any more, or it was changing less. Something occupied the side of the road, hunched in semi-darkness. He heard the truck’s engine before he could make out their shapes: the riders, the semi. The police cruisers’ beams caught the whites of Suzy’s eyes, through the slats of the fence. How long would the others wait for them? Could they break it down, bust out?
Simone stopped running. Theo drew up beside her. The lights were painting colours on their bodies.
She knelt and peeled off her gloves. She took out one last pack of luck, dusting it over her hands and shoulders.
She was breathing hard. She didn’t look at him.
Her bamboo pole lay beside her.
Theo swallowed. “Well,” he said thickly.
Simone raised her head. Colours, shadows, shifted across her features. The night they had met, behind the Knock Knock Club, it had taken so long for him to make out her face.
“What will we tell them?” he said.
“Lie,” said Simone.
“ ‘We’re tourists. Night hiking.’ ”
“Tell some jokes. You’ll be all right.”
“And you?”
Simone stood. “I’ll be all right too.” She picked up the piece of bamboo.
The sirens had stopped.
“Nights like this,” she said.
“Nights like what?” he asked.
The police cars were gathered in a semicircle, cutting off their escape. She shook her head, smiled.
“What?” he said.
“I can’t do anything else,” she said, as if she were quarrelling with something he had said. Though when he replayed it later he wondered if it was an apology.
Then she turned and ran. Toward the fence, tall dull metal, with her pole held out before her. She ran straight, heels lifted high. The tip of the bamboo kissed the hardpacked sand, then dug in, and she leapt. Or she was lifted. The bamboo bent impossibly. It unbent. Simone was curling through the air, thrown through it.
If she landed on the other side, he didn’t hear it.
He only heard the pole as it fell – flimsy, hollow.
Sebald’s giant truck as it roared into motion.
Policemen shouting.
Footsteps around him, and more shouting, voices in Arabic and French, as hands clasped his shoulders, seized his wrists.
As they pushed him toward a police cruiser, he saw that the stars were gone. The sky now seemed like so many he had known. But this is not so, he told himself. Each sky is different.