If Tomorrow Comes

CHAPTER 16

At every slight rise in the ground, Austin expected to see someone coming after him: Noah or Isabelle or Leo or maybe one of the McGuires, whom he’d only seen a few times in his life but remembered vividly. Big, silent, scary. Although why would the McGuires come after Austin? They didn’t care about anything but their mines. No, it would be Noah or Isabelle or Leo. Maybe all three. All three would be a problem. Austin had a stolen pipe gun, but he didn’t think he could shoot Noah or Isabelle, and Leo would probably shoot him first. Certainly Lieutenant Lamont would.

He’d dragged Claire into a sort of cover made of bushes, so he could rest. Rain pattered on the dark leaves above them as Austin sat cross-legged and ate a piece of makfruit from his pocket. It was dotted with lint. He ungagged Claire—they were far enough away that no one in the compound could hear her—and held out part of the fruit.

She ignored it. “What are you doing? Untie me!”

She didn’t sound groggy at all. Maybe he didn’t give her enough knockout drug. On the other hand, maybe it was good that she wasn’t groggy—if she could walk, he wouldn’t have to drag her. He launched into the speech he’d rehearsed.

“Dr. Patel—Claire—I’m taking you someplace safe. It’s called Haven. There is food and water and safety from the collapse of civilization when the spore cloud comes. My mother is already there, and Graa^lok—do you remember my friend Graa^lok? Also two other Terrans and, soon, some Kindred. We’re all going to rebuild civilization after the looters and other desperate people are dead, and you’re going to be part of the rebuilding!”

Claire’s mouth fell open. Raindrops dripped inside and she closed it again. Austin had always liked her pretty, lilting voice, but now she sounded almost like Isabelle. “Are you insane? We’re trying to prevent the ‘collapse of civilization’! Untie me immediately and take me back to the compound.”

“I can’t do that, Claire.” There—that sounded definite and mature. Austin improved on it. “I’m sorry I can’t do that, but I have the greater good to think of.”

Claire tugged at the ropes around her wrists. They didn’t give. She screamed. “Help! Help! Help me!”

What if someone was following them; could they hear her? But if anyone was following, they’d find Austin anyway; dragging Claire this far had left a clear muddy trail. Austin held his breath and waited.

No one came. When Claire finally stopped yelling, he stood up. How would Leo do this? Kind but steely. “Claire, we can do this two ways. You can walk with me holding that rope, or I can knock you out again and drag you, the way I did before. But your legs are all muddy and the back part of your wrap is nearly worn through and exposing your… uh… you.”

He felt himself blushing.

Claire stared at him a long time. Then she crawled out from under the bushes, stretching the rope to its limit, and twisted her body with its bound feet in a complete circle. Austin, crawling out after her, knew what she saw: nothing. Empty, rocky fields in the rain, with the mountains rising abruptly ahead.

“We’re going on now,” Austin said. He wished that his voice was as deep as Leo’s.

“Who was killed at the compound?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is the whole camp rioting?”

“I don’t know. Yes. No. Not all of it.”

“You are an idiot.”

Austin didn’t deign to answer that. He strode forward, tugging her to her feet and then pulling on her rope, and Claire was forced to follow. She stubbed her toe on a rock and cried out.

“Oh, sorry, here’s your other shoe!” He fished it out of his pocket and handed it to her.

She couldn’t put it on with her hands tied like that. Austin bent and tugged the sandal onto her foot, untied her ankles, and straightened. He hadn’t known that small, pretty face could look so scornful.

Claire was a much better walker than Kayla. In another few hours, they reached the tunnel opening. Austin, who’d been a little deflated by her angry silence, felt better. They’d made it without being captured! Now she would see what her rescue was all about!

“I’m going to crawl in there and you’re going to stay here until I tug on the rope. Don’t be afraid, Claire, inside Haven is much different from the first tunnel.”

“I’m not afraid. I’m furious.”

Well, Austin could see that. He dropped to hands and knees, crawled to the grate, and rang the bell. When Tony appeared, he said, “I’ve got her. Dr. Patel. She’s with me now.”

Tony grinned. “Hey! Good man! Come on in, both of you!”

He unlocked the grate and helped Austin down the drop. Austin tugged on the rope until Claire appeared, her tiny body with space all around her in the tunnel, her rain-streaked face distorted by contempt.

Tony said, “Welcome, Doctor.”

Claire said, “When the Rangers come after me, you are finished.”

Austin said, “No, Claire, you don’t understand. This place is impregnable.”

“The boy is right,” Tony said. “We made sure of that. Here, let me lift you down. Just beyond that farther door is Haven. Are you hungry?”

“Finished,” Claire said. “All of you.”

“If only we had a gene sequencer,” Branch said.

“Stop saying that,” Marianne said. She added, “Please.”

They sat on pallets in the leelee room. It was the only room in the clinic not crowded with people, but it was filled nonetheless. With equipment, with the safe, with live and dead leelees, the dead and infected ones in their negative-pressure cages. That spared Marianne the smell of putrefaction; the live ones smelled bad enough. They chattered; the signals that Branch kept replaying from the colony ship chattered; Marianne felt her mind chattering and stuttering from going over the same limited data in her memory.

Much of the lab equipment had been destroyed by the bomb, but Marianne’s laptop had been in the clinic, not in Big Lab. There wasn’t anything on her laptop about virophages; she hadn’t expected to deal with them on Kindred, and of course she’d expected to have access to the digital library on the Friendship. Virophages reproduced only inside their host viruses, like Russian nesting dolls, each smaller than the one that contained it. That required a host large enough, as viruses go. Also, the virophage had to be very small. The first one discovered was only fifty nanometers in size and had only twenty-one genes, thirteen of no known origin. It also contained a genetic segment of its host, which implied a genetic transfer between virus and virophage. To examine a virophage was to look at the earliest type of evolution, a trip back in time that made the fourteen-year jump from Earth to World insignificant. R. sporii might contain a similar segment of the virophage on the colony ship from some eons-ago encounter, so that when the two encountered each other again, the virophage moved in and set up housekeeping.

Viruses and their phages could have complicated multihost lives. The Argentine ant carried a virus, L. humile, that didn’t much bother the ants but which attacked honeybees unfortunate enough to visit the same flowers or to get attacked by ants foraging for honey. Virophages seemed to be implicated in those encounters, although when Marianne had left Earth, the research was still controversial.

She could determine so much more if they had a sequencer to determine the genome of the virophage! They didn’t have the virophage, either, but Branch, the hardware guy, seemed more obsessed with the lack of sequencer.

“If we had one,” he said, “then after the ship is called back here, we could at least—”

“Branch,” she said, with as much compassion as she could muster through her exhaustion, “the ship won’t be called back here. The device is lost.”

“But if we find it—”

“Branch—”

He said quietly, “I want to go home. The ship is our only chance to go home.”

Marianne said nothing; there was nothing to say. She put her hand over his. A long minute later she said, “I’m going out for some fresh air. Back in a minute.” Best to give him some time to control himself.

As she walked to Big Lab, a bit of eighteenth-century doggerel laughed at in graduate school came back to her:

“What are you smiling about?” Isabelle said, not entirely friendly. “I didn’t think there was anything to smile about.”

Isabelle stood in Big Lab, watching four Kindred rebuild the shattered east wall. Earlier in the day the three men and one woman had carted in karthwood, nails, tools, just as the bodies of the bomb victims were being carried out. Representatives of their lahks had come to take the remains of the two Kindred home, even though the spore cloud was so close that Marianne wondered if they would have time to reach their villages. She hadn’t asked. The Kindred carpenters worked in silence. Zoe Berman stood beside them, her rifle trained on the workers; Mason Kandiss stood outside, scanning the camp. Undoubtedly Owen Lamont or Leo Brodie perched on the roof. Maybe both of them.

Marianne didn’t answer Isabelle, who was in no mood to appreciate Jonathan Swift’s doggerel. Instead she said, “The Rangers will go after Kayla and Austin once the compound is secure.”

“Are you sure of that?” Isabelle said.

Marianne wasn’t. She searched for something to ease the terrible twisted tension in Isabelle’s face, to make Isabelle feel better. “Lily still isn’t sick from the vaccine. So apparently it’s not harmful.”

“Which doesn’t mean it will be effective.”

“True enough,” Marianne said. Isabelle didn’t want to feel better.

Big Lab had been cleaned up, debris swept out and benches washed. It no longer looked like a war zone, and the rebuilding would be done by nightfall, although now they scarcely needed the space. It wasn’t only corpses that were departing the compound; once it was secure again, the remaining Kindred would all leave for their lahks. They had nothing more to do here. The means to make more vaccine had been destroyed in the rush to steal it, and the remaining doses would be given to the Kindred scientists going back to their lahks, to do with as they wished. The only people left in the secured compound would be Marianne, Noah and his family, Branch, Isabelle, Salah, and the four Rangers. All of whom Lamont was prepared to defend until, apparently, the end of time.

And then, after the spore cloud, if any Kindred survived, it would be a whole new, and wholly unknown, situation.

Salah emerged from the walkway. He eyed the Rangers with dislike. “I wish it didn’t look so much like slave labor, building their masters’ dacha under armed guard.”

“They volunteered,” Isabelle said. “It’s a form of atonement for what the others did.”

“I know,” Salah said. “But that’s not what I came to say.” He lowered his voice. “Come away from where they might hear.”

Marianne and Isabelle followed him to the far corner. Salah kept his voice down. “There’s two things I think you should both know, as lahk Mothers.”

“I’m not—”

“Just listen, Marianne. I don’t know how significant this is, but it seems it might be. First, I’m pretty sure that Owen Lamont is on popbite.”

“What’s that?” Isabelle said, which saved Marianne’s asking.

“A street drug that acts on multiple brain centers to produce prolonged wakefulness and a sense of power. With prolonged use or in excessive doses, it promotes paranoia and then hallucinations.”

Isabelle said sharply, “How do you know?”

“I’m a doctor, Isabelle.”

Marianne said, “The other Rangers?”

“No. Not yet anyway. But of course, he might decide to share. Here’s the other thing: Three times now I’ve seen Brodie in what looked like secretive conversations with Kindred at the edge of camp, when the other Rangers weren’t around. The Kindred had pipe guns and Brodie didn’t disarm them.”

Marianne said, “I don’t understand. What are you implying?”

Isabelle said, “He’s implying that Leo Brodie is somehow cooperating with or encouraging violence in the camp. Why not say it outright, Salah? You think Leo is betraying us, betraying the Ranger creed, a thoroughly evil guy. Just spit it out!”

“I didn’t say—”

“Yes, you did. The Rangers are dangerous to us, they’re on paranoid drugs, they collude with killers, we shouldn’t trust them at all. I didn’t think you could be so paranoid yourself. Or so petty.” She stalked back to the clinic.

Salah looked stunned. Marianne said, “She’s just worried sick about her sister and nephew.”

“Yes,” Salah said, and then, “No. She… never mind. I’m sorry I spoke. I just thought the two of you ought to know what’s going on with the Rangers.” He left.

Going after Isabelle? Marianne didn’t know, and didn’t really want to. She pulled at the skin on her face. Too much was happening: to her family, to the Terrans, to the compound, to the planet. She stepped forward until she could see out of the rapidly diminishing hole in the wall.

The sun was just setting in a blaze of orange. One moon floated high over the eastern horizon. The brightest of the unfamiliar stars shone faintly; soon fainter stars would frame them, forming unfamiliar constellations that Marianne could not name. And somewhere out there, in orbit around another alien planet, was the Kindred colony ship, full of leelees infested with parasites that might save this planet. Leelees chittering, smelly, all alive-o, and unreachable.

Claire went all over Haven, inspecting shelves, studying equipment. At first Tony accompanied her, explaining, but she never spoke to him or acknowledged his presence. Nor did she acknowledge that her ass was partly exposed and very bruised from Austin’s having dragged her. Austin tried not to look at that, and looked.

Finally Tony said, “Austin, you take her around. Just don’t let her touch anything at all—nothing, you hear? And stay out of the room where Nathan and Graylock are working!”

They weren’t rooms, they were just caves or parts of caves, sometimes with curtains hung from poles at their entrances. That was clearer than ever to Austin, seeing Haven through Claire’s eyes. Caves with rough floors, or dripping water, or supplies stacked untidily on rough shelves of karthwood, or equipment brought inside in pieces and then reassembled, the tools and packing material scattered around, along with plates of half-eaten food. Behind a curtain, Kayla slept on a not-very-clean pallet.

When Tony had gone, Claire said, “Working on what?” She didn’t look directly at Austin, hadn’t looked directly at him since they’d arrived.

“What?”

“Tony said Nathan and Graa^lok are working. On what?”

“Equipment.”

“What equipment?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does the equipment do?”

“I don’t know.” She was making him feel stupid. He hated her. He didn’t hate her. He couldn’t stop looking at her ass.

Claire said, “What medicines do you have?”

Glad to know the answer to something, Austin led her to the shelf stockpiled with glass jars and bioplast containers. Claire opened some, sniffed, squinted at the Kindred writing, series of squiggles and dots and lines. “Can you read this?”

“Of course.”

“Tell me what they say.”

He did, feeling important again, until Claire said, “I don’t know what these are in English, or even if English analogs exist. I don’t know what they’re for. I don’t know the conventional doses. You wanted a doctor, but as far as meds go, I will be useless to you without my own case of Terran drugs.”

Importance crumbled. Austin clutched at her hand. “Please don’t tell Tony that! Please!”

For the first time, she turned her head to gaze at him. “Why not?”

“He’ll send me back to get your drugs! To steal them! And Noah and Isabelle will keep me there, they’ll make sure I can’t escape again, and the spore cloud is coming—”

“What do you think is going to happen when the spore cloud comes?”

“The collapse of civilization! Don’t you know? Kindred will die, most but not all, and the survivors will be desperate, because some always survive a plague, and they’ll steal and kill—just like they did in the camp, to get the vaccine! Only this time it will be to get food and wine and women… Tony told me! He told me how it was on Terra when Rome fell and the siege of Leningrad and the way the Indians massacred everybody at Cawnpore, even babies… and Leo told me about the Brazilian food riots! That’s the way it always is with humans and no matter what Lieutenant Lamont thinks, Kindred are all human!”

Austin burst into tears. Immediately he hated himself for it, and then a moment later he didn’t because Claire’s face softened and she put her arms around him.

“Oh, Austin, it isn’t always like that, and maybe especially not on Kindred where you have such different social systems from Leningrad or Cawnpore or… Rome! Why did Tony tell you all that? It wasn’t fair, you’re just a kid. Austin, listen to—”

“I’m not a kid!” And to prove it, he kissed her hard on the mouth and put a hand on her breast. She came up only to his shoulder and her bones felt light as a leelee’s, so he was surprised at the strength with which she pushed him away. Comfort and sympathy were gone from her face as she stalked back to the main cave.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Austin—grow up!”

Dawn brought more rain. Leo came off perimeter patrol around a quiet and nearly empty camp and reported to Owen, who was coming on duty. In the ready room, Leo took off his gear and stowed it in his lockbox, brushed his teeth, and glanced at the pallet he was not going to sleep on. At least, not yet, despite having had only four hours in the last twenty. Some things outranked sleep.

Isabelle waited in the kitchen. She’d made coffee, or what passed for coffee here. Leo searched for the word and found it: “Nakl.”

“Very good.”

“I didn’t know if you’d come, what with… with everything.”

“Teaching you is about the only good thing in my life right now.”

Leo’s heart threatened to burst right down its seam. Even if she only meant that the rest of her life was shitty—and that was what she meant, not that he was some shining star for her—it was still good. He sipped the nakl she handed him, even though he didn’t like it.

Isabelle smiled. There was something wrong with the smile, something a little off, but she didn’t give him time to figure out what it was. “Let’s see how much you remember from last time. Tell me how to close the door.”

He stumbled over the words but got them out.

“Good! Now tell me how to do it if I’m a mother.”

Shit—she was a mother, and that meant different words. Leo found them, his eyes on her face.

“Good! Great!” Big smile—too big. Something was definitely off.

They went through several more phrases of conversation, and then Isabelle moved closer to him. Leo, no neophyte with women, thought: Here it comes. He was a little surprised that Isabelle would try to pull this, but then, the circumstances weren’t the same as some college girl slumming in an on-base bar. He knew what she would ask.

She did.

“Leo,” she said, taking his hand, “I need you to help me.”

“Yeah?”

She kissed him. The press of her lips, soft and full on his, was so intoxicating that for a minute the kitchen, the compound, the planet were blotted out.

“I need you to go after Kayla and Austin for me, because no one else will.”

Gently he pushed her away. “I can’t, Isabelle. You shouldn’t even ask me, and you know that. This isn’t like you. Lamont will go after them when he can, maybe today.”

“No, he won’t.” She was Isabelle again, straightforward and steely. He liked her better this way, although he understood why she’d tried to fuck him over. Family. Bu^ka^tel.

“Listen to me, Leo. Lamont isn’t thinking straight. He’s getting paranoid. Salah says he’s on some drug—popbite.”

“He is.”

“You knew?”

“Fuck, Isabelle, we all use it when we have to. Maybe it didn’t exist when you left Terra, but in the last decade… We all use it if we have to.” He pushed away the memory of Brazil. “But listen, Austin and your sister are okay. Even Dr. Patel will be. So what if they ride out the spore cloud in some crazy survivalist bunker? Do you really think that those two Terrans will harm them? Tony and what’s-his-name?”

“Who knows what they’ll do!”

“The truth, Isabelle. Do you think they’ll harm Austin or Kayla?”

Long silence. Then she said, “No.”

“Then it can wait. After the cloud hits and we see what we’re up against with survivors and vaccinated kids and all, then we can go convince Austin to come out. Or maybe they’ll just leave the cave voluntarily. Why are they in there in the first place? They’ll all be immune to spore disease.”

“Probably, yes. But any Kindred they have with them won’t be. If they have some survivalist idea of restarting civilization, they’ll have women with them. Claire Patel is too old.”

“So how—”

Isabelle said, “Austin’s friend Graa^lok has sisters. Young, pretty…”

“Well, there you go. And Austin’s not a stupid kid. He makes himself useful, and he keeps an eye on what’s around him. Sure, he’s a little wet behind the ears, but he’s sharp. He got his mother out there by fooling us all, didn’t he? Dr. Patel, too. Those guys will want Austin around. He even finds them new stuff that might be useful, like that alien junk he told me about buried in the sand, and he can also translate anything that—”

Isabelle took a step backward. “What did you just say?”

Leo blinked. “I said Austin can translate any—”

“Before that!”

He had to make an effort to remember. “Austin told me he found some old piece of junk buried in the sand way back in a cave and… let me think… yeah, he said it was alien and wasn’t rusty. At all. Isabelle—what is it?”

Her face had gone bone white. Was she going to faint? Leo reached out to grab her, but Isabelle was made of tougher stuff than that. She held onto a kitchen shelf and breathed deep. Then she said, “Go get Lieutenant Lamont.”

“Whoa, you don’t want to—”

“Do it. I’ll get Marianne and the others. Tell Lamont it’s urgent. Life-or-death urgent. No, tell him something else, something he’ll want to hear.

“Tell him there might be a way to call a ship to take him home.”

Salah Bourgiba wasn’t convinced. Leo could see that. He thought the unrusty object that Austin had mentioned might be anything at all, a view that Leo shared, even though he didn’t like sharing anything with Bourgiba. Dr. Jenner and Isabelle believed it was the call-back device but that, Leo thought, was because they wanted to believe it. Branch wanted mostly to get his hands on the hardware.

It was Owen who disturbed Leo.

He’d gone outside to look for Owen but found him instead in the ready room. Owen must have taken more popbite because he was hyperawake, counting his clips of ammo. They lay on the floor in lines straight as a parade drill, but Owen nudged one of them a fraction of an inch to the right. What was the point of that? Better not to ask.

“Sir, sorry to distur—”

“What?” Owen’s calm, following so much irritability in the past week, was more unsettling than a shout or howl. The whites of his eyes looked yellowish, and the pupils were enormous. Not yet in armor, his weight loss was obvious. How much popbite was he doing? Every soldier knew the limits, as well as what could happen if you exceeded them.

Leo said, “Dr. Jenner and the others think they might have a way to call the colony ship back from wherever it is and use it to go back to Terra.”

Owen went completely still. Seconds passed, during which Owen stared hard at something in the corner of the room. Leo turned his head, but the corner was empty.

Finally Owen said, “How?”

“Some device that Austin Rhinehart found in the mountains. He said to… they would like to discuss this with you, sir. In the clinic.”

Owen put his ammo into his lockbox, locked it, and strode out. Since he had no orders to the contrary, Leo followed.

The Terrans had moved into the leelee lab, leaving the door open to let out some of the stink. Noah wasn’t there. The leelees chittered—didn’t the dumb things ever sleep? Well, if not, they looked better not sleeping than Owen, who reminded Leo of a twitchy jaguar he’d seen in Brazil.

“Lieutenant Lamont,” Isabelle said. “We have two pieces of information for you. First, a few days ago Austin told Leo that he’d found an ‘unrusty alien piece of machinery’ in Tony Schrupp’s cave, where Austin took Dr. Patel. Before she died, the Mother of Mothers told me there had originally been a device to call back the colony ship, World’s other spaceship. It’s been sending signals, as you know. Branch decoded them with that”—Isabelle pointed at a pile of machinery taking up a good chunk of floor space next to a rumpled pallet—“and there is a good chance that if we can get the device from the cave and use it through Branch’s transmitter, we can call the colony ship back here.”

Owen said nothing. His yellowish, huge-pupiled eyes did not blink.

Marianne said, “If we can get the ship here, there might be a chance that Branch could change its destination settings to Terra. After all, other settings aboard the Friendship were reprogrammable. Within limits, yes, but—”

“Why should I believe you?” Owen said in a calm, reasonable voice that nonetheless made Leo’s skin prickle. “You want the hostages back. I said no. All of a sudden you come up with another reason for an extraction.”

Bourgiba’s eyes narrowed and he started to speak, but Isabelle put a hand on his arm. Smart Isabelle—she could do this better than anyone else.

Isabelle said, “I understand what you’re saying, Lieutenant. But Austin spoke originally to Corporal Brodie, and I’m sure you trust your own unit’s intel.”

“Brodie?” Owen said, without turning.

“It’s true, sir.” Leo strained to remember Austin’s exact words. “I caught him coming back to camp and he told me that Noah Jenner already knows where he goes, but that Jenner didn’t know everything, that Austin was the only one who knew everything. The kid said that Jenner didn’t know that Austin found ‘a rusty old alien machine buried in sand.’ He told me it’s shaped like a pyramid. He didn’t know what it was for.”

Isabelle said, “Ree^ka told me the call-back device was pyramidal. Also, it’s the only piece of alien machinery pictured in the tablets but never found. Geological activity over eons—”

Fuck geological activity. Leo saw that Owen had stopped listening. Owen stared at the floor, head down, an un-Owen-like pose. When he raised his head, his face looked somehow both twitchy and impassive.

“All right. We go after the call-back device.”

Don’t say thank you, Isabelle. This was a mission decision, not a favor or capitulation, don’t let him think it is…

Dr. Jenner said, “Thank—”

“What do you want us to do?” Isabelle said, quick and loud. “Do you need a translator?”

Of course he didn’t; the survivalists spoke English. But it was probably the first thing Isabelle had thought of.

“Wake Jenner,” Owen said. “He can guide us to the cave. If he’s too injured, then I need everything he knows about direction, distance, terrain, and the enemy forces inside the objective, including what weapons they might have. What is your second piece of information?”

This time, Isabelle let Dr. Jenner speak. “It’s what’s aboard the colony ship. Every time we’ve exposed leelees to spores here in the lab—”

“You have spores here? From Terra?”

Dr. Jenner looked surprised. “A limited number. What did you think we used to manufacture vaccines?”

Leo thought: Did I know they had live spores? No, he did not. The scientists had assumed everyone knew the science, and Owen had assumed their business was separate from his mission. Just as he’d tried to keep the squad separate and self-contained, using everything short of a nonfraternization order.

“Anyway,” Dr. Jenner continued, “all the lab leelees that we exposed to spores died. But Branch has auditory evidence that on the colony ship, there are live leelees. That argues that they’re somehow immune to the spores that killed the Kindred crew. It might be that just a few with natural genetic immunity survived and bred. But here on Kindred we haven’t found any leelees with natural immunity. The other possibility is a virophage, a virus that destroys the spores, and if we can get the ship here and let the virophages loose before the spore cloud hits, and if the virophage proves to be airborne, it might save any of the population that can breathe it in. It’s a long shot, but even so we—Lieutenant?”

Owen had turned away. No one saw his face except Leo, and he felt his own eyes widen. Owen’s face jerked into a rage that Leo had seen only once before: in Brazil, on a suicide bomber rushing toward a group of Marines.

The rage vanished. Owen turned back to the others. “Bring me Noah Jenner. We start at first light. I’ll take Specialist Berman with me. Private Kandiss and Corporal Brodie will remain here to secure the building.”

Bourgiba said angrily, “We no longer need ‘securing’ because there’s no more vaccine to—”

But Owen had already left the room.

Austin sat at a rough table with his mother and Claire, eating dinner. The cave was dim and cool. Claire had poked among the supplies and cooking pots and weird stove—Austin didn’t understand what powered it—and produced a soup far tastier than the dry and cold stuff Austin had had before. Beyon-mak ate three bowls of it before disappearing back to his stupid old equipment. Tony, who’d also eaten three bowls of soup, kept looking toward the tunnel door.

Claire ignored them all, talking only to Kayla. “Can I ask how many hours of sleep you usually get in a night?”

Kayla shook her head, but then she answered. “Maybe ten. But it’s not good sleep. I can’t get up in the morning.”

“What’s the most pleasurable thing in your life, if you don’t mind my asking? Your life at the lahk, I mean.”

“Nothing is pleasurable.”

There were more questions, gentle and kind—why didn’t Claire talk to him that way!—until Kayla finally said, “Enough. Sorry. I can’t.” Her eyes filled and she went back to her pallet behind the curtain.

“Austin,” Claire said, “your mother is seriously depressed. She has at least eight of the nine signs of clinical depression. Do you know if there are drugs for this on Kindred and what they’re called?”

“Isabelle says there aren’t.” At least she was talking to him.

“What happens to people who are psychotic or schizophrenic or severely bipolar?”

“I don’t know those words.”

“I mean, people who can’t function normally in society?”

“My mother’s normal! She just wants to go home! She doesn’t belong in a du¡hn!”

“Is that an asylum? Perhaps not. But I’m worried that—” The tunnel bell rang three times and Claire startled. “What’s that?”

Tony raced from a side tunnel to the door, unlocked it, and disappeared into the tunnel.

Austin said, “That’s Graa^lok’s signal. He’s back.”

Tony led seven women from the tunnel, followed by Graa^lok. Austin recognized Graa^lok’s mother and two sisters; he’d known them since he was three. The other girls, all young, were strangers. All wore cloaks and carried large packs.

“Oh my God,” Claire said. “You really think you can form a polygamous commune.”

Austin didn’t know what a “polygamous commune” was, but it didn’t sound good. Or maybe it did. Graa^lok’s mother smiled uncertainly and said in World, “I greet you, Tony-mak.”

“Tony-kal,” Graa^lok corrected. “We’re a new kind of lahk now.”

Another of the girls, the youngest, peered shyly at Austin. He stood up taller. She was even prettier than Claire.

Saving civilization might be great, after all.