I?” He gave a little laugh. “So I did. Funny when you think about it. Something along those lines would sure come in handy, given the exigencies of the food chain and all. I’m sure your pal Lawrence would agree. I tell you, that man can eat.” He paused a moment, enjoying this thought, before his eyes hardened on her again. “Now clean yourself up. No offense, Lila, but you’ve got vomit in your hair.”
40
“Sara? Can you hear me?”
A voice was floating toward her. A voice and also a face, one she knew but couldn’t place. A face in a dream, which was what she was certain she was having: an unsettling dream in which she was running and all around her were bodies and parts of bodies, and everything on fire.
“She’s still completely out of it,” the voice said. It seemed to reach her across an impossible distance. A continent. An ocean. It seemed to come from the stars. “How much did you use?”
“Three drops. Well, maybe four.”
“Four? Were you trying to kill her?”
“It was rushed, okay? You told me you wanted her out. So, she’s out.”
A heavy sigh. “Get me a bucket.”
A bucket, thought Sara, what did the voices want with a bucket? What did a bucket have to do with anything? But no sooner had she thought this than a force of cold wetness crashed into her face, blasting her into consciousness. She was choking, drowning, waving her arms in panic, her nose and throat filling with the icy water.
“Easy now, Sara.”
She sat upright, too fast; her brain sloshed in its casing, swirling her vision.
“Ooo,” she moaned. “Ooo.”
“The headache’s bad, but it won’t last. Just breathe.”
She blinked the water from her eyes. Eustace?
It was. His top front teeth were gone, shorn at the root; his right eye was clouded with blindness. With a gnarled hand, he was holding out a metal cup.
“It’s good to see you again, Sara. You’ve already met Nina, here. Say hello, Nina.”
Standing behind him was the woman from the pipe. A rifle was slung across her chest, her arms folded casually over it. “Hello, Sara.”
“Don’t worry,” Eustace said. “I know you have a lot of questions, and we’ll get to them. Just drink.”
Sara took the cup and gulped the water down. It was astonishingly cold and tasted vaguely metallic, as if she were licking a bar of iron.
“I thought you were—”
“Dead?” Eustace grinned, showing his ruined mouth. “In point of fact, everybody here is dead. Nina, remind me, how exactly did you die?”
“I believe it was pneumonia, sir. That or something very heavy fell on me. I can never remember how we did the paperwork.”
The explosion, the dash through the pipe; it was all coming back now. Sara drained the cup and took a moment to inspect her surroundings. She appeared to be in some kind of bunker, although there were no windows; she sensed they were someplace underground. The room’s only illumination came from a stand of flickering torches.
“Where are we?”
“Someplace the redeyes can’t find us.” He had a way of looking at her, angling his face to aim his good eye, that somehow added to the penetrating seriousness of his gaze. “Beyond that, I can’t tell you. The important thing is you’re safe here.”
“Are you … Sergio?”
Another broken-toothed smile. “I’m flattered you would think so. But no. There is no Sergio. Not in the way you mean.”
“But I thought—”
“And you’re supposed to. The name is short for ‘insurgency.’ Nina, if I’m not mistaken, that was your idea, wasn’t it?”
“I believe it was.”
“People need a name. Something to focus on, a face to attach to the idea. That’s our face. Sergio.”
She looked at the woman, who was regarding her coolly, then back to Eustace.
“The explosion. That was you, wasn’t it?”
Eustace nodded. “Our early reports indicate seventeen cols dead, including your friend Whistler, and two members of the staff who were visiting for an inspection. Not a bad day’s work, I’d say. But that’s not the real prize.”
“It’s not?”
“No. The real prize is you, Sara.”
Eustace was looking at her intently now. Both of them were. Sara shivered in the cold. A shift had occurred, an inversion of the conversation’s energies; he was trying to draw her out. Could they trust her? More to the point, could she trust them?
“This is the part where you ask me why.”
Not wanting to concede too much, Sara nodded.
“As of this morning, there is no Sara Fisher. Sara Fisher, flatlander number 94801, was killed in a suicide bombing