Sanctuary

Day 844

They're all gone. Jeremy's still breathing but he won't be much longer. I can see it in his eyes. It's the same look a lot of the others had before they died. It's hard to describe. If I had to, I'd probably say it's something like a look of quiet surprise. A sort of noiseless bewilderment, as if they're thinking, Okay, okay, this is really happening, this is it, this is my death, I should take notice, I should be present to this. And then, at some missed microsecond-because the actual moment can never be seen, no, not really, not ever-they just stop being. They're simply there, and then they're not. Like a sound you don't notice until it's gone. And then there is quiet.

Of course, the hours, days, or weeks leading up to that moment aren't very quiet. They're usually ugly and loud, or violent, or bloody, brutal, terrifying-but for the briefest of moments, just as they near the end of breath, after the grappling and the writhing and thrashing and denying, there seems to be, in their dimming eyes, beauty.

She unraveled the strip of torn shirt from her fingers, and the pen slipped from her hand. It rolled across the table and fell to the floor. She let it lie. She pried her fingers open as far as she could, trying to stretch them wide, but it was too painful. She let go and they crimped back into a twisted gnarl. The whole of the hand was discolored now, swollen past the point of function. She looked at it closely in the dusky half-light of the room. It seemed as if her hand belonged to another. And perhaps it did, for she barely recognized the woman she had become. The bandage on her palm was filthy, the blood already dried black. She lifted a corner of it and pulled. It stuck to her skin. She tugged at it, gently, then not gently, and worked loose the scab-encrusted cloth. Dust and blood had mingled, clotting up the edges of the wound.

A sound then, from the corner of the room, low-pitched and wet. She limped over to the boy and turned him onto his side, tilting his head down. Pink-tinged mucus drained from his mouth. "It's just me," she said, wiping clean his lips. He reached out, grabbing at the air. She let his small hand find hers, and she held it and it seemed to calm him. "Shh." His eyes were open, staring at something only he could see. She ran her broken fingers through his hair, his hair so light and fine, and long now. He'd said he was going to cut it when he turned ten.

She brushed back his bangs.

The boy quieted.

She made it back to the table and sat.

She picked up the pen and snugged it into the crook of her thumb and tied it in place again, pulling the knot tight with her teeth. She took up her journal and pressed flat another page, when a thin line of light fell across the table. She looked up. The sun was just beginning to swell the horizon. The sun that never changed. The sun that shone but never warmed. The sun chosen from a drop-down menu of a dozen other suns. The recorded sun that rose and set in an endless loop on the digital-screened "window" embedded high on the wall of the room.

False dawns.

Pretaped yesterdays made to look like todays.

2

Two years earlier. Ecuador.

Fifty kilometers south of Quito, before dawn.

summit trail on the eastern slope of Mount Cotopaxi.

¡Regresen! ¡Regresen!" the guide yelled, a violent crosswind nearly knocking him off the cliff edge.

He flattened himself against the rock face, waving Julia and Flynn back. "¡Regresen!" The wind had caught them unawares, squall-like, a sudden microburst rushing out of a still-dark sky. Flynn, trailing behind Julia, grabbed her jacket and traversed backward down the muddy slope, slick now with snowmelt and wet ash. Crouching low, he sidestepped into a shallow outcropping and pulled her in with him.

"Holy shit!" Julia yelled above the wind.

The guide stumbled in, crowding between them. "¡Ay mierda!" A crystally mist of rain glinted in the beams of his headlamp. "Los vientos, ¿eh? La montaña está muy inquieta hoy." He peered out, shaking his head and shouting above the wind. "¡Es muy peligroso!"

Julia, more thrilled than frightened, hoped they wouldn't turn back. Winds this dangerous usually didn't last long, and besides, she'd climbed in worse. "Escalemos más, ¿sí?" she asked, but before the guide could answer, Flynn stepped in.

"¡No! ¡No más!"

"Oh, come on! It's not that bad," Julia said, sure that Flynn didn't want to continue anyway. He never hid the fact that he didn't like hiking or climbing. "We can wait it out."

"I'm sorry, no."

Julia was fed up with being told what to do every step of the way, even from Flynn. Yes, he was new; yes, he was probably just trying to please her father; yes, she was too young to be traveling alone-whatever-it still pissed her off. Besides, she was better at mountaineering than Flynn and the guide put together. She'd been climbing since she was six and had been the fifth youngest person to scale Denali when she was fifteen. She'd chosen Flynn to chaperone because it was the only way her father would let her travel the world to climb. It didn't hurt, of course, that she found him ridiculously hot, but still, she didn't need to be treated like a child. She'd be getting five percent of her trust in a few months when she turned eighteen, and then she could do whatever the hell she wanted.

Julia peeked out of the outcropping. Dawn was barely breaking. Up the mountainside, a canopy of steel-colored clouds mingled so thickly with the volcano's ash plumes that neither was distinguishable from the other. A charcoal sky. She stepped farther out, squinting into the wind, and turned back to Flynn.

"Well, if we're not going up . . ." she said, and took off at a jog down the mountainside.

"Wait!" Flynn called after her. "Miss Brandt, don't-!"

"You want to go back, I'm going back!"

"Slow down!"

"Keep up!"

The slope steepened quickly as she descended and the trail turned icier, slush-coated, and mucky. She slowed her pace, still well ahead of Flynn, as an unseen sun began to gray the horizon before her. Twenty chilled minutes later she was at the base of the mountain, the ground there leveling off into a slate-gray expanse of pumice and ash, like the bleak terrain of another planet, all soot and cinders. There was a tiny café-thatched roof and stone-just off a gravel road where they'd parked that morning, and Julia was desperate for a cappuccino. She broke into a sprint, a rainy wind at her back pushing her along, and reached the café before Flynn. Struggling to open the door, she leaned back, yanked hard, and slipped in sideways just as an angry gust slammed it shut behind her.

The room hummed with windlessness.

It was warm and empty and still inside and smelled of woodsmoke.

Flynn blustered through the door a moment later, windblown and breathless; his fair skin, slightly freckled, flushed crimson. He dropped his gear and the backpacks and bent over, hands on hips, wheezing.

"You okay, old man?" He was only twenty-six but Julia liked teasing him.

Flynn looked up at her-not happy. "Please wait by the door."

"There's no one in here."

"Please wait by the door, Miss Brandt."

He stepped past Julia and checked the side windows. Looked behind a counter. Felt the stones above the fireplace. He approached a doorless back room with a curtain of jeweled beads dangling before it, one hand resting on the Glock 19 strapped to his thigh. "¿Hola?" he called out, and stepped through, the beaded strands tinkling as they parted. "Buenos días?"

Julia unzipped her climbing suit, a candy apple-red GORE-TEX onesie from Patagonia, and wondered when Flynn was going to kiss her. She knew he wanted to, from the first day he'd been assigned to her. He avoided looking at her so much that she knew that all he wanted to do was look at her. She would catch him sneaking glances at her lips almost every time they talked. He was pretty transparent for a personal protection agent, as he liked to call himself. Instead of a bodyguard. Which he was. And besides, he wasn't that much older. Only nine years. Her dad was fifteen years older than her mother. What's the big deal? Anyway, she was pretty sure they'd be having sex right now if it weren't for her father-who'd kill him if he ever found out-and Mr. Cooper, who would fire him on the spot.

Flynn emerged from the back room with a confused-looking young man-boy-Julia couldn't really tell. He looked like a fifteen-year-old who had just woken up and was late for school. Flynn whispered into a shoulder-mounted microphone on the inside of his jacket, "Safe, secure." A moment later the scrunch of car tires on gravel, a car door slamming, and another agent entered the café. He unslung a semiautomatic rifle from off his back and took a position near the front door.

"Excuse me," Julia said to the kitchen boy. "¿Café?"

He was staring at the agent's rifle.

"Perdón," she said. "¿Tienes café?"

Startled, he said, "Sí, sí, señorita."

"Cappuccino?"

"Lo siento, ahora solo café."

"Well-okay, fine," she said, disappointed with the service, and fell into a seat by a window. "Michael," she called out to Flynn. He was talking with the other agent. "Michael, come and sit with me."

"A moment, Miss Brandt."

Julia tugged her wool cap off and shook out her hair, loose-waved and long, loving the way Flynn always called her Miss Brandt. She ran her fingers through her hair, scrunching some body back into it, hoping he would notice. He didn't, and she said, "Michael, don't you think we-"

A piercing alarm-high-pitched and cutting-shattered the room. Julia, instantly dragged from the table, was flung into a corner-Flynn covering her-his satellite phone pinging, pinging, pinging. The other guard sprinted over and blocked her body as Flynn answered the call.

"Yes," he said, his voice sharp, efficient. "Yes, sir."

Julia was too annoyed to be scared. What was it now? Another extraction drill? She was getting sick of them. The demonstrations in Quito? The war in Argentina? The satellite phone was only for stateside emergencies, so if it-

Her heart dropped.

The riots back home.

Her family. Her little brother.

Flynn ended the call. "Get the car," he told the other agent, who sprinted out the door.

Julia tried to speak, but Flynn held a hand up, grabbed the backpacks, and hurried her outside-a blast of sleety rain lashing at them as they stepped out the door. The Land Cruiser skidded to a stop in front of the café, and Flynn, shielding Julia with his jacket, rushed her into the back seat and jumped in front. Seat belts buckled, doors locked. Julia held tight to the grab handle above as the car spun sideways-kicking out spits of gravel-and bucked and lurched down the rutted dirt road.

"Make a right at the bottom of the hill," Flynn said. "The airport."

The driver swerved onto a paved road and sped away.

Julia, catching her breath, wiped rain from her eyes. "Michael?"

Flynn looked in the rearview. "Yes, Miss Brandt?"

"Where are you taking me?'

"Sanctuary."

3

Same day, The United States.

Cape Royale, Florida.

Interstate 75 North.

It was an oil fire. Cooper was certain. He lowered the passenger window and leaned out, trying to get a better look. Behind a line of palm trees in the distance, clouds of black smoke, thick and roiling, tumbled skyward, orange flames bursting sideways-an active, angry fire. Thirty years ago in the desert wars, he'd have hardly taken notice. But not so here. Not along Florida's Gulf, where the ultrarich flock to hide their money, avoid taxes, and winter wealthily within iron-gated, hedge-hidden mansions.

Cooper's baseline hypervigilance, which ran high to begin with, ticked up a notch.

"Get off the highway."

Schaefer flipped a blinker and swung into the right lane.

Cooper checked his phone for traffic, news. "We need a different route."

"Ocean Avenue, south. Runs along the coast."

"Do it," Cooper said, grateful Schaefer thought as fast as he did, if not faster. A soldier's soldier in his book, Hallie Schaefer could fly, drive, navigate, and fix anything with a wing or wheel. Mississippi born, she ran away to the Air Force at seventeen, gave them twenty years, survived six deployments, and managed to make it through a decade of hellhole oil and water wars without losing her soul. Or limbs. The smartest of Cooper's team, and the most experienced, she was his second-in-command-no one else he wanted.

"Exit coming up," she said.

Cooper raised his window, shutting out the grueling heat that had been sweltering Florida and most of the country for nearly eight months now. He and Schaefer had sweat completely through their gray suits, large dark blotches of wet pooling beneath their arms and down their backs. He cranked the AC, made sure the windows were locked, and then reached across the dash and tapped the navigation screen to enlarge the GPS.

"Bottom of the ramp, make a left," he said.

Schaefer exited the highway, the GPS promptly trying to reroute her back onto it. Cooper shut the damn thing off and took out a map, a real map, made of paper.

"Ocean Avenue . . ." he said, finding it, "west for three blocks, then-"

"Already got it," Schaefer said, braking for a red light at the end of the exit ramp. "I know the route." Idling there, she glanced over at Cooper and gave him a not-so-subtle look.

"What?" he asked.

She shook her head and smiled. Kind of. She had one of those quirky smiles that only turned up at one corner of her mouth, as if the other half were deciding if it was really worth the effort. "You should say something, you know."

"I was about to."

"No, sir, I do not think that you were," she told him, the twang of her Southern drawl dipping just a little deeper, as it did whenever she was pissed off, a little drunk, or being a wiseass. She was being a wiseass. She reached overhead and toggled down a circuit switch and the driver-client partition lowered and locked into place.

Cooper twisted around in his seat. "Excuse me, ma'am."