Part 91 (2/2)
She hands Doe off to a uniformed officer, dazzled for a moment by the cost in energy, hydrocarbons, fuel cells to bring all these people out here. She tells the woman that they need to mount a search party, that there are two children suffering some form of progeria lost in the woods. That the kids are witnesses against Klopft, and need to be protected.
And then she goes to join the search for them, confident that neither Cascadia nor Interpol had trackers much better than her.
The bole of the fallen tree stretched over them kept the rain off, and the ground underneath was only damp, not soaked like everything else. Martha and Matt had no knives, nor anything but sticks rubbed sharp, but Matt was pulling up the bark and probing in the tunnels underneath for grubs. They chewed them carefully, not wasting anything: food was food.
Martha didn't think the people from the compound-or the other people, the ones who had been fighting the people from the compound- would find them here. They'd run far, and hidden well.
And for a couple of hours, everything was silent except the sounds of animals, and the rain.
Until a boot crunched outside, footsteps approaching, and somebody parted the boughs that fell over them with a pale-skinned hand.
”Hey,” said the woman who had hit Callandar and then fought him while Martha and Matt ran away. ”You guys want to come out of there? My name's Mauritza. I have a warm dry place for you to sleep.”
Martha looked at Matt. Matt shrugged, deferring to her.
How bad can it be?
Gingerly, Martha reached out a cold hand.
Brown waits for her near the outskirts of the camp, his arms folded, letting the official types do their work. He's watching a team carry cages out of the building and line them up in the shade-strange purple birds in polymer boxes with airholes, snakes that seem long and whippy and as curiously jointed as those wooden toy serpents you shake by the tail, octopuses in large wheeled terrariums.
”Look at this stuff,” Brown says, when Mauritza walks up to him. ”Squonks. Tree octopuses. Hoopsnakes.”
She decides she doesn't want to know about hoopsnakes. ”What's a squonk?”
”See those purple birds? They were supposed to be able to dissolve themselves in their own tears. These ones seem to be able to convert themselves into an amoeba-like state and back. One of your techs said it was going to set stem cell research forward fifteen years, if they can figure out how to extrapolate the tech.”
”They're not my techs,” Mauritza says. ”This was just a license job.”
”Sure it was.” He smiles.
She looks away.
”There are a whole bunch of babies inside,” Brown says. ”That same tech told me they're genetically manipulated. Stronger, faster-”
”You have a way of getting sensitive information out of people.”
”I used to have a nickname.”
”I heard.” She pauses, pressed against her eyes. ”If you can build a tree octopus, how much trouble is a superkid?”
”Bet the going rate is higher.”
”Yeah,” she says. ”And so is the cost of failure.”
Brown turns to look at her. ”You know, my license is up as of five minutes ago. I'm not a cop right this second. I'm just a guy with a conscience.”
”Doe's going to walk out of this a hero,” she says.
”Unless you tell somebody the truth.”
She nods. She can't look at him. She keeps talking. Not because he's interviewing her, but because she has to tell somebody, and maybe if it's him, she can tell herself he got it out of her somehow.
Superpowers.
”The last case we worked before I left him,” she says. She opens her mouth. She can't go on.
Brown waits, studying his fingernails.
She studies them too. ”Doe planted evidence.”
”You have proof?”
She nods. ”I have a vid. The same vid that shows me nearly getting shot. I kept it to myself. But that wasn't-” She sighs. ”That wasn't murder.”
Brown says, ”If you come forward with this, that will cost you your career.”
”And him his.” She twists her hands together. ”I was a good cop. It's not the end of the world.”
Brown looks away. ”You are a good cop. You know, I was thinking of getting out of this game-”
”Too much ugly?” she asks, noticing the past tense.
He nods. ”They're going to destroy all of these animals.”
”I know,” she says. ”It's not your fault.”
”Whose fault it is doesn't change what's going to happen.”
She has to force her shoulders out of their hunch. ”What about the babies?”
”G.o.d only knows. Adoption? Want to raise a superbaby? Somebody will. And Matt and Martha?”
”Group home. After they testify.”
”Group home,” he agrees. ”Until they die of old age.”
Her whole body aches with the aftermath of adrenaline. ”What about the animals that escaped?”
”Escaped?” Brown glances across at her and smiles. ”You think these things could survive in the wild?”
Sanchez looks him in the eye. She looks away.
”Of course. How on earth would anything escape a place like this? It's crazy talk.”
She shakes her head, remembering the elegant coil of sticky tentacles through wet boughs.
<script>