Seven: Conspiracy Theory

Two days after Monkey left, everything seemed to break, one bit of disaster falling right after the other. The second and fourth hydraulic pumps cracked and sprayed a hundred gallons of water into fine mist that collapsed back into the waterfall. Trip came dangerously close to drowning trying to repair them with one arm still painfully stiff. Ben had hauled her up by the scruff of her neck and called her a dozen kinds of foolish before sending Nash and Quinn down instead.

Trip would have spent hours pacing along the cliff edge in shoes that squelched beseechingly in her wake, watching the repairs, but the perimeter alarms began screaming on her fourth circuit, and she just barely beat Ben in reaching the watchtower.

"Nothin'!" the guard shouted at them, as they skidded to a stop under the tower. "Not unless it's invisible!"

"Great," Trip said. She was tired and aching and her clothes were sticky with water and sweat, and the sun was barely even up.

The alarms choked off, mid-screech. Trip and Ben waited, listening hard for mechs, or slaver ships, or so much as a stray dragonfly. After five minutes of absolutely nothing, the alarms started up again, and Trip buried her fingertips in her ears.

"I'll get Mark," Ben shouted, inches from her face. "You two can start checking the sensors."

"He won't come," she shouted back. "He didn't for the pumps."

"Why the hell not?"

"He's sulking!"

Ben gave her a look that meant he hadn't understood, or that he understood full well and wasn't impressed. He firmly pushed her toward the first sensor and headed back into town, his hands pressed flat over his ears.

The alarms cut out, and Trip forced herself to take a deep breath and hold it until her lungs began to clench. She let the breath out slowly, just a bit at a time, and tried to find the strength she'd need to check the entire perimeter.

As soon as the last bit of air was gone, the alarms started up again, and Trip smuggled in a few particularly good curses under their racket.

The alarms sounded for just about everything, to warn them of tree leaves, mosquitoes and particularly suspicious breezes. The initial panic downgraded to irritation, then a sort of condemned acceptance as Liberty adjusted to the ruckus.

The perimeter scans were no use. The system's entire purpose was to tell them where the alarm originated, and what triggered it. But the system seemed just as bewildered as they were, and the alarm tripped from a different sensor every time.

By the third hour of manually scaling the rocks, prying sensors from their hiding places and resetting them with Mark's help, Trip's head was ringing, even when the alarm was off, and she could feel blood in her ears. Graham trailed along behind them, his father's oversized hearing protectors clamped down on his head when the alarms were ringing. When they weren't, he gathered stones, collecting and counting them in his hands until the alarm sounded again, then dumped them all and started fresh. He talked, from one instant of silence to the last, as if consciously padding the alarms with more noise.

"—and Wren said that the ones at Pyramid were twice as big and five time more scary and they made hissing and crashing noises but I said, were you there, and she said no, 'cause she wasn't, and Geoff wasn't either, but he doesn't pretend. And Dad said that we should forget some things like mechs and monsters and stuff, but they're so big and fast, and the one Monkey fought was fast—"

The alarms started up again, blessedly, and Graham obediently snapped the plastic muffs over his ears.

Mark moved mechanically from one sensor to the next, not registering Graham's presence and not meeting Trip's eyes as he passed each sensor to her. The two of them hung from the rock face using picks and harnesses, only barely able to reach some of the sensors even then. Monkey never let it look this hard.

The alarms whined into nothing again, and Mark said something in the short silence between the ruckus and Graham's chatter.

Trip popped the foam plugs from her ears. "What?"

"I said, we should just reset the system!" Mark shouted, from three feet away.

Trip reeled away from him. "Jeez, I'm right here! The system would be down for hours, and there's no guarantee it would work."

"It would be better than this!"

Trip retrieved the ear plugs from their strings and began shoving them back into place. "Just figure out what's setting it off."

"What do you think I'm doing?" he demanded.

"Not nearly enough!" she snapped, but he had turned away, half-deaf already, and the back of his head took the brunt of her rage.

She wished with every ounce of energy that they'd been able to find someone, anyone, but Mark, who was still sulking with an intensity that would have scandalized even Geoff. She'd even accept Neil at this point, who'd probably take one look at the entire situation and let it go to hell while he poked animals with sticks.

"—fast like mechs like dogs," Graham continued, as if he'd never been interrupted, "and I've seen those because Dad and I went lots and lots of places after Pyramid came here and said that we weren't safe unless we were quiet, and I was so quiet, I was like a mouse, like this—" He made whiskers with his fingers. "—quiet like that, and the metal dog didn't see us, because we were quiet."

"Graham, sweetie?" Trip called down. "Go visit Marla. I'm sure she's lonely."

Graham wriggled his fingers around his mouth. "No, she's not, 'cause Neil is there visiting, 'cause she said he never does, so he's there now, and he smells like Dad's smelly bottles and I don't like him."

It shouldn't have been so hard not to laugh, but it was. "That's not nice."

Graham grinned at her, and the alarm started up again just as Mark freed the next sensor and handed it down.

This one had been reset, too. Trip had to plug them in, one at a time, to manually override the settings. It was slow work.

Mark pointed at the sensor in her hand and she nodded to mean this one—the eighth reset sensor out of fourteen so far. He reached down to take the sensor from her, and she just barely registered the look on his face. "What?" she shouted, but he turned away and busied himself setting the sensor in the rock.

They clambered down, less graceful than either of them would be able to manage without the screaming noise between their ears. Even Trip's muscles had begun to short-circuit.

Graham hopped along behind them, collecting stones again and casting them over the edge. Trip mouthed something at him, which he took to mean that he should be careful, or not go too far, or to keep the hearing protectors over his ears, and he nodded for any and all of them, and bent down to pick up another stone.

The next sensor wasn't as high as the last, and Mark found good enough footholds to reach it without needing the picks. He had the sensor out and to Trip just as the alarm cut off again.

"Twenty-two," Graham said immediately. "Five more than—"

"Didn't you just check these?" Mark demanded, but it was to Trip. "You just did the perimeter."

Trip reset the sensor—nine out of fifteen. "Yeah, and they were fine."

"With him?"

There wasn't anyone but Monkey who'd have made Mark's lip curl like that, and Trip threw the sensor back at him. "Monkey wouldn't even know how to do this. He doesn't even use the vidscreens when he's here."

Mark almost fumbled the sensor. It danced to the ends of his fingers before he got a good grip on it.

Trip had passed Monkey's house on the way down to the hydraulics that morning, but there was nothing to pull her in. The house was shut up and dark, gathering shadows to it, but it was supposed to be that way when Monkey was gone. She didn't really stop to look at it, all the same.

"And even if he could, he wouldn't," Trip continued. "Why would he?"

Mark didn't answer.

It was almost harder, with his scorn rattling around in his head, loud enough to hear without needing words. Trip extended her arm, stopping just shy of a straight line, waiting to see where the pain set in. She was lucky, Ben said, but she'd had so little luck lately, it was fair compensation.

Mark grunted as he struggled to set the sensor back into its brackets in the rock, and she folded her arm back to her side.

"You don't know," Trip said, willing Mark to face her, at least. "You weren't there. Monkey and I...Monkey and I made it that whole way, to get to Pyramid. Do you have any idea..." Mark would know the way back, the trek from Pyramid that not all of them had survived, but he didn't know how hard it was to fight their way there, just the two of them, and Pigsy, for the last of it. There wasn't a way to explain.

"Did you know," Graham piped up, out of nowhere, "that Wren can only hold her breath underwater for thirty seconds, but I can do forty?"

"Okay, Graham," Trip said. "That's very good. Go find your dad, okay?"

"Once I did forty-two—"

"Shut up!" Mark shouted at him, and Graham shrank back.

Trip put her hand on Graham's head protectively. "What's wrong with you?" she asked.

Mark slammed the sensor back into place and jumped to the ground. He landed hard enough to scatter stones.

"I'm telling everyone," he said, just loud enough for Trip to hear his voice go gravelly. "I'm telling them what I found out about your stupid ape boyfriend. If you aren't smart enough to listen—"

"You are even dumber than you look!" Trip shouted in abrupt fury, and Graham moved away from both of them, his hair catching and snapping on Trip's fingers. "You really think Monkey did any of this? After what he did for you?"

"What did he do for me?" Mark asked. "Come on, what?"

"What did...? We freed you, you fucking moron!"

Mark went perfectly still. "You didn't even see Pyramid."

"I saw i—"

Mark jabbed the pick at her, too far away to be threatening. "No, you didn't. You didn't see a goddamn thing."

Trip had the sudden, suffocating feeling that she'd had this conversation a hundred times since Pyramid, always too hard to put into words. She saw it in the enslaved's eyes, in the way they peered over their shoulders at nothing and woke too slowly from sleep.

"Then tell me," she said. "What didn't I see?"

The alarms started before Mark had a chance to answer, if he meant to. He unsnapped his harness and dropped it right there in the middle of the path, and walked away without another word, without so much as meeting her eyes, and left Trip standing with her databand blazing and the alarms shrieking all around her.

Hours later, Trip was finally finished with the last sensors, and the city was quiet again. She stumbled back home, every part of her like stone, grinding against everything else. And it was with very, very bad humor that she allowed Ben to grab her good elbow and turn her in the direction of the clinic as he caught her outside her door.

"Stitches," he said briskly, without giving her a chance to do anything but follow.

He deemed the wound healed enough for a thick cotton bandage to suffice, and she felt herself go tingly with relief as he put the needles away. The bandage was cool and soft, even though its adhesive grabbed at her skin, and Trip poked it experimentally.

"By the way," Ben said, conversationally, "has someone been reinforcing Graham's vocabulary?"

Trip couldn't imagine what that meant. "His vocabulary?"

"Well, twenty minutes ago, he called Nash a..." Ben paused and pretended to hunt for the exact phrase. "...a 'fucking moron'..."

"Oh," Trip said.

"...and, while undoubtedly true, we don't like to mention it. Not in front of him, anyway." Ben tried so hard not to smile that he was squinting. "Any idea where Graham picked that one up?"

"W—"

"And more importantly, who deserved to be called that in his presence? Aside from the obvious."

Trip shrugged and eased the kinks out of her legs. "He left me to finish resetting the perimeter myself, so..."

"Mark did what? Tell me he wasn't that stupid."

"Mark's always that stupid. But at least the alarms have stopped."

"That boy..." Ben said, then gave up. "Any idea what caused it?"

Trip hadn't had a spare moment to go over what little data there was. "Not yet. But the system's good now."

Ben scrubbed his fingers over his eyelids. "Okay. Keep at it."

There wasn't any choice but to, unless she wanted to lose another day scaling rocks and beating new numbers into the entire sensor array. "Will do." She massaged the sides of her head, thinking. "Was Nash angry? It would be my fault if Graham got a lecture."

"No," Ben said, and smiled wearily. "Nash laughed, and taught him a few more words I'd rather he hadn't."

"I assume you ended up grounding him, though."

"Sort of. He was running a slight fever when he came back, so he's in bed. At least, he's supposed to be. He can crack any code I put on the vidscreens, and I don't know how." Ben smiled. "I can barely find the on button, sometimes."

"It's labeled 'on,'" Trip said helpfully. "Let me know when Graham's tall enough to reach the perimeter sensors. I could put him to work."

"Will do."

"So," she said, and hopped down. "How's the bike?"

"It's..." Ben made a face between panic and horror. "It's a mess."

They crossed over to the garage, really just walking from one room to the next, and Ben pulled the tarp from the bike. If at all possible, it looked worse than it had a few days ago. It had been skinned and gutted, alone in the garage bay. The pieces Ben could identify and salvage were laid out neatly on the table. The rest, and there were an alarming number of them, lay in a heap on the concrete.

Ben set a hand on the bike in sympathy. "We can get parts pretty easily, but it's going to take time and expertise to get it working again. We've been shorthanded, with the hydraulics breaking and everything else."

Trip ran her finger along the smooth edges of the bike, what few were left. She felt sorry for it, having carried them so far, so well, to end up this soulless metal frame. "I can update Monkey on the next dragonfly. If you can get the basics done..."

"We can manage that," Ben said. "But we're not specialists. We make do, mostly."

"That's good enough."

Trip knelt near the front wheel and pulled the loose brake lines toward her. "I thought...something like bolt cutters, maybe?"

Ben frowned. "Yeah, it would have to be something like that."

"Do you have any? We can—" Trip motioned holding the bolt cutters up to the wire. "—test them, see if they make the same kind of cuts."

"Hm." Ben gazed at the brake lines thoughtfully. "Sure. Hang on."

Trip waited as he rummaged through the garage. He checked one drawer, made a displeased noise, and turned to another. After a minute of listening to him open drawers and cabinets and bang them closed, Trip sat down. "Missing?"

Ben poked his head up over his workbench. "Why do you sound like you expected that?"

"Well, whoever did this must have gotten them from somewhere. Maybe it was here." Trip listened to him rattle through his tools some more.

"We don't know that's what happened yet," he said, and went back to grumbling. "I swear they're here. I just used them."

"What if they were taken in the break-in?"

"I looked around both times, and it was just the drugs missing."

Trip played the sentence back in her head a few times before catching it. "Both? When was the second?"

"Last night." Ben grunted and lifted something absurdly heavy from the floor to see if the bolt cutters had fallen under it.

She caressed the bike's front wheel with her fingertips, thinking. The break-in last night wouldn't fit the timeline, but the first one did. "Someone must have taken them from here. The second break-in might have been unrelated... Or the thief tried to return the bolt cutters but couldn't for some reason." She gnawed on her lip. "We really need to –"

"No, Trip. Leave it."

It was a surprise to hear him dismiss it that quickly. "Why not?"

"It's not related to the sabotage. And it could have been done with something other than bolt cutters. Heavy-duty wire cutters, maybe. Anything. We don't keep track of them that closely." He was oddly set on it.

Trip stood abruptly. "It could be the person who tried to kill Monkey!"

"It's not related," Ben said firmly. "This isn't the first time this has happened. It's part of being a doctor, Trip. You give medication out when people need it, not when they don't, and sometimes they don't agree with that."

There was something else. Ben wasn't exactly lying, but he wasn't exactly telling the truth, and there was an earnestness on his face she wasn't used to seeing.

"I guess," she said carefully. "You've been a doctor a long time."

Ben caught her gaze and held it. "I'm sure the bolt cutters are here somewhere. I know you're worried, but it's not related. Leave this alone, please. I'll deal with it."

Trip hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and lifted the tarp from the floor. She laid it over the bike like a shroud, careful to cover every angle of it, without Ben's help.

An awkward silence followed. Ben didn't move toward the clinic, and Trip didn't move to leave.

"Is there...anything else?" Trip asked, finally. "Anything I should know?"

"Like what?"

Mark's snarl hovered in her memory. "Anything about the enslaved? About Pyramid?"

Ben's expression went utterly flat, all the emotion siphoned elsewhere, and fear pinched in her stomach. "Why do you ask?"

"Mark said something earlier. He said...that I didn't see Pyramid. He's right, sort of. I didn't live it. They did. But it sounded like there was something else I should have figured out by now."

Ben worked a filthy rag through his hands, doing more harm than good to them.

"Is there?"

"I wasn't enslaved, Trip, you know that. Why are you asking me?"

Trip sensed the implication that she should be asking someone else close to her, but Ben hadn't meant it like that.

"I just hope you'd tell me if there was something that was stopping me from doing any good here."

"You're doing good," Ben said, sharply. "That's enough. It's more than anyone has any right to ask for."

It wasn't as reassuring as she'd hoped. "But what–"

"It's enough," he said again, softer. "Mark's just looking for trouble, you know that."

The look on his face hadn't felt that way, but Trip accepted it for now, and nodded mutely.

"Hello?" Geoff's voice bounced around the clinic, ringing against the walls and into their ears. "Helllloooo! Anybody home?"

"Oh, for..." Trip turned to the door. "I'll go see what he wants. Let me know if you need help with the bike."

"Of course. I'll be re-cataloging the medications first, but I'll give you a shout later."

Trip left him to it. When she opened the door, Geoff was there, his hands cupped around his mouth.

Carl stood nearby, his fist halfway to the door, and looked decidedly sheepish when Trip walked into the middle of his knock. "Morning'."

"I think morning was hours ago," she said. It mattered, because she had felt each one. "Are you looking for Ben?"

"Yeah, the old noggin," Carl said, and made it sound like an apology. "He inside?"

Trip stepped out of his way and let Carl into the clinic. She pulled the door shut behind him before she turned to Geoff. "There is this great new thing called knocking."

"Yeah, hi," Geoff said, in lieu of answer. "I wanted to see the bike. I brought these."

He held both hands out, with two same-sized bits of mirror lying carefully in each palm. He'd molded plastic casings around them somehow, similar enough to look identical, even this close. They extended into clips that could be fitted to the bike's handles.

"Side view mirrors," he explained. "Monkey's broke right off in the accident. I think they're at the bottom of the waterfall."

"Oh." She accepted them delicately and turned each over in her hands. They were cleanly made, with all the edges filed down with surprising attention to detail. Trip bounced each in her hands lightly; they weighed the same, too. "You made these?"

"Yeah. You think they'll work?"

"I think so. How did you manage this?"

"It was easy," Geoff said, but she saw his raw hands before he hid them in his pockets.

"Thank you," Trip said. "They're awesome."

"No problem. You'll tell Monkey I did them?"

"The instant I see him again." She smiled and motioned for Geoff to stay where he was. "I'll give these to Ben. The bike's not ready for them yet, so they'll sit in the garage for a few days. Hang on."

When she came back out, Geoff was trying hard not to look too pleased, with little success. She started off as a brisk walk. "Come on. I have a question for you."

He caught up with her quickly. "What?"

"Feel like some potential mischief?"

"Almost always."

They rounded the corner at the edge of the square and headed down the walk. Trip looked behind her, just in case Ben had inexplicably followed. She lowered her voice anyway, and Geoff leaned in eagerly to hear her.

"There was a second break-in at the clinic," she said. "Ben said they only took drugs, but he can't find his bolt-cutters, and..."

"Monkey's bike," Geoff said, and she was a little embarrassed at how quickly he got there. "So whoever broke in might have taken them?"

"And might have sabotaged Monkey's bike, yeah."

Geoff looked thoughtful for a full second before grinning excitedly. "So, how do we find him?"

"That part should be easy," Trip said, already looking for places where they could lie in wait. "You doing anything tonight?"

Geoff wore the cleanest black sweater he could find, with sleeves that reached his first knuckles and bunched around his wrists like old snakeskin. The hood was pulled down low over his forehead, and beneath that he'd thought to add a mask that covered everything but his eyes and mouth. Every other bit of fabric on him was a dusky grey-brown that blended into just about everything.

When he came around the corner like that, to disconnect from the shadows abruptly and sidle right up to her, Trip screamed and almost struck him.

"God damn it, Geoff!" she whispered fiercely, after he'd peeled off the mask. "We're not robbing the clinic, you know?"

"Well, we can still be sneaky," he said. "Anything yet?"

Trip eased the kinks out of her back. "No. And I've been here since sunset."

Geoff squatted at her side, and they peered around the slatted metal fence toward the clinic. It was small and drab-looking in the dim light, but they could make out the front door and the window that had been smashed in. They couldn't see the garage entrance, but Ben had locked and bolted it before he went home for the night, and this was the thief's easiest way in.

To make it more tempting, Trip had unlocked the front door again, and left it barely pulled to. But the few people who walked past the clinic so far didn't pay it the slightest bit of attention, save one do-gooder who saw the door ajar and tugged it shut on his way past. Trip was forced to sneak out, low to the ground as if avoiding gunfire, and set the trap again.

Geoff settled himself on the dirt. "So, just like watchtower duty, but we have to be quiet."

"Pretty much," Trip said.

"I just thought, you know, it should be more exciting. We could be after a madman." His voice tipped forward with excitement.

Trip almost snorted. "The closest thing we have to a madman is Neil, and he's just...weird."

"Hrm," Geoff said.

The first hour had already been a matter of watching absolutely nothing happen and easing the pins and needles from her limbs as they went to sleep in quick succession. Trip massaged her toes through her shoes, then worked up to her ankles and calves. Geoff was truly dedicated to the task at first, watching the front door for a few minutes, then the plastic window covering, then switching back, but he quickly lost interest and pulled the mask back over his face.

The nights were getting cooler already, and Trip shivered. She didn't have much of a wardrobe for stealth, so a thin jacket tossed over her usual attire had to suffice. She was probably dressed too brightly, on top of that, but Geoff didn't mention it and she didn't want to walk home and scare the would-be thief away if he saw her. So she hunched down and tried to keep all her body heat in a bubble that extended just a few inches around her, and tried to think drab thoughts.

"Not used to this, huh?" Geoff asked, and the condescension was a little grating. "You should do watchtower duty more often."

"I do it often enough," Trip said. "And I used to do it all the time, thanks. The town was a lot smaller back then."

"Yeah, okay," Geoff mumbled.

She peered at him, trying to make out where the shadows under the mask ended and where his eyes began. "Where did you get that? You don't use it on watch duty, do you?"

"No," Geoff said. "I got it..." He stopped there, and changed his mind. "On the road. You know."

Trip zipped her jacket up as far as it would go, and tugged the drawstrings around her chin, just in case there was warmth hiding there. "You thought it was cool?"

"No."

She tried to see his expression, but it was so hard to tell in this light. "No?"

"No," he said again, shortly.

She thought about it, really thought about it, for what might have been the first time. Geoff didn't have any scars—neither did Wren. She pressed her mouth shut, wondering, and decided to ask. "Who were you hiding from?"

"I wasn't hiding from anyone. I got it off a guy."

"'Off' him?"

Geoff's back went perfectly, unnaturally straight. "Just some guy, on the road."

"I bet it scares Wren."

Geoff glanced at her—she only knew because his eyes flashed white in the lamplight. "I don't wear it in front of Wren. I just thought it would be good to use now. I don't usually wear it."

"No..." Trip said slowly. "I bet not."

Trip concentrated on watching the clinic door for several long minutes, but nothing changed.

Every single person brought stories from the wasteland. Not everyone in Liberty was ever enslaved, not by Pyramid. But there were other things to fear, and plenty to hide from. And if you were alone, or traveling with your younger sister, things could be far, far worse.

"I've heard," she said, trying for casual and not managing it, "that there are groups of raiders out there that think masks make them anonymous, and stronger. They can do anything, be anything."

"Yeah?" Geoff asked, intentionally disinterested.

Trip wasn't ready to let it go. "Raider groups, and slavers...something about intimidation."

Under the mask, a muscle in Geoff's face fluttered.

"Eh," Geoff said at last. "We heard some stories like that. Just rumors, though."

There were a dozen more questions, but Geoff suddenly leaned toward the break in the slats. "Look."

It took her a second to locate the man who slunk along the buildings, pausing under the deepest shadows every few steps before carrying on. He was almost to the clinic now, and she hissed in surprise. "Damn it! Where did he come from?"

"Shh!" Geoff said.

The man eased himself through the darkness to the front of the clinic. He peered through the plastic film and fingered the frayed tape before moving to the door. He paused, surprised, as the door swung in at his touch. The man peered into the clinic nervously, then back out into the street.

"Now?" Geoff asked.

"Not yet," Trip whispered.

The man wrung his hands together in the doorway for a few seconds before twisting himself inside and closing the door behind him.

Trip and Geoff moved slowly to the door, careful to stay out of the light. They took positions on either side and pressed their ears against the thin walls. The thief was overturning bottles and plastic bins, rattling cabinets and drawers. The racket was incredible for someone carrying out a burglary.

The plastic window covering had flopped loose in the breeze and Trip pried it up.

She could just make out the outline of the man at Ben's cabinet, backlit by emergency lights near the floor. He rummaged through each drawer in turn, reading the labels on the bottles but not seeming to find what he wanted. The pills he dropped scattered on the cold floor, and Trip could only imagine how much time Neil spent making them, and how long it took Ben to catalog and sort them.

The man found something he must have liked, because he crowed quietly and slipped it into his breast pocket. Before Trip could get to the door, he swung it open and just barely avoided crashing into her.

Oblivious, the thief clutched both hands to his pocket, over his heart, and scurried toward the other side of the square.

Trip's legs were numb and clumsy after hours of being cramped under her weight. Instead of leaping up and tackling the man, like she tried to do, she stumbled forward and had a sudden suspicion that her kneecaps had vanished.

"Fuck!" she said. "Geoff, go after him!"

Geoff was already on his feet and running when the man heard them and spun to stare back in amazement. After a dazed half-second, he swiveled around and took off in another direction. Geoff scrambled madly to keep up.

Trip banged her fists against her legs to jumpstart them and pushed herself forward into running.

They covered most of the first level of the city, ducking and dodging through alleyways and vaulting over the lower gates. The man vanished briefly as he kicked himself up over a safety rail and dropped a good eight feet to the lower catwalk. Geoff stopped at the edge, slightly daunted, and Trip had enough time to catch up with him on legs that only just felt like hers again.

She grabbed hold of the rail and it squealed in her hands as she flipped over the edge and dangled, disoriented, before remembering to let go. She hit the lower walk with a clang that reverberated in the dark.

"That way!" Geoff yelled overhead.

"Come on!" Trip shouted back, and took off at a dead run in the direction he'd pointed. She slid in a patch of dry earth as she rounded the next corner, and found herself facing two gates. She had heard one snap shut seconds before, but couldn't identify which.

When Geoff arrived seconds later, she shoved him at the left one. "Go. Go go go." She slammed her fingers over the controls near the right gate, punched in a code, and the gate slowly, incredibly, ridiculously slowly, began to lift.

She wriggled under it, crawled back up on her elbows, and ran blind.

Trip made it all the way to the end of the street and had to stop at the dead-end to another gate. She hadn't heard this one, and she knew, without inspecting the doors on either side of the street, that she'd picked the wrong gate.

On the other street, the one she'd pushed Geoff down, she heard the distant thwack of a fist striking bone, and a split-second after, a muffled "Son of a bitch!"

She turned and raced back to her gate and punched in the numbers again, to get back to the other side and to Geoff.

When she reached him, Geoff was leaning against the wall behind the gate, alone, his palm pressed up against his face. He was still wearing the mask, and Trip almost ran right past him when she came through, but saw his teeth against the darkness when he grimaced at her.

"Oh...oh God damn it," Trip said. "Come here. Let me—come here, Geoff."

Geoff peeled the mask off and laid his hand over his eye. He pulled it away and looked for blood, but seemed satisfied. "He got away."

"Yes, I noticed. He hit you?"

"Right in the face."

"I'm sorry," Trip said. "I'm sorry. I should have gone this way."

"Bastard," Geoff said, and squinted off into the distance. "I grabbed him. Well, his arm. He just got through the gate and tripped. He dropped the pills and was trying to get them all, and I caught his arm. He punched me square in the face."

Trip pressed her fingers around his eye socket. "Does that hurt?"

"Of course it hurts! I just got punched in the face!"

"I meant...yeah, sorry. I meant, does anything feel broken?"

"How'm I supposed to know that?" Geoff waved her away, suddenly self-conscious. "Was that the guy who cut Monkey's brake lines?"

"I don't know. I think so."

"He didn't seem like...I don't know. He seemed...weird. Off."

"Like how?"

Geoff looked blankly at the mask in his hand, then shoved it into his pocket. "Just...off. Like his eyes couldn't focus on me. He looked right at me, but not at me. Like at something behind me." He held up his fingers next to his head and made little swirling motions. "Something was not right up there."

Trip immediately thought of the man at the fountain. "Did you recognize him?"

"No. I thought I did for a second, but it just looked like everyone else who comes here. I don't know his name." Geoff covered his injured eye with his palm again. "At least I was wrong about stakeouts. That was pretty exciting."

"That was my fault," Trip said. "Sorry."

"It's not like you punched me," Geoff said. "But you can owe me, if you want."

"Sure. One punch in the face, to be paid in full whenever the need arises."

Geoff smiled. "Hah, deal."

The control panel at the gate beeped, and Trip realized she'd let it run through its automated diagnostic for opening and closing so frequently in the past few minutes. Geoff looked at it thoughtfully. "Do those things store logs of who punches in and out?"

"No," Trip said. "Everyone has the same basic codes. They change every month or so, but everyone has the same one, so it doesn't...help...us..."

She stopped to think.

"Trip?"

"Not the gates," she said slowly. "But the...oh, shit." She turned back to him. "Shit, Geoff, the perimeter sensors!"

"What? What about them?"

"I'm going to the bridges," she said, her mind already racing.

"Now?" Geoff tilted his head to the side, as if expecting motion somewhere between his ears. "Seriously?"

Trip hurried back to the gate and jabbed the code in one more time. "Yes, seriously. I have to check something."

Geoff grumbled quietly behind her, and audibly wished for some of the stolen drugs for his own aching head, but Trip was running full-tilt toward the perimeter before the gate clanged shut and she didn't hear the rest of it.

She should have thought of it hours ago, back when the alarms first started blaring, but the noise had driven every rational thought out of her head, and they were only now starting to return, tails between their legs.

The sensors had logs in their datachips. They helped her maintain perimeter checks and track how often they were calibrated, and by how much. She grabbed her databand from her house and scrolled through the logs quickly. There had been nothing since she and Monkey had been out there, but nothing from today, either. She'd have to check the sensors manually to be sure, at least until the data uploaded to the main system.

She snapped the databand over her arm and headed down to the bridges.

Nash was on duty, and he whistled down at her as she approached. "Getting late, there," he called. "We don't need any more alarms today."

"I'll be careful," she shouted back. "I only need a second."

"I'll come get you if you aren't back in twenty minutes," he said, and it sounded like a warning.

It was much more dangerous to follow the winding paths in the dark, but Trip knew every turn and footfall by heart. She stepped around the biggest rocks without seeing them, and skirted around thorny bushes. She would check one sensor, just one, and call it done.

She went for the closest, easiest sensor, even though it still meant digging her throbbing fingers into rock fissures and hauling herself up. She plugged her databand right into the sensor without removing it, bypassed the alarm as soon as it started, and pulled the log.

Trip's legs melted under her, and she collapsed to the ground more or less intentionally. She had to blink for half a minute to get the numbers to stop dancing.

There was her entry, where she and Monkey calibrated them a few days ago.

There was their round today, when she and Mark repaired them.

And early this morning, so early it was practically in the middle of the night, someone had reset it.

Trip stared at the log, her vision losing focus. There was no name next to the entry, no indication who'd logged in to make the change. It wasn't impossible to fake, but it wasn't easy. She snapped her databand shut on the evidence and pressed her palms into her eyes until lights started to flash.

"Hey, Trip?" Nash called out, his voice booming. "Five minutes til I come down!"

"Coming," she said hoarsely, then had to repeat it so he'd actually hear her.

Nash climbed down from the tower as she came back up the bridges. She had her mouth open and forming half a word when he shoved a thermos cap of steaming liquid at her. She tried to hand it back, but he pushed her hands away. "Hot cocoa," he explained. "Nothing it can't fix."

Trip downed it all without tasting it, to Nash's mild amazement, and handed the cap back. "Has anyone..." she started, and weighed how much she wanted to tell him. "Has anyone...been hanging around here? Anyone come by early this morning?"

"Wasn't my watch, but I can ask around," Nash said thoughtfully. "What's wrong?"

"Everything," Trip said, sounding so bewildered and defeated that she was horrified at herself. "I mean, a lot. Not everything. It's just a mess."

"Mm," Nash said, and tried to hand her another capful of cocoa, which she refused.

There was no point in asking Nash about the sensors. He was a grease and gears sort of man, one of Ben's closest.

"You're on Ben's team, aren't you?" she asked. "Do you know...who would have a pair of bolt cutters, other than Ben? Something that could cut wire, like this thick?" She held out her forefinger and thumb, a quarter of an inch apart.

Nash considered for a moment. "Dunno. Ben has the pair we usually use. Carl's went missing a month ago, but Carl's a drunk."

"Focus, Nash," Trip said, exhausted.

"Sorry, love. That's it, as far as I know. Why? More trouble?"

Trip wanted to file away each problem into a neat container and solve them, one by one, but it wasn't that easy.

"No, no trouble," she said softly. "Damn it."

Steam rose from the open thermos and spiraled in the air before drifting apart. Trip reached out and twisted her fingers through the trails, imagining she could catch it, or vanish with it, wherever it went. The night air was cool and soft, and Trip let it wrap over her skin instead of trying to fight it off.

After a few minutes, Nash slowly recapped the thermos and patted Trip's shoulder. "You know," he said, drawing it out, "I kind of thought everything would be simpler, after Pyramid."

The weariness settled in her bones all over again, like they'd only just crossed the desert, coming the wrong way somehow, and she could imagine filth and sand and sweat in every fold on her. She looked up at Nash, and he smiled at her, not like it had been a criticism of her efforts, but just at life, in general.

"Simpler," Trip repeated, and gently pushed his kind touch away. "I know. I'm working on it."