[chapter continued]
Jacob Redwater’s breath was noisy on Gretyl’s phone.
“We can’t win this with force.” She hung up as the next announcement started playing through the prisons’ outward-facing speakers.
*
In the middle of the third announcement, the cops opened fire on the speakers, more RPGs. The prisoners switched to backups, out of sight behind the roof line. When the cops’ drones went up for a look, they were harried by more walkaway drones, which chased them around the sky and even suicided on two cop drones. While the air battle raged, they got four more announcements out. They got five walkouts from seven announcements. The crowd was going fucking bananas on the boards. They doxxed the cops on the lines as fast as they could, running their graphs, finding more people to record messages.
Gretyl shook her head in amazement as the recordings came in. In the men’s prison, someone was playing D.J., queuing them up. In the women’s prison, someone else was doing the same. One of the boys in the control room did for the cops out front of their institution. She had been skeptical of the plan.
It turned on graph theory: once you hit a critical mass of walkaways, the six-degrees thing meant every single rent-a-cop on the line was no more than two handshakes – or family Christmas dinners – away from a walkaway who would shame and sweet-talk them into putting down their weapons.
Announcements eight through ten played on the parapet speakers, before the cops brought out mortars – mortars! – to attack the walls, bringing them down in piles of rubble amidst mushrooming dust clouds. TransCanada’s stocks plummeted. The contagion spread to all those other places where walkaways were holed up – universities, research outfits, all those refugee detention centers. When the market saw what it was going to take to get those facilities back to default ship-shape, investors panic-sold. They always panic-sold, every time one of these fights broke out. Even the true believers in zotta superiority sold. The root of credit was credo: belief. Watching rent-a-cops bring out their big guns to wipe out speakers had an enormous impact on the market’s animal sentiments: their belief system was crashing, just as it had every other time.
More drones: with speakers, crowd-control drones that came stock with the prison, so big they needed extra avionics to course-correct them from the vibrations of their own speakers.
The drones homed in on the men and women they’d targeted, turned them into spectacles as their squad-mates stared at armored cops haloed by circling drones, too close to their bodies to shoot down safely, even with armor. What if their hydrogen cells blew? What if they were booby trapped?
When the order went out to rotate those unlucky bastards, they trudged toward the APCs at the back of the formation, circled by buzzing drones that haunted them like outsized, big-voiced fruit-flies. In one case, a drone managed to slip inside the APC with its target. The big tank-like car rocked on its suspension as cops inside chased it around, freaking like a church-load of parishioners chasing a lost bat. The video from that drone was a tilt-a-whirl confusion of fish-eye claustrophobia. Eventually, motion stopped as the drone was smashed to the APC’s deck. A moment later, the hatch of the APC opened and three more cops walked away, two women and a man. The man and one of the women argued with the other woman, maybe trying to convince her to stay, but they all left their weapons by the roadside as they struck off for Ottawa.
Things settled. The prisoners had damned few ways to make contact with the cops now, which meant that there could be no negotiation. There had been none before.
Gretyl’s phone rang.
“You have to get Natalie out of there. Now.”
Gretyl felt her guts curdle. Maybe it was a zotta trick to flush them out by making them think the big push was coming. Redwater wasn’t above that. But he sounded desperate in an un-Redwater way.
“No one is coming out until we can all come out.” She carefully avoided confirming Iceweasel’s present location. She guessed this meant Nadie wasn’t working for the old man, because otherwise she’d have let him know his precious bloodline was safe.
“The children—”
“There are many children in here. Why does it matter if they’re related to you?”
He made a puppy noise, between a bark and a whimper. “You evil bitch.”
“I’m not the one with all the guns. Are you here, Mr Redwater? Can you see what’s going on?”
“I can see it. It’s good theater. I’m sure your friends are excited by it, Gretyl. But it won’t matter in five minutes.”
“If I’ve only got five minutes left, I’d better savor them.” She hung up on him again.
“Why don’t you block him?” Limpopo said.
“Because so long as she keeps talking to him, she might be able to convince him not to let his buddies blow our asses up,” Etcetera said.
Gretyl shook her head. “That’s not it.” She looked at the infographics, watched network traffic flow, wondered if it was true that Jacob Redwater could be their savior, whether he was the reason their network links were up at all, so he could call her. “Maybe that’s part of it. But this is the asshole who took my wife away, fucking kidnapped her. It’s not nice, but I’m enjoying making him squirm.”
Limpopo shrugged. “Your last minutes on Earth, and you’re spending them exacting petty revenge? It’s your life, I guess.”
It cut. It was true. Limpopo had always been better at big picture and living the moment. Prison had made her even more stoic. Gretyl tried to imagine what she had endured over the years.
The network links went abruptly dead, their drones shot out of the sky at the same time as the fiber lines cut off.
“Guess I won’t get a chance to apologize to the old bastard.” She groped for Limpopo’s hand. Her grip was dry and her hand felt frail, but it was warm, and it squeezed back.
“I love you, Limpopo.”
“I love you, too.”
“Me too,” said Etcetera.
“Thank you.”
They squeezed their hands tight.
*
The boys chattered like monkeys in a tree. Some asked impatient questions of the two old ladies holding hands and staring at infographics, but Gretyl and Limpopo had nothing to tell them.
The cameras still brought feeds from outside, because the local net still ran, still spooled its footage for exfiltration to the rest of the world. The police lines tightened. There were no more identifiable humans in them. They were all inside the mechas and the APCs, or pulled way back behind the police buses and the administrative trailers that came in on flatbeds. The strategists on the other side wouldn’t risk more psy-ops from the prisoners, even if it meant fighting from behind armor. The tactics of mechas and APCs were primarily lethal, everyone knew it. You couldn’t arrest someone from inside a huge semi-tank or killer robot suit. You could stun them or kill them, but you couldn’t read them their rights or handcuff them.
The mechas stepped forward smartly and planted charges around the surviving perimeter walls, scampered back on three legs, flattening for the explosion that shook the walls down, making the foundations shake, even in their sub-basement.
The cameras on that wall went dark. They retasked cams from the interior courtyard to their infographic feeds, watched the exercise repeated. The APCs rolled, forming an armored wall, the mechas stepped over them, planted fresh charges, retreated. Gretyl reflexively checked to see what the markets were doing, but of course, there was no external feed. It didn’t matter for them. The ending was coming. First days of a better nation. Last moments of the worn-out, fragile physical bodies of some stupid, imperfect walkaways. Gretyl didn’t let herself dissociate, made herself look at the screens, watch the wall come down, the cameras go dark. She squeezed Limpopo’s hand harder.
Her phone rang.
She looked at the infographics, saw somehow, the networks were back online. The networks, which the cops had physically seized, pwned with actual wire-cutters, were online again. Her phone rang.
“Please.” He was crying.
“Mr Redwater?”
“Please. I can’t—”
She almost relented. Go ahead, kill us, your daughter and grandsons are far from here. It was a reflexive thought, common mercy for an old man whose voice cracked with sorrow.
“If you can’t, you shouldn’t. Everyone here has someone who will weep for their deaths. If you have power to stop things—” He clearly did, how else to explain the network link, the mechas and the APCs now still in the courtyards, facing the ruined façades, offices and store-rooms sitting naked to the air, fourth walls removed, looking like sets for dramas. “If you can do anything to stop this, you could save their lives.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You won’t.”
“Can I – Will you come speak with me about it?”
“Mr Redwater, with all due respect, I am not a fucking idiot, you kidnapping, evil fuck.” She said it evenly, but her pulse raced. Limpopo gave her a silent cheer.
“Can I come in, then? Alone?”
She thought. It wasn’t likely a zotta would turn suicide-bomber – blackmail or brainwash someone else to be a suicide-bomber, sure, but not risk their own skin. At the rate things were going, they were all going to die in hours, possibly minutes.
“I don’t think anyone here would object to that. As to what happens out there, with all those weapons and tanks and killer robots—”
“That’s my lookout.” He sounded in control of his emotions now.
“Leave our feeds up. No safe conduct if we can’t reach the outside world.”
There was a long pause. She thought he might have disconnected, but when he spoke, she heard a single clipped plosive as he unmuted his mic. He’d been talking to someone else.
“Out of my hands. But I’ve made a request.”
She shrugged. “It’s the boys’ prison. The southernmost one.”
Quickly, she tapped out a message to the rest of the walkaways, the ones in the jails and in the crowd, explaining Jacob Redwater had asked for safe passage so that he could talk to his daughter’s wife. She implied, but didn’t state, that Iceweasel and the boys were in the building. As the crowd voraciously doxxed Iceweasel’s dad and parceled up tremendous quantities of information on the sprawling Redwater empires, Limpopo and Gretyl whispered to one another about what would happen next.
“It sounds like he’s snapped,” Limpopo said. “Some kind of shear between Jacob Redwater, zotta, and Jacob Redwater, human. Deathbed conversion or something. You said his wife died?”
“Yeah, but from what Iceweasel said, they were basically divorced for most of her life, in all but name. She had a sister, don’t know what became of her. I’m sure he’s got access to as much company as he wants.”
“Whatever else he was, he was charming,” Etcetera said. “In that smart, sociopathic way. Fun to argue with, if you weren’t his daughter.”
“There he is,” Limpopo said. The boys gathered around their screen as they zoomed and error-corrected the feed from the remaining cams in the inner courtyard. He was dressed in bottle-green cords and a down vest over a long-sleeved shirt. His hair was white, but his face was smooth, his posture erect. He walked slowly and purposefully. He was old, but he didn’t look frail.
“Can one of you get him, please?” Gretyl said to the boys. “I don’t want to go up in case he’s planning to snatch me.”
The boys argued over who would do it. A kid named Troy, sixteen with a short afro, an easygoing smile and, smart, fast eyes, won. He raced away. A moment later, they watched him on the screen, talking with Jacob Redwater, leading him.
“This oughta be good,” Etcetera said.
Gretyl wondered where Iceweasel was, whether she was seeing this. There was a lot of clamor from the crowd to livecast her talk with Redwater. She said no, firmly, while agreeing to record and release it later, depending on whether there was a later.
Jacob Redwater came into the control room, preceded by a bow-wave of understated cologne. Gretyl stood and looked him up and down, looking for bulges indicating guns or other surprises. Not that they had to bulge much these days, and not that she knew much about what kind of bulges they made.
His face was impassive. He’d been crying, minutes ago, broken and lost. Now he wore the zotta mask, two parts charming sophisticate, one part dead-eyed predator. A man who could make entertaining conversation over dinner, then go home and bankrupt your employer and put you on the street.
“Hello, Gretyl.” He stood before Troy like Troy had a gun in his back and he was pretending that it wasn’t there.
“Hello, Mr Redwater.” She extended her hand.
His hand was warm and firm. “Call me Jacob.”
Limpopo gave him a funny look. Gretyl remembered Jacob Redwater had set her up to be rendered to this prison, ripped from family and everything dear to her. She was used to thinking of him as the man who’d sired and kidnapped her wife, but he was Limpopo’s arch-nemesis. She wondered if Limpopo would shiv the bastard, who surely deserved it. She was about to lunge to take out her frail old friend, frailer alongside this vigorous, unthinkably rich man, but Limpopo held her hand out.
“Limpopo.” He tilted his head, straining to recognize her.
“Hello, Jacob.”
“Nice to see you,” said Etcetera. Redwater’s eyes widened. He started at the speaker between her collarbones. “It’s me, Hubert. I’m dead.”
“I see. Nice to talk to you again, even so.”
Troy brought him a chair. The three sat together, boys clustered at the room’s other end, ostentatiously not listening while ferociously eavesdropping.
Redwater said nothing. Gretyl put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward, arching her back to work the creak and ache of sitting and terror out. “What did you want to talk about, Jacob?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“You don’t want your daughter hurt. You’re indifferent to what happens to the old dyke she’s shacked up with.”
He shook his head. “I don’t care about your sexuality. My cousin is gay, you know.”
“I know. That’s the reason you’re running the family fortune these days.”
He shook his head. “It’s more complicated. You can believe that if you want. The internal politics of the Redwater family are always and only about one thing.”
“Money.”
“Power. Money’s just keeping score.”
“Must have really fucked you off when Iceweasel gave her share to that merc.” She wanted him to squirm. She’d expected him to be the weeping man on the phone. She didn’t want to die with the sight of him erect and proud burned into her optic nerve, proof the sun would never set on the zotta empire.
He nodded. “It made things complicated in our family. But it wasn’t fatal. Nadie and I are on good terms these days, believe it or not.”
Gretyl kept her best poker face, willing herself not to give away the fact that Nadie had Iceweasel and the boys with her.
“I would like to see my daughter and my grandsons.”
“I think you gave up that right when you had her kidnapped, Mr Redwater,” Limpopo said. They looked at her. Her eyes glittered dangerously. “When you had me disappeared.”
“When you had me murdered,” Etcetera said.
Redwater was impassive. Gretyl thought she saw anxious tells, sudden realization by this arrogant princeling that he was three levels underground, surrounded by people who owed him a debt of violence.
He spoke carefully. “I didn’t say I had a right to it. The things that happened were beyond regrettable. They were terrible. I brought Natalie home because I knew there was trouble ahead for you and your friends. The murders of those two security operators tipped things over the edge. There was no way things would be business as usual after that. I wanted her safe. The things that followed, what happened to you, were nothing to do with me.”
She and Limpopo started to speak at once, broke off, looked at each other. Limpopo made a “go ahead” gesture. “He’s your father-in-law.” She smiled sardonically.
Jacob Redwater returned the smile, pretending he didn’t notice its venom.
“What murders, Jacob?”
“The two people that Zyz lost at the ‘university’ complex. Went in, never came out. That was bad enough. But then we discovered that they’d been captured and subsequently executed – euthanized – that their remains had been desecrated—”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Gretyl said. But she knew. For the first couple years, the deadheading bodies of those two mercs had been like unwanted family heirlooms, dutifully lugged from one place to another, scans cared for and backed up. Back when she was on the move all the time, the arrangements for their care had been a constant reminder of the terrible thing they’d done in the tunnels of Walkaway U, Tam’s dire warnings, the obligation they’d created for themselves. Once they’d settled in Gary and moved the two bodies, or people, or whatever, into canopic jars in the basement, automatically tended as they slept in endless, blank-faced, brain-dead stasis, she’d managed to put them out of mind – mostly.
“So you kidnapped her and deprived her of clothes and companionship because you had her best interests at heart?”
“Yes. Because I knew the alternative was much worse. Death. As you discovered. That’s why I’m here. Because, whether or not you believe this, I love my daughter. I raised her. I held her when she was born. I told her bedtime stories. I changed her diapers. She is my flesh and blood. I am a part of her, always will be. I don’t want her to die. I don’t want my grandchildren to die.”
“But we can all die?” Limpopo said. “No especial reason to keep us around. Apart from generating income for TransCanada, we’re surplus.”
He shrugged. “Not my department. I’m interested in my family. Your family can look out for you.”
“That’s mighty white of you, Mr Redwater,” Limpopo said.
Gretyl almost asked him how much diaper changing and storytelling he did, how much of it was delegated to au pairs. She couldn’t see the point. Jacob Redwater was exactly what he seemed: a zotta who cared about getting things he wanted, didn’t give a shit about what happened to everyone else. However much diaper changing he’d done, it was enough to reinforce whatever part of him believed kidnapping his daughter was an acceptable alternative to stopping his pals from killing everyone within ten klicks of her.
She stared at his excellent skin tone and the muscular shoulders under his vest. He looked like he was having a day off at the cottage, someone in a stock-art photo advertising a line of fine outdoor/casual clothing. Burnished by his years, not battered. Not like Gretyl, not like her friends. She walked away because she couldn’t be a party to making men like this immortal gods. They didn’t need her help.
“Your daughter doesn’t want to see you.” It was true. She didn’t have to ask Iceweasel – she’d never wavered on that.
“She named her son after me.”
“We named our son after you so she’d never forget what she turned her back on. I didn’t understand at first. She explained that she wanted to make a Jacob Redwater that wouldn’t be remembered as a selfish monster.”
He was impassive.
“Holy shit.” A boy pointed to the screens.
They followed his finger. There, walking up Highway 15, was a big crowd. Hundreds of people. At the front, still in remains of uniforms and body armor, were the cops who had walked away. They split into three smaller groups, walked right into the private cops who tried to stop them from entering the prisons’ inner courtyards, scuffling briefly as they tried to decide how much force they could use against these newcomers. Then they were beyond the cops, between them and the prisons. They linked arms and sat down in front of the buildings, saying nothing. The walkaway ex-cops sat in the middle. Gretyl understood the crowd around the world hadn’t stopped when the feeds went dead.
On cue, new drones buzzed the courtyard, all kinds, including network relay. She saw the massive expansion in bandwidth from her seat, surging over the infographics in a flood of blue that went green as the caches on both sides of the link emptied and the congestion cleared – they were in sync with the world.
Jacob Redwater looked... quizzical. He narrowed his eyes. As the boys waved the feeds to zoom over the whole wall, he gave a minute head-shake, as if to say that’s not right.
What had Nadie said? They don’t want another Akron. They don’t want martyrs. If they bomb the place, it will be with the cameras off. They were into new tactical territory now, on both sides. There had been many assaults on walkaway strongholds by default regimes – religious fundamentalists in America and Saudi Arabia; no-insignia mercs in Ukraine, Moldova and Siberia; storm troopers backed by huge, network-killing information weapons in China. There had been advances and retreats. Never this kind of siege.
Gretyl’s phone rang. She knew from the buzz it was her wife. She whooshed out a sigh.
“We’re okay.” She knew Gretyl would have been quietly freaking after a protracted radio silence.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. The boys love you. Are you okay? We’ve been watching it here. The boys are livid that they didn’t get to stay and help with the drones. They’re not quite clear on the danger. I don’t want to worry them.”
“Don’t.” She was keenly aware of Jacob Redwater straining to hear, wishing she’d learned how to do that subvocalization thing with her interfaces. She’d never had much call for private audio-spaces – too much of a hermit.
“Don’t? Oh, worry them. Are you okay? Can you talk?”
“I can.”
“But not much. Why? Who’s there? What’s going on? Are you safe?”
She sighed. Her wife was good at a lot of things, but covert ops wasn’t one of them.
“Your father is here.”
It was an eerie silence, silence of an over-compressed audio channel discarding background noise. “Is he going to hurt you?” She sounded cold.
“He would have a hard time doing that. He’s locked in with us, in a sub-basement of the boys’ prison, a control center. He wanted to talk to you and since you wouldn’t take his calls, he called me.”
Jacob Redwater was thinking hard about where Iceweasel was. What it meant that she had to have this explained.
“Of course he’d know how to get in touch with you. You going to ransom him?”
She couldn’t stop the smile. Because she was expecting it, she got between Jacob Redwater and the door as he stood suddenly, knocking over his chair. He came at her. She remembered what a fit, gym-toned, personally trained, technologically tuned bad-ass he was. She was about to get slugged. That’s when Troy landed on his back and bore him to the ground, arms locked around his neck. The other boys each took a limb and sat on it.
“Gretyl?” She sounded alarmed.
“No problems. Give me a sec?”
She looked down at Jacob Redwater’s face. He was calm, like he was relaxing with a glass of wine in his den, not lying on a concrete floor with four juvenile delinquents sitting on him. “Jacob, Iceweasel and the boys left before this started. They’re safe. Would you like me to ask Iceweasel if she’d be interested in talking to you?”
“Not if I was starving to death and he was the only drive-through on Earth,” Iceweasel said, making Gretyl snort. It was crueler and more gloat-y than she’d intended. She caught herself before she apologized to the spread-eagled zotta.
“I know the answer. Do I get to leave?”
“Why should we let you? This place is full of handcuffs and cells. We could lock you up, make sure whatever happens to us happens to you. It might not stop them from nuking us. Then again, it might.”
“Probably not. I used up everything I had, stopping things so I could get in here. Giving into me cost them a lot—” He nodded toward the screens, where private cops and the walkaways faced each other beneath a canopy of drones. “The people calling the shots wouldn’t mind losing me. It would destabilize things, but it would also set an example for the next time something like this happens. I’m not the only powerful person related to someone on your side, you know. Object lessons are expensive. It’s wasteful to pass them up when they’re available.”
“They’re not going to kill you,” Limpopo said. “Not Jacob Redwater. We’ve seen your board seats. Too many people owe you too much, depend on you too much—”
Etcetera interrupted – beyond weird, Limpopo and her collarbones arguing – “That means there’s people who would love to step into his shoes.”
Redwater shrugged best as he could. “You’re both right. If I died here with you, there would be hell to pay. But very powerful people would get the chance to make themselves much more powerful. The reason I was allowed to do what I did was that it’s a fully hedged risk. Delighted if I die, delighted if I don’t.”
“He probably makes a new scan every morning after breakfast,” Etcetera continued, with machine smugness. “He’d be up and running on a huge cluster by dinner.”
“Not that often. But I’m current, and they’ve dry-run my sims. There’s messy probate questions, so it wouldn’t be dinner, exactly.”
Gretyl hated how he could be pinned to the floor in hostile territory and still be calm and in charge.
“Gret?”
“Sorry, I kinda forgot about you. Look, darling, I should go. I love you. I love the boys. You are my world.”
“We love you, too.” She was crying. Gretyl blinked hard and made herself not cry. Jacob Redwater watched her closely.
Then Iceweasel made a surprised noise. Gretyl jumped. “What is it?” She saw the monitors and gasped.
The private cops were retreating, rank by rank, into the APCs, which were pulling out in an orderly fashion. The cops faced out, toward the prison, as they waited their turn to board their vehicles. As if this wasn’t amazing enough, a cop broke ranks, took off her helmet and dropped her gun, just as others did earlier that day, and crossed over to the walkaway lines. Two more did it. The orderly retreat stopped being orderly. Cops milled about. Many looked like they were listening intently to voices in their helmets. Some talked avidly to one another. They called out jokey, comradely farewells to the ones who’d crossed over.
Jacob Redwater was at a loss. He watched the spectacle, craning his neck from the floor. The expression on his face was the closest thing to fear that Gretyl imagined she’d ever see.
“What do you think, Jacob?” The laugh in Gretyl’s voice was involuntarily mean. “They pulling out so they can nuke us and send a message? Or are they getting out before the stock market melts down and their guard labor walks out?”
“May I sit?”
“Not my decision.”
The boys looked at each other and got up. He sat and worked his shoulders.
“I’m leaving.” He was still transfixed by the feeds. One of the APCs was disrupted by a cop who climbed back out and deserted.
Gretyl looked at him. He was still upright and unwavering, armored with dignity.
“Jacob, I know there will always be people like you.”
“Rich people.”
“People who think other people are like them. People who think you either take or get took. We’ll never be rid of that. It’s a primal fear, toddler selfishness. The question is whether people like you will get to define the default. Whether you can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, doing for all of us before we do to you, meaning we’re all chumps if we’re not trying to do to you sooner. That default was easier to maintain when we didn’t have enough. When we didn’t have data. When we couldn’t all talk to each other.”
“Okay.” No hint of overt sarcasm, all the more sarcastic for it.
“We’re not making a world without greed, Jacob. We’re making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong. Our winning doesn’t mean you don’t get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.”
“Okay.” He was a little paler. Maybe that was wish fulfillment.
“I think your ride is leaving,” Gretyl said. She was elated. The fatalistic acceptance of her impending destruction uncoiled from her chest, turned to victorious song. The part of her that had been emotionally prepared to die caught up to the part of her that knew she wouldn’t have to. She wanted to drink everything that could be drunk, fuck and sing, build a bonfire and dance naked around it. She was almost dead. Now she would live. Forever, perhaps.
“Good-bye. I’ll tell Iceweasel and the kids that you asked after them.”
That hit. He oofed like he’d been gut-punched. She felt like a sudden and total asshole. Whatever kind of monster Jacob Redwater was, he was someone to whom family mattered, in a twisted, coercive way. She almost apologized. She didn’t. She thought she would, but he was gone. Limpopo hugged her ferociously, Etcetera muttered into her cleavage from his speaker. The boys whooped and danced.
“I love you,” Iceweasel said.
“I love you, too, darling. I’m coming home.” She wiped tears of joy off her face. “Unless you and the boys want to come back and stay for a while?” She knew it was a stupid thing to ask. She wanted to keep the first days rush alive for a little longer, before going back to the ongoing days default they’d built in Gary.
“No,” Iceweasel said. She groped for more words, but apparently none came. “What happened to my father?”
“He left. Intact.”
“I think I see him now.”
Gretyl looked at the screen. There he was, walking away, a phalanx of private cops escorting him behind their lines, back to the command vehicles. “That’s him.”
“Fuck,” Iceweasel said. Gretyl’s heart ached and grew two sizes when she heard the boys giggling at their mom’s swearing. What had she been thinking, putting herself in danger? Risking never seeing her wife, her beautiful boys, ever again? What madness came over her? Was she secretly suicidal? “When will you leave?”
“Tomorrow or a little later. There’s bound to be a lot of people moving around, next couple days. Hoa might bring bikes. Whatever makes sense.”
“Will you bring Limpopo?”
She looked at Limpopo, who watched with frank interest. Stooped and old, eyes blazing, take-no-shit attitude you could see from orbit. Gretyl knew from the first time she’d seen Limpopo that the woman was a fucking superhero.
“Iceweasel wants to know if you’ll come with me.”
Limpopo didn’t hesitate. “No. There’s things here I want to help with. It’s my place. I bought it with fourteen years of my life. There are lots of fights to come, and I want to be here with the people who fought for this place. I’ll stay.”
“You hear that?”
“Tell her we love her. Tell her that she has a home here, too. Any time.”
Gretyl said it. Limpopo nodded gravely. The boys watched them wide-eyed, still shocked from the sudden lifting of their death-sentence.
Etcetera added, “Tell the other Limpopo she doesn’t have to worry about me coming back any time soon.”
“I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort.”
It turned out that sims could harumph. It was a new one on Gretyl.