Plague War

23

Chinese artillery pounded the land in the distance, a staggered thumping that came and went. Three or four explosions hit together, followed by a pause, then ten or more impacts in a rush. In the brief quiet, Cam heard American guns returning ‚re. His left ear was still partly deaf but the outgoing shells made a distinct crack. Crack crack. Then the heavier explosions picked up again, battering the other side of the mountain a few miles to the west. Cam wished they’d driven farther from Sylvan Mountain. He constantly expected this narrow rock gorge to erupt with death. They were still so close, and the enemy had begun a new offensive with reinforcements out of Arizona.

The war was always there. Smoke and dust poisoned the evening sky, drifting toward them on the wind. Cam stared at the sunset, a sooty orange glow beyond the dark peaks that formed the horizon — but people were dying in that spectacular light, he knew, and the beauty of it upset him.

He turned the other way, looking for Ruth in the gorge. He was huddled with Foshtomi and Goodrich along a split face of granite, cleaning half a dozen carbines. Busywork. Otherwise the waiting was impossible. Hernandez had ordered them to sit tight. Estey wanted to run patrols through the area — he was as restless as any of them, Cam thought — but they were behind their own lines and Hernandez insisted on as little activity as possible to keep from drawing the enemy’s attention. It was bad enough that they’d rolled away from Sylvan Mountain in two trucks and a jeep, with Ruth, Cam, Deborah, and the ‚ve Rangers supported by a Marine platoon and Hernandez himself.

Hernandez intended to take Ruth all the way to the command bunkers at Castle Peak, but they’d already lost too much time. If she could produce an answer, he needed it now. So they waited. They ate. They tended each other’s wounds and tried to catch up on their sleep.

It had been nearly thirty-six hours since they’d hidden in this jagged gully. Cam ached with tension. More than anything else, the plague year had taught him to act. The urge to stay ahead of every threat, whether real or imagined, was exactly why he’d left Allison. He still wondered at himself. He’d given up her smile and her warmth in exchange for nothing except more hardship, blood, and glory. That was not the decision of a well-grounded individual. At the same time, he wasn’t sure what kind of man would have let Ruth go alone.

“Hey, take it easy,” Foshtomi said, pressing her knee against his.

The slight movement made Cam realize he was as rigid as the rock itself, his body hunched as if to jump up. His jaw hurt from grinding his teeth. She’s right, he thought. You’re actually damaging yourself.

“Sometimes the only thing you can do is wait it out,” Foshtomi said, returning her work. She was inspecting an M4’s bolt carrier group, yet Cam saw her hazel eyes lift to his face once more as if to catch him disobeying her. Sarah Foshtomi was a good squadmate. Cam almost smiled. There were worse things than sitting here with this resilient young woman. That much was true. But he didn’t have the bene‚t of Foshtomi’s years in the military. She knew how to do her job and only her job, accepting her place in the larger whole, whereas Cam had learned nothing except the self-reliance of a loner.

He had never felt more apart. Two of Hernandez’s Marines remembered him as an enemy. Nathan Gilbride was among those Cam had betrayed in Sacramento, and neither Gilbride nor Sergeant Watts seemed as ready to forgive him as their commanding of‚cer had been. Worse, they’d told their fellow Marines. It was an unexpected strain. Cam had never imagined he would see any of those men alive again. He kept his mouth shut and his eyes down. Even Ruth had been taken from him. Ruth had the only tent in camp, a lean-to they’d erected against one of the trucks and disguised with netting and dirt, blending the long shape of the vehicle into the rock. In a day and a half Cam had seen her just twice, both times in conference with Deborah, Hernandez, and Gilbride — and yet as much as he wanted to touch her, he’d stayed back. Her work came ‚rst. Cam was jealous of Deborah for being so necessary. Deborah served as Ruth’s assistant, organizing the blood samples from Sylvan Mountain. Deborah wasn’t above fetching Ruth’s meals, either, or emptying the bucket that served as her latrine.

Cam had to be careful. He’d made a mistake the last time they were in this situation. When Ruth disappeared into her lab in Grand Lake, he’d found Allison.

“Okay, let’s pack up,” Goodrich said. He slung two of the M4s over his shoulder and Cam and Foshtomi stood with him, gathering their own carbines. Sunset was giving way to night. In thirty minutes they were on watch.

As he walked with Foshtomi to the second truck, Cam could not stop himself from gazing at Ruth’s tent. It was a †imsy structure in which to house their best hope. They could never protect Ruth from artillery or planes, whether there were twenty soldiers here or ‚ve hundred, and he knew that he was the least useful of all, with minimal training, one good ear, and the quiet animosity between himself and the Marines.

He might have left on his own if he had anywhere to go, if only to get moving again. The urge ran that deep. He recognized the feeling for what it was, nerves and doubt and old trauma, but he wondered if he would ever be able to settle down. Even if Ruth gave him the opportunity, or Allison or anyone, Cam wondered if he would always be trying to get away from himself.

* * * *

“There she is,” Foshtomi said as lantern light spilled through the gorge. Two silhouettes held open the side of the tent, Deborah and Ruth.

Directly in front of the two women, a Marine ducked his head, pinned in the yellow light. Hernandez had ordered a total blackout. “Hey!” someone shouted. Ruth’s shape hesitated, but Deborah’s taller ‚gure let go of the tent †ap.

Cam set down his canteen and started toward them, blinking to regain his night vision. “Cam, wait,” Goodrich said. He didn’t stop. If the sergeant pressed the matter, he would say he hadn’t understood because of his ear.

“Where is General Hernandez?” Deborah asked the soldiers in front of the tent. She was supporting Ruth as well as speaking for her. Ruth stood awkwardly, protecting her hip, and Deborah kept one arm around her waist. Cam edged through the few Marines to reach her side. One of them said something that Cam only caught part of, “—ight now,” but the man pointed as he spoke and that was enough. Cam was more interested in trying to assess Ruth’s health in the dark.

She noticed him and smiled.

“How are you?” she asked. Then they were separated again as Deborah guided Ruth forward, walking through the Marines. Ruth looked back once, her curly hair like a soft tangle in the moonlight.

What did you ‚nd? Cam thought. He knew her moods well enough to recognize this exhausted pleasure. Good news. It was good news, and that meant none of their losses had been in vain. The thrill of it made him grin as he strode after the group. The wind sifted through the gorge, cold and alive. Cam was aware of another kind of motion around them as other soldiers got up and paced alongside them. Most of the twenty-six Rangers and Marines were in foxholes outside the gully, but Ruth drew the remainder to her in twos and threes.

Like the trucks, the jeep was also draped in netting. Hernandez slept beside the vehicle and its radio. A Marine corporal sat nearby, leaning against a tire with his submachine gun in his lap. He woke Hernandez, who coughed and pushed himself up. Then he coughed again, uncontrollably.

Deborah let go of Ruth and knelt close to him, laying her hand on his back as he rasped for air. “General,” she said.

“I’m ‚ne.” He choked the words out.

Deborah stayed with him. She was obviously trying to gauge the strength of his breathing and Cam didn’t like the obvious tension in her shoulders. Shit. Hernandez had hidden his respiratory problems from them, but even if it was just a cold, not radiation sickness, the man was in dangerously bad shape to be ‚ghting off a virus.

Hernandez was gaunt and pale. “Doctor Goldman,” he said, quickly locating the most important face in the crowd.

“They trusted you,” Ruth said. “They trusted you more than you think.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Leadville,” she said. “The labs.”

To the west, a clump of explosions †ared up from the black mountains. The booming reached them an instant later as Ruth knelt, too, twisting to protect the wounds in her left hip. Some of the Marines also crouched down and Cam was not surprised by this sudden intimacy. Everyone wanted to hear.

“They were testing nanotech on forward units,” Ruth said, “but they must have been almost certain how well the new vaccine would work. They trusted you.”

“A new vaccine,” Hernandez said.

“Yes.” Her eyes were large and childlike. “There are two nanos in you right now, and they’re both different from anything else I’ve seen.”

Hernandez coughed again, wincing. Beside Cam, one of the Marines touched his own chest and several others glanced down at themselves or ‚dgeted with their hands, afraid of the machinery that they could not see.

“They targeted you deliberately, General,” Ruth said. “They trusted you. We’ve taken hundreds of blood samples and no one else had the vaccine or a working ghost.”

“What does that mean?” a woman asked behind Cam. It was Foshtomi, and he turned to see that she stood away from the group, as if that could possibly save her. But she was loyal and brave. The wind blew Foshtomi’s dark hair across her face and she strode forward with the rush of the breeze, joining them despite her nervousness.

Ruth glanced at the younger woman, then turned back to Hernandez. It might have been Cam’s imagination but he thought Ruth looked at him, too, after dismissing Foshtomi. Why? Because she didn’t like it that he and Sarah were friends?

“How long were you stationed outside Leadville before the bombing?” Ruth asked Hernandez. “Were you above the barrier that whole time?”

“What are you saying — we were immune to the plague?”

“At some point. Absolutely. The atmospheric effects of the bomb had nothing to do with the fact that your troops were able to run below ten thousand feet and survive.”

Hernandez shook his head. “We would have noticed.”

“No. Not if you never tried it. You wouldn’t have launched any attacks below the barrier until after Grand Lake brought you the vaccine that Cam and I carried out of Sacramento, right?”

“We mounted a few strikes. We thought there were still areas where the bombing had wiped out the plague.”

“You were immune. The vaccine out of Grand Lake wasn’t half as good as what you already had.” Ruth laughed, but it was a melancholy sound. “You must have gotten it some time during the two weeks before the bomb. Leadville caught our friends in the Sierras, which is where they got the early model of the vaccine. Then they infected you with an improved version and a spin-off technology to see how the two would interact.”

The soldiers moved uneasily again. “Jesus,” Watts said with his hand at his mouth. It was another protective gesture, no different than the way Foshtomi had hung back from the group. These men and women still thought of the nanotech as a disease.

Ruth said, “Did they give any kind of inoculations or pills? Something they said was a vitamin?”

“No.”

“It could have been in your water or your food. As far as I can tell, the improved model has the same weakness as the ‚rst generation. It only replicates when it’s exposed to the plague, which means the infection would have been sporadic unless you all ate or drank the same thing.” Ruth paused, embarrassed. “After the bomb, when you left your mountain, did you lose anyone?”

“It was chaotic,” Hernandez said. “And dark and very hot.”

Ruth reached for his arm, making contact. “Is there any way to know if some of them died because of the machine plague?”

He looked down at her hand. He shook his head.

“Please,” Ruth said. “This is important.”

“It was chaotic,” he repeated, and Cam marveled at the understatement.

“We have to assume it’s a possibility,” Ruth said. She glanced at Deborah, as if resuming a different conversation. Or maybe she couldn’t bear to face Hernandez anymore.

The general still had his head down, either wrestling with his illness or his grief. He appeared uncharacteristically weak and Cam also turned away. The soldiers had done the same. Their respect for Hernandez demanded it, and Cam wondered what they would do when he was gone.

“I’ll need blood again,” Ruth said slowly. “We need to make sure we get the new vaccine to as many people as possible, and I think… I’m sure the second nano is the only reason you’re alive.”

“They brought us steak a few days before the bombing,” Hernandez said. “Fresh steak. Not a lot. But we were surprised.”

“That was probably it,” Ruth said.

“We’d already started communicating with other units up and down the line. I…We were talking about leaving our posts.”

The emotion in his eyes was both haunted and amazed. Hernandez was glad to be wrong, Cam realized. Despite everything else that had happened, he took comfort in discovering that Leadville continued to rely on him.

“We thought they were punishing us,” Hernandez said. “We thought the meat was only a way to keep us on a short leash.”

“They trusted you.”

“I was already committing treason,” he said, looking left and right at his Marines. He was using his confession to bring them closer to him. He had recovered from his shock, and again Cam was stunned by the man’s abilities. Everything was a lesson to him. His entire focus was on his troops and the never-ending process of improving them — and he was stronger for it. Not for the ‚rst time, Cam envied Hernandez.

“Sir, a lot of us were looking to the rebels,” Watts said, and Deborah added, “It wouldn’t have mattered. You had nothing to do with the bombing.”

“It does matter,” Hernandez said. “I should have stuck it out. What if the president’s council heard some rumor of what I was doing? What if that’s why they didn’t tell me about the vaccine? Think what we could have done with it if we’d known. We could have moved down onto the highways. We could have dug in and stopped the Chinese cold.”

Cam frowned to himself. It was true that a lot of good opportunities had been missed, but it troubled him that Hernandez could ignore the way he’d been used as a test subject. It was a blind spot. His fealty was the real difference between them, and Cam was angry for him. Cam was angry at him.

“You said they gave us two kinds of nanotech,” Hernandez said, coughing again as he turned to Ruth.

She nodded. “We called it the ghost when we found it in Grand Lake. Nobody could tell what it did, and Leadville must have put it through several generations in a hurry. We isolated at least four strains before we got here.”

“But it’s not a vaccine.”

“No. Yes. In a way, yes. I kept thinking that most of the radiation victims we met weren’t as bad off as they should have been, but no one had a real idea how close they were to the blast. No one except you.”

Above them, the night rippled with birds, an unexpected, darting swarm that lifted a shout of warning from one of the Marines. Cam †inched.

Ruth barely reacted to the interruption, her voice hushed and intense. “Sir, you should be dead. The rads you took are off the scale, but you also have the most advanced version of the ghost I’ve seen. It’s some kind of overall booster. I think it’s a prototype that was intended to protect against the snow†ake. Soldiers carrying a perfect version of it could probably hit the enemy with the snow†ake and not see any effects themselves…and I think it’s helping your tissues stay intact despite the radiation damage. It’s gradually cleaning your cells.” She tipped her face up toward Cam, then looked back at Hernandez and said, “It’s rebuilding you.”

“But I’m sicker than ever.”

“I don’t think it can keep up. It’s an early model.”

Hernandez didn’t say anything else, although his mind must have been racing. Cam was still trying to make sense of everything they’d heard and he hadn’t just learned that he belonged in his grave.

“I’m sorry.” Ruth reached for Hernandez again, and the general took her hand.

She could ‚x us, Cam thought.

“I’m so sorry,” Ruth said, but Hernandez pressed his lips into a thin smile and said, “They kept us alive longer than we had any right to expect.” He meant himself and the survivors from his company. He was still drawing connections between himself and Leadville, taking comfort in the past.

“Can you save him?” Cam asked, because it would have been awful to say what he really wanted to know. Can you ‚x me? He was ashamed to be so sel‚sh, because Hernandez continued to put everyone else ‚rst. Hernandez wouldn’t plead with her, not for himself — but his troops spoke on his behalf.

“Make the nanotech better,” Watts said. “Please,” Foshtomi added, as another man said, “The thing already works pretty good, right?”

Ruth ducked her head. Every day she seemed more humble, which was strange in someone so masterful. Her little habit of turning away came frequently now and Cam remembered the gesture especially from the day she’d ‚rst met Allison, avoiding the younger woman. Ruth was learning to evade challenges, which was dangerous for all of them, and Cam shared some of the blame for her indecisiveness.

“Maybe,” she said at last. “Yes. The potential here is incredible. The model you have inside you represents the best work of the top people in nanotech, ‚fty researchers with full machining gear and computers.”

She meant that she was alone. She was still hedging her words, as if there were any possibility they wouldn’t back her into this corner. Their lives depended on it. More importantly, her work would shape the outcome of the war. Mankind would rebuild on North America. There was no question of that, but the color of the natives’ skin and the languages they spoke would depend on Ruth’s success or failure.

The ability to move freely in the plague zones was only the beginning. A nanotech capable of healing even serious wounds would make them unstoppable.

Cam †exed his ruined hands and glanced at Deborah, Ruth, and Hernandez, all of them hurt in different ways. What if they were able to stand up again after being shot or burned? They would be superhuman, and Cam tried to form a prayer to all of the scientists who had been killed in Leadville.

Help her, he thought. You can help her somehow. Shouldn’t they be able to talk to Ruth through their work? There would be clues and other evidence in the nanotech, obvious problems to ‚x and improvements to be made.

“You’ve done it before,” Cam said.

“I’ve seen it,” Watts agreed.

In the lab in Sacramento, Ruth had quickly drawn together and improved the work of four science teams, building upon the original archos tech to create the ‚rst working vaccine. Of course, she had also had the help of two specialists, D.J. and Todd, both of whom were either dead or hopelessly lost.

“A lot of people are depending on you,” Hernandez said.

Ruth wouldn’t look at them. “I need time,” she said. “Maybe too much time. And I don’t have any equipment here.”

“You do in Grand Lake,” Hernandez said.

“Yes. Some.”

“We can get you there.”

* * * *

They ran northeast on the morning of July 1^st, moving downhill before the dawn lifted over the horizon. The mountains in the east topped out at fourteen thousand feet, hiding the sun. Cam felt his gaze drawn again and again to those peaks. It was dif‚cult to tell in the brilliant new light, but those mountains looked unusually smooth along their southern edges. They were melted. Their bulk was all that had spared Aspen Valley from the bombing, channeling the worst of the blast away. Even so, Ruth’s escort had quickly hiked into an area where the ground was a marsh, still waterlogged from the †oods of snowmelt, and yet the fallen trees were brittle and dry.

“Watch out.” Foshtomi stopped Cam from following Mitchell. Mitchell had stepped over a dead gray stump into an ordinary-looking puddle, but the surface was deceptive. Mitchell sunk to his hip. He twisted to grab the stump and Foshtomi splashed forward to help, both of them coated with the spotty black muck of eroding bark. “Hang on,” Foshtomi called.

Cam looked back. They were in the middle of the group to assist Ruth while most of the squad ranged ahead, but Ruth was already looking for another way through, talking with Deborah. She pointed and moved left.

“Wait!” Cam said, hustling to join her.

A few trees still jutted into the sky, lea†ess and broken. This long mountainside was covered with blowdowns. Fortunately the spruce and aspen forest had been thin at ninety-‚ve hundred feet, because moments after the blast wave knocked them over, the †oods had locked the shattered trunks and branches together in a treacherous puzzle like pick-up sticks.

The undergrowth was a different matter. Most of the brush and grass had survived the heat and the windstorms. In many places, they weren’t drowning either. The trees and rocks formed thousands of small dams, directing the water into rivulets and swamps — but even where the ground bumped up, the brush was sickly. When he touched one, the leaves crumbled away like confetti. Every minute on this ruined slope, Cam was sure they were absorbing radiation.

He reached for Ruth’s arm as she began to crab her way over a pair of logs after Deborah. “You have to wait,” he said.

Her dark eyes †ashed at him. They no longer wore their goggles and masks. There was no need, so he got the full brunt of Ruth’s expression. “Let go,” she said. “Let go of me!” She climbed across, peeling bark away in clumps beneath her damp gloves and boots.

Cam followed her. “Goddammit, wait,” he said, looking for Deborah’s eyes instead of Ruth’s. He was slowed by his ribs and Ruth had already limped to the next blowdown, grabbing for handholds among its jagged branches.

She’d been like this ever since Hernandez left them.

“You have to talk to her,” Cam said, striding alongside Deborah, but the tall blond only shrugged, almost indifferent.

“I think she’s right. We need to keep moving.”

“If she breaks her leg,” Cam said, raising his voice.

Suddenly Ruth stopped in front of them. Cam looked out across the hillside. Forty yards ahead, Estey had raised his hand, signaling for them across the snarled trees, mud, and water. In the space between, Goodrich and Ballard also stood waiting. The soldiers made three strong human shapes among the debris.

Cam waved back at Estey and said, to Ruth, “It’s stupid for you to walk in front. We have to get back to the others.”

But that wasn’t what had stopped her. She’d found a bird. “Oh,” Deborah said softly as Ruth knelt and reached for the pathetic creature.

The ‚nch couldn’t have been in the plague zone very long because it was still alive, although its feathers were molting from its belly and neck. It †opped weakly in the muck, trying to escape. It had no strength in its wings and it might have been blind, too. The bird’s eyes were a cloudy blue-white that Cam had never seen before.

“This way!” Estey yelled, and Cam waved again, although he wasn’t sure if Ruth would obey. She hesitated with her gloves on either side of the bird. He thought she must not have seen the bloated chipmunks they’d passed ‚fteen minutes ago, two little bodies that had washed down the mountainside together. The chipmunks would have stopped her, too, and he preferred her wild impatience.

Ruth could be careless of her own safety when she was manic, but it also made her dangerous to anything in her way. They couldn’t afford for her to fall apart. They needed to harness her expertise one more time — and they were still an hour from their rendezvous. Cam hoped to God she’d make it.

“Look at him,” she said. She meant the bird.

“We need to go,” Cam said, and Deborah added, “Ruth, the sun’s coming up.”

“Right.” She didn’t move at ‚rst. “You’re right. It’s just a fucking bird.” Ruth stood up and pushed past them with her trembling, ‚lthy gloves.

They were on foot because Hernandez had driven back to Sylvan Mountain, both to rejoin the base and as a decoy for enemy satellites. His trucks were far more likely to attract attention than a handful of people, especially since his vehicles were moving toward the front. If there was an attack, Hernandez wanted to draw the ‚re to himself. He was buying time. He’d organized a †ight of helicopters to take Ruth north again, but he didn’t want to risk a pickup too close to Sylvan Mountain. The Chinese had too many guns focused on the area. The invaders had also continued to push their advantage in the air war. Helicopters would be vulnerable no matter what he did, but Hernandez intended to lead a massive counteroffensive to push the Chinese back. A diversion.

You just make sure you do your best, Hernandez had said as Ruth leaned over his forearm, jabbing the inside of his arm with a needle that she immediately sank into her own wrist. That was why she was so upset. It was clear that Hernandez didn’t expect to see the outcome of her work, and Cam thought he would probably ask all of his sickest men and women to follow him in the front waves of the assault. Cam thought they would say yes.

The worst that Ruth faced were scratches or a turned ankle, and she seemed eager to hurt herself, shoving through the branches and mud. They were incubating. They’d dropped below the barrier forty minutes ago and the perfected vaccine would beat out the earlier model, swiftly multiplying as it was ‚rst to disassemble the plague. At the same time, the booster nano should help protect them against the radiation.

Hernandez would give his life for hers. With more time in the labs in Grand Lake, Ruth had the ability to turn the war in their favor by improving the booster nano. There seemed to be no limit to what it could do. Accelerating a man’s capacity to heal was only the beginning. She might be able to double their strength, their re†exes, their sight. But as always the problem was contamination. If they could pass an improved booster among themselves, they would inevitably spread it to the enemy. Supersoldiers would have the advantage only for a short period before the enemy rose up with the same new traits. The United States would need to launch their new attacks in a single coordinated thrust, if there was time — if there were still enough Americans left.

The swamp turned black as Estey led them into an area where the collapsing forest had ignited and burned before the †oods extinguished the ‚re. Cam saw another dying bird. Then he spotted a blue Pepsi can and wondered how it had gotten there.

From somewhere north came the long, shuddering wake of jet ‚ghters. “Down!” Estey screamed. Most of them splashed into the charcoal-encrusted grime. Ruth stood looking up. Foshtomi grabbed the back of her jacket. “Get down, you idiot,” Foshtomi said, but the thundering sound was far away and getting farther, fading into the night sky behind them.

Cam turned to see the dark west horizon stutter with orange bursts of light as gigantic explosions ‚lled the valleys beyond Sylvan Mountain. U.S. ‚ghters were slamming the Chinese again, preparing the way for the ground assault.

Hernandez had some advantages. He had elevation. It was ironic. The Colorado armies had stayed above ten thousand feet because they were afraid of the plague, ceding most of the lowlands and highways to the Chinese, but now they would crash into the enemy with all the momentum of superior positions. Not for her, Cam thought. They weren’t only doing it for her, although Hernandez might have tried more conservative tactics if he hadn’t wanted to protect Ruth above everything else. That was why she was so unsettled. Thousands more would die to serve her, no matter if it was her decision or not.

The sun touched them at last as they hiked out of the swamp onto a ridgeline. The light felt warm and clean — and the wind began to carry the sounds of artillery. Then there were more planes. The clamor of war followed them for miles and Ruth kept her head down, limping through the rock and scorched grass as fast as she was able.

The thrum of helicopters echoed from the shallow mountain pass in front of them. It became a roar as three snub-nosed Black Hawks surged out of the landscape ahead. Estey knelt with his radio as Goodrich waved both arms over his head, so Cam was surprised when two of the attack choppers banked away and kept going. More decoys. The third helicopter came straight for them and †ared hard, lowering its skids to the earth as the crew chief banged open the door.

* * * *

“Do you trust me?” Ruth asked, leaning close enough that her hair whipped at Cam’s face. He barely heard her. On the †ight deck, the sound of the rotors was bone-jarring. The turbines screamed each time the chopper lifted and swung through the terrain. Cam looked out from the noise at the quiet world †itting by. The shapes of mountains heaved up and down, but the desolation was constant. Endless miles were burned or †ooded or brown with dead trees.

Ruth leaned away to see his face. There was something new in her eyes, excitement and fear, an idea, and Cam nodded. He let her brush her lips against his good ear again.

“I need you to trust me one more time,” she said.

* * * *

Estey’s Rangers were separated from each other as soon as the chopper landed in Grand Lake. Cam and Deborah were pulled into the effort as well. Special Forces medics drew several hypodermics of blood from each of them. Other soldiers led them to command shelters and barracks, rapidly pricking the insides of their arms with needles, then stabbing those bloody slivers into other men and women. It was almost funny. Cam was badly worn and the process had a madcap feel that reminded him of the bumbling clown shows he’d seen at various fairs and amusement parks when he was a kid.

Where did that memory come from? he wondered, pressing a gauze pad to his bleeding arm as three soldiers rushed him toward another bunker. They shouted once at a civilian. The man tried to grab Cam but the soldiers punched him in the face.

Grand Lake was in turmoil. Most of the area was evacuating. Cam found himself in a tent crowded with pilots in full †ight gear, all of whom ran from the barracks as soon as they were inoculated. Cam also passed through two shelters full of of‚cers where he learned as much as he needed, listening to them con‚rm signals and rendezvous dates. A full platoon had taken Ruth to her lab. Some of the top commanders were also staying, at least until alternate bases were established below the barrier. They were trying their damnedest to get out of here without crippling their defenses. That was impossible. The transition would be a staggering amount of work exactly when they needed most to focus on the enemy, but they were too vulnerable on these peaks. Chinese ‚ghters had broken through to Grand Lake eight times in the past two days, strafing its makeshift air bases and ground crews. Enemy planes could come again any minute.

Cam knew something they didn’t. Neither sides’ efforts would matter if Ruth was successful. She no longer planned to improve the booster. She imagined a way to remove the enemy completely, and yet there was no guarantee that her scheme would work. Until then, Cam could only do his part.

He spotted Foshtomi once in between the tents, running with her own bodyguards. Another time he saw a mob on the hillside across from him, a near-riot in the refugee camps that must have gathered around another of his squadmates. A lot of the refugees were already gone, taking their chances with the early model of the vaccine. Some had stayed, however, either from inertia or to help organize the rest.

Allison Barrett was one of those who’d remained. She found Cam that evening as he ate with Ballard and Goodrich. The rest of their squad had yet to reappear, and his heart leapt at the sight of a familiar face. Cam stood up from the table and walked past his guards, embracing her.

“Come with me,” Allison whispered. Her blue eyes were bright and urgent.

He shook his head. “I can’t.” He thought she meant outside the tent, but Allison had larger plans.

Allison bared her teeth in her ‚erce, beautiful grin and said, “You can help us. Please. Regular people are important, too. We need more leaders and you’ve been under the barrier so many times. You know what to expect.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please. We’re going east.” She kept her arm cinched around his waist. “This place will get hit again. You know it will.”

“Yes.”

Ballard said they’d used the snow†ake. The ground assaults out of Sylvan Mountain had failed almost immediately, beaten back by Chinese air superiority as Hernandez must have expected. Hours ago, Grand Lake had dusted the Chinese as they pursued Hernandez back into the mountains, decimating many of the U.S. forces as well. It was a desperate show of strength. Both sides were frantic and outraged. The rumor was that the launch codes were locked. There could be a nuclear exchange, and Grand Lake was surely a prime target.

“You should go,” Cam said.

“You can’t help her any more. You’ve done enough.” Allison bared her teeth again in her aggressive way. “She’s not in love with you.”

“What?”

“She doesn’t love you. Not like that.”

“That’s not what this is about,” Cam said honestly. The connection he felt with Ruth was much more than as a lover. It was layered and powerful. Yes, they had been physically intimate, touching and kissing. Maybe there would be more. But his feelings for her went beyond that. He had to see this through.

“You can change your mind,” Allison said. “You can come with us anytime.”

Then she walked away. Cam went after her, although he stopped at the wide door of the tent. Two of his guards had followed him and he glanced out at the hazy night, searching among the busy lights of American planes. Would there be any warning?

Maybe it would be better just to vanish in a single white instant of nuclear ‚re. They wouldn’t suffer. They could stop running at last.

Cam thought of Nikola Ulinov, whom he could never meet. He thought of Ruth, furiously trying to outrace the tide of war. Despite everything, he felt still and quiet. He’d done what he could. Now it was out of his hands again. One way or the other he’d do everything he could to help Ruth. He continued to wait and watch as Allison joined the bustle of soldiers rushing to get out of this marked place.