Specimen Days

She might have been telling the truth. How could you know, with a Nadian?

"So," he said. "I guess you don't like talking about your past, on Nadia."

Silence.

He said, "But how about this? Do you have a family here? Did you have a family there?"

Nothing.

"Did you once have a family? Were you married? Kids?"

More nothing.

He said, "Do you think you can sleep?"

"Yes," she answered.

"I fall on the weeds and stones, the riders spur their unwilling horses and haul close."

"Good night," she said. "Good night," he answered.

He mounded a little dirt pillow for himself and folded his hands over his chest. After a while, he slept. He dreamed of a boy looking at a man who was looking out a window into the darkness in which the boy stood. He dreamed of a train that flew over a golden field, bound for some unutterably fabulous destination.

* * *

He woke at the first light. She was asleep. She had curled herself into a ball. Her head rested against his shoulder.

He had this chance to look at her, then.

Her head was slightly larger than a cantaloupe. She had no hair at all. Her eyes, closed, still shone through the veined membranes of her eyelids. Her skin in the dimness was deep green, nearly black. Their skins were not scaly. That was a myth. Her skin was slick and smooth as a leaf. It was thin and fragile-looking, like a leaf.

She breathed steadily in sleep. She whistled that little involuntary song. The thin line of her mouth, lipless, was only that: a line. Their mouths weren't expressive. It was all in their eyes and nostrils. Her small, smooth head pressed gently against his shoulder as she slept.

Then she woke. Her eyelids fluttered. She was immediately awake and entirely vigilant. She sat up.

He said, "Are you all right?" "Yes," she answered.

"We should start walking. We should stay off the road."

"Yes."

"We're going to have to steal a pod somehow. Which will be difficult."

"I can steal," she said.

"I don't mean morally or philosophically difficult. I mean a pod's security systems are hard to override. I'll try."

"Yes. Try."

"Assuming we're able to get a pod, we shouldn't have too much trouble in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is mostly just refugees. Who are mostly harmless. But then we'll be in Ohio. Ohio is the beginning of the Free Territories."

"Yes."

"Do you know about this?"

"Little."

"It's all pretty loose out there. After the meltdown, just about everybody from where we're standing all the way to the Rocky Mountains was evacuated. Temporarily, supposedly, but people didn't really come back. Who's out there now, mostly, is the ones who refused to leave, and it's still impossible to tell how damaged they are by the fall-out. It's them and the nomads who drift up from the Southern Assembly or down from Canada. They can be nasty. They're the people who didn't quite work out in civilized society. Some of them are evangelicals. Some are criminals."

"Like Nadia," she said.

"I suppose. In certain ways."

"We walk now," she said.

"Yes. We start walking now."

They were able to stay parallel to the road, though for long stretches the episodes of scrubby forest gave out, and they had to walk across open ground. They moved quickly but not too quickly. Hoverpods shot past on the road a half mile to the left. If someone happened to glance over and see them, they would be semiplausible as refugees seeking food and shelter. They would be less plausible as a man wandering with a Nadian. They had to hope no one seeing them from the road would be suspicious enough to alert Magicom. They could do nothing but hope.

They walked across expanses of grass and weed. They passed once through an abandoned housing tract, neat rows of similar houses with the grass grown up around them. The houses had been one idea, endlessly repeated. Time and weather had bleached them, made them semitranslucent, like paper houses. There was a peculiar satisfaction in their silent sameness, in the way their modestly peaked rooflines cut like little teeth into the blank white sky. In their quiet ongoing collapse.

Near midafternoon they came upon a complex that shimmered above the road. It was a faux-Gehry silver oval fifty stories high, decorated with small extraneous bulges and, on its southern side, a forty-foot fin that angled halfheartedly in the direction of the sky. Under its sloping silver underside would be the garage area.

"So," Simon said. "Civilization. This is probably one of the last inhabited complexes, this far west."

"Yes."

"Heavy security, I'm sure. But let's think for a minute here."

"Yes."

"They wouldn't let us into residential or business. We could probably slip into shopping, but they'd have their eyes on us every second."

She said, "They make deliver here?" "Deliveries? Sure. All the time."

"That is not much guarded?"

"Probably not. So, you're thinking we could hang around the delivery port and try to steal a cargo pod?"

"Yes."