71

REN. SAINT RACHEL AND ALL BIRDS

YEAR TWENTY-FIVE

“Croze!” I say. “I can’t believe it! I thought you were dead!” I’m talking into his bedsheet because we’re holding on so tight I’m smushed up against him. He doesn’t say anything — maybe he’s crying — so I say, “I bet you thought I was dead too,” and I feel him nod.

I let go and we look at each other. He tries a grin. “Where’d you get the bedsheet?” I say.

“There’s a lot of beds around,” he says. “These things are better than pants, you don’t get so hot. Did you see Oates?” He sounds worried.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to spoil this time by telling him about something so unhappy. Poor Oates, hanging in a tree with his throat cut and his kidneys missing. But then I look at his face and realize I’ve misunderstood: it’s me he’s worried about, because he already knows about Oates. He and Shackie were up ahead of us on the path. They’d have heard me shout, they’d have hidden. Then they would have heard the screaming, all sorts of screaming. Then, later — because of course they would have come back to check — they would have heard the crows.

If I say no, he’ll most likely pretend that Oates is still alive, so as not to upset me. “Yes,” I say. “We did see him. I’m sorry.”

He looks at the ground. I think of how I can change the subject. The Mo’Hairs have been nibbling all around us — they want to stay close to Croze — so I say, “Are those your sheep?”

“We’ve started herding them,” he says. “We’ve got them kind of tamed. But they keep getting out.” Who is we, I’d like to ask; but Toby comes up, so I say, “This is Toby, remember?” and Croze says, “No shit! From the Gardeners?”

Toby gives him one of her dry little nods and says, “Crozier. You’ve certainly grown,” as if it’s a school reunion. It’s hard to throw her off balance. She sticks out her hand and Croze shakes it. It’s so strange — Croze in a bedsheet, looking like Jesus though his beard isn’t exactly flowing, and Toby and me in our pink outfits with the winking eyes and lipstick mouths; and Toby with three purple Mo’Hair legs sticking up out of her packsack.

“Where’s Amanda?” he says.

“She’s not dead,” I say too quickly. “I just know she isn’t.” He and Toby trade a look over my head, as if they don’t want to tell me my pet bunny got run over. “What about Shackleton?” I say, and Croze says, “He’s okay. Let’s go back to the place.”

“What place?” says Toby, and he says, “The cobb house. Where we used to have the Tree of Life Exchange. Remember?” he says to me. “It’s not too far.”

The sheep are heading that way anyway. They seem to know where they’re going. We follow along behind them.

The sun’s so hot by now that it’s boiling inside our top-to-toes. Croze has part of his bedsheet draped over his head; he looks a lot cooler than me.

It’s noon when we reach the old Tree of Life parkette. The plastic swings are gone, but the cobb house is the same — even the spraypainted pleeb tags are there — except they’ve been building onto it. There’s a fence made of poles and planks and wire and a lot of duct tape. Croze opens the gate, and the sheep go in and file towards a pen in the yard.

“I got the sheep,” Croze calls, and a man with a spraygun comes out through the house door, and then two more men. Then four women — two young, one a bit older, and an older one, maybe as old as Toby. Their clothes aren’t Gardener clothes, but they aren’t new and they aren’t pretty. Two of the men are wearing bedsheets, the third has cut-offs and a shirt. The women have long cover-ups, like top-to-toes.

They stare at us. Not friendly: anxious. Croze says our names. “You sure they’re not infected?” says the first man, the one with the spraygun.

“No way,” says Croze. “They were isolated the whole time.” He looks at us for confirmation, and Toby nods. “Friends of Zeb,” Croze adds. “Toby and Ren.” Then he tells us, “This is MaddAddam.”

“What’s left of us,” says the shortest man. He says their names: his is Beluga, and the other three are Ivory Bill, Manatee, and Zunzuncito. The women are Lotis Blue, Swift Fox, White Sedge, and Tamaraw. We don’t shake hands: they’re still nervous about us and our germs.

“MaddAddam,” says Toby. “Good to meet you. I followed some of your work online.”

“How’d you get in?” Ivory Bill says to Toby. “To the playroom?” He’s eyeing her antique rifle as if it’s made of gold.

“I was Inaccessible Rail,” says Toby.

They look at one another. “You,” says Lotis Blue. “You were Inaccessible! The secret lady!” She laughs. “Zeb would never tell us who you were. We thought you were some hot bimbo he had.” Toby gives her a thin little smile.

“He said you were solid, though,” says Tamaraw. “He insisted on that.”

“Zeb?” says Toby, as if she’s talking to herself. I know she wants to ask if he’s still alive, but she’s afraid to.

“MaddAddam was a great caper,” says Beluga. “Until we got snatched.”

“So-called drafted by fucking ReJoov,” says White Sedge, the youngest woman. “Crake, that little bastard.” She’s brown-skinned but she has kind of an English accent, so it comes out bahstahd. They’re a lot friendlier now that Toby’s told them she was really somebody else.

I’m confused. I look up at Croze, and he says, “It was that thing we were doing, the bioresistance thing. Why they put us in Painball. These are the scientists they scooped. Remember I told you? At Scales?”

“Oh,” I say. But I’m still not clear. Why did ReJoov scoop them? Was it a brain kidnapping, like what happened to my father?

“We had visitors,” Ivory Bill says to Croze. “After you went for the sheep. Two guys, with a woman and a spraygun and a dead rakunk.”

“Really,” says Croze. “That’s major.”

“Said they were Painball, like we should respect that,” says Beluga. “They wanted to trade the woman for spraygun cells and Mo’Hair meat — the woman and the rakunk.”

“I bet it was them got our purple Mo’Hair,” says Croze. “Toby found the legs.”

“Rakunk! Why would we trade for that?” says White Sedge indignantly. “We’re not stahving!”

“We should’ve shot them,” says Manatee. “But they were holding the woman in front.”

“What was she wearing?” I say, but they ignore me.

“We said no trade,” says Ivory Bill. “Tough for the girl. But they’re desperate for cells, which means they’re running out. So we’ll deal with them later.”

“It’s Amanda,” I say. They could have saved her. Though I don’t blame them for not trading: you can’t give spraycells to guys who’ll use them to kill you. “What about Amanda?” I say. “Shouldn’t we go and get her?”

“Yeah — we need to get everyone together now that the Flood’s over,” says Croze. “Like we’ve said.” He’s backing me up.

“Then we can, you know, rebuild the human race,” I say. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s the only thing I can think of. “Amanda could really help us — she’s so good at everything.” But they just smile at me sadly as if they know it’s hopeless.

Croze takes my hand and walks me away from them. “You mean that?” he says. “About the human race?” He smiles. “You’ll have to have babies.”

“Maybe not just yet,” I say.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll show you the garden.”

They have a cookhouse, and some violet porta-biolets over in one corner, and some solar they’re fixing up. There’s no shortage of parts for just about everything back in the pleebs, though you have to look out for falling buildings.

Their vegetable garden is in behind: they don’t have a lot of stuff planted yet. “We get pig attacks,” he says. “They dig under the fence. We shot one of them, so maybe the others got the point. Zeb says they’re superpigs, because they’re spliced with human brain tissue.”

“Zeb?” I say. “Is Zeb alive?” I feel dizzy all of a sudden. All of these dead people, coming alive again — it’s overwhelming.

“Sure,” says Croze. “Are you all right?” He puts his arm around me, to keep me from falling down.