Scale, p.15
Scale, page 15
Jake left the apartment and sat on a bench beside the water fountain a short way down the street. School still wasn’t out for three minutes; he might as well stake out the apartment until he had a chance to talk to Shane’s friends.
As he waited, he noticed people leaving their buildings and gathering on the street, craning their necks and looking to the east. Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him; he stood up, and, seeing nothing, walked over to one of the groups that were positioned at an intersection, where the view was less obstructed.
The light just above the horizon might have been a bright star, or maybe Jupiter, but Jake recalled someone on the radio saying that the satellite, Friendship, would show up in the sky over Mauburg again some ninety minutes after the launch – engines no longer firing, but illuminated by G8’s new power source.
Any doubt about the object’s identity soon vanished; it was brightening and dimming like nothing else he’d seen. Every tert it blinked out completely then lit up again, though the luminosity it reached after each full extinguishment kept changing. At first Jake wondered if the power source was faltering, but the blinking itself was metronomic, and the hue was shifting as well, with the initial blue-white taking on a tinge of green. As he watched the satellite flash on and off for what must have been a full second, he saw it dip into the red and back, and he finally realized that the aim – of course – was to grab the attention of a viewer at any scale. In District One, the blinking that caught his own eye would be imperceptible, but the longer cycle, involving colors to which Scale One vision was more sensitive, would be just as prominent.
He wasn’t sure what to make of the underlying message; if you were sympathetic to the satellite’s creators, you could see the effort to bridge the scales as laudable, while if you weren’t you might read it as threatening. Was it proclaiming “The sky belongs to all of us,” or “Now we can rule you all, from the sky”?
He glanced over toward Thaddeus’s building and saw two figures approaching the complex; they had their backs to him, but one was the right height and build to be Shane Beckman. Jake sauntered down the street and caught up with them in time to see them enter Thaddeus’s apartment.
Case closed. His own curiosity wasn’t satisfied, but it was a family matter now.
Jake went back to the water fountain, took a drink, then sat down on the bench before making the call.
“I’ve found Shane,” he told Elaine. “He’s with Thaddeus.”
“That’s wonderful! Thank you. Have you talked to him?”
“No, I haven’t spoken to either of them.”
“What’s he doing there?” Elaine asked, bewildered.
“I don’t know. I just sat outside the apartment for a while, and I saw them go in. You could try calling Thaddeus again. I’ll wait.”
She called Jake back almost at once. “He’s still not answering me.”
“Can you come here yourself?”
“Not for five minutes, I’m at work now.”
Jake hesitated. “I can approach them, or I can keep an eye on them. It’s up to you. You’re in a better position than I am to judge how Shane will react if I knock on the door and tell him that his mother sent me.”
Elaine said, “Just keep an eye on them, please.” Jake had been scrupulous not to hint at any of his unfounded theories, but it was clear from her voice that she’d formed her own concerns.
“Is there anything else I should know about Thaddeus?” he asked. “Any criminal record? Any history of violence?”
“Not that I know of,” Elaine replied. “He just seemed ... ”
“What?”
“He made me uncomfortable. When he visited us, he was always friendly and smiling, but it felt like he was testing you, waiting for you to say the wrong thing.”
“Do you want me to call the police?” Jake offered.
“No! Shane would never forgive me. Can you just ... keep track of them, until I finish work?”
“Of course,” Jake assured her.
“Thank you.”
Jake settled down to wait, hoping that he’d be in for an uneventful few minutes. Friendship was visible above the rooftops now, twinkling across the spectrum like a drunken sprite. Was it a coincidence that its chosen orbit made it rise exactly sixteen times faster than the sun? He wondered if the people from D2 to D5 would welcome a celestial herald that carved the solar day into pieces more closely attuned to their body clocks, or if they’d just find it all the more intrusive and impertinent for showing up every time they got out of bed.
Two men with large backpacks came down the street, and were admitted into Thaddeus’s apartment. Jake tried to keep his speculations in check, but whatever was happening it seemed unwise, now, to linger in one spot and risk drawing suspicion. He left the bench by the fountain and found a new vantage, where some trees along the verge largely hid him from sight, but he could still see his target well enough between the branches.
After a few seconds, Thaddeus, Shane and the two newcomers emerged from the apartment and set off down the street, heading south, all of them with backpacks now. One of the newcomers looked anxiously over his shoulder, glancing at the bench where Jake had been. Jake let them walk out of sight, then he moved to a parallel street and caught up with them, watching them pass by at a crossroads. The streets here offered no hope of even the thinnest crowd to hide among, so if he was spotted again it would all be over.
Would that be so bad? He didn’t really fear for his own safety, and if he disrupted the men’s plans that might be enough to keep Shane out of trouble until his mother could come and try to talk some sense into him. Still, Elaine had instructed him to watch, not approach, and it might yet be possible for her to resolve everything without alienating her son with the revelation that she’d sent someone to spy on him.
Jake lost track of the group, failing to sight them at an intersection, but his guess that they’d turned east proved to be correct. Were they heading for the desert? The thought that they might try to attack the launch site seemed preposterous – even if they were part of a much larger force – but he tried to prepare himself for any possibility. Spotlight had managed to avoid killing any of the soldiers at the Town Hall, and he hoped that all of G8’s sites would be protected by non-lethal measures, but the prospect of having to drag Shane away from a barrage of gunshots set his guts churning.
His targets turned south again, toward the river. They were already east of the docks, though; as far as Jake knew, there was nothing but marshlands along the riverbank here.
The houses petered out and the streets became tracks through wild scrubland, with no lighting. The giant rootlife plants around him provided plenty of cover, but the paving was cracked and his footing felt precarious in the gloom. By the time he came across an old, battered sign and stopped to read it by the moonlight, its warning of treacherous ground ahead for anyone smaller than Scale Three told him nothing his own instincts hadn’t proclaimed already. If these adventurers wanted to end up buried in quicksand then that was their prerogative, but he wasn’t being paid enough to try to pluck them out.
He crouched beside a shrub and watched the group pause to take spread-shoes from their packs. So the joke was on him; if there was any rescuing to be done, he’d be the beneficiary. He couldn’t imagine an innocent reason why these four people had skipped work and school to plod along the riverbank, but exactly how their presence could contribute to the nationalist cause was equally mysterious.
They moved away through the shadows until Jake lost sight of them completely, though he could still hear their oversized shoes slapping against the sand. He walked a little further along his own track, until he came to a point where the surface more or less disintegrated. He crouched down and worked one of the last paving stones free, and then another, feeling no compunction for the damage he was doing, shortening the path to nowhere by a few millimeters.
Carrying the two slabs of rock, he returned to where he’d last seen the group, and placed one slab on the sand beside the track. Then he stepped onto it, placed the second one in front of him, picked up the first, and repeated the whole process.
Five or six steps in, he felt a powerful conviction that he had once done something like this as part of a childhood game, but he couldn’t recall any other context or details. Maybe it was just déjà vu, or perhaps he’d seen other people doing it as a form of sport, or military training. It was certainly exhausting; the slabs weren’t heavy, but trying to make as little noise with them as possible, and keeping his balance while thinking about the consequences if he slipped, made every move ten times more arduous than if there’d been nothing at stake.
Jake reached the track that the four had been on, and when he crouched down he could just make out the faint imprint of a spread-shoe in the sand beside it, to the east. He couldn’t see or hear any trace of the group themselves now, but at least he was sure which way they’d set out.
He laid down his slabs and followed them, helped more than hindered by all the rootlife plants that either restricted the route they could have taken, or disclosed it outright in the form of snapped stems or torn blades of grass.
He stopped to catch his breath and drink from his water bottle. When he looked to the east he saw a road cutting through the scrubland, maybe half a meter away, so flat and flawless that it resembled nothing so much as a long, dark stream. The trail he was following veered south, but he was never going to catch up with the group if he spurned every advantage like this.
When he reached the road and jumped across the gap from his paving stone to the smooth black surface, it took all his self-discipline not to cry out at the shock to his joints. He had never trodden on anything so unyielding in his life, let alone landed on it after a careless leap. This was not just a refurbished version of one of the derelict tracks that he’d thought were the only paths through the scrubland. If G8 had laid this road themselves, it probably led to some facility that they’d constructed out here. Jake could imagine news of such a place making its way to Thaddeus and his friends, but even if they’d felt compelled to do something with the information, he wished they’d just tipped off the army rather than taking matters into their own hands.
He gave his knees half a second to recover, then he set off down the road, peering ahead warily, expecting to see a building or a gated compound appear every time he came over a rise. He could smell the river on the breeze. Who built a factory out here, on marshland? To his left, Friendship continued its ascent; its incessant blinking was starting to get on his nerves.
When he spotted a truck parked on the road, with three people standing beside it, he drew back, cursing, and detoured into the scrubland again with his self-laid paving. The sentries were holding rifles; he could hear them talking and joking with each other, but their conversation gave no hint of their purpose here. Were they guarding the truck, or the road? As Jake drew level with the truck, he saw that the road itself came to an end just a little further on. There was no factory. Where the shrubs gave way to the marshes, the road gave way to sand. He could even see the river now, glinting in the moonlight.
“Hey!” someone behind him whispered. “Are you crazy? Where are your shoes?”
Jake turned, braced for a fight, but the two men just grinned at him, amused by his plight but not hostile at all.
“They got stuck in the sand,” he improvised.
“You’re lucky you didn’t just sink,” the taller of the two marveled. “You better stick with us till we get to the rendezvous. We’ll grab you if you slip again.”
The men clearly thought he was an ally, but did not expect to recognize him. So whatever they were planning had been organized discreetly, without any one big face-to-face gathering where everyone was introduced.
Jake made his way south beside them, wondering if it was even worth pondering the pros and cons of attempting to flee when the actual mechanism of escape eluded him completely. Would Thaddeus’s friends recognize him as the random bystander they’d noticed sitting on a bench? If he arrived beside these other, genuine members of whatever this was, some trace of their own credibility would rub off on him. But there were surely other questions he might be asked that wouldn’t be as easily dodged as the one about his shoes.
They arrived at a spot on the edge of the marshes; Jake caught glimpses of other people, loosely congregated around them, but the vegetation here was as thick as ever, and he had no real hope of counting their number.
The tall man touched a comrade’s elbow and whispered something; the recipient shook his head, but after moving away he found someone else to speak to, presumably on the same matter. Jake wondered if they were asking if anyone knew who on Earth he was, and whether he should be trusted or disposed of, but within a second or two, a spare pair of spread-shoes were passed back along the chain. He slipped them on, feeling oddly chastened, as if this generous act toward an enemy they didn’t even know was an enemy somehow obliged him to reconsider his whole position. He certainly felt more sympathy for these locals than he had for the invading soldiers, but if the local sentiment was against independence, what did they have to fear from the referendum? Cheating, maybe, but shutting the whole thing down would be as much a form of vote-rigging as any other.
In any case, he was only here to try to get his client’s son to safety, not to advance any political agenda. If Spotlight ever found out that he’d declined the opportunity to ingratiate himself with them by ratting out Thaddeus and Shane, that would certainly put an end to any possibility of joining them, but his obligations were clear.
As yet, though, he hadn’t even spotted Shane. Jake tried peering through the scrub discreetly, but it was hard to scan for faces without looking suspicious. Whatever confrontation was coming, he assumed that everyone around him was carrying some kind of weapon. Being accused of spying while surrounded by a leaderless gang wielding knives was the kind of scenario he’d only ever explored in nightmares, and the only solution he’d ever found had been to shout until he woke.
“Won’t be long now,” the tall man assured him. Jake grunted assent, unsure how much anxiety was visible in his demeanor, even if, mercifully, it was easy to misattribute it to their presumed common cause.
A cascade of brief whispers moved through the group. “Take position!” the tall man instructed Jake excitedly. With no idea what that meant, he watched the others arrange themselves – spread out, but not too much, all facing the direction of the road while remaining hidden behind vegetation – and tried to intuit a suitable gap he could fill. If the group as a whole had never rehearsed anything in person, then however they’d conveyed their plan to each other as an abstraction, it had to be robust to a certain amount of error.
Someone tossed the end of a rope to the tall man, who removed a tie from the loop that remained, unwound a couple of centimeters, then retied the loop and threw it to Jake. Jake mimicked the action, and passed the dwindling loop to a man further from the road than he was. Looking south, he could see two other ropes being unfurled. So what were they planning to drag off the road? Or who?
Jake heard a gunshot and the rope went taut. Reflexively, he tightened his grip and dug his spread-shoes into the ground, then as a small amount of slack came to him from the tall man, he passed it on and fought to increase it. It was clear that his side had an overwhelming advantage of numbers in this tug of war, but the need to stay hidden, to weave the rope between the plants, and to avoid a bullet from their opponent, all went some way toward leveling the competition.
There was another shot, closer now. Jake peered through the foliage and saw one of the sentries, lassoed but still holding his rifle, struggling to keep his footing in the treacherous sand. Then two men ran at him from different directions, surprisingly fast in the awkward shoes; the sentry wheeled around to take aim at one of them, but the other reached him first and pulled the rifle from his hands.
A cheer went up across the group, but at least one other line was still in play. As people subdued the disarmed sentry, others moved to the adjacent rope, and Jake took his cue from them.
With the team on the rope almost doubled, the victim rapidly succumbed. Jake watched anxiously as the second sentry toppled to the ground, his rifle trapped in the lasso already rendered unusable. His captors bound his hands and gagged him, but they didn’t beat him, or leave him to sink; they tied him to some spread-shoes that supported his weight, and then two men stayed watching over him.
The third sentry had been captured already. But what was the prize they’d been guarding?
“It’s coming,” the tall man told Jake. “Can’t you hear it?”
Jake had no idea how to respond.
“You’re on the bridge, aren’t you?” the tall man asked.
“Yes,” Jake replied, afraid that if he said no he’d need to describe some alternative.
“Come on, then!”
Jake followed him to the road, where he saw that some of his comrades had opened the back of the truck, but rather than looting the contents they appeared to be clambering inside with the intention of staying there. He and the tall man discarded their spread-shoes and jogged to the end of the road, where a dozen people were kneeling in the sand along the eastern edge, groping around as if they’d lost something.
Jake fell to his knees and copied them. The road didn’t actually end where he’d thought it did; a thin layer of sand covered it as it continued toward the riverbank. He probed the hidden surface diligently, hoping he wouldn’t be the one to find whatever they were searching for, but if he did it seemed safer to shout out in triumph and then ask for a second opinion than to pretend he hadn’t noticed anything.
When his fingertips struck what felt like the edge of a hatch, he almost reneged on his strategy, but then he forced himself to yell, “Got it!” and started sweeping sand away with his hands. The others gathered to help him, and together they exposed a square cover a couple of centimeters wide.
