Termination Shock

The detail about the park didn’t make sense to Saskia until she looked about and understood that, at least for the next few moments, they had close to absolute privacy because they were in some kind of nature preserve surrounding the confluence of the two rivers. Saskia unbuttoned the cotton shirt she had donned this morning in Huis ten Bosch and peeled it off, momentarily exposing a brassiere and a lot of skin until she was able to pull the spandex sun-shirt down over her body. While she was tugging the silky fabric up her arms, Fenna grabbed the hood from behind and pulled it forward over Saskia’s head. It came down to just above her eyebrows. Some loose fabric was tickling her chin. This was a sort of mask that could be pulled up over the chin, mouth, and even the nose, leaving only an eye slit. “Does anyone have sunglasses?” Fenna asked. Because of Rufus and Alastair they would be speaking English.

Amelia was able to produce from her bag a pair of ordinary (not electronically enhanced) sunglasses with an old-school military look to them. Fenna unfolded them and slipped them onto Saskia’s face, carefully guiding the ends of the bows into the tight gap between her temples and the spandex hood. The look on Fenna’s face was one Saskia had seen often: she wasn’t crazy about what she was seeing, but she had tried her best, and it would have to do.

“You don’t want to be recognized by some random camera,” Rufus guessed.

“Best not to be,” Saskia said. “Until we have things sorted.”

“The rest of your squad?”

“Fenna travels with me all the time,” Saskia pointed out, and so now it was Fenna’s turn to go through a similar transformation using the garment from the other earthsuit. Fenna was braless, wiry, and heavily tattooed, so any lurkers watching from the scrub along the banks would have seen more, but not for long.

Twenty years ago these garments would have done more harm than good, if the point was not to be conspicuous. But now the opposite was true. Anyone out in the open in this heat needed to have some plan for how not to die of it. Rufus looked like he’d done this before; he’d put on a broad-brimmed hat. Amelia and Alastair, however, were dressed altogether wrongly for these conditions.

They came in view of what was apparently downtown Waco: a vintage suspension bridge, the Hilton where, a couple of hours ago, Willem had reserved rooms for them, and some commercial buildings that didn’t rise more than a few stories. Bigger structures loomed a little farther away. Of these, a huge stadium was the most prominent.

“Baylor University,” Alastair said, following a map he could see in his glasses.

“Where Lennert and Johan went?”

“Different complex, different part of town.” Alastair removed his glasses, folded them, tucked them into a case, pocketed that, excused himself, and threw up over the side of the boat. “The heat doesn’t agree with me,” he explained, his chin quivering.

Rufus throttled the motor down. “Jump in the river and cool you off,” he said, somewhere between a suggestion and a command. “I’m a keep an eye on you. You’re the canary.”

Saskia looked at Rufus curiously, and he noticed it. “In the army,” he said, “you leading a platoon somewhere that’s cold, you pick a skinny Southern boy, a brother maybe, and when he’s cold, you stop for a spell and warm up. Some place hot, you pick someone like him—what kinda accent is that, sir?”

“Scottish,” Alastair said and spat bile into the river.

“It ain’t hot where you from.”

Alastair shook his head.

“You are the canary. You start throwing up, we look for ways to chill.” Rufus nodded at Saskia and Fenna. “You two splash a little river water on those garments. Be good for a while.” He nodded at Alastair. “Take a swim, sir.” He appraised Amelia. “Where you from, ma’am?”

“Suriname. It’s hot there.”

Rufus had been surveying Amelia’s face, maybe trying to piece together a racial profile, perhaps taking note of the broken nose and the slightly thickened ear on one side. His eyes strayed downward. Saskia clenched her teeth, thinking he was going to check out Amelia’s boobs. But he was looking at her deltoids.

“Grappler?”

Amelia gave a slight nod. “Judoka.”

“Brazilian?”

“Olympic.”

“Military?”

Amelia nodded. That seemed good enough for Rufus. “Take care of yourself, ma’am. We’ll talk later.”

Conveniently, Alastair wore boxers. Rufus ended up towing him languidly past the immense football stadium on a rope attached to the RHIB’s stern.

In the corner of her eye Saskia could now sense Rufus giving her a look that said, What’s it going to be, Your Majesty? He did not strike her as impatient or restive, just curious and . . . available. It was the first moment since the crash when she’d not simply been reacting to events.

“This is not such a bad situation overall, yes?” she said. She said it in Dutch, which meant that she was only saying it to Amelia and Fenna.

Both of them laughed in her face.