Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(39)
While Angela had been chatting Kellen up for information, the older woman had been down here at the food court, specifically in the shiny industrial kitchen of Charlie’s Fine Tortilla (still displaying a tarnished and perky “Coming soon!” sign), cooking and then serving vats and vats of amazing-smelling foodstuffs to the three-hundred-odd folks who called the Pentarc home.
Other meals, Kellen had told Angela on the ride down, were made of ration patties like the one she’d scarfed earlier, but for one sliver of each day, every human person in the structure was invited—requested? Instructed? How authoritarian did the authority get around here?—to come down to the food court and dine en famille.
Which meant a hot press of bodies gathered around plastic picnic-style tables, all bumping up against each other and air-horning a cacophony of languages. Dozens, maybe, with the sub-hum of com translators making conversation only minimally possible. All those people moved, smelled, radiated heat. Their organic odor mingled with roast corn, garlic, and way too much cumin.
Walking into such a stew held all the charm of wading through living, breathing Ebola. Angela halted two steps from the elevator, watching the writhing, laughing, chattering, slurping, burping mass of humanity. It was…terrifying.
“I thought you said this was a family dinner,” she whispered.
Kellen had come off the elevator at her side and stood close, almost protectively. It still took a minor miracle for him to hear her over the din. “It is. The fam’s back over near that old kebap storefront. See there? Sort of yellow-and-green sign?”
He pointed to a table off to the right. Angela recognized Heron and Mari talking to a third person, whose back was to Angela. She didn’t see mech-Daniel anywhere, but that wasn’t cause for alarm. He had a task and was almost certainly back in their unit diligently at work.
“Who are all the rest of these people?” Angela asked. If she looked at them, actually looked at the jumble of organisms again, she worried she might be sick. Or run away. So many. Too many. The table with places reserved for Kellen and her seemed acres away.
“Ain’t you an elected representative of the people? Behold”—Kellen swept one arm in an expansive, dramatic gesture—“the people. Isn’t that what you politicos do for a living, press flesh and kiss babies?”
“God no.” She shuddered. “Bioagents and lone-wolf attacks have pretty much put an end to all that. We broadcast now and live past forty.” Okay, only three public figures had contracted fatal diseases during mass outbreaks of the past few decades, but still. Angela had always approved of the segregation of the ruling class. Alone is safe.
Instinct told her to run away, hide from the morass of organic material in this place. Rebuild her walls. But honestly, was that even possible? Those walls had come down, literally right on top of her at the Hotel Riu. She couldn’t return to her bubble of protection, her safe life of physical solitude.
No more hedging. No more hiding.
A slightly built old man, wearing a ratty printed robe with an electric cord for a belt, turned to peer at the new arrivals. He stopped talking midword, focusing all his attention on Angela. On second glance, he wasn’t a little old man at all. He was a kid, maybe fourteen, just skinny and with the posture of someone who’d been kicked. Slowly, the rest of his table fell silent and turned as well.
Their gazes pricked Angela, as if she’d been sitting too long and her whole body had gone numb and now was alight in agony as feeling swooshed back in.
The teenager hung back, but a whisper arced around their wide table. Another refugee rose. He was older, an adult or close to it, wearing a cheap robe printed from one of the patterns Angela recognized from the mostly failed Clothe the World campaign of a few years back. He approached the elevator.
Her body cringed away instinctively, but Angela had spent way too much time training for the psych-emitter to let something as mundane as instinct control her. She bloomed a soft smile over her face, a practiced smile and one that she knew also fired specific neurological activity that would be interpreted as acceptance and compassion. She didn’t see any receivers for her psych-emitter, but brain training for its use had taught her how to manipulate her own emotions, and she had gotten damned good at it. She calmed.
The young man wasn’t wearing a cuff com and certainly didn’t look like he had the technological means of translating. As it turned out, he didn’t need one.
“Senator Neko,” he said in perfect English with a sweet rub of Southern on it. “I saw you on vid. It sure is a comfort, you coming by. They told us when they brought us here that we were being rescued, right before that last cluster of storms blew into Mobile. I didn’t think the government was doing the rescuing, though. You gotta forgive me for thinking y’all were just ignoring us.”
This Atlantic hurricane season had been typically brutal. Angela vaguely recalled a closed-door congressional committee discussion regarding mandatory evacuations in early June. If she remembered correctly, the interior minister had swept in and nixed the idea out of hand, before anybody could vote on it. Preemptive evacuation was ludicrous, he’d said. It would break the economy. In retrospect, however, the idea had been a good one. More than ten thousand people had perished on the Gulf Coast this summer. Hundreds of thousands remained displaced, swelling the temporary-housing cities that had sprung up all over the country. All over the world.