Veil Page 18

  “Me too,” Santiago choked on the words. “Me too.”

  A flash of silver. One of Santiago’s long-winged drones, circling lazily as it came in for landing. The kaleidoscopic rush of impending ruin. The SaudExxon machine rearing up to crush the world in its maw. She had initially fallen for Tommy’s act at Galang’s funeral because she wanted to believe that people could change. But he hadn’t changed. He was the same old arrogant, terrified boy she’d known all those years ago.

  When Zia was a child, Miranda had shaken her awake early one morning at the house in Guanacaste. Come, she’d said. Blinking the sleep from her eyes, Zia had followed her mother through the backyard and down to the stream. Look. Miranda pointed. A traveling circus had performed in the village the night before and a raccoon, bandit-faced and bushy tailed, had gotten his hands on some cotton candy. He placed the pink pillow on the sand, ripped off a chunk, and dunked it into the stream, the spun sugar dissolving into the flowing water. He looked at his empty palms in consternation, tore off another chunk, and repeated the process. Zia looked up at her mom. They wash their food before they eat it, said Miranda. Visibly frustrated, the raccoon tried again. Then it sat back on its haunches and huffed. Its snout turned back and forth between its enigmatic prize and the stream. Then it buried its face in the cotton candy and didn’t stop eating until its belly was round. She learned, exclaimed Zia. Just like us, said Miranda. Learning is life.

  Tommy might not have changed. But Zia could.

  Fuck you and your little cabal.

  She squeezed her father’s hand.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

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  Rain lashed at the wall-to-wall windows of Santiago’s villa, gusts of wind smearing drops across the glass. Zia, Santiago, and Dembe had shemaghs wrapped around their faces. The surround sound system was pumping Kendrick Lamar’s posthumous album at max volume, intricate lyrics tumbling into and over each other in a waterfall of words and beats. Any audiovisual bugs that had survived their sweep would have a hard time gleaning anything useful and couldn’t transmit through the jamming anyway.

  Dembe placed three small headlamps on the kitchen counter.

  “Darkness is our friend,” she said. “So don’t use them at all if you can help it. And if you absolutely have to”—she clicked one on and it emitted a flat red glow—“you’ll get low energy red light.” She zipped up her jacket. Santiago opened his mouth to say something and Dembe silenced him with a hard look. “I don’t need suggestions. I need obedience. We will get there. Just stay close. Ready? Good.”

  They snatched up their headlamps, cinched their hoods, and slipped out the back door into the storm. Dembe led them quickly across the flagstone path and into the forest. Zia followed and Santiago came behind. Raindrops clattered against their hoods, drowning out all other sound. Mud sucked at their boots, branches grasped at them through the pitch darkness, and every breath contained nearly as much water as air.

  Dembe was nothing more than a shadow among shadows before Zia, who was desperately trying to keep up and just as desperately trying to make sure they didn’t lose Santiago. They slid down a slick rock face and forded a swollen stream, the rocks on the bottom shifting underfoot. Zia’s left ankle throbbed. Nerves screeched like electric guitar feedback through the studio of her mind. The storm and the jungle closed in around her, locking her off in a murky world of tropical deluge where the only hope was the grayscale shudder that might be Dembe’s receding back.

  Born alone. Suffer alone. Die alone. Life was a single player game where the only victory conditions were self-imposed. It was as if everyone were stuck in hermetically sealed bubbles, hands pressing against impenetrable glass as they tried but never quite managed to reach each other. That gap was what her mother had tried to bridge with prose, burying herself beneath the words for readers to excavate and recognize in themselves.

  Zia sucked for air, coughed up water, and nearly lost her footing. She threw a look back over her shoulder. Nothing but trunks and vines shrouded in gloom. Panic wiped her mind blank. Where was her father? They had lost him in the forest, abandoned him to his own bubble. Electric tendrils fingered out from her gut. Anything might be lurking behind the inky mess of trees and undergrowth and falling water—anything but Santiago. Had he slipped and broken a leg? Had he returned to the villa on some misguided quest to provide a distraction to cover their escape? Had a clouded leopard survived on this remote island and decided to exact vengeance on the prime trespasser this very night? She turned to call out to Dembe for help and Zia’s panic redoubled when she saw she had lost their guide. Black on black on black. Why hadn’t she paid attention to The Princess Bride? Never enter the motherfucking Fire Swamp.

  Calm down. Think. Reaching up, Zia switched on her headlamp. The light was red and soft and gritty, transforming the jungle into a surrealist hellscape, ferns reaching out of some adjacent, bloody dimension to brush her shoulder with a frond. And then the fronds parted and Santiago stumbled into her. Zia clutched his jacket to keep from falling over and they caught their balance. She looked back again, sweeping her cone of red light across the foliage and Dembe was standing right behind them.

  “Almost there,” hissed Dembe. “Just over the next rise.”

  Zia switched off her headlamp, plunging them back into darkness. Before anyone could move, she reached out and clasped Santiago and Dembe’s hands. Santiago’s was cold and slick with sweat. Dembe’s palm was warm and surprisingly dry despite the downpour. They paused for the briefest of moments and then both squeezed without a word and Dembe led them out of the ferns and up a muddy slope.

  Zia held Dembe back when Santiago was flagging and encouraged her father to speed up when terrain permitted. The feeling of their hands in hers was so sharp, so present compared to peering into the surrounding darkness. She felt their every slip, change of balance, and moment of doubt. She knew when they found a solid foothold or sank ankle deep into a puddle. Urgency surged back and forth through their palms in tides of emotional osmosis.

  And then they reached the top of the ridge and the lights of the airfield blazed up at them through the intervening trees, illuminating cascading sheets of rain and casting long twisted shadows across the forest floor. A few cars were parked between one of the hangars and the edge of the forest. Dembe approached one, popped the trunk, and tossed each of them a large, tightly packed backpack. Then they jogged across the slick tarmac to the drone taxiing for takeoff. Long wings trembled in the gusts of wind and light glittered off the rain-slick silver hull.

  This elegant machine was one of the hundreds of peripherals through which Interstice’s geoengineering system manipulated the stratosphere. The last thing Tommy wanted to do was disrupt the very drones he prized so highly, the fleet whose helm he would take as soon as he secured Santiago’s access codes. What Tommy couldn’t know, what not even Ben knew, was that Santiago had outfitted one very special drone to take passengers. All they’d had to do to slot it into the flight schedule was update the protocol via a hardwire connection.

  A seam appeared across the belly of the metal beast and a narrow stairway lowered to the tarmac with a hiss of hydraulics. As they climbed, Zia flashed back to the first time she’d boarded this bird at Santiago’s insistence, the aquamarine lake set like a jewel in the gaping crater of Pinatubo, her horror at the secret Santiago had been so hesitant and yet so eager to share. An inscription she hadn’t noticed before greeted her as she squeezed into the cramped passenger cabin behind Dembe and her father:

  In front of the sun

  does Svalinn stand,

  The shield for the shining god;

  Mountains and sea

  would be set in flames

  If it fell from before the sun.

  —Grímnismál, the Poetic Edda

  Engines howling defiance at the raging storm, the drone accelerated up the runway, pressing them back into their seats before they had time to buckle their r
estraints.

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  As they ascended through the storm, Zia was sure Tommy’s destroyer would shoot them down. Their ploy had been discovered and their world was about to explode in a burst of anti-aircraft ordnance. Or maybe the carrier would launch a swarm of attack drones to force them down. Turbulence rocked their drone, pressing them up against each other in the tight cabin. Lightning flashed. Zia was convinced the wings would snap under the force of the wind. The excruciating beat stretched into an eternity and then they broke through the cloud layer and were engulfed in sudden, incomprehensible calm—purgatory fading in the dawning awareness that they were, at least for the moment, free.

  Santiago checked his phone and shook his head.

  “Nothing,” he growled. “We’re still within range of their jammer.”

  Not quite free, then. They might be off the island, but they were still inside the invisible bubble of chattering radio waves emanating from Tommy’s transmitter, suffusing the spectrum with nonsense, just like his smear campaign had filled the headlines with so much scandal that there wasn’t room left for truth.

  They were airborne, and gagged.

  Reaching into an inside pocket, Dembe produced a small bag of dark chocolate-covered almonds, popped a few in her mouth, and offered the bag to Zia who waved it away, nauseous.

  “Eat,” Dembe insisted, shaking a few almonds into Zia and Santiago’s palms. “We all need to keep our blood sugar up. Right now you’re running on nothing but adrenaline. Once that dries up, you can’t afford to crash. I’ve lost good soldiers because they didn’t eat their snacks.” She gobbled a few more. “These have chocolate to perk you up and protein to keep you going.”

  Zia put one almond in her mouth and chewed, trying to ignore the urge to vomit. Dembe raised her eyebrows and Zia gave in and managed to swallow a few more.

  After passing around a water bottle to wash down the nuts, Dembe rested a hand on the bulkhead and looked at Santiago.

  “Let me in,” she said, calling them back to themselves with her composure.

  He nodded, retrieved a tablet from his backpack, and plugged it into a slot on the control panel. Opening a command line, he began to type, code spiraling ever inward toward the kernel. His singular focus was contagious and mesmerizing to watch. Then, like a canvas screen disappearing behind a projection, Interstice’s digital skeleton vanished as he brought up a dashboard and handed the tablet to Dembe.

  “Full admin access to this drone,” he said.

  Dembe gave Zia a questioning look.

  “Fiji,” said Zia, remembering the taste of fresh coconut juice, aquamarine tide pools, and coral reefs bleached white as bone. She’d deployed there for nine months in the wake of a typhoon that had wrecked the archipelago’s infrastructure. “Aim for Nacula Village in the Yasawa Islands.”

  Dembe nodded. “I’ll make the course corrections, delete the changes from the logs, and backfill the database with records from a previous flight.”

  “Fiji?” asked Santiago. “Why Fiji?”

  “With any luck, Tommy will find it just as counter-intuitive a destination as you do,” said Zia. “Plus, I have a friend there who might be able to help.” She could only pray Selai hadn’t already forsaken her as a terrorist on the basis of Tommy’s lies. “Speaking of…” Zia checked her phone. “Still no service.”

  The drone dipped left and right, then evened out again.

  “What was that?” asked Zia.

  “I’m not sure.” Dembe was frowning down at the tablet. “Unless—”

  “Full bars!” shouted Santiago, holding up his phone. “We’ve breached their jamming perimeter. The autopilot must have recalibrated after syncing with the satellite.”

  There was a moment of unexpected silence, as if none of them had quite believed they’d make it this far. Then service bars appeared on Zia’s phone. Dembe reacted first, swiped her tablet to deploy the routines she’d written to fabricate the satellite logs as she absentmindedly popped more almonds into her mouth. Santiago met his daughter’s eye and the argument they’d had after her first drone ride over Pinatubo echoed in collective memory.

  Stop, or I’ll blow the whistle. And boy, will I blow it loud.

  The moment of truth had finally come.

  A full confession was the only way to unravel Tommy’s plot. Revealing the geoengineering program would precipitate a geopolitical crisis. Scientists would rightfully condemn Project Svalinn. Tribunals would break up Interstice on the basis of its data falsification. Santiago would become the world’s most hated man. India would demand to know whether or not the program had sabotaged the monsoon, and few would accept the answer that attribution was impossible in such complex models. Countries who believed they were being hurt by the program would call for an immediate ban while those that believed the program gave them a regional climactic advantage would fight for continuance. Powers great enough to mount their own efforts would do so, further complicating the picture. Strike forces would deploy. Tension would escalate, with no end in sight. It might even spark a world war.

  But even that dreadful scenario was preferable to letting Tommy hijack the skunkworks. Increasing aerosol injection to mask the impact of burning more fossil fuels, he’d jack up the program until the risk of termination shock was apocalyptic. He’d protect the value of SaudExxon’s holdings, take the throne, and run the planet into the ground from the safety of an air-conditioned palace. If anybody stumbled on the truth, the same scenario would play out, only worse because the stakes would be yet higher.

  But if the world found out about the program a priori, Tommy’s house of cards collapsed. SaudExxon could push for aggressive injection in the diplomatic scrum to come, but the chance at a clandestine flywheel of pure profit would be dashed. Only by blowing the whistle could Zia and Santiago hope to save themselves, and every minute they kept silent was a minute Tommy still had to silence them.

  “I’ll start prepping my statement,” said Santiago, his tone at once meek and dreamy, as if dissociation was the only way he could bear to confess his long-held secret. The world might not believe it, coming from a suspected terrorist on the run from the law. Certainly, many would think it was a poor attempt at distraction from the accusations being levied at the Leóns. Breaking the news in such a charged environment would doubtless undermine anyone’s ability to react thoughtfully, increasing the risk of violence. But by the very same token, it would attract enough attention to guarantee further investigation, investigation that would wreck Tommy’s plans.

  Zia unlocked her phone, held her breath, and signed in.

  Data spooled across the screen. Photos of Zia and her family plastered all over social media. Headlines painting them as monsters. Articles peppered with quotes taken out of context. Threats and questions and fiery op-eds holding forth with unassailable conviction—righteousness at its most corrosive.

  Only under the onslaught of notifications did Zia realize what a blessing it had been to have been involuntarily disconnected. She didn’t want to see the news, open her overflowing inbox, triage the texts, or listen to the voicemails. She didn’t want false sympathy or official summons or death threats. She didn’t want to know what the world thought of her. She wanted to stay in this drone forever, cruising through the thin outer reaches of the atmosphere, beyond Tommy’s reach.

  Beyond anyone’s reach.

  Zia had always run. At every turn, she had obsessively sought out opportunities to be of service, without acknowledging that she had needs of her own. She had gazed out at life from behind a one-way mirror, without letting anyone gaze back in. If she gave shelter without taking it, she’d be free to do whatever she wanted, to be fully herself. But maybe she couldn’t be fully herself, maybe nobody could be fully themselves, except through connection. How had Galang phrased it? We’re like electrons, we only exist in relation to each other. Maybe the freedom she’d been chasing wasn’t freedom at all, but alienation.


  It wasn’t that she didn’t love her friends and family. She loved them so much that she wanted to offer them everything, and never ask for anything in return. She was the host, the rock, the pillar they could lean on in times of need. She was always there for them, but would never expect them to be there for her. She had convinced herself that extreme self-reliance was a prerequisite to love, but it was actually just another kind of flight, another way to run from life’s terrifying interdependence. It was time to run toward her fear, to embrace vulnerability as a source of strength, to stop pretending that she could rely only on herself. No matter how uncomfortable it made her feel, she needed to ask her friends for help.

  As she opened the group chat, she steeled herself against recrimination. Santiago might be her father, but Aafreen, Selai, Kodjo, Daniela, Vachan, and Li Jie were Zia’s found family. She would rather suffer the contempt of millions of strangers than endure her friends’ judgement. With fictional tales of her imagined sins dominating the news cycle, what must they be thinking?

  Zia froze when she saw the most recent messages.

  She scrolled back, read, re-read. Scrolled back, read, re-read. Scrolled back, read, re-read. It was as if dawn was breaking inside her, thick slabs of cloud painted pink and orange, rays of light slanting across the sky, warmth kissing frost covered meadows. The glow started in her gut and swelled, filling her up to the brim, buoying her heart into her throat, raising goosebumps on her arms, and suffusing her with grace.

  They weren’t condemning her.

  They were saving her.

  When Bonnie’s story broke, the group chat had erupted in outraged disbelief. But Zia’s friends had immediately started poking holes in the article. Just as Himmat had checked his calendar and refuted the CBI agent’s accusations, Kodjo had gone back through his personal diary and discovered that on the night the article claimed Zia had been meeting with a rebel leader from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kodjo had in fact been confiding to Zia the details of his engagement to Lucy over a few too many bottles of rum in a remote Ghanian village where Zia was managing an anti-malaria program.