Veil Page 20
Zia shot a sidelong glance at Santiago, who nodded curtly. “My dad is prepared to immediately hand over the geoengineering program and the entire Interstice drone fleet to a coalition of countries who commit to creating a multilateral institution to manage it—and the climate. Imagine a new international organization along the lines of the Arctic Council or the International Atomic Energy Agency—coordinating with the UN but with few enough nations that things can actually get done. It’d be a sort of club, and we’d offer them the opportunity to become the founding members.”
There was a moment of heady silence.
“I hate to be the one to say this,” said Selai. “I mean, I’m a proud Fijian and all, but there’s a reason we weren’t the cool kids at boarding school. Let’s get real. The powerbrokers we have ins with don’t actually broke a whole lotta power. We’re talking about Costa Rica, the Maldives, Fiji, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Ghana, Indonesia, and El Salvador, right?” She counted them off on her fingers. “Your dad’s company probably earns more every year than their combined GDPs, and the capitals that count treat them as an afterthought, at best. It’s like if the Avengers all had superpowers like lightning-fast-bookkeeping or the-ability-to-suppress-yawns-even-when-everyone-around-you-is-yawning. I mean, that’s cool and all, but it ain’t gonna stop an alien invasion.”
“Exactly,” said Zia, gaining momentum. “What countries are powerful enough to take unilateral action? The big, rich, powerful ones. None of them would ever let any of the other major players control this kind of a program, and would wage war to prevent it. But if our group of poor, weak countries are in charge, Washington, Beijing, and the rest know they can comfortably sanction the coalition as long as the other big boys do too.” She leaned closer to the camera. “If we go public by simply announcing what my dad’s been up to, everyone will reach for their guns. But if we announce what my dad’s been up to and that it’s being handed over to a new international organization, everyone’s going to have to at least take some time to consider the situation. By having a bunch of little guys assume ownership of the problem, we’re giving the bullies an excuse not to take unilateral action. Our weakness is our greatest strength.”
Kodjo narrowed his eyes. “Even if we’re able to get to the people you want us to, announcing that they’re taking over the program from a rogue billionaire who’s going through a major scandal will put them in the middle of a media firestorm.”
“It’s a risk,” acknowledged Zia. “But there’s a substantial reward. They’ll get to write the rules for engineering the climate. They’ll get to define who else gets admitted to the club in charge of writing those rules moving forward. Our countries have done the least to contribute to emissions and suffer the most from the impacts of climate change. Now, we can finally do something about it, and we have more moral high ground from which to do so than anyone else. I’m asking you to be the messengers, to make offers they can’t refuse.”
“But you have to break the news today, or Tommy won’t stop until he silences you,” said Vachan. “How are they going to agree on any of these things over the course of a few hours? Treaties take years. I mean”—he exchanged a glance with Kodjo—“we can’t even agree on what the right course would be.”
Zia held up a finger. “We’re only asking them to agree to one thing: to allow us to announce that they are part of the coalition that is taking over the program. That’s it. We’re handing them the reins. They get to decide how and where to ride. If my dad’s the jockey on this racehorse when it hits the headlines, everyone will be as fucked as he is. If they take his place, we’ve got a fighting chance of turning an unmitigated disaster into a mechanism for unwinding environmental inequality.”
“Your plan is insane,” said Aafreen thoughtfully. “Totally, one hundred and ten percent, spectacularly insane. There are too many moving parts and there’s too little time. It’s historically unprecedented.” She laughed a husky, faraway laugh. “Then again, the really interesting parts of history are always the unprecedented bits.”
“So,” said Zia, summoning every fleeting scrap of self-possession and letting the full force of her conviction blaze through her eyes. “Who’s in?”
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Dembe rapped her knuckles against her helmet.
“Remember your training and lead with your hips,” she said. The visor magnified her amber eyes, revealing delicate green striations. Her stance was loose, relaxed. The more tenuous the situation, the more composed Dembe became.
Zia envied her equanimity. Her own heart was hammering like tropical rain on a tin roof. Disembarking unconventionally. It might be the best way to throw Tommy off their scent, but she was ready to call it off and take their chances. They could find some other way to cover their tracks. Her palms were damp inside the gloves. Acid burned the back of her throat and she couldn’t stop clenching and unclenching her jaw. The best laid plans shattered on contact with reality. What had seemed clever now revealed itself to be suicidal.
As Zia opened her mouth to object, Dembe engaged the emergency release and the hatch exploded out of the hull. Frigid wind instantly filled the small cabin, tearing at their jumpsuits, sucking the breath from their lungs, and sawing away at any exposed patches of skin with a thousand tiny razors. Their ears popped as the pressure plunged and Zia almost lost her footing as a gust buffeted her.
Santiago’s free hand found Zia’s, and she squeezed—terror and determination leaping across the gap like electricity between two charged conductors. Then Dembe seized the front of Santiago’s jumpsuit and yanked him toward the wound in the sleek skin of the aircraft that opened on the howling abyss. She helped him spread-eagle himself across the opening, gloved hands gripping either side.
A meter away, Zia’s heart leapt into her throat.
Dembe tapped Santiago’s shoulder once and he bobbed his head.
Was this the last time Zia would see her father alive? She had never shared how much the signed copy of The Princess Bride book meant to her or called him out for ditching her at the US Open. She had never admitted to him that her habit of challenging his every move was a serpentine homage to his single-mindedness. Despite years of hemming and hawing about it, they had never kayaked up the coast of British Columbia together. She had never told him how much it had hurt when they retreated from each other in the wake of Miranda’s death.
Dembe tapped his shoulder twice and he bobbed his head again.
Zia could smell the faint scent of smoke, cinnamon, and sweat her father exuded, feel the muscles and tendons and bones through his skin, see his overlarge glasses fogging up one humid morning on a family backpacking trip through Costa Rica’s cloud forests, her mother laughing and wiping them clean with the hem of a flannel shirt.
Dembe tapped his shoulder three times and Santiago disappeared.
One moment he was spread-eagled across the void and the next he was gone, and with him any hope Zia still harbored that they might make it out of this alive. You were supposed to have days of training and plenty of tandem skydives before taking your first solo jump. Dembe had done her best to run them through the basics, but this was utter madness.
Then Dembe gripped the front of Zia’s jumpsuit and pulled her forward until their visors bumped against each other. Dembe caught and held her gaze for a moment.
“You got this, babe,” she yelled, Zia could read on her lips the words the wind stole. Dembe bumped her visor against Zia’s one more time and then shoved her around and helped position her over the aperture to infinite sky.
Zia gripped the edges of the opening with all her strength. Her muscles screamed. Her joints creaked. Her mind raged in denial.
Whatever you do, don’t look down.
She felt a single tap on her shoulder and her eyes darted up, down, left, right. Nothing but nothing everywhere.
We’ll never survive.
Zia nodded.
Double tap.
Nonsense. You’re only sayin
g that because no one ever has.
The wind was a solid thing. An avalanche. A demon.
Zia nodded.
She tensed her grip but the metal was beginning to slip away under her gloves. Not too tight. Not too loose. Just right. Imagine you’re holding a delicate little bird. This was her last vestige of control, her last thread of sanity.
Triple tap.
Miranda had tried to teach Zia to surf one summer when they were staying in Guanacaste. From shore, the waves looked like gentle, pastel, rolling hillocks. In the water, they were violent beasts rising from the depths. As Zia was paddling out, a blue-green monster reared up and flipped her over, tumbling her around underwater like a washing machine. Her lungs burned and she didn’t know which way was up and she was spinning, spinning, spinning, and it was never going to end and then somehow her head popped up above the water and she gasped for breath and her mother was there beside her laughing her bright, kind laugh and saying, “El océano es más poderoso de lo que podemos imaginar. No luches contra el. Sólo dejate ir.” Zia could still taste the brine. The ocean is more powerful than we can imagine. Don’t fight it. Just let go.
Just let go.
Against all instinct, Zia summoned a force of will she didn’t know she had and released her grip.
Sky—the long-winged drone receding fast.
Sea—an endless dark expanse.
Sky.
Sea.
Sky.
Sea.
Sky.
Sea.
Zia was flipping, limbs flailing.
Sky.
Sea.
Sky.
Sea.
Sky.
She arched her body, brought her arms to her sides, bent her legs slightly, and thrust out her hips as far as they would go.
Sea.
Sea.
Sea…
She had leveled out, belly to earth.
Breathe. She had to remember to breathe.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
The Pacific Ocean spread out to the horizon in all directions. The last stars winked out overhead as pre-dawn charcoaled the sky in shades of gray. She was flying. She was falling. She was impossibly, heart-stoppingly free.
Zia brought her arms up from her sides, bent her elbows, and held out her palms on either side of her head. The air whisked away all delusion. All the heated arguments she’d ever made, all the fierce opinions she’d cultivated, all the false certainties she’d built up over a lifetime. What did it mean for a person to pass judgement on the world? In striving for rightness, for universal solutions, it was so easy to forget that reducing reality to a mental model meant reducing reality. Zia, and so many others, so often acted as if a single human brain could accommodate the universe—the fundamental fiction from which ideology sprang. Perspective could yield as much beauty as the grail of objectivity. Honoring limitations and uncertainty was a crucial aspect of truth. The fewer doubts a person harbored, the more you should doubt them.
Something grabbed her forearm and Zia nearly peed herself. She looked over to see Dembe falling beside her, grinning madly through the visor. Her expression was so genuine that Zia couldn’t help but smile back. Dembe pointed with her free hand and Zia spotted Santiago a few dozen meters below. Navigating the air with the same grace as solid ground, Dembe adjusted her body and Zia mimicked her, both of them accelerating down, down, down until Dembe managed to reach out and seize Santiago’s forearm.
He looked up in shock and then all three of them were beaming and shouting and laughing and crying—disbelief, relief, and the surreal joy of free fall fusing into pure overwhelm. They linked hands, each forming the point of a triangle. In the ethereal half-light, reality seemed to shift and surge around them, unable to contain itself.
Dembe let them go, checked their altitude, and tapped her wrist. Zia and Santiago released each other and all three of them separated from each other like dandelion seeds on the wind. Zia ran through her mental checklist over and over. Tilting her head, she found the ripcord. Then she arched her body and pulled.
The canopy filled with air. The harness yanked her up, slowing her fall to a gentle drift. Panic’s emotional static faded. There was her dad and there was Dembe, both hanging from their respective canopies, testing their toggles by turning left and right in long arcs. The leading edge of the sun burst over the horizon, transforming the ocean from slate to deep blue and revealing the Fijian archipelago spread out below them, volcanoes jutting up through dense jungle and surf breaking against stranded atolls. And thousands of meters below, smaller than a child’s toy bobbing in a bathtub, the fishing boat Selai had sent to collect them.
Costa Rica. Ghana. The Maldives. It was a start. Given the circumstances, it was the best that could be hoped for. El Salvador was on the fence and there was a chance Zia might be able to rope in Fiji if she was there in person. It might not be enough, but it was something, something she’d be able to use when she called Bonnie. With stories citing her friends’ alibis undermining the original article, Zia was willing to bet that the veteran editor would welcome the chance to correct her mistake, issue a retraction, and break real news with the particular rigor of someone making good on a second chance, a sentiment Zia could understand all too well. And if Bonnie didn’t want the scoop, they’d simply call a press conference.
Zia looked up past the edge of her canopy.
There, sunlight glinting off its fuselage as it ascended into harlequin clouds, was the drone. Dembe had instructed it to descend to an altitude where they could jump without oxygen. Now that it had offloaded its cargo, it would automatically return to its prescheduled route. Even if Tommy invaded Interstice’s island base and noticed that one of the drones had returned without a hatch, its sanitized logs would reveal nothing. Nor would his analysts turn up any unusual activity at other international airports, exposure that would have been unavoidable if they’d landed the drone at any field with a long enough runway.
This crackpot stunt might have killed them, but it had bought them precious time—and if fate proved uncharacteristically kind, maybe future historians would look back on this whole geoengineering debacle and come to precisely the same conclusion.
The sea rose up to meet them, groundswell rolling through the glittering water. Zia inflated her life vest. The toy boat was larger now, and growing quickly. Selai was waggling shakas at her from the prow, shouting, “Yeeaaah, girl!”
Closer. Closer.
Peaks crested and crumbled into foam.
Zia flared the canopy.
Just let go.
Now.
She pulled the quick release right as her feet hit the water.
Salt had never tasted so sweet.
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It was midmorning, but branches filtered out so much light that the forest floor existed in a permanent state of dusk. Water dripped from rustling leaves and insects sang a deafening chorus. The air was so thick with smells that it was hard to distinguish them from each other, like myriad colors mixed to yield dull brown on a painter’s palette. Mud squelched under Zia’s boots, threatening to suck her down into the thick carpet of decomposing life into which rampant vegetation sank its roots.
Maybe it was Miranda’s influence, but Zia had always found coffins to be strange and slightly disturbing. Life became new life. Every atom in every body had been a building block for countless previous lifeforms, and would contribute to countless subsequent incarnations. Why would you want to separate your corpse, however temporarily, from the never-ending cycle that was so very apparent in this jungle? Denying impermanence was like trying to light a match in a hurricane.
And yet, once a year or so, Zia woke up just before dawn convinced her mother had just been humming Celia Cruz’s “Quimbara” from the other room. And yet, after her first official date with Dembe, Zia had automatically pulled out her phone to call Galang and tell him all about it before realizing they’d never be able to dish secre
ts again. And yet, Zia still couldn’t believe Tommy had fallen victim to his own conspiracy.
SaudExxon didn’t lose face lightly. Zia had called Bonnie immediately after Selai had offered them asylum in her house on the Yasawas. The story had broken the next morning, and with Bonnie’s help, they’d made all the data and Santiago’s explanation-cum-confession available to a team of investigative journalists from a cross section of leading publications. This new twist, combined with the alibis from Zia’s friends, undermined Tommy’s fabricated evidence, and Bonnie had been livid that she and her fact checkers had been duped. The implications had played out across the headlines for weeks, sparking vicious debate and condemnation of both Santiago and SaudExxon.
Riyadh wanted a scapegoat, and Tommy’s cousins in the corporoyal family leapt at the chance to oust a competitor. He was denounced as a lone traitor acting on his own initiative and publicly beheaded—inviting even more of the same international recrimination the corpomonarchy had been hoping to sidestep by executing him. Fifteen countries had already retracted their concessions, and a few dozen more were under review. It was exactly the kind of irony that Tommy would have appreciated, and it had all happened so quickly, and in so brutal a fashion, that Zia didn’t even know how to make sense of the fact that the shining, heartless boy she had fallen for all those years ago had bled out on a public square. Was his corpse in a coffin even now? What did SaudExxon do with the bodies of executed royals? Was he yet another death she was at least partly responsible for?