RACHEL

The landing on Guam—which took place late morning, local time, under a clear tropical sky—had been a trial. While the storm-related bounces and jounces had ended, the approach seemed to require a dozen different turns, some wrenching, all of them tedious.

Yahvi was still locked in Zeds’s embrace; Rachel decided to leave her there, since the Sentry could protect her as well as any seat belt.

It was Tea who lost patience first. “Chang, tell us what the fuck we’re doing. I hope this isn’t evasive action because someone wants to shoot us down.”

Hearing that, Rachel sat up straight. But Chang said, “Guam is safe to approach. Steve is just maneuvering to get us in a traffic pattern so we appear to have flown from China.”

During the final minutes, Rachel twisted and looked back at Xavier, who had his head down in his makeshift lab. “What do you suppose he’s doing?” she said to Pav.

“I think he’s made a fresh start,” he said.

“Here? I thought the power was too low or too intermittent or there were too many bumps—”

“Xavier is a resourceful guy. You know . . . he’s the kind of guy where you lock all the doors and he still crawls in through the window.”

When they had glided in and then finally come to a stop at another dismal cargo terminal, Rachel and Pav, Tea, Chang, Edgely, and especially Yahvi and Zeds were eager to get out of the plane.

Xavier chose to remain behind. “I need another hour,” he said.

Pav was going to pursue the argument, but Rachel grabbed his arm. “Let him be,” she said. “We need that transmitter.”

The layover in Guam was much like the one in Darwin, except for daylight, the predominantly Asian Pacific staff, and the more decrepit nature of the buildings. “How long will we be on the ground?” Rachel asked Chang.

The agent already had his face in his datapad. When he raised it to answer, he was more vague than Rachel liked. “Longer than Darwin,” he said. “You can eat, take showers.”

“‘Longer than Darwin’ is fairly imprecise,” Rachel said, unwilling to let Chang evade the question. “It doesn’t take more than an hour to refuel, right?”

Chang and Edgely exchanged a look, which infuriated Rachel. “Goddammit,” she said. “You two better tell me what’s going on or we’re going to have serious problems.”

Her anger was fueled by fatigue, of course, but also frustration at being at the mercy of two people she didn’t really know . . . on a world that was as alien to her as Mars or the Architect home world might be.

Fortunately, Edgely was always eager to share. “We’re waiting on a second plane.”

“To fly us?” Pav said.

“To fly in formation with us,” Chang said.

“Why?” Rachel said.

Chang sighed. “We have almost no hope of entering Free Nation airspace undetected.”

“I thought we were flying into Mexico!”

Edgely slipped into teacher mode, growing almost indecently enthusiastic. “Oh, we are! But we come close to Free Nation airspace. They will track us. As you already know, they have air-, land-, and sea-based military.”

“The other plane is actually a decoy,” Chang said.

Edgely placed his hands in front of him, palms down, right hand half a dozen centimeters above the left. “When we reach Free Nation’s radar range, we will be flying one above the other, at different altitudes.

“The two planes will show as a single blip. As we get close enough to the western coast of North America to be tracked with some fidelity, our plane will descend below tracking altitude and divert into Mexico while the target plane will turn north and fly parallel to the California coast.”

“Are you expecting it to be attacked?” Pav said.

“Yes,” Chang said. “But the transponder will show that it’s a Chinese commercial aircraft—it will be contacted and warned off, and will turn back.”

“You must have found some brave people to fly that thing,” Tea said.

“Expensive people,” Chang said.

“But also brave,” Edgely said. “They have a narrow fuel margin. They have to fly toward California long enough to draw all the tracking—”

“And targeting,” Chang said.

“—but not so long that they exhaust their fuel. They have to turn around and head back to Hawaii. There’s no place else for them to land.”

“Meanwhile,” Rachel said, “where are we?”

“On the ground in northern Mexico,” Chang said.

You hope, Rachel thought. And I hope so, too.

Two hours later her spirits had improved. She had showered, eaten, and assured herself that her daughter was also fed and cheered up and that Zeds was as good as he could be.

Tea had managed to clean up, too. “I feel so shallow, but I really enjoyed that,” she said. They were alone in a hallway on the second floor of the hangar building, where an executive had a fancy suite that included a private bath. Rachel had used it first, then gone for a bite with Pav while Tea took her turn. Now Tea regarded her. “So, how is all the shit you’re dealing with?”

Rachel smiled. “There’s no way back and nowhere to turn.”

“All you can do is go forward with your eyes open and your head high.”

“Even if it kills me.”

Tea laughed. “I’m with you, Rachel. Right behind you maybe, so I don’t catch the first bullet. But whatever happens, we’re all in it, too.”

“That’s what bothers me,” Rachel said. “I don’t mind risking my life—”

“But you’ve got Pav and Yahvi—”

“And all the others.” She blinked and just started crying. “I already lost Sanjay!”

“You didn’t lose him,” Tea said. “If the Reivers hadn’t shot your ship, you wouldn’t have had that rough landing. They killed him, not you.”

“They injured him. But I left him to die. . . .”

“Oh, honey, I talked to Taj. Your poor Sanjay was dead the moment they took him out of your ship. You did what you had to do . . . you acted, you led. You got us out of there.”

“To what? Being flown across the Pacific by people we don’t know? Waiting for a decoy plane so we don’t get blown out of the sky trying to invade America?”

Tea regarded her. “Take it from one of your team . . . you’re doing great. Keep moving forward.”

Tea’s words did their magic: Rachel felt comforted, though she suspected her improved feeling might also be due to being clean, or possibly just her hearty lunch.

No matter the source, she would need all her strength. She desperately needed to connect with Keanu and Harley Drake, because key information needed to be sent . . . and decisions made.

Her first target was Xavier, who was proudly emerging from the plane as promised, almost two hours after landing. “Here’s our transmitter,” he said, holding out a misshapen gray box the size of a pillow as if it were the gift of the ages. Rachel wanted to laugh. Raised in the United States for the first fourteen years of her life, she thought machines should be like Apple products, smartly designed, symmetrical, polished . . . not the wacky lumps that passed for them on Keanu.

Xavier, who clearly had a more charitable view of these products, noted Rachel’s resistance. “It works,” he said. “I just tested it.”

Given the size of the unit, they had to find her a table in a relatively private place in which to work. Then she had Xavier tell Pav she wanted to be left alone, a feeling that surprised her, since she was so reliant on him.

She was realizing that she needed to regroup, to run through her internal list of tasks. It was how she had functioned best as mayor, as some version of the “leader” Tea had cited—indeed, how she had functioned best as wife and mother.