Sole Survivor

Traffic was light. The road ascended into forests. Cottonwoods and pines shook, shook, shook in the wind.

He could not answer. He could only drive.

‘When you insisted on believing the little girl with me was your own Nina, I let you go on believing it.’

For whatever purpose, she was still deceiving him. He could not understand why she continued to hide the truth.

She said, After they found us at the restaurant, I needed your help. Especially after I was shot, I needed you. But you hadn’t opened your heart and mind to the photograph when I gave it to you. You were so. . . fragile. I was afraid if you knew it really wasn’t your Nina, you’d just. . . stop. Fall apart. God forgive me, Joe, but I needed you. And now the girl needs you.’

Nina needed him. Not some girl born in a lab, with the power to transmit her curious fantasies to others and cloud the minds of the gullible. Nina needed him. Nina.

If he could not trust Rose Tucker, was there anyone he could trust?

He managed to shake two words from himself: ‘Go on.’

Rose again. In 21-21’s room. Feverishly considering the problem of how to spirit the girl through a security system equal to that of any prison.

The answer, when it comes, is obvious and elegant.

There are three exits from the ground floor of the orphanage. Rose and the girl walk hand-in-hand to the door that connects the main building to the adjoining two-story parking structure.

An armed guard views their approach with more puzzlement than suspicion. The orphans are not permitted into the garage even under supervision.

When 21-21 holds out her tiny hand and says Shake, the guard smiles and obliges — and receives the gift. Filled with cyclonic wonder, he sits shaking uncontrollably, weeping with joy but also with hard remorse, just as Rose had trembled and wept in the girl’s room.

It is a simple matter to push the button on the guard’s console to throw the electronic lock on the door and pass through.

Another guard waits on the garage side of the connecting door. He is startled by the sight of this child. She reaches for him, and his surprise at seeing her is nothing compared to the surprise that follows.

A third guard is stationed at the gated exit from the garage. Alarmed by the sight of 21-21 in Rose’s car, he leans in the open window to demand an explanation — and the girl touches his face.

Two more armed men staff the gate at the highway. All barriers fall, and Virginia lies ahead.

Escape will never be as easy again. If they are apprehended, the girl’s offer of a handshake will be greeted by gunfire.

The trick now is to get out of the area quickly, before project security realizes what has happened to five of its men. They will mount a pursuit, perhaps with the assistance of local, state, and federal authorities. Rose drives madly, recklessly, with a skill —born of desperation — that she has never known before.

Barely big enough to see out of the side window, 21-21 studies the passing countryside with fascination and, at last, says, Wow, it sure is big out here.

Rose laughs and says, Honey, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

She realizes that she must get the word out as quickly as possible: use the media to display 21-21’s healing powers and then to demonstrate the greater gift that the girl can bestow. Only the forces of ignorance and darkness benefit from secrecy. Rose believes that 21-21 will never be safe until the world knows of her, embraces her, and refuses to allow her to be taken into custody.

Her ex-bosses will expect her to go public quickly and in a big way. Their influence within the media is widespread — yet as subtle as a web of cloud shadows on the skin of a pond, which makes it all the more effective. They will try to find her as soon as possible after she surfaces and before she can bring 21-21 to the world.

She knows a reporter whom she would trust not to betray her:

Lisa Peccatone, an old college friend who works at the Post in Los Angeles.

Rose and the girl will have to fly to Southern California — and the sooner the better. Project 99 is a joint venture of private industry, elements of the defence establishment, and other powerful forces in the government. Easier to halt an avalanche with a feather than to resist their combined might, and they will shortly begin to use every asset in their arsenal to locate Rose and the girl.

Trying to fly out of Dulles or National Airport in Washington is too dangerous. She considers Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. She chooses New York.

She reasons that the more county and state lines she crosses, the safer she becomes, so she drives to Hagerstown, Maryland, and from there to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, without incident. Yet mile by mile, she is increasingly concerned that her pursuers will have put out an APB on her car and that she will be captured regardless of the distance she puts between herself and Manassas.

In Harrisburg, she abandons the car, and she and the girl continue to New York City by bus.

By the time they are in the air aboard Nationwide Flight 353, Rose feels safe. Immediately on landing at LAX, she will be met by Lisa and the crew that Lisa has assembled — and the series of media eruptions will begin.

For the airline passenger manifest, Rose implied that she was married to a white man, and she identified 21-21 as her step­daughter, choosing the name ‘Mary Tucker,’ on the spur of the moment. With the media, she intends initially to use CCY-21-21’s project name because its similarity to concentration-camp inmates’ names will do more than anything else to characterize Project 99 in the public mind and generate instant sympathy for the child. She realizes that eventually she will have to consult with 21-21 to pick a permanent name — which, considering the singular historical importance of this child’s life, should be a name that resonates.

They are seated across the aisle from a mother and her two daughters, who are returning home to Los Angeles — Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina Carpenter.

Nina, who is approximately 21-21’s age and size, is playing with a hand-held electronic game called Pigs and Princes, designed for preschoolers. From across the aisle, 21-21 becomes fascinated by the sounds and the images on the small screen. Seeing this, Nina asks ‘Mary’ to move with her to a nearby pair of empty seats where they can play the game together. Rose is hesitant to allow this — but she knows that 21-21 is intelligent far beyond her years and is aware of the need for discretion, so she relents. This is the first unstructured play time in 21-21’s life, the first genuine play she has ever known. Nina is a child of enormous charm, sweet and gregarious. Although 21-21 is a genius with the reading skills of a college freshman, a healer with miraculous powers, and literally the hope of the world, she is soon enraptured by Nina, wants to be Nina, as totally cool as Nina, and unconsciously she begins imitating Nina’s gestures and manner of speaking.

Theirs is a late flight out of New York, and after a couple of hours, Nina is fading. She hugs 21-21, and with the permis­sion of Michelle, she gives Pigs and Princes to her new friend before returning to sit with her mother and sister, where she falls asleep.

Transported by delight, 21-21 returns to her seat beside Rose, hugging the small electronic game to her breast as though it is a treasure beyond value. Now she won’t even play with it because she is afraid that she might break it, and she wants it to remain always exactly as Nina gave it to her.

West of the town of Running Lake, still many miles from Big Bear Lake, following ridgelines past the canyons where the wind was born, bombarded by thrashing conifers hurling cones at the pavement, Joe refused to consider the implications of Pigs and Princes. Listening to Rose tell the story, he had barely found sufficient self-control to repress his rage. He knew that he had no reason to be furious with this woman or with the child who had a concentration-camp name, but he was livid nonetheless —perhaps because he knew how to function well in anger, as he had done throughout his youth, and not well at all in grief.

Turning the subject away from little girls at play, he said, ‘How does Horton Nellor fit into this — aside from owning a big chunk of Teknologik, which is deep in Project Ninety-nine?’

‘Just that well-connected bastards like him . . . are the wave of the future.’ She was holding the can of Pepsi between her knees, clawing at the pull tab with her right hand. She had barely enough strength and coordination to get it open. ‘The wave of the future unless Nina. . . unless she changes everything.’

‘Big business, big government, and big media — all one beast now, united to exploit the rest of us. Is that it? Radical talk.’

The aluminum can rattled against her teeth, and a trickle of Pepsi dribbled down her chin. ‘Nothing but power matters to them. They don’t believe .. . in good and evil.’

‘There are only events.’

Though she had just taken a long swallow of Pepsi, her throat sounded dry. Her voice cracked. ‘And what those events mean. .

‘... depends only on what spin you put on them.’

He remained blindly angry with her because of what she insisted that he believe about Nina, but he could not bear to glance at her again and see her growing weaker. He blinked at the road ahead, where showers of pine needles stitched together billowing sheets of dust, and he eased down on the accelerator, driving as fast as he dared.

The soda can slipped out of her hand, dropped on the floor, and rolled under her seat, spilling the remainder of the Pepsi. ‘Losin’ it, Joe.’

‘Not long now.’

‘Got to tell you how it was . . . when the plane went in.’

Four miles down, gathering speed all the way, engines shrieking, wings creaking, fuselage thrumming. Screaming passengers are pressed so hard into their seats by the accumulating gravities that many are unable to lift their heads some praying, some vomiting, weeping, cursing, calling out the many names of God, calling out to loved ones present and far away. An eternity of plunging, four miles but as if from the moon——and then Rose is in a blueness, a silent bright blueness, as if she is a bird in flight, except that no dark earth lies below, only blueness all around. No sense of motion. Neither hot nor cool. A flawless hyacinth-blue sphere with her at the centre. Suspended. Waiting. A deep breath held in her lungs. She tries to expel her stale breath but cannot, cannot, until——with an exhalation as loud as a shout, she finds herself in the meadow, still in her seat, stunned into immobility, 21-21 beside her. The nearby woods are on fire. On all sides, flames lick mounds of twisted debris. The meadow is an unspeakable charnel house. And the 747 is gone.

At the penultimate moment, the girl had transported them out of the doomed aircraft by a monumental exertion of her psychic gift, to another place, to a dimension outside of space and time, and had held them in that mysterious sheltering limbo through one terrible minute of cataclysmic destruction. The effort has left 21-21 cold, shaking, and unable to speak. Her eyes, bright with reflections of the many surrounding fires, have a faraway look like those of an autistic child. Initially she cannot walk or even stand, so Rose must lift her from the seat and carry her.

Weeping for the dead scattered through the night, shuddering with horror at the carnage, wonderstruck by her survival, slammed by a hurricane of emotion, Rose stands with the girl cradled in her arms but is unable to take a single step. Then she recalls the flickering passenger-cabin lights and the spinning of the hands on her wristwatch, and she is certain that the pilot was the victim of a wet mission, remoted by the boy who lives in a steel capsule deep below the Virginia countryside. This realization propels her away from the crash site, around the burning trees, into the moonlit forest, wading through straggly underbrush, then along a deer trail powdered with silver light and dappled with shadow, to another meadow, to a ridge from which she sees the lights of Loose Change Ranch.

By the time they reach the ranch house, the girl is somewhat recovered but still not herself. She is able to walk now, but she is lethargic, brooding, distant. Approaching the house, Rose tells 21-21 to remember that her name is Mary Tucker, but 21-21 says, My name is Nina. That’s who I want to be.

Those are the last words that she will speak — perhaps forever. In the months immediately following the crash, having taken refuge with Rose’s friends in Southern California, the girl sleeps twelve to fourteen hours a day. When she’s awake, she shows no interest in anything. She sits for hours staring out a window or at a picture in a storybook, or at nothing in particular. She has no appetite! loses weight. She is pale and frail, and even her amethyst eyes seem to lose some of their colour. Evidently, the effort required to move herself and Rose into and out of the blue elsewhere, during the crash, has profoundly drained her, perhaps nearly killed her. Nina exhibits no paranormal abilities any more, and Rose dwells in despondency.

By Christmas, however, Nina begins to show interest in the world around her. She watches television. She reads books again. As the winter passes, she sleeps less and eats more. Her skin regains its former glow, and the colour of her eyes deepens. She still does not speak, but she seems increasingly connected. Rose encourages her to come all the way back from her self-imposed exile by speaking to her every day about the good that she can do and the hope that she can bring to others.

In a bureau drawer in the bedroom that she shares with the girl, Rose keeps a copy of the Los Angeles Post, the issue that devotes the entire front page, above the fold, to the fate of Nationwide Flight 353. It helps to remind her of the insane viciousness of her enemies. One day in July, eleven months after the disaster, she finds Nina sitting on the edge of the bed with this newspaper open to a page featuring photographs of some of the victims of the crash. The girl is touching the photo of Nina Carpenter, who had given her Pigs and Princes, and she is smiling.

Rose sits beside her and asks if she is feeling sad, remembering this lost friend.

The girl shakes her head no. Then she guides Rose’s hand to the photograph, and when Rose’s fingertips touch the newsprint, she falls away into a blue brightness not unlike the sanctuary into which she was transported in the instant before the plane crash, except that this is also a place full of motion, warmth, sensation.

Clairvoyants have long claimed to feel a residue of psychic energy on common objects, left by the people who have touched them. Sometimes they assist police in the search for a murderer by handling objects worn by the victim at the time of the assault. This energy in the Post photograph is similar but different — left not in passing by Nina but imbued in the newsprint by an act of will.

Rose feels as if she has plunged into a sea of blue light, a sea crowded with swimmers whom she cannot see but whom she feels gliding and swooping around her. Then one swimmer seems to pass through Rose and to linger in the passing, and she knows that she is with little Nina Carpenter, the girl with the lopsided smile, the giver of Pigs and Princes, who is dead and gone but safe, dead and gone but not lost forever, happy and alive in an elsewhere beyond this swarming blue brightness, which is not really a place itself but an interface between phases of existence.