TWENTY-FOUR

Factory 22 was set against a postcard-perfect background of forested hills, one mile downstream from Cumberland Gap. Appalachia’s economic system had evolved to a perfect symbiosis; each town supported a factory, and each factory provided the town with necessary employment opportunities.

The exterior of 22 was structurally identical to all other factories in Appalachia: a low, one-story brick structure with solar panels, prison-style fencing, and guards at the gate. A lane ran from the gate through a manicured lawn and tasteful landscaping.

Mason Lee was alone, without shotgun, when he approached the guard at the gate, a soft-bellied man in his midforties, whiskers roughly shaven.

“I have authorization.” Lee anticipated the guard’s question and pulled out his vidpod. “Let’s make this fast.”

It seemed that the guard became deliberately slow as he unclipped his own vidpod. Mason resisted the impulse to whack the man on the side of the head with his cast.

“Ready,” the guard finally said.

Lee beamed his authorization via infrared. The guard peered at his screen, and Mason could hear the words from a vidcast from Bar Elohim.

“Give this man unescorted access anywhere he wants in 22.”

Unescorted access.

This, coming from the image of the face of Bar Elohim, caused the guard’s eyebrows to rise, and to Mason’s satisfaction, the insolence disappeared. The guard nearly tripped over himself to open the gates.

Mason Lee was inside.

“Tell me about the dead fugitive,” Carney said. “Jordan Brown.”

The sun was clearing the mountaintops to the east, and they were only halfway through the five miles to where GPS showed the livery horse was waiting.

“What does it matter?” Pierce said from his saddle. “The man’s dead. Well on his way to being buried, I assume.”

“I know who he is,” Carney continued as if Pierce hadn’t dismissed him. “Face recognition software and mandatory registration. I pulled up the information within twenty minutes of snapping his image in the apartment with my vidpod. He arrived at the collective, one of our labor communities, ten or twelve years before that. We can’t be sure, because it was before mandatory registration. No record of her birth certificate, so that doesn’t help me pinpoint it any better. My guess? He fled here from Outside just after she was born. So tell me why Outside suddenly wants him for a crime committed almost twenty years ago?”

Carney was making simple deductions. Jordan hadn’t committed any crimes inside Appalachia, so he must have done it Outside. That would have been before the completion of the perimeter fence, an extensive construction project that divided Appalachia from Outside sixteen years earlier. Unlikely that Jordan would have slipped into Appalachia after that. Even less likely that he’d found a way inside within the last five years, after mandatory face registration had been imposed. A registered population meant a controlled population. Jordan wouldn’t have been able to work or find housing without allowing his facial features to be indexed; had he tried, he would have shown up on law-enforcement lists that cross-referenced warrants from Outside.

Jordan clearly slipped in while the fence was being built and found a way to establish himself as a collective worker before face registration.

The girl was from Outside too. Her age dictated it, unless Jordan had adopted her once he was inside. But in Carney’s experience, fugitives didn’t saddle themselves down. The only explanation was that he’d fled with her.

There was something else. Jordan was dead. Pierce still wanted the girl, but they both knew she hadn’t committed any crime.

What did this mean? What was it about the canister that Pierce refused to discuss? Carney wanted to know but reasoned he needed to come at it sideways.

“What was Jordan Brown’s crime?” Carney asked again. “And why the interest now? After all those years he’d been gone from Outside, how did you find him?”

“We’d both be better off if I didn’t answer that.”

“The more I know, the better my chances of helping you find the girl before Mason Lee.” Carney wasn’t going to push much harder than that. This monitored conversation, after all, could be reviewed at any time, now or in the future, by Bar Elohim.

They rode in silence for about a hundred yards. Jordan had died. Instead of the agent leaving Appalachia at that point, he was still here, enduring a horseback ride. What could the girl have that was so valuable? Carney considered the silver canister, but he couldn’t come up with a reasonable answer.

“I’ll tell you what I can,” Pierce finally offered. “We learned about Jordan because of a surgeon. Dr. Vadis. He comes into Appalachia on a rotating basis.”

Carney nodded for Pierce to continue. He didn’t need an explanation of visiting surgeons. Appalachia was too small for specialized medical care. Instead, Outsiders came in on visas.

Carney squinted. “If a visiting surgeon passed on information to you, that tells me something troubling.”

“Not even close.” Pierce shook his head. “We’d like them to help us, but they refuse to break patient confidentiality.”

“I don’t understand, then.”

“Dr. Vadis is a second-generation surgeon. His father, Dr. Vadis Senior, spent nearly a decade as a visiting surgeon before him. Our man showed up expecting to see Dr. Vadis Senior.”

“You know this because…” Carney waited. Pierce seemed to be struggling with reining his mare but began talking again after she settled.

“Jordan Brown handed a large envelope with x-rays to Dr. Vadis’s nurse. He told the nurse that Dr. Vadis would understand, assuming the senior Dr. Vadis, who had taken the x-rays, was the visiting doctor. The son knew nothing about the x-rays, and when he stepped outside his office to ask Jordan about the them, Jordan took them and left without identifying himself.”

“X-rays of Jordan?”

“They were the girl’s films,” Pierce answered.

“Come back after initial surgery how many years earlier?”

“Twelve or thirteen. There’s no record of the x-rays or a surgery in the doctor’s office.”

“So something on the x-rays was significant enough that Jordan expected a surgeon to remember them well over a decade later. Had the surgeon operated on the girl?”

“You asked how we found Jordan. I’m answering. Vadis, the son, made copies of the x-rays before coming out to ask Jordan questions. When Jordan left so abruptly, that raised more questions. The doctor took the copies back Outside with him and started asking around. Which eventually led our agency to the films.”

“You won’t tell me what was on the them?”

“It took about a month to track Jordan down because he’d lied about his name at the doctor’s office. We found him at a collective. Or rather, we knew he lived at a collective. When I got there to arrest him, he wasn’t there, but his registered vidpod was.”

“Interesting.”

“The short version is that he’d been doing that for years, disappearing for two or three days at a time, unreported by the collective.”

“You mean,” Carney said, “protected by the collective. Where’d he go?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Each time he went, he was taking a big risk. Five years in the factory if caught without his vidpod, right?”

“The collective knew this and told you.”

Pierce nodded. “Serious trading was done to get this information. We got full disclosure; the collective suffered no penalties.”

This was big, Carney thought, if Bar Elohim authorized that kind of immunity. “Why didn’t you arrest him when he returned to the collective?”

“First thing I did after the initial interview with the head of the collective was go to the cabin to get the girl, but she was gone. Someone had warned her while I was interviewing. Jordan never returned to the collective. I can only presume he was reached before he headed back home and he had arranged to meet the girl. That’s when Mason was brought in to track them down.”

“I’ve got two questions,” Carney said. “Why would the collective protect him all those years by letting him go places unregistered and by warning him about you? What was on the x-ray?”

“You’ll only get the answer to the first question,” Pierce said. “The collective protected him because he wasn’t just a laborer. Jordan had been providing everyone in the collective with medical care for years.”

Maybe that was significant, Carney thought. But the real significance was in what didn’t get answered—what was it about those x-rays that made the girl so important to Outside?

Whatever it was, Carney couldn’t help but think it had something to do with the canister.