The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

long, elegant hands, which moved balletically as she talked. She had jumped forward three centuries in her thirteenth year and had been the Alderwoman for decades now. “It’s Nick, isn’t it? Nick Davenant.”

“It’s good to see you again,” Nick said, and bowed.

“Be careful with that bow,” she said, and held out her hand. Nick flushed and shook it. Her skin was cool, but her ring on her finger was warm.

She turned to Leo. “And you’re . . .” She paused, looking up into his face. He waited for her to remember him. And she did. “Leo Quonquont.”

Nick was impressed. How many thousands of names and faces did she have logged in her mind? The Alderwoman stood back now and crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you fellows doing here?”

Leo pointed with his chin at the bathroom door. “We’re waiting for our friend Meg.”

“Ah. The hungry one. I’m in a rush to get up to the compound, so please say hello to her for me. See you back at the ranch.” She nodded to them both and walked away into the crowd.

Meg popped out a moment later. Her mouth was a tiny, tight line, her eyes wide and frightened.

“What happened?” Leo touched her shoulder.

She looked from one to the other of them. “Did you see her?”

“Yes.” Nick had never seen his friend so perturbed. “She said to say hi. She was in a rush. What the hell happened in there?”

“I’ll tell you in the car.”

But when they reached the convertible Meg had second thoughts about getting in. “I shouldn’t tell you in there. It’s probably rigged with some sort of recording device.”

“Bugged,” Leo said. “That’s the word for it.”

“I doubt very much whether—” Nick reached for the door handle.

“Whatever.” Meg was looking up and down the street. “Just come on.”

With her arms tucked into theirs, the two men had to bend over Meg to hear her whisper as she trotted them along at a furious pace. “I slipped into the stall next to her,” she said. “I popped right up on the toilet and looked over the divider.”

“You didn’t!” Nick laughed, horrified.

“Sure I did. Why not? Well. There she stood, holding her cell phone. I thought for certain she’d look up and see me. Then the phone vibrated, and she answered it.” Meg looked up at her companions, first Leo, then Nick. “I could barely hear her. But she said, ‘She has disappeared. Ignatz has fled. The Brazilian resistance is fractured for the moment. Whenever they regroup, we have to be ready.’”

The two men stopped and stared down at her.

“I’m not telling you a lie. God strike me dead if I tell a lie.”

Whether the car was bugged or not, they argued about it all the way home. Meg fought loudly, Leo calmly, Nick with a disbelieving contempt for his friends’ opinions. Meg and Leo said this proved what they had suspected. The Guild was corrupt. They were killing people. Somewhere out there—in Brazil—there was a resistance movement.

“I don’t believe it.” Nick folded his arms and stared at his reflection in the car window. The sun had set; they had been around this argument three or four times already. “Every member of the Guild is made a millionaire, no strings attached. Why would anyone resist that?”

“No strings? No strings?” Meg’s voice filled the car. “You don’t have the sense that God gave a billy goat!”

“It’s good that you’re content, Nick,” Leo said, calmly glancing over his shoulder and then turning the wheel to change lanes. “But you cannot force us to . . .” He paused, clearly searching his prodigious memory for a phrase. “You cannot make us drink the Kool-Aid. The evidence is incontrovertible. Someone has disappeared, and someone else—this Ignatz person—is in hiding. Gacoki said ‘the Brazilian resistance.’ Meg heard her say it.”

“No,” Nick said. He heard the way his voice was shifting registers, moving to the front of his mouth, taking on the clipped precision of an affronted aristocrat—but he was too frustrated to temper his condescension. “This is paranoia—a delusion of Meg’s.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” Meg was technically sitting in the back, but she was so angry that she had thrust her skinny shoulders up between the front seats.

Nick turned his head and looked her in the eye. “I’m not calling you a liar, Meg. I’m calling you a drunken left-footer.”

After that there was complete silence between them.

* * *

The next day, Meg and Leo were gone. Disappeared from the compound.

For a couple of days everyone gossiped about it. The general consensus was that they’d been cherry-picked for jobs in the Guild, airlifted out of the compound to glorious new lives in London, at the Guild headquarters.

Nick knew better.

Either his friends were on their way to Brazil, seeking their fantasy of a resistance movement, or they were dead. In Wellington’s army the smallest infraction had been a capital crime. Theft. Insubordination. What Meg and Leo had voiced last night was bigger than that: tantamount to treason. They had broken the fourth rule: Uphold the rules. No questions. No unhappiness. No disloyalty. Perhaps the car had been bugged. Maybe the cost of dissent was death. Maybe the Guild had taken them away and killed them.

Nick stopped going to classes, stopped socializing. He was thrown into grief—for Meg and Leo, and back into all his original grief for what he had lost when he jumped. For everyone he had ever known. His entire world.

He would have been completely alone if not for the girl with the dark eyes. At least she hadn’t deserted him. Her eyes, her smile—they absolved him. As they had that first time, and every single time afterward. He floated around his pool in Leo’s panda and dreamed of that warm, comforting gaze.

* * *

Exactly a year after his arrival, Nick had left the compound outside Santiago and begun his life in the United States. Nine years later he was still here. He told people he was thirty-three years old. But when he counted to himself, he counted