“It’s just a couple of quick questions,” Ralphs interjected.
Scanlon’s head swiveled to look at her. “Depending on the answers.”
Ralphs rolled her eyes. “Can we come in?”
“How about we just do it right here?” I said.
Ralphs looked around, then shrugged. “Okay, sure. When was the last time you saw your Aunt Dymphna?”
The question took me by surprise, and Scanlon seemed to pick up on that fact, his brow furrowing behind his dark shades.
“Dymphna?” I paused. Part of me just wanted to blurt it out, to tell Ralphs about the chickens and the mystery disease and everything. And I might have, if not for Scanlon. Maybe it was the Wellplant, or the attitude, but I didn’t like him, and I didn’t trust him. “Not since I was little. Why?”
“We’re asking the questions here, Ms. Corcoran,” Scanlon said.
Almost at the same time, Ralphs said, “We have reason to believe she’s in the area, for the first time in a long time. You’re sure she hasn’t reached out to you or your family?”
“Well, I can’t speak for my mom, and as I said, she’s not here. But I imagine if my Aunt Dymphna had gotten in touch, Mom would have mentioned it.”
“Any idea why she might be in town?”
“Hopefully not for the H4H convention,” I said, with a laugh that no one else shared. “No, I don’t.” I shook my head. “Why are you looking for her?”
“She has some old warrants,” Ralphs said. “Nothing serious, but we want to talk to her about some other matters. It’s very important.”
Scanlon glared at her, then he turned to me. “You do know that lying to the FBI is a serious crime, don’t you, Ms. Corcoran?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You pointed that out last time we spoke.”
Scanlon stared at me for several seconds, his head tilted forward, as if his Wellplant was studying my face. I glanced at Ralphs, who was looking back and forth between me and Agent Scanlon. She looked confused and slightly concerned by his behavior.
“Is that it?” I asked her, determined not to show how unsettled I was by Scanlon’s scrutiny.
“Yes, that’s all for now,” she said. “You have our contact info. Let us know if your aunt Dymphna gets in touch.”
“Or if you have any new dealings with CLAD,” Agent Scanlon added without moving his face. “Any dealings at all.”
I smiled. “Okeydokey.”
THIRTY-TWO
From the Levtrain, the sky seemed smudged with a haze of gray smoke. It was densest to the northwest, the general direction of Claudia’s neighborhood, but there was so much of it, and it was so widespread, there were obviously fires burning elsewhere, as well. As I watched, a pink plume of fire retardant appeared in the sky, gently falling to the earth. I couldn’t see the drone that had released it or the fire it was intended to smother, just the stuff itself, drifting down through the hazy sky.
I had thought about calling Claudia to tell her about the protest, but she had enough going on. She had already said she felt she should be at home with her family as they worked their way through the immediate crisis. I didn’t want to put her in a position of having to choose between obligations and feeling guilty either way.
My stomach tightened into a knot as I worried about the Bembry family, the arguing and the tension, the fear and uncertainty. I knew a lot of kids whose parents had gotten divorced, and that in the end, it could be a positive thing. But whenever I had seen them together, Bonnie and Chris had always seemed very much in love; it was heartbreaking to see them arguing like that.
But Bonnie and Claudia were right: Chris was different. His Wellplant had changed him. And as much as Bonnie might want him to get rid of it, even if she could convince him to, it wasn’t really an option, not a simple one.
When I got off the train, the Lev station was more packed than I’d ever seen it. I squeezed my way through the crowd, feeling claustrophobic as we all ascended the escalator, with people pressing from all sides. I desperately wanted to get out onto the street, but it was even worse up there.
The cordons had been set up to keep the pro-chimera groups separate from the H4Hers, much like the previous protest. But the H4H area was much bigger than before, and there was less of a buffer between the two groups. There were a lot more cops than before, too, and more of them seemed to have Wellplants—or maybe I hadn’t noticed it before.
A stage was set up next to the H4H area, with lots of American flags, a huge picture of Howard Wells, and a massive H4H logo. In front of the stage, there was an impressive bank of video and holovid cameras.
I slipped into the pro-chimera area and made my way toward the southernmost part. It was already crowded, probably more chimeras than not. More and more protestors were cramming in, pushing the rest of us up against the partition. The H4Hers behind their partition were barely ten feet away, looking at us with disgust. A surprising number of them had Wellplants, too.
I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find Rex, but I spotted him easily, looming over the crowd, six inches taller than pretty much everyone else. He was casting about, looking this was and that, and I smiled, because I knew he was looking for me.
I jumped and waved, but he couldn’t see me until I was almost upon him. His face lit up when he saw me.
“Hey!”
“Hey!” I said back.
I put my arms around him and kissed him, then we had a hard time parting because so many people were pushed up against us.
I didn’t mind the excuse to stay close.
For the next twenty minutes, more and more people crowded into both enclosures. Rex and I talked quietly about the brush fires and the drought and the climate conference, about the Bembrys and Chris’s Wellplant, the broader Wellplant Blackout, and about Howard Wells and his candidacy.
We did not talk about the mystery illness spreading through the H4Hers, or about Sly or CLAD or Chimerica or any of that, but I knew he was thinking about it as much as I was.
I caught a glimpse of Ruth and Pell and Jerry, but by the time they showed up, the crowd was so dense they just waved and stayed where they were.
As a bunch of guys in suits climbed onto the big stage in the H4H area, Donna Bresca from E4E stepped up onto a plastic crate and led a few chants, but they were drowned out by the deafening cheers as Howard Wells ascended the H4H stage. He walked from one end to the other, waving, clasping his hands over his head, pointing to people he knew in the crowd, or pretending to. After a few minutes of milking the crowd for applause, he waved to them to quiet down, as if he hadn’t just gotten them all worked up.
“Thank you, thank you all,” he said, as the crowd quieted. When they were silent, he waited a few more moments, letting the anticipation build.
Pell shouted out, “Howard Wells, you suck!” earning laughs and applause on our side of things. But at the same time, a woman in the other enclosure shouted out, “We love you, Howard!” Everyone around her erupted in cheers.
Wells put a hand over his heart and pointed at the woman who had shouted, and the crowd cheered again, forcing him to calm them down again. This time he didn’t wait for absolute quiet, leaning toward the mic and saying, in a singsong voice, “I’m ba-ack!”