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She opened the bathroom door.
“Sorry, I’m out of shape and sweaty,” Sam said, pulling his T-shirt over his head.
“Well, then, a shower is just the thing,” Astrid said. She held up a fresh bar of soap and smiled. “I could help.”
Dekka was the last to wake, and when teased about it grumbled that she was the oldest one there, after all.
“Yeah, you’re way old, Dekka, practically legal drinking age,” Shade teased. She was in an easy chair, sharing it with Malik, the two of them squeezed together in too little space.
“Oh, so this now?” Dekka said sourly, seeing them. She shook her head, but her disapproval was fake and no one believed it. Francis handed her coffee. “I remember when I didn’t drink coffee,” she said, taking it gratefully.
She glanced at CNN on the TV and read the chyron scroll at the bottom.
Four hundred and nine confirmed dead in Las Vegas.
Death toll expected to mount into the thousands.
Hospitals overwhelmed.
Red Cross urgent requests for blood donations.
But the picture above the crawl was not of burned bodies and hollowed-out buildings. It was of Cruz walking down the Strip with a baby in her arms, followed by a scarred, soot-covered, exhausted band.
“Who’s got the remote? Turn it up.”
“. . . the one bright moment coming when a Rockborn mutant identifying herself as Cruz brought a baby out of the inferno . . .”
“Like you said, Dekka, they need a hero,” Shade said.
“We need one, too,” Malik said. “We have a face now. Something people can hold on to and think maybe they shouldn’t just exterminate us.”
“Cruz is the official face of . . . of whatever we are,” Armo said. He grinned his goofy-sweet grin and added, “At least it’s a nice, friendly face. Not like . . .” He hooked a thumb toward Dekka, who calmly lifted a cushion and threw it at him.
“They’re going to come up with a name for us, you know, and it’ll probably be as bad as Lesbokitty.”
“A name for us?” Francis echoed. “Like the Rockborn Gang?”
One by one, faces turned to Francis. She shrugged and blushed.
“Sorry,” Francis said. “I was living with . . . my mom . . . like a . . . well, it was a biker gang. It was the first thing that popped in my head.”
“The Rockborn Gang,” Shade said, her arm around Malik’s neck.
“There are worse names,” Malik conceded.
Dekka picked up the phone. “Yeah, front desk? Can you connect me to CNN?” She drank more coffee while she waited. “Hello? This is Dekka Talent.” Pause. “Dekka Talent. You know . . . Jesus H. Lesbokitty, dammit, get me the newsroom.” With her hand covering the mouthpiece she said, “If I ever find the Twitter moron who started that, I will . . . Hello? Yeah, this is Dekka Talent. Two things. One: if you call me Lesbokitty I will fly to Atlanta and shred your office. Two: we are the Rockborn Gang. Yes. Gang. And . . .”
Dekka stopped, held the phone away from her ear. “I got cut off. Or something. It’s just static.”
“Look,” Armo said, pointing at the TV. CNN was just snow. Armo took the remote and switched to MSNBC. MSNBC came out of New York.
CNN was in Atlanta. It was two hundred miles from the coast where, MSNBC was reporting, something—something very bad—had happened.
ASO-6
PETTY OFFICER DEB Forte, battered, bruised, bleeding, frantic with dread and certain that she was the only person who could end the Nebraska’s suffering and save the world from whatever monster had seized the boat, made her final connection.
She had been wedged in an impossibly tight space atop the nose cone of a Trident II rocket. She had removed the cladding and uncovered the eight steel cones like baby birds in a nest. And even as the Nebraska was dragged and pummeled, she had used her soldering iron, her tool set, and her knowledge of primitive computer systems.
