And then there were the tick stories, which Neil told with as much nostalgia as he did those of nature’s majesty. This one—he’d point—I got when I stripped down to bathe in a waterfall. Fucker was on me the second I pulled off my microsuit. This one—he pointed again—had stopped itching the second before I managed to use the Stamp, and I worried for days that I’d gotten to it too late. Jesse nodded and prodded, and he kept saying, “Fucking rad,” and Edie had gotten uneasy. Shut up shut up shut up, she wanted to snap at Neil. Because she knew enough by now about how Jesse’s mind worked to guess how this would go. She had seen it the previous month, when Jesse had spotted a man outside a club who had pulled up on one of the new CO2 motorbikes, and instead of just waiting to place an order for one at a dealer, Jesse had transferred the guy ten thousand credits on the spot, taken the key, and gotten Edie to drive his Zepplyn 8.0 home. Or how, at a rave, he’d accepted a Bullet from some weirdo stranger with eyelid rivets and popped it before Edie could protest. He had finished that night stripped naked and running down the side of the road, screaming, “HEEEEEEEEEE!” until he fell over in a ditch, unconscious.
He was an innocent. What he saw in himself as hot-bloodedness and boldness, a masculine thirst for thrills, was actually just a longing for acceptance and admiration, and a childlike confidence in the goodwill of others. It made Edie’s heart break for him, and it made her feel that it was her duty, as the one person in his inner circle beside his parents who wouldn’t indulge and lie to him if it meant getting an opportunity or a freebie, to look out for him. And she owed him. Didn’t she? And so she had agreed to join him on this Outer Limits Excursion, though she knew all too well the dangers that awaited them on the other side of the Salt Line. The thought of one of those miner ticks burrowing under her smooth skin had awakened her every night of their strange stay in this sumptuous brick training facility, sweat popping on her brow, heart racing.
—
On the final day of boot camp, they shaved their heads. Edie twisted her long brown hair into a sloppy ponytail and took up a pair of scissors, then hacked above the rubber band until her hand ached and the last hairs finally gave way. There was a bulletin board where the women and some of the men hung their ponytails—“Wall of Manes,” the placard read. Smiling, she added hers to the display, spearing it with a thumbtack, and the group clapped good-naturedly. Jesse snapped her picture and posted it to his feed before she could tell him not to. Edie could just imagine the comments that were pinging his alert box, the now-familiar assortment of insults and promises of sexual aggression and expressions of dismay from Jesse’s adolescent female fans (and even some of his middle-aged ones).
Now her scalp was bristled with fine hairs, and she couldn’t stop running her hands across it, listening to the rasp against her dry palms. Jesse, robbed of his cap of waves, looked a bit older, the angles of his cheekbones sharper, but still handsome. He was surveying the wall, all those flaccid tassels like the trophies of a hunter, and he must have sensed that Edie was rattled because he said, “It reassures me, actually.”
“The hair wall?”
“Yeah.” He pointed a few different places. “How many do you think are up there—a hundred or more? And they all came back.”
“They didn’t all come back,” Edie said.
“They mostly all came back. And heart attacks? That could happen anywhere.” He took her hand. “If anything, it makes me feel like—I don’t know—it’s not that big of a challenge. It’s a little disappointing, even.”
Edie laughed. “You’re nuts.”
“About you,” he said, and he gave her a very full, sudden kiss. “Damn, honey, if I knew your head was going to be so pretty, I’d have suggested you shave it months ago.”
“I don’t look too militant?”
“You look fucking rock and roll is how you look.” He kissed her again and then resumed his pacing, lace-up boots squeaking a little on the polished floors. They were waiting for Andy to come down and give them one last pep talk before lights-out, and the nervous energy in the gymnasium was so palpable that Edie vibrated with it. The three-week training had sounded excessive, even dull, when she and Jesse were doing their research, but it had gone by in a blink. And Edie didn’t feel ready. Her hair was on the wall, and the small, circular burn scar was on her ass, but she didn’t feel ready.
The Andy who had revealed himself to Edie that day in the weight room had not made a reappearance since, and it was hard now, watching him work the room on this last night of boot camp, to believe he had even existed.
“Wow,” he said with a laugh. “I sure see a lot of cue balls.”
The travelers murmured and smiled, touching their heads self-consciously.
Andy’s face grew serious, but his eyes twinkled. “I’ve got to tell you. I had serious doubts. If someone had told me three weeks ago that every single one of you would be Stamped and shaved and ready to load that bus at oh-six-hundred tomorrow, I’d have wagered otherwise. But you proved me wrong. You did good. Damn good.”
Mickey Worthington’s mouth tilted, and he folded his arms across his chest, nodding with satisfaction. Even the Japanese couple who’d begun boot camp in such a perpetual state of affront, Ken and Wendy Tanaka, seemed pleased. Jesse whooped and raised a cheer, which the rest quickly chimed in on.
Jesus, Edie thought. We’re a bunch of suckers. But she felt her own tiny, reluctant swell of pride, too.
“I would be proud to lead this group anywhere,” Andy said, setting off a second round of applause. Edie joined it halfheartedly and stared at Andy, willing him to meet her eyes, but he kept his focus elsewhere, bobbing his head in a modest way and finally lifting a hand to ask for silence.
“You won’t sleep well tonight, probably, but try. The first few nights out there are always rough. You’re going to feel aches in muscles and joints you didn’t even know you had. You’re going to feel hot and constricted in the micro-sleepsacks, which is why I urged you to start using them during boot camp, even though I realize how hard it is to give up comforts you know you’re not going to have for much longer.
“Worse, though, is the fear, and the way that fear fucks with your head. You’ll wake up dozens of times convinced something is crawling on you. It won’t matter that I’m telling you now it’s going to happen. It won’t matter that the combination of the micro-sleepsack and micro-tent makes the risk of infiltration negligible. It will be so real to you that you’ll sit up, snap on your light, and wake up your tent partner. And the second you finally slip off into real sleep, someone else will shout or switch on a light and bring you right back. You won’t be happy campers these first few nights.”
A hand shot up, and Andy nodded his acknowledgment.
It was the woman who’d worn diamond earrings on that first day. The earrings were, Edie supposed, now locked up with the rest of her valuables in her room safe. “Will you dispense sleeping pills?” she asked. It was stated explicitly in the tour company’s brochure, and in the Traveler Contract they’d each had to sign, that weapons, most pharmaceuticals, liquids, and unpackaged food items were forbidden for travelers; the guide and his two assistants would control the stores for the safety of the group. There was a note of something in her voice—desperation, defensiveness—and Edie felt vaguely uneasy.
“I think you know the answer to that,” Andy said, the glint in his eye extinguished. “No sedatives or mind-altering drugs on the excursion. It’s better for you to wake up to something that isn’t really there than to not wake up when something is. I can’t stress enough the importance of that.”