Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

This sounded like an opening for Willem to declare he wouldn’t dream of doing so, and so he opened his mouth. But Sister Catherine ran him off the road. “I can provide easy and safe conveyance to your uncle Ed’s if that is where you would prefer to wait this out.”

Her phrasing could not help but raise a question in Willem’s mind as to what “this” was and how long “this” was projected to last. Part of him wanted to stick with Western-style accommodation near the airport. But a lot of people who’d been staying at the Sam Houston had probably felt safer there, until they’d been hustled out of the building by cops and watched it blow up.

So he accepted Sister Catherine’s offer. Five minutes later he and Amelia were lying down in the aisle of a yellow school bus as Sister Catherine fired it up and pulled it out of the school grounds and onto the streets of Tuaba. Her proficiency with the vehicle’s manual transmission, the adroitness with which she gunned it through traffic, her hair-trigger approach to application of the horn, all made Willem wonder what other skill sets this nun had acquired during her (he estimated) three decades as a bride of Christ.

“You saw the gun?” she asked him, in Dutch. “Up on Sneeuwberg?”

“A very quick glimpse,” Willem said. “Then there was some sort of attack and we had to evacuate.”

“Still, it’s good that you saw it,” Sister Catherine remarked. “Not just the gun. The whole mine. So you know what we are dealing with. The scale of it.”

Noteworthy to Willem was the nun’s utter lack of curiosity about the attack. He raised his head from the floor of the bus and exchanged a look with Amelia.

He asked, “Do you think that the attack was related to the new gun project or—”

“No!” she said, with a brusqueness that gave Willem a glimpse of what it would feel like to be a dull pupil in her classroom. “No one here cares about any of that.”

“Climate change, geoengineering . . .”

“No one cares. Except foreign countries. And it is those who decide our fate.”

“Whether you will remain part of Indonesia or—”

“We are ‘part of Indonesia’ in the same sense that Indonesia used to be ‘part of the Dutch Empire,’” she said, and, in the scariest thing Willem had seen all day, turned around to look back and down at him while removing both hands from the steering wheel to form air quotes.

“Please overlook my poor choice of words,” Willem said, suppressing the rest of the sentence and keep your eyes on the fucking road.

“Go and sin no more,” she cracked, swinging the bus decisively onto a side street. Judging from the frequency with which Willem’s skull was slamming into the floor, this one was not as well paved. They were plunging into puddles that began, but never quite seemed to end. Canopies of trees were looming above the windows. The verdant scene was interrupted by the hard corner of a rusty shipping container. Standing atop it, well back of a coiling fumarole of razor wire, was a young man in a backwards baseball cap and mirror shades, cradling an AK-47 and smoking a cigarette. Others like him came into view as the bus slowed and then stopped. Sister Catherine put it in neutral and stomped the parking brake with a vehemence she might have used to crush a scorpion threatening a pupil. “School’s out,” she said.