The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [129]
“Why not?”
“Prolonged immersion in the fluids softens keratin. Nails continue to grow at a good clip, perhaps an eighth of an inch a month. With the subject’s spasmodic movements within the protective net, nails catch and tear from their bed. Although the nails continue to grow for a time, they can’t anchor to a softened bed. The new stumps catch and rip. After a few years, those in suspension lose the capacity to regenerate nails.”
“And their hair?” She unconsciously reached to her head. It felt funny, the stubble catching on the palm of her hand.
“That’s a different issue. Some people retain follicular activity and others lose it.”
Tyler neared the peninsula on the kitchen side and grabbed a mug of coffee. “Antonio and I will leave shortly. I suggest you take it easy for the rest of the day and try to sleep.” He turned to Raul. “You were up all night.”
Raul stifled a yawn and nodded.
They had agreed that phone calls or any other means of communication from the house were an unnecessary security risk. It seemed Tyler had considered all eventualities. After using the Squirt transmitter of his Metapad twice the night before, he had decided to stop using it at the farm. It was supposedly safe, but he didn’t discount the possibility that repeated use could be detected. Every day, Tyler and Antonio had gone on errands, using the travel as their excuse to send and receive expensive messages: expensive because no two consecutive texts could be beamed anonymously from a single m-phone.
It made sense the DHS would pay special attention to traffic from m-phones. Specially designed for teenagers, m-phones were available at vending machines—cheap at two hundred bucks each—and were sealed disposable units with no other feature than about a month’s worth of local messaging; they were useless for long distance or international. Once used for a single message, Tyler ran each phone through an industrial bone-meal processor and dusted the resulting powder in a septic tank to join the house effluent and the pigs’ waste. Laurel followed Tyler as he pocketed the Metapad he’d taken from the bookcase the night before and thought that, in this instance, the communications Tyler had to make would involve more than short messaging.
After Antonio and Tyler left, Lukas and Raul went outside to stretch their legs. Laurel nestled by Floyd, their couch angled between Russo’s and the TV, which was showing two human mountains crashing together in a sumo-wrestling championship.
Floyd draped his arm around Laurel’s shoulders and drew her to his chest. “What’s next?”
“I suppose Tyler will come up with a plan to move Russo in the next few days to a place where he can make some sort of declaration.”
“But he can’t speak.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Laurel asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve caught him awake once or twice, his half-closed eyes following me around the den as I checked his vitals. I think he could have said something but chose not to.”
“And Lukas?” Floyd asked.
“What about him?”
“How can we use his offer?”
“My take is that Tyler will make his contacts and structure his plan today. When he’s ready to go for broke, he’ll ask Lukas to contact the DHS, probably this evening or tomorrow, and give details to send our enemies like a pack of wolves in the opposite direction. That’s what I would do, anyway.”
“Makes sense. Ever thought about the identity of whoever planned the breakout?”
“Many times. It has to be someone high up in government. Probably a group.”
For a while neither spoke. Floyd took one of her hands and kissed the tip of each finger in turn. She peered into Russo’s placid face. He was awake and sentient, easy to determine after the previous days.
Unlike the common pattern of average sleepers, Russo thrashed and moaned constantly in his sleep, his brain probably racked by nightmares. He reverted to immobility only in wakefulness. Floyd had suggested they prepare a quart of watered-down broth, and Laurel had pushed a straw down the side of Russo’s mouth from time to time when his breath and heartbeat steadied. Then,