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Renata realizes that if her mother wants the device, she shouldn’t have it.
For a moment, they stand there awkwardly. Each Granger is trying to figure
out what the other one is going to do without saying anything, which might
give away their own respective plans. Polly shifts his eyes between them,
making his own decisions, if he’s even capable of that. Renata helped him
realize that he wasn’t going to die, but does that mean they’re the same?
She has clearly been heading towards her own epiphany for a while now, but
Libera must have done something to make that happen, and it doesn’t appear
that she did the same for Polly. Still, he seems to have some sense of what
should happen here. He reaches into his pocket, and tosses the car keys into
the air, not even towards Renata. As he does so, he says, “go. I’ll hold her
off for you.”
Renata starts running, catching the keys mid-bound. She can hear the two
robots fighting each other as she’s getting into the car. She ignites it,
and backs out. He already pulled off most of the brush, but the rest needs
to fall off the hood. She starts driving towards the two of them. Just like
Quidel before, even without them having to speak, Polly just knows what
she’s thinking. After grappling with Libera this whole time, he changes
tactics, and shoves her away from him, stepping back to get clear. Renata
slams into her mother who isn’t really her mother, then stops. “Get in!”
“Just go!” Polly urges.
“Get in!” she repeats.
Polly reluctantly gets into the passenger seat, and lets Renata drive off.
“I’m the driver here.”
“Not today, you’re not,” Renata claps back.
He looks over his shoulder. “She’s not there.”
“What?”
“She’s not behind us,” Polly clarifies. “She’s not on the ground, or even
standing up. I don’t see her.”
Libera’s face suddenly appears at the driver’s side window. Despite never
having thought she was strong enough to punch through a window before,
Renata knows herself better now. She may not understand it, but just
believing in her own power has to be enough. She smashes right through the
glass, tipping Libera’s chin on the follow-through. Libera has to let go
with her left hand, but manages to hold on with her right. She’s being
dragged on the ground as Renata pulls the car onto the paved highway.
“I’m not going to hurt you!” Libera cries. “We’re not on opposite sides. Let
me explain!”
“I can’t trust you!” Renata argues. “You’ve been lying to me my whole life!”
“I’ve not been your mother your whole life! I replaced a different model
only a few years ago!”
“That makes it better?” Renata jerks the car to the left, and then the right
as fast as she can, trying to shake Libera off. It doesn’t work.
“The intelligences in this dome built something that was never made before,
because it’s not legal! I didn’t come here for it, though! I came here for
you! I’m trying to help you! I’m trying to free you all! Let me show
you. All I need to do is hold my left hand up to Polly’s face!”
“You’ll do no such thing!” Renata sees that Libera has been holding on to
the door, instead of some other part of the car. That is a weak spot. Hoping
that it doesn’t go beyond the limits of her strength, she lifts her left
foot, and slams it against the door. It snaps off of its hinges, and falls
down on the road, taking Libera with it.
“I can’t believe you just literally kicked your mother out of the car,”
Polly muses.
“Renata looks in the rearview mirror, watching as Libera stands up and
starts to dust herself off. “She’ll be fine.”
“She knows where we’re going. She knows the protocol.”
“There’s another town not too far from it, which will probably have a
payphone too. We don’t have to call from a specific one.”
Polly nods. “I don’t really, um...get what’s going on. With the whole, you
know...”
“I don’t either,” Renata assures him. “But that well has run dry. Quidel
wants to tell me the truth. He tried to explain at the bank, but he knew
that I wasn’t ready to hear it. I need to speak with him without my fake
mother breathing down our necks.”
Polly nods again, and waits for his next question. “She said something about
us being in a dome?”
Renata looks in her rearview mirror again. There is no telling how powerful
Libera is. She could be as fast as a car. She depresses the accelerator more
out of fear. “Yeah, I don’t know what that means, but it sounds really
apocalypty, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. It does.”
They continue to drive down the highway, not running into any more trouble.
They turn left instead of right. The other town is sixteen kilometers away,
instead of nine, but it’s not the one they agreed on going to, so it’s
safer. Unless Libera realizes that they might do that, and is expecting them
to show up there. But if she can’t run as fast as a car, she’s going
to need to find some mode of transportation. Oh, shit. The Javelotians. They
were obviously not stupid enough to drive right up to the cabin in a loud
vehicle, but it’s probably not far away, and if Libera has had half the kind
of training Renata expected to have from the NSD, it would not be hard for
her to find it.
They come to another fork in the road. The next big city is a hundred
kilometers away. That’s where Renata would have taken the device had she
been on the other team. If anyone started to suspect that one of them was a
decoy, they would probably postulate that the real one was moving in the
opposite direction. That just makes sense. So a good strategy might be to
just take it farther down the road from where the decoy is heading. It’s the
last place they would look. Maybe. If she’s wrong, and she drives a hundred
kilometers out of the way, it will delay their reunion. But then again, that
might be a good thing. If Libera gets her hands on a phone, they won’t
respond to her. There’s a reason they put her on the decoy team. McWilliams
doesn’t trust her either, so she doesn’t have a passphrase. Only Renata
does. Only she can make contact. “Strap in, Polly. It’s gonna be a long
trip.” She turns left again.
