Immunity Index, Sue Burke [accelerated reader books txt] 📗

interventions than by anything I could do. Humans tend toward the norm in IQ, the most human of all characteristics. But I could make promises, and lo, if they were believed, they would come true. Placebos were effective medicine.

But that was all behind me, and a court order now banned me from initiating contact with my children. The past, tucked into the back of my mind, gave me frequent nightmares about fine people who became pariahs through no fault of my own besides ambition.

Two days after the testimony, in a hotel room in New York City, a tiny robot gun waited for me to return. How it got there was somehow never determined. It had two bullets. One lodged in the woodwork, the other in my left lung close to my heart, where it exploded. A fragment sliced open my pericardium. I never knew if the emergency-room staff approved of my work, but I was most grateful for theirs.

Now that lay in a past that felt much more distant than it was, and before me lay the immediate chance to save or murder billions.

CHAPTER3

Irene woke up a little before dawn—time to get to work, and she’d never get used to getting up so early. But just like elephants, mammoths didn’t sleep much. Nimkii would be waiting for her. She listened for rain. It had stopped. Good. She listened for quarrels. Silence. Good. She got up, dressed, decided to skip breakfast, and was out as sunshine crept over the horizon. Raindrops clung to everything, sparkling like a magical landscape.…

He wasn’t there.

That was impossible. She climbed on the truck bed for a better look at the far side of the pen. Maybe he’d lain down to sleep.

Instead she saw that the water trough had been torn up and out, its pipes broken and spouting water, and she could figure out what had happened next. The flowing water had eroded the soil around a fence post, and he’d pulled down a whole section of fencing. He’d charged through the opening, waded across the moat, dug a ramp through the soft dirt on the other side, and torn through the wire fence meant to keep out humans. It would have been like cobwebs to him. His big prints marked a path through the mud.

“Nimkii!” She didn’t expect him to answer. She heard only a distant crow. Nimkii was out, free, wandering somewhere. Maybe even stolen. Or hunted, slaughtered. Gone.

Her breath trembled. No. Stay calm. Step by step. First, tell the owners. Then search. What would she need for a search?

“Nimkii!” she called again. “Pedazo!,” as if he would answer—well, maybe he would, maybe with a roar or a trumpet.… But he didn’t. She jumped down from the truck bed and ran into the house.

“Nimkii’s out! He got out!” she shouted as she opened the door.

Ruby was stirring oatmeal. Alan was sitting at the kitchen table. Their wide eyes asked the same question.

“He tore up the watering trough, and the water wore down a way for him to get out. I can’t find him.”

Alan was on his feet, scowling, before Irene had finished. “He has a radio tag around an ankle. We can track him.”

Irene followed him to the little office nook in the living room. “Open IDSleuth,” he told the screen. “This will tell us where he went.”

A message said: “Subscription expired.”

“Hey, Ruby!” he shouted toward the kitchen. “Did you renew the tracking subscription?”

“You mean IDSleuth?” she shouted back.

“Yes. For Nimkii.”

“They raised the rates a lot.”

“You didn’t talk to me about that.”

Irene knew where this discussion was going. “I’ll go look outside. Tell me if you learn something.” She didn’t wait for an answer. She wasn’t even sure if Alan had been listening.

She ran up to her room, put on heavy boots, slipped on her phone, grabbed a whistle—and what else would she need? Her wallet with an ID because the authorities might get involved. She ran down two flights of stairs and out.

“Nimkii!” she shouted, running to the moat. “Pedazo!” He knew that name, too. Maybe he hadn’t gone far.

Grass was trampled in a wide area around the pen, as if he’d hesitated over where to go. It would have been dark. He’d never been outside a pen in his life. He would have probably been frightened and would seek someplace that felt safe. What would that be? She walked in half circles, head down, looking for more trampled grass.

He’d headed west, then come back. East? Yes, around to the gate of the pen. He’d looked at it for a while, then kept going … to the area where they unloaded food. A bale of hay had been ripped up and some of it had been eaten. Then?

No clues. She shinnied up the winch’s scaffold and saw an obvious path trampled through the alfalfa field alongside the pen. The tracks led straight to a line of aspens to the north that served as a windbreak. She slid down and ran toward it.

On the other side of the aspens was a creek, then a bit of scrub lowland, and beyond that a cornfield. He’d passed through the aspens—white-barked, tall, slim, straight, leaves rattling in the wind and a few already turning yellow. He’d shoved down some of them. On an impulse, she tried pushing on a tree. It didn’t move. She pushed harder, and her feet slipped on the wet ground. Yet Nimkii had felled an identical tree. A big, strong, frightened animal was roaming loose.

Her phone rang: Alan. “Irene, where are you?”

“East. I’m at the north creek. He’s come through here, I think. I’ll keep following him.”

“We’re about to get the tracking up. Then we’ll call the sheriff. They have tranquilizing darts for the rifles.”

No!

Alan was right, though. Nimkii needed to be captured. But where would they take him?

“Just find Nimkii,” he said. “We’ll take it from there.”

“All right.” That wasn’t what she wanted to say, but that was what she had to say.

All right. Keep going. She ran out of the aspens