Chapter 85

At the sight of the approaching vehicle, Althea’s heart pounded against her ribcage. Between the darkened sky and the rain, she couldn’t make out much of the rider or what they were riding, but her conversation with Julie was fresh in her mind and she was painfully aware that she was alone out here, standing in the middle of an open space, and could expect no one to protect her.

Looking for any sort of cover, she ducked down and ran to where the chain-link fence might hide her from at least a casual observer. The fence was only about four feet tall, but at least it had some kind of green plastic privacy barrier woven into the links. She crouched there and waited for sounds of the vehicle passing through or turning and driving away.

Instead of driving away, the rider stopped in the cabin’s front yard and dismounted. Even over the rain, their boots squelched audibly in the mud as they walked towards the building, helmeted head scanning back and forth.

Althea took a deep breath and sprinted to the stage with the pillory on top of it. The stage was a lot shorter than the fence and she had to go down on her knees to hide behind it, but she wanted to put the house between herself and the rider if they came looking for her. Maybe then, she could make her way around to the path and make a run for it.

“Althea! Althea, are you out here?”

Hearing her name made Althea’s breath catch again. She’d been hoping that this might be some brief, random encounter.

“Althea!”

A note in the rider’s voice gave Althea pause. Carefully raising her head above the edge of the wooden platform to get a better look at the other person.

Yellow raincoat, motorcycle helmet, blue jeans, boots ... Althea’s eyes cataloged details of the rider quickly before she ducked down again. Only after she was hidden again did she start to synthesize a more complete picture. The rider was small ... maybe a child, maybe a petite woman. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the shape of what she’d just seen. Was the rider a woman? She thought she remembered female curves, but couldn’t be sure if she’d imagined them.

“Althea!”

That time, she was almost certain it had been a woman’s voice. Althea rose slowly and, seeing that the rider was looking away, bolted to the side of the house so that she could approach while still mostly unseen.

Before Althea could make a decision, the rider started up her vehicle again. Althea could now see that it wasn’t a motorcycle but some sort of four-wheeled contraption, low to the ground and with high, wide tires that looked like they were meant for riding through mud.

Feeling foolish, Althea stepped out from behind the house. “Hello?”

The engine cut off and the rider leaned forward. “Althea?”

“Yeah ... You’re looking for me?” Althea asked.

The engine cut off again and the rider dismounted. Up close, she looked like she couldn’t be much more than five feet tall as she gestured Althea forward. “Come on. Let’s get inside.”

Althea followed feeling chagrined and cataloging her own appearance as she walked. Not knowing what her role would be in today’s meeting with Nick, she’d dressed professionally, but with a not-workplace-inappropriate amount of decolletage showing. Her tan suit and cream-colored blouse were now soaked through and clinging to her body - thick, dark, and complex enough to cover what needed to be covered, but too bedraggled to be professional. There was mud most of the way up her legs. Her hose were definitely ruined and the entire outfit would probably never be wearable again.

The rider climbed up onto the back porch of the house, extracted what looked like a hotel key-card from somewhere inside her slicker, and pressed the card to a reader next to the door. An indicator light lit up green. She opened the door and again gestured Althea forward.

As Althea stepped inside, the rider took off her helmet. “Are you all right? You’re not injured, are you?”

“I’m not injured,” Althea answered slowly, unable to keep from staring. The young woman in front of her was exquisitely beautiful - caramel skin, high cheekbones, long black hair. Even with her hair askew from the helmet and wet from the rain, she was striking. Althea found herself asking. “Who are you?”

The rider extended a hand. “Sarita Bhatt-Blackstone. I’m Nick’s fiancee.”

Althea shook the proffered hand. “Oh ... why were you looking for me?”

“Nick’s team got a call that you might be in trouble. We knew you couldn’t be far away, so everybody went out to try to find you as quickly as possible. We were hoping it was nothing, but wanted to address the situation as quickly as possible. There are a lot of ways to get hurt out here if you’re not careful.” Sarita was already walking further into the house as she spoke and added from somewhere further inside. “Feel free to claim one of the bedrooms if you want some privacy to get out of those wet clothes. There should be towels in every bathroom and I’ll grab you a robe as soon as I find ... ah, here they are!”

Althea followed Sarita into the house. As she emerged from the short front hallway, the sight of Sarita’s muddy boot prints crossing one corner of the next room made her pause long enough to kick off her own muddy trainers.

Sarita emerged from a doorway catty-corner to where Althea was standing, a folded white terrycloth robe in her arms. Seeing Althea standing there unmoving, she asked, “Are you okay?”

Althea had been thinking hard and shook her head to focus. “I’m ... yeah. How did you say you knew I needed rescuing?”

Sarita handed her the robe. “All I know is that someone called and thought you were in trouble. Let me call in and I can tell you more.”

“Sure.” Althea looked down at the robe, not sure she wanted to get undressed just yet. Her initial fear of an unknown rider in the middle of nowhere had passed, but she shouldn’t assume this situation was entirely safe and innocent. She was still out here with no guarantee of safe passage.

Still, she went into one of the bedrooms and laid the robe across the cozy-looking quilt that covered the bed in there and had just emerged from the en suite bathroom with a pile of towels when Sarita poked her head in. “They say someone named Julie Wainwright called to say you might be in trouble.”

“Oh God, Julie.” Althea dropped the towels on the bed and ran a hand through her soaked hair. “I was on the phone with her when the storm started up in earnest. I got ... hit with a ton of water all at once and dropped my phone. She must be totally freaked out. Do you ... have a phone I can use? Mine broke when I dropped it.”

“There’s a landline next to the bed, but you should really get out of those clothes first. You can get sick from standing around soaked to the skin even in this climate and someone from Nick’s team will call her back, I’m sure,” said Sarita.

Althea looked longingly at the old-fashioned looking black phone on the bedside table, but now that Sarita mentioned it, she became aware of how cold she was right now. She nodded, “Yeah, all right.”

“You can get a shower if you like. I’m going to see if there’s any tea in this place. I can make you a cup if you like,” said Sarita.

“Uh, tea sounds nice. Thank you.” Before she could change her mind, Althea started to undress. She could hear Sarita moving around elsewhere in the house. Once she had the robe on and a towel wrapped around her hair, she emerged into the living room where Sarita was sitting on one of the couches with two cups of tea on a tray in front of her on the coffee table.

Althea sat on the other couch and picked up one of the cups of tea. “Can I ask you something?”

Sarita sipped her own tea. “Sure.”

Althea decided to start with one of the easier questions. “If you didn’t know where I was, how did you know to bring a key for this particular house?”

Sarita smiled over the rim of her cup. “I didn’t. All of the buildings up here use electronic keycards and they’re controlled from...” She gestured with one hand. “ ... somewhere. I should probably learn the specifics of how Nick’s team does its magic now that it’s going to be our team, but I just know that they basically know what I’m going to need before I do. I assume that once I was taking part in search and rescue, someone made sure my key would open any of the doors it might need to open out here. I didn’t really think about it.”

Althea nodded thoughtfully. “You said you were Nick’s fiancee?”

“Yeah, I’d appreciate if you didn’t spread that too widely. We’ve been planning that for a while, but the last pieces only just fell into place very recently. You’re kind of the first person I’ve told. We haven’t even picked out rings yet,” said Sarita.

Althea couldn’t help but feel like the answers she was getting were just raising more questions about this place and the people in it, but she decided to press on to the elephant that was, if not in the room, at least in the backyard. “Can I ask why there’s a pillory out back?”

Sarita froze for a moment, head lowered to sip her tea. A faint blush crept over her cheeks. “Are you sure you want me to answer that?”

“I kinda really do,” Althea insisted.

Sarita sighed and put her mug of tea down. “Okay. So, this is a party house.” She frowned. “Let me back up a step. Do you know anything about Nick, Fisher Island, and the Caldera?”

“I was on Fisher Island once before to help set up the teaching hospital. And I’ve heard stories about the Caldera, but I didn’t want to believe them,” said Althea.

Sarita sat back and looked at her. “I should be better at talking about this kind of thing. I’ve known Nick for years. In a broad sense, I’ve lived with Nick for almost five years, but there’s still stuff...” She raised a hand to stop herself. “Okay, here’s the short version. The Caldera is where Nick and his friends live and play. Normally, there’s nobody up here who doesn’t know that, but I understand that you had to come here because of some emergency that couldn’t wait. Still, you don’t belong here. Most people stay in Covenant Bay.”

Althea put her own mug down. “This isn’t exactly reassuring me.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I almost never come up here myself, but we...” Again, she waved off her own words. “Anyway, the Caldera is outside of the Covenant Zone, which means that the standard rules of law and protection and stuff that get enforced down by the Bay don’t apply. Most people who come here sign a contract with Nick that offers them certain protections and rights, but it depends on what they’re here for. There’s a regular contract for people who stay in or near the main house - just a promise that Nick’s team tries to keep things from getting violent or too weird really, but out here, these are the party houses. The people that come out here are either in Nick’s inner circle or they’re here to party with Nick’s inner circle. The contract for coming out here is really short. It basically says that Nick’s team will do their best to keep you alive, but beyond that, it’s all unwritten agreements. And when someone has a problem after the fact, Nick is the final arbiter of right and wrong.”

Althea was both fascinated and horrified. “So, if he decides you’re wrong, you go into the pillory?”

Sarita laughed and covered her mouth for a moment. “Oh, no! I mean, I guess he could if he wanted to, but ... that’s not really his style. No, the pillory is there because at some point somebody wanted to be put in a pillory.”

“Why ... would...” Althea started to ask, drawing out the words as she tried to decide if she wanted an answer.

Sarita raised her hand a third time. “The kind of parties that happen out here almost always have a sexual component to them. I’ve never been to one at this house, but I assume the pillory is there because someone specifically wants to be put in the pillory ... during a sex party.”

“Oh. Uh ... wow,” Althea managed to answer before words evaded her entirely.

It was much later that night and she was still at the party house when Althea finally got to talk to Julie again. Her cell phone was buried in a bowl of uncooked rice in the kitchen, but she doubted it would ever come to life again. With the death of that phone, she’d come to realize that she didn’t know Julie’s phone number. She eventually thought to try calling Information even though she suspected she would only get her friend’s landline at home - if Julie even had one.

She’d been surprised to find that Jayanesia’s information service did have people’s cell phone numbers, but like many services that gave out personal data, it was opt-in only and, like a good Jayanesian, Julie had kept her number unlisted. Instead of giving Althea Julie’s number, information had asked her for a callback number and sent Julie a message asking her to call that number.

Hours later, the phone finally rang. Althea picked up immediately, “Hello.”

“So, I hear you’ve had a little adventure today,” said Julie.

Althea laughed. “You have no idea. I’m sorry if I freaked you out.”

“Don’t sweat it. I’m just glad you’re okay and not ... You’re not somebody’s sex slave yet, are you?” Julie asked.

“Don’t even joke. This place is weird as fuck!” Althea exclaimed.

“Do tell. I was looking up what I could find out about it, but I don’t know what to believe,” said Julie.

“There’s a pillory in the backyard of the house where I’m staying tonight,” said Althea.

“You mean like one of those things pilgrims stick their heads and hands through and then paddle each other’s asses?” Julie asked.

Althea let out a short bark of laughter. Julie’s understanding of American history was spotty at the best of times. “Yes, but I’ve been promised that Nick doesn’t actually use it to punish people. It’s just for sex parties.”

“No way. Does it have like a padded bench for your knees?” Julie asked.

“I didn’t have time to check. I was running for my life when I saw it. I thought there was some like grizzled old hunter or something chasing me,” said Althea.

“Okay, I think this is the part where you have to start at the beginning and tell me everything,” said Julie. Before Althea could gather her thoughts, she added, “By the way, you’re out of wine.”

“I have two full bottles of white in the cabinet over the fridge,” said Althea.

“Let me rephrase that. By the time you get back, you’re going to be out of wine. And also, your devil cat wants to say hello. Should I put him on the phone?” Julie asked.

“Give him this number. He can call me himself later,” deadpanned Althea. “Do you want me to tell you about my adventures on sex party island?”

“Are you allowed to? They won’t throw you in the pillory for telling me?” Julie teased.

“They could just throw me in the pillory because they want to,” Althea pointed out.

“Still no contract?” Julie asked.

“No, they actually brought me a contract a little while ago, but I’m still up in the Caldera where Nick Coyle’s word is law,” Althea answered. She surprised herself with how flip she was being about the whole situation, but it didn’t seem like there was anything to be gained by freaking out. She started by explaining her purpose for coming out this morning.

Julie already knew about the lockdown. It had become a major topic in the news and the general consensus was that Jayanesia was probably overreacting. Julie didn’t offer her own opinion and Althea didn’t dwell on the topic, instead focusing on the narrative. It wasn’t long before Julie interrupted her. “Wait, you actually met Nick Coyle?”

Althea was confused. “Yeah, it’s not the first time I’ve met him. You know I worked on the teaching hospital out here years ago, right?”

“But, you met him in person? Not just via Zoom or something?” Julie persisted.

Althea ran her hand through her finally-dry hair. “Yeah, this isn’t the first time I met him in person either. I met him at a party during the hospital job.”

“And you never thought to mention it until now?” Julie demanded.

“I just ... It wasn’t...” Althea paused and took a breath. “Actually, I kind of embarrassed myself the last time I met him, but if I start telling that story, we’re never going to get to what happened today.”

“I will allow you to put a pin in that story, but you’ve got to tell it to me once you get back,” said Julie.

Althea hadn’t particularly wanted to tell Julie that story in the past - partly because she was embarrassed for having fled the beach instead of just politely declining Kiki’s pass and partly because Julie was not only openly bisexual, but seemed puzzled every time she remembered Althea wasn’t. While the Hader administration back in America was openly talking about making such things illegal again, Jayanesians took the idea of girls kissing other girls so much in stride that they didn’t even call it bisexuality. In Jayanesian English, bisexuals were people who continued to have serious relationships with both sexes well into adulthood and that was No Big Deal. Still, she said, “I will. I promise.”

From there, she managed to tell Julie the whole story with limited interruptions. The only thing she left out was Sarita’s announcement of being Nick’s fiancee because she’d been explicitly asked not to share that detail too widely. Instead, she referred to Sarita as Nick’s girlfriend leading to a brief discussion of how many girlfriends Nick Coyle seemed to have. In addition to Althea’s overnight bag, the security guard had brought a laptop for her use and she’d been using it to better understand her predicament. A Google image search for “Nick Coyle’s girlfriend” had shown multiple women. Most of the top hits were on Nick’s distant cousin Pilar Rodriguez-Stone followed closely by a tall, busty Australian blonde named Emily King. Next was Kiki. Even with safe search on, there seemed to be dozens of pictures of Emily and Kiki together in various states of undress as part of some ad campaign for lingerie.

On a hunch, Althea had done an image search just on Nick next and quickly found pictures of him with dozens of different women on his arm at different times. She even found an article on a smarmy gossip site with the headline, “Nick Coyle Sure Has A Lot of Girlfriends.”

At that point, Julie completely derailed the story by saying, “You know, you and Emily King look like you could be sisters.”

Althea laughed. “I don’t remember anyone who looked that good back home.”

“She probably doesn’t look half that good in person,” Julie opined. After a pause, she added, “I bet you could be one of Nick’s girlfriends if you wanted.”

“Ugh, pass,” said Althea immediately.

“Oh, yeah. Young, handsome billionaire. Gross,” said Julie.

“Young, handsome billionaire with A Lot of Girlfriends who puts girls in a pillory at his sex parties,” said Althea firmly. “Hard pass.”

“We don’t know he does that himself. Maybe he’s just a really good host,” offered Julie.

“He’s a sexual deviant is what he is. Would you ever want to be a part of something like that?” Althea asked rhetorically.

“I don’t know. You still haven’t told me if there’s a padded bench or not,” said Julie.

Althea laughed hard at that one, but managed to stay on the point conversationally, “I didn’t mean the pillory. I know that some people get off on that kind of thing. I meant the idea of being like one of a hundred women this guy’s with?”

Julie paused long enough for Althea to realize she wasn’t about to hear the answer she’d expected. “I think that would depend on what he expected from me and what I was getting out of it. Nice hookup in a posh hotel with room service in the morning? Why not?”

Althea bit back her first reaction to that answer. Growing up in rural Tennessee with a mother who practically lived inside a Haderite church had taught her a very specific word for girls who had casual sex with no expectation of marriage and it had taken her years to cut the chain that hung it around her own neck. She damned well wasn’t going to hang that burden on anyone else. Still, she said, “I don’t think I could do that. I might think about it, but I’m not like you, Julie.”

“Right, you’re American. Missionary position with your husband and only for the purpose of procreation,” Julie teased.

“That’s not...” Althea started to protest before she found herself laughing again. “Even my family was never quite that bad.”

The conversation wound down from there. Julie had drunk enough that she started to trail off in the middle of sentences and Althea had an early morning planned for the next day. Even if she hadn’t, the events of the day caught up with her and she found herself fighting off yawn after yawn.

As she lay in bed waiting for sleep to take her, Althea took a guilty moment within the safe confines of her own imagination to imagine what it would be like to kneel on a padded bench with her head and hands held firm in a wooden pillory and let someone like Nick Coyle do whatever he wanted to her.

She was relieved to find that the thought still frightened her more than anything even if it didn’t terrify her as much as she’d grown up believing it ought to.

“Your ride is here, Miss.”

“Yui, I have to go. My ride to my next meeting is here.” Althea said into her new phone and glanced at the battery indicator. She’d been talking all morning and it was still at 82%. U’ilani had delivered the phone to her first thing in the morning along with an “overnight guest care package” that Althea had barely had a chance to glance through.

The lockdown was going into full-swing and the epidemic response was going at full steam. Althea’s hand-picked assistants had already been at their desks for a while when she called just before 8 AM. With the ports closing soon, every minute could make the difference between getting and not getting lifesaving supplies. With any luck, this epidemic wouldn’t be too serious, but no one wanted to rely on luck when a bad decision could literally be the difference between life and death.

The only reason she got off the call for the ride to her meeting with Nick was so that she could have all her numbers ready for when the billionaire started asking her questions. And the main reason she felt justified in doing so was because SSCS was on the job.

The concierge service was eerie, terrifyingly competent. In many cases, Althea told them she needed something and they told her how soon it would be there. Where they couldn’t get items immediately, they spelled out options for getting those items in the future. In most cases, the prices were aggressively reasonable. Reina had taken the initiative of finding a shipper out of Hawaii that would agree to deliver to Jayanesia City during the lockdown as long as they could be authorized to do so.

It started to feel like Althea could say, “Just supply us with everything we need to respond to this epidemic,” and it would be done. Reina had brought in a subject matter expert far more experienced with this sort of thing than Althea herself and that had been invaluable, but mostly because it allowed her to focus on learning the specific needs of the here-and-now and communicating those needs to her subcontractors.

By the time she stepped outside, she’d received promises for nearly all the highest priority items that could possibly be delivered in the next few days. The only thing she’d come up really short on were ventilators. The Chief of Medicine at Sirona General believed they should have at least a dozen and they currently had exactly two. SSCS had been able to locate three more and were “exploring less traditional channels for more” even now, but the devices were extremely rare and sufficiently difficult to manufacture that no one could promise to make more before this crisis was over.

Carlos, one of Althea’s three personal assistants, was following up every possible lead on Jayanesia to maybe rustle one or more of those elusive devices from one of the country’s many, many strange little nooks and crannies. A man in his early fifties, Carlos was, among other things, a picker. When he wasn’t working, he was traveling from one small community to another all around the islands and quite often, he came into work with some small treasure that had been collecting dust in an attic or garage for decades before he found it and convinced the owner to sell it to him.

Carlos had once pointed to an ambulance parked in front of Sirona General and told Althea that he’d bought it along with two others from a man living in an old aircraft hangar in the interior. The ambulances were older models and appeared to have once belonged to the US military, but they were good enough to be pressed into service when one of Sirona’s shiny new ambulances was in the shop.

If there were any ventilators squirreled away around Jayanesia, Carlos might well be the best possible person to look for them - particularly since he was already criss-crossing the country buying up everything from medical-grade refrigerators to lab coats and sterile cotton swabs that had been bought for some TV show that never got made.

When Carlos heard that Althea was meeting with Nick Coyle, he’d cryptically told her to ask if there had been any leftover supplies at the Coldwater Lab, but refused to give details when she asked what he was talking about.

Thoughts of ventilators and Carlos were pushed to the back of Althea’s mind when she stepped outside and saw what was waiting for her. The little red Italian sports car she’d seen outside Nick’s cabin yesterday sat with the top down and yet another stunningly beautiful woman sitting behind the wheel typing something on her phone. The driver looked up, “Althea?”

“Yeah, are you my ride?” Althea asked even as she made to get in the car.

“Yeah, I’m headed out and Nick asked me if I could pick you up. I hope you don’t mind having the top down? It’s not great back here, but as soon as we hit the main road back to Covenant Bay, it’s way better than air conditioning,” said the woman. When Althea looked uncertain, she added, “I brought an extra scarf you can use.”

Althea still wasn’t sure. She’d never ridden in a convertible before. Still, she hardly felt like she could be picky. “Sure, sounds good.”

The driver reached into a bag at her side and extracted a white silk scarf similar to the one already wrapped around her own head. “I’m Verity, by the way.”

Althea settled in and did her best to imitate the way Verity had her scarf tied. “I guess you work for Nick?”

Verity laughed. “No, not really. I’m his fiancee.”

“You are?” Althea managed to choke out before quickly looking away.

Verity made a smooth k-turn and got them onto the hard-packed road before saying anything. “Sarita mentioned she met you yesterday.”

Althea nodded. “Yeah, she’s the one who found me when I got lost.”

“And she probably blabbed to you that she was Nick’s fiancee too, didn’t she?” Verity asked. To Althea’s wan smile, she laughed. “We’re forming a domestic corporation. It’s this big manifest destiny thing with the Stone family.”

Althea had heard about domestic corporations in her Franchise and Contracts class. A weird artifact that seemed to be one part tribal law and one part libertarian wet dream, domestic corporations were a logical extension of Jayanesia’s contracts-first approach to law. Where many other countries required that all marriages be between one man and one woman and pretty much all of the others insisted they be between only two people, Jayanesian law allowed for any combination of consenting adults. As she understood it, there were fewer than a hundred such “extended families” in Jayanesia and they were largely the province of religious types and extropians, but they did exist.

Verity seemed content to focus on her driving, but Althea felt that a response to such a statement was in order. She finally managed to come up with, “Wow, I guess that’s why you’re in Jayanesia then?”

“I am in Jayanesia because Nick’s here ... and he built me a really pretty house. Nick is here because he owns a great, big freaking island and, like many people who can afford not to, he doesn’t feel like living in America right now,” said Verity. After a minute, she added, “I guess we would have had to come here to set up the DC anyway, but as it is, we live here now.”

“I moved here from Tennessee back in 2017,” said Althea.

Verity smiled. “2017 was a banner year for emigration, wasn’t it?”

Althea had to agree with that. Many people had been shocked to the point of disbelief when Chet Hader won the American presidential election in 2016. He was too retrograde, too extremist, too intolerant. One of Althea’s neighbors in Haven had spelled it out by saying that there were too many things about him that only appealed to “simple-minded, slack-jawed, rapture-awaiting Bible-thumpers.”

Even though she’d put much of it behind her, Althea couldn’t help but be insulted by her neighbor’s characterization of the people she’d grown up with. No one in Althea’s hometown was surprised by Hader’s election. It might be a miracle, but it was a miracle they’d been praying for every day for over a year and one they’d shown up in force on election day to guarantee.