The River of No Return

I hadn’t noticed!”
    “If I’m a happy camper, you’re a conspiracy theorist,” Nick muttered.
    Meg shrugged. “Mind control doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Everything about the Guild is too comfortable, too nice. Like the fact that there actually aren’t any weirdos here, and as you say, weirdos must jump. So where are they?” Meg sucked the last of the Sex on the Beach from her glass with an obnoxious slurp. “Something’s wrong. There has to be a catch.”
    “She’s right.” Leo twirled his panda so he was facing Nick. “The Guild is too perfect, and that guy was way too creepy for your average asocial modern guy. I could feel it. There was something very wrong about him, and about what he was asking.”
    “Feelings!” Nick scowled. “Can we stop talking about feelings? God!”
    “Have it your way.” Leo sounded tired. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”
    “I think you—both of you—are jumping to conclusions. The Guild has been perfectly open, and more than generous with us.”
    “The Guild is rich and powerful,” Leo said, “and it tells us what it wants us to believe.”
    Nick, in his frog, felt chilly. He wasn’t used to arguing. In his world, one either gave opinions or received them. For a long time now, as Marquess of Blackdown and then as the leader of a company of soldiers, he had been at or near the top of every hierarchy. He took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s assume you are right. What are your options? Abandon the Guild?”
    “Why not?”
    “Oh, please. Do you really think you could make it out there alone?”
    Leo closed his eyes and swished his fingers in the water. “The Guild can’t possibly catch every single person who jumps. There must be people out there who don’t belong.”
    Nick laughed scornfully, but neither Meg nor Leo responded. So he put his head back and stared up and out, into the night sky.
    * * *
    They had one more good day, the three of them. Two weeks after the unpleasantness in the infinity pool—unpleasantness to which they never again referred but that hung around them like a cold fog—Meg, Leo, and Nick drove down to Santiago for a couple of days’ vacation from the compound. They roared around the city in one of the Guild’s fleet of BMWs, a yellow convertible. They shopped and ate in restaurants and wore their modern clothes without a hitch. In the evening they celebrated by going dancing.
    Nick and Leo were both propositioned by the same girl in the club, though neither accepted her offer. Leo had left a woman behind him and wasn’t, as he’d told Astride and several other interested Guild women, “ready.” But Nick? Looking into the girl’s slightly smudged, pretty face, he found that he simply didn’t want to. It was as if the rakish young marquess who had rutted his way across the early eighteen hundreds was still back at the terrible white hospital, asleep. Or dead in the dirt of Salamanca.
    Only Meg actually took someone back to her hotel room that night, a fact that kept Nick and Leo up, laughing over a bottle of wine in the hotel bar, until the dawn.
    The next day the adventurers stumbled out into the afternoon sun, looking for something to eat before getting back on the road. They ended up at the Mercado Central, eating shellfish and admiring the 1872 cast-iron market building.
    “Each one of us is older than this place,” Meg said, quaffing her champagne. She was on her third glass.
    Nick shrugged. “We aren’t older than those mountains.”
    “How do you know?” Leo cracked a crab claw, scowling as he tried to dig out the tender flesh with a yellow plastic devil’s fork. “Maybe they were put up last year as a tourist attraction.”
    “Look,” Nick said. He pointed through the crowd that pressed its noisy way past their table. “It’s Alice Gacoki.”
    Meg and Leo swiveled in their seats. The Alderwoman was standing alone, absorbed by the spectacle of a mountainous pile of fish cakes. Then she glanced at her watch and moved along to the next stall.
    Leo pushed back his chair. “Let’s follow her.”
    Meg was on her feet in a second. “Quickly, Nick. She’s short. We’ll lose her in the crowd.”
    “Just why are we doing this?” Nick shoved a last bite of lobster into his mouth, threw a careless wad of pesos onto the table, and caught up with his friends.
    They followed the Alderwoman through the crowd, ducking behind slender cast-iron pillars that couldn’t actually hide them and laughing out