A calm smile softened his face. “I know you do.”
She knew, the same way she knew to find the glass slippers and that nothing in the basement would kill Alex. The same way she knew she couldn’t let Hera into the house.
For each thing she knew, for every new insight she learned about the Storeroom and everything inside it, her father slid a little closer to death.
Evie waited for someone to knock at the door. Someone would. She’d done nothing but answer the door since she got here. Well, that wasn’t true. It only seemed like it. But if she worried about the door and who’d be at it next, she wasn’t worrying about her father. He’d fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence, speculating about what Arthur would be like and when he would return, speaking with an awe-inspiring certainty that it would happen, that it wasn’t just a story.
She left him alone, went to the living room to lie on the sofa, and sobbed into a pillow so she wouldn’t wake him up. Mab came and put her chin on Evie’s leg, gazing at her with sad brown eyes. Evie wondered where she’d come from, if she was another piece of the magic that protected the house and bound her and her father to it. Another magical artifact, emerging when she was needed.
She wondered if Alex would come back. She still couldn’t guess who he was, but she kept returning to the descriptions of the fall of Troy in the Aeneid. He might have been part of Aeneas’s crew, which sailed to Italy and founded Rome. But he’d said the language on the apple was Greek. She’d even found a book on the shelves, a coffee table book with lots of photos and illustrations, and a chart showing the script from the apple: Linear B, the language of Mycenae from around the time of the Trojan War.
Virgil provided a solution to what Evie had always thought was a supreme failure of logic in the story: Why had the Trojans been so eager to bring such a bizarre and suspicious object as the horse into the city? The answer: The Greeks must have left behind a spy to convince the Trojans that the horse would bring them luck. Odysseus, master of the plan of the horse, chose his friend Sinon, a persuasive and credible speaker.
Evie could see them: they must have known that if Sinon failed to tell his story convincingly, the Trojans would kill him along with all those within the horse. It was not just his own life he was offering to sacrifice. He must have known that the lives of all his friends and comrades rested on his words. He would have been honored and flattered that Odysseus had asked him. He would have been afraid. But Odysseus’s hand on his shoulder, his intense gaze, would have made him confident. Odysseus would have given Sinon the bruises and chafed wrists that lent proof to his tale. It was hard, beating his friend, but he would not have given the task to another. For his part, Sinon would have thrown himself into the role. So much depended on it.
At least that was how Evie would write it, if she were telling the story.
While many tales traced the fates of the heroes of the Trojan War, she couldn’t find out what happened to Sinon. Not in any of the stories, not so much as a line from a poem that said he was among the company that traveled home with Odysseus and was caught up in those adventures. She would have expected to find him there, if he had survived the sacking of the city. His name faded from the record. He might even have been a pure invention of Virgil’s, an ultimate example of Greek treachery, a well-wrought piece of propaganda. He could have been killed—but surely the story would have said so.
Or he could have dropped out of history. The gods who backed Troy must have been furious with him. Any one of them could have laid a curse on him. If they were anything like Hera . . . Evie’s skin prickled, thinking of what they could do to him.
Sinon, then. The Liar. Why didn’t that make her feel any better about Alex?
She thought about going to look for him. Hopes Fort wasn’t that big. He might even have been hanging around the house still, watching, as he’d been doing all week. She could go into the yard and yell Sinon and see if he answered. But she didn’t leave the house, because she wanted to stay near in case her father needed her.
She didn’t have to stay and do nothing. She had work. She’d left Tracker in a fix. She pulled her laptop to her and returned to the story.
Tracker, alone on the tundra, hoped she would be able to keep her bearings. She felt right on the edge of losing herself. And if something happened out here, the chances of the others rescuing her were slim.
Now how was she going to get out of this fix? Talon could sweep in and rescue her. It wouldn’t be any more unlikely than a dozen other storylines she’d done. It would return the characters back to the main plot. But this was supposed to be Tracker’s story. This was Tracker’s chance to shine.
She couldn’t spend the whole time wallowing in self-doubt, either. So all Evie had to do was get her to the bunker at the gulag, then see what happened next. Her hands paused over the keys. She looked over the back of the sofa to the kitchen door, waiting for someone to knock.
Her father emerged around suppertime, moving slowly but appearing alert. Evie rushed to help him, and of all the wonders, he let her. She heated up soup for him. He ate half a bowl and a few crackers, and seemed pleased with the accomplishment. They spoke little, commenting on the weather, passing on the gossip from town.
“Did anyone stop by?” he said.
“No.”
He limped back to bed, stopping on the way to scratch Mab’s back. Evie was proud of herself for not asking, yet again, if he needed help, if he was all right. She just had to hope she could get to him in time if he stumbled.
She returned to the sofa in the living room and tried to write. How long could she keep Tracker wandering on the tundra? Because when she reached her destination, Evie would have to figure out how she was going to beat up the bad guys and rescue the prisoner. All by herself.
Both she and her laptop fell asleep after midnight.
In the morning, her mobile phone and the house’s landline rang at the same time. Evie started awake, remembered where she was, and sat frozen while she decided which one to answer first. In the end she answered her mobile, which was closer and didn’t require a mad dash to the kitchen. Then the house phone stopped ringing.
“They’ve done it,” Bruce said as greeting. “They’ve fucking done it.”
Bruce kept harping on about the world, the news, everything, when her own world had shrunk to this house and her father. She ought to care—the world situation was going to hell. Even without watching the news, she could sense the tension in Bruce’s voice. She ought to care. But she only felt tired.
“Who’s done what?”
“Congress voted to back China. Who’d have guessed? Ten years ago, China was the fucking ninth level of hell, and now we’re allies? It’s unreal.”
She winced. “Wasn’t China backing terrorists? The Mongolians? We’re not supposed to be backing a country that backs terrorists.”
“An economic market of a billion and a half consumers can’t be wrong, I guess.”
“You know my mom died in the Seattle bombing.”
“Yeah, I know, Evie.” Background static on the connection filled the pause. “You’re not the only one who feels that way. Protests are going on in Seattle and New York. They’re about to turn them into riots. The National Guard’s being called up.”
“Shit.” The architects of history, the generals and game-players, were at it again.
Another pause. Then, “How are we going to spin this in the book?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know who the bad guys are anymore, Bruce. We could miss the deadline. Delay the publication, see how this is going to play out. Or we could zap the team to another planet and pretend like none of this is happening.”
“I think I’d like to get zapped along with them. Paula isn’t going to be happy.” Paula was their editor, the one responsible for harnessing their creative energy and packaging it into the final product.
Evie gave a huff. “What good is being the creators of the country’s bestselling comic title if we don’t get any
clout? Paula can deal with it.”
“Roger, Captain. You sound like crap, by the way.”
“I fell asleep on the sofa.”
“Right. What was the last thing you wrote before you fell asleep?”
The file was still on-screen, autosaved and everything. She read him back the last few lines. The last few interesting ones, anyway. What she’d produced last night looked abysmal by the light of day.
“Shit,” he said. “Tracker goes rogue. I like it. This could work.”
“It wasn’t really what I intended.”
“Hey, don’t argue. Just run with it.”
“Right.”
“Go take a shower. Get some coffee. Take care of yourself, okay?”
“You, too, Bruce. Hey, Bruce?”
“Yeah?”
“Does it even matter anymore?”
“What do you mean?”
“The comic. Why are we even talking about it? The world’s going to hell, my father’s dying—why am I still sitting down at my laptop?”
She could hear his breathing over the connection. He was tired; he’d been making himself sound cheerfully irate to hide it.
Then he said, “What choice do we have? It’s what we do. Otherwise we’d have to curl up in a ball and go crazy.”
She chuckled. Keep on going. It was all they could do.
“Thanks for calling.”
“I’m just worried about you.”
As she clicked off, her father came into the room, freshly showered, hair still damp, tucking his shirt into his jeans. He grabbed his coat off the chair he’d put it on, like he was actually planning on going somewhere.
“Dad?” She rose and followed him to the kitchen. Mab trotted along with them.
“That was Johnny on the phone. They’ve called up the whole Citizens’ Watch. He’s going to come pick me up.” His car was still out from when he’d collapsed on patrol.
“You can’t go out!” And how dare Johnny give him a ride in his condition.
“Why not?”
“You—you’re sick.” Did she really have to remind him that he’d spent yesterday in bed, doped up on drugs?
“Homeland Security’s instituted a lockdown and curfew. Johnny doesn’t have enough people to patrol. He needs me.”
A security curfew in Hopes Fort was ridiculous—no one ever stayed out late anyway. “Dad—nothing’s going to happen here. Those rules are for places like L.A. and—and Seattle.”
His lips thinned, like he was holding back words, or his temper. She should have said New York, or Chicago, or Atlanta. Anywhere but Seattle. The word was like saying failure.
Then he said, “It’s the principle of the matter, Evie. I have to do my part. I can’t go to L.A. or Seattle to help. So I do what I can here. Even if it isn’t much. Even if it doesn’t mean anything.”
He’d joined the Watch five years ago, right after Emma died. It was how he coped. Evie had the comic; he had this.
She couldn’t say anything to stop him. She’d cornered herself by bringing up Seattle, and gave up her right to continue arguing.
“Dad—I think you should go to the hospital. After yesterday—I could drive you, just to get checked out—”
“What’s the point? They’ll tell me it’s hopeless. That there’s nothing they can do to save me, but they can give me something for the pain, and they’ll pump me full of morphine and leave me in a bed to fade away. I can die on my own, I don’t need their help.” His hand on the doorknob, Mab sitting nearby and looking earnestly up at him, he said, “Watch over the Storeroom.”
Stifled tears tightened her voice. “I don’t care about that.”
“You will.” He scratched Mab’s ears. “Help Evie watch the Storeroom, girl.”
He closed the door behind him. Through the kitchen window, Evie watched him walk to the end of the driveway just as Johnny drove up in his police sedan. She thought her father was still limping. With his hands shoved in his coat pockets, his shoulders stiff against the chill air, it was hard to tell.
Robin Goodfellow crouched in the scrub by a fence post and watched the artist at work. The Curandera stood on the side of the highway running east out of town. The wind tangled her graying black hair; she wore a turquoise-and-silver pendant, which she gripped in her hand.
A person could go east from here, and keep going east for a thousand miles without the scenery changing much: flat winter fields covered in dry, bent stalks; a few fence posts strung with barbed wire; and sky, so much wide-open sky, a person could lose himself, wander in circles, and feel so small, he’d disappear from the universe.
The earth in this part of the world only slept. Long ago, when the mountains that made the spine of the continent were built, fires and earthquakes ravaged the land. People forgot what violence was necessary to create the beauty that decorated the postcards. That had happened so long ago, people had no need to remember. They did not care that the land was not still; it only slept.
The Curandera knelt, rubbed her hands together, then pressed them flat to the dirt. She beat the earth, making a slapping noise that carried. Again, and the slap became a thud. Then a groan that vibrated through the ground. Robin stood nervously, feeling the movement of the earth.
What Hera had said of the woman: for generations, the women of her family had been granted the power to speak to the sky, the sun, and the earth. They could feel its moods, sense waters building in the heavens, bring rain with a prayer, heal the sick, kill with a thought, speak to creatures who were not human. She could feel the veins and muscles of the earth, and the joints that moved it.
The ground lurched.
The earthquake started in earnest, and Robin clung to the fence post like it was a plywood raft put to sea. The Curandera remained on her knees, unwavering. Each time she touched the earth, another tremor racked the land, as if her slight arms were epic jackhammers.
A grumbling crack appeared across the highway. Farther along, another split broke through the asphalt. Grinding, tearing, the road came apart, one section rising while another fell, crevices growing between shattered slabs of pavement.
She raised her arms high, and the earthquake stopped.
Dust settled. Dislodged pebbles clattered and came to rest. A thick silence soon covered the world.
The Curandera knelt in a miniature canyon of her own making. For at least a mile, the road was devastated, pieces lying on top of each other, separated by gaps, like a strip of tile that some madman had taken a hammer to.
Robin leaned gasping against the fence post. “Bravo,” he said at last.
She gazed across the wasted land as calmly as she had before the earthquake. “The highway west of town is the same.”
“So the town’s cut off?”
“Mostly. Some people do still remember how to travel on foot.”
“But no one will be driving for quite some time.”
He approached the Curandera and offered her his arm to escort her back to town. She turned her shoulder to him and walked alone.
Nothing ever happened in Hopes Fort. At least nothing interesting. Evie had ardently believed that her entire childhood. She clung to that belief now. Her father would be fine. Johnny would keep an eye on him and bring him home—or better, to a hospital—the minute he looked ill. Okay, the minute he acted ill. He looked plenty ill already.
She slumped back on the sofa. Her laptop stared at her. All she could do was write. Didn’t seem very useful or heroic. The comic’s production schedule seemed less relevant than ever. But what would she do if she didn’t write? When she was starting out, when she wasn’t sure she was ever going to be able to make a living at it, she used to play that game with herself: What would she do if she failed? Go into advertising? Open a bookstore? She’d thought up a dozen half-assed plans, including marrying a millionaire. Plenty of those hanging around L.A. Dogged persistence won out in the end. But she imagined a dozen alternate time lines, where she led lives that didn’t involve writing.
Exhaustion never entered into Tracker’s consideration of her current situation. It simply wasn’t an option. When the bunker of the gulag finally appeared—a mound in the distance on the flat, frozen waste—she dropped to her knees and crawled, offering as low a profile as she could. She kept her gun in her hand. It was just like Basic all over again. Hell, it was almost fun. If only she knew that Jeeves and Matchlock were all right, and Sarge and Talon. She shouldn’t have had to do this alone.
Their information said the agent would be in the first bunker. The rest of the complex was underground, and had caved in years ago, when the last of the political dissidents were released and turned their frustrations on the structure itself.
She lay flat on the ground for two hours watching the concrete hut. No doors opened; no shapes appeared at any windows. She flexed the muscles of her limbs to keep them from cramping. Annoyed, she thought there should have been someone around: guards, a change in duty shifts, something.
She wasn’t well camouflaged—her dark fatigues were meant for nighttime operations, and the land here was bright, the overcast sky stinging with light, the ground textured with pools of crusted snow and lichen-covered rock. But there didn’t seem to be anyone around for miles. The bunker was still, silent. Quietly, she approached: a few steps and pause, a few more steps, looking in every direction, over her shoulders, up at the sky. She was used to having someone watch her back.
Soon, she crouched under the window of the bunker. Her gun felt clumsy in her gloved hand. Maybe she wouldn’t need it. Slowly, she rose until she could peer over the sill, into the room.
The room was empty.
But a trapdoor in the floor was open.
She closed her eyes and breathed a curse. Either the spy wasn’t here at all—or their information about the complex was wrong, and she wouldn’t be able to just run in and run back out again.
The door was unlocked. She opened it just enough to slip inside, then swept the room, sighting down her gun.
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