by Jon McGoran
We talked as if we’d never been apart—not for the weeks since I’d last seen him, or for the years since we were little kids and I’d known him as Leo Byron. It was unseasonably warm, and after dinner we sat outside, right on Germantown Avenue. A cop car drove by, and Rex watched it, unperturbed. He saw me looking at him, and he smiled.
“Just so you know, I’m no longer a wanted man,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. On top of everything else, Rex had been accused of robbing—had robbed—a deli for money to help me try to get Del’s bad splice fixed.
“Genaro died, so the charges were dropped.” Genaro was the mean and bigoted old owner of the deli.
“What? How did I not know this? He died?”
Rex nodded. “Peacefully. Or at least, in his sleep.” He smiled sadly. “I don’t know if he was ever really at peace. Hopefully he is now.”
“What about ‘flight from arrest’ or whatever? Disappearing from the back of that police car?”
He shrugged. “If I ever get arrested for something else, they might throw that on top. But for all intents and purposes, it’s done.”
I grinned and poked his shoulder. “So I guess the crafty accomplice who helped you escape should have nothing to worry about?”
He laughed. “I will take the secret of my crafty accomplice’s identity to my grave.”
I hadn’t actually been worried about my own arrest, but this was still a relief to hear.
“So…” I paused for a split second before deciding to try again. “Where have you been all this time, then?” I asked. “What have you been doing?”
He’d been smiling playfully almost the whole time we’d been there, but now his smile faltered. “Jimi, I—I can’t say.”
“What do you mean, you can’t say? Says who?”
He slowly shook his head, and lowered his voice even further. “I can’t say that either.”
“So…you can’t tell me where you’re going next, either?”
“No. I’m sorry. I really wish I could. I hope you believe me.” He looked stricken.
“Right.” I wasn’t going to beg or cajole or nag, but I couldn’t resist the slight chill that crept into my attitude.
The rest of that evening was nice, but not as nice as it would have been if his secrets hadn’t been hanging over us.
They still hung over us.
* * *
—
“Have you seen Sly?” I said as we ran through the icy night.
Rex turned to look at me, confused.
I glanced at him and shrugged, then went back to looking where I was going. “I just figured you’ve been gone, he’s been gone, maybe you two had seen each other.”
He turned to look at me in the darkness for so long that he almost stumbled. “I—I’m sorry, Jimi. You don’t know how sorry. I’m just…I’m trying to do my part to help make the world safe for chimeras, and for everyone.” He said it like he was reciting a pledge. “I wish I could tell you more than that, but I can’t.”
“Okay, whatever. It’s fine,” I said. I tried to sound nonchalant but I could feel my face growing hot. I started jogging a tiny bit faster, and Rex had the decency to let me run a few steps ahead, at least until my face felt like maybe it was back to its normal color.
Half a block later, he pulled up next to me. We didn’t speak, and it felt awkward, like we were both trying to achieve the kind of comfortable silence we’d shared in the past.
We rounded a curve, and a few blocks up ahead I saw the light from North Avenue, which separated the zurbs from the city.
Rex turned to me and cocked an eyebrow. I didn’t know what he was getting at, but then he started running faster. I matched his pace, and then he started running faster still. I caught up again, and then he turned, grinning, and took off like a shot. It was an obvious attempt to coax me out of my frustration, and I shook my head, but I also laughed and tore after him. I couldn’t tell if he was running full out, but I was and it felt great.
Ahead of us, the blur of headlights and the whoosh of speeding cars on North Avenue stopped. The crossing light had turned green and the timer was ticking down. We were so far away there was no chance we would make it, but we were running flat out and neither of us slowed. By the time I caught up with him, we were just a few feet from the intersection. The crossing light turned red again and the cars shot forward. We both tried to stop, but Rex’s feet lost traction on the ice and he went into a slide, his momentum propelling him toward the traffic.
For an instant, I thought he was going to die. My heart shot into my throat as I grabbed him under the arms, but I was standing on the ice, too, and his mass took me with him. I dug in my heels and pulled back as hard as I could.
Somehow I managed to stop our forward motion, but with my arms tangled in Rex’s, there was nothing I could do to stop falling, or to stop Rex from landing on top of me. I braced myself for impact, doing my best to keep my head from cracking against the icy concrete.
I hit the ground hard, flat on my back, then Rex hit me even harder, smooshing the air out of my lungs. I struggled to regain my breath, and as he scrambled off me, I took a big gulp of air.
“Jimi!” he said, crawling over, and bracing his arms on either side of me. “Are you okay?” Cars were speeding past, inches from where we lay.
I took another gulp of air, trying to breathe and trying not to laugh.
He looked confused at my expression, until I managed to say, “Caught…between a Rex…and a hard place.” Then the laughter won out, which really didn’t help with the whole breathing thing.
Rex’s head sagged and he groaned with a crooked smile. “I guess you’re okay, then.”
I held up my hand and teetered it back and forth.
“Thanks for the save,” he said, tipping his head at the traffic that he had almost fallen under.
“I owed you one,” I said.
Our smiles faded as we looked into each other’s eyes, suddenly very serious.
We hadn’t really had a proper “hello” since he returned. So, as the torrent of cars roared past us, I put my arm around his neck and pulled myself up to him, put my lips against his, and said hello. Properly.
A few of the vehicles honked at us, but they were moving so fast their horns were more like blips than blasts. I didn’t care. Rex didn’t either. Between us, in our little bubble, there was both absolute calm and absolute electricity.
I don’t know how long we stayed there like that, but by the time we parted, the crossing light was green again.
Rex rose to his feet and lifted me to mine. I laughed and started running again, across the avenue. Rex laughed, too, as he ran after me, but I didn’t look back and he didn’t catch up until we reached the Levline station.
When I turned and plopped down on the cold steel steps, he was still twenty feet behind me, his face contorted with the effort of not grinning. He slowed for the last few steps, white clouds of condensation billowing with each breath, then he sat down on the steps next to me.
I leaned against him and put my arm around him.
“I’ve missed you, Jimi Corcoran,” he said.
“I’ve missed you, too,” I told him.
A high-pitched whine descended out of the black sky, and without a word we scurried up the steps to the platform as the Lev train pulled in.
It was late enough that fewer than a dozen people were in our car, most of them in their own little worlds. But with a dozen people, you were almost guaranteed to have a couple of jerks, and as we took our seats, I spotted them, directly across from us. One had tinted contacts and the other a patchy beard, both sneering and making a show of staring at us.
I looked away from them.
Across from me was a poster for a band called Menagerie. Their lead singer was a chimera with a snow leopard splice. They had a big hit with a song called “Earth for Everyone.”
The music was a bit too pop for my tastes, and some people thought the band was just cashing
in, but it had a catchy beat and a good message, and it was encouraging to see a major label getting behind a chimera band. It was less encouraging to see that someone had scratched out the lead singer’s eyes and drawn an arrow going through her head, and someone else had written MIXIE MUSIC SUCKS across the rest of the group.
I looked out the window, instead, at the darkened buildings and lighted streets whizzing past. Rising above them a few blocks away, lit from below and gleaming in the night sky, was a huge golden cross with a garish H4H emblem at the center, taking up nearly half of it. My heart sank a little. The whole city had been talking about it, but this was the first time I’d seen it in person since it was erected on top of the Church of the Eternal Truth, otherwise known as H4H Central.
The church was already pretty unpopular among a lot of people who opposed their anti-chimera rhetoric. Now they were offending even more people in the mainstream religious community. Several denominations had spoken out against the way Eternal Truth twisted the Bible to suit the H4H agenda, but they were aghast at the giant H4H logo that now sat on top of the church, at least as prominent as the cross it was incorporated into.
But not everyone was unhappy with them. Since GHA passed, Eternal Truth had been bringing in money by the truckload. Enough to pay for the cross, as well as a huge addition to their building, a bigger and brighter sign out front, and anti-chimera Holovid commercials and billboards around the city.
The Genetic Heritage Act may have been partially blocked, but the people who supported it had revealed themselves. And there were a lot of them.
It seemed to me that the people who thought these H4Hers were ignorant bigots needed to show themselves, too. To stand up and be counted instead of quietly shaking their heads in disgust.
Reflected in the window I could see the two jerks still staring at me and Rex. I turned and stared back at them. Then I pulled Rex’s head around, raised myself up off my seat, and put a wet kiss right on his lips.
Rex looked down at me, half smiling, half annoyed. He knew I had done it at least partially to aggravate the pair across from us. He didn’t usually approve of provoking people like that, even obvious jerks. But I think the fact that it was in the form of a kiss helped.
The jerks looked away from us for the remaining few minutes of the trip. We got off back in Silver Garden, and hoofed it up the same hill I’d climbed less than two hours earlier.
The light over the sign in front of New Ground went out just as we got there. I ran up and found the door locked. I banged on it, hard.
“Easy,” Rex said, coming up beside me. “Don’t break it in.”
After a brief moment of keys scratching the other side of the door, it was yanked open, replaced by Jerry’s red face.
“What?” he demanded. “You almost gave me a heart attack banging like that.”
“Doc’s been arrested. He needs a lawyer,” I said.
Jerry’s shoulder’s slumped. “What now?”
“It’s serious,” Rex said. “It’s murder.”
CHAPTER 6
Rex and I sat with Jerry in the back office while he called a series of people at Earth for Everyone. The E4E staff was transferring him to this person and that, trying to figure out which lawyer could take the case. Not surprisingly, the legal fight over GHA was taking up a lot of their attorneys’ time. Finding someone who was free was going to be difficult.
At one point, someone put him on hold for what seemed like twenty minutes. In the lull, something that Doc had said came back to me. Jerry seemed to sense it. Maybe he saw a strange look on my face. He turned to me. “What is it?”
“You told me Claudia Bembry got her splice fixed.”
“Who’s Claudia Bembry?”
“The girl who was here after the riots last fall, when we brought Ryan.”
“Oh. Yeah. So?”
“You told me she got her splice fixed.”
“And?”
“She didn’t.”
“Huh. I thought she did. She seemed okay. She even fixed my espresso system.”
“Doc said he tried to help her but he couldn’t and then her parents came and got her.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
“Look, kid, there was a lot going on those days, including Ryan dying in my office and you guys heading out to Pitman. Sorry if my health updates on someone I barely met weren’t up to your standards of accuracy. All I know is, Doc treated her, and when I got back from Pitman, her parents had already come and gotten her. Oh wait, I do know one other thing: you’re a pain in my ass.”
Rex was looking anywhere but at me this whole time, mostly at his shoes or the ceiling. I don’t think Jerry was done with me, but at that point, mercifully, someone picked up on the line.
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “I’m waiting to be connected to a Marcella DeWitt….Oh, hello, Ms. DeWitt, I’m very sorry to have woken you….That’s right, this is about Hector Guzman.”
I could tell from what Jerry was saying that she was trying to deflect like all the others—this wasn’t her specialty, she was too busy working on the GHA stuff in addition to her regular job. Maybe it was because she was groggy or maybe because Jerry was just getting good at his spiel, but I could tell based on his end of the conversation that she’d relented and would be going to the police station first thing in the morning.
I checked my watch, figuring it must be close to midnight, and was stunned to see it was barely ten o’clock. DeWitt had the right idea. I yawned, wide and long, and drew looks from both Rex and Jerry that seemed oddly appreciative, like they were impressed by the magnitude.
“Sorry,” I said.
Almost immediately Rex and Jerry were fighting off yawns of their own.
“All right,” Jerry said, exhaling loudly. “There’s nothing more we can do tonight, but DeWitt’s going to want to talk to the two of you tomorrow, since you were there when Doc was arrested. For now, you need to get the hell out of here so I can finish closing up.”
We were quiet walking back to the Levline, and after we got on the train, too. There were only three other people in the car with us, and none of them were H4H jerks.
“Where are you staying?” I asked Rex after a couple of stops.
“Near Doc’s place. Jerry set me up.” He reached over and took my hand in his. It was massive, but it felt just right.
“Then why are you coming all the way out here? You’re going to have to get right back on the train and double back.”
He shrugged. “It’s late. You’re alone.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Okay. Well…it’s been a while since I’ve seen you, and I want to spend more time with you.”
I reached over and patted his knee. “See? Now that’s a good reason.”
I slid a little closer and leaned my head against his shoulder. We’d be at Oakton in just a few minutes, but I closed my eyes anyway, enjoying the feeling of Rex by my side. As I did, though, a flood of images from the previous few hours washed over me.
“Did you know about Claudia?” I asked suddenly.
“What, that she was still a chimera?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I never met her, so if I heard anything, I probably wouldn’t have thought about it.”
“Right.” I felt bad having gotten on Jerry’s case about it, but it was upsetting. I’d seen how badly Claudia had wanted to get her splice fixed, and all this time I thought she had, and that she had gone back to her old life, the one that she’d been so afraid of losing. I thought she was happy.
I allowed myself a slight smile. At least she wasn’t still with her idiot ex-boyfriend, Kurtz. I wondered what she could possibly have seen in him in the first place.
I thought back to when I first met Claudia, just hours after she’d been spliced—scared and alone, wandering through the city looking for Doc Guzman just as all those morons were out there rioting, threatening chimeras. But she was a rock. She was upset, su
re, but she kept it together even when it looked like getting her splice fixed was hopeless—which, as it turns out, it was. And she didn’t miss a beat when we found Ryan, bleeding and dying, or when we had to carry him back to the coffee shop.
The girl had an inner strength. I felt reassured by it. Claudia would be okay no matter what. I just wished her life had been more like what she hoped it would be.
As the train slowed to a stop at Oakton, we got to our feet. Rex put his arm around my shoulder, holding me close. We walked down the steps to street level, then walked along the sidewalk, under the tracks, to the steps on the other side.
I started up, but Rex didn’t seem like he wanted to.
“Aren’t you going back?” I said.
“I’ll walk you home first.”
“It’s just a few blocks,” I said, reaching up to touch his face. “I’ll be fine, and you’ve got to go all the way back.”
“But—”
“Besides,” I said, biting back a smile, “you had a long day, coming back from…where was it again?”
He started to hedge, then he realized that this time I was messing with him. He started to laugh. His eyes sparkled.
I laughed, too. “I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
He stifled another yawn. “Yeah, okay.”
A far-off whine announced the approach of the Lev train coming the other way.
“Well, thanks for a memorable evening,” I said.
“You, too.” He came in for a kiss, and lingered with it, long enough that I was worried the train would arrive and leave without him. We parted as the train pulled up to the platform above.
Rex added one last kiss and said, “See you tomorrow.” Then he dashed up the steps, each footfall sending a wispy cloud of ice particles cascading from the steps.
Then the train pulled away, and I was alone.
CHAPTER 7
It was late and it was cold and I was just a few blocks from home, but suddenly I felt creeped out. Again. And it wasn’t because I was alone, it was because I felt like I wasn’t. Just like earlier, when I felt as if I was being watched. I knew it was ridiculous, but I still couldn’t shake it.