I sat there stunned. Ari turned and started to walk away.
“Wait!” I got up and hurried after him. “I’m sorry. I misread that totally. I thought it was just—well—controlling behavior.”
He considered this with a complete lack of expression. When I put my hands flat on his chest, he forced out a twisted smile.
“Do you know what’s wrong with you?” he said. “You don’t know how to trust someone.”
“Say what? I’m trusting you with my life, aren’t I?”
“Are you? Physically, yes. You know perfectly well that if someone tried to harm you, I’d stop them or die trying. That’s not what I mean.”
“Let me guess. I bet this is leading up to, if I really trusted you, I’d marry you and give you my whole life.”
“Exactly.” His smile turned genuine. “You do see it, then.”
“Oh, go do your damned push-ups!”
He muttered a laugh and left the room. I snarled at his retreating back.
Around noon LaDonna and Itzak appeared at our front door, a perfect distraction. Itzak carried in a couple of steel tackle boxes containing, he said, not fishing gear but tools, materials, and diagnostic devices. For hours that afternoon the three of them did various elaborate and arcane things to and with electronics, while I sat in an armchair in the living room and read books the old-fashioned way: by sunlight. One project I did understand. Itzak put a lock on the gun drawer in the file cabinet at the head of the stairs. He installed a digital gadget keyed to Ari’s fingerprints.
“No one else can grab the gun and turn it on Ari, huh?” I said. “Not unless they had a blowtorch or chisel or some such thing.”
“Before they got it open that way,” Itzak said with a sunny smile, “Ari would have killed them. I could put your print on the pad, too. It’ll take multiple IDs.”
“No, thanks. I have my own weapons access points.”
“I’m so glad you and Ari found each other. You’d both be hell for anyone else.”
I had to laugh at that, mostly because it was true.
“Ari’s insisting on putting detectors on the roof,” Itzak continued. “Pray for us.”
He squared his shoulders like a soldier going to battle and stalked off toward the back of the flat. I heard him speak to LaDonna as he passed her in the hall. She strode into the living room and flopped down on the couch.
“I am not going up on the roof with those two idiots,” she announced.
“You strike me as a wise and sensible person.” I closed my book. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something, anyway. Do you know if Seymour ever looked at the vision I sent him? I’m kind of wondering what he made of it.”
“He’s on vacation as far as I know.”
“Vacation? Since when do we get vacations?”
“When you work in the home office, you do. Maybe you should transfer over.”
“DC’s not my kind of town.” I shuddered at the very thought. “Do you know when Seymour’s coming back?”
“Soon, I think. But you could try his assistant. I-C’s his handle. He’s been trying to find an astrophysicist we can trust to look over your data.”
“Astrophysicist?”
“Look, I’m no physicist, just a math head. I do understand parallel world theoretics, but that’s because it’s been my hobby since high school. I won my first science fair with a project on the subject.” She smiled at the memory. “Anyway, thanks to your brother, it’s part of my job now. But that’s my limit. Mr. Spock the all-knowing scientist only exists on TV.”
“That’s true. I guess you don’t have a tricorder.”
She laughed, and I grinned.
“I did read over your report on that vision,” LaDonna went on. “Seriously horrible, but all I can say is the multicolored spray must have been some kind of radiation from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. And you knew that already, I bet.”
“Yeah, even I could figure that much out.”
I was going to continue our discussion, but from overhead came footsteps and the sound of hammering. We both looked up as if we could see through the ceiling. The thumping continued, punctuated now and then by muffled voices.
“I’m not having any premonitions of impending deaths.” I spoke quite loudly.
“Good.” LaDonna spoke the same way. “I was about to ask.”
When my landline phone rang, I answered it. Mr. Singh, the realtor, said hello.
“Let me guess,” I said, bellowing. “The neighbors want to know what Ari’s doing on the roof.”
“That is precisely it,” Mr. Singh bellowed in return. “They are worried because he appears to be wearing a firearm on his chest.”
“That’s called a shoulder holster. He’s not going to shoot anything. He’s just fixing our security system.”
“Ah.” Mr. Singh paused and sighed. “Very well. I shall tell them.”
We hung up. Eventually the noises stopped, and the members of my private Geek Patrol returned to the living room. Itzak sat next to LaDonna on the couch, and Ari took the other armchair.
“All right,” Itzak said. “Someone’s directing an odd kind of energy at these flats. That much I know.”
“You don’t have any idea what it is?” I said.
“No, but it doesn’t much matter. I’ve identified the multiple frequencies they’re using, so I can block them, and that’ll work for now. I’ve set it up in the system records as Q—Ari’s suggestion, Q for query, because we don’t know what it is. LaDonna told me earlier that your employer’s research arm will take the problem from there. The real question is who’s sending it and why, but I’ve been told I shouldn’t ask that.”
“That’s right.” I softened the words with a smile. “Don’t ask it. Forget you ever knew about it, even.”
“It’s probably Ari’s fault, whatever it is.”
“Always,” Ari said. “My enemies are everywhere.”
We all laughed, even Ari.
“How long will you be staying in town?” I asked LaDonna.
“I have to go back tomorrow,” she said. “Tzaki took the day off, and he’s driving me to the airport. He’ll see me off.”
“Reluctantly,” Itzak said. “But I’ve been promised that I’ll get e-mail.”
“About Fred’s old job, of course,” LaDonna said.
They shared a smile. The smile and the way she’d used his nickname gave LaDonna away. She had a little more than recruitment on her mind, but then, so did Itzak. How often does one hypergeek find another, after all, that magic someone who can actually understand what they’re talking about? Race and religion present big problems for normal people, but hypergeeks know one another when they meet, and that kind of love conquers—well, not all, but an awful lot.
As they were leaving, I had a chance at a private word with LaDonna while Ari and Itzak were teasing each other about some incident in their shared past.
“Thanks for the help,” I said, “and e-mail me if I-C tells you anything interesting.”
“I will for sure. That energy beam’s pure Qi, not that I could tell Tzaki that.”
“Not yet, anyway.”
We giggled.
Ari and I spent a quiet Sunday evening, or at least, I did. He put in a couple of hours of push-ups and other forms of self-torture. We went to bed early, and a good thing, too. On Monday morning, my cell phone chimed and woke me at 6:15, an hour that signaled bad news. I grabbed the phone from the nightstand and mumbled a hello.
“Nola? Thank God I reached you.”
The panic in Al Wong’s familiar voice brought my mind online fast.
“Al? What’s happened?”
“Sean’s disappeared and Michael with him. Eileen just phoned me to let me know they never came back last night. She’s damn near hysterical. So’s Sophie.” Al paused. I could hear him sucking in a deep breath. “So am I.”
I could guess. “They went off looking for Dad,” I said. “Didn’t they?”
“That’s what
the note said.”
“What note? Look, can you start at the beginning? Like, please?”
“Okay.” Al paused again, and when he resumed, his voice sounded steadier. “Yesterday afternoon we went over to Eileen’s to have lunch with your mother. I know you and she don’t get along, but Sean does love her. So I figure I can put up with her now and then.”
“You’re a brave man.”
“Thanks. When Deirdre left, Michael and Sean went upstairs to get some CDs Sean was going to borrow. I didn’t think anything of it, but they must have planned this then. We went back to our place, but a couple of hours later, about six o’clock, I guess it was, Sean realized he’d left his wallet at Eileen’s, because he’d taken it out to lend Michael twenty bucks.” Al paused for another deep breath. “‘Oh, shit,’ Sean says, and he sounded so damned innocent that I should have known he was lying. ‘I must have left it in Mike’s room. I’ll just drive over and get it.’”
“Without a driver’s license?” I said. “Doesn’t he keep that in his wallet?”
“That occurred to me, yeah, but way too late. So he went over and never came back. I called over there around nine in the evening. Eileen was shocked. They’d left at seven, told her that they were driving back to our place, Sean’s and mine, I mean.”
“Wait! Eileen didn’t have any kind of premonition—”
“No advance warning, but when I called, she felt that something really bad had happened.”
“A danger alert? That kind of thing?”
“Worse than that.”
“Crud.”
“Yeah, exactly.” Al paused again to steady his voice. “So first we did the ugly routine of calling the police, the hospitals, that kind of stuff to see if they’d been in an accident. We couldn’t find anything. Finally, she searched the house and found the note tacked up to the door of the first-floor storage room. I wanted to call you right then, but it was almost midnight, and so I figured we’d better wait.”
“Oh, yeah? I wish you’d called me right then. It’s been hours now.” I stopped myself from delivering an angry lecture about time stream scars and how fast they fade. Al was stressed enough without me barking at him. “Anyway, this note, what did it say? Can you tell me?”
“I’ve practically got it memorized. Dear folks, sorry. We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want to argue about it.”
“The little swine!” I said.
“Yeah,” Al said, “though swine is too nice a word. Anyway, they went on to say that you’d know what this all meant. They were going back to some place called Interchange because they’d been there a couple of times and found the gate that leads to your father’s location. They want to scout it out, according to the note.”
“Crud.” It took me a moment to go on. “Yeah, I do know what it means.”
“It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”
“Very dangerous. When I get my hands on that little brat Michael, I—” I stopped because he was too big to spank, and there’s no use in making empty threats. “Well, I’ll chew him out but good.”
Al groaned for a comment. By this time Ari had woken up. He was watching me narrow-eyed. I mouthed, “I’ll explain in a minute,” in his general direction.
“Al?” I said. “Still there?”
“Oh, yeah,” Al said. “Is there anything you can do to get them back?”
“No, not at the moment.” At that point I woke up enough to remember that I was talking on my cell phone—an unwise move. My end of the conversation was secure, but his wasn’t. “Look, I’ll call you right back. I have to switch phones. This one’s not as secure as the landline. You guys have a landline, too, right?”
“Yeah. For my elderly relatives.”
“Give me the number, and I’ll call you back on that in a couple of minutes.”
I took the chance to duck into the bathroom as well as put on my jeans and a pale gray Western-cut shirt before I called Al back. He answered on the first ring.
“Okay, look,” I said. “I’m not sure where they’ve gone and how they got there, but it wouldn’t matter if I did. I can’t use those gates. I can’t follow them. Al, do you understand the concept here? Like, they’re on another world than ours, something called a deviant world level?”
“Sean told about all that a couple of days ago.” Al’s voice hovered on the edge of tears. “I thought he was kidding. Making up an elaborate story, you know? With Michael like maybe they did when they were kids.”
“Unfortunately, he was telling you the cold truth.”
An awake and clothed Ari walked into the living room. “I’ll go start the coffee,” he said. “I don’t know what this is all about, but I can tell we’ll need coffee.”
For about ten minutes more I talked to Al. I did eventually manage to get him to understand about deviant worlds, gates, Michael’s abilities, and the reckless egos of teen boys with wild talents. During our talk, Al alternated between periods of calm and fits of anger-laced anxiety. He told me, just before we hung up, that he was going in to work anyway, for the distraction.
Ari had just handed me a mug of coffee when Aunt Eileen called, and I held the same conversation all over again. It ended the same way, too, with me admitting that there was nothing I could do at the moment.
“There’s no use in even trying to locate them psychically,” I finished up. “You remember, don’t you, the first time my miserable jerk of a brother went to Interchange?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I do.”
“I tried to sense him and never could.”
“Well, maybe I’ll dream something useful. I’ll take a nap this afternoon. I have to tell your mother, and I’ll need a nap after that.”
Aunt Eileen hung up with a resigned sigh bordering on martyrdom. I did the same.
“I’ll kill him,” I said to Ari. “I will strangle him with my own two hands.”
“Michael or Sean?” Ari said.
“Whichever one I can grab first.” I had a swallow of coffee, which had turned cold. “You get to shoot the other one.”
“It’s a bargain. Seriously, though, let’s hope they can get back again.”
“Yeah.” The anger ebbed, and I felt like crying. I suppressed the urge. “Let’s hope. Damn it, I should have known something was wrong.” I paused to think about what I’d just said. “This is weird. When they went through the gate, I should have felt an overlap. I didn’t get any warning at all. Neither did Eileen.”
“Can Sean or Michael block that kind of thing?”
“I don’t know. That’s a good guess, though.” I leaked a few angry tears. “The little bastards!”
“The only thing I can think of to do,” Ari said, “is to bring Spare14 into this. He has access to other world-walkers, and if Michael’s broken a law or a regulation, maybe I can gain authorization to go after him.”
“You’re brilliant. It’s Monday, so maybe he’ll be in his office.”
When I called, that particular hope vaporized. Spare14 had left an automatic message on his telephone system. He was out of the office “for a few days,” he said, and would try to get back to everyone later in the week. I left a dispirited message and hung up.
“He’s probably gone to Interchange to meet Javert,” I said.
“Most likely,” Ari said. “I’m going to make you some breakfast, and you’re going to eat it.”
“No pickles!”
“There’s some of those frozen waffles left.”
I made a small retching noise. He got the point and allowed me to have a couple of apples instead. I returned to the living room to avoid watching him eat the toaster waffles. He always dumped canned tuna on them. Right out of the can.
I spent a miserable day alternating between fits of worrying and doing research—the safe kind, that is, in books. Despite what I’d told Aunt Eileen, I couldn’t stop myself from running scans: LDRS, SM: Ps, SM: Ls, SAFs. Although I used every talent I could think of, I never picked up the slightest trace of Sean and Micha
el. All day, Ari kept moving from one window to another, all around the flat, to stare out and watch the street in front and the garage area in back. He was always armed.
Aunt Eileen called me late in the day. She’d given my mother the news.
“How did she take it?” I said.
“At first she tried to dismiss it. They’re just playing a joke, she says. April Fool’s, just late.” Eileen snorted in disgust. “I’m afraid I got just a wee bit angry. She began to listen, then.”
“Just began to, huh?”
“Well, you know how she is. It all elevatored, or whatever that word is they use for battles. Escalated, I mean. I ended up hanging up on her.” Eileen paused to sigh. “Then I really did need a nap.”
“Did you dream anything interesting?”
“Not really. Just one image of Sean wearing a necklace. I think it was a necklace. One of those modern things that are just smooth metal, like a narrow collar.”
“That’s odd.”
“Very. By the way, I called poor Al, just to see how he was holding up. He left work early, they told me, and he’s taking tomorrow off, a personal leave day. If the boys aren’t back by tomorrow morning, I’ll invite him over for lunch, and why don’t you and Ari come, too? Maybe if we all concentrate, they’ll hear us and come back.”
Highly unlikely, I thought, but I kept the thought to myself. I had nothing better to offer.
“Sure,” I said. “Around noon?”
“That will be fine, dear, yes. I’ll see you then.”
At sunset Ari brought out a pair of binoculars with night vision built in, or so he told me, and resumed his window trek. As the night darkened outside, I could see his reflection in the window glass—and that gave me an idea. Although the full chant-trance procedure had proved itself too dangerous to play around with, I had other lore to draw upon. All the research I’d done on magic over the years had just come in handy. I turned off my computer and got up.
“Ari,” I said, “I’m going to try to get some more information on the leopard women.”
“What? After what happened—”
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