Darleeen grinned. “I’m not insinuating anything, just remarking on what a small world it is. You never know when you’re going to run into someone who knows all kinds of interesting things about a family member, or even several family members. You know what I mean?”
If Ultraviolet did know what she meant, she didn’t stick around to discuss it.
“Several family members?” I asked once Ultraviolet was gone.
Darleeen smirked. “I might have been bluffing a bit there.”
I’d been planning to leave, but the Event Horizon regained a lot of its charm once Ultraviolet had vacated the premises, so we sat there and chatted for the remainder of the morning. At some point, Dirac got up, packed up his art, and left without saying anything else. Just after that, Warner returned from the arcade, looking a bit dazed, but fully confident he would shatter my record once his string of bad luck had passed.
“I’m just three points behind you!” he said.
About an hour later, Hypatia turned up with friendship bracelets for everyone, even the waiter-bot. I got two.
“The second one is from Fluorine,” Hypatia said. “She asked me to give it to you because she’s worried you’re mad at her.”
I’d kept my word about not telling anyone that Fluorine had assisted an Old One in sneaking onto campus and trying to kidnap me, but once she found out her grandmother knew, she had stopped keeping it a secret, and her treachery had been the talk of the town . . . for about twenty-four hours.
The braided twine bracelet was strung with a number of beads. Some looked like little pink and purple gems, but others were letters that spelled out the message SORRY I ALMOST GOT YOU KILLED with three hearts at the end.
“Awww, that’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen!” I said. “They let her out of detention?”
Hypatia nodded. “Yep, just today. She looks great! You know she stopped time-shifting the moment she started telling people what she’d done? I think that secret was the one thing keeping her unstuck in time. It’s weird seeing her stay six years old for a whole hour. Rubidia doesn’t know what to do with all her free time. She’s spent so much of the last few months dealing with diapers and midlife crises that she almost forgot how to be a kid.”
* * *
Dad’s room in the medical building was the closest thing they had to a presidential suite. Somewhat less white and sterile than the other rooms I’d seen, it had a hardwood floor and tasteful, handmade furnishings. Huge floor-to-ceiling windows lined one wall and gave him a commanding view of the western half of the School Town and the country immediately outside its borders. I dropped myself into a comfortable leather armchair by his bedside.
“Bermuda!” Dad said excitedly, his trauma helmet blinking occasionally as he spoke.
“Bermuda?” I said. “The shorts?”
“No, that’s the location of our new home. I’ve just closed on a property there,” he said, looking very proud of himself.
I’d expected something a bit less . . . foreign. “We’re moving to Bermuda? Really?”
“We are! It’s secure and suitably remote, and I’ve already located a facility I can convert into a complete working space within a few months. It’s going to be magnificent.”
“Another discount store?” I asked, wondering if they even had big-box stores in Bermuda.
“No, of course not. As I said before, I’ve moved past practical experimentation for the most part. The majority of my work can now be done via thought experiments and simulation. I just need room for the computers, a stable Internet connection, and enough power to run everything at once without having to use my own reactor. Plus I like the property. It’s an old airfield, and it’s only been vacant about fifteen years, so a couple of the hangars haven’t even collapsed yet.”
“That sounds great!” I said. “I forget, do they speak English there?”
I noticed most of his color had returned. It hadn’t been obvious in the gloom of Subterra, but he had gone a sickly shade of yellowish white during his stay. “In Illinois? I believe they still speak English, unless things have changed quite a lot while I was in that damned cave.”
“Oh, you mean Bermuda, Illinois! That makes more sense. Where is it?”
“Do you know where Chicago is?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Bermuda is nowhere near that. Speaking of which, I was able to speak on the phone to our friend Gus last night.”
We hadn’t been speaking of anything of the sort, but I didn’t bother pointing it out. “How did you manage that? Dr. Foster said they couldn’t tell us where they took him. How is he?”
“He’s well. The location of the clinic where they’re keeping him may be a secret, but I know a few of his doctors personally. They’re trying out all kinds of experimental treatments on him. From the sound of it, they’re having a blast, let me tell you. It’s not every day they get to work with someone who has endured that kind of exposure. They’re not sure what did it, but something they tried made a significant difference. He can actually speak in full sentences that are directly related to what he wants to say. Poor fellow has to do it in iambic pentameter, but Rome wasn’t burned in a day.”
Actually it was, but there was no point in mentioning it. Something had been bothering me, and Dad seemed to be in a good enough mood to bring it up. “Now that you’re back and we’re getting a new house and all . . . do I have to come with you, or can I stay here?”
Dad wobbled his head a bit, the trauma helmet slipping around on his head as he did so. “Of course you can stay! That’s one less problem for me to worry about!”
“Gee, thanks,” I said, unsure whether to be relieved or offended.
“Oh, it’s nothing personal. I just won’t have a proper security apparatus in operation for some time after I take possession of the Bermuda Municipal International Airport. It’s better you stay here so you aren’t looking over your shoulder every five minutes.”
I had a feeling I’d be doing that no matter where I was. “Say, I meant to ask something else. What’s the password for the Chaperone’s override? That could come in handy.”
He laughed and winked, which I’m about 60 percent sure was due to the calming effect of the helmet. “I’m sure it would come in handy, which is why I’m not telling. It’s just a random string of characters. A code I changed that very evening, since I noticed you and that boy committing what you heard to memory. Speaking of the Chaperone . . . you wouldn’t happen to know anything about someone using an audio command stack overflow exploit on her, would you?”
I knew exactly what he was talking about—Fluorine’s hack that allowed her to wander the town after curfew. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Hm,” he said with more than a little skepticism. “Well, someone has been using an audio file with several thousand simple voice commands played simultaneously at high speed to overload the Chaperone’s speech recognition system and disable her for short periods of time. I’ve patched that. Anyone who tries it now will get a nasty surprise, so you might want to share that information with anyone you think might be tempted.”
I nodded, making a mental note to warn Fluorine that her little chirping gadget should be shelved ASAP and a second mental note that he didn’t mention anything about people using piezoelectric EMP candies to do the same job.
My new friendship bracelet shifted on my wrist, catching my eye. I realized that the Fluorine issue was bothering me almost as much as Dirac’s attitude problem. I’d told Dr. Plaskington I knew Fluorine wasn’t a bad person, but . . . “Why would she have helped them like that?” I wondered aloud.
Dad reached out and patted me once on my head. “That Tabbabitha beast bragged about turning her, you know. I remember that. It was right after they failed to bring you in. She said they didn’t even need to brainwash her; they just convinced her that her parents wer
e still alive and that she’d send them home if she did them a favor someday.”
I sighed. “They aren’t still alive, then?”
“No idea. I never saw them when I was down there, so that’s not a great sign.”
“How did the Old Ones even get in touch with Fluorine?” I asked.
Dad smirked. “It was rather clever, really. They employed an unwitting government agent to convey hard copies of her messages directly, circumventing all the School’s monitoring capabilities.”
“A government agent? You mean—”
“The United States Post Office. The whole operation cost the Old Ones maybe five dollars’ worth of stamps. One lie and a few months later, they had a conspirator willing to endanger the lives of everyone here if they called upon her. That was maybe two years ago. Then they just let her simmer until they needed her for something.”
I sighed, feeling completely despondent. “You think you know someone . . .”
Dad patted my head once a second time. I couldn’t help but notice there was a slim book on his bedside table titled Displaying Empathy: Responding Appropriately to Emotional Situations. “Everyone makes mistakes, Nikola. What separates good people from bad people is whether or not they learn from their mistakes. She’s six years old. It’s easy to forget that because she’s brilliant and apparently you’ve known her at several other ages, but intelligence and wisdom are very different things.”
“You can say that again,” I said.
Dad cocked his head, confused. “I doubt that’s necessary.”
I leaned back in the chair, looking up at the ceiling. A faint glimmer caught my eye, and when I looked at my friendship bracelet again, the words spelled out by the beads had changed. It now read, I KNOW I WAS WRONG. It made me feel a little better for some reason.
Something else was bothering me, but I couldn’t put a finger on it. I stood and turned to the window looking out over the town, then returned to the comfy chair and collapsed into it again.
“He told me his name,” I said, before knowing I was going to say it.
Dad sat bolt upright, the motion jerking the trauma helmet from his head. He grabbed my shoulders and drew me close. “Stop right there! Don’t speak of it again! Do you hear me?”
He was shaking me as he spoke. The frantic, panicked look in his eyes was one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen. “What? I haven’t told any—”
He shook me again. “Stop! Stop it! Listen! Do you remember how you called your friend . . . I forget her name—the other Old One? You brought her to us in the hotel? You only had to hold her name in your mind, and she appeared. Knowing their names creates a link, and thinking about it activates that link. I do not think he could get to you here, but it is crucial that you do whatever you can to avoid giving him the opportunity. Do you understand?”
I nodded. “I understand, I promise.” I picked up his trauma helmet and slipped it back onto his head.
He felt it go on, and his expression became sorrowful. Then the helmet blinked a few times, and he lay back on the bed, visibly relaxed.
“So is the world going to end now that he’s awake?” I asked.
Dad picked up a covered plastic cup from his bedside table and took a long drink. “Not yet. I’m certain you injured him—rather badly, in fact. A magnetic field that strong would have rendered him unable to defend himself for a short period of time, and from what you told me, during that time he was probably struck by several million tons of debris. It may even have killed him or put him back into hibernation, but it’s probably smartest for us to assume the worst.”
“Which is?”
“That he is alive and awake, but injured. It should take some time for him to restore himself to . . . whatever it was you saw down there. That said, even without most of his strength, he’s still a serious threat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Strategically, I think he’s aware he can’t defeat all of us, humans and parahumans together, not if we stand together. He’s powerful, but as a group we are orders of magnitude more powerful. Because of that, taking on a few of us at a time is his best option. He’ll exploit divisions in human and parahuman cultures. I expect he’ll find ways of turning us against one another so we’re unable to unite against him. His goal will be to convince people that their friends and neighbors are the real enemy. People who are fighting one another aren’t preparing to face him. Ultimately, he will try to make us believe that standing against the Old Ones is hopeless.”
“What about all the parahumans who are actually helping the Old Ones?”
“They’ve already fallen for it. It’s possible they’ll realize the error of their ways, but I wouldn’t bet your lunch money on it.”
“So it’s not hopeless? Really?” I asked.
“In the end, I believe humans and parahumans will stand united. I’m certain we can win.”
Sometimes I liked that my dad lacked the ability to sugarcoat things, because when he said something good, you always knew he meant it.
“You’re certain, huh? You really think that’s true?”
“I believe it is essential that we act as if it is true.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
He smiled in a sad kind of way and gazed out the window. Outside the faintly glimmering protective sphere of the School Town, an early spring thunderstorm swirled on the horizon. “And yet it is.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I go around telling people I make these books on my own, but that’s not actually true. I couldn’t do this without assistance and support from a variety of people, all of whom probably work a lot harder than I do.
Although it’s completely inadequate, I’d like to take some space here to thank them.
Thanks to my intelligent, ferocious, and formidable wife, Stephanie, whom I look to for counsel, inspiration, and moral support. Thanks to my daughters, Marilee and Zoë, for being readers, critics, and fans before they had good reason to, and for inspiring elements of many characters in the book you just finished.
Thanks to my editor, Stephanie Pitts, who has been dependably, remarkably amazing in all things (especially in those categories requiring patience and understanding). Seriously, if you’ve ever been a fan of a particular author, you’re also a fan of whoever their editor is—they don’t get enough credit.
Thanks to my agent, Josh Getzler, for being endlessly supportive, knowledgable about all kinds of things I’m ignorant of, and for being a great follow on Twitter (@jgetzler).
Thanks to my test readers—Marilee Marshall-Sappingfield, Emerson and Isabelle Caby, Bailey Ogden, and Surreal Taylor.
Thanks to my in-family (read: unpaid) PR team, Amy Beam and Suzanne Marshall-Caby.
Thanks to all the schools who let me waste part of a day talking about books, stories, and fun geeky things.
Thanks to John Hendrix for cover art that captures the books more accurately than I could have hoped. Thanks also to everyone at HSG and Penguin/Putnam for going above and beyond to make this book immeasurably better than it would have been if they’d all called in sick and left it up to me.
And most importantly I’d like to thank you, the readers. Thanks for joining Nikola on her adventures and for being what makes this all worthwhile. You’re awesomazing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eliot Sappingfield was last seen wearing a blue shirt and khaki pants in the vicinity of his home in Missouri. He is known to appreciate stories, science, and various other geeky things. He may or may not be accompanied by his wife, his two daughters (when they don’t have anything better to do), or a pair of goofy basset hounds. He is considered unarmed and not terribly dangerous. The Unspeakable Unknown is the sequel to his hilarious debut novel, A Problematic Paradox.
You can visit Eliot at eliotsappingfield.com.
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