by Matt Carter
He hit “play,” and a set of lights embedded in the bottom of the container started turning on and off in sequence, illuminating a selection of protective symbols hidden in the second layer of glass.
“Wait for it . . .” he told me, then slid a little farther back and pressed “pause.”
The lid slammed shut with the force of, well, as I said before, a rattrap, and latched by itself.
“Just in case we ever figure out how to set a lure,” he explained. “So . . . how awesome is that? Go on, you can say it.”
“It’s perfect,” I said, and I meant it. I turned back to my schedule. “I might need you Friday, too,” I told him. “And of course Saturday we’ve got the damned—”
“And then what?”
“I’m getting to that,” I said. “Monday might be a bit of a challenge, but—”
“That’s not what I mean.”
I put down the schedule and turned my chair away from the desk to wait for him to speak. He preferred it when I avoided looking at other things even though that made it harder to listen. It didn’t make him spit it out much faster this time, though. He just kept picking at a spot of cold solder on the side of the iron, not even looking back at me.
“We . . . we keep watching him, and we keep watching him, and we interrupt when they try to take him, and then we keep watching him, and . . . what’s the plan here? I mean, I’m really, really sorry I screwed up the last—”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I told him for the third time. “I should have anticipated that problem.”
“I’m still sorry. But it doesn’t sound like he’s going to change his mind. How long are we going to keep doing this?”
I’d known this question was coming. According to my standard policies, Ben was already a loss. I didn’t spend resources watching ECNSs who’d already heard my side and told me to go to hell. I couldn’t force someone into the Network, and I couldn’t afford to protect people who wouldn’t help me protect other people. I could think of a hundred reasons why Ben was an exception, but I could also name plenty of reasons to make exceptions for people I’d already written off.
“He’ll be out of Prospero soon anyway,” I reminded Aldo. “This is a small battle. It’s not permanent.”
“You don’t know that. There’s no date set. It could be months. How far are you planning to take this? Until he calls the cops on us? Until we have to kidnap him and keep him in a closet to stop him from wandering into the woods? Until we have to take shifts on the roof with a sniper rifle to keep Splinters and humans away? I mean, I know you put in a lot to get him on the list. I know. It’s a lot of time—”
“It’s not about the time.” I said this without thinking about it first, which, as a rule, is something I don’t do. I said it without having a clue what I meant.
“So, what is it about?”
I turned back to my schedule and started factoring in rest breaks just to make a secure enough thinking space to look for an answer.
What is it about?
I thought about the first night of research when I’d seen Ben’s face on my screen before I’d ever seen it in person. I thought about how well I knew him, even if he never wanted to know me; how everything he wrote read as if he had been laughing as he typed it, even the parts that hinted that he might be crying, too; how he had made me want to know so badly what it was like to be where he was.
I pictured him running out in front of that car to save what he’d reasonably assumed to be another human being, and I tried to take stock of exactly what I could say I’d accomplished in the past seven years if they could still take all of that away from the world and there was nothing I could do about it.
In my right ear, Ben was laughing at something Haley had said that I hadn’t been able to catch. The sound was so much happier than I knew how to be. The pain in my stomach was rising again, but I held it down.
I didn’t want to take that away from him. I didn’t want to force him into the Network, and if crying fits and incompletely rationalized decisions were what happened when he was around, it was probably best not to prolong our contact anyway.
But the threats against him had been delivered directly to me. If there was even a chance I was the reason, I couldn’t just walk away from a very viable chance of putting things right.
“Until school starts,” I proposed. “I probably got him into this. The least I can do is try to get him out. We maintain his protection until school makes it impractical, or until we can get him out of town—whichever comes first.”
Finally, Aldo nodded his concession. “Okay. And then that’s it?”
“That’s it,” I agreed.
My throat was feeling tight again, but before it could become seriously troubling, a name of interest came up on the feed in my left ear. My own name.
“ . . . How is Wilhelmina, by the way? Getting enough sun? Showing any interest in . . . anything?”
I plugged the player into its speaker dock and turned up the volume.
“She’s fine,” my mother answered warily. “Why the sudden interest?”
“The client’s concerned that you might not be the best person for the job. It is family law, after all.”
“Put that away. Now!”
That last voice was mine.
“Here, help me get things cleaned up, get the decoys back in place.”
“Now?” Aldo asked, but he helped me as he did. “But she’s all the way over in Town Hall.”
“The recording’s two hours out of—”
I couldn’t even finish explaining before the front door opened and my mother did what I knew she would, the thing she almost never did. She maneuvered her high heels down the narrow stairs, gave my door a token knock, and opened it.
I fumbled with the speaker and turned it off just before the door was finished interrupting.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, pretending as usual that this was a normal interaction. I scanned the room once more to make sure we’d put everything she was most likely to comment on out of sight, remembered the other surveillance feed still in my right ear, and bobbed my head a few times as if it were music.
“Hi there,” my mother said, pretending even harder. “Hi, Aldo. What are you kids up to today?”
My mother was very, very probably human, and she very probably cared about me. She used to enjoy playing chess with me when I was little, and once, when I was twelve, she blackmailed my principal into letting me switch from a class with a Probable Splinter teacher to one with a Probable Non-Splinter teacher even though she never admitted that was why.
I always did my best to remember those things when I had to see her, to remember anything other than that she had collaborated. It made it easier to play along.
“The usual,” Aldo and I answered her together.
She knew what had happened to my father. I was effectively certain of that.
She knew about me, too, about what I did with my time, and even though she refused to acknowledge to my face that Splinters existed, my crusade had been a constant point of contention between us. In the beginning, she had forbidden all forms of investigation. There had been daily shouting matches, and she had wiped my hard drive more than once. Luckily for me, my brain permanently stores all the information I see or hear. Unluckily, that information often doesn’t make much sense, all jumbled together in my head like that, not the way it does when I put it in front of me so I can reorganize it with my hands. My mother’s early interference caused me enough delays that I’d eventually had to sniff out some of her more mundane underhanded dealings to hold over her head.
Now I was allowed to continue my work without interference on two conditions. I was pretty sure that if I failed at either, she’d take her chances with the bits of her reputation that hinged on the security of my off-site data storage.
The first condition was unspoken. I could never actually get too close to the truth. That was what the decoy leads were for, pinned all over the board whenever she might walk i
n on it.
The second was that I always had to make her look good any way she needed me to.
“Don’t you two feel a little cooped up down here?” she asked, still wobbling on the bottom step instead of coming in, probably less out of manners than the desire to preserve the chemically sterilized fragrance of her crisply ironed suit and more-crisply-ironed hair.
Aldo was about to give the normal response, that there was no reason to feel cooped up when there was no reason to go anywhere else, but I knew where the question was leading. I tried to make it easier for all of us and followed her lead.
“Yeah, actually, we were just going for a ride, probably going to grab some tacos from that place across from Town Hall. Want us to bring something back?”
Look at me, Prospero! I prepared to proclaim silently from the seat of my bike. Look at the happy, well-adjusted spawn of Diana Todd, enjoying a wholesome, carefree evening with a real, living, human companion! See me laugh too loudly! See me babble inanely! See me not obsess over the world’s impending doom at all!
Mom wasn’t Aldo’s biggest fan, but she usually hid it well. She thought it looked odd for me to spend so much time with someone two years younger than myself, but compared with the time I spent with Billy or with no one at all, Aldo was her favorite option.
“Sure, just let me get you some cash.” She dug through her purse, one of an inconveniently large rotating set, and pulled out enough to feed the three of us plus Dad for two nights with a generous tip, even without accounting for my mother’s freakishly small appetite, but she didn’t give it to me. “I had a thought,” she said.
I waited for it.
“Irwin was just saying how much harder it’s been this year to get people together to get the block party off the ground.”
I tried not to let my panic show and kept waiting.
“He’s worried it’s a dying tradition. I said how silly that is, but I thought it might be fun for you two to help out, show off your . . .” She glanced awkwardly around the room. “Town pride. Pick up the torch for the old generation.”
I couldn’t go to the block party.
Ben was going to the block party.
My mother kept smiling, one hand holding the money, the other toying with the brush of the broom I’d secured back over the door.
“Um,” Aldo tried to help me. “We were sort of thinking—”
“That’s okay,” she told him. Only him. “I just thought Mina might like the company, but I’m sure she’ll manage. She’d never make a liar out of me.”
Mom kept smiling.
I had to go to the block party.
“No, it’s fine,” said Aldo. “I’m there.”
“Wonderful!”
For a while, we all stood there, Aldo and me waiting for her to leave so we could figure out how we were going to pull this off, and then I remembered the money. She was finally holding it out to be taken. On top of the party, she was still going to make us waste an evening biking across town. I reached out and took it, already planning out the equipment I was going to buy Aldo with every cent of the change.
7.
The Block Party
Ben
The McMurdo Avenue Block Party was a lot bigger than I’d expected. I figured they would close off a street, set up a few tables of potluck food, maybe even have someone rig up a few speakers to a boom box to get some music going. Simple stuff. What I hadn’t accounted for was that, like many small towns, Prospero is generally starved for entertainment, and when the opportunity for some fun presents itself, they’ll take it with gusto.
The party itself stretched for two blocks, the ends cut off by parked police cars. The first block (the only one actually on McMurdo Avenue) was lined with card tables covered in more food than I had ever seen. It seemed everybody in town had brought at least one dish in a show of neighborly competition, each trying to outdo the last. The street itself was filled with rows of picnic tables where it seemed half of the town milled about, feasting.
The second block was an odd combination of a farmer’s market and a low-budget carnival. Most of the major businesses and many local farmers had booths selling everything from fresh ears of corn to poorly-printed t-shirts. A few more booths held some basic games, a BB gun shooting gallery, a “Dunk the Mayor” booth, a face painting pavilion, and a fortune-teller. The intersection between the two streets had a crude stage flanked by large speakers in the middle of it. Signs by the stage promised a couple of local bands and a magician from two towns over as entertainment.
It wasn’t the grandest party the world had ever seen, not by a long shot, but it was what I needed. It felt normal.
Mom and Aunt Christine mingled with some of the other people from town down by the potluck, so after Haley and I had taken our share from the buffet, we wandered down through the ad hoc carnival.
Haley treated me to a caramel apple that looked almost as big as my head, and I did my best to return the favor by winning her the biggest teddy bear imaginable at the shooting gallery. I was one shot off from the big prize, but she cooed approvingly all the same at the stuffed green bunny I won her.
It felt good to be out with Haley. More and more I found her smile real and unforced, though I knew she still had her bad days. There were some nights I could hear her having bad dreams in the next room, tossing and turning, occasionally crying out in fear. She would always look embarrassed the next morning, but I never questioned her. If she wanted to talk, I’d be there. Until then, I was happy just to hang out.
That happy feeling did not last long.
We were walking past the Dunk the Mayor booth when I got that feeling again. Like I was being watched. I turned around, expecting to see a flash of red disappearing behind a booth.
Instead, I found we had an audience. There were three of them, standing around the Dunk the Mayor booth, a stout, balding man with glasses, a tall, skeletally-thin man in a Hawaiian shirt, and a cold-looking middle-aged woman who tried to look casual and only pulled off
business-casual. The portly man in the dunking booth was soaking wet but still managed to look almost jovial. At least, I think he was trying to look jovial because, much like the other three, he stared at us with a look on his face that might have been fear.
Haley turned, saw our audience and waved to them cheerfully. The men waved back, though they clearly didn’t want to. The woman just stood there, observing us, appraising.
Like a bird of prey.
“Who are they?” I asked.
Haley laughed. “Just some of our Town Council.”
The woman looked familiar to me. Something in the eyes. When she moved slightly and the fading sunlight illuminated the faint, reddish highlights of her dark hair, I realized she just reminded me of Mina.
Great.
“Why are they staring at me?” I asked.
“At us?” Haley replied. She looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook her head, “I wouldn’t worry about them. They’re harmless.”
She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to look at one of the Farmer’s Market booths. For now, at least, she was carefree. Happy. I wanted to be with her, I wanted to have fun again.
But those eyes . . . Mina’s paranoid ramblings . . . they just wouldn’t go away.
Mina
“They’re at the southwest corner,” Aldo informed me. “Moving east one stall . . . two stalls. The way’s wide open.”
I kept wanting to tie my hair back, or at least put it behind my ears, but even my smallest Bluetooth was as obvious as an old-fashioned hearing aid, and I needed to keep it out of sight as much as possible.
Aldo often told me that if my mother and I had only one thing in common, it was our knack for precise, detailed instructions. He never meant it as a compliment, of course, but I was grateful to her for not making me guess what would satisfy her.
I was to arrive in time for the late cosmetic phase of setup, spend no more than a hundred and fifty dollars, and not leave before 8:30 or before I
had been seen by a minimum of five Council members or immediate family members of Council members and made small talk at every one of her list of the dozen most gossipy vendor booths.
There was just one I’d really been putting off all day. It wasn’t as if he was going to try to abduct me in the middle of a crowded event, but small talk with Alexei Smith still wasn’t something I could exactly look forward to, even by the standard of my mother’s favors. The logical part of me wished all human Splinters could be so glitchy and obvious, but that didn’t stop his obviousness from turning my stomach. Mom had hardly made an excuse for why I had to see him, something about his influence on the children of the Council—we both knew the real reason. As a person, he was nobody, but as a Splinter he was somebody, and that meant, as far as my mother and the rest of the Council were concerned, his opinion mattered.
At least getting his attention was easy. All I had to do was walk past the information booth of the Prospero Society of Theatrical Recreation without trying to hide. He took it from there.
“Oh, hello, Meeenaaah!” he dragged out my name like a tongue twister, throwing his arm around my shoulders. “I hoped you would stop by!”
The way he said “stop by,” like he was expecting some kind of congratulations for mastering a non-literal turn of phrase, made me even more aware (if that was possible) that it was not a human hand squeezing my shoulder. I smiled at him and did my best not to shudder.
“You were?”
“I have to talk to you,” he said very seriously, “about trying out for the troupe! I cannot give special treatment, you know thaaaat, but I fear you are the only one in all of town who can be the true spirit of Miraaaanda!”
The society’s traditional production of The Tempest, performed every January 3rd, rain or shine, workday or weekend, on what Alexei falsely believed to be the anniversary of the founding of Prospero, was easily the worst of its regularly scheduled performances—which was surprising considering how much practice most of the cast had. The last Miranda had just graduated out.