The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

  “Burning Man? The weird party festival? No. There’s no way she went to that. And financially, she does okay, but she’s not rich. I have no idea how she could’ve gotten there on her own. Or why anybody would’ve taken her. I do know that she was dedicated to seeing Sariah, though. Or Sara, or whatever you’re calling yourself now.” She flapped her hand at me. “If somebody said that’s where you were and gave her the means to go find you, she would’ve been all in. I’d like to think she would’ve told me, but—I can see her keeping quiet about it until after it was all said and done, so that she wouldn’t have to deal with me trying to talk her out of it. I can’t see somebody taking her all that way against her will, though.”

  I grimaced. Given the cries for help that had been coming across my desk at Justice Hall, the flyers that the Magician and I had seen, and now this, I could definitely see somebody using poor Rhonda Simms as bait to get me to Burning Man. Because it certainly was working.

  “How soon can we leave?” I asked.

  13

  We opted for conventional travel to get to Black Rock City, the unofficial pop-up village made up of the seventy thousand or so attendees of Burning Man. Given that he’d caught the missing persons case, Brody came with us, and now sat tight-lipped at one of the tables in the small private jet, glowering over his paperwork, his gun on the table beside him.

  He’d already been cleared by the organizers of Burning Man to maintain his weapon, particularly given the situation of a potential kidnap victim, but the organizers had stressed that the event was gun-free and they intended to keep it that way if at all possible. That had earned a round of wry comments from everyone involved. There were weapons and then there were weapons… We’d be coming prepared for any eventuality.

  Brody had made no concessions to the sartorial requirements of our destination, but had at least switched out of his usual rumpled suit and opted for jeans, a gray T-shirt, and a loose tan overshirt that would do a passable job of hiding his gun. Nikki, of course, had eschewed her desert camo and gone all out with her ensemble for Burning Man. She lounged beside Brody in a full-on Raquel Welch One Million Years B.C. faux-fur-and-hide bikini, accented by calf-high faux-hide boots. Her tawny golden mane spilled over her shoulders, but from there, her costume sharply deviated from Welch’s in the movie. She was currently fiddling with a goggle-and-face-mask contraption that made her look like she was ready for a postapocalyptic bomb to drop, yet strangely did nothing to diminish the provocative appeal of her ensemble. Draped on the seat beside her lay a faux-fur-trimmed cape as well. The temperatures on the playa would be topping ninety-five degrees today, but Nikki had been living in Las Vegas for long enough that she wasn’t fazed.

  Though Simon traveled with us, the Magician wouldn’t be coming to Burning Man until later this evening. There were logistics to put in place, and he didn’t need conventional transport to get here. Technically, I didn’t either, but for anyone watching, we wanted to give them plenty of notice that the Council had arrived.

  Simon had also dressed in keeping with the spirit of Burning Man, wearing a reflective black tunic and trousers that felt cool to the touch no matter how hot it was outside. He also had boxed up thousands of giveaway temperature-regulator wristbands, one of which he was waving around now. “I’m telling you, we’re going to have eyes in every corner of Black Rock City within the first two hours. These things are going to go fast, and the people who know what they are won’t be able to stop everyone from wanting one.”

  “The bad guys won’t be putting them on,” Nikki pointed out. “If there are bad guys here.”

  “Exactamundo!” Simon crowed. “Which will help us as well. If we meet up with a group of people who aren’t wearing these things, we’ve got our bad guys. Or at least some wise guys. Everywhere else, we’re going to have eyes on the entire crowd, and all that data will be feeding into a central location.”

  He tapped the tablet in front of him, a thick, brick-like apparatus that could probably solve the mysteries of the universe in 3.68 seconds. “We’ve got top-of-the-line facial recognition software pumping through here, so we should be able to find your girl pretty quick, and anybody else of interest as well. I’m telling you, it’s going to be amazing.”

  Brody picked up the band that had been lying beside him, turning it over to study it more closely. “This thing can seriously lower my body temperature? And it’s not dangerous?”

  “Not in the range that we’re talking, nope,” Simon confirmed. “And not in the range of danger even for somebody hopped up on drugs, whether traditional or technoceutical. The data we’ll be gathering will give us that information as well. I got a feeling we’re going to hit a lot of both.”

  “So what’s the plan here?” Nikki asked. “We just hit the crowds and wait for somebody to come up to us? Are we simply canvassing for Rhonda Madsen, or are we actively trying to seek out whoever it is who has been hitting up Sara at her office?”

  I pulled out the most recent slip of paper that had come through back at Justice Hall. All it said was Justice Answers the Call at Burning Man, and today’s date.

  “Justice answers the call,” I said aloud. “If there are any camps or installations that deal with communication, sharing information, anything like that, maybe start there, or anything to do with feathers. It’s already five o’clock. Night’s going to be falling soon enough, and I think this place is only going to get crazier as the day progresses. They’re already several days into the party, which means these people have been riding high for a long time.”

  “Not everyone. You pay for a ticket for the whole week but not everybody shows up for the duration,” Simon countered, peering down at his tablet again. “We’ve had about fifty new arrivals between last night and today. We’ve hacked into the computer system at the airstrip and are tracking down those newcomers. Most of them are celebrities and rich people who want the feeling of the event but don’t want to get stuck in a dust storm for too long. They’re gonna be set up in the fancy camps and probably won’t be our target. It wouldn’t surprise me if Rhonda has been taken to one of the larger camp setups, though, something pretty swank. I get the feeling this operation isn’t small-time.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “These people want to get my attention, not piss me off. They’re not going to hurt her, I don’t think. She probably doesn’t realize what’s going on.”

  “One can certainly hope,” Nikki said. “She’s better off staying in the dark on her role as bait, especially if she’s a fan of yours, Sara. Her cousin Linda was Connected, but doing a good job of ignoring that. I suspect Rhonda has some buried Connectedness within her too.”

  “Agreed,” Brody said. “I don’t even remember the girl, and I hit the high school hard after you disappeared.”

  I grimaced. Brody hadn’t stopped searching for missing persons after I fled Memphis the day my foster mother had died. His missing person had merely become me. It’d been ten long years before I’d finally faced him again—and I hadn’t wanted to, even then—and a long time after that before he’d forgiven me for not seeking him out sooner. He’d deserved to be pissed too. What could I say? I was a master at avoidance.

  We continued the flight in relative silence until we finally angled down toward Black Rock City. Several miles out from Burning Man, organizers had constructed a rudimentary landing strip for flights exactly like ours. When we disembarked, an oversized desert-tan SUV was waiting for us.

  Nikki eyed it skeptically. “That’s an amazing transfer to get us to Burning Man, but I can tell you right now, we’re not all going to be sleeping in that thing.”

  “No, we’re not,” Simon assured her. “We’ve got a tent already set up on the outskirts of the city. Everything is taken care of.”

  Nikki’s smile broadened, her concern evaporating as quickly as my sweat as we stood on the furnace-hot tarmac. “Are we talking pop-up tent or a thousand-and-one Arabian nights? I’m counting on you, Simon. I want you to show me a good time
.”

  The two of them kept talking as Brody and I stood in the stiff wind, our own futuristic masks in hand but not currently on our faces, studying the distant horizon where Black Rock City stood. This far away, Burning Man seemed almost quiet. Serene. Barely a plume of dust rose from the larger installations and roaming vehicles.

  “Have you ever been to this thing?” I asked Brody.

  He shook his head as we set out behind Nikki and Simon. “There was never any reason to go. I had plenty of crime to keep me busy in Las Vegas and even when Connecteds were involved, they didn’t usually get up to too much trouble way out here. Sometimes they got into trouble afterward when they got back to the city, hopped up on the experience of community and pure love and all that bullshit. But that was a different story. They call this place a survival experience, but I don’t think it has much on your average Wednesday in Vegas.”

  We piled into the car and headed out across the barren terrain, reaching the city more quickly than I would’ve expected. Simon directed the driver around the perimeter of the motley collection of RVs, multipurpose vehicles, and hundreds of modest encampments until we reached a much ritzier section than most of what we’d seen, a collection of linen-colored tents spread out evenly over a space the size of a football field, with a much larger tent in the center.

  “This would be what is known as a fancy camp,” Nikki confirmed. “Most likely owned by tech heads and movie stars, like that. You stay here, it can cost thousands a night to walk around in your bikini.”

  “Well, we’re right next door,” Simon said, pointing. “The pink tents.”

  “Pink?” Nikki gasped, craning her neck to see. Sure enough, a collection of three tents stood in a tight cluster, each of them easily twenty-feet square. As we drove up, I realized they weren’t three separate tents but one large structure with two side rooms and a large central area.

  “We’re staying in pink tents,” Nikki said, her voice reverent. “I love this. Whose idea was it, yours?”

  Simon laughed. “Not my idea. The Devil takes the credit here.”

  “Kreios,” Nikki breathed out, her sigh deep and heartfelt.

  We didn’t waste too much time underneath the relative shelter of the opulent living arrangements, though inside the tents, it was even more impressive—large, heavy woven rugs were piled across the fabric flooring, and comfortable chairs and futons were scattered throughout the space. A large cooler filled with ice, water, and refreshments ensured that none of us would starve. With any luck, we wouldn’t even be spending one night here, but it was good to reinforce the impression that we were dedicated to our visit, for anyone who might need such reinforcement.

  All too quickly, though, we were back outside. It was hot in the desert, and the breeze was steady, blowing around a fine layer of dust and sand. It wasn’t bad enough yet to require Nikki’s goggles and face mask, but I could see how they’d come in handy if the weather got out of hand. According to Simon, it was a common occurrence at Burning Man for raging windstorms to spring up out of nowhere. It was good to be prepared.

  Simon’s reflective outfit immediately drew its share of attention, but that was nothing compared to the reaction caused by the squat, snowman-shaped bus that trundled toward us through the crowd, playing Christmas music. With a handheld megaphone, the Fool announced to everyone within shouting distance that he could help them feel like it was Christmas on the spot. Then he flung open the doors on the van and started hauling out his temperature-resetting wristbands, throwing them to any bystanders he could reach. As he explained what they were for, initial interest in getting anything free turned into straight-up delight and wonder. And within only a few minutes, he was the Pied Piper of Burning Man, heading out into the crowd.

  With every step, Simon pulled more of the bands from his tunic’s endless supply of pockets. I barely kept myself from shaking my head as the bands were taken from him by the fistful, passed around from hand to hand and slapped on wrists, with people declaring that they noticed an immediate difference. That couldn’t be the case, of course, as each band needed a few minutes to acclimate to the wearer’s body temperature, but the mind was a miraculous tool. Bottom line, we could not have chosen a better giveaway for this particular crowd.

  “So the map says that the main art installations are this way,” Nikki said, eyeballing the map she’d received back at the airstrip. “After we check to see if there’s any communication-related installations, keep an eye out for anyone playing with fire and feathers. Add the two together, and I gotta think Winged Warriors is where we want to be.”

  Brody sighed. “Winged Warriors? Do I want to know?”

  “According to the description, it’s a suspended reality experience, where you can become one with your inner angel or dragon.” Nikki grinned. “Sounds kind of cool to me. And, if these guys are the ones who took off with Rhonda, that’s where she’ll be too. Otherwise, we need to keep our eyes sharp for one wide-eyed Southern girl not in costume, medium blonde, medium pale, and, more than likely, medium freaked out.”

  We headed out, pushing our way through the crowd behind Simon, with Brody muttering the whole time. Not everyone was drunk or high, though a fair number were. And the crowd seemed in a really good mood overall. The Burning Man attendees we could see were predominantly white, with the air of the upper middle class establishment desperate to let its hair down. This wasn’t too surprising, given that the tickets alone for Burning Man cost over four hundred dollars each and people had to have enough scratch to get themselves and all their gear out into the middle of nowhere, enduring desert conditions for up to nine straight days. As survival experiments went, it was pretty high-end.

  “Will you look at that.” Nikki whistled as we turned a corner and saw an entire line of circus performers on stilts, tossing oranges back and forth to each other, to the delight or general disregard of those around them. Most people were in some form of bikini or minimalist costume, but some were far more tricked out even than Nikki, with long capes and fluttering headdresses, fur and feathers flying. We passed a group of green-suited aliens and another group of Care Bears, their heads swathed in furry attire while their bodies were mercifully fur-free, except for their fluffy tails.

  Everyone seemed to be drinking something from flasks or travel mugs, but the only stands that appeared to be offering anything for sale were pop-up coffee shops. Otherwise, food and drink changed hands on what appeared to be the gift or barter system, much like Simon’s temperature bands. Nobody seemed to notice that the Fool’s supply of said bands was ever replenishing, and we kept moving at a sharp clip to keep people from figuring that out.

  We reached the Winged Warriors installation and stepped inside, the relief from the sun immediate and welcome. Huge fans powered by generators ringed the space, creating a stiff wind no matter where you turned, while people bobbed happily above us, suspended by ropes from a large scaffolding. Additional fans set into the floor created a decided updraft, which made for a fantastic flying ride.

  Brody craned his head upward as Nikki chortled. “I am so going to do this. This is the best.”

  Unfortunately, there was nobody I could see paying much attention to us, and certainly nobody that matched Rhonda’s description. A niggling sense of worry began to spiral up inside me. She wasn’t here.

  I stepped back outside, where Simon was still holding court with his temperature bands, and stared at the crowd hemming us in. Why had I been brought here? What was I supposed to know or learn? How did any of this make sense?

  I was still squinting out toward the far horizon when a voice I hadn’t heard in nearly half a dozen years burst out in startled surprise.

  “Sariah Pelter, as I live and breathe! Look at you all grown up and beautiful!”

  I turned and blinked at a pack of white-haired people a half dozen strong, all of them wearing sunglasses, brightly colored Hawaiian shirts and wide-brimmed hats. They grinned at me in unparalleled delight, especially the stout, sunbur
ned woman at their lead, her body wrapped in an oversized palm-tree-printed caftan and her feet sporting thick-soled Jesus sandals.

  I couldn’t have been more surprised than when she had approached me for the very first time, back when I was a seventeen-year-old kid on the run for my life, my entire world destroyed in terror and flames.

  Back then, Carole Reavers had been big, bluff, and hearty, her hair a brassy bottle blonde and her smile as wide as the open sky, tramping down the rest area sidewalk toward me from her posse of RV buddies, all of them watching and murmuring together. She’d been swinging a six-pack of Diet Coke in one hand and a bag of Twizzlers in the other, as if she didn’t know which I might find more appealing, and her smile had filled up my whole world.

  “Carole?” I asked weakly. How was this even possible?

  The woman swooped forward and wrapped me in a bear hug.

  “You’ve got to see what we’ve done with the rigs,” she announced. “The Rambling Rovers RV Club is better than ever!”

  14

  “Yo, Rhonda’s definitely not—well, hello there.”

  Behind me, Nikki’s words cut off abruptly as she took in my awkward grandma hug with Carole Reavers, unofficial head of the Rambling Rovers. Carole was also the woman who quite possibly saved my life when I was too stupid to know how dangerous it was to be hitchhiking as a teenage kid.

  Nikki stepped forward and reached out a hand. Carole turned to her, extending her own hand automatically. Nikki’s eyes flashed with awareness as their palms connected.

  “I’m Nikki Dawes, and I’ve got a lot to thank you for. Thanks for picking up our girl when she needed it most.”

  Carole beamed. “She told you! Well, it’s only what anyone would have done.”

  I grimaced. I hadn’t told Nikki about Carole, but now, I didn’t need to. The woman’s mind was easy pickings for someone with Nikki’s talent.