“I help you, because you remind me of myself. Take care of yourself, Price.” He releases me, steps back, and folds his arms. “Time to go.”
“You’ll—”
“I’ve already chatted Heath. He’s expecting Soda any moment now, and I’m waiting until morning to implode this thing.”
With nothing left to do, I duck my head, square my shoulders, and enter the rift.
Heath
KELLY TAKES HER SWEET TIME ANSWERING MY HAIL. Panic builds behind my eyeballs as I contemplate all the things she could be doing while she’s not picking up.
Alerting Guy through means I don’t know about, haven’t taken care of.
Torturing Soda.
I fist my fingers and press my eyes closed.
“Heath, these chats are growing tiresome.”
“Send Soda through the rift, and you’ll never hear from me again.”
The silence on the other end of the chatline feels ominous, and again, I have the feeling she’s checking everything on her side of the rift-bridge. I’m confident she won’t find anything. I recorded loops of both Soda and Price sleeping, and they’re still running.
I deactivated the security systems that alert Guy whenever someone so much as approaches the front door. Price and Saige had left without incident, and I’d instructed him to go out the back of the building so the guard wouldn’t see him.
They surely haven’t made it to the house yet. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to use any mode of transportation besides his own two feet. The house is at least an hour’s walk from downtown. Maybe longer.
We’re in the clear, I know it. Now I just need Kelly to know it. “Find anything?” I ask.
“How have you incapacitated Guy?”
“Sometimes Guy drinks too much,” I say nonchalantly. I haven’t drugged him, or otherwise incapacitated him—unless you count cutting off his Circuit access. Which he definitely would consider deprivation. Even if she chatted him, he won’t get it until I turn back on his service.
“My earlier offer is on the table for the next ten minutes,” I say. “Soda comes home through the rift in this building. You stay out of my brother’s business. I never hear from you again, and you never hear from me. Life with Guy Ryerson goes on as normal.”
She remains silent, but I need her to take this deal. Desperation clouds my thoughts, colors my voice when I say, “Clock’s ticking, Kelly.”
And it tick, tick, ticks away until only sixty seconds remain. Kelly’s still on the line; I’d know if she disengaged.
“Soda will be here in an hour,” she says with fifteen seconds left. “I’ll activate the cross over for two-thirty.”
I push out of sigh of relief that leaves my chest hollow. “Two-thirty it is. I’ll be in the conference room, waiting for her arrival.”
“Where’s Price?” she asks.
“Asleep,” I say. “A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. And Cooper?”
“Cooper who?” Kelly asks.
I allow myself to give her a quick chuckle. “A pleasure doing business with you, Miss Openshaw.” I terminate the chat and lean back in Guy’s chair. A smile tugs against my lips until I’m grinning like a fool.
I refocus and wipe the smile from my face. This isn’t over yet.
Forty-five minutes later, I stand in the hallway outside the conference room, my heart too jumpy for me to enter quite yet. I flex the fingers inside the sticky skin glove Price had given me. It has his father’s prints on it—the print I need to unlock the conference room door and get my girlfriend back.
I curl my hand around the doorknob and hold my breath. A kiss of heat and the lock releases. I step across the threshold and seal myself in the room. Pressing my back into the wall, I say, “Show me all surveillance.”
Flatpanels wink to life along both sides of the room, creating a kaleidoscope of colors and sounds.
“Mute,” I say. “Show me surveillance in this building.”
Most of the flatpanels dim, leaving only the lobby, the elevator bank, the hallway I just stood in, and the entrance to the offices in the back, where Price and I spent the afternoon doing nothing.
“Transfer to tabletop,” I say as I stride toward the head of the conference table. That freaky picture frame looms behind me, and I do my best to ignore it. An alarm on my Receiver bleeps at me.
Ten minutes until Soda arrives.
I’ll need that and a few more to doctor up these feeds so Guy doesn’t know what went down tonight.
I work feverishly, tapping and sliding and cloning and dicing and splicing. When the witching hour comes and goes, the hair on the back of my neck prickles.
“Almost done…” I mutter to myself just as Kelly hails me.
“Go,” I say when I answer the call, forgetting for a moment that she’s not Price. A heaviness settles beneath my ribs. I’ll probably never answer another chat from Price, never do another jam with him.
“She’s set to come through. Is everything ready on your end?”
I spin the chair to face the picture frame. “Yeah,” I say, though I have no idea what I need to do on this end to make the cross over successful.
Kelly doesn’t answer, but the substance in the picture frame undulates, nearly splashing over the edges of the metal. I leap to my feet and put some distance between me and the rift, certain I want this to end as fast as possible.
Near the bottom of the frame, a limb of the blue liquid-light emerges from the surface. It steps onto the floor, another foot following it. A body presses out of the frame, and I’m held captive by the strange energy that seems to exist between two states of matter.
Soda’s features come into play, her auburn hair showing through the rippling light. She solidifies all at once, and I move toward her to embrace her, kiss her, never let her go again.
Before I reach her, another protuberance punctures the still shifting substance.
Another person.
“Heath.” Soda engulfs me in a hug, and I hold on tight, breathe her in deep, while I watch the picture frame.
“She’s coming through,” Soda whispers, her body trembling slightly.
“Who is, Soda?”
“Kelly,” she says just as a woman’s features manifest themselves. The rift energy settles back into the frame, leaving us face-to-face with a pale, frail-looking woman in her sixties.
I wish I could say I wasn’t afraid of her, but the fire in her eyes sends a shiver of terror through all my muscles.
Price
SAIGE WAS RIGHT ABOUT WALKING THROUGH THE RIFT. It’s easy, and I arrive in two steps. This basement radiates a chill that burrows under my clothing and attaches itself to my very bones. My teeth chatter before I’ve made it up the stairs. The window sits open.
I take it as my cue, and I use it to get out of the house. Behind the shed, I pause to catch my breath, wondering what to do now. I hate that I can’t chat Cascade’s friend and get him the hella over here.
At the same time, I like living off-grid, enjoy being able to do something without my dad knowing, without the Ad Agency then sending me coupons for a pair of shoes I’ve already bought.
I take a deep breath and regret it as ice shards form in my lungs. I can’t stay out here all night. My window of opportunity to get to Global is shrinking. As soon as my rift-walk registers on Kelly’s radar, I’m sure she’ll lock everything down tight.
An orb drifts over the roof of the house behind mine, and I instinctively move. Around the shed, toward the house, and into the street.
Behind me, purple light paints the sky—the orb found what it was looking for. At least it wasn’t me.
Twenty minutes later, my cramping calf muscles insist I stop running. The downtown townhomes linger one street over, and I hobble that way. Apparently being erased from existence also curtails any exercising you’ve done. I used to run with Heath for an hour, as we both tried to leave our loneliness and turmoil behind.
“Seventeen, nineteen,” I mumble to mysel
f as I advance down the row. Cedar’s is twenty-three. I should know—I passed out on his doorstep.
A simmering noise has me ducking into the shadows along twenty-one. The porch light is on at Cedar’s—the only house in the row with such a sight. He knows I’m here. I don’t know how, but he does.
But another orb has found me. Fear and frustration combine in a sickening lurch in my gut. Thirty feet away—Cedar’s door is only thirty feet away.
A horn blares for a single second and the orb turns purple. Several things happen in rapid succession.
I dart out of the shadows, my muscles firing at full throttle.
Cedar’s front door bursts open.
Something launches from the roof of the building across the street.
The purple light explodes into white and gold just as I gain the stairs to the open front door. I speed into Cedar’s house and slam the door behind me, my chest heaving with adrenaline and lack of oxygen.
“Upstairs,” someone calls. “Now!”
I lunge for the stairs and take them two at a time, the thought racing through my mind about what—or who—I’ll find at the top.
“This way.” The man gesturing wildly to me spins and heads up another set of stairs before I can get an identifying look at his face. But his voice sounds like the Cedar from 2013. The one who collected me in the parking lot and took us to this hipster townhome on Yardley Lane.
I follow him as I try to come up with alternate options. I don’t have many. I was supposed to find Cedar and convince him to send me to the Global Verse. He seems to know I was coming.
As I gain the landing on the third floor and purple light beams through a window at the end of the hall, I realize everyone knew I was coming.
The loud banging on the door two floors below testifies of it too.
“Cedar?” I send the loud whisper down the hall.
A man my father’s age—maybe a few years younger—emerges from a dark doorway halfway down the hall. Though he’s older now than when I first met him in the past, it’s Cedar. A trickle of relief swims among the adrenaline making my muscles so tight.
“They’ve got the block surrounded. Sky-eyes and everything.” His expression doesn’t radiate any fear. Only a freaky calm determination. I can see why he and Cas were such good friends.
My mind trips over how good of friends they were, especially if he’s willing to risk so much to help me.
He doesn’t want to help you, I remind myself as I take in his disheveled hair, his pajamas. He certainly doesn’t seem like he was expecting me.
“I need to go to Global,” I say, my voice scratching my throat. “Cascade is there.”
“I know where she is.” He turns and strides away from me, reaching for the ceiling. He pulls down another set of stairs. “I know what you need, Price.”
I move toward him, unable to read the tone of his voice. Could be annoyance. Could be jealousy. Could be nothing.
“I don’t suppose you have a dimensional portal here in the house,” I say as I peer up into the darkness.
“Nope. Gotta get to Shawna’s lab for that.” He ducks behind the stairs and opens a closet. Bending, he retrieves a bottle and hands it to me. “Sorghum soda,” he says. “Drink it on the way. It helps alleviate the rift-walking debilitation.”
I twist the top and chug the drink, my insides rebelling against the sugary taste the same way they do the idea that we have to get to Shawna’s lab to cross over.
“I’m assuming you have a plan for how to get to Shawna’s lab without all those bots seeing us.”
Cedar chin-nods into the darkness. “You’re hiding up there until I can scrub your imprint from this timeline.”
“How long—?” My question gets silenced by the thunderous crash of a door opening downstairs.
“You have about five minutes while the Hoods sweep the first two floors.” Cedar acts like he doesn’t care if I get caught or not. But the projectile that took out that sweeping bot says different.
I scramble up the stairs, not caring when my hands meet dust and grime and who knows what else.
“An hour,” he hisses after me. “Don’t move. Don’t make any noise. And drink all that soda.”
I press my back into an unyielding wall as Cedar closes the steps, eliminating all the light in the world.
Sure enough, four minutes later, I hear voices. I have a hard time making much into meaning, but I do hear Cedar say, “You woke me up. I was sleeping.”
His pajamas and rumpled appearance suddenly makes sense. Appreciation pulls against my lips, lifting them into a smile. I’d like to take him to the future and see what havoc me and him and Heath can cause.
A pang of homesickness races through me, bringing with it a hot thread of sadness.
I’m never going to the future again. I’m never going to see Heath again. My throat closes and I heave a breath over a groan, trying to stifle it so the Hoods only a few feet beneath me don’t hear it.
But tears are silent, and I allow myself to shed a few for the loss of my best friend.
True to his word, Cedar opens the stairs an hour later. All traces of strobing, purple light are gone. A faint bulb at the end of the hall broadcasts the only light.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Are we walking?”
He chuckles. “Would you walk in the future?”
“No.” I grin at him. “We’d use particle boost boots.”
“Sadly, we don’t have that technology yet.” Cedar opens the closet again and steps inside it this time. “But I’m making a note of it.” He pushes a button and the shelves holding the towels and sheets slides into the wall, revealing a space full of items I can’t really see past him.
He selects something and hands it to me. “Put that on.”
I stare at the cape in my hands. “Uh, this is…” I don’t even know what to call it.
“It flies.” Cedar steps out of the closet, a drape of heavy black fabric in his hands. “It flies really well, and it blends into the night.” He scans me from head to toe and back. “But I guess you blend pretty well already.”
“Not my first jam,” I tell him.
“Mine either.”
I swear he rolls his eyes as he twists to put the cape over his shoulders. He fastens it around his neck, and the sleek design of the clasp impresses me.
“So we’ll…”
“Slip into the shadows as we roof-surf.” He leads me to the roof, which sits in pitch blackness. In fact, every rooftop in the near vicinity is darker than dark.
I appreciate his thoroughness—and the gadgetry he obviously possesses to make all the street lamps go out.
“The trick is to get a running start,” he says. “Then let the cape carry you.” He backs up a few steps. “I’ll demonstrate. You follow.”
“Sounds great,” I say, because I’ve only been to Shawna’s building once, and I don’t even know if it stands in the same place.
Cedar springs into action, his lean body pushing against the night. He leaps to the lip of the roof and soars into the night. I lose sight of him as the cape billows behind him, but I hear the soft scuffle of his landing on the roof of the building beyond.
Taking a deep breath, I launch myself the same way he did, flying through the night with nothing beneath me, no boots to boost me back up if I fall. Exhilaration pounces through my system, and I let myself laugh as I land lithely next to Cedar.
“Only twelve more blocks to go,” he says before taking off into the darkness again. He’s thought of everything, mapped the route to the lab, the path inside. We arrive in only a few minutes, and he has the door to the lab open and the rift activated before I can fully comprehend how valuable Cedar is.
“The Global Verse awaits.” He stands tall and strong, watching me.
I swallow down my nerves. “And I’ll be in this building over there?” The room we’re in is long, and narrow, and cold. A full-length picture frame very much like the one in my father’s conference ro
om looms over Cedar’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” he says. “No idea who or what’s waiting on the other side. Best to lay low until morning.”
I rub the exhaustion from my eyes before looking at him. “Okay. Thanks, Cedar.” I have no idea what helping me cost him. “I just have one question.”
“And I have a favor.”
My eyes narrow, but my cybernetics don’t function without Circuit access. “How did you know I was coming tonight?”
“Got a message from a mutual friend.”
“Who?”
“That’s two questions.”
“Who?” I ask again.
He shifts away from me, his hands coming up to cross over his chest. “Your father.”
I fall back a step as if he slugged me right in the mouth. My face tingles. My lungs feel full of water.
“My father?” I manage to gargle out.
Cedar gives one curt nod and reaches into his pocket. “Wondering if you’d take a message to Cas for me.”
“Yeah, okay.” My voice sounds two seconds from dying. I can’t make my brain function properly. He knows my father?
Cedar hands me an envelope, and I slide it into the pocket of my backpack. It suddenly feels ten pounds heavier. He knows my freaking father?
“Okay, well.” He clears his throat. “Time to go.” He clicks on a computer and taps and types. The rift in the frame blazes to life, and he steps to the side.
I step toward it, thinking about Cascade and her deteriorating cells. Cedar and his secrets. My father and his seemingly endless contacts. Heath and his desperation to get Soda back.
I enter the picture frame with hope pounding wildly in my heart and fear flowing freely in my veins.
Heath
I GOGGLE AT THE ELDERLY WOMAN. Kelly seems to sag before my very eyes as I try to figure out how to make the strong timbre of her voice match this waif of a woman.
She stumbles and lets herself fall into the chair at the head of the table. I step in front of Soda to shield her.
Mend (Rift Walkers #2) Page 24