by Simon Holt
Aaron shook his head.
“So what’s the plan, then? Shady motels for the rest of my life?”
Aaron pulled Reggie close.
“I’ll explain everything. But let’s get settled first.”
They got out of the car. The lot’s weak lights cast dim orange pools on the asphalt. As Aaron fumbled to get the ill-fitting key into the door of their room, Reggie breathed deeply, taking in the chilled night air and exhaling it in a puff of steam. She’d never take fresh air for granted again. The lock popped and Aaron opened the door.
It was typical motel fare: dingy and dusty, two double beds swathed in well-worn comforters, and a carpet that looked like it hadn’t been replaced in three decades. But it wasn’t Unger’s prison, and Reggie could not be more grateful. Aaron brought in two suitcases and wheeled one over to Reggie.
“Henry packed it, so don’t blame me if he didn’t include the right shoes or something.”
At her brother’s name, Reggie looked up. “Right, because that’s what I’m worried about. How is Henry?”
Aaron sat down next to her on the bed.
“He’s fine. Worried sick about you, of course. But he’s the reason we found you in the first place.”
Aaron told Reggie about his encounter with her father at the library and his subsequent attempt to visit her.
“He came to Home? He was there?”
“When they wouldn’t let him in, I thought he was going to tear the place to the ground,” Aaron said. “You should have seen him, Reggie. He was so upset—I know what he did was inexcusable, and I won’t defend him, but after seeing him on that tape… He loves you. He really thought he was doing the right thing, sending you there.”
Reggie was silent. She had taken Aaron’s coat off and now caught sight of her arms, thin and pocked with gray scars. Her trophies from the fearscapes. She knew her body was riddled with them now, and no amount of time would ever erase them. Remembering the last fearscape, she pulled the bottom of her shirt up over the waistband of her pants and looked down. A black mark ran from one side of her emaciated stomach to the other, like a horrible cesarean incision. She heard Aaron’s intake of breath.
“Reggie…” He trailed off, not knowing what to say. Sympathy and rage battled inside him. But just then there was a knock on the door, and Machen and Quinn entered, carrying two large pizzas. The aroma of greasy melted cheese filled the room.
“Ahh, I forgot that smell,” Reggie said.
“I can’t attest to its quality,” said Machen. “It was just the closest food joint.”
“Where’s Macie?” Aaron asked.
“She’s fine. I sedated her—she should be out until morning.”
Machen put the pizzas on the dresser, and Quinn produced some paper plates and napkins. He handed them around, and his eyes lingered on Reggie when he got to her. She stared back. For a moment they both grasped the plate, and Reggie noticed his missing fingers and the scar on his cheek. He, too, bore the physical souvenirs; what were his emotional ones like? Had he, like Henry, had violent outbursts? She still couldn’t quite believe he was here, that he was apparently part of the gang now.
Aaron caught the exchange between the two of them and frowned.
“So it was Macie’s house that you guys went to last year, where you found her brother, Jeremiah,” Quinn said. “And Jeremiah was the one who Reggie…” He glanced at the pizza wedge halfway to his lips and put it back on the plate.
“It didn’t taste like pepperoni,” said Reggie. “But yes, I ate solidified Vour essence, and that gave me my powers.”
“I can’t believe Macie’s still alive,” Quinn went on. “How old do you think she is?”
Aaron shrugged. “I can probably dig up a birth certificate if necessary.”
“I think we should be more concerned about what help, if any, that woman can give us.” Machen tore into a piece of pepperoni. “I think she’s schizophrenic.”
Suddenly Aaron leaped to his feet.
“Sims’s letter!” he cried.
“What’s that?” Reggie asked.
“We found this letter in Eben’s things. It was from a Tracer named Sims—he was the one who sent Macie’s journal to Eben in the first place.” Aaron began to pace and summarized the contents of Sims’s note. “The ‘establishment’ that he infiltrated—it could have been Thornwood, or another hospital. Sims thought that whatever Macie knew, it was important enough to steal her journal and get it to Eben. She’s obviously been a part of this for years; we just didn’t know.”
“There are more journal pages in her files,” Reggie said. “Pages that were torn out of a notebook. I saw them. She must have some kind of information locked away in her head. It’s the only reason Unger would keep her alive.”
“And if she’s been the Vours’ captive for so long, it’s possible she knows more about them than anyone,” Aaron finished.
“Well, we’re not getting anything out of her tonight,” Machen said.
“What is the plan after tonight?” Reggie asked.
Aaron bit his lip.
“To disappear. You and me. We’re going to have to stay on the run for a while, at least until after the solstice. Machen and Quinn will continue to monitor Vour activity and get any leads they can on their schemes. I’ve emptied out my college fund, so we’ll have cash for a while anyway—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Reggie jumped up. Her pizza fell on the bed, untouched. “I can’t ask you to do that, Aaron.”
“You didn’t ask. I decided.”
“No. I’m not going to let you leave your family, your friends, your life—everything you’ve worked for.” Reggie tried to sound as authoritative as possible.
“Everything I’ve worked for doesn’t mean anything if I don’t know you’re safe,” Aaron replied.
“But… but your parents,” Reggie protested. “It will kill them, not knowing what’s happened to you!”
There was a thud as Quinn dropped his can of soda on the carpet.
“Sorry.” He hurried to the bathroom to get a towel.
“I’ve written my parents a letter telling them everything. They’ll believe it or not, I guess, but I thought I owed them the truth. Machen will deliver it once we’re off.” Aaron was so calm, Reggie could scarcely believe it. “This isn’t necessarily forever, Reggie. I’m hoping we’ll be able to come back before too long. Anyway, you’re going to have to tie me up or knock me out to keep me from going with you, and I’m a lot stronger than you these days. So suck it up.”
The emotion was beginning to well inside Reggie. Exhaustion was taking over, reality closing in. She had escaped Unger’s clutches, but she still couldn’t go home. Aaron was willing to sacrifice everything for her, while the people whom she should be able to count on—her parents—were nowhere to be seen. Her father… Aaron was right about her father. She hated him sometimes, blamed him for being bullheaded, for not trusting her, but he had stayed. He did what he honestly thought was best, even if that meant confining her to a psych ward. But her mother…
“If only I knew where Mom was,” she said, to no one in particular, “I could go stay with her, and you all could go back to your lives.”
She had meant it as a rhetorical statement, but the silence that followed was palpable. She caught Aaron and Quinn exchanging a glance.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Aaron said, a bit too quickly. “This is the plan. In the morning, you and I will—”
“I can always tell when you’re lying, Aaron. You’re awful at it. There’s something you’re not saying.”
“Reggie, it really doesn’t matter.”
“You thought of that already, didn’t you? That Mom could take me in.”
“It occurred to me, yes.”
“And you tried to track her down.” Reggie paced a few steps. “But if you weren’t able to do it, then you’d just tell me. Which means—” She whirled on Aaron. “You did find her.”
No
one said anything.
“You did. You know where she is!”
Aaron looked grimly at Reggie.
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you say so? Why can’t we go to her? Is she in China or something?”
“No, she’s in Brooklyn. But, Reggie, she might not be your mother.”
“But—” All the words evaporated on Reggie’s lips, and she sank back onto the bed. The three men watched her uneasily, waiting for her reaction. She was as amazed as anyone that it wasn’t rage, or shock, or even sadness. No, it was something more like relief. “But she’s a Vour. Of course,” she said slowly. The facts stacked up in her brain: how Mom had changed before she left, how she was distant and seemed to lose interest in the family. And then she had just abandoned them. It had never made sense to Reggie—those weren’t things her mother would do. But they were very much the actions of a Vour. She grabbed Aaron’s hands, and now the words spilled out. “How did we never think of this before? It all makes sense now. How did you figure it out?” Her eyes darkened. “Henry wasn’t there, was he?”
“Of course not.” Aaron nodded at Quinn. “We have another Vour detector now.”
Reggie had forgotten Quinn was even there. Now he spoke up.
“I saw her, Reggie. I got the chills thing. That’s how we knew.”
“So you’ve seen her? You’ve actually seen her in person?”
“Quinn did. I was in the car.”
“I have to go to her.”
“No,” Aaron said emphatically. “Absolutely not.”
“Not absolutely not. She’s my mother, and I can save her.”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you,” said Aaron. “Do you know how many Vours are out there looking for you right now? I’m guessing they’ve activated the phone tree. We can’t just show up at one of their homes.”
“They might even send her looking for you,” Machen interjected.
“So much the better,” said Reggie.
Aaron squeezed Reggie’s hand.
“Look, I know you want to save your mom, but it’s not going to do any good if you get yourself recaptured, right? There will be a time and a place to go to her, but now isn’t it.”
Reggie shook her head.
“My mother is living in a world created from her worst nightmares. I’m not going to leave her in there for one more day. I’m not going to leave her behind.” Her lip trembled, and she paused. “Besides, once she’s out of the fearscape, the two of us can disappear together, like your original plan. And you don’t have to leave your life behind.”
“I don’t like it,” said Machen.
Reggie sighed.
“I’m sorry, you guys. You just risked your lives to get me out of that hellhole, and I’m causing trouble before the night’s even over. But you have to understand… she’s my mother.” She faced Aaron. “There have been so many times when I needed her over the past couple years, when I wanted her help so badly. And all this time she needed my help. And I can give it to her.”
Aaron picked Reggie’s pizza off the bed and put it back on the plate.
“When we find out what these monsters are up to, kick the crap out of them, and send their asses back to whatever hell dimension they came from, you should seriously consider law school. Okay. I’ll take you to your mom.”
Machen grumbled something under his breath, but Reggie didn’t catch it. Louder, he said, “Well, if this is the plan, you guys are going to need some weapons.”
11
Reggie tried to sleep, but the adrenaline from the escape, the anticipation of seeing her mother, and even maybe sleeping on a regular mattress for the first time in months kept her awake most of the night. In the morning Machen packed up Aaron’s car with Vour weaponry.
“I gave you the subzero blanket—I think that will be the best way to incapacitate her,” he told Aaron. “You’ll have to charge it up first, so have Reggie keep her busy for a bit.”
“What’s a subzero blanket?” Reggie asked.
“A current runs through it—when it touches skin, it stimulates the nerve endings to simulate the feeling of cold,” Aaron explained. At Reggie’s incredulous look, he added, “Tracers may be lethal bastards, but they’ve got sweet gear.”
“Here, take a nitro-gun, too,” said Machen, handing Aaron a pistol. Reggie grabbed his arm.
“We’re not going to kill her!”
“It doesn’t shoot bullets,” Machen said. “It has darts like the ones we used at Home—it won’t kill a Vour, but it will cause enough pain to make them wish they were dead, and they’ll pass out for a short time. Just take it as a precaution.”
Reggie nodded, and Aaron stowed the gun and extra darts in the car.
Reggie shared an awkward goodbye with both Machen and Quinn. She barely knew them, really, and yet they’d done so much for her. Now they were going to take Macie back to Cutter’s Wedge with them, and Machen promised to try to learn what he could from her.
“Thank you for everything,” she said, climbing into Aaron’s car.
“I did try to kill you once,” Machen said. “I owed you one.”
“And I owe you a lot more than one,” said Quinn. “Good luck, Reggie. I mean it.”
It took them the better part of a day to reach the outskirts of New York City. Aaron drove the entire way, which Reggie was grateful for. In addition to not sleeping well, she hadn’t managed to eat much, despite the enticing aroma of the pizza the night before. Her stomach was so shrunken and unused to rich foods that she’d barely kept down the muffin Aaron had gotten her when he’d stopped to get an extra-large coffee for the drive.
When they started out, she caught Aaron casting furtive glances her way every couple minutes. She knew he was terribly worried about her, but she was still just too exhausted to do much besides force the muffin crumbs down her throat one by one.
She had dreamed of escaping Unger’s clutches from the moment she’d been thrown in the back of that van, but those dreams had been a lot different from the present reality. Perhaps it was too much to ask that she could return to her family, sleep in her own bed, go back to school—fall back into a normalish kind of life. She had thought she would feel elation, or hope, or any kind of optimism at being out of that terrible hospital, but all she felt was an overwhelming weariness, like her organs just wanted to slow down until they stopped altogether. She supposed it was some sort of catharsis, the giant exhalation after months of worry and fear and meds had kept her adrenaline pumped to a manic level.
For now, she just let the morning sun beat down on her. She caught sight of her face in the visor’s mirror and flinched: She’d showered at the motel and changed into clean clothes, but in the daylight her skin looked so pale it was almost translucent, and was certainly not helped by the shadows under her eyes and the framing of her hollowed-out cheeks. Her dark hair, at one time long and lustrous—and the one aspect of her appearance she thought beautiful—was wispy and cropped close to her scalp, like a cancer patient’s. They had kept it cut short at Home since it made attaching the electrodes easier, but she had been so malnourished that it probably wouldn’t have grown more than a couple inches without breaking off anyway. She was gray, and thin, and sickly, a mere shadow of the girl she had once been.
“Reggie, do you want to talk about what happened to you?” Aaron broke the silence at last. “You can tell me anything—I can help you.”
It was the question she’d been dreading. She felt like she owed Aaron an explanation, but the last thing she wanted to do was willingly transport her mind back to that place.
“I—I can’t. Not yet.”
“I understand.” He sounded both worried and dejected. “But are you sure you’re ready to do this? We can take a few days—more than that, if you want. You’ve been through so much….”
“No, I want to get this over with.” Reggie turned to him and managed a smile. “I look worse than I feel.”
Aaron was quiet a moment, then said
, “Don’t start lying to me now.”
Reggie was momentarily taken aback.
“Well, let’s pretend I look worse than I feel.”
“Okay, then.”
It wasn’t the only thing they were pretending, and they both knew it. They were also pretending this was just some normal road trip a couple of friends were taking, that everything was just as it had been, that there wasn’t this new, invisible wall between them.
“Look, I don’t feel like talking, but I’d love to listen,” Reggie said. “Tell me a story. What important stuff have I missed?”
“Oh, all kinds of things. Your best friend, Nina Snow, won a grueling battle for Homecoming Queen last month. A bunch of basketball players got caught cheating on the SATs, and now there’s no way we’re going to State. They put a new soda machine in the cafeteria.”
“I’d actually like to hear about your new part-time gig as Universal Soldier.”
Aaron’s cheeks colored.
“Oh, that. Yes, I have some new skills to go along with the computer hacking and the ability to multiply big numbers in my head. And yet, I’m still afraid of water. Go figure.”
“But seriously, how did all of that happen?”
“How did Machen and Quinn and I become a little team, do you mean?” Aaron asked wryly.
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
Aaron launched into an account of the last several months, starting with the day after Reggie was taken. He told her about Machen quitting the Tracers and enlisting others’ help, including his own. He told her about Quinn seeking him out and proving himself to be, as Aaron grudgingly put it, “reasonably useful.” Reggie didn’t interrupt, but sat back and listened, melting into the car seat, soaking up the heat emanating from the dashboard vent and the overhead sun on her face. After a while, her eyes slipped closed.
When they opened again, Aaron had stopped the car along a tree-lined street, opposite a four-story brick apartment building. It was flanked on either side by similar structures, with a fruit market and a non-Starbucks coffee shop in the nearby storefronts. People who had just gotten home from work were walking their dogs, and young mothers strolled along, pushing high-end strollers. It was a thoroughly quaint little block, straight out of a New York–based romantic comedy. With dismay, Reggie realized she was half-expecting zombies to emerge from the alleyways, or demon babies to start crawling out of those strollers. Would she never be able to enjoy a tranquil scene again?