“How far is it to walk?”
“Just over an hour. Got that in ya?”
“Who knows.” Past the streetlights, the rooftops stood out black against an intense, deep-green glow. That would be even brighter in the desert, but I had no desire to see it. “John? The northern lights... can people usually see them here?”
“Nope.”
“So it’s Them. Like you said before.”
“A sign saying They’re close. Celestial disruptions, all the rules tangled up. Solar storms and magnetosphere disturbances and comets knocked off their paths, nudged by a nongravitational force that can’t be calculated or measured. Don’t think about it. Come on.”
I trudged after her, my back aching from being curled into a comma on the bus. Our street led into a road lined with houses and tall trees, maybe even the GMO drought-resistant ornamental ones Johnny had created a few years ago. The ever-present solar panel tiles blended into the tiles on walls and balconies; several houses had shaped theirs into pictures like the tanagrams the twins used to love: a chicken, a face, a camel, a cat. Streetlight gleamed companionably off satellite dishes strapped to stone minarets. Our sneakers were silent on the road, although we still startled a few feral cats out of garbage cans and gardens, squeezing their skinny bodies through the iron gates everyone seemed to have here. Their eyes shone from blocks away, turning into streaks as they ran. It was so quiet I could hear the patter of their feet on the asphalt.
“The—” I began, and froze. A fat, low SUV had pulled silently across the road twenty yards ahead of us, scattering the cats. I couldn’t read the text on the door, white against navy paint, or see lights or a siren, but I knew cops when I saw them. My senses had gone berserk from fear and I could smell their exhaust from here, sharp and greasy over the chrysanthemum odour of Johnny’s fresh sweat.
Steps sounded behind us; Johnny rose onto her tiptoes, hands spread.
“Don’t run,” I whispered.
“I won’t.”
“Don’t.”
“I won’t, I won’t.”
“How did they find us?”
“Beats me.”
Dark forms emerged from the alleyways, cheerful, teeth gleaming like their reflective badges in the faint light. They were shouting, not in English. I didn’t need to ask Johnny what they were saying. They had guns; so much for protective custody.
I exhaled slowly as they approached, five cops, surely far more than was needed for two teenage runaways. Or were they arresting us for prostitution or whatever? Damn, should have worn fake wedding rings or something. Don’t move, I ordered myself and Johnny, lips moving silently. Don’t give them an excuse to shoot us. Don’t give them an excuse to Rodney King us. Don’t move.
Instead of handcuffs, they used plastic zip-ties, three around my wrists, two around John’s, as she gritted her teeth against their touch. I rolled my eyes when I knew they weren’t looking. It was her they had to worry about escaping, not me. The plastic was tight as all hell, my fingertips beginning to tingle before we had even been bundled into the cage of the SUV. Maybe she couldn’t get out of these after all.
I shut my eyes as we pulled out. It had all been so fast. Johnny had insisted that our positions and trajectories be indecipherable even to ourselves—waves not admitting we were particles, particles denying being waves—but we’d been caught no more than fifteen minutes after getting off that bus. We tumbled around in the cage, seatbeltless, as the cops chuckled and joshed and slurped from their travel mugs, occasionally jerking a thumb back at us. The interior stank of coffee, body odour, and stale urine—about the way I expected a cop car to smell.
What now? My mind began to race, just like on the plane. Oh God, back to the station. Split up, me in a crowded cell yelling for someone who could speak English, demanding my one phone call, a cop-show fallacy that they would laugh at if anyone understood me. And who would I call anyway? Johnny somewhere else, arguing in ten languages, pulling whatever cards she could for either of us: the fame card, the kid card, the Canadian card, whatever might help. Would it be enough?
The darkness in City Hall. The faceless men, the press of our space, shoulders and hands, the sour smell of children, the smell of fear. A dark smallness, a small darkness. No one came for us. No one protected us. We were alone in the dark, us and the dead. I shut my eyes, waiting for it to pass.
“What are they saying?” I whispered when a sharp left threw us against each other, quickly jerking my knee back from hers.
“Blonde jokes,” she said grimly. She was watching the street signs outside, though I couldn’t understand how she could read them, they were going by so fast; tricky things in French and Arabic, some not even on real signs but made out of mosaic tiles, unlit and stuck to the walls. We barrelled down the empty streets, watching the occasional pedestrian leap back. Rutger’s name fell into the cops’ conversation once, hard in the flow of the soft language, like something silvery leaping out of a stream: Rutger Giehl. I looked at Johnny, but she was still staring out the smeared and barred window. I knew she’d heard it, though. That fucker.
The station was huge, so big I would have assumed it was a bank or office building, spotlit with amber lights and surrounded by different colours of cop cars and cops, struggling or resigned people in handcuffs or plastic ties, whole families, everyone waving their fists and pieces of paper or wads of cash, talking at the tops of their lungs. Cats perched on stone barriers, smugly grooming themselves and watching the crowd.
Our doors opened before the SUV had even stopped moving, and hard hands dragged us out, stumbling, up a flight of curved stone steps. We had to fight our way through the mob—hard elbows and chins banging into me, voices in my ears, breath of spices or mint—just to get to the glass doors of the entrance. Only the weight of my bag banging against the back of my legs told me it was still there. Where was Johnny? I twisted to look for her, earning only a harder squeeze from the cop. Something creaked warningly in my elbow.
By the time I caught my bearings again, we’d been stowed in a small, wood-smelling office with brick walls, as if it had been built onto the exterior of the building, barely bigger than the kids’ bedroom back home. I panted, looking up at the flyspecked fluorescents, the ceiling fan, the stacks of paperwork and books. Johnny stumbled in a second later, pushed from behind, and the door slammed shut. In the abrupt silence, we both listened to a deadbolt turn from the far side, then fading laughter.
She had a bloody nose, though her hands were loose, two angry purple stripes on her wrists. “I leave you alone for two minutes...” I said.
“He was asking for it.”
“You and your kung fu,” I said. “You don’t even have one single belt. Not one.”
“A technicality. Just because I didn’t want to do the exams. I still know all the stuff.”
“No you don’t.”
She quartered the room, mostly looking up at the high ceiling. “Damn. That’s pretty high. Well, they made the classic mistake—”
“Took their eyes off you for half a second?”
“Check.” She quickly dug in her bag, flipped open her cell phone and dialed so fast her fingers were a blur. I watched hopefully as she held it to her ear, but she hissed in what sounded like real alarm. “Shit. No signal. It must be reinforced concrete behind the brick. Maybe I can improvise an antenna, put it up against the window…”
“Who were you calling?”
“Put the phone down,” a strange voice said, and I jumped, falling against the wall. Johnny looked up, then slowly wiped blood from her nose with the back of her hand, letting the drop slither into one of the purple ruts.
“How very unfortunate that they have locked you in here with us,” she said. I held down a frantic sob or guffaw as she pocketed the phone and looked up at the huge man who had stepped out from behind a pile of books beside the desk.
“Yes,” the officer said in a heavy accent: Hessss. “I heard. You were videoed, you know, at the airport. Shame
on you.”
“Shame on them.”
He shook his head—a tall, muscular man bulging from the seams of his navy uniform, stained black with sweat at groin and chest, with a thick black beard and moustache.
“We received information from multiple agencies concerned for your safety. So, you are in custody until we have made contact with your guardian or your parents,” the officer said. “No harm will come to you—unless you cause it,” he added, tilting his chin directly at Johnny, who glared at him.
I sensed, almost felt, her resist an impulse to look at her watch. It had been about half an hour since we’d gotten off the bus. Not too long a delay yet—but we couldn’t afford any more, not if the alignment was as close as she kept fretting about. We had to get out of here, and it couldn’t wait until they got ahold of Rutger or her parents. They wouldn’t be able to get ahold of mine, not that they knew that. I hoped that wouldn’t cause even more of a delay.
The big cop glanced at me, as if reading my mind, and ran a hand caressingly along the butt of the pistol in his chest holster, one of three visible on his uniform. For all I knew he had one strapped to his shin, too, like the movies.
“The airport security, they made a mistake,” he said. “Dealing with a little rabid dog. Having reviewed the footage, I will not. Please, sit. It may be some time.”
He gestured at two empty wooden chairs on the far side of the desk. I immediately collapsed onto one; Johnny sat more slowly on the edge of hers.
“Can we at least get these off?” I said, waggling my arms hopefully. “I can’t feel my hands.”
“No.”
I opened my mouth again, and stopped. The pain in my hands had gone from a numb buzz to a roar, creeping up my arms. That wasn’t fair; Johnny’s hands were free. Shouldn’t point it out, though. A heavy silence fell, occasionally punctuated by whatever noises could penetrate the thick wooden door. At least there was that. We were in here, not out there—other cops might take our bags, grope Johnny, there would be fights, chaos, and we’d never make it home, let alone to the great gate. Jesus.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Johnny said.
“There is a bucket in the corner.”
“...I changed my mind,” she said.
After another few minutes, she said, “How did you find us?” I almost laughed; her pride had been hurt. As if we were international spies and not a couple of highly visible teenagers on the run.
“We are not having conversation,” the cop said. “Shut up and wait.”
“That zapper you’re carrying? I invented those.”
“Be quiet.”
“We don’t have time for this,” she muttered.
The cop shrugged, eloquently implying with the single gesture that he too was wasting his time looking after us in this cramped office, instead of filling out forms or working on his novel or emailing his friends, but we all had jobs to do, and the best thing to do would be to not complain about it. And at least he wasn’t interrogating us, or rifling through our bags, both of which I expected to happen any minute now. Think, think. How could we get out of this? Johnny had a plan. Must have. She was always the one with a plan, no exceptions.
Except for the guns. The guns made an exception. What good was it trying to break us out of here if one or both of us got shot?
And I thought again, coldly: Yes, but if I got killed, she would simply take my bag and go. You don’t mourn the pack mule. You just keep going. The gate has to be shut. Has to.
We would not have come all this way if she didn’t truly believe that the gate could be shut.
“Could we at least have some water?” she said.
The cop sighed, the ends of his moustache flapping, but maybe we looked dried-out enough to be pathetic; he opened a desk drawer, took out a bottle of water, dipped his head as he dug deeper in the drawer. Johnny tensed. I held my breath, waiting for the leap, the collision, the gunshots.
But she let him get all the way back up again before she pounced, and I stood up, yelling her name, crashing against the desk and dancing back as they struggled. It wouldn’t have been a fair fight even without the size difference—the desk was in the way, they were fighting around it, sickening crunches of arms and legs against the wood. I could see that he didn’t want to hurt her, which was unfortunate, since she certainly wanted to hurt him, and it wasn’t till he finally held her down with one hand and went for a gun that I leapt.
We collided harmlessly; I felt the breath of air as he evaded my headbutt, the only move—from watching the kids—that I reliably knew in a fight, and then it was just a mad tangle, him throwing me easily to the floor, the casters of the desk chair bumping into my ribs. But Johnny got a hand in, somehow, and drove his head against the side of the desk with a horrific crack. He slumped next to me, and we stared at each other for a moment before his eyes slowly, dreamily closed. I tried to get to my feet and found that I couldn’t.
Johnny pulled the chair away and stood panting while I got my back against the brick wall and clumsily walked myself back up. “Oh my God, oh my God,” I gasped. “Holy shit. What the hell was that? What is this, a kung-fu movie? How are you still alive?”
“Don’t jinx it!” she wheezed, quickly frisking herself. Bruises were already developing, and there was a small, dripping wound on her temple where a fingernail had caught her. She stooped and I strode over and hip-checked her.
“We are not travelling with a gun,” I said. “Especially a stolen cop gun.”
“But what if we need it?” She fished one out anyway, and—I assumed, having never seen it done in real life—put the safety on, then tucked it into the waistband of her khakis, where it promptly tried to pants her, exposing penguin-print panties that I looked away from in horror, too late. The fate of the world rested on someone in novelty underwear.
“I’m gonna need some eye bleach.”
“For what?”
“This is going to end so badly,” I said. “Come on, get me loose and let’s bail.”
She cracked the plastic ties on my wrist using a boxcutter from the desk, and then went for the door, where we both stopped. I bit down a rising scream as blood returned to my dead fingers, shaking my wrists to distract myself from the pain.
“Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” she murmured.
“Plan B?”
Plan B wasn’t as terrifying as I had expected—I was thinking air ducts, squeezing along past whirring fans, like in Aliens or something. But we simply stacked boxes till we had stepped shelves high enough to reach the high, small window that led outside. We reluctantly played rock-paper-scissors to decide who would go first.
The cop was stirring and moaning by the time I managed to get the painted-shut clasp open. I could have fainted in relief. When you knock someone out for more than a couple of seconds, that’s bad shit. We would go from whatever minor crime faking a passport entailed to a manslaughter charge and—whatever came with that. Helping or whatever.
“Move it!” Johnny hissed, as if reading my mind. “I don’t want to hit him again.”
“No, because you might kill him this time,” I muttered. The window had one of those levers on the side that could, in theory, prop it open, but it was bent and not working. I let out a few other choice phrases as Johnny started to mount the boxes behind me, her next words drowned out by banging on the office door. I whirled just in time to see her start, lose her footing, and fall the few feet to the tiles, the gun sliding out of her waistband. It hit butt-first and went off, so loud I yelped, a puff of brick dust floating down onto my hair.
We were still staring at the hole in the wall, a foot from my face, when the cop finally either unlocked the door or busted the lock. Then he stared at it for a moment too.
“Get down, little dog; and you, too,” he said sharply, a youngish guy, thin, with sharp black facial hair, as if it had been drawn on with a marker. “You are being moved to Station Zoor. For... protection.”
“Please, protect me from
her,” I murmured as he approached us with another set of zip ties.
“But that’s halfway across town,” Johnny said, frozen in what seemed like shock as he bound her wrists again.
“Very good. Move.” He glanced down at the unconscious cop, then looked up again, at me. I shrugged.
“You don’t understand,” Johnny said. “We can’t.”
“Uh huh.”
Shit. I didn’t know how big the city was, but her worry couldn’t be good. The time to transfer us there, whatever time she needed to break us out, whatever time to get back to the library...
“Who gave the order to move us?” she said.
“Move, I said.” He still hadn’t pointed his own gun at us; it seemed inert, heavy, very small in his hand. I wondered what it would feel like to have it aimed our way. “No trouble, understand?”
“You’re supposed to return us unharmed, though,” Johnny said. “That’s why they put us in here. You’re not going to shoot us. There would be an international incident.”
“Oh? Move.” He paused, and met her gaze, then flicked it down to the big officer on the floor, getting to his hands and knees, trying to focus on our faces. “Quickly.”
The new cop led us out into the hallway, as crowded as the front of the station had been, and down a set of newer concrete stairs into a car. We’d grabbed our bags, but hadn’t taken the water. My mouth and throat felt so dry that I thought I might start coughing and simply choke to death on my swollen tongue. And as soon as I’d thought it, it was all I could think about. Panic placed a hand over my face and pressed down.
Through graying vision and the thick plastic grate between us and the new cop, I heard Johnny say, “Who sent you?”
“You know who.”
“No, I mean who specifically. They hardly have enough power to let you pull something like this, do they?”
“No, we do not; and some argued against using it at all. But the cats have been reporting unusual sightings lately,” he said, quietly, in perfect English with a faint French accent, his voice much deeper than before. I bit down a gasp as I watched his face shift and blur in the rear-view mirror, as if he’d been wearing a thin mask that had suddenly floated away. “They saw you come into the station.”
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