Love on the Run

by Katharine Kerr

“You’re safe now,” Ari said. “And we’ll endeavor to keep you that way.”

  “Thanks.” She had a pleasant voice, low with a California accent. “I just can’t take anymore, dealing with those creeps.” She lowered her hands and looked at me.

  “Creeps?” I said. “Ash and the gang?”

  “No, the Soldiers of the Risen Lord. Ash is a sweetie compared to them. Although, y’know—” She hesitated, trembled again, and began to cry. “I wish she hadn’t offed Scotty.”

  Ari grabbed the box of tissues from De Vere’s desk and handed it to her. He mouthed “girl to girl” to me, then went to help Rasmussen drag packed boxes over to the door. I pulled up a chair opposite Izumi and sat down. In a couple of minutes she snuffled back her tears and wiped her face.

  “You were fond of Trotter,” I said.

  She shrugged and tossed the damp tissue into a nearby wastebasket. “I dunno if fond is it,” she said. “But I like, understood him. He came from the Kingdom, y’know.”

  “I didn’t know, no.”

  “A lot of the old guys in the Kingdom have a bunch of wives, and that means some of the young guys are kind of in the way, because they’ll never get a wife. So the old guys give them a train ticket and a visa to California or Texas and run them out. Scotty was one of those young guys. That’s why he was so arrogant and stubborn and weird.” She snuffled back a few more tears. “Goddamn Ash anyway!”

  “Why did she kill Scotty?” I said.

  “Same reason she’ll try to kill me. He was ready to go to Spivey and tell him everything. It’s the bombings. Okay, yeah, the Axeman must look like a creep to you, but he took me off the street when I was a little kid. He gave me a home, him and his lady. The gang, they don’t hurt anyone without a reason, y’know? But these Kingdom people—” She leaned forward and held out one urgent hand. “They’re crazy. They’re really crazy. They don’t care how many people they kill. They just don’t.”

  “I got that impression, yeah.”

  “I don’t want to deal with them no more. I can’t. Scotty couldn’t either. When they ordered him to help bomb this place, he panicked. When you guys stopped it, he was glad. And he slipped up and showed he was glad.”

  “So they killed him.”

  She nodded. “Ash came for him with three of the goons. We couldn’t do nothing. At least she didn’t make me watch. She let me get dressed and get out first.”

  “After you left, he put up one hell of a fight. He must have gotten loose for a couple of minutes anyway.”

  “Did he?” Her eyes grew wide. “He didn’t do nothing while I was there. Just stood there and let them hold him against the wall. He told me to just go, get out.”

  “He didn’t want them to hurt you, I’d say. Once you were safe, he could try to get a little of his own back.”

  Two tears ran down her cheeks. She nodded her agreement, then wiped her face on her sleeve.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Why has the Axeman joined up with this bunch of murderous loonies? Does he believe in their version of Jesus?”

  “Oh, hell, no! It’s the money. They pay us for the people we bring, and then they sell them back in the Kingdom.”

  So I’d been right about that. Sometimes you’d rather be wrong.

  “These soldiers, they must know about TWIXT,” I said. “I know the Axeman does.”

  “I guess. No one told me nothing. I was never in real tight with Ash, y’know. She was the boss’ daughter, and she made sure everyone knew it.”

  De Vere’s phone rang again. Izumi turned so tense that she stopped breathing for several moments. De Vere answered, listened, and said, “The truck’s here. We’ve got to get this stuff down to the lobby with as little confusion as possible.”

  “No,” Ari said. “With as much confusion as possible. That will let O’Grady and me get Izumi and the refugees out of the side door while everyone’s busy at the front. De Vere, is there any body armor in this office?”

  “ ’Fraid not. No one thought we’d need any when we set this all up.”

  “Then we’ll have to move fast. Across the street and into the park at the trot, up the hill as fast as you all can walk. Izumi, you and Parra y Cruz will travel in the middle of the squad. Rasmussen, travel behind them and keep everyone moving fast. O’Grady, you go in the middle, too.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve got to be a few steps behind to run scans.”

  “You’ve got the gifts, don’t you?” Izumi said to me. “I figured someone here did.”

  “Just about all of us do, in one way or another,” I said. “Do you know where Ash is?”

  “On her way, and I bet some of the goons come with her. They’ll kill me if they can.”

  “Yeah. We know.”

  Men from the shipping company brought wheeled dollies up to the office for the heaviest cartons. Men from the security guard firm came down to carry the rest. Although the security firm had body armor, they lacked enough to share or even sell us. I couldn’t blame them. We needed speed, anyway, not encumbrance. While Ari gave the men a few quick orders, I tucked Izumi’s long hair into her jacket and handed her a small carton to carry so that it would obscure her face.

  Once everyone had the freight under control, we hit both elevators. Our group of refugees huddled together behind a row of men with loaded dollies. Down we went. The door sprang open, and everyone hurried out. The shipping people and the security guards followed orders and milled around the lobby to hide us from the glass front doors. Izumi set her carton down. Ari, the two women, and Rasmussen scuttled for the side door while I brought up the rear.

  As soon as I stepped outside, I felt danger, as strong as smoke in the air, as frightening as a drawn gun. “They’re nearly here!” I called out.

  Everyone broke into a fast jog. We jogged across the street, made it into the park, and ran across the flat strip of lawn toward the path that led up to the overlap area. The steep hill slowed everyone down. I found myself panting by the time we climbed it. The danger behind us had lessened, but I sensed a threat in front of us. Two more steps and I saw it.

  One of the gang members must have been sent on ahead. A thickset guy in gray slacks and a filthy green sweatshirt appeared out of a grove of trees. He was carrying a plastic thing that looked like half a shoebox with an antenna stuck on top. I tossed Ari my shoulder bag with the orbs as we hurried the last few yards to the overlap area. I needed my hands free.

  “Get one out!” I said. “Wait to throw it till I tell you.”

  I started to gather Qi. When the goon held up the thing he carried, I realized that it was a mobile phone of sorts. “I see them!” he yelled into it.

  The clunky phone in his hand hampered the goon just enough. I managed to wind the Qi into a sphere before the goon ditched the phone and pulled a gun out of his leather jacket.

  “Overlap just ahead!” Ari called out. “I’ll activate the orb.”

  “No, wait!” I yelled as loudly as I could.

  The goon was raising his gun to shoot. I flung the sphere of Qi straight for him. It hit. He screamed as light like fire detonated on his chest and swept over him. I heard a bang like firecrackers behind me. Ari had thrown the orb. Too much Qi—between the ensorcellment and the gate device, Qi floated in the air as thick as gunpowder. The Qi from the ensorcellment rebounded and plunged into the gravity waves blasting out of the gate. Blinding glare, a triumphant yell from Ari, a crash that turned me deaf—the exploding force slammed me facedown onto the ground.

  By the time I struggled to a kneeling position, the smoke had thinned enough for me to look around. My talents confirmed what my eyes saw. Ari had gotten the others safely through, but I’d been left behind, alone on the wrong side of the vanished gate.

  The only things I wanted to do were panic and howl. I squelched those impulses and staggered to my feet. My head ached like thunder from the outpouring of Qi, or so I assumed, combined with the backlash from the explosion. The goon I’d ensorcelled lay on his
back nearby, smiling to himself and scratching his balls. Occasionally he giggled. He’d be unable to remember what had happened once the ensorcellment wore off. His gun and the broken mobile phone lay on the grass nearby.

  The long lawn of the park stretched out around me in the afternoon sun, which shone entirely too brightly on the green. I stood in plain sight. I needed to get away before Ash herself arrived. I thought about returning to the building and joining up with de Vere, but a scan showed me that the truck had already sped away. The same scan pinpointed Ash. She and her little friends had reached the office building and stopped to reconnoiter. Since I’d drained so much Qi, moving fast was out of the question. As I lurched uphill through the trees and obscuring underbrush, I tried to think things through, but the pain in my forehead made thinking difficult.

  I was too frightened to be more than distantly furious with Ari. He’d never looked back, not once to see if I could follow him. Maybe he hadn’t heard me telling him to wait. Maybe he was sick of following my orders. Did it matter when I might never see him again? I remembered Willa telling us to hurry and get out of there, that she couldn’t guarantee that the overlap would work much longer. The thought hit me so hard that I nearly vomited. Beyond that, even if a rescue team got through, TWIXT might never be able to find wherever it was that I was going to end up. My position could perhaps be best expressed by the square root of minus two—an awful joke. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to laugh.

  I might never see my family again, either. My family. Sean. My brother the finder, the guy whose talent allowed him to place anything or anybody he’d seen at least once. He knew me really well. If I could contact him, or if he could somehow get through to Six, he could find me. The realization allowed my mind to settle. I gathered Qi, calmed myself, and kept walking.

  Eventually I reached a pair of stone gates, the exit from the park, at the place where in my own world Mansell Avenue begins its run downhill. On Six, they’d named it Roosevelt Drive, in homage to the assassinated president, most likely. I stopped to breathe and take a quick inventory. I owned about five bucks’ worth of the currency of this world level, my clothes, a couple of crumpled-up tissues, and a chocolate energy bar. That was it, not even a comb, no ID, no nothing. The shoulder bag I’d tossed to Ari contained everything else.

  I ran an SM:D and felt danger all around me, though most of it lay at a distance in time. Nightfall, I felt, would bring the threats close. I had no idea if this version of San Francisco had homeless shelters. If it did, I needed to come up with a story for the aid workers. I tried another Search Mode while I fought to focus my aching brain on safety and finding a place to hide. At last I remembered the Pull I’d felt, the sense that my family’s dopplegängers lived nearby. I opened myself to the Pull and did a scan. The Houlihan house. Refuge lay in the place where the Houlihan house stood in my world.

  I was already standing in the equivalent of the Excelsior district. Since the house’s approximate location lay downhill and reasonably close at hand, I figured I had the energy to reach it. When I came free of the trees, I saw the blue water tower just uphill and south of me, exactly where it should have been. Its existence encouraged me enough that I kept on walking through the tract of houses below.

  Mansell may have been missing, but the other streets I crossed had the same or similar names to those on my home world level. When I finally found the correct cross street, I turned down it. Walking had become torture, but the pain in my head receded when I recognized the hillside lot, planted with a rock garden far more elegant than Uncle Jim had ever managed to grow. I stood at the base of the brick steps and stared up at the building at the top.

  The house looked something like the Houlihan house, in that it had three stories at one end, one in the middle, and two at the other end. Someone had put a lot of work into it, though, judging by the pearl-gray siding, the elegant multipane windows, and a new brick chimney that indicated a fireplace in the living room. A sleek blue car sat at the top of the driveway instead of Uncle Jim’s old truck.

  Well, O’Grady, I said to myself, you’ve found it, your one and only goal. I could go up and knock, I suppose, see if anyone recognized me, try to explain who I was. It all seemed hopeless; a waste of effort, a cruel joke to think anyone would welcome me.

  The front door of the house opened. I heard a high-pitched shriek, followed by a somewhat lower-pitched shriek. Two kids, a girl of about six and a boy of maybe nine, burst out and came racing down the steps toward me. I stepped away toward the street, but the dark-haired girl flung herself at me and threw her arms around my waist.

  “Mama, Mama!” she was weeping and gulping for air between words. “I knew you weren’t dead. I knew it knew it knew it.”

  The boy began screaming, “Dad, Dad, come out!” at the top of his lungs. The girl looked up at me, her dark blue eyes full of tears, her nose running green snot. I fished a tissue out of my pocket and wiped her nose before I spoke. She grabbed the tissue and held it as tight as a holy relic.

  “I’m not her, I’m sorry,” I said. “I must look like your mom, but I’m not her.”

  “You’ve got to be,” the boy said. “You just don’t remember. They told us you might not remember if you hit your head.”

  “I called you,” the girl said. “I called and called, and so you heard me.”

  I’d found the origin of the Pull. “I did hear you,” I said. “But I’m not your mom. I just look like her.”

  The girl stared up at me—and believed me. She let go and sat down on the sidewalk, where she covered her face with both hands and wept even harder. Exhausted as I was, I could think of nothing comforting to say. The boy stood looking back and forth between us.

  “She’s Beth,” he said, “and I’m Donnie. Do you remember now?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’m not your mother.”

  He knelt down and put a skinny arm around his sister’s shoulders. She buried her face in his shirt and wept as she clung to him.

  A man came out onto the porch. As he hurried down the steps, his auburn hair caught the sun. Silver touches gleamed at his temples. He was tall, a little paunchy, with blue eyes and the freckles I remembered, a dusting across his nose and cheeks, because at that point, I recognized him. That is, I knew who his doppelgänger in my own world had to be, even though this man had aged, heading toward forty. So, I reminded myself, had his doppelgänger by now.

  “Cam,” I said. “Cameron Douglas.”

  “Nola?” He started to say more, but his voice caught, and he merely stared at me. Slowly, like a robot, he held out his hand. I took a step back. He took one forward and held out both hands.

  “I’m not your wife,” I said. “That’s why Beth’s crying. She thought I was.”

  “You just don’t remember.” His face went slack, as if he might laugh hysterically or weep or both. “Oh, my God, it’s a miracle. You’re home. Thank God, you’re home.”

  “I’m not who you think I am!”

  “Honey, come on, who else would you be?” He was trembling and smiling both.

  I had nothing to fall back on but the honest truth. “Another Nola O’Grady entirely who got pregnant by another version of you. Who didn’t marry that other you when he honorably offered. A long time ago and far far away.” I glanced at the boy, then back to Cam. I chose my words carefully so Donnie wouldn’t understand exactly what I’d done. “I never had your child. My mother refused to let me just put him out for adoption. So I went to the right kind of clinic, and she never forgave me.”

  “I—” His voice cracked and stuck.

  By this time Beth had stopped crying. Donnie was trying to wipe her face with the mangled remains of the tissue I’d used on her nose. I fished the second one out of my pocket and gave it to him, then turned my attention back to Cam.

  “I guess this Nola did marry you,” I said. “Was she only seventeen, like I was?”

  He winced, nodded a yes, and stared at the sidewalk. His mouth had t
wisted into a knot of old pain. “You’re not a ghost, are you? Come back to remind me?”

  “Of your early sins?” Somehow I managed to smile. “No. Ghosts don’t carry tissues in their pockets. Cam, I’m sorry you lost her.”

  I turned on my heel and walked off, heading toward the cross street.

  “Wait!” Cam called out. “Nola, wait, don’t go.”

  I stopped and looked back, but I stayed where I was. He said a few words to the children, then trotted after me. I glanced around and saw that several neighbor women had come out onto their porches and front steps. When Cam caught up with me, he said nothing at first, merely stared with narrowed eyes. I ran an SPP and picked up a flood of utter bewilderment, but in the flood bobbed an aching concern like an unmoored boat.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got no idea at all.”

  “That’s what I thought. I’ve never seen anyone look so lost.”

  I remembered that he’d always been a decent man, a kind one, really, and a good teacher, too, until his one unfortunate affair with a seventeen-year-old student. Or at least, I reminded myself, the Cam I’d known had been decent, and this one seemed to follow the pattern.

  “Please?” he said. “Come back to the house? Maybe you’re not my Nola. Okay, for the sake of argument, you don’t have to be.” He forced out a smile. The tone of his voice changed, the soft wheedle a person might use to coax a frightened pet out from under a sofa. “Come home—I mean, come back to the house anyway. Maybe you’re not her. Or maybe you’ve just been wandering around going crazy after what happened. I don’t know which. But I can’t stand seeing you with blood over half your face and acting so lost.”

  “Blood?” I raised my hand and touched my cheek. Something sticky covered it. I looked at my fingertips: dark red. “No wonder you thought I might be a ghost.”

  “It looks like someone cut you with a knife. Or was it the shrapnel? Do you remember the department store and the explosion?”

  “Was that where she died?”

  “You didn’t die. It must feel like that if you don’t remember anything. But, yeah, you left me a note. I’m going downtown, you said, to the sale in the Emporium basement. You saw one of our neighbors at the bus stop. She almost went with you, but she decided against it, and you went on alone. And you never came home until just now, so we thought you were dead.”