by Patrick Lee
“It’s only a memory,” Travis said, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet shattered her collarbone and she collapsed, screaming and holding the wound. Travis was already up and sprinting, ignoring her, going right over her and through the doorway.
Across the living room. Through the still-open entry door and onto the landing. He was two flights down before he realized he still had the gun. He stuffed it into his front pocket coming off the final step, hit the exterior door’s latch bar and burst out into the cool night.
He faced the intersection, and the north stretch of Johns Hopkins beyond it.
No sign of Ward at either one.
The man was already out of sight. He’d reached the crossroads and made a turn, one direction or another.
Travis broke into a sprint toward Broadway. He dissected the situation as he ran. Ward couldn’t have crossed Broadway and continued along Monument—Travis would’ve seen him already in that case. He also couldn’t have gone into the parking structure; there was no entry to it anywhere near this street corner. That left north or south on Broadway, and south would keep Ward right next to the hospital for another eight hundred feet. The place he was desperate to get away from.
North, then. Had to be.
Travis was already looking in that direction as he passed the last townhouse. The whole width of Broadway slid into his view.
Ward was nowhere on it.
Travis spun to look south. No Ward there, either.
He faced north again. Looked for places the man could’ve ducked into. Only two were close enough to be plausible options: an alley behind the row of academic buildings to the east, and another behind the row of town houses to the west.
Something metal crashed onto concrete. Maybe a trash-can lid. Definitely in one of the alleys—but which? The acoustics were tricky.
Travis sprinted again, covering the hundred feet north to the midpoint of the shallow block. Faced the left-side alley—behind the town houses—as he stopped hard.
The lid lay thirty feet away in the spill of amber light from the street. Five feet beyond it there was only darkness: a channel of fractured and cluttered space that separated the town houses on the south half of the block from those on the north. It stretched all the way to the west end, almost three hundred yards.
But there were lots of ways out of it, north and south. Mini-alleys that divided parallel homes here and there. Travis could see these only by the gaps in the rooflines three stories up. Down in the dark at ground level there was no detail at all. Ward could be slipping into one of these passageways right in front of him, right now, and he wouldn’t know. Travis threw himself forward into the channel.
Deep shadow. Random shit strewn everywhere. Hazy light from the occasional back room.
Travis found his eyes adjusting after the first ten seconds. Saw a child’s wagon and stepped over it quietly.
Something moved in the dimness fifty feet away. A clatter of wood and concrete and—what else? Human hands striking the ground, Travis thought.
A man cursed softly.
Travis advanced. One careful step at a time.
Faint sounds of movement ahead. Junk being shoved aside. Plastic bags rustling. Ward was struggling to get back on his feet.
Travis tried to fix his eyes on the sound source. No good. At any distance the darkness was still nearly perfect.
He took another slow step—and crushed an aluminum can that’d been lying on its side. In the stillness the sound might as well have been a car alarm.
A man’s voice called out, raspy and sore and full of fear: “Who’s there?”
Travis didn’t answer. He waited. Took soundless breaths with his mouth wide open.
Five seconds passed, and then the rustling noise came again. Ward was still trying to get up.
Was it really that difficult for him to do? That was hard to believe, given the agility he’d shown so far.
Bags slid on the alley floor. Something made of plastic flipped over and skittered.
Suddenly Travis understood.
These weren’t the sounds of a man laboring to right himself.
They were the sounds of a man searching for something.
Ward had lost the notebook when he’d fallen.
Travis advanced again, still trying for silence but not as carefully as before. His right hand went to his pocket and settled on the .38.
He was forty feet from the sifting sounds now, still trying to peg the location. The brick walls on either side played hell with his directional hearing.
Travis was keenly aware of the situation’s risk: Ward knew now that someone was here hunting him. The instant the man recovered the notebook, he’d go silent again, and the advantage would be all his. He could pick any narrow alley at random and disappear.
Travis continued forward. Thirty feet away.
The rustling stopped.
So did Travis.
He froze and held his breath and listened for movement.
Instead there came a shout: “Leave me alone!”
It echoed crazily along the rift between the townhouses, in staggered and distinct reverberations.
But Travis’s ears picked up something else. Some other sound, barely audible beneath the panicked words. He thought he knew what it was, though it made no sense: a zipper being undone.
What zipper could Ward have except the fly on his jeans? Had his pants snagged on something when he’d sprawled? Was he sliding out of them so he could get away?
The echoes of the shout faded and the alley dropped to absolute silence.
Five seconds.
Ten.
Travis felt panic begin to stir. Ward was leaving, and there was no way to stop him.
Fifteen seconds.
Not a sound anywhere.
Travis let go of the gun in his pocket, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.
“Ruben! I know about the VLIC! I know about the instructions!”
A foot scraped on concrete, maybe stopping fast and turning, far away in the dark. Fifty or sixty feet.
Silence.
“I’m supposed to help you!” Travis said.
For a moment nothing happened. Then Ward called out: “Who the hell are you?”
Travis thought about his reply. Saw no reason to be inventive.
“Travis Chase! Let me help!”
He heard a fast exhalation. It sounded like confusion, though it was hard to tell. More likely it was just a physical response to the past minute’s stress.
“You’re only a kid!” Ward yelled.
Travis started moving again. Homing in on the voice’s location: not just far ahead but all the way against the alley’s left side.
“I’m old enough to be useful,” Travis said, letting his own voice relax.
“The instructions didn’t say anything about this,” Ward said. Still unnerved. Still on the brink of fleeing.
“What, there’s a rule against someone giving you a hand?”
The points of the conversation didn’t matter. Keeping Ward talking mattered. And closing in on his voice.
But the seconds drew out, and Ward didn’t reply.
Travis continued moving forward. Slowly. Silently.
Then the man said, “Is it already happening?”
Travis started to ask what he meant, but stopped. Asking for clarification might clash with what he’d told Ward a moment earlier: that he knew what was going on. While Travis didn’t need to make sense, he did need to avoid scaring the guy away.
“The filter,” Ward said. “Is it starting now?”
The filter?
Travis hesitated, still advancing, then decided to wing it. “It’s possible,” he said.
Ward breathed out audibly again. Same location: ahead and to the left.
“It’s not supposed to happen yet,” Ward said. “Not for years and years.”
Travis kept moving. Forty feet to go. He’d have to speak more softly now to hide the fact that he was getti
ng closer.
“Whoever it affects,” Ward said, “it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.”
Travis’s leading foot touched down and froze. So did the rest of his body.
Are you wondering if there’s a connection? Paige had said. Between whatever’s going on right now and . . . the thing about you?
Travis stared at the blackness where Ward had just spoken, and found his thoughts suddenly vacant. The question came out before he realized he was asking it: “What are you talking about?”
He noticed only halfway through—too late for it to matter—that he hadn’t tempered his voice at all.
There was another quick scuff of shoes on asphalt—Ward flinching, maybe—and then a sustained burst of movement as the man took off running through the cluttered dark. Crashing past whatever lay in his path. Stumbling and staggering, but moving fast.
Travis pushed away the confusion and sprinted after him. Following the sound. Gaining now.
All at once he caught a glimpse of Ward, in the vague pool of light below a curtained window. Bald head and T-shirt and jeans—he was still wearing them.
The man had almost passed beyond the light when he sprawled. Caught his foot on something and went all the way down. The notebook flew free again.
Travis doubled his speed and yanked the .38 from his pocket—enough fucking around.
He leveled it as Ward pushed up to a crouch.
But he didn’t fire.
He didn’t need to.
Ward made one desperate grab for the notebook, almost collapsing again as he did, then heard Travis’s running footsteps and threw himself sideways out of the light. The book stayed right where it’d fallen.
Travis pulled up short beneath the window. Stood there catching his breath and listening. He heard Ward staggering in the dark twenty feet off, and then silence again. Had he stopped? Was he weighing his chances of fighting for the notebook?
Travis kept the pistol leveled, aimed toward the last place he’d heard movement. He kept his eyes in that direction too, as he knelt and scooped up the book.
He stared another five seconds, the gun shaking in his small hand.
Then he tucked the notebook against himself like a football, turned back the way he’d come from, and ran.
Travis emerged into the light on Broadway. He heard sirens nearby in the night, coming from several directions and getting louder by the second. He remembered the gunshot inside Garret’s place. There’d be a dozen police cars on this block within minutes.
He sprinted across both wide sections of Broadway and went north toward Ashland, the first street free of construction.
He went east and north for two blocks, then turned west and made a wide swing around the hospital and the crime scene, coming at last to where he’d left the Chevelle. There was a serious-looking ticket stuck under the wiper. He discarded it, set the notebook on the passenger seat, started the car, and got the hell out of Baltimore.
Twenty miles south on I–95, he took an exit to a huge shopping mall. The parking lot was a ten-acre tundra of neat yellow lines and stark white cones of light. There wasn’t a single car in it but his own. He parked out in the center so he could see trouble coming a long way off. He turned on the dome light and opened the notebook.
The first page was blank.
So was the second.
And every other page in the book.
He flipped back to the beginning and saw what he’d missed at first glance: four or five ragged strips trapped inside the spiral binding, where pages had been torn out.
He understood what the zipper-like sound had been, and why Ward had shouted to obscure it.
He got out and stood beside the car and screamed loud enough to hurt his throat. An animal shriek that rolled away across the dark fields and half-built developments at the edge of suburbia.
He paced for a long time, wandering between the car and the nearest light post. Its base was bolted into a concrete cylinder covered with flaking yellow paint. He found himself kicking it every time he reached that end of his track, and wondered how much of his ten-year-old self he was experiencing, emotionally.
He realized he was putting off snapping out of the memory. Stalling. Had no idea how to break the news to Paige and Bethany. He could lie and put his performance in a better light—it wasn’t as if they could check—but had no intention of doing so. He’d tell them the whole thing. He just didn’t want to do it yet.
Reaching the car again, he leaned in and took the notebook off the seat. He stood with his back against the door and stared at the cover in the pale mercury light.
He flipped it open. An entirely idle move.
But he drew a quick breath at what he saw.
The angled light revealed indentations in the page. The ghosts of whatever had been written on the sheet above it, pressed deep by the tip of the pen.
He straightened and moved closer to the light post. Tilted the book and swiveled his body, seeking just the right glare.
The instant he found it his optimism faded. There were indentations, for sure, but they’d come from several pages above this one. A stacked mess of handwriting, so jumbled that he could make no sense of it.
Except for two lines.
Two places where, as it’d happened, there’d been no overlap.
He put his eyes three inches from the paper and scrutinized the words, feeling his skin prickle even before he’d begun to read. It struck him that this was an alien message. Spoken by a human and transcribed by a human, but an alien message all the same.
He let his eyes track over the two lines.
The first was impossible to draw meaning from—it was the end of one sentence and the beginning of another.
a passageway beneath the third notch.
Look for
He considered it for a moment anyway. It seemed to be part of a detailed set of directions. A route to take and something to search for at some given location—a place with notches, whatever that meant in this context. A castle wall? A rock formation somewhere? There had to be a million places that fit the bill, and there was nothing in the line to narrow the field. Travis stared at it a second longer and then let it go.
The second line was farther down and more softly impressed—it must’ve come from an even earlier page. It was a perfect sentence. Travis read it and felt the blood retreat from his face.
Some of us are already among you.
Part II
The Stargazer
Chapter Eighteen
Paige and Bethany stared at the two lines Travis had typed on the laptop. For a long time they neither spoke nor blinked.
The Tap sat nearby on the table, cooling. Travis stepped to the kitchen counter, grabbed a napkin and wiped a thin trail of blood from his temple.
Already he could feel the strange effect of the burned memory: while the past two days in Baltimore were as fresh in his mind as if he’d just experienced them—as he had—they were also stitched into his distant past, foggy as a recollection of a school field trip he might have taken way back then, that spring when he was in fifth grade. The Baltimore memory had simply replaced whatever real memory he might’ve had of those two days, like an exotic film clip recorded over a section of home video. He let the sensation fade and tossed the bloody napkin into the trash. As he did, his eyes went to the microwave clock.
8:50 A.M.
Ten hours and fifty-five minutes to the end of the road.
He heard a group of people go by in the corridor outside the residence, talking. They sounded animated about something.
“This second line,” Paige said. “You’re certain the first letter was capitalized?”
Travis nodded, seeing where she was going. He’d gone there himself while still holding the notepad under the light post, exhausting every possible way the sentence could mean less than it appeared to. If the first letter were lowercase, then the unseen earlier portion of the se
ntence might change the meaning. Might contain a negative that reversed it entirely.
But all such possibilities could be discarded.
“The S filled the line, top to bottom,” Travis said. “Every other letter without an ascender was exactly half that height. Nora’s handwriting was perfect.”
Travis saw Bethany’s shoulders twitch as a shudder climbed her neck. She read the line again and exhaled softly. “Already among us. That makes it sound like they blended in.”
Paige seemed to react to that idea. She looked up at Travis. “Remember what you asked in Ouray? Who has the motive to undo what my father did?”
Travis’s mind called up images of full-floor penthouses eighty stories above Manhattan or Hong Kong, from which a few encrypted phone calls could launch private armies or sway governments—could direct arterial flows of cash to influential interests that didn’t care where the money came from, or why. The notion that such places existed was unnerving enough, even if their occupants were human.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Paige said. “If some of them were already here before the Breach opened, why bother sending instructions through it to make a pawn of one of us? Why would they need a pawn at all? They’re millions of years more advanced than we are. Maybe billions. Anything they wanted to do here, they could’ve done it themselves like you or I would get a glass of water. They wouldn’t need to sneak around and pull strings from behind the scenes.” A silence. “So why did they?”
Travis found only about half his attention going to the question. The other half kept going back to what Ruben Ward had said in the alley—the disconnected talk about the filter, whatever it was. Something that wasn’t supposed to become an issue for years and years—from the vantage point of 1978. Travis had said nothing of the filter since waking from the memory. Though it obviously tied into what was happening now—might simply be what was happening now—it just as obviously had a connection to Travis’s own future, and whatever was waiting for him there. It.
Which he’d never spoken about in front of Bethany, as much as he trusted her. He’d never told anyone but Paige.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Paige said again.