by Matt Forbeck
I fought the urge to spit at his image. "I'm not heading for Mars, if that's what you mean."
"It wasn't, Ronan."
"Get to the point then, Winston." I said his first name like it was a curse.
"I want to know where you're going."
I scoffed at him. "Aren't you just going to track me?"
He smirked at that. "Make it easy on me. For old times' sake. Then maybe I won't have to hang any more piñatas around your neck."
I hesitated. Patrón had the entire resources of the Service at his command, and he could tap Homeland Security for help whenever he wanted it, including the datastream from TIE. I didn't plan on letting anyone follow me, but being evasive about it would only make him more determined to do it anyhow.
"I'm heading up north," I said. "I'm going to crawl into a hole and not come out until I'm ready."
"Like a bear hibernating for the winter."
"I prefer to think of it as a caterpillar creeping into its chrysalis."
"So you're a butterfly in this scenario?"
"I just want my wings."
He put his head in his hands for a moment, then mimed pulling his hair out of his head. "For someone who had eternal life handed to him, you sure have a lot of desires."
I put the last of my gear in the duffel bag and zipped it up.
"I never asked for amortality, Patrón. I just can't seem to kick the habit."
He shook his head at me as if I was a spoiled child who just wasn't quite mature enough to see how good I had it.
"I need you to come in for a backup before you leave, Ronan. I should have insisted on it before accepting your request for leave, but it's time to make up for that now."
"I didn't request anything. I quit."
"That's not how I filed it. You're still on payroll. You're still an amortal. Report in for your backup before you go."
"I was already planning on it."
He raised his eyebrows. "Given your track record on this matter, I find that difficult to believe."
"You're right," I said. "I wasn't lying before, but I am now: I'll be right over."
"Don't mess with me on this one, Ronan. In case you've forgotten, someone slaughtered you not too long ago, and we still haven't figured out who. They might try again. Backing yourself up is only reasonable."
I sighed. I'd been planning to stop by the Amortals Project before I left town. I'd promised Six that I would, after all. But the way Patrón was telling me it was in my best interests brought me up short. He didn't care about my interests, I knew, except when they matched up with his own.
I looked Patrón straight in his eyes, so dark they were almost black. "So now I'm reasonable?"
"This comes from the President herself," he said. "I am relaying to you a direct order to come in for a backup. Today."
I rocked on my heels as I considered this. "Well," I said, "why didn't you just say so?"
I cut off the conversation and headed for the door. From Blair House, the hovercab whisked me away to Reagan International, and I hopped a suborbital that had me in Chicago in under an hour. From there, I rented a hovercar and aimed it east. I zipped through the monstrous maze of starscrapers spearing out of the central part of the city and scooted into a parking slip near the Sears Tower – which it will always be to me, no matter how many times they might sell the naming rights.
When I'd first come to Chicago as a kid, I'd gone to the top of the Sears Tower to peer out of the observation deck of what was then the tallest building in the world. Today, several other Chicago buildings dwarfed the Sears Tower, blocking the view from it in most directions, except for one line of sight that stabbed straight east toward Lake Michigan.
I pulled out a pocketknife I'd picked up in the airport, then crawled under the dashboard and pried open the fuse box. Once inside, I ripped out the fuses that provided power to the GPS system and the mobile net connection, plus anything else that wasn't essential to keeping the hovercar in the air.
Once that was done, I ordered the hovercar to head east. Minutes later, I was out over Lake Michigan, zipping over the crinkled surface the color of dark lapis, a thousand feet below. I shut off the autopilot and took over the controls myself. I liked feeling them thrum softly in my hands. Then I shut down the nanoserver in my head. It asked me three times if I was sure, and I confirmed my choice each time.
I couldn't remember the last time I hadn't had my nanoserver up and running. When the Kalis kidnapped me, they had cut me off from the net, but that had still left my nanoserver going. It had isolated me but not stripped me of my onboard tools.
I felt utterly naked – and free.
I didn't need the nanoserver to show me where I was going. I knew the way by heart.
I tipped the hovercar's controls to the left and swung it around to the north. Then I brought it low, no more than fifty feet above the gray-capped waves zipping beneath the hovercar's hull. I goosed the hovercar up to its top speed and skimmed over the lake until land rose up from the waters before me. Then I turned to follow the curve of the Wisconsin shoreline.
When I spotted Sturgeon Bay, I cut across the channel that sliced through the thumb of Door County and found the Wisconsin mainland again. I chased along that until I reached Escanaba, nestled there on the shoreline of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I turned inland and skipped over Escanaba to pick up the remnants of Highway 2. With the advent of the hovercar, it had fallen into such disuse that most of it was now overgrown with brush and pine trees. Still, I could pick out enough of the gray concrete peeking through the lush greenery that I could follow it.
Highway 2 led me all the way across the UP, through Iron River and Watersmeet and into Wakefield and Ironwood. From there, I tracked it into Wisconsin. When I reached Odana, I steered the hovercar north once more and soon spied Madeline Island heaving up out of Lake Superior's chilly waves.
When I made it to the island, I slowed down and dropped to just a dozen feet above the ground. I found the remains of the road that hugged the island's south shore and followed it to the northeast. When it turned due north, heading straight into the heart of the island, I went with it. I wound my way through a maze of long-unkept roads that had never been much more than strips of gravel. I found North Shore Road and turned northeast, pointing myself toward the deeper waters of Lake Superior, moving farther away from civilization with every second.
Before I ran off the end of the island, I spotted the narrow driveway to the Shack, and I turned left onto it.
Just like that, I was home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Shack was a misnomer, the opposite of what it really was, like calling a fat man Slim or a tall man Tiny. A cabin had once stood on this land, little more than an old logging shack, and my parents had used it as a vacation home. Calling it rustic was being kind to it. It had no electricity or running water, and to heat it we had to haul in propane tanks from La Pointe, the only town on the island.
I'd come here every summer growing up, treasuring the isolation, the solitude the place offered, as well as the chance to reconnect with nature. I swam off the dock, fished, hiked, played with my dog, and baked myself in the sun. I learned to sail a boat here and used my little Sunfish to wander all around the Apostle Islands, poking around among the lighthouses and woods, the beaches and the bluffs.
When I was in college, my parents had the cabin torn down, and a glorious new house went up in its place. It stood three stories tall and drew water off its own well. It brought electricity in from the buried cable near the gravel road.
After my parents retired, they spent most of the year up here. They did everything they could to take the property off the grid. They replaced the roof's cedar shingles with solar panels. They mounted a set of wind turbines on the roof and down on the end of the dock. They kept the propane furnace as a backup but heated the place mostly with captured electricity and wood fires burning in the three separate fireplaces.
I used to bring Colleen and Cal up he
re for at least a week in the middle of every summer, often right about this time of year. After Colleen died, I passed it on to him. That was part of the deal I'd had with my parents: to bequeath the Shack to my kid, just as they'd done for me. I wasn't about to let the fact that I might not ever die put a crimp in that. When Colleen passed away, I figured that both of Cal's parents had died at least once. It was his turn.
I hadn't come back here too often after that, especially after Three and I had our falling out. It was not a place for an old ghost to haunt but for a family to enjoy.
I parked the hovercar on the old volleyball court I'd installed in the front yard back when Cal was in junior high, and I listened to the hiss of the door as it opened. The scent of pine assaulted me as I stepped from the hovercar. I stood tall and inhaled deeply through my nose as the late-afternoon summer sun instantly set about roasting the stress out of me.
I waited for my nanoserver to automatically polarize the lenses in my eyes, but then I remembered I'd shut it off on my way here. I shaded my eyes with my hand instead and gazed up at the old place. It looked surprisingly good. The windows were clean, the lawn had been mowed, and the porch had been swept.
I wondered if Five had hired a caretaker to manage the place or if he'd just spent a lot of time up here himself. When I'd run a check on his movement patterns through TIE, though, it hadn't shown any out-of-state trips. Of course, as a security expert, Five might have been able to manage getting up here undetected, much as I'd tried to do.
I was still wearing my suit and tie, and the warm Wisconsin July had me sweating through my shirt. I'd change into casual clothes once I settled in. I suspected that Five had some shorts and T-shirts here I could borrow. He wouldn't miss them.
As I walked up to the front door, a young dog – a puppy, no more than a few months old – came barreling around the corner of the house, charging straight for me. When I first glimpsed him, my hand darted to my sidearm, just in case whatever was coming at me proved dangerous. As the dog drew closer, though, I dropped my hand and laughed. The puppy slowed down and wagged its tail, its pink tongue hanging out as it panted in the heat.
The dog was the spitting image of my old Airedale, Murphy. He had a black and brown coat of coarse, curly hair trimmed short and neat for the summer, and his tail hadn't been docked, the way the breeders always did for show dogs but had neglected to bother with for our family pet.
Most Airedales look alike to the untrained eye, of course, but I'd spent enough time with Murphy to be able to tell him apart from any others in an instant. This one seemed like a ghost from my past, but when he came up to nuzzle my hand for a good scratch, he felt as solid as ever. I knelt down and gave the dog a good scratch. He even smelled like Murphy.
The Murphy I'd known and loved, though, had been dead for over a hundred and seventy-five years. We'd buried him in the woods here ourselves.
Satisfied with the scratching, the dog whirled away and trotted back off around the house, no doubt hunting for something to chase.
I hefted my pistol in my hand. It felt good. For some reason, it reminded me of prowling around these woods with Murphy and a baseball bat, which at that young age I'd thought would be enough to protect me against any rampaging bears we might find.
Suspicious now, I crept around the side of the house and peered in through the windows. The shades were down in some, while others were too high to reveal anything to me but a ceiling. No lights burned inside, but it was barely early evening, with several hours of sunlight left in the day. The house's air conditioner wasn't running, but the breeze coming in off the lake would make it tolerable enough inside that you wouldn't need it. Most of the windows in the place were raised open a few inches and likely locked in place, enough to let some air in but not so far that anyone would be able to creep inside.
I put my ear up to one of the windows, but I heard nothing. No radio playing. No soft snoring. No footfalls creaking on a loose floorboard. No guns cocking.
Still, my gut told me someone had to be around. Either way, I wasn't about to waltz in the front door and risk getting shot. That would throw me back to square one. For a moment I regretted not backing myself up as Patrón had ordered me to.
I crept around to the other side of the house, making my way along the wraparound screened porch that looked out over the lake below. There I found the door that led straight into the basement. Beside it there stood a window with a weak latch that I'd known about since my youth. The entire time I'd known the place, no one had ever taken the time to fix it.
I popped out the screen in that window as quietly as I could, then I grabbed the lower sash. I pushed it in and jiggled it to the right a bit, then shoved it up. The window opened as smoothly as ever.
The basement mudroom behind the door sat dark and silent, the only light in it filtering in over my shoulder. Confident that no one in the upper floors could possibly have heard me jimmy the window open, I shimmied my way in, headfirst.
I was only halfway through when I felt the tip of a metal cylinder press right into the back of my skull.
"Son of a bitch," a voice behind that cylinder said. It was male and confident and weathered with age. It sounded like my father. "How stupid can you get?"
I knew there was no way I could spin around and shoot the man before he could perforate my skull. I considered shoving myself forward or back, but with my belly hanging atop the windowsill, I didn't think I had even a nanite's chance of getting out of the way before the man shot me.
I tried it anyway. I'm amortal, right? What did I have to lose?
With a roar, I twisted around and tried to bring my gun to bear on the man. He grabbed my wrist with one hand and zapped me in the side of my head with whatever he was holding in the other. A surge of electricity coursed through my skull, and then everything went black. While I figured out I hadn't been knocked unconscious but blind, my attacker twisted my Nuzi out of my hand.
I fell out of the window and into the basement in about as graceless a way as I could imagine. I nearly broke my neck on the floor, but I managed to contort myself fully onto the bare cement without doing myself any more harm.
I heard the sound of my pistol being cocked. I tried to scramble away, but I ran into a wall. I recognized it as the corner of the mudroom, and I started to stand up and feel for the door that led into the rest of the house.
"Sit down!" the man barked.
I froze, waiting for a bullet from my Nuzi to put an end to this part of my life. When it didn't come, I slowly slid back into the corner. Having the two walls against my back felt oddly comforting.
"The blindness is just a side-effect," the man said. "Your vision will clear in a minute."
Within seconds, I could pick out the man's gray shape. The light streaming in through the window silhouetted him in its frame. He was about my height, although he seemed a little thicker. That was all I could make out. I held up my arm to shield my eyes – and perhaps out of some insane hope I might protect myself against an incoming bullet.
"I'm a federal agent," I said. "This place will be swarming with armed operatives in minutes."
"Probably," the man said. "But if that's true, then it's already too late for me to do anything about it, isn't it?"
I knew I could call the Service for backup in an instant. All I had to do was turn my nanoserver back on, and they'd spot my signal. Assuming Patrón was still trying to track my movements, he'd have someone out here in short order. If I actually asked for help, it would arrive even faster.
The man uncocked the pistol. With a practiced move, he pushed the clip release and let it drop out of the Nuzi and into his other hand. Then he worked the gun's action to eject the bullet still sitting in its chamber. He tossed me the clip and flicked the extra bullet along after it. Just barely able to track the clip's arc, I caught it in midair, then scooped up the spare round and popped that back into the clip.
"Just calm down," the man said as he stuffed the pistol into the waistband of h
is shorts. "I'm not going to shoot you."
"This is my house," I said. "You're trespassing."
The man snorted in derision. "Don't kid yourself, Ronan. You haven't owned this house for over a hundred years."
"The owner died. He just willed it to me."
The man cursed. "That's just like Five. Too damned smart for his own good." His voice welled up with regret. "This complicates things."
"You knew him?"
The man growled. "Better than you ever did. You still haven't figured it out, have you?"
I squinted at him, still unable to make out his features. "That's what I came up here for. To get some answers."
The man laughed. "You came to the right place. Can't guarantee you're going to like them though."
"Let's start with an easy one," I said. "Who are you?"
The man hesitated. I could almost smell the circuits overheating in his head. He rubbed the palm of his hand across his forehead.