by Karen Akins
“And why people might suspect you of wanting to do the same thing. You must miss him a lot.”
I shrugged. “It’s hard to miss someone you’ve never known. I mean, he died before I was born. By about two hundred and fifty years. I guess you could say I miss the idea of a father.”
Yet here was Finn, dead for … well, I had no idea how long he’d been dead, since we still hadn’t figured out why he wasn’t in any databases. I had a new appreciation for what it must have been like for my mom, walking away from the love of her life. Not that I was in love with Finn. Or anything like that. At all.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Did you believe them? The people who thought your mom tampered with her chip? I mean, before you found out she was attacked.”
“No. She loved my dad, but she also loves me. She never would have risked it. She knew I’d have no one if…” I choked up. “And she knew it would have been too risky for my dad, too. She obviously never told him she was a Shifter. It would have put him in danger, having that knowledge.”
“Why? My mom knew about my father while they were still dating. And the Haven’s existed for millennia.”
“In secret. In hiding. Would you want that for someone you loved?”
“I guess not.”
“Things are so much better now that Shifters are able to live out in the open.”
Finn didn’t look like he believed me.
“What?” I said. “It’s the truth.”
“Truth.” He chuckled and faced the window.
We fell into a solemn silence until we rounded the corner to the Pentagon. My shoulders started to unclench. But even from a distance, I could tell something was wrong. The Publi-pod slowed at the entrance, but I barked, “Passenger request: Circle the building,” before it had a chance to stop. As the Pod window cleared, I could see a cluster of people on the lawn. Three Institute staff members stood among a crowd of Pentagon workers, pointing back to the ticket gate. She had her back to us, but I recognized one of them instantly as Quigley. A few red-scrubbed medics, like the ones at my house the other day, were also wandering around, holding speak-eazies up to their mouths.
“They’re definitely searching for something,” said Finn, peering out the back-view hole, “but it might not be us.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, one of the workers lifted something from his pocket. He tapped it; a ten-foot soligraphic version of me appeared on the Pentagon lawn. Eep.
“Okay, scratch that,” said Finn. “Maybe the Infobank already notified this Quigmire person that someone was impersonating her.”
“Quigley. And maybe.” I wasn’t convinced. “Why would she jump so quickly to the conclusion that it was me?”
“Video surveillance?”
“Impossible. There are strict privacy laws. Image capture is illegal on public property.”
Finn grabbed the data button and held it up. “So we’ll get rid of the proof. They can’t fingerprint it if they can’t find it.”
“Fingerprint?” A snort escaped me. “Are you kidding?”
“Are you telling me they’ve lost the ability to check for fingerprints?”
“I think you’d have to miss something to say it’s been lost. Fingerprints are über-easy to alter, destroy, steal…”
“I don’t know. Your brilliant hair system seems a bit flawed. I managed to pretend to be you. And you stole Quigley’s hair.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think there are many people who are willing to risk the consequences of getting caught.”
“Death?” His voice slipped to a hushed horror.
“No. They laser your hair off. Permanently.” Eyebrows, eyelashes, body hair. Everything.
Finn laughed as if I’d told the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the Martian.
“Laugh all you want. Shavies are social pariahs. You can’t get a job. You can’t use public transportation. I doubt you’d be able to find someone to sell you a used Pod.”
His smile faded. “Bree, I had no idea. Why did you risk it?”
The obvious answer was to get rid of him, but if I was being honest with myself, the other reasons had outweighed that. It wasn’t like sneaking into the Infobank had triggered the answerpocalypse, but I’d hoped for at least a little insight into what was going on—who attacked my mom, proof that she hadn’t tampered with her chip, proof that she wasn’t a victim of the Madness. If anything, I had more questions than before.
I scratched my fingernail across the dashboard. “I guess after so much numbness of not knowing, I thought truth—any truth—would hurt less.”
“We’ll tell them I did it,” he said.
“Finn, you don’t even exist.”
“Even more reason they’ll believe me. They’ll think I’m some lunatic who held you hostage for your identity.”
I dug my nail farther into the Pod, prepared to argue. After a few more seconds of scratching, though, the Publi-pod must have decided it wouldn’t stand for the abuse. It stopped in the middle of the street and popped open. We were three hundred yards or so from the entrance, far enough that we wouldn’t be immediately noticed. Close enough to see we’d need another way back in. All the entrances would be monitored. There was only one direction left.
Up.
“We’ll have to sneak back in through the roof.” The building was five stories high. I was all of five feet high. Finn was a sturdy six, but something told me those extra twelve inches wouldn’t prove all that useful in this situation.
“We could run,” said Finn.
“No, I don’t want to give them any reason to track my movements today.” I was scared enough that they already had.
No matter what, we couldn’t sit there in the stalled Pod any longer. I motioned to Finn to follow me toward the edge of the building, around the corner from the entrance. I kept one eye peeled for tru-ants, but they must have all been swarming inside the amusement park. As Finn and I neared the exterior wall, I grasped for the first time why the fortress of fun represented military might for so long.
Finn mistook my silence for deliberation. He flew into solve-it mode. “We could jimmy one of the windows open. Or I could hop ledge to ledge. Or we could—”
“Or we could use my grappling hook.” I pulled a metal tube, four inches long, from my pocket.
“Who carries a grappling hook?”
“Standard issue. A girl has to be prepared.”
I heard shouts in the distance and pulled us flat against the building.
“What don’t you have in that pocket?” asked Finn.
“Patience.”
Finn rolled his eyes.
“You know you love me.” I chuckled. As soon as the words flew out, I felt my cheeks flame. I puffed them full of air and blew it out as slowly as I could.
Finn had the good sense to pretend not to hear. A crack in the wall was suddenly the most interesting thing he’d ever seen, and he only looked up when I stepped away from the building. I aimed the end of the tube at a spot under the roof’s overhang. It would be like the training exercises in Gym class. Only four stories higher. With people chasing me.
A pea-sized target shot out the end when I pressed the trigger switch. Ping. It found its mark. I pushed a second button on the tube, and it telescoped in length, soft-grip handles poofing out of the ends. I peered around the corner of the building. The searchers had turned in the other direction for now. Hoping they wouldn’t look up, I grasped one end and held out the other to Finn. “You ready?”
“It’s broken.” He pointed at the place where the target had landed. “There’s no wire.”
“It uses electromagnetic pulses.”
“You’re telling me I’m supposed to trust a pellet gun and a broken car antenna with my life?”
“It’s perfectly safe.” There was nothing like arguing the contraption’s merits with Finn to attempt to convince myself as well. Skepticism marred his usually calm features.
“Look, I’m terrified of heigh
ts,” I said. “If I can do this, you sure as heck can.”
“I thought it was water you were afraid of.”
“I’m not exactly president of the Altitude Fan Club either.” The target was so far up I couldn’t even see the blink of its operational light. What I wouldn’t give for a gravbelt right now. I drew a deep, steadying breath. “You with me or not?”
He laid his hand on the handle in silent acceptance. I pushed the center switch again. Immediately the muscles in my hand clenched the handle tight in an involuntary grasp, frozen in place. I looked up into Finn’s wary green eyes and he bobbed his head to indicate his hand was locked as well. When I pushed the center button once more, we lifted a couple feet off the ground before a red light began blinking. We thudded back down.
“Are we too heavy?” Finn asked.
“No. It can hold up to six hundred pounds.” Think, think, think. In training, we’d only done a few duet ascensions. Coach Black always paired us together by weight. “I think we’re off balance. We need to get, umm, close.”
The daggers in my eyes dared Finn to make a wrong move.
He blinked. “Okay, so I’ll slip my … arm around your…”
“Shoulder,” I said.
“Waist,” he said at the same time.
At least he hadn’t said “butt.”
“Shoulder,” I repeated.
We stepped together. Finn circled my upper body in the crook of his arm. His skin was dry and warm where it met the back of my neck, still moist from my rain-soaked hair. He opened his hand and cupped the back of my head, then seemed to think better of it and balled his hand into a fist. He closed his eyes for a second, and I wondered what he was thinking. Or praying.
I pressed the center button one last time.
chapter 22
I’M GOING TO DIE. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.
Any qualms about propriety or personal space whistled away with the wind whipping past my ears. The world rushed down. I rushed up. Green. Gray. Blue. Nothing was solid. I hugged Finn as tight as I could and dug my face into his chest.
“Woo-hoo!” Finn pumped his free hand in the air.
That snapped me back to my senses. I nudged him with my shoulder. “You’re going to get us caught.”
The jerking motion threw our balance off. A red warning light blinked on. Finn clutched me closer. The flight couldn’t have taken more than five seconds. It felt like five minutes. When we reached the target my eyes were closed again, but I knew it was bad. The street sounds below were nothing but a muffled murmur.
“Wow.” Finn gave my shoulder a little squeeze. “You can see everything from up here.”
“Can you see a way to get us onto the roof?” My voice was a whimper, eyes still shut.
“Oh, yeah, sorry.” He began swinging his torso in an attempt to get a leg up over the edge. Every time he did so, my body swung right along with him, a limp rag doll. His fear of heights certainly didn’t seem very feary to me.
“Man, that broken car antenna has a death grip on my hand,” he said.
“That is a good thing.” I hadn’t intended my voice to screech so much, but at least it got him to stop swinging.
“If I were a few inches closer…” The whole apparatus shuddered as he strained upward and heaved his leg over the edge of the building. Using the rod for support, he pushed himself all the way onto the roof. The red light blinked back on as the handle jerked and swayed. I reached my free hand up and grabbed a pipe that ran along the edge of the building.
“Okay,” said Finn, swiveling his body so it lay flat against the roof. “I think I have a pretty good grip here.”
“Think?” I adjusted my hand so I had a firm grasp on the pipe. “Pretty good?” I chin-upped over the rod to see how secure Finn really was. Wrong move. The red light on the center of the rod came back on, this time unblinking. A shrill beep accompanied it, louder and faster as I leaned forward to inspect it. My fingers wriggled. They were no longer glued to the handle.
“Uh-oh.” I flung my newly released hand up to the pipe next to the other one. The grappling rod gave one final bleep and plummeted to the ground.
“Bree!” Finn plunged his torso over the edge and reached for me, but I was too far under the overhang of the roof. “Hold on. I’ll figure out a way to get to you.”
“Stay on the roof.” It wouldn’t help matters if both of us were stuck.
The color drained from my knuckles as I struggled to keep my grip. My legs flailed wildly beneath me. I kicked one of my feet up and managed to hitch it over the pipe. Then the other foot, which at least took some of the pressure off my arms. From the ground I probably looked like one of those extinct tree sloths that scientists were constantly cloning into existence, only to have them die off again.
Eep. Dying. Not the best line of thought.
“My leg’s hooked around a vent up here now.” Finn stretched down and thrust his hand as far toward me as he could. “I can reach you if you hold out one of your hands.”
“Or. I could not let go of the pipe.”
But as I looked around, I realized there were no other options. The effort scorched my muscles as it was. By the time Finn found help, it would be too late.
“Okay.” Crapcakes. Had I just agreed to this plan? Yes. No other way. “Tell me when.”
He wiped his hand on his shirt and stuck it back down. “Now.”
I closed my eyes and threw my hand out into nothingness. The pain that had branded my arm disappeared; a firm pressure took its place. The next thing I knew, my wrist was locked with Finn’s. I sailed through the air, cracking my eyes to see if I needed to grab on to the overhang. But all I could see was the gray of stone. Wall? Sky? Thud. My body slammed against something solid. I puckered my lips and kissed it. Solid. I loved solid. Finn had flung me all the way to the roof in one swoop of an arc.
He flopped down next to me and grinned. “That’s going to be the best sprained shoulder ever.”
“New goal in life,” I said once I had crawled a safe distance from the edge. “Never be that far off the ground again. Ever.”
“Solution,” said Finn. “Move to Chincoteague Island. Nothing’s over two stories high.”
I couldn’t help but let out a little laugh. I leaned against one of the solar bubbles that dotted the white roof like igloos scattered across a frozen tundra. “Yeah, but after two hundred years I wonder if those ponies have taken over the place.”
“Oh.” He smiled, but there was a hint of sadness in his voice. “I was thinking of my time. Probably all skyscrapers and laser hotels now.”
“What’s a laser hotel?” My laugh was in earnest this time.
“I don’t know. It sounded futuristic and cool. Of course, you can pretty much put the word ‘laser’ in front of anything and it sounds cool.”
“Laser pencils,” I said in a robotic voice.
“Laser chairs.” His robot was better.
I snorted as I thought of another one. I slid down the panel until my heinie hit roof. Finn joined me.
“Laser … bracelet.” My face fell.
“How could you have a—?”
“No.” No … no … no. Where was it? I grabbed my wrist and searched the ground where we sat. “My bracelet. It’s gone.”
How could I have lost it? I jumped up and ran over to the spot where I’d landed. It had to be there. It had to.
“Help me look for it. It’s sterling silver with a heart-shaped locket on it.” My hand stayed clasped over my wrist, as if I could magically make the bracelet reappear if I left it there long enough. On the white roof, the silver should have been easily visible. The bracelet must have fallen off when Finn had grabbed my wrist.
It was gone.
I had failed. I could never get it back.
I could never get her back.
I traced our steps back to the solar bubble and sank down. My hands fell limp. Imprints remained where the links had pressed against my wrist. I
traced them with my finger.
“I always rub the heart when I need to feel close to my mom. Stupid, I know.”
He followed the path of my finger with his own. “Nothing you do could ever be called stupid.”
“Even sneaking back to your time and dragging you into all this?”
“Especially that.” He had that look in his eyes I was learning to recognize, but I didn’t know how I felt about it. It was like when he stared at me he saw past me, through me, in me.
“Finn, I need to—”
There was a bang in the distance. I peered around the corner of the solar bubble. Coach Black had lumbered onto the roof through one of the emergency hatch doors. He wasn’t more than fifty yards away.
“So much for sneaking back in undetected,” whispered Finn.
“I’m in trouble no matter what. But we could still get you out unnoticed. Wait here at least an hour before you go back in.”
He peeked around the edge of the bubble and punched the air in frustration, but then his shoulders fell. “Yeah, I don’t see any other way.”
“Go ahead and give me the data disk. I’ll try to figure out a way to crack into that file.” I held out my hand. “And if I asked you to wait until next week’s Family Night to come back to the Institute, you would…?”
“Show up at your bedroom tonight anyway.”
It was worth a shot. “You still have my hair?”
He nodded.
Coach Black had begun to lumber in our direction in his search.
I started to stand up, then paused. “Be, umm, careful.”
“You be careful.”
“I’m not the one who has to keep hiding.”
“Shouldn’t be too bad. Though if you told me this morning I’d be doing this I’d have sworn you were nuts.”
“Which part? Stealing government property, running from smugglers, or hiding out at the Pentagon amusement park?”
“None of the above.” Finn took my wrist and unapologetically kissed the tips of my fingers. “Leaving you behind.”
And with that I had to walk away. Each step harder than I expected. But I wanted … no, needed to put some space between me and Finn’s hiding spot before Black found me. I jogged off in the other direction, toward the hatch, careful not to glance back at Finn.