“Sure. Standard procedure.”
“He said the suits are in here.” I stop at the shed and throw open the doors. Two shiny white beekeeper suits lie draped over a chair next to a narrow table covered with supplies.
Without saying a word Neil lifts one of the suits high enough that I can duck under it and shimmy in. Once I adjust the suit around me, I hold the other one up as high as I can for him.
As his head emerges from the wide-necked shapeless tunic, I have to laugh. He adjusts the wide-brimmed-hat part of the unwieldy suit over his drying curls, and gives me one of his devastating dimpled smiles through the black mesh netting meant to protect his face. Soon we are both doubled over clutching our sides, laughing uncontrollably. It’s when I grab on to his sleeve for support that he quickly sobers and straightens.
“You know, beekeeping is a serious business,” he scolds. Do I detect a teasing note in his voice? I’m not sure.
“Uh . . . yeah. I know.” I take a pair of pink rubber gloves from the table and pull them on.
Instead of reaching for a pair of gloves for himself, Neil picks up a plastic bottle and squirts his hands with the contents. “Vinegar,” he says, like he anticipates me asking him to explain his odd behavior. “It repels the bees, and it’s easier to extract the frames with your bare hands. At least, I think so.” He points at the long row of vinegar bottles and chuckles. “And apparently your uncle thinks so too.”
“Must be a new obsession of his, then.” I run my hand along the bottles. “He always wore gloves when I used to come here with Grammy.”
“Gloves are perfectly acceptable.”
I pull off my gloves. “Squirt me.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You sure?”
I’m not at all sure. “Totally.”
He douses my hands with the vinegar, and I rub them together. “Too bad we don’t have olive oil. We could make a salad dressing.” Ouch. Lame joke. So lame, Neil acts like he doesn’t hear.
We waddle across the yard to the rectangular wooden hutches where the bees are housed. It looks like a bunch of boxes stacked upon one another. They’re utilitarian and not the slightest bit romantic. The front of each box features a carving of a skep, the traditional cone-shaped beehive design. I trace the carving with my finger, wishing skeps hadn’t been outlawed. I know it’s for the health of the bees, but still. “Beehives used to be so much prettier.”
At the nearest box I hang back and let Neil inspect the individual frames. He pulls them out and scans them with practiced precision. Once I feel like I’ve had enough of a refresher course, I move to the far end and start inspecting too. Bees trickle out of the boxes, and buzz about the frames, but they don’t attack us.
“No swarm cells I could see,” Neil says after he has looked through his boxes. “You?”
“Didn’t see any either.”
“The supers are fine too. It’s really too early in the season for there to be much honey anyway.”
“Yeah. Hey, did you ever notice how bees fly in figure eights?” I ask as we return to the shed. “I mean, not always. But sometimes. I wonder why.”
“I asked Andy’s father about that once. He said the scout bees do it to communicate certain things to other bees, like if they’ve found a new food source or a new place to live. I’ve heard Pastor Joe say it means bees have a connection to the eternal. You know, because a figure eight is a symbol for eternity.”
It’s funny to hear him talking so seriously while he shuffles around in the baggy suit. I have to stifle a laugh. “I’ve heard that.”
Back at the shed we struggle out of the suits.
There’s a loud buzzing sound close to my ear. I move to swat the bee away from me, but it zips past my eye and stings me on the temple. It burns like fire. “Ow!”
I close my eyes tight, grit my teeth, and take deep breaths. Neil takes my chin firmly in his hand. “Hold still. I’ll get the stinger out.”
I peek one eye open. Neil’s face fills my field of vision, and his nearness distracts me from the pain. He squints his eyes until they crinkle, and his perfectly straight, perfectly white front teeth bite his lower lip. A lower lip that’s slightly fuller than his upper lip, and suddenly incredibly tempting. “Got it.” He puts down the tweezers, but he doesn’t back away.
I raise my hand toward my face, but he catches my arm in midair. “No rubbing. Let me put some baking soda and vinegar on it. For the pain. It works.”
I stare at his hand around my wrist.
He blushes and drops my arm like a hot potato. “Sorry about that.”
“No, it’s fine. Fix me up.”
Neil reaches behind him for a box of baking soda, opens it, and pours some out into his hand. He drizzles a bit of vinegar onto it and rubs the two ingredients into a paste. Then he pats my temple with the mixture. The pain recedes into a dull throb.
“You’re right. It feels much better now.” Everything feels better when I’m around Neil.
He searches my face carefully with his eyes, and then bites his lip again. “Can I ask you something?” His expression radiates hope.
I freeze. Is he going to ask to kiss me? It’s the gentlemanly thing to do, I suppose, but it seems like odd timing, considering I’ve been stung by a bee and I have baking soda all over my face. If he does want to kiss me, I wish he’d just do it. Because if he asks me, I know I’ll be disciplined enough to say no. For his sake. I mean, the perfect choirboy with someone like me? I’d feel too guilty.
“Ask away.”
“Are you going on the camping trip next weekend with the youth group?”
I can’t believe it. He gets all serious and googly-eyed to ask me if I’m going to a church function? “No. Can’t. I have to stay with Grammy. Besides, we can’t really afford it.”
“Are you sure? We’d all love for you to come.” He smiles shyly. “I’d love for you to come.”
Not many people these days seem to do more than tolerate my presence, let alone sincerely seem to want me to be around. Grammy puts on a good show, but I’ve heard her early-morning hand-wringing with my dad on the phone about how I’ve disappointed everyone. How I won’t touch the piano. How I hardly eat anything. And speaking of my dad . . . I can hear the hurt in his voice during our strained conversations. It’s more than I can bear.
I take a deep breath, making my decision—for better or worse. “Okay, then. I’d love to come. Grammy willing, of course.” I’ll find some way to pay for it.
“That’s wonderful!” He pulls me into a spontaneous hug, and at first it doesn’t faze me. After all, hugs and handshakes and welcoming smiles are like hyperinflationary currency to church people—produced so freely that they’re not worth much. But as his warmth soaks into me, and he hugs me tighter, I find myself hoping he’ll never let go. I close my eyes and press my cheek against his, skin on skin.
The moment is interrupted by a slow clapping, and my skin goes cold. I open my eyes. Mira hovers above me. “Excellent! That was a real showstopper.”
I rip the patches off my forehead and throw the cable as far as I can, which isn’t far. “Were you snooping in on my memories?” I ask.
“Does it look like I have access to the mainframe in this hovel?” Mira asks. “I saw the pictures from your brain scan. Seemed quite active. Highly emotional.”
“We’ve identified twenty-two further high potentials in quadrant ninety-nine,” Eli reports from his station. “One of them is from Felicia’s hive. A subject called Virginia Burrell.”
CHAPTER 11
I BOUNCE OUT OF MY CHAMBER. Finally some progress. “Virginia’s my friend! Are we going to go pick her up?”
Eli grunts. “No.” He pores over some printouts, his pencil scritching and scratching as he makes calculations.
Mira shoots me a sympathetic look. “We’ll look for her later. Right now we need to move on to another hideout,” she says. “You’ve already plugged in here twice.”
“I’ve been scrambling the signal. They can�
��t tell where she’s plugged in,” Eli argues. “And I’m too busy to move again.”
“Safety first, Eli. You know that.” She waves her hand, and everything except the chair Eli is sitting in disappears. Even his pencil. “Let’s go.”
Eli looks so lost without his tech, I have to cover my amusement with a question. “How do you know where to go when you’re out there? Everything looks the same to me.”
Eli whirls around in his chair and stomps his boots down, startling me. “Don’t you ever stop asking questions?” His voice is low and measured, but his tone is so dismissive that defiance rises within me, unbidden and unstoppable.
“Look,” I say, my voice rising, “I didn’t ask to join your team. You asked me. The least you can do is show me some respect.”
Eli raises his hand, palm facing me, and closes his eyes. He begins to chant in a language I don’t understand, but it has the practiced melody of an incantation. A whoosh of air pounds me into the wall. I hit the floor and gasp. He’s thrown me across the room, without even touching me.
He opens his eyes and smiles tightly. “When you can do that, that’s when I will show you respect.”
I stumble into a standing position and rub my wrist. What’s his problem? “Teach me, then,” I growl.
“All in due time,” Mira says, ever the peacemaker. She sweeps over to Eli and pulls him from his chair. “The faster we get going, the faster you can get back to work.” She turns to me. “And don’t mind Eli. I think the pressure of leading this rebellion has gotten to him.”
She taps the wall so the door opens—Neil’s code again. She gestures for us to follow her. I look back into the hideout one last time. Eli’s chair is still spinning.
“What about Julian?” I whisper as I fall in step behind Mira.
“He’ll catch up with us. He’s out on a mission to try to gather more recruits.”
We’ve run past only about fifty hives of the sector block when I hear the unmistakable buzzing of the scanner drones. I expect Mira and Eli will have us duck into another hive, but Mira surprises me. She conjures and hurls a hooked rope up at the junction where two hives connect, and then pulls on it to test if the hook is secure. She bounds up the rope until she’s kneeling on a ledge and reaching out her arms toward me.
I gape at her and the rope. Does she expect me to climb up too? The buzzing gets louder. My hands start to tremble. I can’t do it. Eli throws me upward with a rush of air. It’s enough for Mira to grab on to my shift and pull me onto the ledge with her. Eli leaps up too, bringing the rope with him.
From our vantage point between the hives, we watch the scanner drones zigzag below us, flashing their yellow light as they seek out anomalies. As they pass, I count them. Twenty-four. More than double the last time.
Once they’re gone, Eli throws the rope off to the other side and scrambles down. Mira touches the rope, and it stiffens into a pole, taut and slippery enough for me to slide down into a corridor that’s only as wide as an alleyway. When we’re all back on the ground, Eli leads us down the alley until we hit a main corridor. We’re one hive away from the main corridor where we escaped the drones—and the only corridor I’ve been in so far—so I make a right turn toward it. But Mira takes hold of my arm and leads me to the left. We pass ninety-nine hives before we reach the next junction, each with a narrow alley in between, and I finally get a better idea of the geography of this place. Each sector is one hundred hives wide and one hundred hives long. As we run, instead of barreling along in a straight shot like usual, we make a lot of left and right turns at the sector boundaries. At first I try to keep track of where we’re going, but as the turns add up, I give up. It’s too much.
Finally Mira stops in front of a hive, taps on the outside wall using Neil’s code, and ushers me in when the door opens. As soon as we enter, she twirls her index finger, and the interior of the hive is instantly decorated to match our previous hideout. Right down to Eli’s pencil that clatters to the floor. He strides across to pick it up and checks if his papers are in order. He nods, seemingly satisfied, and settles into the sofa at the same time that Mira positions herself in the armchair facing him. I sit next to Eli on the sofa.
“I’ve never seen so many scanner drones flying together before,” Mira says. “Used to be you could go weeks without seeing a single one. The Morati must be stepping up production because they feel threatened.”
“They should feel threatened.” Eli cocks his head and looks at me thoughtfully. “To answer your question from before we left the hive, we locate one another by scanning for signature brain waves. After all this time, I merely have to think of Mira, and I know where she is. I can communicate with her too. Like telepathy.” He glances over at Mira, and she smiles indulgently.
So he finally deigns to answer my question. Nice. “No matter how far away?” I try to keep the eagerness from my voice. This might be a way for me to find Neil on my own. And Virginia and Beckah. And everyone else.
“As long as she has not left Level Two, I can find her. And that goes for anyone I have a close relationship with or come in physical contact with.” He reaches out and puts his hand on my knee, his expression vaguely menacing. “Now I can find you, too. And eventually, when you’ve mastered the skill, you can find me.”
“Uh . . . great,” I say, scooting away from his hand. It drops onto the sofa between us with a thud. “Can’t the Morati pick up on all this scanning and communicating?”
“At the same time you send out the signal, you need to block it from everyone but the intended recipient.” He acts like this is self-explanatory.
Why does he always feel the need to chastise me? He had to ask questions once too. “So . . . how do I find people?”
Mira answers. “The farther away a person is, the more power or connection it takes to find them. That’s why you need to start out with someone easy. Someone you have known your whole life who you care about deeply.”
Someone I have known my whole life rules out Neil. “My dad.” The last time I saw him, when he dropped me off at Grammy’s, his expression drooped at half-mast as he drove away.
“Yes. A good person to start with,” she says.
I bite my lip. “Do you think he’s out there somewhere?” My heart fills with hope that I might see him again. If I can find him, then I’ll know it works. That I have a chance to connect with Neil again.
“Even if he is, you might not find him on your first try,” warns Eli. “Or even your thirtieth try. These things take time.”
“What do I need to do?”
“First access a memory of you two together. And then, with that scene fresh in your mind, you reach out to him.”
“I’ll try.” It sounds easy enough. A bubble of joy rises up within me, and I leap across the floor like a ballet dancer, not caring that Mira and Eli are watching. Then I settle myself into the chamber and debate about which memory of my father I should pull up. The water balloon fight that had us soaked and silly during carnival in the Ecuadorian city of Guaranda? Dad conducting one of his own symphonies while I accompanied the orchestra on piano in front of the Japanese president? Or a quieter, more recent moment? I decide on the latter and go in.
Ward, Felicia. Memory #31373
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I swish through the revolving doors and pull my rain- drizzled hair into a low ponytail as I head to the elevators. Because dad’s office is on the fourth floor, I usually take the stairs. But today I’m not feeling up to it. I push the call button, and the doors ding open. Three yawns later I’m in front of Dad’s door, rattling the knob. It’s locked. I rustle though the pocket of my rain slicker and pull out my key ring, a rubber puffin declaring I ICELAND. I insert Dad’s key and let myself in.
Dad’s office suffers from split personality disorder. Most of it is sleek and modern—sharp angles of high-end recording equi
pment mingle with neat stacks of paper printouts of Dad’s scores. But then there’s what I call the cozy corner, ruled over by an ancient leather sofa with the texture of butter. Next to it is a vintage wood-paneled radio, topped with a record player. Vinyls of everything from Bach to The National lie strewn in haphazard piles. I pull High Violet from its sleeve and put it on, setting the needle toward the middle so I can hear the song “Bloodbuzz Ohio.”
The drumbeat at the beginning instantly lightens my mood. I shuck my coat and boots and sit cross-legged on the sofa, waiting for Dad to arrive. I pull my cell phone out of the pocket of my jeans to check the time. 4:05 p.m. He said to meet at four, but then, Dad’s usually late. Mother always says he operates on Dad Standard Time, a full hour later than atomic time.
After the record winds down, Dad swoops in the door, his arms full of shopping bags. “You’re here!” He’s out of breath, probably from taking the stairs. “Can you help me with these?”
I take two of the bags from him and drag them over to his tiny kitchenette. “And put on some espresso while you’re over there.”
Once I place the bags on the counter, I dig out a packet of ground coffee from Café Wacker. I measure out the grounds and turn on Dad’s impressive coffee machine. “How about a ristretto instead?”
Dad laughs at our private joke. “A ristretto is the purest shot of coffee in the world,” he mimics Porter Huntley’s stuffy accent perfectly, and I dissolve into giggles.
Porter was attached to the British embassy in Nairobi, so we often saw him at official parties and functions. Dad found him arrogant and insufferable, especially his insistence on testing the quality of the waitstaff by ordering a ristretto, and Dad never passed up an opportunity to mock him.
After the machine sputters out Dad’s shot, I set it to brew again to pull my own espresso. I place Dad’s glass on his desk. “How’s the ultra fabulous goat symphony coming along?”
“Making fun of goats again? Goats discovered coffee, you know.” He downs his shot, smacks his lips. “If it weren’t for a ninth-century Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi noticing that his goats were extra peppy after munching on a certain berry, you wouldn’t have the chance to sneak sips of coffee whenever possible.”
Level 2 (Memory Chronicles) Page 11