by L. J. Hatton
“You can’t make it work?” he asked.
“I may be able to do the things my father could do, but I can’t do them as well. He encrypted it, and unfortunately, for all the things Nafiza saw, a thirty-three character alpha-numeric sequence wasn’t one of them.”
I opened the computer and turned it on, so he could see the lock screen.
“He’s your father. You don’t know what he would have chosen?”
“He liked puzzles. Riddles. Secrets.”
Things he never shared with anybody, and I doubted if the Magnus Roma I knew was the same man who had locked that computer beyond use. I didn’t know much about him at all.
“I am sorry,” Ollie said. He let the words hang, so they could be an apology for this moment or for previous things.
I sat down with my back to the wall and the computer in my lap. There were no clues to my father’s password. None of those helpful questions you’re allowed to install in case you forget your log-in. Just the counter and thirty-three dash lines, each a reminder that when it counted, I knew nothing.
I tried fitting famous riddles and tongue twisters into the spaces, but there were too many letters. I tried pi, but couldn’t remember more than seven digits. Klok would’ve known the rest, but it would’ve been a waste of a try. Pi was too simple and too well known.
One more time, I put my hands on either side of the computer and focused every thought on my father. Current ran from my right hand first, then my left. It outlined the pathways between different keys and the processor, pinging letters and numbers into place as if I was shooting for the jackpot in a slot machine. S appeared in three slots, then R in one and L, forming lines of gibberish with numbers where there should have been spaces between words. A Y slipped into the last available slot. I took a breath and pushed “Enter,” picturing the sequence as a key I could fit into a lock.
The screen flashed failure-red, filling every blank with an X. The counter now read “3 of 5.” Only two tries left.
I slammed the computer shut and threw it, nearly hitting Jermay in the shin as he returned to us.
“I don’t think that’ll help with the password.” He picked the computer up with one hand. “Can I come in?”
“Do you know the code?” I stayed sitting and made him come to me.
“Jermay’s a jackass?”
He winced when he saw Clementine scowl because her children were in earshot. Somehow I doubted that was the worst word they’d ever heard, considering their father’s temperament.
“That’s only half of it,” I said.
“He’s very, very sorry and will never let the crazy leak out of his head again?” he guessed.
“Close enough. Get in here.”
He was dripping from the rain, soaked through so that the flannel shirt Nafiza had given him had turned nearly black and his jeans stuck tight to his skin. He squeaked when he walked.
He started to hug me but thought better of it when he saw the puddles forming under his feet. Xerxes ambled over, sized him up, and chomped down on his shoe.
“Hey! I said I was sorry!”
Xerxes squawked an answer that would have translated into something far worse for Clementine’s kids to hear.
“Where have you been?” Winnie slapped Jermay on the arm.
“I walked to the city—and it’s a big one. It’s also crawling with Commission. The third transport set down at a private landing strip an hour or so after we ended up here. It’s all anyone’s talking about.”
“Are they looking for survivors?” Ollie asked.
“I couldn’t tell. Too many people with too many versions of what’s happening. I think the official cover story is that a high-altitude equipment platform crashed and burned.”
“What about Arsenic?” Birch asked.
“I didn’t see any warden, and nobody mentioned one,” Jermay said. “But I can tell you this much, people are scared, and they don’t buy the excuses they’ve heard. They’ve never seen a Commission transport file out armed troops in broad daylight. It’s mostly exaggeration, but people over there are thinking they’re about to institute martial law. It’s bad. The sooner we get out of here, the better.”
No snipes and no snark. It looked like the cease-fire was holding between the two of them.
“I brought this back for Anise.” Jermay handed me a bottle filled with red liquid.
“Cough syrup?”
“It’s got fever medicine in it,” he said. “I got the cough kind because I thought she might cough and hurt herself worse. It’s also supposed to make you sleep. Maybe it’ll help.”
I threw my arms around him and hugged him tight. The water and the chill soaked through my ugly purple sweatshirt, but I didn’t care. We didn’t have any money, and he didn’t have anything to sell, so he’d either begged for the medicine or stolen it—two things he loathed, mainly because they both fit the worst ideas people had about our life traveling with the circus.
“Thank you.”
“I tried to get us some food, but all I could manage were granola bars. I couldn’t risk moving anything big.”
Stolen it was, then. Doing magic had given him light fingers, and he’d had a lifetime of practice with sleight of hand. All he had to worry about was his conscience.
“Here you go, Little Bird.” He handed Birdie a pair of wrapped snacks. “I found you one with raisins.”
“Thanks.” She sat cross-legged on the floor, nibbling the bar. “I’m still mad at you, though.”
We sat in a huddle for the rest of the day and into the night, holding our breath at every sound louder than the wind swirling past. The creeper lights put on a show. Cars came. Trucks and people, but no one found the hovel. Slowly, each of us succumbed to sleep, and when I woke up, I was still holding hands with Jermay and Winnie, one on each side, with Birch behind her. The kids were in a puppy-style pile, and Klok sat vigil with my sister, ready to fight the Reaper if he came calling while the rest of us were sleeping.
No dreams had come for me. I liked to think that there was purpose in the nightmares, that they showed me clues or things I’d seen while awake, but overlooked. That night, they were silent.
Dev woke hours later, startled because he didn’t realize time had passed and he thought we were still in the air. He gasped and flailed, tipping himself off his stretcher onto the ground.
“We need to get as many of us to the safe house as possible,” his grandfather told him. “Can you do it?”
“Yes,” Dev said certainly. To prove it, he took his grandfather’s hand and disappeared.
When he returned, we’d find out if there was actually anywhere to go.
I was faced with the same surety I always had. I was the target; they were collateral damage. If I wasn’t with them, then no one would chase them. They could go back to their lives in peace and rebuild. There were kids. I couldn’t put kids in danger to make it easier on myself. I couldn’t risk compromising the safe house or the network that used it.
Dev came back for Clementine and her two youngest. I approached Nola.
“I’m not going with you,” I said.
“I kind of figured you’d say that.”
“It’s safer if I’m not with you, and—”
“You don’t have to explain. I’ll make sure your sister is taken care of.”
She glanced back at Anise the way people do when they’re talking about someone in the same room. My sister’s olive skin was paler than I’d ever seen it, and she was freakishly still, even for someone who personified the quiet contemplation of the mountains. Now, Anise seemed etched out of them, Pygmalion’s creation waiting to be imbued with life.
When he wasn’t quoting Shakespeare, Nagendra told us Greek myths. I’d never realized so many of them had sunk in.
“I’m not going either,” Jermay said. “I stick with Penn.”
Klok beeped his agreement.
“We all do,” Winnie said.
“No!” Dev grabbed at her like he
was going to drag her into the safe house whether she wanted to go or not. “I want you to come with me.”
“Not yet, but someday,” Winnie promised.
“Baba won’t like it.”
“I’ll tell you a secret about Baba, kid. He says a lot of things that he doesn’t mean. He’d do the same thing I’m doing, even if he claims otherwise. I found you once. I can do it again.”
“Don’t leave until I get back.”
“And give you a chance to bring Baba back here to strong-arm me with his superpowered sad face? I don’t think so.” She gave him a quick squeeze around the shoulders. “You’ve got a job to do. Mine’s different. Go on. Get out of here and make me proud.”
Dev’s eyes filled up with tears, but he wasn’t the type to cry in front of people. He straightened his back, lifted his head, and left us in a cloud of burnt cinnamon.
Birdie watched her first real friend go up in smoke.
“I need to ask you a favor,” I told Nola. “When he gets back, I want you to take Birdie with you.”
Who better to watch over her than someone who could actually see her when she vanished?
“No!” Birdie protested. “Don’t send me away. I’m sorry Anise got hurt, but I can help.”
“Listen to me, Little Bird. You haven’t done anything wrong; this isn’t a punishment. I promised to find Bruno and Mother for you, and I will. But until I do, they’d rather have you safe than on the run. Nola will take care of you, and when Anise is better, she will, too. You’ll have Dev, and Wren, and Ollie’s kids for friends. You can have family and a home, and right now that’s more than I can promise you.”
“But I don’t want you to go away, too.”
She had two special talents—invisibility and finding the softest part of a person’s heart to press—but I couldn’t let her get to me this time. She wanted us because we were familiar. We weren’t what she needed.
“I’d rather risk me going away than risk you ending up locked in the dark again,” I said.
The wardens didn’t care that Birdie was a child or too scared to show her face. She was leverage, and I wouldn’t let her be that anymore. She deserved to be a regular kid, without having to wonder if a madman was going to throw her off the Center’s rim to see if she could fly.
Fortunately, I knew her weakness as well as she knew mine.
“Don’t think this is a vacation,” I told her. “I’m counting on you to protect Anise for me, and Winnie’s family, too. At the first sign of trouble, you make them disappear. That’s your job. Got it?”
“Got it.”
She wiped her nose, but she stopped crying.
“Keep teaching Dev to walk that wire. You can show him off when I come back.”
“You’ll come back?”
“Try and stop me.”
“Promise?” She held up her pinkie.
“Promise.” I hooked our fingers together.
Dev appeared again, skidding into the hut like he’d run through the walls. The smell of cinnamon was so strong now that it burned my nose and eyes.
“Who’s next?” he asked.
“We are,” Nola said.
Birdie gave us each a hug, and Nola took her by the hand.
“I won’t let anything happen to her,” she said to me.
“You’d better not.”
If anything happened to my little bird, the Celestine had carte blanche, and I wasn’t going to be responsible for what she did with it.
Dev took Nola’s other hand, and then they were gone.
“I’ll watch out for them, too,” Ollie offered. “It’s the least I can do, considering you could have left us all behind.” He took a seat on the ground beside Anise to wait for Dev to come back.
“I’ll hold you to that.”
I picked up my father’s briefcase. Klok stuffed Xerxes into his pack with Bijou. The creeper lights piled inside, refusing to be left behind.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Before we lose anybody else.”
Our next obstacle was transportation.
A girl alone could hitchhike. Dangerous, sure, but not so bad for someone touched who had already survived what I’d been through. No killer in his right mind would hassle me.
A pair of us could have still gotten a ride, but not five, and especially not when one of us was Klok. People on the road took one look at him and either sped up to pass us by or moved to the next lane. We couldn’t use the golems while the Commission was in the area armed with spikes and hummers, and walking was too slow. Eventually, someone would make a phone call, and then we’d be sunk. Getting where we needed to go would take some drastic measures.
“Statistically, attractive girls who reveal various patches of skin are offered more rides, and they acquire them faster than groups including boys,” Klok rat-tatted. “Penn and Winnie are not ugly. Perhaps they should alter their attire while the rest of us hide.”
“If I could reach your face, I’d slap you,” Winnie told him.
“I rechecked the data. The statistics are correct. I am being helpful because no one else has ideas,” he huffed and cited his sources on his screen.
“A couple of crop tops won’t get us a ride if you three pop out of the bushes and scare the first truck that pulls over,” I told him. “And most cars aren’t going to have enough space for us. We’ve got to rethink this. Klok, I need you to put those ears of yours to use and find us something big, like a van. Once you’ve found one, let me know. Winnie and I can take care of the rest.”
He took his assignment seriously, kneeling with his hands to the asphalt and his eyes closed so that nothing could distract him from his task. We didn’t have to wait long before he signaled.
“Suitable transportation is approaching.”
I kicked a fissure into the road that left it a craggy mess. A blue bus came over the slope and stuck in the hole. It was one of those tour buses that take retirees to casinos, and it was completely empty.
Good citizens that we were, we ran to help.
Anise would not have approved of this plan.
“Are you okay?” Birch asked the driver.
“What happened?” he asked.
“It felt like an earthquake,” Winnie said.
“In this part of the country?”
The man shook his head, like the short stop had addled him. He noticed Klok behind Jermay’s shoulder on the passenger side and turned suddenly nervous.
“I’d better call this in and get some help out here.” He reached for the radio; I touched the side of the bus, blocking every signal with static.
“We can help you,” Jermay offered. “It’s just a few rocks blocking your wheels.”
We were too eager and too desperate. The man smelled a trap.
“If it’s money you kids want . . .” he began, but Winnie pulled the door open and stepped up inside so that they were face-to-face before he could finish.
“Actually, all I want is to talk you for a second,” she said.
CHAPTER 20
I hadn’t traveled in a regular vehicle since I was small enough for Evie to carry on her hip. On one of the trips my sisters and I took with our father, we drove around town in a cab. Other than that, we took the train and we walked, because The Show was no good unless we were all on display.
Soft seats. Air conditioning. I could have lived like that happily for the rest of my life. Driving and driving down an endless road with no destination other than “away,” and I could understand how my father had fallen into the trap of thinking that kind of existence would keep him out of range of his problems, and ours. But like everything else about The Show, it had been an illusion.
On the bus, Winnie sat in the front seat, as near as possible to the driver. Her ability was strongest when she was close to the person she needed to control. She hated what we’d asked her to do, and every once in a while, I could hear her trying to reassure the man that nothing bad was going to happen to him. She apologized and tried to explain that we were d
esperate, leaving out the details of why, but promising that it was just a little longer. Always just a little longer.
In the rearview mirror I could see that the driver was sweating and terrified, wanting nothing more than to turn off or turn around and let us out, but we kept going.
Most of the towns were small. We stopped once for gas in a place that had gone out of its way to re-create a mid-twentieth-century feel. Different municipalities had different ideas of what “safe” looked like, but they all agreed that re-creating the past was the key to protecting our future. The Medusae had never showed interest in us before we ventured out beyond our planet, so to most people, it was logical to go back to a time before such travel was possible.
At the next pump was a woman in a car meant to recall the finbacked classics of that era. More illusion. Her vehicle was sleek and much darker than the pastel colors favored by the land boats people drove in the mid-twentieth century. Inside, it was as modern as anything, with digital displays and a smart engine with a terabyte of memory for data storage.
It didn’t matter. She played the part, chattering away on her cell phone in a flower-print A-line with kitten heels, and everyone around her pretended that it made a difference. The Medusae hadn’t returned, so it must have been working.
They had no idea what was really going on.
The last town we passed hadn’t gone so far in their refacing. Their streets looked exactly as they had twenty-four years ago at the onset of the Great Illusion. There were a few updated cars and repainted buildings, but most everything had ground to a halt with the arrival of the Medusae, and never started up again. Afraid to move or breathe because it might be just enough to tip the scales out of humanity’s favor. Cross your fingers, don’t step on the cracks, and fold the ladders away.
“We’re going to have to stop,” Winnie announced after we’d driven for several more hours.
“Here?” Jermay asked. “Did you not notice those posts we passed a while back? We’re in Death Valley. This is a dry town!”
Dry towns were increasingly common. Dampening posts were installed around the town lines with a lattice of wires above to function like the Faraday cage my father used to contain The Show. They allowed the town to control who had access to tech and when, and they always came with a strictly enforced curfew. As the sky grew darker, they’d tighten the noose, strangling all public electronic output until it was nonexistent or imposing hefty fines for violations. Death Valley was the nickname for the longest consecutive stretch of enforced curfews in the country. It spread constantly, drawing new citizens into its false promises of protection.