“You kept all of these? I thought you lost everything when Parole collapsed.”
Jay shrugged now but he was smiling, seeming caught between embarrassment and tentative happiness that Shiloh had noticed. “Yeah, well… Like I said. Kept the essentials. Um, you can go ahead and look, it’s fine. You’ll meet every-most of them, eventually, uh. Hopefully.”
Feeling warm inside, Shiloh turned back to look over the rest of the wall. There were a few more familiar faces but a lot more xie didn’t recognize mixed in. Some strangers were very strange-looking, but maybe not for Parole. A person who looked like they were made of stitched-together parts of other people—different skin tones, hair, and eyes—was lowering their black hood and leaning down to listen to a younger man with bright orange hair, while Aliyah shot them a fond gaze.
A pink-haired girl in a floating, somewhat futuristic-looking chair—Radio Angel; Shiloh was still having to remind xirself that the voice had a person attached—spun under colorful lights, holding hands with a girl in black from head to toe. Even inside she wore a black-visored helmet and, for a moment, Shiloh thought it was Annie, but realized the skin of her exposed hands and lower jaw was darker and her build taller and more willowy. Strangely, where Radio Angel was lit up in rainbows from the lights, her dance partner’s suit reminded Shiloh more of the eyes of the Tartarus ghosts. It didn’t reflect a thing and this mysterious girl looked almost like a shadow herself.
Shiloh looked further and started to see a common thread. Xie didn’t recognize him, but one man kept showing up in group photos; tall, muscular, dirty-blonde hair and bright blue eyes, usually surrounded by several dogs, seemed to be missing at least part of one middle finger. Usually with an easy smile or the most relaxed one in the room in any given photo. Shiloh was about to ask who he was, since he was obviously important—then xie saw the shark tooth hanging from the chain around his neck. It was the same one Annie wore, the one she held onto like a lifeline when her fear and anguish reared its head. When she remembered Ash. Shiloh kept xir mouth shut and moved on.
Most of the rest were Jay’s selfies. But these were usually with at least one other person, and several with Seven. Everyone Shiloh had met on the FireRunner showed up at least once, along with many people xie didn’t recognize. It took a moment to figure out why these felt unusual. It wasn’t just because of the angles or awkward poses. The first time Shiloh had ever seen Annie giggle, completely happy and unworried, or Rowan smile at all, was on this wall.
Shiloh’s eyes settled on one of Jay, but what had to be a teenage Jay; he didn’t even quite look Shiloh’s age yet. He was caught in the middle of a laugh and had something in his hand—an unfinished project that looked like the custom goggles he often wore now, or a prototype—but that wasn’t what made Shiloh almost do a double-take, then squint to get a better look. It was just as surreal the second time. The young man with Jay had a wry, victorious-looking smile on his face, like his joke had just landed exactly right. Shiloh had seen that look several times by now but, even without it, he would have had a striking resemblance to Indra.
“Is that—”
“Mihir,” Jay cut in immediately but his voice was uncharacteristically soft, almost a mumble. “He saved a lot of lives. More than I ever did, that’s for sure. But, uh, we keep doing the work and, we still got good people back in Parole doing the—oh! Here’s some over here.”
Stefanos’s face smiled out of an older photo on the other side of the wall, unmistakable—except for the lack of golden eyes. Apparently they’d once been a deep blue. Both his arms were flesh and blood and one was wrapped around a young, fiery-redheaded woman’s freckled shoulders. Although he dwarfed her smaller frame, something about the shared determination in their smiles made it easy to see the resemblance, though hers seemed a tad more wolfish.
“Stef’s little sister Danae—she basically made about half this ship. And his limbs, did he tell you that? Anyway, she made a whole bunch of other cyborg people walking around Parole too.” Jay nodded to the next photo. In it, Danae, two other women, and a little boy all cuddled together on the stairs leading up to a brightly lit entrance, a sign reading EMERALD BAR overhead. On one side of Danae and the toddler was a beautiful dark-skinned woman with flowers and vines twisting through her long, curly hair and around her shoulders and arms. Her legs were reminiscent of Stefanos’s limbs, except even these were decorated with greenery and blossoms. The little boy in Danae’s arms wore a crown of the same flowers that cascaded all around her and she was tucking another one behind his ear. Her flowers seemed to have gotten everywhere, including all over the pink-haired, punk-rock-looking (and more-than-vaguely familiar) woman on her other side who pressed a kiss to her cheek. Nobody really seemed to mind. The only other thing keeping the family portrait from being ordinary was the air filter masks they all wore.
“Hope they’re all okay,” he said, smile fading a little. He sounded apprehensive, like someone who’d heard too much bad news in too short a time. “Last thing we heard from Parole was something about them getting separated. That’s…just never good.”
But it was the picture next to the family photo Shiloh couldn’t stop staring at. A spotlight cut through the dark and lit Evelyn up on a night that looked a lot less jazz cabaret and more rock concert than the last time xie’d seen the Emerald Bar. But it was unmistakable. Her rose-violet hair rising in a curling cloud, one arm stretching to the ceiling and one fist around the mic stand, mouth wide open in a climactic note. On it was written: To The One And Only CyborJ With Love, above a large, looping signature.
Shiloh tried to speak but no words came out. Jay never seemed to have that problem.
“I don’t know what Maureen’s talking about, though, a little help from a friend? None of them would be able to help with that disk. Only one who might is Celeste.” Jay gnawed on his lower lip and slowly swiveled his chair in deep thought. “And she’s been missing for a month. I mean yeah, she knows a few tricks, I guess.” He shrugged, conceding the point in what was clearly an understatement. “Couldn’t have pulled Operation Icarus off without her, that’s for sure.”
Shiloh’s mouth dropped open and xie turned so fast xir head spun, mental alarm bells going off so loudly xie couldn’t hear anything but that one word, the driving question since this all began. “What is ‘Icarus’?”
“Hm?” Jay frowned, taking a moment to regain his lost train of thought. “A program that, uh, Celeste and I wrote ten years ago. Parole’s one secret… not a weapon, what’s the opposite of a weapon? Not a shield so much—also kind of the opposite of a shield…”
“Uncle Jay…” Shiloh cut in very quietly but desperately. Xie felt like xir entire body was vibrating all the way down to the soles of xir feet and, considering what happened when xie was around electronics, or especially excited, that might be the case. “I think that word is really important, and you’re the first person I’ve met who might tell me what it means. What is Icarus?”
Jay sat perfectly silent and still. Shiloh knew then beyond any doubt that he’d been deliberately stalling before, distracting, because he said the next words with no flash or pretense. “It dropped the barrier around Parole for one minute.”
“It’s how we escaped,” Shiloh whispered, suddenly feeling as if all the gravity in the small room had disappeared along with the sun. “My mom and I. Ten years ago, that’s how we… I remember looking up at the sky and thinking it was so bright, everyone was so scared and I was too, but I kept thinking it was pretty. I almost wanted to touch it. And then it just—it wasn’t there. So we ran.”
“Yeah.” Jay nodded, but he wasn’t looking at Shiloh anymore. He stared at a spot on the floor or maybe at something from many years ago. “Gave you all the time we could.”
“Thank you.” Shiloh still felt off-balance, like the room had just been spinning at a high speed and xir equilibrium hadn’t adjusted. “If nobody has told you that yet. I don’t know if I’ve ever said—”
“Eh,
CyborJ gets loving multitudes every day.” He shrugged one shoulder, flashed his teeth in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “But, uh. Me, not so much. Thanks. It was nothing.” The not-smile faded. “I mean that. One minute…”
“You got us out. And I don’t even know how many other people, a lot, it has to be a lot. You dropped the barrier. You did what nobody thought could ever be done.”
“Twice." The look on his face was another new one. Grim determination. Hard. "We knew that thing wouldn't stay dead but we thought we'd have more than one minute. We didn't. So we kept working on it, trying to perfect the disruption program so next time we might have more time. And in the collapse last month, we tried again. Still only worked for one minute--but it's all some of us needed. So that's Icarus. It’s the last thing Celeste did before she disappeared.” Now he looked up, seeming caught between tentative hope and vague suspicion once back in the present. “Why?”
“I know that word’s important. The ghosts keep saying it,” Shiloh said, carefully watching as Jay sat back in his chair farther away; any open curiosity in his face closing off as well. “First when one showed up in Meridian, as a dragon. Then later when it—the same one, I think?—pointed out Mom’s lights in the sky.”
“Ignore ‘em,” Jay said through the corner of his mouth, sounding like he was clenching his teeth. “They never have anything good to say.”
“Yeah, except Gabriel said it too.”
Now Jay looked over and Shiloh could see the moment when the puzzle piece clicked into place in his head. “Dreams. You said something about that way back before any of this—” he broke off, eyes dropping to the floor. “And I didn’t lock onto it.”
“You had a lot going on,” Shiloh said easily. It didn’t even seem particularly generous considering the circumstances. And it wasn’t as if they’d had a lot of time to talk.
“Yeah. Yeah, we did.” He nodded, the faraway look creeping into his eyes that Shiloh was coming to recognize. It meant Jay had slipped a thousand miles away and a month ago, feeling the ground crumble into flames far below. Then he seemed to snap out of it, eyes narrowing. “Still. I could’ve listened instead of burying it just because I didn’t want to talk about…”
“What?” That last part Shiloh hadn’t expected.
“Dreaming about more dead people just wasn’t something I was prepared to deal with right then,” Jay said in what was clearly supposed to be a return his usual light, quick tone but just came out sounding strained and tired. “And I thought Gabriel was dead. I stand very much corrected. I thought a lot of things I now stand very much corrected about.”
“More dead—”
“So what’d he say about Icarus?”
“Uh, sorry.” Shiloh paused to catch xir breath and bearings, even though Jay was the one who’d just been talking so fast xir head spun. “Yeah. He said it the same way the ghosts did—Tartarus ghosts, I mean. By itself, really important, and like I should already know. That was the last time we saw him. The day Parole collapsed.”
“Okay.” Jay was almost always focusing directly on something. A screen, a new and interesting development in a puzzle or twist of their lives, peering into somebody’s face with several layers of meaning and usually humor in his own. Right now he just stared into space, seeing nothing. But he didn’t seem to like this particular kind of nothing and Shiloh didn’t like the way it made his face and entire energy level drop. “I wasn’t listening before… I am now. Tell me about these dreams.”
“It wasn’t the first time we had them,” Shiloh started, unable to keep from smiling. “I remember them from a long time ago. Like, years ago, right after we left Parole.”
“You had them all this time?” He shot Shiloh an incredulous kind of please-say-no look, as if this pushed the very boundary of possibility, even in their strange lives. Fortunately, nothing was quite that strange yet.
“No, they stopped for a long time. But then they started again, same as I remembered.”
“Well, I don’t remember this,” Jay mumbled with a little shake of his head. “But back then… we all had a lot going on, like you said. Nothing ever changes. When’d they start?”
“A few weeks before Parole collapsed. Then a really intense one the day of. Then nothing… until Annie and Indra showed up in Meridian. Once we were all together, we started dreaming again, ending up in the tree, the one down in the water tank.”
“Annie. Damn.” Jay was shaking his head. “She never said a word. Not to me, anyway. She had to have told somebody though, that’s just not the kind of thing you keep to yourself—well, maybe she does. She’s not really a sharer. If she told anyone, it was probably…” He didn’t quite finish that thought, but Shiloh followed his eyes this time. He wasn’t staring at nothing after all, but an old picture of a much younger Annie. She was riding on the shoulders of the tall, blonde man xie’d seen in several pictures, but nowhere on the ship. He wasn’t wearing the shark tooth yet, and had all his fingers, but it had to be Ash.
But significant and painful as that realization was, the people in the picture weren’t all that caught Shiloh’s attention. Xie leaned closer, squinting at the somewhat faded, dusty (perhaps smoke-damaged?) surface. “Those curtains. They’re still there.”
“Huh?” Jay looked like he was halfway back in a reverie again, staring at the photo. One he might not really want to leave.
“The Emerald Bar. The last dream we all had, it was there. Those look like the same curtains, that’s all,” Shiloh said, but xie was moving on already. That dream had stayed burned into xir brain ever since for a much more important reason.
Jay swiveled partway around to face xir, looking almost sheepish. “Okay, I don’t know much about this—I really don’t know much about powers at all, everything I know comes from just hanging out with a bunch of people who do have them, so you’re probably better off asking—”
“He was there too,” Shiloh cut in, softly, definitely. Xie’d finally found who he was looking for. He was an unexpectedly hard person to spot even in photos.
“Who was where?”
“Him.” Shiloh pointed. In it, a thin, green-scaled man with yellow eyes and a loose frill of skin around his neck lounged in a beanbag chair with Rowan, curled tight against them under several blankets. He contentedly rested his head on their shoulder, sleepy eyes looking like they might slip shut the moment after the photo was taken. Rowan held a book in front of both of them, and though it was always somewhat difficult to tell where they were looking, their smile didn’t seem to come from something they’d read. “He said his name was Regan.”
“Regan?” Jay lurched upright, both hands clamping down on the arms of his chair to push himself forward. For a moment, Shiloh thought he might jump right out; of the chair or maybe his skin. He seemed almost like he’d been jolted with an electric shock. Jay was usually an energetic presence but this sudden tension was a complete shift and not necessarily a good one. “You saw him?”
“Yeah. He said he was safe with friends, but he couldn’t come back yet,” Shiloh said carefully, watching to see how the words landed. “Gabriel’s with him, and someone else. I can’t remember who. I know it was kind of a weird name, though.”
“Zilch?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I can’t remember.”
“No, I mean did he say Zilch was with him? That’s a name.”
It was a weird name, but not the right one. “I don’t think so.”
“Danae? Evelyn?”
“Not those either.” Shiloh shook xir head, hoping Jay wasn’t going to keep asking.
He stared in rapt hyper-focus usually reserved for screens with lines of puzzling code. He waited for a moment for Shiloh to continue, furrowed eyebrows shooting up when xie didn’t. “And?”
“And that’s it. I wish I could tell you more,” Shiloh said and sincerely meant it, not least because all of this was maddening to xir own unsatisfied curiosity. “He said he was sorry.”
“Great.” It didn
’t sound great when Jay said it and Shiloh doubted the apology was accepted. “He happen to say why he was sorry? Or am I supposed to guess that too?”
“About Rose,” Shiloh said slowly, trying to recall foggy dream details. “Something about…he couldn’t take back what he did to her. Or maybe—didn’t do? And he couldn’t come back. Not until he did something. I don’t know, I’m sorry.”
“It tracks.” Jay’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “It all tracks. The footage was real. No wonder I couldn’t find evidence of… Shit.” He was quiet for a moment, perfectly still except for a few shaking breaths. “Anything else? Anything at all?”
“He did seem upset about one thing.” Xie recalled one detail that previously had been shaken out of xir head by the ghostly encounter and nearly-deadly fight immediately following the dream. “So much that I think it woke us all up.”
“What?” Jay sounded a strange combination of half-annoyed, half-afraid of what the answer might be.
“Annie was still wearing her shark tooth in the dream. When he saw it, he seemed… I don’t know, scared or something. He asked why she had it, and she wouldn’t tell him, and then he started to ask something else.” Shiloh stopped, trying to collect several scattered, increasingly fuzzy pieces. Xie wasn’t sure if xir head was aching from the effort or the unpleasant memory. “But we woke up and the ghost was there. Maybe it was the ghost that did it?”
Jay didn’t answer right away, looking troubled and maybe a little sick. When he did, he gave a slight jump as if startled back into the present or waking from an ominous dream. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe. Listen, this is important… did Regan say where he was? Anything? Anything at all else that you can remember?”
The Lifeline Signal Page 22