A sharp sting from her hand. Fresh blood on her thumb. She winced, fighting tears.
Fuck fuck fuck.
“Number three.”
“Finally,” said Dad, pocketing his phone. He gave her a little push away from the wall. “This will only take a second. How about pretzels after? Those big ones that you like.”
“Sure,” Maya said. Pretzels. That was something.
Dad stepped over to one of the plastic cubes and a grumpy-looking woman took his paperwork. “You know the fee for a nonexpiring renewal is sixty-five dollars.”
“Yup,” said Dad. “Can’t bear to have that old picture slowing me down.”
The clerk didn’t react. “Just a minute…” Her nails click-clacked on her keyboard.
Maya turned away. The flare of anxiety was dying down, leaving her feeling spent, like she’d ridden a great wave that had left her behind on a hard sand beach. Her head foggy, her gaze settling somewhere in the middle distance of the room, unfocused, the blur of the mall beyond.
Later, so many people will ask her what was going through her mind at that moment. They will literally ask her that exact question.
Newscaster: “Maya, what was going through your mind in that moment?”
Reporter: “Can you describe your thoughts when you first saw the boy?”
These and a hundred other variations, on morning news shows and in radio interviews, and Maya will always try to answer, but the truth is, she only remembers being kind of blank, the clock gears disengaged.
She knows why they keep asking: they want to know if they would have noticed too. If they would have acted.
Maya can’t say.
She feels like she will never be able to say.
All she knows for sure is that she was standing there in the DOL, and then there he was. Had she noticed him enter? She didn’t think so. But maybe on some level she had….
“Like a survival instinct?” the newscasters will ask.
“I guess so,” Maya will say. Maybe that’s what gently pushes her gears forward, sends her scouts to their parapets. Makes her look up—
And see the wolf.
He is a few steps into the DOL, coming toward her. The boy in the plastic wolf mask, the kind with a snarling snout, bloody fangs, eyeholes, and cheap elastic that’s straining over his bleached-blond hair.
So much of it is coincidence: that Maya happens to be facing away from her dad, that the window he was called to put her right near the center of the room. That everyone else in the DOL is slumped and sucked into their screens. That all the attendants sitting at the counters have their views blocked by customers or computer monitors.
Maybe at first, Maya assumes he is walking in to meet up with someone in the waiting area. His mom or something.
But the way he walks so stiffly. Like he is made of plastic. His arms barely swinging. The overhead lights make his eyes black shadows behind the eyeholes. And that mask: sure, it’s almost Halloween, but here in the office, that fearsome snarl…
“You just knew something was off about him,” the newscasters will say.
“I guess,” Maya will reply, because it’s easiest, but she doesn’t have some detective’s intuition. She so doesn’t.
And yet…
This boy: about Maya’s height, wearing a puffy black jacket, baggy jeans, dirty black sneakers, skinny but also kind of chubby around the middle.
This boy who stops not five feet from her, facing the clerk windows. Stops and stands so still, seeming to look right through her. Is he holding his breath?
Maya’s pulse rises; she feels flushed. Maybe it is right then that she starts to experience something like fear, like a premonition. Later she’ll wonder how this could be: maybe it was a reaction to quantum tremors in the space-time continuum, slipping backward from a possible future, ripples from all the atomic bonds that will be savaged when the bomb erases her.
Maybe…
Maya watches as the boy raises his hand in front of him, his arm bent at the elbow, just his forearm sticking straight out. He’s holding something. Exhales, a long, quavering sound.
His thumb flicks up.
She will learn only later that this was the moment when the bomb was supposed to detonate. That her life was supposed to end right there, her entire body torn into scraps of tissue and molecules, atoms and freed energy. Entropy winning far sooner than she’d ever imagined. And her brain will rush back to this exact second and burn that blast crater into her mind even though it didn’t actually happen, creating a trap that she will fall into again and again.
But in this moment she is just watching the boy, still not even entirely sure why. His head twitches. Glancing toward the thumb. It flicks down. Up. Again.
Dead. Not dead. Dead. Not dead.
The object he’s holding looks like the top half of a silver ballpoint pen. He’s clicking the button.
The boy seems to shudder.
And in his next inhalation Maya hears something undeniable.
“He sounded scared,” Maya will say. This she remembers. This is true. That slight hitch of a sob held back…
She steps toward him.
The newscasters and bloggers and attorneys all want this to be the moment when Maya knew, when that sixth sense kicked in. They crave some reassurance that we all have it, that in the second before it’s too late, we will know.
“I think so,” Maya will lie. Because she still doesn’t. Not really. And she won’t bother pointing out that technically they’re talking about the second after. Had the trigger worked. She only starts toward the boy once she is already dead.
What she will not quite know how to say is that she maybe does feel something: some kind of connection. Like the boy is sending out a signal. She will wonder if that was real or not, because she’s not the girl who helps strangers, who talks to weird boys in masks. She’s not the girl who sees distress in the world and believes it’s her duty to help. She’s not the girl who’s brave, or courageous, and she’s definitely not the girl who feels vibes or signals or even who goes with the flow. She’s the girl who worries, who doubts, who doesn’t—
A step closer. The boy is still flicking the pen. He seems to be looking at it, and now Maya notices a red wire coming out of the bottom of it, snaking into his sleeve. The boy grasps the wire with his free hand. Jiggles it.
“And then you knew,” they will say, leaning forward, so hungry.
And Maya will nod, but still no, or yes, or…What she does remember is noticing the cuts on the boy’s hands, the bruises, the mess of his fingernails, torn, scabbed around the cuticles. She will learn only later what the boy has really been through, but what she knows right now is what those wounds feel like. That he suffers. And maybe everyone is suffering and—
Another step and she is beside him. “Hey.”
The boy has just pushed the wire back up into the pen, and pressed his thumb down again and inhaled deeply. When she speaks, he flinches and gasps, and the wolf mask flashes toward her and then back to his thumb, still held down on the pen top, hand shaking. Arm shaking.
“Are you okay?” Maya asks.
“Don’t!” he hisses. Buckles like a building about to collapse. His black-hole eyes find her again. “Please…” His voice trembling. “You need to get away from me.”
Maya feels something wet. She sees a streak of darkness down his pant leg, drips running off his sneaker onto her sandaled toes.
She doesn’t say gross, because her eyes are tracking up.
And now it is all a blur. This part will forever be a blur
The boy with his free hand grabbing at his jacket, tugging it up just enough to show her the ring of clear water bottles filled with orange liquid and strapped to him with duct tape, the wires—
“When I let go, it will go off,” the boy whispers. �
�You need to run.”
Oh God.
Maya should run.
Needs to RUN.
And every fiber in her body vibrates with terror and the world seems to go white and her hands—
Both her hands—
Her bandaged, tattered, bloodstained hands—
Grab his, pressing down atop his thumb with all her strength.
The boy spasms. “What are you doing?”
Crying. She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t know.
“You knew that you had to stop him,” the newscasters fill in, nodding at her.
Sometimes Maya nods back. He told her to run. He probably would have given her a few seconds to get far enough away.
“You could have grabbed your dad and fled the scene,” the newscasters say.
Did she ever even think about her dad?
“But you knew it was up to you to save everyone there.”
She doesn’t know what she knew. All she really remembers thinking is No. I will not die.
NO.
Maya squeezes harder, so much harder than she ever has.
“I’m sorry,” the boy whimpers.
“Maya?” Dad behind her.
“Get away! Call the police!” Maya yells, her voice wild, not at all her own.
“What are you talking about—”
“Just do it, Dad!”
The boy moans. “No…”
“He’s got a bomb!” someone shouts.
And now there is utter pandemonium—screaming and crashing and fleeing.
“Maya—”
“Don’t touch me, Dad!” To the boy: “We’re okay, right?” Maya says beneath the chaos, the center of a hurricane, dead still and yet alive—
So terribly, desperately, completely alive—
“As long as we don’t let go. Right?”
The wolf nods. Sniffles.
Screaming. Phones everywhere calling 911.
“Maya?” Dad shouts, nearby or a thousand miles away.
“What’s your name?” Maya asks.
Shaking.
This boy…
“Elián,” he says, and his free hand falls on top of hers.
September 5
“Are you ready?”
No.
He watched out the car window. Crowds, pairs, stragglers, making their way up the sidewalks, across the parking lot.
Sheep.
No, not sheep. Kids. Like him.
You’re not a kid.
Yes, I am.
Had to be. A normal kid. The first day of school.
You are a weapon.
I’m not. Eli put his palms against his legs, just above his knees, and started tapping fast, like a drumroll. He couldn’t do this. There was no way—
A hand on his shoulder. He flinched, a blast of terrible noise and images tearing through his head: the red dark, a flash of sky, closing trunk door, crowded mall—
But it wasn’t a gloved hand. It was Mom’s.
Trust will be hard. That’s what Dr. Maria, the psychiatrist who’d been working with him since his rescue—failure—often said. But touch can be positive.
The back of Mom’s hand was crisscrossed with dry white lines. More lines around her eyes and mouth, gray streaks in her hair. When she’d arrived in the hospital after he was rescued—thwarted—she looked so much older than his memories, he thought she was a ghost.
Your mother needed to be freed from this lie of a world, Gabriel had said.
Three and a half years with Gabriel, thinking his mother was dead, that Gabriel had murdered her. That his sister…
She needed to be cleansed.
Deep breath.
Focus on the present, Dr. Maria would say.
So many voices in his head. So hard to get his own voice out. How many words had he even said in the red dark? It had taken days in the hospital before he could answer any questions with actual words.
“Eli?”
Yeah.
Even his name was new.
Elián Martinez was now Eli Rivera.
Jacob— No. That was never my name.
The wolf mask had hidden his face from the security cameras, cell phones, and reporters. His name had leaked, but he’d only been eleven when he was taken, and because Mom’s strictness about phones had included social media, he’d had almost no online presence. So they changed names and relocated: from the southeast side of Seattle to the northwest. Thirteen miles and seven hundred thousand people between his old life and his new.
Still, his family, the doctors, Detective Pearson, who was in charge of the case, Agent Barnes at the FBI, all the way up to the guy from Homeland Security who showed up now and then—they had all debated: maybe farther away would be better.
How about Los Angeles? Or it says here you have cousins in Fresno….Easier to make a clean break. To leave the past behind.
But there was also a case for staying in the same city. Most of their close family was here. Dad was here, but that wasn’t really a reason; he’d come by the hospital twice, then for a minute at Christmas. Each time he could barely look at Eli, like he was something too repulsive or shameful to acknowledge, never mind embrace. Hadn’t been around much before that anyway.
By staying here, at least some of the topography was familiar. It might help to have something to rebuild on, Dr. Maria had suggested. Completely uprooting to another state might be even more disorienting. Here, he could connect his new life to his old life. He would still have the Seahawks, wet winters, the Cinerama. Here, the good childhood memories could reemerge, find their way to the surface, and knit themselves to his present.
Except to get there, those memories had to pass around, or more often through, the red dark.
There was one other reason to stay in the area. Eli had heard them all talk: the police and the federal agents and the news reporters and the bloggers and, when they thought they were out of earshot, his aunts, uncles, cousins, and especially his mom.
They wanted him.
The man known only as Gabriel. Domestic terrorist. Child abductor. Tormentor. And among his family: Son of a bitch. That bastard. Sick fuck. If they ever find him, I’ll kill him myself.
By the time the fire department and the police and the bomb squad arrived at the DOL that afternoon, Gabriel had long since fled the scene. No fingerprints on Eli or the bomb, which had been one loose wire away from causing catastrophic loss of life. There had been a national manhunt. There still was, technically, but it had quickly lost the front page to an election, then a terrorist attack, and by now, nearly a year later, there were dozens of bombs and bullets that had actually found their targets all around the country, and the Cedar Gate Mall incident was barely ever mentioned.
But Gabriel was still at large and considered dangerous. People like him tended to try again, Detective Pearson had said. And so maybe, she added, if Eli stayed in the same city, he would remember something that would help the case. But it had been nearly a year, and he hadn’t yet been able to give them any more clues about Gabriel’s identity or where he’d been held captive than he had at the start: a red room, its one plywood-covered window, the locked door, the metal pail. The raggedy blanket and half-empty pillow he slept with on the rough wooden floor. The creak of the boards just outside the door that always announced Gabriel’s arrival…
As for Gabriel himself, Eli remembered a white face, always shaved smooth, short hair, maybe brown? Thin, tall, shirt tucked in. Always wore long rubber kitchen gloves in the red dark. Cold, stretchy, squealing when he touched Eli. What color? He wasn’t sure. Black knit gloves at the mall. How tall was he? Age? Did he ever say anything about work, habits, family? Eli had nothing.
He’d never seen the rest of the house, its yard or surroundings. When Gabriel had started ta
king him out, he’d always been hooded and shoved into the trunk. He had never seen the streets, or the neighborhood. The best he could say about the drive to the mall was that it maybe seemed short? But time had lost most of its meaning by then.
Cedar Gate was in the north part of Seattle. In a fifteen-minute radius there were tens of thousands of homes and apartments.
He should have been paying attention! That seemed obvious now, but at the time, he couldn’t remember ever believing he’d be free.
Don’t be hard on yourself, everyone had said. You were in a constant state of trauma.
A state that would take years to recover from. If ever.
And so maybe they also wanted Eli to stay for another reason: He was watched by officers and agents nearly around the clock, his family shadowed anywhere they went. They said it was for his protection, but Eli had heard the whispers: brainwashed, too far gone. Maybe they were really protecting everyone else.
Maybe I programmed you, left commands that I’m waiting to activate.
For nearly a year, he’d been kept at home or in a hospital or a therapy office. A parade of tutors throughout the week. The most public place he went was the gym, where he worked with a strength coach. Occasionally the pharmacy or the grocery store, but never on his own…
Until today.
“It’s just an experiment,” said Mom, rubbing his hand. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll come up with another plan.”
But he knew what that meant: more tutors, small group settings, more time apart from the rest of the world, like he didn’t really exist, and he’d lost so much time already.
Eli watched the kids walking by.
They’re just sheep. I saved you from their suffering.
These kids didn’t look like they were suffering. But they did look different: taller than the kids he remembered, ganglier, bigger in the shoulders and chests. It was like he’d time-traveled while they’d all been living their lives, going to middle school, growing and changing.
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