by Deanna Chase
But I shook my head again, a few seconds later.
I didn’t want to call Jon. I didn’t know where I would go, but I knew it wouldn’t be there. Not yet. I didn’t want to see Jon now.
Frustration seethed around me. I pushed that aside, too.
Why couldn’t I find my damned shoes?
Fuck the shoes. Just go, Allie. Call Jon, have him pick you up...
I shook my head. No. I wasn’t calling Jon. Even without shoes.
Bile surged abruptly up into my throat. I knelt down by Jaden’s desk, now wearing my dress, and threw up in his garbage can.
That took longer than getting dressed.
By the end I was gripping the wooden legs of Jaden’s antique desk and chair, dry-heaving and spitting, tears running down my face. My whole back arched at each heave, wracked painfully as my body tried to self-correct, to rid itself of toxins. I wanted water, but I didn’t want that from here. I didn’t want anything from here.
I needed to get out of here.
I felt relief somewhere. I couldn’t be sure if that was mine, but it wafted around me, even as I felt protectiveness whisper around me, too.
Eventually I stood, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand.
Go, Allie. Please. Get out of there...I’ll be there soon. I’ll handle it...
I hesitated, but only for a few seconds longer.
Then I bent down. I picked up the trash can, barf and all, and walked it over to the bed. I considered plunking the container down right next to Jaden’s sleeping head, as close to his pillow as I could manage...then decided not to do that, either.
I dumped it out, right over his sleeping body.
The smell instantly got a lot worse.
It made me gag all over again. I covered my nose and mouth with my arm, tossing the garbage can on the bed where I’d first woken up. I saw Jaden’s nose wrinkle as he lay there. His mouth curled into a frown, too, and he shook his head...but he didn’t really move.
At least that contented look was no longer on his face.
For about three seconds, I watched him sleep. I didn’t really feel any better.
Still, it would have to do.
Motherfucker.
I ended up at Baker Beach.
I don’t know how I got there, or why I even wanted to go.
I must have walked…barefoot no less…but I scarcely remember that part now, other than in bits and pieces. That alone told me I was still pretty out of it.
Jaden lived by the park, in the Richmond District, but Baker Beach wasn’t exactly close. It was also up a hill and down around and through a bunch of twisty residential streets through a ritzy neighborhood just south of the Golden Gate Bridge.
I went there anyway.
Baker Beach made a certain kind of sense, in the less-fogged parts of my mind.
It’s where me and Jon used to go when Dad was sick.
Even before then, when we were all kids, and when Cassie had problems with her parents, me and her and Jon would go there and stare at the ocean.
It’s also where me and Jon had the much less formal and much more alcohol-infused wake for Dad, after we finally got Mom down for the night with some valium and a couple of sleeping pills. Jon and I built a bonfire and burned his bathrobe and hospital gown there, which Jon snuck out of the intensive care unit somehow. For Jon, both things signified Dad after he got sick, not before, so Jon wanted them gone, and I couldn’t blame him.
They even smelled like death as they burned.
So yeah, not exactly a happy place for me, but it had strong associations. Strong enough that my feet took me on their own, I guess.
By the time I stepped out on the sand, and my feet walked over those cool, dry grains, I felt nothing but a profound relief.
That relief intensified when I reached the pounding surf.
My feet were sore by then, but more than that, I wanted some feeling of washing off the night before…or maybe just waking up. It was still dark out, and cold as fuck, but I didn’t care. I badly wanted to stick my head under that freezing cold salt water, too, not just my feet and legs.
So I waded in, until the waves splashed up to the edge of my dress.
Then higher, up to my belly, the foam swirling around my hips.
It was really fucking cold.
Colder than I’d expected, even. Cold as ice...and the wind cut across my spray-wet skin, even where I hadn’t gone all the way underwater. The salt stung my lips and face, and got in my mouth. I ignored all that, and kept wading out. I even dunked my head and hair once I got deep enough, and by then, my teeth were chattering. My arms wrapped around my torso, half for warmth and half for protection against the battering waves.
Even then, I didn’t stop walking.
Allie, don’t...
The voice was soft.
But I swear I actually heard it that time. As a real, separate thing.
I felt it that time, too, that familiar tug, what I’d begun to think of almost like a conscience, or a guardian angel, maybe. I felt it more than I had in Jaden’s house, clearly enough to see it as something apart from myself. The presence it inhabited wove through some less-tangible part of myself, warming me somehow, even as it trembled inside my chest.
Worse, it made me want to cry.
Up until that precise moment, I don’t think I’d really felt anything.
That flush of anger at Jaden’s house, a wanting of revenge, then...nothing.
Just nothing.
Now, from that faint whisper, the even fainter pulse of warmth, I felt more than I could contain, more than I could wrap my head around.
I still didn’t have words to go with how I felt...not about Jaden.
Not about Jon, either, or what he’d probably say about what happened, or how angry he’d be...or, hell, if I should even tell him. I thought through things I could have done, things I could have said before leaving Jaden’s house. I could have hit him, stabbed him, accused him...or even just calmly asked him what had happened.
Even now, I kind of agreed with that voice.
It wouldn’t have made a shit’s worth of difference.
I wouldn’t feel any better now, regardless of what Jaden said or didn’t say...or if he fought back or let me hit him with a chair or a baseball bat or a butterfly knife or whatever. It wouldn’t have erased it, any more than the ocean did now. Nothing he said would have convinced me, either way. I hadn’t wanted to hear him lie to me.
I also hadn’t wanted to hear him tell the truth.
But I hadn’t come out here to hurt myself.
I hadn’t done anything wrong. Well, not that I knew of, anyway.
That sick feeling didn’t come from self-loathing, or shame, or any of the things people are supposed to feel in these kinds of situations. I hadn’t been drunk. I was in a public place. I’d been on a normal date…and I was an adult, legally and otherwise. Moreover, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have been guilty of anything even if those things hadn’t been true.
So yeah, the sick feeling wasn’t aimed at me.
It stemmed from a deeper, less-directed place...a strangely familiar place, one I remembered, although I couldn’t say from when precisely. Maybe it was just that first awareness of the grimmer realities of the world, what everyone faces, at one point or another, usually as a kid. I faced it as a kid, too, but I guess some part of me needed the reminder.
Not all people are good.
Some are sick inside. Some are broken...or lost.
Some are just fucking assholes.
Part of me feared the world was simply filled with shit like this. That the world itself, and the people in it, were made corrupt, fundamentally dirty.
I didn’t know how to process that fact.
If it was true, I didn’t know what to do with that information. I didn’t know if I was supposed to accept it, try to change it in some way, or simply ignore it. Realistically, I couldn’t change it. I couldn’t stop people from harming me or one another or the
mselves. I couldn’t stop them from lying about it. I couldn’t stop other people from letting them get away with it...or even rewarding them for it.
I couldn’t protect myself, not really. Not from everyone.
Not all the time.
No matter how badass I tried to be.
I found myself explaining some part of that to my imaginary friend, or maybe just reassuring (him?) that I hadn’t come out here to do anything stupid. It felt really important that he know I came out here to think, to gather my resources. Maybe even to decide what to do, whether and how to retaliate. Definitely not to die.
I understand... the presence whispered. I understand, Allie...I do...
I felt his relief. He’d been worried.
I felt more than that, too. A pulse of...something. But his relief remained strongest, heating the very bones in my chest.
I felt him wanting to say more to me.
Fighting with words, maybe to agree with me, maybe to argue. Maybe to give advice. Maybe to distract me. Maybe to tell me it would get better...or maybe to tell me that it wouldn’t. Maybe to tell me that I’d change, that this would make me tougher, harder to break.
Whatever he’d wanted to say, he didn’t.
Eventually he let it go. I felt the meaning dissipate around him, blowing away like smoke, even as that warmth returned solidly to my chest.
Jon will come, the presence told me. Stay there. Don’t leave, Allie.
I found myself nodding, even though the thought made no sense.
Jon wouldn’t come. Jon was asleep right now.
Even if he wasn’t asleep, even if it wasn’t six o’clock in the morning or whatever, even if the light wasn’t only just now rising up over the other side of those cliffs, somewhere across the east side of the San Francisco Bay...Jon would have no idea where I was.
He wouldn’t even know I wasn’t at home.
It was really fucking cold.
When I finally came out of the water, I did what that voice told me, anyway.
I sat on the sand, and I waited.
9
STALKING
Revik stood in the middle of her bedroom.
He felt strange, being there. More so now, after what happened.
He’d been in here before, though. Of course he had; it was part of his job, keeping her hidden and alive among the humans.
So he fought the feeling, told himself it was irrational.
She was at work. He had a line to her, a direct one, and strong, since he was a lot closer to her physically than he usually was. He would know at once if anything changed on her end, and long before she got anywhere near her apartment.
He also had a part of his light casing the outside of the Victorian flat. No one would be able to sneak up on him, or harm her, not with him here.
But he still felt…uncomfortable.
He was here for a reason, of course. He hadn’t just entered her personal space on a whim, or to satisfy some interest or curiosity of his own. He didn’t make it out to San Francisco often enough to be able to blow off checking certain safeguards he’d put in place.
The problem was, he could feel that wasn’t all of it. He could feel the more personal interest there, seething through his light. He could feel it, and it made standing there a lot more uncomfortable than he remembered from times he’d stood here in the past.
Shoving the thought from his mind, he decided to go through the list, first.
Using a small organic tool, he shone a bright light over one segment of wall, the same section the bedroom door hid while open. Within a few seconds, the lines of the compartment he’d built inside the plaster and wood glowed a faint blue.
Clicking over on the same hand-held, he fed the key sequence in by memory.
There was a low humming vibration, scarcely audible.
An organic door popped open in that same segment of wall, just enough that Revik could see its outlines without the light. Clicking off the tool, he walked over, prying open the panel the rest of the way with his fingers.
He pulled out the gun he’d stashed in there seconds later, checked the magazine and the chamber, then the four extra magazines he’d thrown in there as spares. A packet of blood patches sat in that cubby, too, along with contact lenses sized for Alyson, prosthetic-grade latex, gelatin and silicone, a few fake barcode patches to replace their normal tattooed IDs, both his and Allie’s, and plastic binders for…whatever.
He’d left money in there, too, along with an ID chip and a spare, unregistered headset.
All of it worked. The cubby hole was dry.
Nothing had been disturbed at all.
Adding another unreg’d headset to the pile, Revik closed up the paneled door, checking the edges with his fingers to ensure no trace of the seam rose above the wall. Once closed, he checked the lock with his hand-held again for good measure. Satisfied, he walked the hallway to the living room next and repeated the ritual with a similar cubby he’d built there, not far from the original fireplace to the converted Victorian.
He had another stash in the kitchen…and a fourth in the bathroom.
He didn’t like the idea of her being trapped in any one of those rooms. Moreover, given her track record with stalkers, he didn’t want to risk it, whatever the Council said.
Revik was a firm believer in contingency planning.
He did another circuit of the apartment, reminding himself of the layout, noting changes, things she’d bought and added, mostly in furniture and wall hangings. He found himself back in her bedroom at the end of that, this time over a drafting table, where she’d clipped a number of sketches. Using his gloved fingers carefully, he lifted the protective sheeting over the topmost image, curiosity getting the better of him.
He’d always been intrigued by her art. Even when she was little.
Once he had the sheet up, however, he froze, staring down at the new drawing there, feeling something in his light stutter and catch.
She still drew pyramids.
She still drew mountains, too.
But the image had something he’d never seen before. Something eerily familiar, although he couldn’t say for certain what it meant.
A boy sat in the middle of the field she’d drawn, below charcoal mountains that looked a lot like the Himalayas of Revik’s childhood. A hell of a lot like them…and not dissimilar to the construct where he’d last met Vash behind the Barrier.
Dark clouds massed over those snow-covered, jagged peaks, and a crystalline stream filled a portion of the grassy valley. Revik had seen images like that boy before, but usually his back faced outward, and nothing but the back of his head was visible.
This time, the boy faced sideways, looking at an old man sitting under a gnarled tree.
The boy’s eyes were colorless, glass-like.
Revik let the upper layer of paper drop, feeling his heart beating harder in his chest.
Could she be a prescient? A real one?
True prescients were extremely rare. It was an unusual skill, even among seers, although all seers could scan forward and backwards on the myriad timelines that criss-crossed and wound through different layers of the Barrier. While the past could be reassembled more or less accurately, however, visions of the future tended to be deeply flawed.
Too many variables existed.
Too many beings wrote and rewrote and impacted and demolished those competing timelines. Seers like Revik––which was ninety-nine percent of all seers––never got much more than blurry, shifting snapshots that could be blown away by a strong gust of wind.
Or, more accurately, by a single will exerted in a proximal direction.
Unlike the past––which held fast in a kind of stasis to be rewound and re-watched via Barrier time jumps, often as clear as a physical recording––the future changed hour to hour, sometimes minute to minute. Very few seers could rely on anything they saw in those glimpses forward, and only the young and the very inexperienced bothered to try.
But a t
iny percentage of seers had the gift of true prescience.
Meaning, they could somehow see a layer above the crazed mélange of timelines and connecting points and nodes and splinters. They could truly see forward, into the dark. Even they would give caveats, according to Vash…and often more than one possibility. But they could actually see where the gears moved, and the pivot points where those larger track changes occurred. Alyson’s mother had been one of those prescients.
Not her human mother. Her biological mother.
The idea that Alyson herself could be one might not be all that far-fetched.
She was the Bridge, after all.
Thinking about this, Revik edged back to the drafting table. Seeing the leather portfolio case to the right of the table’s legs, he lifted it up carefully, bringing it over to the bed so he could lay it flat. He unzipped the case and opened the black flaps. A stack of drawings, most in charcoal but also a few in ink and even a few paintings, spilled out over her white bedspread. Kneeling down by the bed, Revik began to look at them, handling each one carefully before he moved on to the next. His light took snapshots of the ones that stood out to him the most.
A few were downright terrifying.
Nuclear bombs falling on downtown Beijing.
Helicopters swooping low over the water, snow-covered mountains in the distance.
It didn’t look like the Himalayas that time...or anywhere in Asia Revik recognized. He stared at the mountain formations for a number of minutes, but couldn’t ID them from his light, or from his more conscious memory.
South America, maybe? Or further north? Alaska? Some part of Canada?
He took snapshots of those drawings, too.
He saw New York a number of times. Mostly Central Park, from what he could tell, but the view was from high up.
He saw portraits, too. Jon, Cass...a few of Jaden.
He saw more of the pyramid. The detail on those was getting more and more precise. Revik could see nodes in the pyramid now. Some were even drawn in reverse. Meaning, the darkness of night surrounded the pyramid, which had been depicted in the absence of that dark.
He saw more of China. And a large wave, covering what might be Hong Kong, from the shapes of the buildings.