“It won’t take long.”
Annie sighed, gesticulated emphatically in the privacy of her bedroom for a few seconds, and then joined Wendy and Cora in the kitchen, stopping at the refrigerator to grab a water.
“Sure you don’t want one of these cappuccino things?” she asked. “I can’t, I have to sleep, but I’m thinking there’s no bed in the van. I want to finish them before Vivi tries another one. She drank one last week and wouldn’t stop talking for five hours. I don’t think she even took a breath the whole time. It was kind of amazing.”
“Really, that’s okay,” Wendy said, “but thank you.”
“Sure.”
Annie sat at the table. The roommates didn’t do anything kitchen-appropriate there, because they hardly ever prepared food in the kitchen or ate food in the apartment, so the surface ended up being a catch-all for random bits of correspondence, textbooks, syllabi and so on. Any time one of them was missing something other than an article of clothing—and sometimes even then—the table was the first place they checked.
“What can I do for you, Wendy?” Annie asked. Cora, lingering at the margins of this exchange, looked uncomfortable when Annie called Cora’s boss by her first name. This was not, presumably, a privilege Agent Blankenship shared.
“I wanted to talk to you about what happened earlier today.”
“What, Hume? I was kidding about hating him, he’s actually pretty cool.”
“Not that. Can you tell me more about who you saw in the cafeteria?”
“Rick?”
“Yes.”
“Not really. Thought I saw a guy I couldn’t have seen. That’s all. No biggie.”
People who worked for the Secret Service had remarkable command of body language. It was one of the first things Annie noticed about them, which was to say they creeped her out for some indefinable reason for a good six months until she figured out what it was that gave her the heebies. That understanding led to a deeper appreciation of how much she relied on non-verbal cues as a guide.
Wendy Riviera was an expert at non-verbal non-disclosure. Annie thought she’d probably have to be about ten times more annoying around Wendy before even getting an eyebrow flutter as a reaction.
“And the person you saw was Rick Horton,” Wendy said, for clarification.
“Right, but he’s dead. He was one of the ones who didn’t wake up in the morning.”
Wendy nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “We verified that this afternoon.”
The task of locating, identifying, and burying the dead of Sorrow Falls was something that happened when Annie wasn’t in town, but she heard it was pretty awful. The state of Massachusetts dedicated a new cemetery specifically for the fallen (while quietly returning the ones who already had a gravesite of their own back to their coffins) and erected a monument at the spot where the spaceship once stood. The monument looked like a smaller version of the ship, in marble. What was sort of interesting was that for some odd reason the first thing most people did when they saw it was touch the thing. It was as if they all needed to check off a box in their heads—touch spaceship—and this was the only way to resolve that.
Underneath the monument, in addition to a preamble explaining what the statue represented, there was a brass plaque with all of the names of the dead on it. For a whole bunch of people in town, the way Annie found out they hadn’t survived was by reading the plaque.
Rick’s name was on it.
“Thanks for doing that, I guess,” Annie said. “But obviously, I mistook someone else for him. Not sure why this is a problem for you guys.”
Wendy smiled a perfectly genuine smile.
“Yes,” she said, “I can understand why you would think that. Look, I’m going to be as honest with you as I can be; when something like this happens, it scares the hell out of a long list of important people.”
“Really? Then I take back the offer on the cappuccino drink, you guys clearly need to switch to decaf. And maybe don’t report back every time I have a bad day. It was just a mistake.”
“Annie, I don’t think you fully appreciate the unusual position I and my team are in each day with you. Our number one responsibility, of course, is and always will be to protect you.”
“And your number two responsibility is to protect everyone else from me. I get it.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, no.”
“It’s what you meant. You guys have to monitor my mental state. But I don’t get how this is any kind of red flag. I mean it.”
“It’s actually explicitly stated. We have a list.”
“Oh my God, really? That’s awesome. Can I see the list?”
“You can’t, I’m sorry. But I will tell you one thing that is on the list, and then maybe you’ll understand why we’re talking tonight.”
“Is it seeing dead people?”
Wendy smiled again. She was either an A+ fake-smiler or she was really smiling.
“Yes, it is,” she confirmed.
“But, I mean, you guys appreciate that this was actually a thing, right? A couple of years ago? Maybe you heard about it.”
“Of course. Likewise, someone who had experienced a severe trauma such as, for instance, witnessing the dead rise again, might have that as an indicator of psychological deterioration. At least, that’s what I’ve been told by the people who put the list together.”
“So, you think I’m losing it.”
“No, I certainly don’t. Off-the-record, I think you’re perfectly fine. But in my playbook, this warranted a face-to-face, because I want you to trust us the next time, when this isn’t nothing. We can be your eyes and ears, especially if your eyes and ears are lying to you.”
“Why off-the-record?” Annie asked.
“What?”
“You said that was an off-the-record opinion. What record are we talking about?”
“Ah. I have no plans to report this conversation. Nobody’s listening right now, and we’re not recording anything. It’s just you and me and Agent Blankenship. That’s what off-the-record means.”
“Plus Lisa and Viv.”
“They aren’t here.”
“Yeah but if you asked them not to be here, they know you’re here.”
“Lisa’s rehearsal is running late, and Vivian is at a symposium that was rescheduled at the last minute.”
“You guys did that?”
Wendy shrugged, as if to say, sure we did, it was easy, and this shouldn’t be a surprise.
“Who was Rick Horton to you, Annie?” Wendy asked.
“He wasn’t anything. Rick was about a year older, and we had a couple of friends in common. He wasn’t… I didn’t think of him as a good guy. I don’t want to say, you know, because he’s dead? People are jerks when they’re alive, but not when they’re dead, right?”
“Well not really, but I understand. So, he was a jerk?”
“Rick made me uncomfortable. Um. I don’t know how to describe it. Stood too close sometimes, stared at the wrong body part at the wrong time, you know.”
Wendy was nodding. “That kind of uncomfortable. Did he harass you sexually? Grab you?”
“No, no, it was a vibe, right? One of those people you make an effort to not get caught alone with.”
“All right,” Wendy said. She shared a look with Cora, and a quiet agreement of some kind passed between them. “All right, that makes sense. I can see how you mistaking someone for this person might cause the reaction we witnessed.”
“What do you mean?”
“You held your breath,” Cora said. “And you got very pale. Your pulse rate went up.”
“Holy crap, do you guys have sensors buried on me somewhere?”
“No, sorry, when I saw your reaction I put my hand on your wrist.”
“Annie,” Wendy said, “We really do have your best interests in mind.”
“Okay.”
Annie thought they probably did, but primarily because if things went south with Annie Collins,
the consequences could be pretty catastrophic. She was sure they didn’t want that. But, this was the first time she felt like they didn’t want that because they were legitimately on her side, so this was progress for team Wendy.
Ed Somerville was basically the only person connected to the government in whom Annie placed her complete trust. But she hadn’t seen him in ten months and had spoken to him only twice over that span. It was a long time to spend dealing with people who, day-to-day, she didn’t think she could relax around. (This was despite Ed himself insisting she could absolutely place her trust in her Secret Service detail. Her trust in him was non-transferable.) Cora, for instance, sure seemed like a friend, maybe even a close friend. But she was also Agent Blankenship, and in that capacity, she answered to faceless people with unknown agendas.
“Well, that’s that,” Wendy said, getting to her feet. “I don’t think we need to worry about flagging this and sending it on, do you, Blankenship?”
“No ma’am, I don’t.”
“You mean you won’t be reporting my Rick sighting to Washington?” Annie asked.
“No. If I do, they’ll just panic,” Wendy said. “and there’s no need for that. The further you get, the more drastic this sort of thing seems. Like the spaceship was, I suppose. Anyway, Annie, it was a pleasure meeting you. I’m sorry I waited this long.”
They shook hands again, and agent Riviera headed to the door, which was what Annie wanted all along. She would wonder later, then, why she decided to speak at that moment.
“There’s something else,” Annie said.
“What’s that?”
“About Rick. There’s more.”
Carrying what looked like a genuine expression of bewilderment, Wendy sat back down at the table.
“Go on,” she said.
“Rick was there the night I touched the ship.”
They both looked like this was a large surprise.
“I take it you guys didn’t know this?” Annie asked. “I told Ed about it.”
“Certain details from that night aren’t public knowledge,” Wendy said.
“I know, but I thought you all had clearance.”
“You would be surprised the things they think the Service doesn’t have a need to know. Was anyone else there?”
“Yeah. Rodney Delindo. But he’s still alive, if that’s your next question. If I see him walking around campus next week, don’t freak out, that’s actually possible.”
“Did either of them touch the ship?”
“No, just me. But… you guys know about the ship’s defenses, right? The intrusive thoughts?”
They both nodded, because that was no secret.
“We were all there right after Shippie touched down,” Annie said. Wendy silently mouthed the word Shippie to Cora, who shrugged. Annie’s habit of speaking about the most powerful weapon in world history with the kind of nickname you might give a cat was something to get used to. “The ship hadn’t calibrated to the environment yet, so its defenses were really crude. It decided on Rick as the biggest threat—maybe he was closer or something—and I don’t know what happened after that. Shippie got into Rick’s head and showed him something. Whatever that was, it was way worse than anything anybody after him got.”
“You never pursued it?” Wendy asked. “He didn’t tell you?”
“No. I guess I could ask, but I don’t really want to know that badly.”
“Ask… Rick?” Wendy looked ready to hit some invisible panic button.
“No, ask the spaceship. I’m sure there’s a record of it. But honestly… I mean, Rick was no young scholar in the first place, but whatever happened in his head that night shredded him bad. Last time we talked, he made it pretty clear what he saw was different. I actually think he got a prediction or something.”
“When was that?”
“The day before The Incident. He was talking like he knew what was about to happen. It just sounded like crazy talk, because I didn’t know what was gonna happen and he thought I did. Maybe. Or, it was just him being weird.”
“Annie,” Cora said, “If he knew what was going to happen, could he have survived it?”
“Well he didn’t, right? They found his body and buried him and carved his name in the plaque and everything. So no. And, if I’m being honest, if I could name anyone who would barrel toward his own death, knowing it was coming, it’d be Rick Horton. That’s just the kind of person he was.”
“Let me ask you this,” Wendy said, “And just think about it for a second, don’t answer right away. Does the spaceship have the capacity to see the future?”
Annie laughed. A few months back Vivi got her hands on a spaceship-themed tarot deck and showed it off like it was the most important artifact ever purchased online. Annie appreciated the humor, even if she found the zombie motifs a little distasteful. Now she was wondering if she should dig up the deck and show it to Agent Riviera.
“No,” she said. “Shippie can’t do anything like that. The reason Rick knew what was going to happen is because the ship told him, and the ship told him because the ship was what made it happen. It wasn’t a prediction, it was a threat.”
“You’re sure?”
Yes, she wanted to say, because the universe is expanding, and spacetime is a part of that expansion, and we sit on the edge of both created space and created time, and so the future can’t exist yet because it hasn’t been created yet.
She didn’t say any of that, because it was a complicated idea, and because it wasn’t entirely hers yet.
“I’m as sure as I can be,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, nobody really knows the full capabilities of the ship—aside from you, I guess. It would be good to know if Mr. Horton was talking about The Incident or about something else.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know. That’s my point. What if it was something that hasn’t happened yet?”
Wendy Riviera left a few minutes later, after Annie reaffirmed that the agent’s professionally necessary paranoia was only paranoia. Not long after that, Annie ended up on the balcony, in one of the two plastic chairs they had—there was only room for two—holding her phone and thinking she should call someone.
It was a couple of minutes before she recognized that the instinct she was following was supposed to end with her calling her mother. And she couldn’t do that.
Per Annie’s request, Carol Collins received the finest treatment in the world for her cancer. In truth, this hardly changed her medical care at all, since Boston already had something approaching world-class oncology, but it did make her doctors significantly more motivated to take some risks, if only to say they tried everything.
They did try everything, but in the end, it didn’t much matter, because Carol still ended up succumbing. That was ten months ago, and Annie still thought her mother was just a phone call away.
Her mother’s death ended up being something of a national emergency. According to Ed—who came to the funeral, of course, and then tried not to be too obvious that he was asking questions about her state of mind—the team responsible for Annie at the Pentagon was on high alert the entire week. Annie didn’t really know what high alert even looked like in this context, because it wasn’t like they could do anything to either the ship or to Annie. At best, they could fire a nuclear missile at the spaceship and maybe scramble fighter jets or something, just to say they tried.
Annie didn’t tell Ed that everyone could relax. As far as she was concerned, if she was going to grieve her mother’s passing, it was appropriate that as many other people felt bad about it as possible, including the guys in Washington. This was probably reckless of her, but at the time she didn’t really care.
“Hey.” Cora had stepped out onto the balcony, looking unusually tentative for her. “Can I sit?”
“Of course. Aren’t you off the clock?”
“Yeah.”
Cora sat in the other plastic chair, and the two of them looked out over l
ower campus for a few minutes as the sun set. The view faced north, so the sunset was to their left and mostly obscured by the corner of the roof.
There were times when having Cora around felt comfortably familiar in a way that it took Annie a while to pin down. Cora was always trailing behind a little bit (or storming ahead if there was something they were heading into that needed to be checked, like a public restroom in a strange place) and tended to keep quiet. She spent a lot of time observing and not engaging the people around her, and for the most part everyone who talked to Annie ignored Cora.
Annie eventually realized she was okay with all of this because Violet used to act the same way.
Growing up, one of Annie’s core expectations regarding how her future would play out—expectations which included her mother not dying and her parents not separating—was that she and Violet would go to college together somewhere.
That wasn’t going to be possible, because Violet had no plans to leave Sorrow Falls. Annie wasn’t positive, but it was possible Vi couldn’t leave Sorrow Falls, or not easily. This was in part because Violet Jones wasn’t actually a living human being; she was an alien doing a really good impression of one. Also, other than Annie and Ed, nobody knew she existed.
Well, that wasn’t fully accurate. Plenty of people had encountered Violet over the years, so it wasn’t that they didn’t know she existed, it was that they didn’t recall this fact.
“Are we okay?” Cora asked.
Annie was a little surprised by the question.
“Sure, why wouldn’t we be?”
“I guess I feel as though I’ve violated a trust here.”
“It was a surprise to find your boss in my kitchen, but no, I didn’t think that was your fault or anything. I did kind of freak out at lunch a little, but it’s not like you were the only one who caught that fact, right?”
“Yes. But they asked me first if you were okay and I told them I didn’t know.”
“Oh.”
“I thought I should tell you that.”
“All right. Thanks.”
They sat through an awkward silence for a few minutes. Annie thought she was supposed to be saying something else, and Cora maybe didn’t know exactly how to excuse herself. What came next? Intimate bonding? Makeup tips?
The Frequency of Aliens Page 5