Miles to Go

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “And you heard screaming.”

  The serpent stared at me.

  “Were those screaming on the deck, or-?”

  “From inside. We heard them, as they passed over”

  Vibrations. Of course. I’d save feeling dumb for later.

  “The water shivered with their fear. We followed, as far as we dared, but there were too many humans. Too much light and noise, when they come to shore.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I am sorry the meal was so small.”

  The serpent stilled, like I’d insulted it, or it had no idea what the hell I’d said, and then it slid back into the water, barely a ripple marking its passing, and the dark shadow writhed and roiled back into the depths.

  That hadn’t been its body, I realized: that had been its entire school. I’d been surrounded. Jesus fucking Christ.

  I turned around and sloshed back to shore, picking up Ellen along the way.

  “Was that…another fatae?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind?”

  “I have no idea. The sea-going breeds are kinda standoffish. Swimoffish. Finoffish? They don’t come hang out with landfolk often.”

  “But it had something useful?”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t know how much to tell her. I wasn’t used to working with a partner – the times I’d done work for PUPI, I still worked it on my own, and reported back, mostly, and NYPD protocol was laughably useless here.

  “Five nights ago, a boat came in, unloaded bodies that might or might not be our kids. I’m guessing they are, since there’s no reason fatae would be interested in ordinary humans being hauled out.”

  “And?”

  She was looking at me so expectantly, the lights from the boardwalk catching the turn of her head, the cant of her body, that I felt like not being able to say “So here’s what we’re going to do,” was an utter and absolute failure of myself as a human being.

  Since I’m not entirely human, this didn’t bother me as much as it should have.

  But it still bothered me.

  “And…I don’t know,” I admitted. “‘A boat’ is too vague, and it’s not like there are eyes on the beach we can hack. I’d been hoping they knew something more specific. Right now, the trail ends here. Unless we pick up something new, or you suddenly get a flash of something…”

  The clock ticks on every missing kid case. These were older teenagers, and there were three of them, together, so the clock would slow down a little, but every day that went by, the damage risks went up until the difference between retrieval and failure was not much difference at all.

  I didn’t say any of that out loud, but I’d figured that Shadow was pretty good at reading the silence.

  “They’re going to die. I only see people if they’re going to die.”

  “Valere didn’t die.” I put my hand on her arm, not curling my fingers around, just resting them on her skin. If she wanted to move away, she could, no resistance. “Wren Valere is alive, and well. You see a possible future. Yeah, it’s the most possible, the most probable. But nothing’s set in stone. Nothing’s foreordained. You know Bonnie, I’m sure she’s talked to you about kenning.”

  “Yeah.” She didn’t pull away, didn’t move. She didn’t sound convinced, either.

  “Bonnie sees the highest likelihood of events coming together. But even one push can bring it all down, or send it in a different direction. Bonnie’s like…like a shove. You’re a battering ram. Just your Seeing has the potential to change things.”

  I sounded smooth, persuasive, convincing. Fact was, I didn’t have fucking clue how much impact she had, although what I’d said about Bonnie was truth, far as Bonnie had explained it to me. But what mattered was that Shadow bought it.

  “You’re full of shit.”

  I probably shouldn’t have laughed, but I couldn’t help it. She wasn’t mad, she wasn’t offended, she was just so matter of fact, it was funny.

  “I am. But I really do believe that the fact that you started people looking, started me looking, that we’re asking questions, has the potential to change things.”

  “Change it enough?”

  I sighed, and let my hand drop from her arm as we started walking again toward the lights and noise of the Boardwalk. “That, yeah. That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  “So…we keep looking,” she said.

  Yeah. We kept looking.

  6

  Danny was used to working alone. Ellen had known that, figured that she’d be a tagalong, useful for… well, she didn’t know what she would be useful for, actually. But she wasn’t going to be left behind, to sit and stress and not know what was going on. Not this time.

  And, unlike Genevieve, and even Bonnie and the other Pups, Danny Hendrickson didn’t seem to think that she needed to be sheltered and protected, or act like she was some kind of bomb that was going to go off if someone spoke too loudly, or said the wrong thing. She’d made a Hulk joke, once, and only Sergei got it, which was just sad.

  If being a Talent meant giving up pop culture, Ellen wasn’t sure she wanted any part of it. Except she didn’t have a choice, apparently. This was the road she’d been put on, and she had no real choice but to walk it. So she would.

  While she was shaking sand off her feet, Danny had cornered a bunch of teenagers by one of the hundred and seven pizza places that lined the boardwalk, and was asking them questions, showing them the sketch she had done of the three faces. The teenagers were shaking their heads: another dead end. Ellen considered them, and then considered how little the hot dog had done to fill her stomach, and let instinct and hunger lead her to a nearby pizza stand, a long counter facing the boardwalk, with tables and plastic chairs arranged in the back. It wasn’t busy, so she leaned her elbows on the counter the way she’d seen Danny do in the bar and waited for someone to notice her.

  The guy behind the counter was old, maybe in his forties, and looked like he should have been cast in a mob movie. But his eyes were tired, and kind.

  “A slice and a Diet Coke, please.”

  “Pepsi okay?”

  Ellen made a face, and the guy laughed. “How about a root beer?”

  “That’s good yeah, thanks.” She pulled out her wallet, and counted the bills, then handed them to the guy as he shouted her order to the younger guy by the ovens, and handed her a drink. It was pre-made, and the ice was melting already, but the salty air and the walking and the beer almost two hours ago had left her thirsty enough to not care.

  She turned to watch Danny, who had let the kids go, folding the sketch back into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “You work here long?” She turned back and asked the guy, as he slid her pizza across the counter, the grease already seeping through the two white paper plates underneath.

  “Twenty-seven years this summer,” he said proudly. “Family business, still.”

  “Nice. I bet you get a lot of regulars.”

  “Some. But there’s always turnover. Kids, you know?” He said it like she wasn’t barely five years older than some of the kids he was talking about – and some of them might even be older than she was. She felt older, though. A lot older.

  “Three of my friends were down here, last week.” She had no idea what she was doing, but she’d been watching Danny, and listening, and maybe it was time to be more than just a tagalong. “We were supposed to meet them, but… ” She shrugged, tried to make it seem both important and no big deal. She’d been blown off before, dumped by people she thought were friends, who would have her back. She scooped up some of that bitterness, held it in her stomach, and let it blend with the worry she had for the three faces she had Seen in her vision. “If they took off and didn’t tell me, I’m going to kill them.”

  The guy laughed, and leaned on the counter, mimicking her pose. “It’s summer, it’s the Shore. Stuff happens. You can’t reach ‘em on your cell?”

  “It goes straight to voicemail. All three of them.” She let a little more worry
creep in. “You don’t think anything bad happened to them, do you?”

  “Bad things can happen,” the guy said. “But no, I suspect you’re right, they just flaked, and you can kick their asses all the rest of the year for it. But hey, hang on. Justin!”

  The kid by the ovens turned, and she saw that he was younger than she’d thought, maybe sixteen at most. “Yeah?”

  “C’mere,” the guy said, and swung his arm. “This is my son, Justin. He notices faces better than I do, especially at that age. Maybe he saw ‘em.”

  Ellen started, her mind suddenly going blank. “I—”

  “Here,” and Danny was next to her, his hand sliding the sketch across the counter. “Visuals help better – El’s been known to forget what color her own eyes are, much less someone else’s.”

  “Hey,” she protested, and felt his arm reach around her waist, pulling her close. It should have felt awkward, but it didn’t: she was reassured, and warmed in a way that had nothing to do with the air temperature, or the sweat already on her skin.

  “You know it’s true,” Danny was saying. “Anyway, nobody’s seen them, so if this is a dead end too, I think we’re going to have to admit defeat.”

  The pizza guy had looked up at Danny, then back at her, and he looked like he was going to say something, and then shrugged. Ellen could guess – Danny wasn’t that much older than her, maybe a decade? – but it was enough to raise a few eyebrows, the way Danny was playing it. Definitely not “older brother” style, or tagalong not-quite-partner.

  “Nah,” the kid, Justin, said. “I didn’t see ‘em. Sorry.”

  Out in the distance, over the water, there was a flash of heat-lightning, zigging from one cloud to the other, less a threat of rain than a reminder that it was still summer, that changeable forces still loomed overhead. Ellen didn’t see the flash behind her; she didn’t have to. She felt it, knew exactly where it was, how far away, how powerful, although she had no science training or instruments to measure it. She knew because the vision hit her like an icepick, bypassing her walls and digging right into the softest part of her brain.

  Genevieve had taught her how to make it easier, how to let the visions in rather than having them knock her barriers over. It helped, a little: like diving into a tornado instead of being swept off your feet, she supposed, and then there wasn’t any time to think, her mind sorting through what she Saw, trying to put it into some kind of order.

  She felt Danny grab her arm, leading her away from the noise and bustle of the booths. Her body followed automatically, but the rest of her was inside a room filled with shadows. Her visions didn’t have smell, and rarely sound – when they called it Sight they weren’t kidding. So she looked, and the shadows became distinct shapes: boxes, and tables, mostly. She was in a storeroom of some kind.

  Then one of the shadows moved, coming toward her, and there was a hand reaching out to her, pale and slender, palm turned up. There was webbing between the fingers, and something glittered faintly on the skin, even in the dim light.

  Then the scene changed, wrenching Ellen along with it, and she was in the middle of a street, dark and abandoned. Rows of neat little houses sat along either side, with cars parked at the curb. She looked up, all the way down the street, her sight telescoping in a way that made her want to throw up, and she saw the beach, and the ocean. Too far away. Too far away to be safe.

  “Safe from what, Ellen? Safe from what?”

  She tried to walk toward it, but something had her by the ankles, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t step forward, only back, the weights pulling her back into the shadowed room, and she knew if she went back there she would never escape.

  “Ellen?”

  She made an irritable noise, and tried to flap her hand at him, to tell him to shut up. He must have taken the hint because he didn’t say anything more, although he still had a hand on her arm, somewhere outside the vision.

  The street was nice, the houses in decent repair, what she could see in the night. Was it tonight? She looked up, and checked the moon, hanging high in the black. Tonight, or close enough. Tonight or tomorrow. But where?

  She needed more. Needed to see more.

  Unable to move from where the vision had dropped her, she couldn’t turn to see the cross-street, but it was narrow, almost like an alley, and had more houses on it, smaller ones, almost like cottages. Carlyle, she read off the nearest street sign, squinting to read the letters.

  Not enough.

  You’re a storm-seer. Genevieve had explained it to her, the two of them sitting on a bench in Central Park. The sky had been bright blue, the air clear and cool. Genevieve had said it was safer to talk about it then. We all pull power from current, the magic that run along electricity, but you have an extra gift. Current carries things with it. Memories. Images. You can see them. You can pull them from the current, before they even happen.

  More current. She reached for the power she could feel racing overhead, riding along those lightning flashes out at sea. All those years of denying she saw anything, trying to fit in, it seemed almost wrong how easy it was to find the current, bring it in toward her…

  Too much, too many conflicting sparks. She fell to her knees, the current prickling painfully up and down her spine, unable to settle, and the vision was lost.

  “Ellen. Ellen, come on. Come with me. No, it’s okay,” and he was talking to someone else now, his voice pitched away from her, “She’s ok, I think that last beer did her in.”

  She wanted to protest, but her knees felt like rubber and her head was burning and all she really wanted to do was lie down somewhere until the fireworks scrambling inside her settled down and behaved.

  “You did something with current, didn’t you? And it burned you. It’s okay, you’re going to be okay.”

  Yes. She knew that. She was the Talent here, not him, and she opened her mouth to say that, but all that came out was a harsh gasp.

  “Come on, sit down.” And she was being lowered onto a bench, and Danny was sitting next to her, his arm around her shoulders.

  “I Saw,” she said, barely a whisper. “I saw…her. One of the girls. She’s alive, she’ll be alive, but I don’t know about the others.” The last time she had seen someone twice, it had been Genevieve…and the one missing from that second vision had already died, although she hadn’t known it at the time.

  “And I saw… outside. Outside where she is.” Although she didn’t know for certain the cellar was on that street, why else would she be seeing it? “A street. Hamlin? No, Carlyle. Carlyle Court.”

  She felt him shift, reaching for something, and then he swore under his breath. “You scorched my cell.” There was no condemnation in his voice, just resignation. “No way to get a new one before morning. But the street, it’s near here?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Not here, the town’s not like this one.” The town they’d driven through had cottages the same size, but they were clearly rentals, more run-down, nowhere near as carefully tended. “I could see the beach from there, sort of. Down the end of the road. A private beach? Not like this.”

  “Beach town, nicer, Carlyle Court. Okay.” His arm left her, and she opened her eyes to see him watching her intently, his face in shadows from the streetlamp hanging over them. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” The current had settled, finally, and she no longer thought she was going to throw up. She didn’t want to try standing up just yet, though.

  “All right. Hang tight for a minute.”

  She wasn’t sure what that meant, to hang tight, but she was all right with sitting there while he went off, approaching an older couple walking past them. They spoke for couple of minutes, and then Danny held up his phone as though showing it to them. The woman laughed, and the man nodded, and took out his own phone, entering something on the keyboard. They spoke a little more, and then Danny was coming back, his body language saying he had something, a direction, a scent to follow.

  Oh yay. She forced herself to sit up s
traight, pretending that she was ready to go, not a burden at all.

  oOo

  Shadow looked even more like a shadow, like someone had taken an eraser to her sharp edges. If I had an inch of compassion and any sense whatsoever, I’d throw her into the car and go back to the city, leave her there and come back tomorrow, alone.

  I was pretty sure that her reaction to that wouldn’t be pretty. And she’d be right. She was wrecked, but she’d been the one to see the missing kids, and she had a right to be in on it. If she wanted.

  “Light Bay,” I said.

  She lifted her gaze enough to look at me. “What?”

  “The only town around here that has a Hamlin Court, according to the Internet, is the town of Light Bay. It’s about fifteen minutes north of here. You game?”

  “Yeah. I… Yeah.”

  She wasn’t. But she wasn’t going to admit it, either.

  “C’mon, tiger,” I said, reaching out a hand. “Get to the car and you can sleep the rest of the way there.”

  I ended up half-carrying her the rest of the way. She’d gone silent and loose, like a little kid sullen with exhaustion, and only pride was keeping her upright. I didn’t remember if this was normal for Talent – the ones I hung with tended to be, well, tougher than this.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” It was more of an exhale than an actual word, but she was buckling herself in, and her eyes were open. “Genevieve says that pulling wild current is harder than man-made, and the storm was pretty far away. I don’t think I should have done it.”

  “So why did you?”

  She shrugged, and looked out the passenger side window. “I don’t… it’s not like it is for everyone else. I don’t always have a choice.”

  I started up the car and pulled out of the parking spot, careful to avoid the gaggle of drunk teenagers trying to cross the street in front of me. “The visions?”

  “They come when they come. All I can do is…” and she waved a hand lazily in the air, “ride it.”