by Gary Urey
“Can I see my dad?”
“Very soon,” the Doctor said softly. “I have to attend a Stanford Board of Trustees meeting at the Green Library. Mr. Pinchole has a lot of questions you need to answer about your experiences with the GeoPort.”
Pinchole stood up, motioning for Axel to follow him. Together, they left the Doctor’s office and into the elevator.
Chapter Fifteen
DAISHA
A distressed whine filled Daisha’s ears. Her eyes snapped open. She was lying in a patch of dirt—her head still spinning from the Warp—with a trembling chocolate Labrador cowering nearby.
“Coco!” a voice called out. “Come!”
Daisha quickly stood up. A man in a wheelchair rolled in her direction. He grabbed the dog’s collar and snapped on a leash.
“That loud bang scared my dog half to death,” the man said. “Did you light a firecracker or something?”
“No,” Daisha said.
“Then it must have been those kids riding past on their bikes. Delinquents.”
The man and the dog moved away. As the Warp cobwebs cleared, Daisha realized she was inside a fenced-off dog run next to a basketball court. A sign nailed to a tree read Hoover Park Dog Run, City of Palo Alto.
Home.
Happy tears gushed from her eyes from the utter joy of being back in Palo Alto again. She was standing at the exact spot where she and Axel had first flown through the Warp. Below her feet, soaked into the dirt, was a deep red spill of some kind. The jarring memory nearly knocked her over. This was also where the Doctor’s men had gunned down their parents.
She quickly scanned the dog run for Axel, praying that his smiling face would emerge from behind a tree. He wasn’t there, only strangers and their menagerie of mutts. Afraid the Pursuers might be after her, Daisha hurdled over the fence and ran as fast as she could out of the park.
A weathered flyer attached to a telephone pole caught her attention. There were two photographs of children on the flyer. One was of Daisha, the other of Axel. They were from their eighth-grade Jordan Middle School yearbooks.
MISSING
If you have any information about Axel Jack
or Daisha Tandala, call the Palo Alto Police
Department or the Polly Klaas Foundation.
Someone had torn the rest of the flyer away, but Daisha had seen enough missing persons posters to know that it would list their age, hair color, dates of birth, sex, height, race, and eye color for identification purposes.
The thought of turning herself in to the Palo Alto Police tumbled into her mind, but she quickly dismissed the idea. After all, what would she say to them? She certainly couldn’t tell them about the Warp, the Pursuers, and the Doctor. They’d probably toss her into a mental ward.
She hurried down busy Middlefield Road past her old school, and then walked down N. California Avenue to Byron Street. There, in the middle of a row of houses, was the tiny white bungalow she had shared with her mother.
Her heart raced; her breath came in quick huffs. The house looked the same as when she had last seen it six months ago—the tangle of overgrown flannelbush shrubs in the front yard, the garage door that never closed all the way, and the powder-blue shutters in need of fresh paint.
Staked in the front yard was a For Sale sign.
Daisha hopped onto the front porch and tried to open the door. The handle didn’t budge. She then climbed over the side gate and went around to the backyard. The kitchen slider that opened up to the patio was unlocked, and she stepped inside. The place was completely empty. All of their furniture, plants, photos, and Caribbean-inspired decor were gone.
“Mom!” she called out, her voice echoing off the bare walls.
When there was no answer, she stepped into her mother’s bedroom—empty. A sudden urge to throw up came over her. She ran to the bathroom and heaved into the toilet the half-digested remnants of the egg, bacon, and cheese sandwich the cop had given her. When every bit was out of her stomach, she looked at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror.
Dirt, muck, and filth stared back at her. Lying on the floor next to the sink was a used bar of soap no bigger than a pack of matches. She immediately peeled off her smelly, grimy clothes and jumped into the shower.
Ten minutes later, she felt clean, refreshed, and human again—until she saw the pile of grimy clothes on the bathroom floor.
“I’m not wearing those rancid things ever again,” she said to herself, and then stepped out of the shower.
She paced around the house, leaving a trail of wet footprints. From room to room, the memories flooded her brain. The house was now an empty shell. The only thing left of her old life was inside her bedroom closet. Ever since she was old enough to walk, she had collected the sticky bar-code labels from bananas and stuck them on the back of her closet door.
They were still there. Hundreds of them, as fresh as the day she had pasted them. A nostalgic lump formed in her throat. She remembered her secret hiding place. She crawled to the back of the closet and felt for a hole in the drywall the size of a ripe cantaloupe. When she found the opening, she reached inside and yanked out three spiral notebooks filled with her secret thoughts, several pieces of smooth sea glass, a condor feather she had found while hiking Big Sur, and a crumpled pile of red, white, and maroon fabric.
The fabric was the bandanna skirt and ruffled sleeve blouse that her grandmother had sent her from Port Royal. She remembered shoving the outfit into her hiding place so she wouldn’t have to wear it anymore. The same dress she was wearing when she’d met the Doctor. Despite that grim fact, she slipped into the skirt and pulled on the blouse anyway. The outfit was tight, but clothes slightly too small were better than wearing filthy rags. After lacing up her dirty sneakers and retrieving the penknife and GeoPort from her old shorts pocket, she was ready to go.
“But there’s no place to go,” she mused to herself.
She was back in Palo Alto, but Axel was who-knew-where. Their contingency plan in case of separation was to Warp back to the Hoover Park Dog Run. If she and Axel were to be reunited, it would be there.
Daisha left the house and made her way back toward Hoover Park. She stopped at busy Oregon Expressway. Motorists whizzed down the road until the light turned red. Just as Daisha was about to cross, a fancy black Bentley driven by a capped chauffeur screeched to a halt directly beside her. The windows weren’t tinted, and she saw a man in the backseat. He had a cell phone to his ear. The man moved his head slightly, revealing a huge red birthmark on his otherwise pale face.
The Doctor.
Daisha froze in her tracks, fear surging through every cell in her body. If she ran, the Doctor would see her. The only chance she had was to stay perfectly still and hope the man wouldn’t turn in her direction.
The light turned green, and the Bentley accelerated forward. The Doctor hadn’t noticed her! A tsunami of relief washed over until, halfway up the block, she saw the Bentley’s brake lights flash and its shiny-rimmed tires screech to a stop.
That was when she ran, sprinting recklessly into on-coming traffic. Car horns blasted as she zigzagged her way across the busy expressway before disappearing into the backyards of neighborhood houses.
Chapter Sixteen
AXEL
Pinchole led Axel off the elevator and into a windowless room. There were a sofa, two overstuffed chairs, a coffee table, a water cooler, and a large television monitor hanging on the wall.
Axel plopped down on the sofa. “I want to see my dad,” he said. No matter what the Doctor had told him, Axel wouldn’t believe any of it until he could see his father face-to-face.
“Very soon,” Pinchole answered and looked away.
Axel noticed that Pinchole couldn’t look him in the eye for more than a nanosecond.
“They are involved in very serious, time-sensitive work at the moment,” Pinchole continued, his eyeballs darting around the room. “I have immense respect for your father, and Daisha’s mother as well. They w
ere two of the finest physicists on the planet.”
“You mean are.”
“Excuse me?”
“My dad and Daisha’s mom are the finest physicists on the planet. Not were the finest physicists.”
Pinchole cleared his throat. “Of course, that is what I meant. All of us who work here are looking so far into the future that using the past tense is a bit of a habit.”
“Speaking of the past, if I had radiation poisoning from the GeoPort that caused hallucinations, why aren’t I in some kind of anticontamination chamber?”
“Once we took the GeoPort away, you were no longer subject to radiation,” Pinchole said quickly. “Let’s talk about your fantastical experiences using the GeoPort, shall we? I want to know what it was like traveling through the Warp.”
“You should already know what the GeoPort is like,” Axel said impatiently. “Your men went through the Warp as many times as Daisha and I did.”
“Our men were only following you through the Warp,” Pinchole said. “There is a big difference. Believe me, I would have loved to take a trip myself, but we needed men specially trained in…rescue…so the Doctor only authorized those men for Warp travel.”
“Pursuers,” Axel said.
“Pardon me?”
“That’s what Daisha and I called the men who were chasing us. Pursuers.”
Pinchole nodded his head. “Speaking of Daisha,” he said, his eyes still unable to look into Axel’s, “she should be here in the next day or two. Our men rescued her.”
Axel sat up, his pulse racing with excitement. “For real? Where was she?”
“Our men found her wandering in an Ohio cornfield, confused and disheveled, but otherwise unharmed and well.”
Twenty-four hours of worrying about Daisha’s safety lifted from Axel’s shoulders. He missed her desperately, and longed to see her big smile and mop of dreadlocks. But most of all, he wanted to hug her, hold her in his arms, and never let her go again. The word love popped into his brain, followed by a strange, fuzzy feeling that tingled through his body.
“As I was saying,” Pinchole continued. “We could only follow you through the Warp. That is not the same as you and Daisha logging in coordinates and manipulating the Warp.”
“What do you mean?” Axel asked.
Pinchole plucked out his cell phone and held it up. “Let me simplify things. It’s the same principle that allows the government to track a person’s movements by their cell phone use. Every time you use a cell phone, you leave a cellular footprint wherever you go. You operate a cell phone, and all the government can do is follow you. Get it?”
Axel nodded.
“Now, I want you to tell me everything about Warp travel,” Pinchole continued.
“First, where’s my GeoPort?”
“Don’t worry. We’ve locked it away inside in the Monitoring Room on the third floor with an armed guard.”
“Okay. What do you want to know?”
“Let’s start from the beginning.”
The beginning for Axel had been at the Hoover Park Dog Run. It was also the end of his father’s life—or at least he had thought so. Radiation and hallucinations…Could it all be true? Only when he saw his father alive and well would he be sure.
“I want to see my dad first,” Axel said.
“I told you, your father and Daisha’s mother are working on a very important project. Your reunion will have to wait.”
“My dad hasn’t seen me in six months. I find it hard to believe he won’t take a minute to see that his only son is okay.”
“We’ve shown you a live video feed of them working in the laboratory. Isn’t that enough for now?”
“Please, let me see a live video of them one more time. After that, I promise to answer all of your questions.”
A loud groan escaped from Pinchole’s lips. “Fine,” he blurted and walked over to the television monitor. He fidgeted with the controller until a grainy, black-and-white image appeared on the screen.
The scene was the same as Axel had viewed earlier in the Doctor’s office: his father and Daisha’s mother inside their messy lab. Then Megan, the graduate assistant, grabbed the folder from his father’s desk. He was just about to tell Pinchole to turn off the video when a framed photograph sitting on his father’s desk caught his eye. It was of him, taken on school picture day.
Axel hated school photos, but his father always wanted one to keep on his desk at the lab, next to a photo of Axel’s mother, who had died when he was less than a year old. A week before Axel had disappeared into the Warp, his father had made a big deal of replacing his old seventh-grade picture with the new one from eighth grade.
“My boy’s growing up,” he remembered his father cooing.
Axel gazed into the monitor and studied the picture on his father’s desk. In the photo, Axel’s hair was short and he had a black eye. The shiner had come from an accidental elbow during a touch football game at recess when he was a fifth grader at Walter Hayes Elementary School.
A ten-ton boulder of realization dropped on Axel’s skull in that instant. The half-digested food he had eaten in the Doctor’s office angrily belched into his esophagus. A burning sensation filled his throat, and he felt the blood drain from his face.
The picture on his father’s desk, and the video feed he was watching, were both over three years old.
Chapter Seventeen
DOCTOR STAIN
“Stop the car!” the Doctor yelled at his chauffeur.
The Bentley screeched to a halt. The Doctor jostled in the backseat, his hot cup of coffee spilling all over his expensive Armani suit.
“What’s the matter, sir?” the confused chauffeur asked.
“Did you see that girl?”
“What girl?”
“It was a young black girl with crazy hair. I just saw her run across the street. She looked very familiar.”
“Sorry, but I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Turn this vehicle around. I want to see if we can find her.”
The chauffeur wheeled into a driveway, turned the car around, and cruised slowly down the street. There were plenty of people around—joggers, dog walkers, mothers pushing baby strollers—but they didn’t see a young girl.
“Recognize anyone?” the chauffeur asked.
The Doctor let out a disheartened grunt. “Not yet. Keep looking.”
Daisha Tandala was the spitting image of her beautiful mother. Killing Roswell Jack had meant nothing more to the Doctor than swatting an annoying fly, but ending the life of Jodiann was the most difficult thing he’d ever had to do.
“Take Cowper Street again,” the Doctor ordered.
The chauffeur sped up Cowper, down Marion Avenue, and across Waverly Street. The Doctor felt like a spaniel trying to flush a pheasant from the bush. On their second pass down Cowper, he noticed another street called Anton Court. A sign read: Not a Through Street.
“Go down that one,” the Doctor said. “It’s a dead end.”
The chauffeur obeyed his boss’s command and turned down Anton Court. Only a six-foot hedge separated the street from busy Oregon Expressway. The sound of speeding traffic blasted in the Doctor’s ears as memories rushed into his brain. He vividly recalled the day when Jodiann and Roswell had marched into his office, announcing that they were going to dismantle the GeoPort infrastructure and permanently suspend the research. He thought it was a joke at first, but quickly realized the two were dead serious.
When he had asked why, the two fervently spouted some tree-hugger, antitechnology manifesto about the potential misuse of such knowledge. Without using the Doctor’s name specifically, they explained that they did not want to be a part of some greedy, multinational corporation that would eventually use the breakthrough for the sole purpose of making money under the guise of making the world a better place.
The Doctor had just nodded his head, listening to their impassioned speech with pretend understanding and empathy. When the scientists had lef
t his office, he dialed his cell phone and ordered their immediate assassination. Simply taking the technology for himself and letting the professors live was not an option. They knew too much. The Doctor would not allow them to stand in his way.
“Is that her?” the chauffeur asked.
The Doctor rolled down his window. “Where?”
The chauffeur pointed to the end of the cul-desac. There, standing behind a white van was a young, frightened-looking black girl in a red dress with a shock of wild dreadlocks.
She hadn’t yet noticed them parked next to the curb. The girl was taller than he remembered Daisha, but that made sense because he hadn’t seen her in six months. And her natty black hair was longer too, more matted and unruly. His first instinct was to jump out, grab her, and make absolutely one hundred percent certain it was really her. But he knew the real Daisha was much more agile and fleet than himself. She was strong, wiry, and adept at escape. If it were really her, she’d bound away the moment he opened the door.
“Inch the car a bit closer,” he told the chauffeur. When the car was less than ten yards from her, the Doctor hit Record on the video camera on his iPhone and pointed the lens at her. He then rolled down the window and yelled, “Daisha Tandala!”
The girl immediately snapped to attention. She stared at the car. The Doctor expected her to run immediately, but she just stood there, her mouth hanging open and her eyes wide with confusion.
The Doctor knew that without a doubt the girl was Daisha. She looked just like how he remembered her mother.
A man emerged from the house carrying a large box. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Daisha standing next to the van. “Can I help you with something?” he asked her.
Wanting to diffuse the situation, the Doctor opened the car door and stepped onto the sidewalk. Daisha, seeing that the Bentley was blocking her path back up the street, turned and leaped over a white picket fence and fled into a backyard.