by David Walton
And if it was true—if there was someone out there who had murdered Abby to make some point or just to prove it could be done—then Tyler was going to find him. The police forensics team might be good, but this was out of their field of expertise. Maybe he should try to get the FBI involved. The equipment had been developed at a Pennsylvania university, but the crime had occurred across state lines, in New Jersey. Maybe that would be enough to give them jurisdiction. The FBI might not be competent to evaluate cutting-edge AI technology, but they could probably track down who in the area had purchased the right equipment, or they could run facial recognition from the raceway’s cameras on any known hacker activists.
At some level, Tyler knew he was fooling himself, just trying to keep busy enough to bury the emotions that threatened to rise up and drown him. No answers he found could bring Abby back. No arrested hackers could change the fact that he was at least partially responsible for her death. Solving the mystery wouldn’t convince any venture capitalist to invest in their company, ever again. Nothing would change.
Brandon was right. Everything they had worked for was over. No one would ride in a car that ran down pedestrians on television, not even if a hacker was responsible. Their company had failed before it had even begun.
But Tyler found it hard to grieve for their company, at least right now. It felt wrong to mourn something so insignificant as a career when Abby had lost everything. The loss of his dreams even felt like justice of a kind, a punishment he felt he deserved. He had known the cars were dangerous, of course, but he had never really thought anything bad would happen, not really. He had been living under the delusion his whole life that with enough hard work, the world would open at his touch and give him anything he wanted. Money, fame, love. Now he knew better. And it was too late.
News of Abby’s death was everywhere. It hadn’t become the national debate that the case of the dead motorcyclist in Seattle had—they weren’t a big company like Mercedes-Benz, and so the media treated it as a college project gone bad rather than a threat to public safety. But a news crew had been on site. They had film coverage of the accident. The news media couldn’t pass up the tragedy of a beautiful, dead college student. Three days after her death, Tyler still couldn’t look at news online for fear of seeing her face.
The first night, reporters had staked out their apartment building, hoping for an interview. Tyler had seen a clip of Naomi, pushing mutely past reporters on her way across the green. He hadn’t seen her or spoken with her since the accident. He’d called a dozen times and left messages, but she hadn’t responded to any of them. He knew where she was, of course, or at least suspected, but he didn’t want to barge in there uninvited when she clearly didn’t want company. And yet, she must be grieving terribly. Maybe the right thing to do was to go to her, even if she didn’t think she wanted him. He didn’t want to hurt her any more by forcing her to talk, but it couldn’t be good for her not to have anyone with her. Could it?
He argued the question back and forth with himself, but finally, he couldn’t stand it. He had to go to her. If she told him to leave, he would. On his way, he dropped into one of the campus cafeterias and bought a chicken Caesar salad with extra croutons. There was a good chance Naomi had hardly left the library, and if she hadn’t left, that meant she probably hadn’t eaten much, either.
He climbed the stairs and approached the angled bookcase. A tall boy bent over the water fountain, drinking, so Tyler pretended to be browsing the books until he left. Then he approached the edge of the bookcase cautiously and knocked.
“Go away.” Naomi’s voice was raw and scratched, barely louder than a whisper.
He eased around the corner. “I brought you some food,” he said.
“I’m not hungry. I want to be alone.” She sat curled on the beanbag chair, a pillow under her head. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her face streaked and drawn.
“I know. I won’t stay,” he said. He bent and set the plastic salad container on the shelf, next to the statue of Hedwig. “It feels like a betrayal of her, to keep living. It feels like, how could you eat, or watch TV, or go to class, when she can’t do any of those things? But your body needs food.” He straightened. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“How do you know what it feels like?” she asked. “My parents. They died in a car accident when I was eight. And because I feel the same way now. Not as deeply as you, I’m sure. But it feels wrong to do anything. The only thing I’ve been able to do is run simulations of the demo, over and over again, trying to understand what went wrong.”
Her eyes, which had been distant, focused on him momentarily. “And?”
“And nothing. It never goes wrong in simulation.”
“Of course not. There’s nothing wrong with the software.”
“The only possibility I can come up with is that somebody hacked us. That it was done on purpose.”
Her gaze drifted back into the far distance again. He noticed she held a necklace in her hands, a simple gold cross that she rubbed between her thumb and index finger. A keepsake? Something of Abby’s?
“I was raised to think people go to heaven when they die,” she said. “Or hell. Do you think she’s still . . . out there somewhere?”
Tyler hesitated. He wanted to comfort her, but he wanted to answer honestly, too. “I don’t,” he said. “The neurons that made up her mind stopped firing. The data is gone. I don’t believe it was magically captured or backed up somewhere, to be downloaded into a new body somewhere else. But some of that data is still here, in your memories, in mine. You loved her, and so she’s a part of your life. It doesn’t seem like enough, but it’s all we have.”
“Then what’s the point?” Naomi said, suddenly loud. “Why do anything? Is life just about having babies to pass on your genes before you die? They’re just going to die, too. Why live at all? It’s an endless game that nobody wins.”
“It’s life,” Tyler said. “It’s short, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. What Abby had was precious. It just makes us angry because we wanted her to have more.”
Naomi didn’t answer. She kept looking out into the distance and fingering the gold cross in her hand.
“I’ll go,” Tyler said. He turned sideways to squeeze his way around the bookcase again.
“How’s Brandon?” Naomi asked.
Tyler paused. “Sad. Angry. He blames himself, I think.”
“Good. He was reckless. He should never have tried that crazy stunt.”
Tyler didn’t argue with her. If there was blame there, it fell on all of them, Abby included. But there was no point in saying so. He just slipped out and left her to grieve alone.
By the time he walked back to his apartment, the sun had set, leaving the western clouds streaked pink and orange. He unlocked the door and opened it to find the apartment dark and quiet. The door tended to stick in its frame, but he had long mastered the knack of lifting on the handle and shoving it closed with a shoulder. He stepped through the narrow hallway and flipped on the light in the living room.
Brandon sat upright on the sofa, slightly hunched, his eyes staring. For a brief, terrifying moment, Tyler thought he was dead. Then his head turned, and he regarded Tyler with a glazed expression.
“You scared me to death!” Tyler said. “Why are you sitting here in the dark?”
“It was light before. I didn’t realize.”
“You didn’t realize it had gotten dark?” Tyler looked closely at him. He hadn’t shaved in three days, hadn’t bathed, probably hadn’t eaten much. He looked terrible, but there was something more. He seemed defeated. Resigned. “What happened?”
It took him a moment to answer. “I got a phone call. From my father’s lawyer.”
Tyler waited. “And?”
Brandon looked away. “My father died last night. An aneurism. No warning at all, just didn’t wake up in the morning.”
“Oh, my word, Brandon. I’m so sorry.”
He looked up with anguished e
yes. “What did I do? What did I do that was so horribly bad that I deserved all this?”
Tyler sat down next to him on the couch. “Nothing. You did nothing.”
“I should have called more. He always complained I only called when I wanted money.”
“What about your mom? Have you talked to her?”
Brandon’s face twisted. “My mom died ten years ago.”
“Your stepmom, I mean.”
“Right.” Brandon turned to meet Tyler’s eyes. “She had the lawyer call to break the news instead of telling me herself. Does that sound like we’re on speaking terms?”
“That’s rough.”
“Whatever. I never liked her. She always loved Dad’s money more than him, and I think he knew it. Didn’t matter to him, though. The lawyer wouldn’t tell me anything before the will is officially read, but if I were to guess, Dad probably left her as much of his money as he left me.”
The words hung in the silence. “What are you going to do?” Tyler asked eventually.
Brandon’s face hardened. “You mean, am I going to use my share of Dad’s money to fund our company?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You were thinking it. Abby’s dead, my father’s dead, and you want to spend his money before his body’s even buried?”
“No! I just wanted to know what you were planning. If you were going to go home to New York, or look for a job, or what.”
“I don’t know, Tyler. I just got the news today. I’ll tell you one thing, though. If I do start a company, I’m sure not including you.”
Tyler rocked back, stung. “What?”
“You can’t even accept responsibility. You spin crazy theories about hackers, and you won’t admit you made a mistake. There’s no room for oversights in this business, or people end up hurt.”
“That’s not fair,” Tyler said. “Don’t put this on me. I checked those switches.”
Brandon yelled, an incoherent cry of rage. He punched the wall behind the couch hard enough to leave an impression in the drywall. “Shut up!” he said. “Abby’s dead! Don’t you get it? We can’t go back!”
Tyler stood. He walked to the window and leaned on the sill, looking down onto the street. He understood now. Brandon needed to blame him. He needed to leave him behind and move on. If he did start an autocar company, it couldn’t include Tyler, because then it would be the same thing as before. It would be the thing that killed Abby. Everything was broken now. Their future lay in splintered shards on the ground, and there was no way to piece it together again. Tyler had no idea now where he would be in a month, never mind in ten years. School was practically over, but he hadn’t applied for any jobs. He couldn’t even bring himself to care.
“I’m going home,” Brandon said, as if he had just made up his mind. “I’ll leave in the morning. I won’t be coming back.”
Brandon packed only a few boxes into the Prius. Tyler helped him carry them down, though they barely spoke.
“What should I do with the rest?” Tyler asked. Most of the furniture had been Brandon’s, and he had left behind crates full of electronics and computer parts.
“This is all I need. Sell it, or keep it if you want; I don’t care.”
“Okay. I’ll see you at commencement, then.”
Brandon shook his head. “I’m not going.”
“Seriously? It’s an achievement—you should get your diploma.”
“They can mail it to me. I’m not planning to come back here. Ever.”
Tyler didn’t know what to say to that. He watched the Prius drive away, and wondered if he would ever see his friend again. With Abby’s death, he had lost not just one friend but two. Or maybe three.
He sat in the apartment flipping channels without actually watching the shows until he couldn’t stand it anymore. Then he walked to the nearest café, bought a large coffee and a bagel with cream cheese, and brought it to the library. He shielded the food with his body on the way through the doors so no librarian who saw him could forbid him from bringing it inside. He jogged up the stairs and around to the angled bookcase.
He knocked on the wall. No answer. “Naomi?” he whispered. “I brought you some breakfast.”
Holding the food out in front of him like an offering, he sidled around the edge of the shelves. For a moment, he thought he must have slipped behind the wrong bookcase. The triangular space was empty. Not only was she not sitting there on her beanbag cushion but the cushion itself was missing, as were her pictures, her containers of snacks, her stack of Harry Potter books, and her statue of Hedwig the owl.
Naomi was gone.
CHAPTER 10
Brandon’s emotions swung from anger to melancholy as he drove across Long Island and into East Hampton. He couldn’t see the ocean from the highway, but he could smell it through the open windows, bringing back memories of childhood exploits on the white sands of Cooper’s Beach. He still couldn’t believe his father was gone. Even at college in a different city, Brandon had never been able to escape the fear of his father’s disapproval. Even now, he found himself wondering what his father would think of his choice to skip commencement.
He hated his father. The man had barely spent two hours together with him, but he always seemed to sail in and ruin whatever plans Brandon had for his life. Lego camp? Not posh enough. His friends were always the wrong friends and his dreams the wrong dreams. Despite this, to Brandon’s own disgust, it was always his father that he tried to please.
He had fantasized that the next time he drove this route, it would be to bring Abby home to meet him. He had wanted his father to approve of her. And somehow, he had thought he would. How could anyone disapprove of Abby? But his father had quickly relieved him of that delusion. All it had taken was a text home with her picture and the announcement they were dating. His father’s response had been: “You can do better.”
He hadn’t even met her. She was brilliant, beautiful, funny, kind, and unfailingly polite. She hadn’t grown up with money, but she was graceful and intelligent enough to impress anyway. She was perfect. She had been perfect. And now she was gone.
Brandon’s mind kept going round and round, trying to process her death into something that would make sense. It just couldn’t be true. He had to fix it. He would do anything, pay anything, if only he could figure out how to make it right. He felt the familiar catch in his throat as tears threatened to break through. He wanted to go back in time and cancel the demo, or else give Aisha the finger the night she came to visit and tell her he didn’t need her money, that he would do it all himself.
He cried out in rage and pounded his fist again and again on the steering wheel. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. It had been Tyler’s software, Tyler’s stupid broken kill switches—why wasn’t it Tyler lying dead on the track? In a just world, it would have been.
Brandon took deep breaths and got himself under control. A tiny voice whispered to him that he was just as culpable for Abby’s death as Tyler or anyone else, but he knew that if he listened to that voice, he would go mad. Part of him just wanted to drive into a tree and end it all, but he didn’t quite have the courage for that. He didn’t know what life would look like now that she was gone, but he knew that killing himself wasn’t what she would have wanted.
He drove past his old high school—another rush of memories—and on toward his family’s home, an eight-bedroom mansion with a swimming pool and easy access to both the beach and the golf course. It was technically their summer home, but his mother had loved it here even in the off-season, and so Brandon had spent most of his childhood here. Since their marriage, his father and Jillian had lived here on their own. Now, he supposed, only Jillian did.
Jillian. Twenty-nine years old, sexy and shameless, she had caught his father’s eye on the beach one summer and managed to insinuate herself into his bed and into his fortune. It was embarrassing. She was so obviously a trophy wife he wondered how his father, who would have turned sixty this year, could stand t
o be seen with her in public. Nobody thought it was about love.
It was a betrayal of Brandon’s mother, and it was a betrayal of him. His first summer at grad school, Brandon had come home to the house where he had grown up—where his mother had raised and cared for him—to find her walking around the halls in a bikini. She’d apparently returned from sunning herself at the beach, but hadn’t bothered to change. His father had actually suggested at dinner that night that if he wanted, he could call her ‘Mom.’ Brandon had broken a chair against the wall and had never come home again.
They had visited him at Penn twice, and both times he had been civil. Dad was paying for school, after all, and had even grudgingly contributed a few times to their autocar venture. But Brandon would never acknowledge Jillian as part of the family. She was a gold-digging whore who hadn’t even had the decency to call him herself when his father died. She was probably celebrating. He wondered how much of his inheritance his father had squandered on her. The will would be read on Monday morning, so he’d find out soon enough.
He pulled up in front of the house and parked. He’d thought about finding a hotel to avoid seeing her, but this was his house.
She had no right to stay here and keep him out. And it’s not like there wasn’t plenty of room.
He found her in the den, wearing workout pants and a tank top. She sat on the floor in a stretching pose, with one leg straight to either side, reaching both arms toward one foot with her forehead against her knee. She looked up when she heard him come in. Her eyes were red and puffy.
“Brandon,” she said, her voice soft and compassionate. “I’m sorry—I was just finishing up a workout. It’s good to see you.” She stood and wiped one sweaty hand against her pants before holding it out to shake. He took it, and she squeezed his hand briefly. She looked into his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He was a good man.”