Round Trip Fare

by Barb Taub

Half an hour later, they sat side by side in the kitchen car. Despite ever-dark windows, the pans and kitchen tools hanging around the central island with its tall stools made the warmly-lit car cozy and welcoming. He raised his eyebrows when she brought him scrambled eggs and chocolate chip cookies on a china plate with a small gold train across the center, but she just shrugged. “The supply deliveries have been…odd lately.” She poured him another glass of juice and sat back. “Why are you here?”

  “I heard from Harry.” He spoke around mouthfuls of eggs. “There’s a lead on your sister, some chateau in France. I was supposed to go there directly, but then Jeffers told me you heard from your brother. He was worried it might be some kind of a trick, so I decided to—” He seemed to find his plate fascinating. “—check on you.”

  “And by check,” she air-quoted, “You mean donate several pints of blood and pass out on my bed? I know I feel safer already.”

  He started to chuckle, but frowned instead when he saw her loading her trolley. “What are you doing?”

  She didn’t look up. “My job. The Metro just gave the Welcome Aboard announcement, so I’m getting ready to make a food run. Maybe you should go back to bed and get more rest.”

  “If your brother called you, then the Outsiders know you’re here. You need to stay where I can protect you.”

  She stared at him.

  He tried a smile. “That sounded a lot better in my head. Can I get a do-over?”

  Jaw and shoulders stiff, she finished loading the trolley. “Bain. Stay here and protect the heck out of this jerk.” Ignoring the reproach in two sets of male eyes, she rolled the cart through the door, locked it behind her with her tattoo, and was gone.

  Halfway through the second car on her trolley run, she got into an argument with Pete, the leader of the imps. He stood in front of her with his arms folded across his black leather jacket, a four-foot-tall scaly red teddy bear sporting dark glasses, biker jacket, and attitude. He was just explaining why they couldn’t be expected to drink the swill she was peddling from the thermos on her cart when his eyes flicked to a point above her right shoulder.

  Carey sighed. “Big guy, neck tattoo, moves like a ghost? He’s right behind me, isn’t he?”

  Pete nodded. “Does this mean we can go into the kitchen now? Bargain?”

  “Knock yourselves out. Chocolate is in the third cabinet from the end. Leave me the coffee.”

  Pete looked annoyed, but she held up her hand. “Yeah, let’s just pretend we bargained really hard on this one. I’ll make it up to you next time.”

  “I think you should come with us.” Considering that it came from waist-level, the glare Pete leveled on Yosh was surprisingly scary.

  She led the way to the kitchen car, unlocking it for the imps and releasing a delighted Bain. Ignoring her six-plus-foot shadow, she pushed her trolley back through the remaining cars until she’d offered refreshments to all passengers.

  The last car was empty, and she sank onto the bench seat near the door. “How did you get out?”

  “Went out the other end of the car and over the roof.” He gave a theatric shudder. “It looks a lot easier when James Bond does it.” He took the seat across from her, almost falling into it. His face was still pale, and he was sweating.

  She leaned over to grasp his wrist, checking his pulse before reaching to the overhead shelf for a couple of the bright orange Metro blankets. His skin felt too cool to her as she put a pillow under his head and pulled the blankets around him. His eyes were closed, so she didn’t know if he heard her muttered, “Idiot.”

  Carey wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she woke to find herself slumped against him. His arm was around her shoulders, and one of her hands stretched across his body to rest against his heart. She thought his face had more color, and a fleeting touch with her hand found his skin warm. Pulling the blankets over both of them, she watched his face until she fell asleep again.

  She woke, alone, stretched out on the bench seat, head on the pillow and blankets tucked around her. Overhead, she heard the Metro announcing the next stop would be Between Station. After walking through the emptied train, she laughed to hear his voice coming from the mulch car, pleading with Bain to please just get with the program. Carey was stepping out of the little bathroom, dressed in a red Metro-logo shirt and jeans, wet hair turbaned in a pink towel, when man and dog entered her room.

  “Some people knock and wait to be invited in.” She bent over to rub her short curls with the towel. “It’s called manners.”

  He grunted as he picked up his backpack from the floor and saw that it was open. “Some people wait to be invited before they go through other people’s things. It’s called trust.”

  “Think we’ll ever meet those people?”

  He was laughing as he went into the bathroom.

  Carey was laughing too as she tossed her towel onto the pile next to the washing machine and went into the kitchen car. The tall man leaning against the counter straightened. “Hello, Twin.”

  She froze, then silently leaned her tattoo against the door behind her until she heard it lock. Since Connor’s phone call, she’d been rehearsing what she wanted to say. She still wasn’t entirely sure what that would be, but she was fairly sure that explaining Yosh to her brother wasn’t part of it. Now with him in front of her, though, all she could do was stare, desperate to find the brother she’d adored in the face of the man she didn’t know at all. “Connor?”

  He lifted his right hand slightly, palm turned up, holding out a faded twist of yarn. It was the old bracelet made from the strings that she, Gaby, and Connor had spun at a local fair a lifetime ago. “It’s me.”

  An ugly, choked sound came from her throat. “I’ve never stopped looking for you. I needed you.” She took the bracelet but not his hand. “Connor, where the hell have you been?”

  “It’s a…long story. And I don’t have much time. There are people looking for me. Come with me, Carey, and I’ll explain on the way.”

  “Come with you? Where? And why?”

  He hesitated. “That night, back in the cave, after Harry…” He stopped, and his hands fisted. But his voice, when he spoke again, was in the same gentle, even tones she remembered from their phone call. “That night I was trying to escape when Narcorial found me. He told me he was an angel who wasn’t allowed to act directly because that might interfere with humans’ free will. He showed me how to escape from Harry’s enemies who were chasing us. And he explained what was going on.”

  “But…all these years. Why did you stay away from me?”

  “Narcorial said you and Marley would be safer if you didn’t know where we were.” Connor took a step closer and reached for her with both arms. She stared at his hands and took a careful step back. He smiled slightly but dropped his arms. “You and I still have a task. We just didn’t understand what it was. We know Raziel’s Book powers Null City. We also know that in the wrong hands, it will unmake Creation. If we don’t stop Null City from using the Book, and stop Raziel from making more of them, everyone and everything could be destroyed. That’s our pivot task. Carey, you need to trust me. I’ve spent these years learning to control my concord gift. With your warrior gift, we can do it. We can find Raziel and make Creation safe.”

  “Nice speech.” She wanted to throw her arms around him. She wanted to hit him for all of her lonely years. She wanted to make this almost-stranger disappear and bring back the twin who was the other half of her soul. She was stiff with all that want, arms and legs carved from stone. “What will happen to Null City? To the thousands living there? Families? Children?”

  He looked sad, but his voice was still calm. “You know I’d never want to see them hurt, but can you balance their lives against everyone else? Everyone who will ever be born?”

  She thought for a moment. “Yes, I can. Because you’re wrong. Harry wouldn’t lie to us. And Gaby wouldn’t lie. And all our family, going back to the start of Null City? Connor, they were not all li
ars.”

  “Then come with me. Let me show you everything I’ve learned. Help me find Raziel, just to talk to him. And then you can decide for yourself which of us is wrong.”

  “What about Marley?”

  He hesitated. “I just saw Marley. She’s…changed. I’m not sure who she is any more, or if we can trust her.”

  “We can trust Harry. Connor, I need to talk to you about Harry. I know this sounds crazy…” She half-smiled, waiting for him to chime in with Harry’s favorite phrase, their private code from their days at the St. Helens ranch. You say that like it’s a bad thing.

  His lips pressed into a straight line. “Hadriel is dead. And even if he was still here, he wouldn’t be able to help us. But I’m sure he wouldn’t want to see everyone die.”

  She froze. Slowly, carefully she backed up another step. “Bain. Defense!” The Aussie crouched, teeth bared as the hair on his back raised. Carey bent her knees slightly, the weight of Harry’s knife balanced in her hand. “I don’t know who you are or what you’ve done with my brother. But you’re not Connor.”

  The man across from her shook his head. “Carey, you have the wrong idea.” His soft voice might have been more convincing if he hadn’t accompanied it with the Taser now trained on her. Even as he moved to fire, Bain was leaping for his arm, the probes clattering harmlessly to the side as the Taser’s clicks chittered.

  The man screamed, trying to use the now useless Taser to batter the dog’s jaws buried in his arm. In a stranger’s voice, he yelled at the door. “Get in here now!” Even as his eyes moved to the door, Carey came from behind him and held her knife to his throat, calling off her dog.

  The door to the kitchen car opened. “If you mean the three you had waiting outside the door, I think they’re a bit tied up right now.” Yosh filled the doorway, his gun trained on the bleeding man with her knife at his neck. “Dammit, Carey. I had to go over the roof again. I’m not feeling the love. But I did get three, and you only got one.” Blood trickled from a cut on one high cheekbone and a slash across his left arm, but he seemed otherwise unhurt. “Is that your brother?”

  “No.” She sounded sick. “I don’t know what he is.”

  The man with Connor’s face coughed. Then he died.

  Chapter Nineteen

  June 2011: Null City Metro Station

  “He doesn’t even look that much like Connor.” Carey stared at the last of the four bodies being carried off the Metro at Null City.

  “His gift must have been suggestion.” The lanky young woman with chin-length carrot-red hair looked up from a low-voiced conversation with the ambulance team as they started to load the bodies into zippered bags. Although she looked about Carey’s age, she’d introduced herself as Poppy Garde, Null City’s Anchor, a role she described as, “Kind of like a mayor. Only not.”

  After she supervised the removal of the four Outsiders, Poppy had asked if she could talk to Carey. Now the two women sat in the next car down from the kitchen car. “Did you kill all of them?”

  The doors between their car and the kitchen were open, and Carey had heard Yosh moving around as he cleaned away the traces of her impostor twin. At Poppy’s question, all noise from the kitchen stopped. She shook her head. “Yosh killed one in the fight, and we tried to capture the others. We call them Outsiders. But they mostly kill themselves if they get captured. My friend Frankie at Accords has been running toxicology screens, but they’ve never been able to isolate the poison. Her current theory is that deaths are somehow caused by a magically triggered natural substance.”

  Poppy looked thoughtful and not a little sick. “That explains why we haven’t seen it in Null City. No magic here.”

  Carey knew she should choose her words carefully, but nobody had ever accused her of tact. “So…your last name is Garde?” She was trying for a friendly smile, but from the alarmed look on Poppy’s freckled face, she guessed it wasn’t a particularly successful attempt. “Did you ever know someone named Emily Garde?”

  Poppy nodded cautiously. “She was Null City Anchor before me.”

  Was? Then there’s nobody left. Carey had taken blows to the stomach before. She knew what it felt like. She stared down at the twisted yarn bracelet her fingers were untangling. “She was my cousin.”

  Poppy put a hand on her arm. “She was my mother.” Their eyes met. “Mom had another cousin. Her name was Gaby Parker.”

  When Carey could only stare, Poppy took both of her hands. “My mother was helping Gaby look for her younger brother and sister. If you’re that Carey Parker, I know Gaby wanted to find you.”

  Carey knew her mouth was moving, but she couldn’t tell if any sound actually came out. There was a rush of noise like waves in her ears, and she thought everything was getting blurry around the edges. She felt more than heard a roar, and then Yosh had snatched her hands from Poppy. His arms closed around her, and somehow she was on his lap with her head pressed to his chest. There was a weird noise, a mix of thin sound as if from the other end of a long tunnel, and a vibration that came right through the cheek pressed to his chest.

  “What did you do to her?” He shook her slightly, then brushed the hair off her face. “Carey? Talk to me.”

  “’M okay.” Bain pressed against her leg. She ran her hand over Bain’s head to flip his ears, then peered around the cage of Yosh’s arms to see Poppy’s face. Try again. “You know where Gaby is? She’s looking for me? She’s…alive?”

  Poppy looked sad. “My mother told me she last spoke to Gaby in the mid-nineties. She had been living in France and looking for you, but she and three friends were getting onto the Metro to try to win their pivot task. We haven’t heard anything from them since then.”

  And the punches just keep coming. “No family.” Carey closed her fist tight on the scraps of yarn that made up her brother’s bracelet. She thought she should really be more numb by now.

  Poppy reached again for Carey’s hands. “You know the Metro moves in other dimensions including time. So don’t make them dead in your head. We actually think they must have succeeded, at least in some ways, because the Metro was failing, but it came back. Oh, and you can just drop the no-family crap. You’ve got me. And I’m very sorry to tell you, but you’re also stuck with Zach. My brother, Zachary Menard. Or at least, it used to be Menard, but he gave that up for a Metro ticket, and good riddance it was. So he’s Zachary Garde now.”

  »»•««

  When the Metro left Null City, Carey went straight to her compartment and climbed into bed, ignoring a visibly worried Yosh. Bain pressed his nose against her arm in case she needed to pet someone, then quietly stretched out at her feet. She stared at Harry’s drawing on her iPad—the only picture she had of Gaby—while her hands picked at the tangled yarn bracelet, and her mind worried at the open sore that used to be her connections.

  She’d lost fights before, of course, mostly training matches and sparring bouts. But she never saw those defeats as anything except the next challenge, the next time she would win. Now, for the first time in her life, Carey wondered if it was time to give up. It wouldn’t even be that hard, because there was nobody left for it to hurt, except maybe Harry, and he was already mostly dead. She and Bain could go to Null City, where she at least had Poppy and her brother, her sort-of cousins. There could be a normal life, maybe one that included a family of her own eventually, instead of a sword, a few old pictures, and a backpack of weapons.

  Finally she flipped the iPad screen back to the Halloween picture, smiling in spite of herself at the manic grins on their faces. Well, okay then. Marley would tell her to analyze battlefield position and strengths. Connections? Gone. Weapons? Mostly gone, but she still had her training. Assets? She did have Harry back—kind of—and hoped the real Connor was still around—somewhere—and that Gaby was looking for her—maybe. Resources? She had a tiny group of friends. Plus there was Director Jeffers, who at least wanted her help. And…there was Yosh, who was…what? The annoyingly sexy warrior who just wou
ldn’t stay out of her thoughts and not a few of her steamier dreams? Plan? When you have nothing left to guard and damn little to lose—and when you just can’t seem to figure out how to give up—it might be time to go out and make them bleed.

  As plans go, it wasn’t much. But make ’em bleed was definitely in her skill set. She went into the bathroom, washed her face, and went to tell Yosh she was taking her war on the road.

  When she entered the kitchen car, the bright overheads were turned off. It smelled like cinnamon and burned toast, and there were lit candles on every surface. Carey looked closer and almost smiled. Cinnamon-scented tea-light candles. She had no idea why he felt the need for candles, but their soft glow was a welcome relief to her tired eyes.

  Yosh looked up from stirring a frying pan on the huge stove. “Those are the stupidest little candles I’ve ever seen. We need to eat pretty soon because they keep burning out.” He frowned at her. “Are you…okay?”

  She nodded, opened her mouth, and then closed it. Nodded again.

  “Good. I’m starved. And I made you my specialty. Eggs and burned toast. I got pretty good at the eggs when I was…”

  “Lizard frying in the Mojave. Gotcha.”

  They had almost finished when the tea lights started to flicker out. He took both plates to the sink and came back with one of the bags of candles and a box of matches. “Light some more of these, and I’ll be right back.”

  By the time she had them lit, he was handing over her iPad. “Do you have anything on here we can dance to? Preferably not related to a TV show that’s been off the air for the past eight years?”

  She started her workout playlist, and laughed at the look on his face as Steam Powered Giraffe’s “Fire Fire” filled the room.

  He shrugged and held out a hand. “Dance with me?”

  “You dance?”

  “Mostly I hold onto women and do some random swaying. Does that count?”

  “It’ll do.” She stepped in, and his arms closed around her. Closing her eyes, she felt him start to move with the music. His lips were on her hair but neither said anything as music swirled around them and the candles burned down.