Echo 8

by Sharon Lynn Fisher

“The fade went right through the door!” an agent shouted at them from the lobby. “Just like a damn ghost!”

  “Caufield?” called Ross as he ran to meet him.

  “Both of them—out the back exit!”

  Ross knew what her car looked like, but why in hell had he not made a point of knowing where it was parked? There was a lot on the south side, but there was also street parking closer to the entrance.

  Street parking, prompted his gut. So now he had a choice: Follow her to the street, possibly not catch her, and have no vehicle to follow her in. Or go for his car and miss seeing which direction she’d gone.

  Either way he was fucked.

  An agent burst into the lobby. “Heading west on Massachusetts.”

  As Ross ran for his car he snatched his phone out of his pocket and started typing a message to the Seattle Field Office.

  “Ross, wait,” ordered the director.

  Ross froze and glanced back.

  “The fade’s got Dr. Caufield?”

  More likely the other way around. “They left in her car. I’m asking the field office to issue an APB—”

  “Put your phone away, Agent McGinnis.”

  He stared at the director. “Sir?”

  “Calm down and think. We can’t involve the local police if the fade is with her.”

  What had he been thinking? He’d been thinking about the woman he’d just made love to, and her lifeless body discarded beside the road.

  Or ravaged by rats on some post-apocalyptic Earth.

  “No, sir,” agreed Ross. “I’ll go after them.”

  Garcia nodded. “I’ll debrief the others and contact you with any additional information. Bring back Echo 8 alive if you can. Promise him anything you need to.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ross, hardly hearing his superior at this point. Thinking better of heading straight for the car, he turned and bounded up the stairs to his apartment.

  As he changed into civilian clothes, he tried to focus on where she might go. The Bureau believed he had a gift for this. Tess seemed to believe it too. Time to put it to the test.

  But he soon found that focusing on Tess only further addled his brain—thoughts of her were steeped in strong emotions he couldn’t afford to let sidetrack him right now. His current state of mind was the opposite of what Tess had told him was most conducive to psi.

  He switched his focus to Jake. Where are you?

  Ross jumped as his phone gave an alert. He glanced down at the text … the field office confirming the APB—which he had sent despite the director’s reminder about the classified nature of all this. “No engagement,” he’d warned them. But it was better for everyone if he found them first.

  Now to get to the car without Garcia seeing him leave without backup.

  As Ross stuffed extra ammo into the pockets of his jacket, an image formed in his mind, too abstract to identify—a cigar shape with rows of tiny round windows. The more he tried to concentrate on the image, the more it fragmented and blurred.

  He started for the stairs, and the image flashed again. He froze and closed his eyes. What was it? A bus? Ditching the car would be a smart move, something Tess was sure to think of, but Jake on a bus? It didn’t really look like a bus—more like one of those bus-shaped trailers. An Airstream—a huge one.

  That made no sense.

  * * *

  “We’re going where?”

  Jake stared at Tess as the Slinky—Seattle’s light-rail commuter train—whisked them along the track toward Seattle Center. She’d known this was going to be a hard sell.

  “They’ll assume we’ll head out of town. No one will think to look for us there.”

  Jake glanced around at the other passengers. The nearest one was half a car away.

  “Because it’s crazy,” he hissed.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  The Slinky slowed, and Tess stood up. “This is us. South Lake Union. Come on.”

  Jake growled his dissatisfaction, but he rose and followed her off the train.

  In the course of their journey, the summer-blue sky had swollen and distended into a bruised-looking belly of rain cloud. Now it was spitting a chilly rain, and only a few other passengers hurried with them off the platform and down to the sidewalk below. Tess headed for the Space Needle saucer, which rested atop a single-story building at the south end of Lake Union. When they reached the huge disk, she veered left and passed along the west side of the building.

  Out back they crossed a waterfront park—a postage stamp of well-manicured grass dotted with abstract metal sculptures. Off to the left was their destination—a rusted-out hulk from another era, the decaying Kalakala. Three hundred feet of riveted sheet metal hole-punched with tiny windows, the century-old ferry looked more like an abandoned spaceship.

  As the nonprofit that had hoped to restore her went bankrupt over the last couple months, the Kalakala had evolved into an unofficial shelter for the homeless. They kept inside the ferry and out of the public areas, which meant they weren’t panhandling around shops and restaurants, so the police had left them alone so far. One of the downtown shelters had donated portable toilets to keep them from fouling the waterfront.

  They stopped a few yards from the dock. Jake eyed the huge art deco artifact with alarm. “It’s a fucking ghost ship. What if it’s full of junkies, or worse?”

  “I know it’s creepy,” she said, stuffing down her own misgivings. “But no one in there is going to mess with us, Jake. At least not more than once.”

  She gave Jake a significant look, and he frowned his disapproval.

  “Listen, it’s temporary. We just need a place to hide until I can figure out what to do next.”

  “Hide from Ross, you mean. That’s really what this is about, isn’t it?”

  She pushed her fingers through her damp hair, shoving it back from her face. She stared at the hulk of the Kalakala.

  “This is bigger than me and Ross, and even you. But if we’d stayed, I’m pretty sure they would have stopped me doing the transfers at least for a while. And you didn’t have a while.”

  She looked at Jake. His brown eyes rested softly on her face.

  “God knows I’m no fan of Agent Ross—he’s way too alpha for you, Doctor. But I can’t say I blame him. If you were my girl there’s no way in hell—”

  “Jake, don’t.” Tess cleared her throat, swallowing the possibilities she’d left behind her.

  A police siren sounded in the distance, reminding her of the danger of lingering in public places.

  “I don’t want to get picked up right now,” she said. “I don’t want any decisions made for me. Something happened last night that I need time to process before it happens again. Please get on the ferry with me. I promise I’ll tell you everything.”

  Jake gave an exaggerated sigh. “You know damn well I’ll do anything you want. But if I wasn’t first cousin to the Grim Reaper, I’d sure as hell make you at least kiss me for this. I’m getting all the aggravation, and your bodyguard is getting all the rewards.”

  “He might argue with you about that,” Tess muttered as they headed for the boat.

  Jake answered with a loud bark of laughter.

  The Kalakala had two sets of wide, double doors, fore and aft, to allow cars to drive on and off the main deck. One of the aft doors had been propped open, leaving a ten-foot-high, cavelike entryway.

  “Let me go first,” said Jake, stepping around her onto the dock.

  “Let me do the talking.”

  “Absolutely. I can’t wait to hear this.”

  They ascended the short ramp and passed through the open door. Blackness swallowed them.

  Small, round windows spaced about three yards apart down the length of the main deck did little to dispel the gloom on such an overcast day. But gradually Tess’s eyes adjusted enough to make out a few shadowy shapes.

  “That’s far enough.” A woman joined them in the square of light that barely penetrated the cavernous main
deck. She was tall, with red dreadlocks that hung to her waist. She stood eyeing them, arms crossed. “What do you want?”

  “We’re looking for a place to stay for a few days. Do you have room for two more?”

  The woman’s eyebrow hitched up with surprise. She scanned them both from head to toe.

  “This ain’t a hotel,” she grunted. “Police looking for you?”

  “We’re not in trouble with the police, no.” True enough. Just barely.

  “Social workers? Reporters? Jesus freaks?” She bent closer. “Don’t lie to me, honey.”

  Tess had acquired an excellent poker face from her work with research subjects, but the wiry redhead unnerved her. She froze, pinned down by the unrelenting gaze.

  “Her boyfriend’s stalking her,” Jake said. “Police won’t issue a restraining order. Guy’s gone completely apeshit. I’m afraid he’s going to kill her.”

  Tess winced as the woman’s gaze jerked, hawklike, to Jake. “Now see, that’s just the kind of trouble we don’t want here.” She smirked. “But I have a nose for bullshit. Wanna try again?”

  “Listen,” Tess cut in, “how about we pay you, and you let us keep our secrets. It’s just for a few days.”

  The woman raised long, bony fingers to her black-denim-clad hips and continued to study them. She was tall enough to look Jake in the eye.

  “How much you got?”

  They’d stopped by a finger-scan cash machine before getting on the Slinky, and Tess had given five hundred dollars to Jake for safekeeping. He reached into his jeans pocket and came out with a twenty. He held it up between two fingers, and the woman snatched at it.

  Jake jerked the bill away before she could take it. “What’s your name?”

  The woman scowled. “Maggie.”

  “Twenty for each day we stay, Maggie. We want our own space, right here by the door. I have posttraumatic shock, and I don’t like strangers close to me. Tell the others.”

  “Tell them yourself, Slim.”

  “Do you want the money or not?”

  Maggie frowned, but she held out her hand and Jake gave her the twenty. “If you plan to share our food, you need to hand over another one of those.”

  Jake eyed Tess, and she nodded. He handed Maggie another bill.

  “There’s food and blankets belowdecks.” Maggie sniffed. “No cooking inside—use the stoves on the deck outside the front doors. Piss in the Sani-Cans, not in the boat and not in the lake. Crash where you want”—she pointed the folded bill at them—“but the captain’s bridge is off-limits.”

  Maggie moved away, and Jake withdrew into a dark corner by the doors.

  “I don’t like this,” he muttered as Tess joined him.

  They pressed their backs against adjacent walls, watching the movement of the others in the car compartment. There were three small groups within about ten yards. Tess could hear murmurs of their conversation, but beyond a curious glance or two, no one seemed to be taking much interest in the newcomers.

  “I don’t like it either. Three days at most, I promise.”

  “Tess, that woman … she feels wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He thought for a moment. “I don’t know what I mean. She feels cold, I guess.” He shook his head. “That’s not it. She feels wrong.”

  Tess rested her head against the cold metal hull, considering. Her brain was foggy from the transfer in the car, and at the moment she was just grateful to be sitting down.

  “We’ll keep an eye on her, and on the others. In the meantime, I think we need to start doing shorter, more frequent transfers. I’m going to be the only one doing them for a while, and they’re much less draining when we do them before you’re faded.”

  “You know that’s not sustainable, Doc.”

  “Yeah. I’m trying to think of something else. You’re doing so well with control, I thought maybe you could try stealing a little here and there from other people. When there’s some distance, or something in between, the sensation is really very subtle. Much as I hate the idea, I think it’s possible you could do it without people noticing. But…” I don’t want to expose anyone else to the side effects.

  She held out her hands to him. “We’ll figure it out. In the meantime, let’s do a few minutes while we’re sitting here. Then we’ll find something to eat, and maybe you can watch while I nap. Sleep and calories help with the recharging.”

  Jake raised his hands, and soon he was relaxing into the transfer, his breaths coming slow and even.

  “I feel more in control this time,” he said.

  “Good. That’s what we want.”

  Jake closed his eyes, and Tess tried to ignore the burning/buzzing sensation in her palms. Her thoughts drifted to Ross and one of the last things he’d said to her.

  Sounds like just the f light part to me.

  Was Jake right? Had this been more about running away from Ross than anything else? She believed she’d done it for Jake, and to protect herself from getting locked into the Bureau’s agenda, but would it have hurt to stay awhile and hope for a chance to talk to Ross? She’d just assumed that with Garcia there he’d go happily back into the fold.

  And why shouldn’t he? His job was just as important to him as hers was to her.

  Tess turned, scanning down the length of the ferry, easily half the length of the Seahawks’ stadium, maybe more. She could still hear the low conversation of the others, and now loud laughter ringing at the far end of the deck. She noticed a partially enclosed stairway about five yards away, and wondered if it led belowdecks.

  Tess felt the connection break and returned her attention to Jake. “Enough?”

  “Never enough,” he murmured, his eyes soft.

  They sat cross-legged, facing each other.

  Warmth stole into her cheeks as she remembered Ross’s declaration about Jake: He’s in love with you.

  Jake raised his hand toward her face, and her breath caught.

  “I don’t feel … dangerous right now,” he said in a languid tone, hand still hanging in the air. “I almost feel like…”

  Like you could touch me. She knew what he was thinking, and she wasn’t afraid.

  “Why don’t we try it?”

  He blinked at her, and his fingers moved closer. But he dropped his hand before touching her.

  “We need to go back,” he said.

  “Jake—”

  “I mean it, Tess. You need to give Ross a chance to help you fix this. You and me off on our own—there’s no way it’s gonna end well. It’s like the three of us are a fucking hydrogen atom.”

  Tess frowned in confusion. “A what?”

  “Come on, try to keep up, Doctor. One arrogant proton cozying up inside one sexy, certifiably insane nucleus, while poor, lonely, negative-charge boy is doomed to circle in the distance.”

  “That’s one hell of a metaphor.” Tess laughed.

  “Tell me why I suddenly became more of a threat to Proton Man.”

  She’d been both dreading and craving this moment. She knew how he was going to react, but she desperately needed to talk it over with someone. Because there was no reason to think it wouldn’t happen again.

  “Something happened last night that scared us both. Before we really had a chance to talk about it, the Bureau director showed up with all this talk about covert operations and training Echoes to be killers.”

  “Forget about that for now. Tell me what happened.”

  She folded her hands together, squeezing. Feeling her own solid flesh. “I dislocated.”

  Worry creased his forehead. “Why do I get the feeling you don’t mean you threw out your knee?”

  “For ten, maybe fifteen minutes, I went somewhere else. Just like you did when you came here. I think I was on your Earth.”

  Tess described her harrowing descent down the muddy hillside. The fires and the rats. The final plunge into light that closed round her like a tunnel and spat her out the other end.

  “It w
as real, Jake. I didn’t dream it. Ross said I was there, and then I wasn’t.”

  When I came back, he held me until I stopped shaking. Until I almost felt safe again.

  “I don’t doubt it was real,” growled Jake. “This is because of your contact with me. We’re running because Ross knew that, and he didn’t want you doing the transfers anymore, and he was fucking right, Tess.”

  She nodded. “I agree. It’s the transfers. And it could happen to him too.” Fear sucked at her stomach as she thought about him dislocating and not being able to get back.

  Jake stared at her, angry and incredulous. This was going about as well as she’d expected. “So let’s hear some geek-speak, Doctor. Explain to me how this is happening and what you’re going to do if it happens again.”

  “I can’t explain it, but I assume our exchanges have created some kind of link to your world. And there was a trigger too.… I think it had to do with Ross.” With running away from Ross. “It’s like you said about the hydrogen atom—you and me and Ross are hopelessly tangled up. I feel that, Jake.”

  “You could have died. We have to stop.”

  “You’re right; I could have. And I won’t lie to you; it scared the hell out of me. But I think it’s possible I may be able to control it. I think it may be related to fight-or-flight response, and if that’s true, if I get into trouble I should be able to come back.” It was the only thought that had kept her from losing it in the twelve hours since the dislocation.

  “Not only that, Jake. If it happens again, maybe I can learn more about your Earth. If rats survived, other mammals may have. People may have. Many omnivores survived the K-Pg event—the one we believe killed off the dinosaurs. What if you could go home, Jake?”

  Jake leaned close, eyes bright with anger. His voice burned low as he said, “Back on my Earth, I lost the only people I loved. They died because of me. I didn’t want to go on living without them, so I blew my brains all over the wall of my apartment. I haven’t changed my mind about that decision. I’ve never regretted it, not even for a moment. On this Earth, you’re my reason for living. I go along with your crazy ideas to make you happy. I like talking to you. I like feeling your energy running through me. But I won’t let you die because of me.”