by Daniel Price
“Yes, and I assume they have LoJack on this world, or some other high-tech system that makes it easy to track stolen cars. Are you really that eager for another police chase?”
“Well, that’s the practical objection, but—”
David stopped at the sound of Theo’s dark chuckle. For a moment, the boy’s expression turned so cold that Mia felt the unprecedented urge to move away from him.
“I was about to say that we could target an older vehicle, one less likely to have a tracking device. But by all means, Theo, go ahead and mock me. At least I’m offering options.”
“I’m not mocking you, David.”
“Then why were you laughing?”
Theo couldn’t safely answer that question either. He remembered what it was like to be sixteen and fearless. He remembered the false security his own brilliance afforded him. Now, at twenty-three, it was far too soon to play the role of the hardened old crank. And yet here he was, chuckling at David’s impertinence, fighting the urge to say, “Boy, it ain’t that easy.”
“I was mocking myself. But for what it’s worth, you’re right that we need wheels. We’re going to hit desert soon. That won’t be fun to walk.”
Zack continued his memory sketch of Evan Rander. “As long as we bring enough water and don’t pray to any golden calves, we’ll make it through the desert. I’m more concerned about the financials. Fifteen hundred isn’t enough to get us across the country.”
“You don’t think so?” Amanda asked. “I mean we’re stocked up on supplies now. If we’re careful—”
“If there’s one thing I learned today, it’s that ‘cheap’ times six equals ‘expensive.’ Unless Future Mia fronts us another loan, we’ll have to come up with more.”
“I’m not so sure.”
Theo shook his head. “No, Zack’s right. It’s not enough money to get to Brooklyn.”
Hannah leered at him with sudden puzzlement. He caught her hot stare. “What?”
“You said that before.”
“Excuse me?”
“That thing you just said. You used those exact words back in the van.”
Now it was Theo’s turn to become baffled. “I don’t recall saying that.”
“I don’t recall him saying that either,” David attested. “I was there the whole time.”
“No. I don’t mean the van today. I mean six weeks ago. When I first met you.”
In the wake of everyone’s dumbfounded looks, Hannah bared her palms. “I’m not making this up! We were on our way to Terra Vista. You’d fallen asleep. And then suddenly you mumbled, ‘He’s right.’ I said, ‘Who’s right?’ and you said, ‘Zack. He’s right. It’s not enough money to get to Brooklyn.’ Then your nose got all bloody and you fell into your coma.”
The showerhead dripped ten more times before Zack broke the muddled silence.
“Uh, normally I’d write that off as a strange coincidence. But after everything we’ve seen, Theo, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest you might not be entirely weirdness-free.”
Theo felt a hot rush of blood in his face. He stammered for a response.
“I really don’t see how—”
“Oh my God!”
The others followed Mia’s gaze to the lumivision, where the nine o’clock news had just begun.
Contrary to Amanda’s expectations, the broadcast didn’t open with her police sketch. In fact, the standoff on Highway V would merit just forty seconds of airtime. In the absence of any fatalities, and the coordinated silence of all law enforcers on scene, the incident was treated as just another police chase. Another irksome traffic jam.
The top story of the day was much juicier. The star of the tale was Sterling Quint.
—
At 6:34 this morning, operators at Triple-5 Emergency received eleven distress calls of the exact same nature—eleven spouses, lovers, and siblings who’d all succumbed to the same fatal stroke. When record checks revealed that the deceased were all employees at the same organization, authorities suddenly became quite interested in the goings-on at the Pelletier Group.
By sunset, the last of the bodies had been discovered. Four names on the payroll had yet to be accounted for: Erin and Eric Salgado, Beatrice Caudell, and the head honcho himself, Sterling Quint. The world-renowned theorist had left for work at 7 A.M. and was never heard from again.
The story quickly caught fire at newsrooms across the nation. Some broadcasts filled their screens with juxtaposed photos of a dour Quint and a nervous Beatrice—a saucy suggestion that the pair had perpetrated the massacre and were now lovers on the run.
The Silvers watched the lumivision with wide eyes and white faces, processing the deaths of everyone they knew outside the motel room. Hannah thought of poor Charlie Merchant, barely a year older than her. Her eyes welled up with tears.
“I don’t get it. Why would he kill them?”
“I assume you’re not referring to Quint.”
“You know I’m not, David. Come on. I’m talking about Azral.”
“It had to be him,” Amanda said. “Him and Esis.”
The widow couldn’t get her mind off Czerny. His death had seemed so inconsistent with his type of injury. Now she knew why. She bit her trembling lip.
“They threw them away. They didn’t need them anymore, so they just tossed them like garbage.”
David shook his head. “For all we know, this was the work of Rebel’s people.”
“Doubtful,” said Theo. “If Rebel’s people had the ability to kill remotely, they wouldn’t have come at us with guns and swords.”
Mia couldn’t bear the thought of anyone having that power. She pictured Azral standing before some necromantic circuit breaker, shutting off lives from miles away. She could only imagine he had six more buttons, all labeled with the names of people in this room.
“Do you think maybe Beatrice got away?” she asked.
The lack of response was enough to confirm her grim suspicion. She took a moment to mourn the poor woman who’d baked her a cupcake for her birthday.
Zack remained silent from his perch on the bed, stewing over the large new problem this tragedy created for them. The Salgado van and the body of Dr. Czerny were two thick chains that tied the Silvers to the Pelletier slaughter. While the media continued to chase ghosts, the federal agents would have a stronger notion of who to blame.
—
By ten o’clock, Melissa Masaad was angry enough to break the law. It took twenty minutes of research to uncover the location of the nearest tobacco den, hidden away beneath a Terra Vista bowling alley. Six more minutes of digging earned her the passphrase.
“Are your bathrooms clean?” she asked the cashier, just as she was told.
For once, Melissa’s foreign attributes worked in her favor. The greasy old man at the counter would have never suspected she was a Dep. Even if she had been with DP-4, the illicit substances division, she wouldn’t have wasted time on such a piddling sting. The Bureau didn’t care about smoke-easies.
“We have a clean bathroom downstairs,” the cashier replied. “They’re pay toilets.”
“How much?”
“Twenty dollars.”
“Goodness. Do these exceptionally clean toilets come with Eaglenet access?”
For an extra ten dollars, they did. Melissa carried a handtop under her arm. She was determined to keep working, all through the night if she had to.
Two stairwells and one purchase later, she sat in an overstuffed recliner in the corner of a dim and smoky lounge. She closed her eyes as she savored the taste of the cigarette, her first in twenty-two months. She’d been hoping to enjoy her life in America without the crutch of nicotine, but today was a day of extraordinary frustrations.
“It’s out of my hands,” Cahill told her, five hours ago. “We hunt where they tell us to hunt
.”
Melissa had crafted a no-nonsense approach to tracking the fugitives—a strategic sweep of every pawnshop and panhandle park in the ten-mile radius of the abandoned van. From all appearances, these runners were low on resources. Finding them was simply a matter of anticipating their chosen method of fund-raising.
Unfortunately, the mystery of the dead physicists crashed her plans like a wayward truck, dominating the team for the rest of the day. Nine hours ago, Melissa walked through the empty corridors of the Pelletier building, marveling at the results of her wave scans. From all gauges, the entire building had been temporically reversed, a feat that was as bizarre and unlikely as broiling a high school. Soon policemen stumbled across a bloody Japanese sword, just one foot outside the property perimeter, a discovery that made even less sense. The only encouraging find was a missing door from the stolen van, direct evidence that the fugitives had been there.
Seven hours ago, Melissa sat at the bedside of Janice Salgado, the widow of Martin and mother of the three security guards who were either missing or dead. She was a heavyset woman with a cherry-red bouffant that matched her freshly cracked eyes. A constellation of baby spot sedatives was peppered across her neck, twisting her mouth into an unholy union of a smile and a scream.
“There were six people living in that building,” Janice told Melissa. “Marty didn’t know where they came from. He said they just showed up one day with bracelets on their wrists and . . . weird stuff. They could do weird stuff. Erin took a real shine to one of them. Young girl named Mia. Poor child. Erin said . . . she said the poor thing lost her whole . . . she lost her whole . . .”
Janice sobbed and clutched at Melissa’s blouse. “Please. Please find my youngest. I know in my heart they’re gone, but they need to be buried with the family. Please.”
Five hours ago, Melissa stood at the city coroner’s office, watching through a window as men in masks examined Constanin Czerny. As they finished their work, her handphone rang. Cahill didn’t sound pleased.
“Just heard from the directors. Our scope has changed. For the short term, they want us to devote all our resources to finding Sterling Quint.”
“What? But sir, the runners—”
“I know. I know. It’s all image control. The story’s gone national. They reckon we’ll look like humps if we can’t track one of the country’s most famous dwarves.”
Melissa clenched her jaw. She had a grim hunch that Quint, Caudell, and the two Salgados had all been inside the Pelletier building when it was mysteriously reversed. Dead or alive, their bodies would have been erased out of existence. The British referred to the process as “nulling.” The Americans called it “zilching.” In both countries, it had become the cornerstone of waste management, as well as a favored tool for criminal evidence disposal. They’d never find Quint.
“Sir, this is the most perplexing case I’ve ever seen. There’s so much I don’t understand. But one thing I know is that every trail leads back to those six people. We need to find them.”
“I agree with you, hon. But look at the bigger picture. I’m still five signatures away from making you the new me. This isn’t the time to kick sand.”
Twenty minutes later, she received a preliminary autopsy report on Constantin Czerny. He had died of the same subarachnoid hemorrhage as the other victims. But from the unique attributes of his abdominal wound, he’d been stabbed by a projectile made of pure tempis.
Melissa was downright smarmy when she updated Cahill.
“Shame we don’t know anyone who can cause such an injury, sir. Perhaps Dr. Quint will know.”
That was when Cahill told her, with a hopeless sigh, that it was out of his hands. If Melissa wanted to do more digging on the tempic redhead, he wouldn’t stop her. But she had to put in face time on the Quint search. Such was the price of career advancement.
After three hours of pointless legwork, Melissa escaped to the tobacco den, puffing cigarette after cigarette as she scanned through digital mug shots. The red-haired woman was, as Melissa feared, a virgin to the justice system. Odder still, there was nothing in the news archives about a girl named Mia who lost her entire family. Were these people in any systems?
In a desperate last effort, she accessed the Eaglenet bitboards and launched a keyword search through today’s online discussions. There was much talk of tempis and even more talk of redheads, but not a lot of chatter about both. After wading through a number of false double-positives, Melissa found an interesting post in a customer support forum for a popular brand of armored safe:
This incredibly intense redhead came into my store today and slapped her hand on my counter. Suddenly the tempis on my Shellbox started rippling. Has anyone else seen anything like that?
A profile search on the author revealed him as John Curry, a pawnbroker here in South California. His shop was just eight miles from the site of the fugitives’ abandoned vehicle.
Melissa took a final drag of her cigarette, closed her handbook, and hurried outside to the company van. She steered it thirty feet into the air and then shifted to 10×. She could still taste the tobacco on her lips as she shot through the night like a missile, straight toward Ramona.
NINETEEN
Amanda didn’t know how to feel about her latest transformation. She watched her reflection from the desk chair while Hannah brushed inky dye into her tresses. Stroke by stroke, lock by lock, red to black, red to black.
At midnight, the job was finished. Now Amanda stared in wonder at the dark-haired stranger in the mirror. To her surprise, she didn’t hate the new color. And yet she couldn’t help but lament the latest upheaval to her personal status quo. She was a widow now, an alien, a fugitive, a brunette. Mad events were slowly turning her into a parallel-universe version of herself. Bit by bit, piece by piece, she was becoming Altamanda.
Hannah removed the drip-stained towel from Amanda’s shoulders, then studied her reaction. “I did the best I could.”
“What? No, you did great, Hannah. It’s perfect. I’m just upset about the reasons behind it.”
“Well, it’ll work. I doubt anyone who’s looking for you will recognize you now.”
“That’s really all that matters. Everything else is . . . I just need to get used to it.”
Amanda bounced a mirrored gaze at Mia. “So what do you think?”
Mia had peeked up from her journal many times to watch the recoloring in progress, this strikingly cozy endeavor between women. Having grown up in a house full of brothers, it was strange for her to witness the feminine rituals of siblings.
“Looks good,” she listlessly replied. “You two finally look related.”
Hannah tossed her rubber gloves in the sink. She was too tired to color her own hair. Too upset. She plopped herself onto her bed, sending Zack’s drawing fluttering down to the floor. She was sick of thinking about the bothersome man in the picture.
On the flip side of Peter’s letter, Future Mia had reserved some words for a new orbiting threat.
I’m not even sure how to explain Evan Rander. He’s from our world, but he acts like he’s been here forever. He knows us all disturbingly well, and yet none of us know him. We still have no idea why he hates us so much. He always seems to find us when we’re alone and at our most vulnerable. He likes to twist the knife, especially on Hannah.
Once Evan’s identity was uncovered in retrospect, Zack worked with Hannah to provide a composite sketch of the smiling cowboy who’d greeted them at the side of the van.
“It makes no sense,” said Hannah. “What could we have done to make him so angry? What could I have done?”
Mia shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s just crazy. If I had spent the last six weeks wandering alone out here, I might have lost my mind too. I probably would have slit my wrists.”
The sisters traded a dark look in the mirror. Amanda tensely wrung her fingers.
/> “I don’t know who this guy is. Right now, I don’t care. We have bigger problems.”
“Easy for you to say,” Hannah growled. “He hasn’t singled you out.”
Amanda turned her sharp gaze on her. “Do you want to trade places? Because I’d rather have a stalker chasing me than a team of federal agents.”
“Hey, fun fact: the feds are after me too.”
“And this Evan guy is following all of us! Why do you . . .” Amanda closed her eyes and waved a tense palm. “I can’t handle a fight with you right now.”
“Then don’t start one.”
Amanda tightened her towel wrap and shot to her feet. Mia watched with puzzlement as she closed the bathroom door behind her.
“Okay, what just happened?”
Hannah threw herself back onto the mattress, throwing a dismal gaze at her scarred wrists. “It’s nothing. Old wounds.”
“Will she be okay?”
“She’ll be fine,” the actress replied, with dripping venom. “She’s a rock, that one.”
Mia returned to her journal, her thoughts twisting with unease. She wondered if she dodged a bullet by not having sisters. All things considered, she preferred the way men fought.
—
Zack and David crossed midnight like frigid old spouses, puttering away in parallel beds. While David browsed a local paper, Zack drew an elaborate pen sketch of Bugs Bunny. There were only a handful of people who’d recognize the poor rabbit now. Zack wasn’t even sure David was one of them.
The boy glanced with concern at the stack of glossy blue cash on Zack’s nightstand. He checked the door to the bathroom, where Theo had been showering for forty long minutes.
“Maybe we should put that money in a safer place,” David suggested.
“What, you mean a hedge fund?”
“No. I mean perhaps I should give it to Mia or one of the sisters.”
“Oh, you’re just hoping to catch them in their undies, you scamp.”
“Zack, I think you know what my issue is.”
Zack did know, and he was trying not to get angry about it. “What do you have against Theo anyway?”