by Daniel Price
“That feed was closed-circuit.”
“Nothing’s closed-circuit. You did a stellar job, by the way. The generators were a brilliant idea.”
Melissa blew smoke through a scowl. “So while we’ve been following these people, you’ve been following us.”
“More or less. But before you beat the war drums, know that I’m not here to plunder. I’ve only been asked to assess and report. You’re lucky they sent me and not someone else.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I don’t think we’re ready to handle this problem,” Cain confessed. “Integrity’s in a state of flux right now. Bunch of young hard-liners are taking us over, pulling us back to our dark early days. If they got their mitts on these outlaws of yours, it wouldn’t be pretty. At the very least, that Maranan fellow would be a goner. The lab boys would fish the ring out of his brain like the prize in a cereal box.”
Melissa’s stomach twisted in tension. “You can’t do that.”
“There’s no ‘me’ in that equation, hon. I don’t run the Sci-Tech division. Not anymore.”
“Obviously you still have some influence if the agency sent you here.”
“If I sing the right tune, I can quell their interest for a while. But I can’t do it alone. You need to keep me posted on everything you learn, especially about this Azral and Esis Pelletier.”
“You seem fine at gathering this information on your own.”
“It’s harder than it looks. If I get my news straight from you, I’ll have better luck spinning my new bosses. Are you willing to work with me?”
“That depends. Why are you really doing this? What do you get out of it?”
Cain sighed a long spout of smoke, then tapped his ashes out the window.
“‘Associate’ is just a title they slap on the folks they don’t know what to do with. There are those who hope I go the way of Andy Cahill. I have other plans. Fortunately for you, they involve keeping these fugitives away from Sci-Tech. At least until I get it back. Now I know you’re cynical about us God-and-country folk, but I swear to you I want these people alive. I think we can learn a lot more from their mouths than their corpses. I know you feel the same way. So let’s help each other.”
Melissa couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being positioned like a chess piece, though she saw little choice at the moment. “I’ll keep you posted on everything I learn.”
“Good. Your big task now is to find those other four runners, fast.”
“Believe me, that’s my top priority.”
“It better be. Because if they make any more headlines, it’ll be out of my hands. Integrity will cloud up and rain all over them.”
They stared at the Royal Seeker again. Neither the license plate nor the Vehicle Registry Pin existed on record. Either the tags were unparalleled forgeries or the van had somehow been pilfered from the future. A month ago, Melissa would have laughed at the latter theory.
“Guess everything’s about to go topsy-turvy again,” Cain reckoned. “Everything we know, right out the damn window.”
“I only recently resumed smoking myself,” Melissa admitted.
“Have you said it out loud yet?”
“Said what?”
“That they’re from another world.”
Melissa felt a familiar lurch in her gut, the one she suffered whenever mad reality confronted her.
“Not yet.”
Cain took a last drag of his cigarrillo, then chucked it away. “Well, maybe it’s time to start.”
—
As soon as she returned to her desk, her handphone buzzed with a new text message. Owen Nettles was a blond and bespectacled little man who never made eye contact and rarely spoke above a mumble. But for all his awkwardness, he was one of the Bureau’s best ghost drill operators. Melissa had left him at the Nemeth lake house to learn more about the missing fugitives.
His update wasn’t encouraging.
Melissa frowned as she keyed her reply.
Melissa winced with discomfort. Owen’s deep love for ghosting had mutated into an unhealthy fascination with David Dormer. She’d have to talk to him about guarding his tongue around the others. The Bureau didn’t look kindly on boyers. She typed:
She sat at her desk in a state of fidgety distraction, chewing a dreadlock as she twirled Cedric Cain’s contact card in her fingers.
“Something, something, private school. Something, something, private school.”
Her agents traded dark and baffled glances. Howard waved to her from the edge of her desk.
“Melissa?”
She snapped back to awareness. “Hello, Howard.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m all right. Thank you. How are you?”
“Well, truth be told—”
“Has Amanda written anything yet?”
“No. Not that I saw.”
Melissa muttered an expletive and hurried down the hall.
Amanda curled into an uncomfortable fetal position on the sofa, the best she could manage with her chain restraints. Her eyes were dark with fatigue and anguish.
Melissa retrieved the notepad from the floor. A few lines of scribble graced the top page.
I don’t think you have the others. If you knew they were okay, you would have told me like you did with Theo. I’m sorry to use your kindness against you, but information’s the only leverage I have. I plan to use it sparingly.
For what it’s worth, I do believe everything you said about honoring my rights. I pray to God the rest of your people are as decent as you.
With a weary sigh, Melissa sat down on the folding chair and rubbed her throbbing temples.
“When I was thirteen and living in Khartoum, a drunk driver struck me down in a crosswalk. I lost my left arm and my right eye, and my spine was shattered in three different places. It was extreme good fortune that the hospital had installed its first reviver the week before. I woke up inside the machine, fully intact and with no memory at all of the incident. I didn’t believe the story until the doctor showed me photos of my mangled body.”
Amanda sat up on the couch again. Melissa absently twirled the tempic screwdriver in her fingers.
“That was when I first realized the great and wonderful change that was happening all over the world. To this day, I remain endlessly fascinated by temporis. I built my first tempic barrier when I was sixteen, and then my first ghostbox a year later. I understand these devices better than I understand most people. I love them all. Except for the weapons.”
She fixed a heavy stare on Amanda’s long fingers.
“When I think about what you and your people can do, I feel like an amateur all over again. I barely know how to process it. And now on top of all the lunacy . . .”
Melissa shook her head at Amanda in bleary awe.
“You didn’t have temporis at all, did you?”
“What do you mean?”
“On the world you come from.”
Amanda met Melissa’s gaze with brief and pensive silence. “No.”
“I can’t even imagine what you people have been through. The shock and upheaval. It staggers the mind.”
The generators hummed without interruption for ten long seconds before Melissa stood up.
“I don’t have the others,” she confessed. “The lake house was abandoned by the time we got there. My guess is that they’re proceeding to Brooklyn in the hopes that Peter can help them locate and rescu
e you. I assume that’s where we’ll apprehend them.”
“I hope not,” said Amanda.
“I understand. But the fact remains that your companions are out there right now, hunted by forces far worse than us. And now they have to function without their seeing eye and their tempic arm. At this point, we’re their best option. You’ll just have to trust me on that.”
She opened the door, then turned around to Amanda.
“I’ll do everything in my power to protect you. That’s an unconditional . . .”
Melissa took another look at the rectangular discoloration on the wall. Her jaw went slack with revelation. She knew why it bothered her now.
“. . . chalkboard.”
Amanda looked at her askew. “What?”
“There was a chalkboard there. This used to be a classroom.”
“Uh, okay. Why are you—”
Melissa closed the door and ran back to the bullpen, urgently scanning each agent.
“What happened to the local men? Did they all go home?”
“One of them’s still here,” said Howard. “He’s in the bathroom. Why?”
Melissa rushed to the men’s room. The heavyset blond at the urinal jumped at her abrupt entrance.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“How long has DP-9 occupied this building?” Melissa asked.
He shook his head at her in exasperation. “You stormed in here just to—”
“How long has DP-9 occupied this building?”
“I don’t know! Ten years or so. Why?”
“What was it before you moved in?”
“It was a school! Some fancy little academy. Why the hell are you—”
Melissa bolted down the hall and burst into Theo’s room. He tossed her a genial smile.
“What’s up?”
She squinted at his free hand, clutched around the edge of his desk table. His grip tightened defensively as she approached. She pried his fingers, revealing a small brown sticker.
PROPERTY OF ARCHER LANSING PRIVATE SCHOOL
Melissa laughed with dark disbelief. “You knew you were coming here. You foresaw this.”
“I think you’re overestimating my—”
She fled the room and made a beeline back to the bullpen, stopping at Ross Daley’s desk.
“Did you leave Theo alone at any point during his hospital stay? Did you leave him within reach of any handphones?”
Ross scowled at her in insult. “No. Of course not. What do you take me for?”
“You don’t want me to answer that.”
She spun around to Howard. “Call Owen and Carter and anyone else who’s not here. Tell them to get back now. The rest of you, grab your guns.”
Howard flashed his palms. “Whoa, whoa, boss. Slow down. What’s going on?”
Melissa cracked another jagged laugh.
“I don’t know how he did it, but Theo got a message to the others. They’re right here in Charleston. And they’re coming for their friends.”
—
On the dark and chilly patio of a fourteenth-story hotel suite, between the empty lounge chairs and the potted cherry trees, four weary travelers stood side by side at the guardrail. The DP-9 building rested a thousand yards to the east. The Silvers could see lit windows between the trees, and the occasional glimpse of moving figures within.
Hannah stowed away her cheap binoculars and looked to Mia, Zack, and David. Like her, they were dressed in black from neck to toe, and wore their worries openly.
“Okay,” said the actress. “Now what?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Their last hour in Nemeth had passed with creeping dread. Between the plink-plink-plink of the rain on the windows and the tick-tick-tick of the grandfather clock, David drummed a one-finger beat on the face of his wristwatch. Mia tapped a pen against a page of her journal. Zack paced the hardwood floor in clomping worry, the handphone clutched tightly in his grip. He’d left two texts and a voice mail for Amanda. She had yet to respond.
At the stroke of one, a ringing chime sliced through the house, startling everyone. Zack raised an angry palm at the wooden clock. Suddenly the hands spun like fan blades and the glass turned gray with dust. The oil on the gears dried away to nothingness until the inner workings creaked to a halt. A four-year demise condensed to five seconds. A timepiece choked to death on time.
The cartoonist looked to David and Mia with grumpy contrition. “I’ll fix it later.”
Suddenly the handphone chirped in announcement of a new text message. Hannah sped down the stairs in a windy blur, de-shifting at Zack’s side.
“Is that her? Is she all right?”
Zack furrowed his brow at the screen. “I’m not sure . . .”
“What do you mean?”
“Just read it!” Mia yelled.
“‘Sorry, Zack. They made me power off my phone in the exam tent. No news yet. I’ll call when I know more.’”
Now the others landed on Zack’s uncomfortable perch, caught between their doubts and their wishful thinking. Before anyone could speak, Zack aged the handphone to a husk, then chucked it to the floor. It shattered into rusty fragments.
Hannah grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?”
“When have you ever heard her say she ‘powered off’ something?”
“Okay, that sounded strange, but that doesn’t mean—”
“I’m sorry, Hannah. We’re out of rosy scenarios. That wasn’t Amanda. That was a Dep.”
Hannah glared at Zack. “But why destroy our last phone? If that was her—”
“They wouldn’t have tried that trick if they didn’t want us to stay here. They’re tracking us. We need to go.”
“Go where?”
“Go how?” Mia asked. “Amanda took the van.”
“Our only choice—”
“Stop.”
David hadn’t said a word in two hours, fearful of the furious invective he’d unleash. He’d warned them all what would happen if Amanda took Theo to the health fair. No one listened. Now Zack was about to leave an oral trail of bread crumbs for the Deps to follow.
“Everyone stay quiet until I finish.”
The others watched blankly as he paced back and forth across the living room, adjusting his gait each time. After three treks, he shuffled his way back to the sofa.
“All right. Now gather around me. Sit closely.”
They clustered around the coffee table. David closed his eyes. Suddenly the first floor teemed with the recent ghosts of himself, a busy crowd of self-projections that walked, skipped, and hopped in every direction.
David formed a small bubble of space around the four solid Silvers. “This is the only way we can safely talk. If they see us in their ghost drills, they’ll read our lips.”
Mia wished she was in a state of mind to enjoy the new scenery. Her voice creaked with strain. “Are you sure that wasn’t her, Zack? I mean if you’re wrong—”
“I’m not.”
“—we’ll be leaving them. They’ll come back to an empty house with no way to find us.”
“He’s not wrong,” David said. “They’re in federal custody. There’s no time to debate this.”
“So what do we do?”
Zack bounced his busy gaze between Hannah and Mia. “You two pack our stuff. As much as you can. David and I will be back to pick you up.”
“Pick us up in what?”
Seeing Zack’s grim expression, the boy nodded with understanding. “Something borrowed.”
—
They cut through the rain in long-legged strides. Their closest neighbor lived a half mile down the road, in a humble wooden A-frame that was overdecorated with American flags and crucifixes. The owner’s Dixon Tumbril rested in the driveway, a boxy white minivan filled with clutter.
While David kept a wary eye on the lit windows of the house, Zack reversed the car doors to an unlocked state. They slid into the Tumbril in quiet synch and pulled down their rain hoods.
“Smells like dog in here,” Zack muttered.
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“I wouldn’t call this begging. I’m wondering if we should just offer them cash.”
“We don’t have time to broker a sale, Zack, or soothe your criminal guilt.”
“It’s not guilt. I’m just afraid this won’t work.”
“It’ll work.”
During his nine days of power practice, Zack had conducted a few casual forays into temporal duplication, otherwise known as tooping. He learned thirty years after the rest of the world that metal objects cloned better than most, acquiring unseemly patches of rust but keeping most of their structural integrity.
He concentrated on the keyhole until it shimmered with a faint white glow. Soon a splotchy metal construct grew from within, forming the tip of a key, as well as a broken piece of key ring.
Zack marveled at his new creation. “Holy shit. That’s surreal.”
“Closest thing to magic I’ve seen yet.”
“Yeah, I’m the Merlin of car thieves. My mom would be proud.” His face crinkled with disgust as he touched the key’s surface. “It’s slimy.”
“You probably cloned some of the driver’s hand.”
Zack didn’t want to picture the mass of insentient goo that would result from a fully tooped human. He cleaned the key with his sleeve.
“All right. I’m ready. Do your thing.”
David looked to the house. “On my signal. Three . . . two . . . one . . .”
With a flick of his hand, the property was consumed in a booming rumble, a perfect echo of the thunder that had blanketed Nemeth ten minutes ago. Zack started the engine under the loud noise cover, then checked the front window of the house.
“Good job.”
Now it was David’s turn to marvel. “Wow. I’ve never thrown thunder before. That was like something out of Norse mythology.”