She was by the river, the cold air burning her lungs, as she stared across the bridge at the Dark One right before their last battle. Part of her always would be.
6
SLOANE HAD HARDLY gotten the ring on her finger when the crowd swallowed her in congratulations. Someone thrust a champagne flute into her hand, and she looked for Matt, hoping she could plead with her eyes for an escape. But he was talking to an older gentleman in a suit and sipping a similar flute of champagne. Sloane’s face was hot. She smiled at a woman who told her—tears in her eyes—that they were a “perfect couple,” thinking of one of the recent articles about Matt that had called their relationship “perplexing.” It was affixed to their refrigerator because Matt had thought it was amusing.
Sweat rolled down her stomach to her bellybutton. She searched the crowd for Albie and found him near one of the large pillars, talking to a woman in a tight black dress with her hair pinned up on one side. Sloane excused herself from the teary-eyed woman—who was recounting the story of her own engagement, twenty years before—and set her champagne down on one of the empty tables on her way to Albie.
When she reached him, she drew him in close so she could speak right into his ear. “I have to get out of here,” she said. “Want to come?”
“Uh,” Albie said, looking over his shoulder at the gala. “Yeah. Sure. What about Matt?”
Sloane looked for Matt in the crowd. He wasn’t hard to find. His smile alone was a beacon, and then there was the glittery gold of his bow tie. Fondness pierced the mire of anxiety within her. He was good at this. He had always been good at this. “He’ll be fine,” she said. “Coat check. You got a five?”
Albie was digging in his pocket for his billfold as they marched out of the ballroom together. The coat check was a gap in the wall manned by a postadolescent with gel in his hair playing a game on his phone. As he shuffled away to find their coats, Sloane hiked up her skirt to undo the delicate straps of her shoes. She would be faster on flat feet.
“Spotted,” Albie said under his breath. Coming out of the ballroom was a couple in matching white tuxedos, their eyes fixed on Sloane. She grabbed her stomach impulsively and hunched, pretending to be sick. Albie grabbed the coats from the shuffling attendant, tipped him five dollars, and put a hand on Sloane’s back reassuringly.
“Let’s find you a bathroom,” Albie said as they passed the two men near the ballroom doors. He glanced at them. “Avoid the spanakopita.”
The men looked at each other, stricken. She and Albie limped along toward the hotel restaurant, bent and huddled into each other, and once they were out of sight of the ballroom doors, she laughed and dragged him toward the kitchens.
Both of them had had their strengths, and Sloane’s had been getting out of bad situations. She was always looking for exits, even when there weren’t any. On a few occasions when Matt had dug in and decided it was time for them to make their heroic last stand, she had helped them escape instead. It was the only time she had ever felt like she really was a Chosen One.
And now that skill was helping her escape conversations. Not exactly how she had imagined putting it to use.
“Hello, hi! Ignore us, official hotel business!” she chirped once they were in the kitchen. She slipped behind one of the line cooks, lurched away from the heat of a pan fire, and ducked under the arm of someone opening the deep freezer. Albie apologized in her wake. She pushed the door to the alley open and drank in the cold air, her shoes dangling from her fingertips by their straps.
“God, don’t tell me you’re going to walk barefoot in an alley,” Albie said, offering her her coat.
“I mean, I’m going to try to avoid broken glass,” she said, shrugging the coat on. Her smartphone was in the pocket. She took it out to use the flashlight on the ground and found a hopping path over garbage and puddle and early frost. They went past a line of dumpsters, and when they reached the corner where alley met street, Albie grabbed her elbow to stop her.
“Okay, there’s a shitty dive bar around the corner,” he said, pointing to a pin on his phone map. “But we’ll probably have to take it at a run so nobody spots us.”
Sloane grinned. “This feels like old times, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, except without the threat of imminent death,” Albie said, snorting. “Let’s go.”
Together they ran down the sidewalk and around the corner toward the sign for Fred’s that was rendered in green neon lights in a window. The place was empty and smelled like a gym. Peanut shells cracked under Sloane’s bare feet as she and Albie walked to the bar. Her barstool was ripped down the middle, with duct tape stretched across it to contain the stuffing.
“Perfect,” Sloane said.
“Whiskey,” Albie said to the bartender, an older man whose expression communicated profound lack of interest. Albie glanced at Sloane. “Make that two doubles. Old Overholt, if you’ve got it.”
The bartender raised his eyebrows but turned away to pour them their drinks. Sloane took the pins out of her hair, lined them up on the bar in a neat row.
“I take it that proposal didn’t go the way you’d hoped,” Albie said to her.
“If this night had gone the way I hoped, there wouldn’t have been a proposal at all,” Sloane said.
“Then why the hell did you say yes?”
“There were five hundred cameras documenting every second of it,” Sloane said. “What did you want me to do, completely devastate and humiliate the goddamn Chosen One of Chosen Ones on national television?”
Albie considered this. “Fair enough.”
“Anyway, it’s not that I don’t want to marry him.” She paused and frowned. “Okay, I guess I don’t, but I have no idea why.” She groaned and put her head down on the bar.
“Ugh, okay, either the feet or the head have got to stop touching every surface in this place,” Albie said. He grabbed some paper napkins from the end of the bar and thrust them at her. “I feel like I might know why you don’t want to marry him.”
“Oh?” Sloane unfolded one of the napkins and wrapped it around one foot before balancing it on the rail again. It stuck there without difficulty. “Enlighten me.”
“Well,” Albie said, scrunching up his nose, “it seems like he doesn’t really know you, Slo. You aren’t squishy in the middle—”
“Technically everyone is squishy in the middle—”
“—which is okay. Many fine generals and responsible, emotionally distant fathers have also been un-squishy. We even call some of them heroes.”
“I’ve always wanted to be an emotionally distant father.” Sloane slid a napkin over on the bar and hit her forehead against it. “Fuck, Albie, what am I gonna do?”
“I mean,” Albie said, “you already know what to do, don’t you?”
Sloane sighed and looked at the ring she wore on her left hand, sparkling in the yellowish lights of the bar.
The bartender set two whiskeys down in front of them. They picked them up at the same time, then tipped them back in unison, both swallowing most of the whiskey at once.
“He wants me to just get over it, I can tell,” she said. “He feels like we all went through the same thing, so if he’s okay, I should be okay.”
Albie pressed his lips together and finished his whiskey. He signaled the bartender for another round.
“Do you think he’s right, that I should just . . . get over it?” she said.
“Well, if you figure out how,” Albie said, “let me know.”
She sipped the last dregs of her whiskey and stared at the array of multicolored bottles behind the bar. “We never talked about it,” she said hollowly. She meant the day she and Albie had spent as captives of the Dark One. The only day, of all the dark days they had endured, that neither of them ever mentioned.
“What’s there to say?” Albie said.
“Yeah,” Sloane replied. “He also told me to go to therapy.”
Albie snorted. “Therapy. Is that all anyone can tell us to do
?”
“Didn’t help you?” she said.
“It did. And it didn’t. I don’t know. I just wish people would stop talking about it as if just going fixes everything,” Albie said. When he picked up his fresh glass of whiskey, his hands were shaking. He looked at her. “Why did you request those documents, Sloane?” he said. “It seems like it’s only made things harder.”
Sloane was quiet for a moment. “I’ve always wondered something,” she said. “I wondered if they found more potential Chosen Ones than just us. I know the criteria were specific, but there are like three hundred million people in this country alone, so—maybe there were a few others.”
“And this bothers you.”
She nodded. “What if,” she said, tilting her glass with a fingertip, “what separated us from them—what made us Chosen—was just that our parents said yes, and theirs said no?”
She remembered the conversation with her mother. The dim bedroom, with the heavy curtains closed. The clothes she had stepped on as she crossed the room to the bed. And the shape of her mother’s body under the blanket, curled in on itself like the dead bugs in the light fixture over the kitchen table. The way everything had smelled like unwashed body and liquor.
And the way she had told Sloane to do whatever she wanted.
Albie gave her a sad look. “It would mean we have shitty parents,” he said, “which, to be honest, I pretty much already knew.”
“No, that’s not how it went.” Sloane was laughing through each word. “Bert took me aside and he was like, ‘You don’t seem to work well with people watching you.’ ”
“And then he told you to be the rogue assassin!” Albie exclaimed. “I’m telling you, that’s how it went.”
“How could you tell me how it went—you weren’t even there! Plus, I never assassinated anyone.”
“I’m telling you, you were a much more badass Chosen One than I was,” Albie said. “I was like . . . cannon fodder. Like what Bert said to me—‘You’re a good man in a storm, Albie. Matt’s lucky to have you.’ To die in his place so he can go on to save the world, you mean.”
Sloane shook her head. “You know that’s not what he meant.”
Albie shrugged.
“You motherfuckers.” Esther stalked over to them. Sloane hadn’t seen her come in. She wore a faux-fur coat that puffed up around her face like an old-fashioned ruff. Behind her were Ines and, brushing snow off his shoulders by the door, Matt. “Next time you’re going to bail, you better tell us first. I was talking to some woman about her trip to Florence for twenty minutes.”
She dropped her clutch on the bar, signaled the bartender, and ordered a small fleet of gin and tonics.
“Hey there,” Matt said, putting his hand on Sloane’s shoulder. His fingers were cold. “This is a weird way to celebrate our engagement.”
“Oh, boy. Fun’s over,” Sloane said to Albie.
“Shh,” Albie said. “He can hear you.”
“Geez. Tell me how you really feel, Sloane,” Matt said stiffly.
“I feel like I wish I hadn’t worn these spandex undergarments,” Sloane said. “Sit down, have a drink.”
“Why are your feet wrapped in napkins?” Esther asked her.
“If Albie had his way, my entire body would be wrapped in napkins,” Sloane said. “Nap wraps. Wrapkins.”
Matt was looking at her in a way she didn’t like. Like she was a car that had broken down on the side of the road and he was looking under the hood to see what the problem was. Like there was something wrong inside her that he could make right. And maybe that was the entire problem with them—he didn’t see her; he saw who she could be with a few adjustments, and all she wanted was to stay busted and be left alone.
“You know,” she said, propping her cheek on her hand, “I like being this way, actually.”
“What, drunk? Yeah, lots of people do, Slo,” Matt replied. His hand was still on her shoulder, but it was warm now, from her skin.
“Not drunk,” she said. “The way I am all the time. I am that way all the way through. No marshmallow center. Anybody else’ll tell you.”
Albie was nodding along. “Maybe like . . . a lemon-juice center. Or a licorice center.”
“Maybe other people don’t know you like I do,” Matt said gently.
“Except this is me, telling you,” Sloane said, her voice suddenly firmer. “The Dark One sucked out all my insides. I know it. Everyone knows it. Except you.”
“Sloane . . .”
“I’m going home,” she said. She peeled the napkins off her feet and put them on the bar. She stumbled outside, holding her shoes by the straps. Matt followed and hailed them a taxi. He didn’t try to talk to her, and he didn’t even object when Sloane cracked the window open and stuck her head out as they cruised down Lake Shore Drive. By the time they got home, her nose and cheeks were numb.
TOP SECRET
AGENCY FOR THE RESEARCH AND INVESTIGATION OF THE SUPRANORMAL
MEMORANDUM FOR: COMPTROLLER
ATTENTION: FINANCE DIVISION
SUBJECT: PROJECT RINGER, SUBPROJECT 5
Under the authority granted in the memorandum dated 4 March 2008 from the director of Central Intelligence to ARIS on the subject AR/CO-2 Project Ringer, subproject 5, code name Deep Dive has been approved, and $763,000.00 of the overall Project Ringer funds have been allocated to cover the subproject’s expenses.
Charlotte Krauss
Director of Artifact Research
ARIS
TOP SECRET
7
THE FUMES FROM MATT’S old diesel BMW combined with the hangover were making Sloane a little sick, so she leaned her temple against the cool window. Esther had left earlier that morning. They had dropped her off at the airport on the way, with a promise to fly out to California and visit her soon. Albie was in the front seat playing DJ and navigator at the same time, a phone in each hand. Ines was next to her in the back, tap-tap-tapping on her knee, which was also jiggling.
“My God, Ines,” Matt said. “You’re like one of those toys that buzzes when you wind it up.”
“Well, if you didn’t drive like you’ve got nothing to lose, I’d probably be calmer.”
“Indoor voices, please,” Sloane called out. “Slo’s gonna vom.”
“And what? If we’re loud, we’ll miss it?” Ines said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes,” Sloane said. “I require an audience.”
Ines laughed and offered her an empty potato-chip bag. Sloane tried to catch Matt’s eye in the rearview mirror, but his phone rang. “Eddie?” he said, answering it. Not that he would have met her eyes anyway—he hadn’t so much as glanced at her since the night before.
Sloane glared at Ines, but she took the bag and angled even more toward the window so she couldn’t see Ines’s leg jiggle. She watched the trees smear past. They were an hour north of Chicago, where the city turned into peaceful suburbs with perfect lawns and mailboxes shaped like barns and dogs and boats. She wondered what it was like to carry lunch money to school instead of a faux-cheese sandwich wrapped in paper, to drive a car your parents bought for you to learn on, to go on school field trips to the city and stare up at the towering skyline. All these safe little lives going on uninterrupted.
“I gotta go, Ed, we’re approaching a dead zone,” Matt said. A second later, he hung up and put his phone back in the cupholder.
Bert had taught her how to drive when she was fourteen, out in the fields behind the house where she had learned about the Dark One. She had almost rolled the old Accord taking too sharp a turn in the mud. She hadn’t needed to go to the DMV for the driving test like everyone else—Bert had snapped a picture of her against a blank wall and then one day just handed her a license out of the blue, along with a passport and a Smoothie Fiend BUY 10, GET ONE FREE! card with two stamps on it already.
Sloane smiled at the memory. She still had that card in her wallet.
“Better download that map, Albie,” Ines said.
“You knew it at one time,” Ines said. “But you had a couple hard years in there—”
“ ‘Hard years’ is a nice euphemism for ‘so, so high’—”
“And as a result, I don’t like to count on your memory.”
“Fair enough.”
A shiver crawled down Sloane’s spine as Matt turned off the main road. She checked her phone—no bars, and they weren’t even within a mile of the Drain site yet. They didn’t even know why they’d been summoned, but when Agents Henderson and Cho summoned them, they went. It was easier to keep an eye on ARIS when they were invited.
It was quiet in the car as the first signs of the Drain appeared in the land around them. People had resettled in areas like this after the destruction, but the homes here weren’t the kind with manicured lawns and novelty mailboxes. This was a sea of temporary dilapidated structures that had never been properly repaired after the Dark One destroyed the place. People were living without water or power and sometimes with massive holes in their floorboards. Matt had dragged Sloane to volunteer here once, and she’d had to pick her way across a collapsed porch just to get to the front door of a house.
Trees had grown wild and tangled, their roots crowded with weeds as tall as Sloane; long grass collapsing under its own weight hung over broken sidewalks. The road itself was full of potholes thanks to rough Midwestern winters, so Matt’s driving became even more erratic, and Sloane started to contemplate the potato-chip bag again.
“Oh, boy,” Albie said. “Fun times ahead.”
Sloane craned her neck to see out the front windshield, almost knocking skulls with Ines as she leaned in too. Up ahead, the road appeared to come to an abrupt end, and there was just a sea of brightly colored tarps, like the bumps of moguls on a ski slope. And past them, on a small hill, stood the temporary government structure that surrounded the center of the Drain, a white geodesic dome roughly the size of a football stadium. Sloane’s phone lit up as cell service came back.
Chosen Ones Page 5