Scan

by Walter Jury

  “Agents.”

  “Core agents. I monitor the local law enforcement communications. They mentioned Race.”

  My stomach clenches at the mention of his name. “Seems like the security around this cabin is pretty tight.”

  My mom gives me a pained look. Her eyes are slightly puffy, a souvenir of her grief. “It is. And its location is secret—your father is . . . was very good at that kind of thing. But if they set up roadblocks and checkpoints, we’ll have a hard time making it out. We have to leave before then.”

  “All right,” I say, rising from the bed, already headed for the dresser.

  “All right.” She hesitates for a moment. “Christina’s up. She looks better.” Then she leaves me there to stare into the drawers at clothes that once belonged to my father.

  I pull on a henley shirt and some jeans, and then rummage around for a belt. I need to be able to move fast, to run if I have to, and I don’t need my pants sliding down to my knees at the worst moment.

  I emerge into the hall at the best moment, though, so I hope that’s some sort of omen. Christina comes out of the bathroom, a towel pulled tight around her body and another wrapped up around her head. She jumps when she sees me, and her towel turban falls to the floor, sending damp tendrils of hair over her bare shoulders.

  This is the way I would like to begin every morning. My God.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi. Sleep well?” Damn, my voice just cracked.

  She smiles, and it is the most delicious thing, a sweet curl of her lips. Has she forgiven me, or is this only a temporary truce? “I did, actually. I needed it. How about you?”

  I barely slept at all. Laid awake with fists clenched and muscles jacked tight, fighting back the tears. “Yeah, like the dead. How long will it take you to get ready?”

  She gives me a look that tells me she’s seen through my bullshit once again. “Not long.”

  This is the moment when I should say something cool, something funny, something that halts the slow slide into awkwardness, something that makes things better. But . . . I miss it somehow, like arriving a moment too late and watching the train pull out of the station without me. Christina’s smile fades, and her fingers curl deeper into her towel, holding it firmly in place over her chest.

  When we hear my mother’s voice coming from the room right next to the kitchen, it’s like someone has thrown us a life preserver. Both of us tune in at the same time, needing to focus on anything but the weirdness.

  “I understand. Don’t tell them anything,” my mother says.

  We stare at each other, wide eyed.

  Christina bites her lip. “Do you know who she’s talking to?”

  “No.” I hate this feeling, like I can’t even trust my own mom. It makes me feel cornered. Alone and trapped. She’s not letting me in because she seems to think I’m still the twelve-year-old kid she left behind four years ago. I was hoping we’d drop that shit after we had it out last night, but now I’m not so sure.

  “She . . . she’s not going to . . . hurt me, is she?” Christina asks, interrupting my thoughts. “Because I’m—” She winces. “Because I’m not like you?”

  I touch her shoulder. “I wouldn’t let her.” I already have. But I’m not going to make things more complicated by telling her that. Christina flashes me a nervous look and beelines for her bedroom door, leaving me standing there, straining to understand the rest of my mom’s conversation. I make out a few words here and there—I think she’s talking to someone about when we’ll be arriving.

  I hear her getting off the phone and decide I’ve had enough. I pull my dad’s phone from my pocket and hit SEND on George’s number.

  He picks up immediately. “Tate. I was just about to call.”

  “Hey,” I say. “You . . . know about Dad, right?” He must, since he knew it would be me on this phone. I squeeze my eyes shut and sink onto the bed.

  “I know,” he says quietly. “I’m so sorry, Tate. I’m so sorry. I know it was tense between you two, but your father loved you—”

  “I know that,” I whisper. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  His voice is thick with grief as he says, “He was so proud of you. He didn’t talk about it a lot, but it was so obvious, every time he mentioned you.”

  “It’s my fault he’s gone.”

  “Tate, there was no way you could have known what would happen. You can’t blame yourself.”

  I do, though. And I think I always will. But that’s just one more reason to protect the scanner. “Do you know why they came after us?”

  His breath huffs into the phone. “I knew about the scanner, if that’s what you’re asking. I helped negotiate the meeting between your dad and Brayton. He’s in custody, by the way, but we’re working to get him freed.”

  “What? He shot at me!”

  “But he’s one of us. He won’t be allowed to do that again, though. It was desperate and a huge violation of our rules.”

  “Attempted murder usually is,” I snap.

  “And we’ll deal with him, trust me. The Fifty are calling an emergency board meeting. Most of them don’t know about your father’s invention, though, Tate. We’re trying to decide what to tell them.”

  “Where’s the meeting?”

  “Each of The Fifty has a representative. We meet in Chicago.”

  “I’m with my mom. Should we try to make it there?”

  “No, there are already reports of increased Core surveillance on members of The Fifty. They’ll be expecting you to come here, so it’s the last place you should be right now. Your mom has a good plan, Tate. I was so relieved to hear from her that—”

  “She called you?”

  “She did. She—wait, hang on—” There’s a muffled banging in the background, and George curses. “Hey, I have to go, but I’ll see you really soon, all right?”

  I bow my head. “Sure.” I hang up and manage to scoot into the kitchen before my mom comes out of the office with her bag over her shoulder. Knowing she talked to George drains some of the tension from my muscles.

  “I’ve packed you and Christina some toiletries and clothes,” she says to me. “Let’s load the car.”

  My stomach growls. I never thought I’d find myself wishing for a Meal Number Five, but here we are.

  She sees me put a hand over my belly and smiles at me. It strikes me as a special kind of look, fond, motherly. Foreign.

  “I’ll get you something to eat on the way,” she says.

  “Sounds good.” I hope “on the way” means “really soon.”

  Christina is true to her word and gets ready quickly. She’s done that all-purpose ponytail thing girls always do, and she’s got on a pair of black yoga pants and a loose autumn-orange jersey with a wide neck. As strange as it sounds, I am intensely attracted to her collarbones.

  “Where are we going?” I ask my mom.

  “Virginia. Charlottesville. To a colleague’s. They wouldn’t suspect we’d run there.”

  “Why not?”

  She glances impatiently at the time. “Can we talk on the way? The longer we stay, the more likely it is they’ll be able to hem us in.”

  Once again, she’s treating me like a kid. I clench my teeth as we follow her to the minivan. I’m kind of wishing we had something a little zippier, but then I remember it’s bulletproof. There are a few tiny pockmarks on the tinted windows and black paint, but that’s the only sign this thing survived a gunfight yesterday. As we get in, my mom hands me the scanner. She nods for me to put it in Christina’s backpack and climbs into the driver’s seat without a word. It feels like a peace offering, her letting me keep Dad’s invention close—though I wonder what she was doing with it this mornng while I was sleeping.

  The clouds are a steel-gray blanket today, not allowing a ray of sunlight through. It almost fe
els like it’s still nighttime as we roll along the narrow gravel road, through the woods and back to civilization. I want to cling to the cover of the forest. I don’t want to go back out there and be a target. I know that’s cowardly, and that’s one of the things that makes me different from my father. It burns in my chest, blistering me with my own inadequacy.

  In a shockingly short time, we’ve reached 95 South. My mom has mercy on me and pulls into a McDonald’s and buys breakfast for all of us before getting on the highway. I inhale three Egg McMuffins and can’t help but picture the look on my dad’s face if he could see me now. By the time we’re on the entrance ramp, I’m feeling sort of sick. And scared. My greasy fingers grip the seat. I watch every car we pass, waiting for their eyes to land on me before I remember our windows are tinted.

  “You never told me how you actually got ahold of the scanner,” my mom says after a while. “I’m amazed Fred would have—” Her lips press together.

  I cross my arms tightly over my chest. “No, you’re right. He didn’t tell me much of anything until he was . . .” I rub my hand over my face. “I got into his lab and stole it. This is pretty much all my fault.” I can barely push the words out because my throat is so tight.

  Christina reaches from the backseat and touches my arm, a soft brush of her fingertips. But I can’t look at her. If I do, I’ll probably lose it. Staring at my shoes seems like the best strategy right now.

  “You know what they say about hindsight,” my mom says, her voice soft. “Don’t be too hard on yourself.”

  While my mom drives south, my gaze lingers on her furrowed brow, on the circles under her eyes. She looks tired. And about to unravel. Like she hasn’t quite been able to stuff her grief from last night back into its little box yet. Though I don’t enjoy seeing her miserable, it’s oddly comforting to know that his death got to her, that he still mattered to her.

  We ride in silence down through Jersey, then into Pennsylvania. Christina pulls her iPod out of her pack and slips in her earbuds. She curls up by the window, staring out at the passing scenery. Part of me is desperate to know what she’s thinking, but most of me is too chickenshit to ask for fear she’d actually tell me the truth.

  We get caught in major construction traffic in Philly. The highway narrows to two lanes, and the tension in the minivan ratchets up to a painful degree. We’re stuck here in the crawling traffic, boxed in on every side. Once again, I’m scanning the cars around me, from the woman applying mascara using her visor mirror to the guy screaming into his Bluetooth headset to the girl singing along to her radio to a dude I am fairly sure is trying to jack off in a way he thinks is subtle but is actually not. His unfocused eyes are on the singing girl, but the mascara woman appears to have spied his slack-jawed and glazed expression in her visor mirror and is watching him with a disgusted look on her face.

  Each of them is doing their own thing. Unaware of whether they are H2 or human. Just . . . people, living life. Yesterday morning, I was like that, completely unaware that humans are not the dominant species on the planet.

  My mom isn’t watching the people around us. Her eyes are on the construction workers and police cars clustered at the side of the road up ahead. It’s some kind of checkpoint. Tiny beads of sweat shine at Mom’s temples. I look at the backpack in Christina’s lap, my stomach knotting. Fear is contagious. I’m tempted to ask my mom for one of those Valium. Or maybe offer her one.

  Christina takes out her earbuds. “Are you all right, Dr. Archer?”

  “I’ll be better once we get through this traffic jam.” My mother’s voice is even, but her shoulders are tense.

  There’s a state cop standing in front of his cruiser, watching the cars and trucks and SUVs and motorcycles roll by, occasionally waving some over or having them lower their windows so he can check ID. His brimmed hat is too low for me to see his eyes, which is enough to fill me with a jittery, sick kind of energy.

  “You’re fidgeting, Tate,” my mother says. “Get into the back, please.”

  I do, happy for the moment to let her be in charge. “Dad said Race works for the government,” I comment. “But when he showed up at the school, he had the NYPD with him. Like he was working with them.”

  My mom nods. “Race is part of the Core, and he’s posted in New York. He’s officially a member of the CIA, but he operates his own special unit, from what we’ve gathered. He had a few encounters with your father over the years.”

  “Did he know about the scanner? He showed up at the school so fast.”

  My mother shakes her head. “No, but judging by the way he handled things, I think the Core, or Race, at least, realizes what the scanner can do and that it was built from their technology. Your father’s family kept the H2 artifacts secret for centuries, but I have to wonder if the Core was on the lookout for it because they reacted so quickly. And I think perhaps Fred knew that, too, which was why he was so careful to keep it secret.”

  And I blew all of it wide open and got him killed. I close my eyes and rest my elbows on my knees. My mom seems to sense what’s going on with me, because she says, “Tate, I wasn’t talking about what happened yesterday. With one exception—George—the few people Fred told about the scanner left him feeling betrayed. Each of us had our own ideas about what should be done with the technology.” She sighs, and her expression is full of pain and regret. “He felt such a sense of responsibility. If people died because of what he discovered . . . He was determined to keep that from happening.”

  But as it turns out, he was the first casualty.

  I’m working up the nerve to ask her what she did that left my father feeling betrayed when Christina says, “What if those cops up ahead are looking for us specifically?”

  Christ, she sounds so scared. Like she’s reliving yesterday. Another rush of guilt crashes over me.

  Mom stares at the cop at the checkpoint. “It’s possible. But Race doesn’t want other people—H2 or human—looking for it or exposing it. He’s probably using every resource he has to suppress what happened at your school yesterday. If you get caught by someone other than him, he risks losing control of the scanner.”

  “Maybe we should go public,” I suggest. “It’s okay to shout ‘fire’ in a public theater if there’s actually a fire, right?”

  My mother frowns. “Not a good analogy. What Race is doing now, the Core has been doing for centuries. He wants to eliminate the threat to the status quo and retrieve their technology. We need to think carefully before we decide our course of action.” She looks over her shoulder at me. “When we get to Charlottesville, I’ll figure this out.”

  “We’ll figure this out,” I say, almost under my breath.

  Her gaze lingers on mine for another second before she turns back to the wheel. “If this gets ugly, please let me do the talking.”

  “Fine.” I have no idea what I’d say anyway.

  We’re about five car lengths away from the cop now. The traffic is funneling into one lane. We have to go by single file. I’m really hoping the cop doesn’t pay too much attention to the pockmarks along the side of the car. Maybe he’ll think we got caught in a hailstorm. Or maybe we’re screwed. I pull the backpack from Christina’s grasp, slide it to the floor, and nudge it under the front passenger seat.

  “Here,” Christina says, offering the car adapter for her iPod to my mother. My mom gives her a funny look, then takes it and plugs it in. Christina taps at the iPod, and a few seconds later, we are treated to the bouncy strains of her cherry-flavored pop music. “Seems like we need to avoid looking like we’re fugitives.” She pats my mom on the shoulder in a singularly ballsy way. “Sing along, Dr. Archer.”

  “Oh, I’m not Dr. Archer at the moment,” says my mother, reaching into her bag. “I’m Andrea Parande, resident of Garden City.” She pulls out a driver’s license. My mom was obviously ready for this eventuality.

  “If the offic
er asks, just tell him you don’t have ID.” Her eyebrow arches. “I think your name should be—”

  “Will,” I suggest. “Let’s not get crazy.”

  “And I’ll be Miranda Hopkins,” Christina says as she scoots all the way across the seat. She puts her arm over my shoulders and ruffles my hair—casually brushing it down over the cut above my eyebrow. “Relax, Will. You look like you’re about to detonate,” she whispers. Then she sings softly in my ear, her breathy words sending chills rolling down my spine. It feels like forever since she touched me like this, though it’s only been twenty-four hours, and it’s a jolt to my system. The good kind.

  I glance up to the front, and in spite of everything, I laugh. My mom’s nodding in time with the beat and tapping her fingers on the wheel. She slides down the driver’s-side window like she doesn’t have a care in the world. Christina nuzzles her face into my neck, hiding her face from the cop. I bow my head and inhale her, knowing she’s putting on a show but willing to take anything she’ll give me right now. Also—I need it, too, to hide my face, to pray we won’t get busted. I put my arm around Christina and lace my fingers with hers, anchoring her close to me while the minivan inches forward.

  And then it’s our turn. We roll slowly past the cop. My mother looks right at him and holds up her ID in case he wants to take a look. Christina’s got her face buried in my neck. My hand is in her hair, holding her there, letting her turn my blood into a streaming mess of conflicting signals, cascading floods of endorphins and adrenaline, of cortisol and dopamine.

  The cop peers at us through Mom’s open window. I can see up under the brim of his hat. I can see his eyes.

  They are on Christina. Then he raises his gaze from her to me and smirks. He gives me the barest of nods, then waves us past.

  Holy shit.

  Everything inside me lets go at once, and I tilt Christina’s chin up and kiss her, hard, harder than I should, because I have no idea what else to do with this energy that’s built up inside me over the last half hour. She’s right there with me, like she needs it, too, like she’s using me for the same reason.