Afterimage

by Naomi Hughes

  Sometimes, silence has a weight to it—a shape, a feeling, like it’s a thing you could hold in your hand instead of just a lack of sound. This type of quiet, it’s deep and stagnant. It slides down your throat and seeps into your bones and makes you forget you’ve ever heard anything but your own footsteps for your entire life.

  Quint hasn’t said anything in ten minutes.

  He’s still there. Or maybe he’s not. And why should I care? I should hope he’s gone, should be glad to finally have my head to myself for a while. I should not be holding my breath, straining to hear him in the dark.

  I shuffle onward. Left foot forward. Brace against the wall, shift my weight. Breathe. Right foot forward.

  Listen. Silence.

  It’s like being underwater, this quiet. Deep, stagnant, suffocating.

  I clear my throat. “Talking might help, you know. With being afraid. It … helps me, sometimes.”

  No answer.

  “I don’t care if you’re gone,” I call, just to hear myself say it—but immediately wish I hadn’t, because even I can hear the lie. And is it really that easy to make me a hypocrite?

  “I knew you liked me,” says Quint’s voice from somewhere to my left. The words are light, but his tone is grim and a little bit muffled, like maybe he’s gritting his teeth.

  Relief washes over me and is immediately chased by resentment that I should feel relieved. Ugh, emotions. “Try distracting yourself,” I offer. “Fighting the anxiety that way is usually counterproductive in the long run, but it might help you get through for now.”

  “Counterproductive?”

  “Yeah.” Brace against the wall. Left foot forward. “For panic disorder, which is what I have, fighting the anxiety or trying too hard not to think about it just makes it worse. It means you’re treating the anxiety as dangerous instead of just uncomfortable, which freaks you out more, which makes the panic worse, and on goes the cycle of suck. But for you, distraction is probably fine.”

  “Okay,” he says, then pauses like he wants to say something else. I bite my lip—I’ve hardly told anyone about my diagnosis, and even though he’s already heard me mention it at the hospital, it feels different to tell him about it myself. I guess it’s only fair, though. He gave me something I could use to hurt him and now I’ve returned the favor.

  “You still there?” I ask after a second.

  “I’m working on your distraction technique, trying to think about something else,” he answers. “And do you know what I keep thinking? Why a bomb?”

  I blink, thrown off course. “What?”

  “The blackmailer could’ve killed you the same way he killed the security guard. But instead, he set a bomb powerful enough to level an entire train station. It’s like he doesn’t only want you dead. He wants you obliterated. Also, why would he follow you to the train station instead of just killing you at Fish N’ Chips? I bet there’s something important on that tablet. He wanted to see whatever was on that before he decided whether to kill you. So either he didn’t know the data would be locked, or he did know and he wanted it anyway—which means he has access to an agency network and has probably already opened the files.”

  I swallow. “That is a really, really terrible effort at distraction. I now feel ten times worse than I did before.”

  “You told me to distract myself, not you.”

  “It was in the subtext.”

  “Is it my fault you’re bad at subtext?”

  “Shut up,” I order, but the banter makes me feel a bit lighter.

  He’s quiet for a moment. Then, pensively: “I’m not sorry.”

  The tunnel under my hand falls away; we’ve come to a T. I stand at the intersection and try to discern which blackness looks the least impenetrable. My head is pounding and even though it doesn’t hurt quite as bad now, it’s still hard to walk. I want nothing more than to rest for a moment, but if I sit down I may not get up again. “For your horrendous effort at distraction?” I reply.

  “No. For what I said to you on the stairs.”

  I go stiff. After a second I force my legs to unlock and step into the right tunnel, which doesn’t look any brighter, but I think maybe smells a little fresher.

  He sighs. The sound of it twists through the dark, wrapping around me. “I know you hate me for it, but all I can think is that I should’ve said it sooner, should’ve realized quicker that was the only thing that would get you moving. Then it might’ve saved your brother and not just you.”

  My breath hitches and my fingers tighten around the useless cell phone. I think very carefully about what I want to say, and what I cannot bear to say. “You know what it is I hate?” I answer at last. “That look in the trainmaster’s eyes. That emptiness. I know that emptiness, or at least a form of it, and I despise it. I hate that it happens to everyone in the end and that every damn one of us is helpless against it. That’s the thing I hate.”

  It’s not forgiveness. I can’t give him that yet, not when the guilt and truth and uncertainty of what he said is twisted so deep it stabs me every time I move. But it’s an understanding, or at least maybe the start of one.

  “Is that why you want to be a doctor?” he asks. “So you won’t be helpless?”

  I stop. “Yeah,” I reply slowly. “I think maybe it is, now.”

  Quint inhales to speak, and then—I realize my hand is resting not on concrete, but on metal.

  I hurry forward, half falling, feeling along the outline of the thing. Metal bars, horizontal in a vertical frame. Rungs. “Quint,” I hiss. “I found a ladder.”

  I lift my foot, test the bottom rung. It holds and so do I, for the moment at least. Surface, here I come. My breathing rattles in my ears as I start pulling myself upward.

  “Be careful,” he says. I don’t reply, because climbing is a hundred times harder than walking—my muscles are already alternating between locking up and trembling uncontrollably. At rung number four, my wrist gives out. I dangle, my whole frame shaking with the effort of not falling, and drag myself back up.

  Five rungs. Six. Seven. I hit the ceiling and feel for an exit, praying. My fingers find one crack and then another. It’s a square, inset into the roof of the tunnel. Another hatch. And when I hold my breath I can hear the rumble of traffic.

  I made it.

  I grab the wheel with shaking hands and twist hard, balancing on the ladder. It groans and shudders, but obeys. I heave the hatch up and moonlight pours through like liquid honey. I breathe it in, then look down at Quint. He’s grinning at me, his real smile, with his head tilted back and his eyes crinkled at the corners.

  I can’t help but smile in return. We did it. We made it to the surface. And from the buildings I can see, I’m less than half a block from home.

  My smile fades. Half a block from home. Half a block from finding out who’s alive, and who’s not.

  I shoulder the hatch the rest of the way open and haul myself to the sidewalk. The street is covered in low-lying fog, making the block seem small and isolated even though plenty of cars are still creeping their way through the nearby intersection. A few college-aged guys in a huddled group across the street spot me and one asks if I’m okay, but I turn my back and walk away without a word. I don’t want help, don’t want police, definitely don’t want to be sent to the hospital again. I want to go home. I want my dad, and my room, and my pillow.

  And my brother.

  I trudge across the street, to where our apartment building rises like a beacon. The lobby attendant blinks and stammers, but I drag myself past her and into the elevator without comment. A middle-aged man starts to step in at my side, gets a better look at me, and then steps right back out.

  I mash the fourth-floor button. I lean against the wall, trying to hold myself together. And then I’m standing in front of our door, dripping water the color of old rust onto our welcome mat, inserting my key into the lock and praying.

  He’ll be here. He will.

  Quint looks at me and says nothing.r />
  The door creaks open. I step inside—but the lights are out and the smell is all wrong, musty and stale like a long vacant house. I frown and flick the light switch. Nothing happens. “Dad?” I call, because I can’t say my brother’s name. I take a shaky step through the doorway, squinting into the darkness.

  Slowly, starlight slides across the floor and shows me what’s left of my apartment.

  The carpet is rolled up and shoved against one wall. The door to my room is missing, hinges hanging askew. Mom’s Doctor Who poster is gone. Dad’s sci-fi novels are gone. The walls are an unfamiliar shade of beige, and peeling blue painter’s tape edges around the windows and door frames. There’s no furniture, no dishes in the sink, no heaps of laundry on the ground, only old floorboards that stretch from one vacant room to the next. PLEASE EXCUSE THE MESS WHILE WE RENOVATE FOR NEW TENANTS, says a sign on the wall.

  The door swings shut behind me, sealing me in my tomb of a home.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I STAND IN THE NARROW hallway, hands clenched, heart thump-thump-thumping. Breathe. I just have to breathe. This is fine, everything is fine, there’s some kind of easy explanation. But Dad is gone and my stuff is gone and nothing is as it should be and I have watched way too many reruns of The Twilight Zone to pretend this is in any way okay.

  I turn to Quint. He’s looking at me even though he should be staring at the empty sink, at the blank walls, at the gaping rooms. He needs to say something. He always knows what to say. He’ll know how to calm me down, to get me moving, to explain this away.

  He doesn’t say anything though, only watches me, as sober as I’ve ever seen him. Then he steps closer. He leans in, so careful not to brush against me, like he’s going to whisper something in my ear.

  I blink, standing stock-still, doing my best to not think about leaning into him just a little bit too, closing my eyes and burying my head in his shoulder and maybe, maybe, finally feeling safe.

  He’s not real and you can’t trust him anyway, I remind myself savagely, and don’t move a muscle.

  Ash-blond hair falls over his glasses as he turns his head to look at a spot just behind my ear. He exhales. “Yeah. It’s gone,” he says, and steps away.

  I blink again, trying to reorient myself now that he’s at a safe distance. “What is?”

  “The head injury. The three-inch-long gaping wound in the back of your skull, which definitely should not now be a tiny pink scar but somehow is.”

  “What?” I spin away and raise a hand to my head. My hair is too matted with blood for me to feel the injury itself, but there’s no pain and now my headache is completely gone.

  Mirror. I need a mirror. Four steps and I’m in the bathroom. A paint-splattered drop cloth hangs over the vanity and I pull it down, swiping it across the glass, smearing a wide trough through the dust that coats it. My reflection is washed out, pale and shivering with too-big eyes. I twist and turn. Still can’t see the injury.

  Two steps. I’m at the bathtub. The faucet is broken and the water is freezing and I dunk my whole head underneath until my scalp stings with the cold. There’s no soap. The water turns rusty with old blood.

  I tug my hair aside and feel along the edges of the wound. Nothing. Only a thin raised line, like a year-old scar.

  I stand up. I pace back into the hallway because the bathroom is folding in around me and I can’t sit still. To the door, plastered with its renovation sign. To the sink, empty and gutted. Back again. I close my eyes and cover them with my hands.

  Quint clears his throat. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. We can figure this out. Just calm down.”

  I open my eyes, stop in front of him, and stick a finger in his face. “Do not,” I snap, “tell me to calm down. I am sick and tired of people telling me to just calm down, like it’s something I’ve never thought of before. This is a situation that freaking merits a panic attack, and I will damn well have one if I damn well like.”

  He looks at my finger, then at me. And then, though he tries to smother it, he smiles.

  “Do not smile,” I order.

  He smothers it slightly more efficiently. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s just good to see you …” he lifts a shoulder, “alive.”

  I drop my hand. He’s got a look on his face like he’s remembering me in the hospital, remembering me lying in that bed and ignoring him, remembering me running scared in the train station and freezing up on the stairs—and I guess I can understand the smile. I like me better alive too.

  I go back to pacing, pulling a hand through my dripping hair. “Alright,” I say. “Yes. We can figure this out.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  I stop in front of him and stick another finger in his face. “Shut up,” I order, then rethink. “No. Actually, you’re supposed to be some sort of genius,” I wave my hand at his lab coat, “so go on. Genius us out of this.”

  He arches an eyebrow. “Not sure it works like that.”

  “Then make it work!” I shout. I’m furious at him, at whoever set that bomb, at whatever is causing this impossible situation—but even after my speech about panic being merited, there’s only the anger and confusion and a prickling sort of fear, not the otherworldly terror of one of my attacks. I take a breath and try to think straight. “Someone tried to incinerate me. An injury that should’ve given me a concussion has been somehow healed. My apartment has been miraculously renovated in the space of a few hours, and the only family I have left is—” the word chokes off. “—missing,” I finish, and press my hands to my eyes again.

  He exhales. “Also,” he says, “there are no sirens.”

  I look up. He’s standing at the window behind me. “What?”

  “No sirens. A bomb went off in the middle of the city twenty minutes ago, and there are no sirens.”

  I lean out to look around his shoulder. The night is clear, and beyond the haze of the foggy city lights, the stars shine hard and bright like diamonds. Even though we’re facing north toward the train station, there’s no tell-tale plume of smoke, no wailing ambulances, no fire trucks. And—I didn’t notice it earlier because I was so focused on getting home, but the streets are dry. How are the streets dry? It was storming less than half an hour ago, so much that it flooded the whole subway.

  But then … the water disappeared. And apparently not just from our maintenance tunnel.

  My breath is coming faster and I switch over to my diaphragmatic breathing. Don’t break down, not now. Stay angry—but not too angry. Think. Think.

  My hand goes to the tablet that’s still tucked in my waistband. “The tablet,” I mutter. “It all comes back to the tablet.” Whatever’s happening, it all has something to do with the information on that. But I’d need access to an agency network to unlock the files, plus I have no idea if whatever’s wrong with it is even fixable.

  Kyle would know how to get it working, but Kyle isn’t here. He may never be here again.

  “Magnetics,” Quint muses from behind me.

  I twist around to look at him, grateful for the distraction. “What?”

  “Magnetics,” he says again, his gaze faraway like he’s talking to himself. “The tablet. That was the key that set off the bomb—he wired it with a magnetic trigger. As soon as you took the computer a certain distance from the body, the countdown started. He probably keyed the trigger to the presence of your metallic surgical implants too. It’s elegant, thorough. It’s how I would’ve done it.”

  “If you were a mass-murdering psychopath.” My voice is too loud, but the blank walls swallow it up.

  His gaze refocuses and he winces. “Yeah. That. Sorry.”

  “Just …” I raise my hands, let them flop back to my sides helplessly—then I remember some of Mom’s advice for when I’m feeling overwhelmed. “Let’s just focus on the next five minutes. Okay? What should we do in the next five minutes? What’s our next step?”

  Our. Our next step. When did Quint and I get an our?

  He takes his glasses of
f and cleans them on his lab coat, which I’m starting to realize is his habit for when he’s trying to think clearly. “Well,” he says slowly, “the tablet is probably the best place to start.”

  I’m still flustered from the our so my reply comes out sharper than intended. “Great, thanks, Sherlock. I already figured that out, except it’s apparently smashed beyond repair.”

  He cuts me off. “Yeah, but the hard drive might still be intact. If we plug it into another computer, use it as an external drive, we should be able to open the files.”

  “But we still can’t unlock them without access to an agency intranet, which is, inconveniently enough, only located inside agency buildings.”

  Carefully, he puts his glasses back on. “Yes. That’s right.” I narrow my eyes. “You want me to break into one,” I accuse. “Break into a government facility, and—what? Hope someone might’ve left their computer turned on and logged in for us to plug the tablet into?”

  “There are some inherent risks to the plan,” he admits. “But whatever information is in those files is apparently worth murdering you for, worth exploding a city block for. The longer we go without knowing what that information is, the more likely you are to get killed over it.” He shrugs his coat tighter and gives me a humorless smile. “And like I said, I’m not that anxious to find out what happens to me when you die.”

  I grit my teeth. He’s manipulating me again, talking me into committing a felony again. And again it doesn’t matter—because he’s right. I have no choice. What I do have is a missing family, a hallucination I probably shouldn’t trust but somehow keep trusting anyway, and a plan that has about a ninety percent chance of getting me killed, tossed in jail, or tossed in jail and then killed.

  I cross my arms, uncross them. Rub my temples. Try to think of another way—but there’s nothing.

  Quint waits silently. He’s standing in the hallway across from me now, right under the spot where my family picture used to hang. Its afterimage has been painted over. It makes me want to scrape at the wall, chip away all the ugly new paint and unearth the remainder of my old life. And a foot to his left—that’s the spot where our side table stood. I remember Mom’s bracelet glinting from beneath the pharmacy bag, tinkling when it fell to the floor. I feel for it in my pocket. Somehow, it’s survived the trip through the tunnels: cool, smooth, certain and uncertain, and asking a question I still need to have answered.