Bishop leads me to the door, opens it, ushers me inside.
The room is big, a couch and a couple of chairs face each other around a table nearer the door, but the room is dominated by a single desk which is plunked right in the middle. There are two hardback chairs facing the desk and he points me to one of them before walking around the desk to face me.
“The powers that be reviewed your last glide,” he says as he sits down. “There are some questions.”
I nod. I don’t want to sit—too anxious—but I do anyway. “Okay.”
“Had you had any previous indication that Jordan Castle was going to meet you?”
I shake my head.
“Did you see or recognize any other face or person present at the time?”
His questions feel like they’re coming from a cop and the way he asks them makes it hard to think, but I close my eyes and try to picture the moment I saw myself, the room, the other tables around. It’s all a blur of color and cringiness about how I look. I can’t pull anything new out of my brain. “No . . .” I shake my head again. “I don’t think so.”
He writes something with his stylus on the desk, so I lean forward a little bit. The desk has a series of screens, low light, impossible to see or read from where I’m sitting. He’s writing on one of them with his finger. “Did you give any indication that you knew you were being observed by yourself?”
I looked at me, up in my perch. The memory is strong, real. “Yeah. I knew I was in there. I could feel me looking up at me . . .” I trail off because I don’t have more words.
He taps something else on his desk and then leans back and looks at me. I feel like he’s about to say something, but then I realize he’s listening to something, paying no attention to me. Moments later he nods, says, “Yeah,” and then refocuses on me. “Okay, you can go back to your room.”
Even though he says he’s done, he’s not moving to get up like he wants me to leave, so I stay where I am, staring at him until he says, “You can leave now, Alex. Thank you.”
I get up, slowly, and pad back out the way I came.
Paul’s snoring softly when I get back to the room, so I lie down on my bed and stare at the ceiling in the dark, replaying the whole conversation. He didn’t say I did anything wrong, and I know I didn’t break any rules, but I can’t escape the feeling that Bishop thinks I’ve messed things up.
It takes me a long time to fall asleep.
Thirty-Five
We landed at Joint Base Andrews late coming back from Vegas. Jordan should be asleep, but she’s not. This is our first moment alone and we’re sitting on the bed behind our scrim, cross-legged with Grandma Bev’s screen in front of us, waiting for a call from Will.
We are going to tell him about The Sign.
I feel weird about this, a feeling that is strong even here on my perch in Jordan. I told her it was a sign. I knew she would think it was from God, that her prayers were answered, but it’s a lie just like the ones she hates so much when she tells them.
When I say that to her, someday soon, I will be lying to her, manipulating her, and even though it’s for a good reason, I feel bad about it.
But it’s done and now we’re going to tell Will about the busboy in Vegas. Jordan’s day since lunch has been a blur of barely missed social cues and flubs, because her mind has been dominated by the busboy, what he said, who he was, how he knew.
This is her Abigail moment. This is her sign.
Even as she wonders about it, the screen lights up with a call. Jordan checks herself to make sure she’s still properly put together for Will.
Voices. Urgent ones. Movement in the Central Hall. Something big is happening.
She taps the decline call button. She’ll call him back.
In Jordan’s mind, the movement in the hall is flashes of color—something she does with things she hears but doesn’t see—and it’s dizzying to a visitor perched in her brain. She’s not worried—this happens sometimes. A terrorist attack, Venezuela, Iran—she just can’t be caught talking to Will.
Then she hears Jack in the hallway. “Another one. Here, in Florida. There are witnesses.”
I watch helplessly as Jordan drops the tablet onto her bed. “It’s too late,” she whispers to herself. “Too late.”
She won’t be Abigail. She won’t be the one to reveal the truth.
The busboy was wrong. God missed the moment. David’s army is on the march without her.
The voices begin to trail away, headed down the stairs on the way to the Situation Room.
She’s tempted to follow them, to learn more, but she hesitates, looks at the black screen on her lap.
Whoever the busboy was, he was no messenger from God. She looks down at the tablet in front of her, wondering how secure SECRYPT really is.
He was probably just a hacker making fun of her.
No! I want to shout it to her, but I don’t have a voice on my perch.
She needs to stay strong. She can’t lose hope. She has a job to do. It’s a requirement—my entire reason for witnessing her. She needs to change her mind. She needs to tell the world about Abaddon.
In desperation, I close my eyes and dive down.
A dive within a dive to the Jungle. I’ve never done it while witnessing before, but my only hope right now is that my Voice will know what to do. If I can ask her, maybe she’ll have answers.
The Jungle. At first I don’t recognize it because it’s not loud and full of movement and color. Instead there’s just a single guitar-music thread crashing loud.
I call out for my Voice, but she’s not there.
It’s just me and the lone guitar. I don’t know what to do, but as I think things through I’m also listening to Jordan’s mind and I realize something: her mind and the guitar are playing the same song. The colors flash in tune with her thoughts. The sounds mesh.
Jordan and the guitar strand are the same.
I explore the thread more closely, trying to understand. It pulses with color, thickens, thins, moves in reaction to what’s happening in her mind.
But then I realize I’m wrong.
Not in reaction.
The thread changes before the mind.
The color/music on her thread is hopeless, afraid. I focus on it, feel myself drawn close to it. Up close what I’m seeing becomes more clear. The colors on her thread have meaning—the bright flashes of color and sound are strong feelings—hopelessness, fear. But there are dark spots, too, moments of uncertainty, doubt. The dark spots are like burnt-out bulbs, rests in the music. They are vacancies.
I focus on a vacancy, it grows larger in my sensations of it. I try and imagine it shifting, becoming something else, desire to follow her father.
A part of my presence in the Jungle reaches across the small space between us, begins to bleed my urgency into the vacancy of her uncertainty.
Jordan’s feelings change, just slightly—the hopelessness she feels loosens its hold.
I made them change. My excitement is contagious. I watch as it bleeds across the bridge between us, brightening her whole thread.
ABIGAIL WOULDN’T GIVE UP. ABIGAIL WOULD FOLLOW AND LISTEN.
I wish hard, like a little kid wishing for Christmas.
FOLLOW THEM. LISTEN. BE ABIGAIL.
The strand bends, shifts. The music has changed.
Jordan’s mind shifts with it. I feel it.
She has a new thought. I hear it as I return to my perch: I can still be Abigail.
I just have to pee. Jordan practices the lie as she jogs to her door and out in the hallway, slowing down for silence. Just have to pee. No longer a lie. She does have to pee.
She can hear her dad on the stairs.
“Can we secure the footage? Stop it from being released?”
“Already done, sir.” She doesn’t recognize
the other voice. Some general or another. “We have it for you to watch.”
“We need a statement, sir.” Carol is here. Jordan wonders whether the communications director has a house of her own.
“This is contained for now?”
The general: “We believe so, Mr. President.”
“Then we maintain our position. We call it hysteria.”
Jordan’s heart sinks. Her father is Nabal.
The disappointment morphs into something else. Determination. Excitement.
The busboy was no hacker. The busboy foretold the coming world. In her mind, I appear, my hair down, the busboy clothes disappear, replaced by robes, berries, wild honey. In her mind I am a prophet of prophets. I am her Elijah.
She can still be Abigail. Jordan slips back into her room, forgetting to pee, decides she can hold it.
Back on the bed, her screen lights up. Will calling again. This time she accepts.
My job is done. I fly from my perch.
“I made her,” I say before I even have a thought.
Paul looks at me. He raises his eyebrows.
I’m not supposed to talk about what I see—rules—but this feels big.
“What are you talking about?” Paul asks, and then he holds up his hand, palm toward me. “Forget it,” he says, “I don’t even want to know.”
“Have you ever changed your target’s mind?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not possible,” he tells me.
He’s wrong, I just did it. From the Jungle. Whatever it is, I have power there. I don’t know how. I don’t know why.
But I don’t press the point with Paul.
Thirty-Six
“I can’t glide anymore,” Calvin says at dinner. “Tonight’s my last night.”
The room had been full of noise, but it all stops when he says it. Calvin doesn’t notice. He secures a few stray peas onto his fork and eats them while we all watch and wait for him to say something else.
I break the silence. “What does ‘I can’t glide anymore’ mean? That doesn’t make sense.”
He shakes his head, looks down at his plate.
“There’s a limit to how much witnessing we can do,” Maddie says. “After a while, things get too muddy when we’re gliding, and we stop being useful.”
Corina asks him where he’ll go.
Calvin shrugs. “I’m set up in Santa Fe. Job in a bookstore.”
“That’s not where you’re from.” And then: “They got you set up how?” I was trying to hold the question, but it spills out anyway. “What’re they gonna give you?”
He doesn’t seem bothered by it, though. He raises an eyebrow. “A job, man. Some cash. ID, a verifiable work history, and a brain fully scrubbed of Locusts and Gentry.”
“Won’t people who knew you be . . .” I trail off when he starts shaking his head.
“Nobody knows me, man. Not in Santa Fe, not in Atlanta.” He’s angry. “There ain’t nobody for me out there.”
I’m angry, too. At myself, though. I know his story. I know where he comes from. “Hey, man, I’m sorry. I shoulda . . .”
He smiles, but sadness is what comes through. “Naw, man. It’s my bad. I just don’t want to leave at all, is all.”
His sadness spreads to me and I’m about to cough away the lump in my throat, but then I see that I’m not alone. Paul’s got tears in his eyes. Corina’s looking away at something on the wall to her side.
Maddie reaches over and puts her arms around his neck. Squeezes him. “We want you to stay, too, Calvin.”
Paul steps out from his seat and comes around behind him to rub his shoulders. “You’re going to make good things happen wherever you go. That’s just what you do.”
Calvin goes still for a moment. “Y’all gotta stop this attack, though. I don’t wanna go back to real life and then get eaten because y’all screwed up.”
Maddie kisses his cheek before unlatching herself and returning to her plate. Paul squeezes him once more. “We’re the Justice League, man. We got this.”
I look around the room. Everybody’s nodding, so I nod, too.
I’m not hungry anymore.
After I clear my plate, I swallow my nerves and walk up behind Calvin. “Hey, man.”
He turns around. Smiles up at me. “Alright.”
“Yeah.” I can’t even think of words to say what I want to right now, so I just tell him: “Take care, okay?”
“I always do.” He holds his hand up for me. I take it. Shake it. Don’t really want to let it go.
I’m focused on Calvin, so Damon startles me when he pulls out his wallet, flips it open, and pushes it across the table to Calvin and me.
It’s open to a picture of a little girl with yellow-blond hair. She’s like two, smiling, dressed in a school uniform and posed against a wood picket fence with a school-picture background.
“That’s your sister?” I ask him.
Damon shakes his head. His eyes are wet, and when he speaks, his voice is crackly. “Daughter. Caitlin. She’s four now, I guess.”
I never know what to say when somebody has a kid, so I just look at her picture for a minute.
“Since I got here, all I can think when I look at her is that I’d better not screw up or she’s gonna die.” He reaches for his wallet and I hand it back to him.
He glances at Calvin, then back at the picture. “Someday I want to hold this picture—or hold her—and not think about this shit.” He shifts his gaze up to Calvin again, winks. “Enjoy your memory wipe, man, and don’t worry. We got your back.”
Everybody’s quiet. Damon’s staring at the picture of his daughter again. I try to make myself stay there, but it’s too hard. I want to be alone. I squeeze Calvin’s shoulder one last time and nod to him.
He nods back as I walk out the door.
Thirty-Seven
We’re on the bed again. It’s late. Jordan’s heart is beating fast. The screen is up in front of us, its camera blinking. Jordan’s thought a lot about how to do this, what she needs to do to fulfill her promise to God, to Will. To be Abigail.
She’s written her speech for the Conference, drafted it and redrafted it in her personal journal until it’s exactly what she wants. She’s good at this, and Will has been there to help when she got stuck.
She looks down at herself. She’s wearing a blouse, a muted yellow, and a white half coat over her pajama top. It feels strange, the clothes pinch in weird places where the pajama top bunches up, but it looks alright on camera.
We look down to the journal in front of us, open to the speech.
“Record,” she says.
The light goes on above the screen. Jordan stares at it, smiles grimly. “Good evening. My name is Jordan Castle and I am the eldest daughter of President Vincent Castle. If you are watching this video, it is because something has happened to me and I was unable to make this announcement on live television as I have planned. I expect that if I have been stopped, it will have been by people in my father’s administration, in an attempt to keep this information secret from those it most concerns: you, the people.
“Fellow citizens, the Incursions are real. People are being taken. My father and his administration know this, but they have chosen to keep it a secret.” Jordan’s voice is forceful, filled with truth. She feels strong, purposeful.
For the first time in as long as she can remember, the girl that never felt okay does.
Jordan pauses, nods to accentuate what she’s about to say. “If something has happened to me, and I am not able to deliver this message in person, I have faith that this version will suffice, will be enough to encourage every one of us to rise up, to force the hand of our leadership to face the threat of Abaddon head-on.
“Thank you, and may God be with you.” She’s ready to end the recording, but she can’t be done. She
hasn’t mentioned the most important part.
I dive, her strand pulses, dominating the entire universe around me underneath. I find the right place, alter the notes I need to.
When I surface, she’s already begun to hesitate. She smiles, widens her eyes like she has an idea.
“There’s one other note I’d like you to consider. At present, little is known about the species behind the Incursions, but what we do know is this: We need to listen to the voices who are warning us about the threat. Mr. Jeffrey Sabazios should not be dismissed as a crackpot or a con man. Mr. Sabazios may just have the answers we need, but unless you force our government to act—force my father to stand strong in the face of this threat—we may only learn that his technology can save us after it is far too late.” She pauses, her face stone. Then: “Stop recording. Send to Will.”
It’s done. Sent.
She pictures Will receiving the video, scheming ways to distribute it. She smiles.
It’s good to have a partner. It makes it easier to be Abigail.
When I open my eyes, I’m feeling pretty good. I make way for Paul on the couch and when he goes down, I dictate my glide.
It’s hard to focus, though. I keep thinking about Jordan, how she has someone, a person she knows, who knows her. A partner in crime.
Jordan is doing something amazing, something I’d be too scared to ever do. I’d end up embarrassing myself and everybody else, but if I let myself have a partner like she does, maybe I’d be strong like that, too.
A partner. A single face materializes in my mind.
When I finish dictating, I change out of my glide suit, then sit down to wait for him. I can barely sit still because there’s something I know I’ve got to do.
Not an Abigail moment, but still. Calvin leaving points to the fact that we may not have that much time together. I don’t want her to go without saying my piece.
Paul’s barely opened his eyes when I’m out the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Got something I gotta do,” I tell him. “Just go ahead with your dictation.”
Strange Days Page 20