David knew he was staring, the same as he knew the heady sweet scent and now he knew it was called honeysuckle and he heard the conversations even if he didn’t know the people behind the voices, and the cat had already twice pounced at prey in the dark—mice or voles or something else small and fast and elusive, the cat did not succeed either time, but was already hunting again, and this was him, this was always him.
This was a chance to ask without sounding stupid, for once. He chose his words carefully. “How much more, um, information is it than you’re used to?”
She cocked her head. “A lot? I think it would be exhausting for any length of time.”
“But, like, what’s it like normally?”
“Normal.”
She gave him a look like he was asking weird questions, like people always did. As far as they were concerned, a Pilot felt like a Pilot and there was no point in trying to describe that to others, particularly others who also had one.
He tried again. “I’m trying to get a sense of how different it is.”
“Okay, you know how normally you—no, I can’t put it into words. It’s like there’s that and then there’s this and this is so much more than that. Hey, the cat caught something.”
They both watched the triumphant black shadow move against the black trees.
Oh, how he wished she had said something else. He wished she’d put words to normal the way nobody ever did. Even now it rose in him, agitation desperation anger at everyone who said his Pilot was normal managed to make him feel like he was somehow abnormal without being willing to say as much, yes, abnormal for his questions, but they couldn’t fathom that his Pilot might be different that he might be different, no, they assumed he couldn’t handle it, that the thing falling down the thing failing was his cope his competence not the implant in his head surely nothing was wrong with that. Sometimes he wondered if other people had this problem. He’d wondered it so many times but he didn’t know where to find them or how to find them without calling more attention to himself.
His sister said he worked for the devil and he told her he needed to—was that a betrayal? Did she know what it was like in his head? How could he explain why he was working for them anyway, how he was sure it was him that was wrong and not the Pilots in general nobody ever said they felt like this this mounting surmounting mountain of stimuli God if Alyssa had said “noise” he would have dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him just for the sheer relief of hearing someone else say it. As it was, disappointment settled over him like a wool blanket, another itch, another shred of his attention fragmented off to scratch that itch, to resent, to mourn a moment where he could have shared this with another person.
Except it wasn’t how she felt not how she normally felt the thing she was describing was the thing he felt every day but it was a high for her momentary fleeting he had forgotten to ask how long this drug lasted. And—his stomach dropped at the thought—what if he had chosen the Superman pill instead and what a name, was the thing he normally felt a Superman feeling? Would it have amped his brain up even more? He tried to imagine it tried to imagine what it would be like to have even more stimulation he would go crazy he would be the person who clawed his own eyes out who ran his head into a wall unless it was like the way stimulants worked with ADHD he’d seen brain diagrams they somehow worked with the overcharged brain instead of making it explode.
He checked the time and it had been only fifteen minutes he still didn’t know which pill he’d taken but his heart was racing like he knew he knew he knew he had made a mistake he was going to die this was how he would die not an IED not like the little boy not a sniper just his own brain exploding because he took a pill at a party. Kids, don’t do drugs. What had he even been thinking. He watched Alyssa watch the world through his normal everyday hyperaware hypervigilant eyes. Fun for a little while, maybe.
He didn’t remember it being fun ever. If she panicked he could tell her all of his coping mechanisms, the things that worked on patrol to control it the things that worked in a mall with his mother as much as they worked at all he was still a work in progress. Running. Fighting. Playing with language like it was a puzzle a toy a Rubik’s cube. He could tell her all those things if she asked. If she needed.
She didn’t look like she needed. She looked like she was enjoying herself, and this wasn’t a comparison he would use out loud, he wasn’t that dense, but she looked like a dog on a car ride with her head out the window. Eyes alert and darting everywhere, body tense. He watched her watching the world, watched with her, considered how rarely he could count something as a shared experience. He didn’t seem to be ramping up.
And then it happened. An un-thing. An unclenching. Not a blanket he had to fight out from under, but a blanket wrapped around him, arms wrapped around him. The feeling behind the feeling of being told everything was going to be okay and believing it. Punctuation on a sentence that had been running so long in his head he didn’t even remember where it had started. Quiet.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
SOPHIE
Sophie ignored the first knock on her door. And the second. They had no reason to assume she was awake at eight a.m. Then her phone beeped, which was unusual, since the rule was the moms had to knock three times. Before she could reach for it, her door opened.
She was about to open her mouth to say they had a deal, three times, but Val threw up her hands like a surrender. Sophie expected a lecture on how the rule wasn’t license to ignore them; the look on Val’s face quieted her.
“What’s up?” Sophie asked.
“Turn on the news.”
Sophie reached for her tablet. She didn’t need to go to a news site because it had already come to her. Three of her keyword alerts had brought hits during the night, and they were all queued and waiting.
Break-in at Balkenhol was the headline. An unnamed intruder had been arrested. It didn’t say how they’d gotten in, but a shiver ran along her spine. Three alerts for the same article. The “Balkenhol” keyword was the obvious one, right there in the headline. The second was “Pilot,” as in “The company is best known as the manufacturers of the ubiquitous Pilot implants.” She was afraid to look at the third, afraid to see if the phrase that had triggered the third alert was “David Geller-Bradley,” which would mean her brother’s stolen ID had gotten him in trouble.
The third alert was “anti-Pilot,” as in “believed to be an anti-Pilot activist,” which was obviously why Val had told her, and which in itself was bad, bad, bad, but at least she saw no mention of her brother or his ID.
Val still stood in the doorway. Watching her reaction? Waiting to see if she was surprised?
“Thank you,” Sophie said.
“Of course.” She shut the door behind her.
Sophie texted Gabe first. How goes it?
She dressed, waiting for him to respond, but nothing came. She wasn’t supposed to contact Lana Robinson from her personal phone, but really, someone should be telling her something. It wasn’t fair that they would leave her in the dark, especially if this involved her brother’s ID.
Her phone chimed. It goes, wrote Gabe. Hugs.
So it was urgent, but there was no hint of where to find him. Given no mention of coffee, the default had to be the meeting space.
The lights were off when she arrived, the windowless space giving the impression the sun hadn’t yet risen. She stepped carefully over the occupied sleeping bags scattered across the floor.
There was a Gabe-shaped dent in the office couch, but he sat at the desk talking on the phone. He nodded at her as she walked in.
“Yeah, you can print that we have no idea who that is, and we did not send him. Gabriel Clary. Yeah. Uh, you can say ‘a spokesperson for the local group.’ Yeah. You, too. Yeah.” He disconnected and turned to her. “That’s like the twenty-seventh call. It’s been ringing since six. They’ve all asked the sa
me things over and over except one reporter who actually seemed interested in knowing something about our meetings and what we do”—he waved a scrap of paper, then stuck it in the top drawer—“Eduardo Toledo. I wrote his name down in case we want to talk to him when things aren’t crazy.” As if on cue, the phone buzzed. He glanced at the caller ID, then ignored it. “They can leave a message.”
“What do we know?”
“Exactly what I said on the phone. We don’t know who it is, and we didn’t send them. Which is totally true.” She waited for him to say more, but he shook his head. “I don’t know anything else, I swear.”
The phone rang again, and as Gabe and Sophie both reached for it, a woman walked into the office. She wore a Pilot-blue dress and matching blue lipstick like she was reclaiming the color.
“Knock fir—Lana?” Sophie said, letting Gabe answer the phone. “What are you doing here?”
Lana ignored the question. “Who are all the people I just stepped over to find you? You’re supposed to be running a field office, not a hotel.”
“It’s sanctioned by the landlord and field office operations.” Sophie closed the door. “They need a safe place to crash, and they repay us with endless volunteer hours. It works.”
Lana eyed the couch like she was debating sitting on it, then decided against it. “No reporters have stopped in this morning?”
“There’ve been a bunch of calls, but nobody has come here.” Sophie looked to Gabe, still talking quietly on the phone, and he nodded in confirmation.
“And that phone stays locked up, right? Neither of you put any apps on it that access the microphone?”
Sophie bristled at the suggestion she might be that amateurish. “Only Gabe and I have keys to this office. Also, it’s a landline. No unapproved apps.”
Lana rubbed her neck, and Sophie realized that up close, under her makeup, she looked exhausted. “Hmm. Okay. It must have leaked someplace else.”
“Must have.” Especially since we were never told anything, Sophie didn’t say.
“It’s not like you had any information to share,” Lana said.
“Exactly.” Sophie was getting annoyed. “I pretty much have no idea what you’re talking about or what happened, but feel free to leave it that way if you want.”
Lana sighed. “I’m sure you saw the news. Someone got into Balkenhol and then got arrested. Everyone assumes it was an anti-Pilot thing, so we’re getting calls from the media and the cops. If they haven’t called you yet, they will. We had nothing to do with it, of course.”
“Of course,” Sophie repeated. Though if that was the case, why did Lana happen to be in the city?
“I’m going to make the rounds of your local news broadcasts to put our best spin on it before they start poking their heads in here. This isn’t the image we want to project.” She eyed the couch again. “Just keep doing what you’re doing, both of you.”
She swept back out of the room, and Sophie looked over to see Gabe watching her with curiosity. “What did she say? I missed some of it.”
“What you said, more or less, and that the police may stop in to chat.”
“Oh, they did already. Before dawn. My first wake-up.”
“You didn’t say that! Why?”
“Why do you think? They wanted to know who was in charge, and if we had planned a break-in, and who hung out here. I said we didn’t keep a roster, and we didn’t do break-ins, which is true. And they asked if we had ever been to BNL, which I said yes, outside, to protest. I probably shouldn’t have said anything, but I thought those answers would get rid of them faster than refusing to talk to them.”
He didn’t point out that it was good Sophie hadn’t been around, that if this did in fact have anything to do with her brother’s ID, it was better their shared surnames hadn’t been invoked. Or that it was good the whole thing had been taken off their hands.
Sophie knew not to raise any of that out loud. Lana had said something about a leak, the only important detail in the conversation. She probably wouldn’t have come in if she thought either of them was the culprit, unless she wanted to look them in the eye while she asked.
All of which left Sophie with almost as little as she’d learned on the news. Someone had been arrested and charged in conjunction with gaining access to BNL. If it was someone from National, something had gone wrong. She still had no clue if this was the operation with David’s ID or not, which was something she very much wanted to know.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
DAVID
The party at Milo’s only confirmed what David had known for years: he was broken. If he wasn’t broken, dysfunctional, a little off, what could explain that there was a drug that took other people to exactly where he lived his life? They were playing games, literal games, with something that had bothered him since he’d gotten his Pilot. When he realized it, he’d wanted to shake that woman Alyssa, to shake everyone in the room.
Instead, in the dawning, blissful quiet the Fortress of Solitude brought him, he asked, “What if you got stuck in that state of awareness?”
“Stuck?” Her eyes still darted around; he’d long ago trained himself to focus so he didn’t go out of his head.
“Yeah. What if you didn’t come down?”
She laughed. “It’s physiologically impossible. It’s just a drug. The effects wear off.”
“But what if? What if it somehow broke your brain? Could you train yourself to work with it?”
“I don’t think I could live at this level of sensory overload. I love chocolate cake but I couldn’t eat it for every meal. This is like everything is too rich, too saturated, too intense. Fun for a while. Speaking of fun . . .” She turned and walked into the bedroom, where everyone else still sat enjoying the pill David had taken, the one that was wearing his edges off, wrapping him in blankets like something delicate in need of protection. His questions had driven her away, he was pretty sure, but he didn’t need to care. He leaned against the railing and watched nothing in particular, listened to nothing in particular, let nothing in particular catch his attention. It was glorious.
He slept until three the next afternoon. He woke as he usually did, head smashing into consciousness, too much consciousness, alive awake alert enthusiastic, as the song Julie used to sing to him went, minus the enthusiasm. Except even more alive more awake more alert than usual, maybe, or maybe that was just the result of having experienced a moment of less awake less alert with which to compare. If the drug had any hangover associated, or any gradual return, he’d slept through it. His brain was back along with the loud bird outside his window the icemaker in the fridge his heartbeat in his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to recapture the quiet but quiet was gone, gone, loud bird gone.
By Monday, he was completely back to his own normal. Back to a job he didn’t want but was afraid to give up. Back to the noise nobody else believed, noise that people played at during parties even while saying it’s a nice place but we wouldn’t want to live there. He hated everyone.
He tried to remember what the quiet felt like. His own personal Fortress of Solitude. He tried to get himself back to that state, but it had never been a thing he could do. Meditation, yoga, alcohol: he’d tried it all a hundred times. Nothing had ever worked, until that pill at that party, and how long had it worked? Hours. He’d left his car there and walked all the way home, four miles, eyes open for stranger danger but awareness gloriously dulled. Anyone could have snuck up on him or stepped out of the shadows, and he’d have missed it entirely, laughed at the novelty even while handing over his wallet.
His day consisted of two health fairs, morning at a high school and afternoon at the downtown jail, the latter for the employees at both the jail and the nearby federal prison. He’d never been to a jail before, and he’d been curious, but the health fair was situated in the outermost vestibule and he didn’t actually get to see an
ything. About half the staff already had Pilots, and his job was to convince the other half to get them. This wasn’t the worst gig he’d had. It was probably true that in their line of work a Pilot would make them safer. If he worked in a jail he’d want heightened awareness, the same way he’d appreciated it on deployment.
The trickier thing was answering questions about Piloted inmates. What would it mean to have a prison full of Pilots? All the more important for the guards and inmates to be evenly matched. Was there a way to turn their inmates’ Pilots off? No. Well, there was a way, but it involved surgery; not something they’d be doing for people who were with them for the short haul, and an invasion of rights for even those on the longer ride.
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