by Kelly deVos
A man in a lab coat paces around in front of a navy blue Chesterfield sofa.
“This is Dr. Knudsen,” Amelia says, turning off the camera.
The doctor gives us a curt nod.
“Let’s get him into the drawing room,” Knudsen says. The doctor is short and squat. He has cropped black hair and is balding on top. There’s something sort of familiar about him.
Navarro grunts as Toby and I drag him into a narrow hallway and then a smaller carpeted room that has been outfitted like a makeshift hospital. A tall, young woman with blond hair is inside, attaching IV fluid bags to stainless steel stands. Another man wearing a surgical mask is placing small medical tools on a tray with wheels.
“Get him on the cot,” Knudsen says, gesturing to one of three padded beds in the room.
Toby and I rest Navarro on the cot as gently as we can.
I grab Navarro’s hand, which is cold and lifeless.
The woman passes Knudsen a mask and assists him in donning a pair of vinyl gloves. The doctor jerks his chin out the door. “You can wait in the sitting room,” he says.
“Don’t you even want us to tell you what happened?” I ask. I feel like a complete idiot. Navarro has a giant piece of glass sticking out of his head. Anyone can see what happened.
“Wait outside,” the doctor repeats.
“I should stay because—”
Knudsen’s wide mouth sinks into a frown. “Because rule number six. Trust no one. You don’t remember me, do you?”
Uh. No. I don’t.
“From PrepperCon? I wrote Your First Kit of First Aid for Surviving the Unsurvivable,” Knudsen says impatiently.
Oh yeah. I remember seeing a little bald man in a red shirt run all around the convention center. “And you were the consultant Dad hired to read the medical chapters of his book?”
“Right,” Knudsen says, nodding. “I must say, your father was always far too concerned with packing light. You can’t solve every problem with gauze and QuikClot.” The doctor is backing Toby and me toward the door. “Gustavo here worked my booth two years in a row. If I wanted to kill him, I’ve had ample opportunity.”
“You’re contaminating this environment,” the blonde woman says.
“I’ll be fine, Susan,” Navarro calls out weakly.
Ugh. I have to let Knudsen get that thing out of Gus’s eye.
Toby and I return to the sitting room, where Annika has positioned herself on one side of the blue sofa. As always, she’s neat as a pin. You’d never guess she was just in a firefight. She has the air of someone whose picnic got rained out.
Toby takes a seat next to Annika.
There’s a large window on the wall to the right of the front door. I peek out at the Astoria neighborhood in twilight.
We are really, really screwed.
Suddenly, I realize I’m wet and freezing, and every part of my body absolutely aches.
I turn to Toby. “As soon as the doctor dresses Navarro’s eye, we need to be ready to rock,” I say. “And we need to do something about that SUV.”
Toby stares into space, as if he’s thinking hard.
Amelia is placing her laptop on the registration desk. “I had my crew move it into the back and cover it with a tarp. We know what we’re doing.”
My anger ignites. “I don’t think you do. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. This is the worst type of place to set up,” I tell her. “There are three or four residents on this street. If it were busier, we might blend in. If it were deserted no one would see us. You’ve put enough people here that we’ll stand out like a sore thumb.”
Amelia freezes in the middle of digging a long cable out of her tech bag. “They had to evacuate this area last week. The cold fusion bomb in California caused flooding all up and down the coast. There was no way to predict that.”
This is going along with the notion that The Spark didn’t know about the attack.
“Right. And how long do you think it’s going to take my mother to swim out of the river and make her way to a phone? We’ve got an hour, two at the absolute tops, before The Opposition shows up here,” I say.
“Um...well...” Amelia stammers. “You think she survived and...”
“Yes,” I say flatly.
“We need to discuss what to do next,” Toby says.
Toby can’t be trusted. He’s here to run off with his girlfriend.
“I know what I have to do. Save Charles.”
If the maps that Navarro spent so much time staring at are right, we’re around two hundred miles north of my brother’s position. This knowledge lights a fire in me. I don’t care what Amelia said, or what Toby thinks is best. I’m going.
I must have said that last part out loud, because Toby stands up.
“You’re going?” He comes to stand inches from my face, his eyes dark and stormy. “You’re not going anywhere without me. We have an agreement. We said we’d stay together.”
An agreement? Is he really referencing what we said that night in the desert?
“We had an agreement. First, you tried to run off. Then, you joined Copeland’s team of supersoldier wannabes,” I tell him. “Finally, you’re shacked up here with your girlfriend and, let’s face it, that’s all you really care about.”
“I didn’t get to choose Ammon Carver for my father any more than you got to select Stephanie Maxwell as your mother,” Annika says in a bitter voice.
I want to smack her.
“I’m not running off with my girlfriend,” Toby says. He sits down again next to Annika and motions for me to take a seat in the armchair next to him. “We’re trying to come up with a solution to a difficult set of problems.”
Since I feel so tired that I might fall down if I don’t sit, I take the chair.
Amelia is fully situated behind the registration desk. She’s got two laptops, a video editing monitor and a large modern modem that probably communicates with a satellite.
Whatever else happens, I’m taking that stuff with me when I go.
Toby leans forward. “Listen. I was going to take off that day in Mexico. That was wrong. I felt so defeated all the time and... I messed up.” He puts his hand on my arm, the way he used to when MacKenna and I would be fighting about some stupid thing and he wanted me to calm down. “But everything I’ve done since then has been to help get Charles back. I joined Copeland’s team so I could get on this mission and so that I could find out whatever I could. We needed an inside man.”
This makes some amount of sense. And I desperately want to trust Toby.
But.
I make a dramatic show of tilting my head in Annika’s direction.
“She’s here to help,” he says.
“She’s here because you’re in love with her!”
Toby’s face turns red, and he steals a glance at Annika. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, Jinx. But that’s not why she’s here. She hates Ammon Carver as much as we do. As much as you hate your mother. She risked everything to come help us.” He gives Annika a gentle prod. “Tell her what you did.”
For the first time, Annika actually looks a bit flustered. “Oh. Well. I overheard my father on the phone, talking to someone about...” She gives Toby a perfect damsel-in-distress look.
He takes over for her. “She overheard Carver discussing arrangements to add additional security to AIRSTA.”
“And something about a prisoner they’re keeping there,” Annika adds.
Toby smiles at her. “Right. I made contact with her when we were at Fort Marshall.”
“How?” I ask. They wouldn’t let me near a terminal, and Toby is no hacker.
“I had access to the computers,” he says impatiently. “They gave me basic credentials when Dad and I were commissioned. I told you. The whole point of joining was so that I could put a real
plan together.”
“Um. Excuse me. What?” Amelia says, glancing up from a monitor where she’s reviewing footage of the car chase. “There’s already a real plan.”
“Right,” Toby says with an eye roll. “That we’re going to roll through Portland in a giant SUV and try to bust into AIRSTA with like forty marines. Sure. Never mind that all major US cities are under curfew, that there are checkpoints all over the place and—”
“We have all the necessary documents,” Amelia says, hotly.
“We’ll get caught,” Toby says, shrugging out of his camo jacket. “Or in firefights with any number of violent mobs that are running around raising hell. Three days ago, fourteen people died during a raid on a food distribution center in the Pearl District.”
“Violent mobs? Portland is out of food?” I ask.
“Almost everywhere is out of food,” Amelia says quietly.
Toby glances at her. “Anyway. We have a better idea. As you know, to cover up Project Cold Front, The Opposition closed the Tillamook State Forest and the Siuslaw National Forest and cut off access to that part of the coast. But Annika got us a vehicle and forestry credentials. All we have to do is make it to a monitoring station about five miles from here. We can go on foot.”
“On foot?” Amelia repeats.
This is a good plan. It will let us stick to the woods. We probably won’t get stopped in a government vehicle.
I point at Annika. “What makes you think she can be trusted?”
Toby makes an impatient noise. “She risked her life coming here. She’s got the uniforms and badges. Show her, Annika.”
Annika opens the large bag she’s been carrying, which is resting by her feet, to reveal green National Park Service uniforms, name tags, fobs and plastic badges. “I’ve even made sure that these credentials won’t trigger any alarms. They’re from employees on sabbatical.”
Amelia stands up and starts to pace in front of the bookcases. “Wait. Wait.”
When I continue to glare at Annika, Toby prompts her again. “Annika, show her the note,” he says.
Annika puts her dainty hand in her bag again. She hands me a folded piece of cream stationery. I open it. At the top, I find the words Beverly Wilshire, Beverly Hills in fancy red script.
And then my brother’s handwriting.
Oh God.
I jump up.
My dear sister...
Of course, Charles would write like this. Like he’s eight going on eighty.
Things are fine here, although I do miss you terribly.
“Annika saw Charles. Last month. Probably when Stephanie was moving him to Oregon,” Toby says.
“How was he?” I demand, coming to kneel beside her.
My good friend Miss Carver tells me she might be seeing you soon. I asked her to give you my regards.
“Physically, he was fine,” Annika says, slowly. “But emotionally...”
I nod. He’s doing about as well as can be expected when your mother murders your father, kidnaps you and then leaves you alone on a military base.
“Charles trusts Annika,” Toby says.
Charles is a small child.
I’m waiting for you to come back.
And he never really understood the rules anyway. He never understood the most basic rule. Trust no one.
But I’d made the decision that I didn’t want to live like my father. Look where his rules got him.
The letter is signed:
All my love, Charles
Like it or not, I’m going to have to trust Annika Carver.
Toby rises again, coming to stand near Amelia, towering over her. “From now on, I am in charge of this mission.”
Amelia casts a glance toward the registration desk. Toby blocks her so she can’t move in that direction. “Jinx, check that equipment. Give me a report on what it’s doing. Ms. Aoki, please have a seat.” He gestures to the sofa, urging Amelia to sit alongside Annika.
I move to the desk. From here I can hear the chatter in the drawing room. The low rumble of Dr. Knudsen’s voice. The clink of instruments. I force myself to concentrate on the laptop. “Uh. It’s a ruggedized UNIX system with a proprietary video editing suite. Something fast. Sophisticated. There’s a satellite modem currently uploading an eight-minute video clip to a peer-to-peer file sharing site” It’s a good setup. The IP address has been cloaked, and the upload is lightning fast.
Toby nods. “Okay. Let it finish and then get everything packed up. No more transmissions without authorization from me.”
As he says this, the progress bar fills, and an alert tells me that the upload is done. I power off the laptop and begin winding up cables. If I’m going to trust Toby again, I have to ask.
“Do you have news about MacKenna?” I ask.
Toby hesitates for a second. “She and that hacker friend of yours made it to Mexico at the staging location for the Los Alamos mission. Dad sent her back to Fort Marshall.” He pauses again. “You really don’t know why she went there?”
“No. But...” I say. If we’re really going to be a team again, I have to tell him. “Right before she left, Terminus and I stole some data off a research computer at SEALAB. I think she must have seen something important.”
Toby sighs. “She didn’t stick around to tell anyone about it.”
MacKenna is impulsive. Reckless. That’s what Navarro kept saying.
“All right,” Toby says. “So we’ll get on the move and try to come up with the best way to infiltrate AIRSTA.”
Amelia’s face scrunches up in anger. “I already told you. My team—”
Toby cuts her off. “We don’t trust your team.” He faces me. “The communication that Annika intercepted said the prisoner was being kept in a bunker adjacent to the cold fusion bomb silo. Clearly, that’s where The Opposition is trying to lure us. Maybe we can get Charles out of that bunker without going into the silo at all.”
“Without going into the silo? Are you serious?” Amelia says, shaking her head. “Millions of people could be killed by leaving that bomb potentially operable. I mean, let’s imagine you rescue Charles Marshall. If The Opposition finds a way to detonate that cold fusion bomb before you get out of the blast radius, little Charles will be killed anyway.”
“What are we going to do if Gus can’t travel?” Annika asks, biting her lower lip. “That thing in his eye...it looked serious.”
I don’t want to think about what will happen if Navarro isn’t okay.
He has to be okay.
I grab the bag of computer equipment and join everyone at the sofa. “Toby’s right though. There’s something about this that is just off. Some part of it we don’t understand. The Opposition has done everything but dare us to go there. And The Spark knew about that bomb that was headed for California before The Opposition deployed it.”
Amelia frowns at me.
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Toby says.
I make a face. “You saw Jo on the Booker. She knew that bomb was going to blow.”
“Rosenthal didn’t know. But I think Copeland did,” Toby says.
“Harlan Copeland is deranged,” Annika comments.
Toby nods. “One of my assignments was guarding Rosenthal’s quarters. SEALAB really wasn’t made for top secret conversations. Rosenthal and Copeland were really going at it. Basically, Rosenthal was saying that after spending all that time with The Opposition, the general’s intel sources ought to be better. I can’t see why they would have put on that display for my benefit. I really think Rosenthal didn’t know.”
“So, all we really know is that both sides need me to log in to the AIRSTA mainframe, and neither side is being honest as to why,” I say, thinking hard.
“Rosenthal is honest,” Amelia says.
I have to hand it to her. She’s sticking with her story.
>
“You really think your father would program the mainframe to allow you to log in?” Annika asks. She hands me a pair of green pants, a beige short-sleeved shirt, a green jacket, a black belt and a green tie.
“It sounds like something he would do,” I say, taking the stuff from her.
“Because you used to do a lot of work together?” she asks.
“Because if my credentials are needed, it means The Opposition can’t kill me and my brother,” I say.
It’s silent for a second.
A chill runs through me. I don’t want to think about what it means that Dad had to build so many safeguards to keep people from executing us.
Amelia glares at Annika. “You got a uniform for me?”
“Oh, you’re not coming,” I say.
We need to travel light, and the last thing we need is some stranger with questionable motives tagging along.
Annika is already giving Amelia a uniform.
“She has to come with us,” Annika says, in a hard, firm voice.
“Why?” I ask, squinting at Carver’s daughter.
“Because she’s right. Public opinion is the ultimate weapon. Like it or not, we need her,” Annika says.
Toby nods in agreement as Amelia looks on.
“The doctor and nurses both work for me, and there are five soldiers in the backyard. A word from me, and you three will spend the rest of your lives in Guantanamo Bay,” Amelia says. “Plus, I’m on a video upload schedule. If I don’t make my deliverables schedule, there will be even more people out trying to kick your asses.”
“You’re producing a TV show,” Annika says flatly. “You want excitement. We’re going to give it to you.”
Amelia appears to think this over. She points to the bag in my hand. “Fine. But if I go along with this, I want control of my equipment. And if you guys don’t deliver something good, all bets are off.”
Toby nods again, and I release the bag into Amelia’s grip.
It’s Annika who answers. “I’ve been making personal appearances since I was four years old. Audiences love the unpredictable. You’ve got four kids battling the collapse of an empire. Your mission is already a success.”
