by Spencer Baum
It was a question people would ask for a generation to come.
Hello everyone. My name is Chanelle Devlin and I’m on the board of Devlin Enterprises.
Jenna Duvall listened to the press conference on the radio inside a stolen van as she drove south on Highway 95 through Arizona.
I know that everyone is eager for answers about all that happened during the Finale broadcast, from Nathan Cavanaugh’s strange soliloquy atop our Jumbotron to reports that my brother Bart was found murdered in New Rome.
Myka Johnson was in her living room, watching the press conference on TV while she nervously awaited a response to her many unanswered texts to her best friend Gabe.
Gordon Bogel was an hour south of Reno, waiting out the night in a hardshell camper, watching the press conference on his laptop and hoping for answers about why the bomb in the Tetradome didn’t go off.
Tonight I can report to you that many of the rumors you’re hearing online are either false or based on rampant, unproven speculation. But I can also report to you that some of what you’re hearing is true. Antidomer terrorists did indeed set off a bomb at the Polaris resort in Las Vegas. And they did attempt to set off a bomb in the Tetradome.
Chanelle wore a white jacket as she gave the press conference. A white jacket, red lipstick, a turquoise necklace, and turquoise earrings.
While we at Devlin are proud that our world class security team thwarted an attempted attack on the Tetradome, I wish our efforts could have extended across the state. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of those whose lives were cut short in the incident at Polaris tonight.
Chanelle’s outfit at the press conference would later get credited with a spike in sales of turquoise jewelry nationwide.
We know that Nathan Cavanaugh was a central figure in the terrorist cell that did this, and we know he had help, but we are still determining the identities of all the people who helped him.
In time, Chanelle’s press conference would pass out of the realm of current events and into history, and when it did, it would be the next sentences, the sentences about Jenna, that were written in the textbooks.
What we do know, with absolute certainty, is that Jenna Duvall was a conspirator in the terrorist plot. Tonight the Devlin legal team, working under the advisement of members of the Congressional Redemption Committee, issued an order to have Jenna Duvall executed by firing squad. That order, I’m sad to say, has not yet been carried out, for in the confusion following the thwarted terrorist attack, Jenna Duvall’s conspirators helped her escape.
Where were you when Chanelle Devlin gave her infamous press conference?
Sparrow Hollister, aka Sunny Paderewski aka Foster Smith aka a dozen other names she’d used over the years, was at a city park in the middle of Las Vegas. She sat on a bench, alone in the dark, watching the press conference on her phone, while also keeping an eye on an apartment across the street.
The apartment across the street was a safe house she’d set up for Jenna as part of her escape. Sparrow knew Jenna wasn’t coming to the safe house, but she felt compelled to sit and wait for her anyway.
Compelled to sit in the moonlight and ponder how it happened.
How years of effort and a perfect plan unraveled at the hands of a woman who risked everything to save the lives of her enemies.
Sparrow had always felt like she could see the future, like human behavior was a predictable set of patterns and human society was a simple story that played on repeat. Until tonight, it always was.
Jenna broke the pattern. Jenna put her own life at risk in order to save the lives of the people who stole everything from her, the people who threw her in jail and cheered for her death.
More than the way Jenna had ruined years of planning, what really angered Sparrow was that she hadn’t seen it coming.
As Sparrow sat alone, listening to Chanelle Devlin lie to the world, she thought about the tough road Jenna had ahead of her. Now that Devlin Enterprises was taking the official stance that Jenna was guilty, they would spare no expense in an effort to find her and kill her.
And Sparrow knew where Jenna was.
On the day she and Gordon killed Kyle, Sparrow tried to clear Kyle’s apartment of information that might lead back to her. She had failed at that task (a memoir hidden in a fireplace—what a strange wildcard Kyle turned out to be!) but in her search for any info Kyle might have been hiding, Sparrow did find an interesting invoice in the desk drawer.
The invoice was from a company called EZ Storage 4U. It was a self-storage business in the northeast part of town. Sparrow had already been to EZ Storage 4U, already spoken with the clerk at the desk, showed him the invoice, coaxed him into giving her the number for Kyle’s unit.
She’d already busted the unit open with a crowbar and gone through everything that was inside. It was a storage unit full of Jenna’s stuff. Women’s clothing, books, photos, sheet music…kind of heartbreaking to go through, actually. At some point during Jenna’s prison ordeal, Kyle had boxed up all her things and put them in storage. He was probably waiting until after she died to throw it out. There were milk crates with old electronics, paper bags with souvenirs and mementos, pictures of Rudy…
And a box. The last box Sparrow looked at in the unit. A medium-sized white cardboard box that hid in the corner. Its edges were folded shut rather than taped, and the box had two words written on its side in black marker.
Jenna’s Letters.
Hundreds of letters were inside that box, every one of them stuffed neatly into an open envelope. The first envelope Sparrow pulled out was faded and worn. It looked like it was at least ten years old. It was addressed to Jenna in a child’s handwriting, and the return address was from Mexico.
They were letters from Jenna’s pen pal.
CHAPTER 89
A computer terminal at a public library in Flagstaff, the reactivation of an old social media account, a few cautious messages exchanged, one of them showing Jenna’s face as photographed on the computer’s webcam, and then Jenna was chatting with her childhood pen pal.
I need help, Jenna wrote. Border Control is probably looking at a photo of me right now.
I’ll ask around, Mariscela wrote. We’ll figure out the best way to get you across.
The next day, behind an abandoned Tastee-Freeze north of Tucson, Jenna met Mariscela’s friend Antonio, who had a minivan with a hidden compartment in the floorboard behind the back seat.
Two hours in a cramped space the size of a suitcase and she was in Mexico.
They met Mariscela on the side of a highway somewhere in the desert. The sun was blinding. Jenna was drenched in sweat. She was woozy and out of it and forgot to thank Antonio and could barely keep her eyes open amidst the onslaught of daylight upon her.
But she was safe, and as her mind adjusted to the reality that she was with a friend who was driving her to freedom, she had a moment of overwhelming joy, one that left her sobbing in the passenger seat.
It was the feeling of freedom, a feeling her soul had forgotten out of necessity but now was glad to remember. It was the feeling of an epic, seemingly endless nightmare being over. A feeling of opportunity, of rebirth, an optimistic euphoria that overrode years of anxiety, anger, and dread. Those first minutes in Mariscela’s pickup were a time when Jenna’s imagination was alight with the possibility of a new life written on a blank slate.
Sometime after the intensity of the feeling abated, Jenna asked Mariscela if she could look at her phone.
They had a brief, goofy exchange when Jenna struggled with the passcode. The phone was like some alien object from the future for how much faster and more responsive it was than the phones Jenna remembered.
Fiddling with that phone, Jenna had a moment of wonder. She had a visceral realization that the world had been marching forward while she had been locked up, that everything was new, that she had no idea what kind of technological marvels awaited her in her new life as a free woman.
Then the I
nternet browser opened and a somber tone overtook Jenna and Mariscela both. Jenna was searching the Internet for info on Gabe Chancellor and her memoir. She didn’t know what she was going to find, but Mariscela’s demeanor told her it wasn’t good.
Though she was looking for info on her memoir, the first thing to catch her eye was a headline about Gabe Chancellor being killed at Polaris.
“What’s this about the Polaris resort?” Jenna asked.
“There’s a lot you don’t know, Sweetie,” Mariscela said.
Jenna found a video of Gabe’s livestream from Polaris. She felt ill when the video captured the first explosion.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be watching that right now,” Mariscela said.
Jenna shrieked at the second explosion, began crying when Gabe mentioned her brother.
“The blood stain was on the right side of the couch!” Gabe yelled as walls collapsed behind him.
An emptiness in Jenna’s stomach as she realized Gabe would never have been at Polaris that night were it not for her.
“In the memoir, Kyle talks about accidentally striking the thumb of his left hand with—"
“What are you saying, Gabe?” she whispered.
Words she had to rewind and watch again, a hurried phrase, something about Kyle being right-handed, but that was all he got out before the fires of hell engulfed him and the feed went black.
“Kyle didn’t kill himself,” she said.
“This is a lot for you to deal with so soon,” said Mariscela.
“She killed him,” Jenna said. “She killed all of them. Kyle and Gabe and…how many people died at Polaris?”
“Hundreds,” said Mariscela.
The feeling of freedom was already gone. The dream of starting over on a blank slate was already wrecked.
“She’s a monster,” Jenna said. “So much worse than I ever knew.”
“Jenna, that memoir, the part Kyle wrote…you haven’t read it yet, have you?”
Jenna was wiping tears from her cheeks. “No, I was looking for it and I got distracted by this video,” she said.
“And you don’t know what’s in it,” said Mariscela.
“I heard a few minutes of a TV interview Gabe did,” said Jenna.
“Right,” said Mariscela. “The interview with Tammy Flanigan.”
“I didn’t hear all of it.”
“Jenna, some of the stuff that Kyle wrote is going to be upsetting to you.”
Jenna’s eyes were already back on the phone, her finger scrolling through search results. It was hard to stay focused. Her hands were shaking and her eyes were bleary.
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to read it right now,” said Mariscela. “Maybe tomorrow morning, after a good night’s rest. Or the day after. You’ve been through so much. Maybe you should give yourself some time to rest before you expose yourself to more.”
“I can’t wait any longer,” Jenna said. “The way Kyle was the last time I saw him…I won’t be able to think about anything else until I know what he wrote.”
She found a PDF of the memoir on the web site for Logic Lighthouse Magazine. She was scrolling through it now, pushing past the sections she wrote in prison, looking for the chapter Kyle added.
“If this is what you have to do then I won’t stop you,” said Mariscela. “Just know that I’m here for you.”
Hello world. This is Kyle. Jenna’s brother.
“Here it is,” said Jenna.
Jenna gave me this memoir and asked me to finish it.
She has no fucking idea what she’s asking me to do.
Jenna had survived years in solitary confinement. She had survived the total annihilation of the life she knew and the person she was. She had outlasted 143 other prisoners through three runs in the Tetradome.
She didn’t know if she would survive this. Reading Kyle’s words nearly broke her. What Sunny did to Kyle, what Kyle knew and never said, what Sunny did to Rudy…
Sunny killed Rudy.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
There would be no fresh start.
How could she possibly start a new life when so much of her old life was unfinished?
How could she move on when the woman who did this, who did all of this, was still out there?
When no justice had been served?
They drove all day and into the night. They talked about the many directions Jenna could take her life from here. She could disappear for a short time, for a long time, forever. The more they drove, the more she thought about what Sunny did, the more she knew she couldn’t start her life over.
Not yet.
“I need to tell the world what I know,” she said.
“You’ve already done that,” said Mariscela. “You wrote a memoir that everybody’s reading.”
“The memoir is what I used to know,” said Jenna. “I need to tell the world what I know now. About what happened in the Tetradome. What happened to my brother. How close Sunny came to killing half a million people.”
“What you need to do is rest,” said Mariscela. “Right now nobody knows where you are. It’s your only chance to have some quiet. As soon as you start talking to the world, the world is going to find you.”
Traffic thinned as they got closer to Mariscela’s house. In the final hour of the drive, they passed only one car, a white sedan going the other way.
It was after midnight when they pulled onto a dirt road and drove down a tree-lined path to a villa that belonged to Mariscela’s family. They parked on the west end of a sprawling house that sat alone on acres of land.
The first thing Jenna did after she stepped out of the car was look at the stars. She thought about Kyle, about Gabe, about dozens of innocent people who died at the Desert Ridge Hotel, and hundreds more who died at Polaris.
She thought about Rudy.
A part of her wanted the grandeur of a night sky in the middle of nowhere to make her feel less significant. She wanted to feel small and unimportant, too small to have any responsibility to worry about Sunny and whatever Sunny was going to do next.
It didn’t work.
She walked around the back of the car, followed Mariscela to the front door of the house, reminded herself that a hot shower and a comfortable bed awaited her inside.
Mariscela had stopped at the front porch. She stood under the light, hunched over, looking at the door.
“Is something wrong?” Jenna asked.
Mariscela stepped to one side so Jenna could see.
There was an envelope taped to the front door.
A white envelope with no stamp and no address information. An envelope that was unmarked save a playful sketch on the front of it.
The sketch, drawn in purple ink, showed a flower with four petals.
THE END
Keep reading for a note from Spencer.
A LETTER FROM SPENCER
Thank you for reading The Tetradome Run on Kindle. I’m proud of this novel and feel a strong connection with anyone who finishes it. This novel is purposely written with an ultra-dense plot that requires a smart reader who pays close attention to every sentence. Thank you for being my kind of reader!
This novel is the result of 4 years of dedicated effort and more than 20 drafts. The first draft of Tetradome Run, written in the summer of 2014, was a traditional dystopia set in some grim version of the future. The idea of setting it in the present, of running two parallel narratives through the novel (one played out in Jenna’s memoir), of putting a political assassination at the heart of the story, and much more, came together piece by piece in each subsequent draft.
By 2017 I had a working novel I was quite proud of, but it was 1,210 pages long! The work of the past 18 months has been transforming a 1,200 page novel into the 426-page burner you’ve just read.
All this is to say, you got quite a deal if you paid $4.99 for the Kindle version or got it for free as part of your Kindle Unlimited subscription.
If you enjoyed The Tetradome Run, I’m asking you to support me by purchasing a signed paperback from my web site as a gift for someone you know who would enjoy this book.
I sell signed paperbacks, gift-wrapped and ready for you to give to a fellow book lover, and ship them with some surprise goodies and a personal letter from me, for thirty dollars + shipping.
Go to spencerbaum.net to learn more and make a purchase.
