I concentrate on loading up my own plate, remarking at stupid length on how perfectly browned the potatoes are. Then I prop up a pillow and settle in on my side, putting my concentration on my food.
I don’t know why I’m so ill at ease, so disconnected from Otto. Worse, I keep wondering if Packard’s woken up yet, and what he’s doing, and how he feels, and I keep mulling over what he told me, the outrageousness of what he did.
I’ve decided I should definitely wait to tell Otto about us disillusionists being free agents. The kidnapping experience was hard on him; I can’t say exactly how, just that he seems less than he was. Less warm, less lively, less Otto. The last thing he needs to know is that his prisoners—and therefore his mind—might be freed more slowly. Or not at all. Who knows what the other disillusionists will do? Who knows what I’ll do?
I shake the question out of my head, telling myself I’ll worry about it later. I’ve had two near-death experiences in the last forty-eight hours, and maybe three hours of sleep. I need to recuperate, too.
From the bed, the view out the window is this panorama of the starry sky, with a crescent moon. And I’m clean and warm, and the food is delicious. I shove another potato into my mouth and chew, staring at the moon. It looks fake, like something you’d see on a greeting card. I kind of hate it.
Otto talks about Deena’s plan. He thinks she wanted to gather highcaps in one place and kill them en masse, with herself as a suicide bomber.
“I couldn’t let that happen,” he says simply, taking my hand.
“It won’t,” I say. “We’re safe.”
He doesn’t answer this; he just gazes soulfully into my eyes. “Have I thanked you lately?”
I smile. “Yes. A lot.”
Just as Packard predicted, the rescue restored things; it was the grand gesture of faith that proved my commitment to him once and for all. He trusts me again. We’re together again. It’s almost perfect. One tiny notch away from perfect.
That tiny notch means everything, though.
“I need to revitalize,” he says, letting me go to sip his Scotch.
“You want to be alone? To make your perfect cone of silence?”
“I can make a perfect cone of silence with you,” he says. “You’re like the beating of my own heart.”
I touch his arm, just above the cast, and smile. I should probably kiss him. Instead, I pull a green top off a strawberry and feed it to him. Our eyes meet. Does he sense that something’s wrong?
I pull the top off another strawberry and feed it to myself.
It’s not like I’m conflicted about Packard anymore. Clearly he’ll never stop duping me. How can I be with a man I can’t trust? I find myself wondering if he heard about the rescue.
Otto’s voice snaps me out of my reverie. “My sweet?”
I meet his gaze, feeling like he’s seeing through me. “Yes?”
“What thoughts?” he asks.
I grab another strawberry. “Just everything.”
He watches me for a spell. Then, “A woman died practically on top of you.”
“And cannibal sleepwalkers tried to eat me, too,” I say, and suddenly I just laugh. I can’t stop.
He stiffens. “What are you talking about?”
I pour another glass of wine. “It’s fine, I’m okay. Everything’s okay.” I settle back in and tell him the story of how the cannibals attacked me. I show him my bite and explain how Simon went back to reinterview the witnesses and found so many of them missing. That we suspect that Stu created new cannibals to kill them. We figured Stuart learned about Simon’s investigation and followed him straight to Ez, and likely overheard something about the descrambler, maybe planted a bug, something. “He sent sleepwalkers after the descrambler so they could get in there and kill Ez. It was him all along. Last I checked, Simon and her are at the beach. Though they’re probably not now.”
He gets very quiet. I’m guessing he feels guilty about imprisoning Ez.
I say, “In a way, it’s lucky that you had her in such a high-security prison. It saved her in the end.”
He turns to me. “You had no right to free her.”
I sit up, not believing he could mean that. “What?”
“You shouldn’t have freed her.”
I look at him like he’s crazy. “She was innocent. She was hurt. She’d been attacked.”
“Justine.” He wears a serious expression, inky brows drawn together. “You can’t randomly decide that one of my prisoners is innocent and release her.”
“It was hardly random.”
“It wasn’t your call to make.”
I sit up, outraged. “We should’ve put her back in there?”
“Yes, and alerted the police to the sleepwalkers and let them handle it.”
“She’s innocent.”
“It doesn’t matter, Justine. It’s not for the disillusionists to determine guilt or innocence. What happens if tomorrow Carter gets assigned to a high-security prisoner, receives a descrambler, and decides to use it to release him?”
“She could’ve died in there. Her old boyfriend was the psycho all along.”
“You and your friends can’t simply go around releasing my prisoners.”
I stare at him. Maybe he’s exhausted. Nobody’s at their best when they’re exhausted.
Softly he says, “The system of law and order is designed to protect everybody. One person can’t decide to change the rules.”
“She was innocent. How is the system more important than that?”
“Law and order is more important than the immediate happiness of one person.”
“Is law and order more important than the life of one person?”
“Sometimes it is, Justine.”
For a wild moment, I think I don’t know him.
“She’s innocent,” I say. “Even Packard didn’t think she looked like a mass murderer.”
“Well, if Packard says it, then it must be so.”
“He was being sincere.”
Otto glowers at the window, jaw set hard.
“Why would he make it up?” I ask.
“Packard’s reasons for doing things are clear only in hindsight. You of all people should understand that.”
I don’t answer. Nothing about Packard seems clear right now.
“How many times has he duped you, Justine?”
“Enough,” I say.
He picks at the gnocchi. “Me, too.”
I turn to him. “When did he dupe you?”
“You were there,” Otto says. “The dreams.”
“Riverside Elem? The Goyces?”
“You still don’t know?”
“That he duped you?”
He regards me carefully. “Maybe it’s time you knew. It would put a few things into perspective.”
“You don’t have to. I know you have a solemn pact.”
“No, it’s time you understood how dangerous and foolish it is to believe Packard,” he says. “It’s time you knew that Sterling Packard duped me into massacring an entire extended family. Deena’s.”
I search his face for a sign that he’s joking, exaggerating. Something. “No,” I whisper.
“You saw the bodies,” he says. “I did that. Twelve of them—all Deena’s people. I killed them.”
“Otto …”
“I didn’t know, of course. But I killed them all the same, leaving her a widow. And leaving Tim and Brucey fatherless.”
“Those were the other two Dorks?”
“You really haven’t put it together? The school, what happened?”
Dimly, I shake my head.
“They were after us. The Goyces. Joyces, I know, but I’ll always think of them as Goyces.” He heaves out a deep breath, then winces. His ribs. “Until the Goyces started coming around, life at that old abandoned school, it was good. Just us highcap kids. No adults. We thought of Packard as the adult, though he was just a kid, too. But he’d been living out in the wild for longer than anybody—practi
cally his whole life, so that made him an adult to us. Out in the wild leading a tribe of children. It had been going for years when my foster siblings and I got there. I’d run away with three foster brothers and a foster sister. We were eight, nine, ten years old, and we’d come from a terrible home—one of the few that would take in suspected highcaps, though there was never any admitting that we existed.” Otto swirls the ice in his Scotch. Is he breaking the pact? It bothers me that he might be breaking the pact.
He continues. “One of the kids at my foster home was this sweet, lovely, very powerful telepath, Fawna. The couple running the home would keep her in a cage, and beat her bloody if any of us boys used our powers or left. Ingenious really, because we all had a protective instinct where Fawna was concerned, and it made us keep each other in line, and turn on each other for the smallest infraction. They had all kinds of booby traps in place for that cage, too. But one day we figured it out. We took her and escaped to seek out Packard and the school. We’d heard the rumors.”
He’s telling me the story. Should I stop him? Packard stayed up for nearly a week to protect this pact.
“It was magical, really. Urban ruins overgrown by forest at the edge of downtown. The river. The bridges. Packard took us in—he was maybe eleven at the time we arrived.”
“Why was he outside so much longer than everyone else?”
“His dad was a thumper.” Otto studies my face. “You didn’t know that? His dad beat him?”
I shake my head, dazed at these revelations.
“Most parents of highcaps will get there eventually, but he started out with bad folks. We think he was outside before he hit six years old.”
“A six-year-old?” With a surge of pity I imagine a little redheaded boy, scared and alone.
“Story is he took up with a bunch of river rat bums who got him stealing for them. Running cons. You can imagine how successful a six-year-old of Packard’s intelligence would be at that. As he tells it, he was more or less supporting the bums. But the yoke of that chafed and eventually he left them, found the abandoned school, and set up there with telekinetic twins—One and Two, we called them. They’d never say their names aloud, these twins—they were that terrified that the big ear in the sky might hear and send them back to wherever they came from. By the time my foster siblings and I arrived, dozens of highcap kids were at the schoolhouse. Some of the kids would steal, some would scrounge, or guard, some kept us clean and dressed right so we wouldn’t attract attention out in public. We even jigged electricity off the grid, thanks to one of the telepaths befriending linemen down on the bridge, asking questions and picking the answers out of their brains.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Peter Pan Island. In some ways, at least. My job was to make force fields to keep out the bums and party teens. We had a hidden entrance at the top of the enclosed stairwell—a little hole covered by trash. The scramble hole, we called it. You could barely see it.”
I nod, thinking back to the dream.
“Bums and teens could get into the stairwell, but they’d try the chained doors, which were held fast by my force field, and they wouldn’t see the scramble hole, which was the only thing not fielded.” He nibbles at the edge of a chocolate. “The school still had books in the closets. The most popular were the travel books, with pictures of things like the pyramids and Stonehenge. We were all fascinated with Stonehenge. That’s where I got the name Henji. Short for Stonehenge. Packard thought of it.”
“Because you have power over buildings.”
“The school was a good place for a while, though it wasn’t perfect. Kids would fight. And there was this dream invader named Manly who would poach our stuff. That’s how it started, I suppose. I had this box of treasures—the usual kid stuff: mouse skull, coins, a ribbon award. Manly got in there and took the coins. One day soon after, I was manipulating the wall—the whole school was built out of cement blocks roughly the size of shoeboxes. I was fooling around in the corner, playing with my force field powers, loosening the concrete, pushing my finger in and out, and I got this notion that I could suck the box into it.”
I get a bad feeling here, thinking about the bodies in the wall. “So, you just knew you could do that?”
“It was a cross between a sense and an urge. So I set the box against the blocks and touched the wall and in it went. And then I loosened the concrete with my fingers and pulled the box out. Then I did it all over again. After that, I started hiding keepsakes and money for the other boys, in whatever parts of the wall they chose.” He gazes out the window. The moon’s moved on. “One summer—there were maybe three dozen highcap kids at the school by then—this telekinetic named Frank disappeared. We knew he hadn’t left of his own volition; he wasn’t a kid to do that. We’d thought the bums had gotten him, but Packard went to see them and looked all over and … nothing. A few days later another kid disappeared, and the next week another.”
“God.”
“We were all so frightened, Justine. Packard started us going out in pairs, but then another was gone.” His eyes look pained. From the story or his neck, it’s hard to tell. “Then one night, Fawna and Manly were coming in from something and they were just about to enter the stairwell when Fawna heard unfamiliar thoughts. She was so powerful for her age. Such an amazing little girl.” He runs his finger through the condensation of his lowball glass, making a clear diagonal line. “They hid in the bushes outside the stairwell door and waited and listened. Fawna got a great deal of intelligence on the men. They would hide inside the stairwell and get kids coming and going. We’d let down our guards in that stairwell. Enclosed, but not protected. Fawna got that the men would come out after their night of bowling—they had a family league. They’d have a few beers and come out hunting us highcap kids. Worst of all, she learned that there was a bounty of $500 on highcap children, and these guys planned to eventually take us all. She managed to warn us inside there, kept kids from coming in or out, and the guys left. She and Manly got a good look at them, and the matching league shirts with the patches that said Goyce. Or so they thought.”
“You must have been so scared.”
“Terrified.” He stares out the window. A bright star crosses the sky. A satellite. “There’d been rumors about some scientist doing vivisection experiments on highcap children. I felt sure that’s where the kids were being taken. Some thought it was a government thing, or UFOs. Packard created new safety procedures, but the next week Fawna disappeared. We were all devastated. Fawna.” He’s silent for some time.
“I’m so sorry.”
“It was the end of something, when she was taken. We were all a little bit in love with her. We didn’t know what to do. We had telekinetics hurling things at them when they came next, but it seemed to just anger the Goyces. They’d sit out there in the stairwell in a line, sitting against the wall, smoking and drinking and talking, and we’d cower in the school. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be hunted like that,” he says. “Vulnerable. Unseen by society. In some ways, this Dorks situation brought it all back. The powerlessness created by those infernal glasses. Those glasses …” He falls silent, picks a nut off a chocolate.
“Because they allowed you to be hunted again,” I say.
“Soon after, Packard wanted to talk with me. Of course, Packard knew what I could do, sucking the boxes into the wall, and he asked me if I thought I could suck people into the wall.”
My heart skips a beat. Packard.
“It had never occurred to me, but Packard wanted me to try to suck the Goyces into the wall the next time they came. He said it would be like putting them in jail. My main concern, I remember, was how they would piss.” Otto plays with the terrycloth belt of his robe. “How would they piss if they were encased in stone? Naturally, Packard had an answer—they’d piss right into the wall. And he told me that once we had all of them in there, he would personally take them to a real jail for kidnapping.” Grimly, he meets my gaze. “In hindsight, I wonder how I�
�d believed it, but we were used to Packard having the answers. Then came rabbit night. We called it that because there had been this influx of rabbits to our part of the river, so we ate a lot of rabbit, and that night everybody who hunted got several. A feast night, but after, we knew it would be a Goyce night. They were coming regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it was a Tuesday. Packard and I snuck down and hid in the scramble hole, and we waited, both so stuffed with rabbit we felt like we could barely fit in there.
“Soon enough, four Goyces came in and set up in a row along the wall, whispering and laughing. Packard nodded his head, and I pressed my hand to the wall and urged it to suck them inside. And it did. They sank into it, as if the wall was quicksand and gravity went sideways. I remember Packard’s face—that look of concentration he gets.”
I picture it precisely. That burning look. Otto may not have felt the enormity of what he was doing, but Packard would’ve.
“It was a shock to see them disappear. It felt wrong, even then. We sat there, God, it felt like forever. Then Packard climbed down into the stairwell, and he started talking, like the Goyces were alive in there. He told them how they shouldn’t kidnap children, and he would take them to see that justice was done. Whenever I’d feel strange about sucking Goyces into the wall, I’d think about that speech. Of course Packard knew I needed that as a way to fool myself. That’s the worst part of it. I knew it was wrong, Justine, but I colluded with him to manipulate myself. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” I say.
“More Goyces came the next day to look for the others. We were on the lookout, and we went down there again, and as soon as they touched the wall, I sucked them in, but one Goyce was on the other side of the stairwell, and he’d seen it. I panicked. I felt like my head might explode. Packard put his arm around me and whispered to wait. He promised me the man would touch the wall, and the man did. And I sucked him in. It happened until they stopped coming. Twelve I put in there. Twelve men and boys, and the Goyces stopped coming. And one day Packard said he brought them to jail. I asked him how he got them out, and he said he pulled them out the other side. I never wanted to question that. I wanted to believe.”
Double Cross Page 26
