by Laura Legend
She broke into a smile.
“I suppose, then,” she said, winking at him, “that we both won.”
Gary laughed nervously and nodded. “I suppose so.”
“Thank you for the memento.”
Dogen was having a hard time following the conversation.
Gary’s face burned red.
“And, uh, thank you for helping me find my daughter.”
The Oracle pulled her crystal ball back toward the center of the table.
“Yes, certainly,” she said. “It was not so long ago that your daughter herself sat in that same chair, asking for my help.”
Gary found it comforting to think that their paths had crossed that much, at least.
The Oracle lightly placed her index fingers to her temples and gazed deep into the crystal ball. The smoke inside swirled mysteriously. The lights in the room dimmed of their own accord.
After a minute of intense concentration, the she looked up at Gary.
“I’m sorry to say,” she said, “that I can’t pin down your daughter’s precise location. She is, in some way, barely on the grid and registers only sporadically as a flickering presence.”
Gary leaned forward, about to protest.
Dogen took a full step toward the table, offering his support.
“However,” the Oracle said, raising her hand to calm them, “I can say with confidence that if you find Thomas—the Thomas—then you will find your daughter. They are together.”
This news left Gary feeling both hopeful and worried. He was glad to have a way to find Cass, but he certainly didn’t trust Thomas. They had only met in passing, but Gary knew Thomas by reputation and, in particular, he knew that Thomas was the person responsible for first planting the idea in Rose’s head that the Lost could be redeemed.
And that idea had cost Rose her life.
What was Cass doing with Thomas?
Gary was afraid to find out. Whatever happened, though, he wouldn’t let history repeat itself.
The Oracle reached behind her for a sheet of paper.
“Tomorrow evening they will be at the following location—one of Judas’s old haunts.” She scrawled an address on the paper. “If you hurry, you can cross paths with them there.”
Gary stood and took the paper from her outstretched hand.
“Thank you,” he said, genuinely grateful.
His thong was riding up and he tugged at it awkwardly.
“No—thank you,” the Oracle said, and blew him a kiss.
19
CASS AND THOMAS had made it as far as Thessaloniki, Greece. Unfortunately, this still left them hours away from Corinth where, according to Thomas, they would find the materials they needed to cure Cass in Jerusalem.
Fresh off the cruise ship in Barcelona, they’d gotten lucky and hitched all the way here on a single ride. But now they’d been walking alongside the A1 with their thumbs out for hours, and no one was stopping.
The Mediterranean sun was high in the afternoon sky and Cass was baking. She was dusty and tired from the motorway—the sky was a brilliant blue, but the breezes from the Aegean Sea she’d been hoping for didn’t materialize as they inched their way south. Atlantis was limp inside of Cass’s backpack, his head lolling out the top. Cass wasn’t sure if cats could sweat but, regardless, he looked damp and greasy. Thomas, though, looked right at home. He’d been born in Greece and his deep, weathered tan looked even deeper and more natural in this light.
For Cass, the weather blinked in and out of focus. Sometimes her mind would skip to another time altogether and a winter landscape with a howling wind would cut into view. Sometimes a dark, apocalyptic version of that same landscape would superimpose itself on her view of the ordinary road stretching out in front of them. In this scene, the sky was dark and red, the road was filled with abandoned cars, and the earth was scorched. But just as abruptly as such scenes would flicker into view, they would disappear again and Cass would find herself back in the present on a dusty road with Thomas, Atlantis, and the clear, bright sky.
Throughout the afternoon, Thomas had stayed close to her side with a hand at her elbow so that, if she faltered, he could help keep her on her feet.
The cars and semis were still blowing past them at high speeds in regular intervals. It was hard not to feel like people actually sped up when they caught sight of them, as if, given the smallest sign of deceleration, Cass and company would hijack a ride.
“You may need to start showing some leg,” Cass suggested to Thomas after another spate of cars sped past. Since their progress had slowed to a crawl, Cass had felt increasingly anxious about the possibility that Red might catch up with them.
Thomas smiled in response, but kept his own counsel. Since they’d arrived in Spain he’d been unusually quiet. Cass wondered if being back in Europe had some effect on him. Surely he hadn’t been hiding out in New York—as far as he could get from the Underside—for no reason.
The sun was behind them now and it cast long, dark outlines of their forms. Cass watched her shadow bob in front of her. Whenever Atlantis poked his head out of her bag and looked over her shoulder, it looked for a moment like Cass had grown a second head with long, pointy ears.
She watched Thomas’s shadow, too. It bobbed alongside hers—though without the consistency Cass would have expected. As their shadows lengthened, Thomas’s shadow looked to Cass like it was behaving erratically and, when she wasn’t looking directly at it, it seemed to move in ways that were not in sync with his body.
Cass could tell, too, that Thomas knew she was puzzled by his shadow, but he didn’t say anything about it either.
They went another twenty minutes without any cars passing their way. When, finally, a truck roared past and still didn’t stop, Thomas took Cass by the elbow and guided her off the road toward a lonely-looking auto repair shop.
They could hear someone banging around inside the garage. The bay doors were open and music was playing. Thomas made sure that they approached the building at an angle so that they wouldn’t be visible to anyone inside. Once they reached the side of the garage, they stuck close to the wall until Thomas could poke his around the side and take a look at what the owner had in back.
There were only two cars in the back, an ‘80s era Ferrari Testarossa in mint condition and a ten year-old Toyota Corolla that looked like it had been through a war. The Ferrari was cherry red. The Toyota was beige.
Thomas pulled out his skeleton key and signaled to Cass that they were going to take one of the cars. Given their extremity and her fragile condition, Cass felt like they didn’t have much choice. In a crouch, they made their way toward the cars. Cass made a beeline for the Toyota, assuming they would take the least conspicuous choice.
Thomas, though, had other ideas. He slipped the key into the door of the Ferrari and popped the locks.
“Never ‘borrow’ things from poor people,” Thomas whispered, “only from the rich.”
“Convenient,” Cass said, pulling open the passenger side door. “But I like it.”
As she started to climb in, though, a burly Greek mechanic in coveralls came through the rear door with a bag of garbage and froze when he saw them. His face only registered surprise for a second before it cycled immediately to anger. He tossed the garbage bag aside and pulled a heavy wrench from his pocket. He glanced at Cass and her damp cat and then over at Thomas. He decided that Thomas was the real threat and headed his direction, slapping the wrench in the open palm of his free hand.
He said something in Greek that Cass didn’t follow—though she was pretty sure it had something to do with Thomas’s mother.
Thomas, as usual, appeared unfazed. He stepped back from the car and, to free up his hands, tossed his bag across the roof to Cass. The throw was right on target but Cass, flickering, lost track of it in the air and dropped it. The contents of the bag spilled out onto the ground.
The mechanic, meanwhile, couldn’t care less about Thomas’s belongings. He stepped up an
d took a swing at his head. Thomas sidestepped the blow and boxed the fellow’s ears, hard. The mechanic stumbled back. Thomas followed up with a quick, sharp blow to his solar plexus. The wrench clanged to the concrete, and the man followed.
The whole thing was over before it had really even started.
Thomas dusted off his hands and started around the car to help Cass.
Cass bent down to gather up Thomas’s things and put them back in the bag. She stuffed some clothes and sundries back in before coming across a stack of banded correspondence, yellow with age.
As soon as she saw it, she froze.
She recognized the handwriting on the front of the envelopes. It was her mother’s familiar, looping hand.
Something inside of her—the part of her that had, to this point, been urging her to trust Thomas—suffered a hairline fracture, compromising its integrity.
Did Thomas know her mother?
An emotional maelstrom—the grief of loss, the shock of recovery, and the pain of realization—that accompanied thoughts of her mother, the Heretic, threatened to break loose and overwhelm what remained of Cass’s fragile grip on the present moment.
Why hadn’t he said anything? Why was he still carrying around letters from her like a prized personal possession? Was he still in contact with her? Was he working with her, even now?
Cass didn’t know.
But she did have to make a split-second decision about what to do in response. Instinctively, she chose to stuff the letters back into the bag and act as if she’d never seen them.
By the time Thomas arrived at her side, she’d fabricated a smile and beamed at him as she handed back his bag. Thomas hefted it and thanked her.
“You ready to go?” he asked.
“Please,” Cass said, trying to bury the uncertainty in her voice.
Thomas put the Ferrari’s top down and they took to the road. The sun was starting to set now.
The wind felt amazing in Cass’s hair. Her head, though, was spinning. She didn’t need to be timesick to viscerally recall a similar ride with Miranda during a time that now seemed irredeemably lost to an inaccessible past grounded in her acceptance and trust in Miranda’s love and intentions. Cass rounded her shoulders against the wind, holding her emotions in check. Miranda’s betrayal did not mean that Thomas would do the same.
Still, Cass couldn’t help herself: every few minutes she found herself stealing glances at Thomas’s profile, wondering how much, really, she knew about him.
20
THEY FLEW DOWN the road, heading south down the A1 from Thessaloniki to their destination in Corinth. The sun was gone, and in its absence the evenly spaced highway lights were mesmerizing. Cass leaned back in her seat, looking up at the night sky and watching the lights.
Before long, she fell again into a fitful sleep, floating just beneath the surface of consciousness.
Her earlier vision with Judas and Thomas recurred, but this time with a twist.
It began the same way.
A hooded figure stepped out of the darkness.
This time, though, the hooded figure was Rose rather than Judas.
Her mother was young, probably in her mid-twenties. She was standing in the center of a narrow, dusty street in a city set on a hill. The hill sloped upward behind her. In the middle distance, the Temple Mount loomed. Cass recognized it immediately. She’d taken whole classes dedicated to exploring the history and inter-religious significance of the site. They were in Jerusalem. At present, the site was dominated by the Muslim Dome of the Rock.
Part of Cass wanted to confront her mother, to stop her in the middle of the street, shake her, and demand answers. Part of her feared that any such confrontation would lead to another scenario in which Rose pulled out a knife, or worse.
Here in the vision, Cass found that her body felt strong and her head was clear. She was ready to take action. In the end, though, caution—or fear—won out.
Cass pulled back into the shadows and watched, willing to let things play out.
Pressed against the wall of a building near an open window, Cass could smell potatoes frying inside. The smell was intoxicating. Her stomach rumbled. Why was she smelling again? If she was, in fact, both a see-er and a smell-er, perhaps tonight she could also be a taste-er? She stole a glance through the window and saw that the frying pan was unattended. She was about to reach through and steal a thin slice of salted potato when Rose started walking and turned a corner.
Shit, Cass thought. No visionary potatoes for you tonight, Jones.
Cass followed the hooded figure, winding through the narrow streets of Jerusalem’s old city until they came to the Western Wall, the last remnant of the ancient Jewish temple complex that had once sat at the heart of the city.
The square was dark. Cass hung back. Rose approached the wall and, after hesitating for a moment, reverently brushed her fingers against the stones. As Cass watched, she could easily imagine herself making the same exact gesture.
A second figure stepped from the shadows. A man. Cass couldn’t quite make out who it was.
Judas?
The man joined Rose at the wall, felt between the cracks of two stones, and pulled a hidden lever.
A secret door opened in the wall. They disappeared inside.
Cass followed the two dark figures down the twisting, descending passageway. The deeper she went, though, the more narrow the passage became. The walls felt like they were starting to close in around her. She could see a flicker of light up ahead. She was almost through but, with just a few feet to go, she felt her shoulders jam in the tight passage. Cass fought back panic at the thought that she might be trapped here. She emptied her lungs and squeezed forward. The walls let go and, with her face and arms scraped raw, she pulled herself free and into the lighted space beyond the passage.
Cass was in an enormous underground cavern filled with columns, wells, and aqueducts. The space was filled with the sound of flowing water. The wells reminded Cass of the Shield Monastery’s courtyard, but on a massively amplified scale.
Was she back in the basement of the Underside? Was she standing in the world’s central boiler room?
The figure who had accompanied Rose pulled a torch from the wall and lit it.
Cass could see now that the man wasn’t Judas—it was Thomas.
Cass pressed herself deeper into the shadows, anxious to see how this would unfold.
Thomas lit several more torches and then joined Rose beside a stone stable off to the side of the room. The table was much like the one that Cass had seen in Judas’s lab—the table on which Thomas’s own body had lain.
There was also a body on this slab. And it, too, was draped in a white sheet.
From across the room, Cass couldn’t make out their conversation, but Thomas was clearly pointing and explaining something to Rose. Occasionally, Rose would interrupt and ask a question or make an observation. Thomas would nod his head in affirmation and then continue.
In the end, though, Thomas deferred to Rose and she was the one who pulled back the sheet draping the body.
Even from here, Cass could tell that the body on the slab was Amare, an enigma in death just as much as he was in life. Or, undead life, since that was the only way Cass had ever known him.
The shadows Cass had been relying on to hide her from view grew cold and heavy. She could feel their dark tendrils starting to reach for her and curl around her arms and legs.
“No,” Cass whispered, pulling at the grasping tentacles.
But for every vine she snapped off at the root, two more snaked around her. One coiled around her neck and began to squeeze.
Cass closed her eyes and fumbled for that familiar spark of fire behind her weak eye. What she needed now was light. She clenched her jaw and flexed every muscle in her slender body, directing all of her energy toward fanning that spark into a roaring fire.
The tendril around her neck squeezed tighter.
She couldn’t take much more of that.
When Cass finally opened her eyes they shone like searchlights and her body smoked with a white light that burst through the shadows, burning them into floating embers, and freed her from their grip.
Cass fell to her knees, smoldering with light.
Nice work, Jones. You’ve still got something left in you. You’re not washed up just yet.
This light show, however, had also attracted the attention of everyone else in the room.
Rose threw back her hood and met Cass’s eyes.
But when Cass returned the look, she found that she was now looking into her own face.
She was the hooded figure.
The figure pinned Cass in place with her gaze.
“Don’t run,” she said with gentle urgency. “Don’t run. Trust him or you will never be healed.”
Then the ground shook beneath them. The torches blew out. Time flickered. And the vision crumbled again into a rolling field of distant white noise.
Cass sat bolt upright in her seat in the car. Her heart was pounding.
The car had come to stop.
Her mother’s words—her own words?—echoed in her head.
Don’t run. Trust him.
They had arrived in Corinth.
21
RICHARD HAD BEEN walking for days.
It wasn’t helping.
He was still unable to concentrate on anything real, anything substantial, beyond Cass, and Maya knew it. Oh, he would still check in with her, showing up to a meeting here, answering an email there, but before the hour was up, he’d find himself back out on the street, walking.
His path traced back and forth through the same unending blocks, as if he were pacing the length of the city itself.
If he walked enough, would he wear away the uncertainties that filled his mind? Thomas appeared to be taking Cass down through Greece. Red was guessing Corinth. Richard recalled the aqua green waters of the Mediterranean cutting through the Corinth Canal, the bright Aegean sun illuminating the remaining columns of the Temple of Apollo, and worn, rocky mountains rounding the region.
