by Scott Meyer
Phillip turned to Martin and said, “You think so, huh?”
Martin replied, “It’s a theory.”
Just then, Nik rounded the corner from the kitchen, calling out, “Okay, who’s thirsty?” When he saw Brit and Phillip’s condition, he nearly dropped his tray of drinks.
Phillip and Martin teleported back to their room so Phillip could clean himself up. Brit used the time to make herself look and feel more human. Twenty minutes later they reconvened in Brit’s living room to compare notes.
Brit and Phillip described how they had heard the same hollow popping noise when the submersible imploded that they’d heard before the two statues fell. Gwen and Martin talked about their inspection of the statue base and their belief that both statues had been brought down deliberately.
“What I don’t get,” Martin mused, “is why anyone would want to kill you in the first place, Brit.”
Brit smiled. “Thanks, Martin. I appreciate that.”
“I mean,” Martin continued, “Brit the Elder being here proves that you survive to be her, so any attempt to kill you is doomed to failure. Am I right?”
Brit looked long and hard at Martin, then said, “Is that the only reason you can think of not to kill me?”
Phillip quickly added, “Besides, it’s not really true.” He went on to give Gwen and Martin a quick synopsis of his idea regarding Brit the Elder’s existence, and Brit the Younger’s killability.
Martin thought for a moment, then asked, “Is killability even a word?”
Phillip said, “If I use it, and you know what it means, it a word. Also, it’s fun to say. Killability. Killability. It rolls nicely.”
“I don’t know,” Martin continued. “It’s not very elegant.”
“The word is killability. Who cares?”
“No, not the word. Well, not just the word. Your idea, too. It’s inelegant.”
“Reality is inelegant,” Phillip huffed.
“No,” Martin said definitively. “Reality is stunningly elegant. Our understanding of it is not.”
“Martin, we’re not going to have this argument again.”
“We never have this argument. Every time we start to, you get mad and start shouting.”
Phillip’s face began to turn red. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said, ‘we’re not going to have this argument again.’ I should have said, ‘again, we are not going to have this argument.’ Maybe you’d think that was more elegant.”
Brit turned to Gwen and said, “I can see why you enjoyed hanging around with these guys. It’s entertaining in its way.”
“Yes,” Gwen agreed, “but as usual, it isn’t really getting us anywhere. Guys, arguments about Brit’s killability . . . oh, that is fun.”
Phillip smiled, and said, “I know, right?” Brit did not smile.
Gwen continued. “Maybe Brit can be killed, maybe she can’t. Either way, Phillip can be killed, and he nearly was. Whoever it is who’s trying to take Brit out could easily kill someone else in the process. We have to stop them, and that means figuring out who it is.”
Brit said, “We know it’s someone with powers. Gunpowder won’t be invented until hundreds of years from now, and even if it were, it would take a heap of the stuff to bring down one of those statues, let alone to put a hole in my diamond sphere.”
“Agreed,” Gwen said. “Of course, this would happen during the one time that we have magic users from all over the world visiting. That won’t make it easier to narrow things down.”
“Who has the most to gain?” Martin asked. “Brit, if you were out of the picture, who’d benefit most?”
“Nobody,” Brit said. “I’m completely unimportant.”
Gwen said, “Brit, that’s not true.”
Brit waved her off. “Yes it is. Brit the Elder has all of the power. I get it. She’s the one who’s done everything. I’m just the one who’s going to do everything, and in the end, what’s that worth? Really, I’m only in the council of three to break ties.”
“But you are on the council,” Martin said. “Maybe someone wants you off. Maybe, maybe . . . maybe they want you and Brit the Elder both off of the council, and they think that if they kill you, it’ll take her out too. Two birds with one stone.”
Phillip said, “Martin, there are only two options. Either their fates are tied together, or they aren’t. If they are, and someone kills Brit here, then she never goes on to build Atlantis, none of this ever happens, and whoever it is who thinks they’re going to gain something most likely loses everything. If, on the other hand, their fates aren’t joined, then whoever kills Brit will find that the only change they’ve created is that the most powerful woman in Atlantis is furious at them for killing her younger self and giving her an identity crisis. Either way, it’s a stupid plan.”
Martin shrugged. “Then maybe the murderer is stupid.”
“Attempted murderer,” Brit corrected. “They haven’t succeeded at anything yet.”
“Which proves my point,” Martin said.
Gwen said, “Martin, you said we should look at the person who has most to gain. Well, that’s Ida, the president. With both Brits gone, she’d be the only council member left. But, she’s not stupid.”
“Are you sure?” Martin asked.
Both Gwen and Brit nodded. “We both voted for Ida. We wouldn’t vote for someone we thought might be stupid.”
Martin accepted this, and the room fell into a sullen silence.
Eventually Gwen said, “Whoever it is, either they’ll give up, which is good, or they’ll try again, and that’ll be a chance to catch them. Either way, I think the logical next step is to go tell Brit the Elder what’s going on.”
“Why?” Brit asked. “Shouldn’t she already know? Having someone try to kill you is pretty memorable. You’d think she’d recall who did it, how many more times they’ll try, and how they’re stopped.”
Phillip said, “Gwen’s right, and so are you. Either she doesn’t know, and we need to tell her, or she does know, and we need to ask her what happens next.”
“No,” Brit said flatly. “I don’t want her to have the satisfaction of knowing that I came to her for help.”
Martin asked, “And if you don’t, you’re okay with having her remembering that you risked your life rather than ask her for help?”
“Yes,” Brit said. “I’m fine with that, because that gives me satisfaction.”
Gwen said, “Brit, if your life might be in danger, and we knew about it, wouldn’t you want us to tell you?”
“You know it,” Brit said.
Gwen said, “And that’s why we have to tell her. Because she is you.” Gwen tried not to look triumphant as she said it.
Brit replied, “Then you have warned her, just now, when you told me.” Brit made a deliberate effort to look triumphant as she said it. She looked at the faces of the other three people. She could tell she had lost the argument, but that didn’t mean she had to act defeated. “Fine,” she said, “we’ll warn her, but it’s not going to be me who does it. One of you three is going to have to go deal with her. Who’s it gonna be?”
While Gwen, Phillip, and Martin all agreed that Brit the Elder needed to be warned, none of them was particularly eager to volunteer to do it in front of Brit the Younger. She clearly had issues with Brit the Elder and might take them out on anyone who seemed to be Elder-friendly. Gwen was her friend and didn’t want to seem disloyal. Phillip was beginning to harbor hopes of becoming something more than her friend, and especially didn’t want to seem disloyal. Martin had a life-long aversion to offending angry women. The three of them stared at each other, mute with indecision, until, mercifully, the doorbell rang.
Nik speedwalked across the room, saying, “Don’t get up. I’ll get that. You keep having your very serious discussion that I was definitely not listening to.”
Brit the Younger rose to her feet and asked, “Why? What for?”
The guard stated, “He is to meet with Brit the Elder.”
Brit the Younger glared at Phillip, who looked uneasily back at her. Martin smiled broadly and said, “Say, that’s convenient.” Ampyx studied Martin, filing this away for later.
16.
The heat was unbearable.
Agent Miller tried to get his mind off of the heat by focusing on the noise, which was deafening.
After a few minutes of this, he tried to distract himself from the noise by focusing on his motion sickness, which threatened to make him throw up at any moment. In an effort to alleviate this he crawled closer to the open door of the unrefrigerated boxcar in which he was riding. Maybe if I look at the horizon, I won’t be sick. That’s supposed to help. Besides, it’s cooler there because of the wind.
He crawled as close to the door as he dared. Close enough to feel that the wind was still unnervingly strong and gusty, and to see that the train was still cutting along the side of a mountain, so that the door of the boxcar opened to a life-ending drop. Not a straight drop. There was a painful-looking gravel berm just wide enough for him to bounce off before he fell over the side to his certain death. His innate fear of heights, and his lack of any decent footing, drove Agent Miller clambering back into the dark corner of the boxcar where it was safe, hot, and loud.
“I hate this,” he shouted.
“What?” Jimmy shouted back. It would have been hard enough to hear each other if they had only had the train noise to contend with, but because of Jimmy’s weird effect on electronic devices, they’d had to find a train going from Seattle to Los Angeles that had three non-refrigerated boxcars in a row that weren’t transporting any sort of electronic devices, and in which the middle car had room for three adults to live for the three days the trip was going to take. That left them with a field of one car to choose from, this car, which was transporting tens of thousands of squeaky, bone-shaped rubber dog toys, manufactured in China, shipped by freighter to Seattle, now headed to a big box pet supply chain’s distribution center in southern California.
For now the squeaky bones were held in large cardboard boxes that completely filled the interior of the box car to a depth of six feet, leaving them four feet of living space on the top. Not that they could stand on the loosely packed boxes anyway.
The agents and their charge had taped several of the boxes to each other and to the walls so that they could have the door of the boxcar open a bit and not be worried about the cargo falling out unexpectedly and taking one or all of them with it. Still, the three men had to live in a moving, rattling, cacophonous metal box, while lying, sitting, crawling, and involuntarily bouncing on a bed of cardboard and thousands of squeaky toys. The din was constant, but not consistent enough to become white noise. Any bump or shimmy on the part of the train, or shift in weight on the part of the men inside the car, caused a spike in the volume of the squeaking.
Miller envied his partner, Agent Murphy. At least he had a means of taking an occasional break. Twice a day they had to check in with their supervisor, but cell phones didn’t work if they were too close to Jimmy and his magnetic field. Being trapped inside a steel box with him didn’t make the cell phone work any better, so in order to check in, all Agent Murphy (who had no fear of heights, unlike Agent Miller) had to do was swing himself out of the open door of the shaking boxcar, grab the ladder that was just within reach, climb up to the roof of the moving train, and make his way far enough away from Jimmy that his phone would work. This meant walking toward the back of the train and jumping to the next boxcar back. Two cars in front of them was an open bin of some foul-smelling material Miller suspected was used in the manufacture of fertilizer.
Miller carefully crawled toward Jimmy, who was lying back on several partially mashed, squeaking boxes as if they were a deluxe bed in the most expensive suite at the finest hotel. Jimmy was wearing his suit pants and a Seattle PD T-shirt. He had his suit jacket folded and tucked under his head like a pillow.
It took great care to move around, not only because the unreliability of the surface made it hard to find footing, but also because it was very easy to carelessly put your weight on one of the seams between the boxes of squeaky toys, meaning that you could be crawling along without a care in the world, then trust your weight to the wrong spot and instantly find yourself falling head first between the boxes all the way down to the splintery plywood floor. If that happened, you’d have to crawl your way up, like a man buried alive, to the surface of your squeaking, cardboard-scented grave.
Miller finally reached Jimmy. He put his head right up to Jimmy’s ear and shouted, “I hate this!”
Jimmy smiled and shouted back, “I know!”
“How can you look so happy?” Miller asked.
“Try being a middle-aged white man, riding a bicycle through Nicaragua. This is luxury.”
Agent Miller put his mouth right up to Jimmy’s ear and yelled, “I feel like I’m going to be sick!”
Jimmy replied, “Please don’t do it while shouting in my ear.”
Miller said, “I should be so lucky,” and carefully slunk back to his corner of the boxcar. He could have stayed where he was, next to Jimmy, but the fact was he wanted as much distance between them as possible. Miller had begun to regret having ever laid eyes on the old coot.
Miller thought back to his life before meeting Jimmy. He was half of a two-man task force, assigned to investigate and possibly solve a series of possibly connected impossible occurrences that were possibly crimes. They had spent years chasing promising leads and had always come up empty-handed. At the time it was frustrating, but in retrospect seemed like some kind of golden age. They never enjoyed returning to their office empty handed, but now they were returning home with their hands full of Jimmy, and it was just as unsavory as it sounded.
Their original plan was to stay in Seattle. They would question Jimmy and decide if he was a crackpot or if he was on the level. Either way they’d get the information they needed and get back to Los Angeles, tout suite. Unfortunately, Jimmy proved to be both a crackpot and on the level, and instead of just answering their questions, he needed to demonstrate his point, and he had a whole list of weird household items he needed before he could stage his demonstration.
It was like trying to interrogate Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Most of the items on the list had been easy. Things like kite string, binoculars, a large scented candle—things you could get at any department store. The problem had been the last item: a room at least forty feet in length with a clear line of sight. The Seattle Police Department had no such room in their headquarters, or at least had none that they were willing to hand over to Miller and Murphy. The SPD had started to tire of the two Treasury agents, their weird informant, and the rash of unexplained electronic malfunctions that followed him wherever he went.
Murphy had tried to find another facility in Seattle that met Jimmy’s specifications, but they all suffered from the same flaw: they cost money to rent, and there was no way the Treasury Department was going to spend money when it had several storage facilities and garages in Los Angeles. Murphy pointed out that transporting Jimmy to California would cost money, but their supervisor pointed out that it would actually be pretty cheap, since, as Murphy himself said, taking an airline flight home was impossible anyway.
They quickly researched several possible ways to get Jimmy to L.A. without his magnetic field killing anyone. They considered renting the bi
ggest truck they could and having him ride in the back, but his field would affect any car that tried to pass. They tried to talk their supervisor into renting an antique airplane, but any modern avionics would be useless, risking their safety, and worse, it would cost money. In the end, the boxcar was the only option. Since it is not actually legal to transport humans in a boxcar for any price, the agents had to sneak onto the train with Jimmy, and were now officially hobos, which cost nothing but their dignity, the one resource the Treasury Department was happy to squander with wild abandon.
Murphy and Miller found a train that suited their purpose, then happily checked out of their room at the cheapest hotel in the SeaTac Airport district. Their boss had gotten a substantial discount by renting their room on a nightly basis, instead of the usual hourly rate plan. They then had to transport Jimmy from the police headquarters to the rail yard, and they couldn’t use any car that employed an integrated circuit, because Jimmy would render it inoperable. In the end, an officer was able to loan them his early-seventies Cadillac, which was barely operable to begin with. They transported Jimmy in the dead of night to minimize any effect he might have on traffic. The stealthy, cloak-and-dagger feel of the operation was spoiled by the Cadillac’s faulty wiring, which caused the horn to honk in time with the left turn signal.
Agent Miller leaned back into the boxes and a miasma of self-pity. Maybe if I lie on my back, he thought, I’ll fall asleep, then throw up, and aspirate on my own sick. Then my body will slide between these cursed boxes and slowly sink down into squeaky oblivion.
He fantasized about this for a while, then his backbone reasserted itself. No, he thought, without me here, Murphy will just be kind to Jimmy, and I can’t allow that to happen, not after all of this.
Miller forced himself to look out the door of the train. He watched the world pass, fast enough to keep him motion sick, but slow enough to give him no hope of arriving at his destination any time soon. After a few moments, he saw a single hand swing in from beyond the door and clutch at its frame, knuckles white with exertion. Miller and Jimmy both scrambled as quickly as they dared toward the door. They had been traveling for nearly two days. This was the fourth time Murphy had made the transition from clinging to the side of the car to sitting inside, and it had already become routine. It was still utterly terrifying for everyone involved, but the terror was part of the routine, just one more item on the checklist.
