She stopped when Simon did. Things were brightening. They were near the edge.
“Bobby looked like such a fool that night. I got a black eye and no food for two days, but it was worth it. I went back to being helpful, though. When you’re hungry and dizzy, it’s easy to lose your will. You make a good call on the next game, the next race.”
“Anybody would,” he said.
“You wouldn’t,” she said. “You would tell Bobby to fuck himself.”
He turned to her then, touched the G pin. “What’s this, if not a fuck you? And how it is you’re even here? I think you told him exactly that.”
They climbed up farther, scuttled under a chain-link fence, and found themselves on the side of a ramp. The sunshine was blinding, and cars whipped by, dangerously close.
“Yikes!” Fawna pressed her back against the fence. They were six stories up—at least. She wished there was a guardrail between them and the cars, but this place wasn’t designed for people. “How do we get down from here?”
“We don’t. You can’t walk these roads. We need a car to come get us.” He pulled out his phone and called Justine. He seemed to be having trouble explaining to her which of the curlicuing turnpike roads they were on. He described the view—the sooty buildings, the river to the North, Lake Michigan in front of them.
I think you told him exactly that, he’d said about the Packers pin.
It was a revolutionary thought. But yes, she had! And she had the strangest sensation, standing in the sun with Simon at the dangerous outer rim of the Tangle: Simon had existed forever for her, fixed in space and time. He’d always been there. And somehow, deep down, she’d always known somebody like him must exist, because his polar opposite existed: weak people who would take everything from her to make themselves strong. Bobby and the Maxxon Scientific researchers were the South Pole, and Simon was the North Pole, tall and free, and he didn’t give a crap about predictions or fate. His strength came from defying the future.
They pressed their backs against the fence as a large truck rumbled by. Exhaust plumed in their faces.
“There’s nowhere to pull over,” she said. “If any car stops, it’ll cause a crash.”
“We’ll just have to be fast.” He turned to her. “So you ditched him. You got away in the end.” He wanted her to keep on with her story.
“I saw Bobby’s future—I saw him get stabbed, and afterward living out his years half-crazy in a prison hospital. I didn’t tell him, of course. Not that he could’ve avoided it, but I didn’t want anything to delay it. And, with him in a prison hospital, I knew that it probably meant I was either free, or dead. I worked on getting free. Barrington’s maid offered to help me, but when I explored that possibility, I saw her getting killed. So I told her not to help me.”
“You can see possibilities?”
“I only see what’s a genuine possibility—there has to be some true intention toward it to create the type of momentum I can see…it’s hard to explain. If I saw every possibility in the world, it would be the same as seeing nothing at all. And I might go crazy.”
A few drivers honked warnings as they passed, unhappy to see pedestrians on a turnpike. Simon put an arm around her and she scooted close to him, playing with the silky corner of his red shirt. It felt good between her fingers. Everything about Simon felt good.
“When I started seeing Otto’s future, I felt like I needed to get out and see him. I was just so angry to be trapped there, and suddenly I didn’t care—I made another big wrong prediction just to spite Bobby. Well, he cut off my food. But by the end of four days of not eating, I felt so…strong in a way. It was weird—not eating anything, I felt strong. Whenever the bodyguard brought my broth, I knocked it away. They couldn’t make me eat. It was kind of wonderful. After a few days, I pretended to be comatose. Bobby was so scared, thinking I would die—seeing him weak and worried was awesome. I wanted to laugh in his face. For all his power, he couldn’t make me eat.”
A driver swerved when he saw them and laid on his horn.
“Then the creep brought in a doctor who owed him,” she continued. “He told the doc to stick a tube in my arm. I thought the doc was going to tell Bobby that I was faking my coma, but he played along, told Bobby I might not recover, but he’d do everything possible. As soon as we were alone, we had a talk. He guessed I wanted to escape. He had this idea to fake my death. Well, no way would I let him help me if it would get him killed. But, when I looked into his future with that possibility, I saw a little house on a tropical island with some goats running around and him, old. It turns out this doctor had this whole escape plan he was keeping secret from Bobby. We made a plan—I’d help him pull together a windfall for his new life, and he’d help me fake my death. I knew he would survive it.”
“Bobby Barrington thinks you’re dead?”
“Yeah. It was really complicated—we had to involve the hospital where the doctor had privileges, plus a nurse he knew.”
“What if Barrington finds out that you’re alive?”
She shuddered as a motorcycle thundered by. “There’d be some killing. But there’s no reason he should—I’ve been out of the media and off the radar. Barrington’s holed up at the Midas Tropicali for the season. That’s his world most of the year. Though, sometimes I freak out that I see him.”
“Is somebody doing something about this guy?”
“Packard’s got some plan to neutralize him.”
“Packard thinks he can neutralize a guy like Barrington? How? By using his awesome powers of insight to read the man like a book?”
“Packard has a plan,” she said.
“Having a plan’s not good enough. Somebody needs to destroy Barrington.”
She caught sight of Packard racing up in his big old convertible. “Speak of the devil.”
Simon frowned. “Justine was supposed to come.”
The car screeched to a stop. “Get in!” Packard said.
Simon helped her in the back seat and practically piled on top of her, shutting the door as Packard peeled out. A van behind him honked, brakes screeching.
Packard eyed them in the rearview mirror. “What happened?”
“Simon took me drag racing.” Fawna suppressed a smile, imagining what Packard must think—she and her frenemy, drag racing. “It didn’t go so well.”
“Drag racing in the Tanglelands?” Packard asked coolly.
“Through it, actually,” Simon said. “But we crashed.”
Fawna smiled at Simon. “I foresaw the crash, but—” she shrugged. “Qué será, será.”
Packard turned his head for a moment, giving Simon a cold look. “She saw a crash—and went anyway?”
Simon’s eyes twinkled. “I didn’t zing her, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Fawna smiled, feeling how much Simon enjoyed that Packard suspected he’d zinged his recklessness into her. Hell, they were so beyond that. She smiled at Simon, wanting to kiss him, and kiss the twinkle in each of his eyes, too. “I wanted to go. Very much.”
“What are you thinking here?” Packard said, eyes on Simon in the rearview mirror, as if his question was a secret code.
“I’m thinking that the lady’s been told what to do and what not to do enough for one lifetime.”
Fawna grinned. God, he was breathtaking. A dazzling, delicious ally. But more than that, her man. He was her man, and she would not let him go.
And she would not let him die.
She’d never wished she had the power to change the future as badly as right then. She could shift it in little ways—throw the fate off schedule and even buy time. But even though shifting key details sometimes altered the way things played out, the endgame almost always happened as planned. Only a profound change of heart would allow Simon to buck his fate and crack his future wide open. Inwardly, she sighed. He’d be the last person interested in that. Simon laughed in the face of fate.
Could she help him? How? She’d said she wouldn’t peek at his futu
re anymore. How could she help him without scrutinizing the details? She stared unhappily toward the front of the car. It was a few minutes before she realized the dashboard clock said it was five.
“Crap! Spanish just started!”
Packard frowned. “At the Ed Center?” She nodded. “We’ll get you there.” He shifted into a new lane and headed to a different loop of road.
“Spanish?” Simon asked.
“I’m getting my high school diploma.” She shrugged to cover her embarrassment for not having one. She would have loved to be able to go to high school; she greatly enjoyed shows about high schools on TV.
“Good for you,” Simon said.
CHAPTER FIVE
Simon climbed out of the backseat of the car, right behind Fawna, and shut the door, then he pulled her to him and kissed her. What did he care that Packard was stewing at the wheel, just a few feet behind them? He knew only that he had to kiss Fawna again.
“See ya,” she said softly. She pulled away, waved good-bye to Packard, and headed up the walk to the Midcity Adult Education Center.
It hadn’t occurred to him that she never went to school. It made him feel sad; she was so bright. So clever.
He stayed next to the car, watching her walk away. He could easily imagine her as one of those highly engaged A+ students who sat in the front of the classroom.
Once upon a time, he’d been one of those students himself. He hadn’t graduated from high school either, although he had an entirely different excuse: he was supposed to have died before his seventeenth birthday. Nobody in Midcity knew that about him.
Nobody must ever know.
Of course, his parents had wanted him to stay in school—for continuity—but when you’re a sixteen-year-old boy with three months to live, continuity is the last thing you want.
Fawna climbed the steps to the door, her crazy blonde hair shifting in the breeze. As if she felt his gaze, she turned. He waved. Slowly she raised her hand in a listless wave. A dark expression seemed to pass over her face. Was she regretting their time? Did she think he didn’t want her? Well, he wouldn’t just screw her in the Tanglelands. That’s not the kind of man he would be to her.
He would put something good on her coat.
“Get in,” Packard growled behind him.
Simon pasted on a smug smile and hopped into the passenger seat of the old boat of a convertible. Yeah, now he had Packard to deal with.
He folded his hands behind his head, letting the sun warm his face. It was good to sit. “Home, Sterling,” he said.
Packard made a U-turn, jaw set hard. The silence hardened between them. They’d never been easy together, and Simon didn’t need powers of prognostication to see that this was going to be a tedious ride, with Packard warning him to stay away from Fawna. Simon half wondered if he should start it up—the sooner the conversation began, the sooner it would be over. And nothing would change. Simon wouldn’t be leaving Fawna alone.
Packard turned to him, hair fiery red in the sun. “What exactly do you imagine is going to happen?”
“What do I imagine…?” Simon smirked. “Are you asking me for a synopsis, or do you want the Penthouse blow-by-blow description?”
Packard looked back at the road. “This is reckless, even for you.”
“Fawna’s a big girl, Packard. I promise you that she’ll greatly enjoy her stay in my evil web of debauchery, and I’ll release her unscathed.”
“I don’t know what you did back there—”
“And you won’t.” Simon sighed contentedly. “So, I understand that you used to have long hair like a girl, and that you were quite the sensitive woodland warrior. Fawna made you sound like some sort of pre-teen elfin king with flowing copper tresses. I want you to know that’s how I’ll think of you from now on.”
Silence. There was a certain wry twist to Packard’s lips. Humorous, even. It was never a good thing when Packard looked like that. Especially after being insulted.
Then Packard said, “She’s different, you know.”
“I know,” Simon said.
Packard shook his head. “I meant, she’s different now. Today, as opposed to yesterday. She’s more comfortable in her own skin than I’ve seen her since her return. She came into something with you, Simon. She came into her own—I don’t know what you did to make her feel okay like that…”
Simon fought back the jubilant smile that wanted to take over his face. It made him so happy to hear this, just stupidly happy. He tamped down the feelings. “Maybe it’s my magic wong. Does wonders for the ladies.”
“You really aren’t getting where this leads, are you?” Packard slid his gaze back to Simon. “Do you think she won’t look? Do you think she hasn’t?”
He stiffened. What had Packard guessed? Packard’s highcap power of psychological-insight-hoodoo sometimes let him guess all sorts of things that he shouldn’t know.
And had Fawna looked? She couldn’t have, he thought. And she must never. But this horrible little feeling blossomed in him now, something like hopelessness. “What the hell do I care?”
Packard drove on without comment.
“She has no business in my future,” Simon said. “And I don’t care to know it. And she knows that.”
“Don’t care to know it,” Packard repeated, breezily, mockingly. “Ah yes. You simply don’t care. Don’t care to know it.”
“That’s right.”
Packard turned his gaze upon him, that oddly bright gaze, seeing too much.
“What?” Simon barked.
“Only a doomed man fights fate.”
Simon felt sick. “Doomed?” he snorted. No way did Packard know. Packard wasn’t a mind reader, just a good guesser. “Doomed,” Simon repeated, now with gusto. “I’m a doomed man. That’s so ultra of you, Packard. So punk rock.”
Packard tipped his head slightly. A head shrug.
Simon watched the road ahead. “We’re all doomed, my friend. Hardly need a fortune-teller for that.” No way did Packard know what the doctors said all those years ago. He couldn’t know how Simon was fighting, how he’d stayed out of fate’s grasp.
“You sing a brave song in the dark, my friend.”
“A song? Please.” He’d been prepared for Packard to rail against him. Packard always railed against him. But not this—this compassion. Compassion was the last thing he wanted. Simon snorted. “I have no use for fate. That’s something your precious—and might I say hot—little prognosticator and I happen to have in common. We both have no use for it. We both reject it.”
“She’s not up to what you’re up to.”
“Maybe. What do I care? And she says she won’t look.”
“You believe her? Like Pandora? Like Bluebeard’s wife? Like Eve?”
“Eve?” Simon said. “Really, what would Justine say about these comparisons of yours?”
“I want you to let me give you some advice,” Packard said.
“Oh, boy.”
“You need to be okay with her looking. With her knowing.”
“If she wants to be with me, she doesn’t look,” Simon said.
“If she doesn’t look, she’s not really with you.”
With. Such a funny word. Packard had no idea know how with him Fawna had been. She had been with him in the trenches, wanting and needing to defy destiny as much as he had. It had meant everything to him that they’d been together in that. No longer alone.
“You should tell her the truth about yourself,” Packard said. “You don’t need to tell me—it’s not my business—but Fawna needs to know the truth.”
“There’s no truth to tell. Why tell her something that I don’t accept myself?”
“If you don’t accept it, then why not?”
Simon sat back. “Touché.”
“Sometimes,” Packard said, “having nothing to lose is something to lose.”
Simon clapped, slowly. “Sterling Packard, folks. You should put up a tent at the Tandy Folly. You could get a lot of quarters wi
th these pearls of wisdom.”
“I probably could,” Packard said.
“I won’t have her look at me like that. It would just…”
“Make it more real?”
Yes.
Simon knew that, to an outsider, he existed as something of a bull in the china shop of life. In truth, his was a strange dance of bargain, superstition, and singing in the dark—singing so bravely and so loudly that it banished the darkness. Packard was right about that part.
“You can let her affect you. You can let her in, Simon.”
“Your new life is making you sound like a Hallmark card.” Even as he said it, Simon realized that he’d already let her in, let her affect him. A day ago, he would never have hid from a Tanglelands gang. If he’d used that sonic blending technique at all, it would’ve been as a way to surprise his pursuers. But something had changed: he’d thought about what would happen to Fawna if he’d been killed in the Tanglelands. The opposite of letting the chips fall where they may, as he liked to say. There was a place for her now. It was reckless. Neo-reckless.
But he must never see his doom in her eyes. The look in people’s eyes when they knew, it made everything more real. It added fuel to his condition.
“Ponder it, Simon.”
“I’d prefer to ponder Bobby Barrington,” Simon said. “Ideally with some big guns.”
“Leave Barrington to me,” Packard growled.
“Do you even know how to get close to him? Do you understand that you can’t simply walk up to a man like that?”
“I’ll handle Bobby.”
Simon slid his gaze to Packard. Sure, Packard could take one look at Bobby and understand everything about him.
But Simon understood Bobby’s world.
At home, Simon changed out of his dirty Tanglelands clothes and settled into his favorite chair with a dusty Spanish dictionary, thinking to brush up on a few words and phrases—proper ones, not the curses and gambling slang he knew. Maybe he and Fawna could have a little conversation.
Later, he practiced a few lines while he made himself a burger with bacon bits, not at all heart healthy. He even hated the phrase “heart-healthy.”
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