“Hey,” I finally yelled. “You know how to travel in time?”
“Not really,” he said. And then, because that was clearly a lie, he added, “It’s complicated.”
“Complicated,” I whispered. By now I’d started to wonder if Touch’s reasons for not talking about his past—not to mention what all he was doing here—were just a mite too convenient. “That ring,” I said. At some point Touch had picked it up off the seat and put it back in his pocket. “It’s some kind of time travel machine?”
“Some kind,” Touch admitted, though I could tell he didn’t want to.
“Listen,” I said. “Listen. If that thing works. If you can travel in time…”
“I can’t,” he said quickly, sounding harsher than I’d heard him.
I sucked in my breath and tried to focus on the road. No matter what he said, I knew that golden ring could help me travel through time. I’d seen it with my own eyes, felt it with my own body. And if I could travel through time? That meant I could go back to Jackson, before I’d hurt Wendy Lee. Better yet I could go back to Caldecott County and stay away from Cody. Hell, I could go all the way back to the hippy commune and stop Mama and Daddy from trying to get to the Far Banks!
Touch must’ve been able to read the excitement building in my face. “Anna Marie,” he said, and then he corrected himself. “Rogue. It’s not like that.”
“What?” I said. “Can you only go forward and not back? Is that it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean I do know, but not exactly. That’s why I didn’t take us any farther than a couple hours.”
He took a deep shuddery breath. Then he put his hat back on and turned the heat up. I didn’t stop him. I didn’t even take my own hat off, though I was starting to sweat. Better to be uncomfortable than to risk not getting his explanation.
“You see,” he said, “back home, I work for… I don’t know what you’d call it here, but I work for, what we think of as…”
“The government?” I said.
He shook his head. “No. Not exactly. We think of it more as one whole. Arcadia, you might call it. A simple and peaceful place, where everyone has enough. Everyone fulfills his or her purpose. I come up with ways to travel. Our world is small. Very, very small, at least in terms of landmass. Like I told you, we’re mostly water. Salt water. So I invent ways to travel on the water, and underneath the water, and sometimes to other planets. To get more resources.”
“And also through time,” I said. As I said it, for some reason, I felt newly afraid.
“Well, yes,” he said. “But that’s new. Not the concept of course—that dates back to our earliest poetry and fiction. But no one’s ever done it before. I’ve been developing this device, and I brought it with me so it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands.” He rolled his eyes, like he wanted to communicate exactly what was going on but didn’t know how. “The thing is,” he said, “we shouldn’t talk about it. There are certain ideas, certain key words, that will lead them to us. Even in your language.”
“OK,” I said, and then added, “Just let me ask one question.”
His face looked hard, but he nodded.
“If Arcadia is so peaceful, what’s with those guys blowing up cars?”
“They don’t work for Arcadia.”
“But you do.”
“Yes.”
“You came here,” I said, “working for Arcadia. And now those bad guys, the ones who don’t work for Arcadia, want you to go back. Right? They don’t want to kill you, but they want you back.”
“Yes,” he said. “At least for now. Eventually they might content themselves with killing me. But at the moment they want to bring me back.”
“But you don’t want to go back.”
He paused for a minute. “Let’s just say I don’t want to go back with them.”
“So how come it seemed like they were chasing me instead of you?”
He paused for the barest second, long enough for me to suspect that he might be putting together an answer for me. Then he said, “They brought firepower of their own. But I’ve got firepower, too. You don’t. Maybe they thought if they caught you, I’d surrender.”
“You made them slow down like that? You made it so they couldn’t do that dematerializing thing twice?”
“Yes,” he said.
I reached over and put my gloved hand on his shoulder. He jumped, like that surprised him a little. “Sorry,” I said, drawing my hand back. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just… I’m glad you’re here. With me.”
“Even though I might get you killed?”
I thought, Just let them try. Touch had this most worried look on his face, all scrunched up between his eyes. He had a little more color to him, but still looked pale.
“Can I see the ring?” I asked.
I expected him to say no, but he reached into his inside pocket and pulled it out. It looked very ordinary, not even particularly shiny. Touch stared down at it in his hands, like he didn’t know whether to be proud of it or chuck it out the window of the moving car. “We’ll hold on to it,” he said, as if he was making the decision then and there. “I don’t want to risk using it unless it’s an emergency. Unless there’s no choice.”
“Hey,” I said. “Hey, Touch.”
“Yes, Rogue?” For the first time today he sounded kind of relaxed, kind of jokey. Like his old self.
“You don’t have to worry about those men coming to get you. Know why?”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause I’m here to protect you. Remember those guys in West Virginia? All I need’s a baseball bat.”
He smiled and nodded. In his head this was just a little joke, a flirty way of comforting him. Still, I could tell, it moved him all the same.
Except to stop for gas and switch off driving a time or two, we drove straight through till the sky got dark again. All of a sudden Touch seemed to know where he was going. Not the names of the states or anything so specific as that. But he sure had become aware of the direction he wanted to go. “West,” he kept saying. “Head west.”
Much to Touch’s relief, I’m sure, we drove back down into the sultry heat of Missouri, and made it almost all the way to Oklahoma. I wanted to figure out a way to slow down, to see some sights. Hell, to just go to a zoo or something! At least I’d seen that famous arc, driving through St. Louis, which I’d only ever seen in pictures. I pointed it out to Touch, and he’d perked up because I was so excited, but I could tell he wasn’t particularly impressed.
We parked at a McDonald’s just outside of Joplin and sat in the dark of the parking lot. Touch reached into his pocket and pulled out the blue ball of light whose special power was emptying out ATMs and making doorways disappear. I wondered what all else it would be able to do by the time we were done with it.
“The truth is,” he said, “I should get rid of this, and the time travel ring. I’d hoped getting rid of the translator would be enough. But obviously it wasn’t. And now this has absorbed one of their weapons.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
He shrugged. “I have no way of knowing what sort of advances they’re making when they’re not here.”
“But listen,” I said, “you already said you can’t get rid of the time travel ring in case of an emergency. It’s your last resort. A person on the run doesn’t just toss his last resort. And as long as they can track you through the ball, you might as well hold on to the ring.”
I reached out to put my hand over that swirling blue/orange ball. Touch stared at it a minute. Then he moved his hand over it, like that helped him figure something out. He closed his fist around it for a minute, and when he uncurled his fingers it was two balls again—the blue and the orange.
“Wow,” I said. “You’re like a magician.”
He pushed the blue ball back into the inside pocket. Then he handed me the orange one. It made me feel uncomfortable holding something that could make cars and doors crumble. As it was, I
started out with enough destructive power on my person.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked.
Touch said, “Flush it.”
He waited in the car while I went inside. In the bathroom that orange ball traveled through the eddy like some kind of supersonic toilet bowl cleaner. I expected the whole bowl to light up and maybe even disappear when the ball went down, but it didn’t.
At the sink I splashed my face with water and stared hard into my own strange eyes. The rare moments I got away from Touch, all these doubts would come flooding over me about the various things he’d said, the way some of his explanations just didn’t add up. I grabbed a paper towel and dabbed at my face. The paper felt hard and crackly. Probably my suspicions came from having Wendy Lee inside me, on account of her sorry history with so many sorry men—starting with that husband who seemed like he loved her and then jumped ship.
Back inside the Prius, I handed Touch a carton of fries and a Filet-O-Fish sandwich. That’s what Cody always liked to order at McDonald’s.
“Were you kind of rich, where you come from?” I asked. I bit into a fry, hoping I didn’t sound like I’d mind if the answer was yes.
Touch sighed. “You know what?” he said. “I’m a little spent from talking about it all so much. Do you mind if we give it a rest? At least until tomorrow.”
The orange ball was gone. Although clearly we were not in a position to get rid of that blue ball, we decided it was best to budget so we wouldn’t have to use it for a while. So after Joplin we just kept on going, taking turns sleeping while the other one drove, and using the cash we had to buy gas. Truthfully the cash in Touch’s pocket was more than I’d ever seen in one place in my entire life. This might not be saying much, but I figured it would keep us a good long while. In the light of day we could count our money, and then maybe buy a tent somewhere in town. Couple hundred dollars for a tent would save us a whole lot of money on hotel rooms. We could head into the wilderness and camp out for a few days, think about what our strategy should be.
Touch liked my idea of camping out. He thought maybe we’d be harder to trace the farther we got from civilization, and the less electricity that surrounded us. “It’s obvious that they haven’t put together any kind of command center here,” he said. “They’re operating from my world, which means they have more information than I do, and more resources. But it also means they’re tracking across a great distance. There are enough variables to make it difficult. Not impossible, obviously, but difficult, as long as we keep moving.”
By the time businesses started opening their doors, Touch and I had driven well through the night, all the way to Pueblo, Colorado. Now I was seeing something that looked a whole lot different than Mississippi. It wasn’t as green for one thing, and for another, the mountains! I had never seen anything close to these kinds of mountains, looming up so high, all snowcapped even in summertime. Touch looked plenty impressed, too.
“Have you ever seen anything so pretty in all your life?” I said.
He looked over at me and smiled. “Not until lately,” he said, and my heart did this little somersault. Then he looked back out the car window. “Actually,” he said, “those mountains remind me of home. Minus the snow.”
“Must be pretty there,” I said, and he nodded.
We drove up and down the main street a ways and couldn’t find an outdoor store, so we went to Walmart. In the parking lot we counted out what money we had left—a little more than two thousand dollars.
“Is that a lot?” Touch asked.
“Small fortune,” I said. “We have to give up the fancy hotels, that’s all. And right here’s the right place to shop.”
We loaded up our cart with a tent and a lantern, some sleeping bags, a cooler, and a bunch of food. I tossed a few artificial logs in there, too, since I never had been much good at making fires. As we passed the book section, I grabbed an atlas, which would come in handy—so far I’d just been zigzagging from one road to another, hoping for the best.
“Look,” I said to Touch, standing in the checkout line. There’d been a whole mess of motorcycles in the parking lot, and the entire store was swarming with people wearing leather, so the two of us didn’t draw as many stares as usual. “We can go here,” I said, placing my finger on a big green spot that said SAND DUNES NATIONAL MONUMENT.
He looked real hard, like he wasn’t sure, so I said, “It’s west of here.”
“Fine with me,” he said, with a little shrug.
Sometimes being with Touch reminded me of my first days on the run from Caldecott County. I remembered how lost I’d felt, almost like I was in a daze. I cared about what happened to Cody, and I hardly cared at all what happened to me. At the same time I felt so scared about what the future held. All those feelings kind of butted up against one another, so it was like I didn’t have any feelings at all. I just went numb. Almost like I’d become an animal, I only thought of living one minute to the next. Touch seemed like that, almost like he’d stopped caring about everything but the most basic survival. The only time he didn’t seem like that was when he took a moment to look straight at me.
Touch took the wheel driving out of Pueblo so I could navigate—he said they didn’t have maps like this where he came from, so he didn’t know how to read one.
“Toto,” I said, as we drove up the long dirt road into the national park, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Mississippi anymore.”
Touch looked over at me like I’d gone and changed his name again. “It’s an expression,” I said. “From a movie.”
Clearly they didn’t have movies where he came from, because he got that quizzical look, with a line between his eyes. Suddenly I got to wondering exactly how old he was.
“So how old are you, anyway?” I said.
“Twenty-five,” he said. “And how about you?”
“Eighteen,” I said. “But shouldn’t you know that? How’d you know my name, anyway, before I’d even told you?”
He laughed. “Nothing mystical,” he said. “And I didn’t use any otherworldly technology, either. I just went into the bakery and asked about you.”
My heart sank. That made one more of us the police would have a description of.
“Look,” Touch said. He rolled down his window. The land here was like nothing I’d ever seen in my life—rolling hills made up all of sand, surrounded by grassy meadows, and in the distance, those tall, rocky, snowcapped mountains. Just behind the road, in a wide and grassy meadow, about a hundred little creatures munched under the hot sun. They looked like deer, but they were smaller, more delicate, with little horns and white fur mixed in with pale fawn.
“Fleetdeer,” Touch said. “We have them where I come from.”
“You do?” I stopped the car. There was no one behind us, and I’d never seen such pretty animals before. A mile or so back we’d passed a sign that said PRONGHORN ANTELOPE CROSSING, so I figured that’s what we called them here. I didn’t mention that, though. Instead I said, “It’s weird, thinking about this whole other planet that’s so much like ours. How far away is it, anyway?”
Touch frowned like this was something else he didn’t want to talk about. I’d noticed lately that he’d stopped saying “planet” altogether. Instead he’d say “world,” or “where I come from.” Sometimes I had the feeling he wasn’t giving me anything close to the whole picture, and not necessarily for the reason he’d given me—that talking about it would summon his enemies.
“It’s really far,” he finally said, which didn’t seem like a very scientific answer, but I decided to let it go. It wasn’t exactly like I was telling him everything there was to know about me, either.
We set up camp a ways past the family campground, which was mostly empty. I realized that by now it was late enough in August that kids had started getting ready to go back to school. This worked out well for us—not so many vacationers to take notice of us. I channeled Cody’s old Boy Scout days and put up our tent. We’d splurged
and bought a four-person Coleman. That way I’d be able to set up some sort of barrier with pillows and maybe even the cooler, so Touch wouldn’t accidentally roll into me during the night. Of course I’d zip myself tight into my sleeping bag, too, but I couldn’t be too careful. The smartest thing would’ve been to buy two one-person tents, but I had to admit, I’d started relying on all this togetherness. I might not be able to actually touch him, skin to skin. But at least we could share the same oxygen.
While Touch walked around investigating the place, I laid out our sleeping bags in the tent. Later on I’d work on that barrier, but for now I liked the look of the two of them, lying there side by side.
Outside of the tent, it was fun just kind of bustling around—finding a place for the cooler and throwing an artificial log on the fire pit. I walked around collecting real logs and kindling, too, feeling like I was getting a little house in order for the two of us.
Touch came around the corner, dragging a pair of sleds. Now, we don’t do a whole lot of sledding in southern Mississippi, but of course I knew what they were from pictures and movies and such. A blue sled and a red one. Touch handed me the rope for the blue one.
“I found these in one of the empty campsites,” he said. Then he turned around and started trudging up toward the top of the nearest sand dune. I stood watching him a minute, then when I figured out what all he had in mind I trotted on after him, dragging my little blue sled behind me.
As a kid I used to dream of snow and all that I’d do if I ever got to it. Of course one of those dreams was sledding. Touch and I set our sleds at the very top of the sand dune. I watched him push off with a little whoosh and then go screaming down the hill.
“How do you stop?” I yelled after him. “How do you steer?”
All I got in reply was the wind and his happy shouting, so I just pushed off myself and hoped for the best. The wind blew back my hair, and hot sand blew up against my skin. I swear I left my stomach way back at the top of the dune, and before I hardly knew it I could hear my own screaming in my ear. But they were happy screams, scared and excited at the same time. When I was almost at the bottom, I saw Touch already out of his sled and standing there waiting for me. It seemed so certain that I’d ram straight into him that I put my feet out to stop myself, but I guess I was going too fast, and I ended up tumbling head over heels, then flying. I landed on the soft sand a good four feet beyond him.
Rogue Touch Page 9
