Come and Find Me

by Hallie Ephron

  On top of that, not one of her alarms had gone off.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Diana crawled under her desk and sat there, hugging her knees to her chest. In her mind’s eye she could still see the black car. Why didn’t her security camera see it too? Why hadn’t it triggered her security alarm? And how come each time she’d looked out through the front camera, the same damned bird was perched outside?

  Diana shivered. All she could think was her security systems had been sabotaged, her electronic fence disarmed, and live video feed had been replaced by an innocuous video loop that replayed over and over. How paranoid was that?

  The pile of avatar clothing was on the floor near the desk. She reached out and pulled the leather jacket toward her. The faintest whiff of Ashley’s licorice scent wafted up to her.

  Home was no longer safe. Her griefer-infested virtual world wasn’t either. Where to go? And how the hell was she going to find the courage to get herself there?

  She draped the leather jacket over her shoulders and raised the collar so it framed her face the way Nadia’s jacket collar did. She pulled the sunglasses from the pocket and put them on. Through the tinted lenses, the room around her took on new clarity and depth. Her stomach settled and her hands grew steadier, as if some of Nadia’s courage were seeping into her.

  She crawled out from under the desk and stood. She laid the jacket over the back of a chair. Then she crept to the living room, lifted the shade, and peered out the front window. The black car was gone. The street was quiet. She checked the security alarm. The word ARMED glowed back at her. A lie.

  She returned to her office. Nadia was waiting for her, suspended on the screen in OtherWorld, right where Diana had left her in the replica of Diana’s office.

  A bell sounded, then sounded again—two new messages.

  PWNED: U there? You gotta see this. 1293, 4681

  GROB: Hey. Got a minute. 1655, 196

  She wasn’t alone, she reminded herself. She had friends, friends in OtherWorld with alter egos in the real world.

  Diana hovered the cursor. PWNED or GROB? She felt a connection to GROB, as if she’d known him much longer than she actually had. But PWNED had been one of the first to friend Diana in OtherWorld. And there was nothing complicated about their relationship.

  Diana transported Nadia to the coordinates that PWNED had sent her. A meadow materialized and, in the distance, a futuristic landscape of crystalline structures. She brought up an area map. A mass of yellow dots, each an avatar, was clustered a short distance due west.

  She turned Nadia and ran her in that direction, through an allée of cyprus trees, along a stone wall, and on to a massive stone gateway. Stepping Nadia through the gateway, she emerged at the topmost rim of an amphitheater that seemed to have been hollowed out from the side of a hill.

  PWNED came up the steps toward her. Tall and lithe, the avatar wore black, crotch-high boots, a microskirt, and a crop top. A diamond twinkled from her navel and her platinum hair was wrapped in a Princess Leia breakfast Danish over one ear.

  An empty voice balloon appeared over PWNED’s head. “I wanted you to see what you helped create.” Her voice was soft and breathy.

  A banner across the stage read FIGHT BACK. LIES KILL. A speaker was standing on the stage, addressing a crowd of avatars seated around him.

  “Is this amazing or what?” PWNED continued. “And it’s just the tip of—”

  Diana interrupted. “I need help. Can I . . . I need somewhere to stay. I’ll explain later, but I need to get somewhere safe. Right now.” She tried to swallow but she couldn’t.

  “Real-world help?”

  “The realest. You’re near Boston?”

  “I’m in it. Can you drive?”

  Diana realized she still had the keys to the Hummer clutched in her hand. “I’m going to have to.”

  PWNED didn’t ask another question. She just gave her address and offered to get on the phone and guide Diana there.

  By the time Diana had transported Nadia home, she was sweating and having trouble breathing. Meanwhile, on the computer screen in her virtual office, Nadia stood cool and serene, game for whatever awaited them. If only Diana could absorb her avatar’s strength and nonchalance.

  Diana held the leather jacket out in front of her, considering. It was beautifully made, the black leather soft and supple, the lining a soft, pale gray silk. She draped the T-shirt over the back of the chair and spread the jeans out on the seat. She set the red leather boots upright, side by side on the floor. Ready to roll.

  “Okay, I’ll navigate. You drive,” Diana told Nadia. The avatar didn’t even crack a smile.

  An hour later, Diana stood in the bathroom. The spray bottle with the mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water that she’d used to lighten her hair sat on the counter. The wastebasket was half filled with a mass of her own hair that she’d snipped off with a nail scissor. She ran her fingers through the short uneven curls she’d left intact. Her hair would never be straight and spiky like Nadia’s, but at least now it was . . . just to be sure, she yanked out a single strand of hair . . . blond verging on platinum. If only she hadn’t trashed every single mirror in her house.

  She put on Nadia’s clothes. This time, before she tried to leave, she made a list:

  Get directions

  Send Ashley cell-phone number

  Shut down computers

  Disconnect systems

  And so on, through getting out of the house. She envisioned Nadia performing each step with cool, methodical precision. Then she began.

  PWNED’s address in the South End was just blocks from downtown. She found directions on MapQuest, printed them out, checked her messages one last time, and shut down her computers. She unplugged her server and disconnected the routers and modems that gave her redundant connections to the outside world. Before she unplugged her landline, she used it to call Ashley’s office and home numbers and leave the number of the prepaid cell phone that she’d be taking with her.

  As she finished each task, she ticked it off. There were just three more things she needed to take with her—the car keys, directions, and her laptop. Her backpack and Daniel’s walking stick were still in the car.

  Ready to go, she hesitated, touching her throat. There was one more thing she needed—a necklace that Daniel had given her. She found it in her bedroom in the little jewelry box she’d gotten for her eighth birthday—a pair of gold Ds, written in script, hanging from a black leather cord. She fastened it around her neck.

  She returned to the kitchen and set the security alarm. Was a bona fide security company really tied to the alarm system, or was that as much of an illusion as the cardinal on the fence? It no longer mattered.

  She locked the door to the garage behind her. Climbed back into the Hummer. Set the map and directions she’d printed out on the passenger seat. Check, check, check.

  It had grown darker outside, and she could barely see where to insert the key in the ignition. She took off her sunglasses. The eyes staring back at her from the rearview mirror were bright and anxious.

  Diana rummaged around in her backpack and found an eye pencil. She turned on the overhead light, angled the rearview mirror so she could see herself, and applied dark lines to her upper and lower lids, then smudged them. That white-blond hair would take some getting used to.

  She turned off the light and deliberately pressed the remote to raise the garage door. The door slowly lifted. A car drove past on the street and Diana flinched. She was at the controls, she told herself, just like when she was at her computer, watching the world through a shield.

  With a quick turn of the key, she started the Hummer, then adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see the empty passenger seat behind her as well as one of her own eyes. Nadia’s eye. It winked at her. We have ignition.

  She shifted into gear and relea
sed the brake. When she touched the gas, and touched it again, the car pulsed forward. Another touch and the Hummer shot out of the garage, across the sidewalk, and into twilight.

  Behind her, the garage door clanked and whirred as it descended.

  Just take it one step at a time. Again Daniel’s calm voice urged her on.

  She pulled out onto the street. Shadowy tree branches, silhouetted against a blue-black sky, passed overhead as she drove a block, then another to a red light. She glanced at the map on the passenger seat. Total distance: 8.7 miles. On a day with good traffic karma, it was about a thirty-minute drive.

  When the light turned green, she accelerated, watching the needle inch up from ten miles an hour. She could feel the suppressed surge of the powerful engine. The Hummer always made her feel as if she were in a tank, as much of an alternate reality as the world of her computer.

  Each time she accelerated, the car seemed to jerk and cough, as if clearing the moisture that had gotten into its systems—after all, it hadn’t been driven in more than a year. As she retraced much of the route Officer Gruder had taken that morning, she focused on the road, trying to come down so easy on the brake so she wasn’t thrown against the steering wheel.

  In her mind’s eye, she could see a map of the neighborhood where she was heading, Harrison Avenue in Boston’s South End. As of a year ago, at any rate, the upper floors of industrial buildings there had been turned into warrens of artists’ studios and galleries. She’d opted for a route through city streets, though the highway would have been faster. She wanted to take it easy her first time back on the road.

  The sun was setting as she crawled up Dorchester Avenue, a storefront-lined street of long shadows that ran into Boston from the south-stick into an ice-cream bar. The street widened at major intersections, then narrowed again to a single lane each way in between.

  A car behind her beeped. She’d have beeped herself. The needle on the speedometer hovered at twenty.

  She accelerated to the thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit, still too slow for Boston drivers. She turned off the main street and wound through increasingly dense urban neighborhoods where the crush of cars and pedestrians made her feel more anonymous, invisible even.

  The number 2497, the Harrison Avenue address that PWNED had given her, was hand-painted across a purely functional steel door to a five-story brick industrial building with oversize, multipaned windows. In front was metered parking, all of the spaces occupied.

  Diana double-parked in front, waiting in a pool of light under a streetlight as traffic streamed past. She found her cell phone and called PWNED.

  “Hello?” She recognized PWNED’s soft, breathy voice.

  “I’m out front,” Diana said.

  There was a whirring sound on the line. Then: “Can you see me? I’m up on the fourth floor.”

  Looking up through the windshield, against the dark sky, she saw a hand waving from an upper-floor window. “Yup, I see you.”

  “Look, there’s a car pulling out on the other side of the street, two buildings down. Bang a U-ey.”

  Diana shifted into gear and signaled a left turn.

  “Hurry,” PWNED said, “before someone else grabs it. I’ll meet you downstairs. The lobby’s a bit basic. Don’t freak out.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  When there was a break in traffic, Diana made a U-turn and got over just in time to slip into the space that a van had just pulled out of. At least she still remembered how to parallel park.

  She turned the car off, set the emergency brake, and sat there for a few moments, taking in the buildings that surrounded her, imagining that she was angling the view on her computer screen. She picked up Daniel’s walking stick from the floor of the car, anchoring her senses on its familiar feel.

  Get out of the car. She tapped her fingers on the stick, as if on a keyboard, typing the command /out.

  Diana grabbed her backpack and laptop case and waited, watching her side mirror as cars came from behind and passed her. She opened the door and got out. Slammed it shut and clicked the remote before crossing the street and walking back up the block to the building entrance.

  Up close, she could see shadows of graffiti beneath the gray paint on the steel door. A piece of cardboard had been slipped into the doorjamb where the latch would have engaged. Diana pushed and the heavy door swung open.

  A naked lightbulb—the spiral-shaped energy-efficient kind—hung from the ceiling, casting a dull glow over a cramped interior. The walls looked battered, like someone had used them for target practice, and the floor was covered with small square ceramic tiles that had once been white. Diana breathed in. She smelled pine cleaner over urine.

  Across the adjacent wall was a massive sliding door to what looked like a freight elevator. Opposite that was a door with a little window in it. She pulled that door a crack. Just beyond was a broad concrete stairway going up.

  Clank. Diana whirled around. There was a hum and then a breeze inside the vestibule, as if someone had opened a window. The elevator was in motion.

  Diana knew it had to be PWNED, doing what she said she’d do—coming down to meet her. But as the hum grew louder, Diana felt as if the space she was in was compressing.

  She darted through the door and into the stairwell. It seemed to take forever for the door to drift shut. She watched through the little window.

  The humming stopped. Another clank and a scree announced the elevator’s arrival. A rectangle of light fell on the floor of the vestibule—the elevator’s door had slid open.

  There was that whirring sound again, and into the vestibule rolled a wheelchair. Sitting in it was the hunched-over figure of a woman. She was pitched forward as if straining to see, her clawed hand gripping the joystick on the arm of the chair.

  Diana pulled the stairwell door open and stepped out.

  “Nadia?” The woman propped herself up against her chair arm with one elbow and offered her other hand. “I’m Pam. Dr. Pamela David-Braverman if you want to get technical about it.”

  “You’re a physician?” Diana asked, grasping Pam’s cool, stiff hand.

  “You bet.” Pam’s mouth opened in a generous smile. Despite braided white-white hair, Pam’s smooth, unlined face suggested she was barely forty.

  “I’m Diana. Diana Highsmith.”

  The elevator door began to close, but before it could do so, Pam backed her wheelchair into the opening. The door crashed into it and rebounded. Then a buzzer started to ring. Pam seemed unfazed.

  “Your car is okay parked where it is for now—until the parking Nazis arrive in the morning. Then I’ve got a resident permit we can leave on the dash.” As Pam talked, Diana could feel her sharp gaze picking her apart—as if she were being autopsied. Pam must have recognized the leather jacket and red boots as part of Nadia’s getup. “Let’s go up.” Pam backed the wheelchair up a bit to make room for Diana to slide past.

  When Diana hesitated, Pam said, “There was a guy inspecting this thing a few weeks ago. It might look like shit but it runs. Otherwise, it’s five long dark flights up. I understand they’ve had a problem with homeless people sneaking in and harvesting lightbulbs. But hey, it’s your call.”

  Pam backed the wheelchair up farther to make more room. Diana stepped into the elevator and pressed her shoulder against the wall as the door clanked shut.

  Pam tipped her chair back so it balanced on its two oversize wheels. She raised the seat and pushed the button for the fourth floor.

  “This new wheelchair has changed my life,” Pam said as the seat lowered. With a groan the elevator started to ascend. “Stays charged for a week. Turns on a dime. Even climbs stairs.” Pam reached for Diana’s hand, and Diana knew her friend was chattering away to help Diana stay calm.

  Finally the elevator stopped and they got out. One of the doors on the dark corridor stood open. Pam rolled toward it. T
he raucous sound of a bird singing leaked from inside.

  “That’s a clock,” Pam said, tossing the words back over her shoulder. “My sister’s idea of a Christmas present. She’s into clocks. She also gave me one shaped like a hen that clucks on the hour and lays an egg. That one’s still in the box.”

  “My sister’s into dietary supplements,” Diana said, following close behind. “And body lotions.”

  “Equally useful, I’m sure, but not nearly as charming.”

  The birdsong clock turned out to be hanging on one of the cavernous apartment’s bare brick walls. The multipaned windows looked as if they’d been original to this turn-of-the-century manufacturing complex. Diana had read enough local history to know that it would have once been waterfront property before landfill extended Boston’s shoreline.

  Waist-high bookcases divided the space. Scanning them, Diana saw mostly medical texts and travel books, including a guide to trekking in Tibet and Bill Bryson’s book on walking the Appalachian Trail. Tucked in also was a well-worn copy of Heidi.

  Flowering plants—including African violets in a range of colors and shapes that Diana had never seen before—and framed photos lined the top shelves. One of the pictures was of a little dark-haired girl of about eight with huge eyes who smiled at the camera from a wheelchair. The two adults, a man and a woman standing beside her and beaming, were probably Pam’s parents.

  Against the back, windowless wall was a bed and about ten feet of built-in closet with a rod chest-high. Computers in a setup that rivaled Diana’s own were arrayed in a front corner under a window. Pam’s wheelchair, with its black-cushioned seat and leather armrests, was the ideal desk chair.

  Once inside, Pam rode smoothly, despite the uneven pine-plank floors. The chair must have had shock absorbers, maybe even a gyroscope to keep it so perfectly balanced.

  Sitting on a cushy white couch accented with hot-pink and deep purple silk throw pillows and drinking a cup of dark, smoky oolong tea that Pam prepared for her, Diana told Pam about Ashley’s disappearance and apparent reappearance. Pam listened, absorbing each revelation as if she were listening to the weather report.