Jenna sat forward in her chair. “What’s that?”
“This woman chasing after the two of you—Jenna, she was your mother.”
The room around Dom suddenly began to spin wildly, numbers unimaginable in their quantities and almost unrecognizable in their form piling up everywhere, bubbling up and pouring out of everywhere as well, and now, for a moment longer than any of the others, he once again found himself looking at the world through Jenna’s eyes.
“What?” The sound that came out of Jenna’s mouth was a shriek, an agony that Dom could feel as well as hear, still somehow inside her head as he was. She stood up, the chair tumbling over backwards and travel papers scattering across the floor. Dom watched as his body jumped up as well, as Billy put out an arm in an awkward attempt to comfort her.
And then he was back in his own body once again. He shook his head to clear it of the wrongness of everything he’d seen with the numbers, then looked sharply at the former priest, not prepared to say anything right now about what had just happened to him. “You said the woman was her mother. What the hell does that mean?”
Father Thomas looked grim, and shook his head, and Dom realized with a start that he hadn’t seen anything of the strange numbers that had appeared when Jenna had been so shocked. “Whatever happened to her, she was subsumed by the Napier adjunct long before she actually laid hands on the artefact. I didn’t know it when I first met her—she was able to shield herself remarkably well, a strength there that I had never seen before.”
Jenna looked up, wiped tears and snot from her face and said, “I have to stay. I need to talk to her, tell her who I am. I can convince her to stop chasing us.”
“She already knows who you are,” said Billy.
Jenna turned and looked at him, angry now. “How can you say such a thing?”
Billy shrugged Dom’s shoulders. “I’m sorry to tell you, Jenna, I truly am, but she must have picked up your scent down in Logan, the first time you found us.”
“Yeah,” said Dom, twigging on. “That explains how she was able to track back at the pay phone. You’re family, Jenna, any numbers you leave lying around would be easy for her to sniff out.” He turned and looked back to Father Thomas. “Maybe she only wants to kill me and Billy.”
“As I said, anything left of Jenna’s mother has been subsumed,” repeated the former priest. “Much the same as it was for Archimedes, I imagine. If Napier was too strong for her to resist when he was just a shadow in a distant artefact, then there is no way that she is able to fend him off when he occupies her body. She’s a puppet, a powerful numerate pulled into a close orbit around one who is even more powerful. She won’t escape, and she won’t ever be the mother you once knew.”
Jenna sank down to the floor, body heaving with quiet sobs. Dom knelt down and cautiously put his arm back around her shoulders. “Hey,” he said, leaning in close to her right ear. “Maybe we get this thing to wherever it belongs, and Napier realizes he has to give up, cuts loose and you get your mother back.”
The look she gave him was a mixture of disgust and pity. Then she managed a small smile. “That’s not at all likely and you know it.” She sniffed and wiped some more tears from her face, then stood back up. Dom stood beside her, unsure where to go with this. “I’ll go,” said Jenna. Her hands were shaking. “If my mom is going to get to know her daughter, it’s as someone who stayed strong and didn’t give up.”
Father Thomas nodded and smiled and lit yet another smoke. “She was the best choice, I thought. Mormon, which is so far from Catholic that she would’ve been safe from any little booby traps that might have been laid into it.” He gave her a gentle smile, which just looked moderately rather than extremely predatory.
“Did . . . did you send her away from me and my dad?”
He shook his head. “She was gone long before we met up, following the scent of the numbers for years before I became aware of her.” He shook his head, staring at the wall on the far side of the room. “Whatever hold Napier got on her must have started with that trip, but she was able to fight it off for a good three years before she had to go answer the call.”
Jenna scooped up the papers that had fallen to the floor, looked them over. “Right,” she said, voice barely a whisper. She looked at Dom. “What do you say we get going?”
He felt pinned against the wall, by the painful look in her eyes, by the situation, and by his fear that he would end up as some sort of strange adjunct to Jenna again. But it felt more and more like a guaranteed loss for the home team if he stuck around, and he couldn’t go and abandon her now. He reached over and squeezed her hand. The rational part of him sure as hell didn’t trust the former priest, but the numbers he could sense coming out of this showed that they didn’t have any other alternatives, and looking at Jenna he could tell that, shocked as she was by the news, what numbers she could see seemed to tell her the same thing. He sighed. “Okay.”
The former priest smiled again; to Dom’s eyes, this time he looked somewhat relieved. “Your flight leaves in ten hours. We have a well-shielded car, so you’ll get a ride to the airport. As well, keeping that package on your person should keep prying eyes off of you long enough.”
“I have my own mojo,” said Dom.
“Why, yes you do,” replied Father Thomas. “However, it all carries your scent. Anyone who knows what they’re looking for can eventually crawl through the cover and find you. I’d hate for that to happen while you’re thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic, not just for the two of you but for the hundreds of others who will be sharing your flight. The packaging on that box will smear away any approaching search numbers and, I think, will also send out some false numbers every once in awhile; think of those numbers as chaff. For the moment it’s your best chance of keeping safe, at least until you’re in Scotland and can start taking advantage of some of the things that are built into the memory of the land there.” He walked over and opened the door. “Come with me. The two of you can have a nap, then freshen up before we get you to the airport. Your flight is a red-eye.”
Somehow, Dom did manage to sleep, crashed on the cot where he’d been laid out after taking the knock to the head. Jenna slept on the other cot in the room, but when Dom woke up he could hear she was already in the shower in the attached restroom. He sat up. Father Thomas was gone. On an old and ratty green couch were suitcases, already packed for the two of them. Dom investigated his, laying things out in neat little piles on the scarred pine coffee table; everything he tried on was a perfect fit. Hell, there was even a paperback novel, a thriller that he hadn’t read and that looked at least marginally interesting.
When Jenna was done, he took his turn, cleaned up thoroughly in view of the upcoming long day aboard a plane. As he shampooed his hair he felt for the bump on the back of his head, but it had completely receded.
Once out of the shower and dried off, he brushed his teeth in front of the dirty mirror, spit into the cracked china sink, then said to Billy, “You’ve been quiet. Same thing happen to you this time?”
“The same thing?” He watched in the mirror as his forehead wrinkled into a frown. “Do you mean you ended up looking out from Jenna’s eyes again?”
Dom nodded, and explained the strange, alien numbers he’d seen. Billy shook his head in response. “Very strange. And nothing I’ve ever heard of before. But no, it was nothing like that.”
“Then what?”
His teeth clenched together. After a few seconds, Billy finally said, “I suppose I’m just a little nervous about returning to anywhere close to my homeland. Will I find something that helps me remember who I am? Will I even live to have that chance?”
“We’ll keep an eye out for those numbers,” said Dom.
Billy shrugged Dom’s shoulders. “I know. I also worry that he knows more than he’s telling about Jenna’s mother. Maybe he’s even lying about it, and it’s a perfect stranger who’s hosting Napier, although don’t ask me why I might think that. Although
he’d have to be pretty damn good to get those numbers to slip by all three of us.” He paused, making a face into the mirror.
Dom pulled a t-shirt over his head, then started combing his hair. “So maybe he’s just so used to lying that it comes naturally, no matter what happens. If that’s the case, then we have to go real careful here.”
“We have to be careful no matter what, Dom,” replied his adjunct. “But the other side of what I’m thinking is, why would he lie? He’s a priest. Shouldn’t it be in him to tell the truth?”
“He’s an ex-priest, Billy. Which this day and age, probably means he was diddling young altar boys or something similar.” He buckled his belt, then sat on the toilet to pull on his socks and shoes. “Fucker scares me.”
“Napier and Archimedes and Jenna’s mother scare me even more.”
Dom picked up the package from the countertop and looked at it for a second, then pocketed it in his jacket. “Point taken.”
There was a knock on the door, and then in walked Father Thomas. “Ready to go catch a plane?”
The ride was quiet, a big dark blue Crown Victoria that sealed itself from the outside world very nicely. Jenna and Dom sat in the back seat, Father Thomas and a driver up front. Jenna reached over and held Dom’s hand on the way out, and the two of them turned and watched the city disappear behind them. The rooms they had used had been in the basement of a church, one of the nondescript Catholic churches of the sixties that inhabited the suburbs of so many North American cities. As soon as the car had turned its first corner, taking the church from his view, Dom had forgotten exactly what it had looked like. Which, he was willing to concede, might have been the point in his case. So instead he concentrated on watching houses and apartments and strip malls go by, followed by large quantities of big box retailers as they threaded their way along busy roads leading to the airport. The numbers of commerce were thick in the air here, enough that sometimes Dom had to fight the urge to jump out of the car and go track down some easy money.
“It occurs to me that you might have some questions remaining while we drive out to the airport,” said Father Thomas, turning around and hanging his left arm over the back of the seat. He had rolled his window—on a warm night thankfully—but even so the cigarette smoke was ever present.
“How did Billy’s host and Dom know to look in the desert?” asked Jenna. “How did they know where they were supposed to be going?”
“It called for them,” was the reply. “The artefact that held Napier and Archimedes, or perhaps even their shadows, tucked inside but still able to affect things. Over time, numbers redesigned themselves or were redesigned and went out, placing hints in various locations that are known to be frequented by numerates: libraries, museums, on the web. Probably even movie theatres and ballparks. I’m sure both Dom and Billy could tell you about the subtle trail of clues they were able to follow, but likely a lot of them looked like they’d been in place for a long time. Decades, at least, maybe even more.”
Dom nodded. “The trail I found made me think the artefact had gone to Utah with the Mormons when Brigham Young had taken them out there, back in the mid-1800s.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “The provenance sure felt right.”
“My host—our host—” clarified Billy, “had found hints in documents about John Wesley Powell’s journey through the Grand Canyon. There were three men who left his party, somehow scaled the walls of the canyon and then went missing, perhaps killed by Shivwit Indians.” He turned Dom’s head and looked at Jenna. “Or else by Mormons who were feeling a bit touchy about what they call Gentiles encroaching on their nation. The papers we found showed that the artefact had been carried by them when they left the canyon.”
“These were original documents?” asked Jenna. “Not, like, photocopies or anything?”
Dom nodded, and Billy said, “Yes. We never thought that we were being led down the garden path. For our own research, it looked as if Powell’s team had brought the artefact with them, but that the only numerate was one of the three who left.” He stroked his chin. “Thinking about it now, it never occurred to us to question why the numerate might have disappeared like that.”
“Why did the artefact have to fake a trail at all?” asked Jenna. “Why not just make a lot of noise and get itself found right away?”
“Because then any joker with a tiny whiff of numeracy would have been able to find it,” replied Dom. “But anyone able to track down the clues it left lying around would be a skilled enough numerate to make the effort worthwhile. If your shadow becomes the adjunct of someone who knows what she’s doing, you’re much better off than if you slide into the body and mind of some punk who can’t keep his formulae straight.” Dom looked out the window now, watched the farmland and light industrial parks go by. He’d forgotten how far the airport was from the city here. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s quite the trick, numbers coming up from shadows buried for ages in an artefact. I knew they were strong, but . . .” He left the rest hanging, fingering the package inside his coat pocket. Suddenly, Scotland looked better than ever, provided this little piece of mysterious mojo got them over there and in one piece.
They pulled off the highway, drove down the long lane to the airport terminal. More farmland occupied either side of the road, yellow canola flowers marching off into the distance, and some distance to the south a farmer was out on an ATV, driving along the fence line, two big golden retrievers running along behind. Cars, trucks and vans were all lined up alongside the sidewalk on the departures level, so their driver double parked and popped the trunk. Father Thomas stubbed out his latest smoke and jumped out with the two of them, leaned back in and told the driver, “Circle. I’ll be about thirty minutes.” Then they pulled out their bags and the three of them walked into the terminal.
“No smoking allowed in here,” said Father Thomas, pulling Jenna’s big wheeled suitcase along by its handle, letting her deal with her own carry-on baggage. “It’s surprising how easy it is to not smoke. I figure by now I’ve probably gone through fifty thousand cigarettes.” He looked at Dom. “You’d think nicotine addiction would have taken hold something fierce by now, wouldn’t you? Especially when the smoker has already proven to be an addictive personality.”
“You’re staying away from children now, I hope,” said Dom.
Father Thomas laughed, short and sharp to Dom’s ears. “Right ballpark, wrong batter. No, Dom, my crime was to help cover it up when one of my brethren diddled several children. He was my best friend, and I thought I could help him deal with it outside the law.” He put one hand behind his head and looked down at the floor. “Instead, he got to four more children before adding another sin to his list, nice and quiet with a running car and a garage.”
“Fuck,” whispered Dom. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, me too. I ended up being the fall guy in all this, drummed out of the church and addicted to a lot worse than just a few packs of smokes a day. But the numerates who also have the Calling, they’ve been good to me. I get a good room in the basement of the church where I can smoke myself to death without fear of sin by suicide, and I even get a part-time nurse,” here he gestured back to their driver, following fifteen paces behind, “to give me a regular dose of methadone, to keep the pain from the cancer from bringing me down too fast.”
“This would be where we’re supposed to line up,” said Jenna, a deep look of agony in her eyes.
Father Thomas pulled her suitcase into place beside her. “You’re not rid of me so easy,” he said. “Until you’re up in the air, I’m kicking around, making sure nothing happens to you.”
“Like not getting on the plane?” asked Dom.
He shrugged, then nodded. “Among other things. This is an important job you’re doing. I’ve screwed up enough in my life. God—and that’s something I’ve had questions about for a few good years, now—has blessed me with the opportunity to make good. You came to the city where I was sent, to the artefact that I was
sent to watch, and at this moment I choose to believe that maybe Fate does exist, the hand of God rather than the serendipity of numbers.”
The line went down quite quickly, and soon Jenna and Dom had their baggage checked in and were standing in the security line. Here, Father Thomas shook both their hands and stepped back. “I wish the two of you God’s blessings,” he said, “but I won’t perform the sign of the cross, in case that gets unwanted attention. What you’ll find over there is as much an unknown to me as it is to you. I hope that you are successful, and that your actions make life easier for the both of you. For the three of you.” He stepped back, and when Dom last looked back, having walked through the metal detector and collected his shoulder bag, Father Thomas was still standing there, head down, fingers twitching as if he did indeed crave a cigarette.
Dom turned and he and Jenna headed for their gate, hoping without any firm belief that all their troubles were now behind them. The flight departed on time, the takeoff a little more exciting than Dom would have expected because Jenna had never flown before and squeezed his hand so tightly that he lost all feeling in his fingers. Soon enough they were high above the prairie, watching the towns light up in answer to the night sky, and the stars overhead responding with their own lights.
After watching out the window for awhile, the two of them leaned their seats back. Jenna turned around, lifted the arm rest between them, and snuggled up against Dom. He put his arm around her shoulder and nuzzled the top of her head, enjoying the sensation of having her so close. She smelled soft and a little fruity, he imagined from the shampoo she’d used; he closed his eyes and inhaled more deeply.
They sat like that for almost half an hour, eyes closed, and Dom was sure by the feel of her steady breathing that Jenna was asleep. But then she spoke. “Dom?”
He opened his eyes, looked down. She hadn’t moved. “Mm?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this the past day or two, and I figured I’d better tell you now.”
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