What Tomorrow May Bring

by Tony Bertauski

  I jerked back out of his head and stumbled over a rock I couldn’t see through the blur of tears in my eyes. I fell and scraped my hands on the hard-baked ground. The pain raked through my mind like a razor-sharp claw.

  What am I doing?

  I wanted him to pay for killing Simon. But… those images… I couldn’t. I ground my hands into the fire-hot dirt as I pushed off the ground, standing and rubbing my eyes with the backs of my hands. Reaching forward again, I sped up the guard’s heart until it was beating normally.

  Simon’s body lay in the dirt behind me. It was wrong that he was dead. Wrong that he was lying in the dust and would never get up again.

  My feet were glued to the desert floor.

  Simon should be coming with me. To convince me to live a life of lies with him. To start over somewhere new. To pretend that we were normal. He should be next to me, trying to get me to open the gates and free the Clan and the rest of the jackers the Feds had sent here.

  The camp was a shrouded, desert-camouflaged mound in the distance. If I jacked the tower guard to open the inner gates, Molloy and his Clan would almost certainly kill the guards. And then the entire camp would be loose, heading to whatever town was closest in this desert wasteland. A thousand camp-hardened jackers descending on a town full of defenseless readers. A chill rippled through me, picturing what some of those jackers might do, then the chill settled into a cold pool in my stomach. Daniel and the other changelings like Laney—how could I leave them behind, stuck in prison full of monsters?

  In the distance, a dust cloud trailed from a pair of trucks racing along the periphery of the fence. The other guards. They were coming, and I was still a thousand feet from the gate.

  I promised I would let all the prisoners all go.

  I lied.

  My legs unlocked, and I raced toward the command tower, waking the guard and ordering him to open the outer perimeter gate. The oncoming trucks were much faster than me, but they were stuck hugging the edge of the fence. My legs burned as I ran, but a single thought seared into my head. A promise. I’ll come back for you. Somehow, I would free the changelings I was leaving trapped behind the camp’s fence. Somehow, I would make the Feds pay for killing Simon.

  By the time I flew through the outer gates, the approaching trucks still weren’t close enough for me to reach. A truck parked near the gate had a passkey dangling from the dash. I jacked into the mindware interface, and the metallic taste stung the back of my tongue as I switched the truck to manual controls.

  I climbed in and gripped the joystick, pulling onto the makeshift dirt road leading away from the guard tower. My hands felt slippery, like the joystick was greased. I glanced down to find it smeared with something dark and red. My stomach lurched, and I used my shirt to hastily wipe away Simon’s blood from the hard, plastic grip. I rubbed my hands on my shirt until the slippery feeling was gone. My chest was so tight that I could barely pull in a breath.

  I left the jacker camp behind as fast as the truck would take me.

  chapter THIRTY-ONE

  It had taken four washings, with soap, to get Simon’s blood off my hands.

  The blood had seeped into my cuticles and under my fingernails and dried while I drove like mad away from the camp. I stuffed my blood-smeared t-shirt deep in the trash can of the Navajo Lutheran Thrift Shop bathroom and slipped my arms through the shirt I had stolen. My hands shook so badly, it was difficult to get the hot pink t-shirt over my head. Then I sat on the cold, miniature-tiled floor and hugged myself hard. My teeth chattered from the shaking, so I clamped my hand over my mouth and focused on breathing through my nose.

  Simon was dead.

  I couldn’t stop the bleeding. I couldn’t even wake him. He died alone on the desert floor. My stomach lurched, as it had countless times since I left the camp.

  Simon had run out and gotten himself killed. But why? Why did he leave the truck, where he was safe, when all he had to do was wait for me to jack the guards?

  I knew why, but the truth made me want to twist up my pink shirt and scream. He had told me why. “I don’t want you to get shot.” He had tried to draw their fire, by running out after me.

  And it worked.

  Tears spilled down my face, and I bunched my knees tighter to my chest, rocking back and banging against the tiled wall of the bathroom. He had sacrificed himself to make sure I got out, but it didn’t make sense that he would run out to catch a sniper’s bullet for me. We weren’t Romeo and Juliet in some demens tragedy. Or did he actually love me after all of the lies and betrayals?

  Simon had lied to me from the beginning. He knew long before I did that I was different—that my Impenetrable Mind was unique, something he had never seen before. That my hard head and extra range gave me an edge over other jackers and the Feds. That I was something they didn’t expect.

  That maybe I was the one who could change things.

  Someone needed to free the changelings that were still trapped in the camp. And someone had to stop the experiments the Feds were conducting on kids like Laney. With my Impenetrable Mind and my dad’s help, maybe I could do more than just make things right at home. Maybe I could do something about those horrors. Then Simon’s death would count for something.

  I suspected that Simon knew that too.

  I angrily brushed the tears away to clear my vision. Simon had paid a huge price to make sure I got out of the camp. I wouldn’t waste that by crying in the bathroom and letting myself get caught again. The Feds were probably tracking me already.

  I pushed myself up from the floor, clenching and unclenching my fists. Avoiding the mirror above the sink, I splashed my face several times and then cupped my hands, gulping down water to soothe my gas-ravaged throat. My hand didn’t shake so badly when I pulled open the bathroom door.

  When I came into the thrift shop, I made sure the short Navajo woman behind the counter was busy folding scarves and the even shorter Navajo grandma was focused on sorting clothes in the back room, jacking them to ignore me as I left in my new hot pink t-shirt.

  As I stepped out of the thrift shop, a blast of dry desert air whipped the tears off my face. When I had left the camp, the truck’s navigator had directed me northeast, across the hard-baked desert to a paved road, and fifteen miles later, I came upon the tiny town of Rock Point, Arizona. The Navajo Lutheran Church complex dominated the town, with a church and school in addition to the thrift shop. The buildings were old and too close together, as if frozen in time and covered with a hundred years of desert dust.

  Patches of scrub brush were scattered between a half dozen trailers and a hydrogen charger station. I had left the truck where I had crashed it—smashed into a pole by the charger station that had appeared out of nowhere when I had tried to park under a covered awning. Driving was a lot simpler than parking, it seemed.

  Maybe the Feds would come after me once they revived the guards and made sure there wasn’t a full-scale prison break. At the very least, they could track the truck’s navigator. I needed to keep moving, and for that I had to get a new vehicle.

  I rounded the corner of the Thrift Shop, and my heart stuttered. A camouflage-colored military-style truck had parked behind my crashed one, half under the awning. I ducked back out of sight and tentatively reached out with my mind. One of the reinforcement guards from the camp was heading toward the charger-station shop. He was a reader, and I almost reflexively knocked him out, but that would only alert the Feds to my presence. And there might be more guards on the way.

  I reached into the mind of the shop owner, an older Navajo man, and planted a sim. I made him believe he had seen me come in with the truck. I was driving erratically, as if maybe I had been shot. He saw my bloody hands when I came in, and I forced him to give me some food and water. Then I left out the back, heading out on foot into the scrub brush. When the guard entered his shop, the older man relayed my carefully crafted sim and conjectured that I must be heading out to the nearby sandstone bluffs to hole up in the cav
es there.

  I quieted my gasping breaths while the guard hurried out of the shop, jumped in his truck, and chased my sim across the desert. I had bought myself a little time, but I didn’t know how much.

  I reached back into the Thrift Shop to scan the minds of the two ladies. The younger one always left her rusted electric car unlocked and parked in back. I edged around the building and started it up. The manual joystick was difficult to turn, but I managed to quietly slide out onto Highway 191. Her relic of a vehicle didn’t have a navigator, so I lifted from her mind that civilization was to the south. The Feds shouldn’t be searching for me in an ancient electric car. I tried to drive like I hadn’t just broken out of prison.

  The laser-straight road went on for an endless hour. I kept glancing behind me, expecting to see a military vehicle bearing down on me, but there were only scrub brush and low sandstone mesas to break up the scenery. At the first micro town, filled with whitewashed trailers and an enormous school in the middle of nowhere, I ditched the electric car and stole another one. I quickly got back on the road, but it seemed like I wasn’t moving at all, only replaying the same bit of dry, desert highway mile after mile. The brilliant blue sky was the same one I had seen overhead for the last two weeks in the camp, only now it wasn’t broken up by camouflage netting and it seemed almost too blue—like it had scared away the clouds with its brilliance.

  The car was running out of charge, so I stopped at the next tiny Navajo town and switched vehicles again. The Feds seemed to have been thrown off, at least temporarily. The next car had a navigator and more range with its hydro power. I jacked into the mindware and set an autopath to Route 40 and got back on the road.

  Route 40 seemed like a tremendously large highway on the navigator, yet it was only slightly wider than Route 191. Still, I headed west toward Winslow, which the navigator insisted had some decent rail transportation. I wasn’t sure where I was headed, only that I needed to be somewhere with people so I could hide among them until I figured out a plan.

  It was one thing to want to take on the Feds and another thing altogether to know what to do. I was sure the Feds would keep looking for me, even if they were delayed by my sim. After all, by escaping their high-security camp, I had just proven I was a dangerous, new breed of jacker that could defeat their security measures.

  Simon’s last breath kept playing over and over in my mind. I wished he had said something, or I could have read the remnants of his mind. At least linked in to let him know he wasn’t alone. And to say goodbye.

  The afternoon sun blinded me with its glare. An hour later, arriving at Winslow seemed like returning to civilization. Terra-cotta shingle roofs and rows of slender adobe-colored houses spaced to meet the range codes sang of order and normal life. People bustled along the tourist shops and restaurants.

  When I switched to manual controls and pulled up to a parking lot at the edge of downtown, I stopped at the entrance. How was I supposed to park in these tiny spaces that seemed barely big enough for a scooter? I was the clear master of preprogrammed autopaths on open stretches of desert road devoid of other cars, but I hadn’t taken any actual driving lessons. That was supposed to happen next summer, before I got my license. The idea of driving lessons seemed to belong to another lifetime. I circled the lot several times until I found three spaces together. I barely made it into the spot without crashing.

  Before I left the car, I reached out to all the minds around me to turn their focus elsewhere. The tourist at the parking meter, the t-shirt vendor tending his cart, the waitress taking an order at the café—anyone that could possibly see or hear me. I was about to step out of the car when I realized that one man, the docent at the trading-post-turned-visitor-center, was a jacker.

  Even in tiny Winslow, Arizona, there were jackers hiding in plain sight. It made me wonder how many thousands of us there were, all hidden in the reader world.

  His mind barrier was weak, and I could have easily jacked in and controlled him. Instead, I slipped out of the car and padded across the parking lot in the opposite direction from the visitors’ center. If I avoided his notice, he wouldn’t detect the blank spot of my mind in the presence of all the readers.

  Trinket shops and art galleries lined the main street, which traced old Route 66. I turned people’s heads away as I walked past. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, and an old-fashioned red-and-white diner beckoned from down the street. A bell tinkled as I opened the door. I made sure all seven occupants—including the fry cook—thought their hearing was impaired and kept their eyes away from the door where I stood.

  Cherry pie rotated on a display on the counter. I took a slice and sat on one of the red vinyl stools welded to the floor in front of the bar. The waitress passed by without a glance and took a plate to one of the customers that she could see.

  I was the Invisible Girl—again.

  Maybe someday I would have a normal life, where I could walk into a diner and be served like everyone else. Simon had joined a gang of criminals and lied to everyone he knew, just to have a chance at that. Laney never had the chance to lie, her abilities betraying her before she could even try to pretend.

  Now she was in a government medical facility somewhere, and no one knew about it. No one knew Simon was dead. Only the Feds, with their secret jacker camp, had any idea what was going on. And if they caught up to me, I would disappear for real, like Laney and Simon.

  They probably had an all-points bulletin out for me already.

  Cameras!

  I scanned the room wildly for a moment and let out a long low breath when I saw there were no cameras in this tiny diner off Route 66. But that wouldn’t be true everywhere. I needed to be more careful.

  I went to find a fork and grabbed a glass of water from the half dozen the busboy had queued up. My throat was still recovering from the gas and the desert and the hours of driving, so I took my time with the bites and sips. When I was done, I stacked my dishes by the busboy’s pile and opened the door slowly to avoid ringing the bell.

  Across the street from the diner was the Posada Hotel, which the navigator had told me was also the train station. Crossing the red cobbled road, I ducked into the shaded arches that framed the train station entrance. I shoved open the green dust-covered doors and stepped into the dark polished-wood interior.

  The schedule board showed two daily trains out of Winslow—one heading west to Los Angeles, and one heading east to… Chicago. An empty feeling hollowed out my bones.

  Chicago.

  Home.

  It was dangerous to go home. Probably the worst place I could pick. But I needed my dad’s help to figure out a plan. And part of me still wanted to know why he hadn’t told me the truth, leaving me to the mercy of Simon and the Clan.

  I focused on the schedule. The eastbound train came once each day at six in the morning. That was more than twelve hours away. The empty train depot had no cameras, only southwestern artwork on the walls. I slipped through the doors connecting the train station to the hotel. As long as there were no cameras, I could persuade the hotel clerk to give me a room. I would hole up until the train came and hope the Feds didn’t find me before morning.

  Then I would go home and make things right.

  chapter THIRTY-TWO

  The rumbling sounded like far-off thunder, but I knew it was only the crack of the rifle.

  A changeling zigzagged across the desert, her bare feet kicking up puffs of dust as she ran. I lined up my sights, correcting for the distance, the rippling atmospheric effects of the heat, and the motion of my target: a dangerous mutant jacker escaping from prison. All I had to do was gently squeeze the trigger and her blood would soak into the parched ground…

  I gasped and bolted upright on the fold-out sleeper bench. I reflexively reached out to scan the occupants of the train, but there were still no jackers on board. Fields of prairie grass whipped past the window.

  I wasn’t a sniper. I didn’t kill anyone. I was heading home. />
  The night before had been a fitful struggle to sleep as I twisted myself up in the hotel sheets only to wake and untwist them again. Fatigue pulled on me the next morning, so I opted for a sleeper cabin on the train. Jacking an image of my Grandma O’Donnell into the conductor’s mind, along with a postcard I had stolen and ripped into the size of a train ticket, had won me a tip of his hat and an escort to my room. He offered the seventy-five-year-old woman he saw before him a bottle of water and left me in a room that was slightly larger than my closet at home. I locked the thin, metal door and sank deep into the sofa. The motion of the bullet train lulled me into a stupor, while we rocketed toward Chicago. Sleep must have claimed me… until the nightmare had startled me awake.

  I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes to clear the remnants of sleep and swung my feet over the edge of the sofa.

  So far, the Feds hadn’t come crashing through the door of my micro-sized cabin. Maybe they had given up looking for me altogether. Or maybe they were waiting at Chicago’s Union Station to arrest me when I disembarked. My luck didn’t go so far as to have no cameras at the guard gate back at the camp. They could probably figure out who had escaped, in spite of not doing a regular attendance roll-call at the camp.

  Even if I wasn’t caught on camera, they might piece it together once they found the dead boy in the desert. I wondered what they had done with Simon’s body. My stomach twisted as I pictured him dying under my hands. The true memories of the smiles and kisses were swallowed up by that last moment. At least my memories of Simon were in my mind somewhere and hadn’t been stolen.

  Unlike Raf, whose memory had been wiped by Agent Kestrel. Raf remembered nothing of that night at the warehouse when he found out my secret and held my hand and told me that everything would be fine. But that memory was emblazoned in my mind. Someday, I hoped Kestrel would pay for stealing Raf’s true memories. In the meantime, I wanted Raf to know the truth.