“Is that even possible?”
Diana lifted a shoulder. “I’ve heard the concept of Time being a loop before. Who says it has to be a straight line? I’m sure Mr. Ping would have some insight into it. You should discuss it with him tomorrow.”
Mara shook her head. “I think it’s best to not lean too heavily on Ping right now. He’s got his hands full, dealing with that dragon of his.” The kettle whistled, and she absentmindedly got up and returned to the table to pour water in their cups. “Did you know that Sam calls her jelly bean?”
“Jelly bean, the bean. Yeah, so what? It’s a pet name,” Diana said.
“Don’t you remember what Melanie Proctor said to Sam when she did his reading? She said a jelly bean will break your heart. Right after she told him that he wouldn’t have a relationship with Dad until after Sam knew what it was to be a father.”
Diana shrugged dismissively. “Daughters break your heart. That’s what they do, even if it’s just by growing up. I wouldn’t read too much into it. Everything isn’t a metaphysical crisis, you know.”
“Has Sam made the connection? Does he remember what Melanie said?”
“He hasn’t said anything. Although he seems to take things in stride, so he probably wouldn’t get worked up about it, even if he remembered the reading. Unlike some people we know, he tends to accept life the way it comes.”
“I’m all for accepting life, when it makes sense. It’s when things start flying from the future or alternate realities that I start getting bent out of shape.”
“If you think about it, what’s happening makes a certain kind of sense. You know that you have the ability to alter the element of Time. And at some point you were going to master it. It follows that, when that happened, you were going to start messing with the past. It’s like Grandpa’s rototiller. You just couldn’t resist taking it apart, seeing how it ticks and then fixing it.”
CHAPTER 16
The model train’s whistle blew three times as Mara pressed a button on top of the black box next to the circular tracks set up on the wood floor of the gadget shop. She sat on the floor with her legs crossed, showing Mr. Wannamaker how the controls on the new transformer worked. The train set was one he had gotten as a child from his grandfather, and he wanted to pass it on to his son now, but it would not operate when he assembled it. Mara quickly saw the old transformer had burned out.
However, shortly after she assessed the problem, the train worked again of its own accord. She still hadn’t gotten a handle on unintentionally repairing things with her touch, but, at least in this case, her practical experience would still be of use. Even though the old transformer now worked, its design was dated and not considered safe for children to use. Even the electric cord was considered below standard. She recommended a new modern transformer for the old train set and had ordered one.
“Once you’ve got the wires attached to the tracks and the transformer, just raise this orange handle here on the side, and it will send current to the train, and it will go,” she said. “Buttons along the top control the direction of the train, the bell and the horn.” She pointed to the side of the transformer. “You have an extra set of posts to attach accessories, like the light tower you’ve got in the box. I’ve put the instructions in there as well, but feel free to call, if you have any questions.”
“Thanks, you’ve been a big help. I guess I’m lucky the old transformer didn’t work, or I might have just given it to him not thinking about the safety issues,” Mr. Wannamaker said.
Mara leaned forward onto her hands and knees, disassembling the train set and packing it away. “I’m sure it would have been fine, but having the new transformer allows for more options and add-ons, and will probably have fewer problems.”
She slipped the lid onto the box, stood up and handed it to her customer. As she was ringing him up, her phone vibrated on the counter next to the register. Her mother was calling. Mara subtly shook her head. Diana’s default mode of communication was verbal, always placing a call, when a simple text would be faster and more efficient. Mara handed a receipt to Mr. Wannamaker and thanked him. She picked up the phone.
“Yes, Mother.”
“You and Sam need to pick up a pizza or something on the way home this evening. I’m running over to OHSU this afternoon to visit a friend. I’ll take Hannah with me,” she said.
“Who’s in the hospital?”
“Mrs. James. You remember her, right?”
“The aura reader. She okay?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll let you know this evening. I’ll tell her that you’re thinking about her.” Diana hung up.
Easily could have been texted.
Again the phone vibrated. BOHANNON popped up on the screen. Mara looked at the time. She still had more than an hour before he was supposed to pick her up for another afternoon of talking to passengers from Flight 559.
“Detective.”
“I told you to call me Bo. If you like, I can start calling you ‘mechanic’ or whatever it is that you do,” he said.
“Okay, Bo. How can I help you? You still coming by to pick me up at one o’clock to visit more strange people from strange places?”
“Actually I’m heading out to the hospital on Market Street in the southeast sector. I think it’s the Adventist one, but I’m not sure. My lieutenant called and said he wanted me take a look at a case out there. Can you meet me there?”
“Is it related to one of the passengers?” she asked.
“Don’t know. He said one of the administrators at the hospital wanted someone to come out and identify a body, but they refused to say anything more. They were acting weird about it, so, of course, he calls me. Might not be anything.”
“I’ll need to tie up a few loose ends here, then I’ll head over. Give me a call if it’s a false alarm.” She hung up.
She glanced around the shop, looked under the counter for her other pending jobs, and decided it would be okay to skip out a little early. Bruce had not even come in this morning. He had called, and said he didn’t have any pending bicycle repairs and didn’t want to just sit around with nothing to do. Mara felt the same. The holidays were very slow, except for the occasional antique train set. She walked over to the front door, flipped the Closed sign to face outward and engaged the dead bolt. Returning to the counter, she pecked the No Sale key on the register and lifted the cash tray from the drawer when it popped out. She would check in with Ping to see how he’s doing and then head over to the hospital.
* * *
Ping slouched and tried to straighten nonchalantly behind the bakery counter when Mara walked in to find him nearly asleep on his feet. It seemed to take him a few seconds to realize that Mara wasn’t a customer. He stopped brushing at his wrinkled apron when he realized who it was.
Without pausing in front of the glass case, Mara walked around the end of the counter and approached him. Reaching out to touch his cheek, she said, “You look like hell. And you’re burning up.”
“I think I’ve got a touch of the flu,” he said. He grabbed a small towel hanging from his pocket and dabbed at his forehead. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
“No coughing or sneezing. A touch of the dragon flu, looks like. If I had the Chronicle, I swear I would—”
Ping raised a hand. “Shush. No confrontations, remember? I just don’t have the energy to argue with you and suppress him at the same time. Please, let’s not make the situation worse.”
Mara pointed to the empty customer area. “Nobody will buy baked goods from some guy who looks like he’s dying from an infectious disease. Why don’t you just close up, go home and get some rest?”
“I’ve got a couple customers picking up custom orders and a delivery that I need to wait on. After that, Sam’s going to take over. He’s getting out of tutoring a little early, so I’ll go home then.”
Mara stared at him for several seconds.
Ping uncharacteristically felt the need to fill the silence. “What?”
“I’m worried about you.”
“I know, but keep following the book. Are you going out with Bohannon again today?”
“I’m meeting him at a hospital to look into something.”
Ping’s eyes widened. “Not another pathogen from another realm, I hope. I’m not sure any of us are up to dealing with something like the shedding again.”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure, but I think his boss would have given him a heads-up if it was something that serious.”
CHAPTER 17
After passing through two sets of automatic glass doors, Mara found herself standing in the large open lobby of the hospital. No one sat behind or in front of the huge reception desk. Everyone seemed to be coming or going, passing to the left or right of the main desk, disappearing beyond the large wall behind it, speaking in whispers that did not carry far in the open atrium-style foyer. She could hear the slip-slip sound of footsteps on the tiled floor. Mara slowly turned, looking for Bohannon in one of the randomly placed clusters of institutional chairs and end tables that dotted the lobby. While facing toward the glass doors, she picked up his distinctive Southern drawl in the muffled drone coming from behind her. She turned back around.
Bohannon and a tall woman in blue scrubs cleared the wall and came into view on the left side of the reception desk. The detective nodded at Mara and guided the woman toward her. They didn’t stop talking for introductions immediately.
“Once they brought him, or it, in, we didn’t know what to do. I mean, we’re not a bunch of engineers. I’m surprised the EMTs even loaded him up and brought him here. Then once they unloaded the body, if that’s what you want to call it, I couldn’t get anyone to take it. The EMTs wouldn’t even take it back. My own morgue here in the hospital refused to store it, until we figured out what to do,” the woman said.
“I thought you said the ambulance crew reported that they were bringing you an accident victim, a pedestrian who had been struck by a taxi.”
“That’s what they said, but obviously we assumed it would be a human pedestrian.”
Bohannon nodded at Mara, acknowledging her, but still talking to the woman. “What do you mean, he wasn’t human? What was he?”
“Didn’t the administrator tell you guys what was going on when he reported it?” she asked.
Bohannon shook his head. “My lieutenant got the impression that your administrator wasn’t comfortable talking about it for some reason. He was vague, evasive and didn’t want to file an official police report.”
“Sounds like the weasels in the front office,” she said. She turned to Mara and extended a hand. “Hi, I’m Jazz. I’m the head nurse in the emergency room. You look a little young to be a cop.”
Mara took the proffered hand and shook it. “Just an intern helping out with the cases no one else wants to work on,” she said.
“You got that right. This one is not something that’s going to fit in any bureaucrat’s cubbyhole, that’s for sure,” Jazz said.
Bohannon interjected, “What did you mean, not human?”
“Come on. It’s probably better if I show you.” She pointed them back the way they came.
Mara caught Bohannon’s eye. “Maybe I should wait here.”
Jazz read her hesitance. “Don’t worry. There’s no blood or guts. Nothing to lose your lunch over.”
Bohannon waved for Mara to follow, and the nurse led them from the lobby into an alcove containing three sets of beige elevator doors. She pushed the Down button next to the middle doors. They all took on that strange silence that people do as they stepped into the empty elevator cab. Jazz pressed the P2 button. After the doors closed, Mara absently watched the lights above the door move from L to P1 and then to P2. In her not-too-distant past, taking an elevator ride into the ground to check out a “nonhuman” pedestrian might have raised her adrenaline levels to something between hyperfreaked-out and spastic. Now she was just curious. She must be getting jaded.
They disembarked in a parking garage and took a right. Jazz led them along the wall for about one hundred yards and then stopped in front of a pale blue door mounted into the concrete wall. Next to it was a keypad. She tapped in four numbers and yanked on the doorknob.
“The perimeter of the underground parking facility is lined with storage rooms that are only used intermittently for some reason, probably because we are all too lazy or busy to come all the way down here to get stuff,” Jazz said, as they stepped into the dark. A moment later the door closed behind them with a metallic clank. “Wait right here. I don’t want you to trip over something. The brilliant architects of this garage put the light switch on the far wall.”
They heard her shuffle around in the dark room. With a loud snap, a set of fluorescent tubes recessed in the ceiling ignited. The room looked like a concrete bunker with a metal counter and two sets of metal shelves mounted to the wall opposite the door. The room was empty, except for a sheet-covered gurney in the center of the floor. Jazz stood on the far side and waved a hand over the sheet, like a model on a game show.
“This, Lady and Gentleman, is our mystery pedestrian,” she said. “Would you like to take a look?”
Mara paled. “You said he was hit by a taxi? I’m not sure I want to see this.”
“I told you, honey. No blood or guts.” She pulled back the sheet.
Mara flinched.
Bohannon’s eyes widened. “Lord have mercy. What is it?”
On the gurney lay the faceless body of a young black man. Apart from the circuitry and filaments nested in the open skull, the body appeared to be that of a college-bound man. A series of rips and gouges wrapped around the left side of his torso, but the skin looked more like crumpled Mylar than human skin. There was no bruising, no blood or meaty puckering, just damage that looked antiseptic, inorganic. A broken machine after a fender bender. One particularly deep gouge beneath the left nipple exposed a metallic rib. His hips and legs lay at an unnatural angle, slightly off-kilter from the rest of his frame.
Jazz shrugged. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was a robot of some kind.”
“Where’ s his face?” Mara asked without taking her eyes off the gurney.
“Oh, it’s down here.” Jazz reached under the sheet at the foot of the gurney and pulled out what looked like a mask.
Mara reached for it. “Is it all right if I look at it?”
“Be my guest.” Jazz walked around the gurney and handed it to her. She turned to Bohannon and said, “I have to get back to the ER. You guys are welcome to stay down here as long as you like. But I think what the front office guys really want you to do is roll this thing out of here, if that’s at all possible.”
“I understand that this is a very strange situation, but I’m not sure I understand the level of anxiety your administrators feel about this. Obviously this is some kind of mechanical device that got damaged in traffic. What’s the big deal?” Bohannon asked.
“Hospital administrators live in constant fear of lawsuits. Anything out of the ordinary sets off all kinds of alarm bells around here.” Jazz stopped next to the door and hit her head with the heel of her hand. “Oh, I almost forgot.” She reached into the front pocket of her scrubs and pulled out a wallet. “The robot was carrying this wallet. He has a driver’s license, several credit cards and a college ID in there. The photos look like that face Mara’s holding in her hands. His name was Cameron Lee.”
“So you’re saying this is a person?” Mara asked, while slowly turning the mask in her hands.
Jazz shook her head. “No, I didn’t say that. I said it was a robot with a wallet. For all I know, the cards and ID are as artificial as it is. If it were a person, it would be in the morgue right now.”
CHAPTER 18
The inside of the mask—the face of the young man who lay on the gurney—appeared scored with thousands, perhaps millions, of fine lines configured in an intricate web that covered its surface. Running a thumb over them, Mara could not detect any
ridges; they were that fine. Not something easily manufactured, without the use of sophisticated lasers and software, or maybe something even more advanced. Turning it over, she looked at the face. The detail was amazing. The light brown skin had pores, follicles of fine hair on the upper cheeks, thicker dark stubble as it approached the jawline. Its eyelids were closed. She grazed the eyelashes with a finger. They felt real. So did the thick brows.
She flipped the faceplate over again and looked at the inside of its eyelids. Turning back toward the gurney, she peered into the jumble of exposed filaments and components in its head. “There doesn’t appear to be any obvious mechanism for the eyes, like a camera or a light sensor of some type that would align behind these eyelids,” she said.
Bohannon was examining the contents of Cameron Lee’s wallet and looked up. “Hold on a minute.” The detective grabbed his phone and scrolled on the screen with a thumb. “I want to check to see if this guy is on the passenger list.”
“He is. I remember the name.” Mara held up the mask and pointed to the faceless body. “There are no real eyes in his head. How can he see?”
“You are trying to figure out how it works?”
“Just curious. This technology is decades beyond anything we have, maybe even centuries ahead, especially if you consider that he is probably more than a mere robot. I mean, he might be a real person.”
“What are you talking about, a real person?”
“This robot had a counterpart in our realm, a real living human being named Cameron Lee. Clearly people from his realm are mechanical or cybernetic or something.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Bohannon said.
“Really? More ridiculous than an FBI agent turning into a lizard? More ridiculous than a bank robber turning into a giant fly, or a dead man infecting dozens of people with his spirit?”
“I get your point.”
Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) Page 9
