New York_A Bridge & Sword Prequel

by JC Andrijeski

  Feeling my face flush as I realized maybe I’d made a mistake, I bit my lip.

  “If you didn’t give it to me, who did?” I said, my voice more subdued.

  He didn’t answer, but turned the note over, staring at my name written on the back. He turned the note to the front again and appeared to read the lines of block-printed words a third time.

  Frustrated, and now convinced he was either drunk, screwing with me, or some kind of idiot, I started to move away from his seat. He reached out before I could take more than a step, moving faster than thought.

  His fingers caught hold of my arm, stopping me.

  “Wait.”

  I came to a dead stop, staring down at him.

  After a pause, he looked up.

  Those crystal eyes had hardened perceptibly. They studied my face, wary. After a pause where he still seemed to be gauging my expression, maybe to see if I’d try to leave again, he glanced back at the note he held in his other hand.

  “Someone gave this to you?” he said. “When?”

  His eyes looked so deadly serious, I found myself lost there briefly.

  Swallowing, I shook my head, unable to hold that still gaze.

  “I was asleep,” I said. “How would I know?”

  “They left it on you? You woke up with this? On you?” That faint European accent grew more prominent. It sounded German to me now. I was still staring at him when his brow furrowed. “How long were you asleep?”

  “I don’t know––” I began, frustrated.

  “Did you see anyone else on this plane you recognize?” he cut in. “I don’t mean friends… or any of the people you’re traveling with. Anyone else. Anyone you recognize from what happened at the airport this morning?”

  I shook my head, puzzled. “No.”

  “You’re certain, Allie? No one? Did you look at all of the passengers?”

  My eyes shifted abruptly back to his.

  “No, I didn’t,” I repeated, my frown deepening “I was asleep. And since we’re asking questions… how the hell do you know my name? Who are you? Are you going to tell me that?”

  His fingers tightened briefly on my wrist.

  For a moment, he hesitated, as if about to give me a real answer.

  Then his mouth firmed, right before he shook his head.

  “Please,” he said. “Think. Try to answer my question. You remember every face you saw as you boarded the plane, even if you aren’t fully conscious of it.”

  Still off-balance, and now a little unnerved, I stared at his pale eyes, suddenly conscious of his long fingers circling my wrist.

  “It really wasn’t you?” I said. “You didn’t write that?”

  “No.” He shook his head, once. “I did not.”

  “Then who the hell did?”

  “I’m trying to help you discern that.”

  “What does it mean?” I said, nodding towards the piece of paper. “What they wrote. Do you know? It’s some kind of scripture, right? Third Myth stuff?”

  Before he could answer, a noise in the aisle caused me to turn towards the front of the plane. A stewardess was walking briskly in our direction, her expression set in a faint scowl. When she caught my gaze, she motioned at me impatiently, pursing her lips.

  Once she was closer, she spoke in a stern whisper.

  “You can’t be in here.” She motioned towards the curtain behind me a second time. “Return to your seat, please. Now.”

  The man let go of my wrist. Something about the way he did it felt reluctant.

  Looking at him, I tried to decide what I should say to him.

  But the stewardess was already ushering me back towards my seat.

  It wasn’t until I was back through the curtain and on the coach side of the plane that it struck me that I’d never gotten the note back from him.

  I considered asking the stewardess to fetch it for me.

  Then I decided it probably didn’t matter. If the guy really was a cop, like Jon said, maybe it was better I’d given it to him.

  The thought only confused me more, though.

  My mind spun over possibilities as I went through my bag, looking for my toothbrush before I finally just grabbed the whole bag, heading for the back bathroom cubicle.

  Who was that guy… really?

  Somehow I believed him that he hadn’t left the note. I had no reason to believe him, but I did. It wasn’t the questions he’d asked really––it was something else.

  Anyway, even if I was right to take him at his word, that didn’t exactly clear anything up about who he really was. And why was he going to New York? Did it have something to do with what happened at the SFO terminal? Was he investigating terrorists?

  Or did it have something to do with me?

  The second option struck my rational mind as ludicrous. Yet, weirdly, it also felt more true––or maybe just not any less true than the other options.

  Still frowning, I padded towards the back of the plane, scanning passenger faces, in spite of myself. I was so busy looking for potential terrorists and thinking about the man in first class, I forgot Jaden and his band sat in the back of the cabin, at least until I reached their row.

  I paused at the end of it, in spite of myself.

  Looking down the span of seats, I saw Randy’s head tilted back as he snored, his headset wrapped around the back of his head, tangled in his long, wavy brown hair. Corey sat nestled in a blanket next to him, his eyes open, but showing him to be watching something in his headset. Next to him, Drake was sleeping as well, a blanket wrapped over most of his body and face, his bare feet poking out at the bottom, his long legs crammed up against the seat in front of him. His food tray was still down, and had three empty plastic cups and three cans of soda.

  Taking a breath, I looked to the next seat.

  Jaden slept there too, his head tilted back, angled in Drake’s general direction.

  Next to him, pouty lips was curled up against his arm and shoulder, her airline pillow propped against his side, her poofy blond hair obscuring most of her face.

  I winced a little, then grimaced, looking away.

  Part of me felt like a shit for checking up on him. Another part of me wanted to walk over to his side of the row and clap my hands really loud in front of both of their faces.

  I tried to imagine how Jaden would react, if he found me sleeping against someone like that, while he sat in a different part of the plane.

  I wanted to believe he’d be really pissed off, but truthfully, I didn’t know for sure, not anymore. He used to get jealous, back when we were first dating, but those days felt a long time ago now. I wondered if he’d even care if I told him I thought the SCARB agent was hot.

  Forcing myself to look away from the blond poofy head leaned against my boyfriend’s side, I firmed my jaw, hiking up the strap of my shoulder bag.

  Aiming my feet for the bathroom, I didn’t look that way again.

  7

  MORNING

  CASS ROLLED HER eyes, snorting, right before she gave me a level stare.

  The meaning behind all three things was clearly aimed at me.

  Leaning her elbows against the vinyl-padded bar, she arched her back and sighed, even more loudly, stretching her spine in a curve so her belly showed below the baby-blue T-shirt she wore. Everything about her posture and body language was designed specifically to let me know in no uncertain terms she was bored.

  Tired, bored, annoyed––and yes, she held me personally responsible.

  I threw my swizzle stick at her.

  She brushed it off her arm, arching an eyebrow in mock offense.

  We’d finally made it to New York, and away from airports of all kinds. All three of us were groggy and nowhere-near caffeinated enough, but we were clean, wearing non-airplane clothes, and reasonably conscious.

  The New York side of things had been considerably less painful than what we dealt with in San Francisco. Truthfully, after the mess at SFO airport, the hassles we went through a
t La Guardia were minor irritants in comparison.

  Unfortunately, most of those hassles were me-related.

  I got hung up at the racial check-point, just as expected, when my thumb-prick scan got flagged as “inconclusive.” Like I said, I have weird blood. My doctors in San Francisco believed I had some kind of genetic disease or anomaly that affected my blood-type, flagging me as a “potential” on any standard racial-cat scans.

  That anomaly had been giving me grief with SCARB since I was a kid.

  Being adopted didn’t help, especially since my birth parents abandoned me instead of registering officially with the adoption authority to give me away. Worse, the International Medical Authority, or IMA, wasn’t able to find a match for me in their records system, which meant they couldn’t identify my precise birthdate or location, either.

  No birth parents of record, no birthday or place of birth, plus adoption, plus weird blood, meant I’d probably be flagged at racial checkpoints for the rest of my life.

  I was already sick of it––and I was only twenty-seven, and I’d hardly been anywhere.

  My abandonment was all over the news when I was a kid, since things like that rarely happened, even back then. My mom tried to make it into a happy story, saying how the news feeds were how she and Dad knew to go in and petition to adopt me.

  They’d been the only names on that list.

  Despite my semi-infamy, even as a baby, I was still a “hard to place” adoption, given my probably-fugitive parents and the inability to come up with a genetic match in any World Court databases, IMA or otherwise.

  Police found me under an overpass, near a dumpster.

  I tried really hard not to make that into some kind of prophetic foreshadowing about my life.

  Worse, from the point of view of the authorities, my birth parents must have both been non-regs, to not be in the databases at all. That, or those same “genetic anomalies” made it impossible for my records to be used to match me with close relatives.

  Since all medical and race-cat records were international now, if my parents were unregistered, it was likely for deeply illegal reasons––which more or less explained why they hadn’t put me up for adoption via the official registry.

  So yeah, I was probably the child of criminals, if not out-and-out terrorists.

  On the plus side, if my parents were still alive and hadn’t yet been caught, they weren’t stupid. If either of them had done so much as a single night in any penal system, World Court or nation-specific, they would have been genetically tested immediately, implanted, tattooed, and added to the global registry. A match like that would have altered my medical records as well, and I definitely would have been notified.

  Realistically though, they were probably dead.

  Even Jon admitted how unlikely it was, that anyone could survive off-grid for this long.

  I didn’t waste much time thinking about it now, but I’d gone through phases where I wondered, sure. I made up various origin stories for myself––as did Jon and Cass. All three of us were fascinated by the possibilities when my parents first told us, especially after my mom and dad sat me down and showed me all the old news stories.

  When he was eleven, my brother was pretty sure I was the daughter of pirates.

  Now I only ever thought about my birth parents in airport queues, when I was overtired and sweaty, cursing them under my breath as I recounted the story for the thousandth time to whatever suspicious-eyed SCARB agent got stuck with me.

  All in all, La Guardia was pretty painless, though.

  It took less time than usual to get a response from the IMA, so I only spent about forty minutes in a back holding cell, waiting to be cleared. Since they couldn’t house me with any actual seers, for obvious reasons, I was alone in my windowless, green-tinged metal cell, watching feeds on a wall monitor behind protective plastic after they took my headset away.

  We left the airport for real about an hour later.

  After dropping our stuff off at our crappy, two-star hotel on St. Mark’s, we’d showered and changed, then headed straight for the club where Jaden’s band was supposed to play that night.

  Jaden himself hadn’t checked in yet. We’d assumed the band would be at the club, setting up their equipment for the show, but they weren’t there, either.

  The club was closed, but we’d been allowed inside as “band crew” when we told the bartender who we were. Luckily, he found our names on the list, so he didn’t hassle us much but offered us cheap coffee and anything we wanted from the soda well.

  Sighing to myself, if less dramatically than Cass, I checked the time.

  It was early still, only seven-fifty-six a.m.

  The showers helped, but none of us slept great on the plane.

  I glanced around the club.

  It was bigger than I’d been expecting, even looking at it from the outside. Four stories of blacked-out windows, and the ground floor, where we were now, had high ceilings and a huge dance floor. In fact, apart from the stage and two bars––the bar we stood beside now, which lived near the front door, and a round island bar in the middle of the room––it was mostly empty. It felt more like being inside a black-painted warehouse than a club.

  The upper levels all had DJ dance floors with different themes, but from what I’d heard, for big shows like this, the downstairs crowd would spill over into most of the other floors.

  The headliner tonight was a biggie, even for New York.

  Jaden told me they were expecting full capacity, around 1800 people.

  Jaden’s band was opening, not headlining, and it wasn’t quite the Coliseum back home, not yet, but still, pretty crazy compared to most of the venues I’d seen him play before now. It was more than twice the number of people as that show in Santa Cruz, and that seemed enormous to me at the time.

  “Come on,” I said. “Just the tiniest bit of slack, okay? This is a big deal for Jaden. We can give him a few more minutes before we bail.”

  “I get that this is big for him,” Cass said, nodding in mock-seriousness. “I really do, Al. I just don’t care.” Her mouth twisted into a more honest-looking frown. “Especially after that crap he pulled on the plane. I can’t believe we’re waiting for him, given that.”

  I bit my lip, but didn’t comment.

  Truthfully, I’d been trying not to think about the damned plane.

  I’d been trying not to think about Jaden, either.

  Strangely, Jaden wasn’t the hardest thing to keep out of my mind, though. Instead, I found myself remembering crystal, colorless eyes, black hair, a narrow mouth, and the look on the guy’s face when I’d yelled at him in his first class seat, making him spill his drink.

  I also thought about the note I’d tossed at him, and what he’d said.

  Cass blew her bangs out of her eyes. As if she’d heard my thoughts, she gave me a half-smile. “So? Whatever happened to the cutie in first class?” Smiling at me, she added, “I still say you should have gone up there and ridden that for a few hours, instead of wasting angst on your two-timing, poser boyfriend.”

  I grimaced a little, maybe partly out of guilt.

  Even so, I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

  “I didn’t see him get off the plane,” I said, my voice carefully neutral. “Jon’s cop, I mean. Did either of you? See him?”

  I hadn’t told them about my confrontation with him yet, or about me getting kicked out of first class. I hadn’t told them about the note I’d found in my lap, either. I didn’t want them to worry. Specifically, I didn’t want Jon to worry. I knew he might overreact to someone leaving semi-religious notes in my lap while I slept.

  “I saw him skate through security,” Jon said, glancing up from where he sat, on the barstool next to Cass. He looked like he was doodling on a napkin with his pen.

  I glanced at him. “Really? He skated through? With his height?”

  Jon nodded. “Barely paused at the counter. They scanned his barcode and he was through.” He
gave me another look. “He had the ‘H’ tat, too, Allie. I saw it.”

  I smiled. “So? I was right, then. He’s not a seer.”

  “He got through that checkpoint awfully fast, Al, whatever he is.” Jon gave me another of those looks. “Faster than the little old couple with New York accents who went through after him.”

  “So you still think he’s a cop?”

  Jon shrugged, hazel eyes returning to his drawing. “That, or SCARB.”

  I nodded, swallowing as I thought about my confrontation with the guy again.

  Had I really chewed out a SCARB agent?

  Remembering the stunned look on his face when he saw me standing there, I bit my lip, unsure if I should be amused or appalled. If he was SCARB, that explained why he’d been so confused by me yelling at him. SCARB agents were probably a lot more used to people being terrified of them.

  Remembering his expression, I felt my cheeks warm more.

  I wondered what he’d do with the note. And why had he cared whether I recognized anyone else on the plane? Did he really think I was being singled out by terrorists for some reason? Or did he think I was being recruited by them?

  When my eyes refocused, I saw Cass smirking at me.

  “You have a little bit of a crush,” she said, still smiling. “Admit it. You liked him. Or at least got all hot and bothered when he saved your life.”

  Feeling my cheeks flush hotter, I scowled at Cass’s delighted laugh.

  Leaning up against the bar next to Jon, I combed my fingers through my damp hair, forcing a sigh. “Look, in terms of Jaden, we just got here. So we chill for a few minutes. Drink some crappy bar coffee. If Jaden doesn’t show, we leave.” Glancing out the street-facing windows of the club, I shrugged. “Anyway, we have time. Not much will be open yet.”

  Cass jumped up and down lightly on her toes in the high-heeled platforms she’d changed into at the hotel.

  “But I’m boooored! We could get real coffee, go to the park. It’s nice outside.”

  I sighed, partly because I agreed with her.