by J. S. Morin
“Hey, Tall-Dark-and-Sarcastic, think you can kill the lights?”
“Gladly.”
“Matt, what are you—?”
But Judy’s question got its answer when the flashing blue lights winked out and streetlights in every direction started failing.
Chapter Thirty
With the streetlights out on a cloudy night, it was child’s play slipping past the police. Judy shivered as we scurried down the streets of Cambridge with no clear destination in mind.
Letting go of her hand, I unzipped my sweatshirt and offered it to her.
Judy waved it off. “You’ll freeze.”
How could I explain in a way that she would understand? The shadows had a warmth all their own. Wrapping them around me, I was practically invisible but also sheltered from the bite of autumn in the breeze.
“Nah, I’m fine.”
Still refusing to accept my offer, Judy proposed an alternative. “Let’s duck in here,” she suggested, gesturing to a corner coffee shop across the street.
Bellstone Alley was too new for me to remember it from my time on campus. The interior was softly lit with pendant lighting highlighting wood accents along all the walls. Two- and four-person tables scattered around the center. The walls were lined with booths.
With the place half empty, Judy and I had no trouble commandeering a booth way in the back.
Since I knew both our usual orders, I went up front and got us both coffee while Judy saved our spot. I returned to find her with her glasses off and a hand covering her eyes.
“You all right?” I asked quietly, sliding a black hazelnut with two sugars across the table.
Judy jerked upright. She wiped her eyes on a sleeve and fumbled her glasses back on. “We fucked up. Tim and I are both going to lose our jobs. I… I can’t even go bail him out because they’ll want to question me. You know I won’t be able to lie.”
I reached across and took her by the hand. It was trembling and icy cold from being outside on a night like this. “Calm down. We got out. We’ll fix everything. We just need to think it through.”
“We have eight months left on the lease for the apartment? How am I going to pay that broke and unemployed?”
“You’re not going to lose your job,” I insisted.
“I have a criminal for a boyfriend. I’ll lose my security clearance. They’ll check and find out I used a backdoor password. They’ll track me down. I can’t live on the run. I’ll end up in one of those women’s prisons; I don’t even fit in with regular women, never mind convicts.”
I sipped at my coffee. There was nothing to do but ride out this storm.
“And my parents… Oh my God. Mom’s going to blame herself for this. Dad’s heart will give out once and for all. I’m going to be responsible for murdering my own father. And for what? Nothing.”
Oh.
There was my cue.
I slapped the invisible thumb drive down and slid it across the table. Judy’s hand felt it. She looked up at me, perplexed.
“What is this?” she asked, lowering her voice for the first time since her rant began. If anyone in the cafe wanted to snitch to the police, they had half a confession in their pocket.
“That’s what I found. That’s what the Chinese hinted at wanting and the guy in the black hat threatened me over.”
Judy felt around the surface and stared in wonderment right through it. “It’s a USB drive. What’s on it?”
I shrugged and pointed to the laptop.
Without further ado, Judy popped the drive into a USB slot in her laptop. I’d like to imagine that it took her two tries because it was invisible, but by that same twisted logic, she slid it in on the first try. The stupid thing probably talked to her, same way my shadow spoke to me.
“It’s a single file. Just a video.”
“Just?” I asked. Depending what was on it, that might have been the best thing we could have hoped for.
Judy dug in her pocket and produced a pair of ear buds. We hadn’t split a pair since high school, during our brief experiment in dating. Once we each had a bud, she angled the screen so the other customers couldn’t see and hit “play.”
The image was Patricia Martinez. She looked ancient, older than I’d known her and by more than the six years that had passed since then. Her hair was frazzled and grayed, with only scattered streaks of black remaining. The skin of her face sagged, especially around the eyes, which were red from fatigue. After a brief glance off-camera, she spoke:
“I have my suspicions who might find this and my hopes. Any visions I have past the… well, past you watching this… it’s a mystery to me. I wish I could explain how it got to this point, but let’s just agree that this isn’t the way I hoped it would turn out.” She laughed without mirth, looking up toward the ceiling. “God, if only you knew how hard this was going to be for me. To act like nothing is going on. To watch my own television show, waiting for people to wake up and realize it’s happening all around them. To know—not through guesswork, but foresight—that if I speak out, I’ll undermine humankind’s only hope. To let them… I can’t even say it out loud. Look at me, a grown woman, afraid of a web cam. But you’ll know what happens to me.
“This isn’t the end. For someone else, it’s the beginning. For now, I can say no more. The risk that this falls into the wrong hands is too great. I’ve left a more detailed message for you to find. Never give up. Until your last breath, keep searching for it. Be who you truly are. Brave any danger. Let no one know of your quest. Even if you succeed, I cannot guarantee that your future will be any better than the ones I rejected.”
The video ended.
“That’s it?” I blurted. “That’s all?”
“It’s all we needed,” Just said.
Words failed me. We’d just committed a felony—probably a few—to get that message, and it was just a pep talk and a promise of a scavenger hunt for better explanation.
Judy closed her laptop and slid it into its case. She grabbed me by the arm as she stood, slinging the case strap over a shoulder. “Come on, Matt. Let’s get to the car.”
“That’s like an hour walk. And I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then we’ll take a cab,” Judy replied. “You’ve got the cash.”
Still refusing to explain what she’d meant, Judy towed me away from the cafe and out into the chilly Boston night.
Chapter Thirty-One
The cab dropped us off a couple blocks from Incident Scene Services, just so no one knew exactly where we were going. Judy hadn’t said a word the entire ride. Whether it was a sensible level of paranoia or she was shutting down like a browser with too many open tabs, I couldn’t say just yet.
“We’re not just heading home, are we?” I ventured, breaking the ice.
“Of course not,” Judy scoffed. “We have a mission.”
I wasn’t following. “Mission? Like some sort of jailbreak?”
Judy pulled up short. “What are you talking about? We’re not breaking Tim out of jail.”
“Kinda cold,” I replied. I intended to mean leaving Tim in police custody when some form of shadow shenanigans might be able to spring him. But it also covered completely ignoring that they’d nabbed Greg, too.
Judy unlocked the car with her fob, and I could see the relieved sag in her shoulders from one thing finally gone right tonight.
“What is it? There’s something you’re not telling me.” It was a flyer. Best I could tell, you could say that to any woman, any time of day or night, and it would apply.
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Nubble Light.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a lighthouse in Maine. That’s where Martinez hid whatever she left for you.”
“O-o-o-o-kay. What makes you say that?”
“Remember the part where she said ‘Never give up. Until your last breath, keep searching for it. Be who you truly are. Brave any danger. Let no one know of your quest. Even if
you succeed,’ and so on? First letter of each sentence: N-U-B-B-L-E. And a lighthouse seems like a logical place to hide something from the agents of shadow. Besides, platitudes aren’t very Martinesian, so it stood out.”
I struggled to recall the exact wordings of the sentences, even seconds after hearing them again. “How’d you pick that out of a video message? I didn’t even see you write it out?”
She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Don’t you see the words when you hear them? I just rearranged them so each sentence was on a new line, and it was painfully obvious. It’s like those newspaper codes in old detective movies. Or those serial killer stories where they leave clues at each murder. Really, Matt? You’re not an idiot.”
I wasn’t sure how I should have taken that last bit.
“So… we’re planning a trip to Maine?”
“Not planning. We’re going. Right now.” She started across the street to the car.
I caught up to her in a few steps. “What do you mean, right now? What about going home? You look exhausted.”
“The cold’s keeping me plenty awake. Plus, there’s no way I can sleep knowing that the fate of the world might rest on us finding whatever’s there.”
As much as I wasn’t sure the shadows meant to destroy the world, they were certainly going to alter its fate if this incursion spread. In Shadowblood, Saliera had been juggling plots and working behind the scenes against dozens of conspiracies to keep Corondia safe. But the shadowlord wanted to rule, not destroy. If Martinez’s promise of more information held anything, it would be the details of those conspiracies—and hopefully how to stop them.
By the time we piled into Judy’s Prius, her face was reddened. First thing she did once the ignition fired up was to turn the heat to full blast and activate the seat warmers. A rush of cold air washed over us. I knew jack about how a Prius worked, but it didn’t magic up heat out of a cold engine. That much was clear.
“You know how to get there?” I asked.
“Look it up on your phone.”
Easy enough, I punched in “Nubble Lighthouse,” and there it was. “Looks like an hour and a half up 95 most of the way.”
“And then…?”
With a sigh, I read off the turns and distances for the whole route.
When I finished, Judy turned on the car radio. It was a news talk show on NPR. They were blathering about crime and popular culture, and the topic of the shadowblood murder, as the news outlets were calling it, came up.
I hit the off button. “Do we really need to listen to that shit? It’s the same old story dragged out again and again. In the 60s, it was rock ‘n’ roll corrupting the youth. In the 80s, it was Dungeons and Dragons turning kids into Satan-worshipers. In the 2000s, it was Call of Duty making us all numb to violence. Why can’t they just accept that crime happens and stop blaming entertainment?”
“Martinez kind of did turn a bunch of people shadowblood,” Judy pointed out. She yawned.
“That’s it. Pull over at the next gas station.”
“Don’t be silly. We’ve got plenty of gas.”
“You’re wrung out. I don’t care how big a brain you’ve got; you can’t will yourself awake. I’m driving.”
“I’m not—” Judy yawned again. “Oh, fine. But I can’t sleep in the car.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
I-95 was quiet.
Matched pairs of taillights drifted away ahead of us. Blinding, twinned headlights crept up from behind until they passed. I was the asshole driving the speed limit, making everyone in the right lane swerve to go around. Last thing Judy and I needed was staties pulling us over.
Judy was curled up in the passenger seat, belted in but lying on her side with the seat reclined as far as it would go. Every time I glanced over to check on her, she was looking back at me.
“You should watch the road,” she said drowsily after about the fifth time I glanced her way.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Tim’s in jail, and he’s not going to be able to call me because I’m an accomplice. I can’t be there for him when he’s really going to need me, and we haven’t been on the best of terms lately.”
I could have let it drop right there. Say nothing, and Judy would have pretended the conversation hadn’t happened.
But I was keeping a car aligned with a strip of black asphalt dotted and striped in an endless repeating pattern, only visible within the range of my headlights. I was bored.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“He doesn’t talk to me about anything but his sleep and shower schedule and any meals he deigns to show up for.”
“It’s work. Patches, bugs, release dates… he’s QA lead. This is like his Super Bowl.”
“That’s one day a year.”
“This is his dream job.”
Judy raised her head. “That’s it exactly. Tim gets his dream… and it’s a job.”
This wasn’t good ground to be treading on save-the-world night. “Things’ll be fine in a couple weeks. Same thing happened for the alpha release.” I conveniently overlooked the obvious implication that Tim was choosing the job over her.
“But when I want to advance my career, he flips out.”
The whole car vibrated as I hit the rumble strip and veered to center myself back in the lane. Eyes on the road. “You get a job offer somewhere else?”
Judy snorted. “Like anyone outside the Seldon Institute and a few clients know I exist. I need to start speaking at conferences, growing my reputation in the industry.”
“So?”
“Dr. Agrawal said that I—”
“Who?”
“Rahi, my boss.”
“When did you start calling him Dr. Agrawal?”
“Matt, can I just tell the story? Anyway, Dr. Agrawal said that it would help my professional image if I had a photogenic smile.”
My grip tightened on the steering wheel. “Well, if that isn’t the nicest way to be a sexist asshole. He’s just feeding into that shit you go to your therapist about. Tell him to go fuck himself.”
“No, I talked to Dr. Grace about it already. She made me convince her that it was my professional image I was worried about, not that I still felt like I didn’t deserve my job.”
“He can still go fuck himself for saying it.”
“Matt, this is why you drive pizzas around instead of selling cars or real estate. He’s trying to help my career prospects long term. I’m 26 with a doctorate in cryptography. I’ve only got a narrow window to establish a reputation as a prodigy.”
I watched an exit sign whiz past. We still had a ways to go.
I couldn’t help my curiosity, and our destination wasn’t going to show up and save me. “And Tim is throwing what particular monkey wrench into this plan of yours?”
“He says I look fine and if conference organizers don’t like it, to hell with them.” She sighed. “I think he just doesn’t want to deal with the cocoon. He’d be fine with the butterfly, but he’s happy enough sticking with the caterpillar.”
For once, I was on Tim’s side in a dispute that involved Judy.
As long as people kept telling her looks mattered, and she kept listening, she’d never feel like she had earned her place. I knew all about Scholarship Girl, the anti-superhero alternate identity that hid behind the overachiever.
But by the same token, who was I to tell her she shouldn’t? She’d been hung up on the crooked teeth thing since high school. While every trust fund girl at Whitford-Essex graduated with a million-dollar smile, Judy’s yearbook photo was a close-lipped smirk. She passed it off as quirky, but I knew better.
Maybe this was a chance to get that particular monkey off her back. Plus, putting aside our recent indiscretion, I wasn’t the one who’d be kissing her.
“Maybe you need to stop talking to Tim, Rahi, and Dr. Grace—and me—and just decide for yourself.” Never push a man who’s going to fall anyway. Judy’s mind was probably already made up, so why
come down hard on either side of the issue?
“Besides,” I added. “I’m shamelessly biased.”
Judy grinned. I tried to picture her with a leading lady smile and failed. She settled back in and closed her eyes.
We drove in silence for a while. Despite her claim that she couldn’t sleep in the car, Judy was snoring softly in the passenger’s seat.
Once we got into Maine and the exit numbers started to climb, I reached over and put a hand on her. She stirred.
“Need you to navigate. We’re coming to our exit.”
Judy rubbed at her eyes. “Directions aren’t any different with you driving.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t memorize them. And I don’t want to risk getting pulled over for being on my phone and driving at the same time.”
She rattled them off back to me.
“OK, Exit 7, and then what?”
Judy sat up and brought the seat back upright. “God, Matt. You can be such a sieve.”
“Good nap?”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
Sure she wasn’t. I hid my smirk as she stared out the window, getting her bearings.
“Did that streetlight go out?” Judy asked.
I blew a sigh. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“You’re doing that?”
“Best guess. It’s either that, or someone tailing us.” I hoped I was doing it. Without their harsh glare, the roads were easier to follow. I wasn’t brave enough to shut off the headlights and see if that helped.
“Well, stop it, or you can find another navigator.”
We wound our way through back-road highways, Judy calling out the turns as they came up.
Judy pointed. “That’s it up ahead.”
We passed a lobster shack. Not long after, the road ended in a parking lot shaped like a cul-de-sac. Around the asphalt edge was a brief drop to a rocky shore without any guardrails in between.
I pulled into a space by a pair of those tourist-trap coin-op binoculars mounted on pedestals.
