“Still planning on moving to Portland to study psych,” I responded without moving my eyes away from the brush. Maybe if I didn’t look at her, my mom wouldn’t launch into one of her monologues about how I should spend another year at home, think about shadowing my father at “the office,” or focus on my relationship with Georgia. Maybe if I didn’t look at her, I wouldn’t want to do those things so much. Apparently, losing Jesse had affected me more than even I wanted to admit.
“I know, Madison… you want to save people like Jesse.” Hearing her say his name made me feel weirdly angry. “But he’s gone, and you need to move on with your life. Your father won’t be able to run HORUS forever, and soon he’ll—”
Something behind her caught my attention. A familiar hoodie with an original Handmaid’s Tale book cover printed on the back was making its way up the escalator, and it was worn by a young man with wavy black hair just like Jesse’s. I had given him that hoodie on our first Christmas, when he had given me a traditional-style quill pen and leather-bound journal after we’d snuck out to do our exchange and then made out in our shed until the sun came up.
Won’t they catch us? Jesse had asked me as I unzipped the sweatshirt he’d tried on and modeled for me. I’d laughed, thinking that my parents had probably never even touched the gardening tools left there by our landscaper, but hadn’t said it for fear it would make him dislike them even more than he already did. I couldn’t blame him—my parents called him “that boy from the barrio” even when he could hear them.
Now this Jesse lookalike was headed to the second floor of the mall, and all I could do was stare after him. There had been a time—right after Jesse’s death—when I would have followed that sweatshirt across Los Angeles, but by now I had tapped so many strangers on the shoulder that I knew what I would find when this Jesse figure turned around and smiled his wrong lips or squinted his wrong eyes. By now I had stopped writing his name, over and over again, across my notebooks in scrawling black print.
Did that mean I had stopped loving him?
“Everything okay, sweetie?” my mom asked as her eyes followed my gaze.
“Fine.”
I stared back down as the machine brushed a final clear coat over the arch of my now-perfect nails. Georgia would notice them later, I knew, the way she noticed every hair trim or new shirt the second I saw her.
The problem wasn’t that I let my mom distract me with shopping trips and space days, I realized as the machine drew the brush back into its belly and retreated to its metal home hanging high above my head.
The problem was that I wanted her to.
“MADDY?”
I shook my head and looked around. Everything outside the bus window was dark, like someone had thrown a blanket over us, and the only interruption to the pitch black was the headlights on the road and several PTVs propped in front of people’s faces. Most of the other bus patrons were asleep, and from the looks of it, had been so for a long time. Jesse’s hair was a disheveled mess, and he had a handprint in his cheek.
My first feeling was the utter panic that comes with a whole chunk of your life having just gone missing.
The second feeling was that I had to use the bathroom.
“I’m here,” I said, which, although I had been sitting there the whole time, seemed to most accurately reflect my feelings. “I just need to pee.”
“Want me to come with you?”
“Ew.” I gave Jesse my most scathing look. “I think I can manage it on my own.”
The bathroom was small and dirty, but after so many hours, I didn’t care. In the chunk of mirror still attached to the wall, I looked hollow, like someone had come along and scooped out any bits of Maddy I’d had left. The only thing left was a pair of brown eyes above sharp cheekbones, a pair of frowning lips, and long hair that seemed like a wig. I felt like a kid in a costume, like any second I could rip off the mask my parents had forced me to wear and reveal the old Maddy living underneath.
But the old Maddy was dead, I remembered, and the mask was me.
Before I could finish in the bathroom, the bus came to a screeching halt and the driver’s voice came over the intercom. “San Antonio. End of the line for this bus; next bus leaves at 9:00 a.m. sharp tomorrow. If you need help arranging a place to stay—”
He droned on, but I tuned him out, and by the time I got out of the bathroom, the conductor was gone. I found Jesse sitting on a nearby bench waiting for me with a concerned expression on his face, while the conductor took rapid puffs from his vaporizer in the small patch of grass nearby.
“I’m fine,” I said, but Jesse’s expression didn’t ease. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” he repeated, but something was definitely wrong. His eyes kept flitting to the driver, then to the bus, then back to me again. In a low voice, he whispered, “They know we’re here.”
“Are you sure?” My voice was so soft even I could barely hear the words.
“Positive. This bus should have gone all the way to Miami.”
Of course it should have. Now that my brain was working again, I realized that it made no sense for a travel bus to let out all of its riders and force them to fend for themselves in an unfamiliar city when they would just get back on the bus again the next morning. Someone must have radioed for the driver to stop for the night, and HORUS was probably headed our way as we spoke.
“We need to find a car,” Jesse said, “but where?
The bus had dropped us off near the Alamo, though there was not much to see in the lamplight except a wall and a lot of signs proclaiming this the historic district. More signs pointed us left, toward something called a “River Walk,” so we followed them down dark streets decorated only by a few solar-panel carriages abandoned on the side of the road. Horse-drawn carriages had been made illegal years ago, but something romantic remained in the animatronic creatures hitched to the front, their metal faces always focused somewhere far, far in the distance.
To reach the River Walk, we had to descend a flight of concrete stairs that swooped to the left and under a bridge. The stairs spit us out along what had to be the San Antonio River, its aquamarine tint and strange smell only a vague sign of the pollution sitting along its riverbed depths. The paths on either side of the river followed their leader faithfully, winding and curving with every turn, while empty benches kept their sentinel watch along the way.
“What was this place?” Jesse asked as he looked up at the wall of blank storefronts across the river from where we stood.
“I think it was a tourist attraction,” I guessed. “Look at the way every shop had an outdoor deck—those must have been restaurants where patrons sat outside and ate Tex-Mex while they enjoyed the warm Texas air.”
“A little too warm,” Jesse complained as he pulled his drenched shirt away from his body.
“Don’t forget that back then it would have been at least fifteen degrees cooler here than it is now.”
“Right.” He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his arm. “And it would have been packed.”
Even though we had to go, to find a car and get out of San Antonio as soon as possible, something drew us a little farther down the path. Even with green water and intense heat, there was something so beautiful about this dark, mysterious ghost town that made you want to take a seat and stay awhile. A small breeze came down the way and rustled the leaves of the overgrown bushes and unkempt trees, and the whole walk seemed to come alive with its every breath.
“Magical,” Jesse said, voicing just what I’d been thinking.
He moved his hand slightly so that the back of it touched the back of mine. I didn’t pull away, but I didn’t take his hand either. In my mind was the image of Jesse on the floor, not breathing, and the feeling of that stiff, heavy hand in mine; yet there were also all the memories of all the other times we’d held hands, the beautiful moments weaving a tapestry that covered that cold, dead body. And then, finally, the realization that none of those memories were mine anyway.
Back to the stiff, heavy hand again.
“You okay?” Jesse asked.
I laughed, because there was nothing else to do. “Not really.”
“Me either.”
“Anything you want to talk about?”
He said not really, just like I had, but I saw through him immediately. Jesse was holding something back, and I was going to find out what it was.
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What you’re hiding.”
He looked at the water in front of us as though it was the most interesting thing in the world—another huge telltale sign that Jesse was hiding something. I knew every expression of his, the way I knew every word of Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights.
“You know I won’t stop pestering you until I get to the answer. You remember that time when you tried to surprise me for my birthday? I broke you in under an hour.”
“And what a terrible hour it was.”
“Please. You were going to tell me by accident anyway. You’re a terrible secret keeper.”
“Fine.” The back of his hand pressed into mine a little harder. “Back at the bus depot, Landon told me that when they… brought you back to life… they made it impossible for you to love me.”
“What?” His hand was still there, but I couldn’t feel it. “How could they do that?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t noticed anything weird, have you?”
“No,” I lied, thinking of the memory of his dead hand that kept coming back whenever we touched.
“Really? No mental blocks or weird urges or repeating memories?”
“Nothing,” I said, all the while becoming conscious of a little voice that had been whispering to me since I’d first seen Jesse. Run. Run. Run.
“Good.”
We stayed that way for a while, just barely touching, me holding back the urge to run until I thought it would break me. The crushing weight of the chase urged us forward again, and we left that strange, eerie place forever.
But the memory, stuck on “replay,” was not just a penny I could toss behind my shoulder into the murky river as we crossed over the bridge toward the city.
I could never leave that voice behind.
Chapter Twelve
Jesse
I DON’T know why I told him. Maybe I wanted Maddy to tell me there was no way HORUS had done that to him; maybe I just couldn’t keep a secret. Either way, I didn’t get the answer I was looking for. Maddy just turned further into himself, and I was left trying to figure out how the heck we were supposed to get across the country without a car.
Back on the main roads, we walked toward the city, a sentinel of skyscrapers guarding our passage. No one would have their own car there, but perhaps someone would know where to get one. As we got closer, the stench of city air saturated with waste, street food, and “clean smoke,” scrubbed of its pollution but not its smell by the required electrostatic smoke precipitators, indicated that though San Antonio was much smaller than Los Angeles, it still reeked.
One difference, however, was that instead of LA’s self-driving cabs, San Antonio was a spiderweb of metro lines. The first major street we came to had entrances on every street corner as far as the eye could see, proclaiming ENTER in bright green neon lights. Trains thrummed under the sidewalk and rattled the shop windows every time they went by, which was about once every other minute, followed by a stream of people exploding from beneath the red metro EXIT sign.
“We can’t even get an SD,” Maddy said, “and if we can’t get a self-driver, how are we going to find a car with a wheel?”
He made a good point. San Antonio was apparently car-free, and I didn’t have any uncles here to call and ask. Then again, maybe Uncle Ric could help us after all.
The next time the metro spit out patrons, I grabbed a middle-aged woman on the outskirts of the crowd and asked if I could use her smart watch. The woman wore a plain gray uniform, probably a factory worker by the looks of things, and her hair was tied back under a gray cap. In her mouth was a wad of pink bubble gum, which they now made to disintegrate over time so that cities didn’t end up covered in it.
“It’s configured to my voice,” she said, which was a polite way of saying no, but I couldn’t take no for an answer.
“You can dial,” I told her, “just please help us. We’re lost, and I need to call my uncle to come get us.”
The woman looked me over, probably trying to decide my age.
“Fine,” she said through chews. “What’s the number?”
I gave her Uncle Ric’s number and waited for an answer.
“Hello?”
“Uncle Ric?”
“Holy shit!”
Before he could give us away, I explained, “Uncle Ric, we’re in San Antonio. We can’t find a way to get home.” I put extra emphasis on the word. “Do you know a way we can get a ride or have someone come pick us up?”
Uncle Ric took a few seconds to answer, and I imagined that his brain was made of very slow, very steady cogs instead of synapses.
“Right. Home. Shit. You know, it’s funny, kid, but your parents were just here looking for you two a few hours ago. Said I shouldn’t help you the next time we talked, just give you the number of someone who could come get you. Said they’d be listening for your call.”
I looked at Maddy, who was leaned in and listening to Uncle Ric, questioningly.
Bugged, he mouthed at an angle where the woman wouldn’t see.
“Thanks, Uncle Ric.”
“No problem. Listen, kid, why don’t you tell me exactly where you are.”
Maddy shook his head no, but I knew Uncle Ric better than he did. He would never sell us out. If he wanted our address, it was because he thought he could get us a ride faster than it would take HORUS to find us.
“What’s the address here?” I asked the woman with the smart watch.
“No clue. It’s the Market Square metro stop, if that helps?” She rotated her wrist twice so that the clock showed the time, and I could tell she was getting impatient.
“Market Square metro stop,” I told Uncle Ric.
“Okay, kid, hang tight.”
He didn’t say any more, and then the line went dead.
“A little rude, isn’t he?” the woman asked when she looked at her blank watch. “You’re just a couple of lost kids.”
“Tell me about it,” I agreed.
Soon after the woman left, a red truck pulled up to the curb near where we waited. Its automatic doors swooped to the side and up, revealing a man in a fedora with the band striped in Mexico’s colors. Beneath the hat, hidden from view until I bent down to see him, was my second cousin Maurice. I hadn’t seen him in real life in years, since I was about five and he was twenty, and I’d certainly had no idea he was in San Antonio. My mom had probably told me at some point when she showed me their family photos, but I usually only heard the first few words she said before I tuned her out. In my defense, she never let me get a word in edgewise anyway.
“Mo?” I asked as the man hopped down from the truck and came around to hug me.
“Little JJ!”
“JJ?” Maddy asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Long story,” I said, though it wasn’t. Basically, I couldn’t say my own name as a toddler, but I knew the letter J—thus, I became JJ, which differentiated me from my cousin Juan and my other cousin, José, by the repetition of one letter. Alliteration, Maddy would have pointed out, but I wasn’t about to tell him that embarrassing story.
“What’s with the getup?” I asked Mo. He was a business executive, definitely not the kind of man to wear a touristy hat and linen shirt with the top two buttons undone. The look suited him, though, hiding his overfed belly and balding head.
“Disguise,” he explained. “HORUS is watching all of the cameras around here, and though they’ll figure out who I am eventually, you should be far from here when they do. Plus, I hung a fake licens
e plate on the back—make sure you take it off around Houston.”
“Thanks, Mo.” I hugged him, and he pounded my back a few times.
“No problem, JJ. When you stop to take off the license plate, check the glove compartment and the back beneath that tarp—I had my staff draw straws, and the winner selected a campground for you to hide out in so that, if questioned, I couldn’t give you away. I also packed you a tent, a tarp, and some munchies my wife made.”
“Did you say campground?” Maddy asked, but Cousin Mo had already tossed me the truck keys and started walking back down the street.
Right before he turned the corner, Cousin Mo called something out to me.
“What?” I called back.
“I said ‘Watch out. Your mom’s with HORUS, and I don’t know which I’m more afraid of.’”
In another second, he had disappeared.
WHEN WE arrived at Hidden Treasure Campground, it was long past dark. One young guard with a baby face who might have been about our age manned the dimly lit check-in booth, and the minute I rolled my window down, launched into a list of rules so fast that I only caught every few words. “No alcohol… parking inward… gates close at 10:00 p.m., open at 7:00 a.m.… bathrooms… quiet time… got all that?”
“Yes, sir,” said Maddy.
The guard handed us a tag to hang from the rearview mirror and a copy of the rules he’d just rushed through.
“Firewood?” he asked.
“Two bundles,” Maddy replied.
While the guard went to retrieve the wood, I turned to Maddy. “How do you know about this stuff?”
“Well, I—”
“Wait. Don’t tell me. You read it in a book?”
The guard came back with two heavy bundles that he threw in the trunk with a boom, boom.
“What about… bears?” I asked. I’d meant to keep that question to myself, but as a kid who had never left the BB and had never planned to before “the incident,” the thought of being this close to nature terrified me.
Jesse 2.0 Page 6
