by Sharon Sant
Yes. And you have made yours, Watcher.
The voice faded. Jacob was snapped back to his surroundings, quickly realising that other restaurant customers were giving him cautious glances. He wondered how much of the internal conversation had been betrayed by his face. What he had learned had left him numb. Whenever he felt anchored, that he had his feet on firm ground, someone was waiting with another revelation to kick them from under him again. He wasn’t sure how many more of these shocks he could take.
His mind raced, turning over possibilities. Did Makash know of this prophecy? He knew about the existence of another Successor even before Jacob himself did, so it would seem like a safe bet that he did. Maybe even Alex knew?
Jacob’s phone bleeped a text. It was Luca telling him he was awake and wanting to know where to meet him. Jacob tapped out a noncommittal reply, giving him the name and location of the restaurant but not really interested in whether he turned up or not. It wouldn’t make much difference to his plans either way, but one thing was certain, he wasn’t in the mood to concentrate on his task now.
Luca strolled over to Jacob’s table. ‘Any luck?’ he asked, flopping down onto a chair next to him.
Jacob shook his head, his eyes darkening by the second.
‘What’s the matter?’ Luca asked, noting the change.
Jacob stared at him with a distracted air, not quite sure that he understood the magnitude of what he had learned himself, let alone explain it to his friend.
‘I haven’t had much luck this morning,’ he said, deciding that the conversation was one he wasn’t ready to have yet. ‘I’m getting sick to death of it all.’
‘You need to de-stress,’ Luca replied, signalling to the hovering waitress that he wanted some service. ‘I know you feel like you need to hurry but you’ve had a pretty intense couple of days. Maybe you just need some time to get over that; it might make you feel a bit more positive.’
Intense couple of days. Understatement of the year. ‘I wish I could.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘And I’m sorry that it’s turning out to be such a rubbish trip for you. I can’t be much fun like this.’
‘Hey, like you said, I knew that it wasn’t going to be a picnic. It’s fine.’
The waitress came over and Jacob shielded his eyes, certain that they had deteriorated to an ominous colour. Luca ordered a drink and a burger and flashed the woman one of his most brilliant smiles. She left them alone again, blushing as she went. Luca leaned closer to Jacob.
‘Are you doing the mind reading thing now?’ he asked in a low voice.
Jacob threw him a sideways glance. ‘No. But I can still tell you fancy that waitress.’
Luca grinned. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘She’s female and under forty.’
His grin broadened. ‘You’d better not check out my mind right now, then, because I daren’t tell you what else is going on in there.’
‘Gianluca Valvona, I’m not sure whether you are the most impressive guy I know or the most exasperating.’
‘I’ll take either of those as a compliment.’
Jacob smiled. It was hard not to feel better when Luca was around. Maybe he was giving too much credence to a half-baked prophecy that was, when it came down to it, a vague doodle on a piece of old parchment that could mean almost anything. He now realised that the Council would say whatever it took to get him back to Astrae; they had never wanted him to embark on this search for his sister. It would be easy for them to interpret this scroll as a portent of his imminent doom and make it the perfect solution to both those problems. The idea lifted his spirits and he resolved to focus, once again, on his search.
A week passed and Jacob’s daily hunt revealed nothing. He tried different locations across the city; at first Luca accompanied him without fail, but as Jacob’s mood deteriorated along with the hopes of ever finding what they were looking for, and his company became more taciturn, it seemed the best way to save their friendship was for him to stay behind at the motel and entertain himself. Jacob would arrive back at the room after dark, exhausted and irritable, having eaten little and concentrated hard during the day. The only thing that changed was the colour of his skin as the sun turned it a healthy bronze, and the colour of his eyes as they became stormier with every frustrating hour that passed.
‘You’re going to have to come up with something else,’ Luca commented as he arrived back from dinner one evening to find Jacob lying on his bed.
‘I know. I just don’t know what,’ Jacob replied, staring at the ceiling fan as it whirred above him.
‘We could try the police.’
‘And say what, exactly? That I’m looking for my twin sister who’s an alien to tell her that she needs to come back to her home planet?’
‘There’s no need to be sarky,’ Luca snapped. ‘I’m trying to help.’
Jacob blew out a long breath. ‘Sorry. This seemed like it would be easy, but I’m wondering now whether the defences Dae put in place are better than I thought. I can’t even get a tiny fix on her. God only knows how Makash found me.’
‘Do you think he’s already found her?’ Luca asked as he kicked off his shoes and dropped into the armchair.
Jacob sat up to face him. ‘That would be very bad news.’
‘Yeah, but do you think he could have done, and that’s why you can’t find her?’
‘I have to believe that he hasn’t.’
Jacob swung himself round to drop from the bed and crossed the room. From a pocket in his suitcase he produced a folded piece of paper.
‘I suppose we could ask around, show her photo,’ he said, feeling unconvinced of the effectiveness of this plan himself as he unfolded a printout of the missing person poster they had first seen on Luca’s laptop.
‘Like I said before, I’m not sure the sort of people who would know where to find her are the sort of people we want to be asking,’ Luca replied.
Jacob stared down at the picture of Alex. Even in the grainy image, he could see confrontation in her eyes, in the whole set of her expression, right down to the spiky haircut. That she had not been as fortunate as he in the path life had chosen for her was apparent in every molecule of her being; everything about her spoke of anger. His thoughts strayed back to his adopted parents and how lucky he felt now to have them. It could so easily have been the other way around. Was it blind chance, or had Dae really engineered it to be this way? His hand crept to his amulet and he held it, focussing on the memory of his real mother. Surely the woman who had risked her own life to give him this protection would not have allowed that to happen to her other child? And in the periphery of his thoughts, the warnings of the prophecy still loomed. Perhaps there was a reason he couldn’t find Alex. He shook the thought away.
‘Maybe you’re right. I’ll try for another couple of days and if I have no luck, I’ll think of another way.’
‘You’ll have to, mate. You do realise that our parents are going to be expecting us back soon. Not to mention the small matter of fabricating a whole load of work experience evidence.’
‘I know. You could go down to the local hospital, take some photos tomorrow?’
‘Random photos of the outside of a hospital building. They’ll fall for that,’ Luca remarked with no small amount of sarcasm in his voice.
‘No,’ Jacob replied slowly, ‘it’s going to take a bit of creative editing.’
Luca grinned. ‘I think I can take care of that, then. Oh yeah,’ he added, ‘there’s a barbecue by the pool if you fancy going down for a bit.’
Jacob yawned. ‘I honestly don’t think I can keep my eyes open any longer.’
‘I’ll go down by myself. I’m getting used to it.’ The note of reproach in Luca’s voice cut Jacob.
‘I’m sorry. I promise I’ll try to be brighter tomorrow. In fact, I suppose we could do something.’
‘Really? Like what?’
Jacob paused. He wanted to keep his friend happy but he couldn’t lose his focus
, not for a second.
Then, the idea occurred to him in a flash of seemingly divine inspiration. ‘We haven’t seen Hollywood yet. Sunset Boulevard, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Venice Beach. How about we go down there?’
It seemed like the neatest solution; it would be teeming with people. Admittedly, many would be tourists like them, but for someone who wanted to blend in and not be found, maybe the perfect hiding place was a place where everyone else wanted to be noticed. He resolved to scan each and every mind, regardless of whether there was any danger of being detected or not - with so many people everywhere, he was sure he couldn’t be singled out.
‘Cool.’ Luca beamed. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’
Something woke Jacob, a profound feeling of agitation that stole his breath as he slept. He bolted up in the darkness and sat with his knees drawn to his chest, trying to collect his disordered thoughts and pinpoint the cause. He didn’t sense malevolence. It was something else, something like anguish... no, it was something more final than that, like an impending death. He recognised the feeling from long ago, when he had lost his parents in a car accident, and then later his true father, Dae. Was this another portent? His dad’s illness was terminal, but he already knew that and, besides, he still had a while yet, didn’t he? He glanced across at Luca sleeping peacefully, limbs sprawled across his bed like a marooned octopus. Surely not? No, Luca was safe, he was sure of that. In the present circumstances, he reflected wryly, there was a distinct possibility it was his own approaching demise he had felt.
He fell back onto his pillow, trying to shake the unease and return to sleep, but the night continued to tick by at an agonisingly slow pace until the first flush of dawn crept beneath the heavy curtains.
Luca woke to find Jacob sitting on the balcony.
‘Get you, essence of cool,’ he remarked, noting that Jacob was sitting wrapped in a sheet from his bed like some third-world refugee. ‘No wonder you’re beating off women with a stick. How long have you been up, anyway?’ he asked, yawning and scratching his bare chest as he stood at the glass doors.
‘Not long.’
‘Liar,’ Luca replied, taking in the shadows beneath his friend’s eyes.
‘I couldn’t sleep, for some reason.’ Jacob gathered the sheet around him and followed Luca back inside.
Luca cocked an eyebrow. ‘If we don’t find this girl soon, you’re going to be cuckoo.’
‘It wasn’t that,’ Jacob said quickly. ‘Something else. Just a weird feeling.’
‘Anything I should be concerned about?’
‘Probably not. Maybe I’ll call Mum and Dad, though, just to check everything is ok there,’ he said, his expression pensive.
‘You don’t think they’re in danger?’
‘No.’ Jacob tugged a hand through his hair. ‘I don’t know what it is. They’re probably ok,’ he reasoned, clearly trying to convince himself more than Luca.
‘Good. Because you owe me a day out, don’t forget.’
‘I know. I’ll phone and then we’ll have breakfast.’
‘It’ll have to wait… time difference – remember?’
‘Yeah, course, they’ll be in bed. Ok, breakfast?’
‘No time for breakfast, my friend. I have chocolate - that’ll keep us going for a while and we can do brunch. There’s no way I’m missing a second of Hollywood.’
‘You wanna get snapped up by a big-shot movie director, honey?’ Jacob said, mimicking the woman from the plane.
Luca threw a towel at him. ‘Ha ha.’
They decided to take a train. The trip was just over an hour with a connection at Union Station and it was reasonably cheap. Luca bubbled with enthusiasm, chatting incessantly, gawping out of the windows and fidgeting like a three-year-old on his first visit to Santa’s grotto. Jacob was still exhausted from his sleepless night and the previous days of intense activity and, although he tried his best to be cheerful, would really rather have sat in a quiet compartment somewhere in silence with his thoughts. But, as Luca insisted on conversation, he could have explained to Luca that he felt like something was amiss, that his mum had been hiding something from him whenever he called. He could have said that he was too scared to use his powers to delve into her consciousness because he was afraid of what he might find there. Instead, he half-listened to Luca as the train rocked back and forth, answering questions vaguely where he guessed he ought to, dipping in and out of the minds of the other passengers when he thought he could get away with it. Not for a moment did he think he was going to find what he was looking for aboard, but with the urgency to yield a result growing daily, it seemed foolish not to.
As they drew into the station, Luca leapt up from his seat ready to disembark.
‘The train won’t stop for ages,’ Jacob said.
‘Don’t care. Where are we headed first?’
Jacob shrugged and reached into the pocket of his rucksack for a bottle of water. ‘You choose,’ he said, popping the lid and taking a sip.
It was all the same to Jacob. He wished dearly, for Luca’s sake, that he could enjoy this trip more. And despite his gratitude that he had a companion, part of him wished that Luca hadn’t come; his presence was making things more difficult than they needed to be.
Once they were in central Hollywood, Luca pulled out his phone and began to snap every tiny thing he saw, despite Jacob’s warnings that he should be more discreet. Even though he was more prepared for any sort of attack, Jacob didn’t fancy a repeat of the confrontation that had been a feature of their first night in the city. People scurried up and down the streets like ants, barely leaving room to manoeuvre a path down the sidewalk. The constant jostling in the hot sun wore Jacob’s mood down even further.
Hollywood was not quite how he had imagined it either. For the most part, it was populated by a strange hybrid mix of iconic landmarks, faux classical architecture and tacky souvenir stalls.
‘Cool! There’s Harrison Ford’s handprints,’ Luca squeaked. ‘Take a picture of me.’
Jacob tried not to sigh too loudly as Luca handed him the phone and knelt down behind the concrete paving stone. He clicked quickly and handed it back. Luca gazed at his image. ‘Wait till Dad sees this!’ He glanced at Jacob as he stowed his phone back in his pocket. ‘You’re not really into this, are you?’
Jacob chewed the inside of his mouth. ‘Yeah,’ he answered finally, ‘I’m just tired.’ He dragged a hand through his heat-dampened hair and ran his eyes over the heaving street. ‘It’s a bit busy for my liking, too,’ he added.
‘But I thought busy would be good? Loads of people to probe.’
‘I know. I thought that, but this is just so… so overwhelming. I can’t make any sense of anything.’
Luca rolled his eyes. ‘There’s no pleasing you.’
‘Don’t be like that.’ Jacob shot him a wounded glance. ‘I’m doing my best.’
‘Well, you’re not going back to the motel until you’ve had some fun, so you might as well submit.’
Jacob gave a small smile. ‘Yes, boss.’
They spent the rest of the morning exploring downtown and tried out lunch in a sushi bar, which neither of them had done before. Jacob felt a little brighter and tried to enjoy himself for Luca’s sake, though it didn’t stop him zoning out for half an hour as Luca updated his Facebook status with a collection of photos of them on various sunny street corners. When they had eaten their fill, Jacob pulled out a guidebook that he had bought from a shabby roadside stall.
‘Where do you want to go now?’ Jacob asked.
‘The beach?’
Jacob opened out the middle pages of the book to a map. ‘Shouldn’t be too far,’ he said, poring over it.
‘We’ll just hop into a taxi.’
‘Are you kidding?’ Jacob replied, looking up from the map. ‘It’d cost a fortune.’
‘Alright, we’ll get the bus, Dad.’
Jacob grinned.
Venice Beach was the very essence of the California t
hey had grown up seeing on TV: a long stretch of bleached road flanked by the needles of fronded palm trees reaching into the azure sky. To one side of this lay white sweeps of powdered sand and the sea, and on the other side, sparkling geometric blocks of concrete and brick bearing colourful hoardings. People jogged, skateboarded, biked past - every one impossibly bronzed and healthy. Jacob and Luca stopped in their tracks as they turned the corner that would reveal the ocean for the first time, both gazing at the scene in awed silence.
‘Wow!’ Luca gaped. ‘Would you look at that?’
And, suddenly, Jacob knew that he had seen the exact same vista before.
‘This is the place,’ Jacob said. Luca shot him a puzzled look which escaped Jacob’s notice as he continued to stare down the white ribbon of the road. ‘My dream on the plane,’ he continued, ‘this is it.’
‘Seriously?’
‘I’m sure.’ Excitement mixed with trepidation began to build, a strange tingle in his gut. ‘I think she’s here.’
Almost as if he had been heard, a figure walked towards them. She was just a bit too skinny, cropped blonde hair; dressed in a vest top, cut off jeans and battered boots, an unmistakable air of belligerence about her. She stopped, about twenty feet or so away, as if she sensed she was being watched, looked straight at Jacob, frozen with a confused expression, then quickly turned about and began to walk away.
‘That’s her! Did you see?’ Jacob cried. ‘We need to catch up.’
They both started at a brisk walk.
‘I didn’t see her,’ Luca said.
‘What? You must have done, she was right in front of us,’ Jacob insisted, keeping his eyes trained on the retreating figure.
She glanced behind and, seemingly sensing that she was being followed, broke into a trot. They quickened their stride; she looked behind again and matched them, until all three of them were running.
Kya! Jacob called, desperately trying to reach her thoughts, to make her understand that he was not a threat, hoping against hope that she might just be tuned in. One last panicked look behind seemed to make a decision for her and she ducked down an alleyway. Luca and Jacob raced to catch up. They skidded to a halt at the opening and looked.
