“Young man, we haven’t been introduced. I’m Fredda’s mother-in-law, Olivia Walker.” The pale-haired woman in green puts forward her right hand, keeping her left arm tight around Fred’s shoulders. I might be meant to kiss it, but instead I step toward her, over the mess on the floor, and shake her hand in both of mine.
“I’m Carter, Fred’s little brother. It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am. I’m sorry I dropped my glass just there.”
“Not at all. It’s a party. These things happen.” Mrs. Walker, with one indulgent glance, takes in the scrum of cleanup activity I’m sensing behind me. Then, her expression hardening somewhat, she scans for the group around them, diffused but still circling, waiting at a safe distance for the signal that I’ve been disposed of and Fred is safe to approach and ensnare again. “I’m sorry to have to ask you to wait to speak to Fredda, Carter, but I’m sure you can see there are so many people who are here for just tonight and are eager to talk with her as well. Could Sophie help you find another drink?”
Hold your line. “No, I’m good, thank you. I just need a minute with Fred. Please. Right now.”
“Everything all right here?” An older guy in a tux with a broad, shining forehead like a helmet appears next to Mrs. Walker.
“Yes, this is Carter, Fredda’s brother. He just dropped his drink but I’m sure we can find him a fresh one,” Mrs. Walker says quickly. “Carter, this is my husband, Jackson Walker.”
“Sir.”
“The veteran!” Mr. Walker exclaims, his face reddening. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, son. I want to hear all about the Wars! I hear you boys’ve been triggering those desert rats five ways to Sunday!”
I can’t. Not with this guy. No way. I appeal directly to my sister. “Fred, please. I’ve got to tell you something. It’s important.” But Fred is white-lipped, wide-eyed.
“Are you sure you want to—” Mrs. Walker begins.
“Fred, please.” Hold your line. Be a good man.
“Carter, she’ll talk to you later.”
“It’s all right, excuse me for just a minute.” Fred maneuvers herself out from under Mrs. Walker’s wing, slides deftly past her father-in-law, who I notice has positioned himself to block.
I pivot and make for the dieffenbachia, waving Fred along without touching her or grabbing her to pull her with me—I figure she’s already had enough handsyness for the night. As we walk, me leading the way to my bench, with her following behind, I swipe open the virtual portal share command again and look for Fred’s handle to select. There are so many people around us it takes some scrolling, but then there she is, FREDDOM. Fred gets the invite as we reach the low white bench under the fake tree.
“Look,” I tell her, and Fred’s gaze goes glassy as she intakes the shared window directly to her retina, rather than her virtual portal—lots of cool shortcut features with the higher-end wearables, I always hear—and then Fred grabs my arm. Squeezes so hard I feel the raised wearable panel edge straining against the underside of my skin.
“I first saw it ten minutes ago, maybe—she hasn’t moved. What do you think this means? Do you think she’s waiting for us—there?”
“I don’t know, CQ. I—” Fred looks wildly around the room, scanning probably for her new husband and his family. It’s a room full of strangers to me but to her it might look more like an obstacle course. “I think we’ve got to get out of here, though. We’ve got to go see. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes. Yes. Exactly.” I’m so relieved I don’t have to do this alone that I don’t even care if she knows it. “You’re coming, right? I’ll call us an autocab.”
“Yes. I—” Her face sets hard. “I’m coming. But, CQ.”
“What? Please, Fred, we don’t have time—”
“Pop. What about Pop? We can’t just leave him here,” Fred says in a low voice.
I stare at her. “Do you not remember how just a couple of hours ago—just like every time we’ve asked him to help us find her—he told us to forget about her? He doesn’t deserve to know.”
“He’ll know if he turns on his mapping function,” Fred points out simply. “We’re all his kids. Our beacons are all there on his map. As a matter of fact, that’s probably the first thing he’ll do once he figures out we’ve left and we’re not here—turn on his mapping and start looking for us.”
With something that feels like a pinch to my navel, I recall what I said to him: Tell me again about how you spent all afternoon sitting in your chair, watching where I went, and probably Fred, too, on your wearable. Is that a habit you picked up after Gard disappeared?
“At least we can get a good head start.”
• • •
It’s not until we’re in the autocab hurling itself northward through light Friday-night traffic that I see how tired and freaked-out and masklike Fred’s face is. She has so much makeup on it’s like an entire other woman’s face has been applied over hers: her eyelashes are twice their normal lengths, her eyebrows are twice as black, her cheeks and lipstick twice as red. “Hey. You okay?”
“No. I am obviously not okay.”
“Gard is here! She’s right here in New Chicago! We’re going to see her in”—I check the autocab’s ETA in the shining panel set in the dashboard—“forty-eight minutes! We found her! Aren’t you glad about that?”
“She hasn’t moved.”
“What?”
“She hasn’t moved; her beacon hasn’t moved, in what—a half hour now?”
“So?”
“Live beacons move, CQ,” Fred says, and now I understand why she didn’t fight me on not bringing Pop with us. She doesn’t want him to see it, if we’re heading toward what she thinks we’re going to find.
I swallow something thick in my throat and look away from her, out the window, where to my right the dry cracked lake bed can be seen illuminated in the streetlights along New Lake Shore Drive as we pass, spotlight after spotlight creating empty circle after empty circle.
“I’m sorry, CQ. I just want you to be ready if that’s—” Fred’s voice rasps back to quiet. Then I hear her strained whisper, “God, it’s too much. I’m losing all three of you.”
I turn away from the window and scooch over on the car seat to give Fred one of those awkward, supportive, pat-clasps that are the only recourse of little brothers when their older sisters look like they’re about to break apart. “No. Fred. Come on. I’m still here. I’m still here, and I’m going to stay here. And Pop’s gonna hang in there, too—he’s a tough old bastard. Vet cancer or whatever the fuck he’s got, he’ll probably outlive us all, like the cockroaches. And Gard is back. Fred, she’s back. She’s still alive. I know it—she’s in hiding, waiting for us, that’s why she’s not moving.”
Fred dabs at her eyes, around all the extra stuff on them. It’s not a helpful effort, but I don’t bother telling her so. “I’m so sorry, Carter, for all the shit I put on you since you’ve been home. I thought I—I thought I was carrying too much.” She gestures at her belly, and it turns into a gentle smoothing motion over the round hopeful fact of herself. “But I know it’s not fair to compare with what you’re carrying around inside you. You’re so young, you—shouldn’t have to carry—death.” Her breath hitches. “But I guess that’s why we have to give it to you. You’re the only ones who can carry it. It’s why we make you carry it.”
I’m not completely sure I understand what she means, but she seems to be talking to the Marine I used to be, or maybe the one I should be. “No one made me. I went on my own. I enlisted. I knew what I was doing. I thought I knew, anyway.”
“They poisoned you. They put death in your hands, and in your—your self.” Fred insists, weeping the same way I’ve seen men weep in battle, unconsciously, just the grown heart’s natural response to the bottom of the world dropping out.
“If I can carry it, I don’t think I deserve to make someone else do it for me,” I tell her honestly. “Jesus, Fred, if you knew half of what I’ve done you wouldn’t feel so bad f
or me, trust me. I’ve—I’ve killed people, in, in horrible ways. I’ve made people’s organs fail; I’ve cooked them from the inside; I’ve made their skin glass; I’ve made their hearts and their tongues and their eyes swell—these triggers we’re using over there, you have no idea. I have no idea—half the time, I’m just triggering out and I don’t even see what happens.”
She’s no longer weeping. She’s just staring at me. I need to stop; I know I need to stop telling her these things. But my sister let me read her private messages with Gard, she’s let me in on everything about herself she was most afraid of—her debts, her fears. I should let her in on at least some of the truth about me, too, mainly that I am not harmless. I am not. But I can be a good man, or I can die trying.
“I killed this teenage girl once—earlier this year—I saw what the trigger did to her. I think I saw. I’m not sure what I saw. But I was exposed to whatever killed her. That’s why I’m sick now. I did it myself, Fred. No one poisoned me, I did it myself.”
“No. That can’t be true. I can’t let you think that.”
“It’s the truth. I mean, yeah, I didn’t make the weapons; I didn’t make the Wars. I signed on because I wanted to outgun Pop, outhero myself. But I was that trigger. It was me, Fred. I don’t blame anybody else. I could blame this—I don’t know—this world, but I don’t want to.”
“I want to. I want to blame this world. It’s the same world that has Gard breaking women’s arms so they can afford to raise their children. It’s the same world that sells me to the highest fucking bidder. No one asked me to carry these debts; no one asked Gard to pick up those burdens; no one asked you to be a fucking vehicle for death in the world, but that’s what we are. You are going to die; you are fucking twenty-four years old. Be angry, CQ! Be fucking angry about it!”
“I could just as easily have died over there, a hundred different times!” I shoot back, exasperated.
“But you didn’t. You didn’t. You came home. You were supposed to live.”
“Fredlet. It’s okay. I’m fine.”
“You are not fine. Nothing is fine.”
“Okay. I’m sick. Pop’s sick. You know, a lot of people are sick, the world keeps turning.”
“Not for me it doesn’t.”
I hold her hand awkwardly, unsure what else to do. Be a good man, or die trying. I can’t say I’ve made my peace with whatever it is inside me that’s eating me, or tearing me to pieces, or stripping me down, but I can see how it’s just as hard for Fred to watch as it is for me to live with, or die from. Because if the best way to hurt yourself is to hurt the ones you love, the second best way is just to watch the ones you love hurting and not look away, just keep looking and looking, knowing the whole time that you can’t do fuck all about it.
The car curls around us. Outside, the warm air, the battered buildings that were once beautiful in pictures, now pocked with broken windows and signs of ruin, and the sulfurous stink of the lake bed all flow by into whatever’s past.
Dec 20 11:00 PM
23 15 42 02 52 53 87 69 23 92
23 15 42 02 52 53 87 69 23 92
23 15 42 02 52 53 87 69 23 92
23 15 42 02 52 53 87 69 23 92
Natalie’s message again. I think it must be on some kind of timer, set to auto-resend every hour.
“A few weeks before Gard disappeared,” Fred says, “I had a scare. I was bleeding, and I wasn’t sure what to do. So I messaged Gard—privately. You saw that, I think. You read those messages, all of them?”
“I did. Yeah.”
Her shame is obvious, and pitiable. “Gard tried to calm me down; she was on her way over—and I just, I guess, I panicked. I didn’t wait for her. I felt like I couldn’t. I messaged Ken, and got his family involved—the whole DOH emergency corps was at my place in like two minutes, I swear to God. They fucking mobilized. And from that moment on I’ve been indebted to these people. On top of all the Care Hours I owe and the millions of dollars in penalties, I might owe the Walkers this baby’s life. Do you see what I mean? Gard was hurt, I think. Like I didn’t trust her, or like I’d chosen them over her. But that’s . . . I hate myself for this, but that’s really why I felt like I had to go through with it tonight, get married to Ken, join the family, the whole fucking goat rodeo, you called it. Yes, I owe them. And, yes, my family keeps dying off or ghosting out on me. But also I’m just not sure I can do it myself—keep this kid alive, be a mother.” A shake of the head, her hands cupping her belly. “I hate that I’m too weak for this,” Fred says stonily.
“You’re not too weak for anything. Look at what you did just tonight. You went through with something hard, to help your baby have a better life. You’re going to find a way through it that works for you—I know you. So you had to marry a rich fucktard, people have had to do worse.” Now she’s laughing, reluctantly. “You’re taken care of, and your kid is taken care of, for life. And at Completion you’re going to rise up and build something even better than what you sold them—and you sold it to them at a profit, okay? So they haven’t beaten you. Not by a long shot. You’re done when you say you’re done, and not a second before.” I’m thinking of Professor Pierce, the way she smiled just thinking about Fred, Fred as she was ten or so years ago, when she was just getting ready to storm the towers. “You’re FREDDOM, dammit. No one who’s ever met you could forget it.”
“Okay. Okay. Enough.” She’s smiling slightly, which means I’ve helped. I’m glad. How could I be otherwise? We’re on our way to Gard. I want Fred to feel the way I feel about that—like we’re going home, after a tiring fucked-up trip. “Thank you.”
“Well. I’m your little brother, it’s my job to look up to you.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner about—about those messages, between me and Gard.” Fred swallows hard. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you anything about the night I almost lost the baby, or about the debt, or about what Gard taught me, what Completion’s really like. I was ashamed. I was just ashamed of myself and what’s been happening to me. I’m the sister who’s supposed to have her shit together.”
I can’t help shaking my head at that. “Fred. I didn’t tell you anything, either. Don’t you know that’s why I never wrote home to you, no matter how many times you asked me to? Don’t you know I was just ashamed, too? I still am.”
Fred’s face is now alight with anger, and somehow it makes me feel better to see—the rageful Fred is the one I know, not the desolate Fred with another woman’s face painted on over her own. “That’s the worst thing about this goddamn world, Carter. You served what’s left of our fucking country, and I’m pregnant with what’s left of the fucking future, and still somehow we’re made to feel ashamed of ourselves, because of how we have to do it. This should be good. We should be good.”
“We are good,” I tell her. “We are.”
“You are.”
“No, you are.”
“No, you are.”
Okay. Now we’re laughing a little. The terror is in front of us, and behind us, but at least we’re still together, and that means something.
“Fred, I want to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve been getting this message all night from Natalie, Gard’s coworker. I can’t understand it. It could be nothing; it could just be a mistake. But she keeps sending it and sending it. I think it’s got to mean something, but I don’t know what.”
“Can I see?”
I share it to her. She frowns. “What time is it?”
“Almost eleven. Wait, a bit past. We’re getting there.”
“Well, fuck, CQ. Did you even try looking it up as a lat/long? It’s got a forty-two and an eighty-seven in it, that’s New Chicago’s latitude and longitude, everybody knows that.”
“Nobody knows that,” I assure her. “Only a nerd like you would know that.”
“Fuck you, everybody who pays attention in geography knows that!” she protests hotly. “Besides, what else would she be send
ing you, other than a location to meet her? These numbers before the forty-two I don’t know, but could be an hour of the day, probably eleven fifteen. Jesus, CQ, it’s not even that complicated, if you hadn’t been drunk all day you could probably have figured it out—”
I’m not listening to her. My heart is pounding. I roll down the window. I stick my head out into the whip of the hot hell-smelling slipstream and whoop. Victory.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Look it up, Fred, look it up. Copy the—the lat/long into the mapping, the thing.”
“It’s probably where we’re going,” she says brattily, but she does it, I can tell, the way her focus flicks up, right, across, down. “Yeah.”
“Yeah? No shit?” I can hardly sit still. I’m about to bounce out of the car. Gard and Natalie are both there, in the same place, the place we’re headed to right now. It doesn’t seem possible that I’ve found both of them at once. It’s too good to be real.
“No shit. Up near New Evanston. An old middle school, looks like.” Fred smirks at me. “You really have a bone for this girl, huh?”
“She sent me this location, like, fifty times today. She’s the one who has a bone for me.”
“Dreaming,” Fred says flatly, crossing her arms over her belly, but she’s loving it.
“You tell me! Fifty times. I swear to God.”
“Pop’s on his way, he’s in an autocab about ten minutes behind us,” Fred informs me. “His beacon just lit up at the bottom of my map.”
This deflates me somewhat. The wearables. This technology, it’s invaded all of us to the point where we almost have no secrets, but it is also just about all that tethers us to each other. “What do you want to do?”
“I,” she says in a steely voice, “want to find my little sister.”
“Fred?”
“What.”
“I hope you have a girl.”
• • •
Fred and I leave the autocab about a half mile from where Gard’s beacon is pulsing on our maps, and we walk by moonlight in darkness. Other than the taps of our heels, it’s quiet this far from the city, and we see no one else on the streets. Most of the houses look like no one’s lived here for a while; there are dead shops and dead bushes on the corners. We’re really in the outskirts of New Evanston now, having crossed through the unrehabbed zone that separates it from New Chicago. Fred’s shoes—heels, white and bejeweled, they mean business—are bothering her. Mine, too. We stagger on.
The Completionist Page 27
