by R. A. Nelson
“Well … I hope you won’t.”
He put his glasses back on, looked down at his book.
“Please go away. I’m busy.”
I looked at the title of the book: Brisingr. “Dragons, huh?” I said. “I read the first one. It was pretty solid. I don’t read a whole lot of sword and sorcery stuff.”
“I’d like to get back to it,” Sagan said. “You know the way out.”
I made a face he didn’t see. “Papi—my grandfather—he turns me on to history books he likes. He’s got unbelievable taste. For an old guy, I mean.” Oops, watch the family references.
Sagan turned a page, and his washed-out blue eyes shifted. I loved the way his straight hair fell over his glasses.
“You’re pretty mad at me, aren’t you?” I said.
He read at least half a page before answering … and then he didn’t really answer. Just sort of grunted.
I leaned toward him, wanting to touch him on the arm. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re welcome for the pizza.”
“Thank you. Got any left?”
“Um. And you are still here because …?”
I touched his arm. He didn’t exactly jerk it away, but I felt his muscles tighten.
“How was school today?” I said.
“College. It’s called college.” What he was saying underneath it was this: I’m not a kid anymore like you.
Whoop dee frickin’ doo, I started to say, then decided I better soften it. “Must be nice.”
Sagan closed his book with a thump and finally looked at me. “Please go away.”
“Nope, sorry. Not until your mood stabilizer kicks in.”
“Why should I even be talking to you?”
“Because I’m cool to talk to. Because you like me.”
Okay, I had the bait out. Now let’s see how he was going to respond. Sagan took a bite of chili, blowing on the spoon before putting it in his mouth. All that junk food in my system—watching him eat was a killer.
He put the spoon down and looked out at the setting sun, slowly exhaling. I waited, hopeful.
“It’s happened all my life, you know?” he said, looking at me. “I’ve been the guy other people could get to do things for them. I’ve always had skills. Or was willing. That’s what people always wanted me for. What I could do for them.”
“A tool,” I said.
Sagan swore. “You really were just after something to eat last night, weren’t you?”
I rolled my eyes. “When you catch somebody rifling through a kitchen, that’s a pretty safe guess.”
“So you decided to charm me into buying you something. You used me.”
Wow, nobody had ever accused me of having charm before. “I didn’t use you,” I said. “Okay, well, maybe I used you a little. But that’s not why I came back.…”
“It was all a joke, wasn’t it?” Sagan wasn’t smiling.
“What?”
“You spent practically the whole night convincing me you were some kind of poor homeless person who had been abused or were in some kind of terrible trouble—”
“Hey—” I couldn’t help myself; I was starting to bristle now. “That’s not fair. Everything I told you is true. I never said anything about being abused. And I said I was only technically homeless, remember? I have a home—but I have to live out here for right now. Because I am in trouble. And yes, it’s pretty terrible.”
“How do I know it’s not just another trick?” Sagan said. “You probably don’t even need those sunglasses either.”
I took off my shades and put them in my pocket. He was moving another bite of chili to his mouth. His hand stopped and his eyes widened. He was staring at me.
“Look, how many times do I have to say I’m sorry?” I said. “You’re right. Running out on you wasn’t … it wasn’t very nice.” I had never liked that word. Nice was people who got the short end of the stick because they were too afraid to stand up for themselves.
“I still don’t know your name,” he said.
“Emma,” I said. “My name is Emma.”
Sagan looked at me questioningly. “Last name?”
“Sorry, that’s all you’re going to get.”
“So how do I believe you?”
“I don’t lie. Well, I didn’t until recently. But I swear that’s my name. They named me after my aunt.”
“Okay. Emma. Keep going. Who is ‘they’?”
“My parents are divorced. I live with my mom and little sister in a ratty apartment. I haven’t seen my dad in … well, a really long time. I don’t even know that much about him anymore.”
“So why did you have to leave?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Sagan gave me a genuine smile for the first time all night. “Hey, I believe in stuff like neutron stars and black holes. This is where I’m supposed to say ‘try me.’ ”
I took a deep breath. “That’s the movies. This is real. Only in the movies would somebody believe anything like this. I still don’t believe it myself sometimes.”
“So you really are living out here? Where?”
I looked away. “I have to keep that a secret. To protect you.”
“Why? What could happen to me?”
“Like I said, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“You owe me,” he said. “I took a chance on you. I could’ve gotten into big trouble letting you stay. The last time I saw you, you were wearing gum boots and pajamas. Your toes were green. Now you come here looking all gorgeous like you just stepped out of a catalog. You could be … anybody. You could be …” He didn’t say it, but I knew from his face what he was thinking. You could be crazy.
“I’m not crazy,” I said. “Wait a minute. Back up. Did you … did you just call me … gorgeous?”
“What if I did?”
“Where’d you say the restroom is?”
Oh my God.
I was looking at the proof in the mirror and couldn’t come close to believing it. I’m beautiful, I thought. For the very first time in my life. Beautiful.
It wasn’t the clothes; it was me. It. Was. Me. I had always been okay with my looks before but sometimes felt a little invisible to guys. Especially when girls like Gretchen Roberts were around. Now I still looked like myself: the same high cheekbones, thick brown hair, slightly wide nose, and big intense wolfish eyes … but something, some miraculous transformation had taken place. All of the parts of me that had never seemed to quite work together before—they all blended now.
It was a miracle. My skin shone. My curling bangs that had always driven me crazy—after camping out in rat holes, bathing with tap water—they fell just exactly across my forehead. My mouth was even poutier. And when I smiled … Oh. My. God.
Of all the surprising things that had happened to me today, this was the most shocking of all.
I walked unsteadily back to the cafeteria. I say walked. But really it was more like floating. Maybe vampires can fly.
“I can’t stand it anymore. Here,” Sagan said when I sat down. He slid his bowl of chili over.
I stared at him blankly.
“You look like you’re about ready to fall over.”
“Oh! Thanks, but I’m not hungry.” I pushed the bowl back. I didn’t care if I ever ate another bite of food in my whole life. I’m beautiful.
“The girl who ate practically a whole pizza is not hungry,” Sagan said. “Okay. So what have you eaten today?”
“Huh? Oh. Nothing. Well, nothing but a ton of mall junk.”
“You went to the mall today?”
My luminous mood plummeted. I could have bitten off my tongue. “Well. Um. I did some … uh … shopping.”
“That’s where you got the clothes?”
I waited, figuring out what to say. “You have to understand. I’m not a bad person. I’m not. But lately … I’ve had to do some bad things. I’ve never stolen anything in my life, I swear. Well, except … lately.”
“You s
tole those clothes?”
I could only nod.
Sagan sighed. “So why didn’t you just go to a thrift store or something?”
“What? You think I should have stolen from poor people?”
“Oh. So you don’t have any money?”
“No. Not even a debit card. I’ve lost everything. My cell phone. All the stuff in my room.”
“It’s not lost if it’s right there,” he said.
“I can’t go back there. I don’t know when I’ll ever be able to go back. I barely made it out as it was.”
“Sounds like you had to leave really fast.”
I thought about how I had smashed through my bedroom window two nights ago. It already felt like another world, another life.
“You have no idea,” I said. “Besides, even if I had my debit card, my cell, if I used them, they could trace it. They could find me.”
“They?”
“Anybody who wants to find me.”
“So it’s somebody in your family you’re hiding from?”
“I didn’t say that. But they sure would like to know where I am. My mom is scared half to death.”
“Why not just tell them? So they can help?”
All the questions were starting to make me feel uncomfortable. I got up and turned toward the window and watched a truck rumbling by in the distance.
“It would be too dangerous for them,” I said. “I can’t be seen around them. There is no way I could go back home right now, Sagan.”
“Why?”
“Somebody is … after me. If they find out where my family lives, they would hurt them to get to me. That’s why I left.”
“Who?”
I started to say something, and he held up his hand.
“I know, I know, I won’t believe you.”
“Right.”
Sagan cursed. “Come on, Emma. If somebody is trying to hurt you, you have to call the police! If you don’t call them, I will.”
I felt my jaw tighten and took a couple of steps toward him. “Look … if you say a word about this to anybody … you’re going to get me killed. My mom and my sister too. Seriously.”
Sagan’s eyes widened. “Drugs. It’s got to be drugs.”
Now I cursed. “No! You’re just like my mom. I hate drugs.”
“I don’t mean you … but you saw something, some big drug deal—”
“Not even close.”
“But it has to be something … crazy. Really bad.”
I felt like pulling my hair out. “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you? It just happened to me. It could have happened to anybody. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I nearly—I nearly died.”
“And you’re telling me the police—they can’t do anything about it.”
“They would make it ten times worse! If I did that, they—the bad people—they would know for sure where my family lived.” They can’t stop this, I wanted to say. Not what is coming. “It wouldn’t do any good,” I said. “The police couldn’t protect us. They’d be as helpless as anybody else. Swear that you won’t call them.”
“Okay, okay, I swear,” Sagan said. “Emma … you make it sound like … it’s the Mafia or something.”
“It’s worse than that. Much worse.”
I started to cry. Which I hated. I had seen so many girls do this … use tears to turn things in their favor. But I couldn’t stop.
Sagan got up and came toward me. “Hey, look. It’s going to be okay. Come on. It’ll be all right.”
His concern made everything worse. Now I was really sobbing. All the stuff I had stored up inside me was about to come flooding out. I bit my lip. Bit it hard and shook my head. I turned my back to him.
“I’m stupid. Really stupid.”
He came up behind me and I could feel his big hands on my shoulders. I wiped my eyes, willing myself to stop. Nothing made me madder than somebody feeling sorry for me.
“Hey. Hey, it’s all right,” Sagan said. “You don’t have to tell me. You’re okay. You’re safe, all right? Nothing is going to happen to you now.…”
“Nothing … right. You don’t know.… You don’t. They’re looking for me right now. I can’t talk about it. I won’t.…”
“Okay … look. Let’s do it this way. I can handle not knowing. Just don’t tell me, okay? Until you’re ready.”
I couldn’t speak for a while. I wanted to fall into his arms. He had said exactly the right thing.
We walked up the sidewalk to the aluminum dome of the observatory. There was a grassy smell on the breeze, and the sky still had a little blue. The only stars out, Sagan said, were really the planets Venus and Jupiter. How could anything be wrong on a night like this?
Where is he? I wondered. Wirtz? Out there waiting for the blackness to fall. What kind of place was he in? How far away? How did a vampire know when it was safe to awaken? Was I the first thing he thought of when he shrugged off sleep, some new way to get at me? Or did he think of something else … his hunger … No. I won’t think about that right now. I won’t. You don’t control me.
I stopped in front of a door.
“Okay. You’ll never have a better shot,” I said. “Show me everything.”
But Sagan kept going, taking my hand and pulling me with him. “No, come on. That’s the Vector Magnetograph Facility. There’s a telescope, but it’s not all that huge.”
“Magneto-flidgy what?”
“It gives you views of chromospheric structures. Weblike patterns on the sun caused by bundles of magnetic field lines …”
“Bleh. Enough.”
Sagan winced. But only a little.
“But the observatory—” I said.
“The dome? That’s not really the observatory. The observatory my mom works with is … in a different place. Come on.”
He took me past the dome and let us through a door with his badge and we walked down a long, dark hall to a long, dark room. Sagan began to glow, a nice robin’s egg shade.
“Okay. Let me find the lights.”
I could already see a couple dozen desk chairs perched in front of computer monitors. Most of the monitors were blank, but a few were scrolling some kind of data.
“You probably shouldn’t touch anything,” he said.
“Wasn’t planning to,” I said.
“A guard comes around just about every night. He’s cool. Most of the time he comes in and walks around and we scare each other.”
“And if he caught us?”
Sagan showed a wicked smile. “If he caught you, you mean. We would both be in it pretty deep.”
I must have looked alarmed, because he added, “Don’t worry, we’re fine. It’s usually in the middle of the night when he comes through. And even if he did, you would just have to keep on your toes. Go to the opposite end of the building, duck in and out of places.”
“I’m good at ducking.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
Sagan turned and lifted his hand majestically, as if we were standing before the pyramids.
“This is STEREO.”
I could see an enormous oval conference table flanked with cushy chairs. The table was crisscrossed with wires that went to telephones and a couple of computer keyboards.
“So, play me something,” I said.
“It’s not that kind of stereo.”
He walked over to one of the keyboards and bumped the mouse. The giant screen popped alive, showing a Windows log-in page.
“STEREO is short for Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory,” Sagan said. “Actually two nearly identical observatories. One ahead of the earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind. Here’s the cool thing about it—for the first time ever it gives us a view of the sun in 3-D.”
He clicked his way deeper into the program. “This is a remote station. Mostly I get to look at what STEREO is looking at. I can’t send it any real commands. With over a hundred million bucks on the line, I’m locked out. But it’s cool just getting to w
ork with the data it collects.”
“Oh. So what do you get for a hundred million?” I said, dramatically stifling a yawn.
Sagan clicked the mouse. “This.”
The screen burst with supercharged greenish light, making me flinch, even with my sunglasses on. I had to step back and turn my head away, shielding my eyes from the otherworldly radiance.
“Pretty amazing, huh?” he said.
When my eyes adjusted, I saw an image of the sun, actually about a quarter of the whole ball, slowly rotating, massive coils of fire shooting out from the edge of the sphere, then turning back in on themselves. As the coils moved across the surface, they swayed and danced, reminding me of videos I had seen of tornadoes ravaging a pasture. I had never seen anything like it.
“Yeah, now that’s cool,” I said, peeking through my fingers, genuinely enthralled as the flames whipped back and forth.
Sagan’s eyes glittered with reflected green light. “That’s one of the ‘wow’ images they throw at people the first time they come to the facility. You should see their heads rock back when they aren’t ready for it.”
“Except … why is it green?”
“Oh. I toned it down, put it into an easier spectrum for you to handle, knowing your eyes are sensitive. The full spectrum would’ve knocked you over. It’s that intense.”
“Thanks. Hey … what’s that bright spot where so much of the fire seems to be bursting out?”
“A CME,” Sagan said. “Coronal mass ejection. Basically an explosion on the sun. You ought to see a CME in yellow-orange! You’d be blinking white circles for a week.”
“I bet,” I said, but the sarcasm in my tone went right over his head. “So tell me again, what’s it for?”
“STEREO traces the flow of energy and matter from the sun to the earth. The two observatories can show the 3-D structure of coronal mass ejections so we can study ’em. CMEs can seriously mess with satellites and power grids. It gives us more data we can look at, see how we might possibly survive a giant CME. At the very least, give us some advance warning.”
“Survive? Advance warning of what?”
He nodded at the fireball on the screen. A loop of flame was wiggling like an electric charge.
“If you get one big enough, a CME or a flare, it could throw us back into the Dark Ages.”
