The puffy-haired kid coughed, expelling pungent smoke. He looked around, as if the wolves might have been closing in this whole time.
“There’s no wolves around here,” Desperate Freeloaders said.
“They . . . only come out at night to hunt in packs,” Olivia said unconvincingly, giving up on the stupid wolf story.
The girl laughed. “You’re not a journalist!”
“I am. I really am. Do any of you guys read The Beat?”
Desperate Freeloaders gave her the side-eye. “You write for that rag?”
“Yeah. You read it?”
“What’s your name?”
“Olivia Nikitas.”
“No shit?” He stepped closer and squinted at her. “You do kinda look like her.”
Olivia retrieved her wallet and showed him her driver’s license, tilting it to catch the moonlight. Desperate Freeloaders grinned.
“You been over in Syria. That’s badass.”
“So how about that ride?”
“Yeah, okay. Your girlfriend coming, too?”
“My—?”
He pointed. At the top of the ridge on the other side of the creek, Dee stood watching them.
“That’s nobody,” Olivia said.
“Maybe she’s a wolf that got lost from her night-hunting pack,” the girl said.
“Yeah,” Desperate Freeloaders said.
The puffy-haired kid sucked hard on the remaining scrap of the joint. “I told you guys I heard somebody yelling.”
“Can we go?” Olivia said.
A few minutes later, she was straddling a dirt bike, her arms wrapped around Desperate Freeloaders’s waist while he impressed the hell out of her with his talent for almost crashing on every turn of the trail. Desperate Freeloaders—what were the odds?
Everything was connected to everything else.
Fourteen
Sheffield, Idaho, at three-thirty in the morning was an empty movie set of a small town. A blinking traffic light hung above the biggest intersection. Puddles, lingering from earlier showers, absorbed yellow light. The unmufflered dirt bikes shredded the night, but there was no one around to care. Of course, all the businesses were closed. But many had CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE signs in the windows. Desperate Freeloaders—who Olivia learned was named Stefan—tucked his bike into the curb and cut the engine. His friends, Doug and Angel, did the same.
Olivia swung off the seat. She felt like she’d been riding a paint mixer. The inside of her head was still jittering.
“You got somebody to call?” Stefan produced his wafer-thin Trinity model.
Olivia took the phone but didn’t punch in Brian’s number. The Society was hunting her; that much she did believe. What level of surveillance were they capable of? Maybe she was being paranoid, but she didn’t want to take a chance on letting Emilio and company know where she was headed.
And if she called the police, what would she tell them? Could she even find her way back to Sanctuary? And if she did, what could she prove? Plus, all that would take time. Alvaro and Dee had spooked her with their running-out-of-time talk. Olivia didn’t want to accept what they’d said about the pandemic, but what if it was true? What if only part of it was true? How much time could she afford to waste?
Stefan and his friends stood by their bikes, watching her. They looked like self-conscious musicians posing for a band photo. “Hey.” Stefan walked over, his hand out. “If you’re not going to use that thing . . .”
Olivia held on to the phone. “Uh, I need to get to Seattle.”
“Bus comes through early.”
“Greyhound?” Olivia started Googling the website.
“Not on my phone,” Stefan said.
Olivia looked up. “How am I supposed to get a ticket?”
“You could buy one in the hardware store, but they’re closed.”
“Right,” Olivia said. “It’s almost four in the morning.”
“They’re closed all the time,” Stefan said. “It’s the epidemic. Everybody’s scared. There’s almost nothing in the whole town open since yesterday.”
Less than forty-eight hours since the president’s announcement. Fear spread faster than variola.
Angel, with the wing tattoos on the sides of her head, walked over. “If you wait by the road, the bus might come anyway. Sheffield’s on the route, even if there’s nobody around to sell you a ticket.”
Olivia said to Stefan, “Look, buy the ticket on your phone and I’ll pay you.”
“No. I don’t buy anything online. That shit is monitored.” Stefan wiggled his fingers. Reluctantly, Olivia handed him the phone. He put it in his pocket. She looked at the others, but no one volunteered the use of theirs. “Hey,” Stefan said, “you ever want to do a story about Sheffield, I can be your source.”
Olivia shook her head. “Sorry? Why would I want to do a story about Sheffield?”
“Because all kinds of shit goes on around here. You know, massive political corruption.”
“Massive, huh?”
“What you should do,” Stefan said, “is give me your number.”
“You can contact me through The Beat.”
“I’ll give you my number, then.”
Angel said, “Give it up, Stefan.”
“No, really.” Stefan rattled off his number and followed it with a big grin. “Aren’t you going to write it down?”
Olivia tapped her forehead. “I have near-perfect recall. Comes with the job. Where do I wait for the bus?”
“Walk that way, out to where Main Street meets the state highway. There’s a bench. It’ll come at like six, I think.”
“Or it won’t,” the wing girl said.
“Thanks, you guys.”
Stefan hooked his thumbs in his pockets. “Hey, we could hang with you, if you want. Until the bus comes.”
“No, we can’t,” Angel said.
Olivia smiled. “I’m good, thanks.” As she walked away, she heard Stefan say, “Bad-ass.”
“Whatever,” Angel said. “That chick’s never going to call you.”
The dirt bikes kicked into life, making a window-rattling racket, though together the sound barely amounted to the noise of one real motorcycle. They ripped past her, two on the left, one on the right. Stefan popped a wheelie and raised his left fist. Yeah, fight the power, kid, fight Sheffield corruption. Three kids playing rebels in a small Idaho town, but without them Olivia might never have gotten out of the woods.
She found the bench where Main Street met Highway 51. Away from the town lights it was too dark to see much of anything else. Crickets chirruped. The moon played hide-and-seek in the clouds. At least it was summer. Every time a pair of headlights appeared, Olivia grew tense. What if it was someone from Sanctuary? Maybe Nike and Robbie and a few of the young guys hunting for her, huddled in the back of the van with hypos and handcuffs and gags.
Dawn came up, revealing two lanes of hard-used road split by a faded yellow line. Utility poles leaned like giant drunken stick figures. Soon the Greyhound arrived and its door swung open. The driver was wearing a filter mask of the type used in doctors’ waiting rooms or in airports, or that covered the faces of Japanese tourists everywhere. He sold her a ticket to Seattle, the route’s end point—an eleven-hour ride.
Olivia passed down the aisle to the back. The bus was about half full. Some of the passengers were wearing masks, too.
Those masks wouldn’t stop variola.
Nothing would.
* * *
The bus reached the Seattle Greyhound station at half past five in the afternoon. Olivia’s headache had finally subsided. A lone yellow cab, remnant of massive herds hunted to near extinction by Uber, rolled slowly past the bus station. Olivia flagged it and took it straight to Brian’s apartment in West Seattle.
She stood on the sidewalk under his window, looking up. The window was open. Why was she hesitating?
Because I’m afraid, she thought, observing the fact of her fear, barely moving her
lips. Dee had said, If you bring him into this, you’ll put him in danger.
“It’s all bullshit,” Olivia said out loud, but she didn’t believe herself.
Shepherds, probability machines, insects burrowing into her brain—though she couldn’t accept all the specifics, she knew something was going on. I have seen the halo. (Hallelujah.) And she had reached into it and erased Dee’s gunshot wound, which no doubt had unleashed the dreaded González effect. But . . . probability machines? Was the only other explanation a psychotic break, a fugue state caused by bad brain chemicals and her experiences in the Disaster? Maybe she should have taken the cab to the nearest headshrinker instead of to Brian’s apartment.
Olivia dug out her wallet and folded it open. She teased out the key tucked behind her driver’s license. Brian had made her the key as soon as they got back from Syria. It was their version of an engagement ring. Except Olivia didn’t want to be fully engaged. She closed the key in her fist, put her wallet away, and strode to the lobby door, which buzzed open when she punched in the code on the keypad.
She ran up the stairs to the third floor. Brian’s door opened before she reached it.
“Liv?” He had his car keys in his hand. “Liv? Oh, my God.”
“Bri.” She started toward him. He barreled down the hallway and hugged her like he wanted to break her in half and put her away in a safe so she wouldn’t disappear again. She hugged him hard, too, his tall, bony frame like a deep-planted anchor in the tornado of the world Disaster. Brian Anker: appropriate name.
“Where did you go, what happened?” he asked, his voice full of emotion. She recognized where it came from: a terror of abandonment. It was a terror she’d spent more than a decade very deliberately subverting in herself, ever since that day she walked into the living room and encountered her father’s body slumped over the arm of his chair, his dead eyes searching the complex pattern of the rug for his lost life. But Brian wasn’t one for subverting his emotions.
“I got a little sidetracked,” she said.
“What? Jesus, you’re lucky I love insane people.”
“People? Not just me?”
“You’re the finest representative of the type.” He studied her eyes. “Wait. It’s not just that you got sidetracked. Something bad happened to you.” She could hear him struggling to keep his voice steady.
“I’m all right, Brian. I—I’m all right now that I’m back.”
“What happened?”
“Let’s go inside.”
A deep scar in the hardwood entry pointed to the living room. The tan window blinds half lidded the view to the street. Every picture, every piece of furniture, every stain and scar and smell, added up to home. Though it had been only a short time, Brian’s apartment had become more of a home than anyplace else she’d lived since she was a kid. This scared her more than a little bit. Home was the place that hurt you.
She looked back. Brian stood with his hands in his pockets, watching her, a deeply worried expression on his face. He waited for her to speak.
“This is going to be hard for you to believe,” she said.
“I’ll believe you.”
“Brian. I mean really hard.”
He removed his glasses and wiped the lenses on his T-shirt. A thing he did, like a coach calling a time-out before the next play, a momentum-changing tactic. Not his momentum; hers. “I’m listening.” He replaced his glasses and adjusted them on the bridge of his nose.
“Okay. But I want to call my stepmom first, make sure she’s all right.” Part of Olivia felt fragile, and that fragile part swung toward Rohana, her living connection to the past. She was thinking, what if the González effect did something to advance variola into Jaipur? “And I need—”
He shook his head. “First tell me where you’ve been.” He shut the door. “And what was that phone call yesterday? You couldn’t stay on the line even five minutes to tell me where you were? My God, I was starting to think you’d been abducted or something. It didn’t make sense that you’d just leave. But I remembered what you told me, that you had trouble sticking around. Do you remember when you told me that?” He said it like a test question. “And do you remember what I said to you?”
She nodded. “You said I wouldn’t do that with you.”
“That’s right. So I knew you hadn’t run out on me two nights ago.”
“Brian.”
“I knew you wouldn’t just check out, fly back to Syria or wherever. Back to the—the Disaster, as you call it. You didn’t take your precious go-bag. You might think you’re capable of that, but I don’t—”
“Brian.”
“What?”
“I was abducted.”
After a moment, he closed his mouth.
She told him everything, going back to the torture cell and connecting it with the abduction by the Society. Parts of the story sounded so crazy that she almost swallowed back the words before they could escape into the open, where Brian would use them to pity her or be afraid for her sanity. And he did flinch slightly when she started talking about the link-bug and Brian’s resurrection. She’d brought up that part before. The two-memory problem. But he didn’t interrupt, didn’t object. And if he felt pity or feared for her sanity, he didn’t allow those thoughts to creep into his eyes. She almost wished he would allow it to show. Brian’s goodness sometimes felt like a fraud.
When she finished, all he said was “I need a drink.”
He went into the kitchen. The refrigerator opened, rattling bottles. This was another time-out tactic.
He returned with two bottles of IPA, his limp barely noticeable.
“So you ditched your crutches,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s down to a dull ache. Look, you really believe everything you just told me is true? That thing where I died. That—whatever you called it.”
“Probability.”
“Yeah. I’m having trouble with that.”
“It was real. I remember it. Only now the old probability feels more like something I read about or saw in a movie. It doesn’t feel, I don’t know, three-dimensional anymore.”
“How can you be sure it ever was?”
Olivia sipped her beer. Taking her time-out. She’d anticipated this question and wanted to get her answer right, state it with the conviction she wished she felt. “Because I know what’s real, even when it doesn’t make sense that it could be. I trust what my brain tells me is true, and this is true.”
“I believe you.”
“Really?”
He bobbed his head. Sipped his beer. “I mean, I want to.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“You know,” he said, “I’m willing to. Trying to. I know you’re telling the truth. At some level, I mean.”
“At some level. Like I’m deluded?”
“No, I didn’t say that. Liv? You said yourself this was going to be hard. Well, it’s hard.”
“At this stage, I guess that’s the most I can hope for.” She finished her beer and set the empty bottle on the end table. “Thanks for sort of believing me.” She meant it. “Can I use your phone to call Rohana now?”
“Of course.”
He gave it to her. The number rang through. Olivia’s aunt Amala picked up and said that Olivia’s stepmother was perfectly fine—and sound asleep, it being barely past 7 A.M. in Jaipur and Rohana being a late riser. Was it an emergency? Should she wake her? No, no, things are good here.
Olivia handed the phone back to Brian.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I think so. Brian?”
“What?”
“If it were reversed, I doubt I could have met you even halfway, not without proof.”
“You would have,” he said.
“I really wouldn’t have. If you ever told me a story like that, I’d think you’d lost your mind.”
“You believe what your brain tells you. I believe what my heart tells me.”
“Oh, my God, that’s sappy.”
“What face?”
Brian twisted his features into a rubber mask of revulsion.
Olivia said, “I have never in my life made a face like that.”
“Sorry, but you have. Absolutely.”
“Liar.”
“You wanna fight about it?”
“Yeah.” She pulled him in by the waist of his jeans, stood on her toes, and kissed his mouth. After a while, they separated. “My breath must be terrible,” she said, smiling.
“It’s a challenge.”
“Hey—”
“Kidding! Or, not really kidding, but you know.”
“Which way to the nearest toothbrush?”
“Meet me in the bedroom when you’re done?”
“Sure, but Brian? I’m a little shook up, and I’ve been on the bus all day. Do you think we could just lie down? I’d like to sleep a little, but I want you near me.”
“Of course. Jeez. You’ve been through a lot.”
“Thank you. We can rumble later on, okay?”
“It’s a date.”
Her purple toothbrush was brush-down in a water glass, where she had left it two nights ago. Olivia realized she was looking for differences, subtle changes butterflied up by her halo choice.
She wandered back to the living room, scrubbing her teeth hard, her mouth filled with sudsy, peppermint-tasting toothpaste. The sound of Brian thumping around in the bedroom gave her a warm domestic feeling of comfort. But at the window she stopped cold, the toothbrush in her fist.
A white van was parked across the street.
She quickly rinsed her mouth and ducked her head into the bedroom. Brian, shirtless and shoeless, saw her face and stopped unzipping his pants.
“What?” he said.
“We have to get out. Now.”
Fifteen
“Why, what’s happening?” Brian tugged his zipper up and grabbed his shirt.
“The Society. I’m so stupid to come here. It puts you in danger. It puts both of us in danger.”
“Hold on. What happened? What’d you see?”
The Chaos Function Page 12
