He spent the next several years engaged in the struggle against the Dark One and his army, emerging unscathed from dozens of altercations, including, most notably, the Battle of Boise and the Springfield Stronghold. He suffered permanent spinal injuries as a captive of the Dark One in 2010 but still fought with the others in the final conflict.
Following the Dark One’s defeat, Albert struggled with substance abuse for years before entering the Assurances Treatment Facility just outside San Diego, California. In an interview in 2013, he said of his addiction: “I didn’t know what to do with myself after the fight was over, you know? It was like my brain was used to the adrenaline and kept looking for it afterward. It’s hard to learn a different way of being, but I think I have now. One day at a time. Now I try to only look at what’s in front of me.”
His friends and family say that Albert was a kind, generous individual with unwavering loyalty to the ones he loved. He will be remembered for his sacrifices of inestimable worth.
Services will be private. Donations can be made in Albert’s memory to the One Day Foundation, which funds drug-rehabilitation programs for low-income individuals.
13
SLOANE WASHED HER HANDS in the crematory sink. The soap smelled like Band-Aids.
Logistics had consumed the past day, with Ines dealing with Albie’s family and Esther making arrangements for the funeral reception from afar. Matt helped where he could, but the grief had hit him harder than the rest of them, and he spent a lot of time blank, awake but empty-eyed. Eddie had canceled his events and meetings. Sloane thought she understood; Albie wasn’t just one of Matt’s friends, he was someone Matt had led, and, for better or worse, Matt always took responsibility for his soldiers.
Sloane’s job was Albie’s body. They didn’t have to talk about who would do that part. She was the only one with the stomach for it.
She had signed all the forms and made all the arrangements. The hospital had given her a bag of the clothes Albie had been wearing when he came into the hospital, and inside it was his late brother’s class ring, a paper clip, and a tiny, roughly folded paper airplane.
The airplane had confounded her at first. Albie had given up paper-folding of all kinds after his injury, frustrated by the inefficiency of his hands. Her instinct was to preserve the plane, just as she would keep his clothes unwashed and never use that paper clip. But something about it wasn’t sitting right with her.
Sloane dried her hands with a paper towel, then looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t look well. Pale and exhausted, her hair greasy, her clothes rumpled. She tied her hair back, hoping it made her look halfway presentable, and went out to meet the crematory operator, who had agreed to give her a few minutes for a bathroom break before they started.
No one had to witness the cremation, but Sloane wanted to. She had identified the body beforehand, forcing herself to stare down at the face that was Albie but not quite Albie. The tuft of dark blond hair that stood out at an angle from his head was undeniably his, but without the life in his face, in his eyes, the body could have been a wax figure. Still, she had agreed it was him, and now the casket was sealed, ready on its cart next to the tray that would roll into the cremation chamber.
The crematory operator was named Walter, and he was about her age, soft around the middle with a pale, drawn look to his face.
“Ready?” he said.
She nodded. Walter showed her the button she would press to start the process.
“Don’t be alarmed if the bottom of the casket catches on fire really quickly,” he said. “It’s really hot in there so the finish might light up too.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve seen worse.”
Walter nodded, and looked away as Sloane approached the button. But she wasn’t as ready as she’d thought. She reached over and rested her hand on the casket. The paper plane was in her back pocket.
“Actually, Walter,” she said, “would you mind giving me a second alone?”
She could tell he was trying not to look annoyed. She had found that people fit into one of two categories when interacting with her post–Dark One: some went out of their way to be accommodating, and others assumed the worst of her. Walter had been sighing at her since she walked in, so she guessed he was in the latter category. But he nodded and slipped out of the room. Sloane waited until the door closed behind him, then took the plane out of her back pocket.
She unfolded it, and smoothed it out on the casket. Written right in the middle of the paper was I’m sorry. I couldn’t carry it anymore.
Sloane’s vision went blurry, and she crumpled the paper in her fist, squeezing it so tightly her knuckles ached. In the time that had passed since Dr. Hart had delivered the news, she hadn’t cried, hadn’t even come close. Not even when she was listening to Esther sob on the phone. Not even when she held Albie’s shirt up to her nose to see if it still smelled like him.
Either way, we’ll carry it. We always do.
Sloane slumped over the casket and sobbed, hugging the wood tight. She felt like she was losing her brother all over again, but it was worse this time, because she would remember more than the itchy wool dress she wore when they lowered the casket into the ground and the way Cameron used to wake her up for the first frost and drag her outside to make footprints in the grass.
With Albie, she would remember the Survival Beer they got after every altercation with the Dark One, the looks they exchanged whenever Matt went into hero mode, and the way they had held each other upright when they escaped captivity together. She had half a lifetime of memories of Albie. They had understood each other’s pain in a way no one else had.
Now there was no one left who did.
The sobs subsided in a minute or two. They always did. Like something inside her didn’t have the patience for such reckless emotion. But she rested her cheek on the casket for a while longer, the wood warm now from contact with her skin. Then she straightened and flattened the crumpled paper against the wood as best she could, folded it, returned it to her pocket. She wiped her eyes and called Walter back in from the hallway.
He took his place again, and she took hers.
Bye, buddy, she thought as she pushed the button, a metal disk the size of her fist. The door to the cremation chamber opened, sending a wave of heat over Sloane’s body. The casket slid into it, and just as Walter had warned, there was a flash of light as it caught on fire. Then the door to the cremation chamber closed, and it was done.
Sloane took the train back from the crematory in her usual disguise: baseball cap pulled down low over her eyes, glasses, a scarf wound around her neck up to her ears. When she had first visited Chicago as a child, the trains had been a marvel, coasting high above the street and glinting in the sun. She still rode them when she could, preferring their potential anonymity to the certainty of being recognized by a ride-share or taxi driver. Today she chose a seat by a window and watched the sun go down behind the towering glass and metal of the Loop.
It was a short walk back to the apartment, but she took the long way around the block. There had been a crowd of reporters and photographers outside their building that morning, and Sloane had elbowed her way through them on her way to the car Matt had called for her, but she didn’t feel like doing that again now. Instead, she walked down the alley, past overstuffed dumpsters, discarded furniture, and narrow garages to their building.
But before she unlocked the gate, she spotted movement in the courtyard beyond the fence, followed by a camera flash. Cursing, Sloane shoved her keys back into her pocket and went to the building next door. It was easy enough to climb on top of the dumpster and hop over the wooden fence into their patch of unmowed grass. She climbed three flights of stairs to the top of the three-flat, then used a nearby broom to nudge open the trapdoor to the roof.
There wasn’t a ladder nearby, but Sloane could do a pull-up in a pinch. She had to stand on a chair—borrowed from someone’s back patio—to reach it, but she managed to
climb onto the roof. It was level with her building’s, the gap separating them only three feet wide. Sloane had made the jump before when reporters had gotten a little too gutsy. She ran, leaped, and landed with a stumble on her own roof.
It was all second nature now, finding new exits and new ways to approach a problem. Sloane was a picker of locks and a solver of puzzles. She had defaulted to practical means to get things done even after they could use magic; it just seemed safer, given what had happened the first time she wielded it.
Sloane heard a voice when she opened the back door, a sharp soprano that didn’t sound like Ines or even Esther, who wouldn’t be landing at O’Hare until that evening anyway.
Agent Cho was sitting on the sofa, a cup of tea in her hands. She looked different outside of the geodesic dome, wearing jeans and a black turtleneck sweater, her hair loose around her shoulders. After what had happened, it probably shouldn’t have surprised Sloane that she had turned up, but it did. Neither Henderson nor Cho had ever come to their apartment before.
But then, none of them had died before.
“Hello, Sloane,” Cho said, looking grave.
Matt, sitting across from Cho on the old rocking chair that had belonged to his grandmother, looked up at her like he had only just realized she was there.
“How’d it go?” Matt said. He got up and pressed a kiss to her cheek. The familiar smell of cedar and aftershave washed over her, and she wanted, suddenly, to curl up with him on their bed, to find comfort in the rustling of their clothes coming off—to feel anything except this yawning hole inside her where Albie used to be. But the strict metal of the ring around her finger reminded her that when this funeral was over, she needed to end their engagement. It wouldn’t be fair to Matt to let herself find comfort in him now only to break his heart later.
“It went,” Sloane said. “What’s going on?”
“Eileen came to . . . offer her condolences,” Matt said, settling back into the rocking chair.
“Oh.” Sloane looked at her. Cho’s mouth twitched into a frown that looked less like grief and more like . . . guilt. “Really,” Sloane said.
Cho played with the string of her tea bag, wrapped around the handle of her mug. It was the one Matt had gotten from NASA as a child, decorated with stars and rocket ships, the name MATTHEW around the rim like a banner.
“There’s something else,” Cho admitted. “Although it’s classified, and I . . .” She looked out the window. The neighbor’s painful blue fairy lights were blinking rapidly enough to give someone a seizure, and Sloane could see the family of four in the apartment across from theirs sitting down to dinner.
“I’m not supposed to say anything, but I think there’s a code of honor that needs to be upheld here,” she finished. “So.”
“This is about the device, isn’t it?” Sloane said.
Cho nodded. “Something went wrong. Well—technically the device worked, so ARIS considered it a success, but—”
Sloane noticed the rapid rise and fall of Cho’s chest, the tendons standing out from her neck.
“Albie was always good with fire,” Cho said. “So we agreed that he would try to use the device to light up a ball of paper in a controlled environment. We had technicians standing by with fire extinguishers, and Albie was in a flame-retardant suit—all the precautions we thought were necessary. So he pointed the device at the ball of paper and . . .” Cho shook her head. “The fire was out of control,” Cho said. “It enveloped three of our technicians. Two of them got out with minor burns, but Darrick, the one who was directly in the path of the flames . . .”
“Dead,” Sloane supplied.
“Yes,” Cho said.
Sloane had seen Albie manipulate fire before. He put the Freikugeln in his left hand, squeezed in his fist, raised the right . . . and light and heat, tongues of flames, danced around his fingers. None of them had really figured out how to control their artifacts, so sometimes tiny flickers were all he could muster, and other times he could level an entire building. Their use of magic had always been unpredictable, which was why it had been good for all five of them to be present at any given time, to maximize their odds of success.
If people die because of your help, she had said to him, you’ll have to carry that around.
Like a prophet.
Sloane let out a laugh.
“Slo,” Matt said, eyes wide.
“Well, thanks for that little revelation, Cho,” Sloane said. “You can go now.”
“Sorry, Eileen,” Matt said. “She doesn’t . . .” He lost the sentence right in the middle and fell silent.
“I understand,” Cho said, getting to her feet. “Let me know if you have any questions. I can’t answer them on the phone, obviously, but you can just ask me about tea, and I’ll know what you mean.”
She handed her half-empty mug to Matt, avoiding Sloane’s eyes, and picked up her coat and purse, which sat on the low table next to the front door. Matt went to walk her out, but before exiting the apartment, he shook his head at Sloane.
When the door closed, she grabbed her keys, hat, and sweatshirt and ran to the back door.
Avoiding the reporters had seemed important ten minutes ago, but she didn’t care anymore. She ignored the flashing and clicking of cameras as she ran down three flights of stairs and then around the corner to the basement steps. Each unit had a small storage space there. Matt and Sloane’s held mostly decorations for each major holiday, even Valentine’s Day. Sloane generally made it her business to hate things like that, but she had a soft spot for cheesy decorations.
As she approached the door to their storage space, her body began to tingle and burn. She unlocked it and pulled the chain for the light. A stack of identical plastic crates, labeled with a label maker, greeted her. She shoved them aside and knelt in the corner where there was a loose chunk of concrete. A second heart beat in her chest, its rhythm counter to her own.
Under the concrete was a sewing kit small enough to fit in Sloane’s palm, and in it, a box of sewing-machine needles of various sizes and thicknesses. A few were broken in half, jagged at the break. She plucked two medium-size pieces from the box and held them up to the light, her hands trembling.
Koschei’s Needle.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE U.S. SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE AND SUBCOMMITTEE ON DARK ONE ATROCITIES
MEETING REGARDING PROJECT RINGER, THE ARIS (AGENCY FOR THE RESEARCH AND INVESTIGATION OF THE SUPRANORMAL) PROGRAM OF TARGETED ACTION AGAINST THE DOMESTIC TERRORIST KNOWN AS “THE DARK ONE”
Washington, DC
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Testimony of Matthew Weekes, Subject 4 of Project Ringer; Sloane Andrews, Subject 2 of Project Ringer; Esther Park, Subject 1 of Project Ringer; and Ines Mejia, Subject 3 of Project Ringer.
MATTHEW WEEKES: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’d like to thank you and the committees here for inviting us today to speak on our own behalf, which has happened somewhat rarely since the beginning of all this. And I’d like to thank you for your commitment to keeping an accurate public record of what happened so it’s not easily forgotten. That’s something that’s really important to all of us.
The four of us came here today to give an account of the events of March 15, 2010, the day of the Dark One’s defeat. We consulted with each other on this prepared statement, and when I finish, we will be available for questions.
So . . . I’ll just get started, then.
In the weeks leading up to March 15, the Dark One and his followers were quiet. The Dark One had kidnapped two of our number for a period of twenty-four hours, during which Albie—I mean Albert Summers—sustained serious injuries. Albie was still in the hospital, and since we weren’t sure the extent to which he would recover mobility, we had to change our plan of attack significantly.
We had done a year of reconnaissance work, with the help of ARIS, trying to discover the Dark One’s origins. But we found no record of him whatsoever. It was as if he had just . . . appeared. But
one of us—
ESTHER PARK: Me. I did.
MATTHEW WEEKES: Okay, Esther pointed out that that in itself told us something—
ESTHER PARK: It told us that at the very least, he didn’t want to be traced. Which meant he had likely gotten one of his followers to do everything for him. After all, he needed food and lodging just like anyone else. So we gave up on learning anything about his origins, and instead we focused on investigating his most loyal followers. It was slow going. They covered their tracks really well.
MATTHEW WEEKES: But about two weeks after Sloane and Albie got back—
sloane andrews: [inaudible]
MATTHEW WEEKES: We finally got a break. Esther successfully identified one of the Dark One’s followers as Charles Wright, who worked as a [redacted] at [redacted] and lived in one of the condos at what was then Chicago’s Trump Tower.
INES MEJIA: So I went to have a look, posing as one of the janitors. A couple people went in and out of the apartment while I was cleaning the windows, didn’t give me a second glance. One time, when the apartment door opened, I spotted him in a crowd of them—the Dark One himself was there. Which was huge—before this we hadn’t known where the Dark One was between attacks.
ESTHER PARK: The rest of us were visiting Albie at the hospital. And it was lucky that we were, because otherwise we might not have gotten Sloane’s idea . . . Sloane?
SLOANE ANDREWS: Yeah?
ESTHER PARK: You want to tell this part?
SLOANE ANDREWS: Okay. Um—I suggested we set a trap. I would do a work of significant magic at the base of Trump Tower on the Wabash Avenue Bridge—the Irv Kupcinet Bridge is technically its name. I figured if I made it visible enough, the Dark One or his followers would be able to see me from the condo.
Chosen Ones Page 10
