by Walter Jury
“The train station,” she pants as we break away and veer down a side street. Her eyes are fixed on the blue-and-white sign up ahead that tells us it’s close.
And we run. I don’t do anything but dog her steps as she leads the way, her steady, freakishly fast strides giving me my rhythm. She looks over her shoulder a few times, her hair whipping around her face, but keeps sprinting as her pack bumps up and down on her shoulders. I don’t even bother trying to check behind us—I’m so off-balance right now that if I try, I’ll go flying.
A few blocks later, she swings herself over a fence separating the warehouse district from the train station area, and I follow, losing my footing and ending in a sprawl on the asphalt. She cries out and turns, but I’m already using the fence to pull myself to my feet. It gives me the chance to see if we’re being pursued, but there’s no one there. I know they’re coming, but maybe we’ve lost them. Maybe we’ll catch a break.
But I’m not taking anything for granted. Not anymore.
I spin around and kick myself off the fence.
“Don’t slow down for me again,” I snap, wiping the blood and sweat from my face.
She takes off, straight for the enormous commuter parking lot. She ducks low and weaves through the parked cars, then reaches back and pushes me down between two massive SUVs.
“How do I look?” she asks, breathing hard.
I blink. “What?”
“How. Do. I. Look,” she says more slowly, like she’s afraid I might have brain damage.
So I focus on her face, which is glowing with exertion. “Awesome, all things considered.”
She tucks her hair behind her ears, pulls a tube of lip gloss from her pocket, and dabs it on as I watch in bemused silence. “I’ll be right back.” She skims her way around the SUV and out of sight. A second later, I hear her voice, her laughter high and crystalline. Then a guy. He’s laughing, too. I peek around the rear bumper of the SUV to see her standing a few rows away, hip cocked, head tilted, smile blinding, taking something from a middle-aged guy in a business suit. He’s holding on to the handle of his little rolling suitcase and shaking his head. He’s wearing this shit-eating grin that makes my stomach turn.
I whip behind the SUV as she turns and looks in my direction.
A few seconds later, she’s back. “That guy let me off easy,” she whispers. She hands me a purple-striped button-up shirt and a baseball cap, keeping a second shirt for herself. “Let’s go.”
She sprints into the open with her shoulders drawn up to her ears, like she thinks someone’s going to start shooting at her any moment. I’m not convinced she’s wrong. We race under the overpass for the turnpike, and then through the automatic doors of the New Jersey Transit station.
“Should I ask what just happened?” I ask between breaths.
She rolls her eyes and holds up her wallet. “Ten bucks.”
“For all this?” I gesture at the shirt she’s holding.
“I might also have given him some digits.”
“You gave a complete stranger your phone number.” Considering she’s saved my life at least twice in the last few hours, I should really try not to sound like an untrusting—or jealous—ass right now, but seriously. Today has worn me kind of thin.
She looks at me like I really am brain damaged. “Of course not. I gave him yours.”
She winks at me and scoots into the ladies’ bathroom.
I go into the men’s and peel off my ruined Jets T-shirt. I rinse off in the sink, splashing the frigid water into my face and letting it bring me back to my senses. The cut over my eye isn’t too bad, and my nose has stopped bleeding. With a dull ache in my heart, I clean my father’s blood off my chest and arms. I’m drying myself off when a toilet flushes and a bald guy comes out of a stall with an iPad tucked under his arm. His eyes meet mine in the mirror as he washes his hands. He shakes them off and then reaches into his pocket, pulls out a business card and a few bills, and slaps them onto the metal shelf below the mirror. I brace myself, because I’m certain this guy is about to ask me for a blow job or something like that, but he just says, “I hope things get better for you, man,” and walks out.
I lean forward. He’s given me the phone number for some local detox facility.
If only my life were that simple right now.
I put on the baseball cap, button up my nifty purple-striped shirt, and head back out into the station. Christina’s waiting for me. She’s used a tissue-thin scarf to put her hair up in this crazy knot on top of her head, and she’s donned one of the suit-wearing guy’s shirts, too. This one is pink with blue stripes. Christina has it unbuttoned halfway, with the tails tied up in a knot and a thin strip of her belly showing. “I’m disguised as Miranda Hopkins, head cheerleader,” she says, putting a finger to her lips. “Shh.”
“I’d never blow your cover. Come on.”
With our eyes darting back and forth, looking for any sign of Lavin or his agents, we get ourselves a train schedule. “We have to get to Princeton,” I tell her. “Northeast Corridor Line.”
She leans against me, her head bowed over the map, and then she looks up at the clock on the wall. “There’s one leaving in ten minutes.”
Our eyes meet. “We need to be on it.” I pull out my wallet and look inside at my debit card. “If I use this, they could track us.” I hand her the two tens the guy in the bathroom gave me.
“It should be enough,” she says, and taps me on the arm with her little change purse. “I cashed my babysitting check this morning. It’s how I bought the gas, too.”
“I’m seriously going to owe you when we get out of this.”
She gives me a somber look. “Yeah.”
I stand close behind her while we wait in line at a little kiosk to buy our tickets. Christina looks relaxed, but I can feel the tension vibrating from her body. She’s like a wire stretched tight, ready to snap. She pays for our tickets, with only the slightest tremble in her hands as she slips the bills into the machine. “I don’t have much left after this.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I say. We ride up the main escalator with our heads down. Our train is waiting on track five. Christina beelines for it, but a familiar figure below us catches my eye.
Mr. Lamb is standing at the base of the escalator. His back is to me. His hands are on his hips. His bald spot shines under the lights. He’s turning in place, staring at the people around him.
Looking for me.
I skip back from the top of the escalator as his gaze slides upward, my heart jacked into a painful fist behind my ribs, and jog toward the tracks. Christina’s already on board. We’ve barely made it, but all I can think is how badly I need this thing to move, to carry us far away from this place. We stand in the junction between cars, pressed together, holding our breaths, her looking out one set of windows and me looking out the other. I don’t want to tell her Lamb is here. I don’t want her to be more scared than she already is.
Finally, after a million years, the train lurches forward. I slide my arm around Christina’s waist and hold her steady, and she lets me. From our concealed position, I watch the platform start to recede. As we accelerate, Lavin himself steps onto the platform, his head low, his eyes on the windows of the last cars as the train pulls away. His jaw is ridged with tension and his lips are a tight, flat line.
I keep my eyes on him until we burst into the bright sunlight and speed away.
WE DID IT. WE MANAGED NOT TO GET SHOT AT AGAIN, and we’re on our way to Princeton, off to meet Brayton and figure out what the hell is going on. The relief nearly knocks me over, or maybe that’s the exhaustion combined with the aftermath of being in a serious car accident. Either way, it feels pretty good for a second or two . . . until Christina untangles her arms from my waist and heads for a seat, her shoulders slumped, and I realize something.
We’re not okay.
&n
bsp; I follow her, reviewing everything she’s done over the past thirty minutes. Pulling me out of a car wreck, leading me to the New Jersey Transit station, using her charm to get us some new clothes, being everything I needed to get me out of there, to keep me safe. But now that I am safe, now that some of the urgency is gone, she’s pulling away. Probably remembering why she ran from me in the first place.
I drop into the seat next to hers. She unties the knot in the pink shirt and buttons it the rest of the way down. It swallows her. She pulls the scarf from its tangled coil on her head and lets her hair fall over her shoulders. Then she tucks it behind her ears and stares out the window, her backpack in her lap.
“Hey,” I say softly.
She keeps staring out the window.
“I’m an asshole,” I say. I brush my fingers along her arm to let her know I’m there, but that I’m not going to push her. She doesn’t pull back, but she doesn’t come my way, either. Something is broken between us, and I don’t know how to fix it, or if it can be fixed at all. I cross my arms over my chest and face front.
I can’t believe this is happening. Any of it. I close my eyes and let the throbbing ache in my head crush my thoughts. All of them are too explosive and ugly to examine right now anyway.
About twenty minutes before we arrive at the Princeton station, I drag myself into planning mode and pull out my dad’s phone. My own phone was in the pack he tossed away in those final minutes before everything turned to shit. Not that I would use it anyway—I’m certain it can be tracked. My dad’s phone is a different story. It’s one of his own design, and nothing he made could be tracked at all. I know because I’ve tried.
I send Brayton a text telling him we’re going to be late. He responds instantly.
R U still in Secaucus?
I forgot about the GPS tracker on the Black Box SUV.
Left the SUV and took the train. Can be at stadium by 4.
Smart. See you then.
Smart. I’m not so sure. How have I lived my whole life without knowing our little family responsibility? Sure, Dad was secretive, but I’ve been in his lab. Hell, I’ve gone through his encrypted files, those that I could crack, that is. I’ve figured out his weapons while managing not to die in the process. I did all that without him knowing about it, a major accomplishment. So how did I miss any hint that the world is run by aliens? Is that why he created all those weapons in the first place? He said he didn’t want his inventions used in an interspecies conflict against the H2, so what did he want to use them for?
I shift restlessly as my father’s voice streams through my head like a loop track. When the time comes . . . it’s Josephus. Who the hell is Josephus? Should I be trying to find him instead of meeting Brayton? My dad didn’t seem to fully trust Brayton, and I’m not sure I do, either. But then again, I don’t know a single fucking thing about Josephus, either. Dad was trying to explain everything right before he died, about Josephus, fifty things I should be careful with, and the scanner. He said that device showed blue for human and red for H2. But there was more, and he never got to say it, never even got to finish his sentence. That missing bit of information could make all the difference, and I haven’t the first clue how to figure out what he was talking about. Hopefully Brayton will have some answers for me.
The questions continue to whirl through my head until Christina pokes my arm to let me know we’ve pulled into the station. She lets me hold her hand as we get off the train, but I can tell she’s doing it for security and not because she wants to be close to me. She looks up at me, a tiny worry line between her eyes. “Where to?”
“The stadium. But I need to pick up a few things first.”
I keep my head down as we walk out of the little train station and into the sunny-white almost-summer day. We follow the signs for the stadium, even though I don’t need them. I know my way. I’ve made this trip before when I’ve come to visit my mom. It doesn’t happen very often, maybe a few times a year in the last four years. Every time, my dad would send me off with something like
Tell your mother I hope her grant gets funded.
Tell her congratulations for getting tenure.
Tell her I wish her well.
Like he’d greet a colleague. An acquaintance. Not someone he’d woken up next to for fifteen years, not someone he’d loved.
Still, he couldn’t fool me. My dad’s ace at hiding his feelings, if he has any at all, but when he talks about my mother, I see the sadness in his eyes.
No, wait. I saw the sadness in his eyes.
It hits me that I’m going to have to tell my mother he’s dead. It makes me want to curl in on myself and die right there. Because I’ve seen it in her, too, the sadness, and I don’t know why they didn’t stick together. They were good together, or so I thought. I was shocked when she left us. Not that my dad was a picnic, but he was at his softest when he was with her. I sometimes wondered if he’d have been kinder to me if I looked more like her—olive skin, light brown eyes, rounded features. Mom is Iranian, which makes me half, but I look more like my dad, with gray eyes and skin more likely to burn than tan. And maybe the reason she and I have this kind of push-pull relationship is because I’m so like him, Archer through and through. I spent a whole year wondering if I was the reason they didn’t stay together. If I was the deal breaker, if maybe she couldn’t watch us butt heads anymore, so she just let him have me and split.
The pain in her expression when I finally broke down and asked was overwhelming.
So no, it wasn’t me. But I have no idea what the hell it was. And I have to admit, it’s pissed me off more than a little. Once I quit blaming myself, I started blaming her for leaving me with him, for not fighting for me.
I wonder if she knows why he treated me like a science experiment, like a recruit instead of a son. I wonder if she knows about the H2 and about Race Lavin in particular. I wonder if I should stay away from her, if I shouldn’t bring her into this at all.
But I need her. I know she cares about me, at least a little, and I don’t know that about Brayton. That—and the very real possibility that Race and Lamb could turn up at any moment—is why we’re stopping at this grocery store on the way to the stadium. I will not take anything for granted.
“I’ve got thirteen dollars left, and some change at the bottom of my bag. You hungry?” Christina asks as we walk through the door of the grocery.
“No.” I’m numb, actually, like the inside of me is just a gaping, empty hole. I hope the feeling, or lack thereof, lasts me through this day. “But I could go for some juice.”
I grab a cart and walk straight for the bottled-juice aisle. Christina watches me pick up the bottles, squeeze them, turn them over, and put them back. “Should I even ask?”
“I need the right thickness.”
She snorts. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
I decide on the Gatorade. It’s a nice, thick plastic bottle with a wide mouth. The right size, too. I put three of them in the cart.
“You must be really thirsty.”
She follows me to the utility aisle. I get some aluminum foil, two bottles of lighter fluid, and some toilet bowl cleaner, reading each label before I drop them into my basket, the words of Sun Tzu echoing deep in my memory: A victorious warrior wins first and then goes to war, while a defeated warrior goes to war first and then seeks to win.
Christina steps up close to me. “What are you doing?”
“I want to be prepared for anything,” I say. “Can you go grab me a wand lighter?”
She pales a little but heads down the aisle. I pick up a few other random items, like a bag of hamburger buns, some chips, and a bag of oranges, because it’s best for everyone if the checkout person assumes we’re planning a barbecue. Also, really, I don’t know where our next meal is coming from, so it doesn’t hurt to have some supplies.
Christina drops
the lighter in the cart and looks over my haul. “Tate, I don’t know if we have enough for this . . .”
She’s right. This is more than thirteen dollars’ worth, and we can’t use a traceable debit card. “Do you think you could maybe . . . distract the cashier?”
Christina raises her eyebrows. “I’ve never . . .” She sighs. “All right,” she says in a small voice.
As I walk down the aisle, my eyes land on the display of pool and beach toys, tempting items in preparation for Memorial Day weekend.
On impulse, I grab a compact little Super Soaker water blaster and drop it into the cart. I instantly feel more secure, because these things have been my trusty companions on many an adventure into chaos. Christina lets out a short huff of laughter when she sees the water blaster. “You were so obnoxious with that thing at the beach last summer.”
Indeed I was, and with good reason. “Have I ever told you how excellent you look in a wet T-shirt?”
“I’d like to stay dry today, thanks.” Her smile fades instantly. Like a drop of water on a hot stove, our moment of connection fizzles to nothing.
While we walk around the store, I do some calculations and transfer a few items to the bottom rack of the cart, leaving about twelve dollars’ worth of stuff in the top.
I strategically select the checkout lane, and Christina gets in front of me and chats up the heavyset, acne-ravaged cashier, flashing her adorable smile and probably making the guy feel like he’s hit the lottery. I back off and skirt around the lane to meet her at the exit, but stay close in case she runs into trouble.
It doesn’t happen, though. The cashier has such a hard-on for her that he barely makes her pay for the stuff in the top, and he’s so focused on her ass as she walks away that he doesn’t notice the items on the bottom rack. I don’t know whether I want to thank him or punch him.
Once she comes out with the bags, I slide the strap of her pack off her shoulder.
She lets me take it, and I unzip it so we can load the groceries in. I pause when I see the scanner. “Thanks for getting this after the accident. I was so out of it.”
